Working with Uncertainty

03.7.2017

There’s nothing certain in life, but death and taxes. Of all the uncertainties that pervade our everyday lives, uncertainty at work is increasingly the nature of things. With rapid change, innovation and constant market disruption; with all the political uncertainty we live with from day to day – the workplace hasn’t been so uncertain – arguably for many decades. And along with that uncertainty can come an unspoken background fear for many people – will there still be a job for me? Will I find my place in the changing scheme of things?

Being with that uncertainty, accepting that it won’t go away and that perhaps it’s in the very nature of work in this part of the 21st Century, calls for a general capacity for resilience. Can we maintain a positive frame of mind for work and live to our full potential in the face of relentless change?

Developing resilience

We’re all resilient to some extent. And for all of us, resiliency can be increased. Evidence suggests that mindfulness training can help us develop our resilience even more, enabling us to recover more rapidly from unwanted change and other setbacks. The more resilient we are, the better we can be at recovering from such challenges.

Self-efficacy - the belief that you can succeed in a specific situation or accomplish a specific task – plays a significant part in the development of resilience. Interestingly, one study suggests that mindfulness and self-efficacy are intrinsically linked. Those participants in the study who believed they would do well, and those with higher mindfulness scores, demonstrated higher levels of resilience. Self-belief, it seems, allied to mindfulness, is a powerful predictor of our capacity to thrive in adversity.

Dealing with uncertainty

Despite the universality of change and uncertainty, many of us continue to harbor the belief that our would be generally more comfortable if we could somewhere find certainty. That may be delusory. Mindfulness training allows us to be more open to life, whatever the outcome. As Eckhaart Tolle once put it: ‘When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life.’

But maybe uncertainty actually serves us…

Although mindfulness training can help us to manage uncertainty to some extent, there may be more to that than mere management. The fact is that uncertainty is a vital part of life. If we always knew what coming next, life wouldn’t be nearly as fulfilling. The excitement of not knowing what might happen can be a great driving force in promoting change, opening up new and more creative possibilities.

By practicing mindfulness, we return our attention to the present moment – over and over.

Stepping slightly apart from the constant stream of anxious inner chatter, we can begin to more deeply appreciate what is here now. That can allow us to embrace uncertainty for what it is – the necessary counterpart of all vitality.

As Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it:

‘There is a way of being, a way of looking at problems, a way of coming to terms with the full catastrophe that can make life more joyful and rich than it otherwise might be.’

To discuss how mindfulness training can help with uncertainty in the workplace and beyond, contact rachel@mindfulnessworks.com or call (+44) 01223 750660