82: The First Step to Making Better Choices: Intentional Thinking - Andrea Liebross
The Key to Making Better Choices: Knowing How to Figure Out All the Options

82: The First Step to Making Better Choices: Intentional Thinking

How often are you dismissing your options before you even have a chance to explore them? This isn’t the way to be making better choices.

This episode is a guide to accessing all your options and making better choices. When you’re on autopilot, your brain is going to accept the options that seem realistic, familiar, and safe. In order to actually explore all your options, you have to make a choice to pause and engage your higher brain.

You have to be willing to ask yourself important and powerful questions to even begin to see all your options. In this episode, I’m taking you through the process of searching for options and ideas so that you can see what it takes to go beyond the easy answers and find out what’s really possible for you. 

In Today’s Episode We Discuss: 

  • Slowing down enough to consider your options 
  • Holding space for intentional thinking 
  • Exploring your own options, not someone else’s 
  • The value of brainstorming your ideas
  • How to open yourself up to new ideas 
  • Ways to find your options 
  • Creating a safe space to explore ideas

Don’t limit yourself. When you create a safe space for yourself to explore ideas, your life will become extraordinary. Brainstorming is a powerful tool that we sometimes forget about as adults. I hope this episode shows you how you can use it to start expanding your horizons. 

If you want to take the next step, I’m here for you. Join us in Committed to Growth to get the support you need to explore your options and open yourself up to new ideas. Apply now at www.andrealiebross.com/committed-to-growth and know that once you apply, you’ve already started to grow. 

Resources Mentioned: 

Reveal the Root of your problem. Take the Reveal the Root Quiz

Apply to Join Us in Committed to Growth

Other Episodes You’ll Enjoy:

81: How to Know What You Really Want

80: Using Feelings to Fuel Success: A Fan Favorite

79: How to Communicate Confidently

TTLU_EP82_MASTERED.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:09] You're listening to the Time to Level Up podcast. I'm your host business life coach, Andrea Libros. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly. Gain confidence. Make your time productive. Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. And finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's time to level up. Let's do this. Hello my friends and welcome back to the Time to Level Up podcast. I am so happy to have you here to continue our discussion about decisions. Now I am recording this on a monday morning. I just came back from two nights with some friends in Cincinnati and we went to celebrate my birthday. Now, you might think, Andrea, why Cincinnati? Why Cincinnati? Well, this was part of a decision making process, to be honest. We have traveled with these two other couples quite a bit. I think we've probably been on ten or 12 trips, and usually we get on an airplane, I'll be honest. But this time, just because of the time we all had and it being a busy season of spring, we really just decided that we were going to go away for the weekend. And we then decided that it would be easiest if we hopped in a car and then we decided OC, which we looked at our options of which cities could we drive to within one half days time that we hadn't been to, and all of us had been to Cincinnati many times.

Speaker1: [00:02:30] But for purposes that were not necessarily pleasure, such as children's sporting events, soccer, tennis matches, work, we'd been all in there a little bit for work. We had never really done the city as tourists. So after brainstorming and looking at all our options, we decided to go to Cincinnati. And I have to say, it didn't disappoint. We stayed in a really cool hotel. 21 see there, there, I guess in multiple cities across the US they're kind of like museum hotels. So there was artwork everywhere. It was very cool. We ate some scrumptious meals and we had a lot of laughs. So now we're back and it is Monday morning and I am coming to you recording this podcast about decisions and accessing all of your options. So let's dig in. Let's dig in. And, and I want you to really think about this in terms of all of the options you have when trying to figure something out and how often we dismiss our options, but even before, we've had a real chance to explore them. So if you're listening to this podcast, you're choosing it as an option. You've got lots of podcasts you could listen to, but you're listening to it for a specific reason, and maybe you've even considered going deeper with some of the work and some of you totally have.

Speaker1: [00:04:08] I know that for a fact because I am working with you and some of you may not have chosen to go deeper with the work or considered working with a coach, but it is always an option. The door is never shut. So let's dove in. So in order to make a decision, we really need to think about what our options are and what the possibilities are. What are our choices in order to choose? And to commit, we need to make a decision. Okay. This is the same line of thinking as when we try to find solutions to problems because we've got multiple options as to how to solve a problem. All right. So making a decision and solving a problem, the process in which we go about it is similar. And you might even argue that solving a problem is a decision. But here's what I find. I find that with my clients, they often don't even see. And I have see in air quotes all the options they have because they haven't asked themselves important or powerful questions. And our options come from thoughts that are really answers to these questions. But in order to ask the questions, we've got to slow down. And this is one of the amazing things about taking a class or attending a workshop or getting coached is that when you slow things down, which the class, the workshop or the coach is providing space for, when you slow things down and we answer a question really intentionally when we are intentional, what we are doing is accessing our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that is unique to humans, not dogs.

