There’s More Certainty Around You Than You Realise
When leaders talk about leading through uncertainty, something tends to happen in the room. Shoulders drop slightly. Expressions become more serious. There is a collective recognition of the weight of it — the relentless pace, the incomplete information, the decisions that have to be made before the picture is fully clear.
That recognition is real. The world we lead in is genuinely VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. That is not a phase to be managed until things settle. It is the permanent operating environment of modern leadership.
What I want to challenge, however, is the assumption that when uncertainty is present, it is all that is present.
In my experience, most situations contain considerably more certainty than leaders give them credit for. The issue is not that the certainty is absent. It is that the attention is elsewhere — so fixed on what is unknown, shifting or unresolved that what is stable, known and genuinely solid goes unnoticed. That matters far more than most leadership development conversations acknowledge.
The Problem With How We Frame Uncertainty
The phrase "leading through uncertainty" is well-intentioned. It can, however, inadvertently place all the weight on the uncertain side of the ledger. It orients attention towards the gap, the unknown, the thing that is not yet resolved. When that is where attention goes, it shapes how people feel — and therefore how they lead.
Leaders who are consumed by what they do not know tend to communicate from that place. Their body language signals anxiety before their words do. Their teams read it and fill the gaps with their own assumptions — rarely more reassuring than the reality. Decision-making becomes tentative. Culture begins to contract around self-protection rather than expand towards possibility.
None of this is weak leadership. It is what happens when the framing is off. When the uncertainty is treated as the whole picture rather than part of it.
“Some situations have more certainty in them than you realise. The practice is learning to look for it deliberately.”
The Reframe: What Has Stayed the Same?
There is a question I use regularly in coaching that consistently shifts something for the leaders I work with. It is deceptively simple:
What has actually stayed the same?
Not as a rhetorical device. As a genuine, structured enquiry. Because when leaders sit with that question honestly, what they discover is that the list of certainties — the things that are known, solid, and genuinely theirs — is almost always longer than they expected.
Here is what that list tends to include. Not all of it, for every person or every situation — though most of it, most of the time:
• Their experiences — everything they have navigated, learned from and built capacity through to this point
• Their track record of dealing with change — including all the previous times they felt uncertain and came through it
• Their values and their identity as a leader — what they stand for and how they want to be known
• Their strengths and natural capabilities — what energises them and what they do well
• Their leadership purpose — the reason they lead and what they are building towards
• Their knowledge, expertise and professional judgement
• Their team — the people, the relationships and the collective capability around them
• Their colleagues, peers and support network
• Their friends and family and the relationships that sustain them outside work
• Their current levels of resilience — built through everything that came before this moment
• The practical constants in their life: structure, routine, the environment they return to
This is not a list of small things. It is a substantial body of resource, capability and grounding. When a leader pauses to genuinely take stock of it, something shifts. Not because the uncertain things have changed. Because the uncertain things are now in proportion.
How do you “ground” yourself and others? Photo Getty Images Unsplash
Why This Matters: The Neuroscience of Grounding
The brain in a state of threat — triggered by uncertainty, ambiguity or the perception of risk — narrows its focus. This is adaptive in the short term: it cuts out noise and concentrates resource. In a leadership context, however, where the "threat" is sustained and the response is chronic rather than acute, that narrowing becomes a liability. Peripheral awareness shrinks. Creative thinking diminishes. The ability to hold complexity reduces.
What interrupts this is not the removal of the threat. It is the deliberate activation of what psychologists call a resourcing state — a conscious reconnection to what is stable, known and available. This is what grounding does. It does not pretend the difficult things are not difficult. It ensures they are not the only things in the frame.
Martin Seligman’s research on optimism is instructive here. Real optimism — the kind that actually sustains performance and generates genuine hope in a team — does not skip over reality. It starts there. It acknowledges the difficulty honestly, at full scale, then turns its attention deliberately towards what is real, usable and available. The sequence matters: acknowledge the reality, identify what is genuinely working, ask the forward question. That is not toxic positivity. It is earned hope — far more generative than leading from the anxious centre of what is not yet known.
