Responding to uncertainty: A compassionate approach to practice

DR MANDY TRUONG: Welcome everyone to the webinar. I would like to acknowledge where I'm speaking from. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to Traditional Owners across Australia. I also pay my respects to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples attending the webinar today. Before diving into our discussion, I have a little housekeeping to cover.

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I don't think I'm alone in saying this, but for me, 2026 has been a lot. Local, national and global events so far this year, along with the ongoing impacts from recent years, have increased the uncertainty and complexity in many of our lives. I have found myself feeling quite overwhelmed at times, if I'm being honest with you, and uncertain about how to manage feelings of stress or worry that I'm experiencing in my personal and professional life.

If you are feeling this way, I think we are not alone. Therefore, Emerging Minds and AIFS have brought together a panel of experts to help us understand and navigate these increasingly challenging times.

I'm really delighted to welcome and introduce today's speakers, Mary Freer and Dr Elly Quinlan. Their bios are in the handout section of the GoToWebinar dashboard. Unfortunately, Michelle Lazarus was unable to join us today due to a prior commitment but still wished to contribute to the webinar, so we have a pre-recorded video with Michelle from an earlier discussion, and we will broadcast this first before we dive into the live discussion with Mary and Elly. Over to you. Thank you.

Michelle, you introduced me to the concept of tolerating uncertainty about six years ago, around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was very uncertain. You've done a lot of research in this space and published a book on how to navigate uncertain times, and how to survive and thrive through uncertainty. When I think about the world that we are living in today, like the economic pressures such as cost of living, social change, and the fast pace of technology and all its impacts, I feel this concept is really highly relevant.

Can you tell me a bit more about this concept of tolerating uncertainty, or uncertainty tolerance? What it is and its relevance today?

PROF MICHELLE LAZARUS: That is a great question, Mandy. Similarly, as you raised, I had been doing research for about five years before COVID and no one seemed concerned or worried about uncertainty, despite us experiencing it every day. Every time we play the lottery, watch a football game, or are unsure of our task at work, there is uncertainty in everyday activities.

I think the point of difference with COVID-19, and when you talk about the present day, is that we are experiencing global-level uncertainty that is shared. I think that's what makes this experience different. When you ask what uncertainty tolerance is, or how we manage and respond to uncertainty, it's an idea that we first perceive uncertainty, like the COVID-19 pandemic at the start. We didn't know anything about this virus, so that would be the perception of uncertainty. Then we have a cognitive, emotional and behavioural response. Or we respond to that COVID-19 pandemic in the way we think, feel or act, and those can be adaptive responses where you are still engaging, or they can be maladaptive, where you shut down, lock yourself away or pretend COVID didn't exist. All of those would be considered, in that case, maladaptive responses to uncertainty.

Those three domains — cognition, behavioural and emotional responses — define our uncertainty tolerance. Interestingly, most of us, especially in Western cultures, perceive uncertainty as emotionally threatening because we view it as something that should be suppressed. If you look up the synonyms for uncertainty, I think 75% of them in the English language have a negative connotation, like anxiety. I think when we think about our responses to uncertainty, we need to recognise that often, especially in high-stakes situations like COVID where lives are at risk, or today where there is geopolitical insecurity, housing crises and financial challenges, all of those are high-stakes situations. So I just want to reinforce that it's totally normal to feel emotionally not great about that. I would argue that that's a signal to you that you're experiencing uncertainty.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That's great. I think that focuses it on our audience — people who work with children across Australia — because professionals who deliver services are living increasingly uncertain lives, but they are also providing support and services to clients who are also experiencing uncertainty and having more complex experiences and circumstances. So in this kind of context, can you talk about how tolerating uncertainty might apply to practitioners working in this space?

PROF MICHELLE LAZARUS: It is a great question. In the context of COVID, we described the stimulus of uncertainty as the never-before-seen pandemic, the virus. In a work environment you're describing with the audience, one of the most universal sources of uncertainty, or stimuli of uncertainty, are humans: our choices, actions and behaviours. In this field that you describe, there is so much uncertainty because the practitioners themselves have their own uncertainty that they bring to the table. Who do they work with? How do they work? What will this interaction look like? The clients they work with have their own family dynamics. At every point you add a human into the challenge, you introduce another source of uncertainty. So I would say that this field is filled with uncertainty. Those stimuli of uncertainty — the humans, decisions, thoughts and actions — can become risk where you can calculate it.

