Decisions, decisions, decisions
Our lives are a compilation of a billion little decisions. From moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Have you ever slowed down and become conscious of the choices you’re making?
Standing in the kitchen in the morning:
‘Tea or coffee?’
‘Do I have time for breakfast?’
‘Wash the dishes now or let them sit for later?’
‘Spend 10 minutes meditating before beginning work for the day?’
‘Look at my phone while I eat breakfast?’
The speed at which these flicker by can be so fast. We may not even be conscious of all these choices, or maybe we are and we’re wrestling with them, overthinking them, or getting overwhelmed by not knowing what to do. Or belittling ourselves for not making the healthiest choices or for having such a hard time choosing!
If you have your own business, there are so many little AND big decisions presented to you everyday. What decisions are sitting inside you now, unmade and constantly being weighed?
How do you choose? What happens inside when you are confronted with all of these decisions?
Take a moment to slow down and check in with your body. See what’s happening with your breath, your heart beat. Do you feel present in this moment? What do you notice?
(Don’t rush the parts where I invite you to pause and feel in :) )
In my own personal journey, decisions have been sticky, hard, & confusing. I have wondered endlessly why that is. And what is the RIGHT way to decide?
And this is where I’ve landed: there isn’t a right and a wrong way to decide.
And there isn’t a right and a wrong decision.
If decisions feel highly charged for you, can you take a moment to check in:
Am I stuck in the “right or wrong” paradigm?
There is one right choice and I must find it?
Even if you’re sensing into your body and your intuition, if you are living in the paradigm of right or wrong, you are probably suffering.
This was a big personal breakthrough for me, to let go of the right and wrong in making choices. Trust me.
I’ve been through a lot of phases in how I view decisions. I definitely spent years believing there WAS a right and a wrong decision. And a right/wrong way to decide. Let me tell you why.
As you may know if you follow me, I came to this somatic work through my own journey healing from chronic illness. I had to make a lot of really hard decisions. Like - what steps to take in my healing when the symptoms I was experiencing felt like life or death? (Sometimes they were life or death). What practitioner could help me when I felt like my body was failing? What remedy to try next? Was it working or did I need to try something else? Would I have the capacity to start a new career, go back to school, work a job, or would my body and mind give out on me like they always seemed to be doing?
And another BIG decision: should I stay in my marriage or not?
In my own journey studying & experiencing my challenges around making decisions (TONS of what has felt like freeze, terror, & urgency in my body around making those choices listed above), I could trace some of these challenges back to earlier life events:
surviving a near death experience (made me think a lot about decisions that may have led to it)
being shamed by doctors afterward because they thought a detox/cleanse I was doing at the time may have contributed to the hospitalization. This let me know I could not trust myself.
disappointing a parent with a life-changing career decision in my early twenties
experiencing family conflict around my decision of which parent to live with in my adolescence
events in early childhood that impacted my development of self-trust
We also aren’t taught much in this culture about how to listen to ourselves - how to hear and honor our hearts and bodies. Instead we are often taught to override the signals of our bodies. For instance - take a young girl who has a gut instinct that an older adult male grandparent or uncle tickling and teasing doesn’t feel good or isn’t okay with her but she is taught to pretend it is okay. We are often taught to override our “no” so as to not to cause a stir or disrupt the social order, and to maintain our sense of care and belonging.
Pause and sense in - Are there any life events you’ve experienced that have impacted your ability to make decisions? How so?
As I healed from the chronic illness, these were some of the many layers that came up. Over time, I took steps to connect more and more with my embodied intuition - or listening to myself (my body, my heart, my gut, my instincts). I got into muscle testing (ever heard of it? Google it if you’re curious). And I started to really get in touch with my body’s messages of what I needed next in order to heal. My body could tell me which practitioner to work with, what modality I needed, what food to eat, what supplement to take, what was coming up to be healed in this moment, and more. I could even muscle test to find the exact number of drops of tincture to take and how often to take it.
What a relief! All of the freeze, confusion, overthinking, I found a way to sail past that for a while and get moving forward in my life with this “yes” or “no” testing in my body.
Then I got pretty addicted to that way of making decisions. I muscle tested EVERYTHING. All kinds of life decisions. And I started to find that my answers could be altered by what energy state I was in - was I grounded? Was I feeling worried? Was I centered? How was I aligned while I felt into my “yes” or “no”? But regardless, I put my intuition at the forefront and made some really big important decisions that I don’t know I would have been able to make otherwise.
Fast forward to now. Decision making is a huge issue for my clients.
I’ve become a lot more relaxed, balanced, and holistic in the way I make choices in my life now. It doesn’t feel like I’m getting squeezed through a tiny opening at high pressure with steam coming out of my ears anymore when I try to choose. And guess what - having the freedom to choose is a hallmark sign of having capacity, being resilient, being joyful & playful, having autonomy in our lives, and being (more) healed.
I have often heard clients tell me that they want to be more in touch with their desires/feelings/needs, they want to sense and trust their intuition, they want to “know.” Yet, when we slow down and tune into the body we find many interesting layers around knowing that need to be seen. Perhaps it feels safer not to know sometimes, because then we won’t have to make hard decisions or feel things we don’t want to feel. Sometimes freedom and possibility feel scary and overwhelming. Often young parts of ourselves don’t feel ready for it and need some love, compassion, and understanding. Sometimes we wish someone would just tell us what to do!
