57. The Power of Choice: From Reaction to Intention
So many women leaders move through their careers feeling like their reactions are automatic, like they’re being pulled by emotion, pressure, or other people’s expectations.
In this episode, I want to show you the truth that changed everything for me and for my clients: you always have a choice. Not necessarily a choice over the circumstance, but a choice over how you show up inside it. And that distinction is where your power lives.
Join me this week as we explore what really happens in your brain when you’re triggered, overwhelmed, or put on the spot - and how the path back to your authority is often just one conscious decision away. You’ll walk away with a simple, repeatable practice you can use anytime you feel hijacked or overwhelmed, so you can lead from intention rather than impulse.
You’re invited to the Undeniable Presence Masterclass where you’ll learn 3 steps to lead with command. It’s happening on November 20th, 2025 at 12pm EST, and you can click here to sign up!
What You’ll Learn from this Episode:
Why choice is the second step in the Self-Empowered Leadership Formula and how it creates agency and freedom.
The neuroscience of reactive versus responsive leadership.
Why choosing curiosity over defensiveness rewires your leadership identity and expands possibilities./
How pausing between stimulus and response creates power to choose who you'll be.
The difference between compliance, rebellion, and conscious choice in challenging situations.
How to use the Choice Inventory to reclaim choice when you feel powerless or reactive.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Episodes Related to the Power of Choice:
1. Master Your Emotions, Transform Your Leadership: 3 Strategies for Success
42. Is It Toxic - Or Just Emotionally Immature? How Powerful Women Lead in Male-Dominated Workplaces
Full Episode Transcript:
I was in a coaching session recently, and my client said something that stopped me in my tracks. She said, “I realize I have a choice whether or not to be offended.” That might sound small, but it's everything, because for years, she'd get triggered when senior men questioned her, interrupted her, or pushed back on her ideas. She'd leave those meetings fuming, feeling unseen, disrespected, or less than.
And yet, this time she paused. Instead of reacting, she realized, “I have a choice.” When she said it, I could feel the power in her voice. It wasn't defensive. It was clear. It was grounded. And it reminded me, choice is where freedom begins. So today, I want to explore this. What happens when we stop reacting from habit and start responding from choice? What shifts when we remember we always have agency, even in the moments that test us the most?
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, today's episode is all about choice, the power of choice. I want to share my own story with you and also about the client that I shared in the intro. But choice has been the biggest thing in my life. It is actually one of the main steps of my self-empowered leadership formula because choice makes such a big difference. Choice is our agency, choice is our freedom, choice is our power.
So, I will dive in and share some stories about myself, but let's hear from my client first. Let me tell you a bit more about this client. She's a senior leader, brilliant, strategic, respected. But every time she interacted with higher ups, authority figures, especially men in positions of authority, something inside her would tighten. It wasn't about them, not really. It was about what authority represented. And it is truly why she came to start working with me because she was not feeling heard, she was feeling dismissed, and she was waiting for a lot of external approval.
So, what we're going to talk about today is something that I have helped her to create and how choice is something that really enables her ability to see herself very differently. We're talking about power, approval, the risk of being dismissed.
So we'd been working on what I call creating mutuality with authority because she in her history, right, even with her parents, had really strong views of authority, how we should treat them, the fear we should have around them. And I want you to notice, what did you learn in your family system about authority figures as well? For me, being from Asian descent, we are told to respect our elders, right? We shouldn't challenge them. We shouldn't not say hi to them. They are kind of, important authority figures that we treat with respect, which is helpful to an extent.
This idea that leadership isn't a hierarchy of worth, but a meeting of equals is not something a lot of our upbringing or programming teaches us. So sometimes people are like, what are you talking about? Mutuality with authority, what is that? They have a hard time seeing that both can be true. But I will share with you the reason that I accelerated very quickly in my career, the reason why people asked me to be in rooms where most people were more senior to me, is because I held myself with mutuality when working with these authority figures. Which means that even if someone has positional power, you also bring value too. You bring expertise, insight, emotional intelligence, context. And those are not inferior qualities. They're important qualities.
