Are You Deciding or Are You Reacting? How to Tell the Difference.

If you've ever made a choice and immediately wondered whether it was actually yours, this episode is for you.

Twenty years in corporate marketing trained me to operate at a speed that felt like capability but was actually conditioned reactivity. When I left and built my own business, I thought I was finally doing things differently. Instead, I brought the entire conditioned nervous system with me, and just upgraded the external authorities I was outsourcing my decisions to.

In this episode, I'm breaking down the difference between deciding and reacting, why they can feel identical in the moment, and what's actually underneath the pattern. This isn't a mindset conversation, it's an internal signal conversation.

We get into:

• The four real-time checks for knowing whether a choice is actually yours
• The difference between a yes that feels like expansion vs. one that feels like relief, and why confusing them is costing you
• Why the gap between where you are and where you want to be is almost never about strategy.
• How Human Design's defined and undefined energy centers play into reactive decision-making
• What to look for in support that expands you vs. support that contains you, and why they can look identical from the outside

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Limitless Life Podcast. I'm your host, Brenda Johnston. With two decades of advertising and photo marketing, I understand exactly how people make decisions, what moves them and what doesn't. In the last 12 years, I've been in the subconscious and energetic transformational space, which means I can see through the noise faster than most. And I know what's actually working under the surface versus what just looks like it is. I'm not here to inspire you. I'm here to show you what's really running things and give you the tools you need to change it. If you're a founder or a leader who thinks deeply, does the work, and still hits walls you can't quite explain, this is your show. We go beyond the strategy, beyond the mindset work, into the subconscious, the body, and your energy so you can lead and build from who you actually are. So let's get into this. Welcome back to the Limitless Life podcast. I want to get into something today that I feel like a lot of us need a reminder of or we need some sort of clarity around. Because, like most women, I feel like I spent the better part of my career in a constant state of reaction. And I had no idea that was going on. I worked in corporate marketing for over 20 years, marketing and advertising. And if you've ever worked in that world, you know that the whole thing runs on manufactured urgency. We were always on. We were always creating, we were always scanning the horizon for the next problem before it arrived, always anticipating, always responding, always moving. And it was exciting and it was exhilarating when I was much, much younger. And I want to be clear about something. This was a marketing job, not a war room. Marketing. But my nervous system response over the years was identical to what it would have been if it was an actual war room. Because everything was urgent, everything was right now, every decision had to happen before the window closed or the opportunity passed, or somebody above you decided you weren't moving fast enough. And after enough years of living inside of that, something really does happen to your body that nobody warns you about, especially not back in those days. But you stop being able to tell the difference between an actual problem and somebody else coming at you because they are reacting to someone else's problem above them. And so the urgency actually stops feeling like pressure and it starts to feel completely normal. Like, oh, this is just how life is. This is how it is. Like, this is the speed you're supposed to be operating at all the time. And let me tell you something. I got very good at it. The anticipating, the reacting, the always being ready. And again, it was so exhilarating when I was younger. It was just like I imagined it would be when I saw advertising things in the movies or on TV, fast-paced, all the things. It was just like that. And I got so good at the anticipating and the reacting and the always being ready that that started to be labeled as oh, she is highly capable. Like she is just somebody who gets shit done. And I did. I got shit done. And I got really frustrated when other people didn't get shit done. And then the time came when it was time for me to leave that world. I decided I was going to build something of my own. I left the corporate world. I started a business on my terms, in my own time, doing work that I loved and that I really truly believed in. And I thought, oh, this is it. This is where I get to do things differently. Except, you know what happened? I brought the whole nervous system from corporate life with me. Because I had a lot of very conditioned patterns from living that life for so long. And you know what? Conditioned patterns don't give a shit about context. They do not automatically update when your circumstances change or switch jobs or whatever. Those conditioned patterns will just keep running. That same urgency, the same reactivity, the same reaching outside of myself for a signal that was supposed to tell me what to do next. It all followed me right into my own business. And I've talked before about how I replaced my income basically within six months before I left corporate. And then I left and I was making more money than I had ever made. But what I haven't really talked a lot about is all of this stuff that I'm talking about today. Because I think there was a part of me that thought because I had not dealt with that stuff, given what I do, that on some level maybe I was a failure, which I know isn't true. But in corporate, the authority was my boss, my clients, the quarterly targets. And in my business, the authority became the business coaches and the online gurus and the five steps to master social media, and here's exactly how you need to structure your offer if you want to sell it. Different voices, same dynamic. I was still reacting. I just upgraded the things that I was reacting to. And let me tell you something, it cost me all of it, all of those things. It cost me time, money. And the one that took the longest thing for me to realize, it cost my sense of my own voice, my frequency. Because when you follow enough other