Brenda Winkle 00:00:18 Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle, and I'm realizing I need to double check my sound. Let me just confirm. And I'm glad I did because it was not correct. Okay, so let's try this one more time. 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 the fact that you probably didn't miss anything because you're probably very attuned to what's happening in relationships, in the energy of a room. You probably read things really accurately, which means you didn't miss anything, but you may have overridden it because we are taught to override ourselves. I mean, that is really what so many of the systems around us teach. And this happens even in family relationships, where we are raised by well-meaning parents who teach us to override our own intuition and instead listen to them because they're the authority. And by the way, nothing has gone wrong here, and we're not making anybody bad.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:44 But this is something that we have an opportunity to unlearn. So, you know that moment right after something happens and you say, I knew it. Whether we're talking about a specific outcome that you had known would happen, or a reaction that you had known would come to pass. Or maybe it's even a situation that developed. You knew the conversation felt a certain way. You knew you didn't really want to do that thing. Or perhaps it's the opposite. You knew you absolutely wanted to do the thing. You knew when the energy changed. You knew when something was a red flag and maybe you talked yourself out of it. And sometimes that can even happen when you know something is a green flag. And it's like, yes, yes, yes, you should do this thing. And then we get in our head about it and we talk ourselves out of that too. So somewhere between feeling it, having the awareness that, oh, I'm, I'm getting an intuitive nudge here and then doing something, you talk yourself out of it.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:57 And that's the part that I want to talk about today, because I actually don't think most emotionally intelligent people are disconnected from themselves. I think what's happening is you're very connected to yourself and you're overriding yourself. So think about like the Inuit experience, we use terms like hindsight is 2020. Now, sometimes when we say hindsight is 2020, we're saying when we look back at the past, it's obvious that we could have done something differently or something that we knew work did work. That's kind of what that means. But also, I feel like when we say hindsight is 2020, we're almost always referencing a subtle knowing that something was going to turn out a specific way, and we talked ourselves out of it. We ignored it. And, you know, this can happen in any number of ways. And let me tell you in a way that I was working on with one of my own coaches earlier today. So I have these glasses and I've had these glasses since 2022. And I know that it's kind of weird to have the same pair of glasses for four years, but when I like something, I like something.
Brenda Winkle 00:04:18 And, so I've had these glasses. They were very expensive, even with my medical insurance. And I love them. They're a little bit edgy. They're very fashionable, and they're made by Gucci. And at the time that I bought them, I paid out of pocket a pretty considerable amount for the glasses, and they were a little tight behind the ears. But I pretended like that wasn't a thing because I really wanted the glasses. I liked the way they looked. I liked the way they felt. I liked how it felt to know that I have glasses made by Gucci. I liked all of those things. Well, four years down the road, I have these little puffy things that are behind my ears because of the glasses fitting too tightly. We could call that. Hindsight being 2020, right? We could say. Yeah. Looking back, I should have known. But the truth is, I did know. I knew the whole time. I knew when I picked them out. Now, why did this come up in a somatic coaching session? Well, I'm not going to get into everything about it, but I will tell you this.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:37 There was a part of me that knew even then the glasses weren't quite right, and I talked myself out of it because I needed them to be right for a variety of reasons. I needed to switch my metal tone to gold. I really like the gold. I wanted an upgrade. Not necessarily a literal upgrade, but I needed something to represent the feelings of going through an identity change represented to me. And now that I'm four years behind, or on the other side of that, I'm recognizing all of the ways that I had ignored my own physical comfort and that I talked myself out of things. And we're only talking about glasses here. So when I say these things to you about overriding yourself, I want you to hear it from the lens of I work through this, too, as somebody with deep empathy, deep compassion, really profound emotional intelligence, and also psychic and mediumship abilities, it's easy for me to override myself, which is interesting because this is literally what I help other people do. But you know what they say.