Too Many Decisions, Not Enough Clarity

Hey there, CEOs, Rachel Cook here, founder of the CEO Collective and your host for the Promote Yourself to CEO podcast. I knew I needed to sit down and record this episode today because we just came off of our in-person and virtual CEO retreats where we had a lot of conversations with small business owners all over the country who are struggling with tough decisions and tough conversations.
So what's going on right now that is causing a lot of us to feel so overwhelmed and so stuck with the tough conversations and tough decisions we know we need to have? Here's what's happening.
Collectively, we are going through a time that we've really never experienced before. We've experienced, if you've been in business for a while, different periods of economic uncertainty where the prices are going up, there's a lot of economic pressure going on, people are spending less or slowing down their buying. And that impacts small business owners really quickly. We are the canary in the coal mine as far as what happens when the economy slows.
Small business owners are usually the first ones to feel the pinch because we aren't multi-billion dollar corporations who have unlimited resources. When our buyers slow down or they stop purchasing, or they change how they're purchasing, that directly impacts us. It impacts our ability to keep our teams paid. It impacts our ability to pay ourselves. It impacts our ability to fund our future growth. So we really are the first line of defense when it comes to economic shifts, economic uncertainty.
When times are good and there's a lot of money flowing and people feel confident in the economy, small business owners win. We are able to see a lot of sales. We're usually able to see a lot of growth during those times. But when things contract, things slow down for us really quickly.
And then you layer on top of all of that economic uncertainty that we've been experiencing this year. And if we're honest, it's been the last few years. We're also in a climate of political uncertainty, of policy uncertainty. I've talked to so many small business owners who feel so frustrated because the policies are changing so quickly. They're getting new announcements that are going to impact them and having to quickly pivot, quickly make changes. And over time, this really just wears you down. It's just exhausting when you constantly are feeling on edge because you're not sure what else is going to roll out that could impact your small business.
And then layer on top of that just this onslaught of news that is never ending and is often so negative. It just starts to make us feel emotionally and energetically drained. This is what we were feeling in a lot of our conversations at the CEO retreat with small business owners who feel like they have been kind of walking on eggshells this year. They aren't sure what's going to happen next. They aren't sure how to navigate the next change. And because there's so much uncertainty, they don't really feel like they know how to plan. They don't really feel like they know what the right next step is. And it's just incredibly defeating, especially if you have, like I have, put everything into your small business.
Most of my small business owners that work with me are like you. They are incredibly confident when it comes to taking care of their clients. They know how to deliver results to their clients. They're confident in what they share with their clients, what they deliver with their clients, how they work with their clients. That is where their true deep expertise is. They have put in way more than 10,000 hours working with their clients, and so that's where their confidence really lies.
But when it comes to the CEO level decisions, the business level decisions, this is where a lot of small business owners start to get stuck simply because we are overloaded with the volume of decisions we're having to make in an environment where nothing feels certain.
The Weight of Decision Fatigue
Think about this: most of us are making thousands, tens of thousands of decisions a day. We're making minor decisions every single day. So what are we having for breakfast? What are we wearing? What time are we getting the kids to school? Those are small decisions, but they do take up some of our cognitive capacity every single day.
Then we have these major decisions in life and in business. We have huge decisions we have to make when things are changing in our business, when we can see sales are starting to slow down, we can see the growth is slowing down compared to previous years. And then we have to make decisions that are strategic decisions. These could be decisions about changing your pricing structure or creating a new offer, or changing your signature offer. These are big decisions that require us to have the time, the energy, and attention to really dig in and make sure that we feel confident in that decision.
But right now, what I'm hearing from a lot of small business owners is that they don't feel like they have the time, the energy, the attention to really do a great job making these bigger CEO level decisions. And it's because of the sheer volume of decisions we are making right now. Everything from what we're making for dinner to are we traveling for the holidays to do you need to clear your calendar to go help your parents with something. It is just a lot. It is so much that we are having to handle every single day.
