Shedding the Corporate Bitch

Embrace Uncertainty for Innovation and Success with Katherine Templar Lewis

• Katherine Templar Lewis • Episode 415

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What if you could take control of those anxious emotions that come up when work and life become uncertain? 

In this episode we are working to understand the world of uncertainty in leadership and life with renowned cognitive scientist and expert in emotional intelligence, Katherine Templar Lewis. 

This episode unpacks the profound impact of uncertainty on leadership and how leveraging it can lead to innovation, enhanced decision-making, and stronger team dynamics.

Guest Bio: Katherine Templar Lewis is the chief scientist at the Uncertainty Experts, founder of the All Women Neuroscience Studio and Labs King Studios, and leads the science on the groundbreaking interactive course, the Uncertainty Experiment. Her passion for unlocking human potential is rooted in her personal experiences with anxiety and imposter syndrome.

Key Discussion Points:

  1. Evolving Leadership Models:
    • The necessity of shifting traditional leadership frameworks to better navigate today’s rapidly changing global landscape.
    • How leaders can facilitate open-mindedness and innovative decision-making within their teams.
  2. Emotional Intelligence in Leadership:
    • The critical role of emotional awareness and regulation in decision-making processes.
    • Techniques for improving emotional intelligence, such as breath work and interoception.
  3. Overcoming the Fear of Uncertainty:
    • Reframing uncertainty as an opportunity rather than something to fear.
    • The importance of identifying and overcoming safety behaviors that limit potential.
  4. The "Tolerance of Uncertainty Scale":
    • Understanding and measuring individuals' emotional reactions to uncertainty.
    • Tools and exercises, such as positive affirmations and envisioning positive outcomes, to enhance tolerance of uncertainty.
  5. Psychological Safety and Empathy:
    • Creating a psychologically safe environment where team members feel empowered to share ideas without judgment.
    • Enhancing empathy to improve team dynamics and leadership effectiveness.
  6. Personal Reflections:
    • Katherine shares her journey of managing anxiety and imposter syndrome, offering insights into how these experiences shaped her research and approach to leadership.
    • The significance of admitting uncertainty and the power of collective problem-solving in fostering trust within a team.

Take-Aways:

  • Embracing uncertainty and vulnerability is not a sign of weakness but a path to growth, innovation, and stronger leadership.
  • Leaders equipped with high emotional intelligence and empathy are better positioned to navigate complex and uncertain situations.
  • By acknowledging and managing uncertainty, leaders can foster a supportive and collaborative environment conducive to creativity and effective decision-making.

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Speaker 1:

In this episode, we're del into the challenges of modern leadership and the necessity of evolving today's leadership models to not only cope with change, but to thrive in it.

Speaker 1:

Catherine is the founder of the all-women neuroscience studio and labs, king Studios, and she's the science lead on an exciting new interactive course, the Uncertainty Experts, part of the world's largest study in uncertainty. Catherine has spent the last three years working with Sam Conniff of Be More Pirate University, college of London and Netflix on how to use both story and science to change people's relationships with uncertainty, which will allow them to worry less and do more. We'll discuss the need for a new leadership framework that embraces adaptability and foresight is not just beneficial but essential and help you to understand the power of vulnerability in leadership, because isn't it time to debunk a common leadership myth the belief that leaders must always have all the answers? Today, we'll discuss the power and the necessity of admitting I don't know. Lastly, we will have to get into the topic of emotional intelligence when it comes to decision making, as emotions play a crucial role in leadership, often dictating the outcome of decisions more than we acknowledge. Stay with us.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms today's managers into tomorrow's powerhouse leaders. Your host, bernadette Boas, executive coach and author, brings you into a world where the corporate grind meets personal growth and success in each and every episode. With more than 25 years in corporate trenches, bernadette's own journey from being dismissed as a tyrant boss to becoming a sought after leadership coach and speaker illustrates the very essence of transformation that she now inspires in others with her tips, strategies and stories. So if you're ready to shed the bitches of fear and insecurity, ditch the imposter syndrome and step into the role of the powerhouse leader you were born to be, this podcast is for you. Let's do this.

Speaker 1:

Welcome. Welcome, welcome Catherine. How are you?

