Welcome to the Get Your Goal Podcast, the place for ambitious overthinking women to explore the mindset, emotions, and daily practices that actually move you forward. I'm your host, Pahla B Master Certified life and goal coach, author, ultrarunner, entrepreneur, and journaling expert. I'm here to help you understand the science and art of rewiring your brain for success so you can get your goal.
Ready to dive in? Let's go. Hello, friend. I have an interesting story to share about this week's podcast. It was actually supposed to be last week's podcast, and I have tried now to record this particular topic... I think this is now three times that I have tried to talk about how to make better decisions and the audio has failed
every time, and I don't know. I don't know if that's like some cosmic message that I'm supposed [00:01:00] to be getting or like what's going on with that. But here's what finally I'm going to do with this topic. Most of the audio that I recorded last week ended up being mostly usable. So what I'm doing right now is simply rerecording an intro to get you in the right frame of mind to listen to what's gonna sound like me just jumping into the middle of a topic here in just a moment.
I deleted the part of the audio that just wasn't working and I actually spent the rest of last week and the beginning part of this week finishing setting up my professional podcasting studio. Because that, that maybe was the cosmic message here that I kept putting it off. I kept, unironically, I kept not making a decision about the kind of podcasting recording studio like equipment that I wanted, because
it was good enough, which I think happens to lots of us. We [00:02:00] avoid making decisions because what's going on in our life isn't quite bad enough to quote unquote make us make another decision. And that really is the heart of getting your goal, is knowing when to make decisions, how to make decisions, and today's topic, how to make
better decisions. And so I wanted to share with you just this quick success journaling success verbal journaling about how I was ready. I was ready to step into calling myself a professional podcaster. I have now set up my studio in a way that feels cozy and amazing, and like, I'm gonna go ahead and say it a real podcaster.
This is what I have wanted for years and kept making decisions that kept having me not quite step into this new self concept. [00:03:00] This is the work of getting your goal: making decisions, making better decisions, and doing the identity work of becoming the person that you actually want to be. And while I'm recording this, I will tell you, I can actually hear my Ps popping.
So there is one more piece of equipment that I am going to purchase next. I actually, I have a popper on this, um, I don't know if that's what it's called, but I have a, a pop screen. I think that's what it's called on this microphone, but I think it needs one more tiny piece of equipment, and I'm prepared to make that decision because of this identity work that I am currently doing about how I see myself in my business. My friend,
you are 100% capable of making not just good decisions, but better decisions, and you are capable of making the kind of decisions that will help you step into being the person who has your goal. So there's gonna be an awkward little moment of [00:04:00] transition here. And then there's gonna be the rest of the podcast where we talk about this topic.
And I hope that both this intro and the rest of the podcast really serves you today. This is something that I have been working on in my own life for, well, for quite some time, and I am gonna tell you a fair bit of that story, but I wanted to actually start by telling you that this is something that is still a work in progress for me, and I think that that is such a fun place to
be, when we talk about concepts. That I am not the one who has all the answers and knows everything that has happened. But I love to show you my journey so far and kind of give you a peek behind the scenes of what your journey might be like. Now, here's the thing about making better decisions. First of all, that is just such a
qualitative thing to say, and there are a couple of reasons why you [00:05:00] personally might have clicked on a podcast with the title of How to Make Better Decisions. I suspect that you think one of two things. Either you currently think that you are indecisive or you have a hard time making decisions, or like making decisions feels very slow for you.
This was me. This is absolutely where I came from. I considered myself to be an indecisive person. In fact, I had the word decisive on my vision board for years, years, and years, because I thought that that was like a character trait. Like I personally, as a human being was indecisive and I wanted to change my character traits.
The other reason you might want to make better decisions is because you don't necessarily mind making the decisions, although you might have already like identified with the first half of it, but, but you also find yourself after the fact, really judging and second guessing the [00:06:00] decisions that you've made or you, I mean, don't even second guess them,
you simply just tell yourself, Ugh, I make bad decisions. Here's the thing about, here's the thing about this topic. First of all, yes, it is qualitative and I really wanna offer you some, some thoughts about how to think about decision making and some practical steps to help you as the podcast title promises, make better decisions with regard to
you. Like, I want you to get out of this what you want, which may not feel especially quantitative. It's why I've used such a qualitative word. My own experience with decision making has been that I make faster decisions and I second guess them less. [00:07:00] It's very fuzzy math. It's very qualitative. I feel better about the decisions that I make and about my decision making process than I used to.
