By Pat Alacqua, originally published by CEOWorld Magazine

It’s not your effort. It’s your thinking. 

You reorganize the team. Again. You push the deadline. Again. You promise next quarter will be different, but somehow, you’re still facing the same frustrations.

Different calendar, same challenges.

It happens in business. It happens in life. It’s not a lack of effort. It’s a lack of a disciplined system for thinking differently about the problems we face.

As someone who’s scaled my own companies and now works with leadership teams navigating growth and pressure, I’ve seen this pattern across every leadership level. Smart people are stuck in a reactive loop, solving symptoms while the root issue goes untouched.

Time and again, today’s leadership challenges don’t come just from big strategy decisions. They come from the blur between work and life, speed and clarity, urgency and meaning. In that fog, it’s not better time management we need. It’s better thinking.

You’re not stuck — you’re just thinking like a firefighter 

When growth creates pressure, leaders fall into a mental trap. They reward urgency instead of insight. They fight fires instead of building fire prevention.

This is true whether you’re leading a team, running a business unit, or trying to protect your weekends. You need a way to evaluate what matters most, and to separate the what from the how, so you don’t default to doing.

When you throw effort at problems instead of deciding outcomes, you make changes but not progress. You start to believe the pattern is normal. It’s not. It’s just familiar.

What’s most surprising is that sometimes the smartest move isn’t to do more. It’s to pause long enough to rethink what success actually looks like.

Work and life run on the same operating system 

Most leadership coaching treats business and life as separate tracks. If you’ve ever canceled dinner because your calendar exploded or had the same conversation with your partner and your VP of Sales, you know otherwise. These aren’t two separate lives. They’re one pattern. And if that pattern goes unexamined, you’ll keep solving the same problems on every front.

BRPs are the quiet pattern behind repeating challenges 

Basic recurring problems — I call them BRPs — show up across departments, quarters, and seasons. They’re the internal misalignments, performance gaps, people issues, and communication breakdowns that never quite go away.

BRPs are sneaky. They don’t scream for attention, but they drain energy, stall execution, and dull your edge. Most leaders treat them like individual issues. But they’re patterns. And until you name them as such, you can’t solve them for good.

Why surface solutions don’t stick 

Here’s what most leaders do when a problem reappears:

• Add another meeting
• Rewrite the plan
• Swap out a team member
• Push harder

They employ the business version of “new year, new me.” And it works for a while, but until they see the pattern behind the problem, they’re just repainting a cracked foundation.

What’s missing isn’t effort. It’s a structured way to make decisions under pressure — one that reveals what’s going on, aligns the right people, and gives you a fast path to execution.

The 3Cs: A system for thinking, not just solving 

Over time, I built a repeatable process I now use and call “the 3Cs”:

1. Clarify the challenge or opportunity
2. Chart the path forward: outcomes, non-negotiables, obstacles
3. Coalign key stakeholders before implementation begins

It sounds simple. It is. The discipline it requires is what most leaders skip. Specifically:

Clarify – This means more than naming the problem. It means stepping back to assess competing priorities, the actual cost of inaction, and whether solving this issue creates value. You might realize the problem isn’t worth solving or that what you thought was the issue is just a symptom. I always emphasize, “We can do anything. We can’t do everything.”

Clarity is only valuable when it leads to better tradeoffs.

Chart – Define success before you jump to action: What must happen? What can’t happen? What roadblocks already exist? List the resources required, the outcomes worth measuring, and the deal-breakers that will derail execution.

This step moves you from instinct to intention. Think of it like plotting a course through fog. If you skip this, you may move fast but in the wrong direction.

Coalign – Here’s where most initiatives quietly fail. You chart the course and then push it forward without buy-in. If people aren’t brought in before the detailed planning starts, you’ll waste time pulling them up the mountain later.

Coalignment isn’t consensus. It’s context. It’s less like a town hall meeting, more like pre-wiring the room before you flip the switch. Quiet alignment early prevents loud resistance later. Bring people into the problem early so they’re part of the solution later.

One-on-one alignment before group sessions matters. It gives people a voice without the performance pressure of a room full of stakeholders, and it gives you better input.

The fastest path isn’t more action. It’s better thinking 

One of my favorite questions to ask is, “What happens if you do nothing?”

Sometimes, the best move is walking away from a tempting distraction. Other times, it’s pausing long enough to redefine what progress really means.

The 3Cs give you the structure to decide if something is worth tackling, not just how to do it. They help you say “yes” with a plan or “no” without guilt.

That’s how you break the cycle.

Stop the pattern before it becomes your identity 

Most leaders wear stress like a badge. They work harder, sacrifice more, and hope clarity will show up after the next fire is out. However, it doesn’t work like that.

You don’t need a new planner. You don’t need another reorg. You need a new system for making decisions and a way to identify and dismantle the patterns quietly holding you back.

BRPs don’t go away on their own. Once you see them for what they are and bring the right thinking to the table, you can stop solving the same problem over and over.

And that’s when momentum finally starts to stick.