Is Fear and Uncertainty getting to you?

The fear of uncertainty.

It’s one of the major fears currently experienced worldwide, impacting the mental health of many.

It’s a fear of the collective unconscious, and something many men are currently facing, for themselves, their loved one’s and in their careers.

What makes it more challenging, is that men generally feel more alone in this battle, because we naturally resist talking about our fears, and so we go through it alone.

On Wednesday night this week in the Ascension Men’s Community, we dedicated a workshop on navigating and embracing uncertainty. The men in the community had a chance to speak about their relationship to uncertainty, how they are dealing with it and the impact it’s having.

Some of the key points we went through were:

- A fear of uncertainty can create a fear of the future, this fear creates hesitancy, this hesitancy affects our confidence, which can lead to a state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn. Leaving us all over the place, except for moving forward.

- There’s two primary ways to meet uncertainty: Avoid or Approach. Avoid, by sticking to what we know, run or hide to a space of security. Or, approach, by allowing curiosity and acceptance to guide us, exploring with our values in mind. The majority of the guys reported to oscillate between the two.

- Those who avoid uncertainty, unconsciously look for ways to escape uncertainty or create certainty by jumping to conclusions, assumptions and black-and-white thinking, whether true or not. E.g. AI will rule the world, and I’ll be left without a job and no one will ever want human connection again.

- Uncertainty provides an opportunity to wake us up, a signal that we have reached a limit in our knowledge and instigates a number of neural changes, to broaden our focus and learn something new. If we choose to see it as a challenge, rather than a threat, we start to see it as a space of possibility, an opportunity for movement and to expand our limits. It’s a catalyst for transformation and profound growth.

- We either accept the fact of life that things will change and the world will not conform to our wishes, or we try to distort the world in order to make it align with our story of it. It gets tiring trying to constantly hold on to our certainties and close our eyes to what’s changing in the world.

We then went through an exercise of meeting our own uncertainty that lives within us, in our body, and learned to use our intuition to guide us through what’s ahead for us.

Finishing off with highlighting the role of the masculine in uncertainty and practical tips to embrace and move through it.

One of the major tips was around VALUES.

Our values are what we can hold onto as we go through uncertainty. Our values are what brings certainty back into our lives and something we can control, filling us up, giving us energy and building confidence in ourselves, so that our capacity becomes greater than the challenge in front of us.

A powerful question the guys use in their daily lives to navigate uncertainty is – “Is this something I can influence, or is it out of my control?”.

Constantly asking ourselves this question will help us let go of unnecessary worry and anxiety, and allows us to reclaim energy and attention to what we can actually influence and control in our lives.

The more we focus our energy into how we can grow and what we can influence, the more we can adapt and thrive to this ever-changing world.

If you're feeling you're alone in this fear of uncertainty, you're not.

There are many men out there facing it and on the front foot to make it work for them, just like in this community.

You’ve got this.