Thrive as a Highly Sensitive Entrepreneur: The Deeper Puzzle Piece (Part 4)

Welcome to day 4 of Your Next Intuitive Business Breakthrough training series! I'm sharing foundational power tools, insights, and perspective shifts that have guided me and my clients towards greater clarity, intuition, and business success.

Feeling like you can’t do business or make decisions without constant overstimulation, emotional reactivity, or perfectionism? Are you sacrificing your well-being and authentic self to fit into societal norms and expectations?

What if instead, you could have a deep connection with your intuition, make aligned decisions effortlessly, and thrive in your sensitive nature? It’s possible. And it's easier than you think!

If you're like most highly sensitive people (HSPs), you want to harness the power of your sensitivity to create meaningful impact, live authentically, and achieve success on your terms.

In today’s episode, I’m going to give you steps and guidance on unlocking your intuition and developing self-compassion to transform your business and life. Whether you've been using survival-based coping mechanisms, struggling with overstimulation, or feeling disconnected from your true purpose, you can learn to trust your intuition, make aligned decisions, and inspire others with your unique gifts as a highly sensitive person.

Join Your Next Intuitive Business Breakthrough Free Series for full access to all trainings and bonus resources: https://wellbalance.ca/breakthrough 

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:11

Hello and welcome to day four of the training series, your Next Intuitive Business Breakthrough. I'm so happy that you're here and if you've been listening along to all the episodes in this training series, I'm so glad that you have stuck with me. If you have not signed up for the training series and you're just stumbling across this episode, I highly suggest that you sign up for the entire training series. You can use the link in the show notes to sign up and you will receive one email a day for five days with links to each of the training modules in order, along with some additional learning resources. Now, in the first three days of this training series, I went over three power tools to help you to better understand and connect with your intuition, what the language of your intuition is and how to use your intuition and your design to help you make the most aligned decisions in your life and in your business. Now, today we're going to change directions a little bit. I've given you some power tools and I've given you some activities and exercises to try, and today I'm going to be giving you a perspective to consider and some deeper underlying how and why, beyond just doing some exercises, while the exercises I gave you in the first three days are going to help you to really better understand yourself and communicate and trust yourself that much more. What I'm going to be talking about today is the deeper mindset and perspective shifts that will make your puzzle pieces click together that much more quickly. And this is the secret sauce that, while the exercises and the activities that I give you and that I give my clients will help you to get more clarity, to give yourself answers, it's this deeper level of the secret sauce that helps everything happen more quickly, more profoundly, and give you bigger breakthroughs in what seems like a magical instant. So I've been talking about connecting with your intuition and how this is important to help you make intuitive decisions for yourself, in your life and your business, as well as using your intuition to guide your clientele to bigger breakthroughs and results beyond what professional skills alone can deliver.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Intuitiveness and access to intuition is something that we all have as a human being. However, those of us who do identify as being highly sensitive have a remarkably high level of intuitiveness. I would say naturally have a better connection with our intuition when we are in the right supportive environment in order to connect fully with it and in order to trust it. This is what we're going to be talking about today. In episode one of this training series I touched upon really briefly, about when your nervous system is supported, then you have better access to your intuition, and studies prove this to be true. And so when your nervous system is in survival mode, when we are in high stress, unsupportive environments both external environments and internal environments, which I'll clarify what that means in a little bit then you will have less access to your intuition. You will have higher access to your intuition when we have a higher window of tolerance and, most importantly, when we have a high level of coherence, as indicated by heart rate variability. And this is the thing in scientific literature that is studied over and over again that coherence and heart rate variability is a signal that indicates that the nervous system is well supported and also that it indicates a stronger connection to intuition.

Speaker 1: 5:28

Now, this nervous system aspect is something that is not new in terms of a topic of conversation. If you have been in my world for any length of time, no matter which era of my business pivot that I've been in in terms of my niche and my focus and who I'm working with, I've always emphasized that the nervous system is a bridge. It is a very important bridge that will impact every single physiological system in your body, and it will also impact energetic components, including access to your intuition, the nervous system. In terms of how the nervous system impacts your physical body, in previous iterations of my work, when I was working with people with chronic illness and autoimmunity and endometriosis, for example, I listed off and mentioned scientific studies that found a link between nervous system dysregulation and how it impacted the regulation of the immune system, and so nervous system dysregulation contributes to immune dysregulation, which contributes to activation or worsening of symptoms, of conditions of immune dysfunction, including autoimmunity, including endometriosis, including fibromyalgia and allergies. Now, this is not what the topic of today's conversation is about, but the same root of your nervous system still holds true when we are talking about connecting with your intuition. And why is that important?

