Ep # 12 The Hidden Driver Behind All Your Decisions - And why it matters.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to talk yourself out of something you actually want to do?

You get excited about an idea… and then suddenly your brain starts listing every possible reason it might not work.

It sounds logical. Responsible, even.

But often, what sounds like logic is actually fear.

In this episode of The Identity Advantage Podcast, we explore what’s really happening inside the brain when we make decisions — and why even intelligent, capable people can talk themselves out of their own dreams.

Most of the decisions we make each day are driven by emotion, not logic. And when you simplify it down, those emotions tend to move in one of two directions: fear or hope.

Fear pushes us toward safety and familiarity.
 Hope pulls us toward growth and possibility.

The challenge is that hope often requires stepping into the unknown, and our brain is wired to resist that.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why fear often disguises itself as logic and responsibility
 • How your brain’s survival systems influence your decisions
 • Why smart people are often the best at rationalizing inaction
 • The difference between decisions driven by fear and those driven by hope
 • How to retrain your brain to tolerate discomfort
 • Why small acts of courage are the key to bigger life changes

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Most of the time, that thing that you're wanting, that thing that you're waiting for, that clarity that you're searching for, is sitting just on the other side of that action that we're afraid to take. Change doesn't start with what you do. Change starts with who you are. I'm your host, Kendall Keaton, and this is the Identity Advantage. Today I want to share with you something that I've kind of started noticing in my own life, something that hit me hard recently is that I realized that some of the decisions that I used to call logical decisions were also the same decisions that were keeping me stuck. They were the decisions that were keeping me exactly where I was. And it was a little uncomfortable for me to admit that at first because we like to believe that we're being logical and that being logical is a good thing. We're taught not to make emotional decisions, we're taught, we're taught to make logical ones, because logic sounds responsible, logic sounds practical, logic sounds smart, it sounds realistic. But the more I really started paying attention to these decisions, the more I realized that a lot of them were not logical at all. What I thought was following logic was actually me following fear. Because fear is incredibly sneaky and it almost never shows up, or never shows up and says, hey, I'm fear. Fear doesn't sound scared. Fear sounds reasonable. Fear sounds like that calm voice in your head that just says, think about this for a minute, or maybe we should sleep on it, or let's just make sure this makes sense first. And it's not bad to think things through. I'm not saying you have to be impulsive all the time. But when you think those thoughts, pay attention to what happens next. Because this is where fear puts on a really convincing disguise. There's a pattern. I want you to think about the last time you had an idea that excited you. Think about something that really got you going, adrenaline pumping. You were super excited about this idea. Whether it was a business idea, it was something that you wanted to write, maybe even a changing direction in your career, maybe it was just speaking up about something that mattered to you. But for a moment, you felt that little burst of energy and you thought, I could do that. And then almost immediately, another voice jumps in, a calm voice, a rational voice, that says, okay, but let's think about this first. And then what happens? You start listing all the reasons why it might not work, why the timing might not be right, why maybe you should wait until things feel more certain. And before you know it, that idea that had excited you five minutes ago is gone. Your perspective has completely changed and you've talked yourself out of it, and we call it logic. But it's not logic, it is fear. And the interesting thing about it is that fear doesn't actually have to stop you completely. Fear just has to slow you down, has to slow you down enough so that you feel comfortable again. Fear just has to convince you that staying where you are is the smart move for right now. It doesn't say don't ever do that ever. It just says maybe later, maybe next month, maybe when things feel a little bit more certain, when you have a little more clarity. Fear only needs to delay you. And the most common disguise it uses is logic. But if we look a little deeper, if we look underneath the fear, there's something even more powerful that's charging that, and it's a belief. A belief that you might not even realize that you're carrying. The belief that causes the fear in the first place. Beliefs like, who am I to do that? Or people like me don't succeed at things like that. What if I try and I'm not good enough? What if I embarrass myself? These are like quiet beliefs that just sit in the background. They sit in the background of our minds and they shape every decision that we make. Those decisions we make shape all the actions that we take after that. All those actions eventually shape the life that we build. And the question I want you to sit with today is what decision in your life have you been calling logical that might actually be fear? What things have you talked yourself out of because it sounded smarter to wait? Or what action have you delayed because fear dressed itself up as being practical? Because the decisions that we call logical are often just the decisions that are keeping us safe. And safe will keep you exactly where you are. Safe keeps you in the known. And if where you are is exactly where you want to stay, then that's fine. But if where you are is not where you want to stay, then this matters. Because sometimes the moment that we back away from change, we will feel relief. We'll make this decision that seems logical and we feel this moment of relief. And that relief tricks us into thinking that we made the right decision. You feel better about it. It's like this sigh of relief that just makes you feel comfortable again. And we think, oh, I must have made the right decision. That didn't feel right, I feel better now. But what actually happened is that you moved away from something that could have changed your life, and fear gave you relief as a reward to make you think you made the right decision. So something to think about is to look back at the decisions you've made recently. Ask yourself honestly, did that decision move me forward or did that decision just keep me comfortable?

