288. The Speed of Your Decisiveness

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 288: The Speed of your Decisiveness.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

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Today I’m going to talk to you about the speed of your decisiveness. I’m so excited to dive into this topic with you. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is working on losing weight. And she was telling me how she’s feeling impatient with it. And she’s having success. I think she said she’d lost about 10 pounds in two months maybe. And I was like, “Are you kidding me? That’s fantastic. What do you mean it’s not going fast enough?”

She said, “Well, I just want this weight to be gone.” I think she has another 10 or so pounds, maybe 15, 20, I don’t know, she has a little bit more weight she wants to lose. It’s a friend that lives on the other side of the country. I haven’t seen her in ages. So in my mind she looks perfect. But anyway she has a little more weight she wants to lose. And she’s like, “I just want it to be gone right now. I just want it to go faster.” And because I was just chatting with my friend, I didn’t start coaching her, or she might not want to talk to me again.

Instead I just thought, yeah, I can relate to that, I get that feeling, a lot of us feel that way anyway. But I was thinking about her desire for things to go faster and how many clients I coach, not just on weight loss but on any goal we’re working on and how we always want it to come faster. And I’m always coaching people to just explore why we want it to go faster and learn to slow it down and learn to be okay with it taking time. That’s not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is how to help it go faster, because I do think there are times when our goals or whatever it is we’re trying to change in ourselves could go faster. And one of the main things I see that slows people down, I think way more than they even realize is indecision, an inability to be decisive. And one of the reasons I think that I’ve had some success in certain areas of my life and I’ve been able to do so at a faster speed than some people, although some people have done it much faster than me.

But I’ve been able to achieve success in certain areas, I do get a lot done, I do tend to move faster in general again in certain areas of my life than a lot of people. And one of the main reasons is because I’m decisive in those areas. I’m willing to make decisions and I do so with a certain conviction. So I want to define for you what I mean by decisiveness and then I’m going to go through tons of examples for you and help you learn how to become more decisive if you are listening and thinking yeah, that’s my problem Jody, I’m just so indecisive, I have a hard time making decisions.

That’s okay, stay with me. So what I mean by decisiveness is, I’m going to break it into three parts, number one, the speed at which you make decisions. Now, I am a believer that you want to make wise decisions. I’m all for you getting some information. My dad always used to say, “Let’s gather the facts so that we can make an informed decision.” So yes, make an informed decision. And we all have varying comfort levels of how much information we need in order to make a decision. I’ve talked about this before.

But my comfort level is that I don’t need much information at all. And I’m not saying that’s the best way or the right way, I just know that about myself, that I tend to think well, I’m just going to do this because it feels right to me or one person recommended it and I don’t want to be slowed down by gathering tons of information so let’s go. Now, again, that can backfire, there are times when I wish I would have gathered a little bit more info before making a decision but those times are pretty rare.

And I would say the speed at which I accomplish things far outweighs those couple of times when I realized maybe I should have found out a little bit more. But again, I’m not saying you have to adapt yourself to my comfort level, but decide what is your comfort level and does it make sense. Do you need to push yourself a little bit to become more comfortable with making a little bit faster decisions? Could you speed it up a little bit?

We all know this from watching our children, like when they get to pick out a toy because they, for my kids they’ll fill up a chore chart and then they get to pick a little something from Target or something. And I have some kids that I know we’re going to go in there and she’s going to pick something and she’s going to be pretty much good to go. Maybe she’ll change her mine one time.

And then I have other kids that I know it’s going to take forever. He’s not going to be able to decide until I finally say, “Alright, I’m leaving, you either decide now or you get nothing.” And even then we’re going to be walking up to the cash register and he’s going to say, “Wait, I changed my mind, can we go back?” And he’s going to try to do that a good three or four times if I let him. So again we all have varying levels of ability to make a quick decision.

What I’m saying is can you push yourself to make a little bit faster decision in an area of your life where you’re not getting the results that you want as quickly as you want? Again I’ll give you more examples but let me give you the other two parts of decisiveness. So there’s the speed and then there’s your commitment to your decision.

Okay, back to the kid in the toy store. If you constantly revisit your decision and question it, and wonder if it was right, and think about the other options that you could have chosen, then again you’re slowing yourself down so much, which leads me to the third thing I want to include in decisiveness, which is your ability to then stop thinking about the decision. If you just make a decision and you commit to it and you decide this is it. Let’s use the toy example again.

So I can either take that toy and as I’m walking to the front of the store to buy it with my mom I can look at the toy and think about how much I love it and how much fun I’m going to have with it. And what I’m going to do with it when I get home and who I’m going to show it to or whatever. I can do that or I can think about the past. I can think about previous decisions. I can think back to the other toys that I saw in the aisle.

So number two and three really go closely together, but it’s the speed at which you make your decision, your commitment to your decision and then your ability to focus forward instead of focusing backward. That is decisiveness the way I think about it. I think in some ways it’s obvious why this will speed up your ability to achieve goals. But I want to dive into it a little bit deeper.

