There’s a reason people stay stuck, repeating the same 6 months over and over again in their life. It’s the difference between hoping something will happen and actually deciding it will.
Many of the leaders I work with experience that feeling of a plateau, or a stuck-ness that drives them crazy. For the most part, these are people who have it together, they are successful in their own right, and they lead a life they are proud of.
But sometimes it’s as simple as that one little distinction between hoping and deciding.
I caught myself doing this last year. I was building an online course, which meant learning backend software I had zero experience using. Every time I sat down to work on it, I felt a low-level sense of dread. I told myself I hoped I’d figure it out eventually. I felt optimistic about it in theory. I even set intentions around it.
But I wasn’t actually doing the thing. I was hoping around the edges of it, which let me hold onto the dream without ever touching the risk of really starting.
Hoping and Deciding Are Two Different Energies
Hoping feels good. It feels safe. It gives you permission to want something without committing to the discomfort of pursuing it. And it comes with a built-in exit ramp: the moment things get hard, you can tell yourself it just wasn’t meant to be.
Deciding doesn’t offer that exit. Deciding sounds like this is what I’m doing, even if it’s messy, even if I fail at first, even if I have no idea how I’m going to figure it out. There’s a boldness in deciding that simply isn’t present when you’re only hoping.
I think a lot of us live in the hoping zone longer than we’d like to admit. We call it staying open, or being patient. Sometimes it’s just fear in a different disguise.
The Task Is Rarely as Hard as the Dread Around It
Once I actually decided to learn the backend of my course platform, something shifted. Not because the task itself got easier. It shifted because I stopped waiting to feel ready and just opened the software and started clicking around. Within minutes, I found solutions sitting right there that I’d spent weeks avoiding purely out of dread.
This happens to me constantly, especially with anything outside my expertise, and I’d bet it happens to you too. We spend far more time bracing for the hard thing than the hard thing ever actually costs us. The anticipation is almost always worse than the doing.
Action Beats Anxiety, Almost Every Time
Underneath the hoping and the dreading is usually the same fear: the fear of failing or falling down in front of people. We are all going to fail, probably hundreds of times over the course of our lives. That isn’t a worst case scenario. It’s simply what building something looks like from the inside.
Action beats anxiety almost every single time. The nerves don’t disappear, not for me anyway. But the moment I take even the smallest step, something in the fear starts to loosen. Motion creates its own kind of relief. It replaces the scary unknown with an actual next step, and then another one after that.
If you want to make an impact in your life, and I believe you do, that impact won’t come from waiting until you feel motivated or certain. It will come from deciding, even in the middle of not knowing how, and letting the doing quiet the fear instead of the other way around.
Where in your life are you hoping instead of deciding?
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