How to Master Uncertainty

In this episode of The Savvy Dentist Podcast Dr Jesse Green is joined by Matt Watkinson. 

Matt Watkinson is an author of three books.
The first one is all around the 10 Principles behind Great Customer Experiences. 
Matt’s second book, The Grid, gives you the Decision Making Tools for Business.
And his third book, which is the topic for this episode of The Savvy Dentist Podcast, is about Mastering Uncertainty.

We live in an inherently uncertain world, and there's all manner of events happening at any one moment. We need to become comfortable with the idea that making decisions in an uncertain world is going to have some successes from time to time, but equally some failures.

In this episode Matt explains how we all can become really comfortable with that relationship with uncertainty. 

Matt Watkinson has worked with all manner of organisations. From the FBI … all the way through to Microsoft. Matt’s hypothesis is that “success is correlated to your relationship, or how comfortable you are with uncertainty.”

Matt & Dr. Jesse discuss what uncertainty actually is. They talk about the biases that we all have. And they talk about why we are compelled to seek certainty.

[14:18] - How is your relationship with uncertainty? Do you ever feel afraid when making a decision or when having to step into something unknown?  [22:32] - People like to think that we're operating in some kind of order. Uncertainty scares most people because they don't like to know that no one really knows what's going to happen and that there's a whole lot of randomness in the world. [25:44] - So how do we make decisions in what is predominantly an uncertain world? [33:05] - Your relationship with uncertainty affects how you perceive Success … and Failure. Unless something works out to the letter, exactly as the plan predicted, then some people see that as failure. How you see ‘success’ can be directly related to you becoming more comfortable with your relationship with uncertainty.  [39:11] - Have a healthy and enlightened relationship with failure and not getting what we want straight away. You need to be extremely tenacious because when things are a numbers game, your numbers might not come up straight away, so you need to keep rolling the dice.