Episode #437 – Decide Like the Woman You’re Becoming

I am Cherylanne Skolnicki, and this is Brilliant Balance, the show for those of us who still dare to want it all, who have big dreams and bold ambitions, I think we deserve to have a big full life and the freedom to enjoy it. So let’s design our next chapter together for brilliance, not burnout. Each week I’ll bring ideas, insight, and a fresh perspective to keep you growing into a life that feels as good as it looks brilliant. Balance your life your way. Now, let’s get started. This is episode 437 of the Brilliant Balance Podcast. Decide like the woman you are becoming. So if there’s one thing that I know about us, you, me, all the listeners of this show, it’s this. We are just simply not the same people that we were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Like so much changes so rapidly for this audience of women, myself included, that I think sometimes we have to revisit concepts from time to time, even if we’ve heard them, you know, in a previous version of ourselves because they take on new relevance or maybe a different lens of relevance when we look from the perspective of where we are today.

Okay? And this particular episode is an idea that I introduced a number of years ago, but even if you heard me talk about this concept back then, right? I mean, shout out to you if you’ve been listening for that long, I can feel confident that you were navigating a different set of pressures, circumstances, decisions, challenges at that time, right? You had a different calendar, you had a different probably skillset, maybe a different level of courage. And in the time since then, I bet like me, you’ve made some hard calls. You’ve carried probably a lot more than you should have. You’ve grown in ways that maybe no one else sees but you. And here’s what I also know, the decisions that you have in front of you right now probably have higher stakes even than the decisions you were making a few years ago, right? The environment that we’re in just feels so noisy.

The expectations that we’re living under are so relentless. I don’t think the pace is slowing down at all. Right? If anything, the stakes feel higher in your business, in your family, maybe in your own body. And when I decided to revisit this concept, it wasn’t because, you know, I didn’t have another idea to share. I have a new idea to share every single week. It’s because I think it’s more relevant now than when I really first introduced it. So many of the women that I am crossing paths with in our coaching communities are still prone to making decisions from a previous identity, a previous set of values, expectations, norms, experiences, right? It’s like I am a high achiever. I am the responsible one, I am the peacekeeper, I am the over-functioner, right? We make decisions from that former identity. But the woman who you’re becoming, right?

She has a different center of gravity. She doesn’t ask what’s gonna make everyone else comfortable. She’s asking what aligns with the future that I’m building? I bet, I hope, right? So this episode really is an invitation to recalibrate, to take another look at your current reality, your exact current reality, not one that’s colored by your past, right? Take a look at your current calendar, your current commitments, right? The things that are tugging on your energy. And ask better questions. Ask, are you choosing like the woman that you’ve been, right? Maybe the woman you’re trying to outgrow or grow beyond. Or are you choosing like the woman you’re growing into, the person that you’re becoming? And as you listen, I want you to hold today’s context in mind, not last year’s, or God forbid, last decades, right? Because you’re operating at a whole new level now, and I wanna make sure that your decisions match that altitude.

Okay? So let’s dive in. So hello and welcome back to the show. I have a question for you as we start today’s episode. And the question is this, if you could go back in time and have a conversation with your 16-year-old self, what would you tell her? I want you to think about this question with me. Now, you may have just shuttered when I asked that question. You may have smiled, you may have rolled your eyes even if you’ve maybe thought about this question before. But I really want you to go there with me as we get into this episode. I want you to think actually very specifically about one of the decisions that maybe you had to make when you were 16. Maybe it was a decision about which summer job you should take, or whether you should take all those honors and AP classes, or a collection of maybe easier electives.

Maybe you were thinking about whether you should date this person or that one right at 16, break the rules or follow them. Should you try out for the team? Might’ve been a decision that you were pondering or whether or not to cut bangs. That was a decision I pondered at 16. You know, which colleges should you apply to these decisions as? And I want you to just maybe even pause this episode and just think for a minute about what it felt like to be 16 and trying to make any one of those decisions. Or another one that came to your mind when I asked the question. And I think the theme is probably that those decisions felt pretty overwhelming to your 16-year-old self. You know, they were all consuming, they were maybe a little scary or a lot scary. Um, they felt like the stakes were pretty high.

