Brenda Winkle 00:00:01 Welcome to your yes filled life. I'm Brenda Winkle, energetic leadership guide, psychic, medium and somatic coach for ambitious leaders who know their gifts are real and who want to stand fully in them. Here you'll learn how to trust your intuition, embody your vision, and step into the freedom you've been creating, all without chasing more certifications or carrying stuff that does not belong to you. Every week, I'll share powerful practices and conversations with thought leaders and changemakers that help you transform your vision into embodied confidence. Claim your gifts without apology and lead with both clarity and freedom. Because your gifts aren't cute. They are powerful. They're real, and they're needed. Start today by downloading my free energy audit at Brenda Winkle. Com for audit. It's the exact tool I use to track what's fueling me and what's draining me. It will help you discern between that hit of achievement and true joy, so that you can lead with more clarity and impact. This is your space to stop proving, start embodying and live fully in your gifts.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:16 Welcome to your yes filled life. Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about why change feels harder when other people are affected. When you're a leader with deep empathy, compassion, and lots of perception. So for highly perceptive people like you and like me, change is not just a personal decision. I wish it was. It would be so much simpler. Like, I remember watching this episode of the Gilmore Girls. I'm a big fan of the Gilmore Girls and Rory's roommate Paris was having an argument with her boyfriend Doyle, and they were having an argument about whether or not to factor each other into their decisions about grad school, and I remember watching the episode at the time. By the way, I'm such a big fan of Gilmore Girls that I've watched the whole series like 13 times through. And I'm not even exaggerating because my daughter and I fell in love with Gilmore Girls and we felt like the Gilmore Girls.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:23 It was just her and me from the time that she was five years old until now. And she's 24. And so we felt like we were our own little version of Gilmore Girls. So we related a lot to that show. So anyway, in this conversation with Paris and Doyle, we were watching and it was stunning to my daughter too. She was like, how do you just decide not to factor someone in? And it turns out that for a lot of people that don't have the kind of empathy like you and I do. It is simply a cognitive, logical decision. You can do checks and balances, I think. Other people feel things too, about whether or not to factor people into their decisions, but not in the same way. Those of us with deep empathy and compassion and perception do so when we are thinking about change. It's not just a personal decision. It feels like a relational event, meaning we know it's going to impact our relationships and we start subconsciously weighing odds like, am I going to be able to execute this change fully based on what I know is going to be the emotional response of these people, or even worse, when it's a change we haven't chosen.
Brenda Winkle 00:03:43 We weren't the architect of the change. We are responding to a change. Then we go through this process of how is it going to impact other people and this can happen when you're highly empathic, even when the change is aligned. Even when it's something you really want and you probably are thinking about or feeling or wondering about how other people are going to react, what their expectations might be, how those expectations might shift, can you continue to meet them in the same way? How stability in the relationship might be impacted or affected? And you're probably wondering how your identity might change and what possible impact that identity shift could have on your relationship. And all of this is happening in like a nanosecond. It's not like you're sitting around listing out these things. It's happening under the surface so fast and so innately that it can make growth feel heavier than you expect it to, and it can make you feel like it's harder to create the changes that you really want. And you may have noticed this. Like sometimes you might know exactly what you want.
