Rethink Your Rules
Struggling With a Big Decision? Ask Yourself These 6 Questions
This episode picks up from where we left off last week. We continue the discussion about decision-making and how to handle the emotions and discomfort that come with it.
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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
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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.
This episode picks up from where we left off last week. We continue the discussion about decision-making and how to handle the emotions and discomfort that come with it.
_________
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. This week we are diving right back into the topic I introduced last week, which is decision making. These two episodes are really going to go nicely hand in hand. I actually was going to do them as one episode, but the first one just got kind of lengthy and I actually am really happy with my decision to split them up, because they are going to have slightly different areas of focus and I'm hopeful this one will actually be fairly brief and kind of a good little take home action item list of action items to use when you go through a decision, whereas the other one is a bit longer and illustrates these concepts with a specific example from my life in great detail. And, as I thought about it more and more, I actually think this is perfect, because we know that humans learn best through story and examples and we remember things best that way. So I believe the time I spent going through the example in last week's episode is really valuable.
Speaker 2:For you to really understand these concepts and believe in them and see how they work, you need those details. At the same time, we don't necessarily need to spend our time thinking about all those stories and granular details every time we come across a decision in our life. Sometimes we just need to kind of have the concepts in the back of our mind and have a quick list of action items or questions to ask ourselves or a quick strategy to put in place and go. So that's what I want to do in this episode this week is give you the basic concepts quickly and then a list of really simple questions to have on hand to ask yourself as you face decisions kind of the shortcut version. So be sure you have a pen and paper as we get towards the end so you can write those down. Or you could also just bookmark this podcast and listen to it when you have one of these decisions that you're facing and just put me in your ear and go through the questions for yourself anytime you want. If you didn't listen to last week's episode, I would not stress about that. It really doesn't matter which order you listen to these in. It's just again. The other episode is going to really illustrate these general concepts I'm going to talk about now.
Speaker 2:Another thing that's kind of fun about how these two episodes are showing out is that they really nicely illustrate something about working with me, which is that I equally prioritize both theory and concepts and action, concrete action steps. So I love teaching these life coaching concepts and I find them to be really transformational, and I love being able to illustrate them very clearly, like I did in this last episode, and giving people some questions and insights that they can ponder after we're done talking and they can actually start taking to a deeper level to transform their life right and transform their minds. I love doing that. It's super fun. I could geek out on it and talk about it all day.
Speaker 2:At the same time, though, I don't love it when we spend so much time off in theoretical and conceptual worlds that we aren't bringing it back down to like the here and now and seeing changes and results and what is concrete and what is something you can wrap your mind around and actually implement and use right away. And so I always leave my clients with two types of takeaways. The first part is the concepts we talked about stuff to think about in Ponder, and the next part is a list of action items to implement right now this week. So I kind of love it because these two episodes are illustrating that. So last week's was a much more teaching, conceptual thing, and this week I am gonna basically distill all of that down into a brief list of reasons why we struggle with decisions and then a brief list of the most helpful questions you can ask yourself when you're facing a decision, whether big or small. So the reasons that decisions are difficult.
Speaker 2:Number one we don't recognize the important role that emotion plays in making decisions. We tend to think it's all logical and rational and I talked a lot about the important role of emotions and decision making in my podcast on January 26th, a couple of weeks ago, so take a listen to that if you have more details there. Number two we believe that there's a best or objectively right or correct or choice. Number three often what we are defining subconsciously as the best or right choice is the choice that will give us the least pain and least discomfort and the most pleasure. And if we're really honest, sometimes what we think is the best choice that the thing we land on that we wanna do we're telling ourselves that it's going to help us avoid pain and discomfort completely Like. I know that sounds crazy, but sometimes when you're making a decision let's say whether to leave a job or leave a marriage if you don't think about it subconsciously. What you're thinking is like if I just had a different boss, I would not feel any frustration about anything at work. I mean and we know that's not true when we say it out loud like that but we don't say it out loud like that we just think all of our problems will be solved by having this boss go away. Right, and that's a fallacy that we have, that if this one situation changes, all the problems go away. It's not true.
