You weren’t sitting still. You were moving through the house. Cleaning things that didn’t need cleaning. Talking to yourself quietly, running the same questions on a loop. Have I tried everything? Have I really tried everything? You kept arriving at the same answer. And then you pushed back against it anyway.
That’s what waiting looks like. Not dramatic. Not paralyzed in a chair staring at the ceiling. Just ordinary motion, in an ordinary space, carrying an extraordinary weight, and not yet ready to put it down.
Maybe you recognize that. Maybe it’s not a relationship for you. Maybe it’s a career you’ve outgrown, a business you’re afraid to start, a life you keep almost choosing. The details are different. The loop is the same.
The Wait
Decision paralysis doesn’t look the way we think it does.
We picture someone frozen. Unable to move. The truth is most people in the wait are very busy. They’re researching. They’re preparing. They’re giving things one more chance, and then one more after that. They’re not stuck because they lack information. They’re stuck because they’re hoping something outside of them will shift so they don’t have to be the one to shift it.
That hope is not weakness. It’s human. But it has a cost. Every day you spend waiting for a sign that isn’t coming is a day you’ve handed your vote to someone or something else. And most of us have been doing it so long we forgot we were holding a vote at all.
The Proxy Audit
Here’s the question worth sitting with: whose definition of success are you actually chasing?
Not yours. Whose?
A parent’s voice that still narrates your choices. A partner’s expectations you absorbed so slowly you thought they were your own. An algorithm’s highlight reel that taught you what a good life is supposed to look like. Those are proxy votes. And they’re powerful because they’re quiet. They don’t announce themselves. They just show up every time you get close to a decision that’s actually yours.
The brain weasels, those spiraling what-ifs that show up right when clarity does, those aren’t wisdom. They’re static. They’re the sound of a vote being handed over in real time.
Here’s the question that cuts through the static: what would you do if money and people’s opinions were not obstacles?
Sit with that. Not to make a plan. Just to hear the answer your body gives before your brain can argue with it.
Clarity doesn’t come before you move. It comes because you move.
The Moment
That day, the waiting stopped.
Not because the answer changed. Because I had circled it enough times to know it wasn’t going to. I had tried everything I could name. I had pushed back against the conclusion I kept reaching. And at some point, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, I made the decision.
Two things arrived at the same time.
The first was relief. Not happiness, relief. The specific physical release of a weight I had been carrying so long I had stopped feeling it as weight. It had just become the shape of my days.
The second was dread. Deep in my abdomen. Tightness across my chest. Breathing that had stalled without my noticing. And then the next inhale, the one that came when I realized I hadn’t taken one I could remember, and with it the thought that landed with everything it had:
I had just voted for my happiness. Even though there was so much pain right now.
The dread wasn’t a signal the decision was wrong. It was a signal I was somewhere I had never been before. New territory. Agreements I had trusted that hadn’t held. Things ahead I had never done.
Most days after that? Dread free.
The right decision was visible in the rearview. It was not visible at the moment of decision. That’s the point.
Your First Vote
You don’t have to make the big move today.
Start here: Identify one thing you’ve stopped doing that once brought you joy. Something small. Something that was yours before it got crowded out by everything else. Bring it back today. Not tomorrow. Today.
That’s a vote. Cast in your own name. For your own life.
The dread you’re feeling isn’t a sign you’re wrong. It’s a sign you’re in new territory. And most of it, almost all of it, turns out to be navigable.
The sign you’ve been waiting for isn’t coming. You are the sign.
LaSchwann Killens is an ICF-trained life and executive coach and the founder of VALADD Coaching. He works with people who are ready to stop waiting for permission and start making decisions that are actually theirs.
Start Here.
Meta Description: You’re not stuck because you lack options. You’re stuck because you’re waiting for permission only you can give. Here’s what the right decision actually feels like, and why you won’t see it coming. From VALADD Coaching.
LinkedIn Pull Quotes:
“Clarity doesn’t come before you move. It comes because you move.”
“Most people in the wait are very busy. They’re not stuck because they lack information. They’re stuck because they’re hoping something outside of them will shift so they don’t have to be the one to shift it.”
“The sign you’ve been waiting for isn’t coming. You are the sign.”