Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of the medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out?
For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress towards your ultimate goals.
Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like “moving horizons,” creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how understanding your unique attributes will help you understand how you react to uncertainty and how teams can implement “dynamic subordination” to adapt in rapidly changing environments.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Rich’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast — #738: The Character Traits That Drive Optimal Performance
- AoM Article: 5 Tools for Thriving in Uncertainty
- AoM Article: The Best Books to Read in Uncertain Times
- The Physiological Sigh
Connect With Rich Diviney
Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)
Listen to the episode on a separate page.
Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.
Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Uncertainty is a constant of human existence. How will market conditions affect your new business venture? What will be the results of that medical test you just took? Will a new relationship work out? For most of us, situations of uncertainty trigger anxiety, even fear. But the stress of uncertainty doesn’t have to overwhelm you. You can learn to navigate it with secure, adaptable confidence so you can keep thriving and progress toward your ultimate goals. Today on the show, Rich Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander, returns to share insights from his new book, Masters of Uncertainty. He first explains why thinking that life will be predictable keeps people from realizing their potential. He then walks us through practical techniques for dealing with uncertainty like moving horizons, creating meaningful goals that work with our brain chemistry, and de-stressing your body so you can be more resilient and make better decisions under pressure. We also discuss how teams can tackle uncertainty by implementing dynamic subordination to adapt in rapidly changing environments. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty. Rich Diviney, welcome back to the show.
Rich Diviney: Well, thanks for having me, Brett. It’s good to be back.
Brett McKay: So we had you on a few years ago to talk about your book, The Attributes. I know it was a big hit with our listeners. You’ve got a new book out called Masters of Uncertainty. Is this book a continuation of your thinking in The Attributes?
Rich Diviney: It’s not a continuation. It’s actually the overarching idea. This is the book actually I’ve wanted to write for years and years and years. And as you know, because you’ve read them, I know we’ll get into The Attributes as simply one aspect of understanding oneself in uncertainty, challenge, and stress. And so in a move that was kind of unconsciously genius, I guess, I decided to write The Attributes book first, which was fantastic because The Attributes is such a big topic and it laid a nice foundation for people to understand them, for us to build our assessment tool, and so on and so forth. But understanding how we operate and perform in uncertainty is really where I’ve always had my passion and what it takes to do that, both neurologically, physiologically, and of course, what we need to know about ourselves. And so The Master of Uncertainty is really kind of the overarching idea that I’ve been exploring for a long time. Attributes was a piece and I just happened to write that Attributes book first.
Brett McKay: Yeah, maybe Masters of Uncertainty is the prequel.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. Yeah, prequel. Yeah.
Brett McKay: So why have you been so passionate about uncertainty and thinking and writing about it? What’s your background with it?
Rich Diviney: Well, uncertainty on its own really is defined as that which cannot be relied upon or known. You’re just in an unknown, unreliable situation or environment. Now, what we have to understand is that there are different forms of uncertainty. You can have uncertainty with curiosity. That’s every kid on Christmas Eve. There’s uncertainty there, but there’s no fear. It’s excitement that comes from that. What we’re talking about and what I specifically focus on is this idea of uncertainty plus anxiety, which equals fear. So it’s the uncertainty that elicits fear because that’s really where most people focus on when it comes to defining their performance or interrogating the performance or when they fail in performing. And so obviously in the SEAL teams and any spec operations unit, especially in combat, you are very well versed in managing and moving through things that are pretty dangerous and scary and have that uncertainty element in it. So in doing that throughout a career in the SEAL teams, I really began to wonder, okay, what is it we do? How do we do it? I began to kind of explore the neuroscience when I linked up with, who’s now a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman.
This was seven years ago, seven or eight years ago, so it was before his enormously successful and awesome podcast. But we began to, he has his fear lab at Stanford, and we began to kind of explore this together. And I began to realize, or I guess we began to realize together that you could talk about the neuroscience and you could talk about the techniques that guys like us use, and you could fuse those together in a meaningful way that allowed other people, anybody, to really understand that this is actually quite human and we all have the capacity to do this.
Brett McKay: So yeah, you mentioned you are a SEAL. That’s your background, Navy SEAL. How did uncertainty show up during your career as a SEAL? Because I imagine that every time you went on a mission, even if you had done a lot of planning, there was still an element of uncertainty to it.
Rich Diviney: 100%. And I would even say uncertainty shows up in SEAL training. I mean, the day one, I mean, SEAL training BUDS, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, is designed to throw you into uncertainty and challenge and stress, all of it, because it’s designed to take you down to zero physiologically and physically and even mentally, and then ask, okay, what else do you got? What else can you do? And can you, in fact, problem solve when things are very, very serious and the stakes are very, very high? And so you start in SEAL training. The guys who show up to SEAL training and make it through were all folks who somehow got good at this prior to getting to the beaches of BUDS. You have to have some level of competency even to make it through the first day, first week, first two weeks of BUDS. But what happens is you hyper develop these techniques, these tools, these skills, if you will, and then you find yourself utilizing them in almost every aspect of SEAL life, whether it’s training, jumping out of airplanes at 20,000 feet, whether it’s in combat, in gunfights, whether it’s scuba diving in dark harbors every one of those environments comes with it, a sense of you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. And so this is why you become masters of the craft.
Brett McKay: What do you think is a common misconception civilians have about how Navy SEALs deal with uncertainty?