If somebody breaks an arm, you have a general idea of the rate at which it will repair or the time it will take for healing to occur. Those uncertainties aren't always calculable, so when you move to the other end of the spectrum where you have complexity, which is what we're describing here, where each health care provider or practitioner involved with the family services themselves have uncertainties with each other, and they have uncertainty in their interaction with the clients, the clients have uncertainty with each other, their peers, their family system and then back again with the practitioner. So we're moving towards complexity.

Why does this matter — the stimulus of uncertainty, whether it's risk or uncertainty? Because our response needs to be different. We cannot use the same responses to managing uncertainty with risk as we would with complexity.

DR MANDY TRUONG: I think that shows the nature of working in this area. You've identified many factors or elements that contribute to uncertainty amongst practitioners. Finally, I was wondering, you mentioned a bit earlier how people have different responses. Is it possible that people can adjust their different levels of tolerance to uncertainty? What kind of strategies or ways of thinking can people adapt within themselves, and also when they are working with their clients within services that may be complex or there may be changing circumstances, such as funding issues?

PROF MICHELLE LAZARUS: It's a great question, and in everything you're describing — high-stakes uncertainty and complexity — there is likely to be discomfort in the practitioner, the people receiving care, and the whole dynamic. While that discomfort exists, one of the important features here is that we can change how we respond to and perceive uncertainty.

When uncertainty challenges were first described, they thought it was a personality trait. I would be labelled, for instance, as uncertainty intolerant depending on when you talked to me within that pandemic. What we've learned is that actually the environment and the context within which we are working changes our response to uncertainty. There are actions we can take as individuals to help us manage uncertainty better. In the case of COVID for me, I had moderating factors which were informing how I was responding to the pandemic, or the stimulus of the uncertainty of COVID-19. I had family in a high-risk area and no control over the situation, but I am a scientist by trade, so I could understand that we were learning more and managing it differently day by day, and that that was a good thing. When you put that together, I had a little bit of anxiety because I had a situation that was out of control and very uncertain with my parents in the high-risk area, but then a more adaptive response because of the scientist background.

That combined with my existing framework that I had of critical reflection and other adaptive responses that I could take, and that led me to be a little bit anxious and take actions like panic-buying peanut butter, because an American without peanut butter is dangerous. I never ended up using it, but you can hear in those reactions that they are very diverse. What I learned since that moment, and what I would do differently now, is rely more on adaptive decision-making in those circumstances. What adaptive decision-making is, is making a choice now for today with the information I have. So knowing what I knew at the beginning of the pandemic, I would have taken steps and precautions like putting on a mask, being careful about how close I was to other people, and I'd still engage in work and do the daily activities required of me. Then if more information came in, like being within five kilometres put me at risk, I would then change my behaviours around how I interact with other people. So I think what I would suggest for people experiencing high complexity in uncertain times is critical reflection: thinking about what is making me uncertain, how am I acting, how am I thinking and how am I feeling. Then reflect on that to do what you can do differently. Then take a step forward, test out whether it works in the scenario, but don't be committed to that as the endpoint. Gather more information and then adapt that response again. I think those two tools are the most powerful tools in the arsenal that seem to be shared across every study we looked at: critical reflection and adaptive decision-making in complex and uncertain times.

DR MANDY TRUONG: That's fantastic, and great that it's evidence-based, that yourself and others have attested to. That's given us a great introduction to this topic, and I really appreciate you laying out that orientation and background for us as we continue the rest of the webinar. Michelle, thank you. Appreciate your time.

Thank you again to Michelle for that excellent overview of uncertainty and uncertainty tolerance. Before I bring in today's panellists, I'd like to take the opportunity to acknowledge that myself and others listening in are coming from a place of privilege. I recognise there are people in our community and around the world who don't have this privilege, or the space and time to reflect on this topic because they are focused on surviving day to day. I think this is partly why today's conversation matters. As professionals, building our capacity to tolerate uncertainty and respond to ourselves and others with compassion can help us create more supportive communities, workplaces and services.

Mary, I'd love to bring you into the discussion now. Can you start off telling is about the concept of compassion? What it means, how relates to uncertainty, and how we tolerate uncertainty and complexity in this world?

