Thriving in the Ambiguity of Change with Cristina and Alex

EPISODE 108

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human, where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that’s with our families, co-workers, or even ourselves.

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni.

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore.

HOSTS: Let's dive in.

Authenticity means freedom.

Authenticity means going with your gut.

Authenticity is bringing 100% of yourself. Not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you.

Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself.

It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true.

Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be.

It's transparency, relatability, no frills, no makeup, just being.

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human. Today, it's just Cristina and I. We're back to just the pair of us for today. We wanted to talk about a topic that's always on everybody's mind, whether they address it immediately or not, and that is ambiguity. There is a lot of that going on in the world right now.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. We are definitely living it. We actually started by picking a podcast topic and then talking about ambiguity and switching over to ambiguity. This is what living in ambiguity and keeping cool looks like.

Alex Cullimore: Well, we'll see if we keep cool. We're going to find out that along the way.

Cristina Amigoni: We throw curveballs to ourselves just to dance around and see what happens.

Alex Cullimore: Got to practice somehow. We can't throw ourselves off. What are we doing? When we think about ambiguity, I mean, a couple of things come to mind. First, there's the economic ambiguity right now. We've watched what? Three different banks collapse, or get absorbed in the last few months. People whisper about things like recessions. There's no real recession, but there's lots of things like layoffs in the tech industry going on right now. We're facing current ambiguity within Seattle, like one of the next things we're going to do. Let's talk a little bit about, I don't know, any of these. Where do you want to start, Cristina?

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. You just took all the known things out of my mind. I'm going to go back to –

Alex Cullimore: Then I tossed it right to you. You're welcome.

Cristina Amigoni: Exactly. Okay. Hold on. Let me turn around, open yet another big new store of what am I supposed to say now? Yeah. It's very difficult. I mean, if we think about it and we break it down, we live in ambiguity every day all day, from something even as simple, depending on the definition of simple and what's going on as the weather. It's raining, like if we were in winter in the northeast right now in Colorado, which is very different. Part of that ambiguity is because we are used to sun and we are used to blue skies is when is the rain going to end? Yes, we have apps and we have all those things, but it's still not enough to really – the mind and the heart around ambiguity don't really communicate well. There's some communication breakdown. Yes, my mind knows that I can look at the weather and say like, “Oh, it's going to rain until tomorrow.” Great. My heart is like, “Is it over? Is it over? Is it over? When are we done yet?”

