You Already Know the Answer. You Just Need a Safe Place to Say It Out Loud.
A little while back, one of the leaders I work with got on a coaching call. Before I could even finish “How can I help you today,” he cut in: “Todd, if this whole thing fell apart tomorrow, honestly? I think I’d feel relieved.”
Now, he didn’t mean it the way it sounds. He’s not a man who wants out of his life — he’s a man who’s tired. He’d been carrying one of those stretches where every fire you put out lights two more, where the people who lean on you have no idea how much you’re holding, and where you’ve quietly started to believe that no one could possibly tell you anything you haven’t already told yourself. I’ve sat across from that exact feeling in enough founders to know it doesn’t mean someone wants to lose their company. Usually it means they desperately want relief from the weight of carrying it.
So I did the thing he didn’t expect. I didn’t try to fix it, I didn’t hand him a plan, and I didn’t take anyone’s side — not his board’s, not his team’s, not even his own version of the story. I just stayed curious. I asked a few honest questions and gave him room to answer them: “That makes sense. What’s actually in your way here?” And as he kept talking, I could hear his thinking begin to change. The business hadn’t changed in those thirty minutes. The problems hadn’t magically disappeared. What had changed was his relationship with the problem.
Most Leaders Already Know the Answer
Here’s what I’ve learned after nearly ten years doing this work — and after twenty-four years before that as a CEO myself: the leaders I sit with almost always already know the answer. They don’t have an information problem. What they’re wrestling with is fear, avoidance, uncertainty, head trash, or simply not having a place quiet enough and safe enough to slow down and hear themselves think.
What they usually don’t have is one single person in their life who wants absolutely nothing from them. Think about who surrounds a CEO on any given day. Employees need a decision. Customers need an answer.
The bank needs its money. Investors need results. The leadership team needs reassurance. And at home, a spouse and kids have their own needs too — often needs already stretched thin by the stress the business creates. You can be surrounded by people from the moment you wake up until your head hits the pillow and still feel profoundly alone, because nearly every relationship in your day has some expectation attached to it. That’s a big part of what a coaching relationship is actually for.
You’re Not the Only One Feeling This
And if you recognize yourself in any of this, I want you to know you’re in good company. A widely cited Harvard Business Review study found that about half of CEOs report feeling lonely in the role — and of those, the majority say that loneliness is getting in the way of their performance.
Separately, Dr. Michael Freeman’s research on founders found that roughly half of entrepreneurs have dealt with a mental health condition in their lifetime. So if you’re at the top and you feel like you’re white-knuckling it alone, you’re not broken. You’re carrying something a lot of very successful people carry — usually in silence.
Why Saying It Out Loud Works
I’ve watched this happen in coaching hundreds of times. A founder comes onto the call wound tight, convinced there are ten separate problems that all need solving right now. Then they finally name the one thing they’re actually afraid of — the real thing sitting underneath the other nine — and something shifts in their whole posture. UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman’s research on affect labeling helps explain why: putting a feeling into words can quiet activity in the amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, and increase activity in the regions tied to regulation and reason.
In plain terms, saying the scary thing out loud can literally change how your brain processes it. That’s why the answer so often shows up while you’re talking and not before. You didn’t need smarter input. You needed to hear yourself in a room where it was safe to be unsure.
What Executive Coaching Is Really About
Now, I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read all of this and conclude that my job is simply to listen well. I hope I do listen well. But nobody should pay Todd Palmer thousands of dollars just because I’m a good listener.
I spent twenty-four years as a CEO and entrepreneur. I built Diversified Industrial Staffing into a six-time Inc. 5000 company. I’ve also been $600,000 in debt. I’ve lain awake wondering how I was going to make payroll. I’ve hired the wrong people and had to fire people. I’ve lost customers I couldn’t afford to lose, made leadership decisions I’m not proud of, clawed through cash-flow crises, rebuilt a company from the studs, and eventually exited it. That scar tissue matters, and it’s a big part of what a founder is actually buying.