MARY FREER: Absolutely love to. So beautiful the follow-on from Michelle. This Let me start with a simple definition, when I talk about compassion, it means, so we are all on the same page, it is our ability of deep listening and open heartedness. Our ability to notice the distress, people might prefer the word suffering, in ourselves and others.

Not just noticing distress and suffering and others, but also being able to notice the distress that you are experiencing. And with this commitment to want to alleviate that.

So wouldn't be our approach adding something with compassion, it is always, I want to alleviate and prevent the distress. In this topic, but does not mean I alleviate the uncertainty because that is any possible task.

So how do we sit with uncertainty, hold it, and the attention it brings are not absorb that?

This willingness to notice the distress via feeling, requires us to exercise compassion and when I talk about compassion, I'm not talking about feeling. I am talking about it as a muscle, I think of compassion as muscular.

We start to grow our capacity to be able to defend ourselves, to be able to offer ourselves some tenderness. To be able to be in the present moment, however uncertain and messy, complex, crazy making it might be, and that is what the definition of mindfulness is. It is being willing to be in the present moment, this moment now, where everything happens, not in the past or the future, this juicy moment, without judgement.

To be able to fully acknowledge that we actually do not know how things will turn out, but how can we befriend ourselves and the architect has this thing he says we have to approach things with tenderness, tentativeness and care. That is our new superpower. And I think that ties in beautifully with this idea of extending a patient to others and to ourselves.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Thank you, I think that it's very powerful and a lot of keywords there about mindfulness and being in the moment and having some grace with ourselves, understanding quick not alone in this space. Thank you for introducing us to compassion. I think that is fabulous wording in a lot of different areas, the clarity around the definition is very helpful.

Elly, can you please help us zoom back into the child and family services context where you work closely, and describe from your perspective and research, what uncertainty might look like for professionals working in this space? And what does your research tell us?

DR ELLY QUINLAN: Thank you Mandy, in Child and family work, uncertainty is not unusual, it is built into the work. We often have to make decisions with incomplete information. We are managing risk, which may be changing. We are balancing multiple perspectives. We have developmental complexity with young people. And we are often working with limited time and resources.

And in this context, uncertainty could look like not knowing why HR old or a young person or a family is not engaging. Not knowing what a behaviour means, not knowing what the next best step is in supporting a family, and not knowing when to involve different people, went to involve the parents, the school, other services.

We can think about uncertainty as sitting at multiple levels. On the client to level, where we may be questioning what is happening here, what does this behaviour mean? What does the family need, what should I do, what is my role?

But then we also have the family or systems level, where we need to to balance multiple people with different needs and often different views. The child, the school, another service may see the them differently.

And that on an organisational level, we are trying to do all this within policies, expectations around how much risk we should be holding, workload, and often a pressure to have a clear answer.

So in my research, practitioners often did not initially experience uncertainty as uncertainty. It often showed as self-doubt, anxiety, frustration, feeling stuck or feeling inadequate.

And that is often an internal story about, I should know what to do, and better practitioner would have figured this out, so maybe I am not enough. This is where compassion is very relevant because without that compassion, uncertainty can easily turn into shame.

The other thing I wanted to flag is, a lot of uncertainty comes from ambiguous behaviour, and it is really important in this space to come out on certain things with a trauma-informed lens, because it helps us ask better questions.

For example, we may have a client or young person who is presenting as quiet, disengaged, given labels like non-compliant. But there may be many possible meanings for this, it could be sensory overload. They may not be feeling safe and feeling they need to mask. They may be experiencing shame. It may be a trauma response. It may be a mismatch between communication. What they might have had previous harm from services.

When we are under pressure as a practitioner, we can rush to answer or rush to certainty, and sometimes in trying to resolve that discomfort, we can end up interpreting behaviour through narrow lens and it can end up sounding like phrases like they are resistant or they are attention seeking, or this family is being difficult, or not motivated or manipulative.

Those kind of explanations can reduce our uncertainty but they also closedown curiosity and can misrepresent people and shape then what support those people are offered, which can contribute to harm.

Also I wanted to acknowledge our practitioners themselves may also be neuro-divergent. They may be managing their own sensory overload, their own feelings about ambiguity, and issues around communicating and workplace pressure, so uncertainty can sit across that relationship and not just within the client.

