Today I want to share with you the 3-step process I use for making any huge decisions in my life.
But first, an acknowledgment.
Thank you to the hundreds of women who responded to my Charlottesville message and who echoed similar feelings. Talking about social inequality in America has quickly become nonnegotiable for
me, and though the struggles of marginalized people in this country is not something I am well-versed in at all, I am working to try to catch up.
When feeling ignorant in anything, I always do the same thing: educate myself as much as possible. Steep myself in books and podcasts and articles of people who are doing the work and who can help bring me up to speed.
Many of you asked for help, too. And though I'm not the source for this, I am going to try
my best to share with you the things I am learning and reading as I go. So …
What I am currently
donating to: Several organizations on
THIS list, as well as monthly to the
ACLU
More to come … as always, open to feedback, resources and more. Just
click reply to let me know.
And now, I want to talk about big decision-making.
I write a lot about things like relationships and boundaries and honest communication and being authentic and while I certainly don’t know everything, the last several years of my life have given me a lot of reps in practicing these things:
Quitting my fulltime job to grow my business, actually growing it—and all the responsibility and
amazingness that comes with that—traveling internationally by myself, putting on large in-person events often ending up in the red, investing tens of thousands of dollars into projects with no guarantee of getting anything in return, leaving a comfortable marriage, filing for divorce, moving across country to start a new life by myself and many things in between.
If I’m honest, it all feels a bit mid-life-crisis-y, ha!, but the alternatives (not doing these things) would
have been way worse, IMO. I don’t regret any of the huge decisions I’ve made, even though not a single one was comfortable or easy.
In fact, I've experienced many instances of feeling like a doormat. And while I do believe feeling this way is a choice ("I'm a doormat" is certainly not factual), the feelings were real and they served as a red flag not to beat myself up but to do something else.
One concern I hear from women constantly is: “I
feel like I need to make a change but I don’t want to do the wrong thing, and I just don’t know what I should do.”
After I started talking about the dissolution of my marriage, many MANY women responded with similar feelings: “I’ve never even spoken this out loud before, but I think I want something different,” or, “I’ve literally never told anyone this, but I feel stuck and miserable in my relationship,” or, “I hate my job but I am scared to follow my real passion,
what if it doesn’t work and I lose everything?”
“Stuck” is real.
And it always sucks. You don’t know what to do, but you know you can’t keep doing what you are doing. Or you are waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or you are feeling anxious all the time. Or walking on eggshells. Or you know you have more to accomplish but you are scared shitless to do anything unfamiliar.
We are constantly up against the comfort
of certainty.
Tim Ferriss says people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty. And I agree. And it’s even been shown in research that the fear of loss looms way larger than the potential for gain. If you are someone who embraces change and loves risk and adventure, you are in the minority. Most people, myself included, fear losing the familiar way beyond the desire for newness.
So knowing that, how can we actually make the changes we
say we want to make, and learn to trust ourselves more, no matter what decision we make?
1) First, is trusting in something my dad always told us kids: “Gradually, gradually, gradually, suddenly.”
You might feel antsy and you might be mired in anxiety and hate the discomfort and uncertainty of a situation. But, you keep. not. doing. anything. about. it. You want to, but you don’t.
The reason you’re not
taking action is because you aren’t ready. And that’s okay. The talking about it, the thinking about it, the writing about it, all matters at this stage. The awareness that you want something else means it’s going to happen. Eventually. Because it can’t not happen at this point.
In my experience, you can’t force it. But here’s also something: you’re never 100% ready either.
It will never EVER feel like a relief to finally act.
But at some point, life will force your hand and you will choose the lesser of two evils. You WILL act, and it won’t be because you’re trying to get something or manipulate someone or make some kind of statement. It will be because you’ve reached a place where you can’t not do it anymore.
As cliché as it is, life always goes on.
2) So second, for me, I know I am finally at the point of action when I start feeling out of my
integrity.
In the past, when I have finally FINALLY done the thing that I anguished over for a long time, it was because I was starting to lose respect for myself.
Sometimes my friends and I will joke by texting each other the “I hate myself” bitmoji. Not because we actually hate ourselves but because we need a laugh when we are at the point that we know something needs to change. When I find myself
out of my integrity and not being the person I know I am, and the person I want to be, it’s the final straw--I act then.
When I am saying one thing and doing another, I am not congruent. And that feeling, in the pit of your stomach, feels icky. We know what it feels like to be out of our integrity. Call it your intuition or your “gut feeling,” but you know. And when you are experiencing that, THAT is when you act.
3) And
finally, make no mistake about it, all choices will feel uncomfortable and hard af.
But in that moment you choose the less hard one. And then you endure it.
When I left my marriage, I cried the entire way across country, ha! I could’ve turned around at any point. And that would have be fine too. But I just kept driving, thinking, driving, listening, kept moving forward, sad and scared and uncomfortable as
anything.
But you do it.
You put one foot in front of the other and endure it. You do one thing at a time and you endure the fallout. And you slowly learn a new reality. You slowly become someone doing something else. You slowly learn a new life. And all the while it’s still not really comfortable.
Until ... it is, again.
It will never feel easy, but that’s not the point. The point isn’t waiting
for ease or safety. It’s acting in the face of uncertainty and fear. THAT is where your build your greatest evidence of self-reliance and self-trust and confidence.
And the more experiences like this you get under your belt, the more confident in yourself you become. It’s a feed-forward cycle.
Anyway, know that I’ve got your back. As always, I am open to feedback of any kind and I would love to hear where you are and what you are up to. Yes,
I love fitness and nutrition and they will always be my first loves, but when you aren’t dealing with your mental game or your relationships effectively, it’s harder to be consistent with your healthy behaviors. It’s all connected, as you know.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being open.
Until next
time!
Xo,
Jill