Episode 301: Indecisive No More: Conquering Decision Fatigue, and Miserable Maybes

Episode 301-Decision fatigue, messy middle, or miserable maybe .mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Episode 301-Decision fatigue, messy middle, or miserable maybe .mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Speaker1:
So what happens in between the first time you think about that to when you actually make the decision? Doesn't have to be a problem, but it can be a huge problem because this is where decision fatigue, the messy middle or the miserable maybe is all possible.

Speaker2:
Podcasting from a little cabin on a hill. This is the Stacy Westfall podcast. Stacy's goal is simple to teach you to understand why horses do what they do, as well as the action steps for creating clear, confident communication with your horses.

Speaker1:
Hi, I'm Stacy Westfall and I'm here to help you understand, enjoy and successfully train your own horses. I have to say, after last week's episode about change, many of you reached out to congratulate me on episode 300 and to share some of the change Challenges that you were going through. Some of the things that came up were the decisions to move. For some people, that was changing where they currently live or changing where they're currently keeping their horse. Other people said they were contemplating changing jobs. They were going through retirement or approaching retirement or on the other side of retirement, changing careers. And many of you were in a similar situation as to what I was, where you see the possibility in the future, maybe three years or five years from now, of possibly changing what you're doing with your horse, maybe disciplines or family changes that are coming and you can already see that possibility of selling horses, and that change is challenging. So after reading and hearing from so many of you, I thought I'd do a follow up episode, or at least an episode that complements last week's topic. This week, I want to discuss decision fatigue and the difference between the messy middle or a miserable maybe. Let's go with decision fatigue first. As I was getting ready for this episode, I did a Google search and I found a fascinating number. I found an article that said, by the time the average person goes to bed, they've made over 35,000 decisions and each of those decisions took time and energy.

Speaker1:
Things like, what do I eat? What do I wear? What do I do with my day? What do I do on my day off? These are all examples of the decisions that we make repeatedly. And decision fatigue is exactly what it sounds like. It is the idea that we can become fatigued from making so many decisions. And it's one of the reasons why so many people talk about forming habits. Because if you form a particular habit, like a morning routine, and then you get into the habit of following that routine, it reduces the decisions that you need to make because they're decisions that you've made ahead of time and then you've practiced. But one of the ways I want to look at it during this episode is the idea that decision fatigue is very similar to physical fatigue. You could be making decisions, and as you make decisions, you could be building a mental muscle or just like a physical muscle, you could be overworking a muscle. So to me, when I think about decision fatigue, I actually think decisions in themselves are not a problem. Decisions can be used to build your muscle, just like weights can be used to build your physical muscle. And yet, in a similar way, just like weights can be used to build, they can also be overused, and they can create a fatigue that then creates damage or injury.

Speaker1:
And one thing that I noticed is that as soon as I think about decision fatigue in a similar way to muscle fatigue, it automatically brings up the idea that I probably need to have some downtime between the exercise of decision making. In last week's episode, I talked about the challenge of change and some of the big decisions I've made recently, and one that I mentioned was selling horses. And when I was going through the process of originally having the idea of potentially selling a horse all the way to the decision of selling the horse, that in between is the part I want to talk about right now, the in-between of when that idea first comes to mind and begins to float around as a possibility, all the way to when that decision is made is ripe for decision fatigue. So let me just put a number on this. So let's say that you start contemplating selling a horse, and you actually don't make the decision to sell the horse for six months. So what happens in between the first time you think about that to when you actually make the decision doesn't have to be a problem, but it can be a huge problem because this is where decision fatigue, the messy middle or the miserable maybe is all possible. The first thing to know is that when the idea of potentially selling one of my horses came into my mind, it wasn't instantly a problem.

Speaker1:
That idea being in my mind wasn't a problem. But there did come a point where I noticed I was repeatedly thinking about it over and over and over again. That repeated thinking about it over and over again was a sign of it growing in my mind. And it was also interesting to see that sometimes I was thinking about it positively, and sometimes, and very often I was thinking about it negatively, all the problems that could come with it. As soon as I noticed that it was becoming this repeated thing that was coming up over and over again in my days, that's when I started to notice that the potential for decision fatigue was happening. I've done this work before on other things, so it wasn't my first go around with the idea of decision fatigue, so I was actually able to catch it on the earlier side and put it into a format I've used before. If you don't catch it that early and the first sign that you are in the middle of something like this is that you just notice you are exhausted and that your brain will not put down this idea that it just keeps mulling over and over and over again. That's a thing. You May 1st find decision fatigue because you are exhausted by it. The good news is it's still the same process that I use no matter where I catch it.