Rich Diviney: Well, I think one common misconception is they think that Navy SEALs are fearless, and Navy SEALs are absolutely not fearless. In fact, fearlessness in of itself is a very, very dangerous thing. I was told by a really wonderful officer when I was a younger junior officer, he said, Rich, beware the fearless leader, because that guy is going to get you killed. And so fear is a natural human thing. It’s a human being’s risk assessment tool, and it tells us, hey, pay attention. This is risky. This might kill you. This might hurt you. This might harm you. So Navy SEALs, we experience fear just like anybody else. However, we have the capacity, the tools, and the practice in moving through that very deftly, so it doesn’t sideline us. We use the fear in a very meaningful way by risk assessing properly and planning properly. But then after that, we understand that, hey, things are just going to happen, and we know how to move through it.
Brett McKay: Yeah, you used the example of the Osama bin Laden raid. This was something that was planned for months. They even built a replica of the compound he was in to practice.
Rich Diviney: Yeah.
Brett McKay: But whenever the actual mission was underway, things just went completely cattywampus. Helicopter went down, and so they had to adapt, and they still were able to get the mission done.
Rich Diviney: They were, yeah. And just a quick correction there. The mission actually hadn’t been rehearsed or planned for too long. I mean, the decision was made by the president when they got the intel, and so the team had about, I think, three weeks, three or four weeks.
Brett McKay: Oh, wow.
Rich Diviney: Yeah. But in that three or four weeks, they rehearsed ad nauseum and memorized and got prepared for every single detail they could possibly anticipate. And yeah, like you said, as soon as they hit the target, the plans changed. Uncertainty struck, and the plans changed. So it’s a classic example of the idea that, and again, we can talk about planning. I do not besmirch planning at all. I think proper planning is good. What we don’t want to do is get caught up in the paralysis by analysis or paralysis through analysis, where we’re trying to plan every single thing. Because A, it’s not going to let us move, and B, it’s a real energy drag. So we have to get ourselves into a position where we plan a couple things. Hey, this might happen, this might happen. And then after that, if anything else happens, we’ll figure it out along the way.
Brett McKay: At the start of the book, you write this. I thought it really caught my attention. Most people fall short of realizing their potential primarily because our culture promotes a misleading belief that life is predictable. How does believing life is predictable set someone up for failure, falling short of their potential?
Rich Diviney: Well, we are lucky enough to live in a society and live in a time, most of us, I guess, where the environment is structured around us so that or such that we can rely on predictability. I mean, people don’t have to worry about getting killed by the saber-toothed tiger anymore or finding their food or else they’re going to starve or finding proper shelter and so on and so forth. However, what we do have to understand is that even though that is the case, even though life is designed nowadays around predictability, uncertainty is always going to happen. It’s always going to be present. The combination of not knowing and the combination of anxiety is going to bubble up that fear response in us. And to assume that things are going to go as planned is a bad assumption because you’re not going to prepare yourself when things inevitably do not go as planned. So I think that’s one factor. The other factor is that we are, as a species, designed to step outside of our comfort zone. I mean, this is in fact why we have gone from cave dweller to space explorer because the human being, the human species were designed to keep exploring, keep discovering, step outside of those boundaries.
And so understanding how we can do that more effectively not only prepares us for that uncertainty, challenge, and stress that hits us without warning, but it also allows us to take deliberate steps, choose deliberate times to step outside of our comfort zone and explore and grow. That’s where growth and evolution happens. And I think that’s a really powerful aspect of unlocking potential of every human being.
Brett McKay: All right, let’s talk about some of the tactics people can use to get a better handle on uncertainty in their work or their life. I’m sure a lot of our listeners, most of them probably aren’t Navy SEALs, but they’re dealing with uncertainty. We’re living in a work environment where artificial intelligence is upending a lot of industries. If you’re a parent, your kids can come home with problems you got to deal with that you’ve never dealt with before. So a lot of uncertainty. One tactic you talk about is moving horizons. And this is where you progress through uncertainty toward your ultimate goal by repeatedly setting and then reaching for one immediate horizon at a time. And you do this by clearly defining a duration, pathway, and outcome or DPO for each step along the way. Tell us more about moving horizons and DPO.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, moving horizons is a tool that taps into our own, every human being’s neurology. And the neuroscience behind that is that when we are in any environment, our brain is trying to figure out that environment. And it’s doing so along basically three major factors. There’s obviously other things in there. But the three primary factors it’s trying to figure out are duration, how long this thing’s going to last, pathway, what’s my route in, out, or through, and then outcome, what’s the end state of this. And what we have to understand is when we are in absence of one or more of those aspects of those three things, we find ourselves in uncertainty and anxiety and we start to feel oftentimes the fear response. An example would be illness. So say you and I got strep throat. Strep throat is a known disease that we know people don’t really die from and there’s a known antibiotic to treat strep throat. So in the case of strep throat, we are knowledgeable about pathway, the antibiotic, and we’re knowledgeable about outcome, which is we’ll get better. What we don’t know, what is unknown is duration. Because some people respond to antibiotics differently than others.
You might get better tomorrow. It might take me three days. So our anxiety, stress, uncertainty level is mild. Now say we get the flu. The flu is also a known disease that most people, at least in today’s society, don’t die from. However, there’s no known antibiotic or medicine you can take for the flu. And the recovery for the flu is variable. We don’t know how long it’s going to take for someone to recover from the flu. So in the case of the flu, we know the outcome. We will get better, but we are absent duration and pathway. So our anxiety, stress level is moderate. Now imagine a virus shows up and we’ve never seen it before. There’s no known cure or vaccine. There are some people dying, there are some people not dying, and it’s spreading around the globe and we don’t know how long we’re going to be in this thing. Obviously, this sounds familiar to most of your listeners because this is 2020 in a nutshell, right? And in that case, we were absent all three. We were absent duration, pathway, and outcome. And our fear, our anxiety, our uncertainty level was high. So all moving horizons does is it gives someone the ability to, inside of any environment, basically buy down uncertainty by creating a duration and pathway and outcome.
