MM_Sept2026 - E5 Decisions without drama_TRANSCRIPT
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[00:00:00] Dr. Julia Bowlin: It means that every decision we make structurally is really a guess dressed up as a plan. That deserves a restatement. Every decision we make structurally is just a guess dressed up as a plan
[00:00:24] Hi there. I'm Dr. Julia Bowlin, and you are listening to Mindset Medicine, your weekly dose of personal awareness. I ask you and invite you to take one deep breath and let this episode meet you exactly where you are. This month is October, and we're spending time with decisions, the ones we make, the ones we avoid, and the ones that quietly wear us down before we even realize it.
[00:00:48] This month, we're focusing on choices that feel grounded instead of draining, and last episode, I looked at the weight of a future that hasn't happened yet, the dread, the [00:01:00] bracing, and the energy spent on something that's still unresolved. And to close out this month, I want to bring all of it back to one simple idea.
[00:01:10] Every decision we make is really just our brain's best guess, and the goal was never to guess perfectly. It's to trust the guess even though we keep moving and to update ourselves gracefully when life hands us something we didn't predict at all. And here's something I've come to believe deeply.
[00:01:32] Decisions don't have to come with drama attached to them. I say that as someone who has, on occasion, turned a fairly simple choice into a full theatrical production, complete with a preamble, a beginning, a middle, an end, and each one running through my mind with its own way of succeeding or its own way of failing long before my decision was ever walked out on that stage.
[00:01:58] But drama is optional, [00:02:00] and it's a layer that we add on top of our choices, not something that's built into the choice itself. Let me tell you about my garden. Before my late husband Ricky passed, he wanted to get me something, something that would last into the future. Some heirloom seeds for my garden, vegetable seeds, herb seeds, flower seeds, and a set of survival seed packets that I wanted to keep for my future, and I started them in late February, early March as seedlings.
[00:02:31] I was nurturing them along in my porch or in my house, depending on the weather, imagining exactly how I was going to plant them once they were ready And around that same time, I hired someone to help me outside with my trees and my bushes, and he's been a godsend. His name is actually Outside Rick. He's got the same name as my late husband, which I will admit is sometimes a little jarring.
[00:02:54] Anyway, he could see that I was deep in grief and deep in my mourning and struggling to actually [00:03:00] get my garden in the way I normally would have. It was late in the season. So without me knowing, without even asking, he gently gave me a gift where he went ahead and planted a full garden. Now, keep in mind, I had three four-by-12 foot raised plots for my garden.
[00:03:17] Not a small amount of gardening. It was a beautiful gift. And the next day, however, I walked out with all my beautiful seedlings in hand, ready to plant them myself. And there it was, my garden already planted. There were poles and there were labels, and I'm like, a Twilight Zone moment. I was confused, right?
[00:03:42] And let me slow down a f- a second on that moment because I actually had a choice how I was going to react. I could have felt robbed of all the time I spent nurturing my seedlings and the meanings behind those, and now they had nowhere to go. Or I could have felt like I'd lost [00:04:00] control, and this wasn't my plan, this pre-planted garden.
[00:04:03] This wasn't the garden I pictured in my head. I could have even turned it into a small grief moment, stacked right on top of the much bigger one that I was carrying over the loss of a place for my seedlings that my husband gave me. But that's not what happened. What I actually felt was deep gratitude.
[00:04:22] Someone saw me struggling and quietly took care of something I just couldn't get to myself. And to be honest, I don't think my seedlings would have survived anyway. And when I actually looked at the garden, it was beautiful. He tilled it. He prepped it. He planted it. It wasn't the garden I planned, no, but it was just a garden, and it was planted with love and still beautiful.
[00:04:48] And here's what I think was really going on underneath everything in that moment for me. Every decision I'd made up to that point, asking for the seedlings, having the seedlings, [00:05:00] grieving my husband while he wasn't there, holding my seedlings, starting these little seeds, imagining where they'd go, picturing how it would all look, it was all really a guess, folks.
