How to Deal With Uncertainty (and Actually Feel Calmer)
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Liz Tran
How to Stay Steady When Everything Is Changing
Adaptability isn’t a personality. It’s a skill — and Liz Tran calls it AQ, the agility quotient. You can build it like a muscle, no matter how you’re wired.
If you have been lying awake wondering how to deal with uncertainty that just will not quit — at work, in your relationships, in the wider world — I want to say something before we go one inch further. You are not bad at this. The skill that carries people through uncertainty is not a fixed trait. It is something you can build, and most of us were simply never taught how.
My guest is Liz Tran, a leadership and executive coach who came up the hard way and built her career on one quality she kept noticing in herself: the ability to adapt. She is the author of AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing, and she joins me to lay out a framework I keep thinking about — the agility quotient — and the four practical pillars (anchors, bets, classroom, discomfort) that make it real.
We get into the reframe that does a surprising amount of work (“Is this happening to me, or for me?”), the four AQ archetypes and their blind spots, why anchors come before bets, the 30-degree turn that beats a dramatic 180, and how to raise kids — and a calmer version of yourself — who can handle whatever the world hands you next.
“Is this happening to me, or is it happening for me?” — Liz Tran, Love, Happiness and Success Podcast
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
Liz Tran: What I do know how to do really well is adjust. I know how to adapt. I know how to be agile.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: So today we’re talking about what might be the most important skill that nobody ever talks about, much less taught you about — which is how to keep it together when everything around you is changing.
Liz Tran: So whenever there was a project that no one had done before, I would say, “I can do it,” and then I’d spend all night trying to teach myself how to do that.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: My guest today is Liz Tran. She’s a leadership coach who has worked with founders and executive teams at fast-growing companies, and she’s the author of the new book AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. She’s here to talk to us about how to apply these big ideas in all different dimensions of life — work, relationships, family, internal experience.
Liz Tran: It was this ability to change, to handle disappointment, to handle uncertainty — and that’s what I call AQ, the agility quotient.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Liz, I’m so excited to talk to you.
Liz Tran: I am too. Thanks for having me, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I always love to dig into a good origin story, and I’m so curious to know — this work on AQ, the agility quotient — is there a personal story behind this?
Liz Tran: Yes. I grew up in suburban Virginia, outside of Washington, DC. In the particular place where I grew up, I grew up in Section 8 housing. My mom was an immigrant, and we were just extremely, extremely poor. And it’s not a poor area. I’ve always felt a little bit on the outside. Probably around the age of eight or nine, I noticed that people could see I was different. Teachers would ask, “Are you okay? How’s life at home?” And I started to think, “Okay, if I focus on my IQ and being really smart, maybe that will distract from people realizing that there’s an insufficiency financially in my background.” So I really worked hard on studying, on doing well in school.
Liz Tran: Fast-forward to being 30 years old, and I found myself working at a venture capital firm in New York City with all these people who had gone to Harvard Law School, Stanford Business School, Wharton. I didn’t have that same pedigree. I realized I actually can’t compete on IQ alone here. But what I do know how to do really well is adjust. Whenever there was a project that no one had done before, I would say, “I can do it.” Very quickly, within a year and a half, I was the only female executive — and the only executive who wasn’t a true investor.
Liz Tran: My job there was to help the founders we had invested in reach their greatest potential. And within that, I realized it wasn’t just me succeeding through something outside of IQ. It was this ability to change, to handle disappointment, to handle uncertainty — and that’s what I call AQ, the agility quotient. I started seeing this in the founders I worked with. They were all assuming a lot of chaos and uncertainty because they were starting early-stage businesses without a customer fit yet. And I thought, “I think this is the quality that makes the difference whether or not they’re going to succeed.”
Liz Tran: In 2019, I made a transition. I became an executive coach. And I started noticing that even with the people around me, some of the smartest, most polished, most put-together people were becoming completely undone by the pandemic — because they did not have that sense of control or certainty they were used to being able to wield. They were very much the masters of their own universes, and none of us were. In that moment, I thought, “This is real. It’s not just for me as someone who grew up feeling like an outsider. It’s not just for founders. It’s for all of us.”
Liz Tran: Especially because ever since 2020, it hasn’t stopped. We’ve been facing more change, uncertainty, and disappointment than ever before. We see it with the climate. We see it geopolitically. We’re even seeing it with technology — so many people who have built skills over decades are starting to wonder, “What’s AI going to hold for me in the next two, three years?”
Liz Tran: In 2023, I was pregnant with my first child in my late 30s, so this was a big change. And I thought, “If there’s a time to work on this book, probably it should be now when my whole life is getting flipped upside down.” They say writers often write the book they need themselves, and I really felt that. AQ is a result of eight-year-old me, 30-year-old me, and pandemic me — seeing the needs of my clients, where I really couldn’t help them solve their issues by saying, “Learn more. Go get the knowledge you need.” It had to be, “There’s a fundamental shift that needs to happen with your perspective and your fundamental orientation toward life — to build AQ in order to not only succeed, but to feel a sense of happiness and personal satisfaction.”
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: What a great story. What I’m sitting with is the way you’re highlighting one of these invisible strengths that is so important, but I think it’s one that can be just not seen at all — or even devalued by certain aspects of the culture. You came into this world in one strata of society and then found yourself operating in groups of people who had a ton of privilege. There was a moment there when you could have questioned yourself: “I’m not smart enough. These people all know so much more than I do.” But you were able to recognize this special ability within yourself that wasn’t in spite of things you’d been through, but because of it.