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. Those are two really important points, is the feeling you have going into it of the unknown and then the secondary thing that can create ambiguities, those expectations. We expect things to be sunny. It's very weird, especially in Colorado to have a particularly rainy day that might – usually, rain will last at most an hour. Now we have two days straight of rain. That's odd. That's unpredictable. Even the apps will tell you that it's going to rain and then half the time that's not true. That expectations management ends up becoming a really important part of ambiguity, I think, in general. That's where things start to spin out. When people whisper about recessions, or we see banks disappearing, or we see the weather changing on us. Part of the frustration and part of the loss is because we have a certain set of expectations that something else might happen, or we hope that something else might happen. There's that grieving loss of the changing expectations of here's what I thought was going to happen. Here's the future I thought was going to be and that's not going to be now. Now it's something else. Now it's when it's undefined and it's particularly ambiguous, I think that becomes particularly difficult for people to wrestle with.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, it is. We actually talk about this. We have a lesson on it in our leadership development program, about getting comfortable with ambiguity, or at least embracing ambiguity. I don't know that we can ever get comfortable with it. We're always going to be fighting the unknown and the darkness of it. We can definitely embrace ambiguity as a part of life and figure out what is it that we need to remain calm in it? Because panicking for every single ambiguous thing makes for a very stressful life. Yes, there are moments to panic and that doesn't mean that panic should be repressed. One of the examples I actually used in our training program a couple of weeks ago was the ambiguity I had to live through while looking for a parking spot. Mind you, during a recession at the airport, that was saying there were spots open, but I couldn't find a single one of them for over 45 minutes. I had a full on just hyperventilating, almost panic attack. I had to stop the car. Not driving it, and figure out what is it that's causing me anxiety. Because the ambiguity, I can't do anything about. I'm going to have to keep circling and finding a parking spot, or come up with other ways to be able to make my plane. What is it that I'm attached to? What is that expectation that now has thrown such a huge curveball that I can't even focus and think straight, or drive for a couple of seconds? I realized that my attachment was to making my flight. Knowing that as I always do at the airport, I park fairly quickly and then I go through security and I let whatever time goes by, but I expect that to go within a certain time limit. I'm at the gate with at least an hour to go before I board. This was all getting thrown out, spending 45 minutes looking for a parking space was not part of the plan, or the expectation. I had to look at the list. I'm like, I'm attached to making my flight, and so I had to let that go and figure out like, “Okay, what happens? What's the case scenario? What happens if I missed my flight?” I'm spending two hours looking for a parking spot. I am going to find a parking spot, even if I have to go to some of the faraway parking lots. What is it? That's one? I'm like, “Okay, I can let go of that. I can catch the next flight. I can catch flights tomorrow. It's okay. It's not the end of the world.” Second one was there was supposed to be a snowstorm coming, at least in Castle Rock, that was forecasted for 12 inches of snow. Part of my expectations and attachment was to park in the garage, so I wouldn't have to dig my car out when we landed four days later. I had to let that go. That was a hard one. Part of letting the go was thinking like, well, I'm traveling with Alex and Kelly. If there are 12 inches of snow coming and I have to park outside, they'll help me dig out the car. Once I let go of those two plans, I had in my mind on how my travel to the airport was going to go, started breathing again, opened up my options on where to find parking spot. I did end up going to an outside space, where it was still hard to find one, but I did find one. Then I made my flight and I had plenty of time at the gate and it didn't snow. None of my worst-case prediction came to fruition. However, the ambiguity is what was paralyzing, because I was so attached to the way I wanted things to go.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's a great example. I think air travel in general will introduce ambiguity in anyone's life. You know that you have to get to the airport. You know you have to maybe check a bag. You have no idea what the line is going to be like. You have no idea what the line is going to be like at security. You have no idea whether the plane is going to be there when you get there. There's just 10,000 different unknowns between you and a destination. It brings up, when you talk about all the attachments to the things that I think the sneaky part about attachment is it creeps up on us like so many assumptions in our heads. We don't necessarily even know consciously, unless we're really, really paying attention all the time to everything we're attaching to. It can be very easy just to get attached to an outcome, or how you think something is going to go and be entirely thrown, without even really knowing why, because it's more subconscious that attachments to here's how it's going to look, here's how it's going to be, here's what we're going to do. It sneaks up on us the way we make assumptions about other people, or we make assumptions about situations and then sometimes are proven wrong, or proven right. We sometimes pat ourselves on the back knowing that we were right in the assumptions. Regardless, there's tends to be some subconscious processing that gets us there that we end up with a bunch of attachments that we weren't consciously making, but now we're bound by and we have to consciously work our way out of when they start to bind us and we're circling around that parking lot and like, well, yet, here's the 98 attachments that are currently being strained by this current event.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, it's so true. We have all these attachments based on past experience, based on what's important to us, based on habit, you name it, whatever it is. Letting those go, it's really hard. One thing that I found myself reminding, or I guess getting comfortable with when embracing ambiguity is switching the attachments. What if my attachments are not about external circumstances, which I can't control? I can't control the economy. I can't control the weather. I can't control 4,000 people, or probably 400,000 people parking at an airport during a recession. We can't control layoffs. We can't control all these other things. What can I control? What I can control is what I believe myself to be able to get through. Do I believe that I will figure it out? Yes. I can attach to that, because then whatever it is, well, I can figure it out, and so I'm not now attached to a certain outcome. I'm not attached to whatever I thought the plan was going to be, or how it was going to turn out. Can I believe in my friends and the support of the community that I work with? Yes, I can actually attach to that. Because no matter what happens, there is going to be support. At least with trusting connections and deep connections. Those are the things to switch to. Once we switch where our heart can switch to those, because our heart understands what happens in those, then you can – it's easier to let go. It's easier to say, “Yeah. The economy is the way it is.” We'll know what to do, because we've figured it out so far, figured out in the past 48 years. We'll figure it out so far.

