CEO and not sure what to do next? Surely not I hear you say. CEOs are focused, have it all mapped out and project the confidence of knowing exactly the next step. Except of course when they don't.

The CEO role is like no other.

I've shared before there are no more "random" conversations on the way to make coffee. Half way back you spot the person who has interpreted the conversation as the latest strategy and has pulled their colleagues aside to start working on it. Of course if you are lucky you find out about it. If you are not, 3 months later, when you are digging to see why no traction on one of your key strategic pillars, it all becomes clear.... (face palm moment #1).

Secondly, no role requires as much repetition of a single message. Repeat, repeat, repeat and did I say repeat. Early on it's like the great big chamber of echoes and your own voice sounds deafening and frankly boring. Just when you are at the point of wondering if you need to record a new track, the magic happens. Someone as far away as possible from you on the organisational chart repeats the idea. Bingo! You may have said it often enough but for goodness sake don't stop.

Thirdly - you are absolutely not the expert of anything anymore. Swallow that one. L Plates are on. If you've hired right, the rest of the team are experts in their own disciplines, and your role is one you don't even recognise and have never done before. Sure, you can lean on all of the instincts that got you here in the first place, but they aren't always relevant, I mean lets face it the buck never really stopped with you before - no matter how accountable you were in your role. And for most of us we had one boss, not 6 or 7.

Lastly, and this was a major wrestle moment for me in deciding to take on the role - if you fail you can't just go back to the old job you loved - and so it means a big leap, because if it doesn't work out you may also end up leaving a company you love.

So this CEO role takes some figuring out.

In the early days, actually on any given challenging day, it is so tempting to dive back into the comfort of your functional role. I've known CEOs who head back to their pricing spreadsheets, who dive into the KPI performance of a group, certain their gut is better than anyone else's, CEOs who talk about the long term growth, about competition, about products, services, you name it, but resist actually putting their head down and working out what this new roles needs from them.

I'm not saying this from a lofty place of brilliance. I had my L Plates on well and truly when I stepped into the role. I was stepping up in the relative safety of an organisation I knew well, my only landmines were navigating peers who possibly wanted the role and focussing on a rather big headache of a key client dependency that represented a genuine risk to our sustainability.

The peers were my first focus. I mean, they were my team now and gaining trust and asserting who I was going to be as a CEO was priority #1. That meant calling out some behaviours we had tolerated as a group before that I was not prepared to. That was Day one.

It took me time to find my feet. Time to work out the hard stuff, to understand truly that long term strategy was my job. Everyone else had one. A job I mean. They contributed to the strategic thinking but like most large, "busy" organisations, the day to day always took precedence for them. If I wasn't thinking about the medium to long term - then the truth was no one was.

And you know what - thinking about the longer term is hard work. Optimising the current business matters, sometimes a lot, but it is the easier stuff - you can see it and measure it and actually, it is someone else's job.

Figuring out where you are heading to stay relevant, to compete and to satisfy your stakeholders expectations is your job and it's hard to do if you are caught up in the day to day.

I had to work out how to get outside the organisation. I had to start gathering insights to challenge my thinking about what was possible, about what our customers needed in the future and who we needed to be when we "grew up".

The CEO role is like no other.

When you fully occupy the role, and finally shift from having one foot back in your old role (the comfort zone), there is spaciousness that I never felt in my functional roles.

Sometimes to the point of feeling guilty that not every minute of the day was occupied. But you see, that's the whole point. As CEO you are paid for your thinking not your doing.

You are paid to think and to be there when your team need you, to bounce, to listen, to challenge and on a good day, to inspire. They are the experts. You are the Conductor.

I am a massive advocate of finding your tribe for support. I did. I found a broad network of CEOs on purpose as it took me out of the day to day, inspired me with fresh thinking, occasionally helped me understand that the challenges I was dealing with were not unique, and very often a simple conversation away from my day to day, unlocked a single train of thought that led me to a solution. I also found a CEO Coach. Someone who had literally lived the experience before. I needed to know I was bouncing ideas off someone who had been there, who had faced the uniqueness of the role.

Who do you turn to?