Why Your Self-Doubt Might Be Your Greatest Leadership Advantage

What if the self-doubt you keep trying to grind past is actually the exact signal you need to listen to? What if leaders building the strongest teams and the clearest strategies aren't the ones who feel most certain, but the ones who've learned to look doubt in the eye and let it sharpen them? I'm Susan Drumm, and this is The Enlightened Executive, where your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution. Each week, we spotlight cutting-edge strategies to help executives and entrepreneurs grow in leadership and in life. My guest today is Abhi Golhar. Abhi is a keynote speaker on innovation, leadership, and decision-making in times of uncertainty. His talk titled Move the Needle: The Future of Innovation introduces a powerful framework that helps leaders turn hesitation into clarity, friction into fuel, and uncertainty into unstoppable momentum. Abhi has built and exited 7 companies and is a 3-time nationally syndicated radio host reaching over 3 million daily listeners. Avi, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks Susan for having me. I appreciate it.

I'm really glad to have you here because I want— your story is pretty fascinating, so we're gonna dive right into that. But tell us about the work you're doing right now and who it's targeted.

Yeah, there I, I'm finding a really big opportunity in the world of lower middle market private credit and private equity, specifically with businesses doing anywhere from $10 to $50 million in top-line revenue. And they're seeking an answer, and the answer they're It's that itch that you can't scratch in the middle of your back. Maybe some of you will meet me in person. I'm 5'5" and like 135 pounds wet. Like, I know what hard labor looks like. I'm just not gonna do it. And I'm short enough that I can scratch the middle of my back.

Okay.

I can like reach around and actually get it. That itch is a combination of a variety of things. One, it's a succession plan. Two, it's how do I exit my business eventually? Three, how do I create enough value on my business for somebody to see value in my business, but more importantly, for them to see value in me. And these are completely what may seem initially as disparate conversations, but they're all the same conversation. And so at Lafayette and Oak, we take business owners, seasoned executives through a process that helps them identify the solutions and the answers to some of these questions to help them improve EBITDA, to help them improve SDE, to help them improve the value they're providing their organization, which then turns into enterprise value. Growth for the long term.

Got it. And you're also a speaker, and your topic around our relationship with doubt was really fascinating to me. So tell me more about what you call almost like the power of doubt and how it's actually a useful tool for us to move forward with, not something we should be ashamed of.

Yeah. So, uh, think inner city Detroit, uh, 2002. It's fall and it's starting to rain a little bit, and I get a call from my contractor, and I'm still a student at the University of Michigan. I get a call from my contractor at like 7:30 at night and and he says, "Abby, you got to get to your rental property that we're renovating for you, like, right now." I'm like, "Dude, what's going on?" I had no idea. And so for me, that was a really scary call because I didn't really know what he was talking about. He said, "Well, no, I'm done working with you. I can't do this anymore. I've left a Shop-Vac in the family room. You got to get down there right now. It's— I got to go." Like, "Okay, aren't you the contractor? Isn't that what you're supposed to be doing, right? Like, what happened here?" So I jump in my 1992 Honda Civic DX. It's this car where you could see the highway from the floorboards as you're driving it to inner city Detroit. And that hour and a half, you're wondering, well, am I even going to make it? By the time I get to my rental property, it starts snowing and it's a full-on blizzard. I pull into my driveway, I run over my mailbox, which I installed, by the way. Like, I was really proud of installing this mailbox. And I opened the front door and immediately I hear running water and I had no idea where it was coming from. So I looked everywhere. I looked upstairs, I looked in the kitchen. Looked behind the cabinets and the counter, like, where is this thing? Where's the water leak? Where is this coming from? And I finally make my way down to the basement and I see a flooded basement. I am up to my neck in water. In that moment, I had a couple of choices. One, I could run away from my problems, uh, which I think I ended up doing surprisingly. Number two, I could face my fears. Or number three, I could really ask myself what was bothering me. And I asked myself what was bothering me and I was scared. I was scared, I was lonely, I was wet, I was freezing cold in a house where there's a good amount of crime, and I had no mentor, I had no forward momentum because I didn't have clarity or confidence to get myself out of this situation. So I start knocking on doors, going down the street, coming back, and I finally find a neighbor who takes mercy on my soul, and we start moving as much water— I finally realized what the Shop-Vac was for— we start moving as much water out of the basement as we could. We toil away until 2 o'clock in the morning, not getting enough water out of the basement, and I leave to the package store, so Jack Daniels and I can have a conversation. For me, that was— it broke me for the most part. I had no idea who I was. I couldn't tell my parents, couldn't tell my friends. I was 18 years old. I was $1 million in debt and I trusted somebody to teach me the game of real estate. And for the first time in my life, I was gonna make my parents proud. I was gonna make myself proud. I was gonna make my brother proud, everybody proud of like who I was becoming. And it went totally the other way. And I had a decision to make. Was I going to let this moment define me or was I going to scratch that itch of something else that was bothering me that I needed to shine a light onto? And for me, that feeling that bubbled up wasn't confidence. It wasn't clarity. It wasn't this need to push through and power through because as leaders, we're taught to face our fears. We're taught to do something beyond a shadow of doubt. What bubbled up for me was doubt. And instead of kind of shoving it away and letting it run amok, I decided to shine a light on it and start asking the questions, why was I feeling doubt?