So I like to think of a goal, any goal I’m trying to achieve as trying to get to the top of a mountain. The mountaintop, summiting the mountain is whatever you define as success in your goal. Maybe it’s achieving a certain amount of revenue in your business. Or maybe it’s just getting a certain amount of exposure, a certain number of followers on your social media or on your email list, or however you want to define it, there are lots of different ways to define it in a business.

Maybe it’s a health goal and again you can define that in a lot of different ways, you can define it by the scale, you can define it by your overall relationship with your body, how you feel physically or emotionally around certain things. So, lots of different ways to define the summit of the mountain with any goal. But let’s just say that we have a summit and we have an idea of what we’re trying to achieve.

Then there are probably a lot of different trails up the mountain. And when we make a decision I’m going up this trail then we get to start heading up the mountain. What I see people do is they get partway up the trail and then suddenly there’s a creek that we didn’t know we were going to have to cross and we don’t really want to get wet. So we’re like, “Maybe I should go back down the mountain. Maybe I should have picked one of those other trails, maybe it would have been better.”

And so we have to go all the way back down the mountain and then start up again from the bottom on a different trail. And unfortunately there is no perfect trail. Every single trail has a place where you’re either going to get wet, or there’s not enough shade, or there’s not enough sun, or there’s a bear, or there’s a steep incline. There’s something that we just wish wasn’t there, we just wish it was the escalator up the mountain.

Where’s the escalator, that’s what I wanted to get on. Now, there’s no escalator, as soon as you stop looking for that and you just decide this is the trail, this is the way I’m going up the mountain then you don’t waste time going back down and trying to find a better easier trail. You just stay on that trail and you just figure out alright, how am I going to get across this creek? How am I going to stay dry? Or how am I going to just deal with being wet? And meanwhile we always have forward momentum and then we get to the mountaintop a lot faster.

So I’m going to talk about business because that’s the area where I’ve been really good at this and successful with this. And then I’m going to talk about health goals because that’s the area where I struggled for a long time and I’m now making some leverage but I had a much harder time. So I’m going to talk to you about both of those examples for me personally so that hopefully you can find whatever is going on for you and apply this in your life.

So in a coaching practice or any kind of service based business, even in a product based business most of the advice out there says to pick a narrow target market or a narrow niche. This is the first place where I see people struggle with indecisiveness and slow themselves down. Now we think we have really good reasons for it. This is always true with indecisiveness, it’s sneaky. Again it thinks that there’s a best option, or a better option, or one that we’ll like better or one that will be more successful in the marketplace.

And some of those things might be true, I’m all for you testing a little bit, but make sure it’s not slowing you down unless you just have no end date at which you plan to reach your goal and you don’t really care how long it takes you, then I’m all in. I’m just trying out a whole bunch of things, keep going to the bottom of the mountain and starting over again if you want. But choosing your target market or your niche is kind of a big thing. I think it’s the obvious area where we see indecision slow people down.

But I want to offer that there are a million other little tiny decisions that might be slowing you down. So I’ll never forget this, I was a year and a half, maybe two years into my coaching practice and starting to really get some momentum and see some real success. And so then people start asking you advice when you’re seeing success because they’re sure that you found the best trail so they want to know what is it about your trail? How do I find that trail?

So I remember in particular people would ask me all kind of questions about things that I thought, why does that matter? “What colors, how did you pick your colors for your branding? And how did you choose the name of your business?” And things like this that I was like, “What? Does that matter?”

But the one that stands out in my mind is somebody said to me, “Hey, I noticed that the online scheduler you use is vCita”, because that was the calendar app that I was using and still use to this day actually. “Could you tell me why you picked that?  Because most people it seems use Acuity, why do you use vCita?” And I remember thinking it’s so fascinating to me that this person is spending time researching this. It’s fascinating. I was like why are they wasting time on that?

And so I answered their question, I said, “I asked one friend who I trust and who has an online business, “What calendar do you use?” She said, “vCita.” I said, “Do you like it?” She said, “Yeah, it’s pretty good.” And I said “Done”, and I signed up.”” And that was seven or eight years ago. I made the decision, I committed to it and I never spend any time thinking about other calendaring options, even though, just like this person said, most everyone I know uses Acuity or Calendly or something else.

I don’t really, other than that one friend I don’t think I know anyone else that uses vCita. It works for me. It hasn’t created any huge problems. I don’t think there is any perfect calendaring system that would do probably everything I wish it would do but it does 98% of what I need and I know how to use it. And so I waste zero time. I don’t look around at what other people are doing and then use it as a reason to question my decisions.

I look at what I’m doing and I question a decision if I have a decision that isn’t serving me, isn’t getting me the result that I want. Do you see what I’m saying? So there are so many decisions to be made in building a business, this is why it takes most people a lot longer than it needs to. Now, it might not be building a business for you, I’m simply using that as an example.

What is it you’re trying to do in your life? Are you trying to figure out a new method for holding your kids accountable? Are you trying to figure out how do I hold my teenager accountable and stop being mad and resentful that he’s not just doing what I wish he would do without me holding him accountable? If so you’re going to find dozens to hundreds of different models and methods for holdings kids accountable, that’s a beautiful thing. Options are a beautiful thing until they slow you down because you’re indecisive.

