The decision-making process during times of crisis can leave you dizzy, your mind scrambled from so many options and questioning your choices. Not a fun or secure place to build your business from. 
So how then can you make good, clear decisions when the world around you feels like you’re in a bouncy castle?
By knowing more about your personality.
I’ve studied different personality profiling systems and truly believe in the power of knowing about my strengths and tendencies.
Why?
Because when you know yourself better and can predict the way you tend to react to things, you can hack them for greater productivity while also leveraging your innate tendencies to increase happiness and success in your life.
You don’t get stuck wondering why things aren’t working and you’re equipped to fix the problems.
You can also use personality profiles to find the business that’s best suited for you.
Table of Contents
Decision-Making Process 101
It all came to a head in March…
In early March 2020, when the world was unsettled with COVID-19, I shut down for 5 days. As an empathetic person, I was feeling all the feels. I couldn’t think or make decisions. In fact, what I was doing was making a decision, changing my mind, making another decision and repeating this process until I was exhausted…
Now, I'm self-aware, so I knew that I was experiencing this. But all the things that I normally do to move through it weren't working like they normally do. Nothing was working.
Since I love digging deep into understanding how I tick and how other people tick, I went through the process of looking at my tendency.
The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin is a book and also a quiz that gives you an idea of what your default response is to external requirements and internal requirements. I know what mine is (if you're wondering, I'm an Upholder) and it wasn't helping how I was feeling. I literally went back to the book and read through it but didn’t find any new insight.
So then I looked at my Myers-Briggs profile. That didn't help either.
Next, I looked to StrengthsFinder 2.0, another amazing personality test, which is 100% focused on strengths only. No answers there either.
None of my go-to strategies worked.
I felt chaotic, making decisions was hard, and I worried if the decisions I was trying to make might lead to unnecessary mistakes. I knew I needed to feel calm inside, but how?
How the heck was I going to get to that point?
That’s when a friend of mine asked,
“Hey, have you heard of Human Design?”
What is Human Design?
It's based on astrology, science, chakras and nine different energy centers, all interwoven together to form the Human Design philosophy. It’s a free analysis and chart that you can get here to help you transform your life.
It can be complex to understand, but you'll find a breakdown of each Human Design type here.
One thing Human Design can show you is how to best make decisions, something they categorize as Inner Authority. It gives you your best decision-making process–what you need to do to feel like a decision for yourself is or isn’t good.
Knowing your inner authority is like having an internal compass or GPS. When you listen to it and follow it, you will know when you’re on the right path just by how you feel inside. It also makes you your own authority instead of looking for answers from others (*cough* hello $9000 mistake).
Human Design – Five Inner Authorities
There are five centers that guide decision-making, and at least one needs to be activated to be self-sufficient in your own decision-making process. They are:
- Emotional authority: uses feelings to decide
- Sacral authority: needs to listen and feel for gut reactions to decide
- Splenic authority: uses instinct to decide
- Will-power authority: uses motivation to decide
- Identity authority: relies on the heart to decide
My Results
My Human Design makeup revealed that my inner authority is Sacral. That means that for me to make decisions, I need to listen to my gut. It's instinctual and I know immediately if something lights me up or not.
I was feeling frustrated with myself, not with anybody else. I appeared to be changing my mind every single day during that period in March and my Not-Self theme (another Human Design term) reflected that very clearly.
When I’m not being true to myself, I end up feeling frustrated.
I was making decisions up in my head versus in my gut, and the result was feeling major frustration. It was all spelled out using Human Design.
Once I learned this, it was no wonder that I was struggling.
So all of this to say that until you are in a place of calm and you understand what is a good decision for you and how to make one, don't make decisions, right?
Every time that I have strayed from my inner authority I have also strayed from my business goals. When I’ve agreed to do things that turned out to not be great for me I was using my head instead of this process where I should have been listening to my gut.
So I'd love, love, love for you to go through this if you are struggling. If you're struggling to make decisions, either personally or for your business, once you understand your personality you're then ready to move forward.
Once you've got a clear picture on your Human Design piece, you can next move into achieving calmness.
JST: Just Sit There
JST is a practice and it simply means just sit there. Now it sounds really simple, yet it's super powerful.
What you're going to do is find a quiet place where you can be alone. Let everyone know that you are not to be disturbed.
So if you've got kids at home, or any other distractions like pets or spouses, lock yourself in the bathroom. Or wait till the kids are occupied or in bed. But you can't do this with anyone else around you.
No distractions. No phone. No technology. Nothing. Just you.
If this is your first time doing something like this, don’t worry about doing anything other than sitting there. Just sit for 30 minutes minimum.
You’re literally just going to sit and what this does is allows your brain and mind to take a break, to literally stop having to process information because you're not giving it any more information. You're just sitting there.
Now I will say the first 10 minutes can be really tough, particularly if you're someone like me who is always doing things. My brain in that first few minutes is going: “Lise! What are we doing? We are wasting time. We should be doing something! We should be doing all of these checklist items!”
You just have to wait for that uncomfortableness to pass, then you will relax and start to feel calm.
How often?
During that period in March, I was doing this every day. It wasn’t until I pulled in the Human Design element and understood my inner authority that I started to feel right, started to feel like I could make good decisions again.
I make decisions based on when something lights me up. It's a very definite yes or no. There is no gray. And my decision-making process is fast. I literally process something straight away and I feel it in my gut. So as soon as I understood that, I went back to doing JST and focusing on my inner authority. That’s when I came to some decisions about my business, and I was able to confidently act on them. All just by taking the time to listen to my inner authority.
Advanced JST
When you’ve been doing JST for awhile, you can start to incorporate a question you need to get an answer on, all while focusing on your inner authority.
Now I will say this, don't try to ask yourself more than two questions or two journal prompts per JST session. If you do more, you're going to just switch back into overwhelm and chaos because your brain is going to come up with a lot of options and more questions. Don’t do that. Just ask one question.
Everything that we need to know for ourselves is literally within. That’s your inner authority. When we start to listen to it–especially in the decision making process–we don’t have to look externally for answers. Ask yourself a question and if you are self aware enough, you will get the answer you need to hear. We are equipped that way, we just don't listen!
Have a pen and paper or journal handy so you can capture everything that comes through to you. This is my favorite thing to do every single day. If I don't get to it every day, the next day I can start to feel a little panicky with everything that’s going on, right? So I make it a cornerstone activity in my day.
Your Action Plan
When you need to make decisions, pivot, or you just want to feel calm during times of crisis, use this process.
What did your inner authority reveal to you?
Write down what you heard and put into action, knowing that you have all the answers you need inside. Trust it.
It's awesome and very, very simple.