And so where did you come up with, with that? Like, I mean, isn't doubt sort a new normal human emotion that everyone experiences. So, what does knowing why, how does that benefit you?

Well, I'm a guy. We don't experience emotions at all. I don't know what you're talking about. Yes, you do. These things.

You just pretend you don't.

Yeah. No, no, no, no. We're not, you know, I can't, you know, I had doubt whether or not this hairband was going to work today, right? Right. So for me, doubt represents a gap in time. The reason we would have doubts about anything is because we're feeling something about a situation, about a task, about the thing at hand. And it's the feeling that we need to understand to shine a light on, hey, how do we get through this challenge? Or how do we— what is it about this thing that's bothering me? More often than not, like you found being a really good podcast host and an interviewer is if you were to talk about yourself 80% of the time and the guest only had 20% of the time, nobody would listen to the Enlightened Executive podcast, right? They'd be like, you've got to be kidding me. I don't want to hear only about Susan, even though how— even though she's incredible and beautiful and all sorts of things. In the same manner, when we offer a little bit of time and a gap in time, we have the ability to rest in our awareness, to address what we're thinking, how we're feeling about what we're thinking, and offer a bit of a cooling-off period So we're not reactive to the flooded basement. We're proactive and we can actually think through positive solutions instead of going down a road that doesn't really help from a negative mental perspective.

And so is there sort of a process that you would take someone through to, let's say, understand and uncover the why so that they can get to that point of action?

Yeah. And it's the intersection between Clarity and confidence. So I, in that moment when I saw my flooded basement, I realized I had no idea what I was doing and I was completely paralyzed. Like I was so distraught mentally and emotionally, I couldn't move physically. And I've started companies, I've sold companies, I consult with companies, we raise a bunch of capital for companies. These are decision-making moments, life-defining moments that if we're distraught in the moment and we are distracted, it doesn't offer us the best tools within us to overcome or shine that light on doubt. And so the intersection between clarity and confidence, I think, is very interesting. If we don't have a whole lot of clarity and a whole lot of confidence in what we're doing, we end up in a state of paralysis. That's where I was. That's where, if we're facing the world of AI, I mean, AI, Anthropic, is disrupting industries. It's disrupting bookkeepers, any kind of financial analysts. I mean, it is You pick an industry and it is having a net positive or net negative impact depending on how you feel about AI. And will we allow ourselves to be powerless and not have the clarity or the confidence moving into the next day or tomorrow or into the meeting with somebody that says, hey, can't AI do this, right? Like, why are we even here? That level of paralysis can overwhelm an organization, can overwhelm the leaders of an organization, and ultimately have a negative impact on the P&L. And we see that every day. We see those leaders that don't have the level of confidence that are kind of frozen in time. We would never go back to marketing into, in the Yellow Pages anymore, would we? No.

Yeah, we're reverting back. Well, so, so imagine, okay, you diagnose like people are in this state. Where do you take them from there?