So the first thing I want you to know is this problem is not about lack of effort. It's not about work ethic. It's not about your ability as the CEO. It is about decision fatigue. That is the first thing we really need to address when we are talking about these big decisions and tough conversations we have to have.
If we are experiencing decision fatigue, we're always going to feel like we're struggling to figure out the right next step for ourselves, our lives, and our business. So that's the first thing I want you to think about: acknowledging that decision fatigue is real.
Understanding Cognitive Capacity
We all have a certain amount of cognitive capacity every single day, and that amount of cognitive capacity we each have is limited. This is not an indefinite amount of cognitive capacity we have. It is limited and it is impacted by everything going on in our life.
It can be impacted by whether you got good sleep last night, if you're feeling well. I have chronic illness, so there's often days where I didn't sleep well, where I woke up and did not feel good. If I'm not feeling well, my cognitive capacity is seriously diminished.
You could also have your cognitive capacity diminished by trauma, by grief, by big things that are happening in your life that you are still processing. So it's not like every day we all wake up with the same amount of cognitive capacity. It changes day to day, and it's also not like each and every one of us have the same cognitive capacity. That changes person to person and situation to situation. Everybody is a little bit different.
But what I want you to know is that when you start your day, you have the amount of cognitive capacity you have for that day. And the more decisions you have to make, the more you are using up that cognitive capacity. So you're starting with what you have. Imagine like a gas tank.
If you're starting on full, you had a great night's sleep, you woke up feeling energized and feeling ready for the day. But then as you start your day, you're making decisions. What am I making my kids for breakfast? What am I going to wear so that I can get ready for work? Every decision you make is using up the fuel in your tank, in your cognitive capacity tank.
If you're like me and you wake up some days and you didn't sleep well, or you're not feeling great because you're struggling with chronic health issues, or you're just not feeling well, then maybe you didn't even wake up with a full tank. Maybe you only woke up with half a tank. All of these things impact the amount of cognitive capacity we have available to us.
And if you've ever gotten through a really intense day, even if you felt like you started that day really well, you had a lot of energy, you had a lot of brain power, you were able to handle things as they came at you—if you've ever had a day where you finished what you had to do for work, you shut your laptop, but then you got back into life mode, family mode, and all you could do is say, "What are we having for dinner?" and you just default to frozen pizza again and again—then you've used up everything in your tank. This happens all the time. This happens so much.
And for small business owners, I think we have higher demands on us. We have higher cognitive capacity and cognitive load than your regular person. Think about if you were to do the work that you do for your clients for someone else. You wouldn't also be thinking about the marketing of it and the sales of it, and the management of it, and the operations of it, and running the team. You would just be thinking about taking care of your clients.
But when you're the small business owner, we have so many more decisions and we have incredibly complex decisions that we have to make. So complexity of those decisions requires more cognitive functioning, more cognitive capacity, and this only accelerates the decision fatigue. And when we feel like we have so many decisions we have to make, and for each decision we have to make, there's unlimited options, it just creates even more decision fatigue.
What Leaders Do Differently
Now, this is something that I think is really fascinating because when you start to really look at how leaders of big companies are able to keep up the pace at which they work and the amount of decisions they have to make, you will often hear from either leaders in business or from—I also see this in prolific artists and creators—they will often reduce the amount of decisions they have to make in a lot of areas of their life because they know it's the only way that they're going to have the capacity for the big decisions.
So think about this. We all have seen and heard about Steve Jobs who wore his famous black turtleneck and jeans every single day. It was one less thing to worry about. We all heard about Barack Obama who said, "I'm only going to get suits in gray and navy." It eliminated a lot of the decision fatigue.
There are a lot of prolific creators who will eat the same breakfast every single morning and they will go through the same routine every single day to start their day. And it's all because they're eliminating decision fatigue. They're eliminating the cognitive load that happens when you're having to make decisions for every little part of your day.
So the reason they do this, the reason those people have created these systems for themselves where they're making one decision and then sticking to it for a lot of the small things in their lives—whether it's what they wear or what they eat or the workout they go do, or their routine in the morning—is because then those become less about making decisions. It becomes, "This is just how I get up and go. This is how I run my day." And that frees them up for the big decisions, the big decisions, the strategic decisions that move their business forward.
