Ep #63: How to Make the Right Decision

Ever spent a sleepless night worrying about making a decision? Or not taken a leap because choosing to invest in yourself or stretch beyond what you’ve done before feels so scary? Ever heard yourself saying, “I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do. What if I make the wrong decision?”

I get it. Indecision is a hallmark of codependency and perfectionism, and my love, have I got some remedies for you. This is one of my favorite topics, and learning to make powerful decisions, to be deeply decisive has been so healing in my life. So keep listening my love, it’s going to be a good one.

You’re listening to Feminist Wellness, the only podcast that combines functional medicine, life coaching, and feminism to teach smart women how to reclaim their power and restore their health! Here’s your host, Nurse Practitioner, Functional Medicine Expert, Herbalist and Life Coach, Victoria Albina.

Hello, hello my love. I hope this finds you doing so well. I’m so excited to share that my masterclass, the Feminist Wellness guide to overcoming codependency starts in just a few days, if you’re listening to this episode when it came out on Thursday, April 30th. We start next week, May 4th. Very exciting.

And you can still grab a spot in the course. Just hop on over to victoriaalbina.com/masterclass, and yes, I’ll put it in the show notes, and fill out the form there to get on my calendar. The course is so amazing and I made it with the same love and care and devotion with which I make the weekly podcast.

So you know it’s chock full of amazing science, woo, psychology, thought work, ritual work, and tons of focus on using thought work, of course, to build self-love, self-worth, valuing yourself, and learning how to reparent to be tender and sweet with your perfect inner children, even – maybe especially when they’re throwing a little fit. Because they need your love and care.

You’ll get tons of face time with me during the weekly live coaching calls, plus weekly recorded lessons and lots of meditations throughout. There is a monthly group breathwork session, and one of my favorite parts is that collective, that group environment. We’re building a sweet family of women who want to change their lives for the better, who want to live with intention, and will be supporting each other, making new friends, connecting, supporting, witnessing, celebrating.

And it’s going to be amazing. I mean, it already is. So if you’ve wanted to join us, act now. Don’t delay. But seriously, please don’t miss out on this if you’ve been thinking, “Yeah, I want to work with Vic. I love the podcast, I’ve been learning a lot, I want more.” Well, you can have it.

Hop on the interwebs, grab one of those last two spots and off we go. So my love, speaking of deciding, you’re worth taking care of. Deciding to invest your time and money on yourself. This week, we’re talking about decision-making. With all the energy swirling in the collective field right now, y’all are telling me that it’s so challenging to make decisions, that that part of you that’s been nervous about decision-making has really been coming to the fore during this quarantine.

To rest or to do an online workout. What to eat? Whether to answer that phone call from that friend who always catastrophizes and who you know is likely freaking out. Whether to invest time, energy, money in your own health, healing, and transformation right now, knowing that things are uncertain, while also knowing that things are always uncertain.

And codependency and perfectionism are huge players here. If you’re always trying to keep other people pleased with you, not judging you, liking you, thinking you’re doing things perfectly and that you’re constantly achieving and succeeding, then making decisions that feel risky can feel really scary.

Sometimes too scary to bear, which can lead to classically codependent black and white thinking. It can lead you to not see the growth opportunity or the possible outcomes of investing in yourself, just the worry, fear, and possible failure, where failure is a bad thing, which we know it’s not, but does your brain?

I want to tell you about my client Julia. Julia grew up with a codependent mother who always put the family’s needs ahead of her own and said things like, “I’ve suffered so much for you children and I’ve sacrificed my career, my life, to keep this family happy.”

She kept the house spotless instead of taking care of herself, she made the most gorgeous lunches for everyone else, but often skipped breakfast because she was too busy in the morning, making sure everyone else was happy, which meant she crashed out exhausted by lunch time.

Julia said that she herself was – and I do quote – “the most indecisive person ever,” particularly when it came to taking care of herself. She was unsure of her professional goals. Her driving why. Because she heard so many competing stories in her head about who she should be and what she should do with her life.