You create what was previously unknown and you do that by, in whatever environment, you’re in asking yourself, what do I know and what can I control in this moment? And you pick something to focus on, a horizon. And once doing so, you’ve created a duration, pathway, outcome. So I’ll give you a quick example of SEAL training. So in SEAL training, you run around with big, heavy boats on your head all the time for hours and hours. And I remember doing this, it was three in the morning or something. We were on the beach and we were running next to a sand berm. And of course, I was miserable, everybody else was miserable. And I remember saying to myself, you know what? I’m just going to focus on getting to the end of this sand berm. And what I realized, well, I didn’t realize at the moment, but what I did at that moment is I picked a horizon. And by picking a horizon, I created a duration, pathway, outcome. Duration, from now until end of sand berm. Pathway, from here to end of sand berm. And then outcome, end of sand berm.
By doing so, I also neurologically created myself a small goal and then a reward at the accomplishment of that goal, which is a dopamine reward. And that allowed me then to, once I hit that accomplishment, to come back out, ask the question again, okay, what do I know, what can I control? Pick another horizon and then do it again. And you can do this cycle over and over and over again through any uncertainty, challenges, and stress until basically one of three things happens. Either you move through the challenge, you’re done. You accomplish the goal, or you gain enough certainty in your environment so that you no longer have any uncertainty in your environment. So the moving horizon strategy, by the way, is the reason why it’s such a powerful strategy, a powerful tool, is because every single human being has done this at some point in their lives, right? So I’m not telling anybody anything new. They’ve done this. They’ve chunked their environment in a way that allowed them to step through whatever they were trying to step through. All we know now is by articulating it and understanding it, you can in fact do it more often. You can practice it and become very, very good at it so that you do it without thinking, which is where masters of uncertainty lie.
Brett McKay: As you were speaking, an example that came to mind where you could use this, is unemployment. Let’s say you lose your job, you get laid off. You can use moving horizons to work through that. I think the uncertainty with job loss is typically duration. How long am I going to be unemployed? The pathway, it’s like, okay, I got to start networking, submitting resumes, things like that. The outcome is obviously I have a job. So the duration thing could be the tricky part. But yeah, you can just keep setting smaller goals for pathways until you accomplish your goal of getting a job.
Rich Diviney: It’s a wonderful example. I would say the initial loss of employment immediately creates an absence of all three. How long am I going to be unemployed? What’s my route? What’s my pathway to get a new job? And then how long, am I going to be able to get a new job? So you’re immediately absent of all three of those. You’re correct. So in those cases, in that case, someone needs to say, okay, what do I know? What can I control? And create a horizon and therefore create a DPO. So it could be, you know what? Okay, I have a buddy. My buddy can link me up with a recruiter. That’s my first horizon. I’m going to call my buddy and see if he can link me up with a recruiter. You’ve created your first horizon. You’ve created your first DPO. You do that. Then whatever that result is, you create your next one. Then you create your next one. But it is very much about working the problem in the moment and focusing only on that which you can control in the moment. One thing you will never, ever see Navy SEALs do is worry about stuff they can’t control in the moment. If they don’t have any control of it in the moment, we’re not going to worry about it. It’s useless.
It’s a waste of energy. And this goes for everything from SEAL training to legitimate gunfights in Iraq or Afghanistan. When you’re in a gunfight in Iraq or Afghanistan, there’s so much going on, but you’re in the moment. You’re saying, what do I know? What can I control? What is my thing that I can actually take focus on and control in this moment? And you start moving through that. And slowly, certainty builds, hopefully, and you move through that. But I think unemployment is a wonderful example, and you can see exactly why these strategies are not only reserved for Navy SEALs or super performers. They’re very human.
Brett McKay: Yeah, another example I thought of was waiting for medical test results. So you might know you’re getting results back in three days. So what you do is you set a horizon and you just say, okay, I’m going to research the different possibilities of what I might have and what that might mean. That’s my horizon. And then when I reach that horizon, I’m going to ask myself again, all right, what do I know and what can I control? And maybe set another horizon where I then research specialists who might be able to help me and then just concentrate on that horizon. And that can give you a sense of control. It gives you something to do. And I don’t think not everyone might want to do that because some people just don’t want to worry about things before they’re concrete. And maybe they’re just going to say I’m just going to focus on keeping up my health by making sure I do one of my workouts every day for the next three days. That’s the only thing I control, and that’s the only thing I know has a benefit. Related to moving horizons and creating manageable horizons is creating meaningful horizons. What do you mean by that?
Rich Diviney: So the meaningful horizons describes what the size horizon needs to be. That’s always the next question. Okay, how do I know, like, what should I focus on? Or what’s the best size horizon? And so what we have to understand to understand the answer to that question is dopamine as a neurotransmitter, which is a very powerful chemical. It was for years and years regarded only as a reward chemical, but it’s much, much more than just a reward chemical. It’s actually a motivation chemical. It kind of gets us up and moving. It tells us, keep going. This is good. Keep doing this. Dopamine is what gets us up out of the bed in the morning. They’ve done experiments in the lab with rats where one group of rats is given, well, I guess a whole group of rats is given a device where they tap a lever and a tasty pellet comes out of that thing. And so, of course, every rat will just sit by that thing and just hit the lever, hit the lever and get a pellet. Then they took half of that group and removed the dopamine from that group. And all they needed to do was put those rats who had no dopamine basically a rat’s length away from that lever, and those rats wouldn’t even move to get that pellet.
