Let's Be Healthy Latinas!

97. When Change & Decisions Feel Hard: 5 Steps to Help You Ground

• Naihomy Jerez • Episode 97

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We trade a planned topic for a real-time unpacking of how overwhelming decisions were draining our energy and how five simple practices brought us back to a grounded, clear place. We connect emotional stagnation to physical symptoms, use tools to regulate and reflect, and end with flexible, values-led action.

• naming stagnant emotions and their impact on the body
• the cost of avoidance, rushing decisions, and rigidity
• feeling the full emotion without performing calm
• speaking with safe people for validation, mirrors, and perspective
• journaling prompts that surface lessons, fears, and the ideal
• defining five non-negotiables with therapist support
• 12-minute meditation to shift state and calm the nervous system
• asking the 10-year-old self what they need
• choosing flexibility over forever decisions
• a clear recap of the five practices to get unstuck
• invitation for supported, personalized wellness change

If that support would help, book a consultation with the link below, or DM me on Instagram and we can see if it’s a fit for you

Audio Books Mentioned:
We Can Do Hard Things: Answers to Life's 20 Questions, By: Glennon Doyle, Abby Wamback, Amanada Doyle 

The Source: The Secret of the Universe, the Science of the Brain, By: Tara Swart, MD, PhD

Thank you so much for listening!


Speaker 00:

