111. Who Is Actually Making Your Decisions?

Holly Toscanini: I want to start with a scenario and I want you to notice what happens in your body when I describe it. You're facing a decision. It doesn't have to be enormous. It could be about your career, a relationship, your health, or how you spend your free time. You have a sense of what you really want to do. It's quiet, but it's there. And then almost automatically you start making the calls. Not literally, of course, but in your head. You're running a kind of internal consultation process. What would my partner think? What does my doctor say? What did that podcast mention? What would my mother say if she knew? What do the people I respect think about this kind of choice? And by the time you finished consulting, your original instinct has either been overruled, diluted, or buried under so many other people's frameworks that you genuinely can't tell anymore what you actually wanted. Now that's not a decision-making process that's gonna work. But it is what happens when you've handed the authority to decide what's best for you over to everybody but yourself. So today we're gonna talk about what it actually means to outsource your authority, who you're handing it to, why it happens, and how to start taking it back honest check-in at a time. Welcome back to How to Lose the Weight. I'm Holly Toscanini, and this episode is the first in a new series I'm calling The WAIT Framework. That's W-A-I-T, 12 weeks of going deeper into the specific patterns that keep midlife women stuck and what it actually looks like to move through them. We're starting with the W in Wait, Witness. Before you can change a pattern, you have to be able to see it clearly, not judge it, not fix it, just see it. That's what this first group of podcast episodes is designed to help you do. And today's pattern is one of the most invisible, most automatic and most consequential ones I see in the women I work with. And it's this habit of outsourcing our authority. By the end of the episode, you're gonna have a name for what's been happening, a clearer picture of who's been in your head when you make decisions, and one very practical thing you can do this week to start changing that. Ready? Let's get started. I want to define what I mean by authority because I'm not using it the way it usually gets used. I'm not talking about authority as in power over other people. I mean authority as in authorship, the capacity to be the primary author of your very own decisions, to have your own read on a situation carry real weight in how you respond to it. When you outsource that, you're not making your own decisions. You're crowdsourcing them. And the result is a life that's been shaped more by what other people are thinking, other people are recommending, expecting, and what they model, than by what you actually know about yourself. Now, outsourcing your authority doesn't feel like weakness when you're doing it. It feels like being thorough, like being responsible, like not being arrogant enough to think you have all the answers all the time. For a lot of women, it feels like the humble, careful, grown-up thing to do. And to be clear, consulting people you trust gathering information, seeking expertise, none of that is the problem. The problem is when the consultation replaces your own knowing rather than informing it. When you can't make a move until you've gotten enough outside confirmation, right? When your instinct doesn't count until someone else has validated it, that's the pattern. And for many high achieving, emotionally intelligent women, it runs so deep and so automatically that it genuinely doesn't feel like a pattern. It just feels like how you make decisions. But here's where it came from. And I want to be quick about this because this isn't a history lesson. It's a recognition exercise so we can witness what's happening. See, most women were raised in environments that rewarded deference, not just being agreeable in a surface way, but genuinely calibrating themselves to what the adults, the institutions, the cultural systems around them approved of. You learned early that having your own strong read on things and acting on it without checking in, it could create some friction. Maybe make you seem a little difficult or cost you approval. So you learn to check. You learn to check first with your parents, then your teachers, then your partners, then all the experts, and then the internet, and then, well, wellness culture, which has its very own elaborate set of authorities you're supposed to consult before trusting your body or yourself. And eventually, The checking became so habitual that it started happening before you'd even finished having your original thought. Now, it's not a character flaw, but it is a learned pattern. And learned patterns, once you can see them clearly, can be changed. I want to give you a practical frame for this because abstract just isn't useful in this case. So here's what I've come to understand about how most women actually make decisions. We don't decide alone. We consult. And over the years, we have assembled what I think of as a sort of inner council, a group of voices, influencers, and figures whose opinions have been given a sort of a standing seat in our decision-making process. Now, some of these voices are people we love. and some are experts we respect. Others are cultural systems we've absorbed so gradually we don't even notice them. And some of them, if we're being honest, are voices we never consciously invited. They just showed up one day and never left. But here's the thing I really want you to hear. The reason most of us keep consulting these voices isn't just habit. It's because somewhere along the way, they became our permission givers. That people and systems we need to hear yes from before we feel safe trusting ourselves to move. That's the pattern we're gonna name today. Not the council itself, having people you trust and value is healthy, but the automatic handing over of your own authority to them, the waiting for their green light before your own instinct gets to count, that's what we're here to see clearly. So let's look at who tends to sit on this council. I found there are usually five types of voices. And most women have at least three running in the background without even realizing it. The first is what I call the historical voice. This is usually a parent, a primary caregiver or a formative figure from early in your life whose approval you learned to need. Now the historical voice doesn't have to still be in your life or even still be alive for their seat on your council to remain occupied. You internalize them a very long time ago. Their presence is sort of a memory, not even really a person, but it functions like a person, reliably showing up the moment you're about to do something that maybe would have made them a little uncomfortable. You'll recognize this voice when you catch yourself thinking, ooh, what would they think of this? Or when you make a decision and feel a preemptive brace for disapproval from somebody who isn't even in the room. The second is the expert voice. This is the doctor, the therapist, the nutritionist, the financial advisor, the coach, any professional whose credentials