So what this means is that, and dopamine works in our system, is that when we create a horizon, we are giving ourselves a motivation through dopamine, and we have an amount of dopamine that’s allowing us to keep going. If we create a horizon that’s too far away, that’s too big, we will run out of dopamine along the way, and we will quit. All quitting is is just you run out of dopamine. That’s what it is. So if I’m in a situation, and maybe I’m on that beach in Helwig, and I say, you know what? I’m running with this boat. I’m just going to make it to the end of the week. That’s way too big in that moment. The other side of that is if you pick a horizon that’s too close and too easy, you won’t get enough of a dopamine reward to feel it and be motivated to pick another horizon. And so that would be maybe I’m just going to count three steps. That might be too small, whatever that is. But as you can tell, these are very subjective to the person, and they’re subjective to the intensity of the environment.
The more intense the environment, the shorter the horizon is likely going to have to be. But we can and must modulate this size, these meaningful horizons, as we move through, and it has to be subjective to our own experience.
Brett McKay: Well, let’s walk through an example of doing this. Let’s say someone wants to start a business. They have a 9:00 to 5:00 job. They’ve got a dream of becoming an entrepreneur, starting their own business. What would setting meaningful horizons look like for that?
Rich Diviney: So let’s just work through at least a basic level of subjectivity here, right? So imagine the person has already started some businesses before and is looking to start a new business get out of what they’re doing, looking to start a new one. Their first horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to call my buddy who’s a VC, pitch him an idea, and see if I can get some funding going, okay? Because that’s the first thing. Or their horizon might be, you know what? I’m going to start something up. I’m going to talk to my friends, start something up, and we’re going to see if we can put together something in the next three or four months. That might be the horizon for someone who’s done it before. Someone who’s never done it before and is literally deciding to quit their job and do it, their first horizon might be, I’m going to go to the library and start learning about how to build a business, how to create a business. I’m going to call somebody to ask some questions to do that.
A really good way to describe this, so in the book I talk about a guy I met who was an ultra runner. And when I met him, I said, how’d you get into ultra running? And he said you won’t believe this, but I used to be 400 pounds or so.
Brett McKay: Wow.
Rich Diviney: And I was like, oh no, I was like, my gosh. I mean, tell me that story. He’s like, well I was so heavy and I was so overweight and unhealthy. And I decided one day, I’ve had enough, and I’m going to start running. I’m going to set a goal to run a marathon. And I said, so what’d you do? He’s like, well, the first thing I did is I decided I was going to go home and I was going to order running shoes. So that’s what he did. And then when the running shoes showed up, he said, okay, tomorrow morning when I get up, I’m going to get up and put on the running shoes. He did that. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his front door. Next morning he put on the running shoes. He walked to his mailbox and then so on and so forth until he was running a marathon six, eight months, 10 months later, I can’t remember. So the example for him was putting on his shoes and walking to the front door was a meaningful horizon.
Now, I try to run a couple times a week when I’m home and not traveling. I like doing it. If I have to take two or three months off and I haven’t run in two or three months and I decide I’m going to start running again, putting on my shoes and walking to the mailbox is not going to be enough of a horizon for me. It’s not going to be meaningful enough for me because it’s too short. And so we have to understand that this subjectivity matters and we have to begin to modulate our own horizons. You can do this in the moment too. I mean, you can actually in the moment pick something and as you’re moving towards it to decide, oh, wait, that’s way too far and pick something shorter. Or you accomplish this like, actually, that wasn’t far enough. I need to pick a longer one. So it’s not, you don’t have to get it perfect every time, but it must be subjective in whatever endeavor you’re doing.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like a skill that you develop on how to measure that. Reminds me of in weight training or even in running, you have this RPE, rate of perceived effort.
Rich Diviney: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And it’s auto-regulation and it takes a while for you to figure out like what’s a 10 for you, like what’s really, really hard and what’s a four. When you first start off, I think you typically underestimate because you’re not fully aware of what your body can do. But then, yeah, once you get the hang of it, you’re able to be like, you know what? My goal is to go for an eight and today this effort feels like an eight. But on another day, an eight could be less or more just depending on what’s going on…
Rich Diviney: 100%. I’m so glad. I went for a run this morning and I was traveling all day yesterday, so I didn’t eat a lot all day yesterday. And so when I went for the run this morning, I started and I just felt completely depleted. And I was like, oh my God, I was slower than I usually am. And so perfect example that you just gave, because my eight today was markedly slower than my eights when I’m properly nourished. So yeah, you’re 100% right.
Brett McKay: Okay, so creating meaningful horizons is about making sure the horizon you set is challenging enough or just like has enough to it to keep you interested, but not so challenging that you give up and quit. So here’s an example. Let’s say you’re thinking of moving somewhere different from where you’re at right now, and you’re not sure about the move. Like you don’t know if you’re gonna like it or not.
I think it takes about two years to really feel settled into a place and be able to feel like you click with it. But telling yourself you’re definitely at the state for two years, that can feel pretty psychologically daunting. And I think you can tell if you’ve got potential with the place in a year. So you set a horizon for one year. You say, I’m gonna do all I can to dig into this place for one year. And at the end of the year, I’ll evaluate if it’s working and whether I wanna stay. So that could be a motivating, meaningful horizon. Another idea you have on sort of modulating and taking control of your dopamine system to stay motivated is this piece of advice that I thought was interesting. It was counterintuitive. It was keep your eyes off the prize. How does that actually help with long-term motivation?
