We hear a lot about the transformative power of gratitude. Any number of coaching or mindfulness frameworks will suggest that you build a habit of reviewing the aspects of your life for which you're grateful. The idea is that this brings your attention back to the simple truth that you're happier than you think. It's just that something recent is intruding. The opportunity you didn't get. The signal from your boss that things are going badly. And that recent thing is hijacking your attention, making you feel at risk.

This uncomfortable feeling is enough to send you to your coach, your therapist, or your self-help shelf looking for a way to calm it. What you'll usually find there is some version of the same advice. You should take a clear-eyed inventory of your situation. Get the facts on the table and let them tell you, with mathematical precision, whether you have real cause for concern or you're just having a bad week.

As an executive coach, I get to watch a lot of these inventories play out in real time. When a client comes to me with discomfort, I'll often push them to go a level deeper to understand what's actually generating it. And they start listing. My boss is fine. I mostly like my colleagues. I believe in the mission. I'm not working crazy hours. My comp is fair, given the market.

Most of the time, the list declares that nothing is seriously wrong in any of the areas that matter. And there's relief in that. A surprised relief, the sense that things aren't as bad as they felt an hour ago, that this was probably just a bad day or one small thing getting more weight than it deserves. We end the session with the client feeling better. As their coach, I feel like useful work was done.

And then the same discomfort emerges again a session or two later.

When I see that pattern, I know the "things are pretty good" inventory isn't going to cut it. Something is off, and it's small enough to hide behind the good list but stubborn enough to keep coming back. There is usually a specific source. Envy for the position a peer just moved into. The sense of being passed over for something you didn't even realize you wanted until someone else got it. A decision from years ago that still hasn't stopped bugging you.

That thing isn't competing with your gratitude, and it doesn't need to be pushed down in order for you to be at peace. You can mean every item on your list of what's good and still have this nagging worry.

Wanting something to be different doesn't cancel out being genuinely glad for what you already have.

So when the inventory calms you but the discomfort doesn't go away, that's not a sign you did the exercise wrong. It's a sign the exercise answered a different question than the one you were asking. The list won't tell you what a specific feeling is about. For that, you have to go looking directly. What is this actually pointing at? The particular thing underneath the general unease. What would it mean to take that seriously instead of arguing yourself out of it with everything that's going right?

The useful work starts with the thing the list left out.

A Habit to Excel

A client of mine has been working nights and weekends for months. She steps in when something’s slipping and stays late to get the deck right. She takes the extra client call because she’s the best one to do it. This is how she’s operated her whole career, and it’s worked. Her effort gets seen, appreciated, rewarded, at least it has been up until now.

It’s the cost of producing the work that’s changed. Her health has taken a hit. Her time with her family has shrunk. She can feel that the arrangement is unbalanced and comes to coaching wanting to explore what to do.

What’s Driving her Drive?

As we talked, it surprised her to notice that no one is demanding this level of sacrifice. She’s offering it, and the company is accepting it, which is exactly what companies do with offered effort. That reframes the problem entirely. A company squeezing you is a familiar problem that you can push back against. It’s harder to sit with the truth that you are setting the pace yourself and then feeling resentful when you can’t balance your investment with what you’re getting back.

This pattern is common in people who learned early that effort is how you earn your place. The habit becomes how she knows she’s doing the job right, regardless of what the job actually requires. When the returns on that effort start to flatten, the instinct is to lean harder into it, on the theory that enough volume will eventually break through.

A Timeline Mismatch

The clearest signal is the mismatch in pace. Her daily investment runs hot. Every week brings another late night, another problem she absorbs before it becomes anyone else’s. Meanwhile the conversation about her role, her level, her comp, moves slowly. Performance reviews happen on a calendar. Promotion cycles wait for budget and headcount and org design decisions well above her pay grade.

At some point the math stops working. Every company has a limited amount of comp to give and a limited number of senior seats to fill, and her company is already near both limits. There isn’t a bigger title available that would come with the raise and scope to match it. So her extra effort, past a certain point, stops buying her anything more. It just becomes what people have come to expect from her by default. In effect, she’s working for free.

Aiming the Effort Somewhere Else

For a while, the conversation with my client circled around visibility. How does she make sure this work is seen? How does she position the work so it counts toward the next level? Useful questions, but they assume the constraint is attention. The deeper we went, the clearer it became that the constraint was structural. No amount of visibility creates a promotion the org chart doesn’t have room for.

Once she could see the ceiling clearly, she started to notice how many of her nights and weekends were spent covering ground that nobody had actually asked her to cover. Problems she absorbed before anyone else even registered they existed. Most of it had become automatic, a reflex built up over years of effort mattering more than it does now.

Seeing the ceiling gave her something she hadn’t had in a while: the option to let something go without deciding first whether she’d be punished for it. She could let a deck ship a little rougher. She could let a colleague handle the fire drill she’d normally have jumped on. Small tests, and each one came back with the same information: the company absorbed the change without much notice at all.

The version of hard work that gets rewarded and the version that just gets absorbed often look identical from the inside. Once she had proof that the org would survive without her running quite so hot, she started to wonder what the extra hours had been crowding out. What she's exploring now is what it might look like to spend some of that same energy on the parts of her life she'd slowly drifted away from.

The split relationship

A client of mine keeps returning to the same description of her manager: I like them as a person, but as a manager I have concerns.

She says some version of it almost every time we talk about her boss, and it’s clear the sentence itself is telling us something.

She likes her manager. They get along, she feels understood and supported in important ways. She also has a real problem with how she’s being managed. Her boss wants to be looped in on decisions that should be hers alone, asks to approve things that don’t need approval, and gets involved enough that it’s starting to slow her down.

Both things are true. The problem is that liking the person makes it harder to deal with the manager.

What warmth is hiding

The management problem itself is fairly straightforward. Her boss is too controlling, and she needs more room to make decisions and do her job. The fact that her manager is warm and likable doesn’t change that. But it does make it hard to say something about it.

An unpleasant manager gives you something to push against. You’re already frustrated, the relationship already feels strained, and raising the problem doesn’t add much additional risk. It’s different when you like your boss. Now there’s something you want to preserve. You may worry that being direct will damage a relationship you value, or wonder whether you’re being unfair or ungrateful, or tell yourself the problem isn’t serious enough to risk making things uncomfortable.

So the conversation keeps not happening. The manager keeps managing the same way, my client keeps the relationship she values, and the problem stays exactly where it is.

Why a likable boss can be harder

This dynamic shows up well beyond 1:1 management. Teams put up with broken processes because the person responsible for them is well liked. Business partners avoid difficult conversations because they care about each other. Friends let things slide that they might address much more quickly in a different relationship. The better the relationship feels, the more reluctant we can become to put any strain on it, and that makes sense, since relationships matter and there are real consequences to damaging them.

But sometimes preserving the good feeling becomes more important than dealing with what isn’t working, and over time that takes a toll.

