What Do You Do When Everything Feels Out of Control? How the Control-Certainty Matrix Helps You Regain Focus, Confidence, and Calm in Unpredictable Times.

In this special Bite Size Fridays bonus episode, I wanted to pause and respond to something that’s been showing up a lot lately—in emails, conversations, coaching sessions, and across social media: a growing sense of unease. People are feeling overwhelmed, doom-scrolling more than they’d like, and struggling to stay grounded in a world that feels unpredictable and increasingly chaotic.

In response, I walk you through a mental model I personally use and often share with clients: the Control-Certainty Matrix. It’s a simple but powerful tool that helps you figure out where you are when everything around you feels up in the air—and what to do next.

We explore how to recognize whether you're navigating chaos, leading under pressure, enduring with patience, or executing with confidence. Each quadrant demands a different kind of mindset—and in this episode, I offer strategies, insights, and questions to help you shift from reactive to resilient, no matter which quadrant you’re in.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why 2025 is the definition of a VUCA year (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• How to use the Control-Certainty Matrix to get clarity in uncertain times
• The four quadrants:
  • High Control / High Certainty – Confident execution
  • High Control / Low Certainty – Leadership under pressure
  • Low Control / High Certainty – Acceptance and quiet strength
  • Low Control / Low Certainty – Surviving the storm
• What skills help in each quadrant: resilience, adaptability, equanimity, patience, and more
• How to use self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-efficacy to steady yourself
• Why leading yourself must come before leading others

Chapters

• 0:16 Introduction to the Podcast
• 1:42 Practical Tips for Everyday Challenges

Transcript

Speaker: 0:08

Music. Well, welcome to It's an Inside Job Bite Size Fridays, your weekly dose of resilience, optimism, and well-being to get you ready for the weekend. Now, each week, I'll bring you insightful tips and uplifting stories to help you navigate life's challenges and embrace a more positive mindset. And so with that said, let's slip into the stream. Music. In our last series, we explored the 12 skills of the contrarian mindset. Skills that challenge conventional thinking and help us build true resilience. But resilience isn't just about what we cultivate. It's about what we confront. That's what this series is all about. Over the next 15 Bite Size Friday episodes, we'll take a hard look at the fears and unhelpful mindsets that hold us back, the ones we all face but rarely talk about. For example, the fear of failure, the fear of vulnerability, fear of change or uncertainty, the fear of conflict, the imposter syndrome, or the weight of perfectionism. These fears don't just slow us down, they quietly shape our decisions, limit our potential, and keep us stuck in patterns that no longer serve us. Most self-help advice teaches you how to work around these fears. This series challenges you to face them head on. Because if we want real growth, deep, lasting change, we can't afford to ignore what makes us uncomfortable. Contrarian thinking isn't about being difficult for the sake of it. It's about questioning default reactions, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and seeing challenges from an angle most people overlook. So let's cut through the noise, break the patterns, and reshape the way we think, one fear at a time, one unhelpful mindset at a time. Music. Hey, folks, welcome back to the show. This Bite Size Friday, I want to dive into something that I think is very pertinent. This is sort of a kind of almost of a bonus episode. I've been receiving a number of emails and contacts through social media from the podcast and also from the clients from my business about doom scrolling, about this sense of uncertainty, this sense of volatility, this sense of the unknown. You know, at the time of recording, we are about five months into 2025, and it's just been since January 20th. It's just been a it's just been change after change after change, added with complexity, added with challenge, added with all the strife and the challenges of what's going on in the globe right now. That I wanted to create this bonus episode to maybe hopefully address some of those issues in through a pragmatic way. Now, many of you may be managers, leaders, parents, coaches for a sports team for kids or what have you. And I think what is very important right now is to understand that in order to lead others, in order to manage situations, we have to be better at managing ourselves, at leading ourselves. And so today I want to address that. What I think is a relevant, a super relevant skill for 2025 as we move through this, I don't know how better to say it, a chaotic year. Let's just call that walking through the storm. And by no means what I will share with you today is a panacea for uncertainty, for the lack of autonomy, for lack of agency, feeling powerless. But what I want it to be is a tool in your toolbox to help you find buoyancy, to find stability, to find that inner sanctum in you, that inner refuge that you can retreat to, that you can find stability and you can feel grounded to weather this chaos, to weather this storm. Because all storms end. They are temporary. But from the here and now where you are standing