#48: Certainty in Decision Making: Unlocking Your Unique Style for Clear, Confident Choices [Decision Making Series]

Jan 27

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Today’s episode is all about certainty in decision making. I'm really excited to share that I'm kicking off a new series that is all around decision making and how to make clear, confident decisions in your life. Not only that, but how to make these clear, confident decisions in the ways that are most aligned to you so you can feel certain in your decision making process. Because actually, we all make decisions differently. Our mind-body connection operates differently. By learning, understanding, and embracing your specific decision-making style, it's going to really change the game and you’ll have much more certainty in your decision making. It's crazy, but it's true. I have seen that firsthand for myself, for family members, for clients—it's a thing. I'm really happy to be taking you through this series.

Why Certainty in Decision Making Feels So Hard

To start, I want to share some background about decision making and some of the principles that we'll be taking through the next seven episodes where I will share a different decision-making style each week.

Starting off, I want to talk a little bit about conditioning. Conditioning is this concept that we have been conditioned and are conditioned as people our whole lives, from when we're born. The families that we are born into, school, friends, teachers, other people that we interact with along the way in our lives—they all condition us in different ways and we may not be really aware of it at the time. Sometimes we can be, and other times not as much, but everyone's energies are interacting with each other. Everyone's values and beliefs impact how we communicate. That has an impact on the information you receive from the other person. It's all part of the process of life. It's not good or bad in a sense. It's not something that you can avoid because it happens on the personal level all the way up through society and culture. We're conditioned on the macro, all the way down into the micro.

It's something I'd like you to be aware of as we talk about all of this. What happens is this type of conditioning, while we can't escape it, depending on how much we take on within ourselves, changes how we operate individually.

Certainty in Decision Making quote from Mary

The Power of Your Mind-Body Connection

All of my work is around the mind-body connection and supporting people to open and unlock their mind-body connection in different ways. This podcast is all about finding tools and different ways that work for you to lead your life. I'm not here to do it for you, but I'm here to share and support you, because I really believe that each and every one of us has a purpose here to support the collective. The more that we can come into contact with that purpose by opening our mind-body connection, the better off we will all be.

So, conditioning is something that happens to us. When we embrace our mind-body connection and get curious about that, we can peel back some of those layers to better understand ourselves. That is where this piece of decision making comes in. We each have our own decision making style. But it can be hard to connect with it if we're not aware of the conditioning that happens and if we're not reflecting on how other people or situations are impacting us when we make those decisions.

That's one piece of it: conditioning. That's something important to be aware of.

The Power of Your Mind-Body Connection

The other piece relates to your mind-body connection in the sense that we typically make decisions from the mind and decisions are actually meant to be made from the body. This is a big thing, so I'll say it again: we as humans tend to make decisions from our mind, but our decisions are actually meant to be made from our bodies. Our bodies know before our mind knows. Our mind is just communicating out what it thinks through and decides to express.

What's happening is our body is connecting with our inner knowing. If you've ever had a situation where you felt in your body something was off or something was wrong, or it didn't seem correct in some way, even if you couldn't place why, that was your body signaling to you that it knows that something is off. That's just one small example that I'm sure we can all relate to some degree. Of course, it depends on how connected you are to your body at this point in time. No judgment if you're listening to your body already or if you don't usually. That's okay. We're going to talk through that through this series.

The piece is, you have felt this. I'm sure you felt this to some degree in your life at some point. Whether it was a feeling about another person you interacted with, or a situation you got put in that felt uncomfortable. It's those times where your body might be saying no, but you're saying yes because you feel bad, or you feel an obligation of some type, or you're thinking about a larger impact and how it might play out with other people. Any of those things—they can all show up in that kind of case.

Really, at the end of the day, our bodies have always been a tool to keep us safe. They've always worked in this capacity of instinct and intuition throughout the evolution of the human journey. So what we're getting at here is that understanding that piece, and understanding that actually you're meant to make decisions from your body instead of your mind, is really the first step in being able to embrace your decision-making style with more alignment. However, you make decisions now, that's okay. This is an invitation to allow you to explore in a different way. Maybe there's a different way you want to start making your decisions.