Speaker1:
I've just gotten better and better at catching it and dealing with it proactively much earlier. So what I do, as soon as I notice that a decision is beginning to pop up over and over again, and has that potential for wearing me down, is I actually start to put boundaries around it. So I actually set a time period in my day when I'm going to think about the decision or think about the challenges of making this choice, I'm going to set a time around it. And what this does is it actually teaches me how to pick up that idea and how to put it down. It teaches me and allows me to practice decision making without actually making the decision of selling the horse. So let me explain it like this. The decision of when to think about the Decision becomes the thing that I am practicing. So, for example, let's just say that your decision making time, or the time that you're going to allow yourself to think about this decision that's got the potential to wear you out, you could do that in many different ways. Here's some ideas. You could do it during your daily commute to work. You could say, that's the only time I'm going to allow myself to think about it is when I'm driving to work and driving home from work.

Speaker1:
Or maybe you're going to do it while you're out cleaning stalls, or maybe you're going to set a specific time and you're going to journal while you do it. If you do, that morning tends to be better because you're a little more mentally fresh. But the big thing here is that you literally pick a time to think about it. By the way, it's nowhere near as fun to think about it during a set time like 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. or whatever that is for you, it's nowhere near as alluring at 6 a.m. to think about as it is when it just randomly pops its head up and down. But what starts to happen is that you actually get to build the decision muscle by the decision of when you will allow yourself to think about it. So the boundaries of the five minutes that you're going to spend, or the drive time, or the stall cleaning time or whatever it is, that decision and honoring that decision of that's the only time you're allowed to think about it and mull it over, is the way that I can feel my mental muscle being strengthened. But I don't go into fatigue because I don't allow myself to be mulling it over every waking minute and waking myself up in the middle of the night with it. What I've noticed over the years of using this practice is that in the beginning and with certain subjects, sometimes I have to really limit the amount of time that I allow myself to unpack that subject and really look at it, that can be as short as five minutes.

Speaker1:
Literally setting a timer on my phone for five, ten, or 15 minutes. And just considering. Let's stick with the idea of selling a horse, just considering the idea or the pros and cons of selling one of my horses. And that might be a shorter amount of time in the beginning, and then it can get longer. That was one thing that I noticed is that it was actually hard for me to do for a long periods of time, so I did it in set chunks, and your brain will not want to do it at 6 or 7 a.m. in the morning. It will not want to do it for five minutes. And the actual work is picking the time period and the allowed amount of time, and then putting it down for the rest of the time. And that literally is the work at the beginning. Now, before I go on, let's talk about what to do when that doesn't work. Meaning you're going to say, okay, I'm allowed to think about selling my horse at 8 a.m. to 8:15 a.m., so I've picked a 15 minute time window, and that's what I'm going to sit down. And you actually set a timer and you actually sit down and you actually do it, and you have the experience of doing that, and then you get to 815 and you decide not to.

Speaker1:
I guarantee you by 820 you're going to have thought of it three more times. So the secret there is that you can't actually stop yourself from having the thought pop into your head, but you can choose what to do with it. And I literally say thank you. We'll consider that again at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning. The other thing I will allow myself to do in that moment is I'll also allow myself to write down a note. Let's say that at 10:00, my brain pops up, an idea that I've actually never considered before. It's a different option, and as soon as it pops up, I recognize. Wow, I've never thought of that before. And then I also recognize. Wait a minute, it's not 8:00 In that moment, I allow myself to write it down in a note on my phone and then put it away until 8:00 the next morning. And so that's how I end up putting boundaries around my thinking. So my decision making doesn't lead to decision fatigue. Instead, I actually practice the decision of honoring that time. And I get to practice that every single day. And that becomes the muscle that actually makes whatever that decision that you're contemplating, that that decision boundary and time and the practice of doing that begins to raise the quality of my decision making overall, because I learned that I'm going to honor my decisions now before I move on to messy, middle or miserable.

Speaker1:
Maybe I actually want to go to the next level that I notice. So at first it's just wrangling myself Off into a set time period, and that time period could be as short as whatever you want it to be. But let's just say five minutes. Or it could be as long as 45 minutes or an hour. You'll have to play around with that. But I would suggest that shorter amount of time where you can stay really dedicated to it and then you can put it down because again, think of this like working out a physical muscle. So you're exercising your legs or your arms. It's wise to build up to that. And this decision making process is very similar to exercising a muscle. And there is something to dedicating a set time and a limited amount of time that actually starts to increase your quality of decision making in that time. Because again, if you're anything like me, you're going to get to that set time 8 a.m. and your brain's going to be like, oh, we should totally be considering something completely unrelated to this at that time. So it's actually wrangling your own brain into that. That becomes the true work that then leads to higher quality decision making with less fatigue.

