THE POWER OF SIMPLY DECIDING

Free will is real.  At least as it relates to our freedom to make decisions in every moment. The freedom to choose to do things differently than we have in the past or to react with a different emotional choice to patterns we recognize in our lives.  No matter what is happening outside of us, we have the power to choose.  To simply decide.  It's not a new concept, and seems to have gathered a little bit of momentum lately on social media.  But what does that really mean?  And is it really that simple?  Listen in as I share the ways in which I've been exploring this concept and searching for my own answers.  Maybe something will spark for you. Or maybe it will just remind you that you held the power all along. Either way, I'd love to have you in the conversation with me.  Let's get into it. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Unsided. Unsided. Unsided. Hey everybody, it's Christopher. Welcome back to another episode of Unsided. I'm always happy to be here in conversation with you. Today, on my mind is the power to decide. How's that for a beginning? It's something that I've really kind of, I don't know, allowed myself to explore more lately. The power of what it means to say, I simply decide that something is going to be this way. And there's certainly a bit of delusion in it, at least as I'm going to talk about here, healthy delusion, around perhaps having to look at something that is presenting in your life in a specific way, and deciding that it's going to be another way. Or deciding that you're going to interpret that situation differently than you have before. I was listening to a book on tape recently by the author Neil Donald Walsh, and he talked about the idea that life is in fact designed specifically so that we run up against the same scenarios over and over and over again, so that we have, through free will, the opportunity to make a different choice and decide who we are in that moment in a different way. The key word there being decide. And you know, I was I was working recently, I was away from home. And when I'm away from home, I have a lot of time to think. And I always have these grand ideas about all of the things I'm going to do to be extra productive with myself. And the fact is, a lot of those things don't happen. But one thing that I have more time to do and that I do very easily is think. And I read and I listen to books on tape and I watch TikTok because TikTok honestly is fascinating to me because it can be curated in such a way that you just get the information that you want. It's such a wonderful example of, and maybe wonderful is the wrong word. It's just an interesting example of what happens when you curate something with your mind, the algorithm kind of being representative of life. What we pay attention to, we get more of. And so I watch a lot of people talk about their journeys to healing and self-awareness. And I kept hearing, I simply decide. And I can't remember which creators talked about it. It was multiple times, uh, but I I simply decide. And the words in and of themselves, I mean, they're you know they make they make sense. I make a decision. But what resonated for me differently was that in the face of something not looking like I think I want it to look, or in the face of me having a reaction, a pattern, an emotional reaction that I've had over and over and over again, that's a definable pattern, I can simply decide to have a different reaction. And that sounds so simple. And it's not something that is new information. Most of what I talk about, probably nothing that I talk about is original. Most of what I talk about is something I've learned somewhere along the way, something that somebody else has said or interpreted. So this idea that I could make a decision not to be upset when something happens, or not to fear the worst when something happens, or I could make a decision to expect even more when I'm in a good place. I could make a decision that would align with an open heart and possibility. That's not news to me. But somehow it shifted when I thought, okay, you know what? I'm I'm done. Maybe what I'm looking at actually is a little scary. Maybe what I'm looking at actually is uh a little triggering and rightfully so, whatever that thing is. But if I can continue to find reasons to have that pattern in my life, you know, and I don't believe in predestination. I do believe that there's some form of creation happening based on our energy. There's just too many examples in life of what you put your focus on persists. Right? Even in resistance, that's why they say what we resist persists. What we don't want, what we're afraid of. And I've I know enough to know that when I do focus my thoughts, amazing things happen. And when I focus my thoughts negatively, even if, even if those things still would have happened anyway, the negativity becomes heightened. And suddenly my mind is out of possibility. I'm constricting my body, I don't feel well, I get inflamed, whatever the case may be, things are off, energy is not flowing. So I've practiced in my life for most of my life, and I say that meaning that I started in my early 20s, but that is most of my life. For most of my life, I have practiced some idea of understanding that I had free will. Certainly in Christianity, the environment that I was raised in, free will was a big part of that. And then certainly there were people who take the idea of free will and they use it to coerce or control. We're not talking about that here. I'm talking about just you wake up in any given day and you have free will to make any decision you want to in that day. And I don't know if it's just my makeup. I don't know what part of its nature versus nurture, but I have a very active mind and I look for logic. I look for things to make sense. And emotions can be confusing for me because they make the logic less