Hello friends, welcome back to the podcast. So earlier today, I had a therapy session with my therapist, and I was planning a different episode for today. But I don't know if you can feel my energy or not. I was like, I cannot. I I am not in the energetic space to discuss the topic that I was planning to for today, and I considered not even recording an episode. However, I was like, I'm just going to talk about the process that I've been going through to make a decision and to decide what to do. I've been having such a hard time with making a decision or choosing a direction to go in. For me specifically, it's been with career and finances. And I was like, people who are trying to make decisions about their health and wellness might be feeling the same kind of distress that I am in health and wellness space as I am dealing with career and finances. And I feel finally like I have more clarity on the direction I want to move in, the actions I want to take, and why, right? Like that's really important why. In the past, I would have just dwelled and dwelled and dwelled and kept everything in. And that is not good for our health and wellness, right? Everything coming back to that. Because stagnant emotions. I'm sorry, there's like a car alarm going off right now, as there sometimes is. Oh, okay, it's gone. So where was I? Okay, yes, stagnant emotions. This is so real. Like, y'all, bear with me. Stagnant emotions. When our emotions become stagnant in our body, it can really manifest into health problems, right? It really, really can. It can affect specific organs, it can manifest into different illnesses. And I don't know if you've heard of these stories of people showing up to the doctor, and they're like, I don't feel well, my head hurts, my stomach hurts, or I think something's seriously wrong with me. And sometimes there is, and the doctor sometimes is like, you're fine, like I don't know. And oftentimes it's tied to emotional distress or stress and things like that that's manifesting physically in the body, and that is something I don't want to happen to me. So I've been working on navigating everything that I'm feeling on the inside because before I used to just hold everything in, I would go into freeze, I would go into avoidance, and I'm really trying to use the tools that I have invested in deeply with healers and with coaching and with therapy to process what is currently happening. So, what I'm gonna do in this episode is walk you through what I've been doing, and hopefully, one of these pieces will be helpful to you if you need them, if you've been trying to make decisions for yourself. Uh, and hopefully you get to hang on to one of these tools, which I've actually acquired from different sources, and I'll tell you a few of them. I'm actually trying to look them up now so I can tell you where I acquired some of these tools from because I think um that's really important too. I didn't just come up with I didn't just come up with these tools on my own. A lot of times, again, they've been from the investments I've made, from therapy, from coaching, and audiobooks or books that have reminded me of these things. It's not necessarily something new, but a reminder of the tools that I do have and how to lean into them. Okay, let's get started because we deserve to be unstuck. Um, oh, I'll mention one other thing. Aside from being in avoidance um and stuck, another thing I would do to make decisions or to take action was to rush and to take action in desperation. And that's also not helpful. I would just be very spontaneous, I would rush into things, I would not think about it because a lot of times I just wanted to get rid of my emotions and that decision so quickly, and I also did not want to make decisions from a place like that, from that emotional space. I wanted to make decisions from a place where I felt more grounded, more neutral, more level-headed, and I'm turning my head right now because I just remembered there's this what's called an emotional vibration chart that kind of delineates emotions based on your vibration, and all the way at the bottom is like guilt, shame, grief, things like that, and towards the top, there's joy, peace, acceptance, forgiveness, willingness. So I definitely wanted to be toward the high end of the vibration chart, um, and feel very confident, very grounded, and very knowing of the actions and decisions that I wanted to take and be able to communicate that. So I think that piece was also important to share if you at all feel seen in that. So let's get started. I was trying to make a list for you. Like, I'm gonna share five things, I'm gonna share seven things, but the truth is that my list is a little like took a little mind of its own, and it started as a list, and then I started filling in the blanks and all this. So just flow with me here, okay. I'll try and do a recap at the end as to what these things were. So the first thing I've been doing, maybe I should number these as we go along. This is like a little workshop we're doing here all together. All right, so the first thing I started to do or I allowed myself to do actually was to feel my emotions and to feel my feelings. Uh, a lot of sadness, lots of frustration, lots of I don't know, not knowing. I don't even know if that's an emotion. I should look up the emotions chart. There is an emotions chart too, but feeling lost, and that doesn't feel good. Okay, and just the fact that I allowed myself to say that I will feel my emotions in this journey has been helpful. Allowing myself to cry, allowing myself to feel sad, allowing myself to not put on a show or a performance, just and meeting myself there. So if you follow me on Instagram, you've probably noticed that I've been not on video that much, and that's one of the reasons. Another one of the reasons is because anytime I show up on video on Instagram now, it shows my stuff to nobody, like it'll go from almost 200 views to like 20 views, and that on its own has me a little annoyed. So I've also been trying to build community in different ways, like meeting people in person, communicating through my email list, and through here on my podcast. So I digress anyway, feeling making sure I'm feeling my emotions and meeting myself where I am. So, in doing that, something that has been helpful and not so easy for me is talking to other people. I am an avoider, I am a well, maybe I should say recovering from these things. I like avoidance and hyperindependence, where I just will not share what's happening with anyone because I tell myself or I've learned that I need to solve all my issues myself with no support because that's what I was used to doing growing up. And as an adult, and as I get deeper into my healing journey, I've had to