What If You Make the Wrong Choice?
There’s a specific kind of fear that shows up when you’re on the verge of a real shift in your business.
It’s not loud or dramatic. It’s quiet. Heavy. It’s the constant, looping whisper in the back of your mind: “What if I make the wrong choice? What if I try this and fail? What if I make things worse?”
It’s the fear of the unknown battling the very real pain of the known. And it is utterly paralysing.
"What If We're Beyond Help?"
In a recent conversation, a founder told our own founder, Justine, that she knew she couldn’t keep going as she was. The burnout was too deep, the systems were too broken. But every time she considered a change, she froze.
“I’m just scared,” she told Justine, her voice quiet. “What if we’re beyond help?”
That fear is the loneliest place a founder can be. It’s where you obsess over everything that could go wrong if you make a change, while ignoring everything that is already going wrong by staying exactly the same.
The Real Risk is Staying Stuck
The truth is, we have been conditioned to see risk as taking action. But for a founder in a business that is no longer serving them, the equation is flipped.
The real risk isn’t failing at something new. The real risk is succeeding at staying stuck.
It’s the risk of waking up in one year, or five, in the exact same place: just as tired, just as overwhelmed, with a business that still demands everything from you and a life that feels like it’s on hold. That isn’t a “what if” … it’s a certainty, if nothing changes.
A Better Question to Ask Yourself
Fear loves to ask, “What if it doesn’t work?” It’s a paralysing, dead-end question.
So the next time that whisper starts, don’t argue with it. Don’t ignore it. Just answer it with a better, more powerful question:
“But what is the cost of staying right where I am?”
Get specific. What does your health look like in a year? Your relationships? Your passion for the business? What moments with your family will you miss?
The fear of moving forward might not disappear. But when the fear of staying stuck finally becomes bigger, clarity appears alongside it.
Fear Doesn't Have to Disappear for You to Move
If you’re wrestling with your own version of that fear, here’s what we want you to know: the worst-case scenario isn’t that you’ll try something and it won’t work. The worst-case scenario is that you’ll look up in five years and realise nothing has changed at all.
You don’t need to be fearless to take the next step. You just have to decide that your future is more important than your fear.
Fear doesn’t have to disappear. It just has to stop being in charge.
The Founder Who Was Beyond Help?
That same founder who quietly asked us, “What if we’re beyond help?”, the one paralysed by the fear of making the wrong choice … sent us a photo a few months later.
It wasn’t a picture of a sales chart or a completed project.
It was a picture of her son at his soccer game on a Tuesday afternoon. The note was simple: “Just because I could.”
Where is she now?
She’s not “beyond help.” She’s reclaimed 15 hours a week.
Her team now runs their own weekly operational meetings. She isn’t invited, and she doesn’t need to be. They solve problems she never even hears about.
She’s no longer the chief firefighter. Her time is spent on the two things only she can do: mentoring her senior team members and developing the new service line that she’d been dreaming about for years but never had the headspace to build.
Last week, she booked a family holiday for a month from now. And for the first time, she isn’t dreading the mountain of work she’ll come back to.
She’s proof that the biggest risk wasn’t making the wrong choice. The biggest risk was staying right where she was.
Ready for a Moment of Clarity?
This is a heavy topic, and the first step toward moving through fear is getting a clear, objective picture of your situation.
The Visionary Reset Quiz is designed to do just that.
Think of this as a moment to breathe. No follow-up calls, no pressure. Just a clear picture of what’s going on in your business. It’s a diagnostic that will pinpoint the exact bottleneck draining your energy, so you know exactly where to focus first.