Knowing how to make good decisions that support you is vital to living a fulfilling and self-directed life. It’s how you reach, and then exceed your potential. So if you’re constantly being pushed around by fear-based, anxiety driven thinking, it’s time to stop listening to your Lizard fear-brain and start making decisions from a more empowered place.
Fear-based thinking seems to be on the rise. This makes sense given what’s going on around the world. We’re living in incredibly fast-changing and dynamic times. Change is something that your Lizard brain, the more primitive part of your brain that takes care of fight, flight or freeze responses, just doesn’t like. But when you’re letting this survival-driven part of your brain run the show and inform all of your important decisions, you’re dramatically limiting the scope of your choices in life. And when you constantly do this you end up stagnating. You feel even more frustrated, anxious and uncertain.
Knowing how to make good decisions in life that aren’t subconsciously driven by fear is the antidote to resisting change and getting stuck at your current level of success.
Flipping From Fear To Self Confidence: How To Make Good Decisions
#1 Centre And Ground
The first essential step to learning how to overcome fear is knowing how to centre and ground yourself. This instantly puts you into the present moment. And when you’re fully in the moment, you’re not ruminating on the past or constantly fast forwarding into the future. You’re then able to self-reflect.
Here are some effective ways to do this:
Breathing techniques, moving meditations like yoga, drawing, painting, gardening, swimming, body work – any activity that gets your attention fully immersed and engaged in the now and that grounds your energy is always the first step in disengaging from your Lizard brain’s fear-based, worst case scenario thinking. It’s getting out of your head and into your body and the Now.
#2 Trust Your Intuition and Gut Feel
When you know how to stop getting caught up in negative thinking and self-defeating scripts you’re able to screen out all the noise and tune into your intuition and gut feel on what’s best for you. Often you already know what’s going to bring you the most joy, fulfilment and opportunity. But when you’re constantly letting your Lizard brain butt in and tell you why it’s not such a good idea, you end up doubting yourself, and can’t see the woods for the trees.
That little voice deep down inside of you is there for a reason.
The more you listen to it and take what it’s trying to tell you seriously, the stronger and more valuable it becomes. Intuition is a valuable source of data. An energetic, non-verbal read on what’s going on within and around you. Most successful people totally get the value of it. But it often gets dismissed as ‘woo woo women’s fluff’ in the West because it’s not logical or considered to be evidence-based. Yet the more you ignore your intuition, the more frustrated and unfulfilled you end up in the long run. So stop listening to the limbic-brain, fear-based people around you, and start paying attention to what your intuition is trying to tell you. It will change the quality of your present and future life.
#3 Surround Yourself With Positive Self-Confident People
To maintain a positive mindset so that you’re able to make good decisions, you need to have self-confidence and self-belief. If you’re struggling to take control of your Lizard brain and learn how to make good decisions in life that support and nourish your body, mind, and spirit – then you need to seek out positive can-do types who already know how to do this.
This is the fastest way to learn any new skill. Subconsciously you’ll start to absorb and model aspects of their behaviours, mindset, attitudes, and beliefs. That’s also why you need to be discerning around who you choose to spend the most time with. Because you’re impacted the most by the 3 to 5 people around you each day. So make sure they are people who are positive self-actualizers.
Don’t waste years buying into a part of your brain that’s just not designed to encourage you to seek out new opportunities and growth. Irrational fears, inner-resistance, and anxiety-driven faulty beliefs are the biggest success killers around. They create all kinds of maladaptive, negative thinking habits and behaviours that can be tricky to dismantle and replace with more realistic and supportive ones if you’ve been holding onto them for years. Save yourself time and sort it out now so that 10 years later you’re not in the same spot, feeling frustrated and exhausted.