Become an expert in uncertainty (w/ Sam Conniff )

33:15And therefore, I will pivot, I will change the business to be this new thing that I really do believe it could be. In that process is a lot of uncertainty. Firstly, you're dealing with I'm speaking from personal experience. Firstly, you're dealing with the acceptance of failure, you are unable to do the business you set out to do in the first place. and so you're not just dealing with the grief of coming to terms with your own inability to build and your fallibility you're also at the same time trying to skip over any morning period to go into inspiration land of a new path of what you could create it's a very interesting and difficult psychology to manage.

34:01And I've done it twice. I'd love to know what, as an uncertainty expert, people need to know. And honestly, as well, worth saying, this is a very difficult time in business, has been the last 18 months. Often startups have two choices, give up or pivot. So I think this is going to speak to a lot of people because a lot of people have to choose the pivot path or choose the pivot path, it's worth saying. How can they manage their uncertainty?

34:36Yeah, and thank you for reminding that final point because it is, it's fucking hard, isn't it? And I think you called to some of the really important parts of it because it's connected to your ego and identity. It's a deeply emotional process. If you've got people who are relying on you, that adds a whole other hue to this thing. and there's the idea that you hoped it was going to be, which in your mind was a reality. So morning is right. There are two well-known states, readiness for change and resistance for change. And we tend to oscillate between those. In fact, if you zoom out even, I think firstly, I think zooming out is a really good thing to do.

35:12The further the perspective you can take, the less abrupt your pivot will look. And the less abrupt it is, the more easily you'll be able to manage and handle it. One of my mentors once told me that all of the whole entrepreneurship journey is from a distance a nice curve and when you're up close it's a fucking horrible stairway where there's a series of horizontals that you trundle on nicely and then whammo you hit the vertical and then for ages you feel like you're not moving and then luckily there's another little horizontal then whammo but you zoom out and there's your curve and i think that's that's that's true to a point so um resistance for change is where and so the the broad you know this most human beings are oscillating between two states two psychological states attract and avoid that's how we've got this far.

35:56We move towards things, we move away from things. And in terms of change in life, this is measured as readiness to change and resistance for change. If you are in a state of resistance to change, it's quite problematic. And it's very hard to go through with whatever pivot plan you're going to undertake. We've all met people, we've all been in that moment, our capacity to invent new narratives and stories, our capacity to procrastinate, If you've ever been confronted with a very difficult decision or an important task, blinked, and two minutes later, you're like deep into social media, a bottle of wine, or starting a fight, or whatever the fuck it is, right?

36:34Change resistance works at a really deep level. And what it's trying to do is keep you safe. Change readiness is a completely different capacity. And this is, you know, if these two states are a track and a void, it's the state of availability. It goes back to being open-minded. It's a very hard thing to do when you're under pressure, but that's the state in which you need to be for a pivot to take place. Otherwise, you're holding on to these ideas. And the trick in uncertainty experts that we learn about this is the mind is based on a predictive model. That's how all of our brains work. We constantly map out and see the world around us.

37:10And so we make a prediction about what's supposed to happen. When that prediction doesn't occur, we get what's called a prediction error. And that's, you know, releases in our bodies as a form of dissonance. and that's to train us to go and do the right thing. And business is really hard because the predictions we make, you know, we make a spreadsheet, we put some slides together and then we think it's reality. And it is in a way, right? It's a future truth and we're trying to convince many others of it. But when it doesn't go as we've expected, prediction error takes place and that forms dissonance in the body, which releases nasty chemicals and doesn't feel good.

37:38So the first thing to note is being able to spot the difference between an actual error and a prediction error. Have you made a mistake or have things just not gone to plan? then there's letting go of the plan itself you know plans are great until we get hit in the face or whatever the phrase is and you know we've all written plans that were meant to convince other people and then we've fallen foul of being convinced by them ourselves so being able to separate from that comes to something that i've always found really difficult in fact the thing i've always found most difficult as an entrepreneur the letting go the saying no and the deciding what you're not going to do.