Brenda Winkle 00:04:58 You know exactly the next step to take. That makes sense. You might even know that the direction feels totally aligned for you, and yet it doesn't feel that simple. And this isn't about self-doubt. It's not like you're doubting yourself or your abilities. It's because you can feel how the decision is going to affect other people, other people's comfort, other people's sense of stability, their idea of who you are. And if you're somebody who naturally feels what others feel, this change can feel heavier than it looks from the outside. But here's what I want you to know. There's nothing wrong with you, and you're not doing it wrong. I want to make a distinction here that I work with and support people who have deep empathy. Compassion are highly perceptive, probably very intuitive, and might identify as intuitive or empaths. I don't support people in Codependence because I'm not a therapist and I don't pretend to be. In fact, none of the tips or tricks or ideas that you get from this podcast are intended to be a replacement for your professional mental health or medical care.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:08 Empathy is simply the ability to understand or share somebody else's emotions. That's if you Google it. That's what you're going to find on Google. That's what Google says. I would say that for somebody who has this deep empathy and compassion, not only are you aware of it, but you have a deep understanding of the effect that it has on people because you feel it. You feel it in your emotions. You feel it in your own body. It's very different experience. It's the difference between like wearing honey on your skin, like you can feel it on your skin. You can feel that it's a little sticky. You can smell that it's sweet and tasting the honey where you can feel how it is kind of sticky, but it's also sweet and it's different. It's the same thing for you. When you have deep empathy or compassion, you are actually having an internal experience about other people's emotions, whereas codependency is a dysfunctional one sided pattern. Again, I referred to Doctor Google for this and you can too.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:14 Codependency is a dysfunctional one sided pattern where self-worth depends on fixing or rescuing other people. It often leads to enabling behavior and a loss of personal identity. That is not what we're talking about here, because again, I don't treat mental health issues. I support highly empathic, intelligent, compassionate, intuitive, perceptive leaders. So let's talk about growth. A lot of times, the rhetoric that we hear on social media that we see in the blogs and here on the podcast, is that decisions are purely individual. But for thought leaders like you. You know that your decision affects your team, family, clients, partners, communities. Highly perceptive people don't just think about the impact. They feel it right. And often this is starting before anything is actually shifted because of your abilities as an empath, or maybe somebody with empathy. Depending on how you identify, you're actually sending your energy into different places, and you can kind of predict based on the energy that you send out, what is going to be the emotional impact of decisions that you make.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:45 Now, let's be clear that the feeling this ripple or potential ripple is not the same thing as being unclear. This is really important. Feeling emotional weight or even the sense of responsibility is not the same thing as being confused. And many empathic leaders delay decisions not because you don't know what to do, but because you're processing. You're processing the multiple layers of impact all at once. So, for example, if you get ready to think about making a massive change that's going to impact your family, team, community. You may feel excited about the new potential. You may feel like energized by the potential of new change. You might also, at the very same time, feel slightly sad about the change and hopeful and responsible and a little scared and it happens all at once. But this does not mean your decision is wrong. It means that you are tracking energy and emotion from other people because you care. Now this can create a sense of hesitation in really capable people, because highly perceptive people like you often anticipate how others might feel.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:07 You might imagine conversations in advance. You might want transitions to feel really respectful, and you probably want change to be really thoughtful. And you're also trying to weigh. And again, this is all happening a little bit consciously, but a lot of it's happening on the subconscious level because you are weighing not altogether altruistically the impact. And what I mean by that is, yes, you do care about how other people are going to feel and the impact that is happening for them, but you're also weighing the impact on you of their emotions. And this is a really important distinction, and it's one that not everybody can make, because not everybody is affected by emotions and energy the way that you are with your deep empathy and compassion. And so you're weighing the visible impact, like, what are the actual changes that we know we can conceptualize? But then you're also thinking about the emotional impact that's going to have on the people, and then you're thinking about the emotional impact of that on those people on you. Okay.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:18 And this is happening because you can carry multiple perspectives internally at once. The problem is that sometimes the part that's confusing is what is yours. Like, how do you actually feel if you're not thinking about everybody else's feelings or the impact everybody else's feelings are going to have on you. And so that is where we get into the invisible pressure that we sometimes feel to keep things comfortable. So yeah, it's because we care. Definitely. That is true. But like I mentioned, it's also a little bit of self-preservation because if we know that we're going to really upset somebody that you are incredibly affected by when they're emotional, you might find yourself making different kinds of choices. And so a lot of times, empathic leaders can feel an internal pull to avoid disappointing, avoid creating any kind of instability, avoiding being misunderstood, avoiding even looking a little bit ungrateful, and definitely avoiding creating an emotional emotional disruption. So even the positive changes for you often feel complex and layered and emotionally charged. Because again, some of this is happening on the conscious level.