Overcoming the Fear of “Major” Decisions

John: You’re listening to The Present Professional, where we explore the intersections of personal and professional development.

John: To change your experience of life and work with every episode. So tune in, grab your notebook, and let’s go.

Tony: Let’s go.

John: Welcome to another episode of the present professional. Today, we’re here to talk about overcoming the fear of making major decisions. And we wanted to talk about what even classifies as a major decision. And then after thinking about it, it really is all relative. A major decision to me is not the same to Tony, is not the same to you, listener. So we’re going to come at it from a perspective of no matter where you are in the intensity at which you’re holding your decision, there’s going to be some things that will bring to your awareness that you can help yourself get to a point of moving forward because ultimately that ambivalence is stopping us from moving into our greatest potential. Now, to start, you’ve got to start with honoring and integrating the fear. Now, this fear of whatever decision you have in front of you, it’s there to serve you for a reason. Fear is meant to keep us safe, to keep us alive, to ensure our survival. And at the same time, while we’re employing those same primitive tendencies that kept us alive on the savanna, we can have the tools now to overcome them and move forward. So first start with understanding how has this fear served me? And it could be something as small as, I haven’t had to have the conversation that it’s going to take to move forward in this decision. Sometimes difficult conversations can bring up some of our most intense anxieties. Maybe it’s a feeling that your body is choosing. Maybe it’s something from your past that you’re holding on to and the fear is helping you hold on to something that has kept you comfortable for so long. And when I say honoring and integrating it, it’s like really looking at the fear like, thank you. I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I appreciate how comfortable and safe and protected that in what the way that you’ve served me and I appreciate you and now it’s time for you to step aside. I’m going to be okay so I can take back the wheel of my life and start driving forward. So that was the first concept that I wanted to bring to light and there are so many different ways that we could talk about The way that fear shows up in different ways to move through it But I want to pass that over to Tony to let him can bring up You know his first insight and any feedback you have on that Tony

Tony: then the first feedback I have is, wow, because you are acknowledging the fear in what you’re saying. You’re not acting as if it doesn’t exist. I feel like a lot of people I come across and I talk to about similar topics tend to want to imagine that the fear doesn’t exist. Or maybe it’s a prior thing where they don’t want to say that they have fear. No, I’m not afraid. No, I’m not scared. You know, and it’s like you say to honor it. That’s that’s profound. That’s big. Like, can you can you even elaborate on that some more? Like the fact that you mentioned that people should honor the fear like that? Let’s not let’s not pass that up before I jump in.

John: And I’d say that, especially as men, I see this a lot in men, like what you were saying on the pride aspect and not wanting to admit that fear is present. I think that by ignoring fear, suppressing fear, or moving forward in spite of fear, I think moving forward in spite of fear can be done while honoring and integrating it. As a matter of fact, I think it is more profound in that sense. Because when you honor the fear, you can get the information from it too. So I want to say that it’s not just all sunshine and rainbows, but to ignore fear is to ignore the insight, is to ignore the self-awareness that it can give you from honoring and integrating it. So, whenever you honor the fear and you ask it, why it’s been here to serve you. What is your purpose, fear? Whatever this biggest fear, little fear, anything that comes up in your body, that sensation of wanting to hold back. of wanting to find safety, the fight, flight, fun, or freeze responses that can come up to hold us back from making those decisions and moving forward. I think it’s we’re doing ourself a disservice by not pausing and asking the fear and really getting the insight from it. So I think that it’s a step in developing the self-awareness around your emotions and letting your emotions be messengers in a way that can serve your decision-making going forward. Because to ignore, then you don’t get the data from that. You don’t get the insight from the fear side to go into your decision-making. And sometimes it’s not ignoring the fear, yet ignoring the message from the fear might be necessary, or changing the story that comes from that message to move forward, right? We don’t have to listen to our fear to move into the decision, yet at the same time, there’s no need to ignore it. Honor it, integrate it, take back the wheel, and then you choose.

Tony: Man, that’s important because with that, if you can acknowledge the fear and respect the fear too, then you’ll realize what it’s telling you. Because sometimes the fear signal is telling you something bigger, something greater than what you can see now or what you can see coming. And if you start to unpack that, rather than run from it, you can see what and why you’re avoiding whatever you may be avoiding. The definition of fear, I wanted to point this out according to dictionary.com, is a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc. whether the threat is real or imagined, the feeling or condition of being afraid. And, you know, when you talk about the primitive nature of humanity, we used to live in fear, fear of being eaten by something bigger than us.

John: We’re not the top of the food chain, that’s for sure.