Two things can be true

My client isn’t wrong about either half of her sentence. She likes her manager. She also needs her manager to manage her differently. The challenge is to stop using the first fact to discount the second.

She can value the relationship and ask for more autonomy. She can appreciate her manager’s support and still be frustrated by her need for control. She can like the person and still want something about the working relationship to change. In fact, a good relationship may be one of the best reasons to have the conversation. There’s something there worth protecting, and protecting it over the long term may require being willing to make it uncomfortable for a little while.

If you’re finding that a good relationship at work is making it harder to talk about what isn’t working, that’s worth paying attention to.

The instinct to apologize

A client of mine came into a session frustrated with herself. She’d made a call on a direct report’s performance, moved fast because the situation felt urgent, and later realized she’d missed something. Once she’d talked to a few more people and looked at the fuller picture, her assessment changed. Her first instinct was to go back to her report and apologize for getting it wrong. She’d already drafted most of the conversation in her head by the time we got on our coaching session.

I asked her what she wanted the apology to accomplish.

She wanted her report to feel heard. She wanted to show that she’d taken the earlier conversation seriously enough to revisit it. She wanted to repair something. When we looked closer, though, nothing between them had actually broken. She hadn’t been unkind or dismissive. She’d formed a judgment quickly, the way managers often have to, and then learned more. Still, inside she worried that she had caused harm.

What does an apology do?

Apology belongs to a specific kind of event: two people who need to keep functioning together, and one of them has been careless with the other’s feelings, trust or dignity. It works well for that. But is it the right tool in a work context when you change your mind based on new input?

Managers do carry a kind of relational weight with the people who report to them. A report who feels judged too quickly experiences that personally, even briefly, so the impulse to smooth it over isn’t wrong - but it may not provide what’s most needed. Contrition may be somewhat comforting but what that person usually needs is confirmation that their manager is willing to keep looking at a situation and capable of updating a view when the facts call for it.

There can also be unintended consequences. Saying "I got this wrong" out loud is a kind of admission that works its way into the narrative and may hang around longer than the situation warrants.

What she said instead

We rewrote the conversation together. Instead of an apology, she went back to her report with an account of her own thinking: she’d had more time to consider what he’d told her, she’d talked to a couple more people and looked at the situation again, and she could now see there was more going on than she’d originally realized. Here’s where she’d landed, and how she got there.

We tested adding a line of contrition to the end of it, something like an acknowledgment that she should have seen this sooner. It didn’t clarify anything. If anything, it reopened a question that hadn’t been there before, about her judgment in general rather than this one call. Her report didn’t need to know she felt bad. He needed to know she’d taken what he told her seriously enough to act on it, and that her view of him had genuinely changed as a result.

Corrections do more work

An apology asks the other person to manage your discomfort. It puts them in the position of deciding how to receive an admission they didn’t ask for, sometimes even in the position of comforting you. A revised assessment doesn’t ask anything of them. It hands over better information and shows them how you arrived at it, which is a cleaner transaction on its own terms. For a direct report watching how a manager handles having been wrong, it’s also the more instructive version. It demonstrates what accountability looks like. Instead of a display of remorse, it shows a willingness to keep gathering information and change course in public.

There’s a version of this story where an apology is exactly right. If she’d dismissed her report in the room, or made the call in a way that ignored what he’d told her outright, that’s a rupture, and the repair for it is personal. Most of what triggers the instinct to apologize at work is different. It’s closer to discomfort at having moved fast on partial information, which is a different problem with a different fix.

What are you trying to give?

Before deciding whether to apologize, it’s worth asking what you’re actually trying to give the other person. If the honest answer is reassurance that you got something wrong and feel bad about it, that need is real, but it belongs somewhere else. If the answer is a clearer, more accurate picture of what you think now and why, give them that instead. It won’t read as dramatically as taking responsibility. It will do more of the work responsibility is supposed to do.

Most of us treat behavior change as a purely internal process. You sort through your feelings and assumptions, identify the habit you want to adjust, create a plan, and act on it.

The problem with this approach is that it puts a lot of weight on the parts of us that are already tired, distracted, overwhelmed, and pretty bad at holding the line under pressure. Because we default to this model, we miss the tools and structures already in front of us, ones that could provide real scaffolding for building new habits.

I’m referring to the spaces and objects around you: things you inhabit and interact with every day without ever considering them part of the change you’re trying to make.

I read about a woman trying to use social media less who bought a second phone (no cell plan, wifi only) and keeps it next to a specific chair in her living room. That chair is the only place scrolling is allowed. Instead of relying on the discipline to avoid the apps on the phone she carries everywhere, she designated a place and let the place be the permission-giver.

I’ve been trying a version of this myself. In an effort to lose the habit of keeping my phone in reach at all times (it’s hard to even admit that this is a powerful compulsion!), I’ve assigned certain spots in my house “no-phone” status. I do my best to keep my phone out of these places, because being in them tends to trigger an especially deep dive into the screen. These spaces include the bathroom (of course), the dining table, and the living room couch.

The flip side of this (using a space to invite a behavior in, rather than keep one out) has worked even better for me. I have one chair in the living room set up for reading: a good lamp, my current book or article, and reading glasses always at the ready. I know that this is the place where I read. Now when I sit there, I feel like reading. The place has taught my body what happens here.

This same opportunity exists in work contexts: building your physical environment on purpose. Instead of using the same desk, chair, and office for email, calls, document reviews, and (if it can ever happen) strategic thinking, consider dedicating a specific location to your most cognitively demanding work.

One executive I coach moved her real thinking (quarterly planning, the harder personnel calls) into a different room. Not a nicer room, just a different space. The content of those conversations stayed the same, but her ability to stay with them increased.

If you’re working to change your behavior or build new habits, think about how your rooms and spaces tie you to your current patterns. Ask yourself how freeing a space from its usual associations, or claiming a new one, might create the physical cues that pull you toward the behavior you actually want.

Grappling with Uncertainty

In a recent session, one of my coaching clients announced that they were seriously considering a lateral move inside their company. We had been working for some time on their feelings of uncertainty about their current role. They could see the ceiling above them and support from their boss had been inconsistent at best. In general, their pace of advancement had slowed and their engagement and motivation had dipped. So I wasn’t surprised that they found the idea of a change appealing.

On paper, the new role looked good. As we discussed the details and my client’s reasoning it came to look even better. They left the session feeling close to a well-informed decision.

The next time we talked, the framing had changed…

What if the current situation improved? They had history there, relationships, a reputation that had taken years to build. A new boss could change things. And how much did they actually know about the new role? The people seemed good from the outside, but was that reliable? What if it was just an unfamiliar version of the same problems?

The Problem With More Scenarios

What this client was doing was trying to future-proof the choice. If they could model enough scenarios, account for enough variables, they could find the option with the better future. But the analysis wasn’t generating any progress.

