554: A Simple Way to Tolerate Uncertainty

Hi there, this is Elise Benin, your marketing mentor, and this is the podcast for you if and only if you are ready to leave the feast or famine syndrome behind, and I mean for good. there's a lot of uncertainty out there lately have you noticed that's why in today's solo episode I shared a few new ideas about how to invoke trust to counter the unknown. Not only trust in yourself and in the marketing process and in me, frankly, but also I talked about how to build trust in the minds of your people, your market, your network, which is going to be more and more important with the rise of AI.

So listen and learn. All right, I think it's time for another solo episode, that is. And I want to start by quoting one of my clients. She wrote to me, It feels like all of humanity is walking in a dark tunnel with a light at the end, ready to spill out into another world, but we have no idea what is there and what we might need to have when we get there.

The only thing that I feel certain of investing in is people and relationships and the strength of my own mind, I suppose. Unquote. I love this idea. Many of the ideas in here, especially of investing in people and relationships.

I agree with that. And the strength of one's own mind, not, I suppose, for sure. And so today I just wanted to talk a little bit about this unknown that she is talking about. I think a lot of people are feeling it for many different reasons.

And because we focus here on the Marketing Mentor Podcast on running a small business, then I'm especially talking about uncertainty and the unknown as it relates to your business. And one of the questions I've been asking my groups, my Simplest Marketing Plan, my Simplest Marketing Plus Plan Plus members is this question. What do you wish you knew about your business? Just think about that for a second I wonder what you would answer What do you wish you knew about your business And once you have a question or two for yourself then the next question is is the answer to your question even knowable Because when I did this in some of the recent community events, there were so many questions, so many different really good questions, some of which were totally knowable and others not knowable at all.

And so then the question became, can you tolerate not knowing the answer to that question, whatever it is? Because, you know, the unknown can be either terrifying or nerve wracking or exciting or maybe all of the above. And the thing is that I am a little bit more woo or woo woo, as we say, than usual this month, because I went on a yoga retreat in Italy earlier in the month. I crossed the ocean to spend a week with my awesome yoga teacher, Meg Shuba, at MegShubaYoga.

com. And she brought together an intergenerational group of 20 women. We were between the ages of 25 and 80. We did yoga.

We talked and talked and talked over three-hour, four-course meals. We bonded and we cultivated relationships, basically. And who knows what will come of them, right? There's the unknown right there.

We never know if the relationships we're starting will go anywhere, right? And of course, that includes the relationships you are starting, whether you are a member of the Simplest Marketing Plan or not. But with all of the marketing you're doing, the whole point is to begin to build and cultivate relationships with people whom you could help. That's the idea.

That's the goal of marketing. Now, I love not knowing what will happen, not knowing where things will go, which is also known as the uncertainty, the unknown. but clearly some people do not like it at all. And I get it.

But I do think we need to build our tolerance right about now for the unknown. And on the retreat, my yoga teacher gave me an idea about how to do that. And if you saw my quick tip recently, it was from May 27th, 2026. It's on the Marketing Mentor blog at marketing-mentor.

com. You'll be familiar with my favorite takeaway from that yoga retreat. Before I tell you what it is, I'm going to describe how you do it and you are welcome to follow along. It's super simple.

I just want you to close your eyes and interlace your fingers together and then put the palms of your hands on your heart This is called unshakable trust And she also said it a way to catch your heart in your hands, which I just love. So unshakable trust, I think maybe not the answer, there's never the answer, but an answer to this question of how do you build tolerance for the unknown and uncertainty? So the question then that I've been asking my members is what does unshakable trust mean to you?

Because as with everything, there are lots of different definitions. And I asked that in some events, as I said, but I also asked it on LinkedIn. And here are a couple of the responses that I loved. Catherine said, the concept of unshakable trust has meant that I shift focus away from what does this get me to more like, I know this will come back to me.

And I love that, right? So it's a mind shift away from what is automatically in your mind which tends to be very me, me, me oriented, over to something that involves other people and the future and the unknown. I know this will come back to me. What's implied there is I just don't know how or when, but that's all right.

Someone else named Kathy Lee wrote that unshakable trust means 0% doubt in the outcome of an action and nobody can talk you out of it. And I love that too, because of the strength of nobody can talk you out of it. And in response to her comment on my post, I wrote something like, that includes you yourself not talking you out of it, right? And she said, yep, for sure.

Because it seems to me, yes, there are people in your orbit who might try to talk you out of being self-employed or doing what you're doing or trying something new and a little risky. But what I see in the people that I work with is the self-doubt, the self-talk, the negative self-talk is the worst culprit of all. And that is actually something you can control. Then in the outreach club, which is a weekly kind of co-working session that comes along with the SMP Plus program, last Monday, I asked people to do their outreach with unshakable trust, whatever that means to them.

And at the end, I asked how it went. And one person said, yes, it was definitely less stressful because I trusted the process and let go of the outcome. I didn feel like I failed even if I did And that just a little bit sad because you didn fail She didn fail It just that nothing has happened yet You have to let go of the outcome Someone else wrote, it seems to be easier to respond confidently when I have unshakable trust, when I'm doing outreach with Unshakeable Trust. And I love that.

And by the way, this is really not just about trusting yourself and trusting the process and trusting me that I know what I'm talking about, because I have been doing this for almost 40 years now, and this is what works when you do it. But your market also needs to trust you. In fact, I do think that building trust with your market, in your market, that means your people, the people you want to help, is more and more important in this age of AI. Because at this point, already nobody knows who to trust.

And that's only going to get worse. So if you can use your marketing, especially your high quality content marketing, which is one of the simplest marketing plan tools to build trust, that's definitely one of the things that it can do, then you will be far ahead of the people who are not doing it. All right. I think that's probably enough for today.

Just a few ideas, seeds to be planting in your head. And I will leave you with the questions that I asked the members of the Simplest Marketing Plan to discuss in our networking breakouts when we meet monthly for office hours, which is happening today. I will ask them to discuss how do you deal with the unknown and what can you do to build your own tolerance for uncertainty and unshakable trust? What can you do to build unshakable trust?

All right, that's all for today. I'll be back again soon. Thanks so much for listening. I couldn't do this without you.

I do hope that was helpful. This idea of unshakable trust as the antidote to uncertainty is one I've been meditating on and building on for a bit now. It's inspired by what I'm hearing in the market, my market, of course, but also inspired by a new book I'm reading. It's called How to Not Know by Simone Stolzoff.

Highly recommended. So if you want my help figuring all this out, take advantage of my free mentoring session. You can find that and lots more resources, including my simplest marketing plan at marketing-mentor.com.

So enjoy, and I'll see you next time.