38:13And I learned this only recently that the CIDE at the end of decide is from the same etymology as homicide or suicide because it means death to the alternative. So when you really put something down, you know, you can't actually really fully change unless you completely put something down. The other state, so if our brain is working constantly on a predictive processing point of view, when things don't go as planned, prediction error occurs, we find it very hard to move, we become very, very brittle, resistance to change. The alternative state we try and push out towards is to increase this, you know, increase the palette of opportunity as to what's going to happen around you.

38:49And that's to update your predictive model. There's lots of different ways you can do this. Really good culture does it. Lived experience of others does it. If there's someone that you know and love and they told you about a dangerous traffic zone, you don't need to go to that corner to know that you'll keep your kids away from it. there's a set of experiences which increase our predictive capacity for the world um one of the uncertainty experts we interviewed he'd been a prisoner of war um his men were being held as with he they're being tortured and they all lost their capacity for for reasoning but it was only going to be a strategy that would get them to safety and he told me about the ooda loop which is what raf pilots get taught and it's how to pivot at speed observe orient decide act and we're all operating on OODA loops and it's how you update your predictive model of the world right so you're in prediction um uh prediction error dissonance my world's got short small shorter and smaller so OODA loops how you may move your way out of it observe the the the broadest amount of available facts you've got is this working or reorient itself no it's not I need to try something else decide to try the new thing great take an action and then repeat and then repeat if you're under pressure and feeling stressed and you can't quite work out then your OODA loops are going to to be very very small the more perspective and power you've got the larger they're going to be the rf are taught to do these things in like millisecond rotations and it's how you're able to make decisions when you're going at 500 miles an hour but it's a really effective model when you're trying to work out what this pivot if it is necessarily a pivot or is it just a necessary part of the the mess that that precedes any success there's no one's got to success without it and the other part that we learned I learned in all this that surprised me was the necessary failure ratio of any good idea it's about 20 % to get something to work you want to be failing at around a 20 % mark so that you can put the things out if you can decide to let them go and then move on but once again the final part of it is the big difference between change readiness and change resistance isn't cognitive it's emotional and so I think the things that's why I welcome them the final parts of it if someone's going through a pivot you can't just plan it you have to be able to think it and feel it understand what it is and why you aren't letting it go because otherwise change resistance is going to trip you up and you'll call it a number of different things but if you're not on board in body and mind you're not going to be able to go through it yeah that resonates actually makes a lot of sense um a lot of what we talked about has been you know how do i as a founder deal with uncertainty because I'm used to dealing with uncertainty, entrepreneurship's about uncertainty, blah, blah, blah.

41:31But actually my team is going to go through the same uncertainty I am, realistically. They might be protected from some of the facts and whatever else, but ultimately I presume to build a thriving organization, I need to have an organization that's resilient and capable of handling uncertainty. So how do I train them? book them all on the uncertainty experts exactly answer um the

42:02in a survey of around 20 000 people i think i said this 70 odd percent of them seem to be in the low uncertainty tolerance from what we can segment in our data entrepreneurs have a typically high tolerance to uncertainty as you'd imagine so it has to be considered in the round if we're thinking about how this is going to be useful both in a team and in a society setting you can think about it uh uncertainty tolerance is a it's really distinct so people with in environments or in groups with low uncertainty tolerance there is a tendency towards group think because we're less able to speak our minds or even work out what it is that we think so we'll go with the with the group we're also more prone to uh binaries so if someone you know someone's being the strong person or there's a big argument going on uh we're more prone to criticism so we'll start taking less risks or less likely to speak out so you can really see how uncertainty tolerance has an effect on a group setting it's been studied in organizations it's been studied society in numerous studies in north and south america around elections when there's low tolerance to uncertainty in the community we will go for the extreme tendency we'll go for whatever backward looking bullshit narrative is being sold and we're less able to handle the the nuance and the space in between high tolerance for uncertainty however high levels of empathy creative problem solving ability to handle doubt.