right now, you can just see this storm last and last and last and it'll go on forever. But as they say, this too shall pass. So today I want to perhaps kick off with the term that many of you may know and some of you may not know. It's the acronym VUCA. That stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. And I think this term is... It's the right term, the right acronym to describe the kind of precarious nature the world is in right now. So let me walk you through how I see each of these words. You know, volatility, this is when the situation, the world around us seems unstable, and the changes are unpredictable and they're rapid. The challenges and the changes around us, they arise quickly and often without any signaling or any warning. it just shows up uninvited and there it is. Uncertainty, well, we've talked about this a lot. This is the lack of predictability. It's having insufficient information about the current circumstances, the current situations in which you find yourself. It's understanding that we lack insufficient information about future outcomes or the consequences of decisions. It could be our decisions, or it could be decisions at a greater level, above and beyond our paycheck per se, above our heads. Then there is complexity. This is the numerous interconnected factors and variables that make it difficult to fully grasp the cause and effect relationship. Meaning, what does one change happening, how does that play out? It's like trying to predict billiard balls. You can predict the white ball hitting the eight ball if you're very good and you know the angle. But when you're breaking the cluster of balls at the beginning of a billiards game, who knows where all the balls are going? That's complexity. It's trying to understand, trying to simplify a complex situation. And that's not always easy. And the last one is ambiguity. This is when situations have unclear meanings and they can have multiple interpretations. You know, we can have multiple meanings about things and this can lead to confusion about what is the best approach? What is the best response? When you put all this together, you can understand why sometimes people feel untethered, they feel unmoored, that they're floating about, they are navigating the sea without a rudder. And whatever other metaphor or analogy you want to use, I think it perfectly describes to some extent the situation many, many of us, the majority of us find ourselves in right now. And in this VUCA world, if you are a leader or manager, I think the skills that are needed to learn on top of resilience, and I'm going to go into some of those today, is that leaders must rapidly adapt to these changing conditions. It's about making decisions under uncertainty. It's about trying to navigate the craziness and chaotic nature of the complexity we find ourselves. And it's also to clearly communicate despite ambiguity, despite the unpredictable nature and insufficient information that we find ourselves in right now. And so today I want to talk about something called the control certainty matrix. Now this is a tool that I use in my private life and my. Through uncertainty, through the lack of autonomy, through the lack of agency. Now, the brain, the brain loves certainty and it loves control. That's its sweet spot per se. And what the brain really does not like, that puts us into threat mode, as it puts us into a survival reactive mindset, is when we interpret the world around us as there is no certainty or complete uncertainty and we have no control. We have, as I said, no agency or autonomy over the situation. So today I want to introduce a tool to you, as I said, that I use. It's called the control certainty matrix or the certainty control matrix. And basically I want you to imagine x, y axis. Now the y axis is the vertical line that moves from zero to 100. That's the certainty. The x axis is horizontal moving from zero to 100 and that's control. Now, within this matrix, there are four quadrants or four blocks. Now, if we look at the XY axis, just to walk you through it right now, if I have 100% certainty and 100% control, this is what we can call confident execution. This is the sweet spot where we all like to be leaders, right? This is when we show up at our best because we have complete certainty, complete control. Everyone's a great leader in this spot. And then you have the other opposite end of that, where we have no certainty, no control. Well, this is complete chaos and vulnerability. Now on the x-axis, if we have full control and low certainty, this is leadership under pressure. Now, the other quadrant is when we have low control and high certainty. This is when we need to employ acceptance and patience. Now, what I want to do is I want to spend the remainder of this episode walking you through each of the quadrants and what we can do cognitively and emotionally for ourselves to find stability, irregardless if it's high control, high certainty, or low control and low certainty. High control, high certainty. This is the sweet spot that we all want to find ourselves in. This is where the brain, this is its happy place. And pretty much if we had to describe it, it's when you know what's happening and you can influence it. So examples of this is when you're executing a well-rehearsed presentation. Something that you know inside out. You are the guru and the master of your discipline. It's about managing a project within your area of expertise. for example. Or at home, it's following a recipe you've