The promotion you want but have quietly decided is out of reach. The lateral move you cannot tell is the right one. The difficult stakeholder you keep meaning to handle next cycle. None of these feel like decisions. They feel like waiting, like being responsible, like gathering more information before you commit. But waiting is the decision. And in pharma, where cycles are long and the calibration room moves on without you, the cost of staying on the fence compounds quietly until the opportunity belongs to someone who decided faster.
This episode came out of two things happening in the same week. A strategy hour for women in pharma and biotech that sold out, with a last-minute rush for the final spot that crashed the registration system. And a conversation inside The Right Move Protocol about being stuck in the same patterns, getting distracted, and not following through on the plan. Both are the same behavior wearing different clothes. Both are what sitting on the fence looks like in real time.
What You’ll Learn
- What sitting on the fence really means
- The questions that expose the real reason you’re not making a decision
- How to calculate the actual cost of indecision before it costs you in your career
- Where certainty about a decision actually comes from
Key Takeaways
1. What sitting on the fence really means
Sitting on the fence rarely feels like avoidance. It feels like diligence. You are weighing the pros and cons. You are doing the research. You are asking whether now is really the time and whether the investment is worth it. It feels intentional and smart.
There is a definition that calls fence-sitting deliberate indecision, and it is worth sitting with how much that stings. Because underneath the research and the careful weighing is usually one thing: you want something, and there is a risk attached to it that you feel uncomfortable about. The discomfort is the real reason. The pros and cons list is the cover story.
2. The questions that expose the real reason you’re not making a decision
When you are on the fence, the work is not to keep weighing. It is to figure out what decision you are actually avoiding and why. For most high-performing women in pharma, the thing in the way is not capability. It is the discomfort of the unknown, the possibility of getting it wrong, the fear of other people being disappointed.
This is where self-awareness does more than any pro and con list can. When you own that it is you stopping you, not the timing and not the circumstances, you get a choice. You can stay stuck and frustrated, or you can decide you will not be the reason you do not do the thing you want. That ownership is uncomfortable. It is also the fastest way down off the fence.
3. How to calculate the actual cost of indecision before it costs you in your career
Indecision feels free because nothing visibly changes. That is the trap. The cost is real, it is just deferred and invisible until later. The episode walks through the questions that make it visible. What is the cost of staying on the fence. What is the actual worst case scenario of the decision in front of you. What is the real likelihood that worst case happens. And if it did, what would you do next.
That last question matters most, because the answer is almost always that you would handle it. You have handled harder. Every promotion you earned, every team you led through a reorganization, every high-stakes decision you made without knowing the outcome first is evidence that you can trust yourself with the next one.
4. Where certainty about a decision actually comes from
You will never feel one hundred percent confident about something you have never done. Everything you feel confident in right now is confidence you built by doing the thing, not before it. Certainty is earned on the other side of the decision, not in front of it.
The most recent member of The Right Move Protocol is a former one-to-one client. Years ago, when the investment was smaller and still felt like a lot, she was hesitant and nervous because she had never invested in herself that way before. She did it anyway, and she met or exceeded every goal. Now she is positioning herself for a Director role and wants coaching support as she steps into a high-stakes leadership seat, managing stakeholders and leading a team. This time there was no fence. She came in certain, because she had already lived the result. Her confidence the second time was built by the decision she made the first time.
The Bottom Line
Sitting on the fence is not neutral and it is not free. For women in pharma who are already the highest performers in the room, indecision is often the one thing quietly keeping them from the role, the visibility, and the next move their work has already earned. Getting off the fence is not about forcing a yes. It is about naming the real reason for the hesitation, doing the math on what waiting costs, and trusting that you can handle whatever comes next.
If you have been attending the sessions, booking the consultations, and still not committing, this episode is a calm look at what is actually happening and how to move. Tune in when you have the space to be honest with yourself.
Ready to Take the Next Step?
If you want personalized support applying this work to your own career, learn more about The Right Move Protocol—my coaching experience for women in Pharma and Biotech who want clarity, momentum, and results.