Speaker 3:

I'm good, I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Speaker 1:

I am excited to have you here. This topic is very interesting to me because it is a crazy, crazy time right now, and it has been for a number of years, but it doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon, and so I want to get into all of that. But what I'd love to learn first, and have our viewers and listeners learn, is a little bit about Catherine.

Speaker 3:

I'm Catherine, catherine Templers. So I'm a human and cognitive scientist because I, you know, I've been a science geek for as long as I can remember. I'm based in London, in the UK and, yeah, really, my greatest passion has always been humans. I think we're absolutely fascinating, I think we're incredibly powerful and amazing and I sort of grew up amazed really, at how we've lost so many fundamental skills of being human, like connecting with each other. We're all isolated. We have all these big challenges.

Speaker 3:

I was once described as the most recklessly optimistic person that that lived in science world of science. I really do believe it because I've always had this fundamental. You know, every day when I go into science lab, I'm blown away by what humans can do and it excites me so much that I think, you know, I mean my entire career path studying cognitive and brain sciences has just been to tell people. I used to. I used to have a boyfriend once. I used to wake up in the middle of the night because I'd be excited about something in science. I have to tell him what's something that we can do and we don't know, you know our brains amazing.

Speaker 1:

Let me ask you then, segueing into our topic how did you then land up in this space of uncertainty?

Speaker 3:

I think because I'm high, I was, I am, I was a highly anxious person parading around as an incredibly brave person. I used to you know they, I was very lucky. I. I did my science and my academics at Oxford University, but I used to sort of have a short, spiky hair and wear loads of mascara and had half a shaved head and I used to ride a big Ducati motorbike all to hide the fact that I was incredibly anxious and I didn't realize it for a long time.

Speaker 3:

But a lot of the work I started to do in my academic research was looking at how do we unlock potential? You know, I was. I was the girl at school who teachers used to say you know, easily distracted, easily led astray, has lots of potential, just doesn't fulfill it. And I was devastated by that because I was like I don't know how to unlock my potential. What does that even mean?

Speaker 3:

And I think I became more and more aware that being quite an anxious person was really holding me back. It meant that I wasn't the person pushing myself forward or believing in myself. You know enough to speak out in a meeting or really push my ideas forward. And I think you know Ryan was interested in your work. I think I was also under the impression and maybe this is being British as well that as a woman, you know you shouldn't be too outspoken or too pushy, and I could never find that balance. So I started really studying brains and what anxiety does to the brain and imposter syndrome, and how to unlock this incredible capacity for innovation, creativity, self-belief that we all do have, which is not taught the tools at school.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely, I absolutely agree with you. Now let me ask you, though. You've been quite successful, so is uncertainty a good thing, to have a degree of uncertainty, and if so, then what are the positives and negatives of it?

Speaker 3:

It took me a long time to realize that a lot of my success had been a resilience that I naturally had in moments of change and uncertainty. And that was the real unlock and this work for me really started to condense together. When the pandemic hit, I was, you know, my lab shut down. I was working with the University College London and people were like, how do we navigate this time of change? And I realized I was actually quite good at it and what the research started to understand as we went and we explored more and more people out in the world facing this time of great change is that if we can accept uncertainty, we hate.

Speaker 3:

Our brains hate uncertainty. They don't like to know, to not know what's happening. But we're also living in a society where we crave certainty and a lot of our leaders promise certainty as well. But the uncertainty is fundamental to the fabric of life. You know that's the Buddhist philosophy. The only certain thing is uncertainty and we don't need to solve uncertainty to make things certain. We need to actually be able to change our relationship with uncertainty to see the opportunity within it. It's only in times of uncertainty that, as human beings, we can evolve, we can adapt, we can do different things. We can try new things. In fact, we've survived this long because we're very good with uncertainty. We just, in modern world society, convince ourselves that we need certainty.

Speaker 1:

So you say that we have to change our relationship with uncertainty, and yet for many triggers a whole other level of of anxiousness yes, yes, and safety seeking, you know we are.

