In recent years, it happens to me more and more often to work with managers and professionals who, on paper, do not have any problem.
They are competent, structured, used to managing important responsibilities. They have experience, vision, capability.
Yet they find themselves in a situation that spaces them out. They struggle to decide.
Some time ago I started a journey with a manager in a large company. A brilliant person, with years of experience and a role of great responsibility. He managed teams, projects, complex budgets. He was used to making decisions every day.
Yet, what he told me in our first meeting was very clear: “It is not that I do not know what to do. It is that I have too many things to consider.”
His day was full. Calls one after the other, meetings, messages, continuous requests. Every decision brought with it new variables, new implications, new risks to evaluate.
And at the end of the day, the sensation was always the same: having worked so much, but without having really decided with clarity. He felt that the ROI on the invested energy, the real return compared to all that effort, simply did not return.
This is an increasingly widespread dynamic. Often it is called decision fatigue, but reducing it to a mental question is limiting. Because what happens, in reality, is much deeper.
When the nervous system stays too long in a state of activation, the mind changes its way of functioning. It becomes more crowded. More reactive. Less selective. One continues to do, to produce, to answer… but it becomes increasingly difficult to see priorities with clarity.
In the work together we did not start from strategies. It would not have worked. Because when the system is in overload, even the best method risks remaining on paper.
We started by working on two levels, in parallel. On one side, coaching: we simplified objectives, built clear decision-making criteria, reduced mental noise and gave structure to what was previously perceived as chaos with exercises and techniques ad hoc for his needs.
On the other side, we worked on the nervous system, because it is there that a large part of the game is played. When the body stays in a state of constant alert, the brain struggles to be strategic. It remains operational, but loses flexibility.
Session after session, the change was not “spectacular” in the classic sense. It was more subtle, but much more concrete. He became more lucid. Decisions started to become faster. Priorities more evident. The mental load more sustainable. And above all, the internal perception changed. He no longer felt constantly in a chase.
After a few months he told me a phrase that perfectly summarizes the whole journey: “Now I do not have fewer things to do. But it is as if I finally see them the right way.”
And it is precisely this the point. Today, in most cases, capability is not missing. What is missing is the mental space to use it.
It is here that coaching and neuroscience truly meet. Coaching helps you to make clarity, to define direction and to build a method. The work on the nervous system creates the conditions so that that method can truly work.
When these two dimensions begin to dialogue, the way you work changes. The mind becomes clearer. Decisions simpler. Energy more stable. And all this without “doing more”, but starting to function better.
If you work in a role of responsibility, you probably already know it: it is not the number of decisions the problem. It is the state in which you take them.
📩 If you feel that your mind is always full and decisions are becoming increasingly heavy, we can work on it together. Write to me for a first free consultation Devecchi.federica@gmail.com
Sometimes it is not needed to add anything else. Sometimes it is needed to create space.