Liz Tran: Thank you for saying that. One of the things I love about this framework is that I think it’s true for a lot of people, regardless of whether you’ve had a lot of privilege. The name of the game of being human is hardship and challenges. AQ reminds us that those are the moments that grow us, that make us. I have a very good friend who really struggled with the death of her father. She said, “The reason I struggled is because it was the first time anything hard had ever happened to me.” She was in her late 30s when that happened. There was this rigidity within her that expected everything to follow a certain path — and when you come off the path, it can be scary, but it also holds so much more potential. It has been empowering to reshape my story and say, “I’m not deficient — I’m just smart in a different way.”
Liz Tran: That’s what EQ gave us in the ’90s. IQ is a product of the 1800s — France was mandating students go to school, and they needed a test to sort kids into classrooms. That became the default understanding of intelligence, which I don’t think was ever its main purpose, but it aligned with the Industrial Revolution. Then in the 1990s, a hundred years later, that paradigm broke down — suddenly we had this idea that knowledge work and interpersonal skills were just as important. EQ became taught in schools and organizations because it was so valuable. Now here we are 35 years later. It’s predicted that if you’re a member of Gen Z, you’re going to have 18 jobs in six different industries over the course of your career — at a bare minimum. You look at Fortune 500 companies, the average tenure used to be 80 years. Now it’s like 18. Things are moving so much more quickly.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: The adaptability, the agility quotient — I think of it from my framework as a therapist as psychological flexibility. Certainly when it comes to career and workplace, but even in relationships. I once did an interview with someone who was so disappointed in me because they asked, “What’s really the secret to having a strong relationship with someone else?” And I went there. Psychological flexibility is what we need to cultivate in order to be responsive to what your partner is saying, and not cling in really strong ways to your own perspective.
Liz Tran: I totally agree. When I think about the best friendships, the best romantic relationships — you could be the most charismatic person in the world, but if you’re holding so tightly to your own POV, you can’t be in a relationship with someone else. Our couples therapist said to me, “You can hold on to what’s quote-unquote ‘right’ in this hypothetical, philosophical, rigid perspective — or you could just be flowing in the relationship you have.” I wrote this book with people in mind to use it at work and with their careers. And then as I was going, I was like — this is so much about relationships. It’s about parenting. What an AQ-generating experience.
Liz Tran: Are you someone who looks at change and uncertainty and says, “I don’t want that. I do not like it. Why is this happening to me?” Or are you someone who looks at the exact same set of factors and says, “Oh, this is something that’s happening for me”? That psychological divide crosses lots of different lines — politically, geographically. It doesn’t actually really matter. But people really tend to veer off to one side or the other.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: There’s so much to unpack here. Before we go on with how to develop this, can you paint a picture of what this agility quotient really looks like in action? If you were to describe a hypothetical human or what they were doing if they were expressing this — what does it look like? What does it mean?
Liz Tran: There are four pillars of AQ. I call them the ABCs. The first one is A for anchors. This is kind of unusual because we think with agility, things are always changing and moving. But actually, the most high-AQ people have a lot of stability in their lives, and that allows them to take risks and make changes. Your anchors are your people, places, and routines that give you a sense of grounding. It’s the same way a boat can survive in rockier waters when it has a heavier, more stable anchor. When you’re checking in to see if you’re high AQ, are you creating the right environment for yourself to feel safe and regulate your nervous system, so that when change and uncertainty hit you, you can deal with it from a calm place?
Liz Tran: The next letter is B for bets — the complement to anchors. Bets are actions you take without knowing the outcome. It can be something little, like trying a different coffee shop, or medium-sized like changing your haircut, or trying a different style of pants — to something major like moving to a new city, trying a new relationship, ending a friendship, or shifting a dynamic with someone at work. We should be betting regularly to build our AQ. The high-AQ person moves anyway, even before they’re ready and even if they’re afraid. If you’re waiting until you feel 100% confidence about something, it’s probably a little too late.
Liz Tran: C is for classroom. Do you feel like there’s always something to learn, especially the more experienced you are in your domain? Can you take on a beginner’s mindset where you don’t assume you know the right way forward? As a coach, people always ask, “You must have the best answers for everything.” I say, “That’s actually not my job. I’m learning just as much as my clients are. My job is to help them arrive at the answer for themselves.” Classroom is the idea that there’s always more to learn. You should be a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all. The research shows the most confident people who are actually regarded as the most competent ask a lot of questions. They don’t talk a lot.
Liz Tran: Finally, D is for discomfort. High-AQ people become very comfortable with situations that don’t feel good. A lot of us have been trained to run away from those. But it’s the same way that if you’re working really hard at the gym, it can feel good to feel the burn. Not that we want to push ourselves to burnout, but there is a sweet spot where you’re pushing yourself into enough uncertainty and discomfort that you know you’re growing. And then instead of saying, “Wow, I’m having a really hard time. This is awful,” you say, “Wow, I’m really growing my AQ right now.” The net output of these four ingredients is that you move from a space where you’re not avoiding the things happening to you — you’re not putting your head in the sand and watching a lot of Netflix and drinking a lot of wine — and you’re also not fighting against it. You move into what I call the full stage of AQ, which is embracing it.
