Ways to distinguish yourself – #15 Embrace uncertainty with ease

By Rajesh Setty on Tue 29 Mar 2005, 11:14 PM - View Comments

Come to think about it – life would be pretty boring if there was
certainty every step of the way. Unfortunately life is not boring and
we have uncertainty about several things in our life. However, most of
us can’t handle uncertainty very well. In fact, many of us panic
when there is uncertainty although the same people are smart enough to
know that there is no way to get certainty on everything. There are no guarantees.

Life presents us with a series of situations and challenges almost on a
daily basis. If there is a problem that will affect us (in other words,
the solution to the problem is of interest to us) we are eager to
respond to it quickly (most of the time) and we want to be certain that
we come up with the best response to the problem. None of us are
interested in giving a mediocre response to a problem whose solution
matters to us deeply. Let us think about this for a minute. I am sure
that in many cases we don’t know what the right response is. The right
question therefore is “Do we have the courage to admit that we don’t know the answer?”

Most often, we are self-conscious and we may make up something or
provide a diplomatic response. What’s really going on in our mind is
something like “May be I should know the answer”, “This is part of my
job and I know I am good at this” or “What would others think if I say
I don’t know” and so on.

I urge you to take the challenge and next time you are presented with
such a problem or situation respond with “I am not certain about how to
handle this.” and watch how new ideas will flow in. May be you will
decide to call someone and discuss the situation or you will go the
library and pick up a book on a particular topic or you will go to the
web and research. You may decide to respond totally different this time
around.

One thing that I have realized is that there is more help than you ever need only if you are humble enough to ask. For that you need to develop an attitude to embrace uncertainty with ease.