But then part of us also doesn’t want to be told what to do by someone else. We want it to come from us.
Because deep down, many of us really want to trust ourselves. Believe in ourselves. We want to know what we want. Or give ourselves permission to explore what we want. We want to live a life that feels good - for US. We want to follow our deepest desires (or feel safe enough to let them seep into our consciousness to be more known).
Take a moment to slow down and sense into this list below. I’ve enjoyed compiling all the different ways I’ve noticed contribute to my decision-making. Oftentimes I’ll feel into many of these ways. I’m doing it all the time. Just getting to know myself more. Who I am, what I want, how I want to live my life, what kind of experiences I want to have, what I most care about.
I hope you can create space to do that for yourself too and be patient because it can take time to shift away from the charge, urgency, and pressure around decision making.
Sense into your body. If you’re for example weighing whether to create a 1:1 or a group offering in your business, see how each one feels in your body. Maybe one feels opening and one feels constricting. Maybe they both have mixed sensations and emotions. Take time to feel them and take note.
Do the quick answer test. Sometimes this can snap you past the b.s. storytelling and overcomplication that gets in the way. You can do this with yourself or ask a friend to ask you questions about the decision and answer IMMEDIATELY without thinking about it at all. Tip - take a few minutes to get into your body and ground yourself before doing this practice.
Ask wise parts of your body. Tune into any areas of your body you consider to be important to how you want to live or are particularly wise. Your heart, womb, sacrum, root, gut. Your center. See how the answer is different when you are grounded, or not. When you are connecting with Mother Earth. When you’re in your upper body, or lower body. When you’re in your head, or when you’re in your body. When you’re activated, or when you are regulated and calm. Also explore what it’s like to let your body lead. Let it lead you down a path in the woods, to the book it wants you to read, toward the person it wants you to talk to.
Get in touch with pleasure. Do regular practices to create a relationship with pleasure - noticing pleasure when you feel it, what in your environment brings you pleasure (it could be the wind on your face, a hot mug of tea, etc), how does pleasure feel in your body? Then play with the decisions you make and which ones will bring you the most pleasure.
Get to know your sense of integrity and values. What is important to you in life? What do you stand for? What feels in line with your sense of ethics? Who would you be most proud to be? If you have your own business especially, you might explore your relationship to social and environmental justice, accessibility, inclusivity, implicit biases. Are there policies you would like to have and stand by? Check in with how decisions weigh against your sense of integrity and what is important to you.
Explore what lights you up and excites you most inside. What brings in passion? Fire? Creativity? Inspiration? Joy? When do you have the most fun? You can explore this in your body, holding the choices to see which one lights a spark in you. One practice I’ve loved for myself is imagining traveling forward into the future, and looking back over this decision. The decision I make will lead to an experience. When I go forward and look back, do I feel myself treasuring that experience I got to have? Am I incredibly grateful in my heart that I gave that gift to myself? Remember that your decisions are creating experiences for you. For YOU! They aren’t about proving anything, they don’t have to be about accomplishing and achieving. In the end, life is mostly about experiences, right? What experiences do you long to have? What experiences will you be grateful you had when you are old and looking back over your life?
Imagine yourself as the hero character in your own book. Your life is a book, a story! And not only are you the main character, you are also the author and the reader of the story. Step into the shoes of the author or reader - you are their favorite character and they are rooting you on. What do they hope you will see about yourself? What are they cheering for you to do?
Allow yourself to get comfortable with trial and error. You don’t have to know. You can make a decision and later find out it didn’t work well for you. Or that some parts worked and others didn’t, or you might not want to do that again. You can launch a program and learn 10 new skills but decide you never want to offer that program again. But hey, you did learn those 10 new skills. Nothing is wasted.
Challenge your patterns, explore your growth edges, and try on new ways of making decisions. What do you always do? Do you always choose what feels safe? Do you always challenge yourself and do the brave/hard thing? Do you always say yes? Do you always say no? Notice what feels comfortable and uncomfortable for you. What feels familiar and unfamiliar. Explore both. Are you always rushing, always trying to achieve and do more? Try sitting back and see what life has to offer you when you surrender.
Decide to not decide. At least not yet. Waiting to decide is also a decision. This is a great practice if you tend to have a sense of urgency about decisions. Sometimes life answers the question for you. Sometimes more experiences are yet to unfold that make the decision more clear for you in time. Sometimes we need to remember that life is a mystery and we may never know. Even with all the intuition in the world, all the self-assuredness and self-trust, we truly still never know anything. Anything can happen. Anything is possible. How comfortable are you sitting with uncertainty? With the mystery of life? With not knowing? Can you let life be a mystery and an ADVENTURE more often? Can you appreciate the mysterious unfolding that is so different than what we expected yet often ever more beautiful than what we originally imagined?
I encourage you to take another pause after exploring this list. Hopefully you sensed yourself a little with each suggestion. Take away at least a couple of these decision-making modes to explore further.
I’d love to hear what landed for you - email me if you’d like to share. Enjoy the mystery.
Warmly,
Nicole