Speaker 1: 7:11

Before I talk directly to the importance of nervous system and intuition and the importance of connecting with your intuition, I want to take a step back for a minute and talk about highly sensitive people, because there's some really important associations here that I want to click into place for you in order to help you maybe widen your perspective about yourself, especially if you identify as a highly sensitive person. Highly sensitive people, or HSPs, otherwise known as sensory processing sensitivity, make up about 20 to 30% of the population. So people who have sensory processing sensitivity, otherwise known as highly sensitive people we are more affected by our environment, for both better and for worse. So this means that if you're a highly sensitive person and you are in a negatively supportive environment, you will have a tendency to be more negatively sensitive, overwhelmed and reactive to your environment, versus if you are a highly sensitive person and you are in a positively supportive environment. Studies show that you will have greater vantage sensitivity than less sensitive individuals in the same environment. And I'm going to unpack exactly what that means, because this is so important and I don't think enough of us highly sensitive people understand this concept when it comes to your level of thriving in your life, in your work, in your business, in your relationships the underlying things that will help you, as a highly sensitive person, not only just get by, not only just do okay, but truly flourish and thrive, over and above what a less sensitive person will be experiencing if they do the same things for themselves.

Speaker 1: 9:12

To unpack this concept, first of all, studies show that when a highly sensitive person is in an unsupportive family or not in the right conditions for themselves, they're not accommodating for their sensitivity, needs and their oversensitivity to environmental conditions making adjustments externally, and they are not surrounded by supportive people, then these highly sensitive people will have trouble developing self-acceptance and compassion and confidence towards themselves, and this leads them to believe that their sensitivity is a flaw. I can count myself as one of the people in this particular subset of the population, having grown up in a family that did not understand what highly sensitive person is. And this is no surprise, because the term highly sensitive person only entered scientific literature in around 1997. So if you're an adult listening to this, especially if you're in my generation, you grew up in a time where the term highly sensitive person was not a known term and your parents definitely were not up to date on what we know now about sensitivity, including my own, would not have understood sensitivity, never mind know how to adequately nurture and support the needs associated with this trait. So this is point number one. Keep this in mind.

Speaker 1: 10:43

I'm going to refer back to this in a moment. Versus studies show that when the highly sensitive person is in a positive environment, both externally in terms of accommodating for their sensitivity needs, being surrounded by supportive people, but also a positive inner environment within themselves, they're going to thrive, and studies show that they will exhibit a higher level of cognition. They will exhibit a higher level of cognition, of productivity, of resilience, than somebody who is less sensitive, who is in an equally supportive environment, and this is what they call vantage sensitivity. So what this means is a supportive environment. It's not just a nice to have for highly sensitive people. It's a key that unlocks abundant amounts of thriving, and this is something that we don't talk about a lot in society, especially say, for example, a lot of focus in the medical system and in literature is all about just trying to manage symptoms, to try to feel somewhat better when you're feeling awful.

Speaker 1: 11:56

But the science shows that when you establish the right conditions for yourself as a highly sensitive person this isn't just about just getting by and feeling less awful you're going to thrive. And when you thrive, you're going to be able to take all those sensitive gifts that you have within you, including your connection with your intuition, and take that and put it in the forefront of what you are doing so that you can create a bigger impact, not only for yourself and your work, but the people that you are leading and for humanity in general, and I'm going to come back to this concept in a minute, because there are scientific studies that prove that when you do this, you can actually contribute to elevating the consciousness of all of humanity, and I'll explain what that means. And I know that sounds huge, but it's absolutely possible. And the root of all of this is you finding the proper support for yourself. Now, this can include making sure that you are positively supporting yourself with your environment in terms of managing the amount of overstimulation, giving yourself adequate rest and breaks and those types of things, and that can be helpful. But there's a deeper root here. There's a deeper root here that when you address this deeper root, you're going to find that your level of overstimulation and your tolerance and resistance to things that may have previously overwhelmed and overstimulated you before when you address this deeper root, you're going to find that likely, you're going to be able to tolerate more of these things that may have previously overwhelmed you.