unknown 5:47

Right?

SPEAKER_00 5:47

Did it come from clarity or did it come from fear wearing a very convincing mask? Because the life that you say that you want is not always waiting for the perfect plan and it's not waiting for every step to be clear. It's just waiting for you to move a little bit. Even just a little bit, and fear is fighting against even the smallest of steps. Most of the time, that thing that you're wanting, that thing that you're waiting for, that clarity that you're searching for, is sitting just on the other side of that action that we're afraid to take. Hope will always invite you forward, and fear will always try to keep you where you are. You will feel hope about an exciting idea, and you're gonna want to take action on it. Following that hope moves you towards that thing that you want. Fear will jump in and give you reasons to stay, make them sound very reasonable, but following fear keeps you where you are. There's hope and there's fear, and the decision that you make between those two emotions shapes everything that comes after that. The beliefs you hold will shape the actions that you take, and the actions that you take shape the life that you build. And very, very often the life that we want is just on the other side of all those decisions that we're calling logical. And when we talk about those emotions, hope and fear, I want to take a minute and kind of dive a little bit deeper into this because these two emotions are essentially like your primary emotions, just like there's primary colors, and every other color is a derivative of those colors. All colors are built from the same three primary colors. All your emotions, like fear, is any emotion. There are thousands of different fears: fear of success, fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of doing it wrong, fear of doing it right, like anxiety is fear-based, worry is fear-based, guilt is fear-based, that the fear that maybe you have done something wrong. So, for the sake of conversation, we're going to boil this down to just the two emotions: fear and hope. Hope is the chance that you could feel anything good, that you could do anything, be anything, have anything that could make you feel better. Hope that you could have more joy in your life, hope that something could make you happier, hope that you could have financial freedom or time freedom. Every emotion or every action that you take exists in one of those emotions. Fear, you're gonna do something to avoid, it's an avoidance motivation. It's gonna cause you to draw away from something. And if you move into hope, it's gonna cause you to move towards something. And when we really look at how we as human beings make decisions, every decision we make is emotional. Even the ones that we think are logical. If you think you are making a logical decision, you are just unaware of the emotion that is behind that decision. You're choosing an emotion of comfort. You're choosing an emotion of safety. You're choosing an emotion that makes you feel relieved. There are no logical decisions. Every decision starts in an emotion. All of them. There's something like research says that there's tens of thousands, I think it's over 30,000 decisions that we make a day. Some of them big, some of them small. Most of them are so automatic that we don't even notice we're making them. But every single one of those decisions was driven by an emotion at some point in time. And when you simplify it all down to the root level, there are two emotional directions that we will move in: fear and hope. Fear moves you away from something, hope moves you towards something. Fear pushes you towards safety, towards things that are familiar, towards protection. And moving towards hope puts you towards growth, possibility, change. Fear says stay where you are, hope says move towards what could be. But there's a reason that we don't move towards hope more often, and it's that hope, almost always, will point towards something unknown. Something you haven't done yet, something you have to try, something you might fail at, but in any case it's unknown. And the unknown makes your brain nervous. Your brain likes patterns, it likes things that are familiar. Your brain likes the things that it already knows how to survive. Which is why even when people are ambitious, even when you do feel motivated, incredibly smart people will talk themselves out of their dreams. Because fear doesn't sound like fear, it sounds like logic. And I can't talk about this without thinking about a movie that illustrates this perfectly. And if you've not seen it, consider yourself having homework. Because if you have never seen, it's the movie The Crudes. It's an animated movie. I think it might be Dreamworks, I think. I don't know. Don't quote me on that. But if you've not seen The Crudes, you need to watch it. But this movie is like the perfect example of this concept. So if you've not seen it, go watch it. It's in the movie The Father. I'm not gonna, I won't give you spoiler alert, I'll try not to, but in the movie, The Father is obsessed with