So how do you want to speed it up? How do you want to be committed to your decision, which is just a choice you make by the way, to be committed? And then can you practice forward focus? Can you practice focusing on why this system is going to serve you well? And you’re excited to implement it and there is no perfect system and any one you choose is going to be challenging, let’s just go all in on it and move forward.

Are you trying to make decisions about something in your home, how to – I don’t know – change a certain part of your home or what have you? Again, speed, commitment and forward focus will get it done faster otherwise we all know, these things can drag out for years we never achieve the results we want in our lives. Even today in my business I have colleagues that I adore and interact with and some of them do more asking of advice than others. And again I’m not saying that’s good or bad. I’m all for you asking advice of people.

But sometimes I want to go, “That person who I respect and admire, and is doing really well, seems to ask a lot of advice, I wonder if I should be asking more advice.” But when I pause and recognize that I tend to operate better when I commit to my own decisions. If I have a decision I’m thinking about and then I ask advice of people I respect and trust, then some of them might agree with me and maybe some of them won’t. Some of them will say, “I don’t know, this part I would think about and this part might concern you.”

Then what it does is it chips away at number two and three for me, it chips away at my commitment to my decision and my ability to focus and move forward. Now I get stalled out a little bit in indecision. So for me personally with business I tend to have more success when I don’t ask advice. I just make the decision and then I go try it out and then I find out if it was the right decision or not. And if it wasn’t, if I don’t get the result I want or it doesn’t play out the way I hoped it would then I learned some things. Now I can make a new decision.

But my commitment to the decision plays such a huge role in whether or not the decision plays out the way that I want to. So I don’t want to do anything to impact my commitment to the decision. Do you see what I’m saying?

I want to talk about again my health and my weight loss goals that I’ve had. And just a little update, I have, over the course of the last seven or eight months, lost 20 pounds and I have about five more to go. Even better than any of that, feel so much better, I respect myself more. I love my body more. I have a healthier relationship with food. I feel confident that I don’t have to be perfect and when I get off track I know how to get back on track. So many amazing things have come from going down this journey I’ve gone down of my health and weight. I’m so grateful to myself for doing it.

But indecision kept me stuck for many, many years, not only kept me stuck, it actually created the opposite result that I wanted. It caused me to gain weight and to negatively impact my relationship with my body and food. Because there’s so many people out there with so much advice about the best way to eat, and the best way to think about food, and the best way to think about your body.

So with this one I did rely on some experts and I tried a couple of different experts and I learned some things from every one of them. But it wasn’t until I started working with Brad Jensen of Key Nutrition and counting macros that that whole approach really resonated for me. As this is the way that I like that works for me, that feels healthy to me, that feels doable, feels like I could do for life. So it’s okay to rely on somebody else, on an expert, or a friend, or whoever you want to rely to, a coach, to help you make a decision.

But here’s the key, when I started working with Brad I told myself, I’m going all in on what he tells me to do because I don’t feel confident making the decision about what to do yet, how to eat, how to navigate all of this. I’m going to a 100% trust in his advice. And he always has me make decisions with him. But I trust his expertise and his recommendations a lot. I go all in on them. I don’t question them like, “Well, Brad, this person says this and this thing I used to do before, it kind of worked too.” I really keep my head committed to the decisions that I make with him.

And that has caused me to be able to finally achieve the goals I’ve had for many, many years for myself around food, and my weight, and my body, and my health. So I want to kind of wrap this up with giving you how you can practice. If you are indecisive and you have a goal, and you can see that it’s slowing you down, you can practice decisiveness with the smaller things in your life. You don’t have to dive right in, although you can, I’m not opposed to you trying and pushing yourself to just make a decision about a big area.

But certainly practice it in the smaller areas of your life. My daughter who’s in eighth grade, going to Zoom school right now, said, “Mom, I have this class and I’m working with these other kids on this project, and we have to turn in a video and we all did certain versions of videos. It’s so annoying when it comes time to vote and we say, “Which video do you like best? Which one do you think we should use?” And some of the kids say, “I don’t really care.”” I said, “Yeah, notice how it slows everybody down when people are indecisive.”

It’s okay to like all of them or not like any of them, there are still times when you need to make a decision, just pick any one at random then but make a decision, don’t be the person that says, “I don’t care.” Why do you not care? Care, care about things. Just choose to make a decision and have an opinion about the little things, like the committees that you serve on or work on, have opinions.

It could even come down to something as simple as, “Hey, where do you want to go to lunch today?” Do you say, “I don’t care” or, “I don’t know”, because it’s too hard to make a decision? Or can you practice being decisive? Can you say, “You know what really sounds good to me is Costa Vida.” Again it doesn’t mean you have to be difficult but be decisive. Practice it in little areas of your life and you will get better at doing it in the bigger areas.

And you guys, the speed at which you will reach your goals has a direct correlation to your level of decisiveness. I promise you this is true. Alright, have a beautiful rest of your day and I will see you next time. Take care.

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