Liz Tran: AQ is our birthright. We can all access it. Think about our ancestors — they were roaming around, hunting and gathering. They had no idea where they were going to sleep, no idea what they were going to eat. That is still embedded within us. We’ve just gotten accustomed to the feeling that we can control everything. It’s a resetting back to our default settings.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: There’s so much here. Cultivating AQ intentionally can do so many things. First, create better outcomes through taking bets. But there’s also this emotional groundedness that comes with it — improved relationships, more emotional equilibrium. Because if you’re not constantly being reactive or upset about things not being the way they should be, you’re going to feel a lot better. That idea is at the core of so many things, including Buddhism, mindfulness — really being able to accept what is in a healthy way.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: I do have a question. Speaking as a psychologist who has become very interested in the science of personality — different people have different core personalities, and a constellation of life experiences that can create differences in our orientation toward the world. This flexibility versus rigidity can be one of those spectrums. Even in the Big Five personality traits, one of the big ones is openness to experience, which might be related to what we’re talking about with agility. So I’d be curious to know if this has come up for you in your work — are there some innate personality types that have an easier time with this versus others for whom it’s not quite as instinctive?
Liz Tran: I love personality as well. A lot of my coaching experience is rooted in personality assessments. I’m trained in the Hogan, the Enneagram, MBTI — and for this book, I really wanted to understand that. The research from this book is my close coaching relationships with hundreds of founders and leaders, and developing our own personality assessment for AQ.
Liz Tran: Every person is going to most strongly identify with one of the four core AQ archetypes. You can take a quick quiz at aqquiz.com — it’s 11 questions. The first one is the kind of quintessential good-in-emergency, chaos-handling type, which is the Firefighter. They know how to jump in when there’s a spontaneous reactive moment that needs to get solved. The firefighter is so great in those situations. They’re the person you always call when there’s an emergency. The downside is that they’re so good with change and emergency situations that they don’t usually plan very much — they sort of think the plan’s going to change anyway. So there’s a level of intentionality they could be missing.
Liz Tran: The opposite type is called the Novelist. The novelist is someone who’s sitting at their desk and not really in the real world — they’re imagining this whole plot that can happen. “In five years I want to have a dog, a kid, two cars. I want to move to Colorado.” When things don’t go their way, which life never does, they get so undone by it. I’m a novelist. So if I have a block to work on my book and I get a call from my kid’s caretaker — “Can you help me with blah, blah, blah?” — I feel so overwhelmed. I’m working on it. My biggest learning was when I was almost 40 having my first kid: it was so overwhelming to realize kids don’t follow a schedule, even if you plan it out. The novelist is great because they help other people plan. They’re great at synthesis, narrative, research. Where they need to work is on real-time flexibility.
Liz Tran: The next archetype is the one we kind of think of as the quintessential high-AQ person — the Astronaut. They are on the edges of innovation. They have a vision and a future, and they live life to the beat of their own drum because they see the vision so clearly. They’re easygoing with change. They don’t even register a lot of things as change that other people do. People often say, “Wow, how did you do that? How’d you take that big risk?” — and they’re like, “What?” It didn’t even feel risky. The downside is sometimes they’re so fast that people around them get confused. The learning is, when astronauts can step by step help people see the same vision, go more slowly and bring people along — they are so inspiring.
Liz Tran: The last one is the Neurosurgeon, which is the opposite. The neurosurgeon is perceived typically as the lowest AQ, but it’s not actually true. They’re just really slow. They’re really intentional. It can take them a long time to make up their mind because they’re so motivated by excellence. Their level of perfectionism is off the charts. Think about a neurosurgeon — they’re in school for 15 years before they even start operating. I have a friend who is a neurosurgeon. She decided to buy an apartment, and she looked for an apartment for 10 years. She’s the same way in her relationships. The thing about the neurosurgeon is what makes them really high AQ: once they decide they want something, nothing will stop them until they get it.
Liz Tran: The archetypes all can be extremely high AQ. The biggest key is you have to know what your strengths are, what your blind spots are. Once you know that, you’re unstoppable, because you can take the hand you’ve been dealt and play it beautifully. No matter if you’re a neurosurgeon or a novelist, everyone can reach that highest level of full AQ.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s so inspiring. There’s always a path to more flexibility even if you have an innate style aligned with one of these archetypes. Even as you were describing the neurosurgeon — somebody with a lot of grit who gets locked into a specific direction over a long period of time. Even then, there are ways to be more flexible within that.
Liz Tran: With the neurosurgeon, I always say — know that it’s about self-awareness, and know you’re going to push yourself to a higher degree of perfectionism. Aim for exposure therapy where you’re slowly going toward a North Star of becoming one with discomfort. Maybe start where you’re 10, 20% rushing yourself. You have a project you want to spend a month on — push yourself to get it done in three weeks, then two weeks. It’s this constant edging toward a change from the way you are. You’re never going to be as free-flowing as an astronaut, but there is a range in which you can really shift your personality.
Liz Tran: If anyone listening feels like they might be two archetypes, sometimes we show up differently at work versus at home. Especially if you’re a high-EQ person — interpersonally sensitive to what others want — you can adjust your archetype based on what the situation needs from you. At the end of the day, the dream is that we all learn to flex a little bit into each one of the other archetypes. Even if we can’t quite get there, we still have the self-awareness to know, “I can call a friend who’s a neurosurgeon, or a friend who’s an astronaut.” One of my best friends is an astronaut, and she’s the person I call when I’m feeling a little blue or having a crisis of confidence. She can really quickly remember and connect to what my why is.
