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. Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about why you override yourself even when you know better and you intend better. Because this happens to us as empaths. In fact, we can't muscle our way into things the way that some people can. It just doesn't happen for us. And so if you've noticed that you can know exactly what to do until someone else has an opinion, or until someone else feels disappointed or tries to convince you to do something else, or you start imagining how your decision might impact the other people around you, and then suddenly, before you know it, something that you were very clear about feels incredibly complicated. Today, I want to talk about why that happens and what you can do with it, because I don't believe empaths have a clarity problem. That's not the issue. The issue is we have learned, we've been taught and rewarded for prioritizing other people's signals first and more than our own.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:40 Most people think that self trust is about getting clearer and in a certain way it is. But that's actually not what I see. The people that I work with, the empaths who come in all walks of life, we're talking from engineers to doctors, educators to stay at home moms. These people are thoughtful, intuitive, emotionally intelligent, very intelligent in general, probably educated, highly self-aware, very tuned in to themselves. They've done a lot of inner work, and they're also attuned to the people around them. They know they literally know what to do. The challenge isn't knowing. The challenge is staying connected to what they know. When relationships, emotions, expectations, and other people's reactions enter the picture. And I get this. This is part of my journey to I'm not immune to this. I am an empath. I am a very, very strong empath. I have what Krystal Clenney called the six empath tracks. I'll put a link to that podcast episode where she talks about that. I have all six of those tracks.
Brenda Winkle 00:03:57 I also have all of the Claire's, and I also am a medium. And so when I say I'm very sensitive, I mean I'm very, very sensitive. And so this stuff impacts me too. I am literally teaching what I wish someone could have taught me years ago. It would have saved me a lot. But then again, I wouldn't be here right now talking to you. So I don't regret a thing, but I just want you to know this is not coming from a place of judgment or superiority. This is coming from. This is what I wish someone would have told me. So let's talk about what's actually happening. You know what you want, or you've maybe made a decision. And then the next thing you know, your attention shifts because somebody says something, or you might even start anticipating what someone might say, how they might feel, how someone else might react, if someone will be disappointed, if someone will be mad. And then you start to wonder, am I selfish.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:03 Am I missing something here? And before you know it, your own knowing gets much, much quieter than what everyone else is saying to you. And it's not because you're not intuitive. In fact, it's the opposite. You're incredibly intuitive, which is why this becomes very confusing. Now, I've been talking recently in my speaking commitments about the difference between empathy and intuition, and I won't go into it in depth here, but there is a difference between empathy and intuition. And if we don't discern where empathy is from what our intuition is saying, we can make misaligned choices. Because your intuition is your GPS, it's your internal GPS, and your intuition is connected to your emotions. It's connected to things that you feel in your body. And depending on how your intuition comes in. You could see things or hear things or imagine things in your mind's eye or just know things. And if you have a strong ability as an empath, what can easily happen is the other people say things, or maybe even they just sort of transmit their feelings.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:25 They might not even say it. And you pick it up and it's louder than your own internal signal. And this is true for you. Whether you are a bio empath, meaning you were born with empath abilities, or if you were an environmental empath because you needed to develop these skills as a way to stay safe and create some predictability in a childhood that was either chaotic or unpredictable or even abusive. And in my work, I have not found there to be a tremendous difference in the way that we deal with and manage empathy. Whether you're a bio empath or an environmental empath. And in my case, I'm both. I have PTSD and I have no memory of not having my psychic, intuitive, and empath abilities. I don't remember not having them. I always have had them. I do have a memory of the first time I scared somebody with them, and that was when I was about seven, maybe, maybe six. And it was in first grade when I knew something had happened in my teacher's house.