So when she said to me, I have a choice whether or not to be offended, what she was really saying is, I'm stepping out of the inferiority superiority game. Right? She was stepping out of this game that she was playing inside of herself that had her react in certain ways and had her take on a lot of emotional energy and mental energy. She stopped reacting to power as if it was a threat, and instead met it as a peer.
And again, this is how I think about the way that I show up with other authority figures. I think, you know, I respect them. I think that they have a lot to bring, but I also know what I have to bring. And I have a choice in the moment to show up with my thoughts, my questions, my curiosity. And this is really where the magic happens. This is where you create more agency for yourself, especially in those high stake situations.
And so this real shift that happened for my client, right, it's when you know your own authority. You don't have to fight or prove your authority. You show up as someone who belongs in the room. Because choice, at its core, is about belonging to yourself first. Like if I didn't see myself as worthy of belonging with all these other senior people, I might be sitting in the back of the room. I might not share my opinions. I might not ask the question. I might just say, oh, that question’s dumb, let's not ask it.
Instead, I hold myself as a mutual person in this conversation, even if this person has more positional power than me. I still see myself as valuable and useful for and to them and for myself, right? And so with my client, what was happening a lot of times is from a neuroscience perspective, she would get very triggered and upset historically.
Here's what's fascinating about this from a neuroscience perspective. When we feel threatened, our amygdala, which is, you know, this part of the survival system, the ancient survival part of your brain takes over. It says, this is dangerous, we've got to defend ourselves, we've got to retreat, or we need to people please. There's two sides of it. Either you are going to show up super powerful, really defensive, or you might hide and be more compliant to be safe. That's what happens in those moments when someone questions you or your heart starts racing, your jaw tightens, or your mind goes blank, right? You're actually having a nervous system response that's also, you know, your brain response.
But when we pause, even for a second, right, this is where you learn to intercept yourself. This is where I really help and coach my clients as we talk through the choice you have, right? And often times we're even looking at the choice we made in a certain situation. because even when we see ourselves in the past situation, we're like, I don't know what happened. By owning that choice, that just gives us power, right?
Like I literally just had an argument with my husband a couple weeks ago. And me saying, whoa, I was super defensive. I don't like that part about me. I don't like saying it out loud. But I love the part about me that I have a choice to own it, to claim it and say, I was showing up defensively. And I'm not ashamed about it. It's just what it was. And now I can move forward. I'm a human person learning and growing.
And that part of us, our allowing ourselves to make that choice to own our choices, right? We activate the prefrontal cortex. That part of our brain that brings us back to reasoning, creativity, emotional regulation. If you've ever come to any of my masterclass, which if you haven't, I'd love to have you there, I always start off with this brain piece because it's so important. We have a part of our brain that is all geared for survival. It's always looking out for threats. Then we have this executive functioning part of our brain that is all about expansion. It's about taking calculated risk. It's about doing uncomfortable things to expand, to grow, to speak up, to be heard in a room full of men, to, you know, move across the country, to sign up for a marathon because you know you were meant for more. That's the prefrontal cortex.
And here's the truth. Choice doesn't guarantee the outcome you want. This is just true. Just because we make a choice doesn't mean that it guarantees the outcome of what happens. You can't always predict how someone else will respond. But you can always decide who you'll be in that moment. And that changes everything. So you might not control the outcome, but you control the experience of yourself in it, and that's power.
You being able to say, wow, do I want to make this decision? Just like my client, right? Do I want to be offended in this moment? Is being offended by what this person is asking me going to serve me? Hey, sometimes it could be yes, I'm offended. I'm going to share it. And sometimes it could be no. And these are choices and it's awareness. But the fact that you know you have a choice about this helps you to feel more empowered, to feel like you have power. You can choose.
