You're still performing. Still hitting your numbers, or close to them. Still showing up, still contributing, still doing All The Right Things. But something feels off. You second-guess calls you would have made confidently two years ago. You over-prepare for conversations that used to feel natural. You find yourself waiting for validation that used to feel unnecessary.
This isn't burnout, exactly. And it's not incompetence. It's what happens when smart, capable people spend years in environments that systematically undervalue their judgment — and they start to internalize that message.
In sales and revenue roles, the pressure to defer is constant and often invisible. Defer to the manager's read on the deal. Defer to the process. Defer to the person in the room who speaks loudest or most confidently. Over time, that pattern of deference erodes something important: your trust in your own read on a situation.
The instincts don't go away. They get quieter. They get overridden so consistently that you stop consulting them. And then one day you realize you're making decisions almost entirely based on what you think you're supposed to do — and barely at all based on what you actually think.
It starts with noticing. Before you override your instinct with logic or with someone else's opinion, pause long enough to hear what it actually is. What's your gut read on this deal, this candidate, this direction, this decision? What do you actually think, before you filter it?
You don't have to act on every instinct. But you have to start listening to them again before you can learn to trust them.
The leaders and professionals who do their best work aren't the ones who've perfectly optimized their decision-making process. They're the ones who've learned to trust their own judgment — and use external input to sharpen it, not replace it.
That's a skill. And it's recoverable.
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