The ZOOM chat blew up when I asked this one question
I spoke to over 500 female founders two weeks ago at the Millionaires Playbook virtual summit.
My topic was why decision making matters more than any tactical strategy in sales or marketing.
I expected nodding along. What I got was a chat that wouldn't stop moving, twice, for two very different reasons.
The First Flood
We were talking about exit planning, long term vision, the Polaris Point™, the fixed destination every decision in your business should be navigating toward.
I asked a simple question. Do you actually know your long term plan? Your exit plan? What you're building toward?
The chat lit up.
Not with answers. With admissions.
Founders running serious, established businesses realized in real time that they'd been growing hard without ever deciding where it was supposed to end up. Revenue was up. Vision was not defined.
Once that gap was visible, the next layer got uncomfortable fast. Because building toward a real destination sometimes means restructuring a division, exiting a partner, or cutting losses on something you've invested years into.
That's not a tactics problem. That's a decision making problem, and it gets more expensive the longer a business runs without addressing it.
The Second Flood
The chat went quiet, then erupted again later, this time when I talked about avoidance.
Your brain is wired to protect you from hard conversations, from risk, from the possibility of failure or a painful exchange with someone you depend on.
So instead of having the one hard conversation that would actually move things forward, you focus on a tactical skill. A funnel tweak. A new hire process. A system upgrade. Something that feels productive because it's measurable, and because it's nowhere near as uncomfortable as the real issue sitting in the room.
I asked them, what's the ONE conversation you're avoiding right now, while you focus on something smaller instead?
That's when the chat really moved.
A founder naming the co-founder relationship that needed to either get fixed or end. A CEO naming the leadership team member who'd been in the wrong seat for two years. A founder admitting she knew a division or a product line needed to be shut down, that it would cost money in the short term, but that she'd been running on an invisible track to nowhere for over a year because cutting it felt like admitting failure.
Different industries, same elephant.
The conversation, not the tactic, was the actual lever for growth.
If You Felt That Too
If you read any of those moments and felt something tighten in your chest, that's worth paying attention to.
It usually means you already know which decision or which conversation is sitting underneath your current strategy, quietly slowing everything else down.
I've spent 20 years watching this exact pattern, first among colleagues in medicine and healthcare leadership, and later in boardrooms, on advisory boards, and inside companies doing eight figures and companies just stepping into that range. The brain doesn't avoid hard decisions because you're weak or unprepared. It avoids them because avoidance feels safer than the unknown outcome of confronting them, even when staying the course is the more expensive choice.
Mastering emotional intelligence isn't about being nicer or more self aware for its own sake. It's about using that awareness to face the decision you're avoiding, and to influence the people around you toward a real, mutual win, not a forced one. This is the work I do alongside CEOs and leadership teams navigating exactly this.
If you already know which conversation or decision you've been circling, reply to this email and tell me what it is. I'll reply back with a real next step, or things to think through, for that specific situation.
Talk soon from my summer home on the Maine coast.
As always, I am rooting for you from your corner.
Kasey
P.S. Remember, the size of the business does not change the importance of decision making, it only changes what it costs to keep avoiding the hard ones.