Decision vs Indecision: 3 Decision Hacks for Getting More Done in Your Business

You're listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast with Debbie Sassen, Episode 141.

Welcome to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Debbie Sassen. I went from being a financial adviser, author and chronic under earner to building my business to six figures as a financial planner and money mindset coach. And then, on to multiple six figures as a fulltime money and business coach.

I help entrepreneurs create money making businesses and build wealth, using sales and money mindset strategies in alignment with authentic Jewish values. Now, let's dive into today's show.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the podcast. It has been a week. For those of you who are listening the first week of August, when this podcast is dropping, and for those of you who are listening to this podcast later on in life, I want to give you a little bit of a backstory. First of all, I'm going to tell you that I nearly forgot to record my podcast this week. Literally, it has been a crazy week.

We started this week in Germany. As you might remember from last week's podcast, we were invited to Germany to the city of where my grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents were from.

My dad was actually wasn't born in Paderborn. Jews were not allowed to be born in Paderborn when my dad was born, in July of 1938, so my grandmother had to travel over 100km to Hanover so that she could give birth in a hospital that accepted Jewish women at that time.

But we were in Paderborn over the weekend. We left on Monday because we were celebrating the rededication, as it were, of the building that was once owned by my grandfather, Haus Grünebaum.

Then, on Shabbat, on Saturday, while we were there, Hezbollah launched a rocket attack on Israel into a civilian area. It actually landed in the Druze town of Majdal Shams. Twelve little kids were killed on Saturday afternoon while they were playing soccer.

This was a terrorist attack on a civilian population, and Israel, rightly so, retaliated against Hezbollah, against Hamas, against Iran, and basically, they took out ... We took out the number one leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, and a couple other head honchos in Hezbollah and other terrorist regimes, part of the Iranian Republic and fundamentalist regime, terrorist regime, and we are currently under a state of waiting.

We're on high alert because it's very possible that we are going to be attacked by Iran; which we were about four months ago. They sent over 300 or so missiles. We intercepted all of them. There was no damage caused at that time.

But it has been a little bit of a surreal week, that's why I forgot about my podcast.

Our flight back to Israel was canceled, and we had to fly from Germany to London, and then take an EL AL flight. Thank the Good Lord for EL AL, and thank the Good Lord for my bank account, because we were able to pay for EL AL tickets. We were not booked on EL AL, but we were able to get ourselves back to Israel on a red-eye. So, I didn't sleep on Monday night.

Anyway, that is my beautiful story. Call it a sob story, if you will. It is just life when you live in Israel.

If you're listening to this podcast, whether it's late in 2024, 2025, or some time in the future, this is your “back to the future” podcast episode. I'm just marking it, because our brains forget things, that this is actually what's been happening in July of 2024. And now, it's August.

What I want to share with you on today's podcast is all about decisions versus indecisions, and help you be more productive. We're going to talk about three productivity hacks that you can use in your business and in your life to make more money, make better decisions, make decisions that you love, and make more money in your business.

Before I do that, I'm going to tell you about the first decision that I really am encouraging you to make, and that is my Money Healing course. Today, when this is dropping, August 7th, Wednesday, August 7th, it's my Hebrew birthday, the third of the Hebrew month of Av. Today is the last day that the Money Healing course is available for $61.

Many of my clients in my group coaching program, Wired for Wealth, have gone through this course... It is a part of Wired for Wealth... and it has changed their relationship with money. They have healed money messages, especially family-of-origin messages around money.

Side point, by the way, when I was in Paderborn last week over the weekend and speaking with family members, there were 30 of us from the extended Grünebaum family. I really became aware of the fact that my dad's parents, his mother and his father, came from very well-to-do families, even wealthy on my grandmother's side.

And that is also part of my family of origin, part of my lineage; it's not a part of my lineage that I was made aware of. I kind of started thinking about it in like the last few months as we were approaching this trip to Paderborn, but my story has always been one of a survivor and my grandparents going from riches to rags.

On my mom's side, riches to rags to riches. My father's side was only riches to rags to middle class. But that survival energy is so much a part of who I am. And part of my growth for the rest of 2024 is tapping into my family of origin story that goes back hundreds of years rather than decades. To really connect with that part of my family that lived with more comfort and more abundance.

