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're powerful. They're real, and they're needed. Start today by downloading my free energy audit at Brenda Winkle. Com forward slash 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 the moment when you get ready to talk yourself out of something that you know, or into something that you don't know. And what I mean by this is not that you don't know something, but the moment when you have the choice to listen to something that's coming from external sources over your internal sources and make whatever's coming externally more true than what's internal. And let me give you a couple of really quick examples before we dive into the episode. So recently I was dancing, and I mean, I love to dance and I go dancing often, and there was a practice song that was on before the class began, and there was a man standing there practicing by himself. And it's common in my dance studio for people to just say, hey, do you want to practice? And that happens before the classes. And it's it's just a way to literally get some practice.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:31 And so I didn't realize that the man had significantly less experience in bachata than I do. I've been dancing bachata for the last three plus years, and he has been to three lessons. So we're talking about three years versus three hours. And there is something that happens when there is a person who says something with so much conviction that we think, oh yeah, that must be true. And there was this specific move that includes something called a hair comb, which is not actually about the hair. It's a move where you take the hand over the head and then back down the shoulder and then run it down the front of the body. And it's a move in Latin dances that just creates some styling that is done by the follow. And the follow is typically not always, but typically a feminine person. And so anyway, this hair comb move is something where you get up in this kind of twisted position with your arms, and then when the lead releases my right hand, my right hand can go all the way out and over the top of my head and then come into a hair comb.
Brenda Winkle 00:03:53 Well, in this practice session with this man, he was not releasing my right hand. And he was trying to do the hair comb with me for me by holding my hand over the front of my face. And there was a moment that I thought to myself, oh, maybe I've been doing it wrong for the last three years. Maybe this person really knows the right way to do it. And I questioned what I knew, and at the same time I'm thinking this just does not feel like it's muscle memory. This feels really different. Really new. I don't know why I don't know this. I dance a lot. I've danced with hundreds of partners at various social events and so on and so forth. And it wasn't until a few moments later when he mentioned, oh, this is my third class. And I'm like, oh, interesting. So I just almost let you tell me how to dance my own follow part and I started to question it. I started to question what I knew. This socialization runs deep, and it's not just the man and woman dynamic.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:05 It's not just the masculine, feminine, feminine dynamic. It is absolutely something that comes up for those of us with deep empathy and compassion. But I think it's also a very human experience. And so have you ever noticed that moment when you're experiencing some discomfort, there's something that doesn't quite feel right or aligned or familiar, but it sort of feels as though you're being told it is right and it is aligned and it is familiar. And then maybe you end up telling yourself things like, Maybe I'm reacting or I'm overreacting, or maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had this wrong the whole time. Or maybe it's more like it probably is not that big of a deal. I guess maybe I'm making too much of it. Or maybe that's not what they mean. Or maybe it's I don't want to be unfair, or I don't want them to be embarrassed, or I don't want them to feel bad, or I'm just too emotional. Or maybe I should just give it more time. And before you even realize what's happening, you are disconnecting from yourself and you are making somebody else's experience or what they're saying more weighty than what you know to be true.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:22 And this is one of the biggest ways that self trust erodes. For emotionally intelligent people, it's not because they're missing things. It's not because they miss the feelings or they miss the cues. It's because we overwrite it. We overwrite it really quickly. And there's a reason why this override happens so fast. If you have a high level of emotional intelligence, whether or not you identify as an empath. You have been trained and rewarded for having your attention focused outward. When you are really reading the room and you are tending to the energy of the people in the room, and when we are always focusing our attention outwards, sometimes we forget to pull it back inward, to notice what is actually true for us. And the truth is, and the reason this is so confusing is your empathy often activates before any type of self-protection or even sovereignty. And when we start to think about our nervous system and brain science, we know from the research at UCLA that the brain perceives any type of social rejection with the same severity as physical pain.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:56 Meaning we are hardwired to value connection over just about anything else, including safety, including our own autonomy, including what we know to be true, including our sovereignty. Because the brain really values connection. And when we start to realize that this is biological, and it's even more of a phenomenon that happens with deep empathy and compassion because of the way that our unique brains are wired, we can start to beat it with some compassion and a lot less judgment. And when you have deep empathy and compassion and you're highly emotionally intelligent and Your focusing, your attention outward, your maintaining connection kind of at all costs. Because not only do you feel the sense of protectiveness for your own protection, but you also feel how a loss of connection might be perceived by the person that you're with. Then it can kind of create this. Hypervigilance and the hypervigilance of maintaining connection at all costs creates a very fast paced rationalization, which means before you can even consciously be aware of what's happening, you're creating a reason why this must be true.