457. Decision Energy

Welcome to episode 457, Decision Energy. You’ve heard of decision fatigue but have you heard of decision energy? Today I’m talking about the difference between decisions and choices. I’m going to teach you why part of all of us resist making decisions and how that’s holding us back. And from this understanding we’ll dive into how to become a confident decision-maker and gain energy and momentum from decisions as well as creating the life you truly desire.

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m Jody Moore and I’ll be your coach today.

Hey everybody, hope you’re having an awesome week. As of the time I record this, it’s spring break for my kids. We just got back from a little trip to the San Diego area. It was beautiful. I am excited to be here and talk to you about this podcast because one of the things I do a lot when I have a little time off like that is I listen to a lot of podcasts, audiobooks, personal development, inspirational things.

And I get so many ideas, some of them directly out of the mouths of other people but then I turn them into my own. And other times just hearing people who are in a really positive headspace triggers a lot of ideas for me. So this idea of decision energy is one that sort of came to me as I was listening to a bunch of stuff over the weekend. And I want to begin by acknowledging that there’s this phenomenon even in the world of psychology, it’s not a diagnosis, but it’s a phenomenon that’s recognized called decision fatigue.

And we talk about this a lot where we become physically, mentally and emotionally depleted if we have to make a whole bunch of decisions, especially within a certain timeframe. If we have a day of lots of choices, lots of decisions to make, we may find ourselves exhausted and depleted and less able to function at the highest level that’s available to us when we have more energy.

This can be true in certain occupations where maybe there are lots of decisions to constantly be made, especially if the decisions feel really weighty or heavy. I’m thinking of a surgeon, who has to make what could be potentially life altering decisions. So we see it show up more in certain fields than others, but it’s certainly something that I would say I can relate to at times in my life. Probably something you’ve experienced as well.

Well, what I want us to try on today is, I want us to reframe, instead of calling it decision fatigue, what if what it actually is, is choice fatigue? And some of it is inevitable, but a lot of it we can prevent by how we approach decisions. We all have choices to make all day long. And thanks to the amazing, abundant world we live in, we have more choices than ever but we still only ever have a handful of decisions that really require our attention.

And when we use our human brains, the capacity, our God given capacity to make decisions, then it should help us have fewer choices to make or make the choices much more obvious when they do come up. So I want you to think of decisions and choices as two different things. Decisions are the bigger picture, longer term sort of commitments, you might say, that we make that should make then the choices that come up really obvious. So if you make just a few confident decisions then you won’t have to make very many choices thereafter. Are you with me?

Let’s look at some examples. If you are married, then at some point you made the decision to marry a certain person. If you’re in the kind of marriage where you’re just married to one person and you are monogamous, in whatever way you want to define that. Then it should mean that other choices are not even necessary for your brain to entertain. Giving you a lot more brain power and energy to focus on different things.

So if I’m married and my company has a Christmas party and I want to take a date. Then I don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about who I’m going to take as my date. I’m going to take my spouse. So it’s pretty obvious in certain areas of your life. Now, this doesn’t mean we’re perfect always at honoring our decisions. And we’ll come back to that in just a minute.

But ideally the decision to marry a certain person means that other choices now I don’t have to waste my brain power, my energy on entertaining. I simply already know what the choice is that lines up with my decision. If you made the decision to be a parent at some point, then that should change some of the choices now that you make in your life. I decided to be a mother, that means when it’s time to pick my kids up from school, I go pick them up from school even if I would rather go play pickleball with my friends.

If I’ve got children that I’m responsible for and I’m their mother and I don’t have any other way to get them home and have them cared for then that’s the choice I’m going to make. Becoming a mother, the decision to become a mother, I should say, causes me to then override some other choices, not all choices. I’m just saying, some of the choices are off the table now that I’ve decided to become a parent. So again, we all do this in certain areas of our life. We make decisions that then guide our choices.

Now, if we choose to, we can leverage that in other areas of our life, areas where we may be stalled out or not progressing or not getting the results that we want. We need to take a look at our decision energy and decide, have I leveraged the energy that’s available to me by deciding or am I doing the opposite, which is draining me because I have so many choices to constantly be making? What is the opposite of deciding? It’s being undecided? It’s being confused. It’s just not knowing what we want or what we’re going to do.

Now, most people when I’m coaching, describe indecision, confusion, not knowing as just something that’s happening to them instead of describing it how I want to offer to you, as a choice. We choose to be undecided by just choosing not to make a decision. We choose to be confused. We choose to not know what to do because we could easily just decide and say, “This is what I’m going to do. This is what I’ve decided to think. This is what I’ve decided to try. This is who I’ve decided to be.”