Liz Tran: So familiarize yourself with your strengths, because we tend to undervalue them — they come easily for us, so we assume they come easily for everyone. There’s a study I love: the highest-ranked chess players think they’re much worse at chess than they actually are, because they know the full scope of what’s possible. Whereas a novice chess player actually thinks they’re better than they are. Even for the neurosurgeon, they might think their bar for perfection is reasonable — when other people see it and say, “Wow, this is a little intense.” For the astronaut, “My vision is coming so easily for me. Why don’t other people see the same thing?” They forget they just arrive faster — and that’s a beautiful thing.
Liz Tran: The second thing — think about the last moment you didn’t handle as well as you could have. See if you can spot that blind spot in your archetype. For me, I noticed my habitual patterning as a novelist was: whenever something caught me off guard, I would immediately go into victim mode. “Why is this happening to me?” But that’s not helpful. If your flight is canceled, it doesn’t matter if the crew didn’t show up or there’s a problem with the aircraft. The only thing that matters is you’re not getting on that flight. For me it was less victimization, less asking of questions, more taking action. For some people, it might be slowing down that action. I have a lot of clients whose greatest challenge to being high AQ is they should probably slow down.
Liz Tran: As you grow your AQ, it’s really just about trying things differently than your status quo. We all have default programming. It doesn’t have to be a massive 180 change. Even if you’re just turning 30 degrees in a different direction, that is the best way to grow your AQ. Take a bet. Do something different than you normally would. Switch up your playbook. Eventually your toolbox of the tools you can reach for in these moments becomes much broader than it is today.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: That’s such great advice. For somebody like me, on the more flexible side of the spectrum, going back to that anchoring space might be the different thing to try. The ability to take chances, to take risks requires this very deep sense of basic security in the world and confidence in yourself — that even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you are certain of your ability to deal with whatever it is. Many times what I see when people get paralyzed — “No, I need to know” — it’s because they need certainty to move forward, and without that, they feel overwhelmed and anxious. But part of that is having basic building blocks of stability and predictability in your life that serve as a foundation to take other risks. If you don’t have that, when you do start taking risks, it just turns into chaos.
Liz Tran: An example I’ll give — someone I write about in the book was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given essentially 18 months to live. In that time, he was with a long-term partner, and he proposed: “Let’s get married.” They had been fostering a kid when he was diagnosed, and he said, “Let’s adopt her. Why not?” A lot of people in that situation would err on the side of fewer responsibilities, but he doubled down on those anchors. “I want a family, even if I’m not going to be here forever.” That allowed him to try experimental treatments. He immediately signed up for a drug still in research stages. He’s been living with this for 25 years.
Liz Tran: A lot of people get this diagnosis, sell everything, move to a beach, and live out the rest of their life. He said, “These anchors gave me something to live for.” We look for certainty in the wrong places. We try to find it through more information — looking at the news. I call it future panic: you feel like if you read enough articles, go on Reddit enough, ask AI for the probability — it’ll give you the answer you want. But that’s an illusion. Get it from the people, the places, and the routines you can feel, smell, and touch. Everything else is fake. You’re trying to predict, trying to give yourself a false sense of control. You can’t control what’s going to happen to you, but you can control that soft landing.
Liz Tran: When you’re a high-AQ person, you are not the best at predicting the future. You are becoming a general athlete that can handle anything. The analogy I think is really beautiful is — a ship doesn’t sink because of the water around it. Anything could be in the water, it’s fine. It sinks because it takes on the water. When you have these anchors, that’s your protective mechanism against the water flowing in. You have your people, your home, your yoga studio, your place of worship, or your yoga practice, your tea in the afternoon, your commute to work where you listen to the radio and your favorite albums.
Liz Tran: Those things seem so small, but they are profound. With anchors, the more simple they are, the more important they are — because they become this fabric of your life you can lean on. It took me a really long time to get pregnant. I did a lot of rounds of IVF, and no one could figure out why it wasn’t working. During this time I would go for the same walk every afternoon with my dog. I would sit on the same bench, and I would drink the same cup of tea. It was so small, but that was everything to me, because there was this little thing I had control of over the day that was productive. It made me feel good. I would wave to the same people — the people who worked in the ice cream shop, the guy who lived downstairs. We sometimes don’t give these anchors enough credit. When we’re in turmoil, we forget about them. We let them go. We don’t call our best friend. We’re too busy to get dinner. If it seems small and like you can skip it, that’s even more reason to make it a regular part of your life.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: If you’re going through a phase of life that feels overwhelmingly chaotic, step one — find something in your life that you can just be like, “This is what I do.” Some wise clinical supervisor of mine said, “Just make your bed in the morning.” Make your bed. Drink a glass of water. There you go.
Liz Tran: I love that. Do you have some anchors that you think about — people or routines that you love?
