Why Your Self-Doubt Might Be Your Greatest Leadership Advantage

Most leaders have been taught to see self-doubt as something to overcome. 

Push through it.
Ignore it.
Project confidence anyway. 

But what if that’s exactly backward? 

In a recent conversation with entrepreneur, investor, and innovation speaker Abhi Golhar, we explored an idea that challenges one of leadership’s biggest myths: doubt isn’t the enemy of great leadership. Used wisely, it’s one of its greatest assets. 

The strongest leaders aren’t the ones who never question themselves. They’re the ones who know how to question themselves productively. 

The Leadership Myth of Absolute Confidence 

Leadership often rewards certainty. 

Executives are expected to have answers, make decisions quickly, and project confidence in front of employees, boards, and investors. Over time, many leaders begin believing that uncertainty is a weakness that should be hidden. 

The problem is that certainty can become dangerous. 

When we become too certain, we stop asking questions. We stop seeking different perspectives. We overlook risks. We become attached to being right instead of getting it right. 

Healthy doubt creates space for curiosity. 

And curiosity is where innovation begins. 

When Doubt Becomes Data 

One of the most compelling moments in my conversation with Abhi was hearing the story of his early entrepreneurial journey. 

As a college student renovating his first investment property, he arrived one winter night to find the basement flooded. Standing in freezing water, alone, with no mentor and no clear solution, he had every reason to panic. 

Looking back, he realized something important. 

The fear itself wasn’t the problem. 

The real opportunity came when he stopped trying to suppress the fear and instead asked himself what it was trying to tell him. 

That shift—from resisting doubt to listening to it—changed the trajectory of his leadership. 

Most of us experience the same internal dialogue, even if the circumstances are different. 

• “Am I making the right decision?”  

• “What if this strategy fails?”  

• “Am I ready for this next level?”  

The goal isn’t to eliminate those questions. 

It’s to let them sharpen your thinking instead of shrinking your confidence. 

Why High Performers Often Struggle with Doubt 

Ironically, the leaders I coach are often the ones who experience the most self-doubt. 

Not because they’re less capable. 

Because they carry enormous responsibility. 

They know their decisions affect employees, customers, shareholders, and families. That awareness naturally creates moments of uncertainty. 

The difference between effective leaders and ineffective ones isn’t the presence of doubt. 

It’s their relationship with it. 

Some become paralyzed. 

Others become defensive, overconfident, or unwilling to seek feedback. 

The most effective leaders become more curious. 

They ask better questions. 

They invite different viewpoints. 

They use uncertainty as information rather than evidence that they’re failing. 

Self-Awareness Changes Everything 

One of the biggest blind spots in leadership is assuming our internal narrative reflects reality. 

This is why transformational leadership starts with self-awareness. 

When we become aware of our habitual patterns—especially under pressure—we gain the ability to choose a different response. 

At Meritage Leadership, we often use the Enneagram because it helps leaders recognize the predictable ways they react to uncertainty. Each personality type has a different relationship with doubt. 

Some overanalyze. 

Some push harder. 

Some seek reassurance. 

Others avoid difficult emotions altogether. 

None of these patterns are inherently wrong. 

They simply become limiting when they operate unconsciously. 

Awareness creates choice. 

And choice creates better leadership. 

Turning Doubt into Better Decisions 

Instead of asking, “How do I stop doubting myself?” 

Try asking different questions: 

• What is this doubt trying to protect me from?  

• What information might I be missing?  

• Who has a perspective I haven’t considered?  

• Am I responding to facts—or to fear?  

• What would I do if I trusted myself to figure things out along the way?  

These questions don’t make leaders less decisive. 

They make decisions more informed. 

Research consistently shows that leaders who actively seek diverse viewpoints and challenge their own assumptions make better strategic decisions than those who operate from unchecked certainty. The goal isn’t endless analysis. It’s thoughtful confidence built on curiosity rather than ego. 

A Better Way to Lead Through Uncertainty 

Today’s business environment changes too quickly for any leader to have all the answers. 

Markets shift. 

Technology evolves. 

Teams become more complex. 

The leaders who thrive aren’t the ones pretending they know everything. 

They’re the ones willing to keep learning. 