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Transcript
If you’re someone who wants to find out just how good your career can get and how much of a difference you can make in the pharma biotech industry, you are in the right place. Welcome to Your Worthy Career, the podcast for women building meaningful, high-impact careers in pharma and biotech. I’m Melissa Lawrence, career and leadership coach, organizational psychology expert, and the founder and author of Your Worthy Career. I spent over 12 years inside this industry in talent development across biotech and large pharma, and I’ve been coaching women in this space exclusively ever since. I bring you research-backed strategies, an insider perspective on what’s actually happening inside industry organizations, and the perspective shifts that get you real results.
Here we build careers that are meaningful, aligned with who you actually are, and positioned for the impact you’re capable of making. Let’s get started.
Hello, hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. Now, I just finished delivering my strategy hour for women in pharma and biotech, and it was such a jam-packed session. I’m curious if you were there, send me a message on LinkedIn. But we talked about the strategy to find and open your hidden door in your career. And this is a concept that I developed that I cover in my book and is essentially a It’s about finding the right role and career experience that doesn’t rely on corporate ladders and instead is fully aligned with who you are, your timeline, and the impact that you want to make.
And it sold out very quickly. I am limiting these sessions to just 25 people right now, and I’ve done the mass webinars where there are hundreds of people on there, and I wanted to do something more intimate, kind of more advanced, more high level. So. I will host this again. So definitely keep your eye out on my website or better yet, if you want to make sure that you don’t miss any offerings like this that I have in the future, join my BioPharma Trailblazers email list, because this is where I often go deeper on concepts we talk about in the podcast, provide kind of unique content insight, career tips that you don’t find anywhere else.
And then also share these kind of unique opportunities to learn from me, get some coaching, new ways to work together. And I typically give first dibs to my Trailblazers. So you can join at yourworthycareer.com/email. Now this strategy hour, Selling Out, actually has a lesson in it about sitting on the fence. And that’s kind of how I came up with the topic for today’s podcast is because of this and some other things that have been happening recently.
And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Now, a few days before the strategy hour, I sent an email to my Trailblazers to let them know that there was only one spot left, and it seems that many people tried to get that spot at once because it actually crashed the registration system. And I had some people reach out to me and say that they tried to register and it went blank, and to confirm if they registered or not. Now, some of them maybe just didn’t see the email until that day, but here’s what struck me. That last-minute rush, everyone trying to grab the spot at the very last second, that is what sitting on the fence looks like in real time.
They wanted it, but they waited, unsure if they wanted to commit the time, the money to join, until the spot was almost gone. And the result was that this last-minute fury resulted in some people not getting a spot that actually wanted one and having to wait until the next time it’s offered. And some people missing out on getting the strategy and coaching and we did some Q&A too, that could have really helped them. So this happened, and then in the Right Move Protocol, my signature program, we have had some conversations on being stuck in a pattern of the same things or getting distracted and not following through on the plan that we set for ourselves. And all of this got me thinking about the behavior of just like sitting on the fence, not making quick decisions that you feel confident about, and as a result, making less progress, losing opportunities, and really Playing small.
When we are sitting on the fence, it is because we’re not making a decision. We’re considering different options until we make the decision. We’re hurting our little bottoms straddling that fence, okay? If you imagine, at least the way how I picture it, it helps to sometimes visualize. It can give you some motivation to get off of it because you can associate it with being uncomfortable and also recognize that you are putting yourself on that fence and it is fully in your control to get down.
I saw this definition once that said sitting on the fence is deliberate indecision. Deliberate indecision. And that kind of offended me. Like, deliberately indecisive? When we’re not making a decision, it’s usually because we’re weighing factors like pros and cons and doing research.
And do we really want to invest the money? What if we do? What if we don’t, right? Like, there’s a lot of questions, a lot of research, and it feels intentional and it feels smart. Not that I’m deliberately not deciding what to do, right?
But if I’m honest, it is. When we sit on the fence, it’s usually because we want something, but there is a risk that we feel uncomfortable about. Let me give you an example. I’ve been interested in playing pickleball for a hot minute, and I looked up some places in my area that offer open play or lessons. I found the place I wanted to go.
And because you know how things are, I started receiving ads then on Facebook for a 7-week beginner’s program. So I reached out, I asked about it, but I didn’t sign up. And I thought, now is not really the best time because I had some things planned, I’d have to miss some classes. But really, it’s not about having 7 Saturdays in a row that I could attend, right? I also thought, I’ve never played before and I might be the most inexperienced.
