What Sounds Right Isn't Always True

For a long time I prided myself in making decisions quickly. I was of the school of ‘A good decision today is better than a perfect decision tomorrow’.

(A quote attributed to Gen. George Patton though who I thought I was a war with I don’t know.)

I didn’t make the decisions recklessly. I made them confidently. With the kind of clarity that lands well with others.

It seemed to work. People didn't challenge it. Things moved forward. So I kept doing it and it felt good.

What I didn't notice was how rarely I was asking myself whether any of it reflected what I genuinely thought. Whether I even knew.

I couldn’t point to a single moment where it went wrong but gradually it became harder to tell the difference between what I knew and what sounded good. An answer, delivered quickly, was a shield against questioning my thinking. For myself and others.

And that's a quiet problem. Not a crisis. Just a slow drift away from your own thinking. Until one day you reach for your genuine view on something and find it harder to locate than it should be.

At senior levels this can go unnoticed for years. Because performing certainty and having certainty can look the same from the outside. Others don't always know the difference. And eventually neither do you.

The shift for me came when I started sitting with questions a little longer before answering. Not to appear more considered. But because I realised I owed it to myself to know what I actually thought before I said anything out loud.

And "I don't know" turned out to be one of the more useful things I learned to say. Not as an abdication. As a starting point.

Is the view you're expressing actually yours — or is it the one that sounds most appropriate?

What Sounds Right Isn't Always True