Listen to Your Body to Make Better & Faster Decisions
Last winter I had a a lot going on in my personal life. I was finding it harder and harder to focus and make the bigger strategic decisions that were needed.
Thankfully, I applied for and was gifted 6 months of coaching via the StartingBloc network (yep, a coach needs coaching too - no one can do entrepreneurship alone!). It allowed me to safely deal with my personal life, knowing that I had created a formal container for accountability and support for the work of growing my own business.
I always viewed decision making as a function of my mind.
I would lay out the pros and cons, the potential risks, and then how to mitigate those risks (that’s the project manager in me).
With my coach, Tess, we started examining decisions from a holistic point of view. I identified that I was ignoring the different layers of myself that exist in each moment.
If you were raised in a family, household, or culture that focused on academic success - then you might know what meeting high expectations feels like. For most of my life, I felt like my body only existed to move my brain around!
Striving, achievement, and perfection didn’t care about my feelings or my energy. So, I didn’t either. Looking back, it’s a strangely macho attitude for someone who identifies as a fiery feminist.
That mindset led me into years of damaging my body and my mind, for perceived “success”. I’m pretty sure I’ve been ‘pushing through’ any signals that my body, and my feelings were sending me.
I’m learning that my body and my feelings are channels that offer me additional data towards any situation.
Just because I wasn’t taught how to understand them, doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
Here are some example questions I use when I’m checking in with my body and my feelings on a decision:
Is my body feeling tight or expansive about this choice? Which parts of my body?
Is that tightness coming from fight or flight? Am I facing any actual life or death risk?
What’s feeling uncomfortable? What kind of discomfort am I avoiding?
Is that discomfort real fear for my safety or is it self-doubt and intimidation?
My answers usually point out what’s really going on underneath of my indecision. Knowing that, in combination with what my mind thinks I should do, helps me reach greater clarity.
Checking in with my body and my feelings is the only way I know to develop a strong sense of intuition and make high quality decisions - without all the internal agony. This slows me down in the moment, but over time I can consistently make the ‘right’ decision, faster.