What you find is you'll inch forward a little bit in clarity and maybe a little bit in confidence, and you're like, wait a minute, I'm finding my pathway forward. The Momentum Matrix is designed to help one go from a state of low confidence, low clarity, to a state of high confidence and high clarity, which is where everybody wants to be. Everybody wants to be in the zone of momentum where everything is working and it's fun and it's exciting and We now have the ability to control our own future, or we made an investment in this new technology, or we brought on this really cool CEO or COO or C-suite executive, and she or he is gonna crush it for us. And we need that productive quarter, uh, to hit our earnings calls, to fill the gap. Everybody wants to be there. What I've found is organizations that I've either acquired, turned around, or invested in will typically spend 4.5 weeks on average in the zone of momentum before they fall into, say, the zone of overthinking, where you've got a high level of strategic clarity, but then you've got a low level of confidence. In this particular zone, you've got clarity on 50 different things, and I'm guilty of this, right? Like, I've got 50 different new initiatives, and of course I'm gonna crush all of these initiatives in the next week. Or do you need to be the guy or the gal that's up at 4 o'clock in the morning? You're going to run a marathon, yoga, maybe a little meditation, levitation if you can do it. Write in your journal, walk the dog, take the kids out for school, make lunch, all before 7 o'clock. That level of overthinking gives you a certain level of paralysis, but it also leads teams astray. You're missing the mark. You don't get things done. You miss deadlines. Your budgets are off.

I think that's what a lot of people are feeling with so many priorities. I often am hearing right now, you know, the priorities keep changing, like on a weekly basis, or they just— more things get loaded on and I can't sift through what really matters. It's sort of this whiplash that— No, this one. No, it's this thing. No, actually, we need to be doing this thing. Oh, we're going to do this thing, right? So, is that— what part of that matrix is— and I'm assuming this is sort of like a 2x2, right? It is. It's a 2x2. So, what part of that matrix are you in when an organization is showing that type of weakness?

You're in the zone of wandering, and that's exactly it. You've got so much confidence and not a lot of clarity. You're like, wait a minute, I could be doing all of these things, but which one is the right one to go do first? You might have team members, you might have junior analysts, senior analysts, your leaders saying to you as the CEO, saying to you as the business owner that of course we need to adopt AI, but then we need to overhaul our CRM system and we need to migrate to Salesforce. But then we also need to go on a capital raise, right? We just raised $25, $30 million in a Series A. We've gotta get to Series B, and of course that's really important. And then we need to go raise. So after we raise the money, then we need people. And, uh, what about our customers? We need an AI chatbot named Stephanie to deal with all the customers now that the volume of marketing is increasing. You're missing the mark when when you're in wandering mode. The wandering mode to me is very similar to going to the gym. I can talk a big game. I'm— I don't know if I'm gonna work out my shoulders or my legs or my biceps or, you know, my neck muscles, and, uh, I just leave because it becomes too overwhelming.

Well, it sounds like the pattern that you had to see in yourself— let's talk about that. You know, you noticed at that moment that you were paralyzed, you were stuck. Is this something that— because usually patterns are repetitive things, right? There's like, I notice this is the way I operate, and I start to zoom out. And in that moment of zooming out, I can see like, oh, I'm doing the same thing I've been doing in this situation every single time. What was that that you had to confront in yourself? What was your pattern in how you were leading or working or showing up that you had eventually had to change?

Expectations. So it's cool to have expectations. You can have expectations of yourself. I have expectations of myself. My hair product, not so much because it doesn't work. I've tried all of them and I'm still struggling in the humidity of Atlanta, New York, and DC. It's okay to have expectations. The challenge though, Susan, is when we become attached to these expectations. So I'll give you an example. You and I go out to a very nice dinner and, uh, we're in New York and I say, Susan, we're going out. I'm so excited to take you to one of my favorite restaurants of all time. It's in Midtown Manhattan. It— we're gonna get dressed. The chef is a good friend of mine. It's a 3 Michelin star restaurant, as they all are in New York, and we're gonna have a blast. The service is second to none. Okay. And I've built this up, this idea of this restaurant and built it up in you. And you go to the restaurant and let's say the chef is having an off night and you stub your toe. And from the onset of walking in, the moment you walk in the door of that restaurant, you're like, ugh, you know, my toe hurts. You get, you know, you sit down and it's just not the experience that you expected. And that ruins the rest of your evening. And maybe that even ruins the rest of your week, all because you had an expectation that your experience at the restaurant was gonna be incredible. But it wasn't.

