CwL Ep 145 When it’s time for a change – Decision-Making (Part 3)

Hey, it’s Lisa Corduff. Welcome to the podcast where you can expect inspiring, raw, energising, and transformative conversations with people on the path of personal evolution. I’m here to really live my life, and if you are too, these conversations are just for you. I’m really glad you are here. Enjoy.

I can remember when we had two kids and I was in the shower one day and Nick actually came in and was like, what did you say? I couldn’t hear and I said, I wasn’t talking. And he said, yes, you were. And I realised out loud I, I’d said stuff out loud that I thought I was saying in my head, I don’t know if that happens to you. And I had actually been talking to our third child. I had said out loud, I know you are there. I know you’re coming. I had this sense that I absolutely, there was a third baby to come. And I was weirdly in conversation with that little soul, whatever you want to call it. And it was almost like I didn’t have to make a decision. There was just this thing that was going to happen. It was a given as compared to the years that Nick and I spent deliberating about when we were going to move back to Melbourne, where we would live if we moved back to Melbourne, what was the right time to go?

Whether we should at all. Our life is good here in Brisbane for context, we’re both Melbourne based. We left in at the end of, in 2008 and we lived in Sydney for five years. And then we lived in Brisbane for another five years. All the children were born interstate. And it was always this question of when we would go home and it was just a constant thing. I actually have a friend who we would’ve like just this running joke about where we wanted to live. Nothing was ever in set in concrete for either of us. And we would dream about year to living and we’d send each other things on real estate.com from random places because it felt like this never ending decision that was never actually made until Nick first entered rehab in Brisbane in 2017. And I knew I wasn’t going to be able to manage this situation on my own anymore.

And we needed our family. And within three and a half weeks we were back in Melbourne. And it’s this thing with decision making. You can be forced into a position where you have to make one. You can know that there’s a decision to be made and just basically put it off forever or you can know that you need to actively be in decision making mode around something and get to the other side of that. So that is where I’ve been for a little while with this decision to go away. So I knew it was time for a change in part one. I sort of gave you a lot of the reasons why I had reached that moment. I think the previous episodes where I talk about the making of harvest, you get deeper insight into also why this is just a period of time that is ripe for something different to happen.

And then in the previous episode, I talked about all of the stories, all of the reasons why this wasn’t going to be possible for someone like me. And I was coming up against all of these beliefs and stories and how I actively had to, through the process that I teach in the change method, make sure you are registered for our June class. It’s the last time I’m teaching it live. The link to that is in the bio. If you in the show notes, I mean, I needed to get to the point where I made a decision one way or the other. And it’s torturous that place before the decision is made because things can go either way and you are in this limbo state. So there’s a few things that helped me make the decision. And I talk about these in my programs quite a lot, literally putting all the tools to work to get to this point.

But I really did. While I have such an amazing support network and hardcore cheerleaders, I knew that I wanted someone to kind of validate that this was not a bad idea. Literally no one told me it was a bad idea. It did come up against a little bit of resistance from my parents. This is a hard thing for them to understand. And of course they worry, parents worry. But I actually knew that no matter what anybody else said, I mean, who is literally going to say Lisa, really terrible idea to go travelling with your children for all those months? I mean, some very honest friends reminding me that it’s not going to be a walk in the park. But absolutely, it was a good idea. But they didn’t need to convince me. I needed to convince me. And the only way that I could do that was to get really, really quiet with myself.

I have spent a lot of time in with myself, but even just taking all the fucking buzzwords and shit out of it, I just had to get really honest with myself. I just had to be quiet, be silent with the outside world, with all of the fears, with all of that stuff, and just see what it felt like to embody a yes decision. So I started to act and speak as though it was happening before it was happening. I just thought I would experiment to see what it felt like in my body, because I do think that our body knows and remember that my head’s all over the place with all sorts of other things. And this decision I knew was a body decision. It was not a head decision. And I kept coming up with, yes, we can be logical about this or we can just trust this is a hell yes for Lisa, for the being that is Lisa Corduff right now. This is yes. But then of course I can feel that and our minds are going to have our minds way. So I had to do things like I reminded myself that there’s no such thing as a right or wrong decision. There’s just a decision. And then as a beautiful friend reminded me, they become more right due to the actions on the other side.

How am I going to make this the right decision?

Yes, of course we get stuck in this. It’s right to go. It’s wrong to go. It’s right to stay. It’s wrong to stay. And that wasn’t it. As I said, I love my life. We have a beautiful rhythm and routine. Things feel manageable, but also things have felt just flatlined for me. They have, and I know it’s a hard thing to explain or justify to your parents, we’re going to be of course worried why this quite outside the box idea is the thing that I need right now. To do that, I had to be clear with myself. I had to be in silence. And I had to also know that, fuck this, this could be terrible. We could always come home, but I’m never going to know unless I go.

