040: The Cost of Waiting Too Long-Why Difficult Decisions Get More Expensive Over Time

Have you ever known exactly what needed to be done but kept putting it off because you didn't want to hurt someone, disappoint someone, or become the "bad guy" in the story?

In this episode of Sustainable Success, Fredricka shares a recent leadership experience that forced her to confront a difficult truth: the hardest decisions rarely become easier by waiting. In fact, they often become more expensive emotionally, financially, energetically, and professionally.

Using a real-life business situation as the backdrop, she explores why so many of us delay difficult decisions, how we confuse kindness with avoidance, and the hidden costs of staying out of alignment with our values, mission, and goals.

Whether you're a business owner, leader, entrepreneur, or simply navigating a challenging season of life, this episode will encourage you to examine what you may already know deep down...and where courage may be required to move forward.

In This Episode:

• Why difficult decisions rarely get easier with time
• The difference between compassion and avoidance
• How hope can become a substitute for strategy
• The hidden costs of delaying necessary action
• The leadership balance between kindness and accountability
• Why protecting your mission sometimes requires uncomfortable conversations
• Questions to help you identify where you may be avoiding reality
• How alignment creates peace, even when decisions are difficult

Questions to Reflect On:

• Where in your life are you already clear, but still pretending you're waiting for clarity?
• What is it costing you to avoid making a difficult decision?
• Are you protecting someone's feelings at the expense of your own growth, health, business, or future?
• What would become possible if you trusted yourself enough to act?

Resources & Links:

Join the Limitless Living Facebook Community for women who are becoming, growing, healing, and creating lives that feel more aligned and meaningful.

Connect with Fredricka:
www.fredrickadavis.com

Next Episode:

Why do we avoid hard decisions in the first place?

Next week, Fredricka explores the emotional drivers behind procrastination, people-pleasing, fear of judgment, guilt, and avoidance—and shares practical steps for moving through them with confidence and clarity.

Remember:

Be Rooted.
Be Resilient.
Be Limitless.

Grab Your Free Reset Guide and more at www.fredrickadavis.com

Continue the conversation inside the here: Limitless Living community.

If this episode resonated with you, you can also send Fredricka a message through the Fan Mail link in the show notes. Your questions may be featured in a future episode.

And if you know someone who needs to hear this conversation, please share the episode with them.