mastered, you've cooked a thousand times, you could do it with your eyes closed. And the emotional state here, we tend to feel confident, we feel focused, we feel collected, and we feel calm. It's in this zone, which is like the zone of execution. We can just decide and execute without a lot of thought being needed. You know, here's where clarity meets capability. You know the terrain, you have the map, you have the right tools, the know-how, the experience. And in this quadrant, while it's defined by precision, control and effective action, the traits here are about delivering results. It means performing with consistency. It means optimizing performance. This is where you can lead through doing, not just knowing what to do, but doing it well. It's the space, it's the place of skilled autonomy. It's about reliable outcomes. We know, we can read the future pretty much because we know how it's going to play out because we've done it scores of times. Here, your confidence is grounded in evidence, in the facts. You know, the mission is clear and so is your ability to complete that mission. You know, it's the confidence we feel. We trust in our skills and our knowledge and our judgment. There is no doubt. There is a sense of composure where we feel sort of a calm focus under pressure. We know what the pressure is and the stressors are there, but we see more as a positive or a eustress than a negative stress, a duress. There's a sense of mastery. There's a refined competence from experience and learning that we've mastered over years, if not decades. And there's also self-efficacy. This is the belief that our actions will produce positive results and outcomes. Now, this is the sweet spot, the easy quadrant. High control, low certainty. So examples of this is leading through a crisis, leading through an emergency. It may be about making decisions with incomplete or insufficient information. It's about responding quickly to unexpected challenges and change and complexity. And many of us, if you're a leader or you're running your own business, can find ourselves in this place right now. I guess a good description of this is about taking action, but you don't know what the outcome is. The outcome is unclear. You may have a foggy abstract picture, but you don't have an exact clear and vivid picture of that outcome. This is what I like to call the zone or the quadrant of leadership truly under pressure. You know, here, if I may spend a little time to describe it, it's where the landscape is shifting. The map hasn't been fully drawn. It's just kind of partially populated. But... Because of the control over it, our compass is still working. It can still point a certain direction. Now, this quadrant demands a presence of mind to be self-aware in the here and now. It requires a level of emotional steadiness and a willingness to act despite ambiguity, despite the unclarity of the situation. Here, it's about shaping outcomes through effort. I think the key take home here is if you look at 100% attention, from my experience, working with myself and with clients, 20% should be on the outcome to make sure you're headed in the right direction and you have the right orientation. And the remaining 80% of your attention should be focused on effort and action, trying to move towards that outcome. Because remember, when there is low certainty, we don't know what the outcome is. It is so abstract that what we can focus on in leadership for ourselves and for others is to focus on the actions, the things that we can control in order to influence a permutation of the outcome that we want. And the traits we want to adopt when we're leading ourselves or leading others is resilience. It's the ability to bounce back despite the uncertainty. It's a sense of tenacity that means the sustained effort when the outcome is unclear that we keep trying we fall down we learn we get up and move forward it's about courage is about stepping forward into the unknown with agency define our sense of autonomy and the other one is adaptability this is flexible thinking it's the ability to adjust our actions to changing information. And this is the key, the quintessential aspects of the contrarian mindset. So the traits here reflect a contrarian mindset of engagement. You push forward, you adapt fast, and you refuse to be paralyzed by what you don't yet know. And truly, in this quadrant, this is where real leadership is forged. It's not in certainty, but it's in the motion through uncertainty. Low control, low certainty. You know you're in this quadrant if, for example, you're experiencing a personal crisis or trauma. It's just so raw, it's so new that nothing is settled, everything is up in the air. It's finding yourself caught in an unfamiliar environment during an upheaval. This might be an emerger, an acquisition, and it could be watching uncontrollable global events unfold in front of our eyes. We just turn on the nightly news, we scroll through social media, and we see it happening. And we feel so disempowered. We feel no sense of agency or autonomy over the situation. We feel like we're being swept up in a powerful river with rapids and whitewater rapids that we do not have the strength. The only strength we have is to keep our head above the water. Some of the emotional states, which is completely normal in such abnormal situations, we feel anxiety, we feel a sense of powerlessness or helplessness, we can feel this sense of overwhelm. This is the quadrants, what I call the storm. This is characterized by