Episode 018: Big Decisions – Fear, Shame, Intuition, and Relief

Have you ever felt the fear and shame that comes with making a big decision? Following that decision based on your intuition, you’ve likely felt relief to some degree. In today’s episode, I’m sharing about a few big decisions I’ve had to make recently and how I knew the decisions I made reflected my truth.

Review the Show Notes:

Moving Someplace for Everybody Conference (1:00)

Feeling Shame (2:38)

Listening to Your Gut Instincts (3:45)

Deciding to Move Out of My Parents Home (6:24)

Big Decisions Come From Your Core (8:30)

Knowing Your Truth in Decisions (11:39)

Review the Transcript:

Welcome to some place for everybody where we talk about belonging and being a human in our bodies and living in and learning to love our bodies. I’m your host, Carly someplace. This podcast is brought to you by Someplace Images, Boudoir for everybody, you can see the full show notes at some place for everybody.com. Now, let’s change some self perspectives.

Hi, y’all, it’s Carly someplace. So as I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear this week, we’re going to discuss something else hard. And this is something that has been weighing on me specifically a lot lately. So today we’re going to talk about making big decisions. And in making big decisions, we’re going to talk about the pressure and stress and anxiety that kind of come along with making those and and why that’s there and why they feel so heavy to make. So as I’ve I know, you’ve heard because it’s been in my commercials here, it’s been in things that I’ve talked about, I have an entire interview about it with Tina, the someplace for everybody women’s conference for 2022 is now getting moved to 2023. And so that was an incredibly big decision to make. And it was this like, guilt over my head that I even had the first thought to make that decision. When I finally reached out to Tina and said, Okay, so I’ve been thinking her immediate response was me too. And I think that having that solidarity and having somebody else come in and be like, Oh my gosh, I’ve been thinking the same thing. I’ve been having the same fears.

And I’ve been having the same worries was like an immediate, even because we hadn’t made a decision yet, just to hear that we were thinking the same things. And just to hear that I wasn’t alone in making this big decision was unreal for me in the way that like, relief just washed over my body. I’m like, there’s so many, there’s so many ways that our body can tell us so many incredible things. And while I’m not an expert on that, I know from my own experiences that that wave of relief of just like literally the tension going out of my shoulders, and that kind of like, cool wave of like, Oh, thank goodness like that is that is what relief was to me. And there’s a lot of, we could talk a lot about emotions in our body and how they present themselves. But one of the biggest ones that I know presents itself in a lot of people and let’s let’s talk about this for a second before we get into big decisions is shame. When we feel shame in our bodies, we feel like hot flashes, either in our face will feel ourselves getting warm, or our our cheeks heating up. But there’s so much of it that’s central and it will wash over you and feel very warm. At least it does for me. And that hot flash of shame is something that sometimes when I have a bad thought, or I have anything if I feel embarrassed, if I’m going to, like in this instance, bring something up, that’s a really hard discussion. For me, that’s what my body does is that it gives me that shame feeling and that shame instinct of of that hot flash of like, oh, this could go really bad. Maybe I should just keep it to myself. And, and in making big decisions.

Like literally, your body is giving you these signals of being like maybe this is a bad idea, a bad idea to read, discuss something or a bad idea to have a decision. And I’m here to tell you that while that instinct is there, there’s also let’s talk about another another feeling in our bodies. gut instinct. So while it’s that shame feeling for me comes when I want to discuss something that has been deep on my mind with with a big decision with somebody because I’m like, what if they reject me? What if they are having opposite feelings, and they don’t agree with me. And all of those are very legitimate feelings. I’m not going to say that they aren’t. But I am going to say that those are my what ifs and those aren’t at the base of my gut feeling. And if my gut feeling is telling me to do something, then it’s fear that is holding me back and shame of asking questions or re asking questions in order to make things work and make an actual decision. The decision to push our conference back for an entire year did not come lately at all. There’s a lot of things to move around. There’s refunds to process, there’s things like that. But it is at the core of what Tina and I feel it is the right decision. And a lot of that came from my gut feeling and my gut feeling of I felt like I did not have the proper time to launch the conference. There were so many other things going on. The launch of this podcast was happening at the same time the launch of the journal was happening. There were so many big things happening, that I didn’t get to give it time. And I was like, I wish I could do that again.

I wish I could go back, I wish I could take it back and be able to do it again. And then the overall arching factor was that COVID is still running rampant. And this newest variant of Omicron is just so much more contagious. And that at the end of the day, did I would I want to book a conference where I was having these feelings of staying with other people and getting to meet new people and having these new connections? And would I feel safe with COVID? In that situation? So those were factors for me of what really does this come down to? And where are we going from here? And how can this be better. And so when we sat down to talk and having these feelings, and I was, I was so nervous, even with Tina, who is one of my close friends, that I was going to sound silly saying these things. And I think one of our biggest things making a decision is that we think that we are going to receive shame for it, and that we’re going to receive pushback for it. And in so many scenarios, we might, and I’m not, I mean, I’m just relating this to the conference in general, but even making big decisions. Let’s go to another big decision that I made. So even before buying my house, which was a big decision in itself, deciding to move out of my parents house, I lived with my parents off and on. And I have no shame about this into my 30s because I traveled almost full times in someplace that midges is a destination based studio, I was traveling nine to 10 months of the year. And it really didn’t make sense for me to have my own place or be paying rent somewhere. When I was really only home honestly, for like four or five days at a time when I was home. Sometimes it’d be two weeks, you know, different things like that.