Sometimes my husband will say something to me and I'm like, whoa, I'm offended. Or I could say, instead of being offended, which might be my gut reaction, I might say, tell me more about this. I'm hearing this, X, Y and Z. I'm hearing you judge me for the way that we're parenting our child. You know, that might be a question, right? So instead of making that choice to be offended, I'm actually asking a question to get more data. So instead of reacting to what I thought I heard, I'm actually clarifying. And there is power in that clarification.
There's power for me. I pause, I calm myself down. I'm not in that survival mode that is going to cause me to have like a bigger fight with my husband. I'm asking for clarity. I'm having him pause so that he can explain to me clearly what he actually means. And then that pause allows us to have a deeper level conversation. One where we're more grounded, one where I feel like, oh, my prefrontal cortex is more online. I'm not feeling defensive. I'm more feeling curious and open to the possibilities.
And this is the same thing that my client noticed. She was like, you know, the finance leader is always asking me these questions, but I noticed, you know, this time when she was talking to him, she was like, you know, they were good questions. I paused instead of getting offended, which was her like reaction, her go-to emotional reaction. She actually said, these are great questions. And instead of feeling shame for not knowing them, because this was her historical pattern as well, she said, I can make a choice. I can make a choice to not feel ashamed for not knowing the answer and instead say, hey, I'm going to go find out the answer and get back to you. This is where she is more engaged and more present to have a conversation with the person in front of her. Instead of going inward, shutting herself down, being angry at him, spinning out, feeling offended, feeling ashamed for not having an answer. This is where that spin out doesn't serve us.
Instead, she's showing up as a powerful leader in the moment, accepting of what is happening, asking questions, informing herself, not so quick to go to that survival brain. And this is power people. This is so important.
So now I want to be real about this, right? Choice doesn't always feel available. I get it. Sometimes you're like, I didn't have a choice, especially when you spent years adapting to systems that reward conformity, silence or self, you know, abandonment. Especially for women, we have been taught to be nice, to abandon ourselves in certain ways, to put other people's emotions ahead of our own. And so we may be reacting to some of that programming. When you've been taught that speaking up is risky or that challenging authority will cost you, there's punishment on the other side. In those moments, it's easy to forget that you have options.
This is exactly why people come and coach with me. To understand, you know, I know I have choice, I know I have power, but I don't really feel like it in those moments. This is what we unpack together. This is how I use my three step Self-Empowered Leadership Formula, which is, you know, number one about context and curiosity, number two about choice, and number three, commitment to who you're becoming. And it's not easy. This is why, you know, step two is really about understanding yourself.
So you might think I can't either comply or I can't rebel. This might be something really hard for you, especially if you've grown up, you know, respecting authority so deeply that it feels like you're breaking big, big roles. And because in between compliance and rebellion is choice. There is a choice. There's something you can do in that middle ground. There's a lot of things you can do actually. And choice is quieter, but infinitely more powerful than just complying or rebelling.
It's the decision to see a failure as data instead of a verdict, right? Like this is why if you are doing bold things and new things in your life, your ability to bounce back is really about your relationship with choice. Are you going to choose to see this as a failure, an indictment of, you know, your self worth? Or are you going to see this as learning? Hey, this is just information. This is just feedback that I get to be curious about. One decision, one choice leads to curiosity. Wow, what can I learn from this? When I do it again, what will I do instead? The other one, right, seeing it as a failure, a punishment, an indictment, a verdict, will lead you to more shame.
And when you're in shame, you're going to make more choices that are more in that survival brain instead of curiosity. When you're in curiosity, your prefrontal cortex is blinking with lights. It's, you know, trying to connect a lot of things. It's trying to solve things. But if you're in that shame and that heavy emotion of sadness and guilt and the thought of like not surviving, your brain's not going to give you the really complex, resourceful, advanced thinking that prefrontal cortex will do.