And taking all other choices off the table and not entertaining other choices, that is available to you and I know it feels hard to do. I’m going to give you some tips in just a minute. I just want you to try on the idea that it’s a choice you make to make a decision so that you don’t have to make a bunch of choices. That’s it. How do we know what the right thing is to do? We don’t, we don’t know.

People who decide, I’m going to go after this goal, this is the goal I’m setting. It’s not that they know the right goal. They just decide what the goal is. They just commit to a goal. They just pick a goal. They just take a guess. It literally is a guess. I’m not saying it’s a completely uninformed guess. I’m not saying you wouldn’t want to learn from other people or take your personal life experience as you make your guess. But your brain will already do that automatically because it’s really good at doing all of that. You just have to make a decision and go with it.

Not making decisions as much of the time as you possibly can, will cause you to waste time, waste money and waste your life. And that’s important to keep in mind, because your brain might believe the opposite is true. Your brain might tell you if it’s like most of our brains, that you should stay in indecision because if you make a decision to move forward, that might be the wrong choice. And then you will have wasted time or money or your life. And I want to tell you that your brain is very wrong about that, here’s how we know.

Let’s say you’re trying to decide, you’re at a fork in the road and you’re trying to decide, should I go down path A or path B? You can apply this to any decision you’re trying to make in your life. Do I choose path A or path B? As long as I stay in indecision and not knowing what the right path is, I stay right there at the fork in the road. But if I choose path B and maybe I head down that path and maybe I get halfway down that path and then I realize this was the wrong path. Then I go back to the beginning and then head down path A.

Now, if your brain’s like, “See, that would have been a waste of time”, if we got halfway down path B. I want to make a counterargument. Heading halfway down path B and then turning around and coming back is still a better use of my time or whatever other resources we’re talking about than staying at the fork in the road because now I know I want path A. Before then all I can do is take a guess. Until I head down a path, sometimes, many times we don’t even know what’s the right path until we try one out. That’s it. That’s the reality.

Not to mention, as I went down path B, I probably learned something. I might have met somebody. I might have contributed something to someone else. There’s so much more happening. There’s more growth. It’s a better use of my time, a better use of my resources, a better use of my life to head down a path, even if it’s the wrong path than to sit at the fork of the road trying to take the right guess. There are no right guesses. We have to move forward before we have that true knowing of what we want. Are you with me?

So one of the things I want you to keep in mind if you’re like, wow, I’m at that point, I’m at this fork in the road. I can’t clearly see here from the fork what the right decision is. I’m going to have to just make a decision and move forward and it’s scary. If that’s you, then first of all, I want you to remember that no decision is permanent. I should say, most decisions aren’t permanent because there may be some that are permanent.

For example, if I decide to have a child, maybe I’m trying to decide whether I should have another baby or not. And I decide to have a baby, that’s a pretty permanent decision. Most of the paths that would then lead me in a different direction, maybe abandoning the child at some point or whatever, are going to be choices that most of us are probably not going to want to make. So we might say, some decisions are permanent. I’m with you on that. Well, first of all, most of them are not, so keep that in mind.

Most of the choices we’re making are not permanent, but even the ones that are, there’s always a way to get to the destination you’re trying to get to. So let’s say I’m like, “Path A or path B?” I pick path B and it’s a permanent decision. And I get halfway down and I start realizing, this is harder than I thought or this is challenging or this isn’t creating what I want.

Well, maybe we thought that path B was going to be the fastest, easiest way to get to our destination. And maybe we’re realizing now it’s not. That doesn’t mean you can’t get to your destination, I promise. Because the destination all of us actually want is to feel better about ourselves, to feel better about our lives, to find more peace and joy and fulfillment and happiness and love. And less resentment and frustration and shame and guilt and overwhelm and fear.

The final destination is always just feeling better. So even if we realize, oh, shoot, I picked path B and if I would have picked path A, it would have been faster and easier for me to get to the destination. It’s fine because we can still get to the destination no matter what. I really do believe that. Alright, so that’s the first thing to keep in mind. I should say most decisions are not permanent.

I could change my mind, but here’s the thing. How do we know the difference between changing our mind and just not fully deciding? Because your brain, if it’s like mine, will try to get tricky with you and tell you that you’re just changing your mind when the truth is you’re still in indecision. You haven’t fully committed. You haven’t given this path enough time, effort, energy, and commitment to try to see it through. This is what I think is the difference.

I think that indecision doesn’t require much courage, even though it doesn’t feel good because we don’t like feeling stuck, but it’s not scary. Whereas decisions are scary because we’re foregoing other choices. And we’re going to now take action, and we’re going to move forward. We’re going to go down that path and there’s going to be some things down that path that we’re afraid of but there will be things we don’t even know to be afraid of yet. So decisions take courage.

