When Clarity Finds You
For most of my career, I treated clarity like something to chase.
I thought it lived at the end of long meetings, neatly organized spreadsheets, or project plans color coded by priority. Clarity, I believed, was the reward for discipline.
But lately, I’ve realized that clarity doesn’t always arrive on command. Sometimes it finds you in the quiet moments you weren’t planning to have. The pause between decisions. The space after a hard conversation. The early morning stillness when the world hasn’t asked for anything yet.
When I first stepped into leadership, I assumed my job was to have all the answers. The pressure to appear certain was constant, especially in rooms filled with people expecting direction. But certainty and clarity aren’t the same thing. Certainty says, I know the way. Clarity whispers, I can see where I am. There’s a big difference.
The best leaders I know aren’t the loudest voices in the room. They’re the ones who create space for others to breathe, think, and grow. They don’t chase productivity; they create clarity. And that clarity doesn’t come from endless motion. It comes from presence.
Last week, I had one of those humbling “I thought I knew better” moments. It started with a small miscommunication that spiraled into unnecessary tension. Everyone involved was acting in good faith, but somewhere along the way, the message got lost. My instinct was to fix it quickly, to call meetings and smooth edges. Instead, I stopped. I sat with it. I asked myself one question I’ve started using as a leadership reset: What is actually true here? Not what I want to be true. Not what I fear might be true. Just what is true right now. That simple question cut through the noise. It shifted the conversation from reaction to reflection, and we found our footing again.
Clarity doesn’t demand control. It invites honesty. As I launch Lead Like You Mean It, I keep returning to this idea: clarity is a gift, but it’s also a practice.
It’s the act of aligning who I am with what I say and how I lead. Some days that means admitting I don’t have it all figured out, but I’m willing to stay in the room until I do. Leadership, at its core, is a series of moments where we choose who to be. Every time I choose stillness over reaction, curiosity over certainty, and presence over performance, I feel a little closer to my True North. Clarity doesn’t need to be chased. It just needs space to emerge.