And I wanna tell you right here at the jump that thinking that you, you know, are indecisive or have a hard time making decisions or that you make bad decisions. All of all of what we're talking about today is a symptom of overthinking. Because you, my ambitious overthinking friend, you currently tend to overthink things. And I say that with so much love and with so much understanding because I still, I mean, even after all of the work that I have done on myself and my goal and my mindset and all of the things, I still absolutely consider myself an over thinker.
I am currently in the process of [00:08:00] right sizing my thinking and my feeling. Because here's what's actually going on. This is the crux of everything that we are talking about today. If you currently are struggling with your decisions, it is a symptom of overthinking, and the fix for overthinking is to feel more.
Your thoughts and your feelings are, I'm gonna say, supposed to be equal. They're supposed to be in equilibrium, in balance. When you overthink, you under feel. And then there is probably, probably a backside of that where there are people who over feel and under think. I gotta tell you, that sounds so foreign to me.
I'm actually, I'm gonna put a pin in that and do some thinking about it, but I'm actually, I really am going to [00:09:00] consider whether or not that could be a thing. It probably is. Boy, that would be such a different podcast. It would be such a different field for me. Okay. I'm gonna put a pin in that because it's not what we're talking about today.
What we are talking about today, my overthinking friend, is right sizing, balancing your thinking and your feeling. And before we get to the feeling part though, I really wanna do talk about the thinking part because here's, here's what happened for me here is some of the, the information that I needed to be able to reframe the way I was talking about myself. The way I used to talk about myself, back when I had the word decisive on my vision board,
I thought that being decisive was a character trait, that it was not even necessarily a skill, but I do think that I kind of thought about it as a skill that I wanted to [00:10:00] gain. That I wanted to get better at making decisions as though there was some kind of standard of decision making that could, that I could, you know, point to and say, okay, now I am a good decision maker, so therefore I will get faster and better at it.
And part of the problem for me personally was that I had kind of a, a fundamental misunderstanding about what decisions are. And I don't say that to you like, oh, you're misunderstanding this as any sort of a judgment. I think that we all get taught about decisions in a way that really doesn't serve us.
That really makes us well, makes us, gosh, I know you heard that. That puts us in a position where it is very easy to draw the conclusion that we make decisions poorly or that we are indecisive. Here's [00:11:00] the thing about decisions. When you are making a decision, you are actually making a guess about the future.
And I don't think anybody really talks about it like that. I think a lot of people really try to say, oh, when you make a decision, you need to be certain and you need to know how things are going to turn out before you make these decisions. Or you have to be completely okay with however it turns out.
And I think, I mean, especially those of us who overthink. Being completely okay with, however it turns out, feels ridiculous. But here's what I really want you to know. When you're making a decision, you are making a guess. You are. You cannot know the future. It is. It is. I mean, by its very nature, the space time continuum moves in one direction.
The only thing you can know is the past and the present. The future hasn't happened yet. You cannot feel certain about the [00:12:00] future. And I'll get to what you can feel a little bit later in the podcast, but understanding that you are making a guess... It could go one of two ways. It could actually put you in a pit of deep despair and send you into a bigger spiral of overthinking because you can't be certain, or, and here's what I offer you.
It could kind of let you off the hook. Because you have been trying to operate in some sort of a zone of certainty, recognizing that the future is uncertain can let you stop trying to feel certain. Rather than that being your guidepost. Again, I have more later in the podcast about what can be your guidepost.
The second thing I really wanna offer you, and this one was a huge game changer for me, is that you are not deciding [00:13:00] the outcome. You are not deciding the consequences. When you're making a decision, you are deciding your course of action because that's what you have control over, my friend. Often we get into this pickle of overthinking because we are trying to control things that are outside of our control.
What you have control over is your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and your results. The consequences of your decision, the outcome of your decision has so many ridiculous outside factors. In fact, that is the next bullet point in my list of notes, is that outcomes are literally never one-to-one, you make a decision and then you get a result, [00:14:00] and they are a complete 100% correspondence of one to the other.
