It all comes down to learning how to trust ourselves. For example, picking between two great job offers and not being able to choose which one to take. They’re both great! They’re not perfect, some of the benefits could be better, and there’s going to be some annoying parts of the job, but both opportunities are still great. And still, you can’t make a decision. 

If you know that something like picking between two great job offers paralyzes you, then we need to start strengthening your decision-making skills. Don’t worry! We’ll do this together. 

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about the power of making a decision. I’ve made so many career changes in the last five years alone. And even though most of these career decisions wouldn’t be the ones I stuck with, they would lead me to create the Courage Driven Latina program. And I never would have gotten there if I had never made the decision to pivot. Listen to this week’s episode to learn how you can start trusting yourself and believing in the power of making a decision. 

Follow Erika on:
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Website:
http://www.theerikacruz.com

How to work with Erika:

Join the waitlist for the Courage Driven Latina program here.

Join the waitlist for the Magnetic Mastermind here.

Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST.

Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello. Hello. Welcome back to Chingona Revolution podcast. This is your host, Erika Cruz, and if you hear background noise today, that is because I am filming outside. I am currently visiting my brother in Southern California and I am in his backyard because I was trying to record in my nephew’s room, but with all his toys around, I figured it would be a better environment to.

Film outside and it is beautiful weather today. So if you hear some birds or some cars, that is why, because I am filming outdoors. But I have a really good episode for you today. If [00:02:00] you’ve ever found yourself saying, damn, I just can’t make decisions. I’m so indecisive, I have a hard time making a decision and sticking with it.

Well then this episode is for you because we’re, today we are talking about the one thing that’s going to unlock the next chapter in your life, and that is the ability to make a decision.

Uh, okay. If you are watching the video version of this. Paloma is on the trip with us. My dog is on the trip and uh, I thought there was, um, a snake in the backyard and it was Paloma exploring.

So you may see some animals behind the scenes as well.

 I actually have an announcement to make before we get into today’s episode, and I’m really excited about it because I haven’t done this in years, but I am actually taking on. A couple of one-on-one clients, and when I say a couple, I mean only two. So I already, I decided I was gonna take a [00:03:00] total of four.

A few of the spots were already taken by existing clients, but if you are interested in working with me one-on-one, that means we get to meet weekly one-on-one for 50 minutes. You also get Voxer support, which is this app that you can voice note me from, or you can send a message from. 

we don’t even have a link for this yet, because this was something I just decided to do. And again, we’re only taking, or I’m only taking on a few clients. I only have space for two more. So if you are interested in working with me one-on-one, send me a direct message on Instagram. That’s at the Erika Cruz.

That’s Erika with a k. On Instagram and I will send you all of the details. We work together for four months. You get literally daily support from me. It’s like I get to be in your back pocket. So whether you’re looking for my support through business coaching or life coaching, or if you just want to build the skill of more courage.

Then this is your opportunity because I don’t [00:04:00] anticipate, I’ll do this for a long time, but I was really missing working with people one-on-one. So I’ve already, as I mentioned, put on a couple of clients and I am loving it. So I’ve decided to take on two more clients. If you are interested, send me. Dm.

Alright, let’s get back into this episode because I’m telling you all it is a really, really good one. So if you are feeling stuck, if you’re feeling like you’re in your head and you can’t really seem to move forward in your life or in your career or in your business, and maybe you’re like, oh man, I kind of wanna start a business, but I’m not sure which kind of business to start.

Or, I think I wanna ask for a raise, but I’m scared to ask because what if they don’t give it to me? And what if they then think I’m greedy and then fire me? Right? You know how our brain can work. Or if you are looking to, you wanna make a move somewhere, right? Like maybe you wanna move abroad or maybe you wanna move across the country, and the fact that you are not making a decision is just like really weighing heavy on you, then this episode is for you [00:05:00] because I want you to know that clarity does not come from thinking, it comes from deciding.

And this episode is for you. If you are the ambitious one in your friend group or in your family, and you know that you’re meant for more, but you really feel stuck between. Dreaming about what you wanna do and actually doing it, and that ability to make a decision is hindering you.

So there is a self-development, kind of like spiritual teacher, Bob Proctor. I absolutely love his stuff. You can find him on YouTube. But Bob Proctor said, once you make a decision, you will find all the people, the resources and the ideas that you need. Every time. So pretty much what he is saying is when you allow yourself to make a decision that you wanna do a certain thing, everything else lines up to help support you with that decision.

