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. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. Today in the podcast, we're going to be talking about why awareness isn't enough, although it is a really important starting place. Here's the thing. You can know exactly what you need and exactly what to do and still not do it. You can understand the pattern. You can have total recognition of the steps you need to take. You can notice yourself overwriting yourself in real time and still repeat the behavior. Now, this doesn't happen because you're weak or there's something wrong with you. Much like the diet culture would have you believe, there's something else going on. Awareness alone doesn't create change. What we need to create the change is to feel safe enough to implement the change, so that then you can embody it and make it part of you. Awareness is what we come to. To understand the pattern. But practice changes. What happens next? So many times we feel like since we're aware of something that it should be enough, right? I'll give you an example from my own life.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:49 I tested pre-diabetic a number of years ago. I was aware that I had too high of blood sugar. That didn't mean that I changed anything. I didn't like it. I knew I wanted it to improve, but I didn't do the things that I knew would improve it. Like lift weights, reduce simple sugars and simple carbohydrates and increase protein, I just didn't. Emotionally intelligent people like you and me often overvalue insight. And I'm telling you this because that was my experience when I was thinking about my own pre-diabetic diagnosis. When we understand it, it creates a temporary feeling of relief. Oh, that's what's happening. And then when we name it, we feel sort of productive, like, oh yeah, I know that this thing is happening. But then what we end up doing is we either consume a lot of content and become experts on whatever it is that we're trying to understand or shift without actually creating any changes, or we'll just kind of numb out or blind ourselves. Either one of those might happen.
Brenda Winkle 00:04:13 So this comes up for us across a lot of different topics and areas of our lives. So for example, you might hear yourself saying things like, I know I need to set a boundary there, or I know that I am doing too much, I'm overcommitted and I need to slow down and put less on my calendar. Or maybe you say things like, I know that I need to rest more. Or like in my case, I know I need to lift more weights and eat more protein. Or maybe for you, it's I know I'm people pleasing, but I keep doing it. Or I know that I'm overriding myself right now. Here's the thing I really want you to understand. Knowing is not the same thing as interrupting the pattern. Insight can explain the behavior, and it helps us create a sense of self-compassion, which is really important. But your brain and your nervous system are hard wired to prefer familiarity. We know it's safe, even if the familiarity is not giving you the results that you want, even if it's causing you pain because you're repeating patterns that are painful or the results are painful.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:33 Your brain and your nervous system still prioritize the familiar. Anything that is a change is viewed by the brain and the nervous system as a potential threat. And when there's a potential threat, your brain and your nervous system are going to push a stop on you, no matter how much your conscious mind is thinking, I want to make this change. And this happens for a lot of different reasons. One of them is that if your brain or your nervous system perceive that the change you want to make is going to create a shift in your identity, all of a sudden, all the bells and whistles around your belonging and your acceptance start to go off, and this can come up for you again across topics around your life, whether we're talking about health or maybe it's weight loss, or maybe it's growing that business, or maybe it's showing up on social media in a bigger way. Or maybe it is finally having the courage to have that conversation, whatever that is. That is a potential change. Your body, your nervous system, your subconscious is going to shut down until and unless it feels safe enough to actually weather the change.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:51 So this is what's happening. There's actually nothing wrong with you. And the other really important piece that I want to name here is there is a lot of research around willpower. And we know that willpower doesn't really exist. I mean, we talk about willpower, and if you watch social media, you'll hear a lot about willpower. But willpower only works when you're fully resourced. I mean, you don't have a lot of stress in your life. You're fed, you're hydrated, you're well-rested. You don't have a lot of other things going on in your life. And there are times that we might be able to get results with willpower alone. Whether we're talking about building the business, having the conversation, prioritizing your health doesn't matter. But what do you think the ratio is of the times when you're completely resourced? Stress is managed and you can actually willpower your way through it versus the times when you do have stressors. Or you might be a little bit less rested than you were a day before, or you didn't drink all your water.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:03 What do you think that ratio is? For me personally, and this is just my experience, yours might be really different for me. I think I'm probably around 80 to 90% most of the time. The vast majority of the time I'm resourced enough that willpower alone can work. But in that 20%, when something stressful happens or I'm doing too much just because my calendar gets busy because of certain times of year or something happens, or I don't sleep well because my blind broke and I forgot to wear my sleep mask. Real story right there. In those moments, I notice that my willpower is non-existent and the research supports this. So if we can give ourselves grace about willpower, that would be a really, really important step to take before we actually get into the heart of this conversation. So there's this instance when or instant, I should say, a moment when you know you need something, you know you need to have a conversation. You know, you need to say no. You know, you need to prioritize the protein.