When you recognize what you are in control of and what you are directing and what you are guessing about, and really truly letting things outside of your control be outside of your control, a/k/a, the future, and all of the other factors that go into the consequences or the, the outcome, and really take responsibility in a beautiful, loving way for
your course of action. All of a sudden decision making feels a little bit different. Let me make a little bit more of a point about the outcomes are literally never like a one-to-one decision equals result. Outcomes always, always have dozens of factors and very few of them are in [00:15:00] your actual direct control.
So when you are analyzing a decision, either beforehand or after the fact, the only thing that you, I'm gonna say should be judging and neither one of those things is correct, but the only thing that is fair to analyze is your actions. And really when I'm talking about judging, what I mean to is paying attention.
Because the thing to pay attention to is your feelings. What? I know I've given you plenty of foreshadowing like, like I know you saw that coming, but here's the thing about making a decision about your course of action. The reason a decision could feel lousy is because either beforehand or after the fact is because you are trying to make a [00:16:00] decision about your behavior without factoring in your feelings.
But here's how the world actually works. Here's how you actually work. When you have a thought, your thought creates your feelings, and I mean that in every literal sense biologically, specifically. Your thought is a spark of electricity in your brain, and that spark of electricity sends out a cascade of hormones.
The hormones in your bloodstream create physiological sensations, AKA feelings. Your emotions are an interpretation... Your emotions are your brain's interpretation of the physiological sensations in your body that we have given [00:17:00] names to. When you have a, a jittery feeling in your extremities, we very often, I mean, we very often don't notice the physicality of it, but we call it because your brain has interpreted those physiological sensations,
we say something like, oh, I feel antsy, or I feel anxious. Your brain interprets the physiological sensations in your body, your feelings, and gives them a name. So your thoughts create your feelings, and then it is your feelings job to drive your actions. Now here is where we run into trouble when we are making decisions about your course of action
without paying attention to your feelings. You can, through willpower or judgment or demanding of yourself, you can behave. You can make [00:18:00] yourself behave a specific way. But when your behavior is out of alignment with your feelings, when you didn't listen to or ask your feelings' opinion about your course of action, that is why we a spend time dithering, because we feel whether we notice it or not, or whether we acknowledge it or not, because oftentimes this is
this is very behind the scenes, very subconscious below the surface, we've been taught to listen to our brains and not our feelings. It's why we feel indecisive is because we are offering ourself these, this list of this course of action or that course of action, or this other course of action, and this is how it could all turn out and all of the feelings don't feel good.
Which is why we are struggling to make a decision about how to proceed. It's also why we judge ourself after the fact, because we [00:19:00] made ourselves behave out of alignment with the feelings we were having that we chose not to notice. And I say choose, that sounds really judgy. So often we shove our feelings down because we've been taught to, we just don't even notice that we had a lousy feeling about the course of action that we chose, and that is why we judge ourselves afterwards.
Your brain on some level is noticing that your body is not in tune, you are behaving, or behaved in a way that was not in alignment with your feelings. This is why in order to make, I'm gonna say better decisions, you want to ask both your brain and your body for their opinion so that you can make a decision.[00:20:00]
I wanna offer you a story about my own decision making process that may or may not feel out of reach to you right now. I have what I call a hell yes, and I feel like I have talked to you about this and I could not point to which specific podcast episode. I feel like it was the one where I was sitting in my Thunderbird, I think it was wake up call.
I don't know that for sure. I don't know that for sure. You're welcome to listen to any of the old episodes anytime you want to, for anything. In any event, I feel like I have talked to you about my decision making process. I know instantly when my brain and my body are in alignment with a course of action, it feels like a hell yes.
That's what I call it. You could call it a big yes, you could call it a deep knowing. You could call it your instinct, your intuition, trusting your gut. [00:21:00] It kind of doesn't matter what you call it. In fact, it definitely doesn't matter what you call it. What matters is that you recognize it. What I'm going to offer you as your practical course of action from this podcast today is this recognition of your yes and your no.
There is an excellent chance that you have been taught throughout your life, on every single level, even from the most basic function of you were taught in school, that when you were hungry that you had to wait to eat until it was time to eat. That when you had to go to the bathroom, you had to raise your hand and ask and sometimes be told no, because we were in the middle of a test or we were in the middle of a lesson or, or whatever.
