Brenda Winkle 00:00:01 Welcome to your yes filled life. I'm Brenda Winkle, energetic leadership guide, psychic, medium and somatic coach for ambitious leaders who know their gifts are real and who want to stand fully in them. Here you'll learn how to trust your intuition, embody your vision, and step into the freedom you've been creating, all without chasing more certifications or carrying stuff that does not belong to you. Every week, I'll share powerful practices and conversations with thought leaders and changemakers that help you transform your vision into embodied confidence. Claim your gifts without apology and lead with both clarity and freedom. Because your gifts aren't cute. They are powerful. They're real, and they're needed. Start today by downloading my free energy audit at Brenda Winkle. Com for audit. It's the exact tool I use to track what's fueling me and what's draining me. It will help you discern between that hit of achievement and true joy, so that you can lead with more clarity and impact. This is your space to stop proving, start embodying and live fully in your gifts.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:16 Welcome to your yes filled life. Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when things happen, maybe you get really busy? Maybe life is stressful. Maybe there's stuff going on that you suddenly stop sounding or feeling like yourself, and you might find yourself tolerating more than you want. Second guessing yourself more than normal. Overthinking everything. Not feeling clear. Maybe feeling disconnected from your boundaries or even rolling them back. You start people pleasing again. You slip back into older patterns that you thought you'd already healed. Well, congratulations. You are normal. So we're going to talk about that this episode. And we're going to talk about how important it is for you to resource yourself well and as often as possible so that we can prevent this. So if you've ever been around kids or raised kids, you know that when a child, a toddler, preschool, or even school age kid gets tired and hungry, things start to get harder. There's a lot of emotions.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:40 There can be tears. That's when temper tantrums and fits are very prone to happening. And we know this. In fact, we know this so well that across a lot of American culture we term dinnertime hour as the witching hour, which, by the way, I don't really like because it states that witches are bad, but and I don't think that's true, but you get the point. The point is, we know that when kids are tired, hungry, depleted, that their behaviors change, that they don't have capacity or nervous system regulation the same way that they do when they're rested and fed and they've had water and they've gotten a chance to get a hug or a different things like that. So isn't it interesting that as we become adults, we suddenly think that we're different and we think that we should be able to go and go and go and go and not rest and not get good nutrition and not get hydrated. And we push through and we delay eating, we delay drinking, we even delay going to the bathroom.
Brenda Winkle 00:03:53 And then we wonder why we're struggling? Well, today we're going to talk about that. And we're going to talk about why self trust can feel harder under emotional overload and how to begin to return to yourself again. The truth is that when you are under stress, it is impacting your ability to discern. And we know that depending on the kind of stress you're under and your own unique response to that stress, that one of two things is either going to happen, you're going to get laser, laser, laser focused on one thing and not see the big picture, or we know that it's going to be like, you scan way back, like you're in a big panoramic view where you've pulled way back so you can see the entire scene, but then you lose the details. Depending on what your body is doing. It'll be one of those two things where you get like super hyper focused on the minutia and miss the big picture, or you get the big picture and miss the details. When this happens, your emotional bandwidth shrinks.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:09 Your nervous system will begin to seek familiarity because familiarity, even if it's not comfortable or what you actually want, create safety in the body because your brain, your nervous system, even your subconscious is coding familiarity as safety. And so when you're under stress, your body, your nervous system is going to seek familiarity. So of course, we start to see patterns that you thought you had changed come back. We see habits that you thought that you had broken. Come back. We see old thinking patterns returned to the surface. And I just want to normalize this. Because if you think that you should be able to always and forever have every boundary set, have your empathy managed. Have every dot. Excuse me. Every I dotted, every T crossed all the time. That's just not realistic. It's not going to happen for any of us. And so many times I work with people and I work with high achievers. I attract high achievers because I am one. I understand this deeply what it's like to be an empath and to be a high achiever.