92. Why Smart Women Leaders Spin & How Discernment Changes Everything
Spinning can feel productive, but it often leaves you drained, second-guessing, and stuck. It’s not that you lack skill or knowledge—it’s that uncertainty is being mismanaged, and your brain treats the unknown like a threat.
In this episode, I break down the difference between spinning and discernment. You’ll see how spinning shows up in your nervous system, your thoughts, and your body, and why learning to pause and choose intentionally allows you to act with clarity, trust, and confidence even when outcomes are uncertain.
By the end, you’ll understand how to stop wasting energy on what you cannot control, build stronger self-trust, and step into leadership with authority and presence. This episode gives you strategies to make faster, more confident decisions, move past mental loops, and lead with calm, grounded authority… without waiting for certainty or the “perfect moment.”
Interested in working with me? Book a free 1:1 consultation here!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why spinning quietly drains your energy, clarity, and leadership presence.
How to notice when spinning is showing up in your nervous system, thoughts, or body.
How discernment allows you to act with clarity, trust, and confidence even when outcomes are uncertain.
How to stop wasting energy on what you cannot control.
Strategies to strengthen self-trust and leadership presence.
How to move beyond mental loops and make faster, more confident decisions.
Ways to step into leadership with authority, presence, and calm under pressure.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
If you haven’t already, please follow the podcast and leave a rating and review to let me know what you think. Find complete instructions here!
Watch my TEDx talk: Reclaiming anger: A woman’s birthright
Get the free guide, The 5-Minute Reset to Own the Room, here!
Episodes Related to Why Smart Women Leaders Spin & How Discernment Changes Everything:
Full Episode Transcript:
What if I told you one distinction could save you years of mental exhaustion, years of second-guessing yourself, years of waiting for certainty that never comes? Because most high-achieving women aren't overthinking, they're spinning. And spinning feels so productive that most of us don't even realize we're doing it. Today, I'm going to teach you the difference between spinning and discernment. Once you understand this distinction, you'll make decisions faster, trust yourself more deeply, and stop wasting emotional energy trying to eliminate uncertainty.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to this podcast episode. I am so excited to bring this to you because it is something that has been challenging for me, especially in an AI-amplified world. That's what I'm calling it. We're amplified with AI tools all around us, and one of the things that I have noticed myself go into, even with my AI chat, is spinning. I actually asked it this question: What is in the way of my business growth? And it actually told me that I am spending too much time engineering for certainty. Yes, that's right, spending time engineering for certainty.
This hit me so hard, and I know with all of the high-achieving women that I coach that this is also the thing that has them spinning, right? We are spinning looking for certainty, and I want you to know the difference between spinning and discernment. Because discernment is a key pillar of my Command philosophy, how I coach women, and the importance of really having emotional clarity using your judgment, using the data in front of you to make a judgment call, to make a decision, to use all of this information to move ahead, right? Versus spinning is something very different, but if you are not clear and grounded in yourself, you can get lost in the difference between spinning and discernment. This episode today is going to clear it all up for you.
So, if you feel like you're spinning, this is the perfect episode for you, right here, right now. I want you to think about the last time you knew exactly what you wanted to say but you didn't. Maybe it was in a leadership meeting, a difficult conversation, asking for a promotion, giving feedback. You hesitated, not because you didn't know but because something happened in the five seconds before you spoke. That moment, that determines your leadership, not what comes out of your mouth, what happens inside your mind before you open it. This is why this is so important because we can find ourselves spinning just thinking about what to do next, but we can also in these very important moments find ourselves spinning before we're trying to speak up.
This week, don't try to become more confident, become more observant of yourself. Your exercise this week is to notice what happens in the moment before you speak, what happens in the moments before you actually decide what to do next, right? Because here is what typically happens. It can be an in-the-moment thing that has you questioning yourself and really thinking about the data in front of you, or it can really be you negotiating with yourself.
So, the difference between spinning and discernment, here's the distinction. Both spinning and discernment look thoughtful. This is why it's confusing. This is why sometimes when I am thinking through a decision, it feels so sophisticated, like I am actually thinking and involving questions and it's an internal experience. They're both different experiences though. Spinning, this is what spinning feels and sounds like. It sounds like, what if I'm wrong? What if they disagree? What if I need one more opinion? What if I just wait a little longer? What if I'm missing something? Spinning is trying to eliminate uncertainty before taking action. It's your nervous system trying to negotiate certainty.