And if you are making a new decision versus just quitting and staying in indecision you will know because you have given enough action to the first decision to have a true knowing of what’s right. Let me say that again. The way to know whether you’re on track making a new decision or you just didn’t commit to the first decision is you will have a true knowing of what’s right because you took enough action to try to make it work. You spoke freely out loud about your decision. That’s one side.

When we’re really quiet and don’t tell anyone. It often means it’s because we haven’t fully decided and we don’t want anyone to come along and ask us and we changed our mind a month later. So you speak about it often and confidently. And if that’s just not your personality to be outspoken about yourself and your life, then make it fit for you. Do you write about it in your journal? Do you talk to God about it if you’re a prayerful person? How do you handle decisions that you fully made, are you handling this decision that way, or are you noticing that you’re in indecision about it?

How much action are you taking? And that might be something you want to decide ahead of time. When I work with entrepreneurs on this, there’s a lot of decisions to be made as an entrepreneur. A lot of times I say, “Let’s commit to this decision until this point.” I do this in my own business too, actually. I’m like, “We’re going to commit to executing this strategy for a year. We’re not going to change our minds for a year or until we help this many people. Until we have this many people that we are able to help through this program, we’re not changing course.”

So sometimes I do like to decide it like that in advance if I know it’s going to be tempting for me to jump back out of a decision too early without a really confident knowing.

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So most decisions are not permanent, even the ones that are, it’s still available to you to get to the destination you want. I want to talk a little bit more to entrepreneurs, especially coaches trying to grow coaching businesses because I coach a lot of you in The Lab and this comes up a lot.

So if you are let’s say a newer coach just starting out, I would recommend that you make a decision about what you want to achieve in your business in let’s say the next three years. So for example, again if you’re newish or brand new, just starting out, you might decide, in the next three years, I’m going to get my business to a point where it generates $500,000 a year in revenue. I want you to try on whatever number you want to pick or whatever time frame you want to pick, you pick. I’m just using that as an example.

I want you to try on making that decision. Notice the difference between I’m going to try to make $500,000 in my business or I’m going to make $500,000 in my business within the next three years. I just decided that’s what I’m going to do. They feel very different. And what most coaches say to me, I ask them, “What are you trying to create? What are you trying to achieve?” It might be a money goal. It might be an impact goal. It might be a time goal.

I work with coaches sometimes who are working way too many hours and hustling too much. And I’m like, “What if you just decided you are only working 25 hours a week or 35 hours a week or whatever?” And they’d say, “I’m going to try.” I’m like, “No, no, no, that’s not making a decision. That’s pretending to make a decision. That’s being interested in a result. It’s not being committed to a result.” And there’s a big difference between being interested in a result and committed to a result.

Decisions commit you and they eliminate other choices, which is a huge gift to give yourself because choices drain our energy. So not, I’m going to try to hit this mark, but I just decided this is what I’m going to do in the next three years. Now, it also feels kind of scary to say that, to say, “I decided this”, feels a lot scarier than saying, “I’m going to try to do this.” But again, let’s go back to some of our examples.

What if, as you got married, you said to your spouse, “I’m going to try to be faithful to you.” Does anybody say that when they get married? I don’t think so. Even though not everybody’s perfect at being faithful, we still don’t go into it with that intention. We go into it saying, “I’m going to love and cherish and honor you. I’m going to be faithful to you.” That’s what we decide. Imagine if we’re like, “I’m going to try, but we’ll just see how it goes.” We don’t do that in these areas where we’re much better at making decisions because we know that’s not a decision. Trying is not a decision.

So you decide and then you commit to the actions that you think will help you achieve that result. So again, if you’re an entrepreneur trying to grow your business, you have to commit to working. Listen up, especially those of you who are like me, who are in the thick of raising kids and working from home. So many of you get frustrated with not making progress and you’re not showing up and working.

You’re not sitting down doing the things that are necessary to serve people in the world. The way that you get clients as a coach is, you go serve and take care of people in the world and you monitor how it’s going. And if it’s not landing for people or they’re not moving along and they’re not interested in what you offer, then you change it up. You have to do a better job of serving people. You have to do a better job of finding the people who want your help. You have to keep going. You have lots of work to do.

Coaches will tell me, “Well, I’m only working a little bit because I don’t have a full roster of clients yet.” I’m like, “Well, then you’ve got lots of work to be doing.” It’s just not coaching work yet. It’s still coaching, it’s just not coaching in a formal paid way. It’s creating content that can help people, it’s whatever other strategy you want to use. I don’t want to turn this into a marketing call, but my point is you’ve got to show up and work.

