 Today, I'm gonna share with you the Footless Joe proven method to make really difficult decisions. For instance, I chose to cut off my own leg and you can too. Just kidding, please keep your limbs. Hello there, my beautiful, lovely internet friends. Welcome back to the floor of my living room. I filmed my most recent video here and I came to the realization that this is actually kind of cozy and comfy and I like it here. If you are a returning viewer, you might be familiar with my story of how two and a half years ago I had to make the decision to have a leg amputation for hope at a better life. And that's sort of the sentence that I always say that kind of covers the agonizing period of having to choose to lose a part of myself forever, to lose a body part. Today I wanted to share how mentally I made that decision. One of the most difficult, confusing, bizarre decisions you can ever make because the reality is that life is not simple or uncomplicated and many times we have to make impossible decisions. So where do we even start with that? Now, as we dive into the crevices of my consciousness and how I decided to cut off my own leg, whenever I say that it makes it sound like I did it. Don't worry, surgeons did. I wanted to take just a moment to thank our sponsor Skillshare. You've definitely heard me talk about Skillshare before they are a company that I'm honored to be able to work with because I actively use their products. Skillshare is an outstanding online learning community that connects you with all kinds of inspiring and creative classes and courses. Developing ourselves is not only a wonderful and fun thing to do, it can also really help to inform and clarify goals and visions and help you make difficult choices. 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And now let's get back to the reason while we're all here. If you're anything like me and use the opportunity to go out to dinner, deciding which restaurant to go to can be like a 15 minute process of weighing the pros and cons and making sure everybody's unborn and it's stressful and it's difficult and maybe you kind of hope that someone else will make that decision for you but it doesn't even really matter that much. Decisions are not easy in any aspect of life. So when you're faced with choices that have severe or significant consequences or long-term repercussions or a lot of uncertainty where do you even start? So if you're new to my channel, hi, I'm Footless Joe, I'm really glad to see you here. Two and a half years ago, like I said, I had a leg amputation but prior to that, when I was 13 years old I fell off a horse, had a bad accident, shattered my ankle, that led to 14 years of surgeries and injections and procedures trying to get things better and it just got worse and worse to the point where I could barely walk, I couldn't do anything I loved and it became clear to me that it wasn't going to get better. Like keeping my ankle, I wasn't going to be able to attain a higher quality of life where I could do more things or be in less pain. It was gonna stay the same and then eventually get worse. And I had this one final ankle surgery in March of 2018 and once that didn't work the reality really became clear to me that this was not going to get better. It was gonna get worse slowly but surely and if I wanted to keep my ankle I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn't gonna be able to live anywhere close to the kind of life that I wanted to live. Now I did know that another option was on the table. I had known that that option was on the table for a long time but all of a sudden it became clear to me that it might be a choice I had to make. So was I going to keep my leg that was very damaged, caused me a lot of pain and a lot of grief which would have been a perfectly valid decision or was I gonna opt for amputation where there were a lot of unknowns. It was very terrifying. It might be a big loss but I had a chance at a better life, a life where I could actually walk and do things and enjoy activities again. The first thing I did when I really began considering this life altering decision was separate out in my mind my emotions from my logic. Now I'm not saying suppress your emotions and don't listen to them. I'm just saying I kind of drew a line and was like, okay this is what I feel and this is the more logical rational side of things and I chose to first focus on the logic and the rationale. And one of the reasons that I did that is our emotions are super, super, super important. We have them for a reason. Sometimes they do make decisions cloudy. Sometimes something can make sense from emotional perspective but the rationale is not there to back it up and vice versa. So I first focused on all the logistical stuff. What kind of life did I want to have? How did keeping my leg allow me to achieve that? How did losing my leg help me achieve that? What are the physical mental social risks of keeping my leg? What are those risks with losing it? And I began slowly whittling down what makes the most sense and when that answer was very, very clearly to try amputation and that is when I invited my emotions back into the picture and said, what do we feel about this? Because with such a life altering decision it did make logical sense. Like it was the next step. It was the best chance that I had at living a life I actually wanted to be a part of. However, I knew that the emotional cost and emotional consequence was gonna be gigantic, much larger than I could ever fully estimate or know. So I let all of that in, in a picture to future in which I didn't have a leg. Is that something I felt like I could deal with? Could I find resources and help for that? How would I feel if it didn't fix the problem but only made things worse? Okay, so then I had the rational logical decision and I had my emotions introduced into figuring out how I was gonna feel about this. And the next thing that I did was start talking to professionals, people who actually knew about this. One of the first people I ever very seriously talked to about amputation was actually my therapist, was a counselor and they helped me start grasping the gravity of that decision, really figuring out what my motivations were, clarifying some things. After that, I talked to surgeons, obviously got their opinion because they're the ones who really matter when it comes to this kind of decision. They were on board, agreed that the time was right if that's what I wanted. So after talking to professionals, people who are educated in the topic in which I was exploring, I began talking to the people who were close to me in my life, other people with this decision would impact because the reality is, oftentimes when we make life-altering decisions, our life is not the only one that's impacted. Even if we are the person who bears the primary responsibility for that choice or the impact of it, we're not totally disconnected beings, like there are people in our lives who it's also going to affect. So I talked to my husband and my parents and my brother and my friends and then people I didn't immediately ask began chipping in their opinions because they'd heard I might have to make this decision. So in asking advice from trusted people, I ended up with a ton of opinions from all different kinds of sources and I became completely overwhelmed and kind of just wanted to shut down because everybody had a different take. Why would you even think about that, Joe? That's a terrible decision. Yes, absolutely, why