And there is a feeling in your body as well. And if this episode is hitting you deeply and you want to dive in deeper, I have a specific worksheet that you can download to actually catch yourself in this. But I want you to notice the body sensations you have when you're spinning. Because this is where you can really stop yourself and notice, instead of staying in that spinning pattern, you can ground down and make a conscious choice. But we can't really make a conscious choice without being aware of what's happening inside of us. So, let me tell you a little bit about what spinning feels like in my body. It may be a little bit different for you, but I want to give you this visceral definition so that you can notice the sensations that are coming up in your body as you are more in the spinning mode versus discernment.
Okay, so spinning feels like a tight chest, racing thoughts, mental looping, this urgency, scattered energy. You feel not grounded. You feel a little bit restless and it is anxiety-driven, right? And what it is hyper-vigilance. It's difficult to decide. And again, it sounds a bit like needing to wait, more time, right? But what it actually is self-protection, fear of uncertainty, trying to eliminate risk. Your nervous system feels activated, so you're not taking deep breaths, it feels like shorter breaths, and you're seeking approval or certainty. It's delaying a trust of yourself. You'll also notice that you don't trust yourself as much in this spinning. There's an avoidance disguised as strategy and emotional risk management trying to say that you are being risk-averse but staying in this stuck feeling and trying to control the outcome.
And this is what happens to me when I am spinning in my business, and I'm like, what should I do next? What offer should I have? And then I start spinning in this question for myself versus being grounded in my body, taking a deep breath, and noticing I have a choice here. I can make a discerning decision. And the difference for me really is when I'm noticing in spinning versus discernment is there is a thought. It's either, am I trying to make a good decision? Am I grounded in my decision-making? Or am I trying to eliminate uncertainty?
Eliminating uncertainty requires a lot more thought and it requires a lot more energy, but the reality is we can't always eliminate uncertainty. That is the whole thing about the emotional piece around this. We don't know what's going to happen. We have to take risk and we have to learn from those. But when we are spinning, we are trying to eliminate that. It's like we can't tolerate any type of uncertainty, so we keep going and going and going. Versus discernment asks, here's what I know. Here's what I don't know. Here's my recommendation. It is grounded. It is grounded in yourself. It is grounded in self-trust. It is a place where you can tolerate disagreement. It is a place where you can be open to making mistakes but learning from those mistakes. I can adjust if new information arises. Leadership requires judgment, not certainty.
And even in my own business, I'm like, okay, well what do I know about past launches? What do I know about the clients who learn the most from what I have to teach? What do I know about the offers that I have already offered and the activation that people get from it? What do I know about what works and what doesn't work? This is a much more grounded approach. It's not spinning looking for certainty. It is grounded in myself, and I am much more clear. And this is what you feel when you're actually in this discernment energy, right? And making a decision from discernment, not spinning. You're grounded, you're calm but alert, you're clear, you're present. You're more steady in your body. Things feel spacious. There's not this urgency like, oh my gosh, the house is on fire and we've got to go, go, go. There is focus though. There's a calm conviction and a connectedness to yourself.
When I am in discernment, I am trusting of myself. I am willing to move forward without knowing all of the things that will arise or unfold. So what you sound like is, here's what I know. Here's what I don't know. Here's my recommendation. I can tolerate disagreement, right? You have emotional regulation within you because you can tolerate things not going 100% your way. You trust yourself in real time. You're adaptable. This is executive maturity. This is action despite uncertainty. This is decision-making under uncertainty. It's leadership thinking and it's truly strategic judgment. It's saying this is what I want to move forward with even if I don't know all of the answers. And even if I fail or even if I make a mistake, this is the next course of action.
It's not just this urgency spinning looking for a perfect answer. And there's a real body motion. I mean, I literally felt it this morning when I was like, what do I want to do? Should I go work out? Should I go for a run? Should I take a nap? Should I do my podcast? Should I do all the marketing stuff, read all the emails, work on my launch? I had all of the thoughts in my head, right? And what I did was I took a moment to just take a deep breath and remind myself that I get to make a decision and that when I take deep breaths and when I put myself in more of a meditation and then I ask myself the question from that grounded conviction versus that spinning energy, then I typically will come up with a pretty good solution that I feel good about moving forward. It's very interesting because I teach this in my group coaching where I'm literally having people pause, ask themselves their wisdom, their innate wisdom will come out. They will say this is what I want to do.
