The phrase is everywhere

There is a phrase you cannot escape right now.

You hear it in boardrooms and on podcasts, in news articles and dinner conversations, from politicians and from the person next to you on the train who has been staring at their phone with a look you recognise.

We are living through unprecedented times.

It is said with a particular weight. The gravity of someone delivering news that changes things. And the people listening nod, because it feels true. Because something about the present moment does feel genuinely strange and new and difficult to navigate.

But I want to push on this a little. Because I think the phrase is doing two things at once, and only one of them is helpful.

What it gets right

The first thing it is doing is describing reality. And on that front, it has a point. The pace of change is genuinely disorienting. The volume of information is genuinely overwhelming. Artificial intelligence is rewriting entire industries in real time, and nobody, not even the people building it, fully understands where it ends. The geopolitical order that held, however imperfectly, for seventy years is fracturing, with alliances shifting, borders contested, and the assumption of Western institutional stability looking less stable than it did a decade ago.

The sense that the ground keeps shifting is not imaginary. Something real is being named.

But the second thing the phrase is doing is quieter and more insidious. It is suggesting that ‘unprecented times’ have never happened before. That previous generations had it figured out. That somewhere behind us, there was solid ground, and we have somehow wandered off it.

And that part is simply not true.

Others were here before us

Consider what the generation born in 1900 lived through by the time they were fifty.

Two world wars. The Spanish flu, which killed between 50 and 100 million people in two years. The Great Depression, which wiped out savings, ended businesses and broke families across the industrialised world. The rise of fascism and the fall of empires. The invention of the telephone, the automobile, powered flight and nuclear weapons, all within a single lifetime. The complete restructuring of social order, of gender roles, of what work meant and who got to do it.

If they had gathered around a table in 1950, they would have had every justification in the world to look at each other and say: we are living through unprecedented times.

They would have been right.

Or consider the generation that came of age in the mid-fourteenth century and watched a third of Europe die of the plague in four years. No explanation that made sense. No treatment that worked. No way to know who would be next or when it would stop. Just a world that had, without warning, become completely unrecognisable from the one they had grown up in.

Every generation, at some point, has stood in the middle of a moment that felt like it broke the rules of how things were supposed to go. And every one of them had to find a way to live inside that moment rather than waiting for it to pass.

The hidden trap inside the phrase

Here is where the phrase becomes a problem.

When we tell ourselves that our times are unprecedented, we are not just describing our situation. We are also, quietly, reaching backwards. The subtext of unprecedented is: compared to what came before. And what came before, in the imagination, is always more stable. More comprehensible. More manageable.

There is a word for this. Nostalgia. The longing for a past that, on closer inspection, was not quite what the longing imagines it to be.

Nostalgia is a very human response to uncertainty. The brain reaches for what it knows. It searches its memory for a time when things made sense, when the rules were clear, when you knew what to expect. And it finds something. It always does. Because memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction, and reconstructions tend to edit out the confusion and fear and helplessness of the original experience.

The result is a past that never quite existed. A golden age assembled from selected fragments. And the more disorienting the present feels, the more golden that past becomes.

None of this is a character flaw. It is a cognitive pattern, and a very old one.

But it is worth seeing clearly, because nostalgia dressed up as analysis is just comfort seeking. And comfort seeking, while entirely understandable, does not actually help us navigate the moment we are in.

The leader facing a team that is anxious and disoriented is not helped by longing for the days when people were easier to manage. The organisation navigating a market that has changed is not helped by the story that things used to be simpler, because even if they were, they are not now.

The past is not available. It never was.

What history shows

What the generations before us actually demonstrate, if we look at them honestly rather than nostalgically, is something more useful than stability.

They demonstrate adaptability. They demonstrate that human beings are capable of enormous recalibration under pressure. That meaning can be found inside chaos. That the capacity to act, to connect, to build something, to keep going, does not require certainty as a precondition.

