There’s a specific moment when knowing what you want stops being enough. When the real work becomes choosing it, fully, without a backup plan. For high achievers, that moment is often the hardest. Not because you lack courage, but because you’ve trained yourself to optimize, strategize, and wait for perfect conditions. But commitment doesn’t require perfect clarity. It requires trusting that you can handle whatever comes next. And that trust? It’s built one decision at a time.
If you’re entering the new year with a clear sense of what needs to change but an unclear sense of how to actually commit to it, you’re not alone. Most high-performing leaders I work with aren’t struggling with a lack of vision. They’re struggling with the gap between knowing and choosing. Between planning for the life they want and actually building it.
This isn’t about goal-setting. It’s about something deeper: the psychological patterns that keep you in perpetual preparation mode, and what it takes to move from waiting to committed action.
Why High Achievers Struggle With Commitment (Not Just Decisions)
Let’s be honest: high achievers are excellent decision-makers in most contexts. You can analyze data, weigh options, and execute under pressure like it’s your job. Because it usually is.
But when it comes to decisions that fundamentally reshape your life? Leaving a role that no longer fits, starting the business you’ve been “planning” for three years, setting a boundary that might actually disappoint people, choosing the direction that feels true even if it doesn’t look impressive on LinkedIn? That’s when the whole decision-making machine suddenly grinds to a halt.
It’s not that you can’t make the decision. It’s that you can’t commit to it.
There’s a difference, and it matters. Decision-making is cognitive. You’re good at that. Commitment is existential. You have to mean it. A decision can be reversed, adjusted, optimized. Commitment asks you to close other doors, to stop hedging, to accept that you won’t know if it’s “right” until you’re already in it.
For someone who has built success on being thorough, strategic, and prepared, that level of uncertainty feels less like wisdom and more like professional self-sabotage.
So you stay in the planning phase. You gather more information. You wait for a clearer sign. You keep your options open, telling yourself that this is intelligent strategy, not elaborate avoidance.
But here’s what I see in my work with leaders: the psychological safety of “keeping options open” often becomes a very comfortable prison. You end up living in a state of constant evaluation, where every choice is provisional and nothing ever feels fully chosen. That chronic state of indecision doesn’t just delay progress. It fragments your energy, erodes your self-trust, and creates a low-grade anxiety that most high achievers have mistaken for motivation since approximately 2008.
Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that entrepreneurs and high-performing leaders carry a significant mental load related to decision-making. Not just the volume of decisions, but the emotional weight of high-stakes choices that don’t come with guarantees. Add perfectionism into that mix, and you get decision paralysis dressed up as strategic thinking.
The truth is, waiting for perfect clarity is often just fear wearing a really expensive suit.
The Real Cost of Waiting for Perfect Clarity
So what are you actually waiting for?
Most high achievers will say they’re waiting for clarity, certainty, or the right timing. But when you dig deeper (and I will, because it’s literally my job), what you’re often waiting for is permission. From the market, from your peers, from some external force that will validate your choice and remove the risk of being wrong.
Spoiler alert: that permission never comes. And while you’re waiting for it, here’s what’s actually happening.
You’re delaying the life you say you want. Not in some distant future, but right now. Every day spent in waiting mode is a day not spent building, experimenting, or learning from the feedback that only comes through action. You’re essentially hitting pause on your own life while you wait for someone else to press play.
You’re teaching yourself not to trust your own judgment. Each time you override your internal knowing in favor of more analysis, more input, more waiting, you reinforce the belief that your own clarity isn’t enough. Over time, this doesn’t make you more discerning. It makes you more dependent on external validation. Which is ironic, because you probably got where you are by trusting yourself in the first place.
You’re losing the momentum that creates opportunities. Opportunities don’t wait for you to feel ready. They respond to committed action. When you’re in waiting mode, you’re not positioned to capitalize on the openings that emerge through movement. You’re too busy researching them.
You’re modeling indecision to the people who look to you for leadership. If you lead a team, run a business, or influence others in any capacity, your relationship with commitment is visible. People can sense when their leader is hedging, uncertain, or operating from a place of self-protection rather than conviction. And they mirror it right back to you.