Rich Diviney: Well, this feeds into the meaningful horizon concept. So in other words, we have to have an objective, right? We have to have something we’re moving towards, whether it’s run a marathon, whether it’s make it through SEAL training, whether it’s start a business, okay? That’s the objective that has to be present. However, we know, just because we just talked about it, is that that’s too big, that’s too far away. That’s too much of, that’s the whole elephant. And you need to break the elephant into one bite at a time. So when you are in this process of moving horizons, as you move through these challenges, especially during uncertainty, to keep focusing on the big goal, the big picture is too much, it’s too far away, it’s too much to handle. So keep your eyes off the prize is simply a reminder that, hey, it’s there, it’s driving you, it’s important, but take it down to the chunk and focus on that chunk. Don’t worry about the big goal right now, focus on the chunk. This is what keeping your eyes off the prize means. And it’s important because if you focus on that big thing too much, then you’ll lose focus on your horizon shifting and you will eventually, it’ll be too long and you might give up along the way or quit.
Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so we’ve talked about some psychological tactics you can do to reframe things in your head whenever you face uncertainty, how to manage it, how to navigate it. You have another section in the book where you talk about actual tactics, like physiological tactics you can do to calm down the arousal system that kicks in whenever we’re afraid, whenever we’re dealing with uncertainty. And this is important because you need to be calm in order to be in the right mental space to choose an appropriate next horizon. And that can be challenging when uncertainty is just thrown right in front of you, right in the moment, like something’s wrong in the moment and you don’t know what’s going on, how’s it gonna affect you, what do you need to do, and you’re just stressed out. So what are some tools people can use to reduce the arousal they feel whenever they’re stressed out in uncertainty?
Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, there’s many, although the most powerful, fastest ones that have kind of been discovered have to do with our visual system and our respiratory system. And that’s because our visual system and respiratory system are directly connected to our central nervous system, which is what we talk about, sympathetic, parasympathetic systems when we’re in stress, challenge, uncertainty. And so what’s happening, like you just described, when we have uncertainty, challenge, stress, fear, all that stuff, our anxiety goes up, our autonomic arousal, our sympathetic system starts to climb. So let’s talk about the positives and negatives of this, right? As our autonomic arousal climbs, we’re in sympathetic response, our frontal lobe, the decision-making part of our brain begins to recede, and our limbic brain, our emotional kind of unconscious brain, our lizard brain begins to come to the fore. Now in the extreme cases we encounter what’s called autonomic overload or amygdala hijack which is when the frontal lobe the decision-making part of our brain has receded completely and our lizard brain has taken over and we are acting without thinking okay now this comes in very handy for things like jumping out of the way of a moving train or running from a bear.
Okay but it doesn’t come in handy for 99% of the other things that happen to us in life when we can actually really use some conscious and intelligent decision-making going on and so what we have to understand is physiologically we can bring that frontal lobe back online by decreasing our autonomic arousal. We can do this visually or through breath now like a visual tool that I talk about in the book is open gaze you know when we’re stressed and focused what happens is our gaze begins to focus in very tightly on whatever the threat is that’s why we sometimes get tunnel vision during these phases so what they found is if you go into open gaze and open gaze is simply the technique of just if you’re staring out or even if you’re staring at something you just soften your gaze you’re no longer staring at it anymore you’re just kind of noticing all of your peripheries you’re just taking it all in this is very easy to do with horizons and things like that but they’ve proven that this type of open gaze begins to shift your physiology from sympathetic to parasympathetic and brings down your autonomic arousal.
There are respiratory tools as well I’m not going to go into all of them but when we talk about breath when we get stressed and anxious what happens is our breathing changes it becomes quicker shorter, we’re not taking in as much oxygen we’re taking in a lot of carbon dioxide and so another technique that I lay out is this technique called the physiological sigh where basically you take a full deep breath in, you top it off and then you slowly breathe out and what’s happening there is you’re blowing out the carbon dioxide from your system which is de-stressing you which is taking your autonomic arousal down. And so this is taking your autonomic arousal down it’s shifting our physiology and most importantly allowing our brains our frontal lobes to get back online in such a manner that we can start to ask questions about our environment. And of course the first question we want to ask is what do I know? What can I control? What’s a horizon I can focus on? And so there are physiological ways what’s happening there is when we think about uncertainty plus anxiety equals fear the way we buy down anxiety is through those techniques those physiological techniques.
You can buy that down the way we buy down uncertainty is through the process of moving horizons but as you buy down both of them the fear starts to dissipate.
Brett McKay: Gotcha okay so an example of this let’s say you run a business and you have a website that takes orders the website crashes that can I mean that’s happened to me with some of the stuff that I’ve run. It can just stress you the crap out. Especially when you’re having a lot of high traffic and like this is really important that the site be running and I’ve, whenever that happened I just like freak out, oh my gosh. I would have been better first to just do some of those practices maybe open up my gaze do the sighing.
Rich Diviney: Yeah.
Brett McKay: And then that calms things down and then I start doing the moving horizon thing.
Rich Diviney: Yeah although I will say I mean the cool thing about this is even choosing in the moment to do like say five physiological sighs that’s a horizon right there. You’ve just picked a horizon you’ve picked something to focus on you do that and you come back out and you say what can you do again. So you can use even these tools even these breathing tools as many horizons. Sometimes the environment’s so intense that your only horizon is I’m gonna take ten breaths that’s what I’m gonna do. And after that I’m gonna see what’s going on. So yeah it’s a great example and all this meshes in a very very meaningful way.