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:53 They say you teach what you most need to learn. And so here I am. So when we when we go back and we look at things, of course, we're like, obviously this little sign actually meant something and we ignored it. That's one piece. The other piece is that we can mistake our intuition for overthinking. Another way to say this is we can mistake our intuition for our empathy about what we might think could happen. Somebody might feel, somebody might say the outcome might be. And if we're in this pattern of overthinking, we won't take action. And when I was working with Marie Forleo and she was my coach, I loved one of the phrases that she said, which I have paraphrased to say, clarity does not come from thought. Clarity comes from action. And one of the things that we can mistake as highly intuitive people is we think that it's all in our minds and we think, well, if I just think about this long enough, if I obsess about it long enough, I'm going to eventually have the answer.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:04 And I have found that in my personal life, that is not true. And I have seen that in my clients and my friends. We never get to the other side by overthinking. And so when you actually know something, you probably know it on a body level. It's coming through in your body. Maybe your body feels relaxed or expansive, or it feels like moving forward, meaning like you're leaning forward, leaning towards something. It feels really positive versus that little bit of doubt, that little bit of anxiety. It's so subtle. But there is a knowing. And if you stay in the thinking part and you never take an action, it's very, very, very hard to distinguish overthinking from intuition. And it requires us to take action. So I'll give you another example. This is also from this week. It's been a big week for me. I have been working on my health for the last several years. One of our former podcast guests and she's coming back onto the podcast is Alli Nowicki and I have been working with Alli.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:15 She's been my coach in a health program called transform. And so I've been working really consistently to make sure that I'm eating protein, that I'm lifting weights, that I'm taking care of my health. And one of the things that I have not been successful with is getting a doctor on board to do the blood work that I needed to do to make sure that I'm making the progress that I want to be making. And in fact, this particular doctor I had been working with was blocking me from getting just even a basic metabolic bloodwork panel done, and instead was only testing blood sugar. And so I was very frustrated, and I was up in my head about it, and I reached out to one of the small groups in transform that I'm a part of. And I was just saying, I'm feeling anxiety about this and one of the other doctors, because the program is primarily doctors. One of the other doctors said, I really hope you can find somebody that you can partner with. And when she said that, I was like, oh, that's what I need to go into this looking for.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:20 I need to look for a partnership. So the moment she said that, I made an internal decision, I was going to find somebody to partner with. And I remembered back to a Facebook post, I'm always talking about a Facebook post with this, PDX Boss ladies group, and I had put a post in there asking for some medical advice, and somebody had commented, and I reached out to her office, scheduled her appointment, and all of this happened this week. I scheduled her appointment. I got labs done, I got labs back, I got to follow up made and it's boom, boom, boom, boom done. Clarity does not come from thinking about it. Clarity comes from taking action. And the cool thing is, everything is great, my health is great. And I also have somebody on board who now is a partner. And if I would have just stayed in the thinking phase, I would have continued to resent my former doctor and tell myself a story about how I don't have the medical care I want.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:19 I hope I'm okay, and all the things I had to take the action. And so when we make the mistake that we're thinking our overthinking is actually intuition, we are in a loop. We're absolutely in a loop. We have to take an action to get out of the loop. And then another thing that can happen with this I knew it moment is when our empathy overrides our discernment. And what I mean by that is that we allow our own sensations and tracking of other people's emotions to influence our decision making, and so we make decisions that aren't completely aligned for us. And this happens in big ways, and it happens in really small ways. And I'll give you another example. My gosh, this week has been massive for me. I am like, I'm going through this huge identity shift where I am facing things. I'm cleaning up my own proverbial closet literally and figuratively. And when I just sat and I meditated and I connected with the the energy of my business, I realized that I'm scattered on too many platforms.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:38 And so I made a decision this week that the best thing for my personal energy and for my business energy was to move my membership off of its current platform back onto my website, and it was super uncomfortable because I know that my members love my current platform. They love it. They have told me this over and over and over again. They they absolutely love it. And truth be told, I love it too. It's very, very good. And I kept getting this nudge that for my own energetic containment and for that of my business, that I need to streamline all the places that the energy is flowing. And so I decided that the best decision to make was the one that was the best decision to protect the energy of my business, my business as an energetic configuration and myself. And it's taken me about four months to do that. I have known for four months that that was the direction that I thought was right. I've been asking them, do you really love this platform? And they're like, yes, we love it.
