How to Make Decisions From the Inside Out, Not the Outside In
Along with Self-Love 101, Self-Confidence 101, and Communication 101, Decision-Making 101 is one of those classes I wish we’d all had in school. After all, what could be more important than how you make decisions? Each decision leads to an experience and a series of experiences is what constitutes life.
It’s unfortunate that decision-making isn’t something we’re taught in school, but it’s also something that we can’t help but learn more about as we journey through life. And throughout my life, I’ve learned a good amount about what leads to good decisions — and what doesn’t. I can confidently say that making decisions from the “outside in” definitely comes with some drawbacks.
Are you curious about what I mean? If so, keep on reading!
The limitations of making decisions from the outside in
When I say ‘making decisions from the “outside in”’, what I’m referring to is focusing heavily on your worries, fears, and apprehensions alone throughout the course of making a decision… for example, worrying about what other people think about your decision, being afraid of what the future will hold if you do or don’t make the decision, or being afraid of confrontation and choosing to avoid it at all costs. Making decisions from the “outside in” might look like making a list of pros and cons, weighing the good against the bad, and asking your mind what it thinks are the justifications to make a certain decision over another one.
When we make decisions from the “outside in”— in other words, predominantly using our mind while nudging our heart to the side— we’re making safety our primary goal and priority. Our mind speaks the language of safety and our brain is hard-wired for it. It makes sense, then, that we would consider safety in making some of our most important decisions. The trouble comes when we focus only on safety and thereby make decisions from a place of fear. Wouldn’t you agree that fear isn’t necessarily the place from which our best and truest decisions are born?
I don't know about you but when I've made decisions from a place of fear in the past, things haven’t always turned out as well as I would have hoped. The last time I made a decision from a place of fear, for example, I was left with extreme disappointment and hurt. The experience was multifaceted and multiple people outside of just myself acted from a place of fear, but from my self-awareness I know that I did in fact act from a place of fear. I wanted to avoid looking incompetent or inferior and that led me to a decision-making process that, albeit protective and supportive of how I was feeling at the time, didn't lead to the best possible outcome.
So I ask you now, as I’ve asked myself many times before: What part of you is leading each of your decisions — fear, protection, pressure, avoidance, groundedness, self-trust, love, clarity, or something else entirely?
What part of you is leading your decision — fear, protection, pressure, avoidance, groundedness, self-trust, love, clarity, or something else entirely?
When I think about decision-making today, I acknowledge that the goal, really, is to make decisions from a place within us other than fear, lack, or avoidance... and not by shoving fear aside or ‘feeling the fear and doing it anyway’ as some motivational speakers or coaches might say. Effectively managing fear is a much different and gentler process than we are led to believe and I describe how to work with fear in this article. I encourage you to read it to learn how to navigate your fear in a way that works well over time and then to come back here to continue learning about a decision-making process that you’ll be thankful to have at your disposal over the course of your life.
Why inside out is the way
When fear, avoidance, people-pleasing, self-doubt, or external pressure are driving our decisions, we often end up making choices that don’t actually feel deeply aligned once the dust settles, and that often give us more fear, lack, worry, and doubt.
Our minds are incredibly important and protective. But when fear, overanalysis, external pressure, or self-protection completely dominate the decision-making process, we can lose touch with deeper forms of knowing inside ourselves too.
When we can instead let ourselves make a decision from the inside-out and let our heart run the show, we’ll:
No longer let fear dictate what happens. Yes, there is an appropriate time to listen to your fears when in a dangerous situation that requires you to stop engaging or leave it altogether, yet that time isn’t all of the time. Sometimes we need to try something new, do the more risky thing, take a new path, or choose differently than we have in the past in order to fill our life with the potential and possibility that we’re really looking for.
Develop a sense of inner trust—Making decisions from the inside out, which I’ll describe next in detail, lets you trust that know what the best decision is for you; as a result, you’ll trust yourself and be able to make choices more easily now and well into the future.
Know that you are choosing and living in the right way for you, not anyone else. Our fears often arise from belief systems that we were taught or somehow adopted while growing up and these belief systems don’t always align with our own values or perspectives of ourselves, others, or the world. Making decisions from the inside out guarantees that you’ll more consciously choose and live in the right way for you, and less so based on how other people or society says you should live.
Be more able to honor and take a stand for what you believe in. As you make decisions from the inside out rather than the outside in, you may begin noticing yourself letting go of patterns like chronic people-pleasing, over-explaining, self-abandonment, or over-compromising in situations that don’t feel aligned for you. Over time, you’ll notice that you focus far more on how you feel about yourself and your actions than on what other people think or feel about you.