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:25 You know, you need to say no, I don't want the buck. Lava and the Stroop waffle sample at the Beaverton Saturday market. True story from today. There's an example when you know what you need, and then you talk yourself out of it. You talk yourself out of it because you have an empathy that comes online and you want connection and you want belonging, or you have an empathy that comes online and you realize someone's going to feel really disappointed or sad, or you start over explaining instead of setting the boundary, or you engage in conversations too long that really need to be done because they're not serving either one of you, or you respond immediately instead of taking the pause, and then you sort of regret it, not sort of you regret it. That happened to me just a few weeks ago when I was going from one thing to the next thing, and I got a text, and the person who texts me or texted me knows that I'm busy in the day. And that's really clear between us.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:33 And yet, for some reason, I put pressure on myself to respond to the text in real time in between two things. And I was short. I wasn't Angry or mean or inappropriate, but I was much shorter than I needed to be, and it caused me to have to go back and make a phone call the next day and say, hey, I apologize. I was really in my go, go, go momentum, and I actually want to soften my response a little bit. And he was like, oh no, no apology needed at all. You're allowed to have feelings about this. And so if that happens to you sometimes, just know you're not alone. Abandoning rest because it either doesn't feel safe to rest or somebody needs something. And you know, where I see this come up a lot, I see this come up a lot more for women than men, and I see it come up in puppies or new dogs, new pets, and I see it come up with mothers of kids when the puppy or the kid needs something.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:42 I see women all the time. Talk themselves out of the rest that they need. And rest might be like mental rest. We were talking last week in power about the seven types of rest, and this is based on research that is not mine. As I'm recording this podcast episode, I don't have that research in front of me, but I will put a link to her research in the show notes. We were talking about the seven types of rest and not all of them are asleep. In fact, only one type of the seven types is physical. Then there's the mental rest. There's creative rest. There's social rest. And so if you think about the ways in which you're telling yourself you can't rest now because somebody needs something that might be an override moment for you. And this one we are diving into big time in June, both on the podcast and in the Empowered Empath Collective. And that is shrinking yourself to preserve Connection. This is a big one, and shrinking yourself to preserve connection can be not sharing wins, not celebrating yourself, not admitting that you've moved beyond something or outgrown something.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:56 Maybe it was a way of thinking or, doing specific things. Sometimes shrinking yourself can look like pretending you don't know what you know, and letting people explain things to you that you are really, really good at. Self override usually happens very fast, and it often sounds completely reasonable. Kind of responsible. Feels like, oh yeah, I'm doing the right thing here. I'm honoring this agreement or I'm respecting this person. Override often sounds compassionate and it often looks logical. But you have to remember, we are in a society that values overworking, that values overwhelming, that values honestly, misogyny and the patriarchy. And so there's a lot of unlearning that we each have an opportunity to do or not do. And when we start to get curious around ways, we're overriding ourselves, a lot of times we are having to learn things that a system has taught us. And when I talk about the patriarchy, I am talking about a system. It is not one person, it is not men. It is a system.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:17 And there's something really important that I want you to know in this. It's not that you missed anything. You didn't miss it, you overrode it. And that's why awareness alone does not create the change, because the override is happening in the nervous system before your mind or consciousness catches up to what's happening. It's a nervous system thing, and this is why practice matters so much more than perfection. The goal is not to get it right 100% of the time. That's not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. Even though I'm doing this work all day, every day, it doesn't happen for me perfectly either. And so I'll give you an example from the dance floor. I love to dance. In fact, I just joined the studio that I have been attending. I've been attending as a drop in, and I've been attending since October as a drop in. And I finally took the plunge and joined, which now means I have unlimited access to dance. pretty much five days a week.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:25 If I wanted to go dance five days a week and sometimes six days a week. So that will be happening. But here's the thing it's practice. It's not a perfect. We need to let go of this idea that sometime you're going to evolve enough that you never have to think about this. If you're listening to this podcast, you have a high level of empathy, you have a high level of compassion, and we don't want to change that. But because you have this high level of empathy and compassion, this is not going to be a box to be checked. This is going to be ongoing. It's going to be something that you continue to come back to. You will evolve, you will improve. But it's not something that's going to completely go away. And thank goodness it's not going to go away. Because if it did, that would mean that you actually lost your empathy and compassion. So the real goal here is to let go of the idea that this is a box to be checked, that it has to be done perfectly, that you should see it coming.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:26 Let's let go of that to okay. You may not see it coming. You might be in it before you realize you're in it. And this happened to me on the dance floor. So I mentioned that there was a person that bought me a water a couple episodes ago, and I don't know which episode we'll have to go back and listen. But anyway, as I kept attending dance classes several nights a week, this person was very interested in my attention and in my companionship, and at first it was kind of fun until I realized, and this is what I'm talking about. I realized that this person's intention was to separate me from the rest of the class because he wanted my attention alone, so he wanted me to be the one that danced with him only. Well, that's not the way these dance classes work. Typically, like, there are some couples that come in and stay as couples, but most everyone, including the majority of couples, comes in and we rotate with each other because that's how you get better at dancing fast is to dance with different partners to understand, oh, that's how this person interprets this move so that you can get to be a better leader or a better follower.
