In this episode, we're exploring the art of decision-making.
An unexpected bout of illness threw a wrench into my plans this week, and I had to make a difficult choice. I share why this choice was challenging for me, and how I came to a decision that felt right. Listen as I use this example to demonstrate how the CALM method is a step-by-step approach to navigating difficult decisions. From connecting with ourselves to evaluating our choices, this tool helps us make decisions confidently and without regret.
Join me as we uncover how to make decisions easier and with more clarity, no matter the size or significance.
_________
Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult
_________
Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
In this episode, we're exploring the art of decision-making.
An unexpected bout of illness threw a wrench into my plans this week, and I had to make a difficult choice. I share why this choice was challenging for me, and how I came to a decision that felt right. Listen as I use this example to demonstrate how the CALM method is a step-by-step approach to navigating difficult decisions. From connecting with ourselves to evaluating our choices, this tool helps us make decisions confidently and without regret.
Join me as we uncover how to make decisions easier and with more clarity, no matter the size or significance.
_________
Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult
_________
Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
Welcome to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. A fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.
Speaker 2:Hey, there it's Jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink your Rules. I first want to say that the webinar I had been talking about for the past several weeks was supposed to happen actually today, the day this is releasing, and I have had to reschedule it and it will now be happening at the beginning of March, on Wednesday, march 6th, at 1 pm Pacific time, and that link is still in the show notes. It's actually the same link. So if you already signed up, I sent you all an email, but you'll be automatically registered for the new time. So want to make sure you know that and remember that webinar is all about how to use my calm method to go from being an overwhelmed chicken with this head cut off kind of feeling, this headless chicken syndrome that we've been talking about to a calmer, more intentional, more connected version of yourself. And it talks a lot about this last week, so I won't labor the point. But if you're feeling that desire for a more calm, peaceful, intentional life, whether it's at work or at home, with your kids or both, and you feel kind of stuck, like you can't get out of the overwhelm and you can't figure out how to solve it, and you're one of those high achievers who always knows how to solve everything, and your brain is always going a million miles a minute and you're hustling, and for whatever reason you're at this point. Most of us are in our midlife, but at this point it's just not working. This webinar is going to be perfect for you. I have figured out the pieces that we all seem to be missing, that put us in this position. I've figured out this calm method which I use with myself and with my clients to help us practice the skills that we need to get out of overwhelm, and these are skills that people have not taught us before and we haven't needed to practice so much before, for whatever reason. So this is the missing link if you're not sure how to get out of your current state of overwhelming, and I'm really excited to teach you about it.
Speaker 2:I've been having so much fun putting the webinar together, so be sure to register for that if you have it. And the other reason I started by talking about rescheduling that webinar is because it's actually part of my topic for you today. So today I want to talk about decisions and how we make decisions and how to make decisions easier, and I was inspired because this decision that I made to reschedule the webinar this week was really difficult for me. So I have actually been attending to do this webinar full disclosure since January and with my new job and family things and whatever else, I just haven't been able to get it on the calendar until it was going to be scheduled for today, february 8th, and I had everything sort of prepared and mapped out at a plan for my week to be sharing about it and finalizing the content and spending time with my family before I head back to work again. I don't see them a lot when I'm working.
Speaker 2:I had it all kind of mapped out and then last week, at the end of the week, I came down with this terrible virus that has I think it's influenza. I did have a flu shot and I didn't get tested, but just from the symptoms and how sick I was and how sick my husband was and how sick my son was before that, I think my son gave it to us and I know that several kids in his class were out with similar symptoms. So whatever this virus was, it was a doozy and it had gone through my family and actually I thought I was going to get away without getting hit with it because I was away. I commute and stay away for a few nights when I do my other job. So while I was gone, kevin and Charlie were sick and I came home and they were mostly better but for whatever reason, they must have still been contagious and so I came down with this terrible virus at the end of last week.