She wanted to be a writer and she was really good at it, but she took a job in finance because she wanted to make her mother proud. She said, “My mom always said things like, I’ve sacrificed my whole life for you, and I feel like I should sacrifice for her. I just want to make her happy.”

What Julia didn’t realize was she was living out the same old pattern of codependency and perfectionism her mother was living in, externalizing her worth and value while ignoring her true passion. This played out in Julia’s life by taking forever for her to get dressed. Do I wear the pants? Do I wear the skirt? That dress?

It took Julia forever to pick a lunch, to paint her house. All of this because her head was swimming with worry she didn’t even realize. Worry about failing, not being perfect, making someone else unhappy with her, displeased if she made the wrong choice.

And what was underneath all of that was this fear that she would be disappointed in herself. And it was exhausting for her, and she was constantly anxious because she was walking on eggshells with herself, spinning in confusion, second-guessing herself, doubting herself.

She also stayed in indecision from a place of fear and almost chose not to work with me because the investment was scary. And I’m so glad she chose herself and took the leap in the end. My love, we have trouble making decisions when we don’t honor ourselves, when we don’t have our own backs, and we fear that we’ll be mean to ourselves, like Julia was, about a decision we’ve made in the past.

Humans socialized as women are taught to doubt ourselves, to not prioritize our needs, to put family first, that asking for or even knowing what you want and need makes you selfish, which is posited as a very bad thing. And what I’ve learned over decades of doing this work is that so many women have so deeply lost touch with our own desires and wants.

As children, as girls, we were taught to be good girls, to be quiet and sweet and pretty and never rude or impolite, which means not speaking up, not voicing your needs, going along to get along, and can also bring perfectionism into it all, especially when there’s a family ethos of codependency, chaos, stress, lousy boundaries, expectations of achievement.

Remember, codependency is when you chronically put other people and what you believe they want and need above what you want and need, taking care of them first. And it’s also when you feel other people’s feelings. When you allow other people’s emotional state to dictate yours.

If dad isn’t happy, no one is happy. So as a kid, you worked to be perfect in order to try to keep dad happy, which is neither your job or something even possible. And so many humans socialized as women, in particular, are raised seeing their job as the upholder of everyone’s joy and happiness, and to make everyone’s lives easier.

Alternately, the flip side of that could be that in a household where a parent or caregiver is engaging in activities the family doesn’t approve of or society doesn’t approve of, such as drinking more alcohol than folks would like, using substances, any other addictive behaviors, buffering. Sometimes one of the children can choose to become the scapegoat.

And when I say choose, this is a child mind choosing. Like this is a survival strategy. This is a beautiful gift from your inner child. No blame, shame, guilt, BS here. Just saying, that child can take on that scapegoat personality and can in a way, work to be seen as the problem because that feels safer than having their parent be seen as the problem.

Whichever way this cuts, it sure can make making adult decisions very challenging. Sexism and codependency work hand in glove, my darling. Capitalism and consumerism tell us, as women, what we are supposed to want and need. That’s really challenging to sort out. Do you want to be thin and pretty?

Those words are in the ultimate air quotes because what does that even mean? Do you want to eat and move and workout and be a certain way? Or is that a lesson? A lesson you’ve internalized because it was told to you so many times. Interesting to pause and think about.

I also think of the push for productivity and achievement that comes from capitalism. That forward motion, rugged individualism, that thinking of ourselves and independence versus collective growth, community focus, a focus on connection and interdependence. All of this can make it feel like you have to go it alone, while also taking care of everyone else and prioritizing them.

So where’s the room to make decisions for you and to prioritize your own needs? Interesting. So my darlings, you are not surprised that we’re just a few minutes in and I will say, nerd alert. I actually crack me up. So my love, you, yes you, have a prefrontal cortex, a neocortex, and that’s an amazing thing.

