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 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. Let's see.
Speaker 2 00:01:27 Just make sure. Okay. One more time.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:32 Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. This week I had one of those experiences where I knew it and I still overwrote it. And I want to talk about it because I want to normalize that. This is what it's like to be an empath. There are going to continue to be moments where your empathy overrides your intuition, where your empathy overrides your normal boundaries, your normal standards. And if you've ever had that feeling like, I can't believe I fell for this thing, this episode is for you. So I want to share a little bit of background around the story so that you can really relate to this. Because even though the actual story might be different from something that you've experienced in your life, I think you're going to relate to what happened. So if I paint the picture, you know that we lost my daughter's dog, Jane, about a week ago, and it has been a difficult several weeks as we've been navigating Bentley's health issues.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:55 That's my dog and his anxiety and his reactivity. And then Jane was declining and it was just stressful. And it's important to name this because as much as I tend to my own energy, as much as I'm careful about making sure that I'm as resourced as possible rested, hydrated, nourished, there are some periods in life where we're not as resourced as we want to be because we're recovering from something, we're healing from something. And this is one of those moments for me. And I recognized that I needed some more support. And so I reached out to a local Facebook group with around 10,000 female business owners, and I asked for recommendations for cleaning companies and asked, you know, maybe some of you might own a cleaning company. And I had many, many, many, many People respond and refer different companies and individuals. And there was one person who DM'd me and instead of commenting on the post, this person sent me a little message that said, would you be open to a walkthrough of your house? And keep in mind, I'm not fully resourced.
Brenda Winkle 00:04:22 I'm feeling tender. I'm feeling stressed. I am worried about the dogs. I'm thinking about all the things we maybe need to be doing. And when this message came in, it hit my system as like, oh, somebody is willing to reach out and support me. Oh, this feels so good. And I'm not saying that's a red flag, but it's definitely a yellow flag. When you have asked for one thing, I asked for people to, you know, tag the people they recommend. And this person deemed me now under normal circumstances. Honestly, I would probably have ignored it because of what I just said. I had asked please share your references, your recommendations. I was willing to invest in this because I knew I needed support. Like, I don't know if you downloaded the podcast episode last time, the one on identity. If you did and you downloaded it in the first 24 hours, you might want to refresh that because I uploaded the wrong episode. And so I actually had to take it down and re-upload the correct episode.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:40 So if you listen to it and you thought, gosh, this seems like maybe we've already talked about this and she's talking about February, it's because I uploaded the wrong episode, which is pointing to the reason why I knew I needed support. Okay, so in that moment, I literally was a little bit more vulnerable, but I knew it. And so I was ready to invest in support, getting some help around the house. So this individual came to my home and their energy was lovely. Very, very lovely. A couple things struck me as odd. One was they arrived early and I mean like 15 minutes early, which is not typical. And even if you arrive early for a business meeting, you typically just wait until it's time. So that was one other little yellow flag that I ignored. This was a cleaning company, and this individual was dressed in pastel linen pants and a white top. And I thought, oh, very, very dressed up to run a cleaning company. And the other thing that struck me is just a little bit like, but I ignored was that this individual arrived in a vehicle that was being driven by her partner.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:08 So her partner waited in the car while she came inside. And by the way, this is a legitimate company. They have a really beautiful website. They are bonded and insured. And so all the things looked okay. But I'm telling you, some red flag or yellow flag, things that I ignored. We start walking through the house and this is the other thing I ignored. Bentley, my dog, did not want anything to do with her. He barked the entire time, and every time she looked at him, he would bark. Now he is reactive. He is anxious, but typically he likes people, and typically he wants to at least engage with people. And he kind of operates under the assumption that people are going to give him treats. And so he likes people. His his real stressor is other dogs. So this, again, should have been a flag to me. But I was feeling vulnerable. I was vulnerable because I was under-resourced, I was needing help, I was needing support.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:17 Oh, I feel emotional. I just needed some help. And so we looked at the second floor of my home, which is the living area, and then we came up to the third floor, which is where my office and, and my room are. And, we were looking around and of course, I've got all of my oracle and tarot cards and all my crystals, because I don't know if you know this, but I am a practicing psychic medium, and I hold sessions on the regular like dozens of sessions per week. And so she asked about that and I said, well, yeah, there's, there's that. And I have some things that are, protective, that are not conventional, that most people don't have in their homes as a way to protect energy. And I'm not going to tell you what those are, because I want to maintain that protection. And we we were going through my office, moving into the room, and she said, I want to know more about what you do.