#47 Powerful Decisions

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 Hey, this is Melissa Parsons, and you are listening to the Your Favorite You Podcast. I'm a certified life coach with an advanced certification in deep dive coaching. The purpose of this podcast is to help brilliant women, like you, with beautiful brains create the life you've been dreaming of with intention.

My goal is to help you find your favorite version of you by teaching you how to treat yourself as your own best friend. If this sounds incredible to you and you want practical tips on changing-up how you treat yourself, then you're in the right place. Just so you know, I'm a huge fan of using all of the words available to me in the English language, so please proceed with caution if young ears are around.

Well, hi there. Welcome back to Your Favorite You. Today I'm going to chat with you about one of the limiting beliefs I used to have about myself. Believe it or not, I used to have the thought that I sucked at making decisions. So many of my clients come to me with this same thought, something like, I can't make a decision to save my life, or I really struggle to make decisions.

It takes me forever to decide something, or I trust other people to make my decisions for me before I trust myself. You get the idea. A lot of them come to me with some sort of flavor of that. Now, most of my clients have tried all different kinds of ways to make decisions for themselves. And I want to point out that we have been socialized to believe, especially as women, that we couldn't possibly know what is best for ourselves.

So, we need to outsource our decisions to other people. For example, we wait until other people order their food at a restaurant to see what we should order. We decide that we are drinking alcohol, or that we are not drinking alcohol based on what everyone else is doing at the restaurant too. Our friends' kids are taking dance lessons, so we should try dance lessons too.

Our coworker goes to Hilton Head for every summer vacation, so we should try that too. My friends think that I should date lots of people. Instead of being a serial monogamist. You know who you are, and my friends say that that's the way to find love. So, I go on all the dating apps, and I go on lots of dates instead of just dating one person at a time.

You get the idea. My clients, and I used to do this too, are outsourcing our power, listening to everyone else's opinion because we hold other people's opinions and higher esteem than we do our own opinion. We also outsource our decision based on what has worked in the past. Believing that the best path forward is the well beaten one, the one that we have done before, and that has worked out for us.

Even though it maybe didn't get us exactly what we want, we survived it. So, since the old way didn't kill us, we can keep taking that path even though it didn't get us exactly where we wanted to go. I, for one, am so grateful to the people who have had the courage to try something new and different. Think of all that we might have missed out on in life if people weren't willing to be brave and do new and different things.

Imagine life without indoor plumbing. Imagine it without an H V A C system. Imagine it without airplanes and boats, without penicillin, without photographs. I could obviously go on and on, but you get the idea as I see it today, and I'm willing to be wrong about this in the future. The solution to making decisions that you love is simple.

Don't get confused. I didn't say that. It was easy. There is a difference. So, get ready because I am going to give you the steps to use when you want to make your next decision. The first step is to ask yourself the simple question that I have offered on the podcast and to my clients over and over and will continue to offer over and over, and that question is, what do I want?

So, ask yourself, what do I want? The next step is to sit still for a moment when you ask that question and see what comes up as your answer. This answer is just what you want. No one else's opinion matters at this moment. In my experience and in many of my client's experiences, you can check your answers by sitting with them and seeing how the answers feel in your body.

I love Glennon Doyle's. Take on this. If something feels warm in her body, it's a yes. If something feels cold, it's a no. Another way to look at this is if the answer feels like it is opening you up, helping you to expand it, likely is a yes. If the answer feels like it is shutting you down, making you retract, making you smaller, it likely is a no.

You have to be willing to be still and quiet enough when you're asking yourself these questions to be able to listen to the answers that your body is giving you. This is something that can take some practice, so I don't want anyone to feel bad if you don't get any knowing from your body initially. It takes time and practice, and this is something that I work with my amazing clients on every day.

I do this work for myself too. Remember, I'm never going to ask you to do something that I'm not willing to do myself first. The next step is the hardest one in my opinion, again, because we have been socialized against it, and that is to trust that you are making the right decision for you. I'm actually writing this podcast today because I just got off of a call with my brilliant client, Sarah.

She says that after working on herself with me, that she finally feels like it is safe to trust herself. She's at the point where she can't imagine a time in her life when she did not feel this way, when she did not feel like she could trust herself. It brings me such joy to see my clients like amazing Sarah, have these realizations.

Sometimes it comes to them as a huge aha, and sometimes it sneaks up on them. I love it when it happens either way. I can't wait to have Sarah on the podcast. I told her today that I already have a title for our podcast together, we're going to call it. It is Safe to Trust myself, so look for that in a future episode.

