Standing Still

For years, I knew something in my work needed to change. I just never forced myself to make the big decision.

I’d built a consulting business advising dairy farms on nutrition: early starts, long drives, barns at five in the morning. I worked hard, I served my clients, and for a long time, that was enough to keep me from asking the harder question.

Driving down the road between farms, the same thoughts circled. Can I even do this? Is this what I want to do with my life? Or am I just good at it, and afraid to find out whether I’m anything else?

I never said the answer out loud. I told myself that as long as I didn’t admit it, I couldn’t be wrong about it.

So I kept the machine running. Do enough to survive, find another client, another season, another drive, just keep showing up. I told myself the grind would eventually lead to success, and that if I just kept going, it would all work out.

In The Things We Hide, I describe four walls leaders build out of their fears and insecurities. Intensity. Insensitivity. Isolation. And the one that looks the most like a virtue: Inactivity.

Inactivity doesn’t always look like laziness. It can look like staying the course long after the course stopped making sense. It is the leader who keeps doing what they have always done, convinced that effort alone will save them, or at least delay the reckoning.

That was me, from the outside, it looked like a solid career I should have been grateful for. Inside, I was avoiding the only decision that mattered.

Beliefs drive thoughts. Thoughts drive actions. Actions drive results. The belief that not deciding kept me safe produced the exact result I was trying to outrun. A life that was running without me in it.

Standing still was never neutral. It was a decision, just the one I made by refusing to make one.

What took me years to learn was that I wasn’t alone, and that the way out wasn’t another lap of the same work. It was admitting the thing I’d been hiding, first to myself, then to the people who could help me carry it.

Podcast

Christina Lecuyer picked up golf at eighteen, which is almost unheard of, and still became an All-American, won five times in college, and turned pro. She spent the next decade playing alongside Fortune 500 CEOs and Wall Street executives, where she learned that the people with the most impressive lives were often the least content. Today, she is a confidence and mindset coach and host of the Decide It’s Your Turn podcast, and her whole focus is on closing the gap between how a life looks and how it feels.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Christina.

1. Indecision Is Still a Decision

Christina’s whole brand is built on one word: decide. Not the small daily picks, but the real ones, where you burn the bridge and leave yourself no way back. Most people avoid that and call it keeping their options open. She doesn’t buy it. Refusing to choose is a choice, and it is usually the most expensive one, because it means staying exactly where you are. She also takes the fear out of it. She doesn’t believe in wrong decisions, only in decisions that hand you information for the next one. Turn left; if it doesn’t work, turn right next time. The only real mistake is standing at the intersection, never turning at all.

2. Comfort Is the Hardest Thing to Leave

Most of Christina’s clients are wildly successful. The companies, the buyouts, the country club memberships, the whole life everyone tells you to want. And plenty of them are quietly miserable. She spent ten years on the course with executives and watched the same pattern up close; the people with everything still convinced the next million would finally settle it. “They weren’t at all happy.” The trap, she says, is comfort itself. When you have nothing, change is easy, because there is nothing to lose. When life looks good from the outside, leaving any part of it feels reckless, even when you already know it isn’t the one you want. So you stay. And staying, she says, is the most painful decision of all.

3. Get Clear, or Someone Else Decides for You

The shift, for Christina, always starts with clarity. She pointed out how strange it is that the same leaders who can forecast their business five years out, to the quarter, go vague the moment you ask what they want from their own life. “I just want to be happy.” She’d laugh that out of any boardroom. “What does happiness mean? What do you want?” You would never accept “I just want to be successful” as a business plan, so why accept it as a life plan? Clarity is what lets you say a real yes and a real no. Without it, you default to whatever you’re already good at, whatever pays, whatever everyone expects. And a life built on default is a life someone else decided for you.

One Small Thing Before You Go

Christina kept circling one idea: the people who build something that lasts are the ones willing to do the small things, over and over, that everyone else skips.

A review is one of those things.

If you’ve read The Things We Hide, leave one on Amazon. It takes two minutes, and it is exactly the kind of small thing that decides whether the next leader who needs this book ever finds it.

And if you haven’t read it yet, let this be your nudge. The whole book is about the walls we hide behind and the beliefs holding them up. Christina would call picking it up a decision. So would I.

Leave a review or grab your copy: Amazon.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.