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:24 And so I told her what I did or what I do, and that I work with people one on one in, in groups, especially people who have high levels of empathy and compassion, helping you to live the lives you want. Set the boundaries. Do the things. Show up in the visibility, whatever it is. And she said, you know, I've been looking for a coach and. I was like, oh, great. Yeah, yeah, I could definitely help you out. And she said, what would you think about a trade where I trade you housecleaning with my company for coaching? And. Under normal circumstances, when I was fully resourced, I would have declined instantly and instead offered to just do a trade for our cash exchange for whatever the the exchange would be. But again, keep in mind I'm feeling raw, I'm feeling vulnerable, I'm not fully resourced and it just felt like. It felt like I was being taken care of in a way. Right? Like, oh, this thing just dropped into my lap.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:39 And yet I have all these signs, the clothes, the car, the early, the, the Bentley. I have all these signs that there's something off. And then I, I have a rule. I teach this to my clients. We don't trade, we pay cash, we don't trade, we pay cash because it always gets messy in a trade. And there are very, very, very few people who I would trade with. And they are all people I know. I would never trade with somebody that I have just met because I don't I don't have an established relationship or established trust. So I am surprised that I agreed to the trade. But I agreed to the trade and I put together an addendum to my terms and conditions for my coaching, my one on one coaching contract that outlined the trade, and she agreed to the addendum. But because of the way I have my website set up, the actual terms and conditions are something you sign when you start the coaching packages. And so she'd agreed to the addendum, but not to the coaching package yet.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:49 And what she told me was that I needed to pay cash for. not cashed. Or it could have been card. Didn't matter, but I needed to pay money for the initial deep clean. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Now, in the back of my mind, I'm cataloging all of these things. I'm cataloging. I don't usually trade all the things I've already mentioned, and still I agree to it. And even though she hadn't yet clicked the link on my website, I went ahead and booked her company and paid for the initial clean, which was not inexpensive, and the initial clean was completed earlier this week and they did a really beautiful job. And after the clean, I reached back out to the founder and said, really impressed with your team. Let's get you started on the coaching. Here's the link again in case you need it. And the reply was, oh, you know, no, I'm not going to be able to trade businesses, just not going very well. I'm not going to be able to trade.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:54 And I just froze. I felt a flash in my body of heat and anger and rage. First at her, first at like, how could you do this? This feels like a bait and switch. It feels like you got me to agree to work with your company under the premise of we were going to be trading, and now you're changing the terms. Absolutely not. This is not okay. I was really angry, really upset. And then I was upset with myself that I even had and agreed to the trade in the first place. And so I reached out. I said, this is not what we agreed to, and this does not feel like an agreement that I'm going to continue to cosign on. We talked about doing this and I laid out XYZ, and I see that we have two options at this point. We can either continue the agreement that we had already made and that you had already signed. Or we can cut ties because I'm just I'm not going to work with somebody that I can't trust.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:00 And she came back with, well, I never meant to make you feel taken advantage of, which is the I never meant to make you feel. That is not an apology, by the way, that is a well, I, I was hoping you wouldn't notice. That's what that means. So when somebody says I was never trying to make you feel this, it was. I hoped you wouldn't notice my bad behavior. And I initially was like, okay, we can we can talk about starting later, because that was her request. And then I slept on it and I thought, okay, let's look at all the red and yellow flags. Let's look at how I was feeling. And I thought about what would I do if one of my clients came to me with this exact scenario? What would I say to them? And I thought about that. And, and so I did what I would have coached any of my clients to do. And I went back to her and I said, this is not aligned.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:00 I cannot work with this energy. I won't work with clients with this energy. And we need to end our our connection right now. And I no longer want to work with you or your company, and I'm wishing you all the best as you work to grow your business. And you know, she had asked me for referrals because things aren't going well for her business. And and I really do wish her all the best as she grows her company. This is not about her. This is about what it's like to be an empath and the ways in which we agree to things we don't want to do that we know aren't aligned because our empathy overrides our intuition. And I want to really emphasize here nothing dramatic happened, but something felt off from the very beginning. And I call this this awareness. Like, oh my gosh, I should have known. I call it the empathy hangover. This is that feeling that you get after you override your intuition, because you could feel and understand the other person more clearly than you could feel, and understand what was happening for you.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:14 The empathy overrides the intuition. So the sequence usually is you feel the nudge. There's some something like there's something off here. You can't really define it. It's not a glaring red flag. It's nothing that would immediately cause you to say no, but it's something. And then you rationalize it. You tell yourself, oh, it's not that big a deal, or I don't want to be judgmental or that's mine. I don't want to be judgmental or you rationalize it, and then what happens is you begin to prioritize their situation and you override yourself, and then you later end up in this pattern of regret and then frustration and the feeling of I can't believe it happened again. This is incredibly common for empathic, emotionally intelligent humans. It's very, very common. And I'll say it hasn't happened to me in a long time because I do this work with so much commitment and so much practice, but it still happens to me. I'm not immune, I always say, and I absolutely mean it. I teach this work because I need this work, and I want to really offer a reframe here.