[00:05:11] My brain had built a picture of how this was supposed to unfold based upon everything I knew at the time. So when reality showed up looking nothing like that picture, I had a choice what to do with the gap between the two, and that gap is where drama usually lives. Not in what actually happened, but in how tightly I was gripping a picture I'd made in my head.
[00:05:37] And once we as people start noticing this pattern that we have, a gap between what we hope or predict or assume is going to happen versus what actually shows up, once we start noticing that pattern, it starts to appear everywhere, and it's not just in my garden. So in my case, the gap was between what I'd predicted for myself, me, [00:06:00] out there planting in the sunshine, spending hours with my hands in the dirt, seedling by seedling, placing them gently with love, versus what actually showed up Which was so much simpler than all that.
[00:06:15] You see, the garden was just already there, and once I released my grip on the version would of what I predicted, what came up wasn't loss. It was, honestly, a huge relief, a genuine physical breath of relief, like something I didn't even know I was carrying, that I was able to sit down. And that same gap shows up in plenty of other places in our lives as well.
[00:06:41] It could be a version of a project at work that comes back looking nothing like you pictured, or a conversation that might have gone somewhere where you didn't expect, or maybe it's a plan for an evening that may have gotten rearranged by something outside of your control. Every one of those moments have [00:07:00] structure, a prediction that we might have been carrying, and a reality that didn't quite match it.
[00:07:07] And here's why the gap exists in the first place. Our brains are built to predict. You've heard me say this many times. They're built to predict constantly and everywhere. We don't experience raw reality. We experience our brain's best guess about reality, and we update it in real time as new information comes in, and it's not a flaw, it's efficiency.
[00:07:33] It's how we function without having to consciously calculate every single input our brain gets every second from scratch every time. But here's where it gets tricky. Because we're so used to living inside our own predictions, our own expectations and assumptions on how we think things will unfold, that it's easy to forget that they were ever guesses.
[00:07:57] We start treating the picture in our head, [00:08:00] the plan, the layout, the way we thought it would go, as if it was the only acceptable outcome. And so when reality diverges from our picture and our image, and it will, the drama in our head isn't really about the divergence itself, it's about how tightly we fused ourselves to the guess we gave about our future I hope that makes sense.
[00:08:27] And here's where the meaning actually shifts. A decision made with all the mental gymnastics, with all the drama, with all the spinning around in heads, does that mean that everything's gonna go exactly according to our plan because we sat there and ruminated on it forever? Folks, no matter how much we try to control it, prepare for it, or plan for every version of it, it's not gonna happen.
[00:08:53] Not even close. And if it does, hooray, right? Celebrate. But that almost never [00:09:00] happens anyway. It just means we can hold our plans maybe a little looser, right? Loosely enough so that when life changes things on us, we can change right along with it, instead of digging in and fighting for the version that was always just in our head.
[00:09:20] Think about what actually happened with my garden. My plan was I grow the seedlings, I plant them myself, I control how it turns out, which is, I'll be honest, always an experience, an experiment, and never what I think anyway. So what actually happened at this time, though, is that someone else planted for me out of love without even asking.
[00:09:43] If I'd held tightly to my original plan, the emotional meaning behind that plan, that moment would have felt like a huge loss, and I won't lie, it did in- initially, but because I held my garden loosely, it became a [00:10:00] gift instead. And I'm gonna tell you, what grew out of that garden was more than I'd ever planted in my life.
[00:10:06] Quite fun, actually. So that's really the whole shift, is trusting that a decision doesn't mean trusting that it'll turn out exactly how we pictured it. It means trusting ourselves enough to meet whatever actually shows up, even when it looks nothing like the plan we had, without needing the plan to have had been right in order to just be okay The garden did not need to match what I'd pictured it to be beautiful.
[00:10:38] It just needed to be looked at clearly instead of compared to a picture that only existed in my head. So stay with me here for a second because there's a name. There's always a name. I tell you this, there's a name for what's happening in my brain that morning. Neuroscientists increasingly describe the brain as a prediction [00:11:00] machine.