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:26 For example, me and the guy in the dance floor, I'm telling myself this hair comb that I've known for the last three years isn't the right thing I must have. I must have mixed it up. I must have gotten it wrong. I must be thinking of something different. And the truth is that if you have this empathic ability, because you had to have this empathic ability because perhaps you had a childhood that was had a lot of chaos, a lot of instability, maybe also had abuse. You learned your discomfort was a lot less important than harmony. And so if you have become an empath because of your environment and your situation, this is even more prevalent. And here's the thing. You probably haven't missed anything. You're probably not confused. You probably do know a lot. You haven't missed red flags. But what happens is you immediately start negotiating with yourself about whatever it is that you're trying to trust within yourself. This is a big deal because what is happening is we're making it sound completely reasonable to not trust what we know.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:46 I'll give you another example. Over the past week, I have been getting to know my new health care provider, and there was a moment when I felt myself start to brace against what was I was perceiving as being misunderstood. There is a very specific thing that I want support on, and I feel like I'm not being heard on it. And there was a moment when I felt myself go into an old pattern of, well, she must know more. She's the doctor. Before I caught it and realized, yeah, she does know more about medical stuff, but I know more about me. And so when I caught it, I was able to ask the questions that I needed to ask. And so We've talked about a couple of different dynamics. We talked about like a male female dynamic. We also have the authority dynamic that can be present. But honestly this can happen in any relationship configuration. And the override sounds very reasonable most of the time. Because the truth is we as emotionally intelligent people understand nuance.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:02 We live in the world of nuance, and so we're always making exceptions, even if we're black and white thinkers, which I'm not. But I raised a black and white thinker. But even if we are black and white thinkers, we still are able to really understand the nuance of different situations. And so empathy can very easily, almost too easily become self dismissal, because our empathy for other people, the way in which we want to honor their authority. We want to honor their experience. We want them to feel good for being around us and for spending time with us, because it matters to us. Not only because we're kind, but because it's actually better for us if they're feeling good, because then we feel good too, right? So this is a little bit self-serving in a lot of ways. And that's the other piece that we don't talk about often with empathy is that there is an element of it that is self-serving, but it's also self-protective. And so we're not going to judge it or make it bad.
Brenda Winkle 00:13:12 But here's the the piece that I really want you to understand. It's very easy to get understanding other people confused with abandoning yourself. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. And When you get into a place where you're feeling like you have to explain or over explain or over justify. My invitation would be to treat that like a yellow flag. Something is just about ready to go off the rails. Something is just about ready to cause you to dismiss yourself. So this shows up for us in a lot of different ways. Maybe it means we stay too long in relationships that aren't serving us, whether those are friendships or work connections or contract connections. You know, if you've hired a contractor for a specific thing romantic partnerships, marriages, you name it. A lot of times, if you have deep empathy and compassion and you're emotionally intelligent, you're going to do literally every single thing you can to preserve that connection, to preserve that relationship. Because not only do you not want the pain of the relationship ending, but you want to protect the other person from the pain of the relationship ending.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:36 And so it's very, very easy for those of us with this emotional intelligence to stay too long in relationships. The other thing that can happen, and there's more than one I've got a list of like 5 or 6 things is it's very easy for those of us with emotional intelligence to overcommit. And the truth is, people want us on projects, people want us in committees. People want our energy because of our emotional intelligence, because oftentimes we are the regulators of the room. We are sort of the emotional thermostat. We are the regulation thermostat. And so people feel good around us when we're emotionally intelligent. And I know because you're listening to this podcast, that you are one of those people that just people feel good around. People probably talk to you all the time and they tell you their life story and they probably say things once in a while. Like, I've never shared this with anybody and I don't know why I'm sharing it with you, but I really feel like I want to share it with you.