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:51 A lot of it is happening underneath in our subconscious. And so when you get ready to really embrace a transition, whether it's a transition that you have consciously chosen or it's something that you're responding to, we want to talk about that level of growth. Okay. So when I'm talking about this kind of transition, maybe it is that you're becoming an empty nester, or maybe it is that you really have a desire, a burning desire to start a business around something you love to do. Or maybe it's that you're thinking about, what are you going to do in retirement as a second act to be of service, to be fulfilled, to be around people, which is actually a major concern for many people, both starting businesses and retiring. How am I going to get around people? And so when we think about this type of growth, oftentimes the role or identity or situation that you've been in has worked for a really long time. There was a certain level of stability you probably enjoyed. There was a level of success, whether we're talking about somebody that is an at home mom, you raised your kids successfully and now they're off doing their own thing, and it's time for you to find your thing to do.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:15 And that feels like a tremendous amount of pressure, because it sort of makes the assumption that you haven't been doing something for the last 18 years. But you and I both know that's not true. The problem is that if you're in that stay at home mom role, which, by the way, there's a lot of listeners to this podcast that identify as stay at home moms who have had other careers. I can't tell you the number of messages I get from people that say, I'm a stay at home mom, or I am a retiree and I get so much out of your podcast, but I don't know if this podcast is for me. I don't know if you work with somebody like me, and I want to tell you, I work with people who are in this transition phase. And so, yes, I do focus a lot of the content on what it's like to be a professional or an entrepreneur, but the challenges that you're facing as a stay at home mom or a stay at home mom who's now an empty nester or a retiree, are not that different when it comes to learning to really take care of our own empathic, compassionate tendencies.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:23 And so the things that you have been doing that created stability and success and growth Worked. They worked for a long time. And now, for whatever reason, because the situation has changed or your goals have changed, or you feel something internally that's really bubbling up, like, I just know I'm supposed to do something different now when that new thing begins to emerge. A lot of times you are honoring the past deeply, as you should, but that can also make moving forward feel really tender and painful. Like it's not giving credit for something that was really important for you, whether that was raising the kids or in a career. And I get that. It feels like you're sort of being pulled apart a little bit. I remember feeling that way when I was leaving teaching, because I spent 26 years in the public schools with a couple years in private schools, and I didn't want it to think like there was something wrong. I didn't. I didn't want to portray that. I wasn't grateful for that time, that I didn't love my students and families because I did.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:40 I loved what I did for many, many years. And that stability of that career was a massive contributor to the life that I was able to provide for my daughter. And so I have intense gratitude and appreciation for my career as a music educator. And also it became time for me to move on. Both things can be true. You can love where you've been and be ready for something new. It doesn't make you disloyal. It doesn't mean you have to hate what happened in order for you to move on to something different. In fact, I'll tell you something. The more you can love, like. Truly love and honor. Whatever situation you're coming from, the easier the transition into the new thing will be. And here's why. When you're running to something new, that's a completely different energy than running away from something. So if you're in a situation right now that you hate whatever that might be, my invitation to you would be to find 1 or 2 things, even if they feel really minute to absolutely love about your current situation.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:01 Because if you fall in love with your current situation, like warts and all. My dad used to say that warts and all, which is an expression that means, yeah, it's not perfect, but when you really learn to love it, the energy shifts and something else new can now be reborn. Because if you're in an energy of pushing away on something, of hating something, hating where you are or hating where you've been. That energy is not clean and it can create some misfires in our decision making. I mean, ask me how I know. I've definitely done both. I have run away from something and I've run to something, and running to something is so much richer, and it is so much more ease and joyful and just like it's the way to go if you can do it. So when you have deep empathy and compassion, it's okay for you to move on. It's not disloyal. A lot of times you'll feel a sense of responsibility to stay where you are because you're weighing like how the change will affect everybody.