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:30 And you'd think that those two things would be competing, but they actually work really well together because we can high achieve our empathy. And a lot of times we'll get into a pattern of high achieving our empathy, where we make sure that everyone around us is okay, that everyone around us is having a great experience. We make ourselves responsible for their emotions. And then even though we know we don't want to do this and we have worked to change the pattern, we start to say yes. When we mean no, we start to over explain things. We start to roll back boundaries. We start to carry people emotionally. We start to tolerate behavior that you normally wouldn't, and we disconnect from our intuition, instead starting to listen to the voices that are coming externally. And we over accommodate exhausted nervous systems, return to familiar patterns. This is not failure. This is not even regression. This is simply nervous system information. So the more you want to learn to trust yourself, the more you want to use your empath abilities as gifts, the more important it becomes to protect your own capacity.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:48 And what I want to highlight here is self trust is not a mindset. It requires internal connection to yourself and to have that internal connection to yourself. You have to be resourced. You need to be rested, hydrated, nourished. And sometimes when we're in certain life situations, those things, the normal resourcing becomes really challenging. Caring for a sick family member. Going through a divorce. Big changes at work where maybe people are shifting roles, or you're bringing somebody in or somebody exiting. Or maybe it's you that's shifting the role. When we start to have these things, it is natural for your body and your nervous system to bring you back into some patterns you thought you had cleared. So let's just give ourselves a lot of self-compassion right now. Okay. Take a deep breath. Put your hand on your heart. If you're not driving. Just take a breath. Nothing has gone wrong here. You can know intellectually what you need. You can know what you should do. You can even have a really good practice of doing those things for yourself.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:09 Excuse me. And then struggle to follow through when your nervous system is depleted. It can be really difficult to hear yourself clearly internally when your entire nervous system is simply trying to survive. And I don't know about you, but for me and for many of my clients, my family members, my friends, May is a very challenging month. I don't quite understand the energetics of it fully, but May is so busy. It's so jam packed that by the time many of us get to May, whether or not we're involved in the public school system, either through our work or through our kids. A lot of times we're like, oh my gosh, thank goodness Mae is almost over. And as this podcast episode releases, it's May 31st. So let's just talk about what this might look like for you. It might look like forgetting you have the need for more space, which as an empath, you do need more space. You need more time to make decisions. You need more alone time. And that becomes really challenging in May for so many of us.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:21 So ways that it shows up for me. I turn to emotional eating. I'm not proud of that. I'm just telling you what I do. I notice that when I'm eating emotionally or I'm drawn to eating after dinner, that's my week's week time that something's going on for me, stress wise. And in May, I had noticed that I was reaching for snacks after dinner again, and I'm pretty careful about the snacks that I keep in my house, because I try to create an environment that supports the person I want to be. But I was really aware at how much I was searching for something, and I did come up with a happy medium. I have this thing that I learned from Ali Minsky's Transform program. One of their other doctors in the program shared a recipe with me that I'm going to share with you, and it is for what I call nice cream. You take about between a half a cup and a cup of frozen cherries. That's my favorite. You could use whatever you want though, and half of a prepared protein shake and blend it.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:32 And then when you blend it. For me personally, I split that in half and I'll eat half of it that night, and then I'll save the other half in the freezer for a second serving of ice cream another night. So for whatever that's worth, hopefully that's helpful. But I noticed that when that was happening for me, my own nervous system needed more care. That meant I needed to go to bed earlier. It also meant that I started to really look at my habits. I had kind of slipped into looking at my phone too late, so I rolled that back, made sure that there were books I was interested in on my nightstand, and really was careful about making sure that I was reading before bed and getting the rest I needed. Because when I'm stressed and May was stressful for me too, because I had a concert in May. Which sounds silly considering I used to say I had like not exaggerating. 30 concerts in May. I had one concert in May, but I had other things happening.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:30 My daughter moved. I was helping her move. I was clearing out things in my own garage to make space for the things that she was bringing to me, so on and so forth. The point is, I knew I needed more support. I knew I needed more pacing that was slower. I needed more self-compassion. So if you've noticed that in yourself to invitation to get curious around how you could give yourself more compassion, more rest, more spaciousness, because I promise, no matter what. You can find it. Even if it's three minutes here, five minutes there, ten minutes here, you can do it. When my daughter was five, I became a single mom, and I recognized at that time how essential it was for me to make sure that I resourced myself. And so when she was five, I would set the microwave timer for five minutes and we would just take quiet time all on her own. Sometimes that meant I was laying in the bed looking at the ceiling for five minutes, or maybe I was closing my eyes.