Alex Cullimore: That's a great way of putting it. That's a great way of prioritizing where to attach. We attach first and foremost to the things you can control. Yourself. That's always the only – the only thing you can ultimately attach to. Secondarily, yes, absolutely. If you invested time in a really good community, you can count on that to be around, so you can count on some support there. You know you'll be able to turn and you'll know you'll have the support of people when they can help and assist. Then letting go of the things we can't attach. Those are huge. The other thing that I would say is the tertiary thing you can connect to. This one, these are getting more and more external and a little bit more out of our control is things like, the eventual goal and outcome. If you think about your plane travel, and you want to get to the destination. That's the eventual goal is, I'm going to end up in X city. Usually, there's some timeline on that. Like, I want to get there before whatever starts, is it the program we're starting? Is it a vacation? I want to get there before the next plane we have to take, whatever it is. There might be a timeline on that. It's a little more out of your control. But when you focus on the outcome there, you have a chance to absorb the inevitable ambiguous roadblocks along the way. Like, “Oh, the bathrooms aren't open in this terminal. Okay. We're going to figure that one out. Okay. There's, there's no food on this side. Okay, let's go figure that out.” Still, the goal is the same. The goal is hey, we're going to get to Dallas, or whatever it is. That means if you have to take a different flight, you have to take a different flight. Might have to take a different connection. You need to check a bag, or not check a bag. Whatever the options are along the way, having a focus on the end goal and attachments to yourself and your own resiliency are two really powerful ways to keep yourself motivated when everything's a little bit in the fog.

Cristina Amigoni: That doesn't mean that we should eliminate the feelings we have in those panic moments. Again, it's not about repressing the panic and never panicking, or not getting angry, or not getting depressed. Whenever the curveball comes, big or small, we have to live those feelings. They’re a part of who we are. We are emotional beings who occasionally think. Letting the emotions go through, but those emotions, it's interesting, because once we let them be and we actually feel them and almost focus into them, we can figure out if I am pissed off, scared, depressed, what was I attached to that's not happening, or that's happening differently? They can be the indication. That's the data, like Susan David says. That's the data to indicate that there's something important there that's being challenged. Use the emotion, go through them, and then also realize, “Hey, now I can use this.” The one thing about the emotions we don't like, I would call the negative, they're just emotions. The emotions that we don't like to feel is that they can be fueling. They can turn around and you can find energy into them, especially if you can start believing, “I will figure it out. It will be fine. I have survived. I've seen this quote many times. I have survived a 100% of the days and of the things that happened to me so far.” Still here. Still survived. Will it be the way I wanted it to be? No. Will it be pleasant? Sometimes yes, sometimes horribly not, but we'll survive it.

Alex Cullimore: That's a really good point. I think you have to feel those things. Because otherwise, you can double your energy output and try and push those things down. Spend a bunch of time telling yourself you shouldn't be stressed out about it. You shouldn't do this. Or, use it as the understanding and you can redirect that. See, that's one line of research has been I've been discovering lately. I don't think it's super recent, but it's new to me. The idea that anxiety and excitement are actually very similar physical sensations. When you're feeling very anxious, very nervous about something, even just telling yourself, “Now I'm pretty excited about this opportunity.” If you're nervous about how a presentation is going to go or something, telling yourself you're excited for the opportunity to do it, can redirect the already existing energy in your body of, “Hey, I'm feeling anxious,” to excitement, because your body doesn't really know the difference. It's a very similar physiological response. We are in both cases in an aroused state and in a much more alert state, but we can direct that towards a more, for lack of a better term, positive or negative psychology, depending on how we invest in it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that's very true. Again, that doesn't mean that we should create ambiguity when it's not necessary. We can learn to embrace it and we can learn to be comfortable with the feeling of ambiguity and our journey through it. Unless you're like us, it may not be a good hobby to just create ambiguity for the hell of it and see what happens to people when you do that. I think it's still a good practice to try and minimize the ambiguity, because there's so much. There's so much ambiguity we go through every single day, personal, work life, other life, weather, you name it, aging, gray hair, anything, everything is ambiguous. If we could reduce, especially in the organizations, the ambiguity for our people, they would actually spend more time doing what they're supposed to be doing and be productive and engaged, rather than spinning and trying to get out of multiple panic moments that could have been prevented with things like communication, clarity, structure.

