401: Making Confident Choices in an Uncertain World (part 3)

In the 3rd and final podcast in the series entitled Finding Clarity in Your Marriage, Betsy talks about the importance of inner strength and how we can create it for ourselves. Betsy goes over the ‘ladder of change’ and offers listeners practical exercises like stability statements to help us train our brains to create stability from within.

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy P, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hello and welcome to the show today. So this is part three of the three part series. This is lesson three, making Confident choices in an Uncertain World. Look, the world feels so unpredictable and really kind of scary in a lot of ways. People feel really divided, and it’s hard to find your grounding. So in this episode, we’re gonna talk about how to do that, how to find that, and a tool that you can use.

All right. I hope you enjoy. Welcome back. This is episode three of How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage, even when the rest of the world feels uncertain. So far, we have covered in episode one why this uncertainty sort of feeds indecision and why your brain keeps you frozen. ’cause your brain works really well, right?

It’s keeping you alive. So that’s a great thing. And in episode two we talked about the hidden cost of waiting. How postponing decisions actually costs you a whole lot more than you think, right? Energy, peace, self-trust, all of those things. And now in this final episode. What I wanna do is give you a bit of a path forward.

So this is where the fog really starts to clear, and this is how you’re gonna learn a little bit more about creating stability inside of yourself. So that you can start making confident choices, even when the world outside is so unpredictable. So let’s start off this episode with talking about why stability actually matters, right?

So let’s start with the truth, and that is that clarity doesn’t come from your husband changing. I know this can feel really hard because like me, you’ve probably thought at some point or maybe many times, if he would just change. If he would just listen to me. If he would just hear what I had to say, if he would just take into account how I see the world, right?

However it is that you say that, then things would be better. But the truth is that it doesn’t come from him changing. It doesn’t come from your kids needing you less. It doesn’t come from the world calming down. Clarity comes from you. It comes from you feeling stable enough to trust yourself, but that’s why you felt stuck for so long.

Because without stability, every choice feels like danger. But with stability. You can finally see clearly. So I want you to think of it this way. Just imagine that you’re standing in the middle of a storm holding an umbrella, right? The storm is wild, like there’s rain coming in sideways, there is wind toweling.

You can’t stop the storm. But if your feet are grounded, if your grip is really good, if your umbrella is steady, then you can stand there without being blown away or drenched. That’s what inner stability does. It doesn’t take the storm away, but it does let you stand in it and feel confident. So one of the things that I wanna frame here as we talk about a shift that I want you to make, and this is really an identity shift.

This is the root of really all the work that I do and have ever done. I want you to think of our, our brains as a ladder. So I want you to just imagine a ladder leaning up against the side of a house, and this is gonna be one of those, it’s gonna be one of those decorative ladders that you put towels on.

Okay? So a smaller ladder, just a few rungs. But I want you to think about the very first rung of that ladder is environment. It’s your house. It’s where you are. It is the gym. It is an environment. Okay? The next one, the next rung up is your behavior. The things that you do, the patterns you run, the way you show up.

Now I’m gonna go up one more level and this, this level, this level we’re gonna call capabilities, right? What you think you’re capable of. Now, behavior and environment are very conscious. You choose those, right? I’m gonna choose to go to the gym, I’m gonna choose to meal prep, for example. So my behavior is the meal prepping.

My environment is the gym. Right. So if we’re thinking about our family life, so the environment is my home, my behavior is the patterns that I run. I might notice those things, right? And those are conscious. I’m aware of them, I’m choosing them. I’m making dinner. That is something that I, my behavior that I’m doing at night, at the house.

Okay. Now when I move into this next thing, potential right or capability, this starts to get unconscious. Now what is unconscious? What does that even mean? It just means things that operate without me thinking about it. When I go brush my teeth in the morning, I don’t even hardly remember. I just know I’ve done it right?

It’s sort of unconscious. I don’t have to watch a YouTube video first. I know how to do it. My body just sort of does it right. It’s unconscious. I know how to do it so well that I don’t have to think about it. So I’ve got my rungs on the ladder. I have my environment, I have my behavior, I have my potential or my capabilities, what I think I’m capable of.

And then the next few rungs up are gonna be my values, my beliefs, and the very tippity top is gonna be my identity. Now the cool thing about this ladder is that whatever is above it influences what’s below it. So as I get into my beliefs, my beliefs don’t matter as much as my values matter. Those are generally really deep seated things, right, that I probably learned as a little kid.

And then when I get into my identity, it’s who do I think I really am? And this can be because it’s unconscious. Can be hard for you to figure out or to identify, but many times it’ll come from when we say something like I am. That’s like my deepest part of my identity. If you could think of an Olympic athlete that was prepping for the Olympics, would it matter if they were in a room?

With a whole bunch of Sweetss, like, probably not. ’cause they’d be like, I am an Olympic athlete. I don’t eat that kind of food. I eat the kind of food that supports my sport. So my identity, who I think I am an Olympian, impacts everything below it. So with that said, the way to make real long lasting change.

The kind that is like brushing your teeth that you don’t even have to think about is by going to the top of the ladder. It’s by changing your identity and who you think you are. So when we start thinking about what happens when I delay, and in the last episode we talked about that cost of delaying I am creating over and over and over, and reinforcing.

My identity isn’t a one of someone who makes decisions, who is worthy of more of all of those things. And when we’re living in this kind of situation, we are in reactive mode. So I talk to women every day that say they react to their husband’s moods, um, their scanning for how he feels every day. They react to their own fears, right?

They have their own thoughts about fears or things that could go wrong. Typically, they’re not spending a lot of time thinking about all the things that could go, right, right? And that’s normal. But they’re reacting to their own fear, thoughts, they’re reacting to politics or the economy. All of these things outside of themselves.

And when you’re reacting, you’re always chasing that stability someplace outside, which is impossible. So the shift is to become intentional. It’s to stop waiting for the outside, to calm down, and to start creating calm inside. By becoming the identity of the person who doesn’t matter what’s happening outside, inside, all is well, and I control how I respond to things and what happens to my life.

So that shift again is to become intentionally intentional. And the best way to make that shift is to ask yourself, what do I wanna model for myself and for my kids? And if you don’t have children, or your children are grown, what do I wanna model for myself? How do I want to show up for myself? Because here’s the thing, whether you realize it or not, you’re teaching your kids right now.

My daughter is 23. She sees everything I do. She notices every little nuanced side comment that I make that I think doesn’t even matter, and she’ll see it and say something. That’s the kind of relationship we have, but she’ll point it out and it just makes me realize how much they’re really watching. I talk to women every day who are the best moms and want good things for their kids.

When we start talking about their kids, they say, I don’t think they really know. They don’t know that we’re unhappy. And I, I disagree. Even if they don’t know the extent that you’re unhappy, they feel the tension. You know, when you walk in a room and you can feel that they watch you freeze. They watch you postpone.

They know that you’ve put your life on hold for things, right? They learn that that’s what adulthood looks like, and maybe you learned that by watching somebody else, right? We come by all of these things. Honestly, the one thing I know about our brains is that it wants to do the thing that is looking out for us, right?

It wants to do the thing that it thinks is safety, and so. Although what happens might not be good for you, your brain thinks it’s good for you, and I think that’s a really important thing to notice. You’re not doing any of this stuff to