Being Me in Decision Making: What Happens When Choice Comes from You?

Decision making can sound like such a normal, everyday thing.

We make decisions all the time. What to eat. What to say yes to. What to say no to. Whether to stay, go, speak, wait, begin, end, change something, keep something as it is.

And yet, when we really pause and feel what happens in the body around the word “decision”, it can be very interesting. For many of us, there is a tightening. A kind of rush. A pressure to get it right. A feeling that something has to be decided soon, properly, definitively, and that if we get it wrong something terrible might happen.

It is quite funny, really, how quickly one word can take us away from ourselves.

In a recent Being Me Therapy session, we explored this together as a group. We didn’t look at decision making as a clever mental process, because most of us already know what it is like to go into the head and try to work everything out from there. We looked at it through the body, through the nervous system, and through the different parts of us that arrive when we feel pressure.

Because the moment we are in pressure, it becomes much harder to feel what is actually true.

Why Decision Making Can Feel So Pressurised

When there is a decision to make, many of us immediately leave the body and go into thinking.

We start weighing things up. We imagine all the consequences. We wonder what other people will think. We worry about disappointing someone. We try to predict whether this will be the right thing in a month, a year, or ten years.

And in all of that, we can lose contact with the simple, living question underneath.

What do I feel?

What is alive in me here?

What feels more resonant now?

This doesn’t mean we ignore practicalities or pretend that choices don’t have consequences. Of course they do. Life is real. Other people are real. Money, time, family, work, commitments and responsibilities are real.

But there is something very important about noticing where we are choosing from.

Are we choosing from fear?

Are we choosing from pressure?

Are we choosing from the part of us that learned to please, perform, avoid conflict, be good, be clever, be safe?

Because if we choose from those places, we may make a decision, but the decision may simply create more of the same life. The same patterns. The same feeling of being slightly outside ourselves.

What Changes When We Call It Choice?

In the session, we played with changing the word “decision” to “choice”.

For some people, that changed something immediately. The body softened. The field widened. There was more space, more possibility, more creativity.

A decision can sometimes feel like cutting something off.

A choice can feel more personal. More internal. More connected to the question of what is actually right for me in this moment.

That doesn’t mean the word “decision” is wrong. Sometimes a decision feels clean, strong and necessary. Sometimes something in us says, “That is done now,” and there is relief in the clarity of that. But for many of us, the word decision carries a history of pressure. It can bring in the old feeling that there is only one right answer and that we must find it quickly.

Choice can give us a bit more room.

It can remind us that we are allowed to feel. We are allowed to notice. We are allowed to experiment. We are allowed to choose something and then discover more from there.

This is such an important shift, because so often we treat decisions as if they are final verdicts on the rest of our lives. But many choices are part of a living movement. We take a step, we feel what happens, we learn, we adjust, we come back, we take another route.

There is more play available than we often remember.

The Things That Get in the Way of Knowing

One of the things we explored in the session was what gets in the way of feeling our own feelings, needs and desires.

People pleasing came up.

Fear of failure came up.

Fear of being judged came up.

The feeling of obligation came up.

The fear that choosing for ourselves might be selfish came up.

This is where decision making becomes so much more than decision making. It becomes a doorway into seeing the parts of us that are still trying to keep us safe.

The part that wants everyone to be okay.

The part that thinks it must get everything right.

The part that learned not to trust itself.

The part that believes other people’s needs must come first.

When these parts are running the show, it can become almost impossible to feel the cleaner place underneath. Not because we don’t have a deeper knowing, but because it is covered by fear, pressure, old learning, and the nervous system’s attempt to protect us.

So we practised gently putting some of those blocks aside. Not attacking them. Not getting rid of them. Not pretending they are silly.

Just giving them a place. Letting the body feel that, for a moment, those fears and pressures do not have to sit right in the centre.

And then we listened for what was underneath.

Choosing from the Cleaner Place

There is a place in us that is much quieter than the mind’s argument.

It doesn’t always arrive loudly. It may not give a perfect five-step plan. It may come as a small sense of life energy, a softening, a pull, a whisper, a feeling of “I want to try,” or “this feels cleaner,” or “not that anymore.”

Sometimes it takes time to hear it. Sometimes the fruit needs to ripen before it falls from the tree. Sometimes we need to stop rushing ourselves long enough to notice that something in us already knows.

This is not about making every choice easy. It is about making more space for truth.

It is about noticing whether we are moving from panic, pleasing and pressure, or whether we are beginning to move from a more connected place in ourselves.

That connected place may still choose something difficult. It may still ask something of us. It may still involve change, conversations, courage, grief, or uncertainty.

But the quality of the choice is different.

It feels more like it belongs to us.

Explore the Full Session Inside Being Me Therapy

This is what we explored more deeply in the May 2026 Being Me Therapy session, Being Me in Decision Making.

We looked at what happens in the body when decisions feel pressurised, how the word “choice” can open a different kind of space, and how to gently put aside the fears, pressures and old patterns that stop us feeling what is actually true.

The replay is now available inside the Being Me Therapy membership.

If this theme speaks to you, you can join the membership to watch the full session and explore so much more Being Me Therapy content, with guided sessions that support you to come back to yourself in your body, your relationships, your choices and your life.