Speaker 2:Number four I think it was on number four we are afraid of making a wrong choice. So because we believe there's a right or best or most logical choice, we also believe there's an objectively wrong or worse choice. And when we are afraid of making that choice, to get really specific, what we're actually afraid of which we also don't often realize is we are afraid of how it will feel to have made that wrong choice. So let me give you an example. If you're being asked to apply for a promotion and you have to put yourself out there publicly and apply for it and it's competitive, and you feel insecure about whether you'll get it or not, whether you'll be successful, one of the reasons you might struggle with deciding to go for that promotion could be that you're afraid that you will try for it and fail in front of everyone. But technically you're not afraid that you won't get the job because you're not gonna lose your current job. It just means you wouldn't have the new job and you would have tried. And what's the harm in trying? But your brain's telling you the harm in trying is that then I'll feel embarrassed, ashamed, like a failure. And that leads me to problem number five with making decisions, which is that we don't trust ourselves to be able to handle those painful emotions that might come with making a decision that causes pain. Okay, we don't trust ourselves to not beat ourselves up after the fact. We don't trust ourselves to have the skills to navigate painful emotions.
Speaker 2:Number six another reason that decisions are so difficult is that the human brain is really prone to catastrophizing. So we know this is one of our thought errors that we have. And so our brain goes to the worst case scenario and is kind of bad at really defining the worst case scenario in a realistic way, just kind of overestimates how bad the worst case is going to be. And particularly if you're a person who suffers from a lot of anxiety that can be even more of the case, and those of us who have jobs that require a lot of thinking about the worst case, like doctors and lawyers and things like that. We are really extreme in this way Because our brains are just trained over and over and rewarded over and over for looking for all the worst case scenarios and being really vigilant for those things. So that's where our brain goes immediately.
Speaker 2:Number seven another reason that decisions are so difficult is that we are very disconnected from our emotions and our true self and what we truly want. And I've talked a lot about this on the podcast before so I won't be labored the point. But if you just think back to last week's episode where I gave that example of making a decision, or if you haven't listened to it, listen to it after this and just notice how much of that process rests on asking yourself what do you want? And recognizing your own internal voice, your internal compass. And those of us who have spent a lifetime focusing on achievement and hustle and people pleasing and perfectionism and external validation and are just plain busy working moms running around like headless chickens we are out of practice at listening to ourselves and what we deeply want.
Speaker 2:Underneath all of that, we're very disconnected. So often we may not even know what our inner voice sounds like or what we really want, because it's been hidden away so long and we're just not practiced at listening for it. So what we often do instead is we use the shortcut of making decisions based on our unspoken rules because we again, we don't remember what our inner voice sounds like. We don't know how to find it. We're taught that connecting to our bodies and our emotions is not a good use of our time. We aren't trained to do that. We are trained consciously and unconsciously in these unspoken rules, which are things like perfectionism and people pleasing and hustle and hyper rationality and the control enthusiasm where you control the circumstances and control their people and solve all the problems. And that leads to number eight, another thing that makes our decisions challenging, which is that those unspoken rules we've been using as a shortcut rather than listening to our own inner voice. They make decisions problematic because they often contradict each other.
Speaker 2:It's not always possible to be entirely perfect and thorough and to hustle and get everything done on your list and to please all the people around you never say no to anyone and to spend a lot of energy making other people change and making your environment better, and because you often can't make a decision that satisfies all of those rules you're trying to follow at once, then you end up in a decision and sort of going back and forth and overthinking, and one of the rules, this hyper rationality, makes us really strongly believe that there's a right answer, like I mentioned before. I mean, I think all humans think that to some extent, but certainly those of us that are in scientific or logical fields and have built careers on being logical and rational and quote unquote, right, right way in the wrong way. That belief is there. So we're telling ourselves, okay, there is a right answer, there's a right way to do this, there's a best way to do this, but I can't figure out what it is because all these rules that I usually use to figure out the right and best way are contradicting each other and I'm not really sure, and so we just end up really stuck in there. Meanwhile, our rule of perfectionism is reminding us constantly that if we pick one and do it and then it doesn't go well, then we're going to beat ourselves up because we shouldn't make mistakes, we should always get it right and we should always be able to do the best thing. So these rules just keep us really trapped right, like we can't win.
Speaker 2:The last thing I want to mention that makes decisions really difficult for us is particularly true for those who are very successful and high achieving, who have a job where they're quite empowered and successful, maybe have a lot of money. People like that so people like the women I coach right Get in this situation where their success from the past starts to work against them, and what I mean by that is that your brain has now built up all this evidence that you are able to achieve success and positive feelings and minimize pain by controlling things around you, making other people change, working really hard, going without sleep so that you can please all the people and be perfect and do all the things. And you start to have higher and higher expectations that that should always be the way that it should go and that's fine until it's not right, until you run into a situation where you can't control the other person or the outcome, or where you aren't able to find the perfect solution in between all of these rules that you're trying to meet and expectations you're trying to meet, or where you simply have too many different things to juggle. Maybe you were able to do it when you were just managing yourself, but now you've also got your family and maybe you're finding out you have ADHD and you're going into menopause and now suddenly the way you did things before is failing you and then your success works against you because you are really stuck without any resources for what to do. You haven't had practice at allowing negative emotions and recognizing when you're rocking a hard place and there's no other solution and thinking of other ways to handle it other than what you've always known.