Speaker 3:

Incredibly. We talk about self-sabotage in our worlds, and what self-sabotage really is is when we're trying to protect ourselves from things like uncertainty and we limit ourselves instead. Everything you know I work in neuroscience mainly and everything in the world you either want to avoid or approach, and uncertainty we tend to avoid. But that does mean not speaking up in meetings, not, you know, not putting forward new ideas and things we call safety behaviors. We've all done it. There's been a moment of uncertainty, let's say at work, where suddenly you find yourself very busy in your inbox. You don't want to face it, you don't want to risk it. And the real sort of the modern research that's all the most sort of interesting thing that's coming out of the research that we're doing and this is research with an amazing social entrepreneur called Sam Conniff and University College London, their brain science department is that actually, you know, we all have a level of uncertainty tolerance that is not just measurable but it's changeable as well. And we can change that by actually starting to understand and be aware of how we emotionally react to uncertainty.

Speaker 3:

And I find this very interesting as a woman. You know the director of my own company and lab and that for many, many years I was told to take emotion out of the business world and that it wasn. For many, many years I was told to take emotion out of the business world and that it wasn't going to help. And now you know undeniably. The truth in neuroscience is that emotions are incredibly important to the decision making program. Like you know, ability. If we can't feel emotions, you lose your intuition and you actually make bad decisions. But those emotions need to be regulated.

Speaker 3:

And so in order to regulate those emotions, you need to be in touch with them. You need to have a conversation about emotion and to recognize them, especially recognize how you emotionally react to uncertainty. From there you can learn to regulate that emotional reaction. And then you unlock this amazing intuitive power that can be far more powerful than facts alone in a moment of uncertainty to make a decision, to lead a team, to be creative.

Speaker 1:

Wow. Okay, there's a lot there. I want to unpack A lot Because, first off, you're absolutely right. I often talk and my viewers and listeners know my whole kind of preaching about we're not robots. We are humans with tons of emotions and to squelch them because we're in a work environment is dangerous and it's very unhealthy and it's certainly restrictive to any type of growth and success. So, that said, I'm totally on board with you. You said when we can measure and then change. So if someone's sitting there listening or watching today and they're saying to themselves I know that I am, I just don't know how to articulate it, I don't know how to identify it, I don't know how definitely to measure it, let alone to then change it. So what do you do and how can you help individuals really recognize that uncertainty and anxiousness to then be able to get to a point where they can measure it? And how do they do that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, well, we've been really lucky in. You know the traditional ways to change. So uncertainty tolerance is a psychological trait, like things like open-mindedness or, you know, everyone is the big five. You know anxiety, neuroticism, things like that. It's just very rarely measured. There is a slightly dry scientific scale called the tolerance of uncertainty scale that you can test people on, and actually on our website we provided a test people can look at and test where they, where they sit on it, but what it does is it looks at, it makes you aware of your how you emotionally respond to uncertainty, which most people don't think about, you know, because you don't like to think about their emotions when we're not. We, we know we live in this sort of slightly toxic positivity era where it's like don't admit, you get afraid to uncertainty, and one of the ways we help people understand it is through storytelling. So we've been lucky enough to work with people like Netflix, one of the big interactive documentary. We create courses. We're writing a book that's coming out in June next year called the uncertainty toolkit. That really helps people realize that we it's okay to not like uncertainty, it's okay to have a negative emotion. You know, know, it was amazing.

Speaker 3:

We went and we worked with all these incredible people. We called the uncertainty experts at the. You know the fringes of society. People had been in gangs, people had been in prison. You know people who had had very sort of extreme circumstances and they all admitted they, you know they had. They're very successful Now. They've changed their lives around by acknowledging the natural fear every human has to uncertainty, and not just that, but what it feels like. You know, we're so out of touch with our bodies and the emotions that sit within them, and so what we do is we help. You know, it's a sort of in psychology, cognitive favoritism touches on this, but we wanted to make something that was much more interactive with people, as a part of our mission has been how can we help people understand what it feels like when they face uncertainty and what can you do to have emotional regulation around that? And that's everything.