Brenda Winkle 00:17:44 In my case, I'm the follow. So if I would have had the goal that I would always be able to see it all coming, then I would have seen it the very first time he bought me a water. But that did not happen. I mentioned in the podcast episode that I did feel like he pulled me out of the class into this resting area, but that was a repeating pattern, and it wasn't that I was being pulled into a different room, it was being it was that I was being pulled away from the group. And, you know, that is a real red flag for me, having come from my background with domestic violence. That's a red flag. That is how a lot of things start. And so I resisted the separation, I refused, I wouldn't go. I wouldn't only dance with him. I got invited into some other big dance circle, which I'll talk about another time. It was so much fun, I loved it, and then I noticed that this person was a little bit pouty.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:48 Literally pouty. The next time that I went back to class and I was telling myself exactly what I tell you, which is that someone's emotional response to you setting a boundary or declaring a need is not your responsibility. And so I did not take responsibility for his pouting. I just did my own thing. I was kind, I was engaging, but I was not overly accommodating. I just was not overly accommodating. And when this person went to explain to me how to do a very basic move between the salsa basic to the samba, which is basically the difference between moving back and front to side to side. I was like, are you are you kidding me right now? I didn't say that, but I think my face said that I am one of those faces that says it. Even if my words don't say it, my face said it and I could feel the cooling off that happened, which is totally fine with me. But I want to really, really hone the point that I wouldn't have even had to do that if I would have seen it the very first time, but we don't see it the first time.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:03 We won't, but we see it faster, and that's the goal noticing faster. The goal is staying with yourself long enough to notice. The goal is to notice when you feel like, oh, something is up here. Something is not the way I would like it to be or recovering more quickly. That's a goal or this goal interrupting the self abandonment in the smaller moments. So when there's an opportunity for you to solve abandon in a big moment, you catch it. And that's what happened for me at this dance studios. The little moments I was catching, it was catching it faster. I was like, oh, this doesn't feel good. And then I would allow myself to think, why? Why doesn't this feel good? And then the answers came. And then I knew what to do, and I just trusted it. Our nervous systems need repetition. Now, if you just found me. By the way, welcome to all the new listeners. I was part of a summit last week. Awaken your psychic gifts.
Brenda Winkle 00:21:04 And if you met me there, come comment over on Instagram at Brenda Winkle I want to get to know you. It was an amazing summit, one of the best summits I've ever participated in with Wendy Mata, and I'm doing more work for her in June, so I'll keep you posted on that. Anyway, I say this to you all the time that it's about practicing. It's about giving yourself the opportunity to create repetition so that it becomes a muscle memory, so to speak. That is so, so, so important. Because if we expect ourselves to be able to do it right the very first time, that is not a realistic expectation. So back to what I was saying before I welcomed all our new listeners, is that I am a choir director. I was a music educator in the public schools for decades, specifically choirs, as many as I could. Literally. It almost killed me, as many as I could, and I still direct two children's choirs and I love it. The two that I direct now are just on Sundays and they bring me tremendous joy, love, love, love them.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:17 But you know what? In music, there is an expectation that you will practice. There is an expectation that you will make mistakes, you will correct them. You will refine specific phrases, specific patterns. That's the expectation. And the other expectation is, no one in the history of ever musically has gotten where they are. Without someone to reflect back, someone to guide, someone to mentor, someone to teach, someone to direct. It doesn't happen. That's why choirs have directors. Are there people that are self-taught in the music business? Yes, but there's a certain point and which they are capped, they cannot move beyond until they get more help. I was just listening to an interview with Kelsey Watts. I am obsessed with all things Broadway Love, a Broadway musical, and I came across Kelsey Watts when I came home from London, where we got to see six in the West End, and Kelsey was starring on Broadway in the US as Jane Seymour in six. And so I am just letting you into the brain of Brenda today.
