Becoming You Again

How To Make Decisions You’ll Stand By

• Karin Nelson • Episode 250

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Does making decisions make you feel anxious and confused? In this episode I go straight to the heart of decision‑making after divorce which is how to stop spinning, center your own opinion, and choose with clarity even when certainty doesn’t shows up. 


I give you a simple way to decide which will make your decision making after divorce oh so easy, every time. You’ll learn to replace pros and cons with personal definitions, read your body’s signals, and trust yourself to have your own back. 

I help you do the real work of making decisions after divorce, from redefining family and values to building self‑trust without waiting for certainty. I share tools to align brain, body, and intuition so choices feel clean, committed, and doable.

 You’ll learn: 
 • centering your opinion without self‑abandoning
 • why there is rarely one right choice
 • using values and definitions instead of pros and cons
 • reading body signals and calm intuition
 • committing and having your own back
 • starting small to rebuild self‑trust
 • managing uncertainty with practical supports

To download your FREE GUIDE: "7-Day Self Trust Reset" click here.

To schedule your complimentary consult with Karin click here.

If this podcast resonated with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts.

Karin Nelson:

You are listening to Becoming You Again, episode number 250, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome to Becoming You Again, the podcast where you learn to step into your power as a woman in this world, where you learn to reconnect to your wholeness, your integrity, and bring into alignment your brain, your body, and your intuition after divorce. This is the podcast where you learn to trust yourself again and move forward toward a life that you truly want. You are listening to Becoming You Again, and I am your host, Karin Nelson. Welcome back to the podcast, my lovely ladies. How's everything going? I have to say, my year so far inside my home has been interesting. We have been taking on the challenge of redoing parts of our main floor bathroom, which is just a half bath, but it's the bathroom that's the closest to my office, and I work all day long in my office. So that's the bathroom that I typically use. And we are replacing the vanity and the toilet. So for the last several weeks, I have not had a bathroom close to my office. I've had to either go upstairs to one of the bathrooms up there or downstairs to the bathroom down there. So for the last few weeks, I have not had a bathroom. And I don't know if you've ever done any kind of remodel, even though this isn't like a full remodel. Um, but there's been paint and, you know, like bringing in new things, like a new vanity, a new toilet. I don't know if you've ever done any of that. I never have, but my partner is very handy and he has done a lot of building things. Like if you remember when I went to Alaska a couple of years ago, he rebuilt our deck. Um and so he's done a lot of things like that. He's very good at things like that. He has a very mechanical engineering type brain, and he can see it. But the problem with redoing things that you have never redone is you come across a lot of problems after the fact. Like you'll take the vanity out, you'll try to put a new one in, and then there will be something that like doesn't fit right or needs to be, you know, like fixed in some way so that it will work properly in the way it's supposed to work. I don't know. I don't know if this is making any sense to you, but it is very frustrating. I don't know how people who are like flippers or who do things around the house on the regular deal with this. But for me, it's annoying. I just have to say it's very annoying because what was supposed to be a very quick in my brain, a very quick, like several day, you know, maybe a long weekend type project has turned into several weeks of no working bathroom right outside my office. And it's fine. I this is such a like not a problem. And I'm just complaining to complain. But um, I'm gonna be very excited once it's done, and we're getting closer every day. It seems like a little bit more is getting done, a little bit, you know, a little bit more is is being completed. But wow, there's also been a lot of decisions that have had to be made in terms of like which vanity and what will work with like our plumbing, uh, which toilet and what will be the easiest or the prettiest to install. Like, I wanted one of those toilets that I promise there's a point to this. You guys stick around. Don't jump off yet. There's a point. I promise I'm gonna tie it into everything. But like I wanted one of those toilets that uh has like, I think they call it an apron, so that you can't see like the plumbing lines or the plumbing like uh ceramic movements. I don't know if that describes what I'm saying, but I don't really know what it's called because I don't do this kind of thing. So I'm just telling you, I wanted one that went straight down. It's easier to clean, it's prettier to look at, it doesn't get all the dust all over like the back, the sides of the toilet, you know. Um, but they're harder to install. I didn't know that. So anyway, lots of decisions. Paint choices. We've got Wayne's coat in there, so it's like what color to paint the Wayne's coat, what color to paint the walls. I don't typically have problem making decisions, but I used to have major problems making decisions because I didn't trust myself. And so that is what we're talking about today. See, see how I tied that in there? That is what we're