72. Stop Overthinking and Make Confident Choices | Beating Analysis Paralysis in Midlife, a Client Story

Are you a woman over 40 or 50 feeling stuck in analysis paralysis, second-guessing every decision from your career to your kitchen renovations, or trapped in a loop of "what if it goes wrong?" You’re NOT alone. In this episode of Mind Your Midlife, I’m sharing the story of my coaching client, Mandy—a highly successful entrepreneur who suddenly found herself unable to move forward on even simple projects.

We are diving deep into the Being Profile to uncover why smart, experienced midlife women get trapped in "mental traffic." We’ll explore how an unhealthy relationship with fear, anxiety, and peace of mind creates overwhelm, and why your subconscious brain is working overtime to keep you safely stuck.

If you are ready to stop researching and start doing — and want to trade constant inner friction for ease and flow — this episode is for you.

What You’ll Learn:

✔ The critical difference between Fear (past threats) and Anxiety (future worries) and how they disguise themselves as "preparation" 

✔ How to measure your Effectiveness and why constant struggle isn't a badge of honor 

✔ The danger of "Mental Traffic": How repeating "it's never going to work" in your head physically stops you from making decisions 

✔ Why connecting to a Higher Purpose is the secret to pulling yourself out of short-term comfort traps 

🎯 OMG Moment:

You caught yourself telling yourself all day that it wouldn't work? Catching yourself is good, because imagine how long that would have kept going. Awareness is the first step to rewiring your subconscious .

Take Action Today:

• Book a Free Coaching Call: Grab one of the limited discount codes this spring to take your own Being Profile assessment and uncover what's keeping you stuck at cherylpfischer.com/coaching .
• Dream Without Limits: Find a quiet spot, calm your nervous system, and write down exactly what you want your outcome to look like without worrying about the "how" .
• Adopt a "Stuck" Affirmation: Next time you are spiraling in analysis, use a pattern interrupt like tapping or repeating the affirmation: "I can figure it out."
• Listen to episode 70.

Midlife women have decades of lived experience and success—we are experts at navigating life . Yet, when our internal "peace of mind" is low and our fear is high, we forget our own capability. 

Take a little bit better care of yourself in midlife.

Grab your Vitamin G pixie sticks for detoxification and wellness at cherylpfischer.com/vitaming.

Transcript

Welcome And Problem Framing

Cheryl Fischer 0:00

Have you ever gotten stuck in what I would call analysis paralysis? And that sounds like a businessy term, but let's be honest. This could happen in any area of life. And as you know, as we talk about all the time on Mind Your Midlife, there is a lot of change happening in our 40s, our 50s, our 60s during this midlife phase. So if we get stuck thinking and thinking and analyzing and can't ever decide, then we're just making it worse. So I want to tell you a story and I want to help you out. Let's talk about it.

Show Intro And Promise

Cheryl Fischer 0:43

Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast.

Mandy’s Story And Assessment

Cheryl Fischer 1:20

Recently, I was working with a coaching client, and let's call her Mandy. I was working with Mandy, and as I start my coaching engagements with clients, I first had her do the assessment called the Being Profile. And you might have heard me talk about this a couple of weeks ago on episode 70. I'll put that link in the show notes to make it easy for you to find. This is such a powerful tool because what we want to know when you come to me for coaching or you come to someone, even maybe for therapy, or someone for leadership help, what you want to know at the beginning of some sort of I want to make a change situation is where am I now? Right? What's going on with me now? And then I know I want to be more decisive, or I know I want to change my job, or I know I want to have a better relationship, but where is the current situation coming from? What am I doing? How am I being in the world that is creating this? And how can I get out of it? That's what we want to figure out. And so Mandy came to me with a very successful business. She's an entrepreneur, she's been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years. Her business is very successful. I'm not sure she always sees it that way. And isn't that the case for us all the time? Don't we see ourselves so much more harshly than others see us? But I can tell you, I know the evidence, she has a very successful business. And yet, she was really concerned about being stuck in projects that she just could never get all the way through. Being stuck and not being able to move forward with decision making, maybe with hiring, just always questioning herself and and beyond her business, this was starting to seep into her life. She was having trouble making decisions about renovations that she wanted to do in her house. She was having trouble making decisions about how she wanted to spend her free time. She had recently made a decision about a new car, but then was questioning that decision. So really, she wanted to find a way to be able to do the appropriate amount of investigation, make a decision, and then somehow feel good about it afterwards. And goodness, don't we all want that? So once we had this discussion, I knew that this would be powerful to help you as well. So, what was happening for Mandy and what we found out in the being profile was that there were a lot of ways that she was being in the world that were affecting her effectiveness. And I'm gonna read you some little snippets of what we help our clients through in terms of understanding the results of the profile so that they can kind of see where they are. And effectiveness is a meta factor in our lives, along with awareness and integrity.