Brenda Winkle 00:17:37 This has nothing to do with lack of awareness. That's not the problem. It's over accommodation and nervous system patterning. So when you are depleted or under-resourced or feeling raw or just needing some support. It puts us at risk of losing our empathy instead of our intuition. Empathy is a good thing. I've said that over and over and over on the podcast, and I mean it. Empathy is a very good thing, but we can't replace our intuition with our empathy because if we do, we'll end up doing things like I just did. Like, that cost me a lot of money. That mistake cost me a lot of money and a lot of bandwidth, and I didn't have the bandwidth to give because now I don't trust the company. So I'm still looking for a cleaning service in the Portland area. So the cost here is not just money, it's not just time. It's that it's costing you bandwidth you already don't have. And if you are not really cued into the tools to use the nervous system regulation tools, the somatic tools, the energetic tools.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:51 It can lead to an erosion of self trust, where you feel like you can't trust yourself because you have this narrative that goes on like, oh my gosh, it happened again. Every single time you override that nudge, that little knowing, that little like, can't explain the the feeling of this little yellow or red flag, but I know it's there every time you override that nudge. You teach yourself that you can't trust yourself. And that's why it feels the way it feels. That's why it feels so heavy and so bad. And that's why you feel so much shame about it. I want you to know this is your gift, and there's nothing to be ashamed of when this happens to you. It is not because you are weak. It is not because you don't know enough. It's not even because you don't have the right boundaries. It's usually a case that you're under-resourced or that you have some nervous system patterning that makes this familiar thing feel safer, even though it's not actually safe. And so the hard truth here is I wasn't manipulated, I wasn't manipulated, I overrode my own gut check.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:19 I talked myself out of it. And this is probably what's happening for you, too. If you relate to everything we've talked about in this episode. You aren't being manipulated. You are overriding your own gut check. So this is really, really important shift. This is in fact, this is the shift. We don't want to go into these situations or come out of these situations with this is never going to happen to me again. That is not realistic. Obviously, this just happened to me and I've been teaching this for 12 years, so they never make this mistake again is not something we want to hitch our wagons to. Instead, what I invite you to do is to work to repair yourself, trust in real time. And here's what that looks like. Notice the feeling of resentment. And usually that's a key. That something is happening. Resentment or that feeling of lack of trust. Like there's something about this I don't trust. Just notice that and then give yourself a moment of pause. Actually pause before you push through.
Brenda Winkle 00:21:36 Because if I would have allowed myself the pause, even in the moment, in the conversation when she's walking through my home noticing the cards and crystals, hey, do you want to trade? If I would have pause, if I would have said, let me get back to you on that tomorrow. I would have had a very different answer than I had in that moment, because I was just rolling with it in real time. So the pause is really important. And then I say this all the time inside my containers, my my group coaching, my membership, even my private one on ones, you have the right to change your mind. You can revisit the decision and say, I've been thinking about this and it actually doesn't feel aligned, or I've slept on this and I'm not comfortable with moving forward. You can change your mind. You can choose a different direction. Even in the same agreement. You can choose a different direction. And I say this because there was an older version of me that let's say if we would have taken the exact situation with the cleaning company, if we would take that exact situation.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:55 She broke her word. Oh, hey, I can't do the trade. I'm just going to do you cash. Have you paid for everything? And then maybe I'll work with you as a one on one client down the road. There would be a version of me in the past that would have said, oh, okay, yeah, we can make that work. And I would just sucked it up and they would have paid and I would have been resentful and pissed, and then I wouldn't have trusted them. And then next thing you know, I'm not happy with them, and it's taking me bandwidth and time because I would feel hypervigilant every time they were coming to my house, every time they were in my house, and every time they left my house because I, I you don't trust them. So this time was really different because as soon as I realized what had happened, I named this doesn't feel good. This is not what we agreed to. You have broken your word. Called it out.