logical. I'm not saying that my penchant to be logical is admirable in any way. It just is. It's just something I know about myself. I like to think things out, I like to think things through. That's hard to say. Um and from there, I like to make my decisions. And then emotions, you know, to me, those are part of a trigger, right? And so when I have an emotion, my ability to make a decision logically gets clouded. And what I've learned over time, without boring you with those details, we can talk about that another time, is that two things can exist at once. So I can look for the logic and I can also honor the fact that I have an emotion. And when I start to honor the fact that I have emotions, and the more that I've started to do that, the more that I can get to a place to hear words differently, like I simply decide. That starts to make a different kind of sense. Because what I would do is I would fight situations with my logic, or when fear would come up, I would try to make a plan. I'm gonna make a plan about everything. I'm gonna make sure that I'm planning into the future for every adverse scenario. Rather than thinking, oh, wait a minute, I'm feeling afraid right now. Okay. Interesting. I recognize this. Now let's look at it while feeling afraid. Let me look at the logic here. Okay, what's the actuality? Okay, it really is this bad, or it's not so bad. Okay, what do I do from there? Okay. Deep breath. Now I can simply decide how I'm going to interpret that. I have the fear. The fear's not going away. I'm not going to logic it away. I have the sadness. I have whatever I have. I have the elation. You know, it can be anything. Now I'm going to decide what to do with that. I'm going to process the fear, and then I'm going to decide, okay, I'm not going to think about the worst case scenario. I'm going to decide that I'm going to make this better. Or that I'm going to make the best of it that I can. And maybe that's not great at the moment. But the decision for me, and and what I share with you obviously is just what I'm exploring for myself. I have a hard time with the idea that anybody knows anything more than any other person. We're all just, in my understanding, on different levels, we are all experiencing something very similar. And then we share as we go along so we can remember and remind each other. And so, as I am sitting here reminding you, I'm telling you what works for me. And so then in those moments, I can start to recognize my pattern and I can start to make a different decision. And that has been so profound in my life recently because there's so much around me that is seemingly out of my control. And I don't think that I am unlike any of you. I know a lot of you feel like you have so much around you that's out of your control. Probably, I would venture, I guess, to say that most of us do. And so what control do we have? Because let's not dismiss the fact that having some feeling of agency or control in your life is important to sleeping better at night, to taking deep breaths and being able to decide. And sometimes the only control that we have is the power of that decision. And that decision is so incredibly powerful because what it does is it allows you in the moment, when these things outside of you, or perhaps inside of you, if you're dealing with your own personal issues, when these things that feel out of control, we can still decide in that moment. Okay, at least for this moment, I'm aware I got this. And as soon as my thoughts are clear and I can take enough deep breaths, I will take care of myself and find my way through it. Whether I have to reach out for resources, whether I do that on my own through a practice I have. Because if we don't trust ourselves, then it's really hard to make a decision. Because what you want to do when you have a decision, which is why sometimes people look for others to make the decision. When we have a decision, we can go, oh, okay, it's decided. All I have to do is this. But in order to simply decide ourselves, we have to trust ourselves. That's been a tough one for me, which is maybe why I've come to this a little bit later in life. Some of you might know this inherently, you know, or maybe you were taught this. At a much younger age, you've understood. My understanding has taken me longer because my trust in myself has been challenged by myself, by others. My wiring throughout my life that I've kind of worked to unravel has been kind of a mixture of I know exactly who I am and what I'm doing because I do have that within me, and anybody who knows me will know that. I'm I'm sure of myself. But at the same time, it's not that hard for me to give power away. Or historically, it hasn't been that hard for me to give power away to someone else to say, hey, am I good enough? Can I trust my decisions? That's part of the whole people-pleasing thing, which I made another episode about. But as I've unraveled all of that and I've come to the understanding that decision is powerful, agency is imperative for my own personal peace. I've then had to trust my decisions. And that's a powerful, powerful thing to learn to do as well. And for me, it's kind of come through my work and my practice, whether it's meditation or time in nature, or working on my relationship with my husband or my children, or going through other tough times, whatever it is. That has been what has helped me to come to trust myself. Because right now, today, I'm here with you. My children are good. I have a husband I love very much. I have a place to live, I have food, I have a job. I did that. I had help. We all have help. We don't exist in a vacuum, but I did that. Every time that I thought that something was insurmountable, I climbed that mountain. People gave me help along the way. Absolutely. But I had to do that. I either had to build those relationships and make people want to help me and then reach