Way back when the Washington Wizards professional basketball team were the Washington Bullets, my wife and I were fortunate enough to win courtside tickets in a charity raffle.  We were close enough to hear sneakers squeak and players curse under their breath.  We soaked in the moment. 

It was glorious! 

But after the first quarter, everything changed.

A man with a microphone appeared.  He was smiling in that way that suggested he was about to ask a question with consequences. He scanned the courtside section, theatrically shielding his eyes from the lights, and then—inevitably—his gaze landed on me.

“You, sir!”

I pointed at myself, as if to confirm there had been a mistake. He nodded. A staffer handed me a microphone.  I had officially become content.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time for our first quarter trivia bonanza!”

The crowd oohed. I nodded solemnly. Bring it on!

“Who is the only basketball player to win a NBA Championship, an ABA Championship, and an NCAA Title?”

The answers appeared on the screen.

A) Julius Erving
B) Tom Thacker
C) Rick Barry

Instinctively, I knew.  Not knew in the sense of recalling a fact from memory, but just felt it in my gut

Julius Erving—Dr. J—was iconic, yes. But I knew enough to know he went to UMass, and I knew enough about UMass basketball history to know that national titles were not part of the story. Rick Barry? A tempting answer. Too tempting.  Which left Tom Thacker.  I had never heard of Tom Thacker.

And that, paradoxically, made the answer feel right in my gut.

But then I did the thing I have done more times than I care to admit.

I looked for reassurance.

I turned around.

Directly behind me was a man who had been drinking since at least the opening tip, possibly since breakfast. He was red-faced, loud, and vibrating with certainty.

“It’s Dr. J!” he shouted, not to me but at me, as though volume could substitute for accuracy. “One hundred percent! No question!”

He was aggressively sure.  And here is the uncomfortable truth: certainty is contagious.

In that moment, my internal voice—the quiet, reasonable one that had already done the math—was drowned out by someone else’s confidence.

And so, on autopilot, with twenty thousand people cheering (I told you it a long time ago!) I said it.

“Dr. J!”

The arena reacted instantly.

Twenty thousand people booing is not a sound. It is an event.  It rolled over me like bad weather, vibrating my bones.

The man with the microphone winced sympathetically.

“Ohhh.  That is incorrect.”

The correct answer, of course, was Tom Thacker.

Doh! I sat there, smiling politely, while internally replaying the moment over and over like a surveillance tape from a crime scene.

I had known.  And I had ignored my inner voice.  And that is something we have to guard against in our professional and personal lives.

We Have to Trust Our Gut Instinct

The leaders who make the most durable decisions in any organization are rarely the loudest in the room. They are often the ones asking one more question. The ones willing to sit with discomfort a little longer. The ones who resist being rushed into clarity before clarity has earned its place.

They don’t confuse urgency with importance.  They take a measured approach and listen to their gut instinct.

When people talk about “gut instinct,” it’s often dismissed as irrational or emotional. But in leadership, intuition is rarely random. It is experience compressed into a feeling before it becomes language.

We may not immediately be able to explain our rationale, but we have seen things like this before.   A manager may hesitate about a hire not because the candidate lacks credentials, but because something in the interaction didn’t align with past experience.

Good leaders learn to interrogate their instincts rather than suppress them. They ask themselves why something feels off. They slow the decision just enough to examine the signal instead of overriding it.

We Don’t Need Validation

There is a quiet cost to repeatedly ignoring our own judgment. Each time we do it, we teach ourselves not to trust our internal compass. Over time, that erosion shows up as hesitation, second-guessing, and over-reliance on external validation.  And that can have a negative impact on our ability to move forward with resilience.

That night at the basketball game, the mistake wasn’t answering incorrectly. It was turning around instead of turning inward.

The crowd will always have an opinion. Someone will always be shouting behind us.

But the most important voice in any decision, whether in our business or our personal lives, is the one that lives inside our own head.