43:18So point one is we need to move the uncertainty tolerance of a team. And when we've worked on this and we've just increased it of a team, the leaders get freaked out because the whole team are taking risks and they're like, wait, I didn't actually mean this to work. And vice versa. If the leaders do it without the team, a challenge happens. And this is best embodied by a survey question I've been asking recently. We now do a leadership specific version of this. In a moment, actually it'd be interesting to know what your answer is. In a moment of real uncertainty in front of your team, would you prefer to be seen as decisive, even if you knew it would lead to a negative outcome, or indecisive if you knew that it would lead to a positive outcome?

43:57Personally indecisive. Then you are one of the 23 % who answered indecisive. The vast majority prefer to be seen as decisive, even knowing it would lead to a negative outcome. when we segment the data between general population leadership teams it goes up to about 90 and then we interview people afterwards and a fucking course right because the whole way that everyone has learned business and leadership right up until the minute is bravado absolutely i think i answer that way because i don't actually do those things i think you are an excellent demonstration of the paradigm shift that leaders need to go through and i've seen that in the way that you have articulated the pivot and the emotional states of this and the blurring of fatherhood i mean that's that's that's pretty clear but you're in the minority i mean hopefully you're the beginning of the shift towards leadership that we need right but the most of the mbas we've ever learned will absolutely tell us the indecision kills businesses and it's true it does of course it does but what's the space in between because when we we ask this very same question leaders will go of course we had to say decisive you have to right that's the tie therein and the teams will go yes we totally expect that to be the answer and we will roll our eyes because will be the ones who have to deal with the fucking shit show of you making a decisive decision.

45:12And, you know, play that out at a policy level. Play that out at a politician. Play that out at a senior. This is where statements come from that then we have to spend however long unraveling. But what does this mean? For a leader with a team, to be honest, in the moment that we're in, there aren't that many questions that don't end, honestly, with the answer, I don't know. Right? But I think it kind of sums up the paradigm of leadership and team building they're in. How do you say I don't know in an inspiring way? Who's ever met a team? I don't know. I don't know and you're not going to know either.

45:47Yeah, exactly. Tell you what, none of us fucking know. And a team who's under stress, who knows there's three months worth of runway, two months worth of runway. I'm sure there's people listening who've got a week worth of runway. Yeah, for sure. No one wants to fucking hear I don't know. But what if that's the truth? what if being sold decisiveness if that's going to be what costs you is worse so i think the answer to that is i don't know but we're going to work it out together because i think i don't know on its own leads to inaction and fear and i think i don't know but we're going to work it out together leads to collaboration when we started the uncertainty experts the companies that came to us would say right we get it yep the whole team's fucking coming to terms with this shit show um Can you give them confidence and clarity?

46:32And we'd say yes, because we didn't know what we were doing. And the answer now is definitely no. You would never say I don't know, that's for sure. Yeah, I do now. God forbid. I don't know is all I fucking say. But we'll work it out together. The brief has changed. Smart businesses who are coming to us saying, we're not expecting them to know it all. That day's passed. We're expecting them to be able to learn it. Maybe not learn it all. and what we want is skills of collaboration and curiosity we need a team that can stick together we need to be able to handle the doubt like doubt is only ever understood universally as a negative yet it's also a place of discovery and we know that and anyone who's had those experiences and why they want to be an entrepreneur and why they're here you know it's like parenting there's only 10 of the moments that make up for the 90 of it which is a fucking horror show but those 10 percent is so good they're so good and the reward that's triggered in the body is directly correlated with how unlikely the result is going to be the bigger the risk the harder the challenge the reward is greater that's how dopamine works that's how all things like that work so we are looking for those curves no matter where which point you're at it and no one ever wants to hear that when they're on the downside of it i certainly didn't want to be told i was here you know to learn fuck it but i think one of the key things for a team leader beginning to explore these questions is to be able to identify the difference between problems and and polarities and we're i think there was once a study on this 95 of um problems have a solution there's a yes no or a series of yeses and no um but increasingly we're looking at things that don't have a clear answer to them and what is and this is something this is an exercise you and a team can do observe is this a problem or is this a polarity polarities have a very paradoxes you know they have a very different way of managing it.

