The Hidden Cost of Certainty

Control is the love language of fear. You open the closet and grab the finest threads to dress control up with confidence, discipline, strategy. But it’s still fear in a beautifully tailored suit.

Because of this need for control you chase certainty. You are the greyhound let out of the gate running like hell so you can keep certainty just close enough to see it. You don’t chase it out of arrogance. You chase it because you are scared. The fear of feeling exposed, irrelevant, replaceable, unseen, are all too real. You are scared that if you loosen your grip, the world you’ve constructed might not hold up.

Your body reveals the internal battle before your mind can recognize it. Your jaw clinches, your chest tightens, breath gets shallow. These are our physical responses to the system begging for safety.

So our natural response is to reach for the things we feel we can control.

Routine.

Structure.

Performance.

Identity.

Beliefs.

Relationships.

Anything that might diminish the feeling of chaos. Certainty has become your emotional duct tape. You have told yourself it’s holding you together but it’s also sealing off the oxygen.

You, like most others, are living in the grand pursuit of certainty. Certainty of religious beliefs, of people, of adversity, of failure, of success, of the things that happen in life you can’t make sense of.

You do it at such a high level with supreme confidence that one day you find yourself in a position of leadership. But most leaders don’t lead. I know that’s not what you want to hear but it’s the truth. Instead of leading, they spend the majority of their time managing other peoples impression of them, their own anxiety or hiding their limitations.

Certainty is the crack cocaine of leadership. You’ll feel powerful after a hit but underneath the energy of the high is pure uncut fear. The fear of being wrong or maybe of being seen.

A leader who needs to be right crushes the brilliance of their team.

The coach who micromanages kills the instincts of their players.

The business executive addicted to control create an organization filled with people who are waiting for their permission to breath.

When a leader latches on to certainty, their team no longer breathes on their own. You lose curiosity first. Risk is next to go and finally truth. Operate from your certainty for long enough and you’ll find yourself leading a room full of once creative, confident people waiting for their turn to affirm your certainty.

I can spot a certainty addict a mile away.

Their meetings feel like tense negotiations. Their feedback feels like a proclamation in all the way’s they’re correct. They worship the outcome, and preach the process as though they embody it. But they can’t imagine what it may be like to live in the process.

The cost is found in a culture wrapped in endless slideshows. In athletes who over think every decision because coach’s ego is louder in their head than their own instinct. In teams that execute the plan flawlessly but never innovate. In people who are wildly successful on paper but are dead behind their eyes.

When you find yourself in leadership, the job isn’t to be right. It is to build your capacity to hold the tension for long enough that the truth can come to the surface. But most people won’t be able to stomach the silence between the question and the answer. They’ll end up filling it with babble and rush to closure. Many will call it being decisive but it’s simply panic with an expensive PR team.

The truth is, performance doesn’t come from control.

Performance comes from connection.

Connection to reality, to being fully present with the moment and yourself.

The best performers aren’t certain.

They are present in the moment.

They feel.

They adapt.

They experience the emotions but don’t hand them the reins. The mentally aware, present person exist in the ever flowing uncomfortable, electrically charged space where anything can happen.

This is where evolution resides. This is the liminal space we avoid because truth can be deafening.

It is where the good shit happens.

For many of you, you’ll find that your self worth is dependent on being “right”. You’ll often lead from fear and certainty. But doing this will siphon the genius out of your team. You’ve probably convinced yourself that compliance is loyalty and unity. And when your certainty has bled into the way you show up you will be surrounded by people who give you silent nods you believe are reverence and affirmation. But it’s actually conformity.

This may be the time in reading where you stop if you don’t want honesty. So, before you read further, take a moment and be willing to sit with yourself in all your uncertainty you’ve decided can’t exist.

If you can’t recognize your own uncertainty, you’ll spend your life attempting to regulate everything and everyone because you need to find reasons why things are.

Most in high performance environments are playing dress up. Athletes are disguising fear as confidence or “the standard”. Executives are disguising ego as clarity. Coaches are disguising control as culture. And everyone is clapping because the illusion is executed like you’re David fucking Blaine.

But peel the veneer back enough and you can see it’s just anxiety with masterful sleight of hand.

If you look with curiosity you’ll see it everywhere.

I’ve seen the athlete who has tied their self worth to the stat sheet or their parents expectations because no on has ever taught them that performance is simply an expression, not validation.

I've sat with executives who kill innovation because they mistake their need to be right for being an effective, decisive leader.

I’ve watched colleagues smile through meetings but subtly manipulate decisions so they can feel like the brightest rock star in the room.

I’ve seen businesses build systems that reward dysfunction and call it excellence because they have success on paper but their culture is crumbling and they don’t dare to ask why.

It’s all theater. And the tickets sell out every damn day.

The most uncomfortable truth is most of you learned early on that the safest thing to do was to appear competent and perform. You learned that love came with conditions and being wrong was lethal.

So you did what was natural. You constructed an identity that could survive any room. It was in control, certain of what was coming next. And when you did this, you lost the very heartbeat that made you the jazz riff in a world full of borrowed melodies. The pulse of your courage to be you slowly became faint.

It is exquisite isn’t it? The irony that is.

We chase mastery and hope we can escape our fragility. Only to discover that mastery demands the very thing we are running from.

The breakthroughs I’ve seen, whether it was in an athlete, a 50 year old executive, or in myself, came the moment certainty fractured. The moment the athlete understood how chasing validation was crushing their freedom in play. The moment someone in a session said, “F it. I’m tired of this.” And actually said it with their chest. The moment truth found its way to the surface and it was courageously spoken.

This is where the real work begins.

It’s birthed in the moments we allow our lungs to expand so we can take the deep breath we’ve needed for so long. It’s not found in optimizing systems or leadership retreats. It’s in the internal rebellion against all the ways you’ve convinced yourself to be certain.

You’ve probably figured it out by now but this isn’t a motivational speech.

I’m offering you a mirror but if you’re like most people, you won’t look long enough to see the real you.

Because you and I both know that once you see it, you cannot unsee it. You begin to notice how much of your “standards” are actually your fears. How your “leadership” is control fueled by insecurity. How your “confidence” is just a mask you put on because you’re exhausted but can’t tell anyone.

If you’re brave enough, you’ll start the work of dismantling the belief system that has kept the world manageable. It will provide you the opportunity to stop worshipping certainty like it’s your salvation and see it for what it is, a chokehold you call clarity. In this unsteady, nerve exposed place, you can remember that the ones who grow are the people willing to own when they’re wrong, undone and undeniably alive.