Speaker1: [00:06:15] And when we are not intentional or we do not slow down or we do not provide ourselves the space in which to think we are back to using our lower brain. The lower brain. Remember, it's just more survival based, it's less logical. And a lot of the times the answers that we get or that come from our lower brain would not even be the answers that would agree with our higher brain answers. But that's all right. That's just the way we operate. You know, our lower brain is driving us 99% of the time. That's just the way it is. But if we pause and really take notice and be intentional. Then we can have our prefrontal cortex or our higher brain do the driving. If we don't pause and we don't take notice and we don't hold space for intentional thought, then our lower brain is the one at the steering wheel of our lives. So when we have questions like Where should we go for the weekend? That need to be answered. Again, it's just another way of saying we need to make a decision in 2022. We often go to Google or Pinterest or YouTube or our friends to seek these answers.

Speaker1: [00:07:47] And I am just as guilty as you about going to the Googles. But when we do that, we are really looking. At someone else's options or ideas. Their options are ideas that they came up with. We're really not accessing our own higher brain. We're accessing someone else's higher brain. But this type of research, which again, I am all in on, can be part of our brainstorming process. It's not all bad. So let's think about the ideas that we gather using these sources. And I would like to think that the ideas that we gather from using these sources, they were part of someone else's brainstorming process, but it could ignite our own brainstorming process. So let's just talk about brainstorming. First of all, brainstorming comes before making the decision. It comes before committing to the solution. And so here's an example that recently happened with a client. So I was recently coaching a client who was a real estate agent, and she said, I would really love to find ways to make more money aside from representing a buyer or a seller, aside from buy sell transactions. And when I asked her, I said, All right, totally fair. I'm in on this. Let's figure it out. What have you already come up with? She'd only come up with one new idea or one idea total, which was to coach new agents. But I asked her, Are you open to doing some brainstorming to see what we could come up with? And she said, sure.

Speaker1: [00:09:41] And we went ahead and did some brainstorming and we came up with so, so many ideas. The rules of brainstorming in my book are that all ideas and all thoughts that come up into our brain are welcome. They're all welcome here. So they're all welcome. Her and her brain really had not offered her any other ideas than coaching new agents. Right. So. When we brainstorm, we're really not shutting our brain down. We're not judging it. And we're not satisfied with just one answer. Now, this is difficult for people to do, especially as we get older. And by older, I mean after age 25. The older we get, well, I should say, the older we get as adults, the less great we come at brainstorming. Kids are so much better than us at this. So in our brainstorming, the me and my client, we came up with serving as a general contractor or helping new homeowners to do all the things they want to do after moving in. Being a manager of all of these home renovation products projects, and these are all things that she loves to do and all things that she has the audience for. Okay. She's in front of these people that need these services already. But her brain had not offered her these ideas until she paused. And our coaching session gave her the space and the platform and the pause to be intentional from which to brainstorm. Her brain on automatic couldn't pause long enough to see these options.

Speaker1: [00:11:45] Brainstorming was really just creating a space where all ideas are welcome. Because you know what it does? When we create the space, it opens us up to be able to receive the ideas. If we don't create that space than our brains tend to go operate on default and not allow ideas in our brains tend to have a wall or a door that's closed. And I love this image, the door being closed because when ideas come to the door, when we are just operating on automatic in our lower brain, the door, the ideas get turned away because the the door is closed. And I witnessed this happen over and over again, especially when I'm coaching, but being open to receiving the solutions or the ideas or the answers in order to make a decision. Sometimes we're just not ready to receive them like we can't. And then an air quotes see it or see these options. But when we create space to brainstorm, then the doors start to open and we are available to receive the ideas. Now before my client and I started brainstorming, she told me the things that she had tried to do in order to make money other than representing a buyer and a seller. And she told me all the reasons why those things didn't work. She didn't have enough knowledge. People didn't want it. It was too close to COVID. So when I started giving her ideas, she started off battling them right away. She had the door closed on ideas.

