#5: How to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The fear of making decisions can paralyze us from moving forward in life. You can address how to overcome the fear of making decisions by connecting with your natural decision-making style. Whether you're struggling with the fear of making decisions in your career, relationships, or daily life, understanding your unique decision-making style through human design (also known as Authority) can help you break free from overthinking and second-guessing yourself. Instead of letting the fear of making decisions keep you stuck in your head, learn how to tap into your body's wisdom to make choices that feel aligned with who you are. The episode explores seven different decision-making styles with practical tools to help you move past the fear of making decisions and into a more empowered way of choosing your path forward.
Let’s jump into decision making, how to overcome the fear of making decisions, and what this all means. The first thing is, you may find yourself overthinking decisions, really wondering, geez, am I making the right decision? And then, you make the decision and then you think, ooh, I don't know about that, or I wish I chose something else instead. We can let our mind kind of play things out over and over again.
What I want to share here are the different ways that you can connect to your specific decision making authority to really get that confidence back and allow it to empower you to make decisions that feel more aligned for you. Nothing's going to be perfect. There's no such thing as always making the perfect decision. But there is this journey in this path of connecting more to yourself and making decisions that are more in alignment with who you are. All right, so that's what we're going to talk about today.
The Truth About the Fear of Making Decisions
When you are afraid of making decisions, it will likely not be something that changes overnight. You’ve likely had fears or overwhelm related to decision making for a while. It’s important to be very mindful of understanding and knowing that it's a journey. At the end of the day, what we're trying to do is stop making decisions from the mind because that's where all the overthinking happens. That's where all of the churn and the worrying and the anxiety and all that good stuff happens. We want to stop all of that and as best as we can and learn and practice making decisions from a more connected place. A tool that I use for this is human design. If you're not already familiar with human design, or if you didn't hear me, maybe on my old podcast, Change from Within, I did some episodes around human design. It's something that I love. It's something that I have found works really well with my clients for understanding more of who they are, how they best navigate the world. It has completely changed my life with how I see things and operate for myself. I'll probably do some other podcast episodes on other pieces of human design in the future, but this one around decision making is that I use human design as a tool for you to discover and identify which decision making authority type you have, which decision making style you have. In human design lingo, it's called authority. But we'll keep it simple here and just say decision making style.
If you're familiar already with human design, you might have your chart already. If you're not, that's okay. You can get your chart here. On the chart it will share with you what your decision making style is. You will need your exact birth date and time and location to be able to pull a chart. It really needs to be the exact birth time because if your birth time changes a little bit, you can have a different result.
I'm going to take you through those seven different decision making styles and then as you see your chart, hopefully you can start to experiment with it and figure out how you can become more connected to this for yourself. And again, if you want more feedback and the opportunity to ask questions and learn more tips and practices that you can use for each, you can definitely join the decision making workshop.
Oftentimes, we are stuck in our mind and what we want to do is get back to the body. If you are someone that overthinks or worries about things or keeps things kind of running in your head, what you want to do is get more connected to your body as a way to feel grounded and make decisions from that place. It depends on which decision making style you have. But at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do, is to get you to connect more with yourself and your body so that you can feel more confident in your decisions. There are other things that go into making decisions, and with human design, there's many layers to all of it. But for the sake of simplicity today I'm going to talk about those seven styles, those seven authorities.
Emotional Authority – Decision Making Style One to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The largest percentage of the population (around 50%) has emotional decision making style or emotional authority. It comes from the solar plexus center. If you have the solar plexus center defined in your human design chart, you will automatically have emotional decision making authority. The decision making styles go in a hierarchy. Depending on which energy centers you have defined it will dictate which authority you have.
If you have emotional decision making style it means that your system works on a wave. You will have highs and lows in your emotions. And then there's also points of neutrality. For decision making, what this means is that you will have times when you're feeling really high and really great and thinking, oh, yeah, this is a great idea, this is what I want to do. And then you'll have other times where that same idea may feel very much not great. And so it can, it can feel, oh, this is terrible, there's no hope in this situation, I don't know what I'm going to do. You can feel both of those.