Speaker 2:And you are really stuck on those beliefs because they have seemed to be working so well for so long. It almost would be easier if they hadn't worked so well, because then you'd be maybe more open to other ways of looking at it. So it really can come out of nowhere and make you feel very blindsided. And remember I talked about how our brain tends to catastrophize and overestimate how terrible the worst case would be. You're going to be even more likely to catastrophize the experience of not being fully successful and potentially even failing, because you haven't done it and you don't even know what it looks like, so you don't have any experience to draw on that says, oh, you know, you can feel terrible and fail and then you'll realize you didn't die and then you can get back up and try again. It sucks and it won't kill you, but you don't have as much experience proving that to yourself because you have been able to avoid it so successfully for so long. It's this black box of unknown. Okay, you may be able to see where I'm going with this, but I'm just going to spell it out for you.
Speaker 2:If that list is all the factors that make decisions challenging and you want to make decisions less challenging, less painful, all you need to do is solve the problems on that list. Right, you can literally go down. If you have problems slowing brain, like mine, you could probably guess what a lot of them are. But you don't have to, because I already did that. I took that list of problems and I said, okay, what are the skills that we need to work on here? We need to work on the skill of understanding, recognizing our emotions, getting in touch with our inner voice, our inner compass. Right, that's step one of my method connect with yourself.
Speaker 2:I said, okay, what's another thing we need to do? We need to understand the human brain and the thought errors and unspoken rules that we've been using as shortcuts. Okay, that's step two. Yes, assess your thoughts, assess your brain. Right, then we need to get a little better at questioning those beliefs that we've been holding so blindly, questioning those thought errors our brain's offering us and maybe considering that there are other ways to do things, there are other possible outcomes. The worst case might not be as bad as we think. Right, that is step three, the loosening or grip step. So, just loosening a tiny bit on these things that we have held to be immutable truths for so long.
Speaker 2:And then I knew that you're going to have to bring it all together and actually make a decision, so you're not just spinning, spinning and spinning, but that's going to feel hard because you haven't done it before. So I knew I needed to give you really specific questions and I needed to guide you in that process to open your mind up to other options you might not have considered before, again, letting go of some of those rigid beliefs, and only one way to do it mindsets. Again, I knew that I was also going to have to guide you to reflect back on your inner voice and connect with that again, practice that skill. And I knew that you're going to have to remember that you have step E coming evaluate and that in step E you are choosing to be able to not beat yourself up no matter what emotion happens and to have your own back and that you get to decide what success means to you. And that helps to decrease that fear that you won't be able to handle the negative emotions that might come with making a decision that doesn't go super well or the pain that comes up with the decision you made right.
Speaker 2:And the repeat step is also designed to really decrease that fear of making the wrong decision and the emotions that come with that. Because when you repeat the calmer method, you go back up to the top and the first step is what, connecting with self-compassion and so whatever negative emotion your brain throws at you after you've made this decision, you know oh, I have a solution for this negative emotion, I can handle it because I have a tool for it. That's my connecting step I go back up to the top and I can handle the emotion. And so the more you repeat it, the more you prove to your brain and give your brain evidence that you do have the skill to handle negative emotions and that they won't kill you. And it makes each subsequent decision easier and easier because your fear of failing, your fear of unknown, is going down, because you've now built up evidence and experience and that's why you've got to repeat it, because you have to practice it over and over. And, of course, every time you repeat it you also get better and better at recognizing that inner voice and what it looks like. And you get better and better at knowing what decisions are going to take you in the direction you want to go, because you've been asking that question. So I wanted you to really have a good understanding of how much intention and thought goes into the calm method and maybe take some notes on that and think about, when you're faced with decisions, which of these obstacles on that list I gave you are the most challenging for you, which thought errors or fears are coming up, and then think about what skills or mindset shifts you might want to work on in order to address those obstacles.