It's really how I've come to live in Israel now. We do live in a two-story house with six bedrooms, and this is just part of my birthright and part of who I am.

Anyway, back to the Money Healing course. My clients have experienced huge shifts in transformation, really uncovered the money messages from their parents that they inherited. It wasn't like they chose them, speaking of decision versus indecision. It wasn't like they decided consciously, “Oh, this is how I have to think about money.” This was a thought that was gifted to them, if you will.

And when they uncovered it, they were able to decide that it doesn't serve them any longer. It's time to heal. It's time to shift. It's time to let go of those thoughts and experiences around money.

To make a long story short, go to my website, DebbieSassen.com/money-healing and get the course. Make sure that you use the coupon code “61”. It's all one word, S-I-X-T-Y-O-N-E. Use the coupon code “61” to get the course for $61 instead of $197.

Because if you're listening to this podcast tomorrow, or any other day after that, the price is going up to $197. Which is still a huge value for you, because you will actually shift your relationship with money and make thousands, tens of thousands of dollars when you think about money differently.

And in fact, while I'm blabbering on in the first 10 minutes of this podcast episode, I want to share a success story. Real shout out to one of my clients. I hope you're listening. I'm not sharing your name, but one of my clients celebrated in our Slack channel this week, in July, that July was her biggest income month ever. She's ending the month with more money in her bank account than she has ever had.

She's a mom of many, and for the first time this year, her family is off of food stamps. I just lost it. Maybe that's another reason why I didn't record the podcast this week, but my heart just burst. The fact that someone had the guts to invest in herself and her business while her family was on food stamps, and joined Wired for Wealth knowing…

She joined knowing that healing her relationship with money was a big part of her journey. And then, being able, 10 months later, to get off of food stamps. My day is done. My week is done. And still I'm showing up to record this podcast. But really, when you change your relationship with money, everything, everything in your business and your life changes.

So, really, go to my website, DebbieSassen/money-healing and get the Money Healing course now. All right.

Let us talk about decision versus indecision. What I want to tell you is that there is really no such thing as indecision. We think that we need to be in ‘Well, I just need to think about it. I need to decide. I want to talk it over a little bit. I need to ask my husband. I need to ask my friends. I need some references.’

All the time that you were thinking about something, I want you to know what's really going on is that you were deciding that it's a “no” until you decide that it's a “yes.” And you're just continuing day by day, step by step saying to yourself, “No, no, no.”

And then at some point, if you make a different decision, that decision is going to be a “yes”. That's how I'm going to preface our discussion today about decision versus indecision.

Now, I want you to understand how your brain is wired because that will make this decision versus indecision paradigm much more evident to you. Your brain is designed to keep you safe. Your brain is designed to conserve energy. Your brain is designed and wired to avoid pain and increase pleasure.

Despite the fact that for tens of thousands, billions of years, depending on how you understand the evolution of the world, human beings have evolved in their capabilities.

If we go back to the beginning of the podcast, the fact that we were able to target Ismail Haniyeh in his bed, in the compound in Tehran where diplomats stay… It is a high security guest house and only Ismail Haniyeh and his bodyguard were killed. That's how precise this happened. It wasn't like the entire building was decimated.

Human brains have evolved, and their intellectual and technological capabilities have evolved to be that precise in their ability to really decimate terrorists and target them.

In our own self-preservation and safety, our brains are still very primitive. We have barely evolved because as a human being, as an individual, your brain is wired to keep you alive. It is designed to keep you safe. It is designed to propagate the human species.

The best way to propagate the human species is for you not to die. Right? That makes sense. And so, your brain is always going to go to safety. It's going to lean into safety. It's going to listen to the fear voices in your head and say, “You know what? If I don't have all the information, I'm just going to stay exactly where I am. I'm going to stay in my comfort zone. I am going to stay safe.”

So, let's make this a much more tangible example for you and for your business. Let us say, for example, that you are going to write an email. Your desire this week is to write one email to your email subscribers, and you want to give them some valuable information. You want to tell them about a launch you're doing.

