Ep. 20 Confident Decision Making

Hey, my friends quickfire podcast: Nine Ways to Make Confident Decisions. If You Struggle making decisions, if you struggle to make confident Decisions, if you waiver, you just can’t decide. You don’t know how to decide. This podcast is for you. I’ve got nine quick tips that one builds onto the other as we go through that is gonna help you move into being a more confident decision maker.

Let’s go. So first of all, in terms of making confident decisions, right? We need to know our long-term goals or intentions, and that’s both of our business and in our life. If we have our north star. If we know where we are headed, then we make decisions based upon alignment with that intention for our future.

Now we don’t need to have our future totally, totally mapped out. To be able to do this, you just need to have some idea of the direction that you are headed in, and that will give you way clearer guidance on your decision making.

Step number two. Take a moment and breathe, and we take a moment and breathe because that helps us come into our body. Our body is a very, very important piece. Our somatic awareness is a very important piece in decision making, which brings us to step number three.

Get out of your head. Often we are trying to make decisions based just on thinking. And when we get a little bit confused or overwhelmed with our decision making, we are not even in that place of being able to make rational decisions using that rational part of the brain, because our brain has, you know, become a little bit overwhelmed.

And so we need to get out of our head and start feeling into our body. Very often with clients who have trouble making decisions, it’s because they don’t actually know what they’re feeling. That’s what I’ve noticed. Anyway, that was certainly my experience as well when I started to be able to tune into what I was feeling.

Which is very much connected to my needs and my values, my intentions, then I could track way better the information that was coming from my nervous system, which is also coming from our intuition. Next step, stop asking other people what you should do. Everyone you ask about what you should do and what direction you should take, what decision you should make is basing their decision, well, hopefully on what they think is gonna be good for you, but also they’re gonna be basing their decision on what their life goals are, what their values are.

Plus a whole lot of other unconscious staff, you are the best person to answer that question. If you need to ask one or two people, of course, go and do that. Ask those trusted people, but don’t be asking everybody in your circle because it just gets really, really confusing. Ultimately, we wanna move towards you becoming the decision maker that you trust within yourself.

Next step is to follow your gut instinct and to be able to do that, we need to be including our somatic awareness into our decision making. You will absolutely have a gut instinct on a decision, right? It’s either a yes, no, or I’m not deciding right now. That’s a decision as well and your gut instinct, which is your intuition, which is that somatic awareness is so, so important in your decision making.

I mean, I can think back to those times where I have made rational decisions about my business, about my life. But I’ve had a gut instinct, niggle of a oh no, or a not now, and I’ve ignored it to my detriment. Yeah, and maybe you can think of those times too. So really listening to your gut instinct, of course, we need to be able to differentiate between

fear of the unknown. Fear of visibility, which are all things that can stop us moving forward with our decisions. We need to differentiate those because that’s what we grow through. That’s why we, you know, as we evolve in our life, we are gonna face those feelings and those feelings don’t feel good. But they are not the reason to say no to a decision to move forward with something.

But you wanna differentiate between those and that it’s a deeper, quieter gut instinct that might show up as a no. It might also show up as a yes, but I’m afraid. But it’s still a yes. Yeah. And so for me anyway, that happens at a deeper level of my being. So it’s really good to be able to differentiate that through, because one of those,

on the one hand, that information is, it’s just information, right? My nervous system is afraid of stepping up in this way because I’m gonna be way more visible in my role. That’s not a reason. To say no, but on the other hand, there could be this quiet, uh uh, no, that is not the right thing for you to do, and they’ll feel different inside your body.

For me that the gut instinct is actually in my gut. It’s lower down in my body. You can track those. That felt sense, experience. When you do decide, decide in a neutral mood. So not when you are like, you know, on top of the world, everything’s amazing, everything’s rainbows and unicorns or not, when you are really, really afraid and contracted

inside yourself. Either of those two ends of the spectrum are not good places to decide from. Decide when you’re feeling pretty neutral. You’ve got access to your feelings. You’ve got access to your rational thinking mind. You’ve maybe thought about it. You’ve checked in, is this an alignment with my values and

my sense of purpose or my intention for my life, and also remembering that any decision that I’ve made, some of them, yes, I have regretted them down the track, but because, you know, and you could say, well, you made the wrong choice there. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I learned so much from that decision that it helped me in that next phase of my life.

Because there are no failures, the only failures that we need to be really concerned about is not deciding. Not moving forward, not taking a risk, not going for it, not deciding yes or no, but just staying perpetually in that, I don’t know, and going round and round in circles so you can have confidence in your decision.

And you’ve leaned into the right decision for you. You might not know how that’s gonna work out six months down the track, but you are willing to trust yourself and you’re willing to back yourself. That is confidence in your decision making. And then after you’ve made the decision down the track, you might choose to evaluate it.

Okay, so actually, how did this pan out? Not in a way of really giving yourself a hard time or beating yourself up, but actually. What was good about this? What went well, what didn’t go so well, and how do I wanna change things? What would I do differently? What would I do differently next time? Evaluating is really helpful as well, and it, it does help you to learn to trust your decision making process, because if you have gotten into that habit of just not making decisions for your life, not taking that leap or, or saying no, and choosing another direction.

Then you actually find yourself stuck and it becomes harder and harder to trust yourself to make decisions. So the best way to go is, is to make the decision and just move forward. I would way rather do that than to stay in this, I don’t know, place, the stuck place of not making a choice. And that’s a little different to, when the timing’s not right.

Sometimes the timing isn’t quite where it needs to be to make that decision. And again, I can feel that through my gut instinct, and I’m sure you’ll be able to as well, right? Sometimes it’s about right timing with our decision making.

So that’s a stepwise method of how I’ve learned to make decisions, how I’ve learned to trust my decisions. They’re not always a hundred percent perfectly what I would do if I had that opportunity to do it again. But that’s life. I don’t dwell on it. I take the learnings from it and move on to the next piece.

So in summary, it is know your long-term intentions. Have some kind of sense of what they are. Breathe, get out of your head if you need to. If you are overthinking it, feel into your body. What is your somatic awareness tell you. What does that gut instinct differentiate between gut, instinct and fears?

That don’t need to hold you back. Those fears are just showing you what you are growing into. Stop asking everybody around you for their opinion and what you should do. You might ask one or two people, but trust yourself. You are the person that has to carry this decision.

You are the person that benefits from this decision and grows from it. So learn to trust yourself in making that decision. Make your decision based on a neutral mood because that will mean you are more even in your decision making. And of course, once you’ve made that decision, a yes or a no, we are moving forward, or we are not.

Of course, there’s always that outlier of, well, not just now, it’s not quite the right timing, which is different to procrastination. Of course, after we’ve made that decision, some time has passed, can be really good to evaluate our decisions. Evaluate what came out of that decision. Not to say I was right or wrong, or good or bad, but to think about for ourselves.

Yeah. Okay. So what did I learn from that? What went really well? What would I repeat and what would I do differently? And the only way we really learned to trust our decision making is to practice it, to do it. The only way we can really learn to trust our decision making is by practicing doing it over and over again.

Be willing to fail because really there’s no such thing as failure. There are only learning experiences. All right, my friends. Hope that was helpful in terms of making confident decisions. I know you’re gonna be amazing at this. I know you already are. It’s some tips that are gonna help you along the way, some tips that are gonna help you to back yourself in the decision making process.

Go forward and make bold decisions. We’ll talk again real soon. Bye for now.