Speaker1:
The first level of doing this work is simply putting the boundaries around the time the next level is actually choosing the angle I'm willing to contemplate during that set time. So instead of, let's say, spending 15 minutes with my brain jumping back and forth between I definitely should sell this horse and I definitely shouldn't sell this horse, here's everything that could go wrong, and I definitely should, or I maybe should or I maybe shouldn't. Instead of allowing myself to jump back and forth between that after I've been doing this process for a little while with a bigger decision, like selling horses, I actually begin to choose the way I'm going to look at it during that set time period. So, for example, I might say this week, I'm only allowing myself to look at the pros of selling my horse. Next week I'm only going to look at the cons of selling my horse, and if this is new to you, you might start out with today I'm going to look only at the pros. Tomorrow I'm going to look only at the cons and then back and forth like that. But again, just like putting boundaries around the time frame and amount of time that you're allowed to exercise this decision making process, there's also benefit to going to the next level and controlling your mind inside of that little boxed in amount of time and saying, I'm only allowed to look at it from this one angle because again, what I notice is that my brain, on whatever day that I want to think about the pros of selling a horse, my brain is going to only want to come up with the cons.

Speaker1:
And because that happens, I get better at looking around in my brain and finding the pros when it only wants to find cons. So again, can you see how the decision quality begins to go up and up and up because of putting these boundaries around it. And I'm less fatigued by it because once I put it down, I spend the majority of my time saying noted. We'll talk about that at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, over and over again to myself. And that quiets my brain and my body down. Now I want to move on to the idea of messy middle or miserable maybe. And for me, in the decision making realm, the difference between the messy middle or the miserable maybe is actually. Well, first of all, listen to the names. Neither one of them sounds amazing. So I think this is why sometimes big decisions feel challenging is because who wants to be in the messy middle or the miserable? Maybe. So what happens is people try to make quick snap decisions, but then they start to realize that quick snap decisions might not be the best way to go, but they also don't want to be in the miserable maybe or the messy middle, so it just becomes a not so fun process.

Speaker1:
Number one, think about the boundaries. But now let's go to what's the difference between the messy middle or the miserable maybe? Well, in the beginning there might not be much of a difference, but I promise you there can be. So for me, the messy middle represents whether I'm talking about training a horse or making decisions. It represents the fact that it's going to be a process to get somewhere. There's work to be done. If I start working out my body and I can't do a single push up, and I want to be able to get to the point where I do a certain number of push ups, it's going to be messy in the middle. If I'm training my horse and I want to teach that horse to go from direct reining to neck reining, then there's going to be a messy middle because you're going through almost conflicting ideas. On one side of the spectrum, when you pull on the left rein,, it means go left because that's a direct rein, and not on the other side. You want to be able to neck rein,, and when you move your hand to the left, it engages the right rein, to tell the horse to go left. Can you hear the opposite? So it makes sense that there's going to be some questions. There's going to be some messy in the middle.

Speaker1:
So for me, the messy middle is the normal amount of work that needs to be done. Miserable maybe comes up more in decision making, but it actually comes up really often in horse training. Also, because it sounds more like this in horse training it goes well. The last time I went out and rode my horse, this fill in the blank problem came up. Maybe I should try this technique. Or you know, maybe it just won't happen again. I'll just, you know, yeah, it happened, but maybe it won't happen again. Or maybe I should send the horse out for professional training. Or maybe I should just sell this horse so the miserable maybe has for me more of this second guessing, spinning Non-decision making quality to it, where the messy middle is more acknowledging that I'm going to be going through a process where the horse doesn't know that the left rein can be a neck rein, or it can be a direct rein. So there's going to be some challenges in making that process or back to you. If you start putting boundaries around your thinking time, that's going to be a little messy, because your brain's going to want to be able to think about it at any time that it wants to. And so it's going to be messy to keep redirecting your brain back to 8 a.m. the next day, instead of just letting your brain run wild with the ideas and wear you out in the end, so miserable, maybe is more of the lack of decision making versus the process.

Speaker1:
So for me, when I was going through the decision making that took me months to get to for selling horses, I was going through the process for months, but the majority of the time was spent in what I would label the messy middle, not the miserable. Maybe I actually love to talk about the messy middle. So if you want to hear more about the messy middle, consider going back and listening to episode 193. The number one way to identify if you're skipping the messy middle or episode 263 the messy middle or normal process reducing frustration and increasing fun. And both of those will actually help you normalize a lot of the challenges that you go through when you're training your horse. So the messy middle to me is, is the normal process of learning or improving something, whether that's a mental change or a physical change. The miserable maybe for me anyway, is when I don't make small decisions. The miserable maybe isn't the decision of selling the horse made in a snap moment, because I actually don't want to make my decisions like that. The miserable maybe is not the six months of maybe I will sell to I will sell. That doesn't have to be miserable. You can actually just treat that six month period like the messy middle of making a decision.