It’s the part of your brain that drives your executive function. Reading, writing, arithmetic, driving a car, the evolved human functions. One of the most important higher brain functions is being able to think about your thinking. Meta thinking. Being your watcher, which we talked about a lot together here, my love, and of course, that part of your brain also makes decisions.

You can look to your future and decide what you’re going to do, and you can get present in the now and can make choices for your future self and your present self, and that is remarkable. Your lizard brain, the ancient part of your thinking machine can only worry. That’s its job, thank you very much. To look for danger constantly so you don’t die, which is very polite of it if you think about it. I’m very glad to have that part.

But that worry part can keep you from moving forward, unless you step in to practice making decisions for your own future from your prefrontal cortex, which can mean putting aside the perfectionism and the codependency long enough to tap into your intuition, your gut knowing. To be able to say, “I’m going to do this for me because I’m worth it, even though it’s scary to make the investment, even though it’s scary to take the leap, even though other people may not like it.”

And that’s when we evolve as humans, when we tap into our highest potential. That is such a beautiful thing. And one of the ways that I think about practicing making decisions is to make them ahead of time, which we use the thought work protocol to help us do, to decide Monday I’m going to work out at 8am and I’m going to practice that thought.

I’m dedicated to movement, even when I can’t go to the gym because quarantine. Or, I’m not going to drink this week because quarantine plus hangover is so not a cute look. Or, I’m going to do one big scary thing for myself to grow and change during this global pandemic. I’m going to say yes to investing in me, and I’m going to launch my online business or train as a life coach, or work to change my thought habits with a coach, or my goodness, whatever it may be for you.

Apply to grad school, write the novel. You make the decision for your future self and you honor those decisions. That’s how we retrain that primitive lizard brain, which is survival obsessed, and thus, lives for instant gratification because that gives you dopamine, and dopamine feels really good. More please.

That was my lizard voice. Y’all, I’m very goofy today. I’m just letting it out. Did you like my lizard brain voice? More dopamine please. I am such a goose. Just side noting because apparently today is for side noting, I love the place of my development that I’m in that I can fully be my weird authentic self and actually find it funny and not cringey or awkward or I don’t need to give a disclaimer. I can just state the fact like, today I’m feeling extra silly goosey and here I am, being me. More dopamine.

I think that’s what lizard sound like. Anyway, alright, refocusing. Another thing that can happen when we let our lizard brain drive the bus is confusion. And that sounds like, “Oh gosh, I don’t know. I don’t know if I should do this. I don’t know how; I don’t know if it’s the right choice.” It’s when you get a case of the I-don’t-knows. And when we decide, because it’s a decision, my beauty, to stay in that confusion, that rumination, that spin, is that we do exactly what we say we want freedom from, and that’s being stuck.

I don’t know equals stuck. It’s simple math. Add a reptilian brain in there. You’re super stuck. And you feel stuck because instead of making and honoring a decision, you spin around in I don’t know. And it’s usually not that you actually don’t know. It’s that you’re continuing to feed that thought into that lizard brain, and that T, that thought that you don’t know leads directly to your feeling. Confused, stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, about a decision that you could just make for yourself using your prefrontal cortex.

Your lizard brain tells you that confusion is important because remember, its job is to keep you safe. And if it has decided that decision-making is scary, it’s going to be biased towards not making decisions. So it feels important to think it over and ruminate, but there’s another way, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Another reason why you might spin in indecision is that you fear making a “wrong” decision. Yes, air quotes again. And listen, before thought work, I used to look backwards and call all sorts of decisions wrong decisions, like dating that person I dated in 2002, taking that job or class, going to there, wherever there was.

And I would tell the story, those were the wrong decisions, which kept my lizard brain rubbing its little hands together, feeling all smug and self-satisfied. If it could talk it would be like, “You see, I told you to stay at the back of the cave and do nothing. Sure, you won’t grow or heal or evolve, but you won’t regret. You won’t die.”

