Change is not the enemy - uncertainty is

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Jaime Leal, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

I truly believe we are all super heroes. As a kid it is easy to imagine you can fly like Superman®, climb buildings like Spiderman® and even disappear as Sue, the invisible woman of the fantastic 4.

Somehow imagining is easy as a kid but it is also easily forgotten as an adult, life has its own way of making us pay more attention to “real” things and we are somehow trained to believe we are not able to do certain things instead of being train to do the unthinkable.

Change happens and before you know it you are wearing blinders and focusing on very specific things also with a very specific set of tools, nothing out of the box is allowed and anything out of view means uncertainty and uncertainty means –no go-, fear.

Did you know most of the kids who are nowadays attending elementary school will become professionals on tasks, jobs and enterprises we know nothing about yet, actually they don’t even exist, yes, they’ll have to invent them as they grow up, that’s the kind of uncertainty they’ll be facing, no more picking out of the basic three (Doctor, Engineer, Accountant) now they’ll have personalized careers, even more than we can see today at the universities.
After all, how would you be able to invent something when you were trained to think inside the box? How will you be able to erase the “IM” from the word “impossible” and make a business out of it? The answer is, facing uncertainty.
Uncertainty is the real enemy, the real challenge, change is not, change happens so often that is kind of unavoidable, we age and even when we try not to move we are already making a decision, so changing is not an option, change is the only way, we are all changing, all the time, till we die.

Uncertainty instead is a different story, since most of the time our decisions are being made to assure certainty, looking forward to keep us inside our comfort zone and making that extra effort to avoid that awful, weird feeling of having uncertainty about what is next, about what is going to happen, about taking that leap of faith towards a new reality.

On my own experience, facing uncertainty is the main difference between being successful and just living an ordinary life, between CEO’s, CFO’s, great managers, entrepreneurs and on the other hand, lifetime frontline employees, ability to deal with uncertainty is the difference between dreamers who wake up to fulfill their dreams and dreamers who are just that, nothing but eternal dreamers who prefer the comfort of letting someone else decide for them.

Dealing with uncertainty is one of the keys to success in life and in the corporate arena helping your people deal with uncertainty gives you that edge when dealing with change management.

Actually in change management everything is about uncertainty, if there’s no uncertainty, there’s no big change around and if there’s no big change around, there’s no big improvement being made and where there’s no big improvement there’s no big money either. Therefore, we can say uncertainty and our ability to deal with it are directly linked to profit.

Let’s face it, the more you help and prepare your people to deal with uncertainty, the better the possibilities of bringing more money into everyone’s pockets, so we better start exercising that “uncertainty muscle” and make a super power out of it, we are all potential super heroes and we even better we can decide which super power to have, so instead of flying like Superman® or climbing like Spiderman, I pick facing uncertainty courageously and smartly.

I love the feeling of a big change about to be made, that moment when you just decide what to do next and move forward to embrace your future, I love helping other people become who they really are instead of playing the safe game which I consider the most dangerous game of them all, I help good change happen®

Jaime Leal
www.jaimeleal.com/coaching