Welcome to Running to Myself. I’m Trisha Stanton. Life and mindset coach, running coach and host of Running to Myself.
16 years ago I ran my first marathon. The process of training for that first race changed my life. This podcast is my opportunity to share some of the lessons I have learned through the many ups and downs of life during my almost 2 decades of running and learning more about who I am. It is my hope that through my stories maybe you will see a bit of yourself as well and find a nugget of truth and inspiration to take with you. Let’s get started.
Do you struggle with decision making?
Do you find yourself needing other people to weigh in on what you should do?
Do you have a lack of trust in your ability to make decisions?
Does your brain seem to resist decision making?
You are not alone. Let’s talk about it.
In last week’s episode we began looking at the idea of developing a strong inner voice. When I talk about my inner voice, what I really mean is the trust I have in my ability to make decisions for myself.
Let's examine for a moment what is happening when your brain is faced with a decision to make.
It is common in certain situations for the brain to be resistant to decision making. This is most likely to happen when you are faced with complex choices, overwhelming information, or situations that trigger strong emotional responses. These situations can lead to hesitation, procrastination, or even paralysis in making a choice.
Why does this happen? Because of the brain's natural tendency to conserve energy, it wants to avoid difficult computations, complex decision-making processes.
This reminds me of something that happened just a few days ago! My sweet little granddaughter was trying to calculate what she could purchase for her Roblox game with the Roblox currency she had earned. She knew how much she had, but figuring out what combination of items she could purchase within the app required some math that involved subtraction with borrowing. So she came to me with her calculations and the hope that I would just give her the answer to her subtraction problem. Poor kid, when grandma is a former teacher, there are no free answers to math problems! But of course I was going to help her work through it. As I helped her set up the problem and work through the steps I watched with fascination as her brain gave a little bit of resistance with each step required to get the answer. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, but it was a somewhat difficult computation and her brain did what brains do and offered up resistance each time the numbers required regrouping and therefore more complex problem solving. Because what she wanted was on the other side of that math problem, once she realized that the grandma shortcut wasn’t going to pan out, she got down to the business of pushing through the resistance even though her brain kept offering it. If you are feeling down on yourself or wondering why your brain is so ready with resistance, just remember, you have had a lifetime of this being the brain’s natural pattern. It is a well worn and heavily traveled neural pathway. Developing a solid understanding of why and how this happens will help you as you begin the process to change your response.
There are 4 common factors that often lead to resistance in decision making and we are going to look at each one and what to do about them today. The four common factors that lead to resistance in decision making are cognitive load, emotional influence, decision fatigue, and habitual behavior.
* Cognitive load:
When faced with too many options or intricate details, the brain can become overloaded, making it difficult to weigh each choice effectively and leading to decision avoidance. If you feel yourself shut down when faced with a decision, cognitive load may be the reason. You feel overwhelmed by the choices and details. It all feels like too much. It’s confusing. You find yourself saying things like, “I don’t know”, “It’s too much,” “I’m overwhelmed.”
* Be careful here. Realize that your brain would rather accept overwhelm and retreat than work through intricate details to solve a problem or make a decision.
* * When I recognize that I am starting to feel overwhelmed when faced with making a difficult decision I take a deep breath and remind myself that this is just my brain’s way of trying to conserve energy. This helps release some of the pressure that overwhelm brings. When I can release the pressure, I am able to return to a better state of mind without running away from the decision making process.
Creating a defined, intentional decision making protocol helps the brain when faced with situations that could lead to cognitive overload. We will talk about that a little bit later.
The next factor that often leads to decision resistance is emotional influence.
Be mindful of your emotional state. An unmanaged mind will lead to decision making based on emotions and emotions are unreliable. They come and go like waves. Strong emotions like anxiety or fear can activate the amygdala, which can override rational decision-making and lead to impulsive choices or inaction. Being aware of your emotions is a powerful tool if you use it. You can use your awareness of your emotions to find the thought that is creating the emotion. Once you get to the thought, you have the power and ability to evaluate the truth and helpfulness of the thought and decide what to do with it. In this way, you are using your emotions as a map back into your thoughts. This gives you useful information to work with. This is different from making a decision based on emotion in the moment.
Having a decision making protocol can help tremendously in keeping you out of emotional decision making. An unmanaged mind leads to emotionally driven decision making or decision avoiding. Whichever the case, it is difficult to build trust in yourself when your emotions along with your unmanaged mind are set free to make decisions for you.