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:34 There was some kind of a disagreement or something, and I mentioned it because I didn't have any discernment at that time. I had no idea you could turn these gifts on and off. I had no idea how to do that or that I should be doing it, that that it was a little bit unethical and kind of creepy ish to not turn off the abilities, which, by the way, that's something really important. You can turn these abilities up and down like a dial And in my belief, and from my mentors who have taught me over the years, this is an important part of discernment. We don't want to have these abilities on 24 over seven. It's almost unethical. If we do. It's sort of like looking in everybody's window in in the evening with the lights on. So we do want to control our gifts. In fact, I was part of a summit recently with Wendy Motta. I know I've talked about that, but it was just an incredible summit. I learned so much and I enjoyed teaching there so much.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:41 And Wendy Motta said, if we don't learn to harness our gifts, our gifts will harness us. And this is absolutely true for empaths, because if you are dulling down your own knowing and instead listening to what you're tracking empathetically, you can make really misaligned decisions. Ask me how I know. So if you've spent years practicing empathy outward, you are in the right place because you have become incredibly skilled at understanding everyone else. So now our work becomes practicing self empathy, where we learn to tune into our own signal because there is a major cost to practicing only external empathy. Empathy is not the problem. Empathy is a really important skill, and if you're an empath, it's a very important and sacred ability. But the problem becomes a problem when your empathy does not include you. When everyone else's feelings and needs and perspectives matter more than your own and your own desires, needs preferences don't carry the same weight as other peoples. That's where the second guessing the overthinking. The reassurance seeking, the validation seeking, self abandonment begin to take over.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:17 And the truth is, most of the time we don't realize we're doing it as we're doing it until it's done. And then we often have some awareness like, oh my gosh, I just made them more important than myself. That's where the self abandonment can come in. And so the possibility is, what if you can maintain your empathy. Because we do want that. I don't want you shutting off your empathy. We need more empathic leaders and healers and guides in the world now more than ever. Truly more than ever, you can feel this new level of consciousness and we're watching the systems around us crumble and thank goodness they're crumbling. Things like the patriarchy and wow, they are. You know, in the last gasps of the crumbling. We can see it right now. All you have to do is watch the news cycle, which we'll get into that another time. But let's talk about the possibility of what can change when you learn how to stop overwriting yourself, where you can matter just as much as other people, or maybe even more.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:38 Because the truth is, what is good for you is of the highest good. A lot of times as empaths, we get this really, really twisted and we think that we'll be more generous of everything that we have, and we'll give more and we'll contribute more, and we'll let other people's preferences matter more, and other people's dreams matter more, and then we get resentful and we get exhausted and depleted and in many cases sick. And if we are carrying illness or resentment, a lot of times that leads to the flipside of resentment, which is entitlement. And then we show up in some ways that are not great. Because if you're giving your all to everything all the time and you're not taking any care of yourself, you're not making your own needs, your preferences, your dreams, your desires matter at all. Of course you are resentful. And of course you're going to show up in some entitled ways in other venues because you're so sick of not being the one that matters. So the work here is we're going to let go of perfectionism, because that's not going to be helpful.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:56 We're going to have to do it a little bit messy. We're also going to need to let go of a need for certainty, which I know how hard that is. We do love our certainty and we're not going to get it right all the time. We'll have to let go of that too. But you can simply just start treating your own feelings, your needs, your desires, what you know as equally important. You can care deeply about other people. And and I know you do. Without abandoning yourself, there's a way to do both. And you can consider other people's perspectives in your decisions without losing your own. And we we don't want to teeter totter into what I was just talking about with the flip side of resentment and entitlement. If we are always, always, always referencing other people's perspectives, then sometimes we get very rigid and very inflexible and forceful and kind of brittle almost when we'll latch on to something because we're so sick of everyone else's lives and opinions and desires and dreams mattering more than our own.