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 Winkel. And today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about the lesson that many of us empaths learned, which is other people's experience matters more than ours. We're going to talk about where that might have come from, how it was reinforced, and more importantly, how you can begin to shift it. So have you ever been in a conversation where you could tell exactly how everyone else in the conversation felt? But if someone asked you how you felt, it was really hard for you to say, or maybe you knew exactly how you felt, but you tried to talk yourself out of it because it wasn't convenient. It wasn't what everyone else thought. Maybe it even was in direct contrast to what other people thought. This isn't a lack of awareness, and it's not a lack of intuition. It's because many of us were taught to pay more attention to everybody else's experience than our own. So before we begin, I want to say in this conversation, we're not going to be throwing anybody under the bus.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:36 We're not going to be throwing parents or parental impactors under the bus, because that's just not what this is about. So if I say anything about parents or parental impactors or the people that tucked you in at night when you were a kid, I want you to know I'm not saying anything bad about them. So if you're listening to this, I'm also not speaking to you about my childhood. When I speak to you about my childhood, I'll be very direct. So I don't want you to read anything into this, which is another thing that those of us who are empaths sometimes do. But I want you to look for the broader pattern and see how this might fit in for you. The lesson that most of us learned was that everyone else's experience matters more than ours. Sometimes this came through actual words where people would say things to us like, be nice, don't be selfish. Think about how others are feeling right now or be the bigger person. Turn the other cheek. Oh my gosh, I'm rolling my eyes.
Brenda Winkle 00:03:42 It made me could hear that through the mic. don't rock the boat. Or you should be grateful for what you have. Don't be difficult. You're being greedy. If you heard anything like that. It's possible that over time you begin to internalize a belief that everyone else's experience matters. Everyone else matters, and you don't. Now, I'm not saying that's for sure what you think, because we're each individuals and there are some nuances here. But in general, I have found that there is usually a message that was delivered in childhood for people that are empaths. And keep in mind, there's two different kinds of empaths. We have the bio empath, which is the person who was born with the neuro receptors and neurotransmitters in their brains to have these empathic abilities, and we have the environmental Empath, which is somebody who learned to be an empath through coping mechanisms because of a chaotic or a an unpredictable or even an abusive childhood. So when I'm talking about being an empath and I'm talking about the messages that we received so many times, we didn't actually need to be told anything for us to internalize the message that other people's experiences matter more than ours, primarily because as an empath, you're automatically aware of how other people feel.
Brenda Winkle 00:05:17 And so you have always been making decisions, putting other people first because you can feel them. You can feel what they want. You can feel what they need. You can feel what they hope. You can feel what they dream. And if you didn't do the things that made the people around you feel really good. You had two negative hits right away. One was that you felt their disappointment, which in your empath body as a kid, that would have been a big deal. And the second thing is, they may have overtly told you they were disappointed and it may have even created conflict. And so you're having reinforced over and over and over again that your needs are costly. They might be too expensive. And this belief shows up for us in patterns like over accommodating. But before I say over accommodating, sometimes people are like, what does that even mean? Let me give you an example. I posted a real on Wednesday last week, and one of my clients reached out about it because the real said that in order for you to really trust your intuition as an empath, you needed to be willing to be misunderstood.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:43 And being misunderstood is a very big deal for those of us that are empaths because we we deeply desire to be understood because there's so many parts of our lives that we don't feel understood. So this comes up for us and our ability to really trust that intuition, that inner knowing is directly correlated to our ability to be misunderstood. So my client responded to that by telling me a story, and she was sharing with me because she was celebrating something really big that happened. So my client is a professional woman. She owns a a clinic. She's in the health care spaces and she's very, very accomplished, very good at what she does, extremely well respected. And she's an empath. And there was somebody who was one of her clients that is also a Facebook connection. And this person had reached out through the social media platform instead of through the regular, modes of connection, like the business email and the business phone number, and requested my client to do something that my client felt was an absolute no. And what she shared was that there was an old part of her that came up that was worried about how it might make this person who asked her to do the thing that she didn't want to do feel until she asked herself this question.