As Abhi shared during our conversation, doubt doesn’t arrive to destroy us. 

It invites us into a conversation—with ourselves, our teams, and the challenges we’re facing. 

When we stop treating doubt as a threat and start treating it as information, we make better decisions, lead more authentic conversations, and create cultures where learning is valued over appearing perfect. 

That’s the kind of leadership organizations need now. 

Not fearless leadership. 

Self-aware leadership. 

Because your greatest strength may not be your confidence. 

It may be your willingness to question yourself just enough to keep growing. 

Episode Transcript

Susan Drumm: What if the self-doubt you keep trying to grind past is actually the exact signal you need to listen to? What if the leaders building the strongest teams and the clearest strategies aren’t the ones who feel most certain, but the ones who’ve learned to look doubt in the eye and let it sharpen them? I’m Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life.

My guest today is Abhi Golhar. Abhi is a keynote speaker on innovation, leadership, and decision-making in times of uncertainty. His talk, titled “Move the Needle: The Future of Innovation,” introduces a powerful framework that helps leaders turn hesitation into clarity, friction into fuel, and uncertainty into unstoppable momentum. Abhi has built and exited seven companies and is a three-time nationally syndicated radio host reaching over three million daily listeners. Abhi, welcome to the show.

Abhi Golhar: Hey, thanks Susan for having me. I appreciate it.

Susan Drumm: I’m really glad to have you here because your story is pretty fascinating, so we’re going to dive right into that. But tell us about the work you’re doing right now and who it’s targeted at.

Abhi Golhar: Yeah, I’m finding a really big opportunity in the world of lower middle market private credit and private equity, specifically with businesses doing anywhere from 10 to 50 million in top-line revenue. And they’re seeking an answer, and the answer they’re seeking — it’s that itch you can’t scratch in the middle of your back. Maybe some of you will meet me in person.

I’m 5'5" and like 135 pounds wet. I know what hard labor looks like — I’m just not going to do it. And I’m short enough that I can scratch the middle of my back; I can reach around and actually get it.

That itch is a combination of a variety of things. One, it’s a succession plan. Two, it’s how do I exit my business eventually?

Three, how do I create enough value in my business for somebody to see value in my business, but more importantly, for them to see value in me? These may seem initially like disparate conversations, but they’re all the same conversation. And so at Lafayette & Oak, we take business owners and seasoned executives through a process that helps them identify the solutions and the answers to some of these questions — to help them improve EBITDA, to help them improve SDE, to help them improve the value they’re providing their organization, which then turns into enterprise value growth for the long term.

Susan Drumm: Got it. And you’re also a speaker, and your topic around our relationship with doubt was really fascinating to me. So tell me more about what you call, almost, the power of doubt, and how it’s actually a useful tool for us to move forward with — not something we should be ashamed of.

Abhi Golhar: Yeah. So, think inner city Detroit, 2002. It’s fall, and it’s starting to rain a little bit, and I get a call from my contractor — I’m still a student at the University of Michigan.

I get a call from my contractor at like 7:30 at night, and he says, “Abhi, you’ve got to get to your rental property that we’re renovating for you, like, right now.” I’m like, “Dude, what’s going on?” I had no idea. That was a really scary call because I didn’t really know what he was talking about.

He said, “Well, I’m done working with you. I can’t do this anymore. I’ve left a shop vac in the family room. You’ve got to get down there right now. I’ve got to go.” I’m like, “Okay, aren’t you the contractor? Isn’t this what you’re supposed to be doing? What happened here?”

So I jump in my 1992 Honda Civic DX — it’s this car where you could see the highway from the floorboards as you’re driving — into inner city Detroit. And that hour and a half, you’re wondering, well, am I even going to make it? By the time I get to my rental property, it starts snowing and it’s a full-on blizzard.

I pull into my driveway, I run over my mailbox, which I installed, by the way — I was really proud of installing that mailbox — and I open the front door, and immediately I hear running water. I had no idea where it was coming from.

So I looked everywhere. I looked upstairs, I looked in the kitchen, I looked behind the cabinets and the counter — where is this thing? Where’s the water leak coming from?

