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Hello and welcome to Find Yourself, Change Your Life. I'm your host, Mary Clavieres. This podcast is here to help you rediscover yourself and become the leader of your life, however you want that to look.

If you haven't tuned in for the last few weeks, we just finished up the decision-making series. This series is all about how you are designed and meant to make decisions in your own unique way. I highly recommend checking it out. It starts with episode 48. If you go back and listen to episode 48, you'll get all the info on how to find your decision-making style, and then you can go to the corresponding episode for your specific style.

The Gap Between Knowing and Living

For today I wanted to do an extension of sorts and talk about what it means to go from knowing something and understanding it as a concept to actually integrating it and living it in your life.

We just spent these 7 or 8 weeks together on the different decision-making styles. Now presumably you know about your style, you can know, practically, what that looks like. But then it's a very different thing to actually integrate it and live it in your life. And that's what I want to talk about today.

Because we really are in a time where there's information overload. We have all the information we could ever need at our fingertips 24/7, even when we're trying to go to sleep. The whole world is connected to us on our little device. We don't need more information most of the time. What we need is to take a pause and tune into how we actually integrate this information and use it in our lives.

With all this information on decision making, yes, you could say, all right, I learned I have emotional authority. I learned that I need to ride the emotional waves and wait till I'm neutral before I make a decision. That's great, but what does it actually mean and how does it feel to you in your system? How does it feel to you when you're in a high or a low? How does it feel to you in your body when you get to neutral?

These are very important things that if you don't pay attention to them, if you don't experiment with them or get curious about the process, you'll completely miss it. And you'll kind of go back to old ways, or you'll stay in your head, or you'll do all these other things instead of being aligned to who you truly are.

This is what I want to talk about and share because it's so important that we actually integrate the information. That's why even in my book, Mind-Body Connection Unlocked, Part 6 is all about integration. Yes, I go through mind, body, soul, all of those things, but then I also talk about integration because it's so important to actually bring this into your being somehow.

It's really moving from knowing something for the sake of knowing it and actually using it and embracing it and integrating it in ways that feel correct and feel aligned for you.

from information to embodied decision making

You're Not Going to Get It Overnight

If you've listened already and you've learned your decision-making style, the question becomes how can you start to work with it in some way.

You're not going to get it overnight, I can tell you that. For me, it's been a process over years of really learning and honing in and tweaking in different ways what it feels like and what it looks like for me, understanding my process, how it shows up, how I feel. And then as we evolve as people and as we expand and grow, it will also start to look different because we'll be deepening into that knowledge in a different way and living it from a different place because of how we're being in that moment.

For anyone that's new to tuning in with their decision-making style, I say it really starts with getting curious. Get curious about how you work right now and start to tune in and experiment with what things feel like for you.

When you're faced with a decision, how does it feel to you? What are you noticing about how you usually operate versus how you're meant to operate based on your style?

This takes time. And we live in a world that is very much instantaneous in a lot of ways with lots of expectations that things will just happen or happen quickly. And this is not something that happens quickly, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth it in a million ways.

What This Looks Like for Each Style

Your invitation is to start to notice, start to become aware of—well, how do I make decisions right now? And where are the areas that is aligned with my decision-making style and where are the areas that it's not?

Let me walk through what this might look like for each style.

Emotional Authority

If you have this decision-making style, you're meant to ride the highs and lows of your emotions, wait until you feel neutral in your body, and then make your decision. The first step with that is: what do my highs and lows feel like? Am I aware when I'm in an emotional high or an emotional low? And what does it look like for me?

If you're in a high feeling very excited, where does that excitement show up for you? Where does that drive show up in your body? And then if you're in a low, where does that show up and how does it show up for you? Does it show up more as nervousness? Does it show up as being worried about things or being negative about things?

It's going to look different for everybody, so that's why it's really important. This is all about self-awareness and tuning in. Someone else can't do this for you.

Sacral Authority

Are you paying attention to your gut response? Are you paying attention to how your body moves before you actually speak? Sacral authority is all about the body response before you speak, before it gets to your mind. Are you tuning into that?

Are you someone that says uh-huh or uh-uh, or do you nod and shake your head, or do you shrug your shoulders? All of these different things are your body's way of responding. And it's understanding - how does that show up for you?

Usually with clients, I can help them with this when they have sacral authority. I can help them on Zoom because I can see what their body is doing. And you can practice this yourself. You can look in the mirror, you can open up a video screen on your computer and just look at how you respond and how your body behaves, and it'll start to give you some clues.

Splenic Authority

Are you tuning in and listening to those whispers of your voice? Are you even connected to that at all? Then it becomes, how can you practice being present in the world so that you can listen to that and hear that more clearly?

It's best for everyone to practice being more present, but especially in this case, if you want to start working with the voice and the whispers of the spleen, very important to be present and to tune into that present moment.

Heart or Ego Authority

If you have this authority, it's all about following your heart, asking what's in it for you. Do you allow yourself to ask, is my heart in this, or what's in this for me in a way that feels good for me? Do you even give yourself permission to ask yourself that question?

Forget about actually making your decisions from that place—are you even allowing yourself to ask that question, or are you always handing your decisions over to other people, other elements, thinking about what someone else would say or how this impacts your work or something else?