The opportunity cost of uncommitted energy isn’t just what you’re not doing. It’s who you’re not becoming. Because the version of you that’s capable of leading the life you want? That’s built through the practice of choosing it, over and over, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Especially when it’s uncomfortable.
5 Ways to Move From Waiting to Committed Action
If you’re ready to stop waiting for your life to start and actually commit to building it, here are five shifts that make the difference between perpetual preparation and aligned action.
1. Name What You’re Actually Waiting For
Most waiting happens unconsciously. You tell yourself you need more time, more information, more resources. But if you’re honest (and I’m asking you to be), what you’re often waiting for is one of three things.
Permission. The external validation that what you want is legitimate, acceptable, or worthy of pursuit. This often shows up as waiting for someone to tell you it’s okay, waiting for proof that others have succeeded first, or waiting for conditions that remove the social risk of your choice. You’re basically waiting for a permission slip from the universe. The universe does not issue permission slips.
Certainty. The guarantee that your decision will work out, that you won’t regret it, that you won’t fail publicly or privately. This is the perfectionist’s trap. The belief that if you just think about it long enough, analyze it hard enough, you’ll eliminate all risk. You won’t. Risk is part of the deal. That’s why they call it a decision and not a guarantee.
A feeling. The assumption that committed action should feel easy, clear, or confident. You’re waiting to feel ready, to feel aligned, to feel like it’s the right time. But feelings are terrible decision-making tools when it comes to growth, because growth almost always feels uncomfortable at first. If it felt easy, you’d already be doing it.
Here’s the practice: before you make your next big decision, ask yourself, “What condition am I waiting to be met before I choose?” Write it down. Be specific. Get uncomfortably honest with yourself.
Then ask the follow-up question: “What happens if that condition never comes?”
Because here’s the truth most high achievers don’t want to hear: if you’re waiting for certainty, you’ll be waiting forever. If you’re waiting for permission, you’re giving someone else authority over your life. And if you’re waiting for it to feel easy, you’re fundamentally misunderstanding how transformation works.
Clarity doesn’t come before the choice. It comes through it.
2. Separate Decision-Making From Self-Worth
One of the biggest obstacles to committed action is the unconscious belief that making the “wrong” decision means something fundamental about your value, competence, or worth.
This is why high achievers agonize over choices that, objectively, are reversible. It’s not really about the decision itself. It’s about what the decision represents. If you choose wrong, does that mean you’re not as smart as you thought? Not as capable? Not as deserving of success? Are you about to be exposed as someone who doesn’t actually have it all figured out?
Welcome to the club. None of us have it figured out. We’re all just out here making educated guesses and hoping for the best.
When your self-worth is entangled with your decision-making, every choice becomes a referendum on your identity. That’s an impossible standard, and it’s why so many high performers stay stuck. The stakes feel too high because you’ve made yourself the stakes.
The shift here is simple but profound: your value doesn’t depend on making the “right” choice. It depends on making a choice and learning from what happens next.
This is where building self-trust becomes essential. Self-trust isn’t about always being right. It’s about trusting that you can handle being wrong. It’s about believing that you’re capable of course-correcting, learning, adapting, and rebuilding if necessary.
When you separate your worth from your outcomes, decision-making stops being about self-protection and starts being about curiosity. You’re no longer asking, “What if I fail?” You’re asking, “What will I learn?” That’s the mindset that allows you to commit without needing guarantees.
And honestly? That’s also the mindset that makes you a better leader. Because people don’t follow perfect leaders. They follow leaders who are willing to make bold choices, own the outcomes, and keep moving forward.
3. Choose Based on Values, Not Outcomes
Here’s where most goal-setting frameworks fail high achievers: they focus on outcomes without addressing the internal foundation that makes those outcomes sustainable.
You can hit every external milestone and still feel disconnected, exhausted, or unclear about what comes next. That’s not a failure of discipline or ambition. That’s a failure of alignment. You’ve been building someone else’s version of success and wondering why it doesn’t feel like yours.
