Right now, we’re living in a period of significant uncertainty about the future. AI is having a significant (but unknown) influence on the future of work. Global instability is making it more difficult for companies to engage internationally. All of these factors are affecting investment in new business, which is making the future economy more difficult to predict.
It can be hard to focus in the face of feeling anxious about the future. Here are three strategies for coping.
Keep calm and carry on
An underlying anxiety will have several bad influences on your daily work life. For one thing, it raises your overall level of psychological energy (called arousal), which can ultimately make you less productive if deadlines and other work pressures compound and you end up with so much energy that you can’t concentrate. In addition, when you’re experiencing anxiety, it generally magnifies your attention to any potential threat in the world, which can make you see the workplace as hostile and filled with potential problems.
It is important to reduce the anxious energy that uncertainty can create. Uncertainty reflects the aspects of work life that you cannot control. It is tempting to seek out news stories that amplify the uncertainty. There is a reason why so many headlines focus on potential problems. Those headlines tend to attract views, because people orient toward the sources of anxiety. The problem is that you can’t do anything about those anxieties, so the time you spend worrying is wasted.
Instead, address the elements that are under your control. Keep a to-do list and engage yourself with those tasks. If you are going to speculate about the future, think about how to solve problems that can be addressed. That will help to keep the predictable aspects of your world in order.
Seek hidden opportunities
A key side effect of focusing on the potential threats in your environment is that it puts you in a defensive crouch and likely to avoid taking risks. Yet, times of uncertainty often have great potential for disruption of industries. The more stable and predictable things are, the more that large firms that dominate markets are likely to succeed. When things are difficult to predict, there is room for new approaches and new business models to get traction.
When you feel like hunkering down, because things seem unpredictable, shift your focus. Be explicit about paying attention to trends. What is everyone saying and stampeding toward in tough times. Then, ask yourself, “What if I believe the opposite of the conventional wisdom?” If everyone says that generative AI is going to disrupt every workplace, ask yourself what the world of work would look like if that wasn’t true. What if very little changes? Are there opportunities there that other people are missing because they have all adopted one way of predicting the future?
The reason why this strategy can be successful is that if you convince yourself to believe something that goes against the conventional wisdom, the factors underlying confirmation bias will kick in. You will start to notice things that are consistent with your new (and unconventional) way of thinking. Even if you don’t end up taking action on the things you notice, it will shift your perspective about the world in ways that allow you to bring a fresh viewpoint to work conversations.
Set a good example
Uncertain situations make it hard for people to know how to react. Our strongest reactions come from situations that have certainty to them. A wedding is an unambiguously happy occasion. A funeral is a sad event. In those settings, we know how to respond.
When the world is uncertain, we’re also unsure how we are supposed to react. So, we look for clues. Often, that information comes from the people around us. Their reactions to the world give us information about how we should respond. This phenomenon is called social referencing, and we start doing it as children and continue throughout our lives. If other people are panicked about the future of work, then that attitude feels like the right one for us to adopt as well.
That means that your reactions to the state of the world are going to influence others. Moving forward with confidence in the face of uncertainty can influence the way your colleagues act. If you adopt the strategy of focusing on the things you can influence and looking for opportunities, you increase the chances your coworkers will do the same thing. That enables you to be an island of stability in the middle of a storm.