And I finally make my way down to the basement, and I see a flooded basement. I am up to my neck in water. In that moment, I had a couple of choices. One, I could run away from my problems, which — surprisingly — I think I ended up doing. Number two, I could face my fears. Or number three, I could really ask myself what was bothering me.

And I asked myself what was bothering me. I was scared. I was lonely. I was wet. I was freezing cold in a house in a neighborhood with a good amount of crime, and I had no mentor.

I had no forward momentum because I didn’t have the clarity or confidence to get myself out of that situation. So I start knocking on doors up and down the street, and I finally find a neighbor who takes mercy on my soul, and we start moving as much water out of the basement as we could — I finally realized what the shop vac was for. We toiled away until two o’clock in the morning, not getting enough water out of the basement, and I left for the package store so Jack Daniel’s and I could have a conversation.

For me, that broke me for the most part. I had no idea who I was. I couldn’t tell my parents, couldn’t tell my friends. I was 18 years old. I was a million dollars in debt, and I had trusted somebody to teach me the game of real estate.

For the first time in my life, I was going to make my parents proud, I was going to make myself proud, I was going to make my brother proud — everybody proud of who I was becoming. And it went totally the other way. I had a decision to make: was I going to let this moment define me, or was I going to scratch that itch of something else that was bothering me, that I needed to shine a light onto?

And for me, the feeling that bubbled up wasn’t confidence. It wasn’t clarity. It wasn’t this need to push through and power through. Because as leaders, we’re taught to face our fears, we’re taught to act beyond a shadow of doubt. What bubbled up for me was doubt. And instead of shoving it away and letting it run amok, I decided to shine a light on it and start asking the question: why was I feeling doubt?

Susan Drumm: And so where did you land on that? I mean, isn’t doubt sort of a normal human emotion that everyone experiences? So what does knowing why benefit you?

Abhi Golhar: Well, I’m a guy. We don’t experience emotions at all — I don’t know what you’re talking about, these things. I don’t. I don’t.

Susan Drumm: You just pretend you don’t.

Abhi Golhar: Yeah, no, no, no, we’re not — I had doubt whether or not this hair band was going to work today. Right, right.

So for me, doubt represents a gap in time. The reason we have doubts about anything is because we’re feeling something about a situation, about a task, about the thing at hand. And it’s a feeling we need to understand — to shine a light on: how do we get through this challenge? What is it about this thing that’s bothering me?

More often than not — you’ve found this as a really good podcast host and interviewer — if you were to talk about yourself 80% of the time and the guest only had 20%, nobody would listen to The Enlightened Executive podcast, right? They’d be like, “You’ve got to be kidding me, I don’t want to hear only about Susan,” even though she’s incredible and beautiful and all sorts of things.

In the same manner, when we offer a little bit of time — a gap in time — we have the ability to rest in our awareness, to address what we’re thinking, how we’re feeling about what we’re thinking, and offer a bit of a cooling-off period. So we’re not reactive to the flooded basement — we’re proactive, and we can actually think through positive solutions instead of going down a road that doesn’t really help from a negative mental perspective.

Susan Drumm: And so is there a process that you would take someone through — let’s say to understand and uncover the why, so that they can get to that point of action?

Abhi Golhar: Yeah, and it’s the intersection between clarity and confidence. In that moment when I saw my flooded basement, I realized I had no idea what I was doing, and I was completely paralyzed — I was so distraught mentally and emotionally, I couldn’t move physically. I’ve started companies, I’ve sold companies, I consult with companies, we raise a bunch of capital for companies. These are decision-making moments, life-defining moments, and if we’re distraught and distracted in the moment, it doesn’t give us the best tools within us to overcome or shine that light on doubt.

The intersection between clarity and confidence, I think, is very interesting. If we don’t have a whole lot of clarity and a whole lot of confidence in what we’re doing, we end up in a state of paralysis. That’s where I was. That’s where we are if we’re facing the world of AI — I mean, AI, Anthropic, is disrupting industries. It’s disrupting bookkeepers, any kind of financial analyst — pick an industry, and it’s having a net positive or net negative impact depending on how you feel about AI.