The assumption in this kind of thinking is that one option has a more knowable future than the other. The current role feels familiar, so its future feels more legible. The new role is unfamiliar, so its future feels unclear. But that’s a difference in feeling. Neither future is actually visible. Adding more imagined scenarios to the comparison just adds variables to a calculation that was getting more complex.

The anxiety driving this makes sense. These are consequential decisions and the impulse to get them right is rational. Unfortunately, predicting which future will be better has never actually been an option.

The Decision You Can Make

When prediction isn’t the tool, a clear read of present circumstances is. Not the imagined future of the current role or the new one. What’s true right now.

The current role has a ceiling they can see, a boss whose support has been inconsistent, and a pace of advancement they can’t justify. Those are observations, not projections. The new role has leadership that looks genuinely different, scope that maps to where they want to go, and a chance to reset something that has stalled. Also observations.

Decisions made from that kind of present-tense clarity tend to be more durable. You’re working with information you actually have. You can still be wrong because the situation can change in ways nobody could have seen. That's not the same as being wrong because you guessed at something you couldn't have known.

Getting Out of the Spiral

There’s a simple exercise that can help interrupt the scenario spinning. Write down everything you think you know about each option. Then go back through the list and ask yourself how confident you actually are in each item. Some of what you’ve written will be solid observation, things you’ve seen, heard, and experienced directly. Some of it will turn out to be assumption or inference, things that feel true but are really just plausible.

The observations are your actual decision-making material. The assumptions are the raw ingredients of future-proofing, and once you can see them clearly on the page, they lose some of their power. You’re getting clearer on where the uncertainty actually lives, and separating it from what you genuinely know. Most people find that the solid column is longer than they expected, and that it points somewhere.

What You’re Choosing

When my client finally made the move, they did it because they’d stopped trying to resolve the uncertainty. The question moved from which future looks better to which decision is most coherent with what they know and what they want. That question had an answer.

The future will be uncertain either way. The current role could improve. The new role could disappoint. What you can control is whether the decision reflects a clear read of where you are, what you’ve observed, and what you’re trying to build. Every decision worth making stands on that ground, and only that ground.

Share Clarity & Traction

I’ve been writing Clarity & Traction for a little over a year now.

In that time I’ve published more than 70 pieces on work, leadership, career transitions, meaning, and the challenges of building a life that reflects your values and priorities.

One thing I’ve been grateful for is the consistency of engagement. Most issues are opened by roughly 60% of subscribers, which suggests many of you continue to find value in these conversations. Some posts are also shared widely, which I deeply appreciate.

But I’ve also realized that I don’t fully understand what resonates most deeply.

Posts about difficult people, career crossroads, and questions of identity at work appear to connect. Practical frameworks seem useful. I’m still learning what creates the most value for readers over time.

Are those topics genuinely more useful or relatable - or do they just have stronger titles?

So, I’d like to ask for your help.

What conversations or challenges would be most valuable for me to explore in the future?

If you’ve been reading Clarity & Traction, I’d love to hear:

• Which post has stayed with you the longest?

• What topics would you like more of?

• What topics don’t resonate?

• What challenge are you wrestling with at work right now?

• If you could ask an executive coach one question, what would it be?

Leave a comment or reply directly to this email. I will read every response.

One of the things coaching has taught me is that progress often begins with better awareness and better feedback. It seemed worth applying that lesson here as well.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and allowing me into your inbox each week.

I’m excited to learn where we should go next.

An Interview Worth Your Time

Scott Pelley spent 37 years at CBS News. He built a career as one of the most recognizable faces in American journalism, a correspondent who traveled the world telling important stories. By any measure, he had built something substantial and durable. Then, over the course of a few weeks, it came apart.

You may have been following this story. Leadership at CBS shifted in the wake of the Paramount sale. Executives with different priorities took over and Pelley resisted. He spoke up in meetings and defended the standards and the people he believed in. He didn’t soften his critique or hedge his position. In the end, they fired him.

Pelley shared his story and his perspective in an interview with the New York Times last week. What’s striking in his voice is the absence of regret. He was sad to go and he grieved what was being lost at the institution he loved. He talked about colleagues he’d built his career alongside. But underneath all of that grief was a sense that the years he’d spent there, the choices he’d made, the stands he’d taken, had been exactly what he should have done. He couldn’t aspire to anything more than what he’d already lived.

That’s an unusual thing to hear from someone who’s just been forced out. Most people carry some version of bitterness or doubt when they’re pushed away from something they’ve built. They wonder if it was worth it and they replay the moments they might have handled differently. Instead, Pelley’s voice had coherence - the sense that a life spent in service to something meaningful had been a good life, even though it had just ended badly.

What Conviction Sounds Like

Most of my coaching clients are searching for this foundation. They sense there’s a way to live and work that’s more grounded than what they’re currently doing. They want to know what it would feel like to speak from conviction rather than from what seems “strategic.” They want to understand how to build a set of values solid enough to act on, even when acting carries some risk.

What makes Pelley’s voice compelling is the integrity of his thinking. The values were formed over decades, tested in difficult moments, woven into the structure of how he understood himself. They’re grounded in experiences of covering wars, interviewing presidents, watching what happens when institutions compromise themselves incrementally. They’re connected to relationships with colleagues he respected, people who taught him what journalism could be. They’re connected to sacrifice through years of showing up to do work that mattered beyond the paycheck.

That solid ground doesn’t require you to be a famous journalist or someone taking on institutional power. I’ve worked with people who built twenty years around protecting their teams from burnout, who turned down money to stay in work they believed in, who made hard choices about how much to work so they could actually be present for their families. I’ve worked with people who built something (a product, a service, an organization) that genuinely helped people solve real problems. The content of what they were in service to varied but the structure underneath was the same. They could point to the years they’d spent and say: yes, that was in service to something that mattered. I’m proud of that.

Asking the Meaningful Questions

You can’t build this kind of clarity while you’re chasing something else. Most people spend the first ten or fifteen years of their careers chasing: the next title, the next rung, the next validation. That chase feels productive and specific. You can tell if you’re winning.

But new questions creep in - if this ends tomorrow (if the company changes, if the role disappears, if you walk away) will you be able to say that you spent these years in service to something that mattered? Will you look back and feel like the sacrifices were worth what they bought you?

Pelley can answer that question. He’s 68, he’s been fired, and he has no regrets. That’s not a small thing. Most people can’t say that about the decades they’ve invested.

The work of building this for yourself happens in the accumulated choices you make over time. It happens when you stay in a difficult conversation instead of checking out or you protect something you believe in even though it would be easier not to.

Scott Pelley's interview is worth an hour of your time. After listening, see what questions come up. What would you make powerful and difficult sacrifices to protect? What would you need to change about how you spend your time, build relationships, and make decisions? And at the end of it, what would have to be true about those years for you to feel like they added up?