You want to ask them to sign up for an upcoming webinar, or even reach out to you and have a sales conversation so that they can work for you. What your brain will want to do to keep you safe is perfectionize. It's not a real word, but I use it all the time. Your brain is going to want to do it right. Your brain is going to think that there is a right way to write the email.

And we've also been told that you need to get the subject line exactly right. Now, I'm not dismissing that and saying you shouldn't work on your subject lines, because if your people open your emails, there's definitely a higher likelihood that they will read them than if they don't. So, there are better ways and worse ways to write subject lines.

But your brain will not send your email until it figures out the exact subject line that it thinks is going to work for you to get your emails open and is going to compel your people to work with you. It's going to want to do it right.

And then once it gets into the email, your brain will spend hours and hours and hours trying to write the exact right words, trying to write it exactly right and speak to all the people.

Your brain is not going to want to speak to one person in your email because it's going to think, “Well, if I talk about all the people and all the situations, then everybody's going to love me. Everybody's going to want to work with me. Everybody's going to tell me how inspiring I am.”

Your brain really is going to feel like it's out on a ledge exposing you when you put words into a virtual digital email thing and send it out to the universe. And it's not going to want to do it.

I remember back in the day when I was first working in my business, I could literally spend six, eight, 10 hours writing an email. Now, depending on the length of the email and what I do, I can get them done in 15, 20 minutes. Sometimes, if it is a very complicated email and I want to put lots of details in my email, maybe it's going to take me a whole hour.

But even that is a very long time for me to be writing an email, because my brain has accustomed itself to believe that it is safe for me to put words on paper, write them all out, edit it once, and maybe go through a second time to make sure there aren't any spelling mistakes or punctuation mistakes.

And you know what? When I get my own emails and I read them over, I always find mistakes. I don't know. My brain just seems to gloss over them and miss them.

But you know what? I have trained myself by making decisions to write emails quickly and send them out into the world. I have trained myself that “done” is better than “perfect”. Your brain is going to want you to believe that getting it done 100% right, 100% perfect is the way to stay safe, the way to avoid pain.

I remember back in the day getting emails from people telling me, “Oh, you have this mistake. You have this grammatical error. You have this spelling mistake,” and I used to be very thankful. I mean, I am thankful whenever somebody sends me an email back and says, “Hey Debbie, you missed this word. You wrote it incorrectly.”

I talk about my selling process and I call it Sacred Sales Conversations because I really do believe a sales conversation is a sacred experience between you and the person on the line who you're talking with. But I wrote it several times in emails, Scared Sales Conversations.

I made that guffaw in one launch, and I thought I corrected it, and it showed up again in a second launch. I'm just not even embarrassed by it anymore. I'm just laughing at myself, “How could I miss that so many times?” But your brain also just gets accustomed to doing the same thing and reading the same thing and it doesn't even see the mistakes anymore.

I think I finally corrected it on all of my emails, we'll see in my next launch. Which, by the way, heads up, is coming end of August, beginning of September. Just dropping some seeds there for you.

Anyway, if you want to be more productive, decide. Decide on purpose that “done” is better than “perfect”. Decide that you're going to give yourself an hour maximum to write an email. Decide you're going to give yourself an hour maximum to record a podcast.

Decide, if you want to put up a social media post, that you're going to also spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes maximum. And that is the perfect amount of time for you to write the email.

What happens is most of us spend time in our brain, “Well, I want to write about this and I want to write about that, and I want to talk about this and maybe that.” We spend a lot of time in the land of ‘I don't know’ and the land of ‘maybe’. And what I want to reframe for you, is when you were in the land of ‘I don't know’ and you were in the land of ‘maybe’, you were actually making a decision that it is a ‘no, for now.’

I want you to stop telling yourself lies; that you're thinking about something because really you're not. You're not contemplating, you're not thinking, you're just being a ‘no, for now.’ And you will make a decision, ‘yes, at the right time.’ And when you tell yourself that it's a ‘no, for now’ rather than ‘maybe, I'm still thinking about it,’ you will be way more productive.

