Your Next Clear Move
Welcome to Your Next Clear Move™—the podcast for leaders, professionals, and high-capacity humans who are done “getting ready” and ready to move.
I’m Debbie Peterson, Leadership Readiness Expert, and in each episode I deliver grounded insight, clarity-driven mindset strategies, and one actionable step to help you stop the drift and lead yourself forward.
This isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It’s about reconnecting to what matters—and making decisions that align with who you are and how you want to lead next.
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Your Next Clear Move
Why Confident Leaders Don’t Wait for Certainty
Leadership demands confidence, especially when certainty feels impossible to achieve. Yet many of us fall into the trap of waiting for perfect information before making important decisions. This paralyzing need for certainty isn't just ineffective—it actively undermines our leadership potential and organizational momentum.
The key lies in understanding the critical difference between clarity and certainty. While certainty demands complete information and guaranteed outcomes, clarity focuses on what matters most right now and taking appropriate action based on what we know. This distinction transforms how we approach leadership challenges. Drawing from Neuro-Linguistic Programming principles, confident leaders embrace a feedback mindset where every action generates valuable information rather than representing success or failure. This creates a continuous improvement loop: take action, gather data, evaluate results, refine approach, repeat.
Whether you're an emerging leader afraid of appearing impulsive, a woman in leadership feeling pressure to prove yourself, a mid-career professional recovering from setbacks, or an executive facing unprecedented challenges, this approach offers a practical framework: identify priorities, make your next best move (not the perfect one), treat outcomes as experiments, and use feedback to guide your next steps. This isn't reckless leadership—it's a disciplined process that builds trust with yourself and your team. When those around you see you moving forward through uncertainty with a thoughtful process, they recognize leadership worth following. What decision have you been postponing because you don't have all the answers? Name it, reflect on what truly matters, and make your next clear move. Visit DebbiePetersonSpeaks.com for more resources on developing clarity in your leadership journey.
Hey, hello and welcome back. I am Debbie Peterson of Getting to Clarity, and this is another episode of the Getting to Clarity podcast, your Next Clear Move. This is the place where you come to get tips, tools and techniques to help you create more success in your leadership and life with less sacrifice to who you are. And today we're talking about confidence, and this is something I hear a lot in the leaders that I work with is that they wish they had more confidence, and I'm tying confidence together with certainty today and why confident leaders don't wait for certainty when they lead. So stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Getting to Clarity podcast.
Speaker 3:The place where busy leaders discover how to create more success in their leadership journey with less sacrifice in their life.
Speaker 2:Here's your host, debbie Peterson, of Getting to Clarity, getting to.
Speaker 1:Clarity. Well, let me say this If you're waiting for certainty before you make a move, you're not leading. You're giving your power away to a future that may never arrive. And especially in the current business environment, the hesitation can cost you everything from momentum to morale with your teams. It can really trip you up, and especially now, because we're not living in what I would call steady times, businesses have to react to this uncertainty and sometimes it feels like a game of ping pong. It changes day to day.
Speaker 1:So leaders at every level, from new managers to seasoned executives, are navigating ongoing ambiguity Economic shifts, ai disruption, tariffs, team turnover, changing expectations, personal challenges oh my goodness. And at all of this going on, clarity feels hard to come by. But confidence doesn't come from having all the answers. You don't need to know it with certainty. Confidence comes from being willing to move forward anyway, because before we can leave with confidence, we have to understand that we're really aiming for something different, something that begins with distinguishing between two concepts, and that's clarity. So there's a difference between clarity and certainty. So, for instance, certainty says I need to know exactly how this is going to go. I need to know how it's going to turn out before I take one step, clarity says, okay, I know what's most important and I'm going to take action based on what I know right now. That's your next clear move, right? Confidence is born from clarity, not perfect information. We get tripped up by that and and that means that you have to learn to act with what. You have to trust yourself, to trust the process, and you adjust as you go. So how do you lead with clarity when the outcome is unknown?