This is especially true for big life decisions—things like a career change, taking on a new role, moving to a different company, starting a business, any types of relationships you're entering into with a new person, either a business partnership or a personal one. It could also be for moving, deciding to move across the country or to another country, something that will greatly impact your environment. All of these things are these bigger decisions that truly change the game when you tune into your body.

If you're anything like me, you may have made a lot of pros and cons lists in the past. I will share about my decision making style in one of the episodes as well. Now I may process with some of that to identify the different values and factors that I'm deciding against, but at the end of the day, I tune back into my body and the feeling from there to be able to make my decision.

You can also use this in partnership with however you usually make decisions until you explore more to see what feels right and true to you. I'm never going to tell you that you have to do it a certain way. Please keep that in mind. But if you are curious and you're ready for something different, ready to look at this a little bit differently, maybe tired of making decisions or tired of being stuck in the overthinking or worried—tired of worrying about making decisions or regretting a decision you might make before you even make it—any of those things, let's just say decision fatigue is real. If you're feeling those things and you're tired because of it, that's okay. This is going to be a new way for you to look at it. Actually, I believe you'll find a lot more peace with this process because you'll feel more clarity from it. You really will. It's a game changer.

Those are a couple of the principles that I want you to keep in mind as we go through this series: first, about conditioning and understanding that for yourself, whatever it looks like; second, the mind-body connection and understanding that decisions aren't meant to be made from the mind, they're meant to be made from the body.

Certainty in Decision Making key takeaways

Introducing Seven Decision Making Styles

In each of these weeks within the series, I will give examples of the different decision-making styles. I will give real life examples so that you can get a flavor and idea of how it works. Keep in mind it's all an exploration for you to see what feels right and true to you.

Why Knowing Your Style Changes Everything

So how do we get to these seven different decision-making styles? I'm so glad you asked! These seven decision making styles are all connected to a tool I use called Human Design. If you haven't heard about it, I have some other episodes around Human Design. What I want to do with this series is—yes, that is a tool that I'm using, so it will be a way for you to find your decision-making style, and it's meant to be used as a tool to help you explore. I'm not going to teach the nitty-gritty about Human Design, but I will say it provides a blueprint or a map about how your energy works. There's a lot of different dynamics that go into it, but the place that I love to start is with how you make decisions, because this has a very practical component to it that you can use in everyday life, all day long, and that is implementing it with how you make decisions and using your mind-body connection for that, which is what I'm all about.

With that, I have a couple of little instructions and a little homework for you for this week before we start getting into each of the weekly episodes. How do you get your Human Design chart? So, this is a chart that takes your birth time, date, and location, and it gives you back the energy blueprint—a map. On that chart it will have a section called “authority,” which is the Human Design term for decision-making style. I like to use “decision-making style” because it's much more relatable. I have a software on my site where you can get a free chart. You just put your information in and it'll give you your specific chart back. You can go to maryclavieres.com/getyourchart to download your chart. On there, it will say what your Authority is. You're looking for the description next to it. It might say emotional, it might say sacral or splenic. There are seven different styles, and once you see that, you'll be able to go to the episode for that decision-making authority. I'm going to put the different authority types in parentheses at the end of each episode title so that you can easily reference it that way too.

Now you have a choice—you can go straight to your authority episode and look at that, or you could listen through all of them so you can start to hear how other people might be wired to make decisions.

This is especially interesting in teams and in family dynamics. For my own family, there are four of us in the house and we have four different decision-making styles, which can feel a little nutty at times, right? Some decision-making styles, for example, are meant to make decisions in the moment—they're meant to listen to their body response in that moment and go with that energy in that decision. For others, the clarity will come over time and they are meant to wait it out and go through their emotional waves before they decide on something.

Decision Making Certainty In relationships

You can probably start to connect these dots. If you're meant to make decisions in the moment, but your spouse or even your business partner is actually meant to make decisions over time, those are two very different styles. How do we make sure that we stay true to each of our decision-making styles while trying to come into agreement on something? There's a lot to it. If you have access to the information, you could also pull charts for those in your life—loved ones or otherwise—that you're interested in learning about so that you can start to build those bridges. But that's secondary to the part where

I want you to look up your decision-making style and start with you, because really once we start to work in alignment with ourselves, then it's much easier to begin to work with others as well. That's a big part of it too.

