547: How to Master Uncertainty. With (Ret) SEAL Commander, Rich Diviney

In a 2020 workshop, retired Navy SEAL commander Rich Diviney asked a group of executives to answer a simple question in thirty seconds: "How can I double my income in the next six months?" He didn't even ask for their answers, only how many they wrote down. Most people came up with five or six ideas. The point was not the quality of the ideas, but the mechanism itself: whatever you ask your brain, it will begin to answer. This is the core of Diviney's approach to uncertainty. You cannot control what happens, but you can control the questions you ask yourself, and those questions determine whether you spiral into anxiety or anchor into action.

The Fear Equation and Moving Horizons

Diviney, a retired Navy SEAL commander and author of Masters of Uncertainty, defines fear as the product of two specific ingredients: uncertainty plus anxiety. You can have one without the other—anxiety without uncertainty (a known presentation you dread) or uncertainty without anxiety (a child on Christmas Eve). It is the combination that produces the paralyzing fear that degrades performance. The strategy, then, is to buy down one or both sides of the equation.