The Connection to The Resilience Wheel
This is not separate from The Resilience Wheel — it is an expression of it. The Attitude dimension — the hub around which all seven spokes turn — is described as our settled way of thinking and feeling about life. The operative word is settled. Not certain about outcomes. Not immune to disruption. Settled in who we are, what we value, and how we meet what comes.
That settledness is what grounding builds. When leaders have it — genuinely, not as a performance — it changes the quality of everything they do.
Their Purpose dimension becomes more accessible because they are not operating from depletion. Their Confidence is grounded in evidence — the actual track record of having navigated difficulty before — rather than needing the external environment to be stable before they can feel it. Their Meaning dimension shifts: setbacks become information rather than indictments. Their Energy is more sustainably available because they are not spending it all on managing anxiety about what they cannot control.
The Resilience Wheel’s three reflective questions sit naturally alongside this practice:
1. What have I been doing recently, behaviourally, against The Resilience Wheel, that has been serving me well?
2. What have I not been doing recently, behaviourally, against The Resilience Wheel, that is not serving me well?
3. How can I do more of the behaviours in the answer to question one?
These questions are grounding in themselves. They orient attention towards what is working, what is available, and what can be done — not as a denial of difficulty, but as a deliberate choice about where energy goes next.
What This Looks Like When Leaders Role Model It
The impact of this reframe is not only personal. When leaders adopt it visibly — when they actively name what is stable, known and solid before engaging with what is not — the effect on the people around them is significant and measurable.
Teams take their cue from the person at the top. When that person communicates from a place of genuine groundedness — clear about what is known, honest about what is not, and visibly oriented towards what is possible — psychological safety increases. Conversations become more honest and more productive. Decision-making improves, because people are thinking from a place of clarity rather than anxiety. Change feels less like something being done to them and more like something they can navigate.
This is not Commander’s Calm as performance. It is Commander’s Calm as the natural output of having done the grounding work. The composure is real because it is based on something real: a genuine, considered inventory of what is known, solid and available.
The cascade effect of this on team resilience is well documented. Research consistently shows that when leaders model resilient behaviour — specifically, maintaining perspective, communicating honestly about both difficulty and possibility, and remaining purposeful under pressure — their teams demonstrate higher engagement, lower attrition and better performance through disruption. Not because the disruption became easier. Because the grounding became shared.
A Practical Starting Point
The next time you or a member of your team feels the ground shifting — the next time a decision has to be made with incomplete information, or a change arrives before the last one has been absorbed — try this before engaging with what is uncertain:
Take ten minutes. Genuinely. Write down — or talk through with someone you trust — everything that has stayed the same. Everything that is known. Everything that is yours, that you have built, that you can draw on.
Your experiences. Your track record. Your values. Your purpose. Your strengths. Your team. Your knowledge. Your resilience.
Then — from that place — look at what is actually uncertain. Not from the middle of it. From a position of grounded resource.
You will almost always find that what needs to be decided is clearer. That the uncertain thing is smaller, or more manageable, or less final than it felt. The question of what to do next will have a better answer available than it did when uncertainty was the whole frame.
That is the practice. It is simple. It is not always easy. It is, however, one of the most consistently effective shifts I have seen in senior leaders who have committed to it.
“We need a sense of grounding to enable us to be open. Clarity about what will stay the same is what makes genuine adaptability possible.”
The Question to Take Away
On a scale of one to ten — how well are you currently leading from what you know, rather than from what you don’t?
If the honest answer is below seven, the starting point is not a strategy conversation. It is a grounding one.
Because there is more certainty around you than you realise. The practice is learning to look for it deliberately — and then leading from there.
For L&D professionals
The grounding practice described in this blog translates directly into programme design. Before any change leadership or resilience development initiative, building in a structured inventory of what leaders know, have experienced and can draw upon — individually and collectively — creates the psychological safety and cognitive clarity that makes learning possible. It is the foundation, not an optional warm-up. Teams that are led by grounded leaders absorb development differently: they engage more openly, commit more genuinely and apply more consistently. The return on that investment shows up in the outcomes your stakeholders are already measuring.
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✉ russell@theresiliencecoach.co.uk | 🌐 theresiliencecoach.co.uk