So anyway, you can listen to the whole series. I encourage you to because, one, it's just fascinating information, and two, I do feel that it's beneficial along the way to really understand how other people are operating. You’ll start to get clarity and develop certainty with your decision making in this process.

Reflection questions for Certainty in Decision Making

Caveats for Certainty in Decision Making

A couple of caveats here. If you end up feeling like you don't resonate with your decision-making style that is shared on an episode, I'll say two things: one, in certain cases you may be on the border between two different styles if your birth time is not correct. You need an exact birth time. If you feel that that might be the case, please feel free to email me—we can talk through your information and I can check on my app to see if you are in fact right on the border of two different ones.

The other piece to keep in mind is going back to the beginning, where I talked about conditioning—it may not feel really correct for you right now because of the conditioning that you have, because of what you're used to and how you're used to operating.

Conditioning is something that has been happening to you all your life, so then the process of deconditioning also takes time. Open mind and curiosity are always great ways to lead. Wherever you can find those threads of connection, wherever you feel called, please go with that. Just keep in mind that you may or may not be surprised with which decision-making style you have. If it's really not fitting, please reach out. It's rare that that happens, but it can happen. I wouldn't want you to miss out on the goodness of this information because of that. If it's interesting to you and you're curious, please feel free to reach out either on social or email me.

Reflection Questions for Certainty in Decision Making

Now you know where to get your chart, so get your chart before we start the series next week. In the meantime, I would also like to share with you a reflection or, let's call it, a little homework for this week, which is an invitation to get curious about how you currently make decisions. You don't need to do anything about it. Just start to observe it.

You can either think back to periods of time where you went through big decisions and how you handled those or maybe something is present for you right now that you're navigating and thinking a lot about. Spend some time reflecting on that.

Just bring it into your awareness:

How do I usually make decisions?

Are there times where that has gone well and times when it hasn't gone well?

We'll dive deeper into each of them again with each of the styles. I will share about the style and give you some reflection questions and prompts to work with it because I want this to be very tangible for you, very practical for you—a way for you to support yourself and lead your life in the way that you want. I really believe a big part of that is being able to make decisions for yourself that are in alignment.

A lot of the time, we take on a lot of things from other people and we are disconnected from that voice and that space. This is reclaiming that. It's getting back to—may feel familiar, it may feel challenging. Any of the ways, it's okay. It's really about starting that process, or continuing that process if it's something that you've already been looking into.

Conclusion for Certainty in Decision Making

Let's leave it there for today in terms of the reflection, the homework, and giving you this base, this foundational level of understanding of where we're coming from for how you make decisions and how you can make them in a clearer, more grounded way. You’re well on your way to finding certainty in decision making. Next week, we'll pick up with each of the styles, the first of the seven styles. I'm really excited about this. I hope you are too. I'm so committed to supporting people with understanding more about how they're designed to make decisions and how that can support them with their lives.

Anything I can do to bring some guidance and some clarity around it is a win for me because it means it's a win for you. I'm really, really excited about that. I'm so grateful for you to be here. If you have any questions, if you have any trouble getting your chart, if you have questions about how to find your authority or questions with, like, "Oh, I don't know if I have the exact, exact birth time," please, please, please don't hesitate to reach out. This is here for you. I'm creating this for you as a resource and I want to be that resource for you.

Let’s keep this conversation going. Find me on social at the links below, and know that in this busy world, I deeply appreciate your time and presence here. You can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram @mary.clavieres, or check out my website for resources, book info, and Decision Making Accelerator sessions.

Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to share this with you and move through these seven decision-making styles with you. It's really such a game changer. I'm excited for it to be a game changer for you, too.

Questions? Please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm also on Voxer at @MaryClavieres.

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Thank you so much for being here, for listening, and for taking these steps on your own journey. Until next week!

Want to learn more about your unique Human Design blueprint?

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You’re invite to book a Decision Making with Human Design session here.

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