Tony: And I think now the fear is more based in societal, emotional, and even mental well-being to an extent. A lot of times it’s in our head, it’s psychological, it’s fear that causes you to freeze. Fear that causes you to not move forward and fear that causes you to not do something. You know, they say the opposite of fear is faith. And faith, without making it a religious context, is really the belief in something either greater than yourself, or something, or the belief in yourself. And I think that it’s easy to just say, well, instead of having fear, why don’t you just have faith? But I can say for me, and not from specific scenarios in my life, but in conversations and life experience, I can see that people will take the faith aspect of just simply believing in yourself and compound that with so many reasons not to believe in yourself. It’s like this logical thing we have where, well, I shouldn’t believe in myself because step 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, as opposed to just simply starting to believe in yourself. So a recent conversation I had with someone, they were They were debating on whether or not they should leave their job. And so we talked about the scenario at length. And when we got to the root of what was really going on was this person identified, started to identify what her self-worth was. She started to identify how people viewed her in her workplace. And in that, it challenged her to start to say, well, I don’t identify my work with what my company values me as. I believe my worth is higher. Fair enough. Well, what’s the real issue? Why do you want to leave? And when we came, when we brought everything down at the end of the conversation, it was really a fear of not speaking up for herself, not advocating for herself, which had led her into the placement where she was in her company. And so my advice was, well, if you want to leave your company, that’s up to you. You know, it’s a big major decision, but take this with you. Start to advocate for yourself now. Like when you walk out of the door, when you exit this conversation, you need to start advocating for yourself, whether you stay with your company or whether you leave. Because if you leave, you still need to advocate for yourself. And if you stay, this is the perfect place to practice and begin to advocate for yourself. You know, for me, I just think about that example as fear or faith. You know, most of the things for me in my life that have happened that have been successes have been because I advocated for myself. I raised my hand, I stood up, I said something, I asked a question. You know, I said, hey, we should do this or hey, I’m not doing that. I think about this podcast. You know, we always talk about this as a perfect example. And it’s like, you know, I was telling Crystal, my wife, recently, I was just talking about our podcast and I was like, This podcast is a culmination of two people who were willing to say, hey, let’s let’s do something greater than ourselves and willing to step up and figure out a way to, you know, make it happen and not make it about us, but make it about the people. And that’s a faith thing. We could easily freeze and have this fear of, well, maybe we’re not the ones who should produce a podcast like this. Who are we to say? Who are we to give advice? Who are we to, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, no, we won’t operate like that. And that is the opposite of fear. That distress and emotion is not non-existent every time we record and I hope that someone can catch something out of that and see themselves maybe in the scenario that I gave earlier with the person who had to make the major decision about leaving or staying with their company.

John: And that is such a great example of getting to the root because I see that a lot and you know folks that are jumping around looking for the again looking for the solution outside of themselves and sometimes an environment isn’t a good fit, then other times we take the problem with us. Like you said, she would have taken that same mindset into the next role, the same issue that created the part where she’s at in that role into the next role or the next company. So it’s getting to the root and that’s really great insight. So thanks for giving that example and then I wanted to present a couple more themes like that that I see come up in a lot of clients, a lot of coaching conversations, a lot of these major decision type dialogues. So one being ambivalence is huge. It’s staying safe and not making a decision at all. And that is the one that I see the most where it’s not only just ambivalence and I’m not sure what the best choice is. But it’s also ambivalent in making reasons for not making the decision, that it’s not the right time, that this needs to happen before I make the decision, or that needs to happen before I make the decision. All of this justification to stay where you are. Now, notice if you’re doing this to yourself, One, don’t beat yourself up about it. Notice it. This is all about creating awareness around the things that are keeping us where we are, not to beat ourselves up about it. So whenever you see that come up and you notice yourself giving reasons for not stepping forward, for not stepping into a major decision, not doing the pros and cons work and like really getting down to what’s going to be aligned with you. A quote that came out of my teacher training, my yoga teacher training actually was, resignation masquerades as reason and one of the girls in my training class Printed out these little cards of all different quotes from throughout the training and that was actually the one that I That I took so she printed them out for everyone else in the class. I took that one. It’s on my fridge actually to remind myself that that am I actually resigning from stepping into what might be scary but also might be the best opportunity that I’ve ever had and a direction of my life that is going to be the most fruitful and fulfilling. by making reasons that it’s not the time, or I need this skill, or I need to be this, or I need to have this recognition, or I need to be recognized by this person in order to do what I want to do. Just notice if that’s coming up. Now that’s one. And then two, black and white thinking. So these are the two biggest things I see coming up in decision-making. One, ambivalence. Two, black and white thinking. So when it comes down to either this or that. Like, if I make choice A, then this will happen. If I make choice B, then that will happen. And there is nowhere in between. There’s no compromise. They cannot coexist in any way. And I’m stuck between these two extremes. And that can look like so many different things in our lives, right? It’s, you know, I have to, it can be a lot in relationships too. Right? It’s, I have to, you know, I either have to stay with this person forever. I either have to marry this person or leave them. And it’s like, okay, okay. What else could be true? Right? What else could exist? What other conversations could we had? What else could be going on? Right? There’s, there’s so many different extremes that we place ourselves in when they are not necessarily the only ways that you can step forward. Same thing with the job, right? I can I either I either leave the company right now or I retire with them Okay. No, let’s let’s talk about Let’s talk about some things in between here, right or even the reaction to the decision, right? You know if I do this then if I make this choice, then this person is going to hate me.

