Uncertainty... What is it good for? Absolutely Nothing! (Say it again...)

I was headed to see a friend last Saturday who has temporarily lost his freedom. Through some poor choices, he has also lost his home and his connection to family and friends. While I was very sad for him and was going to support him in his situation, I was struck by how I quickly went to my own situation and became very insular. By the time I headed home, I found myself in a deep funk borne of existential despair.

As a true extrovert would, I spoke to a few people that morning to try and sort out what was going on. Two themes emerged: first, I had become somewhat disconnected from my overall ambition (what I care about) and, second, an underlying feeling of uncertainty was driving my less than positive mood.

What an opportunity(!) to explore and learn; although it certainly didn’t feel that way at the time. I have remembered Fred Kofman’s assertion that emotions (like the anxiety that I was feeling about the future) should not to be suppressed or avoided (as many people try to) and that they are not inherently good or bad. Emotions are signals that we should listen to and that point to something more fundamental. The anxiety that I felt was an indication that something that I cared about was at risk. The uncertain future put everything I cared about at risk; family and friends, home, and livelihood were at the core.

What fueled my uncertainty? I later see that it is not just me, but our culture and the world beyond that is uncertain. But the world is always uncertain, sometimes more so than others; it is we who try to build safety, security and predictability into our indeterminate lives. Who would have predicted a year ago that we would have our first black president elected, that the shaky mortgages that were given away like candy would affect more than those who took them on or who underwrote them, that the financial markets would be down by 40% or that the world economy including high-flying China would grind to such a sudden, lurching halt? Again, I couldn’t focus on the larger picture, as I was caught up in my own story: an vague outlook for the new business that I successfully launched this year, my changing role as a father as my oldest prepares for college, and the shifting relationship in our marriage as Joy and I practice to be empty-nesters over the next few years. Perhaps most disorienting to me now was the loss of my father in July; he was an outsized presence in the network of voices in my life and would have helped bring calm to my chaotic thinking today.

In my conversations, I was reminded that I needed to reconnect to my ambition and plan for what I could control. Again, I had the opportunity to use this time at the end of the year to reconsider what I was committed to and where I could be in action to move those projects forward in 2009. My good friend Woody Allen (no not that one...) taught me that "we are what we practice"; reviewing my current practices to see where there were breakdowns seemed like a good place to start. I am looking at how I budget and allocate my time (each waking hour is roughly 1% of our day; is what we are doing right now the most important?) so that I can look back at the end of this next year and be confident that I energized the right projects and moved things forward as effectively as I could.

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance" and I realized that was where I found myself. The rational accounting for my current situation looked remarkable: I concluded my best income year ever, my family is relatively healthy, my children are doing well in school, sports and life in general, my wife and I are in conversation about the future and I have good conversations going on with my friends and colleagues in the community. On the other hand, the uncertainty that I described above was dominating my mood. Clearly, my rational being was not able to influence my emotional side to create some balance.

As I looked more closely, I realized that I let some of my fundamental practices slip during the rush of the holidays and had subsequently lost that always precarious emotional strength that is so needed in these times. In my work with clients, I always stress the importance of the body as our primary tool in life; now, I needed to heed my own advice. I needed to attend to the body practices that reduced my natural stress level as much as possible; that would give me the dynamic range needed to deal with normal breakdowns along with the body blows that the world was delivering on a seemingly daily basis.

I modified my daily routine to get back on track, even though I am on a bit of a holiday timetable. I skip sleeping in and instead do my sitting meditation (to keep me connected and open to the world) and then some push-ups, sit-ups and light weights. In addition to good sleep and exercise, I am cutting back on the celebratory eating and partying that I love to do. The results have been quick to help me stay more grounded in my day-to-day and I hope that you have your own routines to help you keep your head, heart and feet aligned in these uncertain times...

For the New Year, my context is "essence." In my business, I am working to transform my network of individuals into a network of networks. As a consultant and coach, I am a change catalyst that helps individuals, teams and companies overcome gaps and move to new levels of performance. Two personal initiatives for the year are around facilitating strategic talent management conversations and using our personal brand to become distinctive and as a competitive advantage.

I hope that this essay is of help to you in your thinking and planning for 2009, just writing it has clarified many things for me. Besides keeping my personal practices on track, my other resolution is to be writing regularly. Let me know what you think and if there are topics that you’d like to hear more about.

Here’s to a happy, healthy and prosperous (however you define it) new year. Cheers!


PS: Some of you reading will remember the lyrics from the 1969 Edwin Starr anti-war song that I riffed on in the title of this blog...