Lead From Clarity, Not Certainty
"It's just not clear to me."
A client said this to me recently. He'd been trying to come up with the three-year vision for his company, and he was frustrated.
Underneath the frustration was a set of thoughts I hear from founders constantly: I need to get it right. I need to know. I should know.
Maybe for you it's not a three-year vision. It's a hire you keep going back and forth on. A strategy question that's been open for weeks. Whether you're building the right thing at all.
Whatever the decision, the experience is the same. The weight of a choice that won't resolve. Cycling in your head, waiting to feel sure before you move.
Most founders assume this means something is wrong with their thinking. They need more information, more analysis, more time to figure it out.
But more analysis was never going to help this founder. He was demanding something no founder has ever had. And as long as you demand it too, no decision will ever feel clear.
The Illusion of Certainty
We're wired to crave certainty in an uncertain world. In a study I came across, participants got a mild electric shock for wrong answers, sometimes 50% of the time, sometimes 90%. The 50% group showed far more fear and stress than the 90% group. Even a guaranteed bad outcome stresses us less than not knowing.
So it makes sense that you want certainty about the things that matter most. The company succeeding, the hire working out, the vision being right. The problem is those are outcomes you can't fully control, living in a future you can't know.
Faced with that uncertainty, your mind fills it in with the things you don't want to have happen. If I get this hire wrong, my board's gonna think I'm not good at hiring. Notice your mind rarely fills in "I probably got this right, and it's gonna be awesome."
Now you're feeling fear. A tightening in your chest or stomach. And most of us learned that fear is bad, that we shouldn't feel it.
So you escape into your head and try to figure out the right answer. If I can just be certain, the fear goes away. But since certainty about the future doesn't exist, the best you can find is the illusion of it. And if you believe you're certain and you're wrong, you're now relating to a distorted version of reality.
Startups are uncertainty machines. If you don't see this pattern, you'll spend your whole founder journey inside it, mistaking it for diligence.
Clarity Doesn't Mean Certainty
So if certainty about the future doesn't exist, what are you supposed to lead from?
Clarity. And maybe the biggest distinction that creates issues for people is thinking that clarity means certainty.
Certainty is about the future, and the best you can ever do there is an educated guess. Clarity is about you. What you authentically want. Where you actually stand right now. You can even have conviction, a strong feeling or intuition about the way to go, without pretending it's certainty. "I feel strongly about this, and I don't know for sure" is a completely coherent place to lead from.
Here's the irony: the need for certainty actually obscures clarity. When you demand something that doesn't exist, its absence feels like confusion, so you keep searching, and the searching is the noise.
And letting go of the need doesn't cost you your judgment. When you're at peace with not knowing, your discernment gets sharper, because you're seeing reality as it is: genuinely uncertain, rather than falsely certain.
Ending the Cycle of Needing to Know
The way out isn't better analysis. Uncertainty, worst-case scenarios, fear, escaping into your head to figure it out: that whole cycle is reinforced by one thing, unfelt fear. So that's where you break it. Here's what I invite clients to do, and it's the most counterintuitive and effective thing I know:
1. Find the fear in your body. Where is it showing up? Maybe a tightening in your belly. At the physical level, that's all fear is: a sensation.
2. Welcome it instead of resisting it. At first it might get a little more intense. Then, within a minute or two, it dissipates. And the figuring-it-out thought patterns start to dissolve with it, because they were only ever defense mechanisms against feeling this. You can't control the future or the outcome, but you can control how you respond to what you're feeling. This is the one point in the cycle where letting go is yours to do.
3. Ask what's actually answerable. Not "what's the right answer?" Ask: what's my best thinking right now? Your best is all you can ever do. And if the decision still feels hard, it's probably because it's close, 52/48. If the answer was obvious, it would be obvious.
4. Treat the decision as an experiment. Once you've felt the fear, the grip of needing to be right loosens, and something better becomes available: pursuing truth. Hold your decision the way a scientist holds a hypothesis, something to test, not a position to defend. If a scientist gets righteous about their ideas, they're screwed. Take the action, uncover the next card, learn. Value speed of learning over looking good.
"It's just not clear to me."
Maybe. Or maybe the clarity was there the whole time, buried under the demand for certainty.
So stop demanding it. The role of a leader is to decide in the face of uncertainty, and that means deciding in the face of fear.
Welcome the fear that's been driving the search. And you'll find you can be clear while being completely uncertain, except instead of fear, there's excitement for what's possible.
With love,
Dave Kashen