Learn that you can handle the things you are afraid of. If you avoided a certain conversation because you were afraid of what someone would say, for example, turning inward and making decisions from the inside out might encourage you to lean in to the conversation. Over time, you may begin realizing that discomfort, disappointment, disagreement, uncertainty, or someone else’s reaction doesn’t necessarily destroy you the way your fear once predicted it would.
So, how do you do it?
Now for the good stuff...
How to make decisions from the inside out
I noted in the beginning of the article that making decisions from the “outside in” resembles focusing predominantly on your worries, fears, and apprehensions and weighing the good against the bad. Making decisions from the inside out, in contrast, means making decisions from a calm and balanced center within yourself. It means tuning into your heart and asking your heart what decision is really best for you to make. While fear-based impulses can feel immediate and loud, deeper forms of inner knowing are often quieter and require us to slow down enough to actually hear ourselves.
The 5 steps to making decisions from the inside-out:
1- Acknowledge your thoughts.
Mindfully acknowledge what your thoughts are regarding the decision that you need to make right now, whether they’re pretty singular or all over the place. Making decisions from a heart-centered place isn’t about kicking your mind to the curb; it’s about bringing your heart on board with your mind.
Making decisions from a heart-centered place isn’t about kicking your mind to the curb; it’s about bringing your heart on board with your mind.
2- Tune into your body and listen to your heart.
Our bodies often communicate through subtle sensations — opening, softening, grounding, contraction, tightening, heaviness, tension, or pulling away — and learning to pay attention to these responses can offer important information during the decision-making process. Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Listen to your heart?” Well, this is how you do it.
Have you ever heard the phrase, ‘Listen to your heart?” Well, this is how you do it.
Be sure to tune in to your own inner experience and develop trust in it over time because everyone’s inner world is a little bit different. The more you do it, i.e., the more you ask your heart for guidance and listen to its response in and around your body and via your senses, the more intuitive the language of your heart will become to you and the more receptive you’ll become to it.
3- Feel your way to a decision.
As you keep feeling your way into a decision through tuning in to your bodily sensations, zero in on a likely decision and ask yourself, “Does this decision feel aligned with the kind of life, relationships, and way of being I genuinely want to move toward?” This is a way to let your mind and heart collaborate a bit on the decision-making process.
4- Act.
This can sometimes be the most challenging part… acting on a heart-centered desire that you’ve felt into but that your mind maybe judges as incorrect, childish, or stupid. Begin with just a small step and let your trust in your inner self develop rather than jumping head-first into a decision and scaring the $h!t out of yourself in the process ;) Then take another step in your heart-centered direction. Go as slowly as you need. There’s absolutely no rush.
5- Practice and reflect.
Practice is how you build self-trust and self-confidence, and reflection is how you help your mind to make connections between the actions you took and the outcomes that followed (which is key to our learning about the difference that outside-in and inside-out decisions have on our life, in the first place!). As you keep practicing turning to your heart for direction on your decisions, reflect on how previous decisions have gone. Journal, draw, and/or talk about these heart-centered decisions, including decisions that may not have made immediate logical sense at first, but ultimately felt deeply aligned internally.
In short, making decisions from the inside out is all about tuning into your heart and noticing, by feeling, the messages that your heart shares through your body’s sensations and acting on them. You can’t analyze and logic your way to a heart-centered decision. Rather than judging or thinking your way to a decision, enlist a collaboration of your mind and heart and feel your way to a decision. According to the Institute of HeartMath, it’s when the mind and heart are cooperating together that “they increase outcomes that fit the need of the situation.” Which is what we all ultimately want, isn’t it?
How do you know when you’ve made a decision from the inside out vs. the outside in?
What if you’re not sure where your decisions came from? What if your decision-making process was all a jumble of a mess and you’re not sure whether it happened from the outside in or inside-out?
I mentioned earlier that your mind, if left to its own devices, is not unlikely to make decisions from a place of fear, lack, or concern. Well, your heart speaks the language of understanding and love, not the language of fear, worry, and regret. So rather than feeling afraid of having made the wrong decision or afraid of what’s to come, if you’ve made a decision from the inside-out, you’ll feel grounded in trust. Rather than feeling the often hectic, hurried, and rushed energy of fear, you’ll feel more balance and in flow.
Learning how to make decisions that feel genuinely aligned is often a gradual process of building self-trust, emotional awareness, nervous system safety, and connection to ourselves over time.
Much of the work inside my course Happy from the Inside Out® centers around this process of understanding our inner world more deeply and learning how to move through life with greater self-connection, discernment, and trust from the inside out.
And if this reflection touches something more personal in your own life, this is also deeply connected to the kind of work I support people with one-on-one.
Note: This article was originally written several years ago and has been lightly updated to reflect my current work and offerings.