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:12 And you know this. I know you know this on a cognitive level. A lot of times, the people that you are planning your perceived change and you're thinking about how is it going to affect them? It's not even on their radar that you're doing this. They don't even know. And sometimes they really would want you to consider them, but oftentimes they don't even know you're considering them. And then because of your deep empathy and compassion, you're factoring them into your decisions. Just like we talked about at the beginning of the episode with Parris and Doyle on that episode of Gilmore Girls, you're factoring them into decisions that they don't want to be factored into. And then there's a certain point at which you start to wonder, when is someone going to factor me in? And when you get to that place. That can be rough, because if you're in that place, you're feeling resentment. You're feeling unseen. You're wondering when is it going to be your turn? When are they going to show up for you? And so a lot of what's happening here is you have unconsciously assumed responsibility for managing their reactions, for preventing their discomfort from maintaining harmony, for ensuring everybody feels okay.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:34 And this can make change feel like something you have to do perfectly right. It probably feels very high stakes. It probably feels like every single decision you're getting ready to make is the most important decision. And it has to be perfect because you're thinking about the ripple effect to every single area of the change is going to have on the people around you your team, your community, your family. And this is also why sometimes clarity disappears in conversations. So I'll tell you, I'll give you a really simple example. I have specific foods that I love to eat and Taste of India in Madison, Wisconsin, is one of my top two favorite Indian restaurants worldwide, and the other one is in Paris. And it's so delicious and so consistent. And they have a chicken McKinney, which is sometimes known as butter chicken. And I really prefer the medium heat spice level on my McKinney chicken. But the last time I was there in Madison a couple of weeks ago, we got takeout because it's my sister and brother in law's favorite restaurant, too, probably in the world for them.
Brenda Winkle 00:21:49 And so they brought takeout and I ordered the McKinney Chicken Mild, and I ordered it mild because I was thinking to myself, well, I might end up sharing leftovers with my mom, and my mom doesn't like this spicier chicken. She would prefer a mild. And then I was thinking, it's also going to be late at night, and maybe I don't need to eat super spicy food right before I go to bed, but that was really secondary to the first thing, which is I might end up sharing leftovers with my mom And the truth is, that's not what I wanted. I wanted the more heat in my Makani chicken, but I ordered the milder one. And then the whole time I was eating it, I was like, this is truly delicious, and I'm really grateful for it and I wish it had more heat. And then the interesting thing was the next day when we got ready to have leftovers, she had her own leftovers of her chicken tikka masala that she ordered in the mild. I wouldn't have had to factor her in to my meal choice decision.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:48 Nobody asked me to. Nobody told me to. Nobody even wanted me to. And yet I did it. And I'm giving you this as a really subtle but real world example of how easily and slippery this is. And then when we add something like emotional complexity about a decision about how you're going to spend your time or where you're going to live, or how you're going to earn your money or what you're going to do for fulfillment, of course, clarity feels less accessible when you're around other people because new information is present their facial expressions, their body language, the tone shifts, the energy shifts, the changes in the energy of the room and the expectations and your system. Your extra sensitive, compassionate empathic system is processing all of it in real time. So here's the part that a lot of people don't talk about that I'm just going to be really transparent about. Growth often requires tolerating temporary discomfort. Growth is not comfortable. And in my opinion, anybody who tells you that it can be comfortable is lying.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:02 Growth is not comfortable. It is going to require you to do things you haven't done before, things that you're not comfortable doing because you haven't done them. How could you be comfortable with him? You've never done him. And so it's going to require you getting out of your comfort zone, doing things that might feel new or scary or different or unfamiliar. And that's going to challenge how you've shown up in these relationships, which is why we talk so much about identity on the podcast, because your internal identity is going to either support you making the changes or not. So even when handled really thoughtfully, change can surprise people. It will change the expectations that they can have of you and how you'll meet those. It can shift dynamics and it can even create new roles. But here's the thing I want you to be really clear on. Temporary discomfort does not mean that any harm has come. A lot of times the temporary discomfort for you is you're no longer making yourself emotionally responsible for people like. I'm not going to order the mild chicken McKinney.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:18 Next time, I'll tell you that for sure. But it does mean something new is emerging. And we're continuing to, like, iterate and grow together. And so staying connected to yourself, to your inner knowing, to your inner truth, to like that part of you that's the newest you. The work is staying connected to that part of you while you care about others, while you have this deep empathy and compassion so you can stay kind and thoughtful and connected without overriding yourself, without accidentally factoring people in that are not factoring you in. And when you can pair self trust and empathy with this type of change, empathy becomes sustainable. Empathy doesn't feel like a liability when you can create the sustainability. So this is really relevant. As identity is shifting, especially as you're embracing change, whether you were the architect of the change or it's a change that's happened. So it might be a career evolution or a creative emergence. I love that a creative emergence, like the book that you've had in you for decades, is ready to be born.