48:19There's multiple outcomes, many of which seem good. How long can we hold on to those? Because the longer you do, the more you're going to explore them, the more you're going to discover something new. It's the F. Scott Fitzgerald line. A sign of a first-rate intelligence is being able to hold two conflicting ideas in mind at once and retain the ability to function. Turns out this is true. 2020, Yale University, there is no state that drives neuroplasticity, our ability to learn and conceive of new ideas more than uncertainty. Hold it. hold your nerve hold that space that's what a leader's role is and the team's capacity to build into that space and that's where our new market our new product the new idea the new message is going to come from how do you manage i mean you sort of speak to a bit but how do you manage poise and you know other than i don't know uh but how do you deliver messages like that with I guess authenticity but not spreading fear but being honest and truthful you know feels like an art more than a skill hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm it's because I'm trying to think I thought you were showing me that's how no no no no no actually that is it step one that was the answer I was trying to not give you a glib soundbite although i know that's what we want um i think the answer is in what has been the most difficult bit for me out of all of this and it's in what's known as embodied cognition uh the the most radical idea in cognitive sciences is that we have two brains you'll know this from from heights right the gut and all its various um sensors and the vagal whatever it's called, nerve, that allows these two things to coexist and correlate and communicate leads us to a place of embodied cognition, which is the scientific terminology for gut instinct.

50:20I was previously the least embodied person I think I've ever met. As Ken Robinson beautifully once said, my body is just a vehicle for getting my brain to the next meeting. I had very little awareness of anything that was going on below the neck. And that was all right, right? Because I'm, I thought I was pretty smart and I could think my way through it or if I couldn't I could make you laugh and if I couldn't I could you know come up with a way out um and this has taught me to have my own arrogance around intellect and and of some really difficult moments where shows of sincerity become very different from acts of sincerity and the process of embodied cognition allows us into this space and if you can rationalize all the available facts that you have at your disposal and then combine them with what you know to be true you will end up making better decisions it's very hard to know what you know to be true but you can we can all know that in moments we've relied upon this system so it takes exercise and it takes practice it's been it builds on the work we already talked about interoception being able to name things as they go on your body whether you know be that challenging you can give them actual names um but once you begin to register and land or participate in your body's fullest intelligence and an ability and you take beyond what you've called gut instinct into a realm where you can you know the studies show i mean take it outside of mathematic puzzles decisions we make through our gut instinct are just as reliable as ones that we make with our intellect i was going to say this they're actually slightly more so apparently and the reason scientifically for that is your gut processes the information to your brain faster than your mind can.

52:08So your vagus nerve is a two-way communication superhighway. It's a good way of looking at a motorway. But they previously thought was brain to gut. So therefore, feeling nervous need a poo is a very good example of I felt that and then I felt that. Actually, the other way is even faster. So actually, when you're in a fight or flight or a, you know, this is your eighth sense thing that you were talking about interoception, and like, I don't know, something's off about that guy. Those feelings that are in your gut, they are often the correct one. Yep. They go up to your mind. Yep. Your mind plays out rational things.

52:45I don't know, you've only met this guy like just now. Why are you being so judgmental? Like every other guy you met recently was fine or whatever. And so you talk yourself out of it. And that's usually right. Totally. And this, I mean, this is one thing we heard from every single interview we did with the different uncertainty experts, whether it was Rez who grew up in a refugee camp in Pakistan or Carl, who was running gangs in Brixton, they all, they came to rely on that internal set of signals, like for their life. And once you've relied on it to that degree, you begin to know that you can cope with it.

53:17But the key is reflection. If you don't reflect on it, you won't harness this skill. So everybody has, everybody's got a decision coming up, listen to this, take the decision first with your gut, and then bring in the best of information you can, and then go through the decision and then come back just just a couple of seconds it doesn't have to be arduous what was my gut instinct that time how did it feel where was it what temperature hue sound whatever you know give it as much description as you can and then do that each time and in time you will get to learn the difference between the left side of your gut and the right side if you got one that feels blue or hot or whatever it is and you'll be able to start using it that's just the process it's not it's like every other aspect of the body that metaphorically works like a muscle and reflection is the key that shifts it.

