You are sitting in a meeting where everyone is talking past each other. Three departments want three different things. The data supports multiple directions. Your gut says one thing, your board says another, and your team is waiting for you to decide.
This is not an information problem. You have plenty of information. This is a clarity problem.
And clarity problems almost always trace back to the same root cause: you have not defined what actually matters.
Most leaders assume they know their values. They can rattle off words like integrity, innovation, growth. But when a high-stakes decision forces those values into conflict, the words dissolve into fog. Innovation or stability? Growth or sustainability? Speed or quality?
The leaders who think clearly under pressure are not smarter than everyone else. They have simply done the work of clarifying their values before the pressure hits — so when the moment arrives, they have a filter, not a feeling, guiding the call.
This post walks through a practical method for building that filter, drawn from the Instant Competence problem-solving framework. It is not theory. It is a set of exercises you can do today that will change how you process every decision going forward.
Why Most Leaders Think in Fog
Here is the uncomfortable truth about leadership clarity: the fog is self-generated.
As Drago Dimitrov writes in Instant Competence, “What you think is important affects what you see and how you choose.” Your values are not just preferences sitting quietly in the background. They actively shape which problems you notice, which data you prioritize, and which solutions you consider viable.
When those values are vague, everything downstream is vague too.
Think about what happens when a CEO says their company values “excellence.” What does that mean? Does it mean the highest-quality product regardless of cost? Operational efficiency? Hiring only the best people? All three simultaneously — and if so, what happens when they conflict?
Vague values create a specific kind of leadership failure: you end up solving problems that feel urgent but are not actually aligned with what matters most. You chase symptoms instead of causes. You make decisions that look logical in the moment but feel wrong six months later — because they were grounded in shallow thinking, not deep clarity.
Dimitrov describes this trap precisely: “What you desire changes when you remember what you value. If you get clear on your values, it can actually change what you desire in a helpful way.” In other words, the thing you think is the problem might not be the problem at all. You just have not looked at it through the right lens.
The Field of Relevance: How to Think Clearly as a Leader by Choosing Your Battleground
Before you can think clearly, you need to define the boundaries of what you are thinking about.
The Instant Competence framework calls this your field of relevance — the subset of everything happening in the world that actually warrants your attention and energy. As Dimitrov puts it:
“There is a hierarchy of care. You care about certain things more than others. You, like every other human, are limited in your resources: time, energy, money, or otherwise. You have to pick and choose which problems are your problems.”
This sounds obvious, but most leaders skip it entirely. They try to think about everything at once. They absorb every piece of feedback, every market signal, every competitive move — without first establishing which of those inputs actually fall within their field of relevance.
The result? Mental overload disguised as diligence. Exhaustion disguised as thoroughness.
Your values determine your field of relevance. They dictate “the scope of your reality, outlining the perimeter of your concerns and the extent of your engagements — essentially, your battleground for problem-solving.”
When you clarify your values, you are not just doing a feel-good exercise. You are building the walls that keep irrelevant noise out of your decision-making process. You are choosing your battleground deliberately instead of letting every incoming signal choose it for you.
The Values Exercise: From Ten Words to Three Truths
Here is where it gets practical. The Instant Competence values exercise is deceptively simple: start with ten values, narrow to five, then narrow to three. The magic is in the narrowing.
Step one: Write down ten values that resonate most deeply with you. Use single words — integrity, courage, family, excellence, faith, creativity, freedom. Do not overthink this step. Let your intuition lead.
Step two: Cut to five. This is where the discomfort begins. The key to making progress is to look for meta-values — underlying principles that bundle several values together:
- Authenticity, responsibility, and trustworthiness might consolidate into integrity
- Decision-making, influence, and vision might bundle into leadership
- Tolerance, serenity, and mindfulness might be captured by peace
As Dimitrov explains, “This process of aggregation will also have the secondary effect of deepening the richness and meaning you see in that particular meta-value.”
Step three: Cut to three. “It’s time to really take your values through the fire so only the pure gold, with impurities melted away, can emerge.” Force yourself to discriminate between the value you have 100 percent buy-in for and the one that is only 99 percent.
Why three? Because three values are specific enough to actually function as a decision filter. Ten values sound impressive on a wall poster, but they cannot guide a hard call at 11 PM when two of them point in opposite directions.
The payoff is immediate. When you can name your three core values without hesitation, decisions that seemed agonizing become obvious. Not easy — obvious. You might still choose the harder path, but at least you know why.
The What-Does-It-Mean Laser: Cutting Through Vague Language
Even after the values exercise, there is a subtler trap waiting: the words you chose might still be vague.
What does “integrity” actually mean to you? What does “growth” mean in practice? If two leaders both claim they value “innovation,” they might mean radically different things — one means constant experimentation, the other means calculated bets on proven trends.
The Instant Competence framework includes a tool for this: the What-Does-It-Mean Laser. Take a word that matters to your decision and define it. Then define the words in your definition. Then define those words. Keep going until you hit circularity — where the definitions start referencing each other.
Dimitrov describes the experience:
“All these words are vibrating with the pulses of your base intuition, where you feel the existence and meaning of the underlying concept. You may have known what the word meant before, but now you really feel it in a multi-dimensional context.”
This is not an academic exercise. It is a practical tool for eliminating the ambiguity that sabotages execution. When your leadership team agrees to prioritize “customer success,” running the What-Does-It-Mean Laser on that phrase will reveal whether you all actually mean the same thing — or whether you have been nodding along to different definitions for months.
Try it now: Pick the most important word in your current biggest decision. Define it. Define the definition. Keep going for five rounds. Notice how the fog lifts.
Putting It Together: Values-Driven Clarity in Practice
Here is what thinking clearly as a leader actually looks like when you combine these tools:
- Run the values exercise. Know your three core values cold. These become your permanent decision filter — not something you revisit every quarter, but something you internalize so deeply it operates automatically.
- Define your field of relevance. When a complex decision arrives, ask: what subset of this situation actually falls within my battleground? What can I deliberately ignore without guilt? Your values draw these boundaries.
- Laser the vague words. When you notice terms like “strategic fit” or “market opportunity” or “alignment” creeping into your analysis, run the What-Does-It-Mean Laser until the vagueness burns away.
- Check for false desires. Sometimes the clearest thinking reveals that the problem you were agonizing over was never really your problem. Dimitrov warns that ungrounded desires — “those that are not lined up with your true, value-based desires” — can send you chasing the wrong outcome entirely.
The leaders who consistently make good decisions under pressure share one trait: they have done the values work before the pressure arrives. They do not figure out what matters in the middle of the crisis. They walk into the crisis already knowing — and that knowing is what allows them to see clearly when everyone else is swimming in fog.
As Dimitrov writes, “Clarity is the compass that guides us from problem to solution, from uncertainty to assured competence.” The compass does not appear when you need it. You build it in advance. And you build it from values.
Ready to Think Differently?
The approach described in this post is part of Drago Dimitrov’s Instant Competence system — a battle-tested methodology for leaders who need to make the right call, even when the path isn’t clear.
Read Instant Competence to get the complete 7-step system, with real case studies and practical exercises.
Or start with the free Clarity Worksheet — a guided tool for defining and solving your most pressing challenge.
For investors and operators who want to apply this thinking to business analysis, Dimitrov’s second book — What Does This Company Do? — maps the framework onto 32 spectrums that reveal what a company actually does.