That happens all the time with movies, right? Somebody tells you how, what a great movie it is, and then you You go and see it and you're like, oh, this was supposed to be a great movie.

Yes. But imagine now beyond that, you take it a step further, right? You say, well, geez, I'm an influencer. I've got a podcast. I'm gonna tell the whole world about how horrible of a restaurant this is, and I'm gonna blog about it. I'm gonna do a podcast episode about it. It's gonna go on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, everywhere. And what you're essentially doing in that moment is you're creating misery for yourself because you've attached yourself to an expectation of something that was going to happen. You attached yourself to an outcome. It's okay. You—

so bringing this back to you.

Yeah.

How did expectation get in your way? And was there like a specific moment or conversation that cracked that pattern open?

So there was the FBI and the Department of Justice.

Okay.

You didn't see that coming.

No.

Tell me more. So, so I left my property the following morning and I'm driving back to, to my dorm in Ann Arbor, my, my 5-foot by 3-foot you know, rectangular space that I reside in, in North Campus. I get a call from the chief security analyst or somebody at Bank of America, and he says, hey, we've got to meet in person and talk about your properties. Like, what are you— who are you and how did you get my cell phone, right? Like, who is this? And I'm scared. So we set up a meeting the following week at the Michigan Union, and it's the— it's the Bank of America guy. And he calls to confirm the meeting. He says, hey, we'll be there right around noon. So we're, you know, any papers, any documents you have about the properties that you invested in in Detroit, please bring them with you. My question— with you, right? I'm like, my question is, who's we? You said we, not just us. Who's we? And I find out at the meeting was the Bank of America, two security officers, and, uh, the FBI. I had an expectation going into the meeting that it was just— I was just going to talk about documents and deal flow and my ambitious goal of flipping Detroit and helping to restore the city to its once former glory. But no, we were talking about the mortgage fraud that they assumed that I was at the center of, that I was creating. I thought like, wait a minute, this is probably my breakout moment. I thought this was going to be a job interview. No, it was quite the opposite. They were wondering, well, how did you end up getting these loans when you're an 18-and-a-half, 19-year-old student at the University of Michigan? You have no income. Back then, in the early 2000s, you had applications that were known as ninja loans, no income, no job applications, right? And you just went stated income, stated credit. So So I guess my mentor finagled some paperwork and I very quickly realized that I was a victim of mortgage fraud. Mm-hmm. I was a million dollars in debt. And by the time that I had worked alongside the FBI and the DOJ, not only to clear my name, but then I ended up putting my mentor in jail for 15 years. I realized that, wait a minute, my expectation of investing is very different than what most people's expect— expectations are of investing. I was attached to a story that I was telling myself about what success meant As it related to investing and building a business.

Mm-hmm.

And how could this happen to me? I'm an academic genius. My dad has a PhD, my mom, two masters, three bachelor's. I, this doesn't happen to me. What are you talking about? What? There's no way that my parents came here on a student visa. My dad graduated top of his class. Like, this is, there's no way this is happening to me right now. Why is this happening to me, Susan? Why is this happening to me?

Whoa. What was the hardest part of that shift? Like, of actually changing, you know, what did you have to like unlearn or let go of?

It was understanding that there's a difference between me being attached to an outcome and expecting an outcome.

Mm-hmm.

And that will tell you where exactly you're placed inside of the momentum matrix. So in that moment where I was having my first conversation with the FBI and, uh, and Bank of America, I was in a complete state of paralysis. And then I quickly moved to a state of wandering. Well, wait a minute. I've got like, I don't have a whole lot of confidence in this, but maybe a little bit of clarity in that. And what do I do? I mean, obviously I've got all this paperwork. None of my signatures match my actual signature. How do I get out of the situation? Am I going to fight? Am I going to have to fight these security guards and like leave? What do I need to do? And then I moved over to the overthinking zone where I'm like, I've got, I've got all this clarity now of the fact that I've got to work with the FBI. I've got to work with Bank of America. I've got to work with the DOJ. And I spent 4 and a half years doing that. And it was an every single day thing for 4, 4 and a half years. And we prepared for a grand jury. I was the key witness to a grand jury. I sat in the seat for 8 hours answering questions, not only for myself, but the other 42 victims of mortgage fraud that my mentor was a part of at the time. And even after that, as much as I had clarity in what to do, I still had a loss of confidence in my ability to do it.