54:02But to go back to the point about poise and how embodied cognition comes together, I mentioned the work of the DMU, Decision Making Uncertainty Centre. The theory they propose to the world, conviction narrative theory, kind of helps answer this question. So embodied cognition is very interesting because one of the other ways that the body thinks and the brain doesn't is that it can kind of transcend then time. That makes it sound a bit grandiose, but let's think about it like this. So the brain doesn't really do abstract concepts like time. A dream or a memory can bring back emotions just as much as if they were happening in the present moment.

54:38So what conviction narrative theory does is it takes this idea into the future. So let's say we've used our interception, right? We now know what that marker means, that signal. I don't need a we. Genuinely, there's something wrong, so I'm going to act on that. I'm now practicing in body cognition. I accept I've got two decision making centers they've served me well before so i'm gonna feed what my brain needs to understand i'm gonna rely on my gut i've been reflecting on it and now i need to make a decision about the future because i need to show up with some poise i've got to show a level of gravitas and belief and that's hard for me to do right now because i don't fucking know what's going to happen and the team want a decision and it's friday and we've got to pay the wages and i can't whatever these are i'm just thinking of my own experiences when i've stood there and had to try and show up in front of people um what conviction narrative theory suggests is if you then project yourself into a future state.

55:27And this requires a degree of mental rehearsal, simulation, imagination, role play, call it what you will. Push yourself into the future state that you haven't yet inhabited and imagine the scenario. Try to inhabit emotionally the scenario if it goes one way. How does it feel? Is there a cue? Is there a, that doesn't feel right. Or that does feel right. Like you just said, I can trust that person. I can't. And then put yourself into the alternative scenario, the B scenario. And again, try to imagine how that looks and sounds and feels and what it's like. And again, look to the body, look for the cues and use your brain.

56:00How can you process those cues? Once you've existed in those future states for a little while, just mental simulation, right? I'm not actually talking about back to the future, just good scenario planning, but with your emotions. And then come back to the present state. Turns out the gut instinct is just as reliable in a future imagined state as the present state. So it's an opportunity to make a decision in a future environment. And now we know the gut instinct can be more reliable. You know it can be more reliable. So then you bring back a sense of confidence, future truths, and then you can stand up in front of your problem and project, project the confidence that you know.

56:35I like it because you can't think your way out of an anxiety issue. And yet thinking through the future and the ruminations of the different circumstances is in itself an anxious practice. So I quite like the idea of the dichotomy of that, but actually also being able to get to a conclusive belief because you're playing alternative scenarios rather than just ruminating on one despicable future. Exactly. And it's the difference between worry and meta-worry. Worry is a really natural and helpful thing. It's a form of scenario planning. Meta-worry, which if any of you are waking up at three in the morning worrying about things you can't possibly address in that moment, is when worry loops have got caught up in themselves and now you're kind of worrying about the worry.

57:20I think of it as the worry go around. The worry go around is when you work all day and you're worrying about what it was that you said to your partner when you left in haste that morning or how you didn't really hug the kids or perhaps you didn't feed the cats or you left the toilet lid open or whatever it is. I think I did all those things. All of those things. And so then you don't really focus properly at work. Every single moment is like trying to get back to the place and then you eventually get back to the place where the kids are and then you just start worrying about work. and actually I wasn't very present today and I really didn't handle that meeting very well and I let all my worries and anxieties at work and then snap.

57:50And so then you don't really come back and connect with all the things you've got to do until then you leave the house the next morning to get back to work and then start worrying. And this worry will move because its job is to do that. Whatever you've got in short focus, your spotlight focus, it will go back to your stage light focus because that's its job is to keep you alive. It's why you worry in the few minutes just before you go to bed because that's really a moment you need to be alert. But this works well as well. There's another technique for a leader trying to have this sense and moment of poise to be really practical on all this because it can start to seem a bit ephemeral so here's a really practical tool that you can use cognitive restructuring uh is a really deceptively straightforward technique and it's really good for moving past fear and these scary moments if you can dan and anyone listening think of a short-term fear you have something that's limiting you and holding you back something you're scared Adolf?

