How to navigate uncertainty
A different take on what's unavoidable.
Being the female owner of a small, service-based business is always a risky and uncertain endeavor.
You never know where the next client will come from or when. New clients flow in, clearly from all the work you’ve done, but the timing is not at all what you anticipated. Then there’s a drought.
You have to juggle cash flow with unanticipated expenses and delayed client payments. Your clients’ business are impacted by forces beyond your control. One LinkedIn or Instagram post gets a positive response from your followers and the next falls like a tree in the forest with no one around to listen.
The rules of the game change, through no fault of your own (think AI), and you’re left with needing to change the structure of your business.
Does any of this sound familiar? I know it does to me.
If ever there was a time to get a handle on how to navigate uncertainty, it would be now.
How Phil Stutz frames uncertainty.
Which is why I was struck deep in my bones when I read a passage from psychiatrist Phil Stutz’s new book. His take on uncertainty isn’t just philosophical, it’s wildly practical (and it comes with a woo-woo warning).
If you’re not familiar with Phil Stutz, he’s a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist (yes, to the stars, among others), bestselling author of The Tools, and subject of the 2022 Netflix documentary film (with Jonah Hill), Stutz.
His most recent project is a book called True and False Magic which he co-wrote with Elise Loehnen. In it, they lay out Phil’s framework and methodology for navigating life in a clear-eyed, positive, life-affirming way. One that deals head on with the way the world and our experience here is structured.
His thesis is that there are three domains or “three faces of God” (replace “God” with the Universe, Spirit, whatever works for you) that are the “Unavoidables” in life. They are Pain, Uncertainty, and the Need for Constant Work. To squeeze the juice from the lemon of life (my analogy), you need to engage with all three at all times.
For our purposes, we’ll focus on the second unavoidable — uncertainty.
“The universe is chaotic In and of itself. There’s no way any human being could be privy to what will happen next. It’s not a bad thing that we’re not privy to the rules of the universe, because knowing what will happen will not solve our anxiety—it would actually be crippling. If you want absolute security, which I call cosmic safety, you ned up instead with cosmic terror, what I call the cosmic twins. You can’t belie this truth: It’s a law of spiritual physics. If the world were predictable, you’d be paralyzed from moving forward.
To deal with uncertainty, you must deal with reality. Our entire society is designed to keep you away from reality. In fact, most of us are convinced that luck or some magical practice or divine intervention will get us off the hook of dealing with these three undeniable realities, these three domains… There is no cure for uncertainty: Working with reality requires taking action and making choices without proof.”
He goes on to say that, “You must continue to engage without guarantee of outcome” and by way of example shares the importance of voting. You may think that your one vote doesn’t count, but by maintaining that perspective, “You’re denying the importance of taking action.”
“… but in reality, when you cast your vote, you are stamping your vision and your willingness to sacrifice with no guarantees of any outcome on the back of an envelope. You need an entire culture that understands and develops this vision…
If you take only one thing from this entire book, I hope it’s this: The most important tool for contending with life is freely chosen faith. This faith is 'chosen’ for no other reason than your desire to have faith. To deal with reality, you must accept the fact that reality is unpredictable and that you must act anyway, using only the faith that you’ve chosen to have.”
Then he shares his wedding cake analogy (and drawing… Phil Stutz is known for his drawings) in which the base of the cake is Faith, then next layer is Action, and the top layer is Confidence.
Faith → Action → Confidence
You start with freely chosen faith, on which you take action (however small), which leads to confidence. The latter is built through experience, not certainty.
The donut shop.
Putting this in the realm of launching a business, Phil Stutz presents the idea of opening a donut shop. You have the idea and the will to open the donut shop and you get some signs from the Universe that help you move in the right direction.
“Now you could spend hours, days, and years, reading about donut shops, going to business seminars and taking marketing classes to try to figure out how many glazed, sprinkled, and chocolate donuts to bake. I see this with my patients all the time: They want to create something, but they want to create it with built-in certainty of its success. People very much want this to be a cognitive process that can be solved. But you’ll never figure it out until you actually just open the donut shop. It’s only then you will discover what you need to know, only when you are right in the middle of the experience—in the process, you’ll find your instincts…
In the first fifteen minutes of having your donut shop’s doors open, you’ll learn more about donut flavors and the intricacies of operating a shop than in fifteen years of research—and you’ll be far more confident in what you’re learning. Research isn’t bad per se, but you’ll never trust research because it hasn’t been lived—it doesn’t give you the right kind of information. Things will never work out the way you were planning for them to work out. On the other hand, the intelligence of the will that is nonintellectual and comes through action—it will find you and give you what you need. Putting yourself in the center of the dynamic forces that control the universe is the intelligence of the will.”
This applies to all stages and aspects of your business.
There are no guaranteed outcomes. It’s only by doing the thing (new offering, blog, podcast, email newsletter, social media posts, collaborations, etc.) that you get the information you need to make the next move.
And uncertainty is baked into all of it.
So where are you waiting for certainty before you act?
What’s your “donut shop” — the idea you keep researching instead of trying?
This week, take one small step. Open the metaphorical doors.
Faith. Then action. Confidence will follow.
Until next time.
Katherine
p.s. I touched on this topic in a post grounded in the story of a female founder I know and shared some specific thoughts on what might be holding you back. Check it out here.
#ICYMI