Speaker 1: 13:35

You might think, oh well, the deeper here is supporting your nervous system. While nervous system support is important and it's the first thing that I always start with in every single one of my programs and with my one-on-one client work, is to make sure that you're doing some things to support your nervous system, whether it be things like deep breathing, doing some exercise as laid out by the HeartMath Institute, maybe practicing mindful awareness, doing things like meditation, vagal nerve toning exercises. These are examples of many different ways that you can support your nervous system and they're all helpful approaches and each of those things may be more or less effective for you depending on where you're at and what your particular needs can support your nervous system. And they're all helpful approaches and each of those things may be more or less effective for you depending on where you're at and what your particular needs are. And all of these things will help you to support your nervous system so that you can increase and have a closer connection to your intuition. However, I am the queen of deeper and deeper. I will go on this concept because there is a deeper layer to address underneath of the nervous things that I have found in my own experience, in my professional experience working with clients, and what I have found in the scientific research proves this to be true is self-compassion.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Self-compassion is the deeper how you treat yourself, the inner narrative in your mind, how kind and nurturing you are to yourself, how supportive you are to yourself, versus being overly critical or judgmental of yourself. And this is the thing if you're constantly hard on yourself, you're always judging yourself. You've got this constant level of inner pressure, inner judgment, inner guilt, inner shame. All of these things are going to put mega pressure on your nervous system. And so you can do deep breathing till the cows come home and sure it's going to help, but it's only going to take you so far. And once you stop doing the nervous system support exercises, if you haven't addressed this underlying root of the level of self-compassion that you have for yourself, you're going to end up right back to where you were before because this inner emotional terrain hasn't shifted.

Speaker 1: 16:06

Going back to what I mentioned earlier about how, when a highly sensitive person is not in a positively supportive family environment, when they're growing up, they're going to have trouble developing self-acceptance. They're going to think their sensitivity is a flaw and, like I said, this has been my experience. I believe there is a direct correlation between if you've been raised in an unsupportive family environment and you don't accept yourself, you don't accept your sensitivity and you believe that there is something wrong with you, then it is going to be hard for you to have compassion for yourself. I know this was the case for me. I was always trying to change myself. I was always insulting myself and hard on myself because I thought that if I did this, if I was constantly berating myself, then maybe this could motivate me to change. This is a social conditioning factor, especially of those of us who have come from our generation and earlier. We believe that we need this negative talk to motivate us to better ourselves. If I put myself down, that'll motivate me to want to change and of course, that's not the truth.

Speaker 1: 17:20

It only takes you so far. It's only a temporary solution that over time is not sustainable and, as you can see, it really lacks self-compassion, and self-compassion here is proven to be the key that will help to A support your nervous system. So when you have self-compassion, studies have shown that it increases coherence, heart rate variability. Without doing all the exercises like the deep breathing and the meditation and all of these other things, nervous system is just going to automatically be better supported and show higher levels of coherence. When you develop greater self-compassion and studies show that self-compassion decreases self-judgment, decreases fatigue. Fatigue because all of that inner volatility within yourself is a very energetic process and it will drain your energy. Self-compassion increases inner calmness, centeredness, clarity, insight, connection to your heart, energy, all of which studies show enhances your ability to access your intuition, and so I looked at some studies. They were looking at psychotherapists and other types of clinicians and level of self-compassion, and these studies indicate that lacking self-compassion can cause these practitioners to be more tired, more irritable, more distracted, less present, attentive, patient and kind, and that's going to impact not only your energy levels, your level of satisfaction with your work, but also what you can facilitate for your client In terms of these parts of ourselves that might not be so compassionate.

Speaker 1: 19:15

It's kind of akin to as I was talking about in the day two training, when we spoke about what is your intuition and what isn't, and when you hear voices that are not kind, that are not gentle, that are not supportive, then likely those are other parts talking and not your intuition. I mean, if you think about that, your intuition speaks to you in a compassionate way. In my mind, that makes intuition and compassion synonymous in a way. Those other voices that show up, as I mentioned, are other parts, for example, your protective parts, and those protective parts are operating from survival behaviors right, and survival behaviors don't always think logically, and this is why we have this thought that comes up and this comes from survival of well, if I denigrate you, if I'm hard on you, if I pressure you, then that's going to motivate you to move, that's going to motivate you to change, that's going to motivate you to better yourself. But here's the thing is that your sensitivity is a part of you and the more that you reject it, the more you try to change it. Because you think it's wrong, that you need to better yourself and bettering yourself means to be less sensitive then you are working against yourself and it is next to impossible to have compassion for yourself when you reject yourself.