Speaker 2:It was one of those things where I could barely keep my eyes open. I could barely get out of bed to go take medicine and take a shower and go back to sleep. I basically lost three solid days to just sleeping. I have this app where I track my sleep to help myself not get super sleep deprived, as I tend to do when I'm excited about things I'm working on. I happen to track my sleep and I can see that I slept like 16 hours a day, which is very much unheard of for me. I would wake up and just still feel exhausted and have sinus headache and all these things. My point is I was really sick, my family was getting over being sick and the days kept going by.
Speaker 2:I looked at the amount of time I had left until this webinar and how I was feeling and all the other things that I planned to do and scheduled out and all my priorities that I was honoring with my family and whatever else. I was like. I'm not going to be able to do a great job of this webinar on Thursday, yet it's not that simple to just cancel it. I'm saying this to people who probably can't understand what I'm getting at. If you're a high achieving working mom a lot of you are nurses or doctors or something like that my mentality around canceling things, backing out on things that I've said I'm going to do, letting illness slow me down, has just, for most of my life, been that's not acceptable. I have a belief system that's very strongly around if you say you're going to do something, you do it. If you don't, that makes you flaky. It makes you unreliable, potentially unprofessional.
Speaker 2:In this case, where I'm so passionate about this business and I really want to make it work and it doesn't grow if I don't put my time and energy into it and I want to give it my time and energy I was really just struggling with giving up on doing something that I felt was a big part of that business that I committed to do. I didn't want my clients to think that I was going to look flaky and maybe decrease the number of people that show up and all this stuff. All those thoughts and feelings and emotions were coming up as I was sitting there, feeling miserable and thinking really like, on the one hand, I can't slash, don't want to do the webinar in this state and, on the other hand, I don't want to disappoint people and this feels really at odds with how I do things in my identity, also knowing that I can and have accomplished many things in my professional life. Feeling sick I actually I'm sure I probably could have felt just as sick at many other times in the past but what I normally would do, I would never just let myself lay in bed and sleep the 16 hours that my body needed In the past, like if I was in my medical training or whatever, had finals in college or something. I would have gotten up. Taken my 24-hour suit of fed talking about the good stuff, the pseudo-fedron that you have to actually sign for behind the counter, which I like to call my watered down math. Take that stuff, hydrate, get up, take a shower and just be out the door and getting my work done. Deadlines are happening, no excuses, get it done. So I have that experience in my life and I have that type of personality where it's easy for me to think like if I need to get something done, I can always power through However my body feels is something I can surmount in order to get to my goal. And at the same time, the webinar was still a few days away and I figured I would probably start to feel better and I certainly could work really hard to squeeze in the six, seven days worth of work and family and personal things I need to get done and squeeze all those things for six days into the next three days and get the webinar done. That's the goal that I set and the commitment I had made to put it on.
Speaker 2:It's funny because I kind of sat there at this point feeling very conflicted and unsure about this decision right, and I also realized that this is part of why I end up in my own version of that headless chicken syndrome that I was talking about and you can listen to last week's episode for more on that. But I think it's pretty clear if you've listened to what I just set up for you here. Imagine yourself in that position. Maybe you have different values around all these things and this seems like an obvious choice for you. But think of a time when you were trying to decide what to do or you weren't sure if you wanted to do something, you weren't sure if you should cancel it, and you felt very conflicted, like you felt like there were strong reasons on both sides to do each thing right. And think of how that feels. It feels so uncertain and overwhelming. It adds all this stress right.
Speaker 2:And think about what it would have looked like if I had gone ahead and done the webinar right. So if I had said gone on autopilot, doing what I've always done, the way I've always found success in my life through my private prior businesses medicine, everything right, I would have gone on autopilot, I would have continued my plan to do the webinar as stated and I would have sucked it up through my illness and I would have also not wanted to give up any of the things I promised to do for my family or personal life. And so the next three days I would have what I would have looked like a headless chicken. I would have looked like a chicken with the set cut off, rushing around. I would have been sacrificing my own sleep, potentially making it harder to recover from this illness, potentially not doing a great job on the webinar and coaching people, I don't know. Maybe I would have done great because, like I said, I've been pretty successful with that in the past.
