The question that shrinks your hardest decision
Twenty-two years to partner, and the question he asks before any hard call.
There is probably a decision you are sitting on right now that feels bigger than it is, the kind that wakes you up at 2 am in the morning, where getting it wrong feels like it would cost you everything.
Dave Zager makes calls like that for a living.
When he was young, he taught himself to build by fixing the computers his dad broke, these problem solving skills landed him the one open position at a consulting firm that a couple hundred candidates competed for on his campus in 2003. The ability to solve problems and withstand pressure has earned him a twenty-two year career and a partner role at Deloitte. Where a wrong call can cost real money and real careers and his way of staying calm through it is simple enough to use tonight: name the worst case out loud, follow it all the way down, and decide from there.
Here are the five ways he answers that, from our conversation
1. Ask the worst case, then decide.
Start where Dave starts, with the question he asks his team whenever someone freezes before a hard call. “What is the absolute worst thing that can happen in the job?” The answer is almost never what people brace for. “Nobody ever answers it the way I think they’re going to,” he said. “You get fired. That is the worst thing that can happen in your job.” Then he follows it down. “If you zoom out on your entire life, are you going to find another job? Yeah. Are you going to land back on your feet? Yes.” Underneath this thought pattern is an anchor. “I wake up in the morning, that’s my anchor. I’m alive,” and the call that feels huge today rarely keeps its size: “Nobody’s going to remember this decision even in a week.” He named the limit too. If every day is a bad day for weeks, “something has to change.” Most days, though, the worst case is smaller than the story you have built around it.
To Coach yourself: Bring to mind the decision that is keeping you up, and ask the honest worst case. Then keep asking “and then what” until you reach the floor.
Once you are standing on it, what do you notice is actually true about your ability to get back up? With the fear down to its real size, what is the one call you are now ready to make?
From Dave: “You’re alive to experience a bad day.” This is a privilege we often forget in the moment.
2. You are untouchable once you have survived hard things.
The calm has to come from somewhere, and for Dave it is his own track record. “I don’t think the universe hands anybody anything that they can’t handle,” he said. “If you really believe in yourself, and you know you can get through because of getting through other hard things, then you’re somewhat untouchable.” The belief is built with your own data of overcoming everything up until now. “If I didn’t believe that in myself, there was no amount of people around me that could tell me you got this. It actually doesn’t really matter.” Other people’s encouragement gives you a small lift, and then it fades. What holds under a big call is the evidence you have already lived through. As Dave put it, “spending more time developing that muscle for each person within themselves is probably the key.”
To Coach yourself: Name three hard things you have already overcome through. As you look at them, what do they tell you about what you can handle? Where are you underestimating that right now? What would you take on this week if you fully trusted your own evidence?
3. Do the thinking, then make the call.
A lot of what makes a decision feel enormous is the fear of getting it wrong. Dave takes that fear off the table by changing what he aims at. “I’m not usually worried with getting the right answer every time,” he said. “It’s more about, have I thought about all the things behind the decision.” Once you have genuinely weighed the trade-offs and made an honest call, the outcome is not fully yours to control, and there is a strange freedom in that. The standard you can actually meet is thoroughness and honesty, and if it still turns out wrong, as Dave says of nearly everything at work, it is recoverable.
Coach yourself: Take the call that is looming. What have you genuinely thought through, and what are you still telling yourself you need first? Which of those is real, and which is the wish to feel certain? Once you can see the difference, what will you decide, and by when?
4. The leader you trust is willing to say they are figuring it out.
When the call affects a whole team, the pressure to look certain gets heavy, and Dave thinks that is exactly the trap. He goes back to the early days of COVID. “To hear someone say we’ve got everything under control, it doesn’t feel right to me. Who would have everything under control two weeks into this?” The leader he trusts says the harder, truer thing. “We’ve never gone through this before. I’m personally figuring it out, but we got you, and let’s answer honest questions.” Dropping the performance of certainty is what keeps him steady, and it is what makes a leader human enough to follow.
To Coach yourself: Picture the update your team is waiting on. What is the honest version you have been holding back, and what has kept you from saying it? What would shift for them, and for you, if you named what you know, what you don’t, and how you have them covered? What is the one thing you will say out loud in your next conversation with them?
From Dave: “When things don’t go according to plan, that’s when you know your true strength with your team and your clients. That’s when you buckle down.” Most things will not go according to plan, no matter how solid the plan is, so approaching changes and uncertain path forward in an honest way helps keep the trust.
5. Let go, because the worst case is still coachable.
The biggest calls of Dave’s career came when he stopped doing the work himself and started trusting a team to do it, which is the hardest version of staying calm, because now you cannot control the outcome directly. “A lot of the time people have a tough time letting go,” he said, worrying about the quality. Gripping it backfires. “The people reporting to you don’t feel like they have the autonomy to make decisions, and you’re stressing out because there are five different people doing hundreds of different things.” What freed him was running the same worst-case question on delegation itself. The worst thing that happens when you let go? “Someone misses a deadline. All of these things are coachable.”
To Coach yourself: Where are you the bottleneck right now? Name the one thing you are holding onto that someone else should own. If you handed it over, what is the worst that happens, and how much of that could truly not be repaired? What will you let go of this week, and who gets to grow because you did?
From Dave: “Everybody should be growing in their career, and in a way, you orchestrated that.” Mistakes or missteps are an opportunity for the person you are managing to learn and grow, allow that process to exist.
Resources Dave mentioned
The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel. A writer Dave returns to often. His line on the comparison trap comes from Housel: when someone admires your car, they are never picturing themselves in your life, only in your car.
A Bit of Optimism, Simon Sinek’s podcast on positivity, which Dave had just started listening to and turns to for the hopeful nature of the message of the podcast.
Leaving you with this question: What is the decision you are turning over right now, and what actually happens if the worst case comes true? Share it with me.
If anything in this article resonated with you, share it with one more person that could also use these insights.
Work with me
I’m Dar Patel, an ICF-certified executive coach (PCC), I have worked with founders and executives, and am the writer behind The Inner Game, the weekly newsletter of Little Pursuits.
My goal is to support founders, executives, and individuals doing one of the hardest things we can do: build and scale something from the ground up.
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