And I understand you might be hearing this because you weren’t going through this in my brain thinking, but it was a beginner’s program, so everyone’s a beginner, everyone’s inexperienced. But in my brain I thought, well, maybe they’ve played tennis before, maybe they have kind of like a transferable skill, so to speak. I might not be good at it. What if I don’t like it? Like, what if I can’t grasp the rules, right?
And this was the real reason. It wasn’t about the 7 Saturdays in a row, right? Like, missing something here and there, like, that’s not a big deal. It was the discomfort of something new, of feeling embarrassed, of what might happen if I tried this new thing with strangers that I wasn’t confident about and it didn’t work out. Right?
And there might even be— for this, there wasn’t necessarily that, but when people are making decisions, sometimes they can even think, well, what if I try the thing and I’ve been like waiting to try the thing or do the thing, and then it just isn’t what I like? Like with jobs, you might think, what if I take this job and then it actually isn’t what I want? Then what am I going to do? Right? And those types of feelings, those types of thoughts can prevent you from even getting started.
And that was the feeling that was preventing me from signing up for pickleball. But listen, rest assured, I did sign up just recently. I actually shared with my Right Move Protocol members. We were talking about taking action on the unknown, doing new things without a guaranteed outcome, what it’s like to anticipate a negative emotion, feel the fear, make a plan, do the thing anyway. And so I signed up because I, I like to go first.
So I signed up and actually I start this Saturday. I’m really excited. I will keep you posted.
And pickleball is a low-stakes example, but obviously you have fences like this in your career too. The promotion you want but maybe feels out of reach, the new role that you can’t quite decide is best for you, the difficult person or situation that you don’t know how to handle. It’s the same discomfort of the unknown, it’s just higher stakes. And when you’re on the fence about something, the lesson here is to figure out why. What is the decision you’re not making?
Because otherwise what we do is is we spin out in all of the logical reasons why we can’t make a decision, why we can’t do the thing that we want to do, right? So for me, with pickleball, it wasn’t whether I wanted to do it or not. I did want to do it. It was taking the action to do the thing I wanted by understanding where the fence-sitting is coming from, right? It was like, why, if I want to do this thing and it’s so simple, Why am I not doing it?
And building that self-awareness. What is the cost of indecision? For me, it would be not trying something that I wanted to do every time I see it on TV or other people doing it and thinking it looks fun and being reminded that I stopped myself. I let my fear of the unknown stop me. And this is why self-awareness can be so important and honestly enough to get you moving, because I will not let myself be the reason that I don’t do what I want.
With everything in my life, the big things I’ve achieved, the thing like my— when I started my business, I also had this fear of what if I fail? What if no one wants to work with me? What if I’m homeless, right? Like, what if all of these things happen, right? And all of that fear can be crippling.
And then you might start researching more, feeling you need more information, looking for the confidence to come outside of you, looking for it to come in some piece of information, some article you haven’t read yet.
But if you own that it is you stopping you, then you can choose to either beat yourself up forever and do nothing, or feel empowered to just go after what you want. You can start solving the right problem. This comes up with coaching too. Women will reach out and they will want to join the Right Move Protocol, and they want to have a better career, and they want to do the work together, but they have this inner fear of what if it doesn’t work for them? What if they take money from their family and it doesn’t work out?
What if they have to miss calls? What if, what if, what if? And so then they say they have to think about it. They can figure it out alone, right? Because they would rather give their all on their own and maybe not achieve their goal or achieve it much later than they could than to go through the ownership of, I might not be happy with how I feel at the end of this.
I might have to deal with things I don’t want to deal with. I might have to do things that make me uncomfortable, right? Like when push comes to shove, maybe they don’t want to be accountable for doing things differently than they’re already doing them. The costs of feeling they made a mistake or having other people be upset with them or being disappointed or being uncomfortable is greater than the cost of never knowing what their career could be. So they sit on the fence.
They might attend all of the sessions I offer, schedule consultations every year or two, but they never commit. And that is okay. I’m sharing this just to bring awareness that this is, this is normal. This is something you can also get out of if you want to. We are all on our own journey.