out for help or know where my resources were and be proactive, which is why sometimes if people get too deep into their victim mentality, they can they can go into that bubble and not come out because they cut off their relationships. Depression can do that too, mental illness can do that. Again, another topic, a much bigger topic for another podcast. But for those of us who are not battling that so severely, and for those who've been in those deep dark places and found your way out, you did that. Which means you can trust yourself. You know, I had to realize that. I I got myself here. I got myself through days that I thought I wouldn't get through. I remember standing in the parking lot, talking to my mother a few years back and saying, I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I was trying to end a marriage that should have ended long before. And I said, I don't know how I'm going to do this. It's going to break me. But here I am today in 2025, and it didn't break me, which means somewhere along the way I made some good decisions that I can trust. So once I get that perspective, and you know, perspective is everything. I often tell my children when they're they're upset about something, rather than listening like I should, I sometimes step in it and offer the, you know, fatherly missive, well, when you get older, you'll have some perspective, and this won't hurt so much. I mean, that's maybe the worst thing that I could say. I don't do it anymore. I've learned to listen more. But there is truth in that. At least I've found in my life. Perspective. I've been there before, I've done it, I got up. Okay. And sometimes life can really get you going. You know, this marriage of mine, which I talk about a lot, but I don't know how not to because it's been such a big part of my life. I mean, it was a, you know, 16 years and then anyway, a big part of my life. But that marriage kind of closed me off to a lot of my healing again. And I had, but in a way that I think was really intentional, because I also don't believe anything is on accident. And out of that really, really tough process, I've been born into a new person. I've blossomed in ways that I don't know if I would have without that experience, because it had to push me into a place of not knowing, so then I could remember. And I got myself out of that too. And I moved myself into the next phase of my life. And then I find the patterns creep in again and the same fear creeps in again. You know, I have a partner who is so self-aware and so willing to communicate. My husband. But he really is my partner, and I haven't had that before not in the way that I found it with him, and that's helped me grow a lot too. And he reminds me of who I am. We should strive to have somebody in our lives who reminds us of the strength of who we are. And if you don't have anybody, I'll remind you right now because you're here listening to this. You're here. You are here. You're strong. You're doing it. And you're certainly not alone. There are so many people who are finding the courage to trust themselves, make decisions, explore, find a practice, something that helps them find peace. And the world as it's structured would prefer for you not to know that you have the power to decide, would prefer you not to trust yourself. That is why religion or corporate mentality or certain family structures are formed the way they are. And that is why so many people feel a lack of power around their family or because of their religion or, you know, and maybe you don't. Maybe you let those things embolden you. And that's amazing. That's wonderful. I'm not saying that religion or family or corporate America is bad. I'm saying that when there is the ability to give away the decision-making process, you also inherently give away trust in yourself. The reverse of that is that you incorporate your family or your job or your community or your church into your process and you say, I believe in you so much that I, in my power, am choosing to let you lead the way for me. But that's because you trust your ability to make a decision. You trust your ability to discern what is best for you. Which is why, you know, it's so dangerous to just communicate in little sound bites, because what I just talked about could have been construed many different ways. Because there are always, there's a polarity in everything. Everything has a good and a bad, a dark and a light. Everything. We assign exactly what that darkness and that light and all of that means, right? We decide. So when there's something facing me that has both dark and light, or it's just all dark or is light, whatever, I have perspective through years of lived experience to make a decision for myself, to trust. And just because it's taken me this many years to start to get here again, does not mean it needs to take you that long, and doesn't mean it's bad if it takes you longer. There's really no goal. What I what I'm even talking about today isn't uh any sort of shame-based, you should be this way or do this. I've certainly done that to myself a lot in my life, but that's not where I am with my desire to explore who I am in relation to myself and into in relation to other people. And that's certainly not something that I ever feel when I'm talking to you and sharing a conversation with you. Because if you were here with me, we would be going back and forth and you might change my mind about something. And I would certainly respect who you are and what it is that you've been through. That's my favorite thing to have that kind of respectful, thoughtful conversation. So sometimes when I'm working through different sides of a conversation here, it's because I'm interpreting or thinking or imagining what the conversation might be and how the person sitting across from me might have a different perspective. Because my perspective is great for my growth, but