talking about today is how to make decisions. How do you make decisions, especially when you are either deciding to get divorced or you are now, you've decided that, which is can be a really big decision for most people because there's so much that goes into it. There's so many other people that are affected by that decision than just ourselves, right? Typically. So maybe you're you've made that decision and now you're in your divorce. Seems like there's lots more decisions that just have to be made. And it can be hard, especially if you are anything like I was, and don't trust yourself to know what the right decision is. And I'm gonna put right in quotes. So just anytime I say right decision in this podcast, I might say it again, I'm not really sure. Uh, but if I say right, it's in quotes because, and I'll talk about it, there's not a right or wrong decision typically, in most cases, when it comes to your own life. So we're gonna talk about, so I want to talk about that today. I want to talk about like what it's like to make decisions for you, how to get to a place where you can make decisions with ease. Doesn't that sound nice? Ugh, doesn't that sound so nice to just be able to trust yourself enough to make decisions? Because, like, let's be real, if you're in the place where you are trying to decide if divorce is the right move for you, like I was in that place nine and a half years ago when I was trying to decide for myself if divorce was the right option for me. And it was excruciating at times trying to figure out should I, shouldn't I, should I stay, should I go, should I blow up my family and start anew? That's how I was thinking about it, right? Which sounds terrible. It sounds really scary. So if you're in that place, I totally understand. I totally can relate to exactly what you're going through. And if you've made that decision or someone made it for you, maybe the person that you're with or what you were with left or filed for divorce or however that went down. Uh maybe you're in a place where you've got lots of other decisions that are coming up, like, how do I answer this text to my ex? What do I say to my kids when they ask me why we're getting divorced? Uh, what do I put in the divorce decree? Where do I move? What kind of a job should I get if I'm if I've been a stay-at-home mom for years? Or do I want to up level? Uh, how do I save money? What types of financial decisions am I going to be making? What do I want for dinner tonight? How do I support my kids through this? How do I take care of myself through this? What do I say when people ask me, why are you getting divorced? Why didn't you try harder? Et cetera. Like there are decisions, we could have decision, fatigue, galore. And it can feel very heavy and very scary if we don't know how to make decisions for ourselves. So let's jump into it. Because what I think most of us have probably been taught on how to make decisions is do a pros and cons list. Now, I'm not saying those are bad. I still sometimes use those. They might be useful to you, but also sometimes it can just keep us spinning because then we do the pros and cons, and then we're still confused and we're like, they're equal, or one doesn't feel better than the other, and I still have no idea, right? So you're maybe making the pros and cons list. Maybe you're trying to decide uh what is gonna happen in the future if you choose one way or the other, which is something we also do because we don't like uncertainty. As humans, we actually really hate uncertainty, even though we live with uncertainty literally basically constantly. But we pretend like we don't. Our brain likes to predict based off of the past what's gonna happen in the future. And so if you're making decisions about things that like you've never experienced before, then you try and like come up with all of the different options of, well, if I choose this, then this might happen. But if I choose this, then this might happen. And I don't, that seems scary and I don't want that to happen. But if I choose this, then what's that person gonna do or say, or how will they show up? And we try to predict like all of the outcomes, which in and of itself is number one impossible, and number two, exhausting, right? Do you see how we just become like decision fatigued? We there's like there's it's almost like we tell ourselves, well, I need to make these decisions or I need to make this decision. And so I'm going to think about it enough that there will be the perfect answer, that there will be the right, the correct, the best answer, that will have zero fallout, or that everyone else will agree with, or that I will just feel so 100% good about that like everyone else will just fall in line and agree with me. And there will be no like repercussions or uh negative emotion attached to that decision. And we think that that's how it's gonna go. But let me tell you something. That isn't typically how decisions work. Now, I'm not saying you can't feel 100% good about your decision. You can. And I'm gonna give you some tools to help you do that in this podcast. But that does not mean that everyone's going to agree with you that this was the right decision. Put that in quotes, remember? Right decision. It does not mean that you're not going to feel or other people in your life will not feel negative emotion because of your decision, even if it's we're just talking about like a basic text or something, okay? It doesn't mean that one option is going to like feel uh 100% positive for everyone involved, and one option will be all of the negative. That's not how decisions typically work. And the better, like the more you can accept that, the easier