When you're in the emotional wave, that's not the time for you to make a decision. You need to wait until you feel neutral about the topic, until you feel neutral in your body about the topic. With the emotional decision making style, you're not meant to make decisions in the moment. You're supposed to ride out the waves until you feel neutral in your body and then you can make your decision from that place.
I've seen this with family members, with clients making decisions from an emotional high or low. It does not end well. It's much better to wait for that neutrality point, that neutral point. I will say with all of this now, in human design, generally people say your decision making style is for big decisions. So big life decisions, whether it's making a big move or changing careers or anything like that. I agree with that and I like to still practice it sometimes for smaller things. It depends what it is. I believe that as you get more used to working with your body and more in tune with your body, you'll be able to decipher even better. Emotional decision making authority is all about feeling it in the body.
The other piece that I want to mention for this one before we move on is that you won't ever feel 100% sure about a decision if you have emotional authority. Even when you get to that neutral point. It can be an 80%. So anything 80% or above, that you feel like it's a good idea and that you want to do that and you're deciding on it, then that's great. Then work with that and go with that. You just won't necessarily ever feel, okay, I'm a hundred percent. So the important thing to do, especially if you're just starting out, is to start practicing and feeling into your body and recognizing your emotional waves. Are you even in tune with your emotional waves? Probably a part of you is, even if you're not fully aware of it.
Something to consider:
How can you start to observe and watch your emotional waves?
Start to observe, watch the waves, and pay attention to how that feels in your body.
Sacral Authority – Decision Making Style Two to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The next decision making style is sacral authority. This is when you have the sacral center defined. This one is about your body's response in the moment. It's a feeling of being lit up from the inside. Especially if it's a yes. It really happens in the moment and you can see it in people. I can see it in my daughter that has sacral authority. I can see it with clients too, when we're on a zoom call and it's really about, again, not making decisions from the mind, but how is the body responding to that thing that you're being presented with?
In my daughter's case, if I ask her a question, I need to look at her to see the answer because she won't always use her words. Actually something really profound that I learned from my teacher in human design was that the worst thing you can say to a kid, basically to a generator child, to a sacral decision making style of a person is to use their words. I used to always tell my daughter to use her words because she wouldn't always talk. But the thing is, her body was still responding to me. Her body was still telling me what it wanted or what it liked or what it didn't like, if it agreed or if it didn't agree. I just wasn’t looking at her body for those signs.
It's a very interesting thing when you learn this and start to use it. Now you might say we still need to learn how to speak and use our words and everything. Yes, absolutely. And when she's meant to make decisions for herself, it's very important for her to be in tune with her body. I don't want to force her to use words before she's ready. I want her to figure it out with her body first. So that's what I've been teaching her. If you have this sacral decision making style, it's really important to pay attention to your body's responses. Someone with this style may lean forward and look more engaged. If it's a yes, they might lean their body backwards. If it's a no, they could shrug their shoulders. They could use more of noises instead of full words of yes and no. So they could use huh. And if they're in that moment. It's really the body response and each person with this, will have their body respond a little bit differently. It's typically coming from the diaphragm. And you'll physically feel it in your body.
You can start to see why it's so important that we're talking about not making decisions from the mind. It's really about connecting to the body because this is where you're going to see and feel and understand these things more. That's all about the sacral decision making style.
A good way to practice with sacral authority is to have friends or loved ones ask you detailed questions in a yes / no format. This will make it easier for your body to respond to what’s being asked.
Splenic Authority – Decision Making Style Three to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The next decision making style is splenic authority. This one is in the spleen center. If you don't have the solar plexus or the sacral defined, but you do have the spleen defined, then you are splenic authority. Splenic decision making style originates in the spleen. The spleen is the oldest of the centers. It carries the primal wisdom to survive and it's very powerful in a lot of ways. It gives subtle nudges in the body. I like to say that the spleen whispers. It's something that you need to be really grounded and present in your body to be able to see and trust those messages when they come in and they come to you. It's really about that instinct that people sometimes have a hard time describing. The spleen is all about that inner knowing, that inner sense of knowing. And things might not make sense in the moment, but you hear it and you say, okay, I'm going to go do that, even though I don't exactly know why. And then you figure out later why that happened.