Aligned decision-making starts with values, not outcomes. Instead of asking, “What will this get me?” you ask, “Does this reflect who I am and who I’m becoming?”
This is the core of the Identity G.A.P. Framework: closing the gap between who you are and how you’re operating. When you make decisions from alignment, you’re not chasing external validation or trying to prove something. You’re building a life that feels true, even when it’s hard.
Research from the American Psychological Association on self-determination theory shows that people who make choices based on intrinsic motivation (values, purpose, authentic interest) experience greater well-being, resilience, and sustained performance than those who make choices based on external rewards or pressures.
In other words, science confirms what you probably already know deep down: building a life that looks good on paper but feels hollow is a losing strategy.
Here’s what this looks like in practice.
Instead of asking, “Will this business idea succeed?” ask, “Does this work reflect what I value and how I want to contribute?”
Instead of asking, “Will people respect this choice?” ask, “Does this choice honor who I’m becoming?”
Instead of asking, “What’s the safest path forward?” ask, “What path allows me to lead with integrity?”
Values-based decision-making doesn’t eliminate risk. But it eliminates the most painful kind of regret. The regret of building a life that doesn’t feel like yours.
4. Set a Decision Deadline and Honor It
One of the most compassionate things you can do for yourself is to stop treating every decision like it requires unlimited deliberation.
Decision deadlines aren’t pressure tactics. They’re boundaries against your own avoidance. They interrupt the pattern of chronic evaluation and force you to move from analysis to action.
Here’s how to use this practice effectively.
Give yourself a realistic but firm timeline. Not “someday when I feel ready,” but “I will make this decision by [specific date].” Put it on your calendar. Treat it like a commitment to yourself, because that’s exactly what it is. And if you wouldn’t blow off a meeting with your CEO, don’t blow off a meeting with yourself.
Gather the information you actually need, not all the information that exists. High achievers often confuse thoroughness with procrastination. You don’t need to read every book, consult every expert, or explore every angle. You need enough information to make an informed choice. And that threshold is usually much lower than you think. You’re stalling.
Commit to making a decision on that date, even if it’s not perfect. This is the practice of choosing “good enough” over “optimal.” Perfectionism will always tell you to wait a little longer, gather a little more data, think it through one more time. But perfect clarity is a myth. At some point, you have to choose. This is that point.
Trust that you can course-correct if needed. Most decisions aren’t irreversible. You can learn, adjust, and pivot. But you can’t learn anything from staying in waiting mode. You’re not gathering data. You’re gathering anxiety.
When you honor your own decision deadlines, you’re practicing something essential: the ability to commit without needing certainty. That’s the skill that separates leaders who stay stuck from leaders who move forward.
5. Trust That Commitment Creates Clarity (Not the Other Way Around)
This is the shift that changes everything: clarity doesn’t come before commitment. It comes through it.
Most high achievers operate under the assumption that they need to feel clear, confident, and certain before they take action. But that’s backwards. And it’s keeping you stuck.
Clarity emerges through the process of committing and moving forward, not through endless deliberation beforehand.
Here’s why: when you’re in waiting mode, you’re working with hypotheticals. You’re imagining scenarios, weighing possibilities, trying to predict outcomes. But you don’t have real feedback because you’re not in contact with reality yet. You’re essentially running simulations in your head and wondering why none of them feel definitive.
When you commit and take action, everything changes. You start getting real information. What works, what doesn’t, what feels aligned, what needs adjustment. You learn things you couldn’t have known through thinking alone. You discover capacities in yourself that only emerge under real conditions.
This is why so many high achievers describe breakthroughs happening after they made a choice, not before. The decision to commit (to hire the team member, to launch the project, to have the difficult conversation, to invest in the direction they couldn’t fully justify on paper) created the conditions for clarity to emerge.
Committed action focuses your energy in a way that waiting never does. When you’re hedging, your attention is fragmented across multiple possibilities. When you commit, your entire system aligns around making that choice work. You start noticing opportunities you would have missed otherwise. You develop skills you didn’t know you needed. You show up differently because there’s no backup plan distracting you.