And the last thing I wanted to flag is, uncertainty is not just an individual tolerance issue, it is also shaped by workplace culture and uncertainty is a lot harder to tolerate when you are in an organisation that expects quick cancer is, need categories, risk-free decisions or constant availability.

And as practitioners, we need environments where it is safe to say, "I am unsure, only time to think this through." Or I need supervision because there may not be a simple answer.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Picky for unpacking all the different layers we uncertainty can occur, that was really important to see those players and how that can contribute to the uncertainty levels that people are... Pressure can build up in certain circumstances or within a service went there is a lot of things going on.

Mary, how do you think practitioners can balance compassion with boundaries? Especially when families are facing complex challenges and workers and practitioners are often feeling the pressure to be constantly available, for example, to fix these uncertain or complex situations?

MARY FREER: Just want to pick up, before I answer that question, want to pick up some of the power things that Elly said anything that resonated with me is this idea of I should know what to do. That is a powerful story that we tell ourselves.

When we have the story that I should know what to do, it meets head-on with shame, because we cannot possibly know what to do. The only certainty that we have is the partiality of knowing, that we can only partially now things and other people can only partially know something.

And so we have to rely on the, we have to stop relying on this illusion that there is this idea of certainty. And that idea of certainty is not a global fixture.

So we're having this conversation here in the global North, it is an economic imperative that we invest in ideas of certainty. Modernity and colonialist he are all about certainty.

I don't want to show that I don't know the answers to the questions. And this is not the reality for every culture. Some cultures hold the concept of uncertainty really differently to the point that we or I might hold the concept.

Coloniality in a way masks the story of holding onto uncertainty and the idea that uncertainty is something we need to fix.

Coming to your question, sorry to deviate, but your question around boundaries - you started up by saying 2026 was a lot. And 2027 is going to be a lot of things too, and 2028, you know what I mean? The is a lot.

So we need to be able to manage and create ife size containers, and I love talking about the container that we make for the work we do.

If you echo to my cupboard and Watford, I figure out what is the right container to give to you to take things away and we do the same thing in life. We say where am I available? What Thompson I available? What time am I available to discuss and what things are on and off the table? What resources do I need available to show up in the way I want to show up.

The same for us as practitioners and for our clients. What are the edges and when we are generous enough to be able to articulate two people that this is how I am available, because I want to show up really big, want to be openhearted, I want to be totally therefore you, but I don't want to fall into the trap of saying, having an open door policy or if ever you need be, call me. Or I have plenty of resources, just send me an email, because we have all had those emails and we are madly working until 7:00 at night.

So we can become clearer about Bentley are available and generous enough to let others know that. Mostly people overstep boundaries because we have never really articulated them clearly, and the first sign that we have not clearly defined our container is we give his voice in our head. And it is his voice of resentment I call it our dear old friend, resentment, because it closes up and we start to hear ourselves saying, "Why is everyone taking me for granted? Do people realise I have work to do? Why do people keep coming to me?"

That is my clue, and I think Mary, have you become clear about the container and have you been generous enough to make sure everyone else is really clear? The idea of being clear about containers are solely saved my life. And we have to keep revisiting it. And they are different for different people in different situations. Menti I am processing that analogy and I think that is an airport on point, affecting on myself I have been guilty of giving too many containers away or having big containers.

MARY FREER: Or we create this massive container, with a lot of street vendors making the traditional dish with 100 kg of beef, we are really just six of us and you're not going to be able to look after that amount of work, we will end up tired and resentful. And containers change over time, a guest can become a know, and that is perfectly OK.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Give yourself permission to have autonomy and control over what you are able to provide, and I am guessing that comes easier with practice, Mary, is this a muscle with the more you do it, the more comfortable you feel with adjusting your containers and boundaries?

MARY FREER: You grow the muscle. You never stop working on it and you have to get really clear.

DR MANDY TRUONG: It very cultural as well. Sometimes you feel like you are going against the norm and I can take a lot of courage dependent on the circumstances. It might be baby steps. Feeling comfortable exercising that muscle. Having grace with yourself and learning. Very powerful take a ways and insights. Very much. If I had time, I take my own notes. That's fantastic.