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:42 And the other thing that can happen for those of us with emotional intelligence is that we tolerate emotional inconsistency. And what I mean by emotional inconsistency is, let's say you have a friend who, when you're together in the physical space, the friendship feels so close, like you could tell them anything. Like you could share your deepest, darkest hopes and dreams. And you could also share the things that you are needing support on. And it just feels so connective. And then after that time that you have spent with that person, it could be weeks or months before they even respond to your text. That's emotional inconsistency and that happens a lot. For those of us with emotional intelligence, and it has a little bit to do with us and a little bit to do with the other people and a little bit to do with our standards and what we're allowing. And one of the biggest things I see this is this is specifically one of the biggest things I see with my clients. And let me tell you how it manifests.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:58 We have different standards for different people. Okay. So let me use some different context here. I love to teach things in a totally different context because it helps really land the point. Okay. So let's say for example, that I have a product okay. So I'm going to show you my lip gloss. This is my current favorite lip gloss. it is the Burt's Bees lip shine, and I like to go between the colors pucker and smooch. And depending on what I'm doing, I'll use one or the other. But this one happens to be smooch! It's my current favorite. Now, the standard for the product is that it is a specific color. It is a specific kind of container. Then I know that the the lid will unscrew. It is a specific feel. There's a standard for that. There's a standard amount. I know that it says net weight 0.5oz or 14.1g. I know that that standard is going to be there across any Burt's Bees lip shine that I purchased because there's a standard, right? If you have emotional intelligence or you're an empath, one of the quickest ways for you to derail yourself is that you adjust your standards based on who you're with.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:33 So what I see happen is you have a standard way of this is how I want to be treated in my relationships. This is the reciprocity that I require. This is the way that I desire to be treated and spoken to. This is how I want to be loved. This is how I like to be communicated with. This is how I like to be touched. These are all your standards. And then what happens is you actually adjust your standards based on who you're with. And most of the time, the standard adjustment is not in your favor. You'll have a certain person or a group of people that you lower the standard for. This happens so many times I see with mothers who have growing teenage and adult children where their standard of treatment that they allow from their children is lower than anybody else, meaning their children treat them worse than anyone else in their lives. And I've seen this over and over and over again, and I lived it for a brief time, too, until I realized what I was doing.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:44 And then I was telling my daughter, okay, we we need a different way to do this. And we had a conversation and it it solved itself. But if we were to do the same thing and apply it to a product, it would be the same thing as if I bought the Burt's Bees from, let's say, Whole Foods. I don't even know if Whole Foods carries it, so I'm just using it as an example. Okay, if I bought the Burt's Bees from Whole Foods and I, it was 0.5oz. And then if I went to buy this from Fred Meyer and it was 0.4oz and the color was just slightly more pink, and then if I went and bought this from a different store, maybe an online store like Amazon something or whatever. Then it was 0.3 ounces and it was kind of orange. It'd be the same thing. You wouldn't buy a product whose standards changed. You just wouldn't. But for some reason, we tell ourselves in the relationships that we should adjust our standards, and we allow this emotional inconsistency to be present in our lives where we have a standard of treatment.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:48 But then the people that are closest to us often are the ones that treat us the very worst. And when you address this, and you name it, you call it out for what it is and you decide your worth. That consistency across the board, every single relationship and every single circumstance in your life begins to improve. When that pattern begins to change and you keep the standard uniform of this is how I will be treated. These are the things that I can do. Love examples I love context changes. I remember one time I was pretty newly divorced, and I had the first relationship post-divorce, and the first relationship post-divorce was an Army Master sergeant, no Air Force master sergeant, and he was deployed shortly after we had gotten together. Now, I had a standard of how much sleep that I needed per night. And I was going to bed, let's say, at 10:00. Well, when he was deployed, he was deployed in South Korea, which meant that his daytime was in the middle of my night.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:14 I completely adjusted my standard of sleep in order to have a middle of the night phone calls with this person. Now, obviously that didn't last for long because my exhaustion overrode everything and I started to get sick and cranky and resentful because I had adjusted my standard to fit this person in a way that was not helpful or healthy for me. So that's an example of adjusting a standard. If you know that you need X amount of sleep, an X amount of nutrition, and X amount of water, and then you find yourself adjusting it for somebody that's a an internal red flag that you're adjusting standards for people. So when this pattern starts to change, you're going to stop spending hours replaying conversations, and you're going to stop needing so much external reassurance because you're going to be more Resourced, you're going to have a better connection to your own body, which means you're going to trust what your body is telling you so much faster. And then it's so cool because life starts to feel more emotionally stable, a lot less roller coaster kind of situations.