Speaker 2:But the point is, when I really thought about that way, I was like gosh, like I don't want to live my life in this headless chicken syndrome vibe anymore. And then I was like, okay, like this is where my call method comes in and I want to just sort of quickly walk through that. So in this case, if you think about the call method, I'll mention how each step works briefly as I go through this example, but I have also outlined it a few times in the past. So the call method the first step is to connect with yourself with compassion, right, and so some of that is what I already articulated to you just a second ago is I really had to connect with, like what am I feeling here? And name those emotions, so not bypassing and just going on autopilot to what I'd always done, but really saying, okay, I'm feeling guilty and feeling conflicted. Here's the reasons why. And I had to ask myself that key question like what do I need here? And I had to get silent for a second and listen for the real answer, because the real answer was I needed to sleep and rest and not be in a big chaotic rush pushing it to get this done. And in the interest of time you know there's a lot of reasons, like about my family and what's coming up after this I just was like you know, for me, what I need is to take this time and I also articulated all the feelings that came up with that and I gave myself in the C step, the connecting step.
Speaker 2:There's also connecting with compassion for yourself. It makes sense that I feel this way. Of course, I'm going to feel all the stuff I just described. I'm sharing it with you here because I have compassion for myself and you might think, gosh, she sounds crazy, right, and I'm allowing you to think that, if you want, I choose to love and accept myself and my crazy brain. You know my crazy hyper focused brain that's got the ADHD and all the energy and things that can do all the things and wants to overachieve and hustle and feels bad when I don't like. I'm just loving all the stuff that comes with that, all the emotions, and not being embarrassed because that's who I am, even if it doesn't make logical sense to anyone else, right? So I really sat and love myself and again, I've told you guys this process doesn't take a lot of time. It takes less time. It takes more time for me to explain it to you than it does for me to just do it. It becomes a habit after a while too. So I don't even like objectively articulate these things all the time. It's just a knee jerk that I have for myself is to accept and name my emotions and sit with them and then, once I had really calmed myself down in that way or connected with myself, I should say, then the next step in the call method is to assess.
Speaker 2:So you assess the unspoken rules that are driving you and the thought errors that you're having, and I articulate a lot of that here for the last few minutes what I figured out. And as I started to assess the situation, I was like gosh, I'm slipping back into a lot of these unspoken rules that I've always had, like my hustle mindset and my perfectionism and people pleasing and all these things and all these rigid expectations, and I noticed where I was making this into a bigger deal than it needed to be. Potentially, I'm assuming a lot of stuff about how many people are going to show up, how many people are going to be bothered by this, what's going to be most successful and helpful for my clients, for my business, whatever, and that kind of leads. I kind of started talking about the third step, which is loosening your grip, which is not just noticing and assessing all your thoughts and unspoken rules and thought errors, but also questioning them a little bit and loosening up from them. So what else could be true? Like I'm making this mean that I'm unprofessional and I'm flaking out and my business isn't going to grow as effectively and my clients aren't going to respect me. And you know that I'm lazy and that I should work harder, I should have planned my time better.
Speaker 2:I make it mean all those things right. I notice all those thoughts and then I ask myself okay, that's what you're making me. What else could it mean? What else could be true? Is that really true, jenny? Right, and then I start to get a little distance. I loosen my grip from that. Well, there are possibly other things people might think. People might think that that's real leadership. People might find it to be a good example of what I teach, practicing what I preach. People might, more people might be able to come because now I have more time or more notice, or it's a different day of the week, right, and there's a lot more down that pathway.
