Transcript: An Intuitive Decision-Making Model for Getting Unstuck

Hello dear listeners, and welcome to Let It Be Easy. I'm your host, Lisa Sanchez, certified leadership and life coach, Reiki practitioner, and recovering overachiever. Not everything in life can be easy, but this podcast is about seeing how some things don't have to be as hard as we think.

This podcast is brought to you by Cocoon. That's my practice, where I offer coaching and other resources to help you trust your intuition, design a meaningful life, and create fulfilling work. You can find out more at the-cocoon.co.

Hello. I am so happy to be here with you today celebrating the launch of my new website and really a whole new chapter of Cocoon.

Today, I wanted to go behind the scenes and walk you through how I used intuition—as well as strategy and logic and emotion—to make the decisions that led up to this moment.

So I'll just be honest that the way that I go about this at this point, it's pretty organic. It's very easy for me to do this because I've practiced it for years, and I have worked through it with clients.

And so when a wonderful client of mine reached out and asked me this question: “okay, how did you make these decisions? How did you use intuition as you were doing it, and especially how did you make decisions around money and investing in your business?” I thought, oh, yes. Okay. This is wonderful. This is a wonderful question because it's something I mostly did kind of naturally, but it has taken me years to develop that process.

So let me try to break it down. So first, the first step that I wanna talk to you about is expressing everything, getting everything out on the table. So basically at the end of last year, end of 2022, I kind of had this like weird, uncomfortable, restless feeling—a little bit hard to pinpoint.

Wasn't really clear what it was about, but I knew I needed some generous space to figure it out. So I gave myself that space. At the start of the year, I grouped my coaching sessions together. I batched them so that I would have an “on” work week where I'm doing lots of coaching, and then I would have an “off” week, which I called a “sabbatical week” where there was nothing on my calendar during the hours when we have childcare. And then I just planned to alternate work weeks and sabbatical weeks until I figured out what I needed to figure out.

That gave me the space that I needed to express everything, to really look directly at the mess inside of me—all the tangled up thoughts and feelings and desires and intuition. And honestly, it took less time than I expected, which happens a lot with my clients too. So I thought, I don't know, maybe it'll take me a year to figure out what's up with me.

And in fact, I had two of those sabbatical weeks. So it was basically a month total. And then it was really clear what needed to happen. So during those sabbatical weeks, I didn't particularly make plans. I really wanted to just sit with the blank space. And I did lots of writing, journaling, letter writing to a friend, talking on the phone with friends, therapy.

I reached out to various like healing practitioners. Basically I came to that time and whatever came up in the moment, like, you know, I could really use this, or, I'm really curious about that. Let me go down an internet rabbit hole, or I just need a nap. You know, I just kinda went with that and, eventually I expressed everything.

I put everything out on the table. That is very often the first step in figuring out what's going on with my clients. Like let's just lay it all out there. You don't have to organize it at first or make sense of it. What are the emotions, the desires? The thoughts? The self-criticism, the like, everything. Let's just get it all out there.

Okay, so the second step is to sift out emotion, logic, and self-criticism. So often I will really want to hear what my intuition is saying. That's what I wanna be able to get to first, right off the bat. But intuition tends to be a quieter voice and those other voices like emotion, logic or reason, and self-criticism can be a lot louder. So that's why I think it's helpful to just let everything out. And then the next step is that part where we are going to get a little bit more organized. We are going to get clear about which of the voices in my head is which. So let me just walk you through the example here.

So for me, as I was going through those two weeks, I started to have this like recurring thought spiral in my head, which was: I really want to allow my business to grow. I've been holding it small, constraining it on purpose while I was going through pregnancy and New Parenthood, and now I, I am ready for growth, but I don't wanna work more hours.

I don't wanna take on more clients and coach more one-on-one sessions. I'm at this spot that's really nice. It works really well for my energy and for balancing my other desires and responsibilities, so, I, I wanna let my business grow, and then the next thing that would happen is I would think, well, you know, probably what needs to happen then is to create resources that people can use while you are not present.

But that's never gonna lead to business growth because you don't have a big enough online audience. My practice has really been running on referrals entirely. So it's pretty rare that someone reaches out to me and doesn't know someone who's worked with me or know someone who knows me.

So then I'm like, okay, now we're gonna do some sifting and figure out break down. That thought spiral. What are the different characters involved here? So it can be helpful to think about that movie Inside Out, if you've seen it, where all of the different emotions in this little girl's head are… each one is its own character.

