She had built the business herself and run it for more than twenty years. She was extremely good at it. Everyone said so, and they were right.
Quite early on she said: I’ve lost my spark.
So she went looking for a new direction, thoroughly, the way capable people do. She had the profiling done. She had her hands read. At one point she consulted someone considerably less evidence-based than me, which tells you something about how comprehensive the search had become.
And every single one of them pointed to the same place.
Not away from the business. Back into it — but differently.
She had been talking for some time about adding training and coaching, passing on what she’d learned. She was unusually intuitive about other people’s businesses and already did this one-to-one, quietly, as part of the work. But doing it properly would mean something else: standing in front of a room, teaching, being considerably more visible.
And she kept putting it on the back burner.
She could not make a decision about it.
Not because she disagreed. She’d go over the same ground again. Same material, same conclusion, a slightly different angle each time, and then a few weeks later we would be back at the beginning.
It took me a while to understand what I was watching. She wasn’t short of information. She had more information about herself than most people acquire in a lifetime.
You can make difficult decisions all day.
You assess what matters, weigh the options, make the call. People rely on you for exactly this. It is, in many ways, the thing you are known for.
Which makes it genuinely disorienting when a simpler question arrives and there is nothing there.
But the problem isn’t that you’ve become bad at deciding.
It’s that almost every decision you’re good at comes with criteria attached. A budget. A deadline. An objective. A client. A consequence. Even when the answer is hard, there is something outside you to measure it against — and you have spent twenty years becoming exceptional at reading those measures.
Personal choices don’t come with any of that.
Do I want to carry this for another year? Is this how I want my working week to look? Am I doing this because I want to, or because I’m good at it and it would be awkward to explain why I’d rather not?
There’s no external measure that returns the correct answer. At some point your own preference has to enter the room.
And that is remarkably uncomfortable when you have spent years being the person who notices what everybody else needs.
Sometimes there is genuinely nothing there when you look. And sometimes it has been there all along, and you’ve been calling it something else — a nice idea, a someday, a thing you keep mentioning and then putting on the back burner.
There’s a second reason, and I think it’s the larger one.
A question about what you want now can start to feel like a verdict on everything that came before it.
If I don’t want this anymore, was I wrong to spend twenty years building it? If I want less of it, am I becoming less ambitious? If something that mattered enormously to me doesn’t matter in the same way now — what does that say about who I’ve been?
Nothing, necessarily.
Something can have been entirely right for you then and not be what you would choose now. We allow this easily in small things. Nobody expects you to want the holiday you wanted at thirty-five, or to still be pleased with the kitchen you chose in 2011.
But when it comes to the larger structure of a life, we behave as though changing our mind is an admission that the original choice was a mistake.
It isn’t. It may only mean that you have changed, and that nobody has asked you about it since.
There’s a study I think about more often than a sensible person should. It’s about posters.
People were shown a set of art prints and asked to choose one to take home. Half were first asked to think properly about why they liked what they liked — to set out their reasons, as any competent person would. That group chose differently from everyone else. Three weeks later, they were noticeably less happy with what they’d taken home.
Analysing the reasons seemed to move them towards what was easiest to explain, and away from what they had initially preferred.
It’s a small study about a small thing, and I wouldn’t hang a life on it. But I think of it every time somebody tells me they need a bit more time to think.
Because we are good at thinking, and we can always find another angle. Another reason. Another person whose needs ought to be considered. Another argument for waiting until the spring.
At some point more thinking stops producing better information. It just keeps you away from the one piece of information that was never going to arrive by analysis.
Years ago I worked with a man from a family of entrepreneurs — everyone around him had built something. His own business was doing well.
He had an assistant in the business whom he had begun mentoring, and he was enjoying it. Everything we looked at pointed in the same direction: there was something important for him in passing on what he knew.
The question was whether he would take it further — perhaps into business mentoring more formally. There was even an opportunity to teach at a university.
He heard it, understood it, and did nothing with it. Moving towards it would have meant changing other parts of a life that worked rather well for him.
Not resistance exactly. More like a door he preferred not to open.
We finished our work together and I didn’t hear from him for a long time.
A few months ago, a message. He’d started working with someone new, and she had suggested — after some months of her own — that he might think about mentoring.
He wrote to tell me what he’d said to her: I had my hands read, a long time ago. That’s exactly what it told me.
The best part of a decade.
And what struck me wasn’t that anything had been predicted. He had already been mentoring. He already knew he enjoyed it.
The information had been there in his own life all along.
So if there’s something you’ve been going backwards and forwards over, it may be worth noticing which question you’re actually asking.
What is the sensible thing to do? What does everybody else need from me? What would be easiest to justify?
All useful. Keep them.
But perhaps add one more:
What would I choose, if my own preference were allowed to count too?
And what would have to change if it did?
You don’t have to act on the answer. You don’t have to blow anything up. You don’t even have to be certain.
But there’s a considerable difference between not knowing what you want and never once giving yourself permission to ask.
If you do ask it this week, I’d like to know what came back. Just reply — it comes to me and no further.
Warmly,
Rosaleen
P.S. The Real Radiant Life Retreat in Bulgaria’s Rhodope Mountains runs 5–12 September. Details are here: https://realradiantlife.co.uk/radiant-life-retreat/