The Sunshine Slowdown

There's a stretch of road in my neighborhood where, at a certain time of day, the sun is so blinding I genuinely cannot see the road. I've lived in this area for almost 10 years. I've driven on this road hundreds of times, and I know every curve, stop sign, and incoming traffic spot, so when I say I know this road, I'm serious.

When the sun is at its brightest, none of that knowledge really helps me. I flip the visor down and lift my hand to block the glare. I can't tell you how many times I've slowed to barely a crawl, or sometimes stopped altogether, because moving forward when I can't see what's in front of me feels genuinely unsafe. Often, I roll down my window and crane my neck outside (a serious feat given how short I am), just hoping to catch a glimpse of sun-free road so I can move.

I'm guessing you know exactly what this feels like.

A lot of the women I work with are navigating their own version of the sunshine slowdown when they come to me. They have years of experience, hard-won expertise, and a deep understanding of their own work, but the road before them feels unclear. Often, it’s the fog of uncertainty, self-doubt, and so many other voices that even a road they know by heart feels impossible to navigate. So, they slow to a crawl, inching forward, hoping the light will shift on its own.

If you’re anything like them, that kind of waiting feels deeply frustrating and too passive, like you're simply not doing anything yet. The thing about waiting though, is that it’s a decision, too.

We talk endlessly about the fear of making the wrong move, but we don’t talk enough about the cost of making no move at all. We wait for a lot of things… clarity, the right time, or until we feel ready, and unfortunately, these are all choices, even when they don’t feel like it. 

Funny enough, for the highly accomplished women I work with, inaction rarely looks like inaction. It looks like productivity dressed up as more research, more time bantering with Claude, refining the offer one more time, gathering a little more data, or telling yourself you’ll be ready when X, Y, Z happens. I’m not judging; I’ve been there too. We’re smart and capable, which means we’re exceptionally good at making waiting look like progress.

The problem with waiting is that it’s actually costing you a lot. Inaction or waiting for the sun to finally shift means the wrong clients keep finding you, the decisions you've been avoiding keep getting pushed further down the road, and the distance between where you are and where you actually want to be keeps expanding. You don't feel the cost in the moment, but you certainly will 60-90 days later. 

I want to tell you about a consultant I worked with, because her story is the perfect example of what this actually looks like.

When she came to me, she had spent months spiraling. Her biggest client had to cancel their contract due to funding constraints. She wasn’t sitting around doing nothing, but she was thinking, researching, turning it all over in her mind. Every week that passed without her making a real move fed a little more of her self-doubt. Why aren't the clients coming? What do I actually want to be doing? Who even am I in this work anymore? The longer she waited to feel certain, the thicker the fog became, and the thicker the fog, the harder it felt to move at all.

This isn’t an unfamiliar pattern. Every woman I work with has felt this in some capacity. In this case, she knew the road. She had the expertise, the experience, and even most of the answers somewhere inside her. What she didn't have was the visibility to see them clearly and the confidence that it was safe to move.

So, let me show you what moving actually looked like for her, because I think part of what keeps women stuck is that the alternative feels too vague. We hear things like "Get clarity" and "build a strategy", and while they sound nice, they don’t tell you what that actually means or what it entails.

When this consultant started working with me, I sent her pre-work designed to surface what she actually believed and where she was trying to go. In our first session, we unpacked all of it together. I asked a lot of questions, and we used her answers to lay out her core conviction and the bigger vision underneath it.

From there, we got deep into the actual guts of her business. With her unearthed big idea, which centered on building capacity inside nonprofit organizations and corporations, we built a real plan to bring that thought leadership to life. We executed it on LinkedIn, developed new offers around it, and built an entire plan that allowed her to increase her visibility. Step by step, we built the bridge between where she was and where she actually wanted to go.

Here's how I think about the work I do. I'm not in the driver's seat, and I'm not handing you a different road. You know your road. What I do is become the shield against the blinding light. I'm the one sitting beside you, blocking the glare just enough that you can finally see what was in front of you the whole time. That, to me, is what a true thought partner is. I don’t do the driving for you, but I do make you feel like it’s safe and possible to move forward. 

As she continued to execute on the plan, she landed several new contracts and clients that grew her revenue, booked new speaking engagements, and eventually, she stepped into an opportunity that let her create even more impact and grow her influence in exactly the direction she'd been aiming for all along. 

To be clear, none of that happened because she finally felt ready. She simply stopped waiting for the sunshine to shift on its own, and we found a way for her to see clearly and move forward with confidence.

This is the part I most want you to hear. The clarity you're waiting for rarely arrives while you sit still. Readiness is something you build by moving, not something that shows up before you start. The women who get unstuck are not the ones who finally felt certain; they're the ones who decided that sitting in the blinding light is costing them more than their fear of easing forward.

If you've been crawling along, doing all the productive-looking things while the real move keeps getting deferred, that's exactly the work I do. I help you block out the glare, see the road clearly, and build a real plan to move forward without torching what's already working.

If that's where you are, I'd love to talk. A free call is a good place to start.