Brenda Winkle 00:13:31 It didn't matter. It was just five minutes of not being anything to anyone, just internal supporting. Brenda. It was life changing. My daughter and I still do that to this day, even though she doesn't live with me anymore. She still does it on her own, and I still do it on my own. We don't necessarily tell each other about it every day, but we still use that as a practice. So invitation to borrow that. The thing I really want you to hear is returning to yourself is the practice. It's not realistic for you to think you're going to get this right all the time. You're not. It's not realistic for you to think that this is just an upward trajectory of honoring your needs and taking care of your nervous system. That's not realistic. We want that to be the way it is. We want there to be a really steady arc up in our evolution, in our healing, in our personal development work. But we know that's not how it works. It looks more like a squiggly line.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:32 UPS and downs and peaks and valleys and twirls and spirals. Because that's the work. The work is to get better at coming back to yourself faster. And the more you come back to yourself, the more you're patterning that. So it's not even a bad thing that you lost it. It's not even a bad thing that you forgot to resource yourself. It's actually a good thing because you're you're really honing in the pattern of self return. And the more regulated you are, the faster this can happen. And I want to make one really clear distinction. Being regulated does not mean you're not feeling your emotions. You can still feel your emotions and be regulated. There is this really prevalent message that I see coming across the social media channels that if you're actually regulated, you never get upset, you never get sad, you never get mad, and that any time you're not regulated, it's a sign you're just not Breathing, right? Or you're not doing the semantics right. And yes, breathwork and semantics can help.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:45 Obviously, I think that because I offer breathwork and semantics, but if we're trying to use the breathwork and semantics to avoid feeling, that's called spiritual bypassing, that is not actually helpful. That is not actually how we come to emotional or nervous system regulation. There are tools. They're not the end game. And that's a really important distinction. The other thing I'd like to invite you to do is to see if you could take more time so you can slow down, create a little bit of buffer between different tasks. If you're really busy on Saturday, maybe you don't pack your Sunday, or if you have two nights with concerts for your kids, which may or may not happen in June for you. I don't know. It depends on where you are in the in the world. If you have concerts for your kids on two nights. Maybe you try and stay home other nights. You can balance it out. You don't have to keep inserting more and more and more to things. And the other thing I want to really highlight here is you deserve support.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:55 You don't have to do this alone. You don't have to do this in a vacuum and think that there's some extra credit points somewhere you're going to get, because you've done this all on your own. I get support. Why would I not think you should get support? Of course you should get support. We should all be getting supported. In fact, I won't work with practitioners or coaches that are not getting support. Which is why I try to practice what I preach now. I don't have one, coach, I have four. I have four coaches that I'm working with, and I'm so happy and grateful for their help and support. The goal here isn't perfection. In fact, perfection is actually going to block this for you. So we want to let go of perfectionism. We just want to stay connected to yourself more of the time. Maybe even set a reminder on your phone to check in with yourself a couple times a day. The version of you that you are becoming still exists. Even if you're tired, even if you're depleted, even if you feel like you have old habits that have resurfaced.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:10 This is what we call the identity shift. You're in it right now. So when you notice that you're being called back into old patterns, old habits that you don't want. That's not a bad thing. That's an invitation to now make a decision from the version of you that is becoming that new identity. Okay, so in my example, I noticed I was emotionally eating, so I did two things. One is I made sure that what I was eating was still healthy, and I reached out and got more support. So invitation to think about how you could apply that to your own life. If you have felt disconnected from yourself lately or like things are hard, it's hard to make decisions. It's hard to hear yourself. It's hard to find time. If you've noticed these old patterning resurfaced, resurfacing, or if you feel like yourself, trust just feels quieter than it used to. Just a reminder, this is part of the process in a massive identity shift to become the version of you that you're becoming.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:18 You just get to return to yourself. One breath, one boundary, one honest moment at a time where you ask yourself the question, what do I already know to be true? And I love this follow up question, which is what am I pretending not to know? Inside the Empowered Empath collective. We did this work this week. It was really, really profound. So invitation to take a little page from our book. We are currently enrolling new members in the Empowered Empath Collective, but the price is going to go up sometime this summer. So if you want to lock in the current rate of $111 a month, which you cannot beat for four live calls a month and a community, you can't beat that price, then invitation to come join us, because the price is going to go up later this summer. I'm teaching a free masterclass on June 25th called Trust Yourself Again. I'll put the link here in the show notes. I hope you come join us at that. Free masterclass and power will be enrolling later this summer.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:29 It is the Self Trust for empaths program that is Really my pride and joy. It is the same method and framework I used to support myself as an empath who's also high achiever. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. I appreciate you more than I can even say. If this episode was helpful to you, could you please consider sharing it with three of your friends? And if you could leave the podcast, your rating, your review, your comments on Spotify and on the other platforms, it means more to the podcast than I can. Even than I can even say this podcast is not free to produce, and one of the ways that you could help the podcast, if you chose, is to engage in some reciprocal energy and leave the podcast your rating and review wherever you're listening. Thank you so much for listening. Bye for now. Until next time.