If you have splenic decision making style, it's very powerful and also very important to stay in tune with yourself, to be able to hear those whispers, to be able to hear those nudges, to see if something resonates with you or doesn't resonate with you. It can really feel like it's coming out of nowhere, but it's really coming from within you. The spleen's job is to keep you safe. If you have this, it's really important to learn to trust this response within yourself. And a lot of the times when we let the mind take over, it's easy to not trust the spleen since it's so hard to grasp some of these concepts or to really say, oh, well, I know exactly what's happening here. We want certainty and the spleen is just kind of like, come with me. You won't know it all, but I want you to still believe me and trust me. It’s really important to practice keeping that connection very clear and kind of observing to see how does that show up for you?
Questions to consider:
How does your spleen talk to you?
Is it more a voice?
Is it more a feeling or pictures?
There are different ways that it can come in for different people. That’s the splenic decision making style.
Heart / Ego Authority – Decision Making Style Four to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
Next one is Heart Authority. Heart or ego decision making style. This originates from the heart center, the ego center and this one is really about what you say in the moment. You really have to trust your voice and let it guide you. The question for you to ask yourself is really, is your heart in it? That is what your body is looking for. Your body wants to know, is your heart really in it?
You have to really pay attention and trust and allow yourself to think about yourself in a way. I hesitate to use the word think, but really to put yourself first and understand. This is with all of the decision making styles, but for this one, it's really about taking a look at you and knowing that what you want or don't want is an important part of how you make decisions. A lot of people can feel selfish or they feel worried about being selfish or being seen as selfish. That's not what this is about. This is really about is your heart in it? Because if your heart is not in it, then it's not something for you. Okay? It won't last for the long term.
Questions you can consider are:
Do you want this thing that's happening?
What will you get out of it?
What's in it for you in some way?
Only manifestors can have that decision making style because it's the heart connected to the throat. I haven't covered energy types on this podcast. I will talk a little bit about that in the decision making workshop and maybe I'll do something here in the future about that too. But each of these have a little nuance to them and what is needed in order to get you to a certain decision making style. Not something to worry about, but just something to. To add to share with you around all this.
Self Projected Authority – Decision Making Style Five to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The next decision making style is self projected authority. This one originates in the Identity center or the G center. And it's something that can only work with projectors. So full disclosure, this is my decision making style. And I've had a lot of experiences with it over time and really have come to know it and understand it in much deeper ways as I've been working on all this. Self projected authority is all about speaking out loud, unscripted, and not only listening to what you say, but also listening to how you say it. It's really paying attention to the energy of what's coming out of your voice. In my case, from all the experiences I've had, I can tell if I'm still processing something not really decided or if it's something that is really lighting me up. All of that I can tell by my voice and how it comes out for me. For me personally, taking walks in nature is something that I do pretty much daily. And when I do that, sometimes a way that I process is to just speak out loud on my walks to see how things are coming out for me and to hear it back. Sometimes I'll record it and sometimes I don't. It's really about connecting again to the body and feeling into what does this feel like when I'm expressing it.
Soundboarding is really great in order to reflect. Speaking to someone else can be helpful. But it's important to know you're not looking for advice. In this case, okay, none of them. You're looking for advice from other people. But since this one is around speaking, it's important to know that you're not looking for advice from the other person. You just want them to hear you out. Sometimes for some people, it can feel easier to talk to a live person instead of talking to themselves. And if there's something that you're looking for in terms of feedback, it would actually be a reflection on how it sounded coming out of you. The other person could potentially pick up on if you sound really excited about something or not. It's really about the energy of how it's coming out as you're speaking it.
Some questions you can consider are:
Will this make me happy?
Will this allow me to express myself creatively?
Am I Heading in the right direction?
The identity center is all about direction, identity, and purpose, which connects to self projected decision making.
Environmental Authority – Decision Making Style Six to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The next one is mental or environmental authority decision making style. This has no inner authority. This one is in a sense similar to self projected, but also very different. This style is around speaking it out. This one's also only possible for projectors. It's when you have just the head and ajna defined in the chart. The environment is very important for someone with this authority. So they're really taking in sensory information from the world around them and really need to be in the correct environment.