Okay, so assuming that the answer that you come up with, that you trust in yourself does not include harming anyone else, the next step is to act on the decision you've made. Interestingly, you would think that this would be the hardest step, the action step, but once you make the decision to trust yourself, the path that you should be headed on just becomes so clear that it becomes nearly impossible not to act on your decision.

Like Anais Nin says, there came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. So many of my clients relate to the sentiment and so do I. There becomes a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.

Once you've taken the action, you will arrive at a certain result. I advise my clients and I also practice the art of never making myself wrong about a decision. Each decision can either help you get exactly what you want, or it can help you grow and learn if you let it. This is the idea of having your own back.

Even if you make what other people would consider to be the wrong decision, quote unquote, you never have to beat yourself up about it. You can decide this ahead of time. How can I make it so that whatever happens, I can see my result as either a win or something I learned from. And if you get really skilled at this with lots of practice, you can see some results as wins and something to learn from.

So, I invite you to adopt the thought that you make the best decisions that you can with the information that you have at the time. Every decision in life is going to lead to some unintended consequences. You have to let that be okay. You have to know that you did your best with the info that you had at the time of the decision.

I would like to invite you right now to think about any unmade decisions you have in your life and the impact that these unmade decisions are having on your life. Here are some of mine right now, today as I sit, that I'm going to make by the end of today. So which flight should I book for our fall long weekend with the boys?

What should we have for dinner tonight? Unfortunately, John is sick today and I'm in charge, so watch out world. We all might be sick by the end of the day. The third question I'm asking is, who should I hire to trim our trees in our backyard? Admittedly, these are all high-quality decisions to make, and none of them is earth shattering or going to change the course of my life, but this is what I'm honestly dealing with today.

Here are some other larger decisions that I've made recently that definitely will have an impact on my life going forward. So, number one, do I want to continue with my one-on-one mindset coaching? The answer to this was a very expansive yes. I didn't even think about it much at all. The question was posed to me.

It's like, yes, of course I paid and we're going forward. Two, do I want to withdraw the offer that I made on a property recently? This was also a yes that felt really good in my body, so I sent a notice saying I was withdrawing. It was no big deal. Number three, do I want to launch another group in September, or should I wait until November?

Like I had originally planned. This one took some time to answer, but once I got really clear on why I would launch in the fall versus waiting until the winter, the answer became crystal clear to wait. So, I'm waiting until November. Here are some decisions that I've helped my clients make recently. So, do I want to start asserting myself more at my job? Do I want to fire my current assistant and hire a new one? Do I want to start initiating more intimacy with my partner? Do I want to tell my parents that we are not planning on going vacation with them ever again? Do I want to ask for a raise at work? Do I want to work fewer hours at my job? Hopefully you get the idea with these few examples of many, these are just the ones I came up with thinking over the last week of coaching.

The result of practicing these steps is that you will become a badass at decision making. Once you become a badass at decision making, you start to feel so much more power over your life, and the value of that is truly priceless. I went to see the Barbie movie by myself the other day. That's another decision I made very quickly.

Yes, I could have waited until other people I know, and love had time to go see it with me. But I had an unexpected free afternoon when one of my clients had to reschedule her appointment. I really didn't want to wait to see it any longer because I didn't want other people's excitement about it and them incessantly for good reason, talking about it spoil the movie for me.

So, I quickly decided to go watch it alone, and it was amazing. One of the lines of that movie that struck me, there were many, but this one hit me right between the eyeballs and I jotted it down immediately in my phone. A male character says in the movie, I'm a man with no power. Does that make me a woman?

My thought immediately was, fuck no. I don't want any of the women I know and love feeling powerless, so it is my renewed mission. To help your favorite version of you make powerful decisions. So, my mission is to help clients with these kinds of decisions every day, all day, every day in my coaching business.

If you are like me and you have the story that you suck at making decisions or that you really struggle to trust yourself to make the right decision, or you feel like you're outsourcing your decisions to other people, I would love to work with you one-on-one. Please go to my calendar right now to book your consult.

If doing so feels like an expansive yes in your body, you will feel so powerful just booking the consult, I promise.

Thank you for listening to the podcast and loving on me all the time. Now that my group launch is closed, I am opening up two spots to work with me one-on-one. If one-on-one coaching is more your jam, please reach out to me to book a consult by going to my website, MelissaParsonsCoaching.com, and clicking on the Work with Me tab.

I would love to discuss with you how I can help you on a one-on-one basis. Talk to you soon.