You used to make decisions fast.
Board meetings. High-stakes negotiations. Career pivots. You processed information, weighed options, committed, and moved. It wasn't arrogance: it was competence. You'd built a track record that proved your judgment was sound.
Then everything shifted.
Maybe it was a divorce. Maybe it was a business collapse, a health crisis, or the slow unravelling of an identity you'd spent decades constructing. Whatever the disruption, something changed in the machinery of how you think.
Now you're sitting in your car for an extra ten minutes before walking into the office: not because you're tired, but because you're running scenarios. You're drafting emails and deleting them. You're lying awake at 2am second-guessing a decision you made at 2pm. You're watching colleagues with half your experience move decisively while you're stuck in a loop of "but what if…"
If this sounds familiar, you're not broken. You're experiencing what happens when the internal architecture that once supported confident decision-making gets destabilised by major life disruption.
The good news? Architecture can be rebuilt. Deliberately. Precisely. And faster than you think.
The Decision-Making Fog Nobody Talks About
Here's what most people don't understand about high performers navigating the 9-18 month window after significant life disruption: the problem isn't intelligence. It's not even emotional instability.
It's that the reference points you used to make decisions have been scrambled.
Your decision-making process was never purely rational. It was built on a foundation of identity, context, and pattern recognition developed over years. When you knew who you were, what you were building, and who you were building it with: decisions had clear criteria against which to evaluate options.
Remove those reference points? The same brain that once cut through complexity with surgical precision now spins in circles. Not because it's damaged. Because it's searching for coordinates that no longer exist.
This is what we call the executive gap: that space between your demonstrated capability and your current performance. It's real, it's measurable, and it's not addressed by traditional therapy or generic life coaching.
What does address it is rebuilding your decision architecture from the ground up.
What Is Decision Architecture?
Decision architecture is a structured approach that guides you through evaluating options and selecting the best course of action. It replaces the ad-hoc, intuition-heavy process you used to rely on with consistent methodologies that restore objectivity and accountability.
Think of it like this: before the disruption, you had an internal operating system running in the background. It processed decisions automatically because the parameters were stable. That operating system crashed. Now you need to consciously install new software: deliberate frameworks that do the heavy lifting while you rebuild trust in your own judgment.
The right frameworks eliminate second-guessing by clarifying three things:
- What actually matters in this decision
- Who holds authority to make it
- What criteria define success
When these elements are explicit rather than assumed, the fog lifts. Not because your circumstances changed, but because you've created structure where chaos used to live.
Framework 1: The Priority Filter
Analysis paralysis happens when everything feels equally important. Your brain can't prioritise, so it tries to process all options simultaneously. The result? Cognitive overload and decision avoidance.
The Priority Filter is a modified version of the Eisenhower Matrix, adapted for professionals rebuilding after disruption.
Step 1: Categorise every pending decision into one of four quadrants:
- Urgent + Important: Requires immediate action and directly impacts your core objectives
- Important + Not Urgent: Strategic decisions that shape your future but have flexible timelines
- Urgent + Not Important: Time-sensitive but doesn't fundamentally matter: delegate or decline
- Not Urgent + Not Important: Eliminate entirely
Step 2: Recognise the trap.
High performers post-disruption typically make the same mistake: they treat everything as urgent and important because their threat-detection system is hyperactive. Your brain is trying to protect you by flagging every decision as critical.
It's lying to you.
Step 3: Apply the 10/10/10 test.
For each decision in your "urgent and important" quadrant, ask:
- How will I feel about this decision in 10 minutes?
- How will I feel about it in 10 months?
- How will I feel about it in 10 years?
Most "urgent" decisions evaporate under this scrutiny. What remains is what actually deserves your cognitive bandwidth.
Step 4: Batch the rest.
Decisions that aren't genuinely urgent get scheduled. Tuesday afternoons. Friday mornings. Whenever. The point is removing them from the constant mental rotation that drains your capacity.
This framework alone can reclaim 30-40% of the mental energy you're currently burning on decisions that don't warrant it.
Framework 2: The RAPID Protocol
When decisions involve other people: business partners, co-parents, teams: ambiguity about authority creates paralysis. You don't know if you're supposed to decide, advise, or defer. So you do nothing. Or you decide, then undo it when someone pushes back.
The RAPID model, developed by Bain & Company, eliminates this by assigning five distinct roles to every significant decision:
- R – Recommend: Who gathers information and proposes a course of action?
- A – Agree: Who must sign off before implementation? (These people have veto power.)
- P – Perform: Who executes once the decision is made?
- I – Input: Who provides information and perspective but doesn't hold authority?