If you have this authority, it's very important for you to be in the right environment for you when you're making decisions. Again, it's what makes you feel good, what makes your body feels. Feel good and paying attention to if it doesn't feel good. If you feel like your nervous system is activated, for example, it’s very important to pay attention to how you're feeling in your body. Speaking it out can be very helpful. In terms of soundboarding, it’s not about looking for advice. Allow the body to lead and don't let the mind take over.
Some questions you can consider are:
Is this the right place or environment for me?
Have I spent time in nature to cleanse my aura?
For me, that's part of why I like walking in nature, because it kind of clears out all the energy and all the noise from everything else. And so it can be the same for anyone that has this environmental decision making style because it's very important for them to be connected to their own truths.
Lunar Authority – Decision Making Style Seven to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
The next and last of the seven decision making styles that I want to share here today is moon or lunar authority. Lunar decision making style. This one is only for reflectors. It's a pretty small percentage of the population, like 1% or so. And it's a reflector is when there are no defined centers in the chart, everything is fully open. What this means is that as a reflector and as you have lunar decision making style, you're meant to connect with the lunar cycle and wait 28 days before making a decision. You want to actually live through the whole month of all the transits before deciding on something.
Your clarity will come as you keep repeating these patterns with the moon. You basically kind of take a flavor of each thing every day of what's going on, how the energies are working and Then at the end of that process, you make your decision. So don't let the outside world rush you in any way.
You're also one that's not meant to make decisions in the moment. So you can see there's a few decision making styles that are really in the moment, and then there's other ones that are really over time. This one is one that's over time. And because you have no centers defined, your environment is very important for you too. Because when we don't have defined centers, when we don't have consistent energy in certain places, you're taking on from the world around you.
It's very important to find your people, find your place in the world and feel good about where you are, because that's going to impact everything else for you. Environment is important for everyone, but more important for some over others in terms of how it impacts their decision making style. This is one that again, paying attention to the lunar cycle.
I tell people with this authority, clients with this authority, that it's good to track things, especially when you're getting used to working in this way or used to trying to make decisions in this way. It's really good to track kind of how you feel across the month. So making note of that on different days and keeping a record to allow yourself to reflect on how you're feeling and what's coming up will be supportive to your process. That is Lunar authority, Lunar decision making style.
Conclusion on How to Overcome the Fear of Making Decisions
Those are the seven authorities or decision making styles in human design. When you know your decision making style, it will help you to overcome the fear of making decisions. By practicing your decision making style you can become more comfortable with knowing what it feels like to make decisions in a confident manner. As you become more familiar with this feeling, your fear around making decisions will get smaller. As mentioned, I'm going to share more about this in the upcoming workshop on March 4th. You can learn more and register here if you'd like. The main takeaway that I want to give you here is to raise an awareness. Again, if you're not familiar with human design at all, or you've heard of it but don't know much, or if you've been at it a while, hopefully you've been looking at your decision making style. But if you haven't, it's really to connect more to your body, pay attention to the signs that your body is giving you. A lot of us are rushing around. It can be hard to feel that we're present. I completely understand. Life takes over, but in those moments, bring your awareness to your body and start to pay attention. Start to get curious about finding out your decision making style and then experimenting with it.
The homework for today’s episode is to one, find out your decision making authority from your human design chart. Two, start to get curious around your decision making style. It'll be listed at the top of your chart. It'll say authority instead of decision making style, but that's what it is on the chart. Knowing this will help you immensely to overcome the fear of making decisions. This information along with practice can support you in being more confident in your decision making abilities.
Register here for my upcoming How to Make Better Decisions in 2025 Workshop.
Resources mentioned:
Get your free Human Design chart here.
If you’d like to connect further about unlocking the next step in your personal development journey, please feel free to reach out. I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram. I'm also on Voxer at @MaryClavieres.
If you want support with where you are right now, I'd be honored to work with you. You’re invited to check out my Human Design readings so that you can learn more about your own energy and how you operate. This tool is a powerful building block that will allow you to live life with less stress and more peace.
If you found this episode helpful, please feel free to share with a friend or a loved one, anyone that you may think about that would benefit from it. If you're looking for support on your journey in any way please don't hesitate to reach out. I am here for you, and I'd love to support you. Thank you so much for being here today. I so appreciate you, and I wish you a wonderful rest of your day.
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