 I would have to agree with Bob Proctor because I’ve seen this happen in my life over and over. [00:06:00] Once I make a decision, everything else seems to line up. Just recently, I was having a conversation with my good friends who are also in the same space that I’m in. Um, being that they’re also running coaching businesses and they also create content, they also have podcasts.

And I said to them, you know, over the last couple of years I’ve really gone hard on the coaching business, and as much as I love the coaching business and I’m going to keep doing that, I’ve decided that this is the year that I’m going to start focusing on speaking engagements and creating more content, which then is probably going to lead to more brand deals.

We probably had this conversation not even a month ago. And it was like I opened the faucet for all of these opportunities to come. What did I do differently? Well, yeah, I was, I was showing up more, but it was all because I made that decision that it was what I wanted. And since I told them this, I have gotten inquiries for about [00:07:00] five different brand partnerships.

One of them, which is already secured, and I ended up negotiating to get. They were, they were offering me a certain amount. They ended up paying me almost three times what the original offer was. And then I, um, got literally three inquiries for speaking engagements. And one of them, which was the one I was the most excited about, is already locked in.

It is an in-person keynote speaking engagement that’s paying me more than I’ve ever gotten paid before, and they’re paying for all my travel, and it’s my ideal audience. It’s for Hispanic Heritage Month. So I’m not saying, oh yeah, you just make a decision and then like the next day, everything magically happens.

But once you make a decision, you start to show up differently. You start to talk to people differently. You start to see opportunities that you didn’t see before. And you can call this woowoo, but according to neuroscience and something called the RA system, the reticular [00:08:00] activation system in our brain that acts almost like an Instagram filter and it’s like, have you ever heard the term of, or the, the statement, whatever you focus on, grows.

That is what happens whenever you make a decision. When you make a decision. You then start to filter through everything to everything that you see in reality. You start filtering through it to see what’s gonna help you get to that goal of yours because you already made the decision that it’s what you want to do.

So I’m really getting ahead of myself here because I was so excited to talk about Bob Proctor and talk about how I truly believe that the universe helps you. When you make a decision, right? If we even think about manifestation principles, one of the first rules of manifestation is that you have to be clear about what it is that you want.

Okay? I keep getting ahead of myself here. Let’s talk about, I. Why people have a hard time making a decision, but not just people. Why do women and women of color, and if you identify as like [00:09:00] first gen or Latina, why is it that you might have a hard time making a decision? And the root reason the root cause of us being indecisive or having a hard time making a decision is because we don’t trust ourselves.

If every time you are looking to make a decision, you’re running to other people to get their opinion, that is a sign that you do not trust yourself. And I say this with a lot of love because there’s many times when I run off to grab people’s opinions as well. Right there, there’s nothing wrong with asking people.

When your immediate reaction, whenever you have to make a decision is outsourcing your decision to other people. That is when we get into a little bit of a danger zone, because then you’re making other people’s opinion the determinant of your life journey. Pretty much. And the reason that we can lack this self trust is [00:10:00] because.

We’ve been conditioned to think like, what will people think of me if I mess up? What if I make the wrong decision? Oh, I’m not supposed to be bold. Um, you know, women a few hundred years ago literally couldn’t get their own bank account on their own. They couldn’t buy a home. Like it hasn’t been that long since women’s rights were somewhat equal.

Right. To men’s now with, you know, don’t even get me started on the women’s rights at this moment. ’cause we’ve definitely taken steps back. But it makes so much sense that we wouldn’t trust ourselves if we’ve been conditioned to not trust ourselves, but just because we’ve been conditioned to not trust ourselves, we can also learn to trust our selves.

And the best way to learn to trust yourself, honestly, we could do a whole separate podcast episode on Building Self-Trust. And if you would like that, let me know. Let me know if you would like that episode because we can definitely put that together. But the way that you begin to trust yourself is by [00:11:00] making decisions and seeing that everything was okay.

And the definition in my, in my mind of self-trust is having your own back regardless. Of the outcome, even if you did make the quote unquote wrong decision, there’s never really wrong decisions. There’s only more decisions to be made, right? But the thing about being indecisive, like, let me tell you why being indecisive is actually worse than making the wrong decision.

Being indecisive is like standing at the base of two trails and you’re trying to pick if you wanna go left or if you wanna go right. And because you don’t wanna make the wrong decision, you don’t make a decision, so you don’t move forward. You literally stay where you are. And that’s what happens to us.

