“I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain.”
René Descartes
Uncertainty is one of the few certain things in life that we can be sure of.
One of the principal causes of uncertainty in everyone’s life is the unpredictability of the future.
We know how the day begins, but are clueless as to how it will end.
We are hard wired to try to predict what is coming and have both conscious and unconscious means of creating millions of different scenarios that we hope will assist us in determining the future.
Still, the fact is that we are not very good at it and even when history should provide a clue we often repeat the same behaviours, resulting in a similar chain of events.
We react poorly to the fear caused by the threat of uncertainty by releasing the hormone cortisol, raising heart rate and sometimes coming completely undone.
Fear avoidance is one of the reasons that we are drawn to people who are confident and demonstrate conviction.
We want to believe people who are sure of themselves, and our brains may be set up to reflect the emotional state of this person through “mirror neurons”. [1]
This theory suggests that the self-assurance demonstrated by a person may be neurologically shared.
It is true that we gravitate to confident people, and confidence is created by both passion in what you are doing and the belief that your objectives are sound in principal and in practice.
One of the things that we are very good at doing is allowing our imaginations to create those scenarios that begin with “what if”.
I can go to town with all the possibilities and create real fear as a result.
So I try to remember that the obstructions that we see before us are mostly imaginary.
By Blake & Boky
1.The Mind’s Mirror, LEA WINERMAN Monitor Staff October 2005, Vol 36, No.9 http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct05/mirror.aspx