Organizational psychologist Dr. Kisha S. Jones says capable leaders rarely stall for the reason they think. When a high achiever hesitates over a decision, they are not missing skill, intelligence, or information. “Most high achievers already know what they want. They can name the move,” Jones says. What is missing is the doing; that gap between insight and action is the space she studies most.
Jones, a management professor and executive coach, works with high-achieving women and has found that the instinct these leaders reach for when they get stuck is the very thing that keeps them there. They respond to hesitation by gathering more: another opinion, framework, and month to think. When applied to this kind of ‘stuckness,’ this approach fails, because the block was never informational.
The Block Is Self-Trust, Not a Shortage of Information
More information does not help because the problem was never a lack of it. When a skilled leader stalls, the missing ingredient is self-trust, not data. Yet the reflex of most high performers is to treat every difficulty as a knowledge problem, since that framing has served them their whole careers.
Gathering another opinion or framework feels like diligence, but it sidesteps the actual question. “At some point, the question stops being what should I do, and becomes do I trust myself to decide,” Jones says. No amount of external input resolves that, because it is not an external question. The leader who keeps researching is answering a question they do not have while leaving the real one untouched.
Waiting Erodes the Very Thing That Was Missing
The cost of waiting is not only the obvious one of missed opportunities and lost momentum. Waiting carries a quieter cost. “The longer you wait to act on what you already know, the more you quietly teach yourself that you can’t be trusted to move,” Jones says.
This turns hesitation into a loop. The block is a deficit of self-trust, and waiting deepens that deficit, because every season spent hesitating is another lesson to oneself that action cannot be relied on. Waiting feels responsible; it can sound like wanting to be sure, or waiting for better timing. But it is not neutral, and the longer it continues, the more it breaks the confidence a leader would need to break out of it. The safe-feeling choice is the one making the underlying problem worse.
Clarity Comes From Movement, Not More Thinking
The way out inverts the model high achievers have always operated by. They believe they must reach clarity before acting; that certainty justifies the move. Jones has found the opposite. “You don’t think your way into clarity. You act your way into it,” she says. Clarity tends to arrive after the first honest step, not before it.
This changes what a leader actually needs to begin. Not the whole path mapped, and not the perfect, fully justified decision, but enough confidence to take the next right step. The cost of waiting is usually higher than the cost of a thoughtful but imperfect move. A leader does not have to keep living in hesitation. They can trust themselves enough to begin, and let the beginning do what more thinking never will. To learn more about closing the gap between knowing and doing, connect with Dr. Kisha S. Jones on LinkedIn.