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:11 And I bet you'll resonate with this. This is such a good question, she said. Why am I worried about how this person is feeling when it's obvious she doesn't care how this makes me feel? To be reaching out through a personal channel when we have a professional relationship, and asking me to do something that she perceived to be very inappropriate and potentially harmful to another person. So that was such a big win for her. I was like, yes, yes, that's amazing. And I bet you can relate to that, because so many times this manifests as exactly that where we are making somebody else's experience or somebody else's feelings matter more than our own. And we're not asking ourselves the question, well, what about my feelings? What do you think is good for me? So that's what what I mean by over accommodating, over committing could be that you keep agreeing to do things that you don't have time or capacity to do. So when my daughter was either eighth grader or ninth grader, I don't remember which.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:17 We lived very close to the school that she attended. It was walking distance. It was probably less than a half a mile, and often she would walk or write her bike to school. And the way that the school district was structured in the town we lived in, the older kids went to school first, so the high school would start like at seven and the junior high would start, let's say 730, and then elementary would start at eight and another set of elementaries would even start at 845. I happened to be working at one of the elementaries that started at 845. At the time that she was in middle school, by 730, which meant I was at home for about, you know, 45 minutes or so after she went to school, I kept getting calls for, I forgot this book, I forgot this form, I forgot this check, and I kept going to the school to drop off whatever it was that she needed, until one of the secretaries put her hand on my hand in a kind way, and she said, you have to stop coming here.
Brenda Winkle 00:10:25 You have to stop rescuing her. And I was sort of taken aback because I had not perceived it to be rescuing. I perceived it to be helping. But as soon as she said, you have to stop rescuing her. I realized she was right. I was absolutely rescuing my daughter from having the consequences of her own decisions. I was robbing her of the dignity of her own experience. And as uncomfortable as it was, I realized in that moment that I was going to have to let her live with whatever consequence she would have to live with if she didn't get to school organized, because my days of dropping things off at school for her were done. That's what I mean by over committing. But it can also come up with things like volunteering for the church bake sale, or volunteering to volunteer in your kid's classroom when you don't have capacity and you've got a deadline. When we overcommit, a lot of times we're trying to make other people think something about us. So if you've ever started a sentence with, I don't want them to think or I want them to think, or I want them to know, that is probably an overextending, over accommodating or over committing.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:47 About to happen. The other thing that can happen for us is people pleasing. And if you have people pleasing tendencies in general, and then you get a nervous system activation where you're stressed, sometimes it feels like you're people pleasing, like your life depends on it. And that can mean you say yes when you mean no. It can mean that you stall out on projects you actually care a lot about that need to be done. It might mean that you start to seek reassurance from outside sources, where you're making decisions by committee, where you're sort of like polling your friends. What do you think I should do? What do you think I should do? And then it can also end up with explaining your decisions. This is one that I still have to work on sometimes, where it'll come up for me that I'm justifying something because I'm worried someone won't believe me or someone won't have value in what I say. I need that like validation externally. And when that happens, I know I'm in an empath pattern, and so I pull it back and I try to give myself the reassurance first, and then I try to not explain the decision to anyone but me, because if I get into justifying, I know I'm in a I'm in a funky energy that is not actually sovereign.