Brett McKay: Okay in the next section of your book so the first section is all about calming yourself down when that fear starts hijacking your limbic system and then figuring out ways to reduce the uncertainty in that specific situation. The second part of your book you talk about identity. And you return to your framework of attributes which you talked about in your first book in this part. How can knowing what your attributes are help you navigate uncertainty in life? Maybe we start like what are attributes for those who haven’t read that first book.
Rich Diviney: Well yeah so this part of the book just described so I say the first part of the book describes those things that are not unique to us as human beings. In other words all of us have this. All of us have the capacity to move horizons and this is how our brain works ubiquitously throughout the human species. The second part of the book focuses on those unique things that we bring into an uncertain situation. This is when we get into those things about us that are different from everybody else. So the first one is attributes and this idea these qualities that we have patience situational awareness, compartmentalization, perseverance, okay. And where we fall on those qualities like we talked about in the last conversation attributes we all have all of the attributes. We have all of these qualities the difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So adaptability for example if I’m about a level six on adaptability which means when the environment changes around the outside of my control it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it. Someone else might be a level three which means the same thing happens to them it’s difficult for them to go with flow and there’s friction there.
They’re still adaptable because all human beings are but if we were to line up these attributes on a wall like dimmer switches all of us would have different dimmer switch settings. And it starts to speak to our own unique performance not only in everyday life but especially during stress challenge and uncertainty. Because in stress challenge uncertainty we are literally running on our attributes. Because all that other stuff you know personality on that stuff goes out the window when the you-know-what hits the fan. So understanding our unique attribute fingerprint or footprint is very valuable in understanding how we’re going to show up in uncertainty. And that’s why it’s so important in this process.
Brett McKay: Gotcha and where can people go to learn like what their attributes are, is there like a website that you have?
Rich Diviney: Yeah. Our website theattributes.com we have it all there. And we have an assessment tool there that you can take and you can figure out where you stand on all 41 attributes and it gives you a readout and gives you some information on how and why you behave the way you do. And so yeah, check it out at theattributes.com.
Brett McKay: Well let’s say you take the thing and you realize, oh man, I suck at adaptability, how should you prepare yourself for times of uncertainty?
Rich Diviney: So first of all, knowledge in this case is power, right? Because if I know I’m low on adaptability, then automatically when the environment starts to change, uncertainty starts to come into the fray. And because the environment’s changing, I immediately can say to myself, oh, wait, this feels bad because I know I’m low on adaptability. And just that conscious thought, by the way, is bringing your frontal lobe back online, or at least keeping your frontal lobe engaged in the process because you’re having a conscious thought. But I would say in those environments, if you know you’re lower on adaptability, you can say, okay, well, when the environment shifts, so say you’re traveling, okay, and you have a couple connections and you’re at the airport and you’re told the flight’s delayed and it’s going to affect your connections down the line. It’s also going to affect the engagement that you were supposed to be at. So you’re not going to get there in time anymore, so on and so forth. Now you are in an environment of uncertainty and it’s because the environment’s changing rapidly. And so the same process applies. You just begin to pick horizons that are meaningful for you.
In the case of low adaptability, just know that it’s going to feel uncomfortable and more stressful and more uncertain because you’re low on it. When I’m traveling, because I do so all the time and the plans start to shift around me, the environment starts to shift around me, I’m pretty high on adaptability. So the difference between me and someone who’s low on it is not that we don’t DPO the situation or shift horizons through that situation. The difference is I just feel less stressed about it. I feel less uncertain about it. So just understand that the attributes we’re a little bit lower on, we’re going to feel more uncertainty, challenge, and stress when those things are exercised due to the environment versus other ones. But the opposite is true. If you’re high on stuff, the attributes you’re high on, when the environment goes uncertainty and the environment requires whatever that attribute is and you happen to be high on it, you’re going to feel less uncertainty and challenge and stress. But that’s one way to look at it is that these uncertain environments that are asking for the attributes we’re lower on, those are likely the ones that are going to cause us more work.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I imagine too, if you’re high in adaptability, if you don’t have enough uncertainty, then you get bored. And that can be a problem too.
Rich Diviney: Yeah. Any of these attributes to their extremes, too high, too low can be bad. Right. But we also understand that any of these attributes, whether you’re high or low is not a bad thing or a good thing. These are completely nonjudgmental. In fact, there are advantages to being high adaptability. There are disadvantages to being high adaptability. And there’s advantages of being low adaptability and disadvantages. So in the normal spectrum of these things, there’s always pros and cons. But at the extremes in any of these attributes, it certainly gets to be a bad thing.
