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Practice Tolerance for Adversity and Uncertainty: A Q&A with Terri Watson
H
ow do you explain the con- who are counting on me to coordinate their cept of Tolerance for Adversity efforts wonder: “Is it really bad now? Should and Uncertainty? we panic now?” they have some solidity. If The phrase Tolerance for Adversity and I can say, realistically, “No we got this. We Uncertainty has three big, important can do this,” and start moving forward with words in it: Adversity is when things are a can-do approach, that lets the whole team really hard, whether it’s physical or you’re function a lot better. just having an awful day. Uncertainty is when you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know the answers, and you don’t know what to do. Tolerance for those things is saying, “Huh, this kind of stinks, and I’m going to figure out what to do next and stay calm and do something worthwhile with what I have right here.” Why do you like this leadership skill so much? For me, it’s the skill that’s the most powerful. If I can learn to live in a world where things are hard and I don’t have all the information, and I don’t know when it’s going to get better—if I can do that, I think I can do anything. What are some of the ways you see yourself practicing Tolerance for Adversity today?
Terri calls Tolerance for Adversity and Uncertainty “the most powerful skill.” Joseph Hoff
30 | THE LEADER
The recent COVID experience has been the sharpening tool on how this skill really applies now in the frontcountry. In a leadership role, I’ve learned that the way I handle a situation affects absolutely everybody around me. And if I start not doing Tolerance for Adversity and Uncertainty well, people around me will start not doing it well. So, the biggest piece in leadership I’ve learned is it’s not only a skill I need to be adept at, but it’s one I have to consciously and overtly model, so that when the people
Can you tell us a story about students learning this skill? I was teaching an Alaska sea kayaking course. We instructors sent the students off on their independent travel, when they had four days to get to our pick-up point completely independent of instructors. A few hours later, the sky turned totally black. Stuff started falling from the sky that looked like snow, but it wasn’t. We were like, “What is going on?” It was volcanic ash. Mount Spurr, on the other side of Anchorage, had erupted. At first, we were worried about our students, but we knew they knew how to find us if they had problems. When we reunited at the end of the four days and heard their stories, the students were just living out Tolerance for Adversity and Uncertainty. “What’s happening? Will this get worse? Will we actually be able to get to our pick-up?” And they, as a group, worked through all kinds of scenarios and came up with solutions and tried to come up with plans. They said that the act of all that problem-solving, feeling like they could take proactive action, made this totally bizarre event more of an adventure than terrifying. I was really proud of them because they had actually used a lot of stuff they learned in classes. They solved their own problems and made their own solutions with the information they were gleaning.