Because you know what happens? You close a decision loop in your brain, and your brain just decides, “Oh, it's a no. Now I have better things to do with my life. I'm going to go and wash the dishes. I'm going to go and make dinner. I'm going to record my podcast. I'm going to go and write an email to my people. But for now, I'm deciding that that other thing that I was going to do is a ‘no.’”

So, stop telling yourself lies and be willing to be done with things as they are. Go forward, action is better than inaction 100% of the time.

All right, the second thing that is stopping you from being more productive, the second thing that is stopping you from deciding that you can go forward and keeping you in the land of indecision is actually deciding on purpose. But not on purpose because you're doing it by accident, that you have tried all the things, right?

If you want to, for example, grow your business, you want to make more money, you might be thinking, “Well, money healing isn't for me. I've tried it. I've tried tapping, it didn't really work for me. I've done some journaling. I've said affirmations. I've done some money mantras. I really don't think that this money healing thing is going to work for me.”

What I want you to think about is that if you haven't tried something, you really don't know. And by you believing that you have done all the things, you don't open yourself up for a different possibility. You are actually keeping the world finite. You are keeping your results finite.

And you are not believing that there is an unlimited G-d in the world who has unlimited resources and unlimited channels for helping you to change your story, to change your relationship with money, to change your business.

When you believe that you've done all the things, you are deciding that growth is not important to you. You are deciding that healing is not important to you. It's not like you're actively looking for a different solution, it's that you're deciding that ‘now I don't really want to go there.’ Or you're deciding that it's going to be too uncomfortable. Because remember, your brain wants to keep you safe.

what I want to invite you to believe instead, what I want to invite you to decide instead, is that there are more options out there. There is more possibility for healing. There is more possibility for growth. There is more possibility for abundance.

G-d is abundance. G-d does own all of the resources in the world and He can give you more. You are meant for more and He can give you more. And when you decide that you actually haven't tried all the things but there are other channels, other avenues, other possibilities that could work for you, and you can make a different decision now, that actually opens you up to growth.

That gives you a choice. That makes you empowered to go and do something else. So, if you want to be more productive, decide that there is another option out there.

And then, once you've decided that there is another option out there, go back to number one, do it now. Do it imperfect. Just do it. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Remember that beautiful book by Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and just get going.

The third thing that is going to stop you from being more productive is believing or deciding that you don't have enough time. You know that old story that we've all heard: You want to get something done, give it to a busy person.

So, here's the thing. Yes, a busy person will get it done, but how does she do it? She just decides to do it. That's why busy people get things done, it’s because they're not wallowing in indecision or deciding no, they're like, “Yeah, for sure I can do this,” and they get going.

Now, this is not a call out for you to go and hustle and grind and do more things, but we believe the lies ‘we don't have enough time.’ And every single one of us has the same number of 24 hours in a day. Every single one of us has the same seven days in a week. We have the same 30, 31 days in every single month.

And there are people who get more done. It's not because they're smarter. It's not because… Well, sometimes they have team members who are working for them, so they have been able to delegate. And that, by the way, is a decision; to hire people and delegate things, delete things, delay things, do them later.

I have a podcast episode called “The Four D’s”; either do it, delay it, delegate it, or delete it. But what happens is people get things done because they decide that they do have enough time. When you are believing that you don't have enough time, how is it that women who have six children, eight children, 10 children, they can be principals of schools and raise their kids and take care of their families, their husbands, etc., and maybe have a side hustle on the side?

And then there are women with two, three, four kids… and I really don't want to be dismissive of anybody and your mental health situation, or what's going on with your kids and special need kids. Please, don't believe for a second that I'm being dismissive of your personal situation because I am so not…

But what happens is that when we believe that we don't have enough time, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and we don't have enough time. When we decide that we do have enough time, and we can just get it done, then we actually get it done.

We stop being in this, ‘Well, I don't know,’ indecision place, the land of ‘I don't know’ and the land of ‘maybe’, and we actually just put our nose to the grindstone. We make decisions. We may be taking perfect action, but we're way more productive.

And what I see with my clients… I had a client session with one of my clients this week, and an entire day went by without things getting done because it was just ‘no decision.’ It was kind of like, “Well, I'm going to write my book today. I'm going to do some social media posts.”

