Ep. 26: Living with the Unknown

Not being sure of what’s going to happen - with the new job, the relationship, your business, your family, or anything else - is scary. It’s also our reality. We can’t predict the future, but there are some situations in life where that fact seems a lot harder to handle than others. In this episode Coach Stephanie walks through her own, current experiences living with the unknown in her family and her business, and gives you 4 steps to help you manage your mind around whatever the unknowns are in your own life. 

Hey guys, welcome to the I'm the Problem podcast. I am excited to be back after a bit of a break over the month of August and ready to roll.

All right, this episode is actually one that I have tried writing out and recording a couple of times over the past few months. And I just didn't feel like I was liking what I was saying or that I had anything of value to say on this topic, because what I realized was I hadn't really worked through this myself, so I didn't really have anything to share other than just the struggle of it, which I think in and of itself could be valuable because it's just nice to know sometimes when you're going through something that it's universal, right? You're never ever alone in whatever you're struggling with. Other people are as well. But that being said, just as a coach and wanting to provide solutions on this podcast, as much as share my own experiences for the sake of transparency and authenticity, and also just creating a community here where we can share anything that we're going through in order to help other people. I really just wanted to wait to finally record and publish this episode once I felt like I had a better handle on the process. So I think I'm there. And if at some point down the road I find a better way to manage the process of dealing with living with the unknown, which is today's topic, then I will go ahead and re-record something and share it. But for now, this is where I'm at, and I hope that this is helpful for you.

So the thing about living with the unknown is this is something we all do every single day, right? We just usually don't think about it because if we start to think about it, then we kind of start to do that like mindfuck thing where it's like, okay, well, I don't know what tomorrow holds. I don't know what the next five minutes holds. There's no guarantee of anything in the future from this moment forward. We all know that logically. We just have to decide that there is some sort of stability and predictability about the future. Otherwise, we'd all be paralyzed in fear. We wouldn't do anything or go anywhere or get anything done. So we've adopted in our own minds this sense of security or this sense of confidence that what we think will happen in the future likely will. There's a sense of predictability that really helps us function in the world. We can all be fairly confident that the sun will rise tomorrow and we will likely be there to see it. We can all be very confident that when you get hungry that you will find food and food will then cure that hunger at least for a few hours. We all feel confident in our lives that when we we hit the button for the remote control on our TVs, the TV will go on. And if not, we know it's probably a simple solution, like a battery replacement that will solve it. So there's lots of things that we can feel confident about and feel like we know and can predict, even though the truth of it is none of us actually know what the next five seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years hold. That's just how we function. However, there are circumstances where we do accept the fact and sometimes even embrace the fact that there are unknowns in the future.

And this is what today's episode is really about. This is something that I've been going through on a couple of different levels in my own life and I will share at a high level a couple of examples since these examples involve some situations that I'm not really allowed to talk about. I'm not going to get into too many specifics of my own story but I'll say just enough to say that if you are going through something regarding a future event or future expectation or something that you want to have happen, but you're not sure it will or something that you're worried will happen and you're not sure it will or won't.

Today's episode is going to be about what the process is for learning to live more comfortably with the unknown. How do you deal with that so that it isn't all consuming, so that you're not constantly having that white noise in your head just wondering, is this going to work out or is it not? Am I going to get the job? Is the partner going to propose? Are they going to accept the offer on the house? Are we going to ever pay off our credit cards? Am I going to get a clean bill of health? Do I have a diagnosis coming? Whatever it is, sort of good, bad, scary, exciting, or whatever it is, that's what we're talking about today.

