Embrace Uncertainty for Innovation and Success with Katherine Templar Lewis

In this episode, we're delving into a topic that's critical for any executive in today's rapidly changing environment, and that is embracing uncertainty and transforming it into a strategic advantage. With the guidance of expert Katherine Templer Lewis, Chief Scientist with The Uncertainty Experts, we will delve 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. Katherine 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. Katherine has spent the last 3 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.

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.

Welcome, welcome, welcome, Katherine. How are you? I'm good.

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

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 Katherine.

I'm Katherine Katherine Templeris. 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, at, 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. I was once described as the most recklessly optimistic person that's, 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 get 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, to tell people. I used to, I used to have a boyfriend once who I used to wake up in the middle of the night cause 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 brain's amazing.

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

I think 'cause I'm a high— I was, I am, I was a highly anxious person parading around as an incredibly brave person. I used to, you know, I was very, I was very lucky. I, I, I did my, my, my science and my academics at, at Oxford University. But I used to sort of have very 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. It's very good. And I didn't realize it for a long time, 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? 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, 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, so I was interested in your work. I think I was also under the impression, and maybe this is being British as well, that as, 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 with the brain and imposter syndrome and how to unlock this incredible capacity for innovation, creativity, self-belief that we all do have. We're just not taught the tools at school. It took—

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? What, and if so, then what are the positives and negatives of it?

Yeah, 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, to condense together when the, when the pandemic hit. I was, you know, my, 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, we, our brains hate uncertainty. They don't like to know, to not know what's happening. But we are also living in a society where we, 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. Definitely. 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, we've survived this long because we're very good with uncertainty. We just, in modern world society, convince ourselves that we need certainty.

So you say that we have to change our relationship with uncertainty, and yeah, if there's many out there, and I actually, when you were speaking about your anxiousness and the way that you went about life, I'm sitting there going, that was exactly who I was. But. How does one change their relationship with uncertainty? Because just that idea for many triggers a whole other level of, of, of anxiousness.

Yes. Yes. And safety seeking. You know, we are incredibly, we talk about self-sabotage in our world. And so 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'm, 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, 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, the real sort of the modern research that, that's all the The most sort of interesting thing that's coming out of the research that we are 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. And, and I find this very interesting as, as a woman, you know, as a director of my own company and, and lab, and that 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. 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.

Wow. Okay. There's a lot there I wanna 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, we are, you know, 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, that uncertainty and anxiousness to then be able to get to a point where they can measure it? And how do they do that?

Yeah, well, we've been, 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 knows 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, people who 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 on a 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, it was amazing. We went and we worked with all these incredible people we called the Uncertainty Experts at the, you know, the fringes of society. People who had been in gangs, people who 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 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 are 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 bit in psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, you know, touches on this, but we wanted to make something that was much more interactive with people. And so 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 from the things you've probably heard about from breathwork to something called interoception, which is this new science of being able to feel your emotions in your body and label them. We are 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 and you can then calm your nervous system. Right. And that's something I think that, you know, and I, I don't make any, any sort of gender stereotypes whatsoever, but a lot of men are cultured to ignore their emotions. Yeah. And women are sort of cultured to think that they're unhelpful and push them away.

Yeah.

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 like you regulate it. And once you start to regulate it, you start to actually tap into the deeper emotional data stream, which is your intuition. And we know that 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. But because, because they lose the emotional intuition that they have, because data's not enough in uncertainty. You, 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. 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, that gut feeling can be very important.

And does it also have an impact to leaders? Because when they are making decisions, especially decisions in times of like significant change and conflict and whatnot, it ha— 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 gonna be on them and make sure that they are also considering their emotions and how they're gonna handle things.

Yeah, 100%. And that's sort of, you know, this idea of empathy is an important leadership skill, both emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. And the emotional empathy is understanding what what the team, what other people feel, and that can be incredibly important for connection and, 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, that is a valid perspective is incredibly important for leadership and innovation. And we know that when people can't handle uncertainty, they can't do something called perspective taking. And that's that ability to see someone's perspective. Because when you can't handle uncertainty, when 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 the 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 into 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, 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 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?

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, which 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, and, and not make a decision, even if it bought 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 that'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.

Stubbornness or pride or ego.

Uh, and that's not necessarily gonna be the best decision.

It, it seems obvious as to why someone, anyone would not be able to say, I don't know. Yeah. But what is that thing that you can tell them to kind of wake 'em up around that stubbornness, around that position of I'm too prideful, or it's gonna make me look weak? What, what do we tell leaders to get outta that mode and to get into that space of being okay with, I don't know, cuz we tell our people that it's okay if you don't know, but yet we can't do it.