Speaker 1: 20:44

Now, as a side note, self-rejection or lack of acceptance of yourself is a really common, deeper emotional root that I used to see a lot when I was working with people dealing with autoimmunity and the things that you don't accept about yourself. They're going to control you. If you don't accept your sensitive nature. You're trying to soldier on, try to force yourself to be like everybody else, even though you're only 20 to 30% of the population, and then you ask yourself well, why can't I just be like the rest of them? Why can't I operate that way? Why do I have to be this way?

Speaker 1: 21:21

When you have these thoughts, there's energy attached to them and these thought processes and the resulting energy impacts your nervous system, impacts predominantly in terms of your nervous system, your heart. Your heart is such an important core of your entire organism. The electromagnetic frequency that's coming from your heart impacts so much about your physiology and your psychology and everything about you. And it also impacts the people around you, because people can sense the electromagnetic frequency that you're putting off. And this is why just trying to control your external environment and putting on airs, putting on a mask, pretending to be someone else, will only take you so far if you've got this inner emotional terrain that's laden with self-judgment and self-rejection and inner guilt and shame and hardship. Because that impacts your heart rate variability, it impacts your level of coherence, it impacts the electromagnetic frequency that is impacting your entire psychophysiological system within your body, but also impacting what other people can sense from you and pick up from you, and studies show that this helps not only you feel better and feel more regulated within yourself and calmer and filled with more happiness and satisfaction and also improves your physical state and emotional state. But increasing your level of coherence, particularly through developing more self-compassion and connecting with your intuition, will help you to make more aligned decisions and show up in the world differently and I'll talk about that in a minute. And it's also going to impact the electromagnetic frequency of the people around you, and studies show that this contributes to raising the baseline level of consciousness within your workplace, in families, in communities, and rippling out to more and more communities, so that you can end up impacting social and global coherence, which can impact not only your individual but also collective health and well-being and contribute to harmony within the entire world.

Speaker 1: 23:52

And you might be listening to this and going, wow, that sounds really woo-woo. Or you might be going, yeah, I'm right there with you. I just want to point out, either way, that there is scientific research that proves this. This is not just me making it up. I wanted to go into the research to find the proof before I shared this episode with you, because it's that important, and I wanted to show you the proof so that it might help you to trust this particular perspective shift that I'm going to be sharing with you today. Okay, so what is this magical perspective shift that I'm alluding to in today's episode? I think I will shape it around sharing a personal story with you, and this is going to help you maybe understand how some of these puzzle pieces fit together.

Speaker 1: 24:36

As you know, I'm more deeply connected with my intuition now than I definitely used to be in my earlier years of my career, especially when I was practicing as a naturopathic doctor, and, as you know from my story and you can go back and listen to some of my previous podcast episodes if you want to hear all the details of all the different iterations of my journey and all the stages and pieces that I went through in terms of my inner healing I did do a nine-month spiritual coach training program to help me to better connect with my intuition, and it was helpful to a degree, but I still didn't understand the whole concept of being connected with my intuition. I wasn't picking up on things like my instructor or the other class participants were. There was a lot that I was still struggling with at that time. Even though I had done quite a bit of healing, there were still a lot of puzzle pieces missing.

Speaker 1: 25:46

What unfolded after I finished that program was connecting to a psychic medium who connected me with my mother's spirit, and if you already know my history, you know that my mother passed away in 2016. That's what sparked a whole series of events that led me to the worst autoimmune and endometriosis flare of my life, that set me bed bound and it set me down this whole path of discovering carnivore and moved me towards the first set of pivots in my work, and those pivots led me to taking that spiritual coach training program, and it was a spiritual coach training program that led me to connect with the psychic medium because she was a guest speaker at the very end of the course. Now, this is the thing when I connected with my mother's spirit, I ended up working with this medium for nine months, so another nine months. It was this work with my mother's spirit that allowed me to develop more self-acceptance and more compassion for myself. I was able to heal some deep mother wounds. Here's the thing there's a lot of layers that I'm not going to go into today about my mother wound and all the different aspects of the inner healing puzzle pieces that needed to happen, but there's a couple of really important pieces that are pertinent to this conversation, and those are the lack of supportive behavior towards my sensitivity and the modeled behavior of lack of self-compassion.