Speaker1:
And that has a completely different feel than the miserable. Maybe to me, the miserable maybe involves not making small decisions. Not setting boundaries around your own thinking would be a great way to look at that. That's one of them. Also, noticing how often your brain draws you down the path of all the problems without spending equal amounts of time with why you're considering this in the first place. So I like to think of decision making as it's almost like when my brain starts thinking about something like selling a horse. It's like all these decisions are like a bunch of flies swarming around and landing on you and biting you and irritating you. And the difference between the miserable, maybe is you just keep letting that irritation of your own thinking keep happening to you. The biting, the landing, the irritating, and it's happening to you. Like all waking moments. And if it's really bad, it's it's waking you up in the middle of the night. And it feels like this physical irritation, like flies landing on you and biting you. But the difference is, you don't have to be miserable when you're in the messy middle. If you can accept that you're in control, even though it won't feel like it at first, because it will feel like those thoughts appear out of nowhere, and then you do have to choose how you're going to handle them.

Speaker1:
When you do recognize that you do have a choice in how you handle those, that's when you can begin redirecting your brain and In this process that I'm doing with myself in the thinking is so similar to what I do when I'm teaching horses who are afraid of objects like bags or tarps or swimming pools. When I'm training a horse to accept something that they are afraid of, it's almost like they are looking at that thing that they're afraid of as this irritation. And I in that example with the horse, I'm the external source that's setting up the situation. So I'm the one that's getting the horse out of the stall, bringing them out to the arena. I've got a bag, I've got a tarp, I've got a swimming pool, and I'm guiding the horse through a process that's a little bit irritating. That's a little bit challenging. That brings up a lot of different thoughts in the horse. And when I'm doing that with the horse, I'm the external source doing that and I'm the one guiding them through it. When I'm making decisions I'm the one that's setting boundaries around my thinking time and my process. So what that does is I am both the reactive horse who's over reacting to the tarp, and I'm the one guiding the process. Now notice how I just said that I'm the reactive horse who's over reacting to the tarp.

Speaker1:
But I promise you, your horse doesn't think it's an overreaction. When they're overreacting to an object like a tarp, it feels real to the horse that they really need to be afraid, and they really need to run away from the tarp. I'm labeling it an overreaction, because I know they're capable of getting to the point where they understand that that reaction is more than is what's needed. So I see their potential there. But I also recognize it's very real for that horse in that moment when I'm in this decision making process and I'm setting boundaries around my thinking time and my thinking process I recognize I'm the reactive one when I'm thinking about whatever that change is. In my example, selling the horse, I am the reactive one and I'm the one who's guiding the process. And the reason I bring that up to you is because I want to encourage you to look at the process of decision making and decision fatigue, and building that decision making muscle in a similar way that you would be thinking about it if you were introducing your horse to a scary object, meaning you're probably not going to do it every waking moment and irritate them nonstop. You're going to do a session of it, and then you're going to put them away, and then you're going to bring them back out. So remember, you want to be as kind to yourself as you would be to your horse.

Speaker1:
And since you would break that lesson down into smaller time periods and you would give them time off in between, out in the pasture, hanging out, and they're thinking about it. And you know this because they come out the next day and they show you what they've learned and they show you their new questions. Make sure you do that for yourself as well. Miserable. Maybe when it raises its head, I actually get to choose how I handle that. Usually it shows up as doubt and I can put boundaries around how and when I will allow myself to think about the subject, and I can practice making that decision to put the idea down until a set time tomorrow, and then pick it up at that set time tomorrow. And that decision making process, although it mostly sounds like a thinking brain process when I'm talking about it like I have been, I want you to remember this when you put the boundaries around decision making, and you have that set amount of thinking time like 8 a.m., just like your horse, when he goes back out to the pasture after you work with him, you will be processing on what I call the back burner When you train yourself to put it down, it will still be simmering and bubbling under there. And just like most horses, you will actually have different ideas when you come out the next day.

Speaker1:
You will begin to see that you have different ideas, because you're not exhausted by the process of constantly thinking about the decision that you're starting to control the way you think, and that this is changing the quality of your thinking during that set time. And all of this is possible because you actually put the idea down and let it process in the background. So again, I want to thank all of you who called in, who wrote in, who reached out and said that last week's episode really struck a chord with you. I hope this episode helps you, because I promise the same thing that happens when you're making big decisions is actually the same thing that's happening when you're making decisions about how you're going to handle any challenges that you have with your horse, whether that's something you're running into in the show arena or whether that is something that's happening, like trailer loading or teaching that horse to neck rein or safely trail riding. All of these challenges that you're facing do involve a lot of decisions, and the way that you make decisions and the way that you allow yourself to think and process and treat yourself in, that will also reflect in your decision making in the moment with your horse. That's what I have for you this week. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again in the next episode.

Speaker2:
If you enjoy listening to Stacy's podcast, please visit Stacy Westfall. Com for articles, videos and tips to help you and your horse succeed.

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