Brenda Winkle 00:13:51 And then I was overriding my own inner knowing because my clients were enjoying it so much. So there's a perfect example of empathy overriding discernment. Now, to be clear, is my website going to be just as good? Yeah, probably. There's a learning curve. It's not quite as intuitive, but it is equally good. There's still the scheduling, there's the calendar, there's still community. And then what I did, which I'm really proud of and really excited about, is I put everything that is our trainings, our breathwork, our on demand breathwork into a replay library that's very cohesive and very well organized so people can access it really simply without having to look for a specific date or anything like that. So it's actually going to be better for my members because I have the capability to do that on my website. And then one of the other pieces that can really impact this. I knew it. Experience is when we start to rationalize our own discomfort. If you notice yourself saying things like, oh, it's not that bad, or, well, it's not that uncomfortable or well, I think maybe he just meant if we're rationalizing any discomfort, it can absolutely lead to I knew it moments later.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:14 And this can be in tangible physical world. Things like picking out a pair of shoes. Or it can be in like tangible real world things like picking out clothes. And it can also be in relationship dynamics where if we rationalize our discomfort and we normalize the fact that we're uncomfortable or that something doesn't feel good, we can continue to sink energy and effort and even sometimes money into something that isn't feeling good. And then we get to what is called the sunk cost fallacy, where we say, well, I have so much invested in this at this point, I might as well just stick with it. And that can be a really big problem when we're talking about this. I knew it experience in terms of overwriting the things that you know to be true. Now, in every one of these cases, there was a subtle knowing. And a lot of times for me, I'm pretty body aware and so I can feel different sensations in my body. Maybe it's tightness across my shoulders or my neck, or maybe it's a clenching in my belly.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:27 Sometimes I'll even notice clenching in my fists, and I'll notice that I have nail marks on my palms because I'm clenching my fists and I pay attention to what's happening in my body. I generally feel very, very well all the time. And so if I have a headache, or if I have a sore throat, or if I have a stomach ache. I know there's something going on energetically and emotionally that I have been ignoring, and so I try to pay really close attention to any sensations or symptoms that come up for me, because I know that that's the way my body communicates with me. I will say this is a learned skill. When I started my own healing journey after leaving a marriage, living in a domestic violence shelter, and starting my life over again, I was so disconnected from my body that when I went to a yoga class in 2008, I literally had the thought, oh my gosh, this is what my body feels like. I was so disconnected from it, and I think that was why yoga was so attractive to me.
Brenda Winkle 00:17:40 Still is, because it's something that puts me in my body and it requires me to place my attention on different body sensations and on different body parts, so that I can create an awareness of what my body is feeling like and what it's communicating to me. And now, as a trauma informed somatic coach, I'm absolutely beyond expert level of being able to not only track what's happening in my body, but I can track it in my clients as well. I can feel, and this is part of my ability as a psychic medium, empathic somatic coach. I can feel and track what's happening in my client's bodies as well. So if they're not connected to what's happening in their body system, I can track it and help create that awareness. And so the really big part I want to name here is you have not missed anything. You didn't miss it, you felt it, but you didn't trust yourself enough to stay with it long enough to get curious around what it meant. Whether we're talking about a body sensation or an emotional sensation where you were experiencing an emotion or even a knowing.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:55 Like, I know this is not aligned or I know this. This isn't going to end well, or I know this is really aligned, or I think I want to be friends with this person. You didn't miss the signs. You saw the signs, you felt the signs, but you ignored them. And there's no judgment here because this is what we have been taught to do. Especially if you have a high level of empathy and compassion. You have been taught to do this because we have been taught in overt and subtle ways, that other people's emotional and physical sensations matter more. And we've been taught this because when they're uncomfortable, their discomfort is almost intolerable for us. And so it is actually to our benefit to make sure that nobody around us is ever uncomfortable, right? And when we live that way, we are absolutely ignoring our own internal cues. Whether those are emotions, subtle, knowingly, or even physical sensations. Most people think that self trust is about confidence. I don't think that's true.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:07 And I also think confidence is something you can practice your way into. I don't think it's something that you necessarily have to have innately to have. I think confidence is more often about whether you stay with yourself long enough to listen to yourself, to listen to your body, to listen to your intuition and then take the next action. I think that's what confidence is. At least that's my experience. When I'm lacking confidence, it's almost always due to the fact that I don't completely trust the thing that I'm doing because there's something that I'm pretending is not there. There's a knowing that I'm pretending I don't have. There's a sensation that I'm pretending I don't feel. And that's why I don't appear confident in certain situations. Because when I'm in my self trust, I am confident. And I've seen this in my clients too. The more they trust themselves, the more confident they become. And it's really interesting because a lot of times when I started this work and when I went into this specific, iteration of the business in 2021, I started asking people what they wanted.
