The more we know, the more we know we don’t know. That’s the route source of uncertainty. Uncertainty comes hand in hand with the appetite for learning, knowing, and much of that comes from a desire to be strong and grounded. So, learning, or the appetite for it ungrounds us, makes us uncertain, because the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. That’s why we suggest righteousness (the desire to fix a thought and make us right) is one of the greatest poisons in life and why the cemetery is filled with righteous people.

TRANSCRIPT

0:02 And today we are talking about mind noise. And as I promised, we are going to talk through all the things that cause it and how to quieten down your mind so that what goes on up in here is under, in some sense, under your control and is peaceful. 0:19 So let’s go through today’s one, and today’s is uncertainty. Now, I would say of all the mind traumatizing thoughts that go through your brain, un uncertainty is the greatest uncertain about the future, uncertain about the present, uncertain about what to eat, uncertain about what to do. 0:41 And uncertainty robs you of groundedness. So when we get uncertain, we become ungrounded. Grounding is probably the most important thing you can learn in your life because as you grow in life, as you grow in leadership, as you grow in romance and you grow in love uncertainty holds you back where you came from. 1:05 Uncertainty as to whether your relationship’s gonna last. Uncertainty as to whether you’re gonna have a job next week, uncertainty about so much. 1:12 Now, a fool will just bypass uncertainty and head straight into the jaws of the devil. For example, every couple of months or every six months at least, I have a blood check. 1:26 In that blood check, I check things like my prostate, my heart. I check for all sorts of elemental control variables. 1:36 I check for iron. I check for everything that could possibly be checked in a sense flu, a blood check. And I do that to eliminate uncertainty. 1:48 So there are certain things we need to do over a protracted period of time to cause certainty. So it is no use. 1:57 Waking up one morning and going, oh, good morning, world. I want certainty because that’s like flicking some sort of a magic switch to create certainty. 2:07 And that actually is called hardheadedness. The one thing you learn in life especially as a teacher or a coach or a leader, is the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. 2:20 And so trying to create a sense of certainty out of knowing things is full hearty. If you come up with a problem and you learn something which solves the problem, that learning in itself introduces two more learnings that you haven’t got. 2:37 So learning is an infinite thing. And one of the things that blocks people in life and gives the massive levels of uncertainty is they stop learning. 2:47 They try to save money on going to courses. And you cannot learn, you cannot learn from YouTube. You cannot learn from books, you cannot learn. 2:57 You can only get A gist of what you don’t know from those things. But learning is application. When you take something and you use it, you apply it. 3:07 And that’s why we talk about in, in all the work we do within a wealth practice, between performances, this is why learning is about application. 3:18 Now, we don’t want to have experiences our teacher flying an airplane and it flipping upside down as it did in Nepal through pilot era, while the pilot was being trained, is not necessarily the smartest way to have an experience. 3:34 That plans shouldn’t fly too slow, and it’s the same in your life. So we learn by by exploration, and we learn by going through challenges and we learn things. 3:47 But the idea of coming to the end of learning, the idea of coming to a conclusion of our learning is what causes uncertainty. 3:55 Because every time we learn something, we birth two more things we don’t know. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. 4:04 And the greatest wisdom comes from that. If you say that my uncertainty is an opportunity to learn something that I don’t know, then you have a window into the future. 4:16 And if you say, my uncertainty is a gift, it’s telling me I need to learn something rather than I’ve failed because I learned something, and now it doesn’t work. 4:28 It’s very hard for leaders, for example, to be both learning and teaching what we say in the yoga environment. And I’ve owned yoga school, so I know there’s only too well that we always warn students that want to become yoga teachers not to do so too early. 4:48 Because once you start teaching, it’s really hard to keep learning because it learning makes you feel insecure about what you’re teaching. 4:56 And so there’s this knowing and therefore certainty that comes from it. And then there’s this willingness to learn more and the uncertainty that it breeds. 5:08 So my noise is when we get stopped, we say, I’ve learned enough, or I’m going to apply what I’ve learned. 5:16 I don’t wanna learn anymore. This is too much from me. I don’t want to come and listen to Chris in coaching this week because it’s gonna be uncomfortable getting used to the fact that the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. 5:29 I spend many, many hours a week, many hours a week going through learnings. Now it’s hard for me because 99% of all the stuff on the internet that I read and look at and listen to, I know, and so I’m gonna fly here. 5:44 He wants to get on camera. The more, the more you learn, the harder it is to learn to find things you haven’t learned, find teachers. 5:53 And so I spend a massive amount of time filtering through garbage Filtering through books that people recommend for me, that they’re not wrong books, it’s just I already know what’s in them. 6:04 And so I’m looking for what I don’t know. I’m looking to feel incompetent. So I take to books that aren’t necessarily down the main street of where I’ve come from. 6:13 One of the interesting experiments we used to do in a bookshop, and I, when I first started selling books and would go to a bookshop, I would relocate all of my books up onto the shelf, which is eye level because I know that’s where most people look for what they’re looking for. 6:29 But I, we would ask, we, I, I had all my students in Canada. I had, I’d trained 200 consultants in Canada to do the inner wealth work. 6:37 And I ask those people to go into bookshop and ask people what they’re looking for and where, and people would be looking for self-help books in the self-help section and then ask, what particular book are you looking for? 6:49 And the truth of the matter is, people were looking for books that reinforced what they believe to be the truth. 6:55 So if they believe peace and calm and ca calmness was the solution to all their problems, they were looking for Buddhism books. 7:02 If they’re looking for therapy type analysis self and, and in the inner child, they’d be looking for books on the inner child. 7:09 In other words, we look for things that reinforce what we currently believe and that has stopped. That means we have blocked learning, we are reinforcing what we already know. 7:20 And that is where uncertainty comes from. It comes from thinking that we know it already, and when now we have to reinforce what we already know in order to stay immune from the two things that nature’s introduced to us. 7:35 For every one thing we’ve learned that we don’t know, I hope this is clear. I hope you realize that uncertainty is a process of life, that we shouldn’t be running away from it, that we can’t flick our fingers tomorrow and say, I want certainty that doesn’t happen. 7:52 What happens is we start to learn what uncertain, what certainty looks like and how un uncertainty is an important part of developing certainty. 8:02 And the more certainty we have, the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. So the more we are confronted by uncertainty, the solution, I would recommend to most leaders in the world who face intuitive uncertainty that comes from mental calm. 8:19 When you silence the mind, your intuition comes up and you might start seeing clouds on the horizon. The solution I recommend for leaders who face this situation is a whiteboard and having someone watching you throw up ideas on a whiteboard that are subject to criticism. 8:38 So in front of a group go, I’m gonna think out loud for a minute. If the competitor does this and we do that and we do this and we do this, what I’m thinking out loud and have someone sitting there going, b******t, b******t. 8:49 And so you, you remain open to questioning and learning things you don’t Already know. But most people I recommend to built by a whiteboard. 9:00 I look at their whiteboard behind them when I’m coaching them and up on their whiteboard is everyday thinking habits. What do I need to do a to-do list? 9:10 What do I already know? Those things need to be rubbed off a whiteboard. There’s a place for those, and that’s called your calendar or your to-do list or your diary. 9:19 What goes up on your whiteboard is what you don’t know, and the whiteboard is for the purpose of getting out of your head the things you are, you, you need to explore the things you need to wonder about. 9:32 And the reason you put them up on a whiteboard is someone else can actually make comment on what’s going on in here. 9:38 So it doesn’t start churn, it doesn’t start ruminating and come home with you and walk through the house with pig poo boots. 9:45 This is Chris. You have a beautiful day. Bye for now.