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John: It’s like, okay, okay, like that might be one extreme bookend that could happen. And then, okay, what else could happen? So notice if you’re placing yourself in this box of extreme bookends and ask yourself, is there any way that both things could exist? Same thing with choosing different jobs or choosing career paths. What ways could they coexist? I want to be a veterinarian, yet at the same time, I really enjoy math and finance. Okay, so well, I mean maybe there’s maybe there’s a Veterinarian collective that you could do you could be in there accounting for or you could do back office things for that industry Right there are so many different ways to bring together the different parts of ourselves into a way that we can move forward in life that noticing that black and white thinking can be the first part to creating the life that you want by combining all of those bookends. So again, always question when you’re between a rock and a hard place. Always question when you feel there are only two options. What other options do you have? And you might find that the decision becomes much easier when you find something in the middle.

Tony: Mm-hmm. Wow. That’s powerful. Black and white thinking. Binary thinking. This or that. One or the other. If I do this, my life is going to go this way. If I do that, my life is going to go that way. Man, that’s good. You know, I’ll add on to that by saying that when I have to make big decisions, like really, really big decisions, or at least, you know, as we talk about what is a major decision that is relative, I like to use this kind of analogy or this kind of like thinking pattern. So I will ask myself, what will I or what will myself think about this decision 10 years from now? And what would my 10 years from now self say to my current self? So if I’m 30, what is my 40-year-old self going to say about this decision? What would my 40-year-old self say to my 30-year-old self? What advice would I give myself? What advice would my future self give my younger self? And when I think of things in terms of that, I start to think about the life that I want to live 10 years from now or 10 years from that decision. And then that helps me kind of walk backwards and take kind of like steps to make sure that whatever decision that I’m making is walking down the path that I would want to be living like in that 10 years from that point of making the decision. And when I look at it like that, man, it always makes the decision easier to make, especially if I have to like make a decision where I say, am I going, like you said, the binary thinking, is it this or that? OK, well, if I choose this 10 years from now, how is that? How could that possibly impact me? Am I going to appreciate it or am I going to be possibly upset or disappointed? about the life that I’m living based on the decision I make now. And when I think like that, it helps with not just major decisions, it helps with small decisions too. You know, there’s a book I love, probably talked about it already, it’s called The Compound Effect. And with The Compound Effect, every single little thing you do adds up, whether it’s good or bad. And there’s an example that the book gives about these three guys, these three friends, and basically one works out a little bit every day, one does nothing, neutral, and then one like slides the opposite way. And over time, I’m just using the same 10-year scenario again. 10 years, now think about the difference of that decision, of that one person working out a little bit every day. the one doing nothing and the one who slides in the negative. It’s the same thing with your minor decisions too. So I just want to kind of give that little 10 year analysis nugget to somebody because sometimes you do feel like it’s binary or it’s black and white and you can’t do, you’re just stuck. Like, what do I do? What do I do? And then if you start to think about your future a little bit, you’ll start to ease off. And it may not even really impact you in 10 years, but still, that kind of can help you almost look in the mirror and say, well, I know that in the future, I don’t want to live like that. So let me just at least start to walk this way.

John: Yeah, it helps you zoom out. It’s perspective taking. And when you look at the decision from multiple different perspectives, it changes how you feel because how we feel is based on our perspective. Just like you said in the definition, right? Whether the threat is real or imagined. Now, the way that the fear is coming up is because of how you’re imagining the result play out, right? The result of my decision, I’m fearful of that imagined result. And now placing yourself 10 years in the future, right? Let’s look 10 years back to decisions that we made, right? Wow, even though it may have given me a lot of anxiety at the time, I feel great about it now. I feel great about where I’m at. And it’s like, that’s where it comes down to the mindfulness aspect of it and self-awareness, right? being okay with reality as it is now, and the more that you are present and grateful for this moment, the same will apply in the future. The less you are present and grateful for this moment, the more fear you’ll have that the future will hold the same.