Whenever we don’t make a decision, we stay where we are. If you were to make a left and go down that path and then decide, you know what? This isn’t the trail I wanna be on, you can just cross over to another trail. [00:12:00] You typically don’t have to go back. To the starting point. And that’s what decisions are like in real life.

You think that you don’t wanna make the wrong decision, right? And you’re not trusting yourself and you’re like, well, I don’t wanna make a mistake. And it makes so much sense that you may not wanna make a mistake and you’re like, okay, wait, let me just like pause. But if I think it’s Amazon, um, Jeff Bezos says, like he said, this.

Years ago, this isn’t recent, but he said at, at Amazon, we make decisions when we have 60% of the information because by the, if we wait until we have a hundred percent information, it’s too late. And that’s the same with your life. You just have to make decisions without. Knowing everything, because if you don’t make a decision, you’re just delaying and delaying your path.

But you know, using this trail example, chances are one trail’s gonna lead you to another trail. And sometimes, sometimes there’s even a third trail that couldn’t have been accessed from the base [00:13:00] of the trails, but one of those trails was going to lead you to another trail. Do we follow, do we follow here?

Right? Sometimes you have to make the quote unquote wrong decision so it can lead you to the right decision. Perfect example is my journey of, um, starting off with creating food content. I was a healthy food blogger that I would bake mostly.

Then from there, that’s what really got me comfortable with creating content. And then I was like, you know what? Now that I’m doing like healthy food, I really wanna get into physical wellness. Became a yoga teacher. Yoga teacher training led me to mindfulness, and I always loved self-development, but having that lens of mindfulness completely transformed the way that I looked at self-help.

And that’s what led me to start doing these free workshops because of the pandemic. And that’s when people started asking me if I offer coaching. If it wasn’t for me taking those initial steps, I would’ve never found coaching. I didn’t even know that coaching was a thing [00:14:00] until people were asking me about it.

So that’s a perfect example of me making decisions that ended up not fully. Manifesting, but those decisions led me to another one. So if you’re sitting here fearing, oh man, I’m not, I might make the wrong decision. How can you go into that with some excitement, like who knows what this is actually going to lead me to?

Or, I have so many friends that ended up moving to a different city or a different country for their partner, and the relationship didn’t work out, but then. Their business started booming there, or they met the person they were supposed to be with there, right? So it was like that person just became, um, almost like they just played a role in their lives to help them get there.

And that’s what happens when you allow yourself to make decisions. You really allow yourself to get into momentum. So. Just to quickly recap everything that we’ve talked about, um, there’s so much power in making a decision because if you [00:15:00] don’t make a decision, you stay stuck and you stay stagnant. Even if you made the wrong decision, you’re literally going into momentum and you’re learning so much.

The reason that it’s really hard for us, especially as women to make decisions, is because we’ve been conditioned to not trust ourselves. But self-trust is having the ability to have your own back, regardless of the outcome, regardless of what happens. Right. And we also talked about shifting the way we thought about making the wrong decision and how that’s actually just momentum.

Another big thing that stops people from making a decision is because they feel that they need to know how. Like let’s say for example, oh, I wanna start a business. Okay, well how am I going to do it? And the how gets people stuck when you just really need to know what and why. What do you wanna do and why do you want to do it?

 You don’t need to know how, and you don’t need to know every step of the way. It’s actually impossible for you to know every step of the way. Perfect [00:16:00] example is what I just shared with my personal story. There was no way I could have known that I was going to end up coaching.

I didn’t know that I had to just make the decision that I no longer wanted to be in tech and that I was going to start working towards something else. And that’s something else. I, I actually will never forget the day that I made that decision, and I was already kind of working at it behind the scenes, but it was a month into the pandemic when everything was so uncertain.

And I remember I had this real heart to heart conversation with myself regarding if I was fulfilled in life, if I was happy with where my life was. And I, you know, I’ve said this many times on the podcast before, but healthy people were passing away and. I mean, there’s nothing more motivating than, or there’s nothing more to light, you know, fire under your butt to see that life isn’t guaranteed.

Right? Life is not promised. [00:17:00] Tomorrow is not promised. And. sometimes we live life, like it’s our practice life. Like we have another one. And yeah, we may live multiple lifetimes if that’s something that, that you believe in. But for this life, like this is it. And a lot of times we’re waiting for something, but I remember during the pandemic, I made that decision.

I was like, you know what? I’m gonna make this lifetime. Worth something. And not to say that my life wasn’t worth anything beforehand. Of course it was, but it was really this moment where I, I, I will never forget, I was in my apartment in Sunnyvale, California by myself. I lived in a studio, an overpriced studio, because I worked in the tech industry.

