After any trauma or upset in your life, there is always a risk that your life has changed and you need to adjust and begin living with the uncertainty that remains.

You would be a rare person if you never experienced uncertainty, so you’re in good company.  What you can sometimes forget is that in life, there is always a degree of uncertainty, but when trauma shines a light on one area of your life, “uncertainty” can become a way of life.

Let’s give you some help to make changes that work.

6 Steps For Living With Uncertainty

1. Understand what type of fear it is

Fear and uncertainty are very closely related.  Fear and uncertainty aren’t all bad, by the way.

You live with a little healthy fear and uncertainty everyday.  A little healthy fear will get you to take action when you need to.  If you get constant pain in your shoulder and don’t take action, the likely outcome is that the pain will get worse and perhaps the injury will get worse as well.  So the fear and the pain will get you to take action.  You may seek the help of a health coach – perhaps a doctor or natural therapist.

Or. you make the uncertain certain and you live in fear that the worst will happen. This type of unhealthy fear can make you freeze.  This can happen in two ways.  Firstly, you ignore all the signs and pretend the pain will go away because you’re imagining the worst. Secondly, the pain starts to shift from your shoulder to your knee to your finger, wrist, toes, as you start to feel pain in places you couldn’t imagine and all the while fearing the worst will happen.  Too scared to seek help, you imagine the worst.

So it’s best to start living with fear and uncertainty rather than living in it, right?!

2. Imagine the worst

What! why would you want to imagine the worst, won’t that just make things worse?

When uncertainty starts to take hold, fear can make things appear even more uncertain and worse than they really are.  One of the best ways to reduce the fear is to face the fear and the uncertainty you’re feeling head on.  By doing this, you start to take back your own power and take the power away from the fear.  Most of the time, you will find that the worst that can happen isn’t as bad as you first thought.

Action: Take a minute to do this deep breathing exercise and imagine the worst possible outcome for an uncertain situation you’re facing.  Once you understand what it is, you can then take action by finding evidence to prove yourself wrong.

3. Find evidence to prove yourself wrong

Now that you can picture the worst outcome imaginable, look for evidence to prove yourself wrong.  When I had finished treatment for breast cancer, a common fear, which I shared, was that the cancer would come back and that I wouldn’t live. I wasn’t ready to go quite yet. I still had a lot of livin’ to do, so I needed to find evidence that I could live through recurrence.

I went in search of cancer survivors who had faced recurrence and beat it.  I know that if they could do it, I could do it also.  I met some amazing people and as I listened to their stories, it gave me hope and trust that if I was to have a recurrence, the outcome wouldn’t be as bad as I first thought and then I was able to imagine a positive outcome.

Action: What evidence can you find to prove that the worst case scenario from step one doesn’t have to be the outcome for you? 

4. Focus on what you can control

A lot of the time, uncertainty and fear can become more intense because you don’t think that you have any control of it – but you do because it’s about the choices YOU make!  You might not have control over getting ill, but you do have control over how you spend your time.

You control whether you make healthy lifestyle choices and whether you smoke or not; how much alcohol you indulge in; what you eat and how much exercise you do; controlling stress, etc.  All of these choices are within your control and overall, they all have an impact on your wellbeing and resilience.

Bottom line: If you can’t change don’t focus on it.

Action: What do you have control over? What actions can you take to focus on what you can control?

 

5. Reduce the impact of living in uncertainty

Living in fear and uncertainty can cripple you.  But, you can implement simple and easy changes that will lessen its grip on you and stop you thinking about it 24/7.  Imagine the freedom you will have and how you will feel when you confidently move from fear to power.

Action: Take a minute to do this deep breathing exercise and imagine yourself living in the confident space where you replace fear with power by doing the actions you have written as you went through these exercises.

 

6. Seek help to get through it faster

Fear and uncertainty can reduce over time, but it can also do a load of damage to your confidence and outlook on life in the meantime.  The best way to get through it more easily is to get help and follow a process that works.

There is no need to battle through it alone when you can implement simple and easy changes to your life once you know what the right changes are and how to implement them effectively.  Learn more here about how to replace the fear in your life with the power you already have.

“The past is behind you, the future will come whether you worry about it or not.  When you worry about it you lose all the beauty and splendour of living now.   Don’t waste your life worry about sometimes that may never happen”

Gai Comans

You might also like to have a look at “The Fearless Path” workbook. Just click here…

You can reduce the impact of living with uncertainty.  Please join the conversation over on Facebook and comment about what actions you can take to reduce the impact of fear and uncertainty in your life.

Love Gai