Brenda Winkle 00:21:24 And a lot of times they wanted two things confidence and clarity. And so I often talked about confidence and clarity on the podcast. And what I'm learning is confidence and clarity are a byproduct of self trust. They're not different things from self trust. They're a byproduct of it. And the cool part is that because confidence is a byproduct of self trust, and clarity is a byproduct of self trust and taking action, that means that we can behave our way into it. Now, when it comes to the override that we are so accustomed to doing, it happens really, really, really fast and it's most often not conscious. None of us set out to say, you know what? I'm just going to ignore my intuition. I'm just going to ignore my body. I'm going to ignore all the sensations. I'm going to ignore these feelings and just move forward. No, we don't do that because we're very intelligent and we have a high level of emotional intelligence. So what's happening is this is happening in the subconscious level, meaning we aren't thinking these thoughts in our awareness.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:38 If somebody asked you If you were overriding yourself, you probably would say no, because until it's done, we don't have the conscious awareness. So let's say let's say this is a typical sequence. You notice something, you might notice a tone of voice or a specific speech pattern, or maybe even you notice an energy shift. You notice a subtle, really subtle amount of discomfort, either emotionally or physically. And then your empathy kicks in and you start to think about the other person's situation, the other person's feelings, and then you start to rationalize. And when you start to rationalize things, you say things to yourself like, well, maybe I'm overreacting or I bet I'm making too big a deal out of nothing. Or oh, they probably didn't mean it. Or I don't want to be unfair or I think I'm just too emotional. Or my personal favorite. I don't want to be judgmental. It's not my favorite. It's the thing that I come up against when I notice that coming up for me, and I hear in my own internal dialogue, I don't want to be judgmental.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:02 I know for certain I'm getting ready to override something. Maybe that's the same for you, or maybe yours is different. Maybe yours is that I'm just being emotional thing. The key thing here is the override happens long before you ever need to set a boundary. Which is why it's very easy to say, I just need to set better boundaries and to think it's about boundaries. Is it about boundaries? Well, yeah. But this override that we're talking about today, when you pretend subconsciously that a that thing's not a thing. It happens way before you ever even need to set the boundary, which is why it's so hard to set the boundary. So this is really the emotional core of why this specific pattern of overriding yourself erodes self trust. Every time you override yourself, you're teaching yourself in a very subtle way. My knowing isn't safe to follow. And then eventually you stop trusting your instincts, your emotions, your body sensations, your discernment. You even stop trusting your no. And the interesting part about this is you also stop trusting your yeses.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:28 You stop trusting those curiosities, those nudges, those things that are pulling you forward. You're like, well, I probably can't trust it because you don't trust yourself because you've taught yourself with with these empathy patterns that you aren't trusting yourself. And so when you get a new idea, or when you have a desire that suddenly becomes very, very real for you, it's difficult to trust because of this whole pattern that we're talking about. And this is a really exhausting place to live. I've lived it, I know this intimately, and I've coached hundreds of people through it, peoples through it, you know what I mean? I've coached hundreds of people through it. This exhausting pattern includes second guessing everything. So even after you've made the decision and you take your action, you go back through it and you're like, well, gosh, I wonder if I did the right thing. And then you replay conversations and you wake up in the middle of the night and you wonder, have I done the right thing? Have I said the right thing? Am I reading everything correctly? Is this even what I want to do? I don't know.
