From External Certainty to Self-Generated Certainty

For most of my career, certainty surrounded me. I stayed for forty years, and then one day, they decided they no longer needed me.

As difficult as it was at the time to let go, I overcame the emotion within 24 hours and decided to move on.

Physically moving on was the easy part. What surprised me was that it still took more than three years to move on mentally. That was the real challenge.

Working in a large organisation, there were structures, systems, expectations, and people to lean on. Decisions had context, and success had benchmarks. Even ambiguity had boundaries. I knew how to navigate all of this and was good at it, having risen to a career level I never aspired to achieve.

Then an even bigger challenge was thrown at me.

My brother took his own life, and my challenge of having lost certainty in my career faded into nothing. I had lost the one man in my family I believed I could trust as we navigated life’s uncertainties together, and he had given up on himself.

In response, I clung to control. I learned more and gathered knowledge. I stayed on my treadmill of life with no off button, grasping for certainty wherever I could find it.

Then I stepped into my own business, and certainty vanished completely. No amount of knowledge gathering or learning was going to deliver the certainty I craved as a core need of my very being.

At first, I thought I was prepared. I had decades of leadership experience, an MBA, and a track record of results. What I hadn’t anticipated was how deeply my thinking had been shaped by external structures. When those disappeared, I felt exposed.

Suddenly, anything was possible, and that was the problem.

Read more here, starting with The Comfort of External Certainty