Today’s Wireboard starts with a little physical activity. And given the fact that sitting is the new smoking, we could all use it! It’s easy and there are just three steps. I’ll wait while you do them:
What was that like for you? Notice anything? When I did this exercise, I noticed two things: First, when we’re walking, we’re constantly shifting weight between one leg and then the other. Second, there’s a subtle act of balance when we only have one foot on the ground. But we usually don’t notice the shifting or balance because we do it so quickly and we’ve been walking for so many years.
In the decades between being a toddler and being elderly, we take that challenge of balancing in the in-between steps for granted. It just happens naturally (unless we’re rehabbing an injury or we’ve had one too many at happy hour).
Now, do the walking slowly exercise again, but this time notice how you feel at the moment you have only one foot on the ground and then how you feel when you have two feet on the ground.
I’m betting that you felt a mildly unpleasant feeling when you were on one foot and a mildly pleasant feeling when you were on both. If you added a tiny leap in between the steps you might feel a more than mild sense of discomfort. Two feet on the ground puts us at ease; one foot less so, and no feet can be frightening by comparison.
Our brains are hard-wired to prefer the ease, certainty and stability of two feet on the ground. But sticking with certainty takes us nowhere, literally. In life, when we need to take a small step or big leap (eg. when we need to move from one place to another), how we imagine the experience of being in-between the take-off and landing can make the difference between getting what we want out of life or not. In almost every context of life, people have to be willing to take risks every now and then or risk, as Kierkegaard says, losing ourselves.
Our fear of taking a leap is not so much about landing in a different place from where we were. Our fear is the uncertainty of what happens after we’ve left our secure, familiar ground. Will we land where we want and will we land safely? The less certainty about the outcome, the more fear.
In a study published last year on stress and uncertainty, researchers at the University College of London Institute of Neuroscience studied how people responded to predictable negative outcomes versus unpredictable negative outcomes. What they found was that facing a 50% chance of a negative outcome was more stressful than a 90% chance. Put another way, the uncertainty we experience is more stressful than an actual negative outcome. Humans appear to be wired to seek certainty (even if the certainty is a negative). But if we are ever to move beyond where we currently are, we have to increase our willingness to manage uncertainty and the stress that comes with it.
So the question is: how do we overcome this uncertainty-induced stress? How can we navigate the discomfort of taking a step? Because we can stay right where we are, in a place of comfort and stagnation, or we can choose to take to the air and find growth.
I’d like to share a few approaches that I’ve used to help manage this fear of uncertainty in the midst of taking a positive step. If we can change our mindset about the uncertainty, we might be able to make these positive steps more easily.
Those are my three go-tos for helping myself and my clients take important steps and manage the anxiety that we all experience mid-step. What about yours? I would love to hear about them in the comments section!