The Upside Of Being Uncertain About Your Next Career Move

/ Blog, Navigating Emotions

Do you feel uncomfortable, even embarrassed, when you’re asked about your career plans and you have to say, “I don’t know!?”

In a profession where we’re rewarded for having the answers, being uncertain can feel scary. It’s one of the reasons career change is hard.

But there’s an upside to uncertainty!

Uncertainty can help you find your way through career transition! Here’s how:

1. Your attention, memory, and decision making are activated when you feel uncertain.

You might feel like uncertainty is holding you back from making a decision, but the Neuronal circuits of uncertainty activate attention and problem solving to help you make the best decision.

We have evolved to survive and thrive in a world where future outcomes are uncertain. You’ve got this!

2. Uncertainty allows you to open up to possibilities.

While the knowing mind tends to rely on old scripts and censures new or unusual options, the uncertain mind is open to new ideas, willing to be surprised and inspired.

You can harness your uncertainty and quiet the skeptical, knowing mind by brainstorming 2-3 “blue sky” career visions. What do you want your ideal day to look like? How do you want to live? Be open to what your subconscious mind has to offer.

**3. Uncertainty motivates you to seek out “uncertainty-reducing information.“**

Uncertainty brings your natural curiosity and exploration online. If you want to figure out next steps, become curious about what other physicians are doing and explore options for yourself.

For how to explore options, read mini career experiments and “playing survivor.”

4. Uncertainty is humbling.

When you’re humble, you’re more likely to be open to new ideas and think outside the box. It means the skeptical, “that won’t work” mind goes offline for a while, allowing space to create new ideas.

In summary:

Even though it feels uncomfortable, the uncertain mind is fertile ground for exploration, brainstorming, and finding new career possibilities you didn’t know existed!

“If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto.”

– Wislawa Szymborska

UTOPIA

Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.

– Wislawa Szymborska