Your reviews mean the world to Fredricka and help other women discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, and welcome back to the Limitless Living podcast. I'm Frederica Deva, your host, leader, entrepreneur. And this is Sustainable Success Tuesday, and we get to talk about all things business, all things human, and how to be the best at what you do every Tuesday. And do it all without losing your sanity while you're doing it. So today I want to talk about hard decisions. These are the ones that we know we need to make, but they're ones that we often put off. These are the decisions we hope somehow will magically resolve themselves if we just give them a little more time. So this week, or last week, I guess, at this point, I had to make one of those decisions and I had to let someone go in my business. And it was most definitely not because they were a bad person. And it was not because they did anything monumentally terrible either, or because they were causing major problems just yet, at least. But it was really because, despite my coaching, my support, encouragement, training, multiple different ways of training, patience and time, more time than I should have spent, and more effort in doing this than I would normally have ever needed to spend. Despite all of that, they simply were not able to perform at the level that our clients are accustomed to and deserve. Now, before I go any further, this episode is not about her. This lesson today or this talk isn't about this person. It's really more about me. Because if I'm being completely honest, I knew a few months ago that something wasn't working and I could feel it in my gut that it wasn't changing. I knew it, but I didn't want to know it. But I knew it. That was a fact. And I kept hoping it would improve. I wanted it to improve. And I kept feeling and thinking, oh, I can fix this, right? Going back to, if you've ever heard any of my episodes, that fixer mentality, you know, that identity, right? And I wanted it to improve, so I tried everything that I could think of to help it improve. Because, again, a good person, she's a good person. Uh, and I delayed making the decision because I genuinely cared. I genuinely did not want to hurt this person. I didn't want to put her in a difficult financial position. I didn't want to be responsible for delivering bad news. And if you're listening right now, chances are you've done some version of this too. Maybe not with an employee or a team member or someone in a business capacity. Maybe it was with a relationship. You put off breaking up for longer than you should have. Maybe it was with your finances. You could have not paid attention and just let things continue to go because you don't want to make the hard financial decisions because they were going to be uncomfortable. Maybe it was with your health. We do this with our health, or a business decision of any kind that you have been avoiding. This can even be with your dreams. Maybe with a dream in particular that you might have outgrown, but you haven't admitted to yourself yet, or has evolved in something different, but you're holding on to what it originally was. So the details, they can be very different, but the pattern is still the same for most of us. So here's why we wait. One of the things I've realized is that many of us confuse kindness with avoidance. And we think we're being compassionate. We think we're giving someone another chance. And I do believe in second chances. I do believe in giving people opportunity to grow and expand and improve their skills. That said, when that continues and continues and continues, we then tell ourselves, well, we're being patient. And sometimes that is true. But sometimes what we are really doing is avoiding the discomfort. We think more time will maybe create more clarity. Or we think it, if we just wait another month, have one more conversation, try one more thing, maybe the situation will somehow change. And we mistake hope for strategy. Now, I really think this is something that many women especially will struggle with here. Not all, for sure. But we often don't want to hurt people. We don't want to disappoint people. We don't want to be judged and we don't want to be misunderstood. We don't want to become the villain in someone else's story. So then we wait and we wait and we wait. So here's the truth. I've been sitting with this this week and just kind of thinking about this on the whole here. Because really, the hardest decisions, they rarely become easier by waiting. And I wanted to share this because if you're in business, you've got to make these hard decisions sometimes. And being able to recognize when you're being compassionate and when you're helping and being supportive and being patient, and it's and it's going to lead somewhere, being able to recognize that versus when you have actually done that and now you're just exhausting that and you're bringing in all these other reasons why you can't do the hard thing, that's really limiting in business. It's limiting in life. Okay. And the decision at that point, it even it becomes even more expensive to you, so to speak, to your emotions. It's more expensive, so to speak, financially often, to your spirit energetically, it's very expensive to us energetically approaching it this way. And it's often far more complicated than if we had just been timely and done the hard thing when it needed to be done. Okay. If you can relate to any of this, I'd love to hear you. Leave me a show comment or you know, join us in uh the Limitless Living Group and pop a comment in there. Because I know a lot of women that struggle with this. A lot of the women I work with, coaching and strategizing in their businesses, often struggle with these types of things, making hard decisions. And again, this can be in many areas of your life. It does not have to be just in business that this can become an issue. There is a hidden cost of delaying things. And what really hit me after making this decision was realizing that every day I delayed it wasn't just affecting me. It was affecting me, of course, as I thought it was. But it wasn't only me carrying the burden or absorbing the discomfort. That actually wasn't the truth. Every day that I waited, I was potentially affecting clients, or I was potentially affecting team morale, or potentially affecting business growth. Every day that I waited, I was potentially affecting the reputation that we've spent decades building. And that realization, of course, was very sobering. Because leadership isn't just about being nice. Leadership is about responsibility. When you own a business, when you lead a team, when people trust you with their care, their money, their time, and their experience, you have a responsibility to protect the