And will we allow ourselves to be powerless, without the clarity or the confidence, moving into tomorrow, or into the meeting with somebody who says, “Hey, can’t AI do this? Why are we even here?” That level of paralysis can overwhelm an organization, can overwhelm the leaders of an organization, and ultimately have a negative impact on the P&L. We see that every day — leaders who don’t have the level of confidence, who are kind of frozen in time. We would never go back to marketing in the yellow pages anymore, would we? No.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, we’re not reverting back. Well, so imagine — okay, you’ve diagnosed that people are in this state. Where do you take them from there?

Abhi Golhar: What you find is you’ll inch forward a little bit in clarity and maybe a little bit in confidence, and you’re like, wait a minute, I’m finding my pathway forward. The Momentum Matrix is designed to help someone go from a state of low confidence, low clarity, to a state of high confidence and high clarity, which is where everybody wants to be. Everybody wants to be in this zone of momentum, where everything is working, it’s fun, it’s exciting, and we now have the ability to control our own future — or we made an investment in this new technology, or we brought on this really cool CEO or COO or C-suite executive who’s going to crush it for us, and we need that productive quarter to hit our earnings calls and fill the gap. Everybody wants to be there.

What I’ve found is that organizations I’ve either acquired, turned around, or invested in will typically spend four and a half weeks on average in the zone of momentum before they fall into what I call the zone of overthinking, where you’ve got a high level of strategic clarity but a low level of confidence. In this zone, you’ve got clarity on fifty different things — and I’m guilty of this too, right? I’ve got fifty different new initiatives, and of course I’m going to crush all of them in the next week.

Or do you need to be the guy or gal who’s up at 4:00 in the morning, going to run a marathon, do yoga, maybe a little meditation, levitation if you can manage it, write in your journal, walk the dog, take the kids to school, make lunch, all before 7:00? That level of overthinking gives you a certain paralysis, but it also leads teams astray. You’re missing the mark, you don’t get things done, you miss deadlines, your budgets are off.

Susan Drumm: I think that’s what a lot of people are feeling with so many priorities. I often hear right now that the priorities keep changing on a weekly basis, or more things just get loaded on, and people can’t sift through what really matters — it’s this whiplash of “no, it’s this thing,” “no, actually we need to be doing this thing,” “oh, we’ve got to do this thing.” So is that part of that matrix — and I’m assuming this is sort of a two-by-two, right? What part of the matrix are you in when an organization is showing that type of weakness?

Abhi Golhar: You’re in the zone of wandering — that’s exactly it. You’ve got so much confidence and not a lot of clarity. You’re like, wait a minute, I could be doing all of these things, but which one is the right one to go do first?

You might have team members, junior analysts, senior analysts, your leaders, saying to you as the CEO, as the business owner, that of course we need to adopt AI, but then we need to overhaul our CRM system and migrate to Salesforce, but then we also need to go on a capital raise — we just raised 25 to 30 million in Series A, we’ve got to get to Series B, and that’s really important. And then, after we raise the money, we need people. And what about our customers? We need an AI chatbot named Stephanie to deal with all the customers now that the volume of marketing is increasing.

You’re missing the mark when you’re in wandering mode. Wandering mode, to me, is very similar to going to the gym — I can talk a big game, I don’t know if I’m going to work out my shoulders or my legs or my biceps or my neck muscles, and I just leave because it becomes too overwhelming.

Susan Drumm: Well, it sounds like there was a pattern you had to see in yourself. Let’s talk about that. You noticed at that moment that you were paralyzed, you were stuck. Usually patterns are repetitive — you notice, “this is the way I operate,” and you start to zoom out, and in that moment of zooming out you can see, “oh, I’m doing the same thing I’ve been doing in this situation every single time.” What was it that you had to confront in yourself? What was your pattern — in how you were leading, or working, or showing up — that you eventually had to change?

Abhi Golhar: Expectations. It’s cool to have expectations — you can have expectations of yourself, I have expectations of myself. My hair product, not so much, because it doesn’t work — I’ve tried all of them, and I’m still struggling in the humidity of Atlanta, New York, and DC. It’s okay to have expectations. The challenge, though, Susan, is when we become attached to these expectations.