So this is something that I do with my clients a lot. Like, okay, who's the character that's saying, “I want my business to grow. It's time to let it grow.” Well, that part is intuition. I know that because there's not much emotion in it for me. Intuition is not emotional. It's not afraid. It's not sad, it's not thrilled.

It just is. It tends to point us in the direction of possibility, point us in the direction of courage, and it tends to come from a place of self love. What would I do if I really loved myself and accepted myself fully? That's intuition and you don't even have to love and accept yourself fully in order to hear your intuition.

You can just ask, what would I do if I loved and accepted myself fully? If I believed in myself? If I trusted in myself? So that for me was the part that was like, it's time to grow. It's time to let this business grow, and also time to share so much of what I've learned.

I have learned a zillion things from coaching clients over the past six years. I would love to download it from my brain and make it available to others. Okay, so then there's the part of me that says, oh, well, it, you can't, it's not even worthwhile to do that. You don't have a big enough audience, so the work you put in to create those resources is just going to be a waste of time at first.

That maybe sounds like logic or reason, but if you listen a little more closely, it gets kind of mean. And this voice is essentially blocking. It's just, it's like putting the brakes on. And I wanna say that I don't wanna make that part of me or that part of you wrong. It's there to keep us safe.

It helps us out, to make sure we don't get eaten by a lion. We don't cross the road without looking both ways. That is an important part of you, and yet it's also important that that part of you isn't just solely in the driver's seat of your life, making all of the decisions. Because if that were the case, you would be pretty stuck.

You would not drive forward. You would sit in a parked car and think about all the bad things that could happen if you drove the car. So I could identify like, okay, yeah, this is this part of me. I felt like it has a point. I don't really have a big audience, and if I am going to put work into creating new resources, um, I want 'em to go somewhere.

I want them to make a big difference. I want there to be more reach than I can actually have with my current online audience. So I was able to identify those different parts of myself, essentially turn them into characters outside of me who are basically having an argument. Let's also bring in emotion.

What emotions was I feeling at the time? I was feeling kind of depressed. Like, oh no, this seems hopeless. Want to grow, have small audience. No hope. I'm stuck. This is not going anywhere. And by the way, I have had this conversation with myself in the past. Definitely. Over these past six years, but it would usually be sort of brief.

But my intuition would be like, one-on-one coaching fulfills you so much. It is exactly what you need. It's everything you need right now in your work. But at this point, this conversation spiral just reached like a fever pitch and it wouldn't leave me alone to the point where I was getting depressed about it.

So that's, that is how I knew I needed the space to sort it out so I can sift it out, these different characters. And next I applied compassionate, generative constraints. So sometimes when you're grappling with a really big question or challenge, like, I wanna grow my business and I wanna be of service to more people and share what I've learned, it can feel just kind of like really open-ended and overwhelming.

So it can be helpful to bring in constraints. Time is often the easiest one to start with. When I'm working with my clients, I am normally speaking with them every two weeks, and so we break everything down into, uh, two weeks. Two week experiments, two week next steps. At the time I was doing these alternating weeks of work weeks and sabbatical weeks.

So I had that in place, the like two week personal sprint of experimenting and testing a hypothesis. And then I also looked ahead. Okay, well let's just say I was going to move forward. With exploring growth for my practice. Let me give myself a time horizon to think about and really root into so that it's less overwhelming and also more generative to have a clear sandbox to play in.

So for me, I thought about the first half of this year, first half of 2023. Let's say I am going to experiment with growth, I'm going to challenge the idea that I can't grow because my audience is too small. I'm gonna give myself half of this year to do that. I'm still working on alternating weeks, and then in the in-between weeks, I'm still gonna give myself time to move forward in some way.

Okay. So that was one constraint. And then as I was digging into this even more, I asked myself like, what are my intentions with this? How would I like to go about it? And I don't mean like in the practical sense, like what's step 1, 2, 3 to get me from point A to point B? No, I mean, what are the principles to guide me, to help me to know that I am doing this in a way that is right for me in this season, and in a way that I'll be proud of and in a way that I can learn from.

So the intention for me was to move forward in this season by allowing myself to be supported. Basically, don't do it all yourself this time, Lisa.

I'm saying it that way because that is my tendency. I very much lean into independence or over-independence. I love to do things myself. I like to do it my own way. I also love the control that comes with that if we're just being honest and, and that has served me well in many different ways. But in this season, I am a parent of a toddler.