Brett McKay: Yeah. I think knowing your attributes can help you design better horizons. So if I’m low on, say, perseverance, that’s one of your attributes. If I’m low on that, I can’t just set long, vague goals. I’ve got to make my horizons shorter, more defined, more frequent, so I don’t run out of gas halfway through. The same thing goes with compartmentalization. That’s another one of those attributes you talk about. So if you struggle with that, you probably struggle to block out noise, stay focused when things get chaotic. So if that’s your problem, then your DPO might need to be even more simple. And so basically, your weaker attributes don’t mean you’re doomed under uncertainty, but they do mean you need to tailor your horizon strategy to how you’re wired. And that just makes the whole system work better. And you also talk about the role that identity plays in motivation and staying the course during times of stress and uncertainty. Talk to us about that.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, identity has always been fascinating to me because it’s always been something on my mind. And it’s because I’ve witnessed and certainly researched and seen examples of people acting in ways that are confusing to them when they look back at it. So take the sports fan who beats the crap out of another sports fan and then is suddenly in front of the judge and like, I don’t know what I was doing. I was out of my mind. They’re confused as to why they even acted that way. And one of the reasons is because our performance, our behavior sits and relies upon the identities that we collect along the way. So we are, as human beings, a collection, a collage of different I ams. They can be everything from benign to very, very important, very powerful. I went to this high school. I am this type of sports player. I am a Navy SEAL. I am a husband, father. I’m a Metallica fan, whatever that is. Okay, we have a collection of these things. And each one of these I ams, each one of these identities comes with it, some conditions, some rules, some behaviors that describe how you act in that identity.
And we align to those. That’s why we chose those identities in the first place. What we have to understand is in uncertainty, challenge, and stress, we are always going to behave towards the identity that we align to, that we prioritize in that moment. And this can be an advantage. It also can be a disadvantage. So the example would be as a Navy SEAL, that’s a very powerful identity. And in Iraq and Afghanistan, obviously, that was the priority identity that I was aligning towards, as were my teammates. However, sometimes the target would change, and we’d suddenly have to put on our husband, father hats because maybe we have to deal with some civilians or kids. This is an example where a fluidity in your identities can actually be very beneficial. Now take this sports fan. I mean, say you’re a fan of whatever ex-sports team, and you find yourself in an argument with a fan of another ex-sports team. And if you continue down that track, depending on the sports teams, you and I could probably comment on some that are worse than others, but if you continue that track, you may find yourself in a physical altercation because that identity is driving you. Or you could calm yourself and ask yourself, okay, I’m also a husband and father.
I’m a professional business person, and so getting into a fight in the street right now is probably not good for that identity, and you can shift. So all this to say is understanding that identities really are very powerful in the way they drive behavior, especially during uncertainty, challenge, and stress, to start to get a handle on those identities we carry, and we all carry a lot of them, we really do. Again, some are really important and powerful, some are fairly benign, but there are a lot of them. Get a handle on what they are and begin to use them in a more effective, proactive way, because you can begin to shift into identities that actually more appropriately fit whatever situation. You’ll often find, if you do the diligence, you might find some identities that don’t matter to you anymore. They’re like, oh, actually, I’m not that anymore. I can discard that one. And then we also find ourselves in situations where we’re building new identities. Entrepreneurs do this. I did this coming out of the Navy. The Navy SEAL identity, very powerful, but once I’m not a SEAL, I’m not a SEAL, and so I put that on the shelf, obviously in a position of honor and respect.
However, now I’m going to build a new identity, and that is author, entrepreneur. And that’s another way to actually actualize this stuff, is to have an understanding and move and flow in a positive way towards whatever you’re looking at.
Brett McKay: All right, so we’ve been talking about how to deal with uncertainty as an individual. So the DPO, moving horizons, using those tactics to calm yourself down, knowing how you typically navigate uncertainty by knowing your attributes, having that identity to help you stay grounded and motivated when things get hard. Let’s talk about teams, how to navigate uncertainty as a team. And you introduced this key principle that you got from the SEALs called dynamic subordination. What is that?
Rich Diviney: Yeah, dynamic subordination is simply, if you were to think about how this looks on a chart, it’s not the pyramid task work structure, which we all know, the leader sits on top and barks orders. It’s not the flat line where everybody’s in this together, we don’t know actually who’s in charge. And it’s not even the upside-down pyramid where the leader’s at the bottom in service to everybody, because the burden is not supposed to sit only on one person. And so what it really is is a blob, it’s an amoeba. And the position of leadership in that amoeba can be anywhere at any time. It’s wherever it needs to be in the moment. And so dynamic subordination is an idea that the team understands that challenges and issues and problems can come from any angle at any moment. And when one does, the person who’s closest to the problem and the most capable immediately steps up and takes lead, and everybody follows and supports. And then the environment shifts, and someone else steps up and takes lead. And so this is how all the highest-performing teams operate. Listen, I was an officer in the SEAL teams.
I went on hundreds of combat missions, and I was in charge of every single one. It did not mean I was always being supported. In fact, most of the time was the opposite. I was supporting other people, whether it was my snipers or breachers or whatever, or assaulters. Sometimes the environment shifted, and they were in support of me. But it was all based on the environment and what was needed in the moment. So it’s a very important concept that tells us that our role on a team has nothing to do with our hierarchy or rank. It has everything to do with what we are there to contribute to the team. And this is how the highest-performing teams operate. And this is the key to operating in uncertainty challenges and stress, because uncertainty by its very nature is we don’t know what’s coming. We don’t know what angle things are coming at. So we need to adjust and focus on whatever we can in the moment, and that might be at any angle.
Brett McKay: And just to be clear, I want to, kind of touch on this, there’s still a leader whenever you have dynamic subordination, correct? Like someone who’s responsible.
Rich Diviney: Yeah, I understand the question, but what we have to do is I can’t answer it if I use the colloquial definition that we all think of as leader. A leader is a behavior. Being in charge is a position. There’s two very different and distinct things. And we don’t get to self-designate, by the way. We don’t get to call ourselves leaders. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny, all right? People decide whether or not you are someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. And I remember being in situations in the military at least a couple times where I’d look at a person in a hierarchical position above me, and I would say, I would not follow that person anywhere. Meanwhile, there’d be someone over to my right or left who had no hierarchical position whatsoever. I’d be like, I would follow that person to hell and back. It’s because of the way we behave. And so leadership is defined as someone who others choose to follow based on behavior, which means everybody on a team can be a leader in the moment. Now, if you’re talking about the person who’s in a position of being in charge, who is responsible for the team holistically, now you’re talking about someone whose leadership role should be to create a dynamically subordinating environment.