haven't you done it sooner? The input I received spanned the whole range of the scale. If you have people pleasing instincts like I do, it might be the easiest thing to just sort of listen to the loudest group of people. That's simple, that's easy, it makes everybody else happy and I can deal with it and that's what I've done for a lot of my life. But at this point, I kind of knew that I had to do something different. So I heard everybody out, I listened and then I took the opinions of everybody except for my immediate family and closest friends, chucked it out the window and I began really listening to the input and the wisdom of people who had known me for a long time who were willing to listen to why I was considering this and also willing to push back because everybody was not on board, everybody did not think this was a great decision, there were a lot of questions, a lot of conversations, a lot of back and forth and I honestly think that was necessary. When you are making massive decisions, I do think it's very important to get insight, input, wisdom from those around you and to have people who do disagree with you. Some of that tension though it's uncomfortable is a really good thing because people who disagree with you are gonna bring up points that maybe are uncomfortable to think about, that was definitely the case for me. My husband was very concerned about this whole decision, understandably so and as we were going back and forth and I was like oftentimes the outcomes are really good with amputation babe, like you don't understand people of great lives, he was like, okay, I need you to find someone who's willing to speak with you who has not had a good outcome with this, who regrets their choice and I agreed though I definitely didn't want to and I was able to find someone to support groups who was willing to speak with me and express why it didn't work for them, my amputation was a horrible decision for their life and really warned me about some things I hadn't thought of, I would not have done that if someone hadn't sort of challenged my thought process and I'm really glad that I did. Through that whole phase of being challenged on what I was thinking of doing I was able to further solidify what I actually really wanted, what actually really made sense for me. The next thing which will not come as a shock to you, I think this is important across the board is I did a crap ton of research, I did all of the Googling and YouTube videos and everything that I could find, I talked to people in real life who had had to make a similar decision, got their input, saw what life looked like now that they had chosen this path, saw what life looked like if they chose the other path. I talked to doctors and amputees and people who knew what they were talking about because of course information is so important when you're making huge decisions. However, I do want to add the caveat there that I don't know that we will ever have enough information to make a really hard decision, like rarely is information alone enough to do that and along with that what became apparent to me, especially when I went through with this, was that even if you read every book and blog and watch every YouTube video on a topic, there are still gonna be things you have no way of knowing. There's gonna be questions you didn't know you should ask. There was a long time where I was wondering what the right decision was, what the right thing to choose would be and it took me a minute to realize that in my situation, I don't know what it looks like for you, but for me, there wasn't any way of knowing what the right and the wrong one was. At the end of the day, it was I got to make a choice and I had to make that choice. None of us have any way to predict the future. Unfortunately, we haven't evolved quite that much yet and I think it's really easy to think of things in the binary of good and bad, right and wrong, but with a lot of things. We have no way of knowing that. We can only make a choice with the limited information we have not being able to know the future. So for me, kind of cutting off the narrative of like good and bad, right and wrong and just weighing the choices I had, weighing the information I had was really helpful. Of course, there are situations in which things are black and white, you know, wrong and right, but those are a lot less than we generally think they are. Last but not least, something I don't think we are taught very often in our society, especially in my country of America, is do listen to your gut instinct. A lot of the ways that I was brought up and in the culture that I was in, following your gut really didn't count for too much, but much like animals in the wild, like human beings, we have instincts for a reason, so don't logic your way out of all of that. I know logic isn't like a verb and I just use it as one, but we're gonna overlook that. Don't completely rationalize and overthink your way out of that. If your gut tells you something, if your intuition says something is wrong with this choice, I don't like this direction, even though it makes more sense, listen to that, dig into it, talk to people about it, let it tell you what it needs to tell you and don't write it off. At the end of the day, if I'm entirely honest, though I went through this whole process of how do I make this really difficult decision, the largest factor that helps me make that choice was when I decided to kind of just get quiet and listen to myself, listen to what my body and my mind or my heart, if you wanna call it that, was telling me, and for me, when I quieted down other voices, I knew that I did not want to keep living the life that I was living with an ankle that was causing me an immense amount of pain and taking away everything that I loved doing in my life. Like that just felt like darkness and felt awful and I knew I didn't want it. That is the choice that I got to make and I'm very grateful that I made it. I was literally, I was just about to say the hard decisions aren't easy, but duh. Having to make an impossible decision is not anything any of us ever want, especially if you struggle with deciding where to go to dinner like I do, but it is possible to make these really, really hard choices and those are just a few things that helped me through my own thought process, my decision process. How about you? Do those resonate with you? Have you ever tried any of those? Are you facing a really impossible choice right now? And if so, what's helping you make that decision? I would love to hear from you in the comments section down below. Share your stories and your tips. Help each other. Thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. They really are one of my favorite companies to work with. I still, to this day, use their product just about every week to learn new things and kind of keep growing, which has been very helpful to me. So thank you, Skillshare. Use the link in the description box down below for that free trial. And to my patrons, thank you for continuing to support what I'm doing here. I couldn't do this without you, so thank you. To you watching this video right now, thank you, Spudscher, for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere else in the world doing anything else, and you chose to hang out with me on my living room floor as I didn't spill coffee today. So thank you so much. I really appreciate you, and I hope you're hanging in there. I love you guys. I'm thinking about you, in the next video. Bye guys.