The people who survived the plague did not do it by waiting for the world to return to normal. The people who rebuilt after the Depression did not do it by mourning what the Depression had taken. They did it by orienting themselves to what was actually there, as it actually was, and working with that.

Overwhelmed means paralyzed

So what does that mean in practice?

It starts with noticing the difference between the story and the situation. The story is “everything is falling apart and we are uniquely unprepared.” The situation is a specific set of challenges, in a specific context, with specific people, specific resources, and specific choices available. One of those is paralyzing. The other is workable.

It means asking smaller questions. Not “how do we navigate an unprecedented era”. That question has no answer and invites only overwhelm. But “what is the one thing that most needs attention this week.” Not “how do we restore certainty” but “what would a good enough decision look like right now, with what we actually know.”

And perhaps most importantly, it means staying in contact with the people around you. Uncertainty is lonelier when it is unspoken. The generation of 1900 did not survive its century by each person quietly managing their own anxiety in isolation. They did it in kitchens and communities and workplaces, by talking to each other honestly about what they were facing, and finding out that the person next to them was also frightened, also uncertain, also making it up as they went.

That has not changed.

Navigating, not surviving

Unprecedented does not mean unsurvivable. It means navigating without a precise map, which is uncomfortable, and which the brain finds genuinely threatening. But the absence of a map is not the absence of direction.

You can still orient yourself. You can still take a step. You can still pay attention to what is actually in front of you. And you can do it with the knowledge that every generation that came before you was doing exactly the same thing, in their own version of a world that had stopped making sense.

They found their footing. Not because the ground became solid again. But because they stopped waiting for it to.

There’s a particular kind of person who believes they’ve made peace with uncertainty. They run things. Make calls on incomplete information. Launch things that might fail. They’ve told themselves that they’re comfortable with not knowing.

Worth examining whether that’s actually true, or whether they’re just fast.

Fast enough to outrun the discomfort. Fast enough to replace one unresolved thing with three new decisions, each generating its own small cloud of not-knowing to be dealt with later. Speed can feel a lot like competence. It’s a very effective anaesthetic. Untill the speed stops working. And the faster you move, the worse you feel.

What nobody tells you about uncertainty: your brain treats it as a threat.

Not a puzzle. Not a challenge. A threat. The same neural architecture that kept our ancestors alive is now scanning inboxes, news feeds, and quarterly forecasts and finding danger everywhere.

The research on this is annoyingly clear. Uncertainty activates the amygdala more reliably than actual bad news. The brain would rather know something terrible is coming than not know what’s coming at all. Given the choice between definite pain and possible pain, we’ll often choose definite. Just to end the suspense.

This isn’t a design flaw you can think your way around. It’s not a mindset problem. It’s architecture.

Which means the right question isn’t “How do I get comfortable with uncertainty?”

It’s: “How do I work with a nervous system that’s convinced uncertainty might kill me?”

The instinct, when uncertainty spikes, is to move.

Make decisions. Create certainty through action. Close the open loops. Feel like something is being done.

Sometimes that’s exactly right. Sometimes the best response to chaos is a clear decision.

But often, the urge to act is just the nervous system trying to discharge discomfort. The action isn’t strategic. It’s self-soothing dressed up as leadership.

A teacher I respect once said: “The quality of your decisions is directly related to the state you make them from.”

Infuriating to hear. Also correct.

There’s a difference between acting on uncertainty and acting from it. One is responsive. The other is reactive. They look similar from the outside. They feel completely different on the inside.

The research points to something counterintuitive.

The people who handle uncertainty best aren’t the ones who’ve eliminated their discomfort. They’re the ones who’ve changed their relationship to it.

They feel the same things. The tightness in the chest, the racing thoughts at 3am, the urge to scroll for something that feels like information but is really just more noise. They just don’t take those feelings as commands.

This, it turns out, is trainable. Not a personality trait. Not something you’re born with or without. Something you can learn.

Here’s a stupidly simple practice.

When things get loud, when the mind is three moves ahead, gaming out scenarios, rehearsing arguments with people who aren’t in the room : pause. Just a few seconds.