Speaker 2:But again, I wanna kind of keep this brief first. So suffice to say, when you're in that loosening your grip step, there's a lot of questions we ask ourselves in this method to really just take a little bit of the edge off and notice how we have not decided I still haven't decided what I'm gonna do at that point. I'm just noticing on both sides of this decision what's coming up for me. And another question I really like in this loosening your grip is what's the worst that will happen? Right? And so if you're in the throes of a decision like this, what's the worst that will happen if I reschedule? And you can also ask yourself the opposite, like what's the worst that will happen if I go ahead and do it? Right? And again, this sounds like an obvious question, but often our brains are assuming the worst case scenario and actually not spelling it out. And actually forcing your brain to answer the worst case scenario is sometimes really grounding because it puts it into like black and white facts, right, it's like I will never be able to be a successful coach and I never will think I'm a play forever and I'll have gone against my core values. Right, I mean I'm exaggerating a little bit, right, but really the worst that will happen is some people might not end up hearing this information. I mean, that's really the worst that will happen. Right, maybe a person or two would have signed up to work with me, but, honestly, that worst case scenario is not that bad, right, and maybe they weren't meant to work with me anyway If me honoring myself and my core values is a deal breaker to them, right? Okay, so now we're ready to move on to the fourth step, which is make a decision, and what I like to think about in this phase, for myself and my clients, are a couple of key concepts.
Speaker 2:Remember that you are always in control. You always have options. You do not have to do anything. I've talked about that on a podcast before. If you wanna go back and listen to it. You always have options.
Speaker 2:However, it's also true that every option is going to have some degree of discomfort, pain, associated with it. It's just part of life, okay. So, with that in mind, well, and I should say. The other thing you need to think about is the fact that you cannot change other people or other situations right. So you have to get kinda realistic. But with those ideas in mind and with your first three steps in mind, having connected with yourself, assess what's going on with your brain, loosened your grip on your beliefs a little bit so you can be more open-minded and flexible.
Speaker 2:Then you say, okay, assuming I could be successful either way, which option do I prefer? Which one do I want more? Which one feels right to me? And then a related question is assuming there's discomfort with either option or either choice, which discomfort is gonna take me in the direction I wanna go? Okay, so you're. Basically, I like to say this is like choosing your heart. So in my case, there was going to be some discomfort and difficulty with canceling, and there was going to be discomfort and difficulty with continuing right. It's not possible to have a choice that just feels great, and the fact of the matter is that's true in most of life. We often just like to pretend that one of our choices will make us feel perfect. So what you want to do is kind of bypass that whole issue and just get your brain to focus on putting aside the fact that I'm nervous I might fail and I'm nervous about the discomfort, right, if we assume that there's no failure, I'll be successful, it'll work out either way, I'll take care of myself. And if we assume that there'll be discomfort on either side as well, which one do I want? Okay? And that's really about connecting back to your core and what you want most out of life and things like that.
Speaker 2:Another question that I really like to ask in this make a decision in time is do I really like my reasons for wanting that? Does that feel good to me? And I have a whole podcast as well about this where we and something I work with my clients on about okay, I think this is what I want to do, and then we really walk through why you want to do it, if you don't want to do it kind of thinking through that, and then at the end we always come back to do I like my reasons, okay. It's a really nice grounding question and something I just want to mention here that didn't really as much to my example today, but it's a really helpful question too.
Speaker 2:Is assuming that this won't change meaning, like this work situation won't change the person I'm dealing with and my marriage won't change, assuming the external factors won't change, because often we're hoping they'll change or we're hoping something we do will change them, and that's like making our decisions kind of messy. So if we just say, okay, assuming that I can't control things external to me people, situations, weather, whatever, assuming that doesn't change, even though I'm hoping it does, so it doesn't change, what are my options and what do I want? Okay, so it takes again any of these like messy thoughts you're having out of the equation. So that's the process I went through. And then again, as I kind of articulate earlier, I was able to say, okay, I know this is not going to be easy and my brain's still going to offer me various things that are going to feel difficult and challenging, but I like my reasons for this decision and I'm going with it. Now I always talk about my calm method, c-a-l-m, and I have actually added a sort of semi-optional, but I really don't think it's optional. Last part, which is ER, so calm ER and the E is evaluate. And the reason I think the evaluate is not optional is because what that does is it brings us back to after we make our decision. We are going to have to live with that decision right.