So every time you choose, every time you make a choice, you rewire your leadership identity. If you choose curiosity more and more and you don't go to that like reactiveness, then you create an expansiveness in your leadership identity. You're teaching your nervous system that you're safe to lead even when it feels uncertain. It's saying it's okay, this uncertainty, these emotions I have, they're okay. I can still choose. I can still make a choice.
So if you're listening and thinking, “but I don't always feel like I have a choice.” That's okay. Start small. Notice your next reaction. A tone that irritates you, an email that stings, a moment of doubt, and ask yourself, what choices do I actually have right now in this moment? You'll be surprised by the space that opens up. I want to leave you with something practical, a little reflection I call the Choice Inventory. If you're journaling or you're just reflecting on your commute, try this.
Where in your life or leadership do you currently feel powerless or reactive? What story are you telling yourself about the situation? And is it true? What would it look like to reclaim even 1% more choice there? What choice aligns with your growth, not your fear.
I want you to hear this. You may not always love the options available to you, but the moment you remember that you have them, you're already free. Because choice creates movement, and movement creates momentum. And momentum creates transformation. Every time you remember you have a choice, you become safer, steadier, more grounded as a leader. You stop outsourcing your peace to other people's emotional reactions. You stop performing for approval. You stop shrinking when challenged, and you start showing others, consciously or not, that they have a choice too. That's how cultures shift, not from control, but from consciousness.
So the next time something triggers you, pause, take a breath, and remind yourself, I have a choice. Because that moment, right there, is where power begins. Not the power to control, but the power to choose who you'll be.
If this episode resonated with you, share it with a woman who's learning to stand in her power, to own her choices, to be more real and authentic in her life. And if you're ready to go deeper with this to lead with more clarity, calm and commands, I'll guide you inside my coaching work. You'll find the details in the notes. You can book a coaching consultation with me. But until next time, remember, power isn't found in outcomes. It's found in the space between stimulus and response. And in that space is your choice. And your choice can either bring more safety and security or more growth and freedom. Right? This is your choice. And there's no judgment in your choice. The awareness around your choice is powerful. It's powerful to own your choices.
Just like I said, it's powerful for me to own when I'm defensive with my husband. But at least I own that choice. I know it's mine. I have the agency. And it's super empowering when I say, I'm not going to show up defensively this time. I'm going to pause. I get to choose something else. I'm not going to shame myself. I'm learning here too.
All right, go out, make powerful choices, be aware of your choices, have some fun with this. It's not that heavy. The more you're curious about yourself, the more that prefrontal cortex is going to come out and play and show you how brilliant and the genius that's inside of you already. And of course, the power. All right, have a great and beautiful week ahead. I'll see you soon.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
And yet, this time she paused. Instead of reacting, she realized, “I have a choice.” When she said it, I could feel the power in her voice. It wasn't defensive. It was clear. It was grounded. And it reminded me, choice is where freedom begins. So today, I want to explore this. What happens when we stop reacting from habit and start responding from choice? What shifts when we remember we always have agency, even in the moments that test us the most?
Welcome to The Balanced Leader, hosted by Yann Dang, a Leadership and Life Coach with over 20 years of corporate experience. Drawing from her journey as a former global finance leader and second-generation immigrant, Yann understands the unique challenges women face in male-dominated workplaces.
Each episode offers insights on balancing masculine and feminine energies, mastering soft skills, and building emotional intelligence. Join us to transform frustration into empowerment and unlock your authentic leadership potential.
Hey podcast listeners, today's episode is all about choice, the power of choice. I want to share my own story with you and also about the client that I shared in the intro. But choice has been the biggest thing in my life. It is actually one of the main steps of my self-empowered leadership formula because choice makes such a big difference. Choice is our agency, choice is our freedom, choice is our power.
So, I will dive in and share some stories about myself, but let's hear from my client first. Let me tell you a bit more about this client. She's a senior leader, brilliant, strategic, respected. But every time she interacted with higher ups, authority figures, especially men in positions of authority, something inside her would tighten. It wasn't about them, not really. It was about what authority represented. And it is truly why she came to start working with me because she was not feeling heard, she was feeling dismissed, and she was waiting for a lot of external approval.
