Simone Stolzoff

That's what we were talking about earlier.

There is this great prayer that you may have heard of before called the Serenity Prayer, and it's very popular in recovery communities.

But it basically says, God, grant me the serenity to separate...

What I can and I can't control and to know the difference.

So often when we're dealing with uncertainty, we spend lots of energy and effort on things that we fundamentally can't control.

So how can you divert that energy towards things that you can?

And the third is, I'd say, choose curiosity over fear.

I think part of the problem, why uncertainty is so uncomfortable for us, is that we have a natural tendency to catastrophize, to think about all the things that could go wrong, to worry about arriving to the airport and there being a five-hour TSA line and you missing your flight.

But I think it's

Also important to think about what might go right.

So to frame the possibility as opposed to just the threat of uncertainty.

Certainly every scientific breakthrough or revolutionary company or genre-busting piece of art has come from someone's willingness to get to a point where they were uncertain and persist nonetheless.

And so thinking about those small steps that you can take to, what I say, row through the fog, to keep moving through the uncertainty that you feel, that is both where clarity and growth will emerge.

Yeah, so the phrase comes from a friend of mine named Emily, and she is a therapist.

But before she became this mental health professional, her mom was given a terminal cancer diagnosis when she was in her early 20s.

And she would spend days after days by her side at the hospital.

And one day, a family friend of theirs named Bill came by to see how Emily was doing.

And so he asked, you know, Emily, how are you holding up?

And she said, honestly, I am not doing very well.

I'm riding this roller coaster of anxiety and anticipatory grief, and I'm not sure what I'll do if my mom passes away.