The CEO called me in. I thought it was over.

Good Morning Reader

Let me ask you something before we get into it this week.

When was the last time you made a decision, a real one, not a meeting to discuss the decision, not a framework to evaluate the decision, but an actual call, committed to, communicated, moved on?

Because what I am seeing right now, across boardrooms and leadership teams and one-to-one conversations, is a pattern. Capable, experienced leaders who are stuck. Not because they lack information. Not because the options are unclear. But because the ground beneath the confidence that got them here has shifted, and they are not quite sure what to trust anymore.

And I understand why it is hard. Not in the abstract. In the specific.

The decisions you made, the risks you took, the rooms you pushed your way into, all of that took courage. That courage built something real. Your track record. Your instincts. Your sense of who you are when things get difficult. And now the world is moving in ways those instincts were not built for. The tools that produced results are producing uncertainty instead. And when the thing that gave you confidence stops working, what you are left with is doubt.

That doubt is quiet at first. Then it takes over.

Sylvia Plath wrote about a woman sitting in a fig tree, watching each branch hold a different possible life. She stayed in the tree so long, paralysed by the fear of choosing wrong, that every fig turned black and fell. Not because she chose badly. Because she did not choose at all.

Indecision is not neutral. It is not a holding position. It is a direction. The direction of staying still while the options disappear.

I have been that person. More than once.

Years ago I was asked to add a project to my portfolio that was already in trouble. Things had been shifting for months. Before me there had been a lot of analysis and very little movement. Nobody wanted to be the one to call it wrong.

I went the other way. I got in front of the teams, sat with the client, and started making decisions fast. Some of those decisions surprised people. What helped me move was something Jeff Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders: recognise the difference between one-way and two-way doors. One-way doors are consequential and hard to reverse, they deserve slow, careful deliberation. Two-way doors are reversible. You can correct quickly. A lot of what we were sitting on were two-way doors. Somebody just had to be willing to walk through one.

So I did. And one of those decisions turned out to be wrong. Wrong in a way that cost us time and money.

I walked into the CEO's office convinced I was done. Instead he said: "Well done on moving. Now tell me what you learned so you do not cost us money like that again."

I found out later that a number of the team leaders had said if I got fired they would walk out. Because we were finally moving. Even the wrong decisions had given us data. We could correct. We had something to work with.

What you avoid controls you. And in organisations, what leadership avoids becomes the ceiling everyone else lives under.

A bad decision that moves you is almost always better than a good reason not to move at all.

The doubt you are carrying right now, the sense that the version of you who got here may not be the version who navigates what comes next, that is not a sign to slow down. That is the gap. The space between who you intend to be and who the pressure is currently shaping you into.

The clarity you are looking for will not arrive before you move. It arrives after. You already know what it feels like to be stuck in it. The question is whether you are going to keep paying that cost.

You do not need to be certain. Nobody is certain right now. You need to be moving.

If this is landing somewhere real for you, I want to ask something direct.

What would it take to work with someone who will not let you off the hook?

That is what I do. I work with senior leaders who are ready to move from the pattern pressure shaped into the leader they actually chose to become.

If you want to explore whether this is right for you, reply to this email or

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One thing for this week.

Write down the three decisions you have been sitting on longest. Not the ones you genuinely cannot make. The ones you have been choosing not to make.

For each one, ask this: if this turns out to be wrong, can I recover from it?

Some decisions deserve to wait. The consequential ones, the ones you genuinely cannot walk back, those warrant the time and the counsel and the care. But that is not most of what is sitting on your desk right now. Most of it is reversible. Most of it is correctable. And the reason it has not moved is not that it needs more time. It is that being wrong has started to feel like something you cannot afford. That feeling is not judgment. That is the pattern.

If it is a two-way door, make it by Friday. Not perfectly. Just make it.

If it is genuinely one-way, name the single piece of information that would actually change your answer. Give yourself a date to have it. Tell someone else that date.

Three questions to sit with:

• What decision have you been calling "not ready" that is actually just uncomfortable
• Who in your organisation is filling the vacuum your indecision is creating?
• If the leader you intend to be were making this call today, what would they do?

If you are honest about it, you already know which decisions you have been avoiding. The scorecard will show you exactly where that pattern is costing you most. It takes seven minutes. - Take the scorecard here