Speaker 2:And finally, the six questions you want to ask yourself to gain clarity on any decision, big or small. Number one, assuming that I can find success either way, that it will work out one way or another. Which option do I want most? Which do I truly want? And if you're not sure, maybe you're disconnected from that inner voice I talked about, so you just don't know. A good trick is to play the game warmer, colder, like you do with kids. So think about one of the options and see if you think you're getting warmer or colder to what feels right to you. And remember you don't have to, it doesn't have to feel perfect. Just choose the one that feels closer to what you really want. Number two assuming there will be discomfort and pain with any option, which discomfort takes me in the direction I want to go, and again, if you're not sure, maybe play the warmer, colder game.
Speaker 2:Number three what's the worst that will happen? Hint, the worst that will happen is always an emotion. We think the worst will happen is harm and death and bad things happening to people. But when you sit down and think about it, those things are bad because they give us bad feelings and it's the emotion associated with that outcome. That's the worst that can happen. So what's the worst that can happen? Figure out what's the worst emotion that can happen with both of these options. Number four am I able and willing to experience that worst case negative emotion if it comes to that and you want to answer that for each of the options you're considering and there's two parts for a reason because they're different questions so able, are you able to handle shame or grief or disappointment? Maybe you are, but maybe you're not willing to take that risk right now for whatever reason. And you could do some followup work on this. Like, if you're not sure you're able, you can ask yourself, well, what would it look like to be able to handle it? How could I improve my ability to withstand that? How could I improve my situation? So it's less likely, et cetera. But you just really want to get a sense of what that worst case negative emotion is and be honest with yourself about whether it will kill you, whether it is a deal breaker or not, and make sure that that is out in the open and not in the open. Make sure that that is out in the open and not affecting your decision kind of in the background.
Speaker 2:Number five is If I chose this option, what would be my reasons and do I like those reasons? You can do this just for one option if you've narrowed it down already after the first four questions, or you can do this fifth question as an exercise. For any option you're considering. What would be the reasons to choose it, and do I like those reasons? Number six is what else could help me feel great about moving forward with this decision? I know this one is a bit vague, which it has to be, because it really depends so much on your answers to the first five questions and the situation.
Speaker 2:Just to give a couple examples, what you need to feel great about it and move forward might be some questions answered about one of the options, or perhaps you need some time to get yourself in the emotional or financial place to move forward and take this risk of the spat outcome you're thinking about. Maybe you need a different option completely, because none of them are jumping out at you and none of them are acceptable, and so you need to get creative and go back and figure out what else is available to you. Work with someone who's not closed-minded, with blinders, on in your situation to see some of their options you might have missed. Maybe what you need is a time-limited decision. You know right now you want to stay at this job, but you aren't sure you want to stay there forever. You can make a decision. I'm going to stay here for six months or a year and I'm going to put a reminder on my calendar.
Speaker 2:Come back and do this process again. Maybe you're going to think to yourself during those six months. I'm going to look for certain things and see if I'm able to make it work here. Maybe you can think about boundaries or expectations that need to be communicated about one of the decisions before you finalize it. All right, so there you go.
Speaker 2:Even if you took away nothing else from the last two episodes, I hope you wrote down those six questions. I hope you will use them for any decision that comes up, and you could be surprised how helpful they are. If you have questions or need clarification, always reach out if they work for you and you have a great example of a success story using these tools. Please also let me know or write a review. I'm here anytime for a free console. If you want to bring a decision or a question or just a whole mess of things that are bouncing around in your brain and feeling overwhelming, bring them all and I'll help you go through them, make sense of them and get a plan together.
Speaker 2:Last but not least, don't forget the upcoming webinar, now rescheduled for March 6th at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern. That's a Wednesday. You'll find the link in the show notes to go ahead and register to reserve your spot, and then that will also get you the free replay afterward. The topic is how to cure your headless chicken syndrome with the calm method.
Speaker 2:So if you can relate at all to this sense of feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, struggling to know what you want, to have a purpose and tension, to be fully present with your kids, and you can't seem to figure out why you're not able to enjoy this life that you work so hard to build, that's what we're going to talk about.
Speaker 2:I'm going to talk about how we got there a little bit, but then we're really going to focus on how we get ourselves out, and the skills I'm going to teach you are not super complicated. They're simple, but they are not easy. And they're not easy in part because no one's telling you about this, no one's taught you how to do this and people aren't really talking about it still, even though those of us that have learned to do these things have seen such a huge impact. So I'm really excited to share it with you. You'll have lots of time to ask questions and have me help you apply the concepts to your own life if you'd like. So be sure to join us live if you can, and I'll be back with more next week.
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 five star rating so we can reach even more women like you.