[00:11:00] I've talked about this over and over again. It doesn't passively record the world the way a camera does. It actively guesses what's coming based upon everything we learned before, and then it compares it to the guess that's actually coming towards us. So some researchers even describe the perception itself this way.
[00:11:22] It's less like a direct recording of reality and more like a carefully managed, constantly updated best guess about what's out there, what's coming towards us based upon our past. And it's not a weakness in how we're built, it's actually just like a computer, remarkably efficient. Our brains that have had to process every deal of reality from the past from scratch in every moment could never keep up, right?
[00:11:51] Too many things happening, so we base things upon our experiences and our assumptions and expectations. And predicting the future is [00:12:00] just a shortcut that our brains use in order to help us function. But it means that every decision we make structurally is really a guess dressed up as a plan. That deserves a restatement.
[00:12:17] Every decision we make structurally is just a guess dressed up as a plan And when I walked out and found my garden already planted, my brain's prediction and reality, they didn't match, right? Here I am with seedlings, and yet my garden's planted. Huh? What? How do I do that, right? That mismatch is normal, and it happens constantly in way far smaller things than what my garden experience was.
[00:12:46] It might be a hallway conversation that goes differently than you expected, or a meeting that takes a turn, or a day that doesn't look like anything on how we pictured it was going to go that morning. I know many of [00:13:00] you have had that experience. You think a day is gonna unfold a certain way, and lo and behold, it doesn't.
[00:13:06] Here's the shift in meaning. The goal of our brains was never to predict perfectly. The brain doesn't do that, ever. The goal is just to notice that there's a mismatch when it happens, and to meet it with curiosity instead of resistance, to actually ask what's actually here, instead of insisting with our brain on what should have been or was supposed to be there.
[00:13:30] And when that mismatch touches something we've lost, or someone we've lost in my case, there's real, real room for tenderness there, and it's important to update that too. It's not about rushing past what the original picture meant to us in our brains, or even pretending that the gap doesn't hurt or ache a little bit.
[00:13:51] It's simply about letting the update happen anyway, the reality versus what we expected, and being gentle in its own [00:14:00] time with the same grace we'd offer anyone whose careful, loving plans met a reality they didn't see coming. And here's where the mindset itself gets to shift. This is how we can change our mindset here.
[00:14:15] This is Mindset Medicine Podcast, by the way. We don't change the behavior first. We change the story underneath the planning. You see, most of us carry some version of an old script in our brain. "If it didn't go the way I planned, I did something wrong," or, "I should have predicted better," or, "I should have controlled things more tightly."
[00:14:39] None of that's true. It's not. None of that's true. That's the story in our brain. A missed guess isn't proof of having bad judgment. It's just what happens when a brain that's constantly guessing runs into a messy, unpredictable, and wonderfully stubborn world [00:15:00] that never signed up to match anybody's plans to begin with.
[00:15:05] Just sit in that for a second, right? Just sit in it. Most of us kinda know this in our head, but we don't know this in our heart, right? Here's another way to hold that same moment. Not, "I should've known," but, "I made my best guess with what I had, and now I get to meet what's actually here." Those are two very different stories to tell ourselves, and honestly, only one of them is any fun to live inside of anyway.
[00:15:32] So how about we lighten up a little bit? Let's ease up some of those plans in our brains. Instead of, "This isn't what I planned, so something's wrong," it can become, "This isn't what I planned. Criminy, now I get to decide what to do with it." Throw your hands up in the air, folks. You can stomp a little bit, be a little sad or a little frustrated, but drop the drama.
[00:15:54] That's the whole trick behind these decisions. Drop the drama, right? [00:16:00] I get to decide what to do with that now, right? The gap between predicting the future and reality never actually closes because our brains don't work that way. Our brain is going to keep trying to predict, right? But the distance between noticing that we have a gap and making peace with it, folks, that's ours to shrink so that our drama doesn't get to move in and fill up the stories instead.