Brenda Winkle 00:23:37 And that is so, so important. It's not that you won't ever have things in life that happen that cause you to feel big emotions. It's not that you'll never get dysregulated again. You will. You will because you're human and you have a nervous system and you have a body. And that's what happens when you have a nervous system and a body. But when you are starting to really keep that standard for yourself, sacred, you just have more resources. So your baseline begins to change. And I really want to say this is so important, especially for my one on one clients, if you're listening right now. the goal is not to eliminate a trigger, and the goal is not to eliminate any type of response or reaction to the trigger. The goal is to bounce back faster, to create more resilience, to give you more tools to cope with what life is giving you. And when we can do that in a faster way, you can move through any emotional upset, any emotional ups and downs in a much faster way.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:48 It can take you hours instead of months. And so that's the work. This is not a box to be checked, and I want to be really clear about that. Anybody that tells you this type of work is a box to be checked and you just need this checklist, or you just need this thing, or you just need this one breathwork session or this one breathwork course, and then your work is done. I would run the other way because that is not how this works. That's not how your nervous system works. That's not how your body works. You can't, for example, eliminate all the stress in your life over the summer. That's not going to happen. So if you set the expectation like, okay, this summer I'm going to reduce my cortisol. Well, that's a great goal. I would like to do that too. But if you're not giving yourself the tools and the practice of noticing when you're in a stress response so that you can actually do something about the cortisol, we have not hit the mark.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:52 Now this is really, really important. So if you're multitasking, if you're doing something else, I want to bring your attention right back here. Because awareness of this pattern is not the same thing as self trust. You can be completely aware, but that is on an intellectual level. It's in your mind. Self trust is something that will happen in relational situations, in your relationships, and it's embodied meaning. You're going to feel it in your body. When we talk about the word embodied, that means we're using the whole body as a communication and an intuition system to give us information. And many self-aware people constantly override themselves. So you can be aware that you have these tendencies. You can be aware that you have these abilities. You can be aware that you're emotionally intelligent and still override yourself all the time. Insight alone does not interrupt nervous system patterns. Insight alone does not reduce stress and anxiety. It's the implementation that is absolutely essential. Knowing yourself Intellectually is very, very different from staying connected to yourself in real time.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:14 So you want to know what actually rebuilds self trust, slowing down before you make decisions. Giving yourself that chance to pause. It sounds too simple to work, but it really does work. Start to pause. Give yourself time to feel what's happening in your emotions. Also feel what's happening in your body. What is your body doing? Is it opening and relaxing and releasing? Leaning forward? Is it tightening? Do you sense nausea or a headache or a sore throat popping up? As you're making a decision, really start to notice what your body is communicating to you. Notice if you can do something to support yourself and your body when other people around you are disappointed. How does that impact you? Can you take some deep breaths and come back to a regulated state? Can you do some tapping? Can you do some mindful things like the fingertips to the thumb in repeating patterns? And I'm showing you on YouTube. if you want to go find me on YouTube, you can watch this. All of those things are ways that we can stay connected to ourselves.
Brenda Winkle 00:28:33 And this is a practice, not a perfect. So we want to find ways to implement this into our daily lives so that it's something we know. Oh, this is a sign that I might be getting ready to override my intuition or myself. These tiny moments matter so much more than you think they do, because the tiny moments are going to be the difference of you leaning into full self trust or overwriting yourself again. So here are some things that you can try. As an example, saying let me think about it and get back to you. Literally buy yourself time. Not explaining yourself immediately like just let it land. Say the thing and let it land. Let it see if they ask any follow up questions. Let's see. That wasn't what I meant to say. But you know what I mean to say. Notice what's happening in your body. Is there tightening? Is there tension? Pause. I've said it before and say it again. Pausing is so important. And then this is really important.