And so how— bring it back. Was there something about doubt that you learned in that moment that actually you found it's in a way, I don't know if the right word is, but like a superpower.

That using it as a power tool is your superpower.

Mm-hmm.

If you, if you look at some, some really incredible, uh, athletes and, and investors and business people of all time, uh, look at Bezos. You can look at even Howard Schultz, uh, of Starbucks. Can you imagine Schultz pitched the idea of Starbucks over 200 times before he got one yes. Can you imagine if he stopped at like number 50? Like I wouldn't be able to have my no espresso Americano. Right, which is just the water. Okay, it's just like, I'm the kind of guy that will go to Starbucks and order an iced no espresso Americano, and the barista is like, leave, you know. But if Schultz didn't move forward in spite of his doubt, or lean into doubt as his power tool, not in spite of it, that's what we're told to do, Starbucks wouldn't exist. Sara Blakely with Spanx, she had $15,000 to hand to her name. She was a door-to-door fax machine saleswoman before she founded Spanx. There was a lot of doubt with her, but instead of, instead of avoiding it, she was able to say, hey, I can suspend judgment about me for a second and let me understand where in this matrix I am so I can address my feeling of what it is I'm doubting. Am I doubting myself? Am I doubting success? Am I doubting this company? Am I doubting my people? Am I doubting the initiative? In the world of today, are you doubting your AI initiative? What is it about the change that you're feeling that you are doubting? Are you doubting the confidence that your team has in you or doesn't have in you? Are you doubting the conversations at the water cooler where everybody's saying, well, hmm, sure.

Let's say you get clarity on that. So you get clarity on what it is that you're doubting. Then what?

The moment you have clarity, that's the moment you gain power. The fact that you know something gives you the ability to step forward in a direction that normally you wouldn't. So going back to the moment where I had all these documents in front of me. Yeah. And I was thinking about, well, geez, what do I need to do? That moment of clarity for me was, okay, I'm going to dedicate my life to understanding what happened here, how I got into this mess, and work with Bank of America, work with the FBI and the DOJ, and unpack this thing. And instead of letting doubt about my ability or doubt about the situation at hand overwhelm me, I used the clarity in the action to say, I'm doing this. And the more that I did that, the more confident that I became about succeeding through the chall— the most challenging time of my life, or one of the most challenging times in my life. By the time it was all said and done, I had a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, 4 foreclosures, and I still— I was $1 million in debt.

So yeah, I think some leaders get stuck because they can't see the full path ahead. And sometimes you get clarity by just taking the most obvious next step, right? It's so often we don't see the full end, like where is the light at the end of the tunnel. You got to keep taking one step forward with your flashlight to keep going, keep going, keep going. In order to know that. And I think that's even more powerful today because nobody knows the story of where things are ending up, let's say AI. And I do think even like in strategy conversations, it used to be you could plan out like 5 years, 10 years. Now it's what can we plan for the next quarter? And let's take the next right action for that quarter.

And isn't it fascinating that you can still drive from— if you got in your car in Miami and drove to LA only at night and only seeing 40 to 50 feet in front of you with your lights on.

Yeah.