I’ll give you an example. You and I go out to a very nice dinner in New York, and I say, “Susan, we’re going out, I’m so excited to take you to one of my favorite restaurants of all time, it’s in Midtown Manhattan. We’re going to get dressed up. The chef is a good friend of mine, it’s a three-Michelin-star restaurant, as they all are in New York, and we’re going to have a blast — the service is second to none.”

I’ve built up this idea of the restaurant, and built it up in you, and you go to the restaurant, and let’s say the chef is having an off night, and you stub your toe, and from the moment you walk in the door of that restaurant you’re like, “Ugh, my toe hurts.” You sit down and it’s just not the experience you expected, and that ruins the rest of your evening — maybe even the rest of your week — all because you had an expectation that your experience at the restaurant was going to be incredible.

Susan Drumm: That happens all the time with movies, right? Somebody tells you how great a movie is, and then you go see it and you’re like, “Oh, this was supposed to be a great movie.”

Abhi Golhar: Yes. But imagine you take it a step further. You say, “Well, geez, I’m an influencer, I’ve got a podcast, I’m going to tell the whole world about how horrible this restaurant is, I’m going to blog about it, I’m going to do a podcast episode about it, it’s going to go on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, everywhere.” What you’re essentially doing in that moment is creating misery for yourself, because you’ve attached yourself to an expectation of something that was going to happen. You attached yourself to an outcome. It’s okay for you. So, bringing this back to you —

Susan Drumm: How did expectation get in your way? Was there a specific moment or conversation that cracked that pattern open?

Abhi Golhar: So, it was the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Susan Drumm: Okay.

Abhi Golhar: You didn’t see that coming?

Susan Drumm: No. Tell me more.

Abhi Golhar: So I left my property the following morning and I’m driving back to my dorm in Ann Arbor — my five-foot-by-three-foot rectangular space in North Campus. I get a call from the chief security analyst, or somebody, at Bank of America. He says, “Hey, we’ve got to meet in person and talk about your properties.” I’m like, who are you, and how did you get my cell phone? I’m scared.

So we set up a meeting the following week at the Michigan Union, and the Bank of America guy calls to confirm the meeting. He says, “Hey, we’ll be there right around noon — any papers, any documents you have about the properties you invested in, in Detroit, please bring them with you.” My question is: who’s “we”? You said “we,” not just “us.” Who’s we?

I find out at the meeting it was Bank of America, two security officers, and the FBI. I had an expectation going into the meeting that it was just going to be about documents and deal flow, and my ambitious goal of flipping Detroit and helping to restore the city to its former glory. But no — we were talking about the mortgage fraud that they assumed I was at the center of, that I was creating. I thought, wait a minute, this is probably my breakout moment — I thought this was going to be a job interview. No, it was quite the opposite.

They were wondering, well, how did you end up getting these loans when you’re an eighteen-and-a-half, nineteen-year-old student at the University of Michigan with no income? Back then, in the early 2000s, you had applications known as NINJA loans — no income, no job — you just stated income, stated credit. I guess my mentor finagled some paperwork. And I very quickly realized that I was a victim of mortgage fraud.

I was a million dollars in debt. By the time I had worked alongside the FBI and the DOJ, not only to clear my name but then to put my mentor in jail for 15 years, I realized: wait a minute, my expectation of investing is very different than what most people’s expectations are of investing. I was attached to a story I was telling myself about what success meant, as it related to investing and building a business.

And how could this happen to me? I’m an academic genius — my dad has a PhD, my mom has two masters and three bachelor’s degrees. This doesn’t happen to me. What are you talking about? There’s no way — my parents came here on a student visa, my dad graduated top of his class — there’s no way this is happening to me right now. Why is this happening to me, Susan? Why is this happening to me? Whoa.

Susan Drumm: What was the hardest part of that shift — of actually changing? What did you have to unlearn or let go of?

Abhi Golhar: It was understanding that there’s a difference between being attached to an outcome and expecting an outcome. And that will tell you exactly where you’re placed inside the Momentum Matrix. In that moment when I was having my first conversation with the FBI and Bank of America, I was in a complete state of paralysis. Then I quickly moved to a state of wandering — well, wait a minute, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence in this, but maybe a little bit of clarity.