Brenda Winkle 00:26:32 It might not even be what I want to do, but then you just, you know, have another sleepless night. You maybe sleep from, let's say, 4 to 6, and then you get up and you go through the day and it doesn't bother you again until you wake up the next night, and then you're filled with a sense of resentment, and you wake up for good for the morning, and you have anxiety coursing through your veins, and you can't tell why. It's because of this pattern. Now I want to say self trust is not always about being right. It's not. It's not about being right. It is about being willing to listen to yourself, to listen to your nudges, to allow those thoughts that are kind of in the back of your mind to come forward. And this is the part where so many self-aware people get stuck, because understanding this pattern is not the same thing as interrupting it. You can understand it on the intellectual level, but until we embody this and we practice it.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:39 Our patterns will repeat automatically and we'll keep doing the same thing over and over and over in different ways of I mean, it manifests differently. Maybe it's, you know, about joining a garden club and we talk ourselves out of it and then we end up registering to do this volunteer thing because our friend did, but we don't want to do it. So we have a repeating pattern. And then the other thing is this is all happening very, very fast. Meaning that if we are not really taking it time to pause and to assess what's true for you, your emotions and empathy around other people can cause this to happen even faster. And then we repeat the pattern where we are saying yes to doing things we don't want to do, or we're agreeing to things, or we're not setting the boundary because we don't even realize there is a boundary to be set because we're feeling for other people. And one other thing I see is people trying to mindset their way through. This override mindset has nothing to do with this.
Brenda Winkle 00:28:44 You can have I mean, it has probably something to do with it, because if you're not willing to address these patterns, then that is an issue. There would need to be an openness and a willingness. But mindset alone is not going to change just because you understand this. And in fact, most things around overriding yourself are not going to change just because you understand it. You need to actually embody the change so that you can begin to fully trust yourself and repeat that pattern over and over and over again. So last podcast episode, I was talking about how I learned to do affirmations differently because the affirmations were causing tension and stress in my body, which meant I wasn't actually trusting my affirmations and I was pushing them away. And a lot of times our cue is body tension or the very things that we're treating. So let's say when I was a teacher, I lived on antacids and ibuprofen. I was literally treating away the signs that there was something amiss. And a lot of this also comes back to our bodies feeling safe enough to actually feel and notice what's happening.
Brenda Winkle 00:29:56 So the goal here is not perfection. This is not going to ever be perfect. It's not ever going to be a box that you check. And I would be highly suspect of anybody who tells you otherwise. Because you are a human being. You have fluctuating hormones, you have fluctuating nervous system. And so this is a practice, not a perfect. The goal here is to notice the moment sooner so that you can begin to say, oh, hey, I want to trust myself more fully. So some examples of ways to do this would be pausing before answering, giving yourself some time before you commit to something, even if it's like instituting a 24 hour policy before saying yes to anything. Really noticing what's happening in your body? Notice if your body contracts in any way. If you have tension or tightness or pain, and then giving yourself permission to revisit decisions that you've made is really, really essential. Because as you take space away from the conversation, you might notice it's not aligned. So permission to change your mind and invitation to release the need to force clarity.
Brenda Winkle 00:31:03 Clarity is not something that's going to come instantly. It's going to come through action. Self trust gets rebuilt in tiny moments where you stop leaving yourself. So if this even if this episode resonated with you, I want you to know you probably are far more intuitive than you even realize. Many emotionally intelligent people have learned to disconnect from themselves faster than they can listen, and that pattern can change. This is the exact kind of thing we practice inside the empath, the Empowered Empath collective. We slow down. We notice the override. We reconnect to the body. We stay with yourself in real time. And also the Ignite retreat applications are now open because this work becomes very different when you step away from your normal environment long enough to hear yourself again. And I'll put the link for applications and information in the show notes. Thank you for being here with me today. Thank you for being here this week. And some invitations. Instead of asking yourself, what should I do? Invitation to ask yourself what do I already know? Thank you.
Brenda Winkle 00:32:15 Thank you for listening today. If this episode was helpful for you, would you please consider sharing it with three people that you care about? And I would really appreciate it if you would leave the podcast your rating and review wherever you're listening. Bye for now. Until next time.