So for me, as I've spoken about to some extent on this pod as well as if you follow me on Instagram, you've seen it, but I right now and my husband are fostering a child who we hope we're going to be able to adopt at some point in the future. That's about as much as I can say in terms of specifics, and frankly, that's as much as I want to say. It's not entirely my story to tell, obviously. That being said, at a high level, I can say when you are going through the adoption process at all, thinking like, I want this to happen, I really want this to happen, and I'm doing everything I can to make this happen. But at the end of the day, I don't have full control of this situation. When it comes to foster to adopt, I can speak on our experience. We have very little control of the situation and we know what we want the outcome to be, but we don't know what's going to happen. And so we are living with the unknown. We are acting as if this is going to work out because that's what we want. But we don't know for sure. And that white noise is there and that fear is there and the anxiety and all of the emotions that come with this process. I've never tried to get pregnant myself, but I imagine that's not dissimilar to that process. And outside of kids, you can think of a number of different ways where this might apply.

Another area that I'm living with the unknown is when it comes to my business. I have some pretty aggressive financial goals over the next few years for myself and my family. And because I have my own business, I don't know for sure how much income my business is going to bring in every single month. I have a rough idea. I can predict it out pretty accurately, but it's not a guarantee. It's not like getting a paycheck where I know every two weeks this is the exact amount that I'm getting. As long as I have that job, I can count on that paycheck. It's not the same when you're an entrepreneur. I don't know for sure if my business is going to make that money, and so I have had to learn to live with the unknown of that, the unpredictability of entrepreneurship. It's less fear, certainly, than the adoption situation for a lot of reasons, first and foremost being it's just less personal. And secondly, I've done so much work on my money mindset that I really don't worry about money the way that I used to and that's a whole other podcast episode in and of itself that I will do soon. It is still something that I do need to planfor the unpredictability of that and figure out what's the story I want to tell myself about that and how do I work through that.

So that being said, how do you move forward when the future is unknown? How do you move forward when you're not sure if the adoption is going to be finalized? When you're not 100% sure what your income is going to be next month or the month after? How do you keep going in a way that's actually productive and moves you towards your goals as opposed to keeping you held back in some way with fear. And I think that's usually what happens. It's not necessarily for the most part that people get fully paralyzed when it comes to living with the unknown, but meaning that you sort of say, oh my God, I'm a deer in headlights. I don't know what the future is, so I'm not going to make a move at all. That certainly does happen. I definitely have had clients and friends and others where they think, you know, I want to start my own business or I want to quit my job or I want to make this big move with my family to across the country or do something major and you don't know what the end result is exactly gonna look like. And so there is a deer in headlights thing where you just don't make any changes and you don't take a step forward because you don't know what that is. But I don't even consider that really being frozen, because essentially by not making a decision, you've made a decision, right? By deciding to, by being kind of the deer in headlights and not making the move across the country, you've decided not to do that. You're just letting that kind of linger in your head as maybe, but you're not taking action.

So when I think about it, I think most people, it's not that they're necessarily not moving forward. I think it's much more common to think about how we react to the unknown by one of a few ways. And one is move forward, but you carry that fear with you, right? And in which case you might not be moving forward in the way that you want to, or you might not be fully moving forward. Another way is you don't do the thing you want to do. You think about it and you let it rattle around in your head, but you don't take the action because that's safer, right? That feels safer to you. So you just kind of don't take action and so that's the deer-in-headlights reaction when again by not making a decision you're actually making a decision. Or the third option is you choose to not. You decide the unknown is too scary and so I'm not going to pursue this and you drop it completely which is fine as a choice if you're comfortable with that decision. I always say make any decision you want just like your reason. If you like the reason that you just decide to not move forward, if you like sort of saying you know what the unknown is too risky, I am very risk averse, I don't want to do this and I'm just not going to even go there and you shut the door completely. If you're comfortable with that, great that's an option for you. What I find is most people aren't. They make that decision and then it just kind of rattles around in their head and sort of haunts them for a while, if not forever. I think it's much better, if you're going to make that choice, to make it as a very conscious I've thought about it, I've really sat with it, and I've kind of mourned and grieved the loss of the thing I thought I was going to do or that I really wanted to do, and I'm consciously choosing a different path. Those are the three ways that I see people handling living with the unknown. There's no right or wrong here, but I think ultimately you want to figure out how to live with the unknown so that you can move yourself towards your goals or you can peacefully close the door on them if that's ultimately what you decide.