I decided to as I was embodying this. Yes, I’m just going to act as though it is. I’m just going to notice where there’s resistance against things, and I’m going to notice where there’s flow. And I cannot even tell you. It’s been like a magic fucking carpet ride. Things just dropping, falling into place. The most extraordinary synchronicities, you would think that it’s some kind of miracle, almost the way that things have fallen into place for us. It doesn’t mean that I, I’ve now got a month until we go and the rubber is hitting the road and probably could have done with making the decision.

But there were things that I needed to test out there. I mean, there were some non-negotiables. So I had a list of things that needed to be set before I could really fully go for this. And one of them was my son. Definitely, as we talked about it together, he didn’t want this to mean that he had to repeat year seven. So that was kind of a non-negotiable. If the school had been, I’m sorry, there’s no way that we can accommodate this and he’ll have to repeat, I probably wouldn’t have gone, or we would have just gone for a month or something, two weeks of school holidays and two weeks of the term that I was kind of peaceful about that. I definitely don’t want to put him in a position where he’s stressed about school and all of that sort of thing. Also, as I said, I have this extraordinary opportunity next year.

It is. I mean, I wish I could share it with you, but no can do just yet. If this trip was going to sabotage, then I also would have not done it for the length that we are doing it because it’s absolutely a priority for me for that project to get up and running. It’s like everything I’ve worked towards coming to fruition and the most exciting thing, can’t wait to tell you. But if this was going to get in the way, then absolutely it wouldn’t have been done like that. So there were a few other non-negotiables, sort of more personal. There was stuff that I needed to be sure about with my daughter’s health. We very, very carefully manage some things with her. So my most amazing team with her have reassured me. We have protocols, we know exactly what to do, we can zoom in with them at any time. I needed to know, they were actually the first people that I spoke to about this because without knowing that I could manage things with her, I wouldn’t have gone. So that was another one of the non-negotiables and all these things just so my things that I thought were would’ve been reasons why I couldn’t go, were just weren’t roadblocks at all. And there were a few others.

When I say it’s been quite extraordinary how things have fallen into place, I just had to keep on. I just kept on with the decision. It’s like, well, maybe the decision is actually already made. I just hadn’t properly called it yet. And I called it I had things that needed to be figured out before I could fully do that. I did it. I embodied the yes instead of staying stuck in procrastinating or if when I had to get into action to see what the result would be. And it was extraordinary. And this has actually seen me bump up against my edge of being a non-committal, unplanned, disorganised kind of Lisa. I am really having to write the to-do lists and make things happen. And remember in the last section, in the last podcast in part two, I talked about making decisions. Me not being able to make decisions is a story that I kept on telling myself the frigging rush of knowing that I can autonomously make big decisions like this and trust myself completely, that whatever’s going to happen now is the right thing to happen, has been a huge, huge thrill. I mean, I’m busting the story as I go and look, I mean, I feel freaking decision fatigued on the back of it, of every day that we are going to spend together.

But right now, I feel really pleased that something that I just started speaking to and kind of throwing out there, and it was in that tone of I just want to get the fuck out of here. I need to do something, needs to shift, can’t done all these small things. I’ve done all these little upgrades to my life. I I’ve done it to the point where I live a lovely life and I needed something more and it was going to take a big ass decision making moment. And I did it say the relief to be on the other side of the decision is palpable. It’s exciting. I made the decision to choose me and the kids and Yolo all the way to town. You only live once is yolo, just in case you’re not big on the acronyms. I mean, it’s what I’ve been saying to myself, what is right now doesn’t have to make logical sense, but you can make a decision.

So that was kind of my process. I thought I would share it with you because I know a lot of women do get stuck in that space of just not making a decision. And I do find before you speak it necessarily, you can embody a yes or a no and see how it feels in you. And then just test a little, push a few things out to the universe, just see, see what’s going to happen here. See whether there’s resistance, see whether there’s flow, see how it feels for your non-negotiables. And if you move through them, just keep going, keep going. So in the next episode, just because I’ve busted some of my stories and I have made a decision, doesn’t mean I’m not shit scared and a little bit daunted by all the things that have to happen before I go. But I’m going to share some of them with you so you can see that it’s not as though there’s not still stuff to work through. There’s stuff. Anyway, I’ll fill you in. Check out part four. I’ll see you in there.

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