Magical Thinking Is Expensive Comfort

"I just need to give it more time."

It sounds like patience. It sounds like fairness. It sounds like the kind of measured leadership you're supposed to model.

And yet it isn't.

In this episode, I share the story of a community committee I stayed on four months longer than I should have while telling myself a different story every single month. It was a pattern I lived from the inside, until a very patient friend sat across from me and named it out loud.

This episode names the pattern clearly: magical thinking in leadership is what happens when the story you're telling yourself feels more real than the evidence in front of you. It's the hope that the team member who promised to do better actually will — without a checkpoint, without a consequence, without any mechanism to ensure anything changes. 

Well-intentioned leaders do this constantly. They call it patience or fairness. They call it giving people a chance. What they're actually doing is protecting themselves from a discomfort that exists only in the story while guaranteeing themselves an ongoing, compounding one.

The hope strategy isn't a strategy. And the women I coach already know that. They just haven't said it out loud yet.

In this episode:

• Why the story always feels more real than it is and what it's actually costing you
• The difference between reasonable patience and the hope strategy disguised as leadership
• How to distinguish a story from a fact and the one question that separates them
• What circle conversations are, why they create temporary promises without real change, and how to stop having them
• The permission to operate from what you already know

This week's permission: You don't need more evidence. You don't need more time. You're allowed to operate from facts.