Speaker 3:

Some of the things you've probably heard about, from breath work to something called interoception, which is this new science of being able to feel your emotions in your body and label them. We're terrible at labeling our emotions and what we find is that, you know, we almost have to feel more to be able to regulate our emotions and by helping people be brave enough to feel more emotion in their body, you then can regulate it, because your emotion is a data stream and it's just your brain trying to tell you something. And when you start to acknowledge it, uh, it then becomes manageable. You can then calm your nervous system, right, and that's something I think that you know, and I don't make any any sort of gender stereotypes whatsoever. But a lot of men are cultured to ignore their emotions and women are sort of cultured to think that they're unhelpful and push them away when actually we need to get to a place where we can actually feel and go. Actually, I do feel afraid at this moment of uncertainty, and that's okay, right, and I can regulate it. And once you start to regulate it, you start to actually tap into the deeper emotional data stream which is your intuition.

Speaker 3:

And we know the people who, for whatever reason, have had the emotional part of their brain disabled through accident, through whatever's happened. They can't make decisions. And they're especially bad at making decisions in uncertainty Because, because they lose the emotional intuition that they have, because data is not enough in uncertainty, you know, in uncertainty, things have changed, so you don't know what's happening next. Your brain can't predict what's happening next. Your brain can't predict what's happening next. When things are stable, you can just use past information and you know what's going to happen and you can gather information. The state of uncertainty is the state where you don't have enough information to know what's going to happen next. But that's when your more subconscious mind, which has a wealth of experience in it and it can pick up on all sorts of things around you that you can't like consciously sense, picks up signals and gives you a gut feeling. I mean, I got feeling to be very important and does it also have an impact to leaders?

Speaker 1:

because when they are making decisions, especially decisions in times of like significant change and conflict and whatnot, it also has to introduce like empathy and compassion as well. So not only do they work to push through their own uncertainty and anxiousness, but they really have to put themselves in their people's shoes in order to really understand what the impact is going to be on them and make sure that they are also considering their emotions and how they're going to handle things 100 percent and that's you know.

Speaker 3:

This idea of empathy is an important leadership skill, both emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. And the emotional empathy is understanding what the team, what other people feel, and that can be incredibly important for connection and just leading and trust and building trust. And we know that the more in touch you are with your own emotions, the stronger your empathy for other people is. The more you can regulate your own emotions, the stronger your empathy is for other people. And then that cognitive empathy Can I understand your perspective? And that's important in innovation, in creativity, in problem solving, anything that you do as a collective the ability to see someone else's perspective as well as yours and it may well differ from yours and to be able to understand that that is it, that is, that is a valid perspective. It's incredibly important for leadership and innovation.

Speaker 3:

And we know that when people can't handle uncertainty, they can't do something called perspective taking.

Speaker 3:

And that's that ability to see someone's perspective. Because when you can't handle uncertainty, when you you block out the fear that you get from it, when you don't process it, when you just try and avoid it, your brain becomes very narrow, it becomes a threat response brain, so you don't want to collaborate with people. You don't want to see other people's point of views, you don't want to be open to new information. Your brain becomes very small. You do what you did before. You find people whose opinions are the same as yours. You go to a sort of safety mode, and that's really reductive, especially in leadership, because it means you can't hold the space to find out new ways of doing things, to work collectively with your team, to come up with a solution, to even have empathy, to connect with your team, and to me it means that they're just at that point, moving away from actually being a leader and just trying to protect themselves, as opposed to even really understanding what others need from them and the business needs from them.

Speaker 1:

Enough to where they're willing to push through and willing to do work on themselves so they can then help other people. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3:

100%. And I think you know the strongest thing a leader today can say is I don't know. But that takes an amount, a degree of ability to tolerate uncertainty. You know, we did this study which was really shocked me amongst thousands of leaders, and we said would you rather make a decision, but it not be the right decision, but make a fast decision? So people knew you were certain, or say I don't know, but would work it out and not make a decision, even if it brought you time to make a better decision? And 79% of leaders said they would rather, or they would feel forced, to just make a quick decision because they couldn't, they didn't feel that they as a leader could say I don't know. And it's so dangerous because it means you're making decisions you know before you thought about it, decisions based on fear. You're doing what you've done before.

Speaker 1:

Governance, or pride or ego.

Speaker 1:

And that's not necessarily going to be the best decision, it seems obvious as to why someone, anyone, would not be able to say I don't know. But what is that thing that you can tell them to kind of wake them up around that stubbornness, around that position of I'm too prideful, or it's going to make me look weak. What do we tell leaders? To get out of that mode and to get into that space of being okay with I don't know, because we tell our people that it's okay if you don't know, but yet we can't do it and I think you're right.

