Calm, clear, and confident

Sometimes we’re really confident about the decision we need to make, and we’re still not in a great place to have the conversation that goes with it.

I facilitated a session this week for a local women’s group on deciding better and leading longer. We spent most of our time talking about the three Cs:

Are we deciding from a place of calm and not reacting?

Are we clear about the problem we’re actually trying to solve?

Are we confident we can execute on the decision once we take it forward?

What I found interesting was that in two of the situations, the women were already confident about the decision itself. One had known the right answer for a while, and the person involved was always an emotional trigger for her. The other could see the right response clearly but knew she wasn’t calm enough to have the discussion she really wanted to have about what she was seeing.

Neither of them needed help deciding. They needed to be in a different place before they could say it.

Sometimes the right move is to wait a day. Get out of the reaction, come back to it, and have the conversation when you can actually hear the other person. That’s sound advice.

What I’ve watched happen, in myself and in plenty of leaders I work with, is that the day turns into a week, and the week turns into next quarter, and eventually the thing gets swept under the rug and never gets said at all. The frustration doesn’t go away. It builds, then comes out later at the wrong time and hotter than we meant.

The bigger thing, though, is what happens when running low is just our normal. When we’re running below half full most of the time, we stop checking any of the three Cs before we make the call.

We don’t pause to ask whether we’re calm.

We don’t test whether we’re solving the actual problem or the symptom in front of us.

We don’t think through whether we can carry the decision once we’ve made it.

Yet we still make the decision and act confidently. A decision made quickly feels the same as a decision that's been pressure-tested. Until it doesn't, and we start second-guessing, or seeing the consequences we didn't consider.

The risk isn’t one bad call on a bad day. It’s a run of decisions nobody checked, and a leader with no way to judge which ones were sound.

Think about a recent consequential decision you didn’t feel one hundred percent about. Which one was triggering your doubt? Clarity about the real issue, feeling calm and not reactive, or confidence that the outcome could be realized?

I run this as a workshop with leadership teams who are on the hook for consequential calls and running at full speed all the time. We focus on what running low actually costs them and how to use the 3 Cs to review a decision before it's made, not after. Let’s talk if this is a need in your organization.

Hi. I’m Melissa. I write for the achiever who knows they can't pressure-test the biggest calls alone but are tempted to do it anyway.

Share The Decisions You’re Making Alone

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