What Do You Do When You’re The One Everyone Expects To Have the Answers?

Picture this: You’re sitting in your corner office (lovely view, by the way), wrestling with a tricky decision that could make or break the quarter. Your CFO wants better data, your board wants better results, your shareholders want better news, and your team want better direction …and your spouse likely wants to know why you missed dinner again.

Who exactly do you call? Your mum? Your golf partner who runs a completely different business? Your accountability group who won’t meet for another 8 weeks? The magic 8-ball from your desk drawer? Unlikely.

Who can you actually talk to when everyone else has an agenda?  

Here’s the delicious irony of climbing the corporate ladder: the higher you go, the fewer people can relate to your problems. Your team needs you to be confident and decisive. Your board needs you to give them direction, not doubts. Your fellow CEOs are either competitors or too busy wrestling with their own business crises.1

The danger isn’t just loneliness (though the corner office can feel surprisingly like a very expensive isolation chamber at times, right?). It’s that you start making decisions in an echo chamber where everyone either tells you what they think you want to hear, or what serves their own interests. I mean, really, what percentage of the time do you hear the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from the people around you? Newsflash: it’s not even close to 100%.

And when was the last time someone asked you a genuinely challenging question without wanting something in return?

What’s the difference between a coach and everyone else who gives you advice?  

Let’s clear something up: coaching isn’t therapy (though your business decisions might occasionally drive you to consider it), it’s not cheerleading (you’ve got a sales and marketing department for that), and it’s definitely not consulting (you already pay enough people to tell you what to do).

Here’s what coaches actually do – they help you think better. Instead of saying, “Here’s how to handle that difficult board member,” a good coach asks, “What would successfully navigating this relationship look like to you?” Instead of prescribing solutions, they help you discover what you already know but haven’t quite figured out how to articulate it yet.

Think of it as having an experienced thinking partner whose only agenda is your clarity and your progression and development. They’re not trying to sell you anything, inherit your job, or impress you with their industry knowledge. They’re the one person in your professional life who benefits when you make better decisions, regardless of what those decisions are. At the risk of mixing my metaphors, they have no axe to grind, and no horse in the race.

And here’s the uncomfortable and inescapable truth: You. Have. Blind. Spots.

We all have them. But unlike your colleagues who might be too polite (or too invested or too scared) to point them out, a coach’s job is to help you see around corners you didn’t even know existed.

What problems do you face that other people simply cannot understand? 

Decision fatigue is real, and when your decisions affect jobs and prospects and revenue, it hits differently than choosing what to have for lunch. You’re managing up to boards who want vision, down to teams who want direction, and sideways to peers who want… well, it’s complicated.

Then there’s the identity crisis nobody warns you about: you’ve gone from being the expert to being responsible for experts. Yesterday you knew exactly how to solve problems; today you’re supposed to know how to help other people solve problems you’ve never encountered. Impostor syndrome at this level feels less like “fake it till you make it” and more like “fake it while everyone watches and judges your quarterly results.”

And can we talk about being “always on”? When you’re the final decision-maker, your brain never really switches off. Every conversation is potentially strategic, every choice has implications, and every mistake gets amplified. Meanwhile, you’re supposed to model calm leadership while internally wondering if you actually know what you’re doing.2

How do you know if you’re making decisions with incomplete information?  

You are, I’m afraid.

You can’t read the label from inside the jar – and you, my friend, are very much inside the jar. As mentioned, every leader has blind spots, but here’s the kicker: by definition, they can’t see them. Blind spots are the assumptions you don’t know you’re making, the patterns you don’t realize you’re repeating, the opportunities you’re missing because they don’t fit your mental model or strategic paradigm.

This isn’t a character flaw – it’s human nature. But while everyone else gets feedback about their blind spots through performance reviews or 360 assessments, who’s giving you that regular objective reality check? Speaking of which, when did you last take a proper leadership assessment? We have one, of course, and others are available, but the point is knowing where your gaps are before the big problems become the BIG problems. Investing $1,000 in a comprehensive leadership assessment could be the best money you ever invested.

What’s the real cost of making big decisions alone? 

Here’s some simple math: better decisions compound exponentially begetting better decisions, whilst bad decisions at your level don’t just cost money – they cost time, talent, energy, effort, belief and momentum; and once they’re spent, they are nearly always impossible to recover.3

Meanwhile, the stress of carrying every decision alone doesn’t just affect your performance; it affects your health, your relationships, and your ability to think clearly about the next big decision.

Coaching isn’t a cost – it’s a force-multiplier. It’s an investment. It’s the difference between struggling through decisions and thinking them through properly.

Why should asking for help be considered a leadership strength? 

Every elite athlete has a coach.4 The best leaders are learners, and learning requires the humility to admit you have made mistakes and that you don’t have all the answers. In a world that changes as fast as ours does, the ability to seek perspective isn’t weakness – it’s strategic thinking.

So, what decision are you wrestling with right now that could benefit from a really smart thinking partner?

Written by Antonio Garrido.
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