The Most Exhausting Performance Is Certainty

I am a cardiologist. I have spent twenty years in rooms where not knowing something is supposed to mean I have failed at my job. I have not failed at my job. But I have paid, in cortisol and in sleep and in the slow narrowing of my own thinking, for the years when I performed certainty I did not feel.

Here is what I learned. The people who trust me most are not the ones I convinced with the appearance of certainty. They are the ones I sat with while I said, honestly, "I don't yet have the full picture, and here is what I am going to do to get it." That sentence never collapsed the room. It always made the room larger.

This week, find one question you have been answering with performed confidence. Just one. Let it be open for a day. You do not have to announce the uncertainty. Just stop paying the maintenance cost of the pretense.

The body will notice the difference before your mind does. The chest will be slightly less tight. The thinking will have slightly more range. That is the physiological signal of honest uncertainty being allowed to exist.

— Job