My value isn’t that I know nothing about your business and listen anyway. It’s the combination of real business experience, entrepreneurial scar tissue, an understanding of human behavior, psychological safety, curiosity, and accountability — in the same room, at the same time. I don’t just create a safe place for an entrepreneur to talk. I create enough safety for them to tell themselves the truth, and then enough accountability to actually do something about it.
And this is where I think “psychological safety” gets badly misunderstood. Psychological safety does not mean comfort, and it does not mean agreement. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes I tell a CEO they’re wrong. Sometimes I tell them they’re the problem. Sometimes I point out that they’re operating from a victim mindset, or I challenge the story they’ve been telling themselves, or I simply ask, “Is that actually true?” Sometimes I tell them the conversation they’ve been avoiding for six months needs to happen this week. Amy Edmondson’s work at Harvard is useful here: what makes a relationship psychologically safe isn’t the absence of hard truths; it’s enough trust that a person can sit in discomfort without fearing humiliation, punishment, judgment, or rejection. So a psychologically safe coaching relationship isn’t one where I agree with you. It’s one where I can say, “I think you’re wrong,” or “I think you’re the problem here,” and you know I’m saying it because I’m completely invested in your growth — not because I need something from you.
I Wish I’d Understood This Sooner
I say all of this partly because I wish I’d understood it when I was running Diversified. There were long stretches where I was carrying enormous fear and had nowhere to put it. I couldn’t dump it on my employees — they needed me to lead. I didn’t want to bring all of it home, because my family was already living with the consequences of my stress. So I did what a lot of entrepreneurs do: I carried it myself. And here’s the part nobody warns you about — when you carry everything yourself for long enough, it quietly starts to change how you lead. You get shorter, more guarded, more reactive. You start making decisions out of fear instead of clarity, and you don’t even notice it happening.
Where This Shows Up in the Business
This is also the part of the conversation that too often gets left out, because we’re talking to entrepreneurs and feeling better isn’t the point. The point is what changes after the clarity comes. You finally have the conversation you’ve postponed for a year. You stop making decisions out of fear. You delegate the thing you should have let go of two years ago. You stop changing strategy every three weeks. You confront the declining margin instead of explaining it away. You repair the relationship with your COO. You stop solving problems your leadership team should own.
The value isn’t that you leave every coaching call feeling better — sometimes you don’t. The value is that clarity changes behavior. You make the decision you’ve been avoiding, have the conversation you’ve postponed, stop solving problems your team should own, or finally recognize that the story running through your head isn’t actually true. That’s when psychological safety stops being a soft idea and starts showing up on the P&L.
Seen. Heard. Known. Accepted.
There’s one more layer underneath all of this. Entrepreneurs spend enormous amounts of energy being seen as the CEO — the successful one, the problem solver, the one with the answers, the person everyone else needs to stay calm. But where does the human being underneath the title get to feel seen, heard, known, and accepted? Not the founder wearing the performance mask — the actual person. That’s a real need, and most leaders have almost nowhere to meet it. A good coaching relationship is one of the few places someone gets to set the mask down and still be fully accepted, without having to perform for it.
So, Who Knows What You’re Actually Afraid Of?
So let me turn it around to you. Who in your life knows what you’re actually afraid of right now? Not your revenue target. Not your strategic plan. Not the cleaned-up version you gave the leadership team. I mean the thing you’re turning over at two in the morning that you haven’t said out loud to anyone. If a name comes to mind easily, hold onto that person — they’re worth more than they know. And if you sit here and can’t come up with one, I’d gently suggest that’s worth paying attention to.
I’m not going to end this by telling you to hire an executive coach. But if you don’t have an honest answer to that question, that’s usually a sign something needs tending. If you want, hit reply and tell me what came up. Sometimes saying the thing to one person who wants nothing from you is exactly where it starts to change.
Here when you need me,
Todd
P.S. If you’re carrying something heavy right now and there’s genuinely no one in your corner to set it down with — that’s not weakness, and it’s honestly a lot of what this work is. Just hit reply.