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: See, that’s the thing — and this even shocks people when I tell them. We have two kids and have never had routines. People talk about — step one of parenting, you have to have routines, you have to have structure. We don’t really have any routines in our home. Everybody’s fine, by the way. Our kids are flexible. It can be fun. Every once in a while we end up at a fireworks superstore somewhere in Wyoming. I don’t know if I have super ultra-specific routines that are natural to me. But when I’m doing better, it’s centered around physical exercise — that really helps me. Creating order in my environment is helpful, because if I’m not intentionally creating order in my life, it can get crazy. At the beginning of the week, I take time to plan. Even if it winds up being different, on Monday mornings I’m thinking about what I should be doing with my time.
Liz Tran: Beautiful. Just remember — anchors are also people. Even if you’re in a household where routines are not your love language, you have each other. That is actually the most dependable thing — just knowing there’s someone who’s a constant in your life. It can even be your home, a cozy place on the couch you like to sit. Or your kids knowing you’re going to be there at a certain time every day. Or a meal you like to have together sometimes. Or the way you hug them. Those things are so important.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: In the zeitgeist these days, we’re talking about emotional security, emotional safety, stability — and there are so many different ways that can look. Given my husband and I’s orientations, we spent a lot of time traveling with our children, almost a fully nomadic lifestyle for a while. People would react: “Aren’t they going to be insecure or anxious because everything is changing?” There are relational pillars — the stability of a relationship. Even if we’re doing different things at different times, there are fundamental things you can always count on. Almost a flexibility in what stability can look like in your life.
Liz Tran: It was the same with my daughter in her first year. We took her to Tokyo, Paris, Canada. People were like, “Is that good for her?” I was like, “I don’t think she cares — because I’m here. Her dad’s here. Her favorite stuffy is here.” She doesn’t care that it’s a different crib. Maybe even why I became a novelist — my mom was very unpredictable. You never knew if she was going to be home, yell at you, or be okay. She really struggled with her mental health. That’s probably why I became a novelist — I needed to create order, predictability, and control. A big part of being a parent is learning that the consistency I give my daughter isn’t really about her schedule, because she’s an organic being. What is consistent is that she knows how mom’s going to react. I might be stern — “You can’t do that, you’re going to hurt yourself” — but I’m never going to explode at her the way my mom did. That relational stability is so powerful. In anchors I always say: people are the first anchor. People, places, then routines.
Liz Tran: The best thing we can do to prepare our children for the world — especially because the world is changing at an exponential rate — is exactly as you said: have them struggle and fail with us safely, so that we don’t pick them up right away, but then we help them navigate. Because if the first time they’re experiencing change, disappointment, and uncertainty is when they’re already out of the nest, I’m worried about them. They don’t have us there. They’re not in those formative moments where they can shape and learn skills.
Liz Tran: When my daughter was learning how to walk, I made a very specific decision — every time she fell, I would just clap. And I would never say, “Be careful.” I would just say, “Pay attention,” or, “Trust yourself.” Oftentimes I would make the calculation: “She’s probably going to hurt herself, but she’s not going to die.” So I would just let her do it. That’s much better than always preventing her from going to the edge of the bed. She fell off the edge of the bed once, and she never did it again. It’s easy with a toddler — “Don’t touch this hot thing” — but it’s more complex when they’re dealing with friendship dynamics, self-esteem, all that stuff.
Liz Tran: The same way we should do that for ourselves. Let’s put ourselves in environments and situations that feel intimidating, off-putting, a little bit disappointing, so that when it actually happens to us in a really meaningful way, it doesn’t feel like our world is ending. We’re like, “Oh, I know how to do this. I feel this muscle.” It reminds me of Alex Honnold, this crazy rock climber. He free-climbs without any ropes. He says, “I practice over and over again with ropes, so that when it comes to the day where I’m free-climbing this huge mountain, I’ve already done it 150 times. You might be nervous for me, but I’m not nervous.” Same thing for us, same thing for our kids. If we can practice this muscle of AQ over and over again, then when we actually need it and we don’t want this to happen to us, we’re not feeling like we’re going to die. It’s not fight or flight. It’s more like, “Okay, I got it.” Just like riding a bike — getting back on.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Such good advice for us all to live by. Liz, this was just a starter pack. You have so much to offer through your book and online resources. Before we end, can you talk a little bit more about what you have going on through social and online?
Liz Tran: Yeah, the AQ book — you can do a lot more work with your archetype, and dig into where your career can go when you raise your AQ. We talk about home life, relationships, and parenting in the book as well. If you’re looking for a different type of guidance, more based in Buddhism and Eastern philosophy, my first book, The Karma of Success, is about how to redefine what success looks like — less from an external perspective and more from your internal intuition. Online, I’m at liz-tran.com. The AQ quiz is there. You can also go to aqquiz.com. I’m on Instagram @liztranwrites, and I’m always interested in hearing people’s stories about challenge and AQ, so always feel free to reach out.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby: Amazing. Thank you so much. The book is AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing, and it’s liz-tran.com for all kinds of resources. Liz, this conversation has been such a pleasure. I learned a lot just talking with you today.
Liz Tran: Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for having me. I loved our conversation.
What to take with you
Adaptability is a skill, not a personality.
AQ, the agility quotient, can be built like a muscle, no matter how you are wired.
The core reframe.
Asking “is this happening for me?” instead of “to me” changes how every hard moment lands.
Anchors come first.
Small, steady routines — your people, places, and habits — are what make it safe to take risks.
Know your archetype and its blind spot.
Firefighter, Novelist, Astronaut, and Neurosurgeon each have a different growth edge.
