These days, the quality of our relationship with uncertainty matters more than ever. Uncertainty arrives at our psychological doorstep in many ways. Some of these ways are in the form of challenge, stress, and performance pressure; and this can impact all areas of business and life, writes Joe Pane.

Our emotional fitness, which is essentially measured by the quality of our relationship with uncertainty, significantly contributes to the level of resilience we can embrace.

How well we embrace resilience influences our level of adaptability and flexibility.

Many of us try to adapt by changing something ‘out there’, which in some instances may help, however most of the solutions lie within us not outside of us. This is true because all experiences are filtered in through our minds. We cannot experience anything outside of our mind. Our mind is a complex combination of thought systems. How well we navigate any form of uncertainty is massively influenced by these thought systems.

You are your thoughts

Our thought systems are made up of a variety of powerful psychological filters such as our values, beliefs, attitudes, and reference points of past experiences. The exciting news is that all these filters have one thing in common which is within our control – the meaning we give our experiences.

We are meaning-making machines in a world that has no meaning. This can be easily misunderstood. In other words, everything in the world is completely open to interpretation. Our level of resilience and adaptability in any workplace is experienced based on the meaning we are giving any well-intentioned message or communication.

Five ways we can foster resilience and adaptability in the workplace:

Change the meaning we are giving what we observe

Emotions do not respond to facts, emotions respond to the meaning we give the facts. This is crucial to know and remember. Our emotions colour and flavour every nook and cranny of our experience. Most of our emotions are manufactured by the meaning we give what we are focusing on.

Becoming aware of the meaning we are giving anything empowers us to change the way we look at things. Once we change the way we look at something, what we look at changes. This is the power of changing the meaning we give anything. For example, we have emailed something we regard as important to someone more senior in the organisation and we receive no response, what does this mean? As Dr Viktor Frankl wrote in his seminal book “Man’s Search For Meaning”, ‘between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom. This chosen response is the meaning we give what we see.’ Change the meaning, change the emotion. Change the emotion, change the experience.

Focus on what you can control.

There are 3 crucial focus points available to all of us. We can focus on what is missing or what we have. We can focus on what has happened in the past or we can focus on what is happening right now. We can focus on self or others. If we focus on what is missing, the past and ourselves, we will provide ourselves a vastly different experience in comparison to focusing on what we have, the present and others.

Which level of truth do you live in?

Psychologically we live on one of 3 levels of truth when interpreting anything in our work environments. These three levels are imagined truth, assumed truth or actual truth. We can completely fabricate our interpretation (imagined), we can present a more neutral response (assumed) or we can just simply focus on the facts only (actual).

Embrace a clean and healthy perspective

We create this by having easy access to gratitude and appreciation. No matter how tough things can be, it has been said that there literally 1 billion people on the planet who would love to have your current problem.

Values clarity

Values are our deepest desires coming to life. These are guided by an emotional compass within all of us. Discover or allow yourself to immerse in activities outside of work which raise your spirit and bring you joy. When you have something to look forward to many times per week, it makes dealing with daily difficulties at work much easier. When we have nothing to look forward to, our problems in the work environment can amplify.

All we have is our mind. By looking after our mind we are better able to foster resilience so we can navigate the inevitable uncertainties our careers and businesses will bring.

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