My instinct is good. That's the problem.

My client was stuck, frustrated, fed up and doing what many capable people do when they're in this situation: reaching for the quickest route to an answer…mine.

I waited, here it comes I thought… sue enough, within a minute of thinking she asked me what I would do.

I had an answer ready. I usually do. And that's exactly the problem I want to write about.

I have found experience doesn't make instinct more accurate, rather it makes it faster and more convincing. The more senior you become, the less people around you will slow down long enough to check whether what you said is right.

I'm known for being direct, I like to get to the heart of a problem and spend my time seeking solution over skirting around the fringes. Seniority doesn't unsettle me either, nor does complexity or hostility – this comes from years of being in uncomfortable conversations and learning to stand my ground. This means I'll usually say the thing everyone in a system has quietly agreed not to mention. Clients tell me they value that, but it has a shadow. I have a well-trained instinct to get to action, which I trust more than I should because I’ve learned that Instinct arrives feeling exactly like insight, and from the inside, you can't tell them apart.

So, I didn't answer. I simply held the space and said, 'This is about what you would do.'

Then I waited.

More than eleven minutes ticked by. I didn't rephrase the question or offer an option for her to react to. I didn't lean towards an answer with a look or a half-sentence. Silence is work for me, and it is harder than it sounds. Every minute, handing over my answer felt more like a kindness.

Then she said, 'I'd do nothing.'

The session changed. It stopped being about fixing an uncomfortable situation and became about waiting it out: what that would ask of her, and what it would cost to be seen not acting. She put it better than I could. Sometimes, to do nothing is the hardest action we can take.

Here is what I had to sit with afterwards. My answer would have been something to do. That's what my instinct produces. It would have been well reasoned and confidently put, and she may well have taken it. But it would have felt like help, even though in reality she helped herself far, far more than I could have.

My answer would also have been wrong. Not because I would have helped create a worse plan than she did, but because my answer would have been the wrong kind of answer altogether. My client didn't need a better plan; she needed to find out she didn't need a plan just yet.

Silence here mattered for a reason that has nothing to do with patience, it overrode the first answer on the table becoming the reference point for her thinking to have become organised around mine. She might have agreed, adapted or argued against whatever I’d have said, the point is any of those still starts from my frame, not hers. Complex thinking is the kind that involves identity, consequence and a solution you can live with. This means it doesn't arrive on demand instead it unfolds slowly and out of having space to order your mind, complex thinking also stops the moment someone offers you a tidier version.

Nancy Kline, whose work on Time to Think is a technique I bring into how I coach, argues that the quality of someone's attention shapes the quality of the thinking in front of it. I'd add one thing from the other chair and that’s attention isn't only what you give, it's also what you hold back.

People talk about psychological safety as though it means wrapping a soft fluffy comfort blanket around someone’s shoulders, for me it’s much more. That session wasn't comfortable for either of us because what the silence made safe was an answer nobody in my client’s position is supposed to give. Senior leaders are paid to act so at the top, 'I'd do nothing' is close to unsayable because it sounds like abdication. It took eleven minutes and seventeen seconds without anyone rescuing her for it to become sayable then once it was said, it was the most considered decision in the room.

I think about this with every leader I work with now. You're asked, 'what would you do?' all day. You're rewarded for answering fast and because your instinct is good, which is exactly why nobody questions it. Very few people at the top have anyone who will make them wait as most of the people around them have learned the opposite lesson: that the useful thing is to let the leader's answer land.

My instinct hasn't changed. As a coach I still feel the answer arrive before the question has finished, but what has changed is that I no longer mistake its speed of arriving for accuracy.

So, a question worth sitting with longer than is comfortable:

What are you about to do mainly because doing nothing would look worse?