Speaker 3:

There's a two shift change that has to happen because leaders can get on board and say I don't know, but if there's still an expectation of them to know, then they again they're going to look like a leader. You know, we've been working with people. You know, especially really interesting people, sort of in the RAF and the army. How do you, how do you say very bravely. You know, they're often in these huge conflict situations where there's a lot of uncertainty and just being able to say, you know, being able to take times that I don't know yet, but we'll work it out together.

Speaker 3:

Because when you start to include everyone else, you know they feel like a collective, they feel like a team, they feel inspired. You know, and you're saying you're not saying I don't know, you're saying we're going to work it out, I will work this out, that's what I'm here for. We will all do this together, you know. So it's that, you know again, assuring people it's going to be okay, because that's what people want to hear from the leaders, that it's going to be okay, and they think that making a fast decision makes that, or saying, yeah, I know the answer. But actually, if you can create a space of I don't yet, but it is going to be okay, we will work it out, and the reason you know we're taking time is to work out the best solution. Then it can inspire confidence and trust that way as well.

Speaker 1:

Because do they not see that if they always have an answer, just because they are too prideful to say I don't know, but that answer is wrong or sends them in the wrong direction, that that's creating more stress and more disrespect from their people than if they were to say, even if it's regularly, I don't know, but we're going to work it out. I don't know, but we're going to work it out. They have such a hard time seeing that, don't they? Yeah?

Speaker 3:

The damage that will happen if they get it wrong will actually be worse than so. All people want to do when you're leading them is to, is to feel safe. You know, and there's lots of ways you can do that, and that's a lot around connection and community and trust and, of course, saying I know. But you say, well, thank god, I don't have to work it out, but if you're wrong, you lose trust, and once you've lost trust as a leader, it's game over. Really, you've got to inspire trust and so, yeah, it's game over.

Speaker 1:

really, you've got to inspire trust, and so, yeah, it's understanding the bigger picture in that, yeah, and you talked about needing to reframe or come up with a new leadership framework in order to then have these leaders move through uncertainty and really be able to deal with the changing environment. What is your take on reframing the leadership framework?

Speaker 3:

I think the first is this sort of recognition that it's very, very static and you know and we, almost every company is going through change at some point, right Right now, transformation, change is this sort of new key word, and so things are evolving a lot faster than they have done in the past. The first is recognizing we are in this new paradigm. You know there's a scale called a study, which is the World Uncertainty Index, and it says we are at the highest uncertainty that we've ever been in human history. Now you can question that by saying everything's always uncertain, but what they mean by that is that technology is moving faster. We are in connection with more moments, more people every day than we ever have. We have micro moments of uncertainty. You know, before uncertainties were the weather and food resources and things like that. You know, not getting easier, and now we have everything from the big conceptual climate change, I mean a lot of the. You know it's very real thing, it's not a concept, but there's more sort of high level uncertainties, economic instability, through to every day. You know, I think in the UK alone so, like two thirds of people want to change their job but they're unsure of where to go to do, you know. And then at home, of course, there's huge uncertainties as people try and balance families and work and and all these things that that is quite relatively modern too.

Speaker 3:

We've been looking at the sort of the reactions people have to uncertainty and they fall into three camps. And the first is emotional and fear. The second is cognitive and fog, so people feel a sense of fear. They then get this sort of sense of confusion that we feel it's like oh I, I don't really know what to do. And the third is stasis, which is why a lot of people feel very stuck right now. So we've been working on leadership frameworks that help recognize these three states and the tools that you can give people to move through them. And so, for the fear, it's about understanding the emotional aspect of uncertainty and being supported by team leaders in this uncertainty and being supported by team leaders in this. And we see this a lot in things like sort of ED&I initiatives that are incredibly important right now and people feel this sort of resistance to it and they feel ashamed about that. Everybody wants the endpoint. Diversity, we know, is incredibly important. So we've worked within companies helping people understand that the resistance you fear, that you feel it's not adversarial. It's not that you don't want the new type you know, diversity or the new transformation that's happening. You're afraid of the process of change. You're afraid of things changing around you and not knowing how to handle it and not knowing what to do. So there we need, we're working with leadership teams to really help emotionally support people through a time of change and understand it's not adversarial to the end point. Right, it's actually a resistance to being uncertain.