Brenda Winkle 00:13:11 I may not be making the most aligned decision if I'm having to justify the decision. So once I can say this is my decision period, then I know I'm in that aligned state and if I'm still explaining, then I might be having my energy in somebody else's energy. I might be tracking their emotions. And so that's one of the things that comes up for me personally. Each of us being individuals, is going to have a different relationship with each of these things. And so maybe you'll find yourself more in the people pleasing side, or saying yes when you mean no side or over committing side. Mine is the over explaining decisions. One of the things that comes up for a lot of the empaths that I work with is replaying conversations like we go over them over and over, over, over them in our minds where we're sort of like, what did they mean? What do you think this meant? Well, how should I interpret this? And empaths really struggle to ask for help because we give so generously, and there's a part of us that really wants to receive.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:18 And the same part of us that really wants to receive also feels like there's no reciprocity anywhere. And so sometimes we'll resist receiving because we're afraid of what the strings might look like if we do receive help. Because it's so often that we're pouring, pouring out into other people and into other situations and other organizations that when it comes to asking for help, we don't know how much more capacity we have to give. And so a lot of times we're leaping to, if I receive, then I'm going to have to give and we don't have anything left to give. And the last thing that can happen, well, not the last thing, but the last thing on my list that can happen is you might be waiting for permission. You might be waiting for someone to say, hey, it is okay for you to do this thing that you really want to do. In my case, this came up for me when it was like 2021 and I knew I was leaving Boise. But I think I've talked about this before.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:24 I'll tell you this story. I had decided that I wanted to leave Boise in 2020, and then I applied for a lot of jobs. I didn't get any interviews? No conversations, no second emails. Nothing. When I say I applied for a lot of jobs, I mean, I applied for like 100. I'm not exaggerating. That's not a euphemism. That is like the actual number of jobs I had applied for. And then nothing happened. And so I decided I had one choice, and that was going to be to fall absolutely in love with my current situation. I was going to fall in love with my house, which I already loved. I was going to fall in love with my neighbors, which I already loved. The thing I didn't love was my school. I didn't love my school. So I made a choice that I was going to fall in love with my school, and I did. I loved my school, I loved the staff. I loved the families, I loved the kids.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:18 It was amazing. I really loved it. And then out of the blue, within about two weeks time, I ended up as a finalist for five different jobs in four different states, one of them being Oregon, where I now live. Actually, two of them were in Oregon. Now, at the time that I was becoming a finalist in all of these things, I was getting offers and some of the offers overlapped each other. One of the offers happened to come from Madison, Wisconsin, which is where my my mom and my dad used to live. My mom still lives there, and my sister and her family live in Madison. And so it had always been a lifelong dream of mine to live in the same place as my whole family. So I accepted that job as soon as it was offered. And then when I went to Madison to do the paperwork to get a little bit of onboarding done, I actually flew there from Boise. I was coming back from a tour of the schools that I might be teaching at, and the phone rang, and on the phone was one of the Oregon districts, and they asked me for an interview.
Brenda Winkle 00:17:30 And in that moment, I knew that there was something there for me because I'd been feeling kind of funny. You know, that funny feeling like there's something not right here. As I was driving through Madison, like, I just felt funny, I felt uncomfortable, I felt uneasy, I felt unsettled, and it was really odd because I love Madison and I love being there. And so I was like, what is this feeling about? And then that phone call came. So I'd been feeling kind of funny. And then the phone call came and whoa, I just felt open and excited and like, yeah, I want to talk to you about this. And so I accepted the interview. Well, that ended up to be the job that I accepted, which moved me to Oregon in 2021, even though I had already accepted a job in Wisconsin. If I would have waited for permission, I wouldn't have made the choice. And I've been here now five years, be five years in August that I've been in Oregon.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:26 Wow. That also means that I've been a full time entrepreneur for the last four years. That's mind blowing. It feels like it was last year anyway. The reason I'm talking about this all is because if you're still operating from there, experience matters more than mine. It's going to be difficult for you to make the choices that you know you need to make. And I know you know this, and I know you. You also know that there's a hidden cost when your experience doesn't carry equal weight, because you stop trusting yourself. It's not like you're knowing disappears. It's not like your yearnings go away. It's not like your dreams die. But there's something that just kind of feels unsettled and uneasy. And the truth is, you already know more than you trust right now. Right now, in this moment. You already know more than you trust. So we just completed the first cohort of power, and my client Jill said. After the power cohort, she said, I can make my own decisions and I don't have to apologize or explain why.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:48 Oh my gosh, this was so good. What changed? Well, her experience started to carry equal weight to those of the people around her. And the thing is, Jill is no less compassionate. If anything, she's more compassionate because now she has more compassion to give, because she's giving herself self empathy where her experience really does matter. And Stephanie, my other client in the First Power cohort, says, I know that I have deep wisdom. What changed for her? Well, it's the same type of thing. Her experience started to carry equal weight. So the new belief that I invite you to play with, to feel around, to see if it could align for you is not my needs matter more than everyone else's? Nope, that's not it. That's not the goal. As an empath, that type of goal would not feel good. The goal is my experience matters too. In fact, can you say that out loud for me right now? If you have capacity and you're not like sitting on a bus or in the middle of a meeting, or, you know, working in your cubicle.