Tony: And let me add one nugget today is think about big decisions you had to make ten years ago. Can you even remember? What was it even? Like some of them you can when you think about it. And some of them, if you look at it, some decisions have helped you get to where you are today. But the stress and the anxiety that you had 10 years ago when making big decisions are Where are they now? Where is that stress? Where is that fear? It just dissipates because life moves on and continues on. So it’s better to go with the current of life than be sitting there for so long stuck and letting that sit on you and weigh on you for years. You can simply do something like this and take it or leave it. go to Walmart, all right? Or go to any restaurant and just look around and see how some people, you can see that they’ve just given up, you know? And you have to start to wonder, like, where am I in the spectrum of giving up? Like, am I still ambitious? Am I still going after goals and dreams that I’ve always wanted and long to live? and do, or am I starting to kind of get stuck or sitting too long in different decisions? And I’m like, I can’t make a decision so bad that now I just make no decisions, like you said earlier, John. So, you know, maybe use the Walmart analogy too. I don’t know. Do whatever it takes to not be stuck, people. That’s all we’re saying.

John: And it doesn’t matter when you start again. Again, it’s about not beating yourself up. So if you hear that and you’re like, man, I’ve been putting off decisions for years, maybe decades. Start now. It wasn’t your time to make the decision before. You needed to hear this. Maybe you’re here for a reason. And this is the time for you to start making the decisions. Again, that’s the profound effect of living in the present moment. There’s always, you can change today. You can change if you hadn’t made a decision that you needed to make in a decade, you can change today. Always. Now, you mentioned the perspective-taking tool to use in decision-making. I want to bring up another tool that you can access at any time, and that’s, it comes back to part of honoring and integrating the fear, but when it comes down to that, there are three different minds that we can utilize. So three different parts of our intuition. So you can leverage your mind, you can leverage your heart and your gut or body intuition, right? We have three sources of understanding if a decision aligns with us. So, when you’re in this decision-making phase, and each of us, you know, it could be based on many different things, your Enneagram, astrology, things like that, where we are placed more naturally in a head, heart, or gut decision-making mentality, yet you can always leverage all three. So when you’re sitting with choice A, you can logically think it out in your mind, right? Shifting perspective, doing pros and cons, right? Looking at the mental aspect of, you know, what do I think about the information I have on this decision and making it from the mind? And then you can shift down to the heart. And that’s how will I feel once I made this decision? and that can be closing your eyes, really tuning in to the emotion that comes up. You see yourself living choice A and really sit with how you’re feeling in that visualization and even in the moment of making the decision. Those feelings, the fear, maybe even the joy of you know, viewing the future of making choice A, that can be a guide for which one to make. Trusting your heart, trusting your mind, and then you move into the gut, right? The feeling, that instinct, the internal knowing that comes up, like a strong sensation that can be felt almost through your whole body at times. Like when you know something is fully aligned that you feel it in your bones. And sometimes that comes down to right when you have to sign the contract and you know like there’s something there right when it’s time you have to make a decision that might be time bound. Listen to what comes up in the moment. If there’s a strong sensation that comes up in that moment and you can make a strong request to delay or shift or if you feel like you’ve made all of the logic that you needed to get to choice A, but for some reason in your body Choice B brings much more ease and rest and peace to even your muscles, your body, your gut, those butterflies. And you got to go with choice B? Do it. Step forward. You’re listening to your intelligence, right? So accessing all of these three will make for a very powerful decision-making not just process, but a way to really live with the decisions that you make wholeheartedly and move forward present in that. If you’ve ignored parts of those intelligence, then that’s when in hindsight we think, man, I knew that didn’t feel right. It’s like how many times can any of you think of a situation in your past where you’ve ignored your heart or your gut, or typically the two that are ignored, and we think that our highest intelligence lies in our mind to make decisions logically. Yet at the same time in hindsight a lot of the decisions that you know that didn’t work out or something that you Something that you know that you had a feeling for in the beginning Like that is powerful Now, how are you going to integrate that moving forward? Sometimes it takes a pause. Sometimes it takes some time to listen into your emotions, to listen into your heart. And it takes some really profound body awareness to listen to the subtle messages from your gut, from your instinct, right? That’s really tuning into subtle sensations. A lot of this can come from working in your meditation practice as well, but it’s all on awareness to tune into those more subtle parts of our intelligence.