Here’s the thing my love, regret is a choice. Your lizard brain doesn’t know that. Your prefrontal cortex knows it for sure. It has a tattoo of it. Regret is always a choice. It’s optional. You don’t have to do it and it gets you nowhere. So what if there were no wrong decisions? What if that wasn’t a possibility?

What if instead, you could honor the you that made those decisions, knowing what she knew at that point in her life, and just move on with love and acceptance? Feel into that. Just accepting. She dated that person, she took that job, she moved to that city, she got that degree, she did that.

Just like a baby falls over about 473 times before they learn how to walk and then they fall over another 473 times as they learn to run, their choice to attempt to stand and move and locomote are not bad choices. They’re not regrettable or wrong. They’re necessary on that baby’s path to being bipedal and that’s a beautiful thing.

Would you want your inner eight-month-old to feel bad for making the choice to try to stand, walk, run? What about an actual one-year-old you know and love? So, why would you be mean to your past self or your present self for doing the next right thing as you currently understand it? What if there were no wrong choices?

By giving your past self and present self extra love and care and understanding, you open the gateway to making decisions now, without spinning in confusion, because you know and trust that future you will not judge you by looking backwards and shaking her little fist at you. You know, trust, and believe that you will have your back, that you will honor that you were in the stage and phase of evolution that you were in in the moment you made that choice and that’s perfect.

You’re learning to stand and it’s perfect. Maybe you fell and it’s perfect. Remember, fail, fail again, fail better, says Pema Chodron. And you only fail in the bad way when you stop trying and it means that you stop making decisions. If this concept of failing on purpose and celebrating failure is new to you, my darling, please finish this episode because it’s a good one and go back to episodes 39 and 40 to learn more about my philosophy around failure.

Remember, your thoughts create your feelings about everything in life. Your decisions are neutral until you have a thought about them. Whether that thought comes from your own mind or your projection of what you think someone else will think, like, if I take this class and invest in myself, my husband won’t like it, or I want to stay at home this holiday but my mom is going to lose it if I don’t come home, so I guess I have to make that decision.

This is codependency in action, perfectionism in action. Making decisions for yourself and your life, worrying about what other people will think of you. It’s not a loving choice for yourself, my beauty. And please, I get it. More than you could even imagine. And I’m telling you from the other side of these thought habits, they keep you spinning in stuckness, confusion, self-doubt, anxiety, not moving forward towards the life of your dreams.

So what if you decide that there are no wrong decisions? Knowing you’ll only feel bad about a decision if you think, “I made a wrong decision.” What if you decided that every choice you make is the next right one? Try that on. Feel into it. But really, take a moment and feel into it.

It feels really good, right? I mean, it also feels really petrifying at first and I get that. Trusting yourself is a process. It’s also a choice you get to make each and every day. Today, I’m going to trust myself and my intuition to guide me in the right direction, and I’m going to make decisions for my present and future self with love.

And of course, trauma can try and get in the way and that’s understandable, totally. I feel that in my bones. And my most beautiful love, you have two options. Stay stuck in your stuckness or gently, lovingly encourage yourself and remember, in this family, we firmly encourage ourselves. We lovingly coax, we never push ourselves.

Pushing is for jerks. We are nice. So you can encourage yourself as your most loving parent to make one more decision for yourself today, from that really conscious, thoughtful watcher place, practicing these thoughts. There are no wrong decisions, there are no wrong decisions. Regret is optional, regret is optional.

And decide that you won’t tell that story on yourself. Decide you’re going to have your own back no matter what, that you’ll honor yourself. Stand, fall, walk, fall, run, fall, repeat. So, you know I’m a practical little nurse and life coach, so I want to pause to share some super practical reasons why I want you to get really comfortable with the discomfort of making decisions for your present and future self on the daily.

One, efficiency. I love efficiency. A lot of nurses listen to the show, hey nurses, and we are queens of efficiency at work. Do the thing that takes the longest first. Don’t grab just one thing from the supply closet. Think of all your patients and grab everything they’ll need all at once. Efficiency.