Growth is a 30-degree turn, not a 180.
Small bets, repeated, widen your toolbox without overwhelming you.
Resilience is built by struggling safely.
For us and for our kids, the goal is to fail with support, not to avoid failure altogether.
The four ABCs of AQ.
Anchors, bets, classroom, and discomfort — the four ingredients high-AQ people share.
Stop hunting for certainty.
Future panic — refreshing the news, googling worst cases — feels productive but makes anxiety worse. Ground in what you can touch.
How to Deal With Uncertainty (and Actually Feel Calmer)
If you have been lying awake wondering how to deal with uncertainty that just will not quit — the low hum of not knowing what comes next at work, in your relationship, or in the wider world — I want to say something before we go one inch further. You are not bad at this. You are not broken. The skill that carries people through uncertainty is not a fixed trait you either have or you don’t. It is something you can build, and most of us were simply never taught how.
Maybe you have already tried to think your way to solid ground. You have read the articles, refreshed the news, run the worst-case scenarios at 2am, and somehow the floor still feels like it is tilting. That exhausting loop is exactly what the coaches on our personal growth coaching team sit with people in, week after week. And it is far more workable than it feels right now.
Here is what I have learned after years of doing this work, and after building a whole team of therapists and coaches who do it every day. Information is rarely the missing piece. Most people already know, in their heads, that change is part of life. What they do not have is a way to feel steady while it is happening, and a real person in their corner while they practice. An article can hand you language and a map. The part where you become the person who stays grounded when the ground moves — that is the work we do together, one conversation at a time. So read this as a starting point, not a finish line.
What is the agility quotient (AQ)?
The agility quotient, or AQ, is your capacity to handle change, uncertainty, and disappointment without coming undone. My guest on this episode, leadership coach Liz Tran, named it as a third kind of intelligence that sits right alongside IQ and EQ. Where IQ is about reasoning and EQ is about reading emotion, AQ is about how well you adapt when life stops following your plan.
Liz did not arrive at this from a textbook. She grew up in Section 8 housing outside Washington, DC, the daughter of an immigrant mom, by her own account extremely poor in a place that was not. Around age eight she decided that if she was smart enough, nobody would notice the rest, so she leaned hard on IQ. Then she landed at a venture capital firm full of people with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton on their resumes, and she realized she could not out-credential the room. What she could do was adapt. She took on projects nobody had done before, said yes, and taught herself overnight.
Within a couple of years she was the only female executive there, and she started seeing the same pattern in the founders she coached. The ones who made it were not the ones with the highest IQ or even the smoothest emotional intelligence. They were the ones who could change course, sit with disappointment, and keep moving when the path disappeared. That, she decided, was the quality that actually predicted who would thrive.
Most of the people I work with have plenty of intelligence and plenty of emotional awareness. What they want is a way to build that third muscle on purpose, instead of hoping they happen to have it when a hard season arrives. That is one of the most common reasons people start coaching with our team.
Why does uncertainty feel so hard right now?
Uncertainty feels harder than it used to for two reasons. There is genuinely more of it, and most of us built our sense of safety on being able to predict and control our lives. When that sense of control cracks, the nervous system reads it as a threat, even when nothing is actually dangerous.
Liz watched this up close in 2020. Some of the most polished, put-together people she knew came undone, not because they lacked skill, but because they had never had to function without the illusion of control. Psychologists have a name for the trait that protects us here. They call it psychological flexibility, and research has identified it as a fundamental aspect of mental health (Kashdan and Rottenberg, 2010). The American Psychological Association describes resilience in similar terms — less as gritting your teeth and more as adapting well in the face of hard things.
And the pace is not slowing. Liz points out that members of Gen Z are projected to hold around 18 jobs across six different industries, and that the average lifespan of a large company has collapsed from decades to a fraction of that. Add technology, climate, and the general churn of the news, and resilience and adapting to change stops being a nice-to-have. It becomes the core skill of a modern life.
How do you deal with uncertainty when you can’t control what’s happening?
You deal with uncertainty by changing two things you actually can control: how you interpret what is happening, and how grounded you are while it happens. You do not get steadier by manufacturing more certainty. You get steadier by building stability you can feel.
Liz offers one reframe that does a surprising amount of work. When something lands on you, the instinct is to ask, why is this happening to me? She suggests a different question: what if this is happening for me? It sounds small. It is not. That single shift, which is really a form of changing your mindset, is the difference between bracing against your life and working with it.
“Is this happening to me, or is it happening for me?” — Liz Tran
She also names a trap most of us fall into, which she calls future panic. It is the urge to find certainty by gathering more information. Refresh the headlines, read one more thread, ask AI for the odds — all in search of a guarantee that does not exist. It feels productive, but it usually makes the anxiety worse, because you are fighting the science of stress by trying to control something that cannot be controlled.
The way out is not more prediction. It is a kind of radical acceptance of what is true right now, paired with grounding yourself in what you can touch. As Liz puts it, a ship does not go down because of the water around it. It goes down when it takes that water on board.
I love that image, because it reframes the whole project. You cannot keep the storms away. What you can do is stay watertight, by leaning on your anchors: the same morning walk, the friend you always call, the small routine that tells your body it is safe.
For a lot of us, that means letting go of control in the places we have been gripping hardest, and putting our energy into the small, steady things instead.