Having said that, sometimes it's easy to talk about but in practice it's challenging or can be overwhelming. One of the things Michelle talked about in the video was adapting decision-making as a way to cope with uncertainty. Elly, going back to your practical experience, what are some things that users can use to bring more compassion and grace to their work?

DR ELLY QUINLAN: Great question. I will talk about what we can do but I will also note what we may want to do or what our instinct might be telling us to do, which is often to avoid. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and it can bring up tricky feelings so often when we feel uncertain, we try to reduce that discomfort and we may avoid having a hard conversation with a client or a family. We may start to blame ourselves. We may feel relieved if the client cancels for the day or have this urge to call in sick before a session we think might be difficult with a client.

These are natural and when I've done interviews with practitioners, they talk about feeling these urges to avoid that uncertainty and it makes sense because it rings that short-term relief but it can also move us away from our client, from the family, from that relationship, the therapeutic relationship we have with people and any necessary conversation. So we want to try and move into a more adaptive response. Naming the uncertainty for our self and considering, what am I unsure about? What is this uncertainty telling me? Is a knowledge gap? Is it a relationship issue, an ethical issue? Or is it something where there is not a clear answer so I need to sit with that?

Depending on what the uncertainty might be a doubt, if it is about the knowledge gap, because there will be times where we come up against something that we haven't had sufficient training or exposure to know how to handle. So we may know and seek further training or evidence, we may review that file to check. Maybe there is a missing piece in here that I need to find. It's about knowing what's going on for a family, about the formulation, slowing down and trying to think outside the box's and consider other explanations. Asking yourself what else could this mean? Could this behaviour have a different functional meaning? Singer if it about the relationship with a family or a client, it can be helpful to bring that into the relationship will stop it's important not to pretend to know more than you do but to invite the client to collaborate by sharing.

"This is what I understand so far, this is what I'm still failing to understand and I'd like to hear you say it."

We also feel pressure to find the answer bit.ly and come back with the answer. Families are sources of knowledge and they are experiencing themselves in what is helped, what hasn't helped, what still safe. That uncertainty can be an invitation to collaborate. If the uncertainty does involve neurodivergent's or trauma, it's important to check for accessibility and safety and consider, other sensory needs here that need to be met? I communicating in a way that is understood and preferred? Is the way that I am acting any need for predictability? Asking yourself, what helps this feel safe for myself and the client? What is making it harder to engage? Is there another way that we can do this? How can I adapt?

DR MANDY TRUONG: Thanks, Elly. I like the element of the visualisation on the slide as well. Thank you. That was really helpful and we can see a lot of the steps that people can clearly set out in their own work or their own circumstance. That's fantastic. Mary, is there any other kind of strategies you like to talk about that you use in your work?

MARY FREER: Yes and I think Michelle really helped us in that beginning video talking about adaptive decision-making. Often in working with clients it may be looking at what are some of the things that people can rely on? When things feel incredibly uncertain, there are some things that we can fall back on. For some people it's their faith, or their friendship group, or the love that they experience from the natural world or another human being, or an animal in their life. Whatever it is. There are things... These things are things that hold a steady and hold us in place. They can be important things to remind people. Also, we have our own histories and for many people they have a very since story about what is actually a very sick and incredible history of resilience. So there may be a setback in their lives at the moment but there are actually some untold stories that lie just beneath the surface that tell us that these are people that can navigate great uncertainty with a lot of grace and diplomacy, sometimes with a lot of grit and bravery.

There was one other thing that I wanted to add when thinking about these ideas of uncertainty. One of the things Michelle said was every time you add another human, you add another layer or another stimulus of uncertainty. When I heard Michelle say that I thought yes, and every time you add another more than human form, every time you had not only human beings but even a natural world, because when we think of COVID, a very tiny, microscopic virus did what no world leader would ever have been able to do. If we have gathered all the leaders in the world together and they came up with a plan that the two years people would work from home, no one would have been able to convince us to do it. But microscopic biology interrupted the entire universe and change the way things happen and it had this amazing impact. 

Sometimes that's the thing in someone's life. It's a virus that they contract, is a chronic illness or a cancer. It's something else. It isn't only about adding in humans to the equation. It's also about the whole more than human world.

DR MANDY TRUONG: I think that's a really important element to add. Sometimes as humans we are a bit self involved and we are in this climate that is changing and adding a lot of complexity for ourselves and our loved ones. I appreciate you bringing those other additional nonhuman element into the conversation because I think they are really important and as much as we humans think we control things that are smaller than us, your example is right about something quite small. It befuddled us for a long time and we all had to adapt. People did adapt in different ways.