Exercise is one of my non-negotiables. I do everything possible to incorporate some form of strenuous exercise into my schedule each week. Run a couple of miles, do strength training, hike when I can find the time. None of it has made me an athlete or even especially fit. I’m probably a little above average for my age.

What keeps me coming back has less to do with the modest physical results and more to do with what the exercise teaches me when I want to quit.

The sequence

It goes like this. Something starts to feel difficult or strenuous, and I think “I can’t keep doing this”, which is followed quickly by an inner negotiation about whether it’s okay if I stop, whether I’ve done enough, whether I’m quitting or just taking care of myself.

If I don’t stop right there, something clicks, and I get curious about whether I can keep going for another minute, what it would be like, how I’d feel about it afterward. And so I keep going for a little while, and then I (usually) feel great!

The whole thing takes maybe ninety seconds from the first signal to the moment I decide to stay in it. By the way, I’m not pushing through any kind of impressive threshold during those ninety seconds. I’m a regular person making a small decision not to bail at the first signal that bailing is available. I’ve started to think that those ninety seconds, repeated a few times a week, are the most useful thing I practice.

What it’s training

The instinct to stop when something gets uncomfortable is quick and reflexive. It disguises itself as wisdom and sounds reasonable in your head. You’ve done enough for today, this isn’t the right time to push, you can come back to it tomorrow when you’re fresher. The body version of that voice is loud and physical, which is part of what makes it good practice, because you can’t intellectualize your way around a burning quad. You either keep going or you don’t, and the decision is made in real time, with the discomfort fully present.

What I’m learning in those ninety seconds is the move from reaction to curiosity. The first thought, the loud one, is I can’t. The second thought (if I let it arrive) is “wait, can I?” That second thought is the whole difference between exiting a moment and staying inside it long enough to learn what’s possible.

Staying in it is where the information lives. When I keep going for another minute, I almost always find that the wall wasn’t where I thought it was, that it was a guess my mind made about my body. Sometimes the guess turns out to be right and I do have to stop. Learning to tell the difference is part of what I’m practicing too.

Where this shows up at work

The professional version of this is everywhere once you start looking for it. A conversation that’s getting harder than you expected and you start scanning for a way to wrap it up. A piece of feedback that’s landing badly and you find yourself thinking about the next meeting on the calendar. A stretch of weeks where the job feels wrong and you start drafting the exit in your head before you’ve even tried staying with the discomfort long enough to understand it.

The instinct in all of those situations is the same as the instinct on mile three. This is uncomfortable, I think I can’t keep doing this, is it okay if I stop? And the same second thought is available if you can find it, the small question about whether you might be able to stay in this for another beat and see what’s there.

I’m not making the case that you should grind through everything that hurts. Some things genuinely are signals to stop, and learning to read those is its own skill that deserves its own attention. What I am saying is that the first signal isn’t always the true one, and most of us have very little practice telling the difference, so we exit early and call it good judgment.

Why the body is a good teacher

Mindfulness traditions talk about sitting with difficult feelings, letting them be there without trying to fix or flee them. But It’s hard to tell whether you’re sitting with anxiety or just thinking about anxiety, and the difference matters. It’s the kind of thing you can convince yourself of either way without much difficulty

Physical discomfort doesn’t have that problem. It has a location, it’s happening now, and there’s no arguing with it. When you decide to keep running for another minute, you’re doing the thing the meditation teachers are describing, except you can’t fake it and you can’t talk yourself into thinking you did it when you didn’t, because your legs know.

That’s why I’ve come to think of physical training as one of the more underrated places to practice the thing you need at work. People talk about discipline and showing up, which is fine, but what I take to my desk later in the day is the small repeated experience of meeting my own limits, getting curious about it, and finding out I could actually go further.

How to practice

If any of this resonates, here’s my suggestion. Pick a form of strenuous exercise you can do regularly, and the next time you’re in it, pay close attention to where your limit shows up. The limit worth paying attention to is the one that announces itself in your head as the urge to stop, which usually arrives well before whatever your watch or your training plan would call the true end. Notice the shape of it when it arrives, and notice the rationalizations that come with it, because they’re often quite reasonable-sounding and they’re worth getting to know by name.

Once you’ve located it, see if you can stay in it for one more minute. The minute is a small experiment about whether the limit is where you thought it was, and what’s on the other side of it if it isn’t. Most of the time, in my experience, there’s another little stretch of capacity sitting right behind the wall, and the discovery of it is the whole reason to do this.

Do that a couple of times a week and something starts to change, slowly, in a way you mostly notice in retrospect. The limit moves a little, but the more useful change is in your relationship to the limit, because you’ve now had the direct experience of being wrong about where it was. You start treating the first signal as information worth examining and not the final word.

And then, sometimes, you feel great about it later.

A conversation in May

I was talking with someone recently about how their organization is doing this year. They’re tracking well against their revenue target, and it’s only May. By summer, it looks like they’ll hit it. Then they said: “We might even achieve our stretch goal. Or maybe even our transformational goal.”

Being on track to deliver the goal is great news but somehow they weren’t allowed to be excited about it. Hitting their number wasn’t going to count as the win. The win was somewhere else, perched one or two tiers above where they were tracking.

That hasn’t been said out loud. It’s been structured so the higher numbers exist as aspirations rather than expectations. The organization gets the upside of aiming higher without the accountability of having asked for it.

The broader pattern

There are other versions of this framing. “We’re looking for strong execution.” “This is a critical year.” “We need elevated performance.” These phrases communicate higher expectations without specifying them, and they put the burden on the people receiving the message to decode what’s being asked.

Most leaders who talk this way aren’t trying to be indirect. The framing has become normalized. It’s how organizations communicate ambition. The gap between what’s said and what’s wanted feels normal because everyone uses the same vocabulary.

But the gap has effects. People spend energy figuring out what the organization actually wants. They live with chronic uncertainty about whether they’re meeting expectations, because the expectations were never named honestly.

Why this approach is outdated

There may have been a time when this kind of framing served a purpose. If you assume people will coast unless you keep pushing them, a linguistic ladder of goals makes some sense. It keeps a target visible above whatever’s been achieved.

That assumption doesn’t match the environment most organizations are operating in now. The people inside these companies are not coasting. They’re working at or beyond capacity. They’re already self-critical, already running internal monologues that say “what you did wasn’t enough.” The ambiguity of stretch language adds noise. It doesn’t add useful pressure. It validates the voice that’s already telling them they’re falling short and gives that voice institutional backing.

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What would clarity look like?

Here’s the revenue number we need to make our budget. Here’s why it matters. If we hit it early, here’s what we’d want to do with the rest of the year. If we significantly exceed it, here’s what that would mean for our customers and our stakeholders.

That’s the same conversation stretch goals are trying to have. It just doesn’t hide behind tiered labels. It treats people as adults who can hold the complexity of “here’s what we need” and “here’s what would be better, and why.” It gives them information they can act on instead of signals they have to decode.