And being decisive is efficient. Ruminating is not. Being in confusion and worry, not efficient. Wastes your time and most importantly these days, your limited human energy. Most of us are stretched so thin right now while working from home full-time, maybe parenting full-time, running a homeschool for the first time.

Or if you’re here in New York, gearing up to spend three hours in line getting groceries. Maybe taking care of folks who are sick with COVID or otherwise unwell, on and on. So why spend energy on things like decision-making? Why stay in that emotional energy suck when you can just decide that there are no wrong decisions and just move forward?

Make a choice and go with it, knowing you can change your mind in the future if you like the reason you’re changing it. You can also just make the decision and choose to not expend anymore energy, to sit with it for now. Remember that when you say, “I need more time to think about it,” you’re not seizing the moment you have. You’re not making that decision. Just postpones it to another moment.

I talked about this in the framework of perfectionism in episodes 56 and 57. It’s so common to just put off the inevitable because you’re scared you’re going to mess up or do it wrong. But in fact, you’re not using that one moment, that opportunity to its fullest capacity to build your life. You’re working about something you’re not doing instead. See what a hot mess that is for your mind? Making decisions saves time and saves energy.

Number two, as I said in episodes 43 and 44, all about worrying, sometimes your feeling is also your verb, your action. That is when you’re worrying about making a decision, you’re not taking action. You’re not moving your life forward, and that indecision is your action and your feeling and the result is not building an intentional life.

Saying you’re confused or you don’t know means you’re not taking action, and that inaction will live in your psyche and your body, taking up space until you take action, until you complete that cycle. And so the logical thing to do, and I think many of us do this is to buffer, because the stress, anxiety, tension of not making a decision is exhausting and brings up so many of our codependent and perfectionist thought patterns.

And when you put it off, it doubles them. It’s like a little grey rainy cloud hanging over your head. So maybe you eat or drink or exercise or make endless pro-con lists or gather more information. Re-read the website you’ve read 10 times, contemplate the benefits over and over, anything to distract you, or to make you think for a moment that you’re doing something to actively inch your way towards a decision when in fact, you’re continuing to postpone it, my beautiful love.

It’s only checking in with your intuition, with your gut feeling, and then taking action, making that decision that can free you from this bind. So one was to be efficient with your time and energy. Two is to be lovingly decisive and to not invite that grey cloud to rain all over your parade, and to take courageous action, episode 38, to move your life forward with intention.

And so three is to continue to evolve and grow and to create trust and confidence, to know for yourself that you are a person you can trust to make decisions. And I get that’s scary, but not doing it doesn’t make it any less scary. Showing yourself that you’re a person that makes bold, brave decisions is how you come to see yourself in a different light.

Thinking it over and over doesn’t. That’s just science, babe. It never has and it never will. And when you make a decision, you expand your world view, your vision. You do the thing and you either learn I want to do that more, or wow, I so don’t want to do that again.

Either way, you learn, you grow, and most importantly, you get out of confusion, out of that spin. And that helps you feel more confident because again, you’re showing yourself you’re someone you can trust to make decisions. And when you make decisions, starting with small ones and building up, you can get more and more confident.

And you know me. I’m a huge proponent of being intentional, thoughtful, absolutely. I’m not telling you to make rash judgments here or rash decisions. Like, never. My work is the opposite. I’m all about mindfulness and being intentional.

I want you to think about this; there is such a difference between making a decision from the energy of being thoughtful, and the energy of confusion, stress, I don’t know, self-doubt, I need to think this over and over for ages or spend a billion hours reading the internet to be able to justify listening to my heart. That is the rushing energy of sympathetic activation that can lead to that dorsal shutdown of I don’t know, it’s too stressful to make a decision, I just won’t.

Once I started making big decisions with a calm, grounded energy, using my prefrontal cortex, and doing so in a second, not debating and doubting and going back and forth, listening to my intuition, to my gut, to my body, it got so much easier. And I felt like a drive in me to stop procrastinating my life away and to learn to do what I teach you, to be my own watcher.

To follow my intuition and to make decisions with ease, knowing that a decision happens in a second. Sure, maybe you thought about it for a day, or a week, or a year, but you made that decision in one singular moment. And baby, you don’t have to delay it. You can make a decision and you can choose to never regret, second-guess, doubt, or worry.

Instead, you can have your own back, be your own ally, and say I made that decision and I’m sticking to it because that’s how I show myself love. So my love, I have a series of questions and prompts to offer you, to help you make decisions in your best interest with less confusion, stress, and I don’t know, less I have to think about it, and more clarity.

So number one, what if you brought beginner’s mind to this? Saw it as a brand-new question. Often, we bring our past experiences to bear on making a decision in this moment without fully investigating the new option. It’s like you’re wearing clouded glasses with a bunch of finger-stained schmutz on them. You just can’t see the new option for what it truly is. It’s all fogged and distorted.

So you get to clean your mental glasses and realize that you’re a new human today in this moment. You’ve never lived this day before. This is beginner’s mind. And yes, I’ll do a whole show about it because it’s a really important concept.

But quickly, it means coming to every moment and decision like it’s a totally brand-new thing. Maybe you said no to grad school because you were scared 10 years ago. That’s not a reason to say no today. Maybe investing in yourself for your health, your wellness, your growth feels scary because you’ve never done it before. But that doesn’t mean you can’t say yes today. Yes to change and growth.

When I’m talking with clients, I often hear, “But I’ve been doing it this way for so long,” and that stands in as a reason not to change. But that’s the reason you didn’t change in the past. It doesn’t mean you can’t take the leap and make the change you need to live an intentional life today by changing that thought.

Two, consider remarkable possibilities. I love this one. So often we’re scared to make a decision because we’re scared it won’t turn out as we hoped. Pause and consider both options leading to amazing, phenomenal outcomes you may not even have ever contemplated.

So let’s say you want to make a decision about your relationship and you decide for now, I’m going to stay with this person. And in that process, you learn about your capacity to show up with unconditional love, to put down your owner’s manual for someone else, which we talked all about in episode 20, and you practice setting boundaries and your life is phenomenal.

Or you decide to leave your relationship and you explore the process and you learn about yourself, and you practice setting boundaries, and your life is phenomenal. What would you choose if both possibilities lead to amazing, remarkable outcomes? Try that one on.

Three, what if you could say yes to both things? Hold duality and find balance. I talk a lot about holding the duality of the human experience and addressed it specifically in the last special COVID time episode. What if you held both options as possible?

You can rest sometimes and you can work sometimes. Deciding to do one this moment doesn’t obviate the option or the other. You can work in your day job that doesn’t feel tied to your passion, your driving reason why, while exploring other options. You can decide to stay in your codependent relationship while you work on yourself with a coach like me.

You don’t always have to pick the black or white option. Just know that if codependency or perfectionism are your habitual thought habits, then black and white thinking may be your default. And that’s a habit you get to explore and work with. You can hold duality, grey, my love. There’s a place, an option other than the black and white. I know you can get there.

Four, what if failure is not a problem? So in episodes 39 and 40, we talked about failure as the most amazing thing. So what if you made a choice? Took that leap and said yes and it was a failure and you learned and were able to grow? That sounds wonderful to me. What if it’s totally okay to fail at something?

But what often happens is that you predict failure, meaning a bad outcome you want to avoid, being tied to one decision or another. And so you put the decision off, postponing it until tomorrow because eventually you’ve have to make it, or just assume you don’t know how to do something new, or you allow yourself to stay in self-doubt versus doing the thought work to shift that pattern for yourself. What if failure is not a problem?

Five, what would future you say? It’s so easy to think we know what our past selves should have done and to be past critical. I do not recommend it. Instead, you can take all the wisdom and zoom forward five or 10 years and ask your future self what they think you should do now.

What would you like to have said yes or no to 10 years from now looking back? Staying small or taking the chance? Risking failure for your own growth? Set a deadline for yourself. Be it a day or a week, don’t make it too big a stretch of time. And when that time comes, listen to your intuition, your gut, and your future self and make the decision. Boom, done.

Also, remember that when you’re not making a decision actively, you are making it passively. So if you’re like, “I should read that book, I should go to this school, I should do that training, I should break up with him, I should whatever,” and you postpone that decision, in that moment, you’re making the decision not to make a decision. So you’re making a decision, my love. You either get to do it in this aligned way that your future self would be like, yeah, way to go, or not.

Six, I love this one. What would love do? This is a question I first heard the amazing Oprah ask us to ponder. There’s not much more to it. Think of love as this beautiful magnificent universal life force and ask what love, self-love, love of your family, love of the world, what would the energy of love invite you to do?

Would love invite you to take a leap for yourself, to find a way to – I’m going to stick with grad school because a lot of my clients are really figuring out their passion and their job and their career and what that’s going to look like. Would love tell you to take a student loan or get a zero APR card or borrow the money from someone, get an advance to make your dreams come true? I think it would say yes please.

Seven, what choice moves you forward in life? So, most of the time we’re overthinking something because we feel fear, and that’s okay. It’s totally okay, natural, normal, human, mammalian to feel fear. And you can feel that fear and make the choice anyway.

We can do hard things, right, my love? And you can do them with a little bit of fear in your body. A little discomfort that we know means that wild growth is coming. Don’t let fear stop you from living your most amazing life. In my coaching world, one of the things that we say is that a decision can make us want to barf in a good way.

I actually have a Slack with some coaching friends that’s called barf club. Going live on Instagram, barf. Putting out a course like the one I have starting next week, barf. Being vulnerable, barf. It’s like that queasy belly feeling of, oh wow, this is going to open me up to the world and change and potential failure. Wow, and I’m doing it anyway because I want the outcome. I want the result on the other side of feeling just a little barfy.

And it’s totally fine. With awareness and being your own watcher, you can feel the difference between a bad barf, like oh, no thank you, someone crossing a boundary, something no, and the queasy that like, yeah, do it, like stage fright. Where you’re like, I’m going to go on stage, I’m going to shine and I might barf.

What also comes to mind is this one time I was giving this really big lecture and I felt really nervous and just like, really butterflies in my tummy. And my beloved friend Becca Salmon who’s just so wise said to me, “Remember, that nervousness is just the universe or god, whatever works for you, reminding you that what you’re about to do is so important.” I love that.

When I’m feeling that feeling, that queasy butterflies in my belly, I know that I need to do that scary thing, like starting this podcast, going on Instagram live all the time, releasing my masterclass. I get to do that nervous-making barfy decision.

Eight, what’s the best- and worst-case scenario? This one is simple. For me, it’s not taking the leap. Not enrolling in the course, not starting that program, not entering a relationship, not leaving a relationship, not putting myself out there. This is the worst-case scenario. It means I’m saying no to the best-case scenario in which I say yes to an opportunity that gives me the queasies and the potential to fail and learn and grow.

And doing all of that, that’s the dream, my darling. And I want to say this clearly. This process can be so uncomfortable, it can bring up stress, past trauma, past worry. For me in my life, what’s more uncomfortable is not learning how to be decisive on my own behalf.

It was so much more uncomfortable to not make decisions to take the leap, to stay stuck and small and spinning and ruminating, living a life that didn’t bring me joy or peace, just because being decisive is scary. I don’t want that for you, my tender sweet potato. Not at all.

This will feel scary and that’s perfect. Feel it all. And then make the decision anyway and move your life forward with confidence, efficiency, bravery, thoughtfulness, and self-love. So let’s get back to Julia.

After working with me on her codependency and perfectionism, the fear of unworthiness that lies underneath it all, Julia learned to check in with herself, to see what she wants, which can be super challenging for all the reasons that I listed at the beginning of the show.

Two, to listen to and parse out the scripts and voices telling her what she wants and needs, learning to tune into her intuition and her own truth. Not the voices from her childhood, society, culture, the patriarchy, et cetera.

Three, Julia learned that there are no wrong decisions because regret is a choice, always. Now, Julia describes herself as a decisive person, which is so amazing to bear witness to. Her life feels so much simpler and she has so much more confidence and joy because she’s not spending her energy doubting herself.

Instead, she’s practicing owning her own truth and living into it, trusting her intuition, her body, and her mind, and she has the thought work protocol, so she never has to beat herself up for any decision, and she knows how to make decisions ahead of time. She gets to lovingly reframe every decision as the best decision she can make with the information she had. And to remind herself that self-love comes first in this family.

And because I love you, I’d like to end with a pep talk so you can remember that you can do hard things and I can show you how. So here we go. We’ll start, as always, with a deep breath in and out. Connect in with your intuition, your body, to get the clarity you need on the right path for you.

If that feels challenging, you can literally just decide that you are going to choose a path and not question it. You will choose it with kindness. You will make a decision. You will remember that regret is a choice, not a given. It’s an optional feeling you don’t ever have to have.

You never have to look back and say, “If only I’d done it this other way,” because you know that everything happens to get you to exactly where you are today, and where you are is perfect, no matter how it feels because it is the present moment that you currently have and in this moment, you get to choose tomorrow.

Remember, there are no wrong decisions. No wrong choices. There’s just the choices you don’t actively make. So instead, make a decision. Have your own back. Own your choices from an empowered place and pause to breathe when those gremlins of shame, doubt, self-criticism and questioning show up in your mind.

Know that you are doing what you currently believe is right for you and praise and love and care for yourself for doing exactly that. No matter what anyone else thinks of your decision, your life is yours to live. Not theirs. They are so welcome to their own thoughts and feelings about your choices and you are welcome to stay in yours.

Honor your healthy, loving adult relationship with you more than any other relationship. You break through codependency and perfectionism when you do this each and every time. And when you value yourself, your life, your needs and desires, your growth first, when you attend to your thoughts and feelings first, instead of wanting, wishing, or waiting for someone, anyone else to do it for you, you are evolving, you are growing, you are changing, you are becoming.

And through it all, you get to learn to be decisive. To decide to feel empowered, strong, capable, to know that you know what you need. And to decide that you’re going to get it no matter what it takes, no matter what you need to do, you will take courageous action again and again for your own life because you are worth it and no one else can do it for you.

This is the path to building powerful self-trust. When you trust yourself in your heart, you are confident in the world. Make your decision with one goal only, to have your own back. Always and forever, all the way through, no matter what.

Deep breath in and out. My love, this process takes concerted effort, practice, and the support of an experienced guide. And if you’re looking for expert guidance from someone who’s literally been there, then I’m the coach for you. What better time than now to do this powerful internal work?

If you’re listening to this show on April 30th 2020, the day it comes out, there’s just a few little days to grab a spot on my calendar for my upcoming masterclass. So head on over to victoriaalbina.com/masterclass. Wanted to keep that easy, and get on my calendar. Let’s talk more about the course and how you can make a powerful decision to change your life forever.

Alright my darlings, I am so looking forward to connecting with all of you. This class is going to be amazing. You’re already amazing. You make powerful decisions. Remind yourself of that. I mean, you made the decision to subscribe to this podcast so you’re pretty good at decisions.

I’m getting silly again. Alright my sweet one, I will let you go have a beautiful whatever time of day it is. Remember, you are safe, you are held, you are loved. And when one of heals, we help heal the world. Be well, sweet one. I’ll talk to you soon.

If you’ve been enjoying the show and learning a ton, it’s time to apply it with my expert guidance so you can live life with intention, without the anxiety, overwhelm, and resentment so you can get unstuck. You’re not going to want to miss the opportunity to join my exclusive intimate group coaching program, so head on over to victoriaalbina.com/masterclass to grab your seat now. See you there. It’s going to be a good one.