The questions I couldn't answer - and why that turned out to be useful
On the specific discomfort of knowing something is ending before you know what comes next.
There is a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that arrives, if you are lucky, somewhere in your late forties.
You are good at what you do. Genuinely good - not in the way people say to be polite, but in the way that is visible in outcomes: in the rooms you get invited into, in the calls that come without you asking, in the things people trust you with. Your track record is real. Your credibility is earned. And yet something is asking a question you cannot answer.
Not a crisis. Not a breakdown. Just a persistent, quiet question sitting somewhere underneath everything else.
For me, the question started small. Is this it? Not despairing, more curious. Like noticing a door you had walked past a hundred times and realising, for the first time, that you had never tried the handle.
Then the questions multiplied.
What am I actually building, and for whom?
If the title disappeared tomorrow, who would I be?
What would I do if I could design this from scratch?
I could not answer any of them. I tried. I applied the same analytical rigour I had used on business problems for thirty years and got nowhere. The questions did not respond to frameworks. They responded to time, to quiet, to the particular honesty that comes when you stop performing competence for a moment and let yourself not know.
What I have since learned - from my own experience and from the women I now work with - is that the inability to answer those questions is not a failure of intelligence or clarity. It is a very accurate signal.
It means the answer is not available yet from where you are standing.
The questions are not asking you to solve something. They are asking you to move.
Not dramatically. Not immediately. But to acknowledge that the version of yourself who built everything up to this point was built for a world that is no longer quite the right fit. Not because you failed. Because you grew past it. That is a different thing entirely.
I spent time, after stepping back from work, taking care of family members who needed me. It was not the life I had planned for that period, but it turned out to be exactly the life I needed. Slowing down long enough to hear myself think clearly - without a meeting, without a deliverable, without someone else’s agenda sitting on top of my own - was the first time in a long time I had that kind of quiet.
The questions did not stop. But they changed shape. They stopped being unsettling and started being useful. What matters to me now, without the external validation structure I have relied on for decades? That is a hard question. It is also, I think, the right one.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this - asking questions you cannot answer, feeling the dissonance between external competence and internal restlessness - I want to say something plainly:
You are not broken. You are not in crisis. You are not failing to figure something out that other people have already solved.
You are in the most productive discomfort there is. The questions that do not have answers yet are doing work. They are dismantling what no longer fits so something better can take shape.
Your only job right now is not to silence them.
Let them run. Write them down. Sit with the ones that will not leave. The answers come later - but they only come if you give the questions room to breathe.
Hit reply and tell me: what is the question sitting underneath everything for you right now? I read every one, and sometimes naming it out loud is the first useful thing.
Until next time,
- Pia
The Strategic Second Act is where I work with accomplished women who are ready to take those questions somewhere. If you are at the point where you want structure and not just reflection, that is what it is built for.
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