But oftentimes we override it or our nervous system is overriding our wisdom and our self-trust with this spinning energy. So this matters a great deal because the more time, the more energy you spend spinning, the less time you're actually moving towards creating the life you want. This is why I believe this is so important to actually notice, when are you spinning in your body and in your mind and when do you move into discernment and how to tell the difference, right? Because this can save you years and years and years of energy, mental energy, emotional energy, years of you not waiting for the perfect time for certainty to arrive before you move.
The real cost of spinning, right? It doesn't just cost you time. Again, it's emotional energy. Every loop, every replay, every extra opinion, every delayed conversation is draining your leadership capacity. And here's what's fascinating, what you are actually trying to protect. It isn't failure, it isn't criticism. It's conflict. It's looking foolish, it's being misunderstood, it's disappointing someone, appearing difficult. This is what we're trying to do. In other words, you're not solving a leadership problem. You're managing emotional risk, the emotions that you feel inside of yourself.
So, I wanted to share this with you because this is what causes a lot of women to hold back to feel like they're doing work but actually not seeing the outcomes of their work because they're spending a lot of time negotiating with their emotions, negotiating with the circumstances that are coming up, and using those emotions and circumstances to slow themselves down from actually taking action. But it actually doesn't feel like a slowdown, it feels like a spinning pattern that happens in your brain. And so when I can take a deep breath and slow down, this is when I can move into more of that discernment.
All right, so discernment doesn't eliminate uncertainty. It expands your capacity to stay connected to yourself while uncertainty exists. That's leadership. It's not certainty, it's capacity, your capacity to hold more. So you stop asking, how do I know I'm right? And you start asking, can I trust myself to handle whatever happens next? Those are radically different leaders. And so you can even ask yourself, if I trusted myself more, what would I do next? This gives you more discernment. This gives you more self-trust to actually move you into a pattern of being more discerning versus spinning and looking for certainty.
So I want to leave you with this. I know this is a short and sweet episode, but I think it's really important for you to notice this difference. Leadership is not the absence of uncertainty. Leadership is your willingness to stay connected to yourself while uncertainty is present. This is where you can use that grounded energy to actually answer those questions. Spinning says, I'll trust myself once I'm certain. Discernment says, I trust myself to navigate uncertainty. That single distinction has the power to save you years of overthinking, second-guessing, and waiting for permission because awareness is where self-trust begins.
All right. I want you to really go risk one yourself and use this episode, listen to it again, and notice yourself, when are you spinning versus when are you discerning? And how can you support yourself through finding out more and more when this is happening? And what happens to your life as you are in more of that discernment versus spinning? I want to hear from you. I'm thinking of you, I believe in you, and I can't wait for you to go out and use this episode for yourself and to save yourself years and years and years of mental and emotional energy that's spent spinning. All right, have a beautiful week ahead and I will talk to you soon. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to this podcast episode. I am so excited to bring this to you because it is something that has been challenging for me, especially in an AI-amplified world. That's what I'm calling it. We're amplified with AI tools all around us, and one of the things that I have noticed myself go into, even with my AI chat, is spinning. I actually asked it this question: What is in the way of my business growth? And it actually told me that I am spending too much time engineering for certainty. Yes, that's right, spending time engineering for certainty.
This hit me so hard, and I know with all of the high-achieving women that I coach that this is also the thing that has them spinning, right? We are spinning looking for certainty, and I want you to know the difference between spinning and discernment. Because discernment is a key pillar of my Command philosophy, how I coach women, and the importance of really having emotional clarity using your judgment, using the data in front of you to make a judgment call, to make a decision, to use all of this information to move ahead, right? Versus spinning is something very different, but if you are not clear and grounded in yourself, you can get lost in the difference between spinning and discernment. This episode today is going to clear it all up for you.
