How to Master Uncertainty and Move Forward Anyway

What happens when everything goes sideways?

In this flash fire episode, I’m sharing powerful insights I learned from Navy SEAL-turned-leadership expert Rich Diviney. After attending a conference to support a friend, I walked away with a game-changing framework for facing fear, chaos, and uncertainty.

We’ll unpack:

• Why fear = uncertainty + anxiety
• The “predictability paradigm” and how to break it
• A 3-step mental model to regain control: Duration. Pathway. Outcome.

If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed, this episode is the mindset shift you didn’t know you needed.

Press play and let’s move some horizons. 💥

Click play to hear all of this and

[00:56] What Navy SEALs understand about uncertainty that we don’t

[01:52] The “Predictability Paradigm”: Why we crave control

[02:49] The Lizard Brain vs. the Frontal Lobe

[03:54] The 3-part framework: Duration, Pathway, Outcome

[04:55] Why uncertainty causes fear—and what to do about it

[05:57] How to apply this to your life and business today

Listen to Related Episodes:

• How to Build Your Self Trust to Make Better Business Decisions
• Three Ways to Remove Comparison and Become Unstoppable

📧 Join my Newsletter for a weekly cocktail of insider business strategy, personal reflections, and the journey of being a thought leader: https://jasminestar.com/newsletter 📧

For full show notes, visit jasminestar.com/podcast/episode561

Transcript

Jasmine Star 00:00:00  So how then do we move horizons? This is essentially like the world's most simplest way of saying we're setting internal goals with ourselves to continue us moving forward in the face of adversity. Let's chat about when things don't go as planned, when you're a little bit uncertain or unsure how things are going to fare. Welcome to the Jasmine Star Show. We're going to have a flash fire session. Now, I have to tell you, I landed in Houston, Texas for a conference, and my intention and my goal was to go and show support for my friend, Doctor Gabrielle Lyon. I said, I'm going to go to this event to show that I am here for her, and I'm supporting her big vision. Lo and behold, my mind is blown by her guest speakers and the people who took the stage. And I am sitting there and I am learning under the master blaster from Lancaster. I didn't even know this man existed. His name is Rich da Vinci and he walked onto the stage. And what I started asking myself, it was in response to questions he was asking.

Jasmine Star 00:00:55  He had said, what happens when things go wrong? And I immediately started thinking about in the past when things had not gone as I expected. And then he got everybody's attention in the room when he said, what happens when the Bleep hits the fan? Then what? And I was like, okay, Rich did not come to play. So he is an author. He is a leadership expert. He is a former Navy Seal. And you can find this information on the attributes.com. Now I went on a deep dive of this guy because I walked away having a clear set of actions that I needed to take as a leader. And I'm going to be sharing what I learned with you. So he's during this stage and he asked a very straightforward question what is fear? What is fear? And he said, fear is the combination of uncertainty and anxiety. When you feel fear, you are uncertain and you are anxious. And he had said that what we want in our lives is predictability. We want things to go as planned.

Jasmine Star 00:01:52  And so he calls this the predictability paradigm. We crave predictability. And then we expect based on evidence of the otherwise that there it's going to go as planned and it hardly ever does. He had said the only thing we can be certain about is uncertainty. And he said, if the vast majority of our life is going to be uncertain and unpredictable, how can we choose flow? How can we move through it? So he sat in front of us and said, I'm going to propose to you how we might master uncertainty. So I said, okay. And he said, he's going to do this in three ways. And these are the three ways I'm sharing with you here today. We're going to master uncertainty by number one, moving horizons. So he had explained that we as humans are driven by our nervous system. So in fear, our limbic system. This is what he calls the lizard brain. Our limbic system takes over. So it impedes us from thinking clearly, from thinking rationally. And we make poor decisions.

Jasmine Star 00:02:49  That is the limbic system taking over. But he says, like, we need to be very conscious that our frontal lobe, our frontal lobe is going to help us think and take control. And so him being a former Navy Seal and trained the best of the best, had said that Navy Seals are honing in that frontal lobe concentration, that the only thing that a Navy Seal can expect all the time is uncertainty. So how do they stay in control? They focus on the frontal lobe and they think rationally through this. And so if we want to understand what it means to set horizons, to actually follow through and say, how do we can control our emotions, what are the things that we're doing? So he breaks it down in three simple ways. Number one duration. What is the length of time I need to be focused here on my frontal lobe and focused on what is at the task at hand. Number two is the pathway. What is the direction of the result of the outcome? Can I move in the direction of the result I want? Can I move in the direction of the outcome? And then the third and final piece is the outcome itself.