[00:16:26] Pivot and shift. Accept and change. Be aware that you predicted and it was wrong, and accept where you are now, and make it okay, and give yourself grace that you aren't a perfect predictor My garden taught me that. The prediction was mine. The outcome by far wasn't what I pictured, and the beauty of it never once depended on both of them matching.
[00:16:53] Never would I have planted and learned how to grow spaghetti squash or garlic [00:17:00] or melons. I haven't done those. I'm usually a green bean, tomato kinda girl. But my garden taught me that, right? The prediction was mine, the outcome wasn't what I pictured, and it's okay. All right, so before moving into today's unicity moment, here's something worth sitting for just a beat.
[00:17:21] Somewhere recently, there might be a decision that didn't quite unfold the way you predicted. Maybe it was a plan that came back looking like the garden that got planted without you, instead of the one that you pictured growing in your own heads. Heads? Hands. Yeah. Maybe it's, was disappointing at first, and maybe you might feel a little bit of sting even if it turned out fine.
[00:17:46] What would it look like to look at that gap for just a moment without deciding what it means that something went wrong? Not the plan you had, just actually what's there. How about we set the comparison down for a [00:18:00] second? You don't have to answer this out loud. You had an imagining. Things didn't go quite how you thought.
[00:18:08] How about we don't think it things went wrong, but the world just moved on in its own way? I want you to sit there. We're gonna go into this. Before I begin, as always, a gentle note. I'm doing a guided experience here, and it is an invitation to slow down and allow yourself to turn inward, to be focused on yourself, the inner thoughts, the inner mind, and you're always in control.
[00:18:34] You can open your eyes at any time, adjust your position, or simply listen without participating. There's nothing you have to do. Just be present if you can. And if you are operating machinery or driving, you know, do not close your eyes during this section. You're welcome to listen and stay present on what your task is, but save this part if you need to for another time where you can be still.
[00:18:57] And whenever it feels right, I invite you to [00:19:00] take a nice slow breath in. We don't do this often enough. Let your body stretch. Hmm. And one more like that, breathing in
[00:19:15] And out And now gently I invite you to take a fist in your hands and squeeze gently, not too hard, just enough to notice it and hold for a moment. Squeezing the fist and relaxing and releasing the fist. Feel that difference between the squeeze and the release. How about we do that one more time? Big breath in and squeeze Breath out and release
[00:19:52] Notice how much heavier or how much looser your hands feel right now [00:20:00] And let's take one more deep breath in and let it out slowly And whenever it feels right, just soften your gaze, and if comfortable, go ahead and let your eyes gently close
[00:20:18] Ah, the peace of being present And imagine a small seed, a little seed resting in the soil and noticing the soil around it. Maybe it's cool and a little damp, holding on to moisture perhaps from a most recent rain Maybe it's warm, sun-soaked, holding the heat of the day even as the light of the day has faded Either way, that seed feels wrapped with a snug and gentle weight pressing in from [00:21:00] every side Not a crushing weight, just, just enough pressure to hold the seed exactly where it needs to be You see the seed doesn't have to do anything right now.
[00:21:15] It's just in rest here, held And at its, at its own pace, something begins to shift inside. A softening, a gentle movement, a slow, quiet loosening deep within the shell. Nothing's visible yet from the outside. Nothing you could point to and say, "There, that's it. That's the moment." No, just a slow internal change, patient and unhurried, exactly the pace it needs to be And a small crack, eventually [00:22:00] a release happens.
[00:22:02] The beginning of something reaching downward for root and something else just quietly reaching up
[00:22:16] Take a breath, and let that same quality of quiet trust settle into your chest. Not needing to know exactly how or when things will grow, just resting in the fact that your own growing is already underway, held warm or cool exactly as it needs to be
[00:22:46] And with your next exhale, let your shoulders soften. There's nowhere else you need to be right now except right here with this seed [00:23:00] and this soil and this breath You see, somewhere in your life, there is a decision you made, a seed you planted in one form or another that didn't grow the way you expected You might imagine that decision now resting in the same soil as the seed.
