I learned the importance of certainty. Certainty feels good. It gives you a sense of authority, even righteousness. Often, it helps me experience what it feels like to be empowered and to empower others.
Until I heard Annie Duke on the hidden power of uncertainty, I learned that confidence and certainty are two different things.
With this new information, many things make sense.
I do notice some truly confident people express their confidence through quiet resilience in navigating through challenges, unlike what certainty feels like. While the "certainty" in public often showed up as the close-ended posture (understandably, this is what's needed to build authority). Certainty says, "No need to look further; this is what you need!"
But in the world of learning, we often need confidence (keep trying) and uncertainty (do things that might not work) and find ourselves constantly flowing in and out of both states - a path forward to what's possible.