situations or circumstances where everything is unclear. You can't seem to predict the future or even shape it, at least not right in the moment. but that doesn't mean you're powerless. The traits here don't give you control. They help you survive the lack of it. This quadrant is about inner steadiness when outer circumstances are beyond reach. It's about finding your center when everything else is spinning. You don't fight the storm. You outlast it. It's grounded not in action but in awareness and acceptance. It's about the ability to hold your humanity intact. And some of the cognitive skills from the contrarian mindset we can use is equanimity. This is the ability staying mentally calm amid the chaos. I've talked about this before. It's about retracting into the eye of the storm as it rages around us. It's also about faith. It's about trusting in something beyond yourself. It may be trusting in the process it may be trusting in the coaching sessions you're having with someone or the therapy it may be trusting in a good friend having a faith that things will turn out best it's about looking at your past experiences and seeing the other tumultuous times that you survived that you grew stronger from that you developed and evolved into the person you are today. It's a faith in yourself. It's a faith that this too shall pass. It's also about surrender. This is the wisdom of knowing when to release control. There is a freedom, there's a liberty, there's a lightness that comes when we just surrender what we try to control and we find that equanimity. We pull into the center of the storm and we have faith that this too shall pass, that day shall follow night. And I think the fourth powerful skill, cognitive skill, is presence. It's about grounding yourself in the here and now, in the moment, even in the disarray. Low control high certainty you know examples of this quadrant is for example awaiting the results of a decision made by others it may be aging or natural process that you can't influence it's an impending layoff after some sort of official notice and what all of these examples have in common is that you know what's coming but you can't change it and here the emotional states that are quite indicative of this is resignation, is a sense of acceptance or frustration or maybe even complacency. When there is low control and high certainty, you know what's happening, but you just can't move the pieces. This quadrant isn't about action. It's about posture. How do you hold yourself when time or circumstance won't let you act yet? You know, the traits here build quiet strength and mental endurance. You're not reacting, you're remaining. The leadership skills here, it's about, well, this quadrant asks you to stand still with dignity, to bear the weight of what is. And it's to preserve your clarity, your character, and your values, even though you can't influence a situation, when the power to change thing is out of your reach. You know, this is, in a sense, if you had to picture it as kind of an inner scaffolding that supports your resilience in delayed or constrained situations. Some of the powerful cognitive skills here that are part of the contrarian mindset when we're trying to lead ourselves through a low control and high certainty. Well, the first is acceptance. And this can be really hard sometimes. this is about coming to terms with what can't be changed it's finding that peace with that it's fortitude fortitude is the mental strength to endure what must be faced again this is not so easy but sometimes some of the other skills that i've talked about in the 12 contrarian skills they dive into this and one of that is sometimes is finding that creating those social bridges finding our tribe who can support us. Another skill is stoicism. This is about maintaining perspective and integrity when powerless. And the fourth skill that I like to employ is patience. It's waiting without frustration or the loss of yourself. So when I'm using this matrix, this control certainty matrix with myself or with my clients, I'll look at my particular situation. And what I want to do is put an objective number on a subjective feeling. So, for example, I'll look at the y-axis and I'll look at what is my level of certainty about this particular situation. I might say, okay, it's a 3 out of 10, 10 being maximum certainty. Then I'll ask myself, what is my level of control in this particular situation? Again, I put an objective number on a subjective feeling. I'll say, well, it's an 8. So, this allows me to figure out which quadrant I'm in. Now remember, in each quadrant, the way I've laid it out, these are leadership skills that we can use for ourselves to find that stability. Because at some point, each and every one of us will find ourselves in one of these quadrants, in particular phase in our life, a particular part of our lives, whether professional or private, what have you. And what we want to do is to be self-aware. Where am I right now? Why do we want to do this? Well, we've talked about this before. It's about the human operating system where it goes from head to heart to hand, where my thinking drives my feeling, which drives my doing. And remember, thinking is about the narrative. What is the narrative I'm telling myself? What is the meaning I'm giving to this situation? Now, our brains are storytelling machines. They will automatically assign a meaning, a story to what's going on. Around us and to us. And where we empower ourselves is to stop up and ask ourselves, what is