Ferdi Appelgryn

"I don't have time."
I hear it most from people carrying real responsibility, and it is usually true. Their diaries are full, decisions are waiting on them, problems keep arriving.
I have started wondering whether being busy can also be useful.
A difficult decision does not disappear because we do not make it. It sits in the background, and it does not sit there quietly. An unresolved decision can draw on the same energy you are spending everywhere else.
A senior person is not working out, so we spend months adjusting structures around them. We know the business needs to change direction, but there is always another operational problem first. We suspect we are no longer happy doing what we are doing, but this is not a good week to think about that. Neither was last week.
Every one of those is a good reason. That is exactly what makes them work. A poor reason gets challenged. A good one gets sympathy, and buys another month. None of the activity is unnecessary. That is what makes it easy to miss. You can have a genuinely productive day, clear twenty things, and make no progress at all on the one decision that matters.

Sometimes constant activity gives us somewhere very respectable to hide.

This is one of the reasons I value coaching. It creates deliberate space away from the demands of the day-to-day to examine the questions that are easy to keep postponing. Sometimes you don't need another productivity system or a better-managed diary. You need an hour in which the difficult question is finally allowed to become the most important thing in the room

A question I sometimes ask: if your diary suddenly cleared for a week, what would you finally have to think about?

The answer usually has very little to do with time management.
Perhaps the question is not whether you are too busy. It is what being busy allows you not to deal with.

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Being needed can become addictive.

I've worked with business owners and senior leaders who tell me they can't take a proper holiday because everything starts falling apart when they're away. They're usually frustrated by it. Sometimes, though, I wonder whether there's also a personal learning opportunity hidden in that frustration.

Being the person everyone turns to can feel good. You solve the difficult problems. Your opinion carries weight. You know the history, the clients and the business better than anyone else. When something goes wrong, people come looking for you. Over time, being needed can become closely connected to feeling valuable.

That's where leadership can get complicated. You delegate a decision, then step back in when it isn't being made quickly enough. Someone tackles a problem differently from the way you would, so you correct the course. A client has always dealt with you, so you continue managing the relationship. It's often easier to answer the question than to let someone else wrestle with it.

There is an important transition here from management to leadership. Management often rewards your ability to make the call, solve the problem and get the work done. Leadership increasingly requires you to build that capacity in the people around you, so the work can continue without your hand on it every time.

None of this looks particularly significant from a business perspective. In isolation, most of it is perfectly reasonable. Gradually, though, you can build an organisation full of capable people who have learnt to wait for the most capable person in the room.

At some point, being indispensable stops being a measure of your value and starts becoming a measure of the organisation's dependence on you.

For an experienced leader, the next stage of growth may require a very different measure of success: what happens when you're not there. Can people make good decisions? Can they solve problems without checking with you? Can they take responsibility and occasionally get something wrong without you stepping back in?

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this: Are you staying close to the day-to-day because the business genuinely needs you there, or because it's the part of the job that still makes you feel useful?

A mature organisation should be able to function when its leader leaves the room. Sometimes the harder part is becoming comfortable when it does.

Some of the most stuck people I've met are also some of the most successful.
That's always interested me.

From the outside, things are working. The career is established. The business is successful. They're capable, experienced and usually the person other people turn to when something needs to be sorted out.

Yet something has changed.

The things that once motivated them have lost some of their lustre. The next achievement doesn't carry quite the same pull. They know something needs to shift, even if they can't quite identify what.

Over the years, I've noticed five patterns that appear surprisingly often when successful people reach this point.

One of them is particularly counterintuitive:
The habits and ways of thinking that helped create your success can eventually become part of what keeps you stuck.

I've explored the five patterns in this article, and why getting unstuck doesn't necessarily require turning your life upside down.

Sometimes the first shift is simply seeing something you've been too close to see.://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-successful-people-get-stuck-ferdi-appelgryn-csmif

Why Successful People Get Stuck One of the more interesting things I've learnt from coaching is that feeling stuck has very little respect for success.Some of the people who struggle most with direction are doing remarkably well on paper.

Most bad decisions don't come from a lack of intelligence. They come from a lack of clarity.

When you're overwhelmed, stressed, or too emotionally invested, your brain starts solving the wrong problem. You work harder instead of stepping back. You gather more information instead of deciding. You wait for a certainty that never arrives.

The biggest breakthroughs rarely come from finding the right answer. They come from asking a better question.

Not "what should I do?"

Try this instead: "Is this actually the decision, or is it the story I've built around it?"

Nine times out of ten, it's the story. The decision was never as hard as it felt once the story came off it.

I've started wondering whether experience has a hidden cost.
Before you stop reading, I'm not suggesting experience isn't valuable.

It is. I'd choose an experienced surgeon over an inexperienced one every day of the week. Experience gives us judgement. It helps us recognise patterns. It allows us to make decisions faster.
The question I've been wrestling with is whether it also edits what we're prepared to see.

Years ago, Koos Bekker challenged a room full of us from the broadcasting world. His view was simple. Our greatest strength had become our greatest weakness. We knew broadcasting so well that we struggled to recognise what new media was becoming. We weren't short of intelligence. We were looking at the future through yesterday's successes. I've never forgotten that lesson.

Since then I've seen the same pattern in leadership.

The more successful we become, the easier it is to assume the next challenge will respond to the same thinking that solved the last one. Sometimes it does. Sometimes our greatest asset quietly becomes our biggest blind spot.

These days I'm less interested in how quickly someone answers a question. I'm more interested in whether they're prepared to ask themselves,
"What if I'm looking at this through an old lens?"

Experience gives us confidence. Curiosity keeps us relevant.
The leaders I admire most never seem to lose either.

I don't think burnout begins when you're exhausted.

I think it begins much earlier. One of the things I've noticed over the years is that people rarely tell me they're burning out. They usually tell me they're busy.

And at first glance, that sounds completely normal. Most leaders are busy. But every now and then, if you keep talking, something else emerges. They'll say things like,

"I don't know what's wrong with me. I sat staring at an email for twenty minutes before I could decide whether to send it."
Or,
"I just can't seem to think as clearly as I used to."

That interests me. Because I don't think they're describing a lack of time. I think they're describing a lack of clarity.
We've been taught to think of burnout as the moment you can't get out of bed anymore. I'm not convinced. I suspect it starts much more quietly.
• Simple decisions become harder.
• Conversations become more draining.
• Things you've done a hundred times suddenly require far more effort than they should.

From the outside, nothing has changed.
You're still showing up, still performing, still getting through the day. But inside, every decision seems to cost a little more than it used to.
I
've been wondering lately whether we quietly accumulate something like decision debt. You keep drawing on tomorrow's mental capacity to get through today.
It works... Until it doesn't.

Maybe that's why so many capable people tell themselves they're "just busy." Perhaps "busy" is simply the word we use when we haven't yet recognised what's really changing.

I'd be interested to know whether you've ever experienced that. Not the exhaustion. The feeling that thinking itself had somehow become heavier.

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