Are you a type A personality, or someone with control freaky tendencies like me? 

 

Then I’m guessing uncertainty drives you nuts!

 

And just like fear it can fuck you up, keep you small and become extremely restrictive.

 

The most uncertain period in my life was when my family was arranging the move to NZ. My husband had been offered a job in the NZDF which was great, the problem was they were restructuring at the time bringing all the armed forces together under the umbrella of the defence force which meant that they weren’t forthcoming with a start date. 

 

Now ordinarily a starting date for a new job is not that big of a deal, but when you consider the logistics of moving to the other side of the world it gets a bit more complex. 

 

For a start I had 2 kids to think of. One in boarding school, did I commit to another year of schooling or not?

I had a business, I had staff to pay, clients to service. Did I sell, did I keep it and buy out my underperforming business partner, did I just shut up shop?

Then there’s living arrangements, visa applications, shipping considerations, telling the rest of the family.

As you can imagine it felt like there were at least a gazillion decisions that needed to be made and I didn’t have enough information to make them. 

 

I felt like I didn’t know how to deal with any of these things until I had a black and white actual written confirmation of when we had to be in NZ. 

 

Actions speak louder than words and all that, so while we had a verbal offer, quite frankly it didn’t mean shit to me.

 

Never before in my life had I felt I had so little control over anything and this went on for almost a year before we finally got a confirmed date. 

 

Needless to say that was the most stressful year of my life and back then I wasn’t quite as awesome at self care as I am now.

 

So I did what most of us do when faced with uncertainty which is to numb the discomfort. At that time in my life it was generally a bottle of wine when I eventually got home from work, often around 8 or 9pm. Of course by then I couldn’t be arsed to make a healthy meal so I’d just eat any old junk as I chugged my wine.

 

I can tell you that the results were not pretty, in fact I was the fattest and most out of shape I’d ever been in my life.

 

I can’t even show you because I deleted every single fat photo because I was so bloody disgusted with myself. 

 

Thankfully I began working on that the day we landed in NZ, but that’s another story. 

 

My point here is that when everything feels chaotic it’s easy to think we don’t have control. The lesson I learned from that year and feeling grotesque because of my actions is that the way we take back control is by taking action on the things that we can control. 

 

Ourselves!

 

By focusing on what we can achieve, taking  action steps in that direction and practising self care we can combat uncertainty. 

 

I find that when things are shit, when we’re tired and stressed, we generally want to put off taking action on our self care until we feel we have some control, until we have some certainty, that’s pretty much human nature. 

 

In fact I had a chat with my bro in the UK just this morning about this very thing. He desperately needs to create some time for himself for some self care. 

 

He works long hours, has a family, is in a job that’s becoming increasingly micro-managed and is not in a great place right now. So much so that he tells me he doesn’t have 5 minutes a day to work on himself. 

 

But, and this is so common,  he said as soon as he finds a new job, he’ll find some time for us to do the work and create his personal success blueprint. I did the exact same thing with my health and fitness with the whole emigrating thing. I kept putting it off until I got to NZ. 

 

I was as good as my word and as I said I started working on it the very day we landed, but I put it off for almost a year. 

90% of the time there’s always something else on the horizon that arrives to cause chaos and uncertainty. 

 

Maybe a new boss, a big new project, ill health, family issues. There is ALWAYS something. There’s always a reason or excuse to put off working on yourself. 

 

A little like facing your fears, it can be confronting diving into uncertainty. To realise that a lot of uncertainty comes from not being clear headed about your priorities, where your focus should be and where you spend your time and energy. 

 

If you want to cut through your uncertainty head to CLICK HERE  to access a super cool free tool to help you do just that so check it out.