Brenda Winkle 00:23:32 And if I'm a little bit all over the place and you dislike it, let me know if you kind of dig it. Let me know, because I'm, I'm letting myself go off script here. I'm really letting go of the outline anyway. So I was listening to this podcast with Kelsey Watts, and I really respect her, and I was drawn to her immediately because she sings in her kitchen with her husband, Brandon, and she sings really well, spectacularly well. And she talks about she auditioned for the musical six, I believe, three years before she was cast and the very first time that she auditioned and she didn't get accepted, she reached out to the casting director and asked why, and the casting director told her that while he asked her a question, he said, have you ever acted? And she said, no, I haven't ever acted. And he said, well, that might be a good place to start. So Kelsey went and got acting lessons and dancing lessons and more singing lessons.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:38 And if you watch her on social media, she is continuing to get lessons. Oh, that's my appreciation practice alarm. You're welcome. So maybe you can appreciate things right now. Let's just take a moment and pause. What do you appreciate? Oh, I appreciate you listening. I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you being behind the scenes with my unhinged brain on a Saturday while I'm recording for you. So back to Kelsey. What's she still takes lessons and the idea that we can do this stuff when it comes to nervous system, intuition, empathy. Without lessons, without practice is foolish. And it is. It's just nuts. It doesn't make any sense. Why would we think we could do something without support and without practice? And so if you're one of my clients, whether you're a private client, a power client, an empowered empath collective client, I want you to know you need to practice every day. That's why I send you the daily checklist. That's why you have access to the breathwork inside your members portal.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:53 Because you need the daily practice. And I'm saying this to all of us, myself included. It's not enough for us to think we can log in to something once a week and be very present for one hour, and then we've got it. It doesn't work that way. Our bodies, our nervous systems, our brains need repetition. They need practice. And you know what else that's going to require you to do? It's going to require you to learn to tolerate the discomfort of not being good at something at first. And a lot of times the nervous system work that we most need is super uncomfortable. Sometimes it even feels a little bit cringey, honestly. And I do this work like full time, and I will be the first to tell you that sometimes the things I'm doing probably make people cringe. And yet it works. It works. And then the other thing that's really important to mention here is that it's very easy to have guilt around choosing yourself, guilt around practicing the things, guilt around even taking ten minutes for yourself to do some breath.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:10 It's really easy to be impacted and influenced by that guilt. Oh, and by the way, I have something very special coming in the next podcast episode, I'm interviewing Allie Nowicki. She is a pediatrician, a board certified obesity medicine doc, and a neonatologist, and she has something that is mind blowing and game changing. Talking about relational guilt. I cannot wait to share that with you. So be sure that you're following or subscribe wherever you're listening because you're going to want to hear this episode. The other thing that gets in our way when we think about ways that we're allowing ourselves to practice, is the fear of disappointing people. And we got to go back to where we started, which is that your brain and your body are wired to reject change, instead preferring what's familiar. So a lot of times the things that you're introducing do feel unsafe at first. I don't mean unsafe, like I'm not physically safe, but you'll notice that you'll have resistance to doing that daily breathwork, or the daily tapping or the daily walking.
Brenda Winkle 00:28:26 You'll notice that there's some resistance there. That is one of those opportunities that you have that we all have. I have it, too, to lovingly say this is actually what I need. It's like we take the vitamins, we eat the broccoli, I like broccoli, but I hear that as a euphemism. Like we eat the broccoli because we know it's good for us. This is the same thing we do the nervous system practices because we know it's good for us. And here's the really cool thing. Practice builds self trust because the practice creates the muscle memory. It creates the repetition which lowers the sensation that it's new and it's changing because it creates familiarity. But then it also creates evidence. And this is key Evidence is one of the things that can be really fueling, but we have to do it long enough to get the evidence. Awareness without practice becomes avoidance. And I know that feels confronting, but it's true. Awareness without practice becomes avoidance. This is where we see things. And I see this in in people and I've done it myself.