Brenda Winkle 00:29:43 Are you honoring when you feel tired and giving yourself an opportunity to rest? That is so essential because if you're tired or depleted, all of this becomes exponentially harder. And then the last thing I'd love to invite you to try is to allow Silence! You don't have to fill every silence. Just let it be silent. Are you going to be uncomfortable at first? If this is new. Yeah. You are. You are. But there is a big payoff for it. One thing I watch happen all the time in this work is that when people begin to begin to trust themselves again, they start recovering faster from a stressor, from a life event and situations that you used to have them spiral for days or weeks or months. Move into hours where you can process things emotionally, let it flow through you. Come back to that baseline, that regulated state. It's not because life has become perfect. It's because they're no longer leaving themselves completely, so they're not having to come back from zero. And because they have practices in place Every day, daily check ins with themselves, daily nervous system practices to maintain that regulated state.
Brenda Winkle 00:31:08 It's not an accident. Like I remember my first time being in a skyscraper and I was probably under ten and it was Chicago, and it was like one of the big, tall skyscrapers. And I remember looking at the gleaming windows of the skyscraper, and I thought maybe they had a different kind of glass. I thought maybe there was something that they knew that made him so shiny and so clean until, as we were leaving, I realized that there were people who were cleaning the windows. The windows weren't magically clean. The windows were clean because somebody cleaned them? The same thing is true for you and your nervous system, the people who are emotionally regulated and have nervous system regulation and are able to come back quickly from stressful events. Don't have something you don't have except they have daily practices in place. They're tending to their nervous system every single day, and this is one of the reasons why implementation and nervous system practices matter so much, because the patterns don't change. Through more information, you can learn more and more and more and more and not actually change anything.
Brenda Winkle 00:32:37 In fact, over consuming information is a common stress response. It's actually the flight stress response in action. It's the one that just keeps you learning like you're a perpetual student. You don't ever actually implement or do anything. You just keep on learning. These patterns don't change through more information. They change through real time practice, support, embodiment, and learning how to stay connected to yourself when the old patterns start to get activated. And by the way, that doesn't mean anything has gone wrong. In fact, it probably means if you're seeing some patterns come back again and again and again, you're actually healing on the upward spiral. Sometimes these do come back, but they're coming back at a different angle, a different perspective, a different place. And you can see your evolution when those things start to come around again. So I have a few reflection questions for you this week. I have three this week. You can either get your notes up out on your phone, or you can keep track of where you are in this podcast right now, so you can come back and listen and write this down later or grab your journal.
Brenda Winkle 00:33:51 So the three questions are number one, Where do you most quickly override yourself? Is it in medical appointments, or is it when there is an authority figure in place? Is it in male female dynamics? When are you quickly overriding yourself? Number two what phrases do you say when you have started to disconnect from yourself? And these might be phrases that you say out loud, but more likely they're phrases that you think and it will be something like I, I must not know enough. Or maybe I don't know as much as they do. Or I was thinking it would be different. What phrases do you say when you start disconnecting from yourself? And number three, what would change in your life if you could trust yourself just 10% faster? What would change? So those again, number one, where do you most quickly override yourself? Number two, what phrases do you say when you start disconnecting from yourself? And number three, what would change if you trusted your body 10% faster? The goal here is not perfection.
Brenda Winkle 00:35:11 The goal is becoming someone who notices herself sooner and leaves herself less often. And honestly, that changes every relationship in your life. Because when you change the relationship you have with yourself, you expand your capacity to be in relationship with others. If this episode resonated with you, would you send it to someone who you think would love to learn to trust herself more? And if you haven't yet left the podcast a rating and review in a while, which, by the way, I haven't seen any new ratings and reviews come through in quite a long time. So I'm talking to you. If you could please leave. Please, please, please leave the podcast a rating review wherever you're listening. It is incredibly helpful to get the podcast into the ears of more listeners. If you're not sure how to do it. Google it, ChatGPT it, clod it, whatever it takes. Like 30s. And if this work sounds appealing to you, and you think that you're ready to really implement and make some of these changes.
Brenda Winkle 00:36:22 Invitation to come join us in the Empowered Empath Collective and power will be enrolling again later in the summer of 2026, so you can join us there where we do this deep work and practice in real life. Thank you so much for listening. Bye for now. Until next time.
