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Uncertainty VIP - Audio

Hello my VIP members, this is AJ. Welcome to this month’s lesson. The topic this month is ‘Uncertainty’. This is an interesting topic. I think some people when they think of this word uncertainty, some people have a very positive feeling about it and other people have maybe a little bit scary and negative feeling about it. I would say probably most people have a little bit of a negative emotion when they hear that word uncertainty.

Uncertainty, of course, is the opposite of certainty. Certainty means you are sure. You know something for sure, definitely, right? If I am certain that I can speak English well it means I’m totally confident, 100%, I know I can do it. If I’m uncertain that I can speak English well it means I’m not sure. Maybe I can. Maybe I can’t. I don’t know. I’m not sure, right? You’re less confident and that’s why people have this idea of ooh, uncertainty is not good. It’s not so good to not know what’s going to happen. It feels better to know yes, this will happen. I know it will. It gives you a sense of confidence.

You’re not going to be surprised. Nothing bad is going to surprise you suddenly.

So, those are general ideas. They’re totally natural and some of them are quite healthy, in fact. However, there’s this great quote by Tony Robbins that I recently heard him say and it got me really thinking about this topic of uncertainty. He said “The more comfortable you are with uncertainty, the greater the quality of your life will be.” So, in other words, if you’re very comfortable with uncertainty in your life, all parts of your life, you’re more likely to be happy. That’s essentially what he was saying.

Then he said “Certainty is like crack, crack cocaine. It’s an addictive drug that kills your soul.” I thought oh, my God, well that’s pretty strong. I wonder. Do I really believe this?

Is this true? So I started thinking about it more and more. What was he trying to say?

What was his point? Because, of course, we all do want certainty and we all need certainty. I mean if I’m going to go teach a large group of people I want to feel certain that I’m going to do a great job. I want to feel very confident before I step onto the stage and teach 500 people. I don’t want to be unsure and nervous. Oh, my God, am I going to do a good job, right? I don’t want that. So what is Tony talking about? He also wants us to be confident and strong, so what was he talking about? Like why is uncertainty a good thing or at least why is it good to be comfortable with uncertainty?

Then what I realized was, at least my belief, is that he was talking about the idea essentially of faith. This is what’s called a paradox. A paradox is two opposites that seem to both be true. One thing is true, but then the opposite also seems to be true and it’s a paradox. It’s a little bit like a riddle. You know well how that can be true and this at the same time, right? Yet, a lot of deep truths are paradoxes. It’s not always something is right and something is wrong. This is good and this is bad. Sometimes this is good and this is good. This is bad and this is bad. That’s kind of the idea of a paradox. The adjective is paradoxical, paradoxical. So this is a paradoxical truth that on one hand certainty is a good thing, we feel happy when we’re certain, but yet on the other hand too much certainty and too much addiction to certainty can make us feel miserable. So we can be happy with certainty and we can be miserable with certainty.

Same thing with uncertainty. On one hand uncertainty can make us feel really nervous and not happy at all, but on the other hand to be very comfortable with uncertainty is a key to being very relaxed and happy. So oh, my God, let’s figure this out. Let’s talk about this a little more in more detail because I think it’s actually one of these deeper principles in life that really is worth thinking about at a deep level. My feeling is that Tony was talking about faith and, essentially, faith is trust, trust especially in yourself. You can define yourself as deeply as you want to. I mean it could just you, your personality and your abilities or at a very deeper level, you know your spiritual self, whatever, but faith is just a sense of certainty that no matter what happens you’ll do what’s necessary and you’ll be okay.

That’s really what we’re talking about here and so this is the paradox. If you have that deep internal certainty that hey, no matter what happens I’m going to be okay. I’ll adapt.

I’ll do what’s necessary. I’ll be fine. If there are failures, if there are problems, I’ll handle it. I’ll be flexible. I can handle it. You have that deep internal certainty. It means that you are much more comfortable with external uncertainty. Because the truth is that the world is an uncertain place, we never know what’s going to happen. There’s so much out there we can’t control.

We can’t control what happens in the economy, right? If the economy crashes there’s nothing we can do about that and so if you sit around thinking about that all the time you could become very uncertain inside, very nervous. You could feel really, really kind of worried and exhausted and fearful all the time because you know that oh, my God, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the economy oh, my God. It’s really horrible. It could get worse, which is true.

And then, of course, there are just events that happen in our lives, you know tragedies or terrible things that happen in our families or with our businesses or with our personal health, all kinds of things. If we want to we could sit around and imagine a thousand bad things that could possibly happen to us in the next year or the next five years or the next 10 years and they are all truly possible. So all that massive uncertainty can make us just oh, my God, feel terrible, if we let it become internal uncertainty.

So I think this is what Tony was trying to say is that being comfortable with uncertainty requires you to have a deeper level of certainty in yourself. So what he’s saying is that if you try to have certainty in the external world you’re going to be very, very miserable.