So that means when do you work and where do you work? And if somebody calls you up and says, “Hey, do you want to go to lunch tomorrow”, and you’ve already decided that you’re going to hit a certain goal in three years, and it’s a big enough goal that it’s going to challenge you. Then you say, “I’d love to go to lunch, but I can’t. I work on Wednesdays. Can we go to lunch on Saturday because I don’t work Saturdays?” Do you see what I mean? You’ve got to say no to choices that don’t align with this decision.

And when your kids say, “Mom, will you take us to the park today?” You say, “I would love to take you to the park. It’s going to have to be after I’m done working because I’m working today until this time.” Just like if you worked for somebody else. This is what blows my mind is we go out of our way to follow through on helping other people achieve their dreams, but we abandon our own dreams for no reason at all.

What I mean by that is, if you got a job working for another company or if you have a job working for another company and your kid said, “Will you take me to the park”, you’d say, “I’d love to. It’ll have to be when I’m done working because I have a job and I’m committed to be working right now until this time.” But when it’s your own dream and your own goal, I don’t know about you but I can abandon that for no reason at all, I just don’t feel like it today. That is not making a decision. That’s indicative of, I haven’t made a decision.

I’m still entertaining all kinds of choices like, do I feel like it. It’s really not a relevant question for me around the goals I’ve really decided. The other thing I was thinking about is the great lengths we will go to, to honor the decisions we make to other people, the commitments we make to other people.

Like, hey, kids, bad news. I know you don’t want to hear this, and I know it’s going to be hard, but we’ve got to move. We’re moving to another state. We’re moving to another country. We’re moving because mom or dad took a job with another company, and they’re requiring that we live there. And so we’re going to help you through it and this will be hard, but we’re going to do it. And we will relocate our whole families to help somebody else’s dream come true, but we won’t even say no to a friend to help our own dream come true. That’s because of lack of decisions. We haven’t made concrete decisions.

The good news is when it is your own business, you actually have a lot more choices that you can make that line up with the decision you made than if you’re working for someone else oftentimes. Not always the case, but that’s usually the case. So be careful, though, about letting that get away from you.

Let’s talk about this with our health. I made the decision just a couple of months ago, I decided I am not getting type 2 diabetes. I just decided. I didn’t say, “I’m going to try not to.” The doctor ran my blood work and said, “You have insulin resistance also known as pre diabetes according to this one lab. We need to run some more labs.” But at any rate according to the one that he ran he’s like, “Your blood is coming back pre diabetic.” And I decided, I am not getting type 2 diabetes.

So I decided I am going to reverse my insulin resistance and I am going to head the other direction. That’s a decision I’ve made. Now, do you know what that’s requiring of me? A lot. It’s requiring that I change the way I eat. I’m not fully there yet, but I’m making big strides and I’m feeling really empowered as I do it. It’s requiring, and when I say require, I mean these are the choices I made. This is what I decided would be the way that I would reverse my type 2 diabetes based on other experts I’ve learned from and books that I’ve read, and lots of other people’s suggestions.

But I decided for me what was going to be doable and what was going to work. And that’s really important as you make decisions. You’re the decision-maker. You decide how you’re going to do it. I decided to wear a CGM or a Continuous Glucose Monitor. I monitor my glucose 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as though I were a type 2 diabetic or a type 1 diabetic even, needing to monitor my glucose so that I know if I need insulin or not. I’m not taking insulin. I’m not taking any medication at this point.

I’m just monitoring my glucose so that I am more well informed about how certain foods affect my body and how movement affects my body and how sleep and water and all of that. I’m just empowering myself with more knowledge. That’s it. I’m following a system I use of herbal mate that I drink to help me with intermittent fasting and a fiber supplement. And I don’t want to go into detail on that right now. Those of you in The Lab, I’ve been talking about that.

So this is my point, I decided I’m not getting type 2 diabetes. Do you know what it’s done? It’s eliminated so many choices for me. It’s narrowed my choices significantly at least. It’s narrowed down the foods I should be choosing from to eat. It’s even narrowed down when I eat and how frequently I eat. And it’s reduced my choices such that I don’t have to waste my brain power on making those kinds of choices very much anymore.

Now, here’s what I want to say. A part of us doesn’t like that. Even though making choices drains our energy, it would be ideal to have fewer choices. There’s another part of us, the little toddler part of us that has a little tantrum, that thinks we’re missing out on something fun. And if I eliminate choices when it comes to my food or my free time or who I’m hanging out with or whatever else, that I’m going to miss out on something fun, poor me and we have a little fit.