Speaker 3:

Suddenly, in my day-to-day life at work, and the second thing we look at is the cognitive reaction to uncertainty. So what happens in your brain? And we call that fog where your brain loves to be able to predict the world around it and the minute it doesn't if it, if it feels unsure, you work with the emotions first, because it feels unsure, it tends to ramp up its use of bias and heuristics and makes assumptions and starts to become closed-minded and starts to cling to what it already knows. So we work with people there to facilitate forums of open-mindedness, being able to questions, being able to find people who have perspectives that are different to you and actually accept them and understand them, and then that opens you up in uncertainty to make more innovative decisions. And the last really is that is what we call stasis people feeling really stuck in uncertainty. Right, and there we help people have more of a sort of growth mindset.

Speaker 3:

In uncertainty, right, and there we help people have more of a sort of growth mindset. We allow people, we help people to look at small goals and why. You know, often everyone has a goal that they want that they always put last on their to-do list, the thing that they really want, you know, applying for that new job or making that big change, and it always somehow we get busy and we don't do it yet. So you know, everyone has that, from leaders through to team members. So we work with them there to really identify what that is.

Speaker 3:

And again, you know, we're so human, our brains are full of negativity, bias, imposter syndrome, you know all these things telling us that we can't. So we really help people reframe the excitement of the uncertainty. You know our brain's default is I want to change careers and I want to go for this new job, but my brain will go. What if it all goes wrong? But we can actually reprogram the brain by by simple exercises. You know what if it all goes right? What does that look like, and the brain is amazingly adaptable and when you start feeding it, more positive. This is why things like sort of manifestation and positive affirmations work more positive scenarios it really gets on board and it starts to look for opportunities and you find that easier to head towards. So you work sort of in those three aspects On that point.

Speaker 1:

how can a leader cultivate a mindset that really is open to change, open to uncertainty, like you said, positivity even that you mentioned at the very beginning? How can they? Do you have a tip or two that they could be doing right now to help them get out of that state? But it could be.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think the one tip is recognizing negativity. Bias is a very real bias in the brain and we find that a lot in things like meetings where people don't speak up. You know, and there is. You know there's different ways you can tackle it as a leader, but one is really cultivating psychological safety of making sure that people know that. You know it does.

Speaker 3:

Failure is fine. This is. You know, we're always competing. We forget how, how, how heavily it weighs on people that we need to come up with the right answer right. So we, being a leader if you, who just loves brainstorming, who loves ideas, no matter how wild they are, you know and to try things out and really making people in a team feel psychologically safe that there's no judgment, that is you know. Obviously no company wants to fail, but having small sort of sprints, innovation sprints where any idea goes, can really help people get excited about creativity, innovation and trying things out. They're really applauding people for coming up with more innovative ideas. Applauding people for coming up with different perspectives, rather than playing it safe, can help people and creating sort of you know, miniature innovation sprints, meetings where all you do is it's just come up with the wildest ideas that you can come up with Again. It can cultivate that type of thinking in the brain. We call it divergent thinking.

Speaker 1:

Now, is this work? Is this work when you say that you help these individuals, these executives? Are you going in at the executive level or are they like? Well, let's get our team on board with all of these concepts and understandings. And they're trying to avoid them then themselves, but, which is important because it has to trickle down, what level are you, you know, are you being brought into to help through some of these things?

Speaker 3:

Interestingly both and it's been a really we started off just wanting to help individuals because you know, if you help someone in their personal life with uncertainty, it helps them in their career and vice versa. And I think that's the thing people suddenly realize they're like, oh, I have the uncertainty of my parents aging as well as my uncertainty of my job stability as well. So we've been working and then we moved into sort of we're in year four of this research project and year two. Year one was about individuals and it was in the pandemic. So it was like how can we help people just have some stability in this time and build community around that?

