Most leaders think AI will eliminate bias from their decisions. But what if the real problem isn’t the tool—it’s the person holding it?

I’ve sailed solo across the Atlantic. I’ve navigated pack ice in Greenland and weathered storms off Antarctica in a 50-foot sailboat with a skeleton crew. I’ve built and run companies since 1992, through boom times and crashes, through partnerships formed and dissolved, through pivots that worked and ones that nearly sank everything.

And I can tell you this: the most dangerous moments weren’t when the wind hit 50 knots or when the market crashed. They were when I made decisions based on fear I didn’t recognize as fear.

Because fear is a master of disguise. It dresses up as prudence, strategic thinking, risk management. It speaks in the language of logic while pulling strings from your nervous system. And in business, this costs you everything—innovation, relationships, market position, and the opportunity to build something that actually matters.

The Illusion of Rational Decision-Making

Here’s what most CEOs and senior leaders won’t admit in the boardroom: a shocking number of their ’strategic decisions’ are actually trauma responses wearing a business suit.

That aggressive acquisition strategy? Might be fear of irrelevance. The reluctance to delegate? Fear of losing control or being exposed as unnecessary. The pivot away from innovation toward ’proven business models’? Fear of failure dressed up as fiscal responsibility. The difficulty firing that toxic but productive executive? Fear of conflict hardwired from childhood dynamics you’ve never examined.

I know this intimately because I’ve lived it. In 2001, as I prepared for the Mini Transat race—4,500 nautical miles solo across the Atlantic in a 6.5-meter boat—the financial climate was disastrous. September 11th had just happened. Sponsors were pulling out of everything that wasn’t essential. My inner voice screamed daily: ”This is never going to work. You’re not good enough. This is reckless.”

What I didn’t realize then—but understand now after decades of both sailing and coaching—was that I was hearing multiple voices speaking simultaneously:

• The voice of real risk assessment (this IS objectively challenging)
• The voice of old wounds (”you’re not good enough” was my father’s refrain)
• The voice of pattern recognition and intuition (some concerns were valid)

I couldn’t distinguish between them. So sometimes I ignored all the voices and pushed through recklessly. Other times I let fear paralyze me when bold action was exactly what was needed. I was making decisions, certainly. But I wasn’t making conscious, clear-channeled decisions.

The Body Knows Before the Mind Does

Here’s something neuroscience has confirmed but sailors have known forever: your body processes threat faster than your conscious mind. When I’m alone at night crossing shipping lanes in the pitch black, my nervous system detects danger—the low frequency vibration of a cargo ship’s engine—before I consciously register what’s happening.

That’s a feature, not a bug. It kept our ancestors alive. But in business, this same mechanism misfires constantly.

Your body stores memories of every time you’ve been hurt, rejected, humiliated, or failed. These aren’t just cognitive memories—they’re encoded in your nervous system, in your muscle tension, in your breathing patterns. When a current situation bears even a passing resemblance to a past wound, your body sounds the alarm. Fight, flight, or freeze kicks in. And then your rational mind, brilliant as it is, constructs a logical-sounding explanation for why this feeling is actually strategic thinking.

I see this constantly in the leaders I coach:

• The CEO whose shoulders rise and jaw clenches when discussing delegation—their body remembering being undermined by a co-founder years ago
• The founder who gets mysteriously exhausted when their company starts to succeed—their nervous system associating visibility with danger
• The executive who makes brilliant strategic decisions but terrible people decisions—because intimacy and trust trigger attachment wounds they’ve never addressed

These aren’t character flaws. They’re unprocessed experiences speaking through the body. But until you learn to recognize them, they run your business from the shadows.

The Cost of Fear-Based Leadership

Let me be direct about what fear-based decision-making costs organizations:

Innovation Dies First

Radical innovation requires psychological safety. It requires the capacity to tolerate uncertainty, to sit with not-knowing, to experiment without guaranteed outcomes. Fear-driven leaders say they value innovation, but their nervous systems are screaming ”make it predictable, make it safe, make it proven.”

