Leading through uncertainty – an entrepreneur’s guide
When you run your own business, every day is a live experiment. Whether you’re testing your value proposition, onboarding talent, raising capital or doing grunt-work, you are required to repeatedly venture into the unknown. As a leader, your willingness to lean into this uncertainty sets you apart from others and allows you to make your mark on the world. But does this bravado mean you’re immune to uncertainty? Certainly not.
Like all of us, you will at times exceed your threshold for tolerating ambiguity. And when this happens, you may feel uncharacteristically uneasy about your future. Try as you might, you will struggle to lean in as you are plagued by confusion, anxiety or an overwhelming sense of despair. In such moments, you may find yourself exhibiting peculiar (and often undesirable) traits. You may be quick to anger or slow to react; obsess over details or become careless in execution; fixate on your passions or lose sight of them entirely. In brief, when you are overwhelmed by uncertainty you stray from being your best self, and your health and the health of your business suffers.
Before you begin, you might like to download The Entrepreneur's Guide to Uncertainty to access three powerful exercises to help you take control of your life. Simply enter your details below to download it now.
Catch yourself before you spiral out of control.
To break this downward spiral, it’s wise to apply a generous dose of self-compassion before taking some simple, practical steps. This combination honours both your emotional and rational sides to optimise your chance of success. Given that emotional support is best discussed in person, this article will walk you through the practical side of the equation using a framework from Stephen Covey’s bestselling book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
You can use Covey’s framework to rediscover your agency and empower yourself to lead through uncertainty. The framework operates across three circles (shown below) and works by focusing your attention and efforts where they will have the most impact.
A) Circle of Concern: elements of life that you cannot control
B) Circle of Influence: elements of life that you can influence
C) Circle of Control: elements of life that you can control
Circle of Concern
If you’re currently feeling overwhelmed, your focus is likely inside your Circle of Concern. This circle encompasses a wide range of challenges that impact your life but are largely outside of your control. For example, you cannot control Covid-related travel restrictions, climate change or world political events, what you ate for breakfast yesterday or another person’s beliefs. When you focus your attention on uncontrollable items, you can feel small and powerless, which saps your potential to create positive change in our world.
Despite this, I am not suggesting you ignore the Circle of Concern. Key items inside this circle may represent important challenges that you can resolve through meaningful work. If this is the case for you, you can bookmark your priority items as long-term challenges rather than letting them weigh you down on a daily basis.
I wonder, how might your life play out if you could take this longer term perspective?
Circle of Influence
Nestled between your Circles of Concern and Control is a grey area. This is your Circle of Influence. It’s easy to overlook this ambiguous circle, but it holds enormous opportunity for you to impact the world around you. After all, what is leadership if not your capacity to influence*? To make the most of your Circle of Influence, you can ask yourself the following question when faced with uncertainty.
What small action can I take today to shift the odds in my favour?
The idea of this question is to help you recall that you have choice, agency and the power to shape your present and future. Adopting this mindset has an enormously positive effect on your psychological and physical wellbeing and can propel you towards your most meaningful results. Here are some more specific variations of this question.
How can I offer my clients even more value?
How can I inspire my people to reach their full potential?
How can I attract even better talent?
How can I respond more effectively to shareholder concerns?
How can I deal with conflict more gracefully?
How can I edge further out of my comfort zone?
How can I make complex conversations more comfortable?
How can I respond to setbacks more efficiently?
How can I make even more robust decisions?
How can I better honour my commitment to work life balance?
How can I manage my emotional state to support wiser choices and actions?
As you form your own personalised questions, you’ll become more aware of your priorities and the resources you can draw on to influence your circumstances.
*’Influence’ in the context of leadership is not about coercing others to do your will; it is about harnessing your strengths to inspire, guide and support people to grow into their full potential and create the positive change you have agreed on.
Circle of Control
If you’re facing extreme uncertainty, you may find it comforting to identify elements over which you have unfettered agency. These include your values, beliefs, words and actions. These elements determine how you interface with the world, and no-one can take them away from you without your permission.
When you realise you have full responsibility for these elements, you may feel simultaneously liberated and daunted. The sense of liberation you experience comes from realising you can choose your response to the world around you – and this opens up a world of possibility. For example:
If you dread meetings with potential investors, you can choose to examine which of your beliefs is holding you back from making these important connections and address it appropriately.
If your team’s performance is waning, you can choose to initiate conversations to explore the root of the problem, reconnect around your shared goals and re-energise performance.
If you are feeling disillusioned with a project, you can choose to ask yourself if you are simply sleep-deprived, under-resourced or perhaps undertaking work that’s out of alignment with your core values.
While freedom of choice is liberating, it can also be dizzying (to borrow danish philosopher Kierkegaard’s term). You may fret over making the right choices. You may be pulled in two opposing directions by your core values. You may say or do one thing when you mean another. You may regret your choices, and not know how to correct them. In these moments, the elation of freedom is tarnished by anguish, but there is no need for this to drag you down. It is also within your Circle of Control to choose how you interpret your experiences – so even anguish can be transformed into a launchpad for achieving your most meaningful results.
Next steps
If there is one message for you to take away from this article it is that:
While you cannot control what the world throws at you, you can choose your response. This includes your long-term vision, daily focus and moment-to-moment choices. This is how you keep growing in the face of uncertainty.
If you would like to explore how you can apply the three circles to your life, I invite you to download The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Uncertainty. (See the form below.) If you’d prefer to discuss how to focus your attention and energy to maximise your impact, please fill out the contact form to set up a consultation.