A little more than a week ago I had the pleasure of hearing writer Glennon Doyle speak. For those of you new to her name, she is the founder of momastery.com, author of “Carry On, Warrior” and “Love Warrior.” She traffics in the same circles as Brené Brown, Jen Hatmaker, Elizabeth Gilbert and the like. That should already tell you that she’s one of our gurus.

I love her blog and her books so I felt confident that this afternoon Q&A with her would be good and she delivered.

While she may be a woman slight of stature, she is full of energy and had plenty of truth bombs to drop. And at other times, her notions about life were set gently at our feet if we so chose to receive them.

She’s powerful in her passion but soft in her approach because she speaks the truth with love and in love. It doesn’t get better than that.

There were so many great little nuggets that I took away from this experience.
But for now I want to share only one because it’s important and I don’t want it to get lost in the others.

It’s about women and decisions.

How do you make a decision? Glennon talked a lot about how we, as women, make decisions. While I am sure this isn’t true of every woman there was enough collective head-nodding and knowing laughs shared that it applies to more than a few.

She talked about how women look outside of ourselves often for guidance. We poll all our friends, colleagues, and mentors. And we decide based on the most popularly supported answer. But we are not necessarily making the choice that’s best for us or resonates most with our spirit.

Instead, she offered, we can get quiet. We get really quiet and sit with our hot pain for a minute and listen. We listen for the next right step, next action or non-action, and we follow that. And when we commit to that, the next step will appear before us but not a minute sooner. We are required to commit.

And then, she said, we don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone. We made our choice, on our own, without a consensus and it only has to make sense to the one who made the decision. In effect, she said somewhat tongue in cheek, we get to make decisions like a man: autonomously and without explanation.

What would happen if we made our own decisions? Not that we can’t talk and get help from our friends, that certainly wasn’t her point. But what if we really focused on what we wanted instead of what everyone else thought we should want, need or desire?

What if we followed our own guidance, made decisions and moved forward and stopped explaining; stopped qualifying; stopped trying to make every damn person feel good about our life? What would happen if your thoughts were enough?
Sunshine & Sarcasm,

Lowi & G