What Uncertainty is Asking of You
There’s a particular kind of uncertainty I’ve been thinking about lately. Not the kind where you truly don’t know what to do.
The kind where you might know, but... there are enough other voices, possibilities, pressures, and very convincing reasons to question yourself that your own knowing becomes harder to hear.
Reflecting back on my own journey through navigating ‘all the things’ that led me through new motherhood, grief, and toward entrepreneurship, I had to get through the terrain of new identities, overwhelm, procrastination, asking for help, and what happens when you’re trying to make a meaningful move without having certainty about how it will turn out.
As I walk myself through my story of my journey, I can hear the thread that was already there-
✦ How do you trust yourself enough to move when certainty isn’t available?
How to Get Unstuck When Making Decisions
Multiple moments in this journey from navigating motherhood with a corporate job toward the unknown landscape that led me into starting my own business were plagued with procrastination. This essentially comes down to knowing how to trust yourself when making decisions. Not knowing what you don’t know paired with the pressure to just do ‘something’ so you can shake the ‘stuck’ feeling tends to create impulsive action that leads to more confusion and overwhelm.
Even when I took the quiet, yet declarative step to start contemplating the idea of a business as a possibility for me, it almost made me freeze because suddenly I was standing at the edge of a new landscape I didn’t know how to navigate.
We tend to interpret procrastination as evidence that we need more discipline. Or that if the idea really mattered, we’d just do it. Because on the surface, the tasks themselves really aren’t mountains. They can be as simple as a line on a to-do list or a framework to follow.
But sometimes the resistance before a meaningful move isn’t telling you no. It’s telling you there’s something here worth observing.
✦ Maybe you’re at the edge of your current capacity.
✦ Maybe the idea has become tangled up with everything you think you should do next.
✦ Maybe you’re trying to follow a formula that worked for someone else, while something in you keeps resisting the direction.
✦ Maybe you do know what you want to do... and the uncertainty of what happens after you do it is what has you circling.
In my own journey, I have learned to recognize that there is a distinct difference between having the plan and working the plan.
Noticing that distinction matters. I could google tips for starting a business or read a book about how to set goals (so many books), but translating that into what worked for me and where I was at was something put me right on the edge of a gap I didn’t know how to cross. Because when we treat every hesitation as something to push through, we miss the information inside it that would help us orient our next actions.
And when we treat every uncomfortable feeling as evidence that something is wrong, we can end up outsourcing decisions that actually require us to know ourselves better.
This can help us stop procrastinating when we are overwhelmed by the next steps or not having the capacity to handle the life changes that they will entail. I can recognize now that if I had a better sense of my bearings about what I was navigating, that awareness would have made me feel more confident and competent to take each next step. Not perfectly, but from a more oriented feeling.
This Week’s Field Observation
If you’re navigating a decision, transition, idea, or next move that feels uncertain right now, notice what happens when you stop asking-
“What’s the right thing to do?”
And instead observe- What happens in me when I imagine doing the thing I think I want to do?
Notice without immediately trying to fix or interpret it.
Where does your mind go?
What stories arrive?
What suddenly feels urgent?
Do you get tired? Energized? Distracted? Overwhelmed?
Do you start searching for more information?
Do you immediately think of someone whose opinion you need?
Do you start building an entire plan when you only needed to decide the next step?
That’s field data. Not necessarily a verdict. The practice is learning to distinguish the signal from everything that gathers around it. This is also a crucial part of learning how to trust your intuition, your Glow, in your life and even in your business.
That’s a big part of what I mean now when I talk about Human Orientation- becoming more familiar with how you meet possibility, uncertainty, friction, pressure, and change, so you have something internal to orient from when there isn’t a perfect map to follow.
If that’s a landscape you’re navigating, this is one of the threads I explored recently in a conversation on the Business Insider Roundtable podcast. I think you’ll find something useful in this conversation.
[Listen to the podcast episode → Apple | Spotify]
And after you listen, try an Observation Snapshot of your own. Choose one thing you’re uncertain about and spend a few minutes observing what happens around it- without requiring yourself to solve it.
See what you notice when the goal isn’t certainty… it’s awareness.
And if someone came to mind while you were reading this- someone standing at the edge of a decision, possibility, or change- send this field note their way.
Maybe they don’t need another answer either… maybe they need a different place to observe from.
Thanks for being in the field with me.
✦
Stephanie Rose is the founder of Firefly Scout and creator of the Human Orientation practice. Through observation, pattern recognition, and self-authorship, she helps people become more accurate interpreters of themselves and their lives so they can navigate change, growth, and "all the things" with greater clarity, capacity, and self-trust.
If you enjoy exploring a different way of seeing, join the Firefly Scout newsletter or download the free Observation Snapshot to start noticing what your life may already be trying to show you.
When uncertainty, overwhelm, or procrastination have you questioning your next move, the answer may not be more certainty. What changes when you observe what’s happening before trying to solve it?