Our third factor is Decision fatigue:
Decision fatigue is simply the idea that after making many decisions, your ability to make more decisions over the course of a day declines. The more decisions you have to make, the more tired your brain becomes and the more resistance you feel. When I am faced with decision fatigue one of two things is at play. Either I am not managing my daily life and routines well or I am in a crisis situation where something serious and out of my control has happened and needs attention and decisions to be made now. I handle those in different ways. One of the benefits of having strong routines and habits is that it reduces the number of decisions that need to be made in a day, leaving energy for the decisions that do need to be made. For example, I know that I will be going to the gym three times each week to get my lifting in. I put those days into my schedule ahead of time. That decision has been made ahead of time. I don’t wake up in the morning and need to convince myself that I should go to the gym. The decision was already made. I gave you an example of an area where I am strong and consistent. Now I’ll pull back the curtain and show you an area where I sometimes struggle and how decision fatigue comes into play when I am not managing my routines and habits well. My trainer wants me to be eating a certain amount of protein each day. I’m onboard with this because I know it aids in my workout recovery and the research shows how important it is for women my age to be getting enough protein. Also, I don't like to eat in the morning, I’m a picky eater, have a very sensitive stomach and when I am stressed lose my appetite. Because of all of this, it is important that I set myself up for success and have the good, healthy food I need to be already in the refrigerator and if possible, prepared ahead of time. If I have to make the decision of what to eat in the moment without setting myself up for success, I will waste valuable brain energy arguing with myself about what to eat and 9 times out of 10 I’m going to choose the comfort food or the easy food over the healthy food. I am especially vulnerable at night when I have already been making decisions all day, I’m tired and I’m already hungry.
Let’s look at another way decision fatigue can come into the picture. Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation outside of our control that requires us to make a lot of decisions about something we weren’t prepared to make decisions about. Our hot water heater recently sprung a leak and caused quite a bit of water damage in our house and garage. We had to make a series of decisions that we had never even considered before very quickly. Decision fatigue, combined with the cognitive load of the complexity of the situation and the fun timing of this costly home expense happening just 2 days after Christmas was definitely a factor that day. What was interesting was that we made all these decisions quickly in the moment, watching the ceiling of your garage cave in will definitely get the adrenaline going! It was later in the day that the decision fatigue set in and every other decision for that day seemed to be too hard. What to do in a situation like that? Well, I decided to cut myself some slack and push all unnecessary decisions to the next day when I had more energy for it. Once I made the conscious decision to take the pressure off myself, I relaxed internally and felt back to normal within a few hours.
The fourth factor and the one that has more impact than we may realize is our habitual behavior. The brain loves to default to familiar patterns and routines. Because this happens with little effort or active thought on our part, it may be preventing us from considering new options or making changes and we don’t even realize it.
Now that we have looked at some of the factors leading to resistance in decision making, let’s talk about what we can do with that information.
You do not need to fear the need to make decisions.
Decision making is simply the process of eliminating choices until you are left with one choice and then acting on that choice. Good decision making is simply being right more often than you are wrong. Sometimes you WILL be wrong and that’s okay. Confident decision making is trusting that you are able to make the best decision possible with the information you have. Creating a decision making framework for yourself will lead to becoming a confident decision maker.
Your values are your individual beliefs that motivate you to act one way or another. They serve as a guide for your behavior. Core values are the values that are most important to you. You already have core values. In last week’s episode I talked about finding your core values and I walked you through a simple process to uncover your core values.
Now it is time to begin putting them to use. Once you have clearly defined your core values, they are ready to become the anchor in your decision making process. This is how you develop your inner voice to be strong and reliable. When faced with a situation that feels overwhelming, rather than retreating and avoiding making a decision or letting your emotions make the decision, look at your list of core values. Of the choices that are in front of you, which one BEST aligns with your values? If the one that best aligns with your values does not readily present itself, use the process of elimination to work backwards. In other words, eliminate all choices that do not align with your values. Just by eliminating some of the choices you will begin to gain a sense of peace. Once you are down to just 2 or three, carefully test each of them against each of your values. Does one fit with all of your values? If so, that is your winner. What about a case where you have 2 or even options that align with all of your values. In that case, choose the one you like best. What if none of the choices in front of you align with your values? In that case, I would consider two things. Number one, I probably need to think of some other solutions. Ones that DO align with my values. The second thing to consider is that if you are in a situation where none of the choices align with your values and alternative choices are not available, you are likely in a situation that is out of alignment with your values. Being in a situation that is out of alignment with your values is going to cause internal conflict. In that case, usually the remedy is getting yourself out of that situation.
A couple of things before I let you go…this decision making protocol of anchoring your choices and decisions to your core values is a very simple process but it does not always result in an EASY answer. In fact, I often find that the decision that my core values leads to is the least convenient or comfortable. My core values often lead me down the harder path. And it often puts me on a path that others don’t understand. But I can follow that path with confidence and joy in my heart when I know that I am in alignment with my values.
If you have never made decisions like this before, it may feel odd at first, especially if your decisions have been primarily emotionally based. This protocol sets emotion aside and uses predetermined standards (which are your values). What makes this a reliable process is that your values do not change based on your mood as emotions do. Having a predetermined standard to measure your choices against and using it with intention will develop the strong and reliable inner voice that you may have thought was out of your reach.
That’s all I have for you today, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Running to Myself. You can find previous episodes on apple podcasts and spotify or on my website www.trishastanton.com. New episodes are released each Monday. You can subscribe on Apple or Spotify to automatically receive each new episode as it comes out.
If you know someone who you think would enjoy this podcast, please share it with them! I will be back next week to share a little more about my journey on the road to discovering my truest self.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about my coaching program or have questions about one-on-one coaching or life coaching in general, please visit my website at www.trishastanton.com or my Facebook Group The Simple Truth Coaching. I would love to hear from you!
Have a great week and remember, Mindset Matters!
