The Question That Finally Got Me Unstuck & Made Me Think Strategically

I want to tell you something I haven't said out loud until now.

Here's the short version, if you only have a minute: the question that actually helps you think strategically isn't "is this urgent" or "is this important." It's "will this make an impact." Those are three different questions, and confusing them is why so many of us stay stuck on something for a year.

THE BOOK I WAS QUIET ABOUT

Make Imposter Syndrome Your Superpower has been out for about a year. And in that year, I did the quiet things. Book clubs. Speaking engagements. A few personal messages to people on this list about picking up a copy. What I hadn't done, not once, was go public. No press release. No standing in the middle of the room and saying, out loud, this book exists and it matters.

If you'd asked me why, I would have told you I was busy. Which was true. I would not have told you I was hiding, because I didn't think of it that way at the time. But that's what a year of quiet is, when the loud version is sitting right there the whole time, waiting on you.

THE TIMES SQUARE MOMENT

A couple of weeks ago, my name went up in Times Square, forty feet tall. Wildfire smoke was hanging over the block. The heat was brutal. I stood there and cried, because it was one of the best days of my life, and because I knew exactly what had gotten me there.

It wasn't a burst of courage. People love that story, the sudden moment of bravery, but that's not what happened. What got me from a year of quiet to a billboard in Times Square was a question I've actually been asking for years. I just hadn't turned it on myself yet.

WHY URGENT VS. IMPORTANT NEVER WORKED FOR ME

Here's the question, and the story behind it.

Years ago, I discovered the Eisenhower matrix, the classic urgent-versus-important framework you've probably seen in a hundred productivity posts. I hated it. It's genuinely confusing in practice. My clients hated it too. They'd get stuck for ten minutes trying to decide which box something belonged in, urgent-and-important, important-but-not-urgent, and by the time they'd sorted it, they still hadn't actually done the thing.

So I threw the matrix out. I stopped asking two questions and started asking one: what's actually going to make an impact today.

That's a different question than either half of the old framework. Urgent asks what's clawing at you right now. Important asks what matters in the abstract, and here's the trap with important, almost anything can dress itself up as important if you let it. Your inbox is important. Your calendar is important. The meeting is important. Important doesn't discriminate, it just piles up.

Impact is the only one of the three that actually forces a decision. Not what's loud. Not what sounds serious. What, if you did it today, would genuinely move something forward.

WHY THIS QUESTION IS THE REAL REASON TIMES SQUARE HAPPENED

Going public with my book was never urgent. Nothing forces you to send a press release, no deadline, no clawing inbox demanding it. And "important" wasn't cutting it either, I'd been calling this book important for an entire year without doing the public part of the work.

What actually moved me was asking a completely different question: would going public make an impact. Not on my ego. On the people who needed to hear what's in that book and didn't know it existed yet. Once I asked it that way, the answer wasn't complicated. Of course it would. So I stopped waiting to feel ready, hired my own photographer since I wasn't going to leave that day to chance, and made it happen.

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HOW TO USE THIS QUESTION YOURSELF

Most of what fills your calendar was never yours to decide. Three meetings stacked on top of each other, and you went to whichever one felt riskiest to skip. A report you owe. A KPI you're accountable for. For a lot of the women I work with, that's not occasional, it's every day, and some days there's truly no room anywhere.

But some days a meeting ends early. A call gets canceled. You find yourself with twenty unclaimed minutes before the next thing starts. And on those days, most women don't protect that time for thinking. They open email. They knock out the next task on the list. Because sitting quietly with a hard question doesn't look like work. It doesn't produce a status update. Nobody's ever told them it's allowed to count as the most important thing they do that day.

Here's where the Eisenhower matrix quietly fails almost everyone who tries to use it. Urgent and important together gets done, it has to. Urgent alone gets done too, mostly because it's loud enough to force the issue. The one box that almost never gets touched is important, not urgent, and that box is where all your real thinking lives, if you ever let yourself claim it.

I block ninety minutes a week for what I call staring out the window time. Not planning a specific project. Not answering anything. Just fifty-thousand-foot thinking, long-term, strategic, the kind of thinking your brain actually needs to process uncertainty instead of just reacting to it. Everyone needs this, not just executives, and almost nobody gives themselves permission to take it.

So here's the practice, and it doesn't require a scheduled retreat. The next time a meeting ends early or a call falls through, don't reach for email. Don't knock out the next task. Ask the one real question: what's the thing that would make the biggest impact if I actually let myself think about it right now or actually do it. Then sit with it, even if it's only twenty minutes. The permission is the whole practice.

That's the real version of the impact question. Not what's urgent, not what's important. What's the one thing that would make the biggest difference if you did it today. Some days the honest answer is staring out the window for twenty minutes, or ninety, so your brain can catch up. It will never feel as loud as your calendar. It makes more of a difference than almost anything on it.

YOUR TURN

So let me ask you the same thing I asked myself. What have you been doing quietly, calling it important, without ever asking if it's actually the thing that would make an impact the moment you said it out loud?

If you're circling your own version of that question right now, that's exactly the work we do inside the Executive Presence Accelerator, the actual, practical work of deciding what deserves your attention and finally acting on it instead of sitting with it. The next cohort opens October 7th. If you want to be first to know when the doors open, the priority list is here.