Alex Cullimore: Even saying, communicating out that you don't know where things are going to go yet is better communication than no communication. Because no communication, everyone fills in the story exactly how they want it. By how they want it, I mean, the natural human bias towards the most negative possible interpretation of the story. That is where people are going to go. In an organization, even if you can't provide perfect clarity, even saying like, we're still working on this, or here's what we're considering, or here's the reality of the situation and we're still even – it’s a great opportunity to solicit ideas from teams, too. But it's a chance to just tell people we're working through this, with rather than just holding back until you have a plan. Because the longer you hold back and the longer you hold back on communicating anything, the more spun-out people get and the longer it's going to take to wrangle them back in when you do have a more definitive message you can give.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, indeed. As leaders, I think it's very common to think that as soon as we get the title, or the team in the org chart reporting to us, we also somehow get permanently certified as chief solution officers. That's not our job. It doesn't mean we have to have all the answers. It's okay to say, I don't know. It's okay to just say, “Hey, here's all the information. I have no idea what this means for the future. I have no idea how things will plan out. I don't even know what to do with the information yet, but here's all the information.” Because like you said, there are some seriously dark movies in people's heads when the opposite is silence.

Alex Cullimore: Hey, I see it going on with the economy alone. You can just see a couple bumps and then people start doing things like layoffs and was that necessary? Maybe, maybe not. Then it starts to catch on like, this weird contagion where other people start to do like, was it necessary? Was it necessary to start this and ironically create weird conditions that you were worried about might happening? It's an interesting exercise in global manifestation.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Yeah. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy.

Alex Cullimore: Market manifestation.

Cristina Amigoni: I'm sure that there are times in the economy where it is – Actually, no. I'm going to take that back. I'm not an economist. This is definitely my completely biased opinion on a soapbox. Given that humans are the ones that create economy, humans are the ones that make it hard and destroy it. It is actually up to us. There is no third outside somehow divine intervention that makes the economy go up or down. We do it. We do it to ourselves. What's happening now, it's some of that, is like, it's really hard to believe that there's a recession when you can't find a parking spot at any hours of the day, of any day of the week at the airport. Where there's literally more people that I've ever seen, even on the week before Christmas. Any time, 3 a.m. and we've done that, thanks to delayed flights. Recession, really? Apparently, there's money. Somebody's spending money, because these flights are not free. Actually, they're probably twice as expensive as they used to be, even six months ago. Restaurants is the same thing. It's impossible to get a seat in a restaurant. You have to make reservation weeks or days in advance. Then you can only go at 10.15 a.m. on the Tuesday after Labor Day to be able to get a seat. Money is out there. People are spending money. They may not be spending it in the same way that they were before pre-pandemic. Maybe it's not on things and it's on experiences. There's also the bubble of the gigantic hiring that happened during the pandemic that now it's being regulated through, unfortunately, massive layoffs. Those are all things that we do. That humans do. Again, there's not somebody from Mars, or somebody from a different galaxy that comes in and just switches the dial on the economy. What if we actually took responsibility for how we react to rumors, to feelings, to fears, to the ambiguity and how we actually do make it a self-fulfilling prophecy, because of the actions that the humans do and therefore, the economy responds to.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. You kind of think of it like a school of fish. They all are reacting to the movements of everything around them. If you take that half moment to change your reaction and be like, “Hey, I don't think this is actually a shark coming our way and you don't swim,” other people also end up following that. We have a little control in our own destiny, even if the destiny becomes attached to the larger group. It is incumbent on all of us to have some of that responsibility to take it, which means taking a flyer on our gut instinct and saying, “Yeah, I don't know that this is the time to jump, or freak out.” You can still do things with precautions and you don't have to stand against the crowd all the time. It’s not like there aren't dangers out there. But it's worth our little investigation and it takes some guts to hold to your convictions and be like, “Yeah, I don't think this is the right move,” just because everybody seems to be moving right now.

