As a member of the “leadership team” at the various companies I’ve worked for, a lot of my job was talking to people. Leads of other teams, engineers, “senior management,” and so forth.

Most of the time, those conversations went just fine, but occasionally we’d get stuck. There are two important ways in which a conversation can get stuck, and I call them “the logjam” and “the loop.”

It’s frustrating for anyone to feel like the conversation isn’t going anywhere, and sometimes that leads to conflict and distraction from solving the problem everyone came to solve, so here are my coaching-inspired tips for moving any conversation forward.

Do you make decisions intuitively or analytically?

What if I told you that analyzing your situation might be more of a waste of time than you think? What if I told you that your intuition is actually a massive window into your intelligence?

In fact, ignoring the importance of intuition almost destroyed the Coca-Cola company.

As a manager, I’ve frequently had conversations with team members about how they can get that promotion they’re after, and as a colleague or friend I’ve also been asked quite often for advice on breaking into the tech industry or interviewing for a software job.

While there are certainly some helpful “rules of thumb,” the best advice that I can give anyone is “just do the work.”

That might sound trite, and it is, but it’s still true. If you don’t want to listen to me, take the advice of two world-renowned comedians and one computer science professor with a Ph.D. from MIT.

The only reliable way to achieve anything substantial is through consistent, sustained action. Moreover, any truly substantial accomplishments take a long time, on the order of years.

In this, there are two key hurdles to overcome:

1. If you want to achieve something substantial, start now, and don’t stop. Doing something, no matter how small, is infinitely better than doing nothing.

2. The penalty for avoiding sustained and consistent progress, especially in technology, is obsolescence.

If you want to achieve more than you’ve ever dreamed, you can. The main reason you think you can’t is because it’s going to take years, and you can’t see all of the steps from where you are right now, so to you it appears to be impossible.

Let’s break it down.

I have had trouble asking for help for nearly my entire life. I don’t know when it started or what caused it, but at some point in my childhood I learned that knowing correct answers is rewarded, and asking for help is admitting that you don’t have the correct answer.

That simple idea led me to perpetrate, quite literally, decades of self-sabotage. Rather than ask a question or offer a guess, I just kept my mouth shut.