Welcome to The Inbox Coach, a monthly email to bring you a little bit of coaching to your inbox and help you to make time for your personal development. In March I’m going to be looking at how uncertainty impacts our career development.

2020 was the year of uncertainty, where everything we were used to relying on disappeared and two months in to 2021, we still aren’t certain what the future looks like. We’ve collectively experienced a huge amount of uncertainty in the last year, but it is something that can happen in our careers at any time. If you have ever worked for an organisation that is going through a period of change or redundancy or had big shifts in your life that have impacted your ability to make decisions at work, you will know what it is like to work in an uncertain environment. Your work becomes stifled, because you don’t want to make any plans until you are certain of the new direction you are going in. You feel stuck, frustrated, angry and concerned that things will never change. This is manageable if you are in a short-term moment of flux, but when the uncertainty is going to be present for months you have to be able to take a different approach. 

The illusion of certainty

Certainty is having confidence in your best guess at what might happen in any given situation. When you think about it, it is an illusion, all be it a very helpful one. Being sure that something is going to go the way you have planned it doesn’t mean it happens that way. If things work out the way you planned, it just means that your best guess was a good one and it matched the outcome. We have to buy into this illusion otherwise we would never make any plans and be constantly preparing for highly unlikely situations which would be exhausting. Even though we know that certainty is to some extent an illusion, something shifts when the possibility of things not going to plan becomes more prominent.

When we are aware of uncertainty or that things might change, we lose the ability to continue working with our best guess assumptions. Our focus shifts to the unknown and the point in the future when all of the answers will appear. Except they usually don’t. If you are waiting to move to a new house before you plot your next career move, you will still have to figure that career move out once you have moved. If you are waiting for your organisation to launch a new strategy before you set your career goals for the year, you still need to have thought about what you want your development to be. Thinking about what you can do until things change, rather than thinking what you will be able to do once things have changed means you focus on what you can work on right now. 

The opportunity of uncertainty 

I think we tend to think of uncertainty as a negative state to be in and as a consequence we rush to gain certainty. What if we can embrace uncertainty and use it to question our assumptions and work towards an outcome that better works for us, because we have affirmed it is the right thing to do?

When we are uncertain, we ask questions to gain knowledge. We gather the information we need to make a decision and to raise our awareness of our situation. This process can help us to see new ways to achieve our goals or even challenge what is important to us. When we are certain we have a tendency to do what we have always done and miss the opportunity to spot a better way of doing something. Working with uncertainty just means re-evaluating your plans and making them work for the situation you are in. 

Reflection

*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add this email to your calendar

If we can reframe uncertainty as a way to review how we approach a task or problem, it becomes a positive opportunity. By taking charge of the situation and thinking about what information you need to seek out, you take back control.  

For the reflection exercise this week I want to help you to create a path out of uncertainty by asking the following questions:

What do I know about my current situation?

What questions do I need to answer to gain clarity?

What action can I take to get started before I have all the answers?

Write your answers down in your journal and reflect on what you do know about your current situation and what the impact of not knowing has on you.   

Action

Planning out your approach to a situation is different from having a plan. A plan often details the specific tasks you need to carry out, whereas planning your approach means thinking about the information you need to gather, the research you need to do and the questions you need to ask to take you towards your goal. You often won’t be able to map your way to the end result because you don’t have all of the information yet, but you can think about where that information will come from. By working through your approach, what you are able to do is to think about the steps you are going to go through and what the action will look like. Often working through what your approach will be will help you to see the resources you already have and prepare you for what is missing. 

Task

Think about your career goals for the next few months and the approach you are going to take to making them happen. Think about the level of uncertainty you are facing (is it less than you thought or more?) and think about what you can do now as well as what you will do when you get more information. 

If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when you are going to do them and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.

Inspiration 

“You can have anything you want in life if you dress for it” - Edith Head

For the inspiration this month I have chosen Edith Head, who was one of the most prolific costume designers in the golden era of Hollywood. As well as working on many Hitchcock films she also did the costumes for All About Eve, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Funny Face, amongst many others.

So much of our ability to be fulfilled in work (and happy in life) comes down to the world that we create for ourselves. How we choose to frame our problems, celebrate our success or think about what is possible, comes down to what we want to create. The advice that I take from Edith Head is to dress for the part you want to play in life. I love the idea that you can imagine the life you want for yourself and start to make that happen by the clothes that you wear. Because clothes aren’t just clothes, you are thinking of the attributes you have that you want to tell other people about and you can use your choice of outfit to do that. By focusing on the attributes you want to show people, you will believe in yourself more and develop them even further.  The outfits that we chose to wear say something about us. This might seem an odd choice for inspiration at this moment in time when workwear is all about comfy waist bands but making time to think about how we want to dress for our zoom calls gives us a moment to think about who we want to be at work. It’s a moment to take back control from the uncertainty and we can start the day thinking about what we want from our career and ensure that every meeting, call and project delivered is moving us towards our goals.

You can find out more about Edith Head and the advice I take from her here

With so much uncertainty going on in our work and home life, as well as restrictions, home schooling and general concern, making time for your career development can be tough. Remember that lots of small actions over time add up, so whatever you do this week to move you towards your career goal it is enough. I’ll be back next week with more thoughts on dealing with uncertainty in your career. 

See you then

Laura