400: The Hidden Cost of Waiting (part 2)

Here is part 2 in the 3 part series entitled How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage. In part 2 Betsy delves into how waiting impacts one’s unconscious mind which can drain energy and erode self trust. Stay tuned until the end when Betsy offers an exercise to identify the effects of waiting. Transcript: Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big. Hello and welcome. Welcome to the show. So this week, if you listened to the last episode, we are doing a three part series. This one is lesson two. It’s the hidden cost of waiting. It’s the things that actually happen to your unconscious when you choose to delay. I hope this gives you some new thoughts, new ideas, and helps you along your journey. So without further ado, here’s the show. Hello everyone. Welcome back to episode two of How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage, even when the rest of the world feels uncertain. So last time we talked about why your brain keeps you frozen and indecision and how to start stabilizing yourself. And today we’re gonna be talking about something that most women don’t ever really see clearly, and I include myself in that. This is a hard thing to see. When you’re in the middle of it, and it is the cost of waiting. So today’s episode is called The Hidden Cost of Waiting, and Why Delaying Clarity hurts you way more than you think. I think this is, I think this is such an important one, especially as women because we handle so much stuff, right? We are the ones that are handling so many of the things in our families. And for our children, for our homes, just to keep our homes running. And we’re also working and making decisions at work and being counted on for things. And so all of this starts to build up. And when on the background, like we learned in the last episode, there’s this. This underlying current of I’m not making a decision. I’m allowing things to stay in a way that does not feel good to me. And I will go to the liberty of saying, and that’s what I deserve, right? Because if we thought we deserved more, that’s what we would get. And so I think there’s an illusion here of safety. When you say, I’m gonna decide about that later, or I’m gonna push that off till after the holidays, or I’m going to wait until somebody graduates from college or high school or dance, or whatever it is. It feels like you’re hitting pause, right? Like you’re giving yourself a break. But waiting isn’t a pause. It’s still playing in the background. It’s not like you shut this off or you stop thinking about it. You just have delayed a decision. And what that does, because it’s still playing in the background, is it begins to drain your energy even when you are going about your day. So now, if you could think about this, if you have a hundred percent when you wake up in the morning, your battery is on a hundred percent, which whose is? ’cause you’ve probably spent half the night tossing and turning thinking about this. In the back of your mind, so, but let’s just say you wake up at a hundred percent, but 20% of your brain is still thinking about the fact that you’re putting this off, or it won’t be that much longer. Or you might be calculating or thinking, or wondering or changing your mind, going back and forth. You’ve only got 80% to do everything else that you’re doing. And so this is what this looks like. It’s gonna show up like thinking about your marriage like on a loop, right? It’s gonna show up as feeling really distracted or disconnected from people that you actually really love and that you wish you were closer to. It’s gonna look like carrying tension right in your body. ’cause you’re avoiding decisions. So you might notice your shoulders are like up in your ears. You might notice that you’re breathing really shallow. You know you’re gonna start to notice that you’re waking up in the middle of the night. Maybe you’re tossing and turning, or you get this idea in your head and then you just can’t let it go. And it’s gonna manifest in ways that maybe you’ve got a lot of headaches or you’ve got belly aches. Or before you go to bed, you like grab the Zillow and you’re like, I’m just gonna look up just to see what it would cost. So like your brain needs that moment of relief, right? And so what ends up happening is a compound effect. It’s like adding. A stone into a backpack every single day, and at first you kind of don’t notice. You’re like, it’s okay. I mean, it’s fine. I know it’s on my mind. But after months or even years, you are completely bent under that weight and it starts to erode your self trust because every day that you don’t choose, you reinforce the idea that you can’t choose. And it robs you of a lot of joy you could be having in the present, right? Because you can’t fully live in today when your mind is tied up on what ifs. You can’t fully enjoy the time with your kids. ’cause in the back of your mind, you’re scanning for something that could be going wrong, that you’re gonna have to handle, or that you wanna see if you can have a preemptive strike against, right? Some way that you can start to control things so that things don’t go outta hand. And so. You are constantly churning on the sidelines thinking about this, and so you can’t be fully present. You can’t be fully enjoying things because you’re always in scan mode. Now, here’s the truth is that waiting is actually a decision. It’s not neutral. It’s a choice to stay stuck. Once you know you’re stuck, it’s no longer a habit. It’s a choice. And it costs you way more than making a move ever Could. Once you begin to make any kind of decisions about anything, the angst is really in the lead up, not in the actual doing, and I’m sure you find that over the course of your life. I even remember way back when I was in college, I’d have a paper to write. Writing the paper wasn’t as bad as the two weeks that I put it off and thought about it and let it stick in my craw if I had just done it and got it over with, things would’ve been a lot more simple. Right. So the decision is being made, the decision is waiting, and that is not a neutral thing that has a high cost to it. So what I want you to do is I want you to grab a piece of paper and I want you to draw across on the paper that makes four quadrants, and I want you to label them like North is Thoughts, south is feelings. East is actions and west is results. And in each quadrant I want you to write what waiting has created in your life. Okay? So the thoughts might be like, I don’t know what to do. The feelings might be anxious or frustrated. The actions might be procrastinating, or I have to have a glass of wine every night just to like deal with what’s going on. Or I’m venting to my friends all the time, whatever that action is. And then the results still stuck. Less energy, less joy. I feel drained, I feel nervous, I, whatever that is, what are the results? And I think that when you see it mapped out, you can’t keep telling yourself that waiting. Is harmless. There’s no way to look at that and walk through that and see that there’s no impact. I believe that when we can get really honest with ourselves, that is when we can start to create change, because we can’t, if we’re still living in denial, like I was saying, once something is seen, it’s no longer a habit. Now you’re choosing. It may be that even as I say this, you’re like, I’m not gonna do that little exercise because I already know. I already know I’m drinking a bottle of wine every night, or I’m. Just opting out or I know that I’ve shrunk. I know that I’m like getting smaller. I know that I’m overeating to compensate to make myself feel better, which that too makes a lot of sense once you understand your nervous system and what happens when you eat to calm your nervous system. There’s so many things here. So although we think I’m being safe, I’m I’m, I’m gonna wait until conditions are right. The conditions are already wrong. Well, you’re waiting because that choice isn’t a choice that’s actually healing or moving you forward. So I really want you to do this even if you’re like, I, I don’t need to do this. I already know. Do it on a couple different things, right? What is the thought that you have? And maybe there’s a thought that you have, you can look back on like last night, what was it like in the evening last night, and what were the thoughts I started to have? Or during the day, maybe you’re at work and a thought comes into your mind. Use that our unconscious minds present information to us so that it can be healed. And it presents it at the time that it believes you are ready to deal with it. That’s why we get so many thoughts when we’re driving in the car or we’re standing in the shower because we’re having a moment where our brain isn’t full of other stuff. And so the information that’s being served up to you, the ideas, the thoughts, the concerns, they are so important because they are things that your unconscious mind has sifted and sorted through and decided this was important and. She’s ready to deal with it. And if you push it away and say, I am not ready to deal with it, you’re telling your unconscious mind that it is wrong. You are not ready. And the more you tell yourself you’re not ready, the more and more deeper you get stuck. So. Do this today. ’cause in our next episode, we’ll, we are gonna cover the path out. So how to create inner stability and finally make really confident choices in a really uncertain world. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today. You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless. And your life. It’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.