Research on perfectionism from Psychology Today shows that one of the hallmarks of perfectionism is the belief that perfect planning prevents problems. But in reality, over-planning often creates its own problems. Analysis paralysis, delayed action, and the erosion of confidence that comes from never testing your ideas in the real world.
The leaders I work with who experience the most momentum aren’t the ones who wait for perfect clarity. They’re the ones who commit to a direction, gather feedback as they go, and trust themselves to navigate whatever emerges.
That’s not recklessness. That’s leadership.
What Committed Action Actually Looks Like
Because “commitment” can sound abstract, here’s what it looks like in practice across different leadership contexts.
In your career: Instead of endlessly researching the perfect next role or waiting for the ideal opportunity to appear, you commit to a direction. Maybe it’s a specific industry, a type of work, or a set of skills you want to develop. And you take one concrete step this week. You reach out to someone in that field. You update your resume to reflect that focus. You have a conversation with your manager about shifting your responsibilities. The commitment creates the path forward.
In your business: Instead of perfecting your offer, your messaging, or your strategy before you launch, you commit to testing it with real people. You put something out there, even if it’s not polished. You get feedback. You iterate. The commitment to imperfect action generates the clarity you need to refine your approach. Turns out, your customers are way more helpful than your spreadsheets.
In your relationships: Instead of waiting for the “right time” to have a difficult conversation or set a boundary, you commit to honoring what you know is true. You schedule the conversation. You practice what you need to say. You show up and have it, even if it’s uncomfortable. The commitment to difficult conversations strengthens your relationships and your self-respect. And it usually goes better than the seventeen catastrophic scenarios you imagined.
In your leadership: Instead of waiting until you feel more confident, more prepared, or more certain, you commit to leading from where you are. You make the decision your team is waiting for. You communicate the direction, even if it’s not perfect. You take responsibility for the outcome. The commitment to decisive leadership builds the confidence you were waiting to feel.
This is the difference between perfectionistic planning and aligned movement. Planning asks, “What if I’m wrong?” Aligned movement asks, “What will I learn?”
One keeps you stuck. The other builds your life.
The Question to Ask Yourself
If you’re standing at the edge of a decision you’ve been avoiding, here’s the question that cuts through all the noise:
What would you choose if you trusted yourself to handle whatever comes next?
Not if you knew it would work out. Not if you had a guarantee. But if you trusted your own capacity to navigate uncertainty, to course-correct when needed, to learn from missteps, to build something meaningful even if it doesn’t look like what you originally envisioned.
That trust (the trust that you can handle what comes next) is the foundation of every bold choice, every aligned decision, every moment of committed action that changes your life.
And here’s what most people don’t realize: you don’t build that trust by waiting until you feel ready. You build it by choosing anyway.
Every time you honor your own knowing, even when it’s uncomfortable. Every time you set a deadline and keep it. Every time you choose based on your values instead of other people’s expectations. Every time you commit to a direction and move forward, even without perfect clarity.
That’s how you stop waiting for your life to happen and start building it with intention.
If This Resonates
If you’re realizing that what’s standing between you and the life you want isn’t a lack of clarity but a lack of commitment, and that commitment requires a different kind of internal foundation than you’ve been building, you’re not alone.
This is exactly what we’ll be exploring in depth in my upcoming free webinar on January 8th: The Inner Advantage: How to Lead with Clarity When Everything Feels Uncertain.
We’ll walk through the Identity G.A.P. Framework and what it actually looks like to make decisions, set boundaries, and build momentum from alignment instead of survival. This isn’t about goal-setting or productivity tactics. It’s about closing the gap between who you are and how you’re leading, so that committed action becomes natural instead of terrifying.
If you’re ready to stop waiting and start building, reserve your spot here.
You’re reading insights from Shakirah Forde, LCSW, Licensed Therapist, Executive Coach, and Alignment Strategist. I work with high-achieving leaders who are ready to close the gap between external success and internal clarity.
If this post resonated, forward it to someone who needs to hear it. And if you want to go deeper, explore The Inner Advantage or reach out about 1:1 coaching.