So they fund the incremental improvement, the me-too product, the safe pivot. They hire the candidate with the perfect resume instead of the one with the spark. They kill the promising but risky project in favor of optimizing the declining revenue stream. And then they wonder why more nimble competitors are eating their lunch.

Talent Leaves

The best people—the ones with options, the creative thinkers, the courageous leaders—they can smell fear-based cultures from a mile away. They feel it in the meetings where people are performing rather than problem-solving. They sense it in the political maneuvering, the blame-shifting, the CYA emails.

What keeps them is authenticity, psychological safety, and leadership that models courage. Not recklessness—courage. The willingness to name what’s true, to own mistakes, to make tough calls from a place of clarity rather than panic.

Strategic Opportunities Are Missed

Fear narrows perception. When your nervous system is activated, you literally cannot see opportunities—your brain is focused on scanning for threats. I’ve watched leaders pass on partnerships that would have transformed their companies, turn down acquisition offers they’d later regret, or hesitate just long enough to miss a market window. Not because the data wasn’t there. Because their fear was louder than their wisdom.

The Preparation Paradox

Here’s something that surprised me in my sailing expeditions: the more prepared I became, the less afraid I was. Not because the ocean became less dangerous—it didn’t. But because preparation changed my relationship with uncertainty.

Before Antarctica, we spent months planning for scenarios: what if the engine fails in pack ice? What if someone falls overboard in 4°C water? What if the satellite communication goes down? We practiced the scenarios, built redundancy, trained our responses.

This didn’t eliminate fear—fear is a natural and sometimes useful response to real danger. But it eliminated panic. It created space between stimulus and response. And in that space, wisdom could emerge.

The same principle applies to business leadership. When you’ve done the inner work—when you’ve mapped your triggers, understood your patterns, developed your capacity to regulate your nervous system—you gain the most valuable leadership skill: the ability to stay present and clear in uncertainty.

This isn’t about eliminating emotions or becoming some sort of robot. It’s about developing the sophistication to distinguish between different signals in your system. To know when that gut feeling is wisdom and when it’s old wounds. To act from courage rather than react from fear.

Why This Matters More Now

We’re at an inflection point. AI is entering every aspect of business decision-making. And here’s the thing most people are missing: AI doesn’t eliminate the need for clear human judgment. It amplifies the quality of the human wielding it.

If you’re making fear-based decisions now, AI will help you make them faster and more efficiently. If you’re operating from unexamined biases and trauma responses, AI will scale those too. The tool is neutral. The human using it is not.

This is why the work of becoming a clear-channeled leader—someone who can distinguish fear from intuition, who can stay present in uncertainty, who can make decisions from wisdom rather than wounds—isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the essential leadership competency for the next decade.

The Path Forward

If you’re recognizing yourself in these patterns, that recognition itself is valuable. You can’t change what you can’t see.

The journey from fear-based to wisdom-based leadership isn’t quick or easy. It requires:

• Learning to read your own nervous system—understanding where and how fear shows up in your body
• Identifying your triggers and patterns—the situations that reliably activate old wounds
• Developing regulation capacity—the ability to calm your nervous system and return to clarity
• Building discernment—learning to distinguish between fear responses and genuine intuition
• Practicing courage—making values-aligned decisions even when fear is present

This is inner work that shows up as outer results. As you become clearer, your decisions become better. Your leadership becomes more authentic. Your organization becomes more innovative and resilient. The talent you need starts showing up. The opportunities you couldn’t see before become obvious.

But here’s the truth: you can’t do this work alone. Just as I couldn’t sail solo across the Atlantic without mentors who’d made the passage before, without a support team, without people who could see my blind spots—you need guidance for this journey too.

Because the very patterns you’re trying to see are the ones you’ve been living inside of. The fears you’re trying to distinguish from intuition are the ones that feel most like truth. The authentic self you’re trying to access has been covered over by layers of protection and adaptation.

This is the work I do with leaders. Not giving advice or strategies—though those emerge naturally. But helping you develop the internal clarity and courage that makes everything else possible. Helping you become the kind of leader who can use AI and every other tool from a place of wisdom rather than fear. The kind of leader who creates organizations where innovation flourishes, talent thrives, and genuine value gets created.