I felt like, as I think back on this, I felt like I didn’t have the information that I needed, right? I felt like there was, I was trying to make decisions with imperfect information for maybe the first time ever around that era. You know, up until then, you’re, you’re being given pretty simple and well framed decisions. And around that time in high school, if your parents gave you some room to make decisions, you’re starting to really deal with nuance. And so I want you to think about what you would tell that young woman. Now, if you could sit down with her and speak to her really openly and honestly from the perspective that you have at this age, what would you say about that decision? And this is one way, this is one frame that you can use to wrap your head around the topic that I really wanna get into today, which is how we make choices, how we make decisions, and how we can use our future self to help us.

So let’s talk about this. Typically, when we are making decisions, we make them from our current circumstances. We kind of have to, if you think about it, that’s all we have, right? We ask ourselves, self, you know, what should I do here? What’s, what’s my next move? And our self, our current self, which has had a certain set of experiences up to that point, tries to sort out what to do. And my belief is that sometimes that keeps us stuck where we are, right? That process of going inward and thinking about our current circumstances can make us play small. It can also sort of have us repeat some mistakes over and over again, right? Why? Why is that? Well, because we’re making those choices from the perspective of a level that we’re trying to grow beyond, right? And I’m not talking about things like, what should we have for dinner?

Although you could, you could run that through this lens as well. I’m talking about those inflection point decisions. You know, the ones that we kind of know in our gut could change things, they could change the trajectory that we’re on, they could make tomorrow different than today, so to speak. And our human selves will choose familiarity over growth almost every time, right? We’ll choose familiarity instead of growth. So we may actually choose something that’s not very good, that’s uncomfortable if it’s familiar to us, if it’s something that we have chosen before and we sort of know the outcome, and when we make decisions from that current perspective, then we’re limited by it. We’re, we’re behaving as though the life we have now, the circumstances that we’re in, that that’s the life we’ll always have. But is that true? You know, that certainly has not been true for me.

I was reflecting recently on the life that I have now, and if I compare that to my life, let’s say 20 years ago, it’s a radically different set of circumstances. It is so virtually unrecognizable, right? So many things about my life are different. And there are of course things that are the same. You know, I still have my parents, I’m still married to the same person. But 20 years ago, I didn’t have any of my children. I didn’t live in this home, I didn’t have this career. Um, I didn’t look the same. Like so many things have changed. So when we make decisions only from our current perspective, we can be limited by it, right? And that framework ignores the fact that virtually all of the circumstances will change over time. And if we’re not careful, they may change in a direction that we’re not happy about or not proud of, right?

If we keep making decisions from our current perspective, we can actually go backwards, sort of by accident, right? So I wanna get acquainted today. Let’s, let’s have us all get acquainted with what I’m gonna call A-V-V-I-P-A very, very important person. And this is your future self. And when you’re making the next choice that you face, I want you to ask yourself what she would have you do. What would your future self have you do? Here’s why. Again, I’m gonna unpack this idea of how do we make choices most of the time from our current circumstances? All too often the thing that drives our decision is one of five things. And I thought about these as I was putting some notes together for today’s episode. There may be more than five. I’m gonna talk about five today. Okay? So one of the things that drives our decisions is this concept of identity or familiarity.

This is what I always do. This is what I know how to do. This is what I have done before. There’s sort of a known outcome, right? And this could be everything from these are the kind of clothes I buy, these are the kind of cars I drive, these are the kinds of things I eat. These are the kinds of vacations I take. This is how I spend my leisure time, right? Like, these are our habits, our decisions, our choices. We have these kinds of limits that we operate within because we’re comfortable there. And this is how you get the phrase that may have run through your mind. People like me don’t do things like that, right? We look around us and maybe we see someone else who’s kind of broken out of that particular pattern that we’re in, and we think, wouldn’t it be nice?