MARY FREER: Also, Mandy, we can learn something from nature. Nature doesn't result tension. Nature doesn't resolve uncertainty, it composts it and uses it for something else. We have this tendency to think that all uncertainty must be resolved so that we can end up someplace where we will have certainty. The moment we agree to let that go, there is no certainty. When I going to be able to create it for our clients and were not going to be able to create it for ourselves. Things are always changing. Thankfully, sometimes they are changing for the good.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Absolutely. We have a few audience questions now. One of the education missions we had was specifically around supporting clients or patients who received unexpected news. For example, chronic illness diagnosis, whether for themselves or a loved one. Mary, do you have any advice for how practitioners and other carers can support clients and patients in these particular circumstances? It might draw from some of the things you very spoken about.

MARY FREER: One thing I would say for practitioners is that we need to hold and not absorb. The tendency is that we start to absorb this pain that we're hearing and for many of us, that's what we do all day. We listen to stories in how people navigate stories that are highly traumatic. I complex and they have real tangible impacts on people's lives. So it's all very well for me to sit here and say that we need to really let go of the possibility of certainty is a certain amount of privileges around me and resources that enables me to say that. So what I would say is that people forget that this is the nature of being human. If we come into this world as an ATM machine, we wouldn't have these problems. The thing is we came here as leaky, juicy human beings and so some days, things will be amazing. Some days everything will go to hell in a hand basket. We spill tea on our shirt before a meeting, which rip over, we get bad news, we find out someone has died or been born, all of these things are happening to us all the time. I go back to really helping people to think about what are the things that tether them into the now.

Not into the future, but what tenders them to now. What are news? Tenderness and grace. The love that we extend to others and the love that we received. For some people it's a connection to the natural world will stop and we practice self compassion. One of the really important aspects of self compassion is understanding that no matter what it is that happens to us, it's happening to many thousands of other people. It's never just happening to us alone.

No matter how bleak it is, our ancestors, the generations before us and all those to come of people all over the world are also experiencing that. It's getting caught into that moment where we think, "Why is this happening to me? It's happening to you because this is what happens. This is the gig. This is being human. So we approach our clients with a lot of tenderness and heart is being in this messy existence is tricky. It's hard.

DR MANDY TRUONG: It is hard but I like a spoke about the strengths, the positive things we have in our lives and for me, I find it easy to take for granted. I think you mentioned that earlier. It's easy to take for granted the things we enjoy and take pleasure in and when we're pulled sideways to different things, there's something urgent that comes up that we have to attend to or feeling that pressure to solve all these problems. I think grounding yourself in a strength based lens is really helpful and things we can try and do a bit more. Elly, do you have any more efficient from your expense in this area?

DR ELLY QUINLAN: I love Mary suggestion of helping people come back to the present and to the Nao. I think that when we can't remove uncertainty, what we want to do is help people feel less alone in it. So acknowledging it, letting them know that there are going to be a lot of unknown is an question marks at the moment and we don't have to figure it all out today. But let's work out what you need to know now and what is the next small step we can take.

DR MANDY TRUONG: I like what you spoke earlier and just now about sitting with the person and figuring out together, not feeling like you have to absorb everything and come up with those problems, and being willing to admit that you don't know everything because you can't. Like Mary said, you can't know everything to help that person in that circumstance. It's a powerful reminder to allow ourselves that position to be honest and the OK with that. Especially when there is a bit of a power asymmetry between being a practitioner and a client or patient. Thank you for bringing us back to that. 

Other questions for our Q&A. There is one, Elly, more around a supervision context. Are there any other additional strategies or recommendations you can provide the audience around, when colleagues are supervising other colleagues in a service setting, to understand what uncertainty looks and feels like? And how they can manage that in their work?

DR ELLY QUINLAN: In a supervision, colleague context, it sounds simple, but talking about uncertainty, normalising it, it is important for people to hear that uncertainty is not a sign of poor practice.

On the flipside, I think having too much certainty and confidence can be dangerous in the work that we do. And in child and family work, especially in complex child and family were, uncertainty is to be expected. It means a situation is complex. It means relationships matter, information is incomplete.