Jasmine Star 00:03:54  What is the desired result? So he says that when you are in a state of uncertainty, when you're feeling fearful, we can control a few things. We can pick the duration. How long do we expect this to be, and what is the pathway out and what is the outcome I want? So the less understanding that we have of duration, pathway and outcome, the less we understand it, the more we experience fear. And he gave an example of during the pandemic of 2020, why people were filled with so much fear and uncertainty was because we didn't know the duration some people had were going through the pandemic. Some people had Covid for a week, some people had it for years that there wasn't a clear pathway. Like, did we have medications? Did vaccines work? Did they not work? What the heck is going on? And we didn't have an outcome. Some people were dying and some people weren't. It was all of these things of uncertainty that drove the fear. Now, when you compare that, when you compare the pandemic to the common cold, well, the duration of a common cold, but we know it's about 5 to 7 days.

Jasmine Star 00:04:55  We know the pathway is most of us feel at like chicken noodle soup, a little bit of meds and then you're on your way. And the outcome is from the common cold. Most of us are feeling better. So what he did with these examples is he said, if you can can take control of the duration of the pathway and of the outcome, these outcomes will empower us to move horizons. Basically, we're going to be sending small, little, tiny tests for us to say, okay, I can set this duration, I can set this pathway, I can set this outcome. Now, whether or not we get the outcome we want, it is the horizon itself that makes us strong. So how then do we move horizons? This is essentially like the world's most simplest way of saying we're setting internal goals with ourselves to continue us moving forward in the face of adversity. We're going to ask ourselves how we're going to move. Horizons is number one. We're going to observe and ask questions. What do I know about this situation? What can I control about this situation? There will be things you don't know and there will be things you can't control.

Jasmine Star 00:05:57  But all we're saying is in the positive mindset of what do I know and what can I control? The second question we're going to be asking ourselves in the face of uncertainty is, okay, I'm going to pick a horizon. I'm going to pick this micro goal for myself, and I'm going to create a DPO. I'm going to create a duration pathway outcome, and I'm going to take control of it because I'm going to control what I can control. Number three, we're going to act. We're going to execute on our DPO. We're going to execute on the duration. If it's a 30 day or a 90 day duration, I'm just going to sit with this and I'm going to focus on this. I'm going to stick with our pathway and I am going to get the outcome, even if it's outcome I don't expect or I don't want. I got it because I stuck with it. And the fourth step is to register a reward, to take time to simply say I executed, I acted, and I got to where I want to go.

Jasmine Star 00:06:49  This tiny little micro step. Even if the outcome wasn't what you desired, you're making sure you're saying, I did what I set out to do. The brain does well with rewards. So let's break this down. In a personal example for myself, how we were moving horizons. Well, we had a marketing promotion. And so what I did internally was to create a DPO. I created the duration. Well, we had two weeks for lead generation. That was my horizon. I got two weeks to make this happen. Then we had a pathway. I was creating free educational authority, building resources. That was going to be the way that we were going to go through a two week promotion. And the outcome, well, what we did is we set good, better, best goals, these lead generation goals. So what I had done in a real life example was I was setting horizons, and I didn't know I was until I sat under Rich and I said, I actually do this and this is what keeps me going on the hardest days.

Jasmine Star 00:07:40  And now I want to pass this framework to you so that you could set up a framework. How long am I going to be doing this? What is the pathway and what is the outcome? And then Rich went on to explain. The second part of this conversation on Setting Horizons was that we have to make them meaningful. Meaningful horizons are creating steps in achievement. So he is not saying go climb Mount Everest. He's saying, what are the small steps along until you reach the top of Everest? We have to ask ourselves, what small steps can we take? Now this is going to be subjective per person. Everybody is different. Small steps, looks different every step along the way. So we have to ask ourselves what am I motivated by? What's going to move the needle? And essentially what Richard explained is you can ask yourself, well what motivates me? Actually, the better question is what gives me a dopamine high? What gives me a dopamine high? What sends off those amazing sounds of bing, bing bing bing bing like a dopamine high? Is your first kiss.

Jasmine Star 00:08:36  A dopamine high is winning a race. A dopamine high is achieving what you set out to do. So you ask yourself, what actually gives myself dopamine? Because what he had said was, when we run out of dopamine, mean, we quit the things that we're doing that no longer give us dopamine. That is when we stop. So he wants to ask ourselves, how do we. And this is what he's asking. Navy Seals, in the darkest and most despairing times is what DPO, what duration pathway, outcome can I do? How do I have a moving horizon? What is going to give me a dopamine high in this situation and how do I navigate myself to that? He then went on and explained this beautiful story about a gentleman who weighed over £400, and he had said that he was taking Rich's lessons, and he had said that he was creating horizons and he would have these moving horizons. And he had said, I want to train for marathon. And when Rich had met him, he was an ultra marathon runner, an ultra marathon.