You know, but people might like me, don’t do things like that, or, or people like me don’t get to do things like that is another way that this one comes up. So familiarity, identity, drive, a lot of our decisions, especially the ones that are sort of habitualized, where we’re making very similar choices over and over and over again. Think about it, this is kind of a mundane example, but it’ll work. Think about where you buy clothes, where do you go when it’s time for you to buy something new for your wardrobe? I bet it’s a pretty limited set of stores, right? Online or in-person, retailers where you go, because why? Because that’s what you’ve always done. And so if you are looking around going, God, I’m kind of in a fashion rut, you know, I don’t really like my clothes very much, I don’t love my wardrobe. Ask yourself, am I letting familiarity and identity drive my decision making here? And again, that might be a kind of basic example, but you can then apply that to other areas of your life.

Did you know that beyond hosting this podcast, I also directly support women leaders at the intersection of work and life. As a member of bold. You get direct access to me, the women on my team, and a peer group of exceptional women who are rewriting the rules and redefining what it means to have it all together. Go to brilliant balance.com/bold to learn more and apply for your spot today. The second thing that often drives our decisions is constraints. We make decisions using constraints. I can only do X, Y, or Z because I only have A, B, or C, right? So classically here, this is about money. We are constrained by our financial picture, and we make choices based on our current financial circumstances. I see this a lot with entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out how to invest in their business based on the current revenue level or income level that they have.

So constraints drive our decisions often, right? I can only do X, Y, or Z because I only have A, B, or C. And think about how limiting that can be. If we are on a growth curve, if we can see that our circumstances are changing and our world is expanding, but we’re only making decisions from where we are right now, it can be very difficult to invest. And that’s not just financially, but that’s a, that’s kind of a classic example for this one. The third thing that often drives decisions is fear, right? We allow fear to be the driver of the decision. And I gotta tell you, fear is a terrible decision maker. Fear does not make good decisions, right? Fear is the thing asking us, what if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail? What if I lose everything or something? You know, that’s important to me.

So fear, what if I’m embarrassed? What if I’m not good enough at it? All of those fears that creep in can cause us to take a step backwards to not take the chance to not go for it, to not put ourselves out there. So when fear is the driver of our decisions, we play safe and small. We make our world tinier so that we are pretty comfortable there. And that leads to the fourth one. I think another thing that drives our decisions a lot is comfort or ease. We could maybe call this one short-term gratification, like what feels good right now? So if fear is driving us to not take the chance, comfort and ease are saying it’s okay, just stay right here. So let’s think about something like fitness. I know a lot of listeners have fitness goals. Like I would really love to exercise more, right?

I would love to make that a regular part of my life because I feel so good when I do it. And yet the same person will say, I’m not doing it. Why? Because at the moment we’re choosing what’s comfortable, what’s easy, what feels good in the short term, instead of what feels good in the long term, right? What will feel good after we’ve done it, and maybe not even after we’ve done it once, but after we’ve done it with some level of consistency. So comfort, ease, short-term gratification can drive our behavior. And then the fifth one, this one is so prevalent, is the opinions of others. What will so and so think or say, if I do this, or even what is so and so telling me to do, you know, my spouse, my parents, my colleagues, the imaginary crowd even like what will people on social media think I should do?

So we will make decisions based on what is going to get us the feedback loop that we want from other people, right? What do they want me to do? Now, none of these are necessarily bad. Some of them can have merit. You know, they can weigh, they can play into a decision making process in a way that is healthy, but they can also lead to us not taking chances or not making moves that could really change the game for us. So I wanna look at an alternate framework that really leverages our future self, that allows you to help to tap into this alternate framework for decisions. So five alternate things that maybe should or could drive our decisions. If we can have a conversation with our future self, here’s what they are. Instead of familiarity and identity, which I talked about before, we wanna think about vision, using our vision to drive our decisions.