And in certain areas of our lives we give in to that toddler at times, maybe, like I said, I promised you I’d bring this back around. Sometimes people are not faithful in their marriages. Certainly sometimes we’re not perfect at eating in the way that we know serves our bodies, I’m not in any way perfect at that. Sometimes we’re not perfect at following through on our calendar and sitting down and working when we said we were going to work.

So this is what I want to tell you is, first of all, I think it’s okay and I even think it’s necessary to sometimes redecide. Certainly if there’s been infidelity in your marriage or something like that, it’s going to be necessary to redecide do I want to be in this marriage? Do I want to be married to this person? And what kind of spouse do I want to be? And what kind of marriage do we want to have?

But even if that’s not the case, even if there’s not some kind of discretion like that, I think it’s really healthy to redecide to be married over and over again throughout your life. Because the alternative is, we get away from the momentum and the power of the decision, and we now start feeling trapped or stuck. And remember, you’re not trapped or stuck. In most cases, you can make a new decision. You are not stuck in your marriage. You don’t have to stay married.

If you redecide, then you can re-tap into that energy and momentum and motivation that comes from making a decision. Certainly this is the case I see for a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of us on our health journey is, we have to redecide, recommit and that’s okay. So it might be necessary to redecide. The other thing that happens is, sometimes we’re testing the parameters. We’re testing the limits my dad used to say when we were kids, “You’re testing my limits right now, and you just found it. That’s my limit.”

So there is this natural inclination within us to test boundaries, test limits. And I don’t know, maybe that’s something that we need to work on in certain areas. But I do think we have to have compassion for ourselves around our, for whatever reason, sort of innate drive to want to do that. In other words, if I want to reverse my pre diabetes. Does that mean I can never eat sugar again? Or does it mean I can eat some sugar if I just cut back on the sugar and I eat it in the right time and I eat it with certain foods? And I’m experimenting with that.

Or does it mean that along with, sometimes I can have a whole weekend where I kind of eat whatever I want or I can go on vacation and eat whatever I want. And then I can come back and get myself back on track. And everybody has advice about what you can and can’t do and what the limits are. But the best way to find out is to be scientists and test your own body. So sometimes it’s us sort of pushing the limits or testing for boundaries of what we can do. Other times, we need to recommit and redecide and you get to be the judge of that.

I want to share with you just one other decision that I made recently that might seem like a small thing, but it’s helping me again with choices. And that is, I say this with air quotes, I say it really loosely, but I’ve decided I’m going to be a ‘minimalist’ in air quotes, ‘minimalist’. Air quotes because my version of minimalism, some of you might look at and go, “That is not minimalism, Jody Moore.” But I know what I mean by it. And compared to the amount of stuff I’ve owned before, minimalism, I’m really excited about.

I’m excited about it because I know for sure that having less stuff makes my life better. And it just frees up my head and my time and just there’s so many benefits to it, I think we all know this. Most of us have too much stuff. So I have decided to become a minimalist. So I’m at the grocery store the other day.

And like I said, I’ve been drinking this mate kind of herbal tea supplement in the mornings that really helps my blood sugar and helps me feel good. And I have to put lemon juice and lime juice in with it or else it tastes pretty bad to me. But if I just squeeze a little bit of lemon, squeeze a little bit of lime, it’s great. And I sip on it most of the day. So I’m new to that. I don’t normally drink lemon water. I don’t like lemon in my Diet Coke or whatever. So I’m new to this whole buying lemons and limes and cutting them up and using them regularly.

And so I’m in the grocery store and in one of the aisles what catches my eye is this lemon squeezer thing. You know what I mean? It’s shaped like half a lemon, and it has handles and you put the lemon in there and then you squeeze it and it squeezes the juice out of your lemon for you. So my brain’s like, “Maybe I should get that.” Because I use lemon juice a lot, and I could avoid getting my fingers all sticky and having to rinse them off and that might be cool. Maybe I need that lemon squeezer thing.

And then suddenly remembered the decision I made to be a minimalist. I don’t need a lemon squeezer. I have my own lemon squeezer. It’s the thumb and fingers that God gave me. And I can squeeze my own lemons and not have one more little funky device in my drawer in my kitchen. So no, not getting the lemon squeezer because I’m a minimalist. So listen, this might sound like a little trivial thing, but it’s not. It’s so powerful.

Decisions should come from the life you want to live and from the person you’re trying to be who can create the life you want to live. Who are you trying to become? What does that person do? And what kind of life do they create in the process? Make decisions today that will make your choices much more obvious.

Alright, thanks for joining me today for Decision Energy. I’ll see you next time. Take care.

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