You can still do that. And to your point, if you've got to stop for gas, okay, you'll stop for gas or charge your car, right? You have a fuel and battery indicator, right? What people will— what I've seen, most people will ignore that indicator. That's what you call stupidity, right? You're not going to run— you're not going to ignore your gas gauge if it's screaming at you saying empty and not fill up. So when you start understanding that you've got these tools in front of you and And my challenge would be take a look at what you're fearing. Take a look at where you have doubt in your life. And it could start with you, start with you personally. For me, even now, it's, it's been, how do I get myself to the gym more? And I can make the excuse of not having enough time, et cetera. And I found out like, wait a minute, it has nothing to do with me, my inability to take action. I'm not willing to take the action because I'm starting my day too early. And then you find out there are all these excuses. I mean, just get your ass to the gym. Gym, right? Like, that's, that's what you got to do. But that's the easy solution. The harder solution is to understand what the attachments are to the expectations of going to the gym and what that means and what the, what the quality of that, of the outcome for my lifestyle is going to be. And if we apply that, say, to an executive role or somebody that's looking at change in the insurance industry or in the legal field, yeah, AI is here and it's not going anywhere. Take a look at all the data centers that are being built. AI will own the commodity. You, you have, you have now information that's free in the palm of your hand. All of time is here, right here on ChatGPT, Perplexity Computer, Claude Code, Grok, whatever, whichever large language model you wish to use. AI might own the commodity, but you will always own the relationship, whether it's the relationship with yourself or with your clients.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So what would you recommend that a leader do tomorrow to implement either this framework or what's at, what's one action step they could take?

I'll give you two. One, rest in your awareness. We all agree that we go through every single day with millions and millions of thoughts that go unaddressed, but some of those thoughts that go unaddressed are actually really crucial thoughts to pay attention to. So if you're in a meeting and, or you're on a Zoom call, or you're grabbing coffee, or it's a quarterly meeting, or you're at an offsite and your body just feels different about an initiative, or you're feeling different about the thought that's in your brain, offer yourself the opportunity to rest in that awareness of the thought that's bothering you and see how attached you are to the expectation that that thought will lead you down. That's a lot. Um, kind of sounds like a word salad, but I promise it's not. So rewind it like 45 seconds and really listen to that because when you rest in your awareness, it illuminates what you're feeling and all the doubts and the things and the fears and the stuff. And then if we become attached to the expectation, of the thoughts that we have that are supposed to do this, or we become attached to the expectation that, man, this is gonna be a really good interview, Abhi. Like what happened, right? Like you're, you know, we, we were supposed to talk about all these other things and you couldn't stop talking, right? Uh, we have to rerecord in January. If that makes us feel good, bad, or ugly, that gives us a data point. And now that data point becomes really actionable. The question is, are we willing to step into the clarity and the confidence that illuminating idea, whatever was uncovered in that moment, after we gave doubt a bit of a, a bit of a shakedown, are we okay with the outcome? Are we attached to the outcome? And either way, is it a net positive, net negative experience for us? And we can start taking action steps from there.

Awesome. I love it. I mean, particularly that last piece around what you're attached to. I think when people say like, okay, I should be more aware, but that tends to be like, okay, that's sort of a nice to have. And maybe it's just about zooming out and taking a beat. Jotting it down like, huh, this is bothering me. This is— just set it there and you can come back to it later in the day. Sometimes that's what I do. I need more space than in the flurry of the day to do things. So that's kind of how I would describe how that piece also shows up for me and what I do about it.

I love that. Keep a journal. God. Yep. Journal. One. Journal. Two. Yeah. These are just— it helps. To take things out of imaginary space and actually put 'em on paper that, and then revisit them later and then mark it down and see whether or not it's an expectation or it's an attachment to an expectation. Either way, whether you'll feel good or bad either way, the question that you wanna ask yourself is, am I feeling better about this or not? Very similarly, like you go buy a new car and the moment that you drive that new car off the lot, you pull it into a Starbucks and you park it. And somebody scratches your car. Oh, you're devastated because it was the most beautiful black BMW X5 M Series like that you have ever purchased or seen in your life. And now it has this big white streak. It's okay to be upset. Totally right. Like we, it's okay to have an expectation that the new car is like a fun drive, et cetera. But if you're so attached to the point where it's ruined your life, that, that needs to be addressed. And so for, you know, so for, for all the business owners that are, that are like, man, I'm really attached to my business and it's preventing the sale of my business, there's something there that we've gotta address and I'm pretty sure it's the attachment.

Well, where can people learn more about you and your work?

Yeah, check me out at abigolohar.com or follow me on LinkedIn.

Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. And if you like this episode, you're not gonna wanna miss my interview with Jason Miller who discusses how leaders need creativity, judgment, and reinvention more than ever in the age of AI. Let's lead the way. Hope you enjoyed today's episode, and I'd like to point you to the next important step. Hit the subscribe button and the bell to get notified when we release new content. I'll see you on the next episode of The Enlightened Executive.