Brenda Winkle 00:23:51 There was a little bit of acknowledgement around that. And then a sort of a loose promise of, yeah, I'll come through maybe in June. And then a realization that. Wait a minute. The one on one work that I do is the highest. It's the highest work I do. It is the most intimate. It is the highest level way to work with me. It is by application only. It is people that I know are willing and ready to do the one on one work that we do. It's people that I know I can trust to be transparent, because if you can't be transparent, it's going to be really difficult for us to move you through any kind of transformation. Because if you're lying about what you're feeling or what you're experiencing, for me, I can track it. I can track that there's a lie, but it's not going to be possible for me to move you through things you're not willing to admit to yourself. So when I took it back into my own empowerment and I'm thinking about, is this a client I would have wanted? The answer was no.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:02 Absolutely not, because I require transparency and self honesty from my clients, because they need to have a certain level of self-awareness in order to work with me. We have to keep it energetically clean in order for the energy to actually flow. Whether it. I'm working with a founder and we're tracking energy of her company and her personnel, or whether I'm working with an individual, and we're working on her own empathic abilities and traits, and helping her to set the boundaries so that she can take care of herself and be more resource in her life. Whatever that is. There has to be trust. There has to be, otherwise it doesn't work. And so when I got real with myself on that, I was like, well, this is obviously a no. Why would I take up one of my coveted one on one spaces with somebody who is not trustworthy and is willing to not be honest? I wouldn't, and so that's why I just ended the agreement cleanly. Like with no guilt. Like I'm not even mad.
Brenda Winkle 00:26:11 I spent the money on the house cleaning after Jane died here a couple of weeks ago or a week ago. It needed to be cleaned anyway, and so that felt really good. And so I don't regret it. But here's the question that I'd like to ask you. Are you someone who over accommodates, over empathizes, feels really, almost confused about what your emotions are and what their emotions are? Or are you someone who can still track those emotions with that deep empathy and stay with yourself. And it's not even a question of are you someone who can do those things? It's do you have the skills to know how to stay with yourself in those moments? And this is the kind of thing we practice inside the empath, excuse me, the empowered Empath collective membership. It's not just understanding it because we can intellectualize this all to live long day, but until we actually practice it and catch it while it's happening and then choosing something different in real time, it can continue. And for some of you, this kind of a pattern doesn't shift just by hearing it.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:23 And it might be that we need to completely take you out of your normal environment so you can really connect with yourself again. In fact, I recommend that every year anyway. And that's a big part of the reason why I offer retreats is to give people that opportunity to step away from their normal life so they can hear themselves again. So the Ignite Retreat is on. It's currently on a waitlist, but I'm going to open up applications. And this retreat is going to be immersive, meaning you're going to really feel like you are in a new, supportive, loving, nurturing environment where you can hear yourself again. It's going to be pattern breaking and identity shifting. This is the retreat where we're going to collapse the time it takes to shift these kinds of patterns. So right now, as I'm recording this episode, it's currently on a waitlist, but I am going to open up applications for that. And there will only be ten spots. And on the application form, I'm going to have a box where you can check if you'd prefer the retreat to be in September or in March, because there will likely be two based on the information that I'm gathering from people.
Brenda Winkle 00:28:41 And so you can tell me which one would be better for you. Fall of 2026 or March of 2027. So I have some reflection questions for you before we close today, so you can get really clear with what your patterns might be and how to come back from that empathy hangover if that happens to you. And so I have four questions that you can reflect on if you want to write them down. This is your chance. Number one where did I know and overwrite? I'll say that again. Where did I know and override? Number two what did I feel in my body? And when I'm asking this question, I'm asking about any sensation feeling that you noticed. Maybe it's you felt warm or cool or tense or relax or stomach ache or whatever. So number two is what did I feel in my body? Number three, what did I tell myself to get myself to stay in that situation? What was the story? Number three what did I tell myself to stay in that situation? What was the story? And number four, the last question.
Brenda Winkle 00:30:08 What would it look like to choose differently next time? That's number four again. What would it look like to choose differently next time? So you don't need to become less empathetic. That is not even the goal. I don't want you to be less empathetic. I want you to use your deep empathy and compassion as you continue to show up in the world. We need that. You need to become someone who doesn't abandon herself Inside of empathy. Thank you so much for listening to your yes Filled Life podcast. We've been asked to apply for the Signal Awards, which I haven't yet decided if I'm going to do, but I know it's because of listeners like you. Thank you for leaving the podcast, your ratings and reviews. If you haven't done that for a while, please go do it right now. It takes just a second if you're not sure how to do it. You can Google it or use your AI and ask how to leave a rating and review. The only place you can leave the actual like sentence reviews is Apple Podcasts, but you can leave comments on Spotify, and you can just leave a rating on some of the other platforms.
Brenda Winkle 00:31:22 And if this episode resonated with you, would you please share it with someone you care about, who you think also might sometimes have empathy hangovers? Thanks so much for listening. Bye for now. Until next time.
