A lot of people come to me for the first time with a specific question that’s been weighing on them.
“Do I take this this path or that one?”
“Do I stay or do I go?”
“Do I do this now or later?”
And that question feels urgent.
Sometimes that urgency is very real. There’s a decision pending, a lease ending, a contract renewing. But other times, the urgency is more existential.
I had one client who said, “Every year I get to this point where I ask myself what if I should move or stay where I am. And then I get stuck, and nothing really changes. And I just don’t want to be here again next year having the same conversation with myself.”
So whether that urgency is because of calendar-based timing or a sense of internal timing, it often feels like there’s a ticking clock. Like if you don’t figure this out soon, you’re going to miss an important window.
This is where A-versus-B tunnel vision tends to kick in.
Your entire field of view narrows down to one binary choice. Path A or Path B. Your brain starts ricocheting back and forth between those two options and that becomes the backdrop as you go to work, as you exercise and as you brush your teeth. It’s draining and it’s distracting. And the tricky thing is that you can make a really strong case for both sides, so it turns into this ongoing internal debate you can’t win.
The more you think, the more stuck you feel.
Part of why this feels so intense is that the decision itself feels like it’s carrying a ton of weight. With or without realizing it, many people are asking one choice to determine everything that comes next. Not in a dramatic “my life is over if I choose wrong” way, but in a more subtle, underlying way.
Choosing A or B feels like it will set something in motion that might be challenging to pursue, hard to unravel or both. And that can feel daunting.
Even when you understand intellectually that there isn’t one objectively right answer, you still want to make the choice that feels right to you. And that can lead to a lot of mental gymnastics trying to account for every possible outcome.
This is where fear and FOMO tend to show up, and here are some of the most common fears I hear – do any of these hit home for you?
There’s the fear of regret. The far of disappointing yourself or others. The fear of wasting all of the effort you’ve put in so far. The fear of being judged for changing your mind. The Fear of closing doors.
And those fears are part of why staying at the crossroads can actually feel safer than moving forward.
Staying at the crossroads becomes familiar. You know how to operate there. You know how to say, “I’m still figuring it out.” And that limbo becomes a kind of holding pattern. I think of it like treading water. Even though it’s exhausting and you’re not actually going anywhere, it can still feel easier than swimming forward, because swimming forward requires committing to a direction. And when you’re treading water, nothing has to change…yet.
This is where zooming out becomes such a powerful perspective shift.
Back when I was 25, I noticed that pattern in myself as I kept going back and forth between different career options. Each option felt loaded and I was spending a lot of time thinking about my decision without feeling any closer to making it.
Oone of my mentors taught me that when you ask different questions you get different answers.
And I realized that the real question wasn’t “which path do I take?”
The real question was actually way bigger and more exciting than the choices in front of me.
The real question was “where am I ultimately going?”
And once I clarified that, it was like zooming out in google maps. I went from only being able to see one crossroads in front of me to seeing a much bigger picture that just wasn’t visible to me before . And I realized that there was so much more than just those two paths available to me. I could take Path A, I could take Path B, I could turn right around from the crossroads and take path C, I could dig a tunnel to path D, I could build a bridge to path E, or I could create a more nuanced path that had elements from each of them.
One client I worked with came to me with lots on her mind, but one of the biggest things she was grappling with was if she wanted to stay with a company and team she loved and continue her great career trajectory or if she wanted to take a year to travel.
It may seem counterintuitive, but what we didn’t do was answer that question right away. We definitely didn’t ignore it, but we didn’t start there either.
Instead, we zoomed out. We looked at how she got here, where she was and where she was heading. And with all of that context we explored and articulated the life she wanted to create over the next five years. Not just in terms of work or travel, but the whole life she wanted to live. And as we peeled back the layers and she gained more and more clarity, her choices started to feel expansive instead of restrictive. And when she ultimately did make her decision it was with this deep sense of confidence because she knew it was an intentional, grounded choice that felt aligned not just for the short term, but for the long term.
And coming back to alignment is what helped me use this shift in a challenging decision about a past relationship. I was living in San Diego and my boyfriend at the time had asked me to move to San Francisco to move in with him. My mind was on overdrive in this mental tennis match of stay or go, but I decided to practice what I preach and shift to the underlying question at hand. It wasn’t actually if I should stay in this city or go to that one, if I should get more serious with this guy or let the relationship potentially fizzle. The question I realized I really wanted to ask myself was “is this getting me closer to or farther away from the life I want to create in this chapter?” Once I made that shift I knew my answer very soon after. I stayed in San Diego, we broke up, and while it was hard, I knew it was so aligned with my Vision.
And sometimes the answer isn’t one or the other, all or nothing. Sometimes it’s A now and B later. And that can be incredibly relieving, especially when people realize that Visioning is about defining success for their next 3 years or their next 5 years, not the rest of their lives. When you realize that something may be part of your next Vision instead of this one, you can look forward to it instead of feeling like you gave up on it.
Another pattern I see is that when people are stuck at a crossroads, they can end up taking opportunities as they appear, not because they’re intentional, but because they’re available. I work with one woman who has had lots of great opportunities fall in her lap, but over time, that left her feeling disconnected from a larger sense of direction.
Zooming out shifts you from reacting to choosing. It puts you back in the driver’s seat.
So as you marinate on this shift, I want to give you a question to reflect on:
If you zoomed out from the specific decision in front of you, what bigger question might you actually be wrestling with?
If you prefer to listen instead of read, you can check out Episode #2: Zooming Out From the Crossroads from my private podcast.
