Some of the leaders I work with, spanning from founders to executives, grapple with what I term "opportunity trauma." This might sound exaggerated, but it represents a real challenge.
These individuals find themselves at a crossroads where the sheer abundance of opportunities, questions about what comes next, or the weight of their past performance create an overwhelming freeze response. Their sensory systems are on overload, pushing their bodies into a shutdown mode to conserve energy for survival. In this state, decision-making becomes challenging, and actions from this mindset can be detrimental. One might think of “opportunity trauma” in a nutshell as “extreme decision-making fatigue and resultant sense of stuckness due to a prolonged excess of opportunities and a lack of inner clarity on how to navigate these opportunities.”
It’s important to highlight the subtle but critical difference between someone struggling with “opportunity trauma” and its symptoms and someone who is navigating more existential decisions affecting their physical or economic welfare. There are many people in the world who face overwhelm from needing to decide whether to work a second or third job to pay rent, or whether to flee their country because it’s too dangerous to continue living there; this is not what I’m talking about.
Opportunity Trauma is a phenomenon experienced by leaders who have excelled in their careers to a point where their menu of options for where to take their life and their organizations is cognitively overwhelming, and they also experience overwhelm from the vast array of external pressures placed on them by employees, investors, board members, followers, media, and others.
When I work with leaders who experience Opportunity Trauma, the goal is to help them become aware of their privilege of choice and encourage them to reconnect with that privilege as a gift, a power, and a chance to contribute to the world.
**Identifying Symptoms:**
These leaders may exhibit symptoms such as:
- Exhaustion merely thinking about work.
- Difficulty making decisions, even trivial ones like choosing lunch.
- Sleep disturbances or extreme fatigue.
- Irritability in crowded or noisy environments.
- Auditory obliviousness when multiple people call their name (imagine multiple children saying “mom”/ “dad“ and Mom/Dad is tuned out to the sound).
- Self-judgment and a sense of feeling incapable.
- A desire to be distracted and a tendency to seek others' opinions.
- Feelings of anger rising quickly if someone asks simple logistic questions
- The inability to consume one more thing (e.g. read a non-work related/fiction book)
**How to Address Opportunity Trauma:**
I’ve recently worked with a few clients to address their opportunity trauma directly and reframe it into privilege of choice. The exercise below has helped these individuals remember just how high their agency truly is.
Try it yourself:
Settle into your body for a moment. Take yourself on a walk (physically or just in your own mind) with no agenda.
Take a few deep breaths with your eyes closed. Or gaze into a green space.
Step onto your mental balcony: With your eyes closed or open look into the horizon to your left and right, and to the front and back. Really feel the vastness that you can capture with your eyes and the rest of your body.
Now imagine and consider yourself part of a larger (eco)system - your company, community, country, and/or world.
Zoom out of your body while holding your decades of involvement in good work (doesn’t always need to be meaningful), lessons learned, recent learnings, decades of growing and hardship… and whatever else runs through you in your gut. Hold your hand over that part.
Try to hold the initial tension of being in your body while allowing yourself to see yourself as part of a much wider system.
From here, immerse yourself and see what nobody else can see, something that feels like vision to you.
This is coming from a place of your own accumulated wisdom and intuition.
What is emerging? What comes through? What are you sensing or feeling? Now center on this one question: “What’s a renewed lens for humanity that you are looking for? Why is my commitment to XYZ at the “table of life” needed?”
Stay there for a while.
If nothing comes up right away, just focus on the sensations running through you and the shifts they create in your perception of yourself. How is your posture changing? What happens to your breath? How do the edges of your skin feel? Let things emerge. Don’t judge.
Come back to it over the next few hours and days. And start writing from that place.
Whatever you see and realize: Make that your obsession. Live and breathe from this place. Let ideas emerge from this place. Surrender to it even if it feels uncomfortable. Find the minimum viable action you can take from this place. Write down what you’re feeling, what action you’re going to take.
Commit to inspiring your team from this place.
**Embracing Indecisiveness:**
Rather than seeking perfection, view indecisiveness as an opportunity for personal growth and leadership evolution. Allow ideas to emerge from this profound connection, even if it feels uncomfortable. Shift your focus from the notion that decisions are final to embracing life's ongoing, iterative nature. Use your privilege to serve—whether in small or significant ways. It’s all part of the practice.
The key takeaway: Embody choice in your body’s system to influence the wider system you live in. This approach involves embracing challenges, finding satisfaction in growth, and using your privilege to contribute and influence positively.
You stop opportunity trauma by observing your indecisiveness, ceasing to judge yourself for it, and instead embracing indecisiveness as a sign from your body telling you simply that you haven’t gone deep enough yet. That you aren’t in alignment with what you know to be true at this stage of your life. That your conscience is intact enough to stop you before making brash decisions that affect other people since your position of power comes with great responsibility. That you’ve outgrown the frameworks that used to work for you — and that’s okay.
See your indecisiveness as a simple call to action, to do the inner work necessary for you to grow into the next-level leadership that’s being asked of you. And to exercise the choice you have to do this work. No matter where you are in your leadership journey, embodying choice in your body’s system so that you can positively influence the wider system in which you live is the most immediately accessible way to honor your calling. This is literally how children learn to walk. Think about it. Watch your child choose the struggle to rise and walk.
If we can’t decide what’s important to us in a moment, we need to zoom out and find what calls us in; we need to put service before personal satisfaction.
Embrace the challenge, find satisfaction in growth, and use your privilege to contribute positively in big and small ways.
All the love, all the power,
Franzi
Everything that I am writing comes from a deep place of reflection, experience, and desire to add value to you and others. If any of this resonates, consider sharing it with someone who needs a deep place of reflection, wants to witness him- or herself in new growth experiences, and knows he/she needs to add value by getting out of their own way.