So, what we're going to talk about today is something that I have helped her to create and how choice is something that really enables her ability to see herself very differently. We're talking about power, approval, the risk of being dismissed.
So we'd been working on what I call creating mutuality with authority because she in her history, right, even with her parents, had really strong views of authority, how we should treat them, the fear we should have around them. And I want you to notice, what did you learn in your family system about authority figures as well? For me, being from Asian descent, we are told to respect our elders, right? We shouldn't challenge them. We shouldn't not say hi to them. They are kind of, important authority figures that we treat with respect, which is helpful to an extent.
This idea that leadership isn't a hierarchy of worth, but a meeting of equals is not something a lot of our upbringing or programming teaches us. So sometimes people are like, what are you talking about? Mutuality with authority, what is that? They have a hard time seeing that both can be true. But I will share with you the reason that I accelerated very quickly in my career, the reason why people asked me to be in rooms where most people were more senior to me, is because I held myself with mutuality when working with these authority figures. Which means that even if someone has positional power, you also bring value too. You bring expertise, insight, emotional intelligence, context. And those are not inferior qualities. They're important qualities.
So when she said to me, I have a choice whether or not to be offended, what she was really saying is, I'm stepping out of the inferiority superiority game. Right? She was stepping out of this game that she was playing inside of herself that had her react in certain ways and had her take on a lot of emotional energy and mental energy. She stopped reacting to power as if it was a threat, and instead met it as a peer.
And again, this is how I think about the way that I show up with other authority figures. I think, you know, I respect them. I think that they have a lot to bring, but I also know what I have to bring. And I have a choice in the moment to show up with my thoughts, my questions, my curiosity. And this is really where the magic happens. This is where you create more agency for yourself, especially in those high stake situations.
And so this real shift that happened for my client, right, it's when you know your own authority. You don't have to fight or prove your authority. You show up as someone who belongs in the room. Because choice, at its core, is about belonging to yourself first. Like if I didn't see myself as worthy of belonging with all these other senior people, I might be sitting in the back of the room. I might not share my opinions. I might not ask the question. I might just say, oh, that question’s dumb, let's not ask it.
Instead, I hold myself as a mutual person in this conversation, even if this person has more positional power than me. I still see myself as valuable and useful for and to them and for myself, right? And so with my client, what was happening a lot of times is from a neuroscience perspective, she would get very triggered and upset historically.
Here's what's fascinating about this from a neuroscience perspective. When we feel threatened, our amygdala, which is, you know, this part of the survival system, the ancient survival part of your brain takes over. It says, this is dangerous, we've got to defend ourselves, we've got to retreat, or we need to people please. There's two sides of it. Either you are going to show up super powerful, really defensive, or you might hide and be more compliant to be safe. That's what happens in those moments when someone questions you or your heart starts racing, your jaw tightens, or your mind goes blank, right? You're actually having a nervous system response that's also, you know, your brain response.
But when we pause, even for a second, right, this is where you learn to intercept yourself. This is where I really help and coach my clients as we talk through the choice you have, right? And often times we're even looking at the choice we made in a certain situation. because even when we see ourselves in the past situation, we're like, I don't know what happened. By owning that choice, that just gives us power, right?
Like I literally just had an argument with my husband a couple weeks ago. And me saying, whoa, I was super defensive. I don't like that part about me. I don't like saying it out loud. But I love the part about me that I have a choice to own it, to claim it and say, I was showing up defensively. And I'm not ashamed about it. It's just what it was. And now I can move forward. I'm a human person learning and growing.