Ask yourself: what’s the weather like in here?

Not “why am I anxious” or “what should I do about this.” Just: what’s actually happening? Tight chest. Racing thoughts. Low-grade dread. Fine. That’s the weather.

Don’t try to change it. Just name it.

It sounds too simple to work. It probably is too simple. But I can tell you it works.

Something about naming an internal state creates a small amount of distance from it. You shift from being the storm to noticing the storm. The storm doesn’t stop. But you’re no longer lost in it.

The unexpected part is what comes next.

The more you practice this, just noticing and naming, the more something else starts to become visible. Underneath the anxiety, there’s often something useful. A signal that was too quiet to hear while you were running.

Sometimes it’s genuine intuition about a situation. Sometimes it’s an old pattern getting triggered. Helpful to know, so you don’t act from it. Sometimes it’s just the body pointing out that caffeine stopped being a substitute for sleep about three days ago.

The discomfort isn’t noise. It’s information. You just can’t read it while you’re trying to escape it.

To be clear: the goal isn’t to become calm.

Calm is not really the goal. The goal is to be less hijacked. To have a slightly longer pause between stimulus and response. To make decisions from something other than the desperation to feel certain again.

I’ll speak for myself here: some days I manage this reasonably well. Other days I make a decision purely because I can’t stand the ambiguity for one more hour. It isn’t the right call. I know it isn’t the right call while I’m making it. But the not-knowing sometimes becomes intolerable, and that’s that.

That is the practice, though. You see yourself doing it. You do it anyway. You notice. You try again.

The uncertainty isn’t going away.

There’s no framework, system, or three-step process that converts chaos into control. Any piece of writing that promises otherwise is selling something.

What does seem to be true: you can get better at being in it. Not comfortable, exactly. But less destabilised. More able to wait when waiting is wise, and move when movement is actually needed.

It doesn’t require believing anything in particular. It just requires practice. Small, unglamorous, repetitive practice.

Noticing what’s actually happening, while the world does whatever it was going to do regardless.

The ground was never as solid as it seemed. Turns out you can stand on it anyway.

I generally prefer to talk about what mindfulness is rather than what it isn’t. But I keep running into people who’ve written off the whole thing based on ideas that are just flat wrong. So here’s my attempt to clear some of that up.

You need to learn a bunch of new skills

Some mindfulness programs get this backwards. They treat it like yet another competency to acquire. Like another item on your already absurd to-do list. But here’s the thing: you’ve been mindful before. Probably many times. Remember that meeting where you noticed your heart rate spiking? Or that conversation with a friend where you picked up on what she was really saying, underneath the words? That’s mindfulness. You already have the capacity. The question is whether you’re using it on purpose or only by accident. Practicing mindfulness isn’t about learning something new. It’s about exercising something you already have but almost never use.

You have to empty your mind

This is the misconception that does the most damage. Most of us can’t empty our minds for more than a few seconds, let alone minutes. (I certainly can’t.) So let me be clear: you do not need to become some detached, levitating version of yourself who floats above the chaos. Mindfulness is just paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, without immediately judging what you find. A lot of the exercises are about noticing. Sounds. What you see. Your own thoughts. Just noticing them. Not trying to make them go away.

It takes too much time (and you don’t have any)

This is the objection I hear the most. And I get it. Everybody’s busy. But I’d push back. The real obstacle isn’t a lack of time. It’s the belief that you’re already paying attention, when you’re not. You don’t need more time. You need more honest decisions about how to spend the time you’ve got. A few minutes a day of actual mindful practice makes a noticeable difference. And once you start weaving it into your daily life, it just kind of happens.

“I don’t like digging around inside myself”

This is where a lot of hard-charging business types tune out. They don’t have time for navel-gazing. They need to focus on their team, their customers, results. Fair point. But here’s the counterintuitive part: mindfulness isn’t really about looking inward. It’s about improving how you engage with everything around you. To do that, yeah, you need to listen to yourself first. Because when you’re more aware of your own state - your stress, your reactivity, your patterns - you listen better, respond instead of react, and see situations with more clarity.