really work on letting go of that and allowing for me to be vulnerable and for other people to support me. So this is a lesson I've been learning. So talking to others has been, I guess, number two of what I've been doing. And of course, this is not talking to anyone and everyone, this is talking to people who I trust, people who I feel safe with, who I know I will be supported by. And those people have been my hubs, my partner, uh, friends, certain friends that I can lean on, my therapist, and a few business supports that I've hired, and I've just shared like how I've been feeling, whether it's frustrated or like nothing's working, things like that. So really leaning into sharing how I'm feeling has allowed me to release, right? To release some of those emotions, to release some of the pressure. It has also opened up conversations where I am validated and I there are stories that other people have from other points of views that make me feel like I'm not alone and I'm not crazy. Cause you know, we be feeling like we're the only ones and then we're crazy. It has also allowed for mirror opportunities where friends have either been in my shoes recently or they're in a different space where I get to reflect off of that and be like, Oh, I think that I need to be in a similar space if I want XYZ and I'm not there, so I need to meet my needs in another way. So it's definitely not a reflection in a bad way, it's a reflection in a good way to try and understand where I am better, and also it has provided a mirror to see like you can bounce back from these things or things can look different because some of my friends have been in this position before and they're in a totally different place now, and it's like wow, we are able to come back from these things because another thing I am actively and and always recovering from is rigidity. I tend to be so extremely rigid with myself, or so zero to a hundred, or like if I make this decision, then I need to 100% scrap everything else. If I make this choice, I cannot even think about or you know, practice something else at the same time. So my rigidity has always been something that has also kept me stuck, and to see the flow of these things with like living examples of someone else has been really supportive to me because it's always valuable when other people bring a different perspective, and with my therapist, is like more of narrowing things down or like really aligning a lot of my thoughts into an actionable path where I'm able to anchor myself in, and with that comes finally being able to journal. I'm not a big journaler for many reasons. Sometimes I feel like I don't know exactly what to write, I kind of get lost in the writing, or I don't really love what I'm writing about, like so many things. But this time around, I just went straight to the point with myself and I asked myself questions like, what is the lesson I'm learning in this season? Like it feels so hard, but I know that every season or every circumstance you learn something from that, so I wanted not to gloss over that. So these are the journaling things I did just to tell you, and this is number three, right? Like the number three thing that I did. And sometimes I'll say that we need this process. I was not ready for journaling in this way, but talking about it with different people and seeing what I consistently was maybe complaining about or worried about, then led me to ask myself these questions in journaling. So the first thing was I wanted again to highlight what exactly I was learning in this season of my life. And I wrote a bunch of things down that I was learning and that was important for me to learn or is important for me to learn, and I would not be learning if I was not in this current situation. So that's really important to know because sometimes we need to put, be put in that situation for us to learn specific lessons. And if you've become a parent or you've switched jobs or you become a caretaker or something like that, sometimes you really have to be in the shoes to actually be learning those lessons. And again, those are important things to know because then these lessons will be transferable skills, right? That you can use and will help you kind of catapult as you move into whatever next season or I don't know, situation, circumstance that you're in. So that's the first thing I did. The second, and this is not at the same time either, right? Like this is over various days. The second thing I asked myself is why am I scared of XYZ? Why am I scared? And I was really avoiding this because I was one, two, three, four, just five points in when the real reasons why I was scared came up for me and I was sobbing. And as much as I like release and crying and all of that, it is freaking exhausting. It is exhausting, it takes a lot out of you to process emotions, and I frankly am kind of tired of being exhausted from processing emotions. Like, I I I needed to chill, but this has been really good, so I asked myself why I was scared, and then I asked myself, what is my ideal situation? What would it look like? And again, I was like one, two, three points in, and again, I started with the waterworks sobbing again, but it was so insightful because it really brought to the surface what I was fill-in-the-blank avoiding. And what I realized was that it brought up so much, it brought up trauma that I had been through that I had not even acknowledged for so many years. Yes, I had spoken about it and glossed over it and was in community about it, but to really write everything down and realize how much specific situation, probably around and like specifically around career, has affected me was really eye-opening. And then it made things more clear of what was trauma, what was ego-based, and how my intuition was actually talking to me in these situations and what I actually wanted. So I ended up bringing this to my therapist and she helped me narrow things down. She was like, from your ideal situation, what are, because there was like a list of I don't know, a dozen, maybe 10 to 12. She was like, What are five things that are non-negotiable for you from this ideal situation, right? Because as with everything, there's gonna be sacrifices, there's gonna be give and takes, but more or less, what are five things that will really hold this idea of an ideal situation down for you? And I was able to identify those. We spoke about them together, we walked through them as to why they were important, and then she was like, Okay, now when you take action on these things the way you want to, you'll be able to be more clear as to where you stand and what direction you're you want to take, and you can kind of and you can use it as a benchmark to make decisions when things come