Speaker 1:That's where mindset comes in and the tools that I've been trained in in NLP they can make the difference. So, when it comes to NLP, there's a presupposition that there is only failure. Sorry, there is no failure, there's only feedback. That's one of the principles, one of the foundational principles, and this is critical for confident leadership. Instead of you know, fearing the outcome, you take a step and oh, I don't know if I want to take the step because I don't know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1:Nlp-trained leaders view each action as part of a feedback loop. So you make a move, you get data or you get new information as a result of making that move, you evaluate and refine right and then you make the next clear move. That's the loop, and this mindset removes the you know paralysis of analysis, or the paralysis of perfectionism, and it replaces it with a sense of what I would call strategic fluidity. Okay, so it keeps things moving, it helps to build momentum, it builds resilience Okay, and it creates leaders who stay present and responsive. Because it is emotion and these principles aren't just abstract theory. They become especially relevant in what we're dealing with now.
Speaker 1:So who is this for? Well, this message is especially important for emerging leaders who don't want to be seen as impulsive, so instead they overthink. It's especially important for women in leadership who feel the pressure to get it right. Right, they have to prove that they belong. It's important for mid-career professionals. You know, if you've been burned by taking a big risk and now you doubt yourself, well, this is for you.
Speaker 1:Even executives who feel the weight of the unknown and hesitate to commit because they don't know what's on the other side of it. In all of these cases, the temptation is to wait for perfect timing, for more information, for a guarantee, but the truth is you don't need certainty, you need clarity on what matters most right now so you can get into action. And that's what makes the difference between leaders who move and leaders who miss the moment. So how do you actually put this into practice? So, when the path is unclear, confident leaders don't freeze. They follow a process, and I love processes. So here's a micro framework that you get your clarity and action, so to speak. So here's how confident leaders move forward when everything feels unclear, which sometimes is every day in this world.
Speaker 1:Number one get clear on the priority. What matters most? It's not everything right now. Number two make the next best move. Not the perfect one, just the next best move. Number three treat that outcome as information, treat it like an experiment. What did it teach you? What is it teaching you? And number four you use that feedback to inform your next clear move. That's how it works.
Speaker 1:This isn't just a leadership strategy. It's a way to build trust with yourself and with your team. So when your people see you moving forward despite the unknown, they don't interpret it as recklessness. They see it as a process. They see it as grounded, confident leadership, the kind that they want to follow. And all of this adds up to a powerful shift in how we define leadership in uncertain times.
Speaker 1:So what does confident leadership really look like? Well, it's not bravado, you know. It's not puffing yourself up. It's not certainty, it's clarity, it's your clarity, it is resilience and it's the willingness to keep showing up and making the next clear move. So in NLP we say you are in charge of your mind and therefore your results, knowing that how you are thinking, what you think of, is going to contribute to your results, so they're tied together. You know. Do you give yourself that space and the grace to figure these things out? That's the kind of self-leadership that creates momentum even when things are uncertain, which is where we find ourselves now, and that's the kind of leadership that the future is calling for.
Speaker 1:So ask yourself where are you waiting for certainty when all you need is clarity on your next clear move? So what's one decision that you've been postponing, you've been putting it off, you've been avoiding it because you don't have all the answers? Name it that is how you call it into awareness, and then you give yourself the space to think, not overthink, but to truly reflect on what matters right now related to that decision. Consider what your next clear move could be. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be aligned in that direction. That's how confident leaders build momentum not with perfect certainty, but with purposeful clarity, and if you need resources to help you get more clarity in your leadership, your business, your career, head on over to my website at wwwDebbiePetersonSpeakscom, and there are a ton of resources there as well as programming for you and your organization. So here is wishing you all the clarity that you deserve, because here's the deal when you have clarity, your whole organization does too.
Speaker 2:Take care of yourself. Bye-bye for now. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Getting to Clarity Podcast with Debbie Peterson.
Speaker 3:If you enjoyed this show, please rate and recommend it on iTunes or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
Speaker 2:To learn more about how you can bring Debbie and her transformational clarity leadership strategies to your organization, visit DebbiePetersonSpeakscom.