So, if you feel like you're spinning, this is the perfect episode for you, right here, right now. I want you to think about the last time you knew exactly what you wanted to say but you didn't. Maybe it was in a leadership meeting, a difficult conversation, asking for a promotion, giving feedback. You hesitated, not because you didn't know but because something happened in the five seconds before you spoke. That moment, that determines your leadership, not what comes out of your mouth, what happens inside your mind before you open it. This is why this is so important because we can find ourselves spinning just thinking about what to do next, but we can also in these very important moments find ourselves spinning before we're trying to speak up.
This week, don't try to become more confident, become more observant of yourself. Your exercise this week is to notice what happens in the moment before you speak, what happens in the moments before you actually decide what to do next, right? Because here is what typically happens. It can be an in-the-moment thing that has you questioning yourself and really thinking about the data in front of you, or it can really be you negotiating with yourself.
So, the difference between spinning and discernment, here's the distinction. Both spinning and discernment look thoughtful. This is why it's confusing. This is why sometimes when I am thinking through a decision, it feels so sophisticated, like I am actually thinking and involving questions and it's an internal experience. They're both different experiences though. Spinning, this is what spinning feels and sounds like. It sounds like, what if I'm wrong? What if they disagree? What if I need one more opinion? What if I just wait a little longer? What if I'm missing something? Spinning is trying to eliminate uncertainty before taking action. It's your nervous system trying to negotiate certainty.
And there is a feeling in your body as well. And if this episode is hitting you deeply and you want to dive in deeper, I have a specific worksheet that you can download to actually catch yourself in this. But I want you to notice the body sensations you have when you're spinning. Because this is where you can really stop yourself and notice, instead of staying in that spinning pattern, you can ground down and make a conscious choice. But we can't really make a conscious choice without being aware of what's happening inside of us. So, let me tell you a little bit about what spinning feels like in my body. It may be a little bit different for you, but I want to give you this visceral definition so that you can notice the sensations that are coming up in your body as you are more in the spinning mode versus discernment.
Okay, so spinning feels like a tight chest, racing thoughts, mental looping, this urgency, scattered energy. You feel not grounded. You feel a little bit restless and it is anxiety-driven, right? And what it is hyper-vigilance. It's difficult to decide. And again, it sounds a bit like needing to wait, more time, right? But what it actually is self-protection, fear of uncertainty, trying to eliminate risk. Your nervous system feels activated, so you're not taking deep breaths, it feels like shorter breaths, and you're seeking approval or certainty. It's delaying a trust of yourself. You'll also notice that you don't trust yourself as much in this spinning. There's an avoidance disguised as strategy and emotional risk management trying to say that you are being risk-averse but staying in this stuck feeling and trying to control the outcome.
And this is what happens to me when I am spinning in my business, and I'm like, what should I do next? What offer should I have? And then I start spinning in this question for myself versus being grounded in my body, taking a deep breath, and noticing I have a choice here. I can make a discerning decision. And the difference for me really is when I'm noticing in spinning versus discernment is there is a thought. It's either, am I trying to make a good decision? Am I grounded in my decision-making? Or am I trying to eliminate uncertainty?
Eliminating uncertainty requires a lot more thought and it requires a lot more energy, but the reality is we can't always eliminate uncertainty. That is the whole thing about the emotional piece around this. We don't know what's going to happen. We have to take risk and we have to learn from those. But when we are spinning, we are trying to eliminate that. It's like we can't tolerate any type of uncertainty, so we keep going and going and going. Versus discernment asks, here's what I know. Here's what I don't know. Here's my recommendation. It is grounded. It is grounded in yourself. It is grounded in self-trust. It is a place where you can tolerate disagreement. It is a place where you can be open to making mistakes but learning from those mistakes. I can adjust if new information arises. Leadership requires judgment, not certainty.
And even in my own business, I'm like, okay, well what do I know about past launches? What do I know about the clients who learn the most from what I have to teach? What do I know about the offers that I have already offered and the activation that people get from it? What do I know about what works and what doesn't work? This is a much more grounded approach. It's not spinning looking for certainty. It is grounded in myself, and I am much more clear. And this is what you feel when you're actually in this discernment energy, right? And making a decision from discernment, not spinning. You're grounded, you're calm but alert, you're clear, you're present. You're more steady in your body. Things feel spacious. There's not this urgency like, oh my gosh, the house is on fire and we've got to go, go, go. There is focus though. There's a calm conviction and a connectedness to yourself.