We all know people this, they’re called control freaks. It’s a slang in American English. A control freak is someone who’s always trying to control everything in their life, all the external things. They try to control the people in their lives. They try to control the economic situation. They try to control their physical space. They’re always trying to make sure everything is under control, right? They’re always trying to organize and control everything. They want everything in the outside world to be like they want it to be and if it’s not, if things are not the way they want, if things start to become a little out of control oh, these people are very unhappy, miserable.

So this is what he was saying when he said certainty is like crack. It’s a killer of your soul. So what he’s saying is if you try to get certainty in the external world, if you’re always trying to make sure that everything in your life is certain, is predictable, you can handle it, you know what’s going to happen tomorrow, that you’re actually going to make yourself very, very miserable and unhappy. And too much of that, like let’s just your life is totally predictable, you know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow, the next day, the next day, well that is a kind of misery called total boredom.

I know in my own life, when my own life becomes too certain, too predictable, in fact this has happened fairly recently with me, that I really start losing my passion and I start losing my feeling of being alive. I’m just like ah, every day is becoming the same. Yeah, I’m not worried. I’m not worried about something bad happening, but I know what’s going to happen. Every day it’s going to be the same and then I really become unhappy because of that – too much certainly in the external world.

So some amount of uncertainty in the outside world, some kind of surprise, like we don’t really know exactly what’s going to happen every day, that can be very exhilarating. It can be energizing. It can give us a kind of passion and excitement. It’s like what’s going to happen next? And, yet, for some people changes and surprises can make them totally just fall apart, to be very, very unhappy. So, again, what it really gets down to, I think what the central issue is, is what’s inside not what’s outside. You’ve gotta find your certainty, your confidence on the inside.

It doesn’t mean that you have to know everything. All it means is that you have a deep confidence in yourself. You know that you are resourceful, that you can improvise and that you are flexible so that if a problem comes up you’ll handle it somehow. If there’s some painful event in your life it will be painful but you’ll heal. You’ll be able to heal and you’ll be able to handle it. You can even look through your past and say okay, maybe some bad things have happened but I survived them all. I managed to adapt and learn and keep going.

That’s really what the core part of this lesson is about is of the ability to be internally flexible, to adapt and learn so that no matter what happens in the external world you can adapt and be flexible and do whatever is necessary to handle the situation and after you start doing that a few times you start gaining a different kind of confidence. It’s the kind of confidence that tells you hey, no matter what I can handle it. I’m a resourceful, flexible person. I can improvise. I can learn. I can handle anything. I don’t need to worry about what’s gonna happen tomorrow. I don’t need to worry about every single possible problem. It doesn’t matter. If it comes I’ll handle it. See, that’s the kind of uncertainty we want. Not try to make uncertainty in the outside world, but rather develop an internal certainty and, again, another paradox. That certainty is based on being flexible, being able to improvise, being able to learn and adapt very quickly and just knowing in yourself that hey, I’m strong. I’m stronger than maybe I think I am and I can handle almost anything.

So, I’m going to leave you with one last analogy to kind of illustrate this point. I think it was Alan Watts talked about this. I can’t remember where I saw this exactly, but I always use it in my mind whenever I have some crisis. Whenever some big uncertainty comes into my life that I didn’t expect and I start to get worried oh, my God, ah, and I get overwhelmed and then I imagine this little analogy or metaphor and it really helps me adapt and be flexible and handle the situation and not be so overwhelmed.

So, Alan Watts discussed it like this. He’s like imagine that you know your life is a rafting trip. You’re in like a big rubber raft on a big river. Now, in a lot of that river there’s just a nice slow meandering kind of pace to it, right? So you’re in it and you can just yeah, you can just sit back and relax. Nothing to worry about, you can kind of paddle slowly. You don’t really need to do much. It’s very stress free, but every now and then you’ll come to these big rapids where there are these big rocks and the water is roaring over the rocks and there’s this huge thing and it looks really scary and the water is going faster, faster, faster. When that happens, that kind of crisis in our life, it’s kind of like a life crisis, right?

We’re hitting the rapids. So he’s like what is the proper thing to do when you encounter a rapid when you’re rafting?

Well, I’ve been whitewater rafting a few times and so I can tell you that he’s absolutely right. The thing not to do is resist, right? If you’re coming towards the rapid, you’re in your boat and you’re coming towards the big fall and everything, the water is going really strong and powerful the worst thing to do is to try to back up. Oh, my God! You can’t do it, right? The water is too powerful. It’s going to strong. It’s too fast and if you try to back up you will exhaust yourself. You might be able to fight it a little bit, but eventually you will get tired and you’ll get pulled over the rapids.

Now, the problem is, as rafting people will tell you, river people will tell you, if you go over a rapid slowly you have no control, right? I’ve experienced this myself. If you go too slowly over the rapid then the water has all the control. You’re just being pulled along by the water. It will take you into a rock. It will take you into a hole kind of in the water. It can dump you over. So the worst possible thing to do is resist. The second worst thing to do is to just kind of do nothing, just steer a little bit but still go slowly, because then you have very little control. Just trying to steer it, steer the raft with that much power, you have almost no control and, again, you’re in more danger. So what do you do when you approach a rapid and you’re in a raft?

