Certainty is a skill, not a mood

At A Glance

Certainty feels like safety — but it's often your brain rewarding relief, not accuracy. A childhood story about leadership, and why curiosity has to be built on purpose.

When I was young, a group of us—friends, plus a handful of neighbourhood kids — went on a trek near the conservation area where we lived.

I decided it'd be a great idea to go further out, off the path. So we did. We ended up in a bog. Everyone came home covered in mud, having had a great day and a surprise adventure.

What I remember about that day isn't just the mud. It was realizing that the whole group had followed me into a bog because I'd decided we should.

That's the first time I recognized anything like leadership in myself—not because I was right, but because I'd committed to a direction and people came with me.

That pattern held for years. Read the situation, trust my intuition, commit with energy and enthusiasm and drive it through. Even when I was wrong, I got good at owning it by laughing about it and moving on.

What took me longer to learn: leading doesn't have to start with the commitment. It can start with the question.

Asking more, gathering more, checking with the people around me before deciding I already see the whole picture — that wasn't something anybody ever modelled for me or taught me.

It took learning about coaching for performance to understand that curiosity first is its own kind of leadership.

There's a reason jumping to a conclusion feels better than sitting in "I don't know" yet and a curiosity mindset.

Your brain rewards resolving uncertainty, independent of whether the conclusion is even right. It's not going towards accuracy, it's moving toward the safety of "we can stop looking now."

You can see this before a conversation even starts. Walk into a meeting already thinking "this person's going to be difficult" and you've made your decision before they've said a word. Everything they say next gets sorted into evidence for what you already decided. If you can get back even behind that initial assumption then you're taking in the same conversation with a completely different filter.

Nothing about the other person changed. What changed is whether you were still gathering information or just confirming what you'd already settled on.

We can all talk and read about "getting curious." But I see it more as a skill that has to be built on purpose. This shows up for anyone leading anything— a team, a household or a client. The strength that gets you into the room is often the same strength that makes you stop looking too soon out of habit and lack of a better strategy.

The fix isn't deciding less. It's intentionally staying open a bit longer before deciding you're done looking.