The Good Entrepreneur Newsletter is written by Nick Kennedy, offering practical tools to overthrow the dictator in your mind so you can live an audacious life. If you were forwarded this email and liked it, get the next issue delivered to your inbox.

I was on the phone with a client a few months ago.

We were forty minutes into the session, and I had just asked her what she thought needed to happen next with Lisa — his underperforming VP who had been "almost ready" for eighteen months.

She paused. A long pause.

"I think I need to let her go."

I waited.

"I've thought that for a while, actually."

There it was. She didn't need me to diagnose the problem. She didn't need a framework or a new lens. She needed someone to sit across from him long enough that the answer she already knew could finally say itself out loud.

This is the most common thing I see in the leaders I work with — and the least talked about.

Not a knowledge problem. Not a skill problem. Not even a strategy problem.

A courage problem.

The gap between where you are and where you know you could be is almost never a knowledge gap. It's a courage gap.

C.S. Lewis wrote about people who know what to do and know how to do it, but somehow never act as "men without chests." The intellect is fully intact. The will is not. The chest — the part of you that translates knowledge into courage — has gone quiet.

Here's what makes this particularly dangerous at the executive level: your success has insulated you from the consequences of not acting. You've built enough runway, enough goodwill, enough organizational momentum that the failure to make the hard call rarely produces an immediate crisis.

The team limps along.

The strategy quietly underperforms.

The conversation doesn't happen.

And you remain successful — just not at the level you know you're capable of.

I know this pattern from the inside. When you are a CEO, it's often the most isolating feeling you've ever felt in your life. You are supposed to have all the answers, yet you're scared you don't know what the next step is. Your decisions have real consequences. The comfortable position is not to make a decision, when in reality, that's one of the worst decisions you can make.

I lived this way as a CEO for far too long.

The question I ask my clients — and myself — isn't: "What should I do?" We almost always know the answer to that.

The question is: what is it costing me, and the people I love, that I haven't done it yet?

Every day you carry a decision you've already made in your head but haven't made in the world, you're paying a tax. Your team feels the ambiguity. Your organization moves more slowly than it should. And some part of you stays quietly frustrated with yourself, even while everything looks fine from the outside.

My client let Lisa go two weeks after that call. He told me it went better than he expected.

"She actually seemed relieved," she said.

They usually do.

The lion doesn't need to learn how to hunt.

The lion needs to decide to stop circling.

You already know what to do. The only question left is when you will do it?

Talk soon,