What’s up, everybody? How are you? What are you up to? Are you going for a walk? Folding laundry? Exercising? Thank you for bringing me with you. I appreciate it so much. If you’re loving the podcast, please go leave me a review. Reviews help people find the podcast. I know I probably say that reminder a lot, but it really does.

Um, and I read every single one. So if you’re loving the podcast, please go leave a review. It would make me smile. , I got a little life update. We have fully moved into our new home. We are slowly getting it taken care of to the point where it feels like home, where I know where most of the stuff is.

There’s still a lot of things in the basement that were already in totes in the basement. And we had a large like storage room with shelves in our last house and we do not have that here. So. I still got to do the basement, but it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind. It’s unfinished. It’s fine, but we’ve got like the kitchen and the pantry and a lot of the bedroom things.

Um, the day to day things are really settling in and it’s really fun. And then I’m also getting to add a little personality. We bought what they call a quick move in home, but basically a builder built our home and it was very white and very beige and lacking in personality. And so it’s fun to be able to slowly put some personality on it.

And our next huge project is putting in the yard. So if you like laying sod or digging dirt or picking rocks, uh, hit me up. You’re welcome to come and help. Cause it’s going to be a huge job, but I’m kind of letting my husband take the lead on that. Um, we also went on this last minute trip to Canada, I think since the last time we chatted.

I. I have a brother. Well, I have two brothers. Have I mentioned this? I have two brothers. They live in Canada. My mom lives in Canada. My dad lives in Europe. It’s a long story. But My younger brother’s son was getting baptized in our church. We baptize our children at eight years old. And so we heard about this and we were like, let’s go to Canada.

We ran to Canada, which it’s far, um, it’s about a 17 hour drive. And so it actually went really well. This is our first road trip. Uh, I have six living kids, but right now four are at home. And so this was our first trip in the van. We’re like, We could have a little bit of space and it was really, really nice.

And we had headphones for my little boys who are my rainbow babies. Um, they could watch their little movie. We could listen to music. It was awesome. So that’s a little life update. , and I’ve got some amazing things cooking for this summer. I’ll give you a little sneak peek. just for my podcast listeners, but I’m going to be giving away some free stuff this summer and it is going to be so fun.

I’m getting everything ready. I just bought so many stamps and I’m prepping. So I will tell you more about that. Um, stay tuned and definitely follow me on Instagram cause I will be talking about it over there or join my email list. You can go to smoothstonescoaching. com. Get on the email list. I always tell my peeps over there

everything first. Now, let’s dive into today’s topic. I am actually doing this I just started some rice in my rice cooker and I was like “Amy put your money where your mouth is!” This topic I just came up with and sometimes I spend a lot of time prepping and other times I just go And this is one of those times where we are just going to go

And this is today’s topic. You’ve probably already seen it because you saw the title, but it is making quick decisions. And the reason I want to talk about this is because I see so many people get paralyzed making decisions. And especially after baby loss, everything seems so much more heightened and so much more scary and so much more complicated.

And like, Just every day little decisions become these huge mountains that we cannot get past. Now, number one, I want you to give yourself tons of compassion if you’re feeling stuck in a certain area. So it’s really normal. And also this is a practice that you can get better at if you practice it, but you’ve got to do it.

And so you’ve got to give yourself opportunities to make decisions. Follow through and see what happens so you can show your brain that actually making quick decisions is one of the best gifts you can give yourself. Now, I have a couple of examples that come up for me. Now, I, my brain really likes to be efficient and it likes to minimize.

Effort, not that I’m lazy, but like if there’s something coming up that I feel like or my brain thinks it’s going to be a lot of emotional effort or there’s going to be a lot of things I have to deal with, um, it tries to shut it down and slow me down. So, uh, an example that might not resonate for you, but it really resonates for me and maybe Some of you will totally relate is like going swimming.