Speaker1: [00:13:38] She said, Well, have you tried this or could you do that? And the way she battled them sounded like, Yeah, I tried that, but it didn't work. Or That won't work for my clients or customers because they're thinking this or that's not possible. I don't think in my business because or the famous that sounds really hard. So really what was happening is that her head wasn't open to receiving ideas, any ideas. And she closed the door and she was shutting them out. She wasn't in brainstorming mode, but when we went inside that coaching session, when she had the space to brainstorm and a partner to do it with. Usually when we think of brainstorming sessions, don't we think of doing it with another person? When she had the partner to do it with me, when I suggested we do it. All of a sudden she had a flip. She flipped a switch. She opened the door. So ask yourself, is your idea solution possibilities, option choices, door open? If it's not, then your brain is going to do exactly what it's trained to do, to shut out anything that we haven't done before, any possibility that isn't a reality. Anything that seems like it might be out of the norm because your brain is doing what it's supposed to do. It's keeping us safe. And that, my friends, is why decision making can be so hard. If we are talking about making a different choice, then what our current choice is.

Speaker1: [00:15:23] Your brain is just doing its job in trying to be right about what it believes. So think about this. Why is it hard to make decisions, decisions about things that are different than our current choice? It's because our brain is just doing its job, trying to be right about what it believes. Remember, our lower brain is driving the train 99% of the time. The lower brain just says whatever you want to believe. That makes things easy and comfortable. I'm in. It makes us feel safe in the world and we understand the way the world works. So as ideas come, the brain will shut them down. It's so fascinating how we do this. And again, I am just as guilty of this as the next person. So how do we give ourselves options so that we truly can make the best decision or find the perfect solution? We need to be in brainstorming mode as much as possible. We are not my friends in that brainstorming place enough because we tend to think of brainstorming is sitting around a table as a group and we all agree that, okay, now we're going to start to brainstorm. Otherwise, when we come up with ideas on our own, we judge the ideas as wrong and we judge ideas as not working are not possible. And therefore we close the door and the ideas are not let in because we are not in what we would consider an official brainstorming mode. So how do we keep the door open for possible solutions and ideas and options and.

Speaker1: [00:17:07] You might think about the strategy as it pertains to decisions that you want to make for your business or your personal life. This might be solutions to a problem. You're having something going on in your family, something going on financially. This can apply in all different ways to your life. Because ideas are solutions, things that you might try, resources that you might tap into, strategies that you might implement in your life or your business with your health. They can come to you at all times if you're in brainstorming mode. Och. So how do we do it? One way is to choose to believe that we're wrong about whatever we're currently thinking. Now, this is not as easy as it sounds. It's not. It is really hard for some people to think that perhaps, maybe we're wrong. It's actually something that comes to me a lot easier today because I have tested it out enough times and I challenged myself to be wrong about what I was sure I was right about, and I saw how much better my life became. I learned this thought I might be wrong from Jodie Moore, a fellow coach. And when I do this for myself, I saw how much more successful I became as a mother, as a business owner, as a coach, as a person, as a wife. I saw how much kinder I was. I saw how much more generous and successful in every other way that I was when I just decided to be wrong about what I was thinking and to adapt a new belief in just a side, even though I had no proof.

Speaker1: [00:18:59] I just decided to believe it anyway. So for my real estate agent client, she was in a place where there were no other ways to make more income. She just couldn't see it. But she thought and I offered her the thought. You might be wrong about that. And it opened up to brainstorming. Here's another way to find options. With the thought. I'm right on track. That's the way it goes when you're building a business. Well, that's the way it goes. When you reach this place in your business, you find other ways to create income. You had several amazing years of buying and selling, and now you're ready to add something else in. This is just the next phase and things happen in phases. And so you're just on to phase two. You're right on track. These options of how to create more income are on their way. Here's another way. When I'm searching for more options, I look at the options. I have and I say, Do I want this to be my story? Okay when I say it like that. The answer is usually no. I don't want the thought that there are no other options, for example, to come true. And if I do, it's going to shut out ideas that are otherwise trying to come to me.

Speaker1: [00:20:32] So what do I want my story to be? I want it to be that I do create income in several ways in the case of my real estate agent client. Once we get rid of stories that we don't like, then ideas are welcome to come in. Solutions can come. Resources can get through the doorway of our brains once we decide we don't necessarily love. The story that we're in right now. So. Listen, I want you to allow yourself to brainstorm. Whenever you're trying to solve a problem or generate ideas, just tell yourself this is a brainstorm. Even if it's just you around the table, even if you're not going into a group discussion like the dictionary defines it. I brainstorm with myself all the time, and I like to do it on paper. I like to open up a notebook and just dump out ideas. And here's an example. In my world, when I started my business, I had a program I called Books and Beyond. And the first book we read in there ever was Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. And she has a concept that ideas come and they knock at your door and they might knock several times. But if you don't answer the door, you don't do something with them. Then they just go away and they try to find someone else to give that idea to. I picture it as like guests coming to your door and if you don't answer the door, they're just going to go on to the next house.