And I said, I made the decision that during this uncertain time, I am going to work. On whatever is next. I don’t know exactly how it’s going to happen, but I know I wanna start a business that gives back to my community. And I also know that now is the perfect time to [00:18:00] do this because the obstacle is the way during, um, recession.

That’s when so many different opportunities come about during these big changes. That’s when a lot of new businesses are born and. Did I know anything about starting a business? Of course not. I knew nothing about starting a business, but when I made that decision, the right people showed up, the right opportunity showed up.

But again, it’s not just because I was like, let me close my eyes and like, you know, I. Manifest everything that was part of it. But in closing my eyes and manifesting things, it inspired me to take certain actions. It inspired me to reach out to people. It inspired me to create the content that I wanted to create.

It inspired me to create these free workshops that ended up getting all these people in, in my community and in my world. So again, you don’t need to know exactly how. All you need to know is what it is that you wanna do and why you want to do it. So let’s say you wanna make a career pivot. You literally have to [00:19:00] decide that you wanna make a career pivot.

You don’t have to know where you’re going to go or how much you’re gonna get paid or how it’s going to happen. You literally have to decide, and you have to make that decision in your body and in your mind intellectually and in your physical body as well. And I totally agree with what Bob Proctor says where.

The right people are going to show up because I’ve seen this happen in my life over and over. But if you are in this place where you’re like, oh, but maybe I should just stay at this job and maybe I wanna go to a different industry, but maybe I wanna start a business, I don’t know, I’m just gonna stay where I’m at.

That’s the opposite of making a decision. You have to help the universe help you. And again, I was, I kind of alluded to this a little bit where. A big part of manifestation is being really clear on what you want and remember, clarity doesn’t mean how. Clarity means knowing what you want, why you want it, and how you’re gonna [00:20:00] feel when you have it.

Perfect example. Let’s say that you want the dream partner. Maybe you’re like, I’m gonna make a decision that I’m gonna meet the person that I’m supposed to be with. Um, and then what, what do you want? You want the person. Why do you want it? Well, because I want companionship. I want somebody to go on trips with.

How are you gonna feel? Well, I’m gonna feel abundant. I’m gonna feel love. And how can you start to feel those feelings now? But notice I didn’t say I. I need him to be six feet hair this color. Um, do this, do that. No, you don’t need to know the hows or the specifics. Let the universe surprise you, but make a decision.

Because if you’re sitting here like, oh, well maybe I’ll just stay single forever. Maybe I’ll just adopt on my own. Maybe I’ll know, maybe a decision on what it is that you want, and allow the universe to help you out. If you know you wanna start a business, even if you don’t know what kind of business, make a decision that you want a business.

What business do you want? Like what is it that you want? You want a business, even if you don’t know [00:21:00] the specifics, even if you don’t know if it’s gonna be like a coaching business or a jewelry business. Make a decision that you want a business. So that’s the what and why do you want it, and how are you gonna feel when you have it?

Those are the three things I want you to ask yourself. What do you want? Why do you want it? And how are you gonna feel when you have it? And for that third one, how can you find that feeling right now? You don’t have to wait until the experience to feel the feeling. You can feel the feeling right now, and according to law of Attraction, that’s the quickest way of bringing that experience to you.

That’s the fastest way of calling in opportunities. 

 let’s say that you really want to level up your career, make the decision that you’re gonna level up the career and then watch things come to you. Whether it’s, oh, hey, here’s this certification you can do that will allow you to, to raise your salary or will allow you to go apply for this other job.

Or, Hey, you know, this new company is actually hiring. Watch those [00:22:00] opportunities come your way. Alright, so I wanna know. What is it that you are deciding today? Send me a DM on Instagram at the Erika Cruz and say, I’m deciding to blank because I wanna celebrate you. I wanna witness what it is that you are deciding on, and if you are still struggling with making a decision, send it to me as well.

Send me the dm.

If there’s one thing I can leave you with that I’ve learned after coaching over 250 women and you know, courage driven Latina is all about helping you make a decision on what it is that you’re going to work on. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that the decision comes first. The decision comes first, and then the clarity comes after.

It’s literally in our courage cycle. If you’re inside the program, I’m referring to the courage cycle. I want you to know that your magic is waiting. You just have to choose, and there’s no such thing as making the wrong decision. I hope this podcast episode [00:23:00] resonated with you. I’m gonna go hang out with my family now.

Have a great rest of your day, and I will see you next week.