All right, so regarding the unknowns, the first thing you want to do, this is just such a fundamental step that we all tend to skip over. I want you to think about what your unknown is, right? So for me, again, I've given you the example of the adoption, I've given you the example of income as an entrepreneur. For you, whatever that is, when you think about the unknowns, think about what is a fact of that unknown versus what is a thought. So for me, the facts are, there is a child, the child is in the foster system. We are technically foster parents. The child has been with us for X number of months, weeks, years. I don't want to get specific, but the child has been with us. There's a number of different facts I can tell you about the child. And there's also facts I can tell you about the child's case. The thoughts about the case are very different. It's never going to work out. It's totally going to work out. Oh my God, I'm going to get heartbroken by this. Oh my God, I won't survive this if this doesn't work out. Oh my God, I will survive it, but I definitely would never foster another child. Oh my God, I want to foster so many children. This is the greatest thing I've ever done. I mean, the thoughts are all over the place.

None of those thoughts are facts. None of them are real. They are just thoughts that my brain is choosing. And it's choosing, frankly, thousands of thoughts every single day about this adoption. Some are thoughts that move me forward towards the goal that we want and some do not. Some help me show up as the version of myself that I want to be in this situation and some do not. So it's really important for whatever your unknown is to just look at the facts. What are the facts versus what are the thoughts? You don't have to do anything with that at the moment, but just separating those things is really helpful because when I start spinning out and thinking like oh my god this is this is gonna fall through this is not gonna happen for us when I start thinking those things they seem so real in my body and so terrifying and so awful and also they are not facts and it's a very good for me to remind myself of that when inevitably my brain starts spinning out in the direction of I don't know what's gonna happen, and so I'm assuming the worst, which is what our brains do.

And that's really key, and that is number two here. You need to know, as you're separating your facts from your thoughts, you need to understand what your brain is doing. Your brain is always going to default to the negative. Your brain is always going to be on defense. That's what your brain does. It's how it has evolved to keep you alive and here on this planet today, listening to this, your brain has been on default and constantly on guard, looking for things that will hurt you, things that could harm you permanently, things that could kill you. Your brain will be looking for those things that don't feel good. And then your brain will say, okay, we're going to move very quickly away from the things that don't feel good because those are bad for us. The key is to remember that your brain doesn't know the difference between physical pain and emotional pain. If I think the thought, the adoption will not work out, that creates a vibration in my body of fear. From there, my brain starts freaking out, right? Because it knows that vibration and it doesn't feel good and it wants to find a million ways where we can play defense here. And so you just need to know that your brain is going to constantly do that. It's going to constantly default to the negative and think like, okay, yep, see, it isn't going to work out. Look at all the ways this didn't work out and all the statistics and it didn't work out for these people and it didn't work out and it's too good to be true and yada, yada, yada, all of that, right? Your brain is going to do that. And so it's really important for you to be aware as you're separating your facts from your thoughts. Your brain's on defense. Your brain is going to think about the negative because that's what it does. And you need to say, okay, brain, I hear you. I understand you're trying to help me here. You're just not that useful. And I say this to my brain all the time when it's throwing up thoughts that are not helpful to me, that are not moving me where I want to move to. I hear you, brain. I understand that what you're saying could be true, but it's not a fact. So it's not very useful for me right now. I'm gonna choose something else. When you get used to the practice of recognizing what your brain is doing and talking back to your brain, it's so much easier to then calm your nervous system. It's so much easier to pull yourself back to the reality of what your situation is, back to the facts, and then you can much more productively choose the thoughts you want to have.