up for you. Okay, so that was so extremely helpful for me, and I'm still like my eyes hurt y'all from the amount of crying I did on this call every single Wednesday. I'm recording this on Wednesday, but you're hearing it on Thursday, or whenever you're tuning in, thank you so much. Um, I just know that I'm gonna cry a lot because I'm still processing emotions, and I think out of I don't know how many months I've been with a therapist, I haven't cried like two days. Again, it's exhausting, but I know that I need to process this in this way. Crying is a way that I release, and I always try and plan or take it easier with myself for a few hours after that because I know it's going to be a lot in that moment. Okay, let's keep moving on. So the fourth thing I've been doing is I've been sitting for 12 minutes. This this might be called meditation for some people. I am not a good meditator, or I always think I don't have the time to meditate or to sit still or in silence, and I know that it's important, but at the same time, it's something that I have not made a priority until I read or I listened to the book The Source, The Secret of the Universe, The Science of the Brain by Dr. Tara Swart. I'll put it in the show notes too. And she was like, All you need is 12 minutes of sitting down and meditating. All you need is 12 minutes, and she went on this little rampage of I know 12 minutes might be a lot of time, you might not have 12 minutes, and she's like, but you really do, it's just 12 minutes out of your day, and you can do it at multiple points, you can do it while you're commuting, you can do it while you're I don't know, definitely not driving. But she's saying, like, you can definitely find 12 minutes to do it, and although I have not done it every single day, I have been more consistent with it, and I actually did my 12 minutes before my therapy session today, and it's been helpful to just quiet down the mind. Usually, when I meditate, I'm a person who sees colors, so sometimes that's helpful, and it's just I actually started doing it more because it would help with my anxiety. So, whenever I noticed that I was starting to feel very stressed out, that my anxiety was starting to rise, that my brain was going a mile a minute, like super fast with thoughts, and I felt like I was losing control. I was like, nope, I need to meditate, and I don't sit in silence because that is actually very uncomfortable for me. So, what I listened to that I've actually been sharing with my clients is oh my gosh, I am looking for this playlist that I've been sending to my clients. Let me see if I find it quickly. It is hold on. No, I lost it. Hold on, hold on, hold on. It is oh my gosh, I can't find exactly the name. Oh, maybe if I go to the messages, thanks for bearing with me. Thanks for bearing with me. Um, okay, I found it. It's called Tibetan Healing Music, Zen Meditation, Stress Relief, Relaxing Music, Tibetan Bowl Bowls, Indian Flute. So I guess it's not really like a name name. It's called Tibetan Healing Music. That's what it is, and I love it because it's gentle, there's a lot of nature sounds inside. There's birds, there's like it said flutes and like light drums and all this, and it just feels very calming to my nervous system. I love the bird sounds, I just really love the bird sounds, and that helps me kind of zone in for 12 minutes. So, again, it might not, and I feel like it's just enough time, okay? Like just enough time before I get antsy, and just enough time for it to be effective. Okay, so yes, that is number four. Okay, another thing that I did today, actually, with my meditation that was so helpful, was ask myself a question, and I'll tell you where it came from. I am currently listening to the audiobook We Can Do Hard Things Answer to Life's 20 Questions by Glenn and Doyle, Abby Wombach, and Amanda Doyle. I had heard, I feel like it was I don't remember if it was all three of them, but I think definitely Glenn and Doyle on the Happiness Lab podcast, where they were having a series on parenting, and they mentioned this book. So I decided to listen to it. And just today, before my therapy session, I reached the chapter on making decisions and how tough that can be, or like listening to your intuition, what something like that. And they one of them mentioned, ask your 10-year-old self what they need. And they were like, Because most of the time, when you ask your adult self what you need, you most likely think of a strategy. And don't quote me, this is not like quoted, this is just you know what I remember. And so, yeah, they were like, most of the time, if you ask your adult self, is going to be a strategy, like I should try XYZ, or I should work on whatever it is, strategy base. But they were like, if you ask your 10-year-old self, most likely your 10-year-old self is gonna say something like, I need a glass of water, I wanna go outside and play, I need a nap, I need rest, I want to watch TV, I don't know, something like that. XYZ is going to be meeting your needs to some capacity. So when I was in my 12 minutes, the question came up for me like, what does 10-year-old Naomi need? And that again made me cry. I made it to my therapy session already crying. Like I was telling my therapist, I'm like, I'm kind of over myself and I'm kind of embarrassed. Um, but anyway, so yes, I asked my five, my 10-year-old self what I needed, and my 10-year-old self was like, I'm tired, I'm tired, I need a break from this. My brain hurts of trying to figure it out, and it's not physically tired, is mentally tired, and I could just see her little face of exhaustion and just needing a break, and needing what I like to say, some floaties, like I'm just sinking, and it's funny because my friend who I sent a voice note to kind of sharing a little bit of what was going on, she was like, Wow, I can hear kind of the burnout when it comes to this topic, I can hear how tired you are over it, and I felt so bad for my 10-year-old self. And as a parent with a 11-year-old and a nine-year-old, I was kind of I could really picture myself in their shoes and when they look tired and overwhelmed and exhausted. And as their mom, I'm not like, well, this is the strategy of not being tired if you need to lay down and you need a break. This is the strategy. You need to work harder, you need to push through, you need to do this, right? Like, I don't do that to my kids. I'm like, yes, let's rest, let's take a break. It's okay if you do this later, it's okay if you change your mind. And posing that question to myself kind of really supported everything else that I had already done, like the journaling work of what I was scared of, what I was learning, what direction I wanted to move in, and then um with the discussion