And the time was left very undefined rather than deciding, “Now I'm going to be very solution focused. I'm going to write an email to my people. It's going to take me an hour and I'm going to get it done. And then, I'm going to take a 15-minute break, maybe I'll do some jumping jacks to get some blood coursing through my body. I'm going to have some water, maybe some coffee. And then, I'm going to sit down at my computer and I'm going to do the next thing.”

We don't want to let things go. We don't want to delegate them. We let our heads spin out on us, keeping us safe, not being productive. We think there's a productivity hack out there that we can use, like Eat That Frog! or some other way of getting things done, the Pomodoro Technique; you work for 25 minutes, you take a five-minute break.

People have different cadences and rhythms in their bodies. Some people will work for 25 minutes. Some people work for 45 minutes. Some people can just focus for an hour or two hours straight and get a lot of things done. So, there isn't one technique or one plan out there in the world.

You make a decision rather than being undecided about time. You make the decision in your brain that you have enough time to get things done. You have enough time to heal your relationship with money. You have enough time to build your business. And then you will actually be more productive and get things done.

Now, here's a last point, it's about money. It's not one of these three productivity hacks that I wanted to give you today. This is actually a money hack. And I see this so often with my clients. That they make a decision to raise their prices and then they go back and forth on it. “Well, I don't know. Maybe it's too high. Maybe I'm getting some pushback.”

I had a conversation with one of my clients just a few days ago, and she joined Wired for Wealth in March. She made a decision to raise her prices and she had an incredible month, two months, right after joining Wired for Wealth. And then, all of a sudden, she started getting some pushback on her prices. And she started wallowing in the land of indecision again, thinking, “Oh, maybe I need to lower my price again. Maybe I'm too high. Maybe the economy… Maybe… Maybe…. I don't know.”

And what I explained to her on our coaching call is that really she just fell out of belief. She stopped believing, stopped deciding, stopped being sold on the value of her offer, the value of what she shares with her clients and how she serves them.

And really it's up to her to go back, recommit, re-decide that how she serves her clients is beautiful and wonderful and luxurious. And it is so worth the price that she was charging just a few months ago.

But when you fall out of decision, and you fall out of commitment, that's when you start wavering on your price. I don't want you to do that. If you were thinking of lowering your price, decide you're not going to do it. Make the decision, it just takes a moment. Go back to recommitting and redeciding why your price is the best price for the value that you offer to your clients.

All right, my friends, thank you so much for deciding to listen to the podcast this week. I want to just quickly give you a reminder about the three productivity hacks that we talked about. One is that you're willing to do it imperfect, right? Imperfect action beats inaction every single time. So, just get the thing done.

Number two, never believe that you have tried all the things. I know there are thousands of books on Amazon that you can go and download about how to be more productive. But really, you just make a decision that you're going to get things done.

Don't believe that you've done it all. Don't believe that you've tried it all. Don't believe that you've done all the money healing stuff there is out there in the world to do. There is another avenue. I don't want you to waste your time by going to read a thousand different books.

I don't have a thousand books on my shelf. I probably have well over a hundred. Maybe one day I'll even count them. No, that would be a terrible waste of time. Most of them I haven't even read cover to cover, I've just taken a few little snippets out of them.

So, don't go buy a thousand books on productivity. Just decide to make decisions and stop being in the land of ‘maybe, I don't know, and indecision.’ There is another path.

Number three, believe that you have enough time. Stop telling yourself the lie that you don't have enough time. The reason that you don't have enough time is because you have an open decision loop. So, just decide that you will get it done.

Again, you have enough time, being imperfect, taking imperfect action, and feeling a little bit raw, feeling a little bit vulnerable. Being courageous is how you grow. Everything you want is outside your comfort zone.

I will see you next week on The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. Thank you for listening in. Bye-bye, for now.

Thanks for listening to The Jewish Entrepreneur Podcast. If you want to stop underselling and underearning and close more sales, you need to clear the limiting money beliefs that are sabotaging your business growth.

Head on over to DebbieSassen.com/mindset and download my free Money Mindset Workbook. Uncover and dissolve money blocks, like hundreds of other entrepreneurs who are now building six-, multi-six-, and seven-figure businesses and creating true financial freedom.