She had a plan. A good one.
Months of thinking. Scenario-mapping. Quiet conversations with trusted colleagues to gut-check her assumptions. She was moving her team toward more autonomy, fewer check-ins, more ownership, a shift that felt like it could genuinely change things.
She knew what she wanted to do. She just couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
So she waited. And she refined. And she waited some more.
From the outside, it looked responsible. Thorough, even. But she knew the truth: she wasn’t waiting for clarity. She was waiting for certainty. And certainty, as it turns out, doesn’t show up before you act. It shows up, sometimes after.
So she acted anyway.
What Happens When You Step Into Motion
This is the fourth step of the POCA® Model for Unlearning, the framework at the heart of my work with leaders: Pause, Observe, Choose, Act.
The first three steps are internal. Pause interrupts the autopilot. Observe surfaces what’s actually driving the behavior. Choose creates space for a different response. But Act is where everything finally meets the world. And for many leaders, it’s the hardest place to get to.
Clarity often follows action. It rarely precedes it.
She introduced the change as a starting point. She named what she was experimenting with. She told the team she didn’t have all the answers yet. She made it real without making it final.
What followed was imperfect, and that’s exactly what made it useful. Some things worked. Others created friction. A few assumptions she’d held quietly, the ones she hadn’t even known to question, turned out to be wrong. The feedback arrived fast and from every direction.
And here’s what changed: she stopped being invested in being right. She became invested in staying responsive.
The team felt that shift. Trust grew because she stayed present, adapted without retreating, and didn’t pretend the friction wasn’t there.
Why We Stay Stuck in the Planning Phase
Most leaders I work with spend far longer in the planning phase than they realize. Planning feels safe. Clean. Controllable. It gives the illusion of progress while protecting us from the discomfort of finding out that something we tried didn’t work.
But planning has a ceiling. At some point, more refinement is adding delay.
Act is what makes the difference between insight and transformation. Between knowing and leading. Between understanding your patterns and actually changing them.
New leadership behaviors don’t take hold through reflection alone. They take hold through iteration. Through trying, noticing what happened, adjusting, and trying again. Identity-level change stops living in your head and starts showing up in how you actually move through the world.
Leadership becomes real in the stepping forward, imperfectly, responsively, and again.
If you’ve been circling an action that needs to happen, a conversation, a structural change, a new way of showing up with your team, consider this your nudge.
You don’t need certainty. You need a starting point.
That’s where unlearning takes shape. And that’s where leadership becomes real.