Cristina Amigoni: Well, and to hold to some critical thinking. Because that's the thing. It's also a, for lack of better words, almost laziness in critical thinking. Is like, is this necessary? Or is it necessary to go through this? Maybe it is in a lot of cases. I'm not saying that every company is out there laying people off when they shouldn't, or they don't need to, but there are different ways of looking at things. There are, like Simon Sinek talks about it in The Infinite Game, those parameters that companies come up with, which are completely random. Again, human created. There's no master plan anywhere that tells you that these are the numbers you have to hit every quarter. That's when you have to hit them and how you have to hit them. That's all human created, man-made. Those are the things that, where's the critical thinking? Just because we're cutting costs by laying a bunch of people off, is that really the first solution, the only solution? Is that all we're going to think about? Maybe there's a million other ways. In the 2008 recessions, there are tons of examples of company that didn't just jump on the bandwagon, because it was panic moment. This is how you do it. This is how you cut costs is you cut people. Right. Then you hire them back at a premium two years later, or 10 months later when humans turn the economy around. How did that work out on your numbers from a long-term perspective?

Alex Cullimore: At least, you shot morale in the foot.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. Exactly. Look at productivity. I was reading an article yesterday on how productivity is the lowest, it keeps dipping. It keeps getting lower and lower and lower every year. No, it's not about the working from home. But it's just the overall insecurity and ambiguity and engagement. No. Honestly, people knowing that they don't matter. In a good number of companies, they don't matter because the arbitrary quarter number matters way more, which could probably be saved by using one-ply toilet paper for a month. Who knows? That's a bit like, where’s the creativity of that?

Alex Cullimore: Always go straight to people, which is the most delicate and one of the worst places to cut. I mean, it's not saying that you never have to. It's just when you do that, you inevitably cause all the ripple effects and it's much harder. You want people to be – It's always difficult, I find, to look at companies demanding loyalty and saying, people just don't want to work for companies. They're not going to stick around. Then turning around and firing a third of their staff. I'm like, well, okay, this is a two-way street. You don't get to ask for loyalty in one way and then like, well. But it's inconvenient for us now, so you're out the door.

Cristina Amigoni:  Exactly. Yeah. Well, and that’s it. I know Simon talks about that in The Infinite Game as well. It's just going, it doesn't work that way. You can't complain about people now showing up to the office when then you turn around and lay off at the first sign of like, “Oh, we're not making our quarter number. Go people, first, move. You're not moving fast enough, out the door.”

Alex Cullimore: We're not family. Just like a family, we will be getting rid of the low performers.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It just doesn't work that way. There's critical thinking. We all have it. It is a capacity of all our human brains. It's not just for the select few. But let's communicate. Let's find ways. Let's figure it out. Yes, sometimes it does end up that some people may have to go. Is it? Why is it a plan A, as opposed to plan three off of it's over because we've tried everything else first?