Making Space for Big Decisions
These are the things that often get pushed off. And right now, in this particular moment in our world at the end of 2025, when I'm recording this episode, there are decisions we have to make if we're going to navigate even more uncertainty, even more political discourse, even more nonstop news hitting our social media feed or our news feed every single day. We have to make space for the big decisions. We have to make space for the big decisions.
We're about to head into a new year, and now is the time where a lot of us are starting to think about what do I need to change in my business in order to make sure next year is successful?
Do I need to review my pricing structure? Has something changed? Are my buyers changing? Do I need to create payment plans? Do I need to have a lower price point offer? Do I need to change something there?
What do I need to change in my products, programs, or services? Are there some that aren't performing and I need to let go of? Are there some I can improve and make better? Are there some that I need to make small little bite sizes in order to get people into the next one?
These are a lot of decisions we're all having to rumble with, especially if you, like so many others, have seen slowing sales or if you've seen buyer behavior change a lot. We have to adapt and adjust our businesses in order for the business to make it through the next year ahead.
And then layer on top of it hard conversations that we have to make and hard decisions we have to make about team. This was a really big conversation at our most recent CEO retreat. We have had a lot of clients who are now in a situation where they hired a team member and that team member just isn't working out. They hired a team member and maybe they're trying to coach them up and see if they can get this team member to work with everybody and get the results they need to make, or they need to figure out if it's time to let them go.
These decisions are so incredibly challenging and they often require some tough conversations, which makes the decision feel even harder. It makes it feel even more intense.
The "What If I'm Wrong" Trap
And I think the reason a lot of us get stuck here is not because we necessarily don't know what the decision needs to be, but we get worried about the "what if I'm wrong" trap.
What if I make the wrong decision? What if I make a decision that makes somebody mad at me? What if I make a decision that doesn't work? What if I make a decision that gets me in a situation I don't want to be in? That makes it worse?
Fear of making the wrong call is a very real fear, and it can make you feel paralyzed. When you find yourself paralyzed, then you find yourself in that wait and see mode. I often see the wait and see mode when people are just so overwhelmed with the decision or they're so worried they're going to mess this up, that they're going to do a bad job, that they're going to make the wrong call, that they prolong the issue that they need to make the decision about. They prolong it and prolong it and keep kicking the can further and further down the road to their own detriment.
I especially see this when people are in wait and see mode: they don't change their strategy and their sales are impacted when they don't adjust their messaging so people aren't resonating with their marketing. They aren't actually taking the next step towards becoming a client.
And I really see this when it comes to managing people. Managing people is incredibly tough and it's so hard. None of us wants to be thought of as the bad boss or the super difficult boss or the demanding boss, but sometimes that wait and see can actually prolong and make worse the issues that you might be having.
So the result of finding yourself in this "what if I'm wrong" trap—what if I make the wrong decision, what if I make the wrong call—is that you get stuck. You stall out your growth. You get stuck in analysis mode. You're second guessing yourself. And honestly, the longer you wait to make the hard decision or to have the tough conversation, the longer you wait, the less options you're going to have because options will start to decrease when you wait too long.
This is really important to consider. It's so important to consider because I often will see small business owners, especially right now, when they're sitting on a decision that they need to make, they don't realize that if they don't make the decision, their runway of revenue is going to dry up, or they're going to run through their business savings account or their cash reserves. They're going to end up having to put things on credit cards or go into debt.
And I've even seen really tough situations where in order to make payroll, people have had to dip into their personal savings to take care of the people on their team. These are challenges that come up more often than you would imagine, and they come up at every level of business.
This is not a "you're a beginner" issue. This is not a "you're only at this level of revenue" issue. I have seen this happen to businesses at everything from multiple millions of dollars to $200,000, where people are finding themselves in situations where because they took a long time to make the decision, they used up their resources and found themselves now with fewer resources and having to make a decision really quickly in order to make sure their business survives.