Defining Effectiveness In Midlife

Cheryl Fischer 4:50

If we can see how healthy our relationship with awareness, effectiveness, and integrity is, we can really see kind of how well this midlife thing is going because it's all about being aware of what's going on around us, seeing the true picture, all the pieces being in working order, and then being able to achieve what we want to achieve. So effectiveness being fulfilling your commitments, doing what you intend to do, meeting your own expectation, consistently producing results that you want to produce. And if you have a healthy relationship with effectiveness, you're accomplishing what you want to accomplish. You're getting the outcomes you want. There's an ease and flow to it. It's not a constant struggle. There's not always this friction and these hard things. There's hard things sometimes, let's be honest, right? Of course there's hard things, but there's some ease and flow. And you know what your priorities are and you're working towards that. Now, for her, this was a little bit unhealthy. And she was noticing that some of the unhealthy aspects of how we might deal with and try to be effective in our lives were popping up for her. So feeling overwhelmed, feeling frustrated by her lack of progress, finding it difficult to move forward in whatever it was that she wanted to do. And really, another interesting aspect, letting herself be consumed by this. Whatever she was struggling with was consuming her. And again, you may kind of see yourself in parts of this. It happens to all of us sometimes. So the question is: well, where is this coming from? Why is this happening? For any of us, we're smart people, we've been on this earth for more than 40 years. I've said it before, and I will use this example again. Years ago, when I was thinking about coaching and podcasting, I said to one of my good friends, I don't know, would people listen to me? And she said, You have almost, at the time, 50 years of experience living a life where you have had so many successes. Why would they not? You know, we get to this period of life and we know a lot of stuff. I I'm I'm just gonna build us all up here for a second because you have been through 99% of you have been through some sort of career shift or job change. Many of you have raised kids. You've all had parents whose relationship with you has changed over the years as they've gotten older and you've gotten older. Many of you have had personal relationships that have either been challenging at times or have changed over time. There's so much learning that we have at this phase of life of just how to go through living in this world, that we're a little bit experts about it. So, why do we then get stuck in this? I can't actually move forward. I'm analyzing, I'm analyzing, I'm frustrated. I can't make the decision, I can't make the decision because we do. This is not just Mandy, we do. So, what we found in her being profile assessment was that there was an aspect of fear that was popping up. And we all have both fear and anxiety, keeping

Fear Versus Anxiety Explained

Cheryl Fischer 8:45

us safe. So, fear tends to be focused on something that you're actually afraid of, linked back to an experience you've had in some way. You got scared on a roller coaster when you were very young, and now you're scared of roller coasters. You were speaking to a group when you were in high school, and it was a scary, terrible experience, and now your body reacts whenever you need to speak to a group, as if it's back there in that scary, terrible experience. That's fear. Anxiety, we're not talking about anxiety disorder. Anxiety is a mood within us that, again, is keeping us safe, but it's more generalized. It's looking forward, it's worrying about what might happen, what might happen. Not always focused on one specific thing, but it can be. So if we have a healthy relationship with the fear and anxiety moods, it means we take those warnings. You know, I remember I was told not to run in the street, I won't do it. I remember I was told not to touch the hot stove. Maybe I did it once, and I remember that that was scary and it didn't feel good. That's the kind of thing that fear and anxiety do for us. So if we can, if we can evaluate, we can recognize, and then we can move through it, that's a healthy relationship with fear and anxiety. We're not going to be the daredevil that doesn't take any precautions into account. We're going to move through it and we're going to keep going. But what we found for her, and this is true for me as well, you'll hear this if you listen to episode 70. We found that there was a little bit of an unhealthy fear that was impacting a lot of parts of her life. So she might tend to defer a decision or avoid taking action because there's this worry in her mind of what if it goes wrong? What if I hire the wrong person? What if this new program doesn't actually work? What if I revamp the program and it it really is worse? What if, what if, what if, based on maybe experiences that were stressful in the past. And so that creates some avoidance because we're trying to manage this fear. We're trying to manage risk until we avoid and we don't take action and we defer those decisions. So already, just to see that that's in there and that's what is affecting the ability to actually make a decision and move forward is powerful because maybe we catch ourselves just a little bit more often. And maybe then we can take a different path. Then there were pieces, though, of the way that she is interacting with the world that shed a little bit more light on this analysis paralysis situation. And so one of them is peace of mind. Let me tell you what peace of mind is. So peace of mind is the quality that we all have, we use it or we don't, that helps us to be calm and focused and to think clearly, regardless of the