Speaker 1: 27:18

As I was growing up, I watched my mom despise herself. She had her own set of wounds that she hadn't processed and dealt with and moved through and because of that she lacked compassion for herself. And it was very obvious and this was the type of behavior that was modeled to me I was not modeled compassionate self-behavior. That was problem number one. And problem number two was that my mother did not accept my sensitivity. I was too sensitive. I was always too sensitive. It was always something that my mother continuously told me, stopping so sensitive, to the point where, in her final days where she was still verbal before she passed away, she told me, michelle, if there's one thing that you can do to become a better person is to be less sensitive, and that's huge To get that message over and over and over again your whole lifetime, right up until the death of my mother that I'm too sensitive and if I want to improve myself in any way, shape or form, I need to be less sensitive. I need to improve myself in any way, shape or form. I need to be less sensitive. I need to stop being sensitive.

Speaker 1: 28:35

Obviously, I did not have a supportive familial environment growing up as a highly sensitive person, because I had a parent figure who did not accept my sensitivity and she did not accept herself, and so she was modeling lack of self-compassion and she was modeling to me not to be compassionate with myself because there was something wrong with me. And so I grew up with this belief that my sensitivity was a flaw, that there was something wrong with me that I needed to change and I can't be myself and I can't trust myself because there's something wrong with me. And because of that, because of these beliefs that I had within myself, a I could not be compassionate with myself because I was filled with judgment, I was filled with shame and I was always filled with inner pressure because I couldn't seem to mask myself enough to hide the sensitivity, enough to be like everybody else. I didn't fit in, and that just made it worse, that reduced my level of compassion for myself, because it made me feel like I was failing, I didn't belong, I didn't fit in, I was too different and I just couldn't figure out how to fix myself so that I could fit in, so that I could be the person that my mother was trying to tell me that I had to be. Can you see how that can shape someone's inner emotional environment and how that caused me to put so much strain on my nervous system? I was in constant self-rejection mode. I was in constant hypervigilant mode, trying to figure out how to adjust myself so that my external environment didn't feel so overwhelming and so that I could somehow be in control of the people in my external environment, so that I could somehow feel safer, and I'm not going to go into too much detail about that point today. Note that one of my earlier podcast episodes I do go into greater detail about this concept in terms of people pleasing.

Speaker 1: 30:50

Fast forwarding to all of this inner healing work journey that I had been on since my mom passed away and I went and embarked on this spiritual coach training program which helped me to understand shadow healing and integration. And while there were parts of me that were improving and I was learning nervous system regulation, there were so many aspects of myself that were improving and, as a result, my health was improving. My endometriosis and autoimmune flares were no longer problematic. Even though I was starting to reintroduce food again, there were still some issues. I still had a lot of food sensitivities, even though I was able to reintroduce a few things and I, like I mentioned earlier, still wasn't fully connected to my intuition.

Speaker 1: 31:38

When I started working with my mother's spirit, one of the things that really stuck in my mind was when the psychic medium gave me this message that my mom admitted that she realizes now how hurtful her behavior was to me. However, she was at a place within her own life and her own existence that she was not able to address these truths in her living time. They were too big for her, they were too hard for her. She was not capable of owning these aspects and taking responsibility for these aspects of herself. And this is the thing not everybody is ready or willing to look at these aspects of the deep inner healing and taking self-responsibility in this lifetime. And she was one of them. And as I was doing this deeper inner healing work and as I was connecting with my mother's spirit, it was allowing her to do her own healing work on the other side that she was incapable of doing during her lifetime. And part of this work was her accepting herself and who she was, instead of rejecting herself because she deeply lacked self-compassion because of her own experiences in her upbringing, and likely, I believe, she was a highly sensitive person herself, and likely she was not in a supportive environment growing up, and so she lacked her own self-acceptance and believed her sensitivity was a flaw, and so when she saw that sensitivity within me, it triggered her. Because this is how shadow work works If there's something within you that you don't feel at peace with, if you have not come to terms with, and when you see it in somebody else, if you're not willing to take a step back and look at the wider perspective and look at the possibility of integrating and coming to terms with these aspects of yourself, if you refuse to do that and you don't want to look at that, then when you see this in somebody else, it will trigger you.

Speaker 1: 33:47

I like to use feeling triggered as a message that there's something within you that you have not come to terms with, and I'll talk more deeply about that in another podcast episode. And this is definitely some of the deeper work that I work with my clients with. When we work one-on-one is taking a look at your triggers gently and compassionately and seeing what about if there was something that you feel triggered about what's actually going on underneath the surface in terms of what are you not at peace with? What have you not come to terms with within yourself? That's causing you to feel triggered, and the same goes for if somebody else is feeling triggered by you. Instead of assuming that it's your fault, compassionately look at them and the fact that maybe there's something within them