During the dot-com bust, CEO Mike McCue saw death on the horizon for his company Tellme. The future had become uncertain. But almost instinctively Mike created a new path forward through the rubble, resulting in a windfall $800 million exit for Tellme.
This is not everyone’s story.
Whether you see uncertainty as an opportunity or a threat says a lot about your personal power.
High power gives you the optimism and creativity to embrace new realities in the face of uncertainty. Low power simply seeks to reestablish the comfort of certainty.
But here’s a view many of us don’t see: certainty is limitation, uncertainty is limitless.
In psychology, the way you see the future is a projection of who you are today. The more certain you are of the future, the more your current mindset defines (and limits) what’s possible tomorrow.
Certainty is stasis.
When something is defined, it can no longer be anything else.
But when you are uncertain of the future, you don’t exclude the possibilities you cannot imagine. Anything can happen – new opportunities, new transformations, a new you.
Uncertainty is a doorway to expansion.
Countless stories of personal transformation happen when people go through job loss, social or economic upheavals, even health crises. During these times, our mental-projection models are crushed, and new opportunities shine through that were previously inconceivable.
I explain in The Science of Personal Power, chapter 4, that CEO Mike McCue’s turnaround of Tellme wasn’t luck, it was the product of personal power leveraging uncertainty.
Transformation isn’t about bad times. It’s painful to wait for the environment to break our mental models and force us into uncertainty. Change simply happens when our mind ceases to limit the future of what’s possible, moving towards the unknown instead.
I invite you to begin letting go of how you see the future today.
Embrace the possibility that next month is a blank slate. Then see what arises from the mental gap.
In reality, everything is uncertain. Embrace this wisdom. Be present and live in the moment. Don’t try so hard to seek new possibilities, allow new possibilities to seek you.