How to Turn Doubt into a Catalyst in Your Professional Life?

Our sense of uncertainty is a holdover from our ancestors. In the early stages of human history, our uncertainty made our safety possible. It made us cautious, assessing situations carefully, and kept us out of questionable situations.

This experience encouraged us to avoid potential dangers or risky situations to preserve our lives.

Still, it is rarely life-threatening in today's world. It's less tied to survival—the fittest survive in this period. Instead, it may produce an experience that teaches some people how to grow in the face of uncertainty.

Tigers with blade-like fangs may not lurk behind our doors, but the lack of knowledge about a situation, the solution to a problem, or the timeframe of an event—like quarantine due to a pandemic—still triggers a sense of threat. The ruins of earlier times distort our understanding of uncertainty and cast it in a bad light.

What Risks Does Uncertainty Pose?

With uncertainty playing less of a role in our physical harm, there are still ways it can undermine our progress and success.

1. Traditional Work

Uncertainty breeds doubt about how tasks are accomplished, and success is achieved. We cling to our habits, behaviors, and previous thoughts and find solace in the safety of traditional work methods. Still, this slows down our growth. In such cases, we fail to try out new approaches, learn new things, cease creative thinking, and resort to routine practices, which eventually cause stagnation.

2. Risk Aversion

Feeling uncertain makes us vulnerable and extremely insecure. We turn to safe coping mechanisms to alleviate these feelings, which often means hesitating and cutting our chances because we are unwilling to accept any opportunity that doesn't fit the mold.

3. Fixating on the Negative

In moments of uncertainty, we tend to focus on the bad things. The speculation our uncertainty creates tends to focus on worst-case scenarios. Once that happens, we unconsciously start to prime our minds to focus on information that supports the possibility of negative occurrences. This distorts our perception of the world and undermines our ability to function.

How Does Rumination Contribute to Your Uncertainty?

When we decide on a course of action, we often weigh all available options or aspects to decide on the optimal step. As our uncertainty grows, we keep weighing every argument, so we lose confidence in our ability to make the right decision. We might look for more information from multiple sources, making things a bit more challenging. We become stuck in a loop of rumination and indecisiveness as the question "what if" takes over our minds.

Rumination greatly influences uncertainty; it involves excessive brooding and repetitive thoughts and choices. Employees may struggle when deciding whether to accept a job offer from a different company. They go back and forth between considerations of their current company relationships, tenure, proximity to home, understanding of job responsibilities versus opportunities for growth, salary increases, fun projects, and a downtown office instead of transcending them. They remain in a state of indecision.

This type of rumination rarely produces a helpful outcome or decision. Instead, it triggers similar experiences to an annoying song stuck in your head and put on replay. Rumination casts doubt on the situation, your decision, and yourself.

What Strategies Can You Use to Manage Uncertainty?

To ensure that uncertainty doesn’t mess with your plans for success, here are some ways to control it:

1. Identify the thought causing uncertainty. Since thoughts are the source of all emotions, knowing the thought will help you concentrate on its root. Once you know it or any other thoughts causing uncertainty, you can concentrate on changing them.
2. Replace the idea with an alternative to ease your uncertainty. It doesn't need to make sense because our brains interpret data differently, and effective alternative thoughts typically rely on data, evidence, or personal experience. Let's say your first thought might be, "I'm not sure if I gave the right answers to the interview questions," if you're not sure you did well in a job interview. Here, an alternate thought could be, "I answered by drawing on my professional background. I might not be a good fit for this job if the answers weren't correct." It takes many tries sometimes to know the best alternative and effective thought.
3. As you consider the situation, establish "certainty points" and "action steps." In our scenario, one certainty point could be that you gave that interview your all, while another could be that you haven't received any feedback yet because the hiring committee stated that you'd receive the decision in a few weeks.

These points of certainty build well-defined borders around the situation, thereby balancing or replacing uncertainty. Hence, action steps provide you with a sense of functional control and allow you to write a thank-you note, email the hiring committee, apply for other jobs, or devise a plan to handle the situation if you haven't received feedback by the end of the month. Get the person's contact information, note their phone number and email address, and set a contact date.

What Benefits Does Uncertainty Offer You?

You will be able to manage your level of uncertainty about your goals once you put the right management techniques into practice. Indeed, uncertainty can be an asset to success.

First, uncertainty leaves room for exploring new options, untapped tracks, and unexpected fixes. Additionally, when you're unsure how a situation will turn out, you don't confine yourself to a predetermined outcome. Lastly, we can explore, examine, and analyze these alternative outcomes. This might lead to a better course of action than the one we initially took.

Ultimately, uncertainty doesn't dictate the outcome or provide the only answer. When you're uncertain, the goal is to learn how to be okay with it and apply the strategies mentioned. Therefore, uncertainty grants you opportunities, imposes no restrictions, and doesn't prevent your presumptions from seizing new opportunities that may arise.

This is also about accepting that, even though you won't know the exact outcome, you will still have plans or strategies to deal with it. This way, uncertainty turns from being an enemy into an ally.