people's frameworks for long enough, especially when you're getting into something new, I had never been an entrepreneur, I didn't know entrepreneurs, like I didn't grow up around entrepreneurs. So I believed that all these people I was investing in had all the answers. So when you follow somebody else's framework for long enough, what happens is you eventually stop recognizing yourself in your own work. To everybody looking at my business from the outside, they would have looked at it and been like, man, that business is kicking. She's doing amazing. The strategies all seemed right. I was following all the steps. And something underneath it all for years, by the way, felt completely off. Like you've built something that fits somebody else's idea of what it's supposed to look like to be successful, and I was just living in it. That's what it felt like. The challenge was my logic mind kept going back to, oh, this is a strategy problem. This is a strategy problem. I need a different strategy. I need to try something else. It wasn't ever a strategy problem, but I didn't understand that piece yet. What it was was it an energetic signal problem. And what I eventually understood, and this is the thing that changed everything for me, is that I had been outsourcing my decisions to external authority for so long that I had genuinely lost the thread of my own knowing. My connection to my inner knowing and my inner guidance was staticky, is how I will explain it. So it's not because it wasn't there, it's because I had been trained, first by 20 years in corporate and then by personal development industry, to always look outside of myself first, to find the right framework, to follow the right steps, to trust the person with the methodology over the thing that I could feel in my own frickin' body and my own knowing. And the frustrating part, the part that I really want you to pay attention to, is that some of that external input was generally good. The turning point for me, I would say, wasn't deciding that the mentors were the problem. It was getting specific about the kind of support that I was actually looking for, that I desired, that I needed, whatever. And the mentors who have changed things for me the most in my journey were not the ones who handed me a template. They were the ones who, and to this day, they are the ones who challenge me to get very uncomfortable enough to grow, instead of comfortable enough just to comply with stuff. They are the ones who ask me questions that make me sit with my own knowing instead of telling me what the knowing is supposed to say. They're the ones who treat my intuition as the intelligence in the room and to trust it. The distinction between the support that expands you and support that contains you is one of the most important things I've learned. And it is why I do what I do, and it's the reason I do what I do the way that I do. And most people struggle with this because both of those things can look identical from the outside. Both of those things involve investing, they involve showing up for yourself. The difference is entirely in what you leave with. Because one leaves you more capable of hearing yourself and trusting your inner guidance and your intuition. And the other version of this leaves you more dependent on hearing from the person outside of yourself, the coach, the mentor, the practitioner, whoever. Now I want to get very practical for a second because this is all great as a concept. But I don't want to just leave you there. How do you actually tell in the moment whether you are deciding or reacting? Because I literally just said they can feel identical. And I know the reaction can feel like a choice. So here's what I actually look at. The first thing is speed, because genuine decisions, the ones that are actually coming from your own inner knowing, your own inner guidance, they rarely need to happen in the next 30 seconds. Reactions, on the other hand, are very urgent. They're gonna feel like they have to happen now, before the window closes, before somebody gets upset, before the moment passes. If you feel rushed by someone else or by your own anxiety, your feelings of anxiousness, that urgency is worth just pausing on. Because that rush is almost never coming from your inner knowing. It is almost never a truth. It's coming from your conditioning. The second thing I look at is where it lives in my body. Because a real yes, a decision that is actually mine, or in this case yours, will tend to feel light and expansive. Not necessarily like excitement, and not always, it doesn't always feel like certainty. But it'll feel like this kind of opening is how I would describe it. And a conditioned, yes, tends to feel more like relief. Like, oh, the relief of that you just avoided something or the pressure lifting off of you. Now, relief and expansion can feel similar enough that people confuse them constantly. They are not the same thing. The third thing that I look at is like what you would say if there were no consequences, not what you would do, what you would say. So if you could answer with zero social fallout or disappointment or awkwardness, what would your answer to the situation actually be? That is usually closer to your real position than whatever came out of your mouth in the actual conversation. Conditioned things tend to have us saying yes and doing stuff before we've had a chance to sit with them because it brings us back to that urgency, right? And the fourth thing, and the one that I personally find the most clarifying, is whether you're deciding or managing. So ask yourself honestly am I making a choice here or am I trying to manage somebody else's reaction? Because those two completely different activities can actually look like the same thing. Deciding is about you, managing is about them. And listen, both have their place, but one of them should not be running your life, is what I'm trying to say here. So here's a reframe that I want to give you. The goal is not to become somebody who never considers other people. That's not self-awareness, that's being a jerk. The goal is to actually know in real time, not after the fact, whether the choice you're making is coming from you or from the version of you that learned her survive by making everybody else comfortable first. Now listen, that version of you did what she had to do. She's very resourceful, she was very smart, she kept you safe in those situations that needed managing, so she does