It’s summer here. We are hitting a hundred degrees in June where I live. And oh my goodness, going swimming. If I think about going swimming, if my kids are like, we want to go swimming. I think, Oh, we have to go to the pool. We have to get all our stuff. We have to bring the towels. We’re going to have to like, who’s going to drown.

Am I going to be able to relax? Or am I going to have to be, you know, um, Really intensely watching my kids who are pretty good swimmers, but not quite. They still need a lot of supervision. Um, how crowded is it going to be? How noisy is it going to be? Just all of the things. And especially what gets me is the aftercare.

It’s like when we have to leave, they’re not going to want to leave. When we get home, we have to have showers. And then we’ve got wet towels from the pool and wet towels from the shower and like all this laundry. So this is my brain. My brain’s like, Oh my goodness. Going swimming. Should we do it? And sometimes it feels really overwhelming, but if my friend texted me right now and was like, Amy, we’re going to the pool, come with us.

I would totally jump on that. And in two seconds, I would round up all our stuff, get the kids changed, you know, go to the bathroom, whatever we needed to do and just go. So why is it so much easier if we have something like an invitation? Now, some people might not react that way, but for most of us, it’s like, if someone else kind of made the decision, like we’re going swimming and we’re going in five minutes, we just go, we just say yes.

And it’s easy. But when it’s our own brain, we’re, we’re really getting stuck in this loop of not deciding. Um, another one is I just. Put up some wallpaper in my mudroom and wallpaper is very controversial people have really strong opinions on it It is peel and stick so I can Take it down if I you know if I need to in the future or if anyone in the future needs to do it but

I was Thinking about this mudroom and I have practiced because if you’ve been here a while, I love diy projects I love painting my house. I love just like accent walls and Anything I can do to just kind of design my house. And so, like I said, I’ve got this blank slate and I thought it’s a mudroom.

It’s small But we got these really cool lockers from this school They’re tearing down and I was like so excited and I just thought let’s do something fun Let’s do something exciting and I got this wallpaper and I was looking for a totally different pattern And I wasn’t exactly finding what I wanted and of course it just based on what I was searching it suggested this other one for me and I was like Oh my goodness, it’s adorable.

And so I just bought it. Like I just measured the room, made sure I had the right amount and clicked buy, and that’s kind of scary. Of course. I’m like. Did I get the right one? Should I have chain, you know, was that the right decision? Uh, it’s amazing. And yesterday I put it all up and it went up really nicely.

There were a couple of hiccups, but overall it went up really, really nicely. And I’m super excited. And everyone in my family is like, “what are you doing? I’m not really sure about this thing,” but I keep promising them once the lockers are in, once I finished the bottom, I’m going to paint it and do some wainscoting.

It’s going to be amazing. But for some people picking a wallpaper could take ages, right? It could, you could be totally paralyzed. So I want you to think about what are, where are you getting stuck in making decisions? Where are you pushing things back and then apply these tips to it. So why don’t we make quick decisions?

Well, there are a couple of beliefs that most of us, if you are in the society that I am in kind of a Western society, uh, here’s the things that keep us stuck. We believe that good decisions take time, right? You should really think about this. A good person thinks deeply about decisions. So I want you to check in with yourself.

Do you have that belief? Is it underneath? Did someone ever tell you that? Did someone teach you that? Have you picked that up somewhere? Have you said it? Maybe you’ve said it to your own family members or friends or whatever. But we believe to make a good decision, you have to take time, right?

You have to think about it. This takes time. That is a totally made up belief, and that’s not necessarily true. Um, another one is we believe other people know more than we do, right? So we live in the information age. We want to research the heck out of everything. That’s not true.

We believe people know more than us. There are experts out there. There are people on Tik TOK who aren’t experts, but for some reason we respect them, right? We believe them before we believe ourselves and we can get really stuck thinking we don’t know enough. We haven’t taken enough time

and then we also believe that there is a wrong decision, and if we make that wrong decision, that’s going to feel terrible. That’s going to have all these cascading consequences, and we don’t want that. We don’t want to feel terrible. We don’t want to make a wrong decision. And so, um, Making the decision feels really, really important.

