“I’m just stuck right now.” I hear this sentence in almost every first conversation. And almost every time it turns out: there are two completely different ways of being stuck — and they need two completely different solutions.
The jam
A jam is a single decision sitting sideways. The price increase. Letting go of the client who no longer fits. The offer you’ve been “still working out” for three months. Everything else runs — but this one thing costs you energy every week because it keeps running in the background.
A jam isn’t bad. It’s normal. It needs exactly one thing: for you to clear it. One decision, made instead of postponed. Often an hour with the right question is enough.
The pattern
A pattern is something else. You recognise a pattern when you clear the jam — and two weeks later the next one is there. Same type, different topic. You ask everyone again before you decide. You need “just a bit more information” again. You re-open decisions you’ve already made the moment someone frowns.
Then the decision isn’t the problem. Your decision system is: too many open questions at once, too much reassurance-seeking, too little calm from which you could think clearly at all.
And here’s the crucial part: patterns don’t resolve with more effort. More discipline, more to-do lists, another course — that clears the current jam, not the system behind it.
How to find out what’s going on with you
Three honest questions:
- How many business decisions are sitting unmade on your plate right now? Zero to two is a jam. More than five is a pattern.
- How many people do you ask before you decide? “I decide, then inform” — or “everyone who’ll listen”?
- And after the decision — do you act within days, or do you often re-open it?
I built a ten-question check from this. Three minutes, instant result, no email needed. It tells you whether one decision is stuck — or the system behind it. And depending on what comes out, the next step is different: one decision in 60 minutes, or three months on the system.
— Iva