Brenda Winkle 00:21:04 My experience matters too. My experience matters too. And let's chase that with my feelings. Matter to my preferences. Matter to my wisdom. Matters to my needs. matter too. My life matters too. So my question for you is when did you learn that everyone else's needs matter more than yours? Was it something that you just kind of figured out, based on how you were treated and how you showed up in the world? Or was there a specific person that taught you that? What kinds of things were you rewarded for? Were you rewarded when you were over giving and over committing and over accommodating? And what happened when you did express your needs? What happened when you trusted yourself? For most of us, it may have been that we were called selfish or difficult, dramatic, greedy or too much? And is it possible that those experiences are still shaping your decisions today? And I'll tell you that the answer for me is absolutely. It's possible. Even though I've been doing this work for a very long time, and I've been supporting empaths for the last 11 years, I still do this work.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:47 That's because this isn't a box to be checked. This isn't like I was telling my clients this this week inside the Empowered Empath Collective. I was telling them, it's not like you can say, oh, I just learned Spanish and now I can go speak it fluently. It's like I took three years of Spanish in high school. I really did take three years of Spanish, but I didn't do the immersion, I didn't do the implementation. And so I don't remember a lot of that Spanish because I needed to learn it and then implement it. And so my invitation to you is to find ways to implement giving yourself self empathy. Learning to trust yourself. Self trust doesn't begin when you become more intuitive. That's not how that works. Your ability to be intuitive is directly correlated to your capacity to be misunderstood, and that requires safety in the body and nervous system. Safety. Breathwork. Tapping those types of things can be really supportive to learn that nervous system safety. And I really want you to hear me when I say the goal is not to become someone new.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:11 You are perfect the way you are. There's nothing that's gone wrong here. There's nothing to be fixed. The goal is to stop treating yourself like the least important person in your own decision making process. That's the goal. So if this resonates with you, I would like to invite you to come join me in a free masterclass. And if you go to Brenda Winkle next level, you can see it there. It's called Trust Yourself Again why? You already know more than you trust. And I'm going to share a simple framework for returning to yourself when stress, self-doubt, or other people's expectations pull you off course. This is free. It's on June 25th at 10 a.m. Pacific, and we'll be live for about an hour together. There is a replay that will be available, and whether or not you decide to continue the work either inside of power, which the summer cohort is enrolling now, or joining us inside the Empowered Empath Collective. This masterclass is going to be very high value, because you're going to have a framework that you can play with, and you're going to be able to start implementing these changes right away.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:30 Thank you so much for listening. And if this resonated with you, if it feels like it might be helpful to some of the other people you care about in your life, would you please consider sharing it with three friends? And every time that you leave the podcast, your rating, your review, your comments, it means so much and it increases the possibility that we can get the podcast into the ears of more listeners. And my personal mission is to lead other empaths to empowerment so that you can step into the roles that you know you're here to step into. Thank you. Thank you for being part of the journey with me. Bye for now. Until next time.