keeping his family safe, right? It's like caveman days and they're just trying to stay alive. And the dad's philosophy is pretty simple. It's like stay in the cave, the cave is safe. It doesn't matter how small the cave is, doesn't matter how dark it is, it doesn't matter if everyone inside the cave is absolutely miserable, the cave is familiar, the cave is predictable, the cave has kept them alive, the cave is safe, right? And the father represents pretty much the fear response inside all of us. It's the biological system in your brain that's constantly trying to pull you back to safety, back into the cave. Right? But the daughter in this movie represents hope. She wants to explore, she wants to stay out of the cave, right? Follow the light, she wants to see what's outside. And hope is the part of you that believes that there might be something more, there might be something better. But the moment you move towards that, towards the unknown, your brain gets super uncomfortable. Right? The dad kicks in and said, Hell no, get inside the cave. I don't care what you think that you want to do, I don't care what you think is fun. I don't care how unhappy you are in this tiny little cave. We're all sleeping on top of each other and we have no food to eat. We're still alive. Your brain does not recognize what might be fun, what might give you joy. It doesn't say, oh, that looks like that might make me happy. Let's go towards that. Your brain says, Do I know that? Do I not know that? Do I know how that will turn out for sure? Or am I unsure? Your brain does not chase happiness. It never will. Your brain will chase the familiar. Your body will seek refuge in the familiar. No matter how unhappy the known is, it's where your body feels safe. But fear is a biological response, which means we can train our response to it, right? We have to dilute a little bit our body's reaction to fear. And you can do this in really small steps. Just practicing little small things that something tiny that makes you nervous that you can make yourself do anyway. And then when you survive that thing, your brain realizes, okay, this was new, but we're still alive. So this little bitty tiny thing is safe. If the thing that you are wanting to do right now seems massive and it seems scary, and you can't make yourself do it, there is a reason for it. Your fear response is very large, and you're having a huge reaction to it, which means that you are human. Fear will never go away, but there are ways to dilute our body's response to it by engaging in little things every day that are a slightly different, that do make us just a little bit nervous. Do things that make you slightly uncomfortable. Simple things in your everyday life, like going to dinner by yourself. That's mighty uncomfortable. And your brain will tell you that it's a life and death situation. There's no way I'm going to that restaurant, party of one, sit down by myself and let everybody watch me eat alone, thinking I got stood up or thinking I'm alone or I have no one in my life. Like all these judgment fears jump into our head. I mean, really think about it. Would you be willing to go into a restaurant, sit down, and eat by yourself? Some of you might, and some of you might say, hell no, I'm not doing that. Because your brain tells you how big of a disaster it could be. Going to a movie by yourself. If you want to go see a movie, no one else wants to see it, the most of us just don't go. Most of us won't go buy ourselves, buy a movie ticket, and watch a movie by ourselves, if anybody even goes to the movies anymore. Maybe you want to go work out and you don't have a workout partner and you're afraid to go by yourself. You don't like working out by yourself. It feels awkward, you can't stand it, so you just don't go because you can't find anybody to go with you. What if you just went by yourself? Be uncomfortable for a little bit, maybe even the whole time. The point is not to enjoy it. The point is just to survive it, that you're gonna walk in that gym, get on the treadmill for 15 minutes by yourself with nobody else there, walk back to your car and you're still alive, and your body will say, Oh, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. There was an adult dance class that I wanted to go to. And I knew going into this that the majority of the people were gonna be like young adults. I'm in my 40s, and more than likely, nobody there was gonna be in their 30s, let alone in their 40s. This was gonna be young adults, and I've not been in a dance studio in over 20 years. But it was an 18 and over adult dance class, and I thought, I really want to do this. This could be fun. Now, all the way up until the day I'm talking, I'm sitting in the parking lot, and my brain is giving me giving me 15,000 reasons why that sound completely reasonable of why I shouldn't go in there. But I had made a commitment to this right here, to making myself uncomfortable, to do things that I'm nervous about that might feel awkward. And so because I made that commitment, I made myself walk in that dance studio. Now it