Brenda Winkle 00:29:43 We listen without implementing. We take in all the information that we can, but we don't actually do the things we know we need to do. We stay in analysis, we just keep consuming information and we just keep analyzing and pro conning. We intellectualize our emotions. We try and make them make sense. We make them something that we should be able to explain. We want to connect the dots. We want to say, this is why I'm feeling this way, because this and this and this. And he said, and she said and all this, that honestly doesn't work because your emotions are not intellectual, by the way. Your emotions aren't facts. Your emotions are emotions. Your emotions are not the same thing as your thoughts. We know that from DBT, which by the way, I'm not a therapist, but we're going to talk about this on the episode with Doctor Ali Nowitzki because debate is a really important part of her work. And then this is the thing that I see really happen a lot with creative types, with entrepreneurs, with the artistic type people.
Brenda Winkle 00:30:54 It's the consuming instead of practicing. You just sign up for more summits. You listen to more podcasts, you sign up for free workshops, but you don't do the work. And look, I get it, I was there, I lived there for probably the majority of 2022 not making that up. I lived there for the majority of 2022. I just I just kept consuming. In fact, there was one time in 2023 when I was doing my weekly planning, and I looked at my schedule and I was giving myself some tough love, and I was doing an analysis of how I was spending my time. And I was realizing that what I was telling myself was a one hour call for a mastermind that I was in at the time was taking ten hours a week, because, yes, it was the mastermind call, but then I was allowing it to become all these other side calls and all these other training calls. And anyway, the point is, I get it. I don't judge it. I've been there, but I also see it.
Brenda Winkle 00:32:00 And a lot of times when we're in that avoidant pattern, we're aware, but we're not implementing, we're trying to avoid discomfort. We're trying to avoid setting the boundaries that we feel scared to set, because we're worried that if we say no to somebody, or we tell somebody that we want to have a say in decisions that affect us, or we say to somebody, this is actually what I need from you right now, and they decline. And then we say, well, then this is what needs to happen next. We're also avoiding taking the action. We're avoiding potential grief that we might have over a change that either we've known is happening or we've been trying to make not happen, or just trying to pretend like it's not there. And a lot of times people avoid doing something because they're afraid of relational change. And if any of those resonate with you, I really want you to make sure you come back and listen to the episode with Doctor Ali Nowicki, because understanding the pattern is not the same thing as interrupting it.
Brenda Winkle 00:33:06 If you've been frustrated with yourself because you know what to do and you still struggle to do it. Awareness is not failure. It's the beginning. It's the first step. And every time you notice yourself before you override yourself, you're strengthening that self trust. So give yourself credit. And keep in mind that perfectionism is not your friend. Perfectionism will keep you from sitting in discomfort. It will keep you from practicing. It will keep you from trying. Invitation just to notice when you have perfectionistic tendencies, come forward. Love them. Thank them for being there. And then let yourself do it a little bit imperfectly. As a musician, this one is hard for me. I like to do things perfectly because in music there's no such thing as a B in performance. Like if you there was a time, I don't know if it's still there. I might have to go search after this. But there was a time on YouTube When there was a band director who was bragging about, well, everybody has to have 100% in music when you perform in an ensemble, because if you don't, it just sounds absolutely terrible.
Brenda Winkle 00:34:18 And so there was a YouTube video of like, this is 100%. This is when they get 80% right. And it was atrocious. Anyway, when it comes to perfectionism, I deeply understand that because it's something I've really struggled with. So invitation to let some go. You're going to be okay. Even if even if you're not perfect. This is the exact kind of work that we practice inside the Empowered Empath Collective. The doors are open now. They will not stay open. So if this is something that is interesting to you, invitation to come join us. And then the Doors to Power are going to be opening up later this summer for our summer cohort, but they're not currently open. But power power will be re enrolling. Here's the thing. It's not enough to understand your patterns intellectually. We want to learn how to stay connected to yourself in real life, in real relationships, in stress, and in the moments that actually matter. I'm going to put all the links in the show notes, including that research for the Seven Ways of Rest.
Brenda Winkle 00:35:25 And I'm so grateful that you're here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. If you feel compelled to share this with somebody who you think could benefit from it, it would mean a lot because there are a lot of people who need this. So find someone you care about. Share it with them. And if you feel compelled to leave the podcast, add a rating and review. It would really mean a lot. Thanks so much and thanks for your recent comments on Spotify. Really appreciate that. All right. Thanks for being here. Bye for now. Until next time.