If you read that and thought, sure, but how do I actually do it when I am in the middle of the fear — that is the honest question, and it is exactly what coaching is for. It is hard to think clearly about your own life from inside it. Having someone in your corner who knows your patterns changes what is possible.
The ABCs of AQ: a simple framework for staying steady
Liz breaks agility into four buildable pillars she calls the ABCs: anchors, bets, classroom, and discomfort. Together they are the ingredients you tend to see in people who handle change well.
Anchors come first, and they are the part people skip. These are the people, places, and routines that ground you. Counterintuitively, the steadier your anchors, the more risk you can take, the same way a boat rides out rough water better when it is well anchored. Bets are the actions you take before you feel ready. They can be tiny, a new coffee shop or a conversation you have been avoiding, or large, a move or a career change. The point is to practice acting without a guaranteed outcome, because waiting until you feel 100 percent sure usually means waiting too long.
Classroom is the willingness to stay a learner instead of defending what you already know. Discomfort is the practice of staying in the hard feeling long enough to grow, the way a good workout burns. Put the four together and you stop bracing against change and start, in Liz’s words, embracing it.
Our free What’s Holding You Back quiz gives you a personalized read on where you’re stuck — thinking, emotions, behaviors, relationships — and what to work on first.
Take the Free Quiz →If you want to know which of these four you already do well and which one is your growth edge, that is the kind of thing we map out together in the first few sessions of coaching. Most people are stronger than they think in one or two of these, and have simply never built the others on purpose.
Which one are you? The four AQ archetypes
Liz also describes four archetypes for how people handle change: the Firefighter, the Novelist, the Astronaut, and the Neurosurgeon. Each has real strengths and one predictable blind spot, and knowing yours is where the growth starts.
The Firefighter is brilliant in a crisis and improvises well, but tends to underplan because the plan always changes anyway. The Novelist lives in the future, plans and envisions beautifully, and gets thrown when reality goes off script. The Astronaut sees the big vision and moves fast, sometimes so fast that the people around them get left behind. The Neurosurgeon is deliberate and exacting, slow to decide but unstoppable once committed.
What I appreciate is that none of the four is the high-AQ one. Each reaches the top of the scale by knowing its strengths and working its blind spot. The Neurosurgeon practices moving a little faster. The Firefighter practices reflecting before reacting. Liz even built a short quiz so you can find your type, which I have linked below.
This is also where an outside perspective earns its keep. It is genuinely hard to see your own blind spot, almost by definition. A lot of the benefits of life coaching come down to having someone reflect back the pattern you cannot see from the inside, and then helping you do something different with it.
How do you get out of your comfort zone without overwhelming yourself?
You get out of your comfort zone by taking small bets and turning about 30 degrees, not by forcing a dramatic 180. Tiny, repeated moves widen your range without flooding your system.
Liz’s advice is refreshingly un-dramatic. You do not have to blow up your life to grow. You just have to do something a little different than your default, again and again, until your toolbox is bigger than it is today. If you have been feeling stuck, that 30-degree turn is often the way out, precisely because it is small enough to actually do.
She uses the climber Alex Honnold as an example. He free-solos enormous walls without a rope, and people assume he is fearless. He is not. He has climbed those routes with ropes so many times that by the day of the free solo, his body already knows it. That is what practicing your AQ buys you: when the big, scary moment arrives, some part of you can say, I have done a version of this before. Personality plays a role too. Traits like openness to experience differ from person to person (McCrae and Costa, 1987), so some of us find this easier than others. The encouraging part is that the skill is still trainable, whatever your starting point.
It is also why I am a fan of taking small bets toward bigger questions. If you are wrestling with something like what should I do with my life, you do not answer it by thinking harder. You answer it by trying things, in small ways, and letting the experiments teach you.
Knowing the move and making the move are two different things, though, especially when the bet feels risky. That gap is where having a coach actually changes the odds, because you have someone helping you choose the next small step and debrief it afterward.
Why reading this article probably isn’t enough
I want to be honest with you about something, because it matters more than any framework here. Reading this is not the work.
Here is what usually happens. You read a piece like this one, something clicks, you feel a little hopeful, and you make a quiet promise to handle the next hard thing differently. Then the next hard thing arrives, your nervous system does what it has done for years, and you find yourself in the same spiral, wondering why nothing changed. That does not mean you failed. It means you are trying to rewire a deep pattern, alone, in the exact moment that pattern is loudest. That is the hardest possible time to do something new.
What actually works is having someone in your corner who knows your specific patterns, who can help you debrief after a hard week and recalibrate before the next one. That is what coaching with our team really is. Not lectures, not generic advice — a real ongoing relationship with someone paying attention to your life. You do not need to be in crisis to start. If something here landed somewhere specific, you can schedule a free consultation, no pressure and no commitment, just a real conversation about what is going on for you. And if you would rather understand exactly how it works first, that is fair too. We lay out the common questions about life coaching in plain language, so you can decide on your own terms. There is a whole range of ways to work with us, from lower-cost group coaching to one-on-one support, so you can start wherever feels right.
How do you raise kids who can handle uncertainty?
You raise adaptable kids by letting them struggle and fail safely, with you nearby, instead of clearing every obstacle out of their path. The goal is not a frictionless childhood. It is a child who learns, over and over, that they can recover.