Speaker 2:And often one of the things that happens after we make a decision is then the discomfort comes and our brain blames us, because our brain was looking at both options and it decided, okay, this is the best option, and then we didn't make it. So let's say, I made this decision, I canceled this thing, and then someone messaged me and said like I can't believe this, like you're a terrible coach, you know? Or a bunch of people canceled and didn't come, and then I got no one to sign up with me and I didn't reach anybody after all that and it was a waste of time. There's always that risk that my brain is going to say well, jenny, the whole reason, like you know, this happened is because you made the wrong decision back then, and then I would start beating myself up, and the thing that's interesting about that is that beating myself up after the fact is a choice I am making with my own brain, which means I can also choose not to do it right. So one of the biggest fears we have about locking in on decision is that later on something will happen, it will feel bad or it won't go well or whatever, and we know that we are then going to think that was my fault, I should have figured that out better. We are going to be hard on ourselves, but that's a completely optional choice that your brain is making, right.
Speaker 2:So you want to plan ahead for your evaluate stage to be very intentional and you're going to say, when I evaluate this, I never intentionally mistreat myself, I will not beat myself up. Right, I will remember that there was going to be risk and discomfort in either path. I never lose. I either win or I learn. You remind yourself of those things so that then, whatever path you take, you can trust yourself to not be yourself up. I would go out on a limb and say often, the worst thing that can happen from making a quote bad decision is literally what your own brain is going to do to beat you up about it At the time. Other people aren't even going to care, but your own brain is like this huge bully. So you want to plan ahead and have the skills to evaluate without being a bully to yourself, and that comes from an intentional choice ahead of time. While you're deciding the thing, that, okay, we don't have to freak out because we know that once we make this decision, whatever it is, we're going to have our own back. We're going to choose to sit with those negative emotions and recognize that that was part of the deal and try to improve.
Speaker 2:And then the R of calmer is repeat. And then you repeat the process and you'll notice that, let's say, you make the decision, it doesn't go well. Your brain offers you all these thoughts that you're beating yourself up about. You evaluate, okay, what worked, what didn't. Okay, maybe I want to, you know, maybe you do want to change your plans and try differently. Now that you've had that experience, that's fine.
Speaker 2:So you evaluate, decide what to do differently, but then notice how the next step is repeat. So you go back to the beginning. You start back with connecting with yourself. And what do you do? You say what's going on, what's the matter? Connect with compassion. Oh, it makes sense that you feel guilty and that you want to beat yourself up and you feel ashamed because you feel like you're thinking that you made the wrong decision. That's okay, you get to feel that way. And also, let's like, take it down a notch and then we'll assess what's really going on, right. So you literally use the calm method to make your decision, and then you go through the calm or and go back and use the calm method to manage your mind after you make the decision as well.
Speaker 2:Okay, what I want you to know is that the framework for making a decision does not change, whether it feels like a bigger decision or a smaller decision. This is a lie. Our brain tells us right that, like you know, if you're thinking about whether to leave your job or leave your marriage, or you know what school to go to, that that decision should be handled differently than the one about whether to cancel my webinar, right, or even something even smaller than that. And this is one of those lies our brain tells us to keep us stuck in indecision and overthinking and all these things. Don't get me wrong. There's an emotional component that can feel bigger, but again, that's optional and your brain is often creating that.