58:42You don't have to share with me. I'm trying to think of one. It's caught me off guard. Short-term fear.

58:52I mean, anything daughter-related, obviously. Yeah. Great. I'm taking her out for the whole day tomorrow. Is she going to be a complete nightmare or a little angel? Short-term fear. Great. Okay. So that doesn't feel great. And that could then lead to limiting beliefs. I shan't take her or I won't take her for long. Or maybe I'll distract her or whatever, sedate her. Well, it depends on your approach to parenting. Right. So what is the regret associated with this event that you'd most want to avoid? A poor memory. I'm really looking forward to it. I love that we do. I think dad and daughter today, no mum, just us.

59:34but you know you're basically doing those things and she's two and a half so i'm doing that for me not her she won't ever remember it so for me it's about creating a nice memory not a bad memory she won't consciously remember it but you know side note all all of our values are based by the time that we're three years old so you know it's a very very very good thing to be doing um and conscious memory is just one very small and very unreliable part of who we are maybe i shouldn't take on that bank robbery that i was planning then i'll choose something a bit lighter different set of values uh okay so now we inhabit both these two things so there's the short-term fear of tomorrow that doesn't feel good but that's just mild anxiety now let's really like check in with the feeling of regret like what would that feel like it was a bit shit or you didn't go through with it or you know wasn't the memory that you thought or you had the you know a disastrous day which is then going to scar scar her and upbringing resentment regret resentment is the most emotionally costly of all the emotions it really like the guilt that you'll feel that giving into your short-term fears guilt passes really quickly you know good apology gets us past most guilt resentment doesn't it doesn't fade its potency remains it's the line you know resentment is the poison you hope someone else drinks um and so you contrast your short-term fear with the regret you want to avoid and we've asked this question many many times i can tell you there's 91 of people depending what you were thinking about listening to this 91 of people say by and large their fear that's holding them back is a fear of failure makes total sense yeah and again similar proportion i think it's about 89 percent of people say the regret they most want avoid is a missed opportunity and that makes sense too or can be condensed as those two things and suddenly the human condition reveals itself and it's also simple and the thing most likely in the world to lead to a missed opportunity is of course fear of failure and if you try to hold those two things together the fear of failure yeah that's not nice i don't want to stand up in front of my team and look like a dick.

1:01:26But the fear, the feeling of the regret that I will face if I don't take this decision or I don't go through with it or I have to fold this up before it's had its chance. Nah, man, that sucks. That's gross. One of the uncertainty experts describes this exact technique and he takes the regret that he doesn't want to have and he imagines putting it in a syringe and then finding the syringe on the floor and then trying not to. I mean, he makes it as gross a thing as possible. And there's much nicer ways of doing cognitive restructuring. But nonetheless, you then hold in your hand the short-term fear that, of course, we face every single day, and a much more powerful emotion that will drive you through it every time.

1:02:02And again, it proves to us that these future states, future inhabited states of emotion, can give us clues to the uncertainty that we're facing and allow us to step through them. That's interesting, because they are absolutely the enemies of each other. Yeah, or they could be the solution to yeah all that okay leaving on a positive note what i think we've only hit positive positive note more positive notes that are genuinely expected nothing less from you but mega insightful and fascinating and gives a lot of food for thought on how to approach for me personally and i think sadly a lot of listeners uh very real things that are coming up in their lives imminently so for anyone that is about to approach this can you please provide a very very short clear summary of the core things that they need to make sure that they're doing soon as uncertainty hits them next time okay um so a couple of things you can draw on immediately is that uncertainty is going to affect your body faster than you can think about.

