How do we persevere amidst uncertainty?

Our brains enjoy predicting the future. It feels good to know what’s about to happen. Even though we don’t really know what will happen, we make plans. We love making plans. It doesn’t matter that most of these are flawed from the start (thanks planning fallacy).

But right now, it’s different.

We don’t know what’s going to happen.

We don’t know what the future will bring.

There have been multiple times over the past 3 months that we didn’t even know what the next few hours or days would look like. And, it keeps happening. First, COVID-19 turned our world upside down. Six days ago, the killing of George Floyd. This weekend, the protests, looting, and police brutality.

As if losing the future view wasn’t enough, we’ve also been exposed to a high dose of fear, anxiety, and tragedy.

I keep asking myself how do we persevere as individuals, and as a community. I have yet to find a satisfying answer, but in the process, I’ve found some nuggets of wisdom that I’d like to share with you.

1. Name it and reality-check expectations

Acceptance is a tough ask, and yet it’s necessary. Starting by accepting that this is a shitty situation is the only reasonable first step, and yet it is so foreign.

In her Podcast “Unlocking Us”, Brené Brown shares a simple, yet powerful way to reality-check our expectations when we’re doing something for the first time. She calls it a Fucking First Time (FFT) and highlights the power labeling has in giving us space to adjust our expectations and process how we feel.

2. Cultivate compassion for yourself and other people

Our perspective is a function of our experience. This means that our understanding of pain is contingent on the experiences of pain, suffering, and grief we’ve lived through before.

Tools like the pain scale can help us contextualize how different our experiences can be from someone else’s. Once we contextualize, empathizing comes easier.

I’ve learned that it’s possible that an experience that is for me a 2 out of 10 in my pain scale, can be a 10 for someone else. Cultivating compassion for ourselves and others allows us to connect while creating space for all of us to show up the best we can.

3. Define what surviving this means for you

Now, more than ever before, it’s easier to compare ourselves to others. Not only do we have the time, but we have developed a habit of content snacking. While there’s a positive trend of vulnerability and tackling hard conversations spreading in social media — the proverbial grass continues to be greener on the other side. This can be especially difficult in times of significant changes like the one we’re all going through.

To counter this, it’s important to define what surviving means for each one of us. For some, this means building our mental toughness, grit, and ability to persevere. For others, it means getting dressed at some point in the day. The beauty is that both of these options, or any other, are perfectly OK.

In the end, what matters is that we survived and came out the other side. Regardless if that means you read extra books, slept more, showered less, built a garden, or simply stayed alive.