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:14 So you can be an empath. You can have a deep level of empathy and compassion without carrying everyone else's emotional experiences, without making yourself responsible for their emotions, for their happiness. And that's what self trust starts to feel like. It's this symbiotic relationship where you can actually improve every relationship in your life because you're taking better care of yourself. Now, I want to say not everybody is going to love it when you start taking care of yourself in this way, because there probably are some people that have been benefiting from you only being an empath, and that's okay. They can be mad. You are not responsible for their emotions. And I do want to talk to you about this, because if you're going into it, the idea that everyone has to be happy about this before you do it, you will never do it, because there are going to always be some people that don't want you to evolve, that don't want you to grow because they're really benefiting from you doing exactly what you're doing. So and there's love for that.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:32 I mean, they're human too, right? They're benefiting from it. But that doesn't mean it's wrong for you to want things to shift. And what I've discovered over working with hundreds of empaths is that when you learn to trust yourself again, that's the unlock. It's not going to pattern this all overnight. I don't want you to think that this is not a box that gets checked. This is not I'm going to learn how to do something in a class, or even in a seminar or a course, this is going to be a lifelong practice for you as an empath. And if you're approaching anything for empaths as though it's a box that's going to be checked and that one day you won't ever have to negotiate. Is this mine? Is this theirs? Do mine needs matter? Do their needs matter more? If you think you're never going to have to negotiate that this is not the work for you. Because my approach is this is the work. This is not a box we can check. This is not a thing that we're going to accomplish or high achieve.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:42 What we're going to get better at is coming back to self trust again and again and again. That's the goal. Coming back into self trust, coming back into the recognition. Oh I might be getting ready to self abandon. Let me pause and see if I can tune back into what my needs are, to tune into what my desires are. So I'm teaching a free masterclass on June 25th. It's called Trust Yourself Again why empaths Override themselves and how to stop abandoning what they already know. So together we're going to explore the why. We talked a little bit about it today, but we'll go into it more in depth. We'll talk about why impasse override themselves even when they're clear what's actually happening. In that moment, that self trust begins to break down. And I'm going to show you a simple framework so that you can return to yourself when things are stressful, when it feels like you're going back into people pleasing patterns, or when emotional overwhelm starts to pull you off course, it's completely free. I'd love to have you join us.
Brenda Winkle 00:17:49 I'll put the link in the show notes, or you can go to Brenda Winkle comm level, because this really is the next level of being an empath, where you can step into your own power and where you get to live a life that is vibrant and fulfilling just the same way that you're trying to create for everybody else. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, I know this is my work, I know this is the next thing I need to do. I'd love to invite you to join us in power. The doors to summer power. The doors to the summer power cohort are now open for early enrollment. Power is my signature self trust program for empaths, so this is a six week live experience with 12 months of integration support designed to help you stop second guessing yourself. Trust what you already know and navigate life with greater clarity, confidence, and self-respect. And when I say a six week live experience with 12 months of integration support, what that means is you're going to get to come live to every cohort over the next year and receive support in a private community in between live cohorts and for a limited time for early enrollment only.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:14 This includes a private one on one coaching session with me valued at $600. Now, the early bird enrollment only goes through June 28th and there are limited spots available. I'm only accepting 20 members, 20 new members into this cohort, but enrollment itself will stay open through July 7th and the program begins for the summer cohort July 9th. And I'll put all the information in the show notes. Or you can go to Brenda winkle.com. So as we wrap up today, I would invite you to think about the questions that you're asking yourself. So sometimes we ask the question what should I do. And we're asking that question externally. We're asking that from the people around us. We're asking that from people we view as having wisdom or more authority, or maybe the influential people in our lives. But what if the question is, what do I already know? So flipping it from what should I do? To what do I already know? And then I'm just curious what might change if you trusted that. Thank you so much for being here today.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:34 Thank you so much for listening. If this was helpful for you, would you please consider sharing the podcast with three people you care about? And if you haven't yet left the podcast a rating and review, it would mean so much. This podcast is not free to produce and you leaving the podcast, your rating, your review, your comments is a great way to engage in some reciprocal energy. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Bye for now. Until next time.