deserve some credit here. She just doesn't need to be the one making your decisions anymore. I want to take a quick moment here because what we've been talking about, the reacting, the outsourcing, the losing the thread of your own signal, this is exactly why I am going to be hosting a session called the Awakening Session. It's going to be on June the 18th, so mark your calendar. It's a free 90-minute live experience, and it is unlike anything I've done before. It's not a training or masterclass in the traditional sense, but it is an actual experience. I'm going to be leading you directly into your own energy in your body in real time. And I'm going to help you get underneath the story that you've been living inside. So you can see what is actually there. Not what you think is there, what is actually running. So registration isn't open yet. But if you want to be one of the first to know about it when it is, make sure you are subscribed to this show so you don't miss it when it goes live. And there will be more details coming soon. And now let's get back into this episode. I want to talk about something that sits underneath all of this because the reacting and the deciding, those are actually just the symptoms. What's running them is something a lot deeper, and it's something that most of us have been operating for a long time. Those conditioned responses that I keep talking about. And we've been running those things for so long that, like I said, they've stopped feeling like responses, and they've actually started to feel like part of our personality. Like, oh, this is just who I am. I'm somebody who says yes, I'm somebody who moves fast, I'm someone who figures it out herself, I'm someone who needs to see the whole picture before I can commit. Those are not personality traits. Those are learned responses to things that happened a long time ago in circumstances that don't even exist anymore. And they are running automatically through a very sophisticated adult life. Conditioning is just a learned response to a repeated stimulus. Something happens, your nervous system has a reaction, and over time that reaction becomes the automatic way of being. You stop choosing it, it just happens. And the the thing doesn't have to be dramatic. It does not require you to have had a difficult childhood or a significant trauma. It just requires repetition. So someone in your life at some point maybe needed you to be agreeable. An agreeable got rewarded. Somebody got upset when you said no, and your system filed saying no is danger, and started steering around those situations. Maybe you tried something once and it didn't work, and your brain started adding things like, oh, hmm, that doesn't work for people like you, to its operating assumptions. None of these things were conscious choices. That is the entire point that I'm trying to make to you. And now, here you are, years later, making decisions. Except they're not really decisions. They're the output of all that old programming running through a very sophisticated looking adult brain. This is also why I talk about energy as much as I do. And when I say energy, I want to be specific. I'm not just talking about crystals and vibes and the mystical unknowable, even though I do love those things. I'm talking about something measurable, something felt and completely learnable. Your energy is information. It's just that most people haven't been able or haven't been taught how to read it. You know, in human design, there's this concept of defined and undefined energy centers and how we absorb and amplify the energy of the people around us. So people with a lot of undefined centers are usually the most susceptible to reacting rather than deciding, because they are literally wired to take in other people's energy, which makes it particularly hard to know where someone else's urgency ends and your own truth begins. Understanding how your energy actually works, especially when you're making real decisions in real life, as far as I'm concerned, this is not a nice to have. It is the whole game. Because if you do not understand how you are wired, you could spend your whole life responding to everybody else's frequency and calling it your own. And I've seen this in people. And the thing about these conditioned responses is like they don't announce themselves. And they don't always sound like fear or feel like they don't always feel like fear. They can present as something totally reasonable. They can sound like, oh well, you know, I just don't want to rock the boat. It's not a big deal. Now's not the right time. I'll figure it out myself. That is conditioning doing its very best work. Presenting as practicality, so you do not look too closely at it. So here's what I want you to take away from today the space, the gap, as I call it, where you are and where you want to be. It's almost never a knowledge gap. And it's almost always a signal issue, a gap between what you actually know and what you're able to access and trust in real time. And closing that gap is not about finding another framework that works for you. It's definitely not about more information. It's really about getting underneath of all of this stuff, all the static, whatever you want to call it, so you can see what's been intercepting the signal. And then you clear the path so you can hear it and trust it. So what you already know can actually come through and you trust it and you work with it as a strategic tool. If you're curious about what that deeper work might look like, what it's like to start getting results from the moment we start working together, starts with an application. The link is in the show notes. And if today's episode landed, next week's episode, we're going even deeper. We're talking about what has actually happened to your intuition and why you can't access it consistently, and what's really running that interference. And it is a good one. So make sure you're following so you don't miss it. Like I said, you can subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and I'm excited to say also amongst the Amazon Music now. If this episode resonated with you, I would love to ask you to share it and leave a review. Let's get this into the ears of the women who need it. Be sure to tag the guest as well as myself so we can connect with you. This show exists because of you, and it also grows in the same way. So thanks for being here with me, and until next time, here's to creating your limitless life.