Speaker1: [00:22:10] Right. So this books and beyond idea. Okay. It didn't really work out too well, but that's okay. It was just an idea. And remember, I mentioned at the beginning that ideas can come to us from Google or YouTube or Pinterest. Well, those original ideas did start somewhere. Those original solutions or ideas can start with you, too. I think that an idea or an option or a choice or a solution that you get from someone else and modify it as your own, which is where I get a lot of my ideas, by the way, most of my ideas, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But the piece that is yours is the most powerful part of the idea. So do not shut down ideas, do not shut out solutions. Be willing to believe and think crazy things that other people will tell you you're that aren't possible or that are unrealistic. And. They will tell you that maybe you should put that idea away for another day. But don't. I mean, truly. That's what people will tell you. If you don't continue to share. But when you create a space that's safe for ideas and solutions to come. You don't shut out those ideas, you don't put them away, you bring them forth. And that is when your life will become extraordinary. Your problems will get easier. The solutions and ideas will be more fun than you ever imagine they can be. I totally promise this is true.

Speaker1: [00:23:57] If you can create a space for yourself, and that can be by finding a partner. Becoming part of a group, having a coach to question you, whatever that is. I promise by creating that space, carving it out for yourself, realizing that that is what you need. Your life will become extraordinary. Why don't you put yourself to the test? Why don't you open yourself up to the most amazing space to create ideas? Where is your space? Where is your space? I invite you, my friends, as I always do, to come join us in Committed to growth. And I know that you will find it pretty amazing. Pretty amazing. If you want to start with us next month, you have until the last Thursday of this month to apply. And apply way before then, because you can get started immediately with your foundation one on one call. You don't need to wait and you can start immediately by digging into member vault our course library. You don't have to wait. And if this isn't the way you want to create a space for yourself, what is what is the way you're going to create space for brainstorming? Which leads to you making decisions, which leads to having a more extraordinary life and a way more fun life. So now I want to share with you what my client, Jill, had to say about making decisions and focusing on what she wants to focus on, finding the next steps, brainstorming, and how she found space to solve issues. Here is Jill.

Speaker2: [00:25:46] I was launching two kids into adulthood. My husband and I were working on some rental business. I was working on my own business, you know, just trying to get our finances in order. And I was really just trying to grow my business. I also work with nonprofits, so I had a lot of things going on in that realm. It just seemed really busy and I just was having trouble focusing. So through my coaching with Andrea, I have been able to really realize that the vision that I've had for actually a couple of years can be a reality. We've made a great plan. I have learned to let go of things that I'm not good at, the technical things, some of those things I've learned to let those go and it's been so freeing. I've been able to think about next steps. All the things I had in my brain are now on paper, thanks to Andrea and I am able to just work on those as my schedule allows and it's going great. I knew I had done as much as I could do on my own through podcasts, book reading, YouTube videos, and I just felt like I needed some individual attention that could apply directly to my specific situation. So I took the leap. All of a sudden it just clicked and I think it was really the right decision for me.

Speaker1: [00:27:24] So what did you think about Jill? What came to you as you were listening to her? I will tell you that we did go through the process of asking and how I helped her ask, what if I was wrong about this? I helped ask, what if I am right on track and this is exactly the way this is all supposed to go? I helped her ask herself what would happen if I tried it. I helped her ask what would be different if it did work? All those questions. So, so powerful. I invite you. To find the support, the container, the space I like to sometimes call coaching a container. Do you have a container in which to brainstorm? If you don't, I'd be happy to do it with you. Okay, my friends. Until next time. Have a great week. And remember, now is the time to level up. There's never been a better time. See you next week. Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up podcast with me, your host, Andrea Libros. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay, now what about you? You've listen to the podcast and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call right there on that call. We'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life.

Speaker2: [00:29:18] And business.

Speaker1: [00:29:19] And have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.

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Who_s the Best Business and Life Coach in Indiana - AndreaLiebross.com

I'm Andrea Liebross.

I am the big thinking expert for high-achieving women entrepreneurs. I help these bold, ambitious women make the shift from thinking small and feeling overwhelmed in business and life to getting the clarity, confidence and freedom they crave. I believe that the secret sauce to thinking big and creating big results (that you’re worthy and capable of) has just two ingredients – solid systems and the right (big) mindset. I am the author of best seller She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary and host of the Time to Level Up podcast.

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