Finding the constraint I didn’t want to see

I’ve spent years telling leaders, founders, and public officials to find the real constraint—the quiet limiter everyone keeps stepping around while pretending they’re making progress.

The most dangerous constraints don’t look like problems. They look like virtues.

I found one in myself.

For a decade, I carried an assumption I never said out loud: The more I commit to my daughters’ success, the better their outcomes will be.

So I invested. Time. Energy. Opportunity cost. I showed up everywhere. I removed friction. I made calls. I opened doors. I did what responsible parents do.

And slowly, I built a bottleneck.

Here’s what I had to admit: I started tying their outcomes to my emotional equilibrium.

When they moved forward, I exhaled. When they hesitated, I tightened up. When they made choices I didn’t like, it didn’t feel like “a fork in the road.” It felt like a threat—not to them, but to the future I was trying to keep them from living.

That’s where commitment crosses the line. It becomes compression. You can call it love. You can call it concern. Either way, the effect is the same: the decision space shrinks.

I didn’t see this in theory. I saw it in a real decision. My daughter was choosing between two strong engineering schools and a large, top-tier public university. From my perspective, the public university was the obvious bet: brand, breadth, optionality. A wider runway.

Without realizing it, I began to manage the outcome. Not with a threat. Not with drama. With something more effective: Certainty.

I argued optionality like it was physics, not preference.

I framed the conversation as if the public university was the only rational option. Which meant she did what any capable young adult does when someone narrows the lane for them: she defended the lane.

As long as I was the constraint, she couldn’t evaluate the options cleanly. My certainty compressed her agency. Her resistance hardened in response. The whole thing stalled.

Then I backed off—fully. Not rhetorically. Actually. I made it explicit that all options were on the table. No penalty. No persuasion campaign. No “final push.”

Something changed immediately. She explored more honestly. She compared more openly. She owned the decision. And she chose the public university—because it was right for her, not because it was right for me.

That’s the paradox: I only got the outcome I wanted when I stopped gripping it.

The issue wasn’t the schools; the issue was what my certainty did to the process.

The constraint wasn’t my daughter. It was my belief that if I cared enough and stayed close enough, I could steer the outcome. That belief confused guidance with control.

That’s not leadership. And it’s not sustainable parenting.

This is not simply a parenting issue. It’s a leadership issue. I see the same mechanism everywhere:

Same pattern. Different setting. The constraint isn’t the goal; it’s the grip.

When I stopped steering, she started deciding. That’s the whole point.