Controllables vs. Uncontrollables: Staying Grounded in a Volatile Market
The macro is loud right now. Layoffs. Restructures. AI shifting which roles still exist. Geopolitical noise that affects budgets and headcount in places it never used to. The fear of becoming obsolete is one of the most common questions I hear from women across every career stage.
How to stay grounded in job uncertainty is a career skill, and it is one that gets built before you need it. I have been through restructures personally. I know what it feels like to sit in that uncertainty, when decisions are happening around you and you are not fully in control. It is anxiety inducing.
Two practices below. They are the ones that have grounded me each time through major change, and the ones I have watched ground the women inside Work Lunch through their own restructures.
Why Job Uncertainty Hits High Performers Hardest
The cruel math of being a strong performer in an uncertain market is that you tend to feel the threat more, not less. You are paying close attention. You read the signals. You internalize the macro headlines. Lower-performing peers are sometimes blissfully unaware. High performers are over-aware.
That over-awareness is not a weakness. It is a feature of the same trait that makes you good at the work. The fix is not to numb the awareness. It is to channel it. The two practices below are how.
1. Separate Your Controllables From Your Uncontrollables
The first move is to physically separate, on paper, what is in your control and what is not. The act of writing it down is the first half of the practice. Acting only on the controllable column is the second half.
Take out a piece of paper. Make two columns.
Uncontrollables. The economy. Organizational restructures. Leadership changes. Industry shifts. Layoffs at peer companies. Political or global events. Headlines about AI. Your CEO's strategic decisions. None of these are within your influence. Writing them down does two things. It externalizes them so they stop running on a loop in your head. And it makes the list finite, which is a relief in itself. The fear feels infinite when it lives in the brain. It feels manageable when it lives on paper.
Controllables. How you show up every day. How prepared you are in your meetings. The quality of your thinking. Who you spend time learning from. How you start and structure your day. The energy you bring into the room. The relationships you maintain on your personal board. The receipts you build of your impact. The skills you sharpen this quarter. All of this is within your power.
Most ambitious professionals spend most of their mental energy on the left column. The fear is loud, and the brain is wired to ruminate. The shift is to redirect that energy to the right column. Every hour you spend worrying about a reorg you cannot control is an hour you did not spend strengthening your own controllables.
When I went through my last major restructure, I doubled down on the right column. I got sharper, more intentional, and more focused on how I showed up. The work I delivered in that period was some of the strongest of my career. That shift changes how you are perceived and how you feel.
The practice is daily. Some seasons require it weekly. The act of returning to the page is what keeps the noise from becoming the operating system.
2. Stay Curious and Do Not Opt Out of Change
The second move is harder, because the instinct in a volatile market is to play small. Keep your head down. Avoid the new tools. Stop volunteering for the unfamiliar. Wait for the storm to pass.
That instinct is exactly wrong. The people who become obsolete are rarely the least talented. They are the ones who opted out of change at the moment the change was happening.
Three practices that build curiosity as a skill.
Learn how new tools actually work, including AI. Not in theory. In practice. Pick one tool. Spend two hours a week using it on your actual work. Build a small library of prompts that save you time. Be the person on your team who can describe, in concrete terms, what works and what does not. That capability becomes a credential.
Ask stronger and more thoughtful questions in every meeting. Curiosity is a visible skill. Senior leaders track who shows up engaged and who shows up defensive. In a volatile environment, the people who are still asking the best questions get pulled toward the most interesting work. The people who are protecting their existing scope get left where they are.
Raise your hand for projects that feel slightly outside your comfort zone. The temptation in uncertainty is to play it safe. The opportunity is the opposite. The professionals who emerge stronger from a restructure are the ones who took on the slightly uncomfortable initiative six months earlier. The project that put them in front of new stakeholders. The cross-functional team that gave them a new skill. The stretch role that put their name in calibration meetings.
These small actions compound. Participation in change keeps you visible. Visibility, paired with strong execution, is what protects you across most economic cycles.
A reminder I come back to often. Your work does not speak for itself. You do.
3. Build a Tighter Network in a Hard Market
The third habit is the one most professionals neglect in a downturn. They retreat. They focus on their head-down work. They tell themselves they will rebuild the network when things are calmer.
That timing is backward. The network you need during a restructure is the one you built before the restructure started. Two moves to keep the network warm.
Reach out to three people every month with no transactional ask. A check-in. A useful article. A reflection from your week. The relationships you maintain in good times are the ones that will move quickly for you in hard times.
Make one new connection a month with someone outside your company. A peer in a different industry. A former colleague who has moved on. A person whose work caught your attention on LinkedIn. The outside connections are the ones that lead to new opportunities when the inside ones contract.
The professionals who navigate restructures best are the ones whose network was already in motion when the restructure hit.
The Bottom Line
How to stay grounded in job uncertainty comes down to a small set of practices. Separate controllables from uncontrollables on paper, and act only on the controllable column. Stay curious and lean into change instead of opting out of it. Keep the network in motion before you need it.
The market will keep shifting. The professionals who endure are not the ones who avoided the volatility. They are the ones who built the right operating system for it.