The pragmatic case

I’m not arguing for directness because it’s nicer. I’m arguing for it because it works better. The doublespeak version of leadership communication evolved in a context where pushing people harder was the main job and ambiguity helped maintain pressure. That’s not the job now. The job now is helping people who are already at capacity make good decisions about where to put their effort. Ambiguity makes that harder. Clarity makes it easier.

The leaders who figure this out will get more from their teams than the ones operating in inherited frameworks. Because they’re being honest about what they want, and that honesty lets people respond to it.

Share Clarity & Traction

The Client Who Doesn’t Need to Worry About Money

Some of the people I coach have crossed a threshold most people never reach. They’ve made enough that the next decision isn’t going to be the difference between security and instability for their family. When this comes up in a session, they’ll say something like, “I probably don’t need to chase the next thing,” and then they’ll pause, a little sheepish, like they’ve just admitted something embarrassing.

The sheepishness is interesting. Pride, relief, but mainly it’s closer to disorientation. The thing that organized their decisions for fifteen or twenty years has stopped functioning as a compass. They got good at working hard toward a goal, and the goal often had a number attached to it, even when the number wasn’t really the point. Now the number has been hit. And they have more options than they’ve ever had and no obvious way to choose between them.

These are people who are used to knowing what success looks like. The unfamiliar part is the question of what to aim at when the old metric stops being meaningful.

What Goes With the Metric

When money stops being the deciding factor, it can slow your sense of forward motion. The idea of progress changes. You used to be able to tell, with a fair amount of confidence, whether a year had been a good one. The compensation moved or it didn’t. The role got bigger or it didn’t. There were scoreboards everywhere.

Without that, the questions get harder to answer. Am I doing work I respect? Am I getting better at something that matters to me? Do I want to keep going with this, or have I been continuing out of momentum? These questions don’t have numbers attached to them, and they don’t resolve cleanly at the end of a quarter. The people I work with in this position often say some version of, “I don’t know what I’m working toward anymore, and I’m not sure I should still be working this hard if I can’t say.”

It’s the recognition that the framework they built their career on isn’t going to carry them through the next stretch, and they haven’t yet built the one that will.

The Other Side of the Same Question

Most of the people I coach are not in that position. They’re still very much thinking about money, either because they’re worried about it now or because they’re worried about what the next decade looks like if they don’t keep building. Their version of the conversation sounds different, but the structural problem is closer than you’d think.

What I see, often, is someone who has named money as the priority and then arrived somewhere they can’t actually live with. They’ve taken the role with the bigger comp, or they’ve stayed in the firm with the better economics, and a year or two in, something is off. They’ve quieted parts of themselves to do work that doesn’t hold meaning for them. The money came in, and the question of whether they wanted to be the person doing this kind of work for this kind of organization didn’t get asked, because the money was supposed to make the question unnecessary.

It doesn’t make the question unnecessary. It just defers it. And when it comes back, it tends to come back heavier, because by then there are obligations and patterns and a sense of having gone too far down a road to easily turn around.

The person who doesn’t need the money and the person who very much does are facing different conditions. What they share is that neither of them is going to find what they’re looking for by thinking harder about money. The first has lost it as a guide. The second is being misled by it. Both of them need a different question.

The Question That Holds Up

The question that holds up, across both groups, is some version of this: What’s the work I can keep doing, keep feeling good about, and keep getting better at?

It requires being honest about which parts of your work you actually find satisfying, separate from which parts you’re praised for. It requires noticing whether you’re still learning or whether you’ve been performing competence on the same problems for a while. It requires looking at the people and environments around you and asking whether they’re ones you want to keep showing up for. None of that gets resolved by reading a salary band, in either direction.

What I’ve heard, across a lot of these conversations, is that the people who end up somewhere durable are the ones who eventually stop trying to optimize for the metric and start paying attention to the experience of doing the work. They notice when something is wearing on them that didn’t used to. They notice when they’ve stopped being curious. They notice when a role they thought they wanted is asking them to be a version of themselves they don’t want to keep being.

Money will keep mattering. For most people it will keep mattering a lot. But it’s a poor instrument for the question of what to do next, because it can tell you what’s available and what’s at stake, and it can’t tell you whether you’ll still recognize yourself in five years if you take it.

The Noise

As a senior leader, does anyone ever really tell you how to do your job better? Not often and not at most organizations.

That’s partly a function of seniority - the assumption is that you’ve already figured it out, that you’re operating at full capacity, that if you weren’t you wouldn’t be here. The developmental conversations that happened earlier in your career stop happening. It’s just expected that you should be producing excellent judgment more or less continuously, without much support.

This might be manageable if the work environment were straightforward. It isn’t. The people around you at this level are operating with their own priorities, their own pressures, their own calculations about what’s safe to say and to whom.

Your manager has an agenda. The people on your team have agendas. Colleagues are competitors in ways that aren’t always obvious. In an environment where promotions are scarce and exits happen fast, the idea that the people around you are neutral, loyal, and invested in your success is a nice one that most senior leaders have already stopped believing.

Getting Twisted Around

Even very good leaders lose the thread sometimes. The environment is confounding enough, and the information coming at you filtered enough, that you can find yourself genuinely uncertain about something you’re actually clear on. You know what you think. You know what you’ve observed. And somewhere in the process of testing it, qualifying it, running it past people with their own stakes in the answer, the original thinking gets muddled.

What’s needed in those moments is a way back to what you already know: your read of the culture, your sense of what the situation calls for, your instinct about the person across the table or the decision in front of you. The instinct was usually sound. Now you need to rediscover it through the noise.

The Thing You Don’t Want to Be True

The hardest version of this is when you already know what you think and you’re reluctant to trust it because the implications are inconvenient. The team member you’ve been defending isn’t working out and you’ve known it for months. The direction you’ve been given doesn’t make sense and the person giving it won’t hear that. The role has stopped fitting and admitting it would mean disrupting a life you’ve worked hard to build.

In each of those situations, the instinct arrives early but what follows is a long process of talking yourself out of it: gathering more data, seeking more opinions, waiting for more certainty. Some of that is reasonable due diligence. But a lot of it is avoidance dressed up as rigor, and at some level you know the difference.

Getting Back

What it takes to return to your own judgment is a willingness to stop treating your instincts as the thing that needs to be proven rather than the thing that’s already telling you something. The read you had early in the process, before the consultations and second-guessing, was usually closer to accurate than the one you landed on after running it through everyone else’s thinking.

The leaders who develop this as a practice are equally rigorous. The difference is one of sequence. They start with what they sense and then pressure-test from there. The instinct becomes the hypothesis rather than the conclusion that needs defending. That’s a subtle shift in how you engage with your own thinking, and it changes the options you can see.

Most leaders who do this work discover they weren't as lost as they felt. They'd just been asking everyone else before they asked themselves.