Alex Cullimore: It is funny that you mention things like the ambiguous quarterly numbers that people bring up. Simon Sinek likes to bring that up. We just created some quarterly numbers. Then even if you don't make the number, it doesn't even mean that you didn't make money. It just, you didn't make what you thought you might be able to make. It's funny when we talk about ambiguity and we talk about creating clarity. It sounds like a clear goal when you're like, we're going to get to X amount of revenue. Yet that is ambiguous. It's not really within your control. It can be something you aim for, but does it actually mean you didn't perform when you don't get there? We’re working with a software company that had to do some massive migration and they were using it on Azure. For a little while, one of the Microsoft services slowed down. You're working with cloud services, occasionally some things are slower. Does that mean the team failed? Does it mean they couldn't make their exact deadline? Did they do something wrong? Oh, no. You still have the same goal. You still have the same performance and it was out of their control. This is why contracts have the force majeure clause where it's like, yeah, we do have the ability to change this contract if there's acts of God and crazy things that happen. We do assume that is out there. Yet, we set these arbitrary goals where we're like, “I can't believe we didn't make it. That's ridiculous.”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Exactly. I'm surprised those contracts haven't been changed to the act of economy, instead of act of God apparently. It's a totally external being that's controlling our fate here on the financial side of things. It's true. I've been meaning to talk about it and also, to share the Giannis, and I'm not going to attempt to say his last name on the podcast. Video where he pushes back on a reporter saying, “Hey, so did you consider this season a failure?” Because whatever team he's working, he's playing on, which I also did not look it up, so I don't remember where it is.

Alex Cullimore: Topnotch basketball facts.

Cristina Amigoni: Didn't make it to the playoffs, or didn't make it past the first series of the playoffs. Whatever the story is, which clearly, and I love NBA enough that they'll actually have to get the facts to tell the story. The core of it, what I really wanted to get to is the fact that he looks at the reporter. He's like, “You know what? You asked me the same question last year. It's the wrong question. It's not a failure, just because we are not winning the championship. You can't look at it that way. There's no failure in sports. Did we try? Yes. Did we try our best? Yes. Did we try our semi best? Yes. Then it was a success. We can’t win the championship every single time.” He uses Michael Jordan as an example. The Chicago Bulls won – he played for 16 seasons and they won nine. Are the others a failure? No, of course not. Because not everybody wins every single time. If the measure of success is having a trophy as the winning, so what if success, what is winning is a different definition than having a trophy, or a ring that you bring home?

Alex Cullimore: That's a great way of looking at it. I have seen that clip floating around. It's a great interview. I would absolutely recommend that to anybody who hasn't seen it yet. It's very powerful. I like the idea of using that as a sports team is that you think about seasons, you can think about that and make the metaphor of business quarters. We all decide that this quarter is where this goal ends, or whatever, which is even more arbitrary to think about it. We just determined this three-month period is the important one. Anyway, that's a total side topic, but that’s a different level of ambiguity. If a team is working its way up and say, it has a hard season, or a good bunch of good players retired and/or whatever it is, it's traded away and now they have – you have to work your way back up, become a cohesive team, etc., there's progress being made each season as you work towards, hopefully, eventually getting to a trophy. Not to say you shouldn't chase those. You shouldn't be looking for the trophies, but if you took four seasons to get up to it, are all of those failures, or each of those better than the last and you could never get to the one where you actually win it without having those first four? That shortsighted perspective of it's only just about the ring this year, which I'm not saying, again, you shouldn't chase that. But the second that's over, then it's only a success if you get it again the next year? It's only a success if you get it again the next year? Where does the train end and what is the actual measure of success there, and how do you account for improvement? If you've got, I don't actually know how many NBA teams there are, but I'm going to say there’s at least 30. There's 30 of them out there.

Cristina Amigoni: I think 32, 33.

Alex Cullimore: 29 that don't make it. Yeah, sounds about right. 31 teams are failures every season? I mean, yeah, they didn't win the championship, but each one is making a stronger stride, changing the game a little bit, doing something new, trying a new tactic, having a new team bonding. Whatever it is that drives that continued success and gets them towards another – the goal still might be winning trophies, but you still have to get the progress to get there. Is it a failure if you're still walking towards that? You're still in the right path. Even if you can't see the path.

Cristina Amigoni: Which sometimes we can, or we lay out the path and then it's – well, we are guaranteed is that it's not going to go the way we expected. There is one thing that it’s not ambiguous.

Alex Cullimore: The only thing you could be totally sure of.

