Become A Champion Of Uncertainty

Welcome, man, to the mantalks show. I'm Connor Beaton, and today we're going to talk about three ways to deal with uncertainty. Now, if you are new here to the channel, if you're watching on YouTube, or if you're tuning into the podcast for the very first time, Man Talks is not therapy. It's training. This is a training ground for men who are looking to better themselves as husbands, as fathers, as leaders. And we provide a lot of tools and resources to do so. So today, as I said, we're talking about uncertainty. One of the things that I've noticed with a lot of men is that we can get caught in this trap of avoiding any experience, any challenge where the outcome is uncertain. And a lot of men will get stuck ruminating in their thoughts, in conversation, ruminating about what decision they should make when the outcome is uncertain, when they are uncertain about how things are going to unfold. Now, why does this matter? Because we as men need to be able to face uncertainty in our lives. If you're a parent, if you're a father, there's going to be a tremendous amount of uncertainty. If you are a business owner, there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Regardless of what career you are in, there is going to be some level of uncertainty. And your capacity, your ability as a man to navigate that uncertainty is going to.

Affect. I was going to say infect. Maybe it will infect certain parts of your life. It's going to affect how confident you ultimately feel. There's a direct correlation between you being able to navigate certain levels of uncertainty in your life and the amount of confidence that you as a man, will inevitably experience and embody. People can feel that men that know how to navigate uncertainty feel more confident because they're less fixated and focused and obsessed about the outcome. The outcome that happens is less relevant. So today, I'm going to share with you a few simple things that you can do to begin to develop a better relationship with uncertainty, to become a champion of uncertainty. And I'm going to start with risk. So the first thing that you can do is to dose yourself with small risks. Whenever we're facing uncertainty in our life, there is almost always, always some inherent risk that we are having to take, right? Asking a woman for her number, approaching her in a coffee shop, taking a new job opportunity, deciding to, you know, take a promotion or moving to a different industry or to start up your own business, all of those things come along with an inherent risk, and some of those things come along with a tremendous amount of risk. And so we want to build up our tolerance towards risk because generally what's happening when we are facing something that's uncertain in our life, there is some risk that we are wanting to avoid, some risk that we are wanting to mediate or not have to deal with. And the challenge here is to be able to develop a higher level of tolerance, a higher level of resiliency when it comes to taking those risks, so that you can assess and analyze that risk in a healthy way without getting caught in the sort of like mental masturbation that a lot of us struggle with, right? Getting caught with the ruminating thoughts, the what ifs, the I should or I could or, you know, the hundreds of different paths that might unfold trying to predict the outcome that we ultimately want. Now, this doesn't mean that you should entirely ignore analyzing the situation that you're in or taking some time to really strategize about what possible outcomes may unfold. It's that you use these small risks to learn how to develop a system within you that learns how to develop not only an intellectual, rational system, but also develops your gut, your intuition. A man's gut and man's intuition can be incredibly powerful. But if we aren't willing to take risks, then we aren't willing to develop that intuition that can sometimes be very potent in guiding us in the direction in our relationship, in our career, in our business. Sometimes business risks, sometimes business and career elevations and progress and growth happen in a very calculated manner. But sometimes they happen because we come to a precipice where we are forced to take a risk. And sometimes we can calculate that risk to the nth degree and still not know what decision to make. Because at the end of the day, it's an intuition, gut based decision that you have to go with. So dose yourself with small amounts of risk, whether that's approaching. You know, I'm just using this like a dating, dating example. If you are risk avoidant and you are uncertainty avoidant, then dose yourself with small, small amounts of risk by approaching women, having a conversation with them, striking up a conversation, asking for a phone number, and putting yourself in that position is going to build up your risk tolerance, your risk resiliency, and that will help you navigate through uncertainty and diminish the level of fear that you feel around uncertainty. Because that is really what's happening underneath is that when you as a man are afraid of uncertainty and not willing to take the risk, generally what's happening is there's a tremendous amount of fear that's preventing you from moving forward, preventing you from gaining the value from the experience of the risk. And so that's the next thing that I'm going to say here. Focus your attention and your consciousness and your awareness on experience over outcome. Especially when you're taking small risks for bigger decisions that you have to make in your life where things are uncertain, of course you want to be able to keep the outcome in mind. But with these small risk, what it's really about is it's not about the outcome, right? If you're approaching a woman and you're going to go ask for her phone number, it's not about the outcome, right? If you're outcome obsessed, that is going to create a whole bunch of stress pressures. It's going to release cortisol in your body, stress hormones, you're going to feel anxious, you're going to tell bad jokes to try and impress her. Whereas if you're not worried about the outcome, you're not worried about whether or not you get the phone number. Because what you are really focused, focused on is the experience of just getting in there, putting yourself into the arena, having the conversation, right? The same can be said at work. If you're afraid of speaking up in meetings or speaking up with your boss. Just doing it little by little, by gaining the experience, rather than being focused on trying to get an outcome can be incredibly powerful for helping you to move through the natural anxiety that may be present around you. Speaking up or putting yourself in an uncertain situation, the last thing is about expanding your consciousness to include not knowing. So by taking these actions, what we're really trying to do is expand our consciousness to be okay with, to be able to hold and handle uncertainty, to be able to know that we can operate in situations where the outcome is uncertain, to know that we can operate and still be proficient in situations where there is inherent risk, where we don't know what's going to happen, where we don't know how the other person is going to react, where we don't know if they're going to give us what we are ultimately aiming towards. And this is incredibly important because this is what develops our sort of competitive nature. It's also what develops our capacity to lean into more confrontational oriented situations, circumstances and conversations. So if you know that you can, you can handle yourself in a situation where there is uncertainty, and you know that you can operate in a space where the outcome is uncertain, where there's a little bit of risk involved, what you're ultimately doing is developing a deeper sense of trust, a deeper sense of respect within yourself as a man, within yourself as a husband, as a leader, et cetera. So make these small choices. Choose some small risks. That might mean, you know, saying what you want for dinner in your family or making a decision of where your family or you and your partner are going to go on vacation for the weekend or where are you going to go on a date night. Maybe that feels like a risk for you. Put yourself in that situation. Push yourself a little bit to take these small risks. Dose yourself with small risks and focus in on the experience. What can you learn? What can you take away? It's not about it being wildly successful and perfect the very first time, that's unrealistic and will always set you up for failure and will always put you in a situation where you avoid uncertain situations and situations that have risk because you are aiming for perfection. I don't know who said it, but there was a quote that said perfectionism is never wanting to get the same thing wrong once, which I thought is kind of like a mind fuck in a way, but it's so true. Perfectionism is never wanting to get the same thing wrong once. So there's no permission, there's no experience in that. We are just aiming for the outcome. So we want to remove that focus in on the experience and then expand our consciousness through these trials, through these experiences to include not knowing, to include being comfortable in who we are as a man, in being able to handle ourself in situations where we don't know what the outcome is going to be, where we don't know how other people are going to react, where maybe we don't know what the environment is going to look like. Right? So there's many different variables but we can know. I trust myself to handle myself in those situations. So that's really what we are aiming at developing. So if you enjoyed this episode, comment below. If you are on YouTube, give us the thumbs up and the subscribe. Don't forget to share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. And don't forget to leave us a rating and review. I appreciate the three people last week that left us a rating that left me a rating and a review. I really appreciate that. So until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.