One of my dear clients told me that he regularly repeats to himself “I’m embracing uncertainty.” This is brilliant, really, because it works for him as a way to pry his white knuckles off of the uncontrollable steering wheel of life right now. And to help him remember this phrase we’ve agreed that he’ll meditate and work out every morning before 9AM. After a lay-off he has more time to do this. The great thing is that he’s actually really doing what we agreed he would do and his mood, therefore, is less of ‘freaked out job searching desperation’ and more of having faith that he will connect with the right job. This is something we have worked on together, and something I work with a lot of clients on…who are you being as you go through the transition before you or that grips you. Our white knuckling doesn’t do us much good really, and we’re less pleasant to be around — for ourselves and others. So now I’m taking my clients lead — he’s my inspiration. I’m embracing uncertainty to let new things appear, more to be revealed, and knowing that from all of our global turmoil something new will be created. Necessity, after all, is the mother of invention, and we are an amazingly inventive society. And I notice that the movies I’ve seen lately speak to these messages — Slumdog Millionaire, Benjamin Button, Revolutionary Road to name a few seem to be talking directly to the shifts in our psyches — the shifts that are being required of us. Be present, be adaptable, reinvent, take risks, tell the truth and be real even if it means doing things that others might think are ‘unrealistic’ or ‘unusual’. Embrace uncertainty — an oxymoron that really works.