And that part of us, our allowing ourselves to make that choice to own our choices, right? We activate the prefrontal cortex. That part of our brain that brings us back to reasoning, creativity, emotional regulation. If you've ever come to any of my masterclass, which if you haven't, I'd love to have you there, I always start off with this brain piece because it's so important. We have a part of our brain that is all geared for survival. It's always looking out for threats. Then we have this executive functioning part of our brain that is all about expansion. It's about taking calculated risk. It's about doing uncomfortable things to expand, to grow, to speak up, to be heard in a room full of men, to, you know, move across the country, to sign up for a marathon because you know you were meant for more. That's the prefrontal cortex.
And here's the truth. Choice doesn't guarantee the outcome you want. This is just true. Just because we make a choice doesn't mean that it guarantees the outcome of what happens. You can't always predict how someone else will respond. But you can always decide who you'll be in that moment. And that changes everything. So you might not control the outcome, but you control the experience of yourself in it, and that's power.
You being able to say, wow, do I want to make this decision? Just like my client, right? Do I want to be offended in this moment? Is being offended by what this person is asking me going to serve me? Hey, sometimes it could be yes, I'm offended. I'm going to share it. And sometimes it could be no. And these are choices and it's awareness. But the fact that you know you have a choice about this helps you to feel more empowered, to feel like you have power. You can choose.
Sometimes my husband will say something to me and I'm like, whoa, I'm offended. Or I could say, instead of being offended, which might be my gut reaction, I might say, tell me more about this. I'm hearing this, X, Y and Z. I'm hearing you judge me for the way that we're parenting our child. You know, that might be a question, right? So instead of making that choice to be offended, I'm actually asking a question to get more data. So instead of reacting to what I thought I heard, I'm actually clarifying. And there is power in that clarification.
There's power for me. I pause, I calm myself down. I'm not in that survival mode that is going to cause me to have like a bigger fight with my husband. I'm asking for clarity. I'm having him pause so that he can explain to me clearly what he actually means. And then that pause allows us to have a deeper level conversation. One where we're more grounded, one where I feel like, oh, my prefrontal cortex is more online. I'm not feeling defensive. I'm more feeling curious and open to the possibilities.
And this is the same thing that my client noticed. She was like, you know, the finance leader is always asking me these questions, but I noticed, you know, this time when she was talking to him, she was like, you know, they were good questions. I paused instead of getting offended, which was her like reaction, her go-to emotional reaction. She actually said, these are great questions. And instead of feeling shame for not knowing them, because this was her historical pattern as well, she said, I can make a choice. I can make a choice to not feel ashamed for not knowing the answer and instead say, hey, I'm going to go find out the answer and get back to you. This is where she is more engaged and more present to have a conversation with the person in front of her. Instead of going inward, shutting herself down, being angry at him, spinning out, feeling offended, feeling ashamed for not having an answer. This is where that spin out doesn't serve us.
Instead, she's showing up as a powerful leader in the moment, accepting of what is happening, asking questions, informing herself, not so quick to go to that survival brain. And this is power people. This is so important.
So now I want to be real about this, right? Choice doesn't always feel available. I get it. Sometimes you're like, I didn't have a choice, especially when you spent years adapting to systems that reward conformity, silence or self, you know, abandonment. Especially for women, we have been taught to be nice, to abandon ourselves in certain ways, to put other people's emotions ahead of our own. And so we may be reacting to some of that programming. When you've been taught that speaking up is risky or that challenging authority will cost you, there's punishment on the other side. In those moments, it's easy to forget that you have options.
This is exactly why people come and coach with me. To understand, you know, I know I have choice, I know I have power, but I don't really feel like it in those moments. This is what we unpack together. This is how I use my three step Self-Empowered Leadership Formula, which is, you know, number one about context and curiosity, number two about choice, and number three, commitment to who you're becoming. And it's not easy. This is why, you know, step two is really about understanding yourself.
So you might think I can't either comply or I can't rebel. This might be something really hard for you, especially if you've grown up, you know, respecting authority so deeply that it feels like you're breaking big, big roles. And because in between compliance and rebellion is choice. There is a choice. There's something you can do in that middle ground. There's a lot of things you can do actually. And choice is quieter, but infinitely more powerful than just complying or rebelling.