Brenda Winkle 00:26:41 Or maybe it's the career in art, or maybe it's the fact that you love to knit and you are now prioritizing knitting as not only part of your identity, but as a worthy way to spend your time. This also comes up for people when they're having a leadership expansion. This has been very true for me over the past year, as I've been stepping into my CEO energy so that I'm running the business as a CEO. I'm running my life as a CEO and it has made some real progress, but it required a different way of being. It required a different identity from me to step into this. It required me to hold different things and let go of things that were not mine. This also comes up for us when we are engaging in visibility changes, where we're putting ourselves out there in a more public way. Whether that means you're signing up to have a booth at the local vendors fair, or you decided you're going to post on social media for the first time in a long time. When we have those visibility changes, this whole idea of empathy can really come up.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:54 Also comes up when you're renegotiating relationships. So I work with a lot of people at the phase of life where they're either transitioning from a full time career into, let's say, a more entrepreneurial version of life where they're becoming coaches or healers or they're engaging in full retirement. And that requires, with your intimate partners and renegotiating renegotiation of how the relationship is going to go. This comes up if you want to start a business, or maybe you've started the business, but you're not prioritizing time and you're working on it like three hours a week, wondering why you're not gaining any traction, or you're not posting or letting anyone know you even have a business. And then you're like, why don't I have any clients? Well, we've got an identity and identity gap here that is really important to acknowledge. Same thing can happen when you're getting ready to leave a profession that you've been in for a long time, or you're stepping into a brand new role. All of these moments often affect multiple layers of your life simultaneously.
Brenda Winkle 00:28:58 It's not just the career change, it's the career change and the relational change. It's the career change and how it's going to affect your family. It's the career change and your coworkers and your team members. And if you've ever noticed yourself feeling very, very clear until you're in a conversation with someone else, this is exactly what we're exploring inside the masterclass that's coming up. We're going to look at what happens in that moment when clarity meets that connection. Clarity means that relationship. And then we're going to talk about how to stay connected with yourself while still being that caring person that you are. So where in your life do you already know something that's really true for you, but you feel the weight of how that might be affecting others? Simply noticing that change is going to create a lot of space, and it's going to create more space for you to think about and feel into The alignment of that decision. And if this resonates, I want you to come to the masterclass. It's called when you know exactly what to do, but something stops you.
Brenda Winkle 00:30:12 We're going to explore what happens in that moment when you feel someone else's reaction. And I'm going to teach you how you can stay connected to what you know while maintaining your deep empathy and compassion. I've developed a five part method, a five part framework called the Power Method, and I'm going to be teaching you part of that inside the masterclass. It's free and you can register at Brendon Winkle next level and I'll put the link in the show notes. I really hope you're going to come. I'm not teaching this again until June, and so if this has been on your heart, on your mind, you're navigating a transition or you wish you were, you wish you were navigating a transition invitation to come join us. And I just want to say thank you for listening to the podcast, we have maintained our standing in the top 5% globally of all podcasts, and I did my reflection as part of the spiritual CEO. I offer a quarterly reflection, so I did mine ahead. In fact, just before I recorded this episode and I learned that listenership is up 33% on the podcast this quarter, and that is directly because of you.
Brenda Winkle 00:31:26 So sincere gratitude and thanks for being a part of this journey. It just means so much to me. If you felt like you got something out of this episode, would you please consider sharing it with three people you care about? And if you haven't left the podcast a rating and review in a while, would you please go do that? It makes such a difference. Thanks for being here. I really appreciate you. Bye for now. Until next time.