you've started treating as more reliable than your own lived experience. Yes, expertise matters, and I'm not suggesting you ignore it, but there's a difference between using expert input to inform your decision and handing the whole decision over entirely because somebody with letters after their names said so. I see this the most often around health. Women who override clear signals from their own bodies because of a professional framework told them that they shouldn't be feeling what they're feeling. And that's not informed decision-making. That's outsourced authority in a lab coat. The third is the social voice. And this is the peer group, the community, the women like us voice. In midlife, this one gets particularly loud because midlife comes with a whole set of unspoken norms about how you're supposed to be aging, what you're supposed to want, what a woman who has it all together is supposed to look like at this age. The social voice doesn't belong to any one person. It's usually a collective pressure you feel without always being able to point where it comes from or who's creating it. but it absolutely has a seat at the table too. The fourth is the cultural voice. Patriarchy, diet culture, hustle culture, wellness culture. These are large scale systems with very specific ideas about how you should be managing your body, your time, your ambition, and your desires. The cultural voice is the sneakiest council member because it presents itself as information, not opinion, as fact, not framework. It's very good at sounding like truth. And the fifth, the one who is often missing from the room entirely, is you. Not the version of you that's been trained to check in. Not the version that filters her instincts through everybody else's frameworks before she lets herself act on them. The actual you. The one who had a read on the situation before the consultation even began. Now here's the question I want you to sit with this week when you face a decision, any decision. Whose voice shows up first? And how long does it take before you let your own voice into the conversation? Because here's what I want you to start noticing. Your inner counsel isn't the problem. Having people in systems you trust is not something you want to dismantle necessarily. The question is whether your own voice has a seat, a real one, not a courtesy invitation that gets overruled the moment it says something inconvenient. You don't need to fire your counsel. You need to make sure you're sitting at the head of the table. when they gather. I want to spend just a few minutes on this next piece because it's the part that stops most women before they even get started. Reclaiming your authority sounds to the well-trained good girl ear like arrogance, like deciding you know better than everybody, like becoming someone who doesn't listen, doesn't learn, dismisses expertise, and generally becomes insufferable at dinner parties. That's not what I'm describing. Reclaiming your authority means returning yourself to the center of your own decision-making. It means that your read on your own life, your body, your relationships, your desires, your limits gets to be primary. Other voices get to be informing, not overriding. The difference matters. Consulting your doctor and then deciding what to do with that information is using your counsel well. Consulting your doctor and doing whatever they say, regardless of whether it resonates with your own experience, while ignoring the thing that your body has been trying to tell you for months, that's outsourcing. Asking your partner what they think and weighing their perspective is healthy. Meeting your partner's approval before you trust your own instinct, that's outsourcing. Reading, researching, seeking out perspectives, all of that is wonderful. Using all of that to avoid having to take a position of your own is outsourcing. The goal is not to stop listening to other people. The goal is to stop treating your own knowledge as the least reliable voice in the room. Because here's the thing, you have data other people don't have. You have decades of information about your own patterns, your own responses, your own body, your own history. You have the most granular, most long-term, most context-rich data set about your own life that exists anywhere. And most of you have been treating it as the least credible source. That's what change changes when you reclaim your authority. Now that you stop listening, that you start counting yourself as a primary source of information and the ultimate authority. So here's what I'd love for you to take away from this episode. You're not confused about your life because you lack intelligence or insight. You are very likely confused because you've been running your decisions through a consultation process that systematically underweights the one voice with the most relevant information, your own. The first step and the weight method is witness. And what you're witnessing this week is specifically this. Who's actually in the room when you make decisions? Who are your permission givers? And where, honestly, are you in that lineup? Where are you at the table? Your one practice this week, when you face any decision, or small, because maybe just pause, right? Pause before you start that consultation. Ask yourself, what do I actually think about this? What does my own read say before I go looking for confirmation or permission. And you don't have to act on it, you just have to notice it exists because you can't reclaim a seat at the head of your own table if you don't realize you've given it away. Now, if you want to go deeper on this, if you want a structured way to identify which specific patterns or archetypes are running your waiting cycle right now, I want to invite you to take the free unweighting audit. It's a short assessment that's going to tell you exactly where you are in the weight framework where you're currently stuck. and give you a personalized direction for what to focus on next. It takes just a few minutes and it's genuinely useful, not just a quiz with a generic result at the end. You can find the link in the show notes or in the description below the video. Thank you for being here. The start of this series is gonna be important and exciting. It's the framework, friends, not the dramatic overhaul, not the thunderbolt of clarity, but the honest, patient practice of learning to see your own patterns clearly enough to change them. Remember, there's nothing left to wait for. And next week, we're gonna go one level deeper because here's what I notice happens after women start to see the permission-giving pattern. A lot of them go looking for more information about it. More research, more reading, more podcasts, more protocols. And that feels productive. I mean, it feels like progress, but sometimes it's just the waiting cycle and I don't know, nicer outfit. Now, the next episode is called the research loop. why more information is just a form of stalling. And we're gonna name this specific pattern of information hoarding for what it actually is, a very sophisticated form of avoidance. If you've ever thought I just need a little more clarity before I can move, this one is for you. I'll see you then. Until next time, bye for now.