mission. So for me, the mission is very clear. I want people to feel safe, seen. I want them to feel heard. I want them to feel supported. Whether it's you listening to this podcast, whether it's someone attending a retreat, participating in one of our programs, or walking through the doors of Massage, Wellness, and Beyond, I want that person or you to know that you're not alone and that we are here. I am here partnering with you and with all of the other people on their journey. So whatever that journey looks like, it doesn't matter whether your journey is from your current state of health to a journey to better health, whether that journey is more confidence, whether it's about less stress, whether it's about finding greater purpose in your life, or a life beyond your survival tendencies, patterns, habits, mode, whether it's a life filled with possibility, that is the work that I do, regardless of how someone comes into that. That is the work that I do, that is the work that my team does. So when something isn't supporting that mission, when something isn't aligned with those values, eventually I have to acknowledge it. Even when it's uncomfortable, especially even when it's uncomfortable. So, you know, there's a balance we as leaders walk. And something else that I've been thinking about all along with this is that so many of us we struggle with finding that balance between compassion and strength in the workplace in general, whether you are the owner, the boss, the CEO, corporate, or otherwise. Most of us have seen both extremes. I have worked, oh, I worked for someone, the extreme version of the hard-driving female boss. Years ago, I worked for someone for about eight or nine years, and she was incredibly successful and she was incredibly difficult to work with and work for and do anything for. Every day felt stressful, completely stressful. Every day felt like walking on eggshells. And, you know, while I learned genuinely a tremendous amount from that experience, one of the biggest lessons was that I never wanted to be a leader the way she was. I never wanted to lead that way. I never wanted people to dread coming to work. I never wanted fear to be the primary motivator. But I've also seen women go to the opposite extreme. So leaders, whether it's in an office workplace or whether it's your own business, who tend to avoid every difficult conversation. And they won't hold their own boundaries. Leaders who tolerate things that should not be tolerated because they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings. Or maybe they have a business that they run with family and boy can that be messy. Or maybe they just don't know how to say no yet. Here's your reminder: no is a complete sentence. So neither of the extremes work. Being too easy, too soft doesn't work, being too hard doesn't really work. Real leadership lives somewhere in the middle of that. And that's compassion with standards, kindness with accountability at the same time, empathy with boundaries. So you can care deeply about someone and still recognize that they're not the right fit. And I'm gonna also add here this is not just in business, this is in relationships, this is in your personal life, ladies. You can value someone as a human being and still make a difficult business decision andor personal decision. You can be compassionate without compromising your values, your mission, or your living in alignment. Now, this again isn't just about business. This is a really good business lesson, but this is also a life lesson. Maybe your hard thing isn't about firing someone. Maybe it's finally looking at your finances. Maybe it's ending a relationship that's no longer healthy. Maybe it's leaving a job that you've outgrown. Maybe it's addressing a health issue that you've been pretending isn't that serious? Maybe it's setting boundaries with someone you've allowed to drain your energy for too long. Whatever it is, ask yourself this what is it costing me to wait to make this decision? Not what will it cost to make the decision, but what is it costing you right now not to make the decision? Because that's the question that changed everything for me this week. I also had this conversation over something entirely different with two other people in my coaching client cohort world, and it applies in all areas of our lives. So as difficult as this decision was, I have to be honest, I feel lighter. Not because I enjoyed making it, oh boy, did I not enjoy it, and not because it wasn't emotional, it absolutely felt emotional, but because alignment creates peace. So when I made the decision that was already I knew what was going to happen inside me, when I followed through and did it, I went, I brought myself, my business back into alignment. And when you do that, it creates peace. The longer we stay out of alignment, the heavier life or the daily grind or whatever you want to call it, the heavier everything starts to become. So I want to leave you with this question this week: where in your life are you already clear, but still pretending that you're waiting for the clarity? Maybe it's more than one area. I would journal about this. And I'll ask it again. Where in your life are you already clear? But you're still pretending that you're waiting for clarity? Sit with that, journal about that, be honest with yourself because your next level of growth, it may not require any more information than you already have. What it might require is simply one actionable step, one act of courage. So I want to thank you so much for spending time with me today. And if this episode resonated with you, I'd love to have you share it with someone who may need to hear it as well. If you'd like to continue the conversation, join us in the Limitless Living Facebook community for women who are becoming. And that means women growing, healing, reinventing, rediscovering, creating lives that they want to feel more aligned in, and so on. So you get to talk to me directly in there and connect with some amazing women. So you can also connect with me directly and find additional resources at my website, Frederickadavis.com. It'll be in the show notes. And next week on Sustainable Success Tuesday's episode, we're gonna continue this conversation. And I want to continue by talking about why we avoid the hard conversations in the first place, what's actually happening underneath that procrastination, the guilt, the fear, people pleasing, all of that good stuff. But I'm also going to give you practical tips that you can use to move forward when you know something needs to change. Some framework for you is what I want to give you next time. And I will talk to you on Thursday for our wellness reset Thursday this week. And until next time, remember be rooted, be resilient, and be limitless.