I was thinking about this teacher I had in university. So I went to Brigham Young university. There was a teacher there who taught, uh, I think it was my accounting class. I was taking a business minor and. I took this accounting class and he was like this very wealthy man who was just teaching for fun, um, as I recall, but anyways, he talked about stocks and he talked about how when you are investing, you could research and research and read and listen to people and have a financial advisor and all these things, or you could just take a newspaper back in the day when they had like, You know, probably the wall street journal with all the stocks listed.

You just take a newspaper. You could throw a dart at a stock and you could just invest in that. And you’d have just as good of a chance of coming out on top by throwing a dart at the newspaper. And of course, You know, that is mind blowing to so many people. And we really respected this man. He, he definitely walked the walk as far as finances, but that’s what he said.

He’s like, you could try all these things or you could just throw a dart and you could win either way, or you could lose either way. And that’s just how life is. But a lot of us get stuck feeling like. Again, we have to take our time, we have to do our research, and if we mess up, we’re going to lose for sure.

So I want you to throw those out the window. Just test it. Just for maybe, let’s say for this week, for this month, for this summer, throw those beliefs out the window because they just keep you stuck and they keep you disempowered. It’s not powerful to think that other people know more than you. It’s not powerful to think that you have to take all this time.

And it’s not powerful to think that you can mess up your life. You can’t even if you fail, you were supposed to fail. Failure is awesome. Do it more. We should do it more. We should mess up more. Life is better that way. I promise you,

you can get better at making decisions. If you number one, let go of these beliefs and number two, keep practicing. So here’s the way that’s going to help you make quick decisions. Number one action brings clarity. Take action. This surprise that I’m doing this summer, I thought of it yesterday. I mean, I’ve kind of been thinking about it in the back of my mind, but yesterday I was like, I am making this happen.

It’s happening. And as soon as I start going on it, I’m going to see whether or not this is going to work, whether it’s going to be problematic, like way harder than I think, way more expensive than I think, way more complicated than I think, or if it’s going to be amazing and create the results that I want.

So you got to take action. A lot of us get stuck in that planning, that researching phase. Just do it. Do the thing. Number two is you know enough now, period. I want you to borrow this thought anytime you’re wondering if you need to take a course, read more, Google more, like ask more people’s opinions. No, you know enough now.

You can make your decision now, today, in this moment. And number three, this is a gift that we’ll keep on giving because it saves so much energy when you can make quick decisions. Thanks. If you have a business, if you have a charity, if you have a family, if you have a job, like making quick decisions, moving forward and letting it ride, it is amazing.

We have all been with a person who is so paralyzed. And then if they do make a decision, they second guess it forever. And if you have not been, Um, with a person like that, it might be you and that’s okay, but notice how much energy it takes to not make decisions. And then to second guess your decisions, it is such a gift and a blessing to your life and to everyone around you.

If you can make quick decisions, this is a quality I think will really benefit you in your life after loss. And you got to be compassionate. You got to understand you have been through a lot. You may have some trauma. You may have some other stuff going on that’s impacting your ability to make decisions.

But when we’re talking about day to day stuff or whatever it is, even if it’s like, should I have another baby? Should I, you know, what should I do medically? All kinds of things that we have to deal with. Listen, make quick decisions. It will change your life. I promise you that. So I want you, as we finish this out, Go make a decision, get yourself some practice.

It could even be just like, what do you want to go drink? Or what do you want to have for dinner? Or where do you want to go on vacation this summer? Anywhere you’ve been stuck, make a decision, communicate it and see what happens. Um, don’t be waiting for everyone else. Just do it. Go make some decisions, have fun with it.

You’re gonna be okay. Like everything is gonna turn out awesome. And if it’s not awesome, that’s gonna be awesome, too Because I promise you life is more fun when you’re doing rather than waiting All right. I’ll see you next time