But for the most part, I was always gone and was like there is a better way to use my money than pouring it into rent when I could just stay with my parents. Well, then when we hit 2020, and we went into quarantine, my mother and I, my mother is one of my best friends. I know, I’ve said that before my mother and I were ready to strangle each other on a very regular basis. Because I was all of a sudden home all of the time. And as an adult, and then but also as her child, we were just going head to head. And when I made the decision that I was going to move out, it felt like this insane. And granted, I was in my 30s I was 31 years old. And I was like oh god, how are they going to take this? I had so much fear that they were gonna tell me. I don’t I don’t even know. I don’t even know what I was thinking. And it’s not like they were gonna tell me no, I mean, I didn’t have any rules. I didn’t have, you know, things like that I was 31 years old. But it was still such a decision that I was like, are they going to be disappointed? Are they going to be you know, what is going to happen here? What’s gonna happen with our relationship? Because right at that point, we were fighting a lot we were there was a lot of yelling happening. There were things like this. And so I truly knew in my gut, that moving out was the best move, but it was still so hard to make the actual decision. And then to tell my parents, like, I felt so much fear around that. So much fear around that. And for not really any good reason. And so a lot of making big decisions comes to is at the core as at your core, you know, you’re making the right decision. It’s something you’ve thought about. It’s those things that you think about when it’s dark, when you have other things that you should be thinking and that that little kernel of truth is somewhere inside of you, inspiring you to make a choice and to push you forward in what you know is right for you.

That is your gut instinct. That is your gut instinct. And that is what you need to be listening to, in order to come out on the other side of a big decision knowing you made the right choice for yourself. And it can be so incredibly hard to take that tiny little itty bitty kernel and be like oh, okay, listen to this. And maybe I sound crazy to you, and that’s okay too. But if you know what I’m talking about, then you know what I’m talking about. It’s there, it’s there, deep in your gut and deep in the back of your brain that this is the right decision, and that you just need to figure out where to go from there. And then it’s just those factors of fear, shame and that shame feeling or or logistics of and a lot of logistics plan to fear of, then how do I actually make this happen? How do I make this big decision and actually move forward with it? And this can be so many things, it can be quitting your job, it can be taking a new job, it can be buying a home, it can be moving into a new place. It can be you know, making a decision that might not Be easy in other ways. For example, I have friends who have recently had to surrender one of their pets, because it just wasn’t a good scenario for them that their older pet wasn’t able to live their best life anymore. And they weren’t with small children and other animals the best caretaker anymore. And that’s okay, too. And there’s so many factors that come into every decision that we make. But these big decisions that way so incredibly heavy on us, are the ones that are going to be with that gut feeling. These are the ones that are going to have shame Preston around them, these are the ones that are gonna have a lot of logistics, and a lot of where do we go from here?

And how do we actually make this happen? Instead of just having a well it’s a decision, it’s not a snap decision of like, do you want Chinese or pizza for dinner, it’s, it’s a completely different scenario. And there are all of these factors. So as I’m talking about this, and explaining a little bit of the feeling behind it, I want you to know that following your gut is a good thing. And that whatever those inklings of truth that you have are for you to listen to them to listen to your intuition is so incredibly powerful, and is going to put you onto this correct path. I guess, I don’t know that maybe sounds a little bit woowoo for a lot of people. But I truly think that the thing inside of you guiding you, your soul, your whatever you want it to be, that is going to steer you in the right direction. And I’m not going to say we don’t all make mistakes when it comes to big decisions. But if we are doing what we truly believe in with these decisions, we are getting one step closer to knowing what our truth is, and feeling what our truth feels like when we’re seeing it and doing all of these different things. And, and so many of those factors can truly play into everyday then decisions in our lives. When we make a big decision.

And we feel like it’s right. And we feel like we’ve done something that is right. We feel better in making other decisions for ourselves, and making more decisions for ourselves that maybe are also hard. But we feel like these decisions come easier and easier when we make a big one that is the right one. And that relief. And the weight that just feels like it’s lifted off of your shoulders is so incredibly powerful. And I want you to take those feelings, and I want you to embrace them and see that you have made decisions and you can make hard decisions. And that making hard decisions helps you make easier decisions. And eventually, hard decisions become easier when you learn to trust yourself. And trust your intuition. Trust your gut. Trust that feeling because at the core of that is you and your morals and your values, and what you truly feel. So if there’s a nagging little voice in the back of your head, telling you that maybe a decision isn’t right for you, or it is super right for you. I want to urge you to listen to it. I want to challenge you to listen to it because it’s hard. Oh gosh, it can be so freakin hard. It can be hard and it can impact a lot of different people. But that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily wrong. If it’s right for you, then it is the right choice.

I’ll repeat myself on that one. If it is right for you, it is the right choice. If you’ve been listening, I talk about learning how to become selfish. Learning how to put yourself first last week’s episode was all about prioritizing yourself. And this is another thing that plays into that. making big decisions and being able to weigh these options make pro and con lists, do all of this other stuff at the base of it all. Your intuition is going to tell you what truly comes down to being right. And that’s not a decision that other people can make for you. It comes down to you, knowing you and prioritizing what you want and what you need or what you feel is best you are a frickin superstar. Listen to yourself. Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. Learn to trust yourself. It’s hard. But it gets easier, and it gets better. So I hope that this finds you at the precipice of a big decision. And that this is something that just hearing someone say, trust yourself. Listen to yourself is going to make a difference because I know it has for me. Until next time, be kind to yourselves. Thanks so much for listening to someplace for everybody. If you love this episode, would you mind leaving me a review in your favorite podcast app and subscribe to the show. If you’re looking for a community to love on you and support you and your self love Journey, come join our all gender Facebook group someplace for everybody which can be found in the show notes at someplace for everybody.com Until we meet again, be kind to yourself.