Liz told a story I keep thinking about. When her daughter was learning to walk, every time she fell, Liz would simply clap. Not gasp, not rush in, just clap, so falling became part of the process instead of an emergency. She makes a calculated call: my kid might get hurt, but she is not going to be seriously harmed, so I will let her try. A child who only ever experiences a perfectly controlled world tends to meet the first real surprise of adulthood as a catastrophe. A child who has practiced falling, with a steady parent right there, tends to meet it with, okay, I have done hard things before.
The same is true for us, which is the quiet theme of this whole conversation. We get steadier by practicing, in small and supported ways, long before the big thing hits. If you want a steady person in your corner while you build that, whether for yourself, your relationship, or the way you parent, that is what the coaches and therapists on our team are here for. It is also, honestly, the most reliable way I know to turn an article you nodded along to into a change you actually feel.
xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
About this episode’s experts
Liz Tran
Liz Tran is a leadership and executive coach who came up the hard way. She grew up in Section 8 housing outside Washington, DC, and built her career not on pedigree but on a single skill she kept noticing in herself: the ability to adapt. By her early thirties she was the only female executive, and the only non-investor, at a venture capital firm, coaching founders and leadership teams through the chaos of building something new. She turned that insight into AQ, the agility quotient, laid out through two simple structures: the ABCs (anchors, bets, classroom, discomfort) and four archetypes (Firefighter, Novelist, Astronaut, Neurosurgeon). Trained in the Hogan assessment, the Enneagram, and MBTI, Liz built her own AQ assessment so readers can find their type and their blind spot.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads). 25+ years of clinical practice. Author of Exaholics: Breaking Your Addiction to an Ex Love. Creator of the Growing Self Institute, where she trains licensed mental health professionals in evidence-based coaching psychology.
Questions about dealing with uncertainty
The agility quotient, or AQ, is your ability to handle change, uncertainty, and disappointment without losing your footing. Liz Tran coined it as a third kind of intelligence alongside IQ and EQ. Where IQ measures reasoning and EQ measures emotional awareness, AQ measures how well you adapt when life stops following the plan. It is a skill you can build, not a fixed trait.
You deal with uncertainty by building stability into the parts of life you can control, so you have something steady to stand on while everything else moves. Liz calls these anchors: the people, places, and routines that ground you. Counterintuitively, the more solid your anchors, the more comfortable you become taking risks. You do not get certainty by predicting the future — you get it from the small, dependable things you can feel and touch today.
Start small. Liz suggests taking bets, which are simply actions you take before you know the outcome, and they can be tiny. Try a new coffee shop, change a routine, have a conversation you have been avoiding. The point is to turn 30 degrees from your usual playbook rather than forcing a dramatic 180, because small, repeated moves widen your range without overwhelming you.
Notice when you are chasing certainty in the wrong places. Liz calls it future panic: refreshing the news, googling worst-case scenarios, asking AI for probabilities — all in search of a guarantee that does not exist. The way out is to stop predicting and start grounding. Return to your anchors — the walk, the meal, the person, the routine — and let the tangible parts of your day settle your nervous system.
Begin with one small anchor and one small bet. You do not have to overhaul everything at once. Change your relationship to change itself: practice seeing hard moments as something happening for you rather than only to you, and build your adaptability a little at a time. The chaos may not stop, but your capacity to move through it grows.
Liz describes four ways people handle change. The Firefighter thrives in emergencies and improvises well, but underplans. The Novelist plans and envisions the future, but struggles when reality goes off-script. The Astronaut sees the big vision and moves fast, but can leave others behind. The Neurosurgeon is deliberate and exacting, slow to decide but unstoppable once committed. Each can reach high AQ by knowing its strengths and its blind spot.
The ABCs are Liz’s four pillars of agility. Anchors are the grounding people, places, and routines that keep you steady. Bets are the actions you take before you feel ready. Classroom is the beginner’s mindset that keeps you learning instead of assuming you already know. Discomfort is the willingness to sit in hard feelings long enough to grow.
You can build it. Personality plays a role, and some people are naturally more flexible while others crave structure, but adaptability is trainable for everyone. Liz frames it as a muscle: the more you practice small acts of change, the broader your toolbox becomes, so that when something big hits, you already know you can handle it.
Future panic is the urge to find certainty by gathering more information — refreshing headlines, reading forums, asking AI — in hopes of controlling an unknowable outcome. It feels productive, but it usually makes anxiety worse. The antidote is to stop predicting and start grounding in the real, sensory parts of your life you can actually rely on.
Let them struggle and fail safely, with you nearby. Liz’s approach is to resist rushing in every time, so children learn they can recover. Her small example: when her daughter fell while learning to walk, she clapped instead of gasping. The goal is not to remove every obstacle — it is to let kids practice resilience in small, supported ways so the world does not overwhelm them later.
Resources Dr. Lisa & Liz talked about
Sources cited in this episode
- Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 865–878.
- McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T. (1987). Validation of the five-factor model of personality across instruments and observers. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(1), 81–90.
- Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 9(3), 185–211.
- American Psychological Association. Resilience. https://www.apa.org/topics/resilience
- Tran, L. (2026). AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing.
- Tran, L. The Karma of Success. (Earlier book referenced in this episode.)
- The AQ Archetype Quiz. Interactive assessment. aqquiz.com
- Alex Honnold, free-solo climber — referenced as an example of practicing under safety before performing without it.