the story my brain is ascribing to this situation right now? And that is where we start. That's where the power is. Because if we don't like what our brains have written for us, well, then we can scribble out that page, throw it out and become the author of our own narrative. We don't have to succumb to the wetware, the survival wetware and software of our brains. We can say, this is what I want to do. This is how I want to write the narrative. And because how we write the narrative, how we consistently think about that narrative, well, that will drive our emotions. That can either make us feel a sense of being empowered or disempowered. And I choose to be empowered regardless of the situation I find myself in. And then that will drive my behavior, where I will engage. But with each of the quadrants that I've articulated today, how I've laid out the terrain, well, that's up to you how you want to use it. What I've tried to do is simplify by creating four cognitive traits for each of the quadrants. So, for example, if we go back to the quadrant where there's high control, low certainty, the four skills I laid out there were resilience, tenacity, courage, and adaptability. Now, you can ask yourself, how am I going to be resilient in this situation? And then you define it. You create a bespoke action to help you do that. How am I going to find tenacity? How am I going to find sustained effort when the outcome is clear? What is courage for me in this case? How do I step forward into the unknown with agency? What does it mean to adapt to this situation? How can I use flexible thinking to adjust my actions with this constant changing topography, this constant changing information? So you can create a bespoke and tailored way. But the first point is to have self-awareness. Where am I on this matrix? The second is self-compassion. It's thinking, I will get through this. You will get through this, Jason. You will get through this. This too shall pass. All storms do. I can look over my shoulder and see all the experience, all the tumultuous events that have been part of my life, like anyone else. And I stand here today and I've survived and I've grown. I've become stronger because of it. And I know I can do this. And then I want to move to self-efficacy and that's putting things to action. What can I do? And I think one of the solid ways I've seen time and time again, over 25 years working with multiple clients, multiple personalities, genders, whatever, Whatever labels you want to slap to a human being, I've seen it time and time again when people use this matrix and they define the skills and they rewrite the narrative for themselves, they find a way through. I'm not saying it's a cakewalk or a park walk or whatever. Sometimes it's climbing a craggy mountain where the gravel and the stones are constantly slipping and your hands get cut and your knees get bruised. But they climb and they eventually reach the peak each and every time. It's a hard slog sometimes, but if we can find, if we can move from the survival mindset and we can find that contrarian mindset, we can lead ourselves through almost anything, but we need to be present with ourselves. We need to be caring to ourselves and we need to move from thought to action. There is no doubt that 2025 is defined by VUCA. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. But you can find that inner tenacity, that inner resilience to ride these waves. And change, challenge, and complexity will always be a part of our lives. It is inevitable. It is part of the DNA of the human condition. Of course, in a simple episode, I can't give you a panacea. I can't give you all the answers, but I hope this complements your thinking. I hope it allows you to reflect on your own lives and to find your own bespoke, your own way, your own tailored way of dealing with the challenges. And remember, you don't have to do this alone. You have friends, you have family, there are professionals out there who can help you through the chaos. We all move through chaos. We all come out on the other end, sometimes a little bruise and battered on the other end, but we've learned, we grow, we evolve as individuals. But if we want to lead others, if we want to lead a team, a division, a department, a company, a group, whatever, we have to learn to lead ourselves first. And hopefully you find some level of value in the certainty control matrix I shared with you today. If you have questions, please reach out to me. I'd be more than willing to help you or to clarify some of the terms. And if you're looking for more and you want to sort of self-study, well, I suggest you go back to the beginning of January 2025. On every Friday, I've talked about incessantly the contrarian mindset and the skills where I've dedicated specific episodes to each of the skills. And next week, I will continue talking about dysfunctional mindsets and unhelpful fears and how we can use the contrarian mindset to overcome and dismantle dysfunctional thinking. And as I often say, keep well, keep strong, and we'll speak soon. Music. If you're curious to know how to build a contrarian mindset for greater resilience, fortitude tenacity psychological strength and a sense of well-being well you'll find the links to the other episodes in the series in the show notes so make sure you hit that subscribe button and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational episodes on monday and the latest Bite Sites episode on Friday and have yourself a relaxing and rejuvenating. Music.