again, in a vacuum, it has no comparison. So I can't really expand my mind. Or my understanding of anything. And I can't make the decisions that I would like to make in life because I have a limited perspective. That's another piece I've been thinking about a lot because I happened to be away from home and overseas when I had this kind of understanding of what it means to simply decide something. I was able to look outside at a different culture who had an entirely different perspective on the world and think about the decisions that they make every day and how they interpret things differently. You know, little things. Like in the particular country that I was in, Bulgaria, there, I love Bulgaria. I love Sofia. The people are great, they're hardworking, they've been through a lot culturally. I mean, you know, generation after generation after generation is still healing over there. Like we all are in many ways. But one of the things that I find most interesting, not just about Bulgaria, but about many other places in the world, is there's not so much of a need for courtesy. Um maybe that's the wrong way to put it, but very polite kind of courtesies. You know, the smiles, the hellos, the thank yous, the small talk that we do in the West. And that is part of our culture. And if we don't do it here, people talk. They say, oh, she wasn't even, she didn't even smile at me, she shouldn't even say hi. I tried to talk to the cashier and she didn't have anything to say. She must be having a bad day. Well, that's perspective. That's a decision. I'm going to decide how I feel about that. And so I noticed that when I was over there, at first I would be a little miffed that perhaps there wasn't a certain kind of politeness. But everybody was kind, everybody did what they needed to do. Nobody was hurting me. I just was noticing that I had a certain perspective. So I decided to make another decision. I decided to not think with a Western mind and to really look more at their culture. So I made a different decision. That's a very small thing. But rather than decide I was in a country where people weren't nice or polite and have that color my experience, I decided I'm going to work to understand and maybe let go of my expectation and perceive this differently. And at the very least, I will then kind of mesh myself into that experience a little more authentically. And it then started to translate over into many other things. I would wake up with fear or anxiety, and I would decide I'm not doing this today. I will decide today that everything is going to work out in my favor and that I always have my back. That's that trust thing again, that self-trust. And I also have people around me or resources that I know how to reach out to. And we are effectively all in this together in some capacity. And that's a different mentality than the divided, than the I don't have agency. Then don't think for yourself that many different structures would like us to have. So when we put our attention back on ourselves, we put on our attention back on our ability to have agency and decide and recognize that we have made every step in our life up that mountain. When we can trust ourselves that way, when I can trust myself that way, then I can look outside and take a deep breath and think, okay, I got this. I have decided, I've got this. I'm not waiting for my job or my mom or my pastor or my president to tell me I've got this. No, I've got it. That's a powerful place to be. It's been really powerful for me. Really healing. And practice and work, for lack of a better word, because it's something I want. I want to change those patterns of thought. I want to change feeling like life is happening to me. Even when things happen, I want to remember that I've gotten myself this far. And I will see myself all the way through. That brings me a kind of peace and a kind of calm that I haven't had maybe ever in my life. And that doesn't mean that everything around me is suddenly calm and peaceful itself. There are still things that I have to deal with. There are still things happening. There's still work. There's still family dynamics. There's still the world at large. But today I'm going to have a good day. Tonight I'm going to have a good night. Tomorrow I'm going to do the same. And I'm going to find my way through, and I'm going to find my way to joy. I'm going to find my way to the things that fill my cup. I'm going to simply decide what happens next in my life. Regardless of the outside influences, I will deal with them as they come and I will decide. And I will let that emotion flow through. I will acknowledge it. I won't try to push it away as best I can. And when I find myself back in a pattern or I can't quite do it, that's okay. I will simply decide I will do it the next time. I will simply decide that I I'm still learning. I'm still growing. And I'll put my trust back in myself. That's my commitment right now. And it's it's humbling. And it's been really helpful. And I hope wherever you are, that maybe something that I've shared here resonated with you. And I don't know, I just feel compelled to remind you again that even being here listening to this, Mel Robbins says that sometimes on her podcast. I love Mel Robbins. You know, the fact that you showed up today means that you have an interest in doing something better for yourself. In growing, in changing a pattern. That's something to that's that's something. That's a decision. That's agency. That's really building trust with yourself. Okay. I always enjoy talking with you, and I will look forward to the next time. And as always, if you have anything to say, feel free to leave a comment, write a review, tell me what you'd like to hear more about. And I just appreciate your time. Time is valuable. Thank you for spending your time with me. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye-bye. Unced it.