When facing uncertain career situations, seeking more information actually overloads your working memory with ambiguous signals, making it harder to think clearly. The counterintuitive fix: deliberately limit what you consume and protect your cognitive resources instead.
So do you have any kind of advice, any tools that people can use to help them be more perceptive and navigate the difficult experiences or times that they might be experiencing, particularly from a career perspective? Big question.
Yeah, it is a big question. I don't want to minimize the truth that these can be very emotionally intense feelings for people. So back to your question about advice, I would say be as self-protective as possible. And what I mean by that is to limit the amount of information that you have coming in around the uncertainty. And it's a little bit of an irony, Paul, because when uncertainty happens, one of the things that you want to do is go out and get some more information. So that you can have pieces of the puzzle to be able to put it together. But the problem is, is if you keep getting too much information and that information also has, you know, kind of waves of uncertainty around it, you're just expanding the amount of uncertainty that your brain has to work with. And this little, you know, scratch pad is getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
Susan’s ICF Educator Award | The Heart Behind the Impact Katy Montgomery, PCC