Speaker 2:I have actually used this exact system over the course of a period of years a couple of years to come to the conclusion that I wanted to leave my job After having been there 14 and a half years, put in my heart and soul into it, being in leadership. It was a very difficult decision, it was not straightforward and I still feel a lot of grief, and it was very bittersweet. It was also definitely the right decision. I'm so grounded and confident in that and I truly can't imagine having tried to make this decision without these tools and being this grounded and solid going into it. Because as I went through the process, a lot of people didn't understand, made a lot of assumptions, made me feel quite isolated. There would have been a lot of opportunities for me to feel shame and regret and to question myself. But because I had done all of this work ahead of time, using the calm method, even when those people did say and do things like that, I really just realized gosh, they just don't understand. Because I knew I was so solid and grounded in my reason, I knew that they just didn't understand or they would never be saying or assuming that about me. And that's the kind of confidence, I will just tell you frankly, I never had in my life until the last couple of years.
Speaker 2:It's pretty awesome. It doesn't take away all your problems, but it just makes you feel so much less vulnerable to everyone else's opinions. So it sounds simple. This may sound like a trivial, small decision to you, but it can work for anything big or small. Wouldn't you love to feel that great if you're making a decision like whether to leave a job or leave your husband? You want to feel that good about it that nobody can make you beat yourself up about it afterward. So what you want to remember is that, no matter how big and scary a decision feels, or how small and insignificant it feels, the process is the same. It might look a little different, it might take a little longer to sort things out, but the steps are the same. And that's why I love this calmer idea, because it applies to so many things, so you don't have to remember a bunch of stuff, you can just remember those things.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I want you to know is that it gets easier and easier. This whole process I described to you that took 20 plus minutes to describe. It didn't take me that long to do. It was sort of it's become like part of the fabric of my life and I'm just doing it all the time. And it becomes more habitual. It becomes easier. It is easier when you first start to spend a little time thinking intentionally about it, to write it down, and it goes a lot faster with the coach because we can help you see your thought errors and help you name your emotions and help you get the skills down and help you start loosening your grip. And my outside perspective is really helpful for all of that, because we are so blinded to our own breaks.
Speaker 2:I learn a lot of these things I share with you from my own coaching. It doesn't like I just figured out of my own. I understand my brain really well, but I also give that to my coach in a session and she helps me kind of understand it better and that makes this work so much more powerful and more impactful. And that again takes down the amount of time that it requires for you because you get to see these patterns and your coach helps you see that. And that, of course, is my not-so-subtle plug to set up your free console call with me.
Speaker 2:Essentially, what we do is you take anything that's on your mind a decision, a frustration, even just a jumbled-up mess of things that are overwhelming and stressing you out, and you just let it all out and I listen and then I look at it and help put together a proposed plan of how we can get you feeling the way you want to feel, showing up the way you want to show up, even if you can't change the situation you're in or your family. Or maybe you're not sure, maybe you're like gosh I don't know if I want to leave my husband. I don't know if this job is right. I don't know if I want to have kids. I don't know why nothing seems to be working, why I felt so on top of things 10 years ago and now I'm not. Whatever the case, we take it, we apply the system that I've used with so many other people and with myself, and then I show you how it would look to use it for your life, and then you get to decide if you want to do that with my help or if you want to keep working on it on your own. It's really funny.
Speaker 2:This podcast is about decisions, and one of my jobs as a coach is to help you get better at making decisions.
Speaker 2:So it's not my job on this consult call that we have is not to tell you what to do.
Speaker 2:It is to sit back and help you make a decision about working with me that you feel great about and giving you those tools, and so even the call itself has a lot of value for you, because if we don't work together, you can still take those skills and feel great about that decision. But just think if working together would get you feeling the way you want to feel a majority of the time before the end of this year. Don't you want to find out? Don't you want to at least consider it? Reach out, let's set up a call and, of course, free webinar is still coming up March 6. We are going to talk so much more about how the call method helps and come back next week. I had a few more things I want to say about decisions, so I will put that in a separate episode. I have some really great stuff planned for you over the next month that I am prerecording episodes, so be sure to subscribe and have your friends follow along, and I will see you next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at JennyHobbsMDcom to schedule a free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a 5 star rating so we can reach even more women like you.