Well, like I said, in my experience all the guides told us the same thing. You actually paddle as hard and fast as you can. Your job is to go faster than the water is going. On all my little rafting trips I did when I was living in Georgia and South Carolina, we’d be coming up and then we’d start getting close to the rapid and the guide would start telling us paddle harder! Paddle, paddle, paddle! So we’d all start padding as hard as we can and we’d start going as fast as possible. As we got faster and faster we actually gained more control and we’d go over these huge rapids. We’d go through and we’d slide right through. It was a lot of fun, everybody is laughing wah! You know? We’d get to the other side and then we’d just keep on going and then the water would calm down again.

So what’s the analogy for our life here? What’s the metaphor? Well, the metaphor is this. That when things in the outside world are scary and they’re changing and it’s kind of like a rapid, the worst thing to do is to try to resist. Say oh, it’s not happening. Oh, no, no, no, I’m not going to let this happen to me. No, no, no, the economy is not bad, oh!

You know this kind of resistance and denial. That’s the worst possible thing to do because you can’t resist most things in the outside world, nothing that’s really big and uncertain. You will exhaust yourself trying to resist it and eventually you’ll be overcome.

The second worst thing to do is to just kind of do nothing. Oh, I’ll just ignore it. I’ll just pretend that this isn’t happening. I’ll just try to forget about it and hope everything is okay. Well, that also doesn’t work a lot of times, right? Because then that big issue, the big uncertainty, that big rapid is not going away and because you’re going to slow you will be controlled by the uncertainty. You’ll be controlled by the crisis. So the best possible thing, just like in a rafting trip, is to go faster than the rapid.

So what does that mean in our analogy if we’re comparing whitewater rafting to life?

Well, what it means is that the best possible thing is that you actually proactively and aggressively change faster than the outside world is changing. So let’s say, let’s just talk about economics. So, again, the economy is getting worse. Just resisting that, it’s not getting worse, it’s not getting worse, that’s the worst thing to do. The second worst is just okay, I’m just going to ignore it. Hopefully I’ll keep my job. Hopefully I’ll keep my job.

I just hope I keep it. That doesn’t work very well either. So how would you go faster than the rapid?

Well, the third thing to do would be to just jump in really aggressively and start learning a lot of new skills, maybe even identify a totally new career or at least a new job that you want, something that’s better, something that would give you more security and you would very, very aggressively and as fast and you could and flexibly as you could you would learn all these new skills as well as you could. You’d become very aggressive at your job, learning all the skills in your job, doing a better and better and better job.

You might go out and start trying to meet people both in your own company at your own job and at other positions, making more connections and contacts. You’d become very aggressive before anything bad happened to you and in this way you’d be much more likely to have a positive outcome during this crisis. You’d be much more likely to actually find a better job or at the very least if people are being cut from your job if you’re being very aggressive and proactive and energetic you’re less likely to be the one cut.

Probably it will be someone else who’s trying to deny it and resist it or who’s just ignoring it.

And it’s not just jobs or economics, this works with everything. You know if your health is starting to be bad you can deny it. It’s not getting bad. It’s not getting bad or you could just try to ignore it and say oh, it’s not that bad, it’s okay or you could become very aggressive and say I’m not just going to deal with this health problem I have, I am going to become super healthy. I’m going to do everything I can to learn about health. I’m going to start running and walking and lifting weights and eating well so that I feel fabulous, right? You go beyond. You go faster than the problem. You actually change faster than the problem does. You adapt faster than the problem does.

That’s the very nice little analogy for anything in your life. So when you’re in the calm parts of the river you can just sit back and relax if you like, if that’s what you like to do.

You know if you’re someone who’s very aggressive you could paddle hard during the calm parts too. It’s up to you. Some people are just always like that. Other people during the calm parts of their lives they just wanna sit back and look around and take it easy and that’s fine, but when the uncertainty comes, when that rapid comes, when that crisis comes, you gotta grab that paddle and go faster. You gotta adapt faster. You gotta learn faster. You gotta grow faster. You gotta become more aggressive than the problem itself.

And the good news is that rapid will not last forever, just like on a real river. If you do that, if you’re really aggressive for a while, maybe several months, maybe even a year, you’re going to come out on top. You’re going to get through that rapid just fine and you’ll get to another calm spot and it’s time to relax again if you want to.

So that’s it. That’s our topic this month ‘Uncertainty’. Just remember the little whitewater rafting analogy. Just think about maybe some problems in your life that you’re having now or that you’ve had in the past and think about them as if they were a river, like you’re approaching the rapids and ask yourself have I been resisting it, have I been ignoring it or am I paddling harder and taking control. I hope that if you’re not doing that that you will start paddling a little bit harder in your life when you hit those crisis points.

All right, I will see you on our social site. Have a great day, bye-bye.