This is where I see myself and what action will move me toward it? So imagine the conversation with your future self at whatever point in the future you wanna place her. You know, it could be yourself a month from now, it could be yourself a year from now, it could be a decade from now. It could be at the end of your life, where do I see myself and what moves me in that direction? What choice or decision that I could make today is putting me one step closer toward that vision? Okay? That’s the alternative to choosing your current identity. We choose vision. Very powerful, right? You would make different decisions many, many times. If you are saying, I’m gonna make the decision that’s familiar to me, or I’m gonna make the decision that’s moving me closer to the vision I have for my life.

They are not the same decision most of the time. The second thing that should drive our decisions are possibilities instead of constraints. Possibilities. So possibilities are where you ask the question, what would have to be true? What would have to be true for me to make this decision and have it be a good one? What would have to happen on the other side of it? Right? What dream am I chasing? That’s a very powerful question. What would have to be true for this to be a great decision? It can help us get past the constraints, right? We can start thinking in terms of possibilities instead of constraints with that one simple question. The third thing that I would love to see drive hard decisions is courage, right? Instead of fear, courage. So the question here that I think frames this is what story do I wanna tell, right?

There’s a classic quote that says, live the story you want to tell. What story do I wanna tell one day? That’s what leads us toward courage, you know, and you can ask yourself this anytime that fear is really governing a decision. You can hear it by asking this question, what story do I wanna tell? Do I wanna tell you about the time that I decided not to apply for that job because I might not get it <laugh>? Or do I wanna tell the story of, man, I applied for that job and it was a long shot and I got it and it changed everything? Think about the difference in those stories, right? Which story do you wanna tell? The fourth thing that can drive our decisions is focusing on our long-term fulfillment or satisfaction instead of our short-term gratification. Okay? Our long-term satisfaction or pleasure or fulfillment. So the quote I like here is one that circulates in the author’s community and it’s, I don’t like writing, but I like having written, I don’t like writing.

There are very few authors who are like that, I just love the act of writing. I like having written, you know, I like looking back at that page and seeing what I’ve done. I like the finished book. How many places in your life do you struggle with the act of doing it, but you love it when you’ve done it? That’s the gear you can harness to tap these long-term rewards. So when we have to push through some short-term discomfort, right? And we have to sort of metaphorically get up off the couch and do something, we are, what we have to keep in our mind is that long term goal, will it have been worth it? And that is very powerful when there’s a little bit of pain in the short term, but the pain is worth it. And the fifth one, instead of the opinions of others, you know, what will so and so think we wanna think about to drive our decisions?

The opinion of our future self. What would my future self be proud of me for doing? What would my future self celebrate? What would my future self honor? When I look back at this moment in time that I’m facing today, where does my future self go? As a girl, that was it. You had to make a hard choice there and you made it. Making decisions from that perspective of our future selves is a fabulous game changer. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities. Maybe you are the kind of person who can start a business. You know, maybe you can marshal the resources to take that once in a lifetime trip. Maybe you do have the courage to go ask for that opportunity. Maybe you can do the hard work today that gets you that degree in a few years and maybe your future self is just waiting for you to ask for her point of view.

I gotta tell you, I love watching people make this shift from decision making, from your current circumstances to decision making, from this future perspective. So I wanna hear your stories. If you, if something opened up for you today when you were listening to this, and man I hope it did, jump into our Facebook group and tell me your story. Tell me where your current self was getting in the way, and tell me the story your future self wants. What is the story that she wants to tell? The Facebook group is at a brilliant balance. If you just go to Facebook and search groups, you’ll find brilliant balance. If I can help you personally, DM me on Facebook or Instagram or email me, um, you can email Cherylanne@brilliant-balance.com. Tell me that’s why I’m here, to help you make these kinds of shifts. That’s all for today, my friends. Till next time, let’s be brilliant.