So if we don't talk about uncertainty, people will try to manage it alone and that can increase shame, avoidance, or practising defensively and ultimately, contribute to burnout.

So in that supervision context, not just focusing on what happened and what you did, but also asking questions around where are you feeling unsure? What are you worried about? And, if feeling unsure, what is the uncertainty making you want to do? So we can help support people away from those avoidant responses towards more adaptive options.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Any other insights, Mary, on helping?

MARY FREER: I am left with a strong sense, doubt is the superpower. The superpower for us to be able to hold things in paradox, that contradict one another. And one of the things about being incredibly curious is that it will always keep us out of judgement.

If we can make that commitment to stay curious, we actually do not know. What I was saying earlier, the thing about the partiality of knowing, we actually don't know. Most of what we think we know our stories we tell ourselves and we think these are fixed ideas and fixed entities that we tell ourselves, we interpret the world and we tell ourselves a story.

A story about my clients react a certain way and we tell as cells stories about why the man in the shop was so dismissive of us. Often our stories about the world are so far from the stories that other people are carrying, that is this total mismatch.

So reminding ourselves, what am I missing, is always a great question. What am I not seeing? What is not apparent to me? What else might be going on here? And how can I acknowledge that I am not going to nail this down? We are not working towards a place where, if I work hard enough or if I am reflexive enough or a study enough, or I become the best practitioner in the whole world, there will still be no uncertainty because you are not going to eliminate that.

The only way to eliminate that is by pretending that we know things that we do not know. We start to try and help ourselves to get a little comfortable with not knowing, we are not pretending. Clients will often look to us, particularly in the healthcare field, or they will look to their clinicians, doctors, specialists, consultants, and they think this person knows these things but there are many things we simply do not know.

We have best guesses in good faith because we want great outcomes. And sometimes it really works, and sometimes folklore is what works. Sometimes superstition is what works. Sometimes it is faith or people's courage. There are all sorts of things that come together, we can just settle on that, but just know that it will feel wobbly but that is the reality, the beautiful reality.

DR MANDY TRUONG: I am just reflecting on my own professional experience. When you are a health practitioner in particular, I think you are trained a certain way to think and react to clinical circumstances. And it is kind of set is the gold standard, the words they use around gold standard best practice, evidence-based, it is kind of a narrow way to think in some ways and when you are talking about things like faith and nonhuman things, it can be really challenging. When you have been socialised in that culture, whether professional culture or Western culture.

I think as you both talked about, staying curious, and open to other types of knowledges, to build your experiences, and that conveys a genuineness with the people you work with that you are willing to work with them and figure things out together. I think that is really powerful and not necessarily easy to do when you have been taught to be a professional in a certain way, but very powerful and increasingly you by people from other cultures, it is having that open mindedness, that nonjudgement, not thinking about shame and stigma but knowing as you said, Elly, we are not alone, we are in this together and we want to do our best to help you have a positive and supportive life.

Just trying to bring things together as we are heading towards the end of the webinar and my head is a bit wary.

MARY FREER: When it comes to healthcare, I think I am personal journey. About 20 years ago I had very complex, confronting health diagnosis. And it took a long time for people to work out exactly what it was that was happening to my body, but I render sitting with a specialist and you know what it is like, you desperately want to know what is wrong with me and how will I become well again?

I remember after a very long and careful consultation, this beautiful man leaned over and said to me, "What do you think is wrong?" and I said, "You want to know what I think?" and he really wanted to know and that question enabled me to not give an answer about what was happening, but to let him know very quickly about the thing I feared the most.

The thing that I think is happening, my sister has this particular disease and I think I might have it as well. And he was able to very quickly rule it out. But what it did in that moment is two things, what you think about your body is really important and it is going to inform what happens next.

And, now I get an opportunity to hear what you are afraid of and now I can help you wrestle with that fear. And it was probably one of the most profound, clinical interactions that I have ever had over a long lifetime. I learned a lot from just that simple question, what do you think? And clients and the people we care for, they have a whole wealth of information that they can bring into the conversation when things are uncertain.

DR MANDY TRUONG: an opening that space for people to be able to reveal that to you is important, and you are time poor, but still allowing that space can be very powerful.

Elly, any other reflections or thoughts on that?