Peace Of Mind And Mental Traffic

Cheryl Fischer 12:08

situation we're in, the circumstances we're in, worry or nervousness that we have. It's you might think of it as like an inner fortitude. It can get through the turmoil and help us to be very discerning and make a decision and take action. And if we have a healthy relationship with this peace of mind quality, then we feel like, okay, things are going to be handled. I'm going to be able to deal with circumstances that come my way. Even when it gets a bit chaotic, I know I'm going to be able to do it. I'm going to be able to figure it out. But if we're on the unhealthy end of this, which is what Mandy was finding, then we more often end up in worry and distress because we see evidence and in fact look for evidence, I would say, that, well, things aren't working out as well as I would have liked. And that makes us distracted. We might then be consumed by internal thought stuff, mental traffic is how the being profile says it. And we're going to stay there for a minute because you know how important I believe that is. When we are consumed by that internal mental stuff, we get even more overwhelmed and we cannot deal with what's going on. We cannot take action. For her, this right here was one of the biggest things that we are going to be working on in coaching. Because what we can do, which is cool, is say, okay, well, what if, what would it look like if you did have a healthy relationship with peace of mind? If you could do exactly what I described, move through in a calm and focused way. What actually would that look like in your life? And we're gonna brainstorm that. And then we're gonna figure out okay, what's the path from here to there? Let's try some tweaks in how we're thinking about our situation. But the fact that we can focus on that and then see where she wants to go is really powerful. So let's let's just stick on this mental traffic, internal dialogue, thought stuff for a minute. You know that your brain is focused on keeping you safe. That's that's why the fear and anxiety mood are in there. We need to keep ourselves safe and alive. And your subconscious brain runs your body processes on automatic all the time, so that you don't have to think. Now I need to take a breath in. Now I need to take a breath out. Now I need to have a heartbeat and then another one. You get my point. We don't have to think about all that. We don't even really have to think about how to brush our teeth or tie our shoes. We just do it. That's the subconscious brain running things. The other thing the subconscious brain is doing is storing up beliefs that you have about the world and how it works and how you experience it and what's gonna happen. And so these are not, I'm not talking about faith or religious beliefs, although they could be in there, of course. I'm talking about if I make this decision, here's what will happen. You will have beliefs about things like that. If I made more money, I would be a bad person. I'm coming back to money mindset just for a minute. We have stuff in there. People who make a lot of money are bad people, people who this are that. There's there's all of those beliefs about the world stored in the subconscious brain, and that's running our lives. And it's also talking to us. So let's take an example where you are in some type of job scenario, and people that are working with you on the project are coming to you with their pieces of the work, and you have to make a decision. On the one hand, it seems like we should go in this direction of maybe individual whatever. The other person's coming to you and saying, this needs to be group-based because it's never gonna work, individual-based. And here's why. And you're looking at all this information, and your head is going, this just is never gonna work. It's never gonna work, it's never gonna work. You go home, you start eating dinner, it's never gonna work. It just doesn't work. It can't be both, it can't be this, it can't be that, they can't be together, it's never gonna work. You know what happens if you spend 24 hours or 48 hours or a week telling yourself in your head it's never gonna work, you get stuck. And that's a very simple example, but that's how we get into this. I'm stuck, I can't make a decision situation, because we have different pieces of information. We

Subconscious Beliefs And Stuck Loops

Cheryl Fischer 17:20

aren't working very well with our peace of mind, we can't move through the distress, the turmoil, the tiny bit of chaos. And so we can't make a decision. And often we're making it worse on ourselves. Now, the interesting thing is another piece of the being profile that we discovered in her case is something that we call higher purpose. And higher purpose means that you have some sort of vision, a higher purpose that you are just compelled to. And it's beyond your immediate worry or immediate comfort, it's beyond your personal concerns, it's bigger. And of course, maybe that might be religious, might be political, but it doesn't have to be. It's just bigger. There's something that you feel so drawn to do, and you take on challenges that you wouldn't normally take on. You are willing to delay gratification because you know what you want to work towards and work on. If we have an unhealthy relationship with a higher purpose, then we're not able to see forward like that. We get a little bit short-sighted and we want immediate answers, immediate results. And we get a little bit limited because we want our own personal comfort and instant gratification. And so you can see how if we don't necessarily work on finding what is that future vision that I'm compelled towards, then it's another reason that we may get stuck down, like mired down into the day-to-day. I don't want to be in this stressful situation. I don't want to have to be dealing with this, and around we go again, stuck in the analysis. So, what Mandy is going to be working on in coaching is peace of mind, higher purpose. What does courage look like? What does assertiveness look like? And you might remember me saying assertiveness is one of my hot buttons that I am working on as well, because I looked at assertiveness as kind of having to be mean, and that's not what assertiveness is. It kind of falls into a similar category as courage, courage to make the decision, courage to move forward. And so if you are finding yourself in a pattern where you keep getting stuck, maybe you're thinking about a job change, or you're thinking about a relationship change, or you've decided that you would really love to get in shape now that you're in your 40s or your 50s, but you're just not doing it because you're not sure what you're gonna do, and you say, I'll do it tomorrow. That's all okay, it's normal, but if you want to get out of it, the secret is number one, find a coach that you can work with to help you because we cannot always see a way out of these stuck situations on our own. So if it's me that you're interested in working with, go to CherylPFisher.com/slash coaching, set up a free call with me. I actually have a limited number of discount codes available this spring for the being profile and the debrief assessment that follows that. You can learn all about yourself, go find out. Maybe it's not me, maybe there's another coach that you're already working with or that you already know, but it does help to have someone else talking this through with you. And then, secondly,