it will be to start making decisions that are aligned with you and that represent what is best and right for you. So the way we want to get to making decisions is we kind of have to, number one, we have to center ourselves. We can't make decisions based off of what everyone else out there is going to think or judge or say or might be best for them. Now, it doesn't mean that you take you don't take those things into consideration. Like, let's use the idea of if you're deciding to get divorced, okay? It does not mean that you don't think like, well, this is just what I want to do. And I don't really fucking care if it my kids get hurt. But so when I say like center yourself, all I'm meaning is you need to consider what is best and right for you first. And you can take into consideration how your decisions will affect other people. But that does not mean that you can't make the decision that is best and right for you. It just means that if you want to consider everyone else, you figure out how to support them through the decision that you come to, if it is going to affect them in an adverse way. I hope that makes sense. Okay, so we want to like first center ourselves and we want our opinion to take center stage here because it truly is the most important opinion in our own lives, right? If we are taking other people's opinions over ours, then we are not considering ourselves. We are self-abandoning, we are not understanding ourselves to a point where we are doing what is best and right for us. And when we do what is best and right for us, that means we are coming from a place of soul alignment. Soul alignment meaning we are listening to our brain, our body, and our intuition, and they are in alignment. They are our north star and they are guiding us. That is where I want you to be when it comes to making decisions. And that sounds, if you haven't been in that place or you're not sure what that feels like or sounds like or looks like, that might feel impossible. But I promise you that the more you can get to know you, and the more you can trust yourself and feel and allow yourself to feel confident about choosing and confident that you can trust yourself to choose, the more you will start to recognize: okay, I am in soul alignment right here. My brain, my body, and my intuition are in alignment, and this feels right. This feels good and right to me. So, how do we do that? Well, number one, when you go to make a decision, stop with the label of there's a right and a wrong. Because maybe that's not true. It's possible that that is not true. It's possible that it doesn't really matter what you decide as long as you have your own back through it. This is where the wishy-washy second guessing comes in. When we make a decision and then we don't trust ourselves enough to support ourselves through it, to believe that this decision is the right one for us. So we don't have our own back, we don't like our reasons for it, and then we second guess and we're like, oh, maybe I made the wrong decision, maybe I shouldn't have done that. And we we can't support ourselves through it. And then we just spin in our brains and we're like, oh no, maybe I should change my mind. So we go back and forth and da-da-da. That is not where I want you to be. You're probably already right there. You've probably been doing decisions that way for a really long time. I know that was my experience. I know that was many of my clients' experiences. So we want to get you to the place where you're gonna have your own back on this decision. What does that mean? It means asking yourself, when I decide this, what kind of a relationship do I want to have with myself? Do I want to have one where I trust myself? Do I want to have one where I am taking into consideration my priorities and my values? And are those important to me? And if they are, then I'm gonna make decisions that are aligned with those priorities and those values. And if they're not, then I know what my decision has to be. A lot of times when we are trying to make decisions, big or small, like I said before, we are waiting for that certainty. We are waiting for like all of the things to line up for us to know, okay, this is this is the right one. I've got that certainty. I feel really good that everything is going to go perfectly when I make this decision. But the problem is, is that certainty is probably never going to come. And so we can sit around waiting for the certainty to come, spinning an indecision, spinning in like distrust of ourselves, spinning in uh not feeling confident about ourselves or knowing which direction we want to go. Or we can just learn to manage our brain around uncertainty, feeling the discomfort of not knowing if this is like gonna turn out the way we hoped, but trusting that we will handle whatever comes our way. And then using our priorities and our values and and and our like redefinitions of things to be our guide as we make decisions. So let me use my decision to get divorced as an example. So when I was going through this back and forth, like, should I, shouldn't I? I don't know what's best for me, what's best for the kids, like will I be okay? Like, all of these questions, right, are going through my brain for weeks, weeks and weeks. And I'm having conversations with my husband at the time, and he can't decide either. And we're just kind of in this like stagnant place where neither of us can decide. And so when I asked myself, I went on this walk, I've I've talked about this story many, many times on the podcast. So if you've heard it before, I apologize that you have to hear it again. Cause here we go. It'll be a very shortened version. I went on a walk, I was outside by myself, and I just finally was like ready to let go of everybody else's opinion. And I just was like, What do you want? Karen, what do you want in this situation? And I just allowed myself to say what I actually wanted, like to be honest with myself without judgment, without needing to like come back with the argument of, yeah, but what about all these other people? Like, I just was like, just be honest. And I just I was like, I want a divorce. So I made that decision. It felt really good and right to me. I knew it was right. So I go and tell my ex and or my husband at the time, and he was like, okay, I agree, this is probably the best. But then for weeks after that, he kept coming back at me, like, are you sure? Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure this is the right thing? I don't know. Maybe we should just work on it. We'll just like I can try harder, you can try harder, blah, blah, blah. Like all the things, right? And I really just had to stay strong in my original decision of no, I know that this is best and right for me. But what also really helped me in staying strong in that decision was my definitions of things. And my definition of family wasn't that it had to look like husband, wife, kids. That wasn't my definition. My definition of family was in my head, we could still be a nuclear family and not be married. And so it was okay. It felt right to me to make that decision. And so let's say you're trying to support your kids in something after the divorce, and you're struggling with how to be the best parent in this situation. You're struggling to decide like how do I support them? How do I show up for them? How do I help them through this, whatever, whatever they're going, what whatever's going on for them, right? A way to help you make decisions in this direction is you can ask yourself defining questions, questions that will help you figure out what your values and your priorities are. So you can ask yourself, like, what does it mean to me to be a good parent? And then really get very specific about the answer. So get really specific about your answers in terms of definitions of things. What is love? What is the definition of love to you? What is the definition of family to you? What is the definition of being a good mom? What is the definition of being a good co-parent? What is the definition of uh being a good employee? What is the definition of supporting the relationships that you want to be close to in your life? Like get really specific about those things. Those will help you align to your values and your priorities. And once you have answers to those, Decisions become really easy because all you have to do is see if what you're deciding lines up with your definition or with your values or with your priorities. And then boom, you've got your decision. Now it doesn't mean that you're not, you maybe aren't going to feel fear. It doesn't mean that you aren't maybe going to feel sadness or uh a little bit of hurt or a little bit of negative emotion in some way. That doesn't mean that it's a wrong decision for you. Okay? Because often we will again, we will go back to this idea that there shouldn't be any negative emotion attached, that we should just be 100% confident in our decision. Maybe not. Like maybe we will have some fear about the decision. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. Doesn't mean you shouldn't make it. It doesn't mean that you can't trust yourself to have your back or to figure it out or to know how to handle things in the future because of your decision. All right, my friends, if you want more specifics about this, I work with my clients all the time on making decisions, on figuring out what feels best and right to them, on learning how to trust themselves, on redefining things, on helping them figure out what their values and priorities are, on managing their brain over uncertainty, on knowing how to have their own back, on realigning their soul, their self-trust, their mind, their body, and their intuition, and on learning how to listen to that guide. And if this is something that you're struggling with, and if this is something that you want one-on-one help with, this is what I do with my clients. So go schedule your free consult with me. Let's talk. Let's figure out what it would look like to work together more. All right, my friends, that is what I have for you today. Go out there, make some decisions, big or small. Start with small if you're real scared. You can just make little small decisions like, what should I have for dinner tonight? Or what should I do with my kids this weekend? Like they don't have to be big. That is what I have for you today. I will be back next week. Hi, friend. I'm so glad you're here and thanks for listening. I wanted to let you know that if you're wanting more, a way to make deeper, more lasting change, then working one-on-one with me as your coach may be exactly what you need. Together, we'll take everything you're learning in the podcast and implement it in your life with weekly coaching, real life practice, and practical guidance. To learn more about how to work with me one-on-one, go to Karin Nelson Coaching.com. That's www.karincoaching.com. Thanks for listening. If this podcast agreed with you in any way, please take a minute to follow and give me a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. And for more details about how I can help you live an even better life than when you were married, make sure and check out the full show notes by clicking the link in the description.

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Karin Nelson

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