Embrace Uncertainty Unlock Your Potential

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, that lived in science, world of science. I really do believe it because I've always had this fundamental— every day when I get into science lab, I'm blown away by what humans can do and it excites me so so much that I think, 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 did my, my science and my academics 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. 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 poten— 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, 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 to 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 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 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. 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.

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.