You have been taught to override your your body's [00:22:00] sensations, which include not just your need to go to the bathroom or your need for fueling, but your other desires. I want to do X, Y, or Z. Like literally fill in the blank. You've been taught to override your Yes. You've been taught to override your no. There were plenty of times,
very early in your life, when you didn't want to do something but had to, for your parents' convenience or for whatever reason, I mean, to behave and fit into society. I mean, sometimes, sometimes we can't behave the way our baser instincts would have us behave. There are all kinds of reasons why you were taught to override your yes and override your no.
There are all kinds of reasons why it is a good idea to pay attention to them now. [00:23:00] Getting in balance with your thinking and your feeling means learning to feel and recognize when a decision feels good to you and when a decision feels bad to you. Recognizing, and I, I, I tell you, I have a name for my, for my, no, it's not a hell no either.
It's a not now or not like this. I tend to believe that there is always a decision that can feel like a big yes, although sometimes it's not even a big yes. There is always a decision that can feel like a yes, and sometimes that yes can be very subtle. Sometimes the no can be very subtle. Learning to understand your [00:24:00] personal cues,
learning to hear when you are asking yourself to behave out of alignment with your feelings, learning to hear that you are dithering because you are not to offering yourself a yes choice. Learning to recognize all of your cues. I have put some of my own cues into language. I, I've learned to recognize when I'm dithering, when I'm arguing with myself, when I'm trying to convince myself, when I'm making a pros and cons list.
When I'm thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking, instead of simply asking my body, is this a yes or is this a no?
Putting that into practical use is probably what's going to feel very difficult for you, and I really offer you that this [00:25:00] is a practice, this is an ongoing process that you can develop for yourself. In fact, it's one of the things I coach on, i'm gonna say most frequently. I, I do not have any quantitative, I have no quantitative numbers to tell you what I coach on most frequently.
Gosh, I've, I've never even tried to figure out, I think, I think honestly, okay. I come to the podcast. Anything that I'm talking about feels like I talk about it a lot in coaching. This is how I come up with a lot of my topics for the podcast, is I think about something I have coached on recently or something that has come up in coaching most recently.
So therefore, because it is most recent, and because I have taken the time to develop it into a podcast topic, it always feels like, oh yeah, we talk about that all the time. I cannot even imagine trying to make a chart of like, here are the topics we coach on and here's how often we coach on them. That's really [00:26:00] funny.
In any event, in any event, I do believe that we coach on this a fair amount inside my Get Your Goal membership because, I mean, here's why this is important to you along the way to your goal, you will be making decisions. You will be making numerous decisions. I can't even quantify that one either. But in the hundreds to thousands of decisions and micro decisions along your way and really being able to make decisions faster and better
is what's going to take you to your goal. I mean, part of what has taken me, I'm gonna say so long, that's really judgmental, but here we go. That sentence is out of my mouth. Part of what has taken me so long on my way to my goals is the dithering, the taking of time to make the decision to behave, and then the judging afterwards.
The faster I get at making [00:27:00] decisions and the more I have my own back, because of that alignment of my feelings, my, my thoughts and my feelings and my actions, the faster I'm moving towards my goal. You will, I'm gonna say you will want to make better decisions. You will want to make decisions that are in alignment in order to get to your goal.
This really is part of what I often say to you, that getting your goal is a process of getting to know yourself. The more you understand yourself, the more you understand your decision making, the more you are leaning into who you are, what your yes is, what your no is, recognizing when you are convincing, when you are arguing, when you are talking yourself into or out of a decision or judging yourself for it
afterwards, really knowing [00:28:00] yourself speeds up your path to your goal. There's no such thing as a good decision. There's no standard out there. There's your standard. There's the speed you can achieve and the lack of second guessing or judging afterwards. And the way to that is to understand yourself. To really hear what you're saying and when you're saying it, and how much you are thinking, thinking, thinking instead of feeling. Balancing your thoughts and your feelings in order to decide your course of action is how to make better decisions.
My friend, I hope this was helpful for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk [00:29:00] to you again soon. If you are getting a lot out of the Get Your Goal Podcast and you're ready to take your journaling and mindset to the next level you belong in the Get Your Goal Membership. Inside you'll find the expert coaching insights and interactive community of other ambitious
overthinking women that you've been searching for. With weekly group coaching, an expansive library of resources, daily accountability, and a safe space to dig deep at your own pace, the Get Your Goal Membership has exactly what you need to get your goal. Head over to getyourgoal.com/membership to learn more and join today.
I can't wait to see you inside.