was a ton of fun. It was awkward. It was pretty much awkward the whole time, but that's not the point. I did enjoy it, but that wasn't the point. The point was when I got done and I got back in my car and I made it home, my body said, you know what, you survived that. You did something that made you uncomfortable, was unknown, because we had no idea how that was going to turn out, and you survived. And every time we do something like that, we dilute the response that our body has to unknown things, to the uncertain. And we slowly become someone who is okay with taking some risk. Every time we do something that's slightly uncomfortable, our brain learns something new. It learns that discomfort does not always equal danger. And if you can imagine it visually like this, picture two glasses. You have one glass filled with some dark water, and this dark water represents fear. Now imagine another glass filled with clear water. Crystal clear water represents hope. Every time you do something that scares you just a little bit, but that you're excited about, so something you're hopeful about, something that fills you with a little bit of hope and excitement. Every time you move into that, it's like pouring a little bit of that clear water into that dark water. Every time. Slowly the fear, that dark water becomes a little lighter, a little lighter, a little bit lighter. Not because it disappears, it doesn't become completely clear. The fear is always there, but it loses its intensity. And eventually these bigger decisions in your life, they start to feel more manageable. Because your brain learns that you survived discomfort before. We went into the unknown before and we survived it. So if you want something different in your life, you have to start here. Just practice small, tiny acts of courage. Find things that make you a little bit uncomfortable and do them. Maybe you are not somebody who likes to start a conversation with a stranger. And maybe you don't have to go tell your whole life story, but just introduce yourself to somebody new this week. Maybe you're somebody who has a hard time saying I love you. Try saying that to one person that you care about this week. Somebody that you love to say, I love you. Speak up at a time when you would normally just stay quiet. I know if you think about it, you can find something. Something that you think might make things better, could make your life better, could be interesting somehow, but you're a little scared to do it. Move into that. Take some hope and move into the fear with it. Every time you do that, you are teaching your brain, you are teaching your body that being uncomfortable is not always life-threatening. And slowly, eventually, the things that once felt impossible to you begin to feel possible. They begin to feel doable. So when you make a decision to do or to not do something, think about this. Every single decision you make is emotional. It is caused by some sort of emotion. It's caused by fear or aversion of fear, or it's hope and moving into something new, better, different, unknown. You have fear and you have hope. There are no logical decisions. If you think you are making a purely logical decision, what's really happening is that you probably aren't aware of the emotion that's driving it. So it's not whether you're making an emotional decision or a logical decision. They are all emotional decisions. Logic is what we use to justify the decision we've made. But you made the decision out of an emotion. The question is which emotion was it, fear or hope? And that decision will shape everything that comes after that. The beliefs we hold will push us into fear into hope. And then we have the option of which one we want to choose. Is it fear or is it hope? Hope will be asking you to take a step forward, a step probably before you feel ready. And every time you move toward hope instead of fear, even in the smallest way, you will change something inside of you. You begin expanding what feels possible for you. And over time, those little small moments of courage will start to build a different life for you. So the next time you feel yourself calling something logical, just pause for a moment and ask yourself this question Is this decision moving me towards hope or is it pulling me back toward fear? Because the direction you choose in that moment will shape everything that comes after. So the next time you feel that small spark of hope, that nudge of excitement about something, that little bit of a pull towards something different, just try following it. Even if the step is small, because every time you move toward hope, you become a little bit more of the person your future requires you to be. Thank you so much for listening. And if something you heard today made an impact or changed the way you think somehow, then share it with somebody you care about. Because sometimes it's that one moment, that one idea that changes everything. And until next time, remember if you want to do something you've never done, you have to become someone you've never been. That is the identity advantage.