It's the decision to see a failure as data instead of a verdict, right? Like this is why if you are doing bold things and new things in your life, your ability to bounce back is really about your relationship with choice. Are you going to choose to see this as a failure, an indictment of, you know, your self worth? Or are you going to see this as learning? Hey, this is just information. This is just feedback that I get to be curious about. One decision, one choice leads to curiosity. Wow, what can I learn from this? When I do it again, what will I do instead? The other one, right, seeing it as a failure, a punishment, an indictment, a verdict, will lead you to more shame.
And when you're in shame, you're going to make more choices that are more in that survival brain instead of curiosity. When you're in curiosity, your prefrontal cortex is blinking with lights. It's, you know, trying to connect a lot of things. It's trying to solve things. But if you're in that shame and that heavy emotion of sadness and guilt and the thought of like not surviving, your brain's not going to give you the really complex, resourceful, advanced thinking that prefrontal cortex will do.
So every time you choose, every time you make a choice, you rewire your leadership identity. If you choose curiosity more and more and you don't go to that like reactiveness, then you create an expansiveness in your leadership identity. You're teaching your nervous system that you're safe to lead even when it feels uncertain. It's saying it's okay, this uncertainty, these emotions I have, they're okay. I can still choose. I can still make a choice.
So if you're listening and thinking, “but I don't always feel like I have a choice.” That's okay. Start small. Notice your next reaction. A tone that irritates you, an email that stings, a moment of doubt, and ask yourself, what choices do I actually have right now in this moment? You'll be surprised by the space that opens up. I want to leave you with something practical, a little reflection I call the Choice Inventory. If you're journaling or you're just reflecting on your commute, try this.
Where in your life or leadership do you currently feel powerless or reactive? What story are you telling yourself about the situation? And is it true? What would it look like to reclaim even 1% more choice there? What choice aligns with your growth, not your fear.
I want you to hear this. You may not always love the options available to you, but the moment you remember that you have them, you're already free. Because choice creates movement, and movement creates momentum. And momentum creates transformation. Every time you remember you have a choice, you become safer, steadier, more grounded as a leader. You stop outsourcing your peace to other people's emotional reactions. You stop performing for approval. You stop shrinking when challenged, and you start showing others, consciously or not, that they have a choice too. That's how cultures shift, not from control, but from consciousness.
So the next time something triggers you, pause, take a breath, and remind yourself, I have a choice. Because that moment, right there, is where power begins. Not the power to control, but the power to choose who you'll be.
If this episode resonated with you, share it with a woman who's learning to stand in her power, to own her choices, to be more real and authentic in her life. And if you're ready to go deeper with this to lead with more clarity, calm and commands, I'll guide you inside my coaching work. You'll find the details in the notes. You can book a coaching consultation with me. But until next time, remember, power isn't found in outcomes. It's found in the space between stimulus and response. And in that space is your choice. And your choice can either bring more safety and security or more growth and freedom. Right? This is your choice. And there's no judgment in your choice. The awareness around your choice is powerful. It's powerful to own your choices.
Just like I said, it's powerful for me to own when I'm defensive with my husband. But at least I own that choice. I know it's mine. I have the agency. And it's super empowering when I say, I'm not going to show up defensively this time. I'm going to pause. I get to choose something else. I'm not going to shame myself. I'm learning here too.
All right, go out, make powerful choices, be aware of your choices, have some fun with this. It's not that heavy. The more you're curious about yourself, the more that prefrontal cortex is going to come out and play and show you how brilliant and the genius that's inside of you already. And of course, the power. All right, have a great and beautiful week ahead. I'll see you soon.
Thank you for being a part of The Balanced Leader community. We hope you found today's episode inspiring and actionable. For more resources and to connect with Yann, visit us at aspire-coaching.co. Until next time, keep leading with confidence and purpose.
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