[00:23:25] Not to fix it, not to redesign it, just to notice it exactly as it grew, rather than how you pictured it growing And whatever bloomed inside of your plan, that's not a failure of the seed, and it's not a failure of the plan that you planted. It's simply what grew. Given everything that actually happened along the way, some of it in your control and plenty of it not [00:24:00] This quiet, open, receiving kind of trust, it doesn't have to just stay here in this moment.
[00:24:07] You can take that with you. It's the trust of knowing you did your part. You planted, you tended, you cared, and then you let the rest belong to something much bigger than your plan You're not giving up. You're not stopping caring how things turn out. You're just loosening the grip enough to let life do what it does, and trusting what grows will be worth receiving, even when it looks like nothing what you pictured Right now that trust is still here with you.
[00:24:48] Letting your palms turn upwards, resting open on your lap or on your sides, however that feels natural. Feel them [00:25:00] opening like that. Nothing gripped, nothing held back And right now, while this trust is still with you, let your hands hold whatever's unfolding in your life exactly as it is No judgment from you about how things are going, no shame from wishing it had gone differently, just allowance.
[00:25:28] Whatever grew instead of your plan, whatever is still out of your control right now, let it rest in your open palms as something safe, something that's okay. Not because it isn't exactly what you wanted, because you just don't have to grip it or fix it or force it into a shape you imagined for it to be to still be safe for you to hold.[00:26:00]
[00:26:00] It's allowed to just be what it is, and you're allowed to be open to it.
[00:26:10] And as you feel your open palms, let the same open stillness settle into your chest, your shoulders, and your breath This is what trust actually feels like in your body. Open hands, open heart, open and ready
[00:26:39] And now that your hands know this feeling, you can call it back anytime just by turning your palms upward anywhere, anytime. You can bring this exact openness with you. Your hands remember. They're ready to receive what actually grew[00:27:00]
[00:27:03] And whatever came up for you while you were sitting with that decision, it doesn't need to be resolved right now. You can simply just know it, a seed planted that grew into something of its own. And gently, so gently, just bring your attention back to the room, the sounds around you, the surface beneath you, your own breath Letting your fingers and toes move a little bit if that feels good to you.
[00:27:36] Whatever feels right, and whenever it feels right, gently let your eyes open and come back to the present moment, feeling better and more refreshed than you did before this moment. That open palm trust is available to you anytime, not just here, but the next time a decision in your life grows into something other than [00:28:00] what you pictured.
[00:28:01] Open hands. Whatever's actually there can be held. And maybe this episode, which really isn't about my garden, was really about a space we have between what we assume and predict in our brains and what actually happens. It was about choosing to meet that space with an open heart and an open hand instead of creating drama and stories around things that don't go our own way.
[00:28:27] And this month, we walked through a lot of space together, the exhaustion of a thousand small choices, the differences between failing and being full, and the fact that being wrong is not the opposite of being wise. The weight of dreading a future that hasn't happened yet, and now this, the simple truth that every decision was always just our best guess, and guess was never the point.
[00:28:57] Trusting ourselves enough to meet whatever actually [00:29:00] grows, that's the point. Next month, we are turning towards something different. Not everything we carry actually belongs to us. Some of it was handed down by our parents. Some of it came from religion or absorbed quietly through friends without either of us ever really choosing it.
[00:29:19] And some of it we learned out of survival, such as coping skills we built when things didn't go well for us growing up that we just kept using ever since, long after they stopped being needed. And next month in October, we're gonna be questioning what still fits and what doesn't. If any of this month's series landed with you, I would love to hear about it.
[00:29:41] Please find me on Instagram or join my newsletter at juliabowlinmd.com where I show what's coming up next first. Thank you so much for spending time with me. And until next time, may you be happy, may you be healthy, and may you be fulfilled.[00:30:00]
[00:30:04] Outro: Thank you for listening to Mindset Medicine with your host, Dr. Julia Bowlin. To learn more about Mindset Medicine, go to www.juliabowlinmd.com and connect with Dr. Julia to find out how our team can help you today. Join us again next week for more expert tips, tools, and strategies to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser in your personal and professional life