My time and energy is very limited, and I provide a great deal of nurturing and support to other people. Especially my toddler, but also to my clients. And so there's a lot that is coming out of me and that is happening in a very fulfilling and purposeful way. I need to make sure that I am also nourished and supported. That my well of inspiration and restoration and everything else I need is being constantly replenished.

And so adding in a new project, a new big project of growth where I do everything myself? That is just like not gonna work for me. And I also felt like I have a lot to learn from bringing in collaborators who can support me in this season.

So that led me to creating another constraint, which brought with a possibility. What I mean is I set aside a budget. Okay, I'm gonna get some help in this season. I decided on a specific number from my savings. I'm gonna take this budget from my savings. It's a number that feels courageous and meaningful to me.

Like, yeah, this is significant. I feel like it has the potential to make a difference. It's also a number that is not too scary for me, or destructive, like let's say I take some risks with this money. I invest in my business and it actually goes nowhere, or it doesn't really fulfill any of my goals over, you know, a certain time horizon. It hasn't like paid off in any clear way.

I will still be fine. That's not gonna create a financial hardship for me. And also like emotionally, I am okay with it. I'm okay with taking this risk. So I set aside a budget. So I had this timeframe. First half of the year. I now have a budget. Okay.

I have an intention–how I wanna move forward—which is to allow myself to be supported. And then I also got clear about my goals. So I have three goals.

The first one is to improve the lives of more people than I can coach one-on-one by creating resources that they can use on their own.

My second goal is to grow my online audience without relying on social media as the foundation of that.

The third goal is to grow my income without working more hours, and especially without being on more calls each week, more scheduled calls. So yeah, I got clear about my goals and once I had all of these things in place to guide me, all of these anchors and perspectives—what am I doing? How do I want to show up to that? What are my constraints, boundaries, timeframe, budget?

My goodness, things became easy from that point forward. I share this with you, because this was my way in this particular season with this challenge of letting it be easy. That's not to say that all of this was easy. It's just that when I gave myself the space to answer these questions for myself and really to get to know the different parts of myself and understand what was happening inside of me—that spaciousness early in the process and the structure of those questions that guide me—it really paid off in terms of kind of unblocking me, getting me eventually to a place of clarity and confidence, being able to move forward and make decisions with a lot more ease.

So yeah, I spent, let's see… January was really the main time of this discernment process for me. February was when I was reaching out to potential collaborators, getting to know them, making decisions about who to work with, weighing the trade offs in terms of my budget of what I needed to prioritize financially for the business.

And then March, April, and May were pretty much all about creating, co-creating with my collaborators and with everyone that I brought together to help support me on this journey in this new chapter. And then, also, so I started to be able to move forward pretty quickly, but there were still some times along the way where I got stuck or hiccups happened. You know, for example, someone I had hoped to work with ended up needing to cancel and bow out.

And then I thought, oh, okay, so now am I gonna do this part myself, or am I gonna now start the search for someone new to work with? Well, I went back to my goals and intentions and the way I want to show up. Oh, yeah. Remember Lisa, you intended to go about this in a way that allows you to receive support from others.

Okay, that makes it clear, no, I'm not gonna just suddenly take this on. I'm gonna do my best to find the right person who can support me in doing this. So that's kinda how it worked. Like I really needed those anchors to get me unblocked in the beginning. And then I needed them along the way. I needed to keep returning to them each time I got stuck, or there were points where I would second guess and be like, oh my, oh my gosh, what am I doing?

The imposter syndrome would pop up, the inner critic, and then I would go back to my goals. Well, okay, well why am I doing this? What's the purpose? Well, I'm gonna improve the lives of more people than I can coach one on one. Oh, okay. Yes. I still want that. That matters to me. It's worth it to take these risks and give it a try and move forward.

And I've got my timeframe. You know, I'll check in halfway through the year, see how it's going, maybe do a little bit of recalibrating and refining and figuring out what's next from there. So this was my, “let it be easy.”

I hope there's something in there that is helpful or resonant or inspiring for you to help you to get unlocked and find ease where you can.

If you would like to see this decision making framework laid out in a structured way, you totally can. Just go to the-cocoon.co/decisions. And that's where you'll find a simple and helpful guide so that you can work through some of these things on your own, if that would be helpful for you.

Before you go, a few final notes. First, if you have a topic or question you'd like me to cover, I would love to hear from you. Just send me a note at podcast@the-cocoon.co.

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on whatever app you use to listen, and if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. That's one of the best things you can do to show your support and encourage me to keep going.

Until next time, let it be easy.