The Reflex

Most leaders move into solution-mode too fast. A problem is described and the pattern is recognized which leads to an idea for fixing it before the other person is even done talking.

If you’re paying attention you can sometimes even see the slight deflation that occurs when exploration narrows to solving in the moment.

It’s understandable. Years of being the person who others turn to for help will shape you into someone who uses that tool easily. You’ve been rewarded for this skill so why wouldn’t you employ it whenever you can?

But there’s a version of this instinct that does more for the solver than the person with the problem.

What Solving Does

When someone brings you a problem, they're doing several things at once. Sharing information, yes. But also testing the relationship, processing out loud, looking for a kind of engagement. And sometimes what they're looking for has nothing to do with getting an answer.

The solving impulse doesn't register this. It goes to work on the content and skips the context. And when that happens, the person on the other end feels a sense that the conversation ended before it began. They got a solution, but not what they came for.

It might seem like the solution is good, that the advice landed well and the recommendation is sound. So it's easy to conclude the exchange worked, when what happened was that one need was met while another went unaddressed.

Solving is appealing because it resolves ambiguity fast and it reinforces the feeling that you're the one who knows what to do. Following someone else's thinking rather than redirecting it doesn't produce anything you can point to when you leave the room.

Know What’s Being Asked

Some people come to you because they need your judgment. They’ve done their own thinking, hit a wall, and want your perspective applied directly to the question in front of them. Meeting that with a solution is exactly right.

Others come in a different state. They’re still inside the thinking and they haven’t fully formed the question, let alone the answer. A leader who jumps to solve in that moment can cut off the very process that would have gotten the person somewhere they’d own.

Knowing when to solve and when to listen is the key. Learning to tell them apart, and tolerating the uncertainty while you do, is where the challenge lies.

What Changes

People bring harder things to leaders who’ve figured this out. The conversations that used to stay at the surface go deeper. There’s more trust, less performance on both sides.

For the leader who’s been the answer-person for most of their career, this is a strange thing to discover: you don’t have to have a solution every time someone walks in. The job gets easier when you stop treating every conversation as a problem that requires your output. And the people around you, it turns out, were never asking for that as often as you thought.

Understanding Your Pace of Work

Looking back over my career, it’s clear that my greatest progress occurred in bursts of sustained effort aimed at achieving a specific goal: selling my company, closing a major client, landing an important new role. This is where the significant pivots or step-ups to a new level of performance occurred. I’m a sprinter - most comfortable running hard at a finish line I can see in front of me.

The chapters that called for sustaining an even pace with incremental progress were less productive. I either lost interest or began to feel itchy for more meaningful change.

I recognize this in myself and have, over the years, worked hard to find ways to employ my natural energies in ways that keep me moving forward.

What’s Your Pace?

Most people have a natural rhythm to the way they do their best work. Some build through sustained, incremental effort over time, showing up consistently, adding a little each day, trusting that accumulation will eventually become something. Others move in concentrated bursts, locking onto a goal with intensity, generating momentum through focus, and then releasing when it’s done.

If you’ve spent most of your career operating primarily in one mode, the other can feel totally disorienting when the work demands it.

The sprinter knows this feeling well. You’ve built a career on your ability to zero in, to generate energy around a specific challenge, to push hard toward a finish line and cross it. Looking back, those bursts form a kind of narrative arc, a series of moments where you showed up fully, delivered something significant, and moved forward. That story has become part of how you understand yourself professionally.

So what happens when the task in front of you doesn’t have a finish line?

When the Work Doesn’t Fit the Wiring

Sustained effort over a long arc is a different kind of work. Progress is incremental and often invisible. There’s no surge of momentum to orient around, no clear moment of completion on the horizon. For the sprinter, this phase can start to feel like something has gone wrong. The enthusiasm that usually comes naturally begins to fade. You find yourself wondering whether you’re actually doing anything meaningful, whether you’ve lost something, whether the work itself is worth continuing.

The pessimism that surfaces during a sustained effort phase is what happens when someone with sprint wiring encounters a task that won’t reward sprint behavior. The temptation is to conclude that you’ve lost your edge, or that the work itself has stopped mattering. What’s actually happening is simpler: you’re operating outside the conditions where your natural energy fires most reliably, and your nervous system is registering the mismatch as a problem with the work. The friction comes from this misalignment but it’s not a sign that something is wrong.

What Self-Knowledge Actually Gets You

Understanding your natural style of motion won’t eliminate the discomfort of working against it. But it can change what you do with the signal. A sprinter who knows they’re a sprinter can recognize the flatness of a marathon phase as a style friction rather than a slip. That recognition creates just enough distance to keep going without catastrophizing.

It also opens up some practical options. Sprinters doing long-arc work can benefit from finding ways to create internal finish lines within the larger effort, genuine moments of completion that let the wiring do what it does well, even inside a structure that requires sustained presence. The goal is to make the marathon navigable for the person you actually are.

Knowing the Difference

The useful starting point is understanding which mode is yours, and what you tend to feel when the work asks for something different. If you can answer that honestly, you have something more valuable than a productivity strategy. You have a map of your own reactions. The next time the work feels wrong, that map gives you somewhere to start before you start drawing conclusions about yourself.

The Video

A few weeks ago, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of himself eating the company’s new Big Arch burger. He held it up, took a careful bite, said some enthusiastic things about it. He referred to the burger as “the product” a few times, which, to be fair, is probably totally normal inside McDonald’s corporate HQ.

Then an Irish comedian found it, posted a mocking reaction on TikTok, and suddenly millions of people were watching a CEO nibble a hamburger like it might hurt him.

Other fast-food CEOs wasted no time piling on. The whole thing blew up over what was, honestly, a pretty minor stumble. And watching it happen, my first thought wasn’t about him specifically. It was about how genuinely hard this job is.

The Part Nobody Tells You

Kempczinski has been CEO since 2019. He posts regularly. He almost certainly has communications staff. Someone probably watched the video before it went up. And it still happened. Could any of them have known that a comedian in Ireland would find the video three weeks later, or that the moment would land the way it did?

This is the part of leadership that doesn’t get talked about enough. You can do the work, develop real judgment, get coaching, get feedback, build a strong track record and still walk into a moment you didn’t see coming. The more visible you are in your role, the more surface area you have. That’s true whether you’re running a global brand or presenting to a room of stakeholders you’ve never met before.

Most of us have had a version of this. A presentation that landed flat. An email that got forwarded to the wrong person. A comment in a meeting that got interpreted in a way you never intended. The scale is different but the feeling is the same - that disorienting gap between what you meant and what people experienced. And the more senior you become, the more that gap can cost you, because more people are watching.

What You’re Actually Signing Up For

The instinct after a moment like this is to find the lesson. Figure out what went wrong, adjust, do better next time. And sometimes that’s the right response. But not always.