All right, number three when it comes to this is accepting reality. This one no one likes, but here we are. Here's the thing, because it's the future and we don't know for sure and we can't predict it for sure, what we know is it may go our way and it might not. I may get to the end of this episode and like it and hit publish, and I might not. I don't know yet, not done with it. It's like anything, whether it's big or small, recording a podcast or managing an adoption. You don't know what the future is. So you have to start accepting the reality of that rather than resisting it. The reason for this is if I was to walk around all day telling myself, and I have lovely friends and family and some of whom who do this, right? It's going to work out. I just know for sure it's going to work out for you. Or I remember when I was single and wanting to meet someone, I remember having people say to me like, it's totally going to happen for you. Don't worry. It really is like I just know it. And it's like, okay, but you don't know it. And all that did was like kind of piss me off a little bit because they were saying things that nobody could promise and nobody knew was true. It bothered me, it triggered me. And it's the same thing when you start trying to resist the reality of something that could potentially happen. If you're thinking in your head, oh my God, I might get this scary phone call from the doctor I didn't wanna get. We might, I might get notified by the real estate agent that they didn't accept our offer on the house. My kid might not get into any of the colleges they applied to, right? I might not get into any of the programs that I applied to. I might not get the job that I've been working so hard towards, the promotion, the new job, whatever it is. If you then decide to choose thoughts like, no, no, it's definitely going to work out. It's definitely happening. I just know it. You're not going to feel better, certainly not in the long run because your brain is smart enough to know that that's bullshit and your brain will call bullshit on you because it's going to be like, no, we don't know for sure. We can't predict. It's the future. So that doesn't help. It just creates resistance to reality. When you argue with reality, you will lose 100 percent of the time. Byron Katie said that, and it is a very useful quote. So the reality is this here. If your reality is I don't know what's going to happen because it's in the future, why not accept that and embrace it and do so in a way that is actually empowering or actually feels a little bit better than the victimhood of, oh my God, I just don't know because I can't predict the future and I don't know what's going to happen. And we all have that thought in our brains. We have that whiny voice in our brain like, I don't know why is this happening? Uh, what's much more useful than listening to the whiny voice is just accepting the reality. So for me, when I think about the income with my business or I and I have a number and I'm like, I don't know if I'm going to get there. What is helpful rather than try and pacify myself with something that my brain will not cling onto because it doesn't believe it's definitely going to work out. It's definitely going to happen. I just know it. Rather than that, it's much more helpful for me to be saying, you know what, yeah, it might not work out, but it might. Any of those thoughts or thoughts similar to that, those are helpful for your brain because they're honest.

So for me, I could sit and think, I really hope that this adoption works out. I'm scared that it won't, but I really want it to. Or I could be thinking like, there's definitely a chance this adoption doesn't work out, but God, there's a chance it does. There's a pretty good chance it does actually. And I would recommend, although I don't think all my examples just followed this, but I would recommend when you're thinking those types of thoughts, the accepting reality thoughts, you do so by ending on a positive note. So the example that I just used about adoption, I would say something like, I don't know if this is gonna work out, but I think it might. Or I don't know if this is gonna work out, but the odds are it will. Like just ending on the positive note, you can accept reality in the first half of the thought, and then end on the positive in the second half, because that's what's gonna actually help lift you up, rather than resisting the reality in front of you, or denying it, or just trying to not think about it at all.

OK, so that's where we are right now. We've got separating your facts from your thoughts. We've got understanding how your brain is going to react to that by playing default to the negative and realizing that and being onto your brain. Then there's the accepting reality and just embracing a thought that is realistic, but also positive and empowering. And then the next step after that is focusing on what you want to have happen and looking for the evidence that it will. So this example I've used a bunch before, but it's very helpful. So if you want to understand the science behind it, Google RAS, Reticular Activating System, RAS, is a very useful element of your brain functioning that actually helps you to sort of see evidence of things that you want to see. So what happens is our brains are in taking so much information in any given moment in time that it can't possibly understand and organize it all. So our brains will focus on what we tell it to focus on. So it's the same and I've used this example before I know but I think it's useful where if you buy a new car you suddenly probably have had the experience of seeing that car wherever you go and it's like oh my god are there that many like blue Subarus on the road all of a sudden? No, you just bought a blue Subaru. So all of a sudden you're seeing them everywhere because your brain is focused on it. It's the same as like if you're thinking of a song that you haven't heard in a while and then suddenly like you walk into the grocery store and then you turn on your car and then you flip on Spotify and like suddenly that song is there and you hadn't heard it in a while and then you heard it three times in the last two days. It's because your brain is looking for that evidence. You've told your brain what to look for and your brain has gone to find those things. It works the same way when you're thinking about something that you want in the future.