Speaker 3:

Year two we went into organizations and we were very lucky to beta test our sort of train, interactive training programs with Lego, with Google, with all sorts of wonderful people, but working with cohorts, and then we realized that there was this sort of leadership teams as well. So now we sort of have two tracks really. And so, yeah, we've been, we work with, with Google and some big companies in their leadership range, taking groups of individuals for a couple of hours and really helping them understand and be aware of their own reaction to uncertainty and how that might be. You know it might be reducing their ability to be innovative, reducing their empathy in limiting them and then understand how their teams are facing uncertainty and how that might be limiting them and unlock them. So it's really been at every level and it's because, no, because no one sits around thinking, oh, I need to tackle uncertainty, there's going to be nothing.

Speaker 1:

And nor do they want to.

Speaker 3:

We love certainty, we're able to face uncertainty, but we need to start to realize that it's continually tripping us up and limiting us. You know, that goes back to who I was as a child. I think I was anxious in moments of uncertainty and I played safe too much. And when you play safe because I couldn't handle the emotions, it was too much of a cost For me. When I was younger, it was unsustainable to be in uncertainty because it produced such high anxiety, such high anxiety when I started to understand and work. It's just a reaction. It's not a reality. It's my brain just trying to keep me safe. You know, I could actually start to learn emotional regulation, and that I didn't realize at the time was not just helping my wellbeing but helping me more innovative, more creative and eventually now you know I run a lab a better leader, I hope.

Speaker 1:

Now, at the beginning of the conversation you mentioned, we were talking about uncertainty and how to measure it, and you mentioned something that's on your website and I caught it as a tolerance uncertainty, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Could you explain that? Yes, so this is a. It comes from the world of behavioral psychology, it's an incredibly valid scientific assessment and it's actually called the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale and it asks you a series of questions. It's about 25 questions. It's been tested to the nth degree within science to accurately show you a score of how much you try and avoid uncertainty versus how much you can contently and without huge anxiety, be in a moment of uncertainty, be in a moment where there's a decision needed to be made or things suddenly change.

Speaker 3:

And what we find is, the less you can tolerate uncertainty, the more anxious you are, the more you find that you avoid moments of uncertainty, even though, of course, there's opportunity in all uncertainty. We find that the more your mind sort of shuts down and you want to make quick decisions or decisions based on things you've done before, and the more that you can tolerate uncertainty. And that means regulating your emotions around them, understanding that you're not going to like this time, but reframe it to be a positive. Look for the new information, look for the exciting opportunity that trickles down to every aspect of your life and well-being, to creativity, problem solving, innovation and leadership as well. So, yeah, so, because it's an incredibly I was gonna say to say boring science scale, but I shouldn't use it. It's a slightly dry science scale, so we made it more fun, which is obviously why we give some memes. And yeah, it is on our website and you can test it. It'll give you an automatic score as well.

Speaker 1:

Catherine, this has been fabulous, very eye-opening as well, and it has me now thinking about just even assessing my own degree, because mine's changed dramatically over the last, like 10, 15 years. I'm not nearly as anxious around uncertainty and change as I was at one time, but I so appreciate all this. It's been fabulous.

Speaker 3:

Brilliant. Well, thank you. I so enjoy the opportunity to talk to people about sort of uncertainty and really, because I'd never thought about it before, I didn't know what to get. I was like, oh wow. But reflection, I really do have this relationship with it and when I address that it unlocks all sorts of things in my life.

Speaker 1:

Well, and I love that. I love the fact that kind of identify the relationship you're having with that anxiousness, with that anxiousness, with that uncertainty. You know put words to it just so, and you know even tell a story to it just so then you can kind of see it for that it doesn't have as much power as you're giving it mentally and emotionally Fabulous. Well, everyone, please follow Catherine on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can find her at the Uncertainty Experts, as her handle as much as her website, uncertaintyexpertscom. Thank you so much, catherine, see you.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of Shedding the Corporate Bitch. Every journey taken together is another step towards unleashing the powerhouse leader within you. Don't miss any of our weekly episodes. Subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you love to listen. And, for those who thrive on visual content, catch us on our Shedding the Bitch YouTube channel. Want to dive deeper with Bernadette on becoming a powerhouse leader? Visit balloffirecoachingcom to learn more about how she helps professionals, hr executives and team leaders elevate overall team performance. You've been listening to Shedding the Corporate Bitch with Bernadette Boas. Until next time, keep shedding, keep growing and keep leading.

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