DR ELLY QUINLAN: I think that is given example, Mary, and I was perfecting as you talk about the barriers that get in the way from us having those conversations with clients, and often it is a fear, I will not look like an expert or my credibility will be questioned. But I am curious, Mary, did you feel your doctor was less of a medical professional and less of an expert after that?

MARY FREER: I adore him! We still see each other, 16 years later, and I absolutely have learned so much from the way he practices. It had the total opposite effect. I just thought, wow, what I experienced was also really important, I am valuable and I am seen. And that is powerful for people, particularly in moments where you are very uncertain about what might happen in the next hour or day.

DR ELLY QUINLAN: Chose the barriers are internal and roomy invite people in, it gives them power.

DR MANDY TRUONG: Well summarised. Just as we are closing, I would ask a question about joy and hope. Mary, what might apply to hold hope that meeting that certainty. Optimism? How do we have some hope and positivity in this space?

MARY FREER: I love talking about hope, and there is a couple of writers, one is Joanna Macy and I would like to introduce anyone listening to check out Joanna Macy's work, an American environmentalist, an author and scholar of Buddhism and has done a lot of work around deep ecology and passed away last year in her early 90s, still actively working and influencing the world right up to the last few months of her life.

Joanna Macy has a model THE ACTIVE HOPE MODEL and you can look into it in more detail but she lays out some very beautiful questions that we can ask that kind of help us to uncover hope and she talks about active HOPE and passive hope and passive hope is where we sit back for external agency to bring about what we want but active HOPE is that we become the active participants in bringing about the things we hope for, so we are part of what God is the change that we are looking for, and it is about the intentions that we have an out ability to kind of hold open that we do not know.

Part of the thing about uncertainty is that we are not certain about the outcome. And often we can say, "We are uncertain about everything but it will all go to hell." No, we can't be so arrogant to know at the last chapter is, we have not read the end of the book yet.

She has a model which is about seeing with very clear eyes, the pain that we are experiencing at the moment all the pain the world is experiencing. Like not talking ourselves into thinking things are not as bad as they are, and then really honouring what is happening.

This is really vital, particularly in the climate crisis, honouring that and then practising this idea of gratitude. What are the things that we are grateful for? What are the things that we love? And then what can we see as a hope or inspiration for what the future might look like? And then what is something we are willing to do that brings about that future?

The is a series of beautiful questions and I use them a lot in workshops. I use them organisationally wide, so people can look at Joanna Macy's model.

The last thing I want to say about hope and I could not talk about hope without doing this, a quote by Rebecca Solnet who wrote the book on hope, and hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen. We have no idea. There is a spaciousness of uncertainty, and in that spaciousness is always room or us to act.

So when you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that it may be able to influence the outcome. You alone or with a whole lot of people. She says hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of optimists and pessimists.

I listen to a podcast with her the other day and Rebecca said something, and are quickly rated down for today, she said, "Hope is a frilly pink dress, people don't want to expose their knees and they feel vulnerable, but despair is a black leather jacket and everybody feels really cool in it." And often that is the thing, we think to be cynical and despairing is the black leather jacket.

But actually to be vulnerable and openhearted, we don't know how things are going to turn out, and in that spaciousness, is lots of room for us to act and to influence. 

DR MANDY TRUONG: What a wonderful way to close the webinar. Mary, thank you for sharing your expense with us and thank you to you, Elly, to provide the supports to many of our audiences working in child and family services delivering all the services and facing many challenges. Please have great compassion with yourself. It's so important as we need everyone to work to build a supportive immunity that we would all like to be a part of. I'd also like to knowledge Professor Michelle Lazarus as well for her contribution to the webinar. Thank you to all of the audience listening in. We can't do this webinar without you. Thank you for your questions and your attention. 

A big thank you to Emerging Minds, our collaborators for working with us in the space. Especially Cathy Moore who came up with this topic with me today. I'm so that we could bring these panellists who you are. And my favourite people in, the AIFS team involved in this production. Thank you to much for being with us again. Please subscribe to our newsletter and you'll be notified of the recording. I delegate something only to listen to every now and then to keep us a contract. There will be a feedback survey at the end so if you have any additional feedback, please, we love to hear from you to keep improving our webinar series. And we look forward to joining you at our next webinar. Take care of yourselves and each other and we will see you again very soon. Thank you.