Higher Purpose And Short-Term Traps

Cheryl Fischer 21:10

the key is to allow yourself to think about what you would like the result to be. So whether this is a work decision, it's a physical health decision, it's a relationship decision. What if you cleared your mind and you took some deep breaths, maybe do a little bit of tapping, but get yourself really calm, your nervous system calm. Maybe you lie on a comfy couch with a comfy blanket, really calm, really quiet, no interruptions. And let yourself dream and brainstorm, jot down notes in a phone, on a paper, whatever works for you. But in that situation where you're stuck. And you're not able to make a decision, and you're just analyzing or asking more people's opinions, and you can't get through the data. What do you want it to look like when everything is said and done? And I don't want you to think anything about, well, that result can't happen because of this, and that result can't happen because of that. No, you get to that later. And nobody's gonna forget to do that. I want you to dream. My business has exactly the right number of employees, and we are a well-oiled machine. And when a new client comes in, the process of onboarding them is so smooth. And this person does this and this person does that, and it's amazing. Or maybe it's envisioning how you want your body to look. I am one of my affirmations, by the way, is I am lean, fit, strong, and healthy. And for me, the combination of those words, I don't want to be skinny. I don't see myself as skinny. I always did see myself as a little bit large because I'm tall and I got tall when I was in like eighth grade, which if that happened to you, you know, it's a little bit mentally troubling. And so lean to me means toned, fit. I want to be able to move. I want to be able to go up and down the stairs and go on trips and go for a walk and bike ride and whatever I want to do, I want to be able to do strong. I want to have muscles, I want to be able to lift things, I want to be able to push and pull. I want all that functional fitness to stick with me. And if we don't keep it up, it doesn't stick with us. And healthy. I mean, there you go. I want to be healthy. We all want to be healthy. So that's my affirmation. My point being, what do you want the end result to be? If you're trying to lose weight, you can focus on the number. If that doesn't make you crazy, you can focus on the number, or you can focus on how you're gonna feel, what you're gonna do, what new clothes you're gonna get, what styles you're gonna wear. Envision that.

Coaching Focus: Courage And Assertiveness

Cheryl Fischer 24:15

So this brainstorming is about allowing yourself to see the result and not take into account any of the struggles, any of the, but it won't work because of this or that. Because that result, that mental movie, as some authors have called it, is what you want to start training your brain to believe. And so we can make it into an affirmation, like I said, with I'm lean, fit, strong, and healthy. You can have an affirmation that says, my office works like a well-oiled machine. I love to go every day. We have new clients reaching out all the time. As long as you start allowing yourself to see the end, then you will catch yourself in the overanalyzing, stuck, overwhelm circle thinking, thinking, thinking stuff a little bit more often. And all we want is baby steps, baby steps forward. The more often, and here's my last tip for you the more often you can catch yourself and say, whoa, what in the world? Why have I been saying that to myself all day? This is gonna work, we'll figure it out. I can figure it out. That's another great affirmation. I can figure it out. If you catch yourself, that's great. It's not bad. Just because you caught yourself telling yourself all day that it wouldn't work, there's no beating up on ourselves. Catching yourself is good because imagine how long that would have kept going. Catching yourself is good. Have something that you can switch to: an affirmation, some deep breaths, some tapping. And you will gradually be able to flip that switch out of the overwhelm a little bit more often, a little bit more often, a little bit more often. And boy, is that powerful. It will change this, I promise. All right, so make sure that you go over to CherylPFisher.com slash coaching, check out the information, let's set up a call. I would love to talk to you. We can see what it is you're going through. And make sure that you have hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this episode, because next week I have a guest who's joining me to talk about pelvic health. And this is not something that we talk about very often, yet it is something that follows right along with all of the midlife concerns we've been discussing recently: hot flashes, sleep, solutions like acupuncture and HRT and hypnosis. Let's talk about pelvic health and find out what the solutions are there, and it's easier than you think, I promise. In the meantime, take just a little bit better care of yourself. That's what we've been talking about today. Just a little bit better care on the outside and on the inside makes a big difference.