- D – Decide: Who makes the final call?
Here's where high performers get stuck post-disruption: you used to hold the D role in most areas of your life. Now, that authority is fragmented: sometimes legally, sometimes practically.
Mapping RAPID for your current reality does three things:
- It reveals where you do still hold decision authority (often more than you think)
- It clarifies where you need to negotiate or collaborate rather than unilaterally decide
- It eliminates the energy drain of trying to control outcomes you can't actually control
This is particularly relevant for how to rebuild life after divorce when co-parenting, asset division, and intertwined social networks mean you're no longer a solo operator.
Framework 3: The Cynefin Diagnostic
Not all decisions are the same. Treating a complex adaptive challenge like a simple operational choice: or vice versa: leads to either overthinking or underthinking. Both are forms of paralysis.
The Cynefin Framework, developed by Dave Snowden, helps you match your decision-making approach to the actual nature of the problem.
Simple/Clear Domain
The relationship between cause and effect is obvious. Best practice exists. Sense, categorise, respond.
Example: Should you attend your kid's school event? Yes. This doesn't require analysis.
Complicated Domain
Cause and effect requires analysis or expertise to understand. Multiple right answers exist. Sense, analyse, respond.
Example: Restructuring your investment portfolio post-divorce. You need data, potentially expert input, but the variables are knowable.
Complex Domain
Cause and effect can only be understood in retrospect. The system is dynamic and unpredictable. Probe, sense, respond.
Example: Rebuilding your professional network after a major career transition. You can't plan this: you experiment, notice what works, and adjust.
Chaotic Domain
No cause and effect relationship is perceivable. Immediate action is required to establish order. Act, sense, respond.
Example: Crisis situations requiring instant decisions without complete information.
Why this matters for decision-making fog:
Post-disruption, your brain defaults to treating everything as complex or chaotic. It's a protective mechanism. But when you apply complex-domain thinking to simple-domain decisions, you create unnecessary cognitive load.
The Cynefin Diagnostic trains you to match response to reality. Simple decisions get simple treatment. Complex decisions get experimental approaches. This alone reduces second-guessing by 50% or more: because you're no longer applying the wrong tool to the job.
Framework 4: The Commitment Protocol
Second-guessing isn't just a decision-making problem. It's a commitment problem.
You make the decision. Then you unmake it. Then you remake it slightly differently. Then you wonder if the first version was better. This loop burns more energy than the original decision ever warranted.
The Commitment Protocol creates a forcing function:
Step 1: Set a decision deadline.
Before you begin deliberating, determine when the decision will be made. Not "soon." Not "when I have more information." A specific date and time.
Step 2: Define "good enough" criteria.
What would make this decision acceptable? Not perfect: acceptable. Write it down. When options meet this threshold, they qualify.
Step 3: Decide and declare.
Make the decision. Then tell someone. A colleague, a coach, a friend. External accountability transforms internal wavering into social commitment.
Step 4: Install a review gate: but only one.
You're allowed to revisit the decision exactly once, at a predetermined point. Maybe it's 30 days post-implementation. Maybe it's after a specific milestone. Outside that window? The decision stands.
Step 5: Execute without negotiation.
Between decision and review gate, you operate as though the decision is final. Because it is. Until it isn't.
This protocol doesn't eliminate doubt. It contains it. Doubt gets a seat at the table during deliberation. After commitment? It waits outside.
When Frameworks Aren't Enough
Here's the truth about decision architecture: frameworks are tools. Powerful tools. But tools require a user with sufficient stability to wield them.
If you're reading this and thinking "I understand these concepts but I can't seem to implement them," that's data.
It might mean:
- Your nervous system is still in threat-detection mode and needs regulation work
- Your identity reconstruction is incomplete, leaving you without clear criteria for what you actually want
- You're carrying cognitive load from unprocessed aspects of the disruption
This is where performance coaching differs from reading articles. A skilled coach doesn't just hand you frameworks: they help you identify what's blocking implementation and build the internal architecture required to use these tools effectively.
If you're a high-achieving professional in the 9-18 month window after major life disruption, the fog you're experiencing is normal. It's also temporary. But "temporary" can mean six months or six years depending on whether you rebuild deliberately or wait for time to do the work.
Time doesn't rebuild decision architecture. You do.
The frameworks above are your starting point. They create structure where chaos lives, criteria where confusion reigns, and commitment where doubt loops.
You used to make decisions fast because you knew who you were and what you were building.
You can get back there. Different coordinates. Same capability.
The question isn't whether you can lead again. It's whether you'll build the architecture that lets you.
