People who like to feel in control often try to manage uncertainty by overthinking everything. They want to eliminate mistakes and surprises.
When someone has a strong desire to feel in control, their effort to avoid negative surprises can skew their thinking in an overly pessimistic direction. This can lead to procrastination and anxiety.
The following seven phrases will help you balance these challenges. These self-talk examples avoid toxic positivity and reinforce your autonomy, so you can pursue your goals or handle whatever is going on in your life more confidently.
Seven Self-Talk Phrases for Managing Uncertainty
1. Whatever Information I’m Given, I Have a Choice About What to Do Next
This phrase helps people who avoid information (medical or financial info, or feedback on their work) because they fear it will take their choices away.
Variations: I can choose my course of action. Whatever information I’m given, I can still make my own choices.
2. The Information (or Result) I Get Could Be Better or Worse Than I Expect
This phrase helps counteract worry and negative thinking, without veering into unrealistic positive thinking.
Variation: My outcome is equally likely to be better or worse than average (for stats purists: assuming “average” is the median).
3. I Can Control These Actions [List], but I Can’t Control This Outcome [State] or Someone Else’s Reaction
You might acknowledge: “I can control the strategies I use, and the effort I put in, but I can’t control the outcome or how others respond.”
This phrase helps you focus on what you can control, while acknowledging what you can’t.
The more specific you are about what you can control, the better. It’ll help you act promptly on what you can control rather than procrastinate or overthink. Try listing three quick bullet points about actions you can control. For example, if you’re practising a talk, then you can control whether you ask anyone for feedback, or whether you record yourself practising and check an automatically generated transcript for any words you said unclearly.
4. Good Decision Processes Can Lead to Bad Outcomes, and Vice Versa
This phrase helps separate your decision process from the outcome.
Examples:
- Someone can make the choice that’s statistically likely to have the best outcome, yet have a bad one.
- Someone can make a reckless choice and still have a good outcome.
This phrase can help if you’ve decided how to proceed, but you’re hesitating because you’re uncertain of what the outcome will be. That’s a common situation. Overthinkers often keep thinking long after they’ve decided how to respond. The hidden reason: they’re trying to control the outcome, not just their decision.
5. I Can Control X Today, but I Can’t Control Y Today
When we’re facing uncertainty in one area of life, we still need to get on with things in other areas. This often isn’t a bad thing. It can help us feel steadier and stable.
Example: I can control whether I wash my sheets or read to my children today, but not how long the results of my medical test will take, or what they will be.
Healthy compartmentalisation helps you put one foot in front of another and get productive things done when you’re experiencing stress in one or more areas of life. (I’ve written about five other healthy compartmentalisation tactics to protect your peace.)
6. I Can Choose to Make No New Mistakes, or I Can Choose to Make Progress on My Goals, but I Can’t Choose Both
This self-talk acknowledges that mistakes are an inevitable part of progress on complex goals.
Overthinkers often ask themselves how they can progress without making mistakes. They hesitate to take action until they feel certain about that answer. However, this question is a red herring.
You don’t need to overthink how to progress without making mistakes. It’s not a necessary condition. Actions that contain mistakes still often lead to progress on our goals.
7. My Biggest Achievements Have Contained Many Mistakes
When we look back at our biggest achievements and successes, what we’ve accomplished, we can usually see that we made a lot of missteps on the journey to success.
This self-talk prompts you to use your own data to see that your future successes will follow the same pattern. Significant achievements never happen without mistakes. We’ll make lots of missteps and stumbles. There are lots of things we’ll do suboptimally, on the way to getting important things done. (Premature optimisation is a huge reason overthinkers stay stuck or underperform.)
Think Carefully, Act Autonomously
Careful thinking is a strength. If you already possess that strength, you may only need a little direction to help you learn to better utilise that strength under conditions of uncertainty. This can be true even if you currently struggle with hesitation or anxiety. Here you’ve learned strategies to redirect your desire for control toward seeing and using your autonomy. Small thinking tweaks can help you step from being a careful thinker to a careful actor, whose thinking guides them but doesn’t trap or limit them. To learn more about strengths that can help you excel in uncertain situations, read this next.
