You know what you want. Something in you is ready. And yet you don't move.
You don't say no. You don't say yes either. Days pass. Then weeks. The moment doesn't arrive so much as get quietly postponed. Maybe it's "when things settle down." Maybe it's "once the economy turns." Maybe it's a business relationship you'd have left years ago, except leaving feels like it costs more than staying does.
I heard a good name for this on a podcast recently - two consultants talking about clients who go quiet mid-conversation. They called it FOMU - Fear of Messing Up and it comes from research by Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna. This isn't the same as fear of missing out (FOMO), which most of us can live with. But instead it's the fear of getting it wrong, which apparently we can't. In the podcast they talk about how it shows up as ghosting sometimes - the silence where a decision should have been. But just as often it's much quieter than that. It's the yes or no you keep meaning to give yourself and haven't.
What's actually happening
When there's too much uncertainty to weigh at once, your focus narrows - not by choice, it's closer to a reflex. This mechanism fascinates me and is something I've been researching over the past few years. Sometimes I refer to it as tunnelling, or describe it as a consequence of working under compression.
If you're already under compression - ill health, job insecurity, excessive workloads, financial stress - your attention is already limited because of the tunnelling effect. Add in more decisions to be made and it's likely to hit a further constraint - the fear of messing up. That combination of low bandwidth and fear slows the pace of change and can make life feel like wading through treacle.
Often the fear of messing up is there, but it's not always acknowledged. Instead, not making decisions can be made to feel like patience, or prudence, or just being sensible until the timing's right. But step back and you'll likely see places where a year has gone by and the right timing still hasn't arrived for some of the moves you wanted to make.
I'd be curious whether you recognise it - the treacle, the timing that never quite lands. Not what to do about it yet. Just whether the shape of it is familiar.
Want to explore this further?
Listen
The podcast where I first heard this named - 2Bobs, with Blair Enns and David C. Baker, on what they call the ghosting problem in client relationships. Available at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.Start here
Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision (2022) - the research behind FOMU, drawn from 2.5 million recorded sales conversations.Related on this blog
The Science of Tunnelling - the deeper dive into tunnelling and bandwidth this piece draws on directly.