The world’s particularly chaotic right now: we’re in a news cycle that seems designed to keep everyone anxious. If you’re finding it harder than usual to think clearly, plan ahead, or stay focused, you’re not imagining it.
But uncertainty isn’t new. What’s new is how relentlessly we’re exposed to it: 50 years ago, you might have heard about a geopolitical crisis a day later, in a newspaper, with some editorial distance. Today, it arrives in real time, from every direction, often before anyone actually knows what’s happening.
The result is that people end up stressed out, burning enormous amounts of mental energy on things they have absolutely no power to change, energy that comes from the thinking, planning, and action-taking that could actually make a difference in their lives.
I’m not saying you should ignore the news or just pretend that everything is fine. Instead, this week I want to give you some tips to help you to direct your attention strategically toward the things that are actually within your control.
Why we fixate on what we can’t control
It’s not a character flaw: it’s biology! The brain has a threat-detection system that was designed for a very different world, where threats were physical, immediate, and local. Spot the danger, respond to it, survive. The system is fast, reactive, and hardwired to keep scanning even when the threat isn’t something you can run from or fight.
Right now, that system is being overwhelmed. The ‘threats’ are abstract, global, and never-ending, and for every one of them, there are dozens of social media posts, opinion pieces, and push notifications designed to keep you engaged… and worried.
Being concerned about what’s happening in the world isn’t the problem. The problem is when that concern turns into catastrophising, which eats away at the focus and energy you need to actually run your life.
Resilient people aren’t immune to anxiety. Instead, they learn how to redirect their attention before it gets stuck in the spiral. There’s a framework behind it, and it’s worth knowing.
How circles can help you
In his brilliant book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey introduces this framework, but the underlying idea is far older. Imagine you’ve got three concentric circles.
The outer ring is your Circle of Concern. Everything that you care about or worry about sits here: the economy, interest rates, what your competitors are doing, the political landscape, global events.
These things matter, and yes, they may even affect you. But you have no direct control over them.
The middle ring is your Circle of Influence. These are things you can affect, even if you can’t control them outright. Your reputation, your relationships, the quality of your work, the advice you give, the information you share. You have some ability to shape outcomes here.
The inner ring is your Circle of Control, and this is smaller than most people would like to admit. It includes your decisions, your habits, your responses, your preparation, your mindset. You own this ring completely.
The insight offered here by Covey is that highly effective people spend the vast majority of their time and energy in the inner two rings. Less effective people spend most of their energy in the outer ring, reacting to things they can’t change, which gradually erodes their confidence and sense of agency.
I’m not saying that you should be indifferent to the world around you here. What I’m saying is that you need to be strategic with your attention. It’s a finite resource, and where you direct it determines your results.
What control looks like in practice
It’s easy to nod along to frameworks, but it’s much harder to actually apply them when you’re doomscrolling at 7am.
So what could the circles actually look like?
As an example, you can’t control interest rates. But you can control how you stress-test your deals, whether you’re over-leveraged, and whether you’ve built in enough buffer to weather a rate environment you didn’t predict.
You can’t control what the market does next year. But you can control the quality of your research, the discipline of your due diligence, and whether you’re making decisions based on evidence or optimism.
You can’t control when a recession might hit. But you can control your cash reserves, your relationships with lenders, your operational costs, and the resilience of your income streams.
In every example, the version of you that focuses on the inner circle is better prepared, less anxious, and more capable of acting decisively when it matters. The version that fixates on the outer circle tends to either freeze, or make impulsive, reactive decisions driven by fear.
Resilience isn’t passive
So I know there’s a version of resilience that sounds a lot like gritting your teeth and getting on with it, and that’s not what I mean here.
Real resilience is something you build before you need it. It’s not a personality trait you either have or don’t, it’s a set of habits, systems, and ways of thinking that you develop over time, through deliberate effort.
I’ve written before about the difference between constructive and destructive suffering. The key distinction: constructive suffering has a purpose, a direction, and an outcome that strengthens you. Destructive suffering just grinds you down. The same principle applies to how you engage with uncertainty.
If exposure to a volatile market teaches you to build better systems, ask sharper questions, and make decisions with more intellectual honesty, that’s constructive. If it just keeps you anxious and second-guessing yourself without changing anything, it’s destructive.
The practice of resilience, in a circles-of-control frame, looks something like this: every time you notice your energy going toward something you can’t change, you redirect it toward something you can. Not by pretending the external situation doesn’t exist, but by asking, given that this is the environment you’re operating in, what’s the best thing you can actually do?
That question is deceptively powerful. It accepts reality as it is, and then helps you look for agency within it.
From victim of circumstance to agent of outcome
There’s a subtle but important mindset shift sitting underneath all of this.
People who are paralysed by uncertainty tend to see themselves as subject to forces beyond their control, and technically, they’re right. The forces are beyond their control. But somewhere in that framing, they’ve also placed themselves outside the equation, as if their own actions and decisions are irrelevant in the face of macro uncertainty.
People who act through uncertainty don’t pretend those forces don’t exist, they just don’t let them take control. That’s not toxic positivity, which I think is quite destructive, it’s more a case of acknowledging what’s hard and uncertain, and combining it with a refusal to stop asking: and what can I do about it?
I’ve talked before about antifragility, the idea that some systems actually get stronger under stress rather than just surviving it, and people can work this way too. But if you can sharpen your thinking, tighten your systems and get really clear on your priorities, you could turn the current global uncertainty into something really productive. Not despite the chaos, but instead because of how you’ve chosen to respond to it.
Putting it into practice
Something you could do this week, if this has resonated with you, is to write down everything that’s currently taking up space in your head. The worries, the what-ifs, the things you’re tracking, the decisions you’re sitting on, the situations you’re trying to work out. Don’t edit it, just get it all down.
Now go through the list and sort each item into one of three columns: things you can control, things you can influence, and things you genuinely can’t affect.
Most people find that the third column is considerably longer than they expected. That’s not a problem, actually it’s useful information. Once you’ve named what you can’t control, you can stop spending energy on it and redirect that energy somewhere it will actually count.
Remember, the world may be uncertain, but your response to it doesn’t have to be.