Yes, you can ask those questions too, but it's very important to be asking and checking in with self. Each of these decision-making styles also have what people go to as a not-in-alignment way. And that's just how that can look in that case of putting other people first instead of the self.

key takeaways for embodied decision making

My Personal Example: Self-Projected Authority

With self-projected, which is my decision-making style, it's all about talking it out. And I can give you a more specific example here of what the process looks like from really knowing something to then living it. And I would say it's very much about uncovering each of the layers.

In the beginning with self-projected authority, I knew I need to talk it out, I need to talk things out, and I understand that that's how I'm meant to make decisions. It's not going to be from thinking about the decision.

And I had a lot of things in the beginning about feeling like I always had to talk things out so much that it seemed like I was outsourcing my decision-making. That was a whole process for me to go through and understand and uncover and say, actually I want to speak things out, I can speak them out, and I don't want to ask other people what they think about it. I want to speak it out and tune into myself.

And that was a process of learning—well, how does it feel in my body? How does it feel in my body as I speak it out? If it's a yes or if it's a no. And that's a very nuanced thing to be embracing and really getting curious about.

It's a process that has gone on over years of learning and integrating, and it's always fun actually to me because as you learn these things and as you practice them, you go deeper into awareness, you go deeper into using this information and living it in a different way.

Now for a while I've known, speak it out, see where I feel it in my body, all of these things. And then another layer of that will uncover and you'll be able to know without having to observe it so much. You will know because you'll be able to identify the feeling right away and you say, oh yep, I'm already starting to feel it in my body. I know the direction this is going.

But you can't get to that place of knowing it and being able to act more quickly on it without building that awareness and without getting curious about how it looks for you. This is such a huge piece and it works in so many aspects of life, so many aspects of life, not just decision-making.

Environmental Authority

It's all about also speaking it out, but letting it drop in and being in the right environment for it. Again, all of this is about testing it out, starting to speak out loud. Do you let yourself speak out loud? And then what are the environments that you're in? Are you in places that feel nourishing to you? And just start to observe what are those environments.

Lunar Authority

This one's a little different because it's a 28-day cycle, but starting to pay attention to that cycle for yourself and bring awareness to, okay, how am I tuning in at the beginning of the month? And then how does that progress throughout the month?

For this one, I always say it's best to keep a notebook. Quite a few of these, it's good to keep a little notebook, but especially this one that kind of works on a longer cycle, and also emotional decision-making style, which works on a longer cycle. If you take the notes, you can then start to see the patterns.

steps to experiment with embodied decision making

Going Deeper

And I would challenge anyone listening that, maybe you're not at the beginning. Maybe you say, I am pretty in tune with my body. Well, for your decision-making style, what's the next layer deeper that you can go with it?

Because anything that you're doing to expand or change your life in some way, live more in alignment, be more connected to your purpose, have a deeper sense of being and understanding of how you're contributing to the world—all of those things that are so beautiful and allow us to connect so much more deeply to this experience called life—all of that can continue to evolve.

You don't need to just stop and say, yep, check. I know how this works for my decision-making style, or yep, I feel where it is in my body and I pay attention to that now, so I'm good to go. There's always an invitation to go deeper if you want to. That's very important. If it's something that you say, I feel good for now, then okay, great. That's where you are. And the day you want to pick back up and say, all right, I want to go deeper with this, then that's great too.

embodied decision making accelerator session

The Sequence: Information to Integration to Living It

The invitation for you today is to start paying attention to the knowledge that you have and how are you choosing to observe it and work with it so that you can start living it. Well, I could also say so that you can start integrating it so that then you are living it. That's the sequence.

The information and then the observation of how you show up right now, that self-awareness, moving to integrating it, starting to experiment and work with it in different ways, to then living it and actually having that be the place that you work from.

I'm going to do an episode all about that as well, a deeper dive into that process. But that's really what's behind transformation.

Start to take a look at that with your decision-making style. This is one easy way that you can start taking a look at it. If you want to look at it for other things, that's great too. But one easy way is to know your decision-making style. Again, if you don't, go check out episode 48, follow the series, then start to bring awareness to yourself. The observations of how do I make decisions today? What is a tweak I can make? Or how do I show up paying attention to my emotions or listening to the whispers or understanding how my body reacts? Any of those things depending on your style.

Start to pay attention and start to experiment with that over the next few weeks. Give yourself a month and say, I'm going to just start looking and observing what's going on for the next month. You don't have to actually change anything yet if that seems too overwhelming. It's really first about tuning in and observing, and then you can move on into, all right, how do I deepen into and integrate it?

And there are reflection questions in the workbook. If you have not grabbed the decision-making workbook, you can get that here. Go ahead and grab that because there are some questions and some places where you can have self-inquiry around these things. And that can also take the work deeper for you.

Invitation to use this however it feels best for you, but really paying attention and being mindful to the fact that information is one thing, actually living it and being with it is something different. If you're looking to actually make the changes and go deeper with it, it's really important to start to understand that process and start to inquire for yourself around it. And observe how you're showing up versus where you want to go with it.

I hope this is helpful for you on your journey. I'm so excited to be sharing this information and going deeper into this work in different ways. Thank you so much for being here. If you know anyone that this could help or support in some way, if someone came to mind to you during this episode, feel free to share it, because sharing is how this gets heard and seen by more people, and I appreciate your support with that.