1:03:16So the first thing to do is to regulate your body. So that could be breathing. It could just be moving your body, shifting yourself out of an environment. The simplest things. I mean, embodied practices can sound a bit icky. But that's stuff like this, right? Shaking and dancing or whatever. Get outside. Get into the fresh air. Take a few deep breaths. Move yourself. Go for a walk. Emotional regulation sounds complicated. It's much easier than you think. If you are in a sustained period of uncertainty, take on a regular practice. particularly any kind of sport dance yoga whatever the fuck it is that brings you back into your body i like structured violence and once a week i do fighting and it's the best thing i've ever done for a non-embodied person i had to do something fairly radical to bring myself into my body and it's it's a yeah that's that's the 101 the fundamentals of it then you bring yourself into the next stage and remember fear fog stasis that's the stage we have to go through so the first thing is we have to regulate the fear once you know you're back in a state a moment of homeostasis, you can tell that, right?

1:04:13Practice this interoception. Ask yourself, have a conversation with your body. That's going to sound stupid, but the more you air it out loud, the more communicative you will come. Very few of us are expert in our bodies and we should be. You know, you wouldn't not read the guidebook on any other really sophisticated thing that you're going to be with forever. So get a little bit expert on this thing. Name some of those feelings, make that practice of interoception something. It will serve you well. The most high-performing, Execs, athletes, investors in the world have naturally high interception.

1:04:45If you increase your interception, you increase your chances of navigating through uncertainty. And then you enter the second state. So the fog, the way that you eliminate the fog and turn it into a space of agility and creativity is to increase your capacity for it. So remember, this is the prediction models, predictive processing. We're all gifted into this life with a negativity bias of around one in 10. That means of every 10 situations that will come your way, your body, your brain systems are going to argue that just about one might be worth trying and the rest are going to work against you.

1:05:14Some psychologists think this is now around one in 200 because of the fucking fucktastrophe of the world and the amount of notifications you get and whatever. Extrapolate that across your working day. That means there's 12 minutes when you might think, oh, give that a chance. So just remember your internal bias is set for negative. So when your brain is feeling confused, you've got to play that role. you have to increase your capacity for prediction. So order off the menu, take a different route, do unusual things, keep throwing a little bit of lightweight uncertainty into your life and reflect on it.

1:05:45That's how you update this predictive model. Or just now, go back into your own life's experience. What are the three best stories you've got? What are the three moments you're proudest of? And what is their relationship with uncertainty? I'm going to bet that they were not the most predictable moments. And remind yourself of that. We know it's an axiomatic truth that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger but we only really believe that retrospectively we don't think about oh great here comes something that's nearly going to kill me it's going to make me much stronger but that that attitude is the difference between post traumatic stress and post traumatic growth you know it's just that's that singular moment of alertness is how we'd go into something as to whether it's surprising and delightful or deeply anxiety making and then that third state the stasis i think arguably the hardest one right Because that's where people, when they're stuck and you try and keep moving, it's when you break them.

1:06:35And there's no one listening who hasn't been close to breaking or isn't close to someone who has been breaking. And that is fucking heartbreaking. It's hard as anything. And that is not the moment to push people through. In our work, what I believe is the way out of stasis is connection. For a while, I thought it was trust. I think that's a big component of it. But if you can connect to what matters to you, connect to yourself, connect to others, connect to the reason you're doing this endeavor, and that can be as material or commercial as you like or as high-minded and purposeful as you like, then you begin to move again.

1:07:08It's only through connection that we begin to find our way through it. So I think that's the approach. Fear, fog, and stasis are the natural human underlying proponent of uncertainty, and that's why it's fucking horrible. You can't think your way through uncertainty. You have to think and feel your way through uncertainty. Use your feelings to regulate the emotions. Allow that fog to become a place of agility and creativity. And the only way out of getting stuck is to connect. Sam, thank you so much for joining us on Secret Leaders. I've learned a ton. Thank you. I appreciate it. Very much for having me.

1:07:38I really enjoyed it. Thanks very much for having me.

1:07:46That was my conversation with Sam Conniff. I really enjoyed recording this episode. Sam just has such a calm presence and so many great insights. If you enjoyed this episode and found it useful, please take a second to share it with someone and check us out on YouTube at Secret Leaders Podcast. Thank you. See you next time.