What do I do? I’ve got all this paperwork, none of my signatures match my actual signature — how do I get out of this situation? Am I going to have to fight these security guards and leave? What do I need to do?

And then I moved to the overthinking zone, where I’ve got clarity on the fact that I’ve got to work with the FBI, I’ve got to work with Bank of America, I’ve got to work with the DOJ. I spent four and a half years doing that — it was an every single day thing for four and a half years. We prepared for a grand jury. I was the key witness; I sat in the seat for eight hours answering questions, not only for myself but for the other 42 victims of mortgage fraud that my mentor was part of. And even after that, as much clarity as I had about what to do, I still had a loss of confidence in my ability to do it.

Susan Drumm: And so, bringing it back — was there something about doubt that you learned in that moment, that you found is, in a way — I don’t know if it’s the right word — but like a superpower?

Abhi Golhar: That using it as a power tool is your superpower. If you look at some really incredible athletes and investors and business people of all time — look at Bezos. Or Howard Schultz of Starbucks — can you imagine, Schultz pitched the idea of Starbucks over 200 times before he got one yes.

Can you imagine if he’d stopped at number 50? I wouldn’t be able to have my no-espresso Americano, which is just water. I’m the kind of guy who’ll go to Starbucks and order an iced no-espresso Americano, and the barista’s like, “Just leave,” you know?

But if Schultz hadn’t moved forward in spite of his doubt — or leaned into doubt as his power tool, not in spite of it, which is what we’re told to do — Starbucks wouldn’t exist. Sara Blakely, with Spanx — she had $15,000 to her name, she was a door-to-door fax machine saleswoman before she founded Spanx. There was a lot of doubt with her. But instead of avoiding it, she was able to say, “I can suspend judgment about myself for a second, and let me understand where in this matrix I am, so I can address my feeling of what it is I’m doubting.”

Am I doubting myself? Am I doubting success? Am I doubting this company? Am I doubting my people? Am I doubting the initiative?

In the world of today, are you doubting your AI initiative? What is it about the change that you’re doubting? Are you doubting the confidence your team has in you, or doesn’t have in you? Are you doubting the conversations at the water cooler, where everybody is saying —

Susan Drumm: Let’s say you get clarity on that — you get clarity on what it is that you’re doubting. Then what?

Abhi Golhar: The moment you have clarity, that’s the moment you gain power. The fact that you know something gives you the ability to step forward in a direction that normally you wouldn’t. Going back to the moment where I had all those documents in front of me — I was thinking, well, geez, what do I need to do?

That moment of clarity for me was: okay, I’m going to dedicate my life to understanding what happened here, how I got into this mess, and work with Bank of America, the FBI, and the DOJ, and unpack this thing. Instead of letting doubt about my ability, or doubt about the situation at hand, overwhelm me, I used the clarity in the action to say, “I’m doing this.” And the more I did that, the more confident I became about succeeding through one of the most challenging times of my life. By the time it was all said and done, I had a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, four foreclosures, and I still was a million dollars in debt.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, I think some leaders get stuck because they can’t see the full path ahead. And sometimes you get clarity by just taking the most obvious next step, right? So often we don’t see the full end — where’s the light at the end of the tunnel — you’ve got to keep taking one step forward with your flashlight, keep going, keep going, in order to know that.

And I think that’s even more powerful today, because nobody knows the story of where things are ending up. Take AI — I do think, even in strategy conversations, it used to be you could plan out five years, ten years. Now it’s, what can we plan for the next quarter, and let’s take the next right action for that quarter.

Abhi Golhar: And isn’t it fascinating that you can still drive — if you got in your car in Miami and drove to LA only at night, only seeing 40 to 50 feet in front of you with your headlights on, you can still do that. And to your point, if you’ve got to stop for gas, okay, you’ll stop for gas, or charge your car — you have a fuel and battery indicator, right? What I’ve seen is most people will ignore that indicator — that’s what you call stupidity, right? You’re not going to ignore your gas gauge if it’s screaming at you that it’s empty and not fill up.

So when you start understanding that you’ve got these tools in front of you, my challenge would be: take a look at what you’re fearing, take a look at where you have doubt in your life, and it could start with you — start with you personally. For me, even now, it’s been, how do I get myself to the gym more? I can make the excuse of not having enough time, and then you find out it has nothing to do with my inability to take action — I’m not willing to take the action because I’m starting my day too early.