Sometimes there isn’t a clean lesson. Sometimes the video was fine and the comedian was funny and the timing was bad and that’s the whole story. Searching too hard for what you should have done differently can be its own trap. It keeps the moment alive longer than it deserves, and it implies a level of control you never actually had.

What you are signing up for, when you step into any kind of visible leadership role, is a certain amount of this. Moments that don’t go as planned. Reactions you didn’t anticipate. That’s not a bug in the system, it’s the system. You’ll never entirely prevent them. The question is whether you can take the hit, extract whatever is genuinely useful, and keep going without letting it shrink you.

Sometimes you grow from these moments. Sometimes you just survive them. Both are good.

He’ll Be Fine. So Will You.

Kempczinski will survive this. McDonald’s will sell a lot of Big Arches. The internet will find something else to talk about, and this moment will fade into a footnote.

What will matter is whether he takes the useful lesson from it and leaves the rest behind. That's the practice for anyone leading in public, and honestly, it's enough.

Finding Your Leverage Points

Most people who are serious about their own development have no shortage of ideas about what to work on. Management books (and podcasts and newsletters) promote new frameworks and approaches, new habits to develop that are guaranteed to change the game in your favor.

The problem is that the list keeps growing and the available time and energy don’t.

So you end up doing a little of everything inconsistently, or nothing deliberately, or cycling through the same intentions every January. None of those options are getting you where you want to go.

What Makes Something High-leverage

A leverage point is an input that produces a disproportionate return across multiple areas at once. Sleep is the clearest example. With healthy sleep focus improves, patience increases, emotional reactivity drops, and hard conversations get easier. It doesn’t just fix one thing. It upgrades the whole system.

Other practices work the same way for different people.

• Regular exercise does it for some.

• A weekly habit of processing and planning before the week accelerates does it for others.

• Protecting time in the morning before the day develops its own momentum.

• A standing conversation with someone who helps you think clearly.

What these have in common is that their absence can affect everything, not just one aspect of your performance.

These are different from optimizations. A better system for managing email, a tighter meeting structure, a new approach to prioritization. Those are worth doing. They just don’t move the underlying state the way leverage points do.

Finding Yours

The questions below won’t produce a universal answer. They’re designed to surface your high-leverage points.

When have you functioned at your best, and what was true about your life in that period? Look for conditions, not circumstances. The conditions that supported your clearest thinking tend to repeat themselves across different chapters of your career.

When a practice stops, what else goes with it? This is a clear signal. You stop exercising and your patience shortens by Wednesday. You lose your Sunday planning habit and the week feels reactive from the start.

What’s the small thing that you could do even in a difficult week? The practices that actually stick are the ones that survive disruption in some reduced but meaningful form. A full workout becomes a twenty-minute walk. A ninety-minute planning session becomes a ten-minute scan of the week ahead.

What’s on your list that isn’t really doing anything? Most people’s self-improvement inventories contain a mix of genuine leverage points and things that felt compelling when they encountered the advice. Both take up space. Only one of them is worth continuing.

What This Surfaces

When people do this kind of audit honestly, a few things tend to come up. Sleep and movement appear on almost everyone’s list, which is worth acknowledging even if it’s not surprising.

The more interesting findings are usually the idiosyncratic ones. The person who realizes they function better when they have one unscheduled hour on Friday afternoon to decompress before the weekend. The leader who notices that skipping their weekly conversation with a trusted peer affects their confidence.

You probably already know what your leverage points are. The question is whether you’re treating them like the priority they actually are, or leaving them at the bottom of a list you’re always about to get to.

The Moment

Your boss, or someone with a bit more seniority than you, asks about something your team is working on. A timeline. A number. Where things stand on a project. And you don’t have that detail.

How you handle the next few seconds tells you something worth knowing about yourself.

Some might reach for their phone, hoping to find an answer before the silence stretches too long. Others offer a rough estimate and spend the next hour silently second-guessing it. Some apologize more than is really necessary. A few make a mental note to build a better tracking system so this never happens again. And a smaller group simply says they’ll find out and get back to you, then moves on without much drama.

These are not equally good responses. And the difference between them has nothing to do with how organized you are.

What’s Going On

The discomfort you feel when you don’t have an answer is almost never really about the missing detail. It’s about what not having it means to you.

If your confidence as a leader is built on knowing everything your team is doing, then any gap in that knowledge feels threatening. Not just “I don’t have this number” but something more like “I shouldn’t be in this room.”

That’s a much bigger problem than the question itself.

It’s time to remind yourself that comprehensive knowledge was never actually the job, even when your team was small enough that it felt like it was. At smaller scales, knowing everything works fine. You’re close to the work, the team is manageable, and staying on top of every detail feels like good leadership. At that stage, it probably is.

But the habit doesn’t scale. As their role grows, a leader who needs to know every detail starts pulling the team closer than necessary. Status meetings become check-ins that are really about reassuring yourself. People get asked for updates more often than they need to provide them. Over time, the team feels your anxiety.

The moment someone asks a question you can’t answer isn’t a failure. It’s a signal that you need to change how you’ve been operating.

How You Respond in the Room

Moments like this are a test of executive presence, and it’s good to be clear about what each response actually signals.

The scramble. You reach for your phone or start visibly trying to locate the answer on the spot. It can look like diligence. It more often reads as anxiety. And it tells the room that you think you should have had this and that not knowing is a problem that needs fixing right now.

The approximation. You offer your best guess with more confidence than you actually have. This works sometimes. It also goes wrong often enough that it’s worth being careful. If the number matters and you were off, you’ve created a bigger credibility issue than the original gap.

The over-apology. “I should know this, I’m sorry, let me find out.” The apology does more damage than the missing information. You’ve just announced that not having the detail is a failure and confirmed it to everyone in the room.

The clean handoff. “I don’t have that in front of me. I’ll get back to you by end of day.” No scramble, no guessing, no apology. Just a straightforward response and a clear next step. This is how someone sounds when they’ve made peace with the idea that their value in the room isn’t about having every answer ready. It signals that this level of detail isn’t what they need to hold personally in order to lead well. For a lot of leaders, it’s harder to pull off than it looks because it requires feeling settled in your own authority.

After the Moment

How you handle it in the room matters. What you do afterward matters more.

The instinct is usually to close the gap. Add a tracking layer, ask the team for more frequent updates, get closer to the details so you’re never caught off guard again. It’s understandable. It’s also the wrong lesson. You’ll end up more informed and more anxious, because the scope of what you feel responsible for knowing will just keep growing.

The better question is what you actually need to know. Not everything, but the right things. How your key relationships are holding up. Where your people are running into walls. What’s at risk. What decisions are coming that need your judgment. A leader who has a clear read on those things can handle almost any question that comes their way.

Getting there usually means tolerating a period where you feel less on top of things than you’re used to. Most leaders find that harder than they expected. It’s also, in most cases, where the growth is.

