Daniel Pink recently had a conversation with David Perell, where he talked about a college professor who stopped him mid-analysis, with regard to his writing, and said, in essence:

You’re trying to “fix” this essay like an engineer rearranging parts. The real issue is simpler and more confronting. You don’t know what you think yet.
Sometimes you have to write to figure it out.

So much of how we’re trained to “think” is that statements opposite.

You’re supposed to have:

• A clear thesis
• A tidy outline
• A three-point structure

…then you sit down and execute.

But life doesn’t work like a school essay, and neither does leadership.

The myth of knowing before you speak

In most professional spaces, we reward people who sound like they already know.

• Leaders who “come in strong.”
• Consultants who present a neat 7-step framework.
• Politicians with a talking point ready for every question.

We’re subtly punished for saying, “I’m still working this out.”

So we force ourselves into premature clarity. We talk before we’ve actually thought, and repeat what sounds good instead of admitting we’re in the middle of the muddle.

The thing is: the really important questions in your life and leadership don’t arrive pre-packaged with a thesis. They arrive entangled in other competing thoughts and ideas.

• Do I stay or do I leave?
• Is this a people problem or a system problem?
• Is this person misaligned, or have we put them in the wrong role?
• What kind of business do I actually want to build for the next decade of my life?

You can’t answer those cleanly in your head. Your brain will loop the same noise, like a song stuck on chorus.

Writing as an MRI

What Pink’s professor named is something I see all the time in alignment work:

Writing is not just output. It’s diagnostic.

When you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and actually stay with one question, something else kicks in.

• The half-thoughts you’ve been carrying around suddenly have to choose a direction.
• That vague resentment becomes a sentence.
• That defensiveness becomes a fear.
• That “I’m just tired” becomes, “I am no longer willing to carry X while pretending it’s Y.”

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve started writing on one side of an issue and, halfway through, thought: “Wait. I don’t believe this,” or choose a completely different angle or approach.

That’s not failure. That’s the work.

Pink tells a story of writing an ethics essay in college and realizing, only as he wrote, that he believed the opposite of what he thought he did. For years he felt embarrassed about that, until someone gave him permission to see it differently:

Sometimes the only way to discover what you truly think is to write your way through what you don’t believe or agree with.

Leaders, you don’t need more talking points. You need more drafts.

If you lead people, this matters.

Because so much of what passes for “strategy” is really improvisation with better clothes. We wing it in boardrooms, polish it in a deck, and hope nobody notices the gaps between what we say and what we actually think.

What if your first step wasn’t a presentation, but a private draft?

Not “Our five-year vision,” but:

“Let me write honestly for three pages about where I think this organization is actually heading… and what scares me about that.”

Not “Our official change-management plan,” but:

“Let me write the strongest argument against the change I’m pushing, and see what’s underneath my own resistance.”

Not “We value our people,” but:

“Let me write about the last three decisions we made that cost people trust, and what those decisions say about our real values.”

You don’t have to share that first draft with anyone. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Because that’s the draft where your social self loosens its grip and your honest self finally gets a word in.

Writing as a place to argue with yourself

Tyler Cowen suggests an exercise: write the most compelling argument you can for something you vehemently disagree with.

Law school trains something similar: argue both sides of a case.

For leaders and creators, that’s not just an intellectual game. It’s a way of stress-testing your own convictions: If you can’t write a strong case for the “other side,” you probably don’t understand the terrain you’re standing on.

And sometimes, halfway through writing that “other side,” you’ll feel a tiny wobble in your certainty. A crack. A “Hmmm.” That’s the moment to pay attention to.

Not because you must immediately switch positions, but because the act of writing has surfaced nuance your slogan brain was flattening.

Nuance is where alignment lives. Not in the loud certainty, but in the quiet, complicated middle you only discover when you stay in the chair long enough to see what else lives in you.

The courage to not know (yet)

Here’s what I’m circling around:

“Writing to figure out what you think” is not just a technique. It’s a posture.

It requires:

• Enough humility to admit you don’t have it all worked out
• Enough courage to face what might come up on the page
• Enough structure (time, space, a notebook or document that’s just for you) to actually do it

In a world that rewards hot takes and instant clarity, this is rebellious.

• Imagine an executive who says, “I need a day to write about this before I answer.”
• Imagine a leader who begins a town hall with, “Here’s what I wrote when I tried to talk myself out of this decision.”
• Imagine a founder who doesn’t post the polished “vision” until they’ve journaled through the parts they’re scared to say out loud.

That’s not weakness. That’s integrated leadership. And somewhere in the quiet between your first sentence and your last, you will feel it:

The moment when the words stop sounding like what you should think…
and begin to sound like what you actually do.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Pick one live question in your world right now – something that feels murky, charged, or unresolved. For the next 15–20 minutes, write only about that question, with one rule: you are not allowed to perform certainty. Let your doubts, contradictions, and “on the one hand / on the other hand” have the mic.

When you’re done, read it back and ask: What did I discover about what I truly think that I could never have accessed by just “thinking about it in my head”?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, MCODE® Legacy Coach, writer and musician. I help leaders and independent professionals close the gap between strategy and execution by making invisible friction visible, so direction can finally translate into results.

If execution isn’t matching intent and you can’t quite see why, message me on WhatsApp. We’ll start with a brief Clarity Conversation to understand what you’re facing and decide together whether a focused Sensemaking Session is the right next step.