And then you find all these excuses — I mean, just get to the gym, right, that’s what you’ve got to do. But that’s the easy solution. The harder solution is to understand what the attachments are to the expectations of going to the gym, and what that means, and what the quality of that outcome is going to be for my lifestyle.

And if we apply that to an executive role, or somebody looking at change in the insurance industry or the legal field — yeah, AI is here and it’s not going anywhere. Take a look at all the data centers being built. AI will own the commodity — you have information that’s free in the palm of your hand, all of time is here, right here, on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Comet, Claude Code, Grok, whichever large language model you wish to use. AI might own the commodity, but you will always own the relationship — whether it’s the relationship with yourself or with your clients.

Susan Drumm: Yeah, for sure, for sure. So what would you recommend a leader do tomorrow to implement this framework — what’s one action step they could take?

Abhi Golhar: I’ll give you two. One, rest in your awareness. We all agree that we go through every single day with millions and millions of thoughts that go unaddressed. But some of those thoughts that go unaddressed are actually really crucial thoughts to pay attention to.

So if you’re in a meeting, or on a Zoom call, or grabbing coffee, or it’s a quarterly meeting, or you’re at an offsite, and your body just feels different about an initiative, or you’re feeling different about a thought that’s in your brain — offer yourself the opportunity to rest in that awareness of the thought that’s bothering you, and see how attached you are to the expectation that that thought will lead you down.

That’s a lot — kind of sounds like word salad, but I promise it’s not. So rewind it about 45 seconds and really listen to that, because when you rest in your awareness, it illuminates what you’re feeling, and all the doubts and the things and the fears.

And then, if we become attached to the expectation of the thoughts we have — like, “this is supposed to do this,” or “this is going to be a really good interview, Abhi” — like, what happened, right? We were supposed to talk about all these other things, and you couldn’t stop talking, right? We have to re-record in January.

If that makes us feel good, bad, or ugly, that gives us a data point, and now that data point becomes really actionable. The question is: are we willing to step into the clarity and the confidence of that illuminating idea, whatever was uncovered in that moment after we gave doubt a bit of a shakedown? Are we okay with the outcome? Are we attached to the outcome? And either way — is it a net positive or a net negative experience for us? And we can start taking action steps from there.

Susan Drumm: Awesome, I love it. Particularly that last piece around what you’re attached to. I think when people say, “okay, I should be more aware,” that tends to feel like a nice-to-have. Maybe it’s just about zooming out and taking a beat — jotting it down, like, “huh, this is bothering me.” You set it there, and you can come back to it later in the day. Sometimes that’s what I do — I need more space than the flurry of the day allows to do things. So that’s kind of how that piece also shows up for me, and what I do about it.

Abhi Golhar: I love that. Keep a journal — journal one, journal two. These just help take things out of imaginary space and actually put them on paper, and then you revisit them later and mark down whether it’s an expectation or an attachment to an expectation.

Either way, whether you’ll feel good or bad, the question you want to ask yourself is: am I feeling better about this or not? Very similarly — like you go buy a new car, and the moment you drive it off the lot, you pull it into a Starbucks and park it, and somebody scratches your car. You’re devastated, because it was the most beautiful black BMW X5 M-series you have ever purchased or seen in your life, and now it has this big white streak.

It’s okay to be upset, totally — it’s okay to have an expectation that the new car is a fun drive. But if you’re so attached that it’s ruined your life, that needs to be addressed. So for all the business owners who are like, “man, I’m really attached to my business and it’s preventing the sale of my business” — there’s something there we’ve got to address, and I’m pretty sure it’s the attachment.

Susan Drumm: Well, where can people learn more about you and your work?

Abhi Golhar: Yeah, check me out at AbhiGolhar.com, or follow me on LinkedIn.

Susan Drumm: Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. And if you liked this episode, you’re not going to want to miss my interview with Jason Miller, who discusses how leaders need creativity, judgment, and reinvention more than ever in the age of AI. Let’s lead the way.

Hope you enjoyed today’s episode, and I’d like to point you to the next important step: hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I’ll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.