with my therapist. So as you can see, everything is kind of starting to fall in line, and this has taken months and months and months of trying to decide what to do, trying to decide when is enough and is enough, trying to decide when am I gonna flip a switch, like all these things, and with all of that, my therapist again reminded me because I was like, haha, I'm not good read change, obviously, and and she was like, uh, remember that nothing is set in stone, you can always change your mind, things are not forever. And I was like, Oh, oh, oh yeah, because y'all, me and rigidity, me and making a decision and not leaving any room for flexibility or play in there is so real for me, and it's so hard to have blurry edges around any of this, and to let ebbs and flows within my decisions happen, um, because again, control, right, and just making up a story of how things are supposed to be and play out when none of it ain't even happened yet, all right. So that was essentially the last thing, and as I was talking with you guys about it, I kind of uh outlined everything. So it's basically five things that I've been doing, and I hope it helps you if you're trying to make a decision for your health and wellness, because some areas of life come easier to some people than others. Others and I don't want to say that my life into health and wellness was so easy, and I just flipped the switch and it was fine because there were so many learnings and ups and downs when it came to that. However, I do find that when it comes to health and wellness, for the most part, it's easier for me to adapt and make changes. Whereas for other people, it might be extremely difficult and excruciating. And I want to say that it's totally, totally valid. Uh, and it doesn't mean that you can't do it, it just might mean that you need a lot of support to get you to where you want to be. The same way that I've needed so much support for myself because this does not come easy to me when it comes to career and finances. Okay, so uh hopefully, this little outline of what I've been doing, which to be honest with you, I've surprised myself that this has been my process, and I'm grateful for again all the investments I've made, all how I've showed up for myself, even if it is, you know, investing in support and trusting myself to just lean into the tools that have come my way and piecing them all together between audiobooks, um, therapy, coaching, healing work that I've done throughout all this time to help me get here because for someone else, these decisions might feel super easy, like a no-brainer. And for me, it's excruciatingly difficult. And my brain is literally drowning and exhausting, exhausted trying to make these changes and and come up with these decisions and take any sort of action around it. So, again, I'll summarize the five for you. It was number one, emotions galore. That's exactly what I wrote down. Just allowing yourself to feel the emotions that come up. All emotions are valid. I've gone from everything from anger, frustration, grief, sadness, all these things to now feeling a little bit more neutral. And I have to say, it just hasn't been an uphill lovey-dovey journey either, because there were a weeks where I felt super calm and confident and just trusting and hopeful. And then the following week I was drowning in my sorrows again. So I'm feeling pretty okay right now, but I wouldn't be surprised if another wave of those emotions come back as emotions come and go. Number two was talking to others, people who you feel safe with, uh, and really being vulnerable and having open conversations. Number three was journaling, and I specifically asking myself what lessons I'm learning, why am I scared of XYZ? And what is my ideal situation? What would it look like for XYZ? Uh, number four was sitting for 12 minutes, like however that works for you, if it's a guided meditation, if it's music like I use, but really sitting in whatever feels good for you, just listening to your thoughts or like breathing and calming um your nervous system. I specifically use this when my mind was racing, when I felt a lot of anxiety, and I just needed to remind my body that I was safe and and learning, not learning, uh practicing my deep breathing again and just calming my nervous system. That was really helpful. And then number five was what would my 10-year-old need? What does she need? What does my 10-year-old version of myself need? And I did that while I was in meditation, but you can also just ask yourself that you can process that through journaling or however it is that you need to. But that question was so good for me because at 10, you're old enough to to know, you know, a little bit more, but you're not necessarily relying on strategy, you're relying on you know, meeting your basic needs, and then from what from there you get to decide what actions you want to take to meet those needs. And lastly, I mean this is not number six, but just for me was identifying things that hold me back in the journey, and for me, that was or that is rigidity and like being scared of change, which I think is is something that's true for a lot of people. So I hope this was helpful for you. If you are in need of support for health and wellness, if you know that in health and wellness is one of those areas where you really struggle, it feels really scary, it feels like it's really hard to attain and to reach, and it's easy for other people, but not for you. But you know deep down that it is something you want to figure out, and you know that it's important to you, you're just kind of lost as to how to get there, and you would benefit from having somebody to hold space for you to give you different ideas as to how it could feel safer for you to adopt and not so scary to really give you validation as to what's happening in your journey and support you with knowledge and skill building and habit building that goes at your own pace, it's personalized to you and what you like and what you need at the moment in your current circumstance, then that is something I 100% support my clients on. I basically walk them through similar processes when it comes to health and wellness, because that's where my gift lies. And so many of my clients, when they are really afraid of wellness or things that they know they want to do for themselves, but they just really don't know how to get themselves to do it, is something that I support them and they are very successful in. So if that's something that you know can be helpful for you, I invite you to book a consultation call with the link in the show notes, or you can DM me directly on Instagram and we can have a conversation to see if it's a right fit for you. All right, I'll see y'all next week. Bye.