So for me, I think about the adoption being completed. I think about my bank account reading a certain number or the income statement for my business, reading of a certain number. I think about that, then I look for evidence that I am moving in the direction of those things that I want. So I ask myself, what's the evidence that my business is growing? What's the evidence that my business is going to hit that number next month? What's the evidence that the adoption's gonna work out? And when you ask your brain to look for evidence, your brain will come up with the evidence. It's very, very useful because it's not bullshit. It's completely true, but you're just telling your brain what you want to have happen, and then you're finding evidence for it. And what that does is that builds up a lot of motivation, inspiration, positivity, just energy, feeling in your body that will then keep you taking actions that will then move you to the result that you want. That's how it all works, right? Your feelings create your actions and your actions create your results. So the more that you're thinking and seeing what you want, the more positive feeling that that's gonna create in your body, that will then lead you to take more of the actions that will then lead you to the results that you want.

Again, we don't have control over everything. In many cases, we have very little control. And when we're talking about the future, we have essentially no control. But you can certainly stack the odds in your favor. There's no reason to not move forward thinking, I don't know for sure if I'm going to make it to 90. But why don't I eat well and exercise and take care of my mind and my body now so that if the thing that I want to have happen, which is me get to 90 and be healthy, if that actually happens, I'm stacking the odds in my favor that I'm going to get the thing that I want, right? So thinking about it that way can be really useful. And then finally, the last thing that I want you to remember here as we're thinking about the future is that you get to decide if you're going to be okay or how you want to feel or respond, no matter what happens in the future. It doesn't mean that you don't feel bad if what you want doesn't work out. If the adoption doesn't work out, it doesn't mean I won't feel heartbroken just because I get to choose my thoughts and feelings, which we always all get to choose our thoughts and feelings. If the adoption doesn't happen, I will absolutely feel heartbroken. If I don't meet the income goals that I set for my business, I will feel disappointed. You don't get to avoid the experience of negative feelings just because you choose how you think and feel about them. But what you can do is decide I'm going to sit with those feelings and then after I've processed them, I get to choose what this means. I get to choose how I want to move forward. I get to choose if I'm going to be okay or not. I get to decide what the story is if something doesn't work out. That's really empowering too because then you're not just sitting around waiting for something to happen and if it doesn't work out, you just kind of have to throw your hands up and say, that didn't go the way I wanted and you know, now I don't know what to do. It's like, no, no, that didn't go the way I wanted. I now need to deal with that. And then I get to decide what I want to make that mean. I get to decide how that's going to inform the next steps I take in the future and how I move forward from there. So just knowing that actually, it helps you sort of take some power back from what the reality is. The reality is we don't know, we can't predict the future. But the one thing you can do is decide and control how you are going to be in the future, regardless of what the circumstances are.

So that's what I have for you guys today on living with the unknown. I would love to help you more with this if this is something that you're going through. I'm very happy to coach you through whatever unknowns you might be having right now and help you move through that unknown so that you can do so in a way that feels empowering and positive to you and that will actually help get you to the results that you want in the future. So there are a ton of ways that we can work together. I offer free coaching over email. I offer one-on-one coaching. All the information can be found over at makeyourpivot.co. All right, guys, thanks for listening. I really hope this was helpful, and I will talk to you soon.