That’s the whole role of the leader in terms of the person who’s in charge. You need to create that environment because if you don’t, you’re not going to create a team that can in fact deal with uncertainty, challenge, and stress. So yeah, every team is going to have a hierarchical nature to it. That’s the nature of a team. But the role of the person in the highest position of hierarchy is to create a dynamically subordinating team. It’s not to have the big office, big desk, get the big paycheck, and be deferred to on everything. It’s to create a dynamic subordinating team that actually moves fast, moves efficiently. And I always kind of told my junior officers when I was talking to them, you have to get used to what I call the irony of leadership. And that is if you do your job correctly, you eventually work yourself out of a job. You create a team that can run without you and in many cases run faster than you, outrun you. That should be the goal of every true leader because every true leader should aspire to that. You want to make your team so good, so much better that eventually, oh man, they’re so good, I got to withdraw.
They’re moving way too fast than I could ever move. And it’s because of the things I’ve allowed and helped them do.
Brett McKay: So let’s say you’re in a position of authority. How do you develop that environment where dynamic subordination exists? I’m sure there’s a lot to it, but one or two things that people can do.
Rich Diviney: Well, I mean, first of all, you empower an environment of trust. Trust is the foundational element. And trust is all about behaviors as well. You can’t make anybody trust you. All you can do is behave in a way that allows them to make a decision to choose to trust you. So as a leader of a team or a hierarchical position, the highest hierarchical position in a team, you must be behaving in ways that promote that environment of trust, making people cared for. You listen to them. You practice empathy. You’re consistent. You’re competent. You tell the truth. You’re accountable. These are all behaviors that will allow for others to look at you and say, ooh, this is someone I trust. By the way, the behaviors that define great leaders are almost synonymous with the behaviors that define trust. So they’re very, very similar. So we have to build that environment by doing, by modeling the behavior we want to see more of and then rewarding the behavior we want to see more of in terms of trust. Now, part of that trust, part of that trust building is that as the person in charge, you need to give opportunities for the people on the team to extend themselves, go outside their comfort zone.
To actually step up and be in charge, to take those positions, even if they might fail because we learn a lot from failure. But when they fail, that’s really important because if you have their back when they fail, they will learn rapidly, they feel that trust and that safety, and they’ll be ready to do it again and do it the right time this time. So we have to, as people in charge, really take responsibility and accountability for creating that environment, both through the way we act, through the way we reward, and through the way we allow our teammates and those in our span of care to really extend themselves and, of course, have their back when they do it.
Brett McKay: Besides developing that trust, another thing you talk about that’s important to have this dynamic subordination take root in a group is really being intentional about the culture in a team. How can a person who’s in a position of authority, not a leader, a person in a position of authority, help develop that kind of culture?
Rich Diviney: Yeah, I mean, a culture is kind of, I mean, very close to the identity of a team. Whatever that culture is, is close to the identity of the team. And those things can be intertwined. In other words, what are the behaviors that this team expresses because we’re part of that team? That’s what the culture really is. And so why we have to be very cognizant of this is because culture in any group of people is going to emerge regardless of whether or not the leader has anything to say about it or not. Whether you’re deliberate about it or whether you’re not deliberate about it, some sort of culture, some sort of identity will emerge. And if we are not deliberate about it, then we might not like what we see that emerges. And so the challenge is to be deliberate about the culture, be deliberate about whatever identity you’re creating for that team. Include the team in that process, of course, because it’s not just you as the person in charge. But what are those things that define us as a team from an identity standpoint and a culture standpoint? The Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts do this well.
The Marines do this well. The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts have a creed, and their creed is really just a list of rules that define their behavior. That’s what it is. That’s the culture. And you talk to any Girl Scout around the world, they are all aligned on that very same rule list of things, that culture. So we can do the same thing in organizations. We just have to be deliberate about it. But rest assured, if you’re not deliberate about it, it’s going to emerge whether you like it or not, and you may not like it.
Brett McKay: And you also talk about once you establish that culture, you have to start being picky about who you let in to the group to make sure that they match up with the culture.
Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, and this is a lot of the work we do with organizations and teams around attributes. Every culture, every identity is going to have a set of attributes that are prioritized. And I say set, it’s probably one or two or three top things that are prioritized. And so what we have to do as people who are bringing new folks onto a team is make sure that the people we’re bringing on are aligned with that from an attribute sense and from a value sense, from an identity sense, all those things, so that they come in and they’re like, okay, this person actually fits, they’re a culture fit. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what the culture is. So you got to start there.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think in times of uncertainty, it really does help to know what you’re about. Well, Rich, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Rich Diviney: Well, yeah, the best place is theattributes.com, like I said. So it’s theattributes.com. So there’s a the in front of the attributes. And there you can find both books. You can find the assessment tool, you can find everything we do for businesses and organizations and teams, kind of a one-stop shop. And of course, the books are also, you can find them on Amazon as well. And I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn under Rich Diviney, but theattributes.com is the best place.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Rich Diviney, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Rich Diviney: Thank you, brother. Great to be back.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Rich Diviney. He’s the author of the book, Masters of Uncertainty. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, theattributes.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/uncertainty, where you can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And make sure to sign up for our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