Jasmine Star 00:09:29  Yo, this is crazy. And he was once £400. He couldn't walk out of his house. So he said that he was creating these moving horizons. So his first horizon was, I'm going to buy a pair of running shoes. That was it. That's what he did. And then he celebrated getting the running shoes. And then the next horizon was, I'm going to put the running shoes on now is it? That was his next horizon. And then the following day he says, I'm going to put the running shoes on and I'm going to walk to the mailbox. And that was it. And the next day I'm going to put the running shoes on, and I'm going to walk to the mailbox, and I'm going to walk around my block. It was the small settings of steps, and proving to yourself that you will stay true to yourself, that ultimately led a £400 man to running multiple ultramarathons. Ladies and gentlemen, this is what we do in our businesses. We have to set these micro tests because if you want to know what our brain as entrepreneurs, we're wired differently.

Jasmine Star 00:10:27  Our brains are craving an environment of intensity. We want it. It keeps us stimulated. We like solving bigger problems. So we must experiment with dopamine. Dopamine is triggered and fires when there's a difficult situation that we don't know an answer to. And yet it comes to us. So we must experiment with dopamine. So we must put ourselves in uncertain situations. And then he gets into the last and final step of how do we move and master uncertainty is number three. You keep going. He had said we need to think of ways to arrest the limbic process. Remember, I studied the limbic processes going in our brain. It's that lizard brain taking over that's in flight. Fight. Panic frozen. No, no, no, he says we need to stop that brain, and we need to focus on the frontal lobe. So how do we do this? He says the best things that anybody that he has ever gotten has gotten through breathing and visualization techniques, y'all. This isn't magic. This is something we can do right now.

Jasmine Star 00:11:26  So he explained, there's a thing called an open gaze. So what happens is when we are in a very stressful situation, our mind's eye is focused on one pinpointed thing. It's the thing that's going wrong. It's the thing that's on fire. It's a thing that you're terrified of. But what he had said is when you actually come back and you look at the big picture. So if you were looking at this one thing, this one disaster of a promotion or it didn't go as planned and you're only focusing on that now, now peel back, look at the team around that. Look at the frameworks around that. Look at the people in your life. Look at the city in which you live. Look at the state in which you dwell. Look at the country in which you reside. Look at the continent in which you are on. Look at how wide this world is. And when we look at how big things are and we realize how small and finite the problem is, it puts context in saying, oh, okay, I am doing just but one thing at one time.

Jasmine Star 00:12:15  And he says that the brain automatically relaxes on horizons. You go out into a forest if you go into a field, if you go out into an ocean, just looking at the horizon, it will calm you. He also says breathing techniques will have a radical form in how you master uncertainty. So all he says is, do you know when you blow out, you're blowing out carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide is the thing that's preventing the oxygen from going in our brain. So when he says, you take a big, big breath in and then a deeper one in. You do that ten times over and your whole system relaxes and the limbic brain retreats, and the frontal lobe is then engaged. That is the very thing we want. So as a review, when you feel uncertain and you say, no, no, no, I have everything inside of me to master uncertainty. I need to one move, horizons I need to do. I need to create meaningful horizons, small steps along the way that just simply prove I am doing it, even if it feels like I'm moving backwards.

Jasmine Star 00:13:22  And three keep going. I sat in the back of this conference room in Houston, Texas, and I was taking copious notes and I thought to myself, what have I done in the past? Does it mirror this? How can I get better now that I know this? And I am telling you, the minute I heard this, my life has changed and I wanted to share it with you, because we can't go back and be the same people with our lives dictated by uncertainty. By quitting too soon after we tried something. And then as I was sitting there, Rich said the following. He said, all growth happens outside of your comfort zone. You must choose things that make you uncomfortable. The past is history and the future is fiction. Choose your fiction carefully. Let go of what you can't control. Anxiety is simply holding on to what you can't control. So let go. My question to you, ladies and gentlemen, is what are you letting go of control? Today I created this podcast because I want to remind you that we can only control the effort.

Jasmine Star 00:14:22  We cannot control the outcome. So what will you let go of today? You can find me on all social media platforms at Jasmine Star. And if you happen to be watching this on YouTube, shout out thank you! I would love to meet you in the comments. I hope you have a beautiful day.