We all have our own priorities. I was speaking to someone the other day that was laid off and said she was enjoying having all these months without work with nice weather, spending the summer with her friends. And I asked her, is this more important to you right now?
And it was. And I genuinely love that for her. I love that she was able to get to a place of this is really where I want to spend my time. I don’t want to move into something that I’m not happy with just because I feel like I should. I want to take this time and enjoy my life, and I have the means to do that.
She got to a decision that she felt good about and was aligned with her goals. But I want you to know this: when you are on the fence, you are not making a decision. When we are overwhelmed There are decisions that we are not making. When we don’t make decisions, it’s often because of a perceived risk, because we’re full of what-ifs. We don’t trust ourselves.
We don’t go all in on ourselves and our decisions. We don’t have extreme ownership. And this is honestly just part of the human experience, but it also can hold you back and keep you playing small when you want more. It can make your life less joyous, less adventurous, your career less impactful. You never really see what you’re really capable of because you don’t ever go all in.
There’s a therapist named Dr. Romanelli who writes for Psychology Today, and he describes this. If you think of a scale of 1 to 10, most people live in a range of 4 to 6. He calls them the 4 to 6ers. They don’t experience the full range of emotion and potential. And listen to me when I say I’m encouraging you to expand out and get off the fence if you feel this is something you want.
If you are someone that wants to live outside of the 4 to 6, know that you will never feel 100% confident on something that you’ve never done before. Everything you feel confident in right now is tied to something you’ve already done. The latest member of The Right Move Protocol is a former one-on-one client, and we worked together many years ago, and I helped her identify and land a new role. And when she first reached out back a few years ago, she was hesitant to invest. The investment back then was significantly less than it is now, and it was still a lot for her.
She had never invested in herself like this before. She was nervous about it. She even had a referral. She even had someone tell her about their positive experience, but this required her to go all in on her with her own money, with her own time. It required her to stretch in her skills and her thoughts and her beliefs.
And she wanted that result, and she believed I could help her, and she met or exceeded all of her goals. Now, a few years later, she’s now positioning herself for a new director role, and so she reached out again, and she wants me to support her as she starts a new high-stakes leadership position. So she wants to have me in her corner to coach her, ensure she manages her stakeholders well, work on her communication skills, leads team well. And when she reached out to schedule a consultation, she said the reason was she had experienced the results. She went all in on the Right Move Protocol, confident it was the right decision.
Why? Because she experienced coaching with me before. She didn’t just think I could help, she knew because she had now had that experience. Now she can invest whatever is needed because she has that certainty and confidence and the desire for the result. In fact, We spoke on the phone and, you know, she is married.
And so we talked about what her husband would think about this investment. And she’s like, I know that I’m going to get results in this space. I’m just going to let him know that we’re going to earmark this amount of money so that I can go into this program. Right. That is confidence.
That is certainty. That is taking ownership, not delegating your decision and seeing what other people think of it before you decide what is best for you.
Now, her confidence wasn’t that assured and ready to go the first time we worked together because we hadn’t worked together yet. Now that she has, it’s a no-brainer. That’s how confidence works. When you’re sitting on the fence, unsure what to do, whether it’s coaching with me, investing in yourself, making a career pivot, knowing how to handle a difficult person, difficult situation, Get off the fence. Get to work identifying the real reason you’re not making a decision.
What is the cost of staying on the fence? What is the worst-case scenario of the decisions that you’re looking to make? What is the likelihood of what would happen, and what would you do if it did? Think about every decision you made without knowing the outcome first and how you trusted yourself to handle it, even if you weren’t sure how you were going to get through it at the You might be a parent and you had to learn how to take care of a child. Maybe you learned how to be a partner or a wife.
Maybe you learned an instrument or a sport. Maybe you signed up for pickleball too, and if you did, reach out to me and give me tips.
Whatever it is, some of our proudest accomplishments come from doing new scary things we didn’t know we could do, things we worked hard for. You are stronger than you think, and you can solve any problem in front of you. You can trust your decisions. You can trust your intuition. And guess what?
Mistakes will happen. You may get disappointed along the way. You might also experience more joy and fulfillment than you even knew was possible. And the only way to know is to get off the fence and go all in. All right, have an amazing week.