Cristina Amigoni: It will always be met with ambiguity. Ambiguity is the only place really that we have to go. It's the only place where we learn, because we don't learn when we know everything already. It's the only place where things move. We evolved. We evolve every day. Every day is different. Everything we do is different. The only way that happened is because the moment that is about to be in front of us, it's ambiguous. That's it. It's never certain. There's nothing certain.

Alex Cullimore: As much as I know, everybody loves a good probability question. This is actually mathematically proven as well that you can't predict something on a continuous scale. You can never be a 100%. Almost assure that you can't – there's a 0% chance of you predicting it right. You think about every single number between zero and one. I mean, every single one, every possible combination of decimals between zero and one. There are infinite numbers between that – between those two. If I ask you to pick one and whether it was the – the one I picked or something, there is a one over infinity chance that you pick that one. At which point, that is actually zero. You're over infinity, it's zero. There's no chance of you, which guarantees that whatever you predict of the future, it will not be exactly that. You can get close. You might be near. That's great. It’s not saying you can't predict these things. But the idea that it's only right if you get it to 100% right, well, you're guaranteeing yourself, you're going to be disappointed.

Cristina Amigoni: Indeed. Yeah. There you go. You've used your math theory degree. That's an ambiguous thing you went into.

Alex Cullimore: Very ambiguous.

Cristina Amigoni: You just create a certainty over it for a second.

Alex Cullimore: That was very ambiguous why I got that in the first place and now we're here. I guess, this was the reason.

Cristina Amigoni: How you would use it and yet, it keeps coming up.

Alex Cullimore: That's good. Actually, just as a closing, that is an interesting idea, because I didn't know how that was going to apply. I didn't know what it was going to be. But because it's knowledge that's in my head somewhere rattling around, it ends up inevitably coloring the context of how I see the world. That's why I end up with an analogy like here. Is it a perfect analogy? Is it one that makes sense to everybody? Hopefully, it makes sense enough. Regardless, it's just my context in the world. That's always going to be colored by that and it's not right or wrong, it's just what it is. It was still not right or wrong to have gone through and gotten, getting gotten to have received a math degree. But it ended up being used in different ways. I could never have predicted how it's going to apply. But it will also color your experience. Take all of it with a grain of salt. Understand whatever is happening and use it in a larger context. Save yourself the pain of thinking it has to mean something immediately.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes. Yeah. Or that you know where the path is, just because you have that. We don't know where the path goes. We know how we can deal with the path and what we bring to the path. Spend time and energy figuring that out. Because that's the only thing that we can count on is, how am I going to deal with the path?

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. There's a good quote that I will paraphrase, because I don't know the exact one. But it's a person can never stand –

Alex Cullimore: We’re getting a resource before we get on and we did this.

Alex Cullimore: We're just going ambiguous all the way down today. The quote is that a person can ever stand in the same river, because it's not the same river and they're not the same person. Even if you’re at the same place, everything is fluid past. You're a different person. You're a different experience. You can feel that even if you watch the same TV show twice, you're going to see something entirely different in it, because you're a different person.

Cristina Amigoni: I know. I'm on my fifth time watching the whole Suits season. There's things that you never noticed the first five times. The whole Suits series. Yeah, definitely. Great quote. Go.

Alex Cullimore: Embracing ambiguity.

Cristina Amigoni: Embrace ambiguity. Find yourselves in the dark fog of ambiguity. That's the only light.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That's actually yourself. It's the only thing you can count on.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening.

Cristina Amigoni: Thank you for listening to Uncover the Human, a Siamo Podcast.

Alex Cullimore: Special thanks to our podcast operations wizard, Jake Laura, and our score creator, Rachel Sherwood.

Cristina Amigoni: If you have enjoyed this episode, please share, review and subscribe. You can find our episodes wherever you listen to podcasts.

Alex Cullimore: We would love to hear from you with feedback, topic ideas, or questions. You can reach us at podcast@wearesiamo.com, or on our website, wearesiamo.com, LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. WeAreSiamo is spelled W-E-A-R-E-S-I-A-M-O.

Cristina Amigoni: Until next time, listen to yourself, listen to others and always uncover the human.