That's not the situation any of us want to be in. That's not the situation I want any single small business owner to be in. So we have to make sure that we are proactively making decisions instead of reactively. And when we know something isn't working, we have to start taking action quickly to course correct.
That doesn't mean impulsively. Clarity is essential, and clarity requires a framework, not acting impulsively, not reacting, but actually having a clear framework to help us make those decisions.
The Power of a Framework
The reason I like having some sort of framework is because usually the problem around these big decisions we have to make for our businesses—it's not that we don't have enough options. It's not that we don't have a million ideas of how we could change things or how we can improve things, or how we can make it work better. It's that we actually have too many ideas. We have too many ideas. We have too many options in front of us.
So think about this. If you have ever found yourself going to your closet—let's imagine you have a networking event, I have one coming up on Friday—let's imagine you're going to your closet. You want to get ready for this networking event. You know that you want to look put together and polished and still comfortable and feel like yourself, but you find yourself just staring at that closet completely overwhelmed because somehow in that moment it looks like you have nothing to wear, even though you have a packed closet. This is what I'm talking about: too many options. It's really hard to get dressed.
But if you've taken the time to create a framework for how you put together your wardrobe, like I learned from my friend and stylist, Nicole Achi years ago, then suddenly it's easier to get dressed because I've already put together a framework for what I need to do in different contexts.
I have a section in my closet where I have a little capsule wardrobe for attending events. I have a little section in my closet for speaking. I have a little section in my closet for going out to a wedding. I have these things already figured out because we had a framework that we put together in order to make my closet work for me so I no longer cry in the closet.
Same thing with—let's come up with another example that's really challenging, especially if you're like me, you're a working mom—meal planning. How many times have you gotten to the end of the day and it's like, "What are we having for dinner? I don't know. I didn't pull anything out to thaw. I am now scrambling to try to figure out how I'm going to feed all these children."
Well, if you simplify your meal planning, if you put together a routine for what you are going to have every single week, and you put a system in place, it becomes so much easier. So we know in my house every Monday we're going to have soup and sandwiches for dinner. Every Tuesday we're going to have some sort of Taco Tuesday. We have kind of a rhythm to how we do our meal planning. And because we have that, it's not as complicated to get dinner on the table. We know what we're going to get every week, we can put in our grocery order, and it simplifies it and everybody's happy.
You want to do the same thing for your business strategy: to eliminate the decision fatigue where you can and have a clear framework to help you see what is essential and what really matters when you are making those big decisions.
So you don't need another tactic, you don't need a million ideas. You just need a way to filter and prioritize your decisions.
Introducing the CEO Decision Matrix
So I'm actually going to host a workshop later on this month. I'm going to put the details in the show notes of this episode all about how to make tough decisions the smart way, the CEO way. And this all starts with creating your CEO decision matrix.
What is a decision matrix? A decision matrix is a framework that you create for yourself and your business. And the important part about this is this is something you create in advance. You use it for the majority of your big decisions you need to make in your business.
And when you make this decision matrix, you've actually laid out in it the key criteria for any big decisions, starting with the vision for your business, where you want to take your business in the future three to five years out. And you lay out each of the big criteria that you know are essential to help you reach that vision. And then you layer in your values.
Your values are some of the most important decision making criteria that you can ever use as the CEO of your small business.
In this workshop, I'm going to walk you through how I've created my own CEO decision matrix, how we teach this in the CEO collective, and give you a template so that you can start making smarter decisions for your business yourself. It's not about too many options. It's about having criteria to help filter out what you need to focus on.
So I'd love you to join us at this workshop. It is coming up on October 15th. We would love to see you there.
If you liked this episode and you want to hear more about things that I have done to simplify decision making, the systems that we've put in place, whether it's in life or business, please head over to Instagram, tag me at Rachel dot Cook, and let me know what decisions are driving you crazy, what decisions are using up all of your cognitive capacity so we can help you to simplify and create the space you need to make the big decisions that you know you need to make in your business. I would love to hear from you.
All right. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.