Before we dive in—a quick update.
I’m excited to share my brand-new speaking reel which offers a glimpse into how I help leaders and teams build momentum and stay energized, and how audiences are responding. Watch it below.
What’s the biggest source of stress and exhaustion for your people right now?
Over the past year, I’ve asked leaders at over 70 organizations this same question.The top answer wasn’t workload. It wasn’t bandwidth.
It was something harder to define—and even harder to fix: uncertainty.
Each day, we wake up wondering what’s shifted—tariffs, technologies, budget cuts, layoffs. The ground never feels quite still.
What We Know: Uncertainty Is Exhausting
In one study, participants were hooked up to electrodes and told they might get an electric shock. Some were told they definitely would.Guess who experienced more stress?
The people who didn’t know.
Uncertainty was more painful than the shock itself.
Why? Because your brain is a “prediction machine”. And when it can’t see what’s coming, it spins—looping through worst-case scenarios, burning energy, draining focus, and flooding your body with stress hormones.
Uncertainty doesn’t just make us anxious.
It makes us tired. Foggy. Reactive.
What I’ve Learned: The Antidote to Uncertainty Isn’t Certainty
The best leaders I met this year weren’t the ones with the answers.They were the ones asking better questions.
Curiosity shifts us from survival mode to possibility mode.
It activates insight, calm, and creativity.
Research backs it up:
- Curiosity quiets anxiety loops (Dr. Judson Brewer, Brown University)
- It builds more resilient, innovative and adaptable teams (Harvard’s Amy Edmondson)
As Edmondson puts it: the role of a leader is shifting from providing answers to facilitating exploration.
What You Can Try: Curiosity Questions
When you feel stuck in uncertainty, don’t fight it. Don’t freeze in it.
Explore it.Here are a few questions I return to—ones that open me up instead of shut me down:
- “If this situation is here to teach me something, what might that be?”
- “What opportunity might be hidden inside this uncertainty?”
- “How might this moment help me become the person I want to be?”
- Or simply, “What might go right?”
These questions won’t erase uncertainty. But they will reframe it.
And in doing so, they restore your energy, creativity, and sense of agency.
I’ll leave you with a line from Everyday Dharma:
“When you’re genuinely curious, you can’t really be furious. It’s impossible for those two states to coexist.”
Choose curiosity.
Every time you do, you trade fear for possibility.