When I am in discernment, I am trusting of myself. I am willing to move forward without knowing all of the things that will arise or unfold. So what you sound like is, here's what I know. Here's what I don't know. Here's my recommendation. I can tolerate disagreement, right? You have emotional regulation within you because you can tolerate things not going 100% your way. You trust yourself in real time. You're adaptable. This is executive maturity. This is action despite uncertainty. This is decision-making under uncertainty. It's leadership thinking and it's truly strategic judgment. It's saying this is what I want to move forward with even if I don't know all of the answers. And even if I fail or even if I make a mistake, this is the next course of action.
It's not just this urgency spinning looking for a perfect answer. And there's a real body motion. I mean, I literally felt it this morning when I was like, what do I want to do? Should I go work out? Should I go for a run? Should I take a nap? Should I do my podcast? Should I do all the marketing stuff, read all the emails, work on my launch? I had all of the thoughts in my head, right? And what I did was I took a moment to just take a deep breath and remind myself that I get to make a decision and that when I take deep breaths and when I put myself in more of a meditation and then I ask myself the question from that grounded conviction versus that spinning energy, then I typically will come up with a pretty good solution that I feel good about moving forward. It's very interesting because I teach this in my group coaching where I'm literally having people pause, ask themselves their wisdom, their innate wisdom will come out. They will say this is what I want to do.
But oftentimes we override it or our nervous system is overriding our wisdom and our self-trust with this spinning energy. So this matters a great deal because the more time, the more energy you spend spinning, the less time you're actually moving towards creating the life you want. This is why I believe this is so important to actually notice, when are you spinning in your body and in your mind and when do you move into discernment and how to tell the difference, right? Because this can save you years and years and years of energy, mental energy, emotional energy, years of you not waiting for the perfect time for certainty to arrive before you move.
The real cost of spinning, right? It doesn't just cost you time. Again, it's emotional energy. Every loop, every replay, every extra opinion, every delayed conversation is draining your leadership capacity. And here's what's fascinating, what you are actually trying to protect. It isn't failure, it isn't criticism. It's conflict. It's looking foolish, it's being misunderstood, it's disappointing someone, appearing difficult. This is what we're trying to do. In other words, you're not solving a leadership problem. You're managing emotional risk, the emotions that you feel inside of yourself.
So, I wanted to share this with you because this is what causes a lot of women to hold back to feel like they're doing work but actually not seeing the outcomes of their work because they're spending a lot of time negotiating with their emotions, negotiating with the circumstances that are coming up, and using those emotions and circumstances to slow themselves down from actually taking action. But it actually doesn't feel like a slowdown, it feels like a spinning pattern that happens in your brain. And so when I can take a deep breath and slow down, this is when I can move into more of that discernment.
All right, so discernment doesn't eliminate uncertainty. It expands your capacity to stay connected to yourself while uncertainty exists. That's leadership. It's not certainty, it's capacity, your capacity to hold more. So you stop asking, how do I know I'm right? And you start asking, can I trust myself to handle whatever happens next? Those are radically different leaders. And so you can even ask yourself, if I trusted myself more, what would I do next? This gives you more discernment. This gives you more self-trust to actually move you into a pattern of being more discerning versus spinning and looking for certainty.
So I want to leave you with this. I know this is a short and sweet episode, but I think it's really important for you to notice this difference. Leadership is not the absence of uncertainty. Leadership is your willingness to stay connected to yourself while uncertainty is present. This is where you can use that grounded energy to actually answer those questions. Spinning says, I'll trust myself once I'm certain. Discernment says, I trust myself to navigate uncertainty. That single distinction has the power to save you years of overthinking, second-guessing, and waiting for permission because awareness is where self-trust begins.
All right. I want you to really go risk one yourself and use this episode, listen to it again, and notice yourself, when are you spinning versus when are you discerning? And how can you support yourself through finding out more and more when this is happening? And what happens to your life as you are in more of that discernment versus spinning? I want to hear from you. I'm thinking of you, I believe in you, and I can't wait for you to go out and use this episode for yourself and to save yourself years and years and years of mental and emotional energy that's spent spinning. All right, have a beautiful week ahead and I will talk to you soon. Bye.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, RSS, or wherever you listen to podcasts!