It’s a spiritual thing

Let me guess: you’re picturing meditation cushions and incense and someone whispering about enlightenment. Look, some people go down that path, and more power to them. But you don’t need to become spiritual to benefit from being more mindful. Mindfulness is experiential. There are thousands of books and blogs on the subject, but the only way to know if it works is to try it. You don’t need to buy the whole philosophy. You decide how deep you want to go.

One more thing: there’s a growing mountain of scientific evidence that mindfulness works. But more on that later.

Most leaders think they’re good listeners. Most of their teams would disagree.

Last week I sat in a team meeting where someone was clearly trying to tell us something important. I missed it completely. I was three sentences ahead, rehearsing my response, half-drafting an email in my head.

By the time I tuned back in, the moment was gone.

I’ve been practicing mindfulness for years. And I still do this. Which is both humbling and, if you think about it, kind of reassuring. If I still screw this up, you’re allowed to as well.

Here’s the thing: listening is the most underrated leadership skill out there. Almost everyone overestimates how good they are at it. Including me, apparently, on a random Monday morning.

Hearing vs. listening

Hearing is automatic. Listening is a choice.

When you listen to respond -which is the default for most of us in business- you’re basically filtering everything through your own agenda. How does this affect me? Where do I disagree? What’s my move? The other person becomes a prompt for your own thinking.

You’re not in a conversation. You’re in a strategy session with yourself.

When you listen to understand, you set that aside. You get curious about what the other person is actually saying. Even when you disagree. Especially when you disagree.

The difference sounds small. In practice, people feel it immediately.

Why this keeps happening

Fast-paced environments reward quick responses. We mistake speed for decisiveness. Most leadership cultures quietly reinforce the idea that the person talking is the person leading.

But the best leaders I’ve worked with do something counterintuitive. They slow down. They ask a second question instead of jumping to a solution. And paradoxically, that speeds everything up. Because when people feel heard, trust builds faster, better ideas surface, and conflicts don’t fester into something worse.

When people don’t feel heard, they disengage. Quietly at first. Then permanently.

And here’s the brutal part: you won’t see it coming. Because nobody tells the leader who doesn’t listen that they don’t listen.

The harder part

To listen well to others, you have to notice what’s happening inside you first.

I know. That sounds like it belongs on a poster in a yoga studio. Stay with me.

Think about the last time someone pushed back on your idea in a meeting. Before they’d even finished the sentence, something fired up. A tightening in the chest. A story about their motives. An emotional filter colouring every word before it landed.

That’s not listening. That’s reacting with a polite face on.

The aim isn’t to suppress those reactions. You can’t, and trying to makes you robotic. The aim is to see them clearly enough that they stop running the conversation. There’s a world of difference between feeling defensive and being aware that you’re feeling defensive. The first one hijacks you. The second gives you a choice.

I used to think self-awareness was a soft skill. Something for off-sites and 360 reviews. Turns out it’s more like operational clarity about your own internal state. So it doesn’t leak into your decisions and conversations without your permission. Less navel-gazing, more not-being-an-idiot-in-meetings.

What changes

I once worked for a CEO who had a reputation for being intense. He was very smart. Visionary. Driven. But people walked on eggshells around him.

When he started paying attention to his own reactivity -really paying attention, not just nodding at the concept- something shifted. He didn’t become softer. He became more accurate. He started hearing what people were actually telling him, instead of what his stress was telling him they meant.

His team noticed within weeks. Not because he announced some initiative. Because they could feel it.

Attention is contagious. When you actually listen, people around you start doing the same. Not because you’ve told them to. Because you’ve changed the room by changing how you show up in it.

One thing to try

Pick one meeting today. Before you walk in, take three slow breaths. During the conversation, notice the moment your mind starts drafting a response while the other person is still talking.

That’s it. Just notice.

Afterwards, ask yourself: what did I hear that I would have missed otherwise?

You might be surprised. I was.