Yeah. And I think you're right. There's a sort of T-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, it's, they're gonna look like a bad leader. You know, we've been working with people, you know, especially really interesting people sort of in the RAF and the Army, these, I mean, how do you How do you say very bravely, you know, and 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, take time and say, I don't know yet, but we'll work it out together. 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 we, 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 know 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.

Because do they not see that? If they always have an answer, just because they aren't, they're too prideful to say, I don't know, but that answer's 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.

The damage that, that will happen if they, if they get it wrong will actually be worse. Then, 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, and trust. And of course saying, I know, makes everyone go, oh, thank God. I don't have to work it out. But if you are 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, it's understanding the bigger picture in that.

Yeah. And you talk about needing to reframe or come up with a new leadership framework in order to then have these, you know, leaders move through uncertainty and really be able to deal with the changing environments. What is your take on reframing the leadership framework?

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 keyword. 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, a scale called a study, which is the World Uncertainty Index, and, 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, 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 shedding disease. Yeah. And now we have everything from the big conceptual climate change. I mean, a lot of the, you know, it's a very real thing. It's not just a concept, but there's more sort of high-level uncertainties, economic instability. Through to our everyday, you know, what is it? I think in the UK alone, something like two-thirds of people want to change their job, but they're unsure of where to go, what to do, you know, and then at home, of course, there's huge uncertainties as people try and balance families and work and all these things that is quite relatively modern to us. 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, ooh, 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, by team leaders in this, you know, and, and we see this a lot in things like sort of ED&I initiatives that are, that are incredibly important right now. And people feel this sort of resistance to it and they feel, you know, feel a shame about that. You know, 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, 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 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 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 ask questions, being able to find people who have perspectives that are different to you and actually accept them and understand them. But then that opens you up in uncertainty to make more innovative decisions. And the last really is that, is, 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. 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.

Yeah.

So, you know, everyone has that from leaders through to team members. So we work with them there to really identify what that is. And again, you know, we're, 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 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 they're easier to head towards. So we work sort of in those three aspects.

On that point, 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.

Yeah.

How can they, do you have a tip or two that they could be doing right now to help them get out of that? Not stated, but it could be.

Yeah, I think the main 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, as a leader, but one is really cultivating psychological safety of making sure that people know that, you know, it does, failure is fine. This, this is, you know, we're always competing, we forget how heavily it weighs on people that we need to come up with the right answer. I think really being a leader 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. So 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, is 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.

Now, is this work, is this work when you say that you help these individuals, these male 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 these, some of these things?

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. Uh, and I think that's the thing people suddenly realize. They're like, oh, I have the uncertainty of, 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 in, in, we're in year 4 of this research project. In year 2, year 1 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, and build community around that? Year 2, we went into organizations and we were very lucky to, to beta test our 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 the sort of leadership teams as well. So now we sort of have two tracks really. And, and so yeah, we've been, we work with, with Google and, and some big companies in their leadership range, taking groups of, 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, 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, yeah, it's because no one, no one sits around thinking, oh, I need to tackle uncertainty. That's why you've been asking the panel. And everyone's like, what is it?

And nor do they want to. No, exactly.

They're like, we love certainty, don't make us embrace uncertainty. But when you 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, when you play safe, because I couldn't handle the emotions, it was too much of a cost. It was for me when I was younger, it was unsustainable to be in uncertainty because it produced such high anxiety. When I started to, 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 be more innovative, more creative. And eventually now, you know, I, I run a lab, a better leader, I hope.

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, I caught it as a tolerance uncertainty test.

Yeah.

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, it's called the, it's actually called the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. And it shows you, it, it, it asks you a series of questions. There's about 25 questions. Has been, you know, 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 needing to be made or things suddenly change. And what we find is the, you know, 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 from wellbeing to creativity, problem solving, innovation, and leadership as well. So yeah, so because it's an incredibly, I was gonna say boring science scale, but I shouldn't use this. It's a slightly dry science scale. So we made it more fun, which is obviously why GIFs and memes. Uh, and yeah, it is, it is on our website and you can test it. It'll give you an automatic score as well.

Katherine, this has been fabulous. Very eye-opening as well.

And.

Has me now thinking about just even assessing my own degree, cuz mine's changed dramatically over the last like 10, 15 years. I'm not nearly as anxious around uncertainty and change as I, as I was at one time. But I so appreciate all this. This has been fabulous.

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

Well, and I love that. I love the fact that kind of identify the relationship you're having 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 Katherine on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can find her at The Uncertainty Experts as her handle, as much as her website, uncertaintyexperts.com. Thank you so much, Katherine.

Thank you.

Thank you for tuning into 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 balloffirecoaching.com 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