The Loop

A lot of senior leaders spend time in roles that don’t feel quite right but aren’t bad enough to leave.

The work is manageable - sometimes challenging in a good way. The compensation is acceptable and the team is cordial. Nothing is obviously wrong.

But it’s hard to silence a little voice that says you should be growing.

What usually follows is an ongoing internal deliberation that doesn’t go anywhere. The same considerations come up, get examined, and no “answer” is returned. It’s an uncomfortable feeling that isn’t enough to force a decision.

The Deliberation That Doesn’t Progress

This pattern is easy to misread. You’re taking your experience seriously, staying with the question, not pushing it away. And that feels like the responsible thing to do; being honest with yourself rather than avoiding something uncomfortable.

But there’s a difference between deliberation that moves forward and deliberation that just recycles. The first creates momentum. The second returns to the same data points, the same unresolved tension, the same inconclusive weighing of options. And because the thinking feels engaged, it’s easy to experience it as progress when it isn’t.

Part of what sustains the loop is that it provides a kind of psychological cover. As long as you’re thinking about it, you’re not stuck - you’re in process. The problem is that the process has no exit. There’s no new information coming in, no assumptions being tested, no conversations that might shift the picture. Just the same internal monologue, running on a familiar track.

It’s worth asking what you would actually need to know to answer the question, and whether you’re doing anything to find it out.

Dissatisfaction and Impatience Aren’t the Same Thing

High performers carry a strong internal sense of trajectory. They expect growth to feel a certain way and arrive on a certain timeline. When a role plateaus, the gap between expectation and experience registers as dissatisfaction, and dissatisfaction gets read as misalignment. But those aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes the discomfort is less about where you are and more about how long it’s taking to feel settled, recognized, or fully expressed there.

Impatience and misalignment can feel similar from the inside. Separating them requires honest inquiry that the loop doesn’t produce.

Presence as a Choice

There’s a default assumption in leadership development that discomfort should be converted into action. Usually that’s right. But sometimes the more useful move is to process the feeling, assess what you actually know, and then deliberately return your attention to where you are.

That’s not the same as giving up. It’s deciding that the question doesn’t need to stay permanently open, that you don’t have enough information yet to answer it, and that being somewhere with intention is different from being somewhere by default. For people who are used to treating every internal signal as something to act on, that can be a harder choice than it sounds.

If you've been circling the same question for a while without getting any closer to an answer, that's worth paying attention to. Treat it as a prompt to ask a more honest question first: is what I'm feeling a signal that something is genuinely wrong, or is it impatience for a change I can't yet describe? The answer to that question will be more useful than anything the loop has been producing.

I recently posted a five-part video series on LinkedIn about the Eisenhower Matrix. Most of my coaching clients struggle from time to time with spending time on the right things, and the matrix is always a helpful and straightforward structure for getting clarity on where your energy is actually going.

Here’s the full breakdown. Enjoy!

Introduction: The Problem with Being Busy

We’ve all had those days where you’re moving nonstop but can’t point to what you actually got done. Try the Eisenhower Matrix. Take everything on your plate and sort it into four quadrants based on two questions: Is it urgent? And is it important?

Quadrant One: Urgent and Important

These are the tasks that demand immediate attention and actually matter. Here’s how to think about them.

Quadrant Two: Important but Not Urgent

This is where most leaders should be spending their time, but it’s the easiest quadrant to neglect.

Quadrant Three: Urgent but Not Important

This quadrant tricks you into thinking you’re being productive when you’re really just being reactive.

Quadrant Four: Neither Urgent nor Important

The easiest quadrant to identify and the hardest habit to break.

“I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know”

People sometimes say this when they first reach out for coaching. They say it almost apologetically as if admitting to a flaw they’re embarrassed about.

“I need help with X” or “I’m struggling with Y” are different statements. Those identify a visible problem. This phrase describes the sense that you need to change or build something in yourself, but you can’t see what it is.

The next level of leadership feels close enough to touch, but the path to get there has gone foggy. The strategies that brought you this far don’t seem like they’ll carry you forward, but the new ones aren’t clear yet.

What Happens

You’ve built credibility and success in your current role. Earned trust, delivered results. People around you are moving into bigger roles and you feel that you could too. The opportunity feels within reach.

But when you try to map the gap between where you are and where you want to be, the picture stays blurry. You can’t identify the missing piece. You suspect there are blind spots in how you see yourself. You worry there are capabilities you should be developing that you haven’t even spotted yet. You look at people operating at the level above you and you can’t reverse-engineer how they’re different.

Some anxiety shows up. It’s not the fear of failure, it’s a fear that you’re working on the wrong things, or missing the work entirely.

Two Anxieties Blur Together

The first is about self-awareness. You worry you’re blind to your own weaknesses. Maybe there’s feedback you’re not hearing, or patterns you keep repeating without seeing them. Maybe your sense of how you’re perceived doesn’t match reality. You want a clearer picture of yourself but don’t know how to get it.

The second is about direction. You worry there are things you should be building or creating in yourself that you haven’t even thought to pursue. Skills you need to develop. Relationships you need to invest in. Ways of thinking you need to adopt.

These two anxieties feed each other. If you can’t see yourself clearly, how do you know what to build? If you don’t know what to build, how do you assess whether you’re capable of it?

The Old Framework Stops Working

This feels destabilizing because it arrives after a long stretch of competence. For years, you’ve had a reasonably clear sense of good performance. You knew what to prioritize, how to add value, where to focus your energy. That clarity made you confident.

Then that framework stops working. The feedback you receive gets more abstract. The problems you’re asked to solve become less about execution and more about judgment. The political landscape gets more complex. The expectations shift from delivering outcomes to shaping direction.

You start to realize that the next level requires something qualitatively different, but you can’t say what. The people who succeed there seem to operate from principles or instincts you don’t yet have. You watch them and you see the results, but you can’t identify the underlying moves.

Permission to Be Uncertain

“I don’t know what I don’t know” is a request for help making the invisible visible. Someone who can see what you can’t. Someone who can help you understand the shape of the gap so you can start closing it.

But there’s also a request for permission to be uncertain. An acknowledgment that ambition alone isn’t enough and that humility about your own blind spots might be where growth starts.

The awareness that you don’t know what you don’t know is sophisticated. It’s metacognition. It’s the ability to step back and see the limits of your own perspective. Many people never get there. They keep operating from the same framework, wondering why it stops producing results, never questioning whether the framework itself needs to change.

Standing at the Threshold

If you’re experiencing this right now, you’re standing at a threshold where the old ways of understanding your work no longer hold. That’s uncomfortable. It’s also a sign of readiness.

The people who reach the next level aren’t the ones who had perfect clarity from the start. They’re the ones who were willing to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, and to do the work of making the invisible visible. The fog doesn’t clear all at once. But it clears enough to take the next step.

And that’s usually all you need.