Tony: Man, I was listening like a student on that one. That was good stuff. That was good stuff. I think that going back to the faith and fear piece, there’s a book that I love by Napoleon Hill. It’s called Outwitting the Devil. It was given to me years ago, and it’s a great book. And in the book, he talks about a few things. He says that there are two bases that we live our entire lives off of, and it’s faith and fear, like I talked about earlier. You’re either operating from the faith zone or the fear zone. And there’s a goal to make humans, make people drifters. And he talks about drifters like at length, but, you know, I’ll just kind of define it real quickly. If a drifter would be a person that’s kind of walking through life aimlessly. And we all, we all suffer from drifting a bit at times. I mean, It’s when you kind of just are floating without thinking. You’re going through life and things are just kind of coming to you as they come. Nothing really profound, nothing really big, nothing negative either. It’s just life is life and as people say, life is happening. And that’s a goal that is by design for us to just be users of technology at a high rate, or even just consumers of food that’s massively produced. So things like that. But there are seven aspects or seven principles that you can use to attain the mental, spiritual, and physical freedom to operate from the faith zone on a more higher basis, or at least some principles to use to combat drifting and combat operating from the fear zone. So I’ll go through them real quickly. The first one is having purpose, and he calls it deafness of purpose, which is to choose some grand aspiration, maybe a big goal, and move toward it relentlessly. you know, so many principles and books around around even that outside of this book. But I think that having that having a big goal, it just helps you to combat drifting, because now you are moving towards something specifically. And if you fall into a drift zone or you fall into kind of just aimlessly wondering now, you’re at least wondering towards something that you that’s by design. It may take you a little while to get there. But, you know, having that purpose allows you to walk down a certain kind of path. The second one is discipline, mastery of self. The more disciplined you are, the more free you can become. If you’re driven by impulse, you’re likely to go nowhere like a drifter. So you want to be more disciplined and less impulsive in your decision making. That mastery will just guide you and give you some real deep level principles for all parts of your body, all parts of your life, your mind, your body, your spirit, all of it. The third is learning from adversity. And treating a failure is just a failure. Or like I like to say, treating a loss is a lesson. Whether you learn from a failure or you let it stop you is up to you. So treat failures for what they are and don’t make them bigger than they are. Fourth is environment. Control your environmental influence. Control who you hang out with. Control what your room, your apartment, your house, your office. Control what those things look like because your environment will have more of an impact on you than you think. If your environment is messy, maybe that’s just how you operate, but it does impact your level of thinking and the way that you move and do things. It’s the same. Same goes with the people that you are around as well. Fifth is time. Time can make drifting a permanent thing. So you want to control your time. Like I like to say from another book, 5 a.m. Club, Bulletproof your time because that will allow you to make positive and wise choices because you’ll say no to things because it doesn’t fit within your time because you’re moving towards a deafness of purpose. Six is harmony. In order to balance your mental, spiritual, and physical aspects, you need to operate from a harmonious standpoint and learn to trust and believe in yourself. If you trust and believe in yourself, it creates harmony within yourself. and then you have harmony with others. And lastly is caution. Always act, always make decisions, but always think before you act. And if you use these seven principles, you can operate more from the faith zone, and most importantly, come back drifting and falling into that kind of subconscious where you’re just walking through life and not really making the decisions you want to make, you’re making the decisions that come to you. Awesome.

John: We’ll link that book in the show notes as well. So if you guys want to learn more, follow up. So any of the books that we mentioned here will work to place in the show notes as well if you want to go a little bit deeper. And lastly, I want to mention Just give yourself permission. Give yourself permission to move forward. Give yourself permission to make the wrong decision. When you give yourself permission to make the wrong decision, you free yourself from the anxiety. It’s okay to make the wrong decision. A lot of what we’ve learned that have made us who we are today are because of the wrong decisions that we’ve made. So let it happen. Give yourself that permission. Use some of these tools or your own tools and the decisions that you’ve been waiting to make anywhere that you’ve been resigning in your life, give yourself permission to move forward. It can start today. Thank you guys so much for being listeners. We just love showing up for you guys every week. You do a lot for us as much as we hope that we are showing up for you guys. So interact with us any way that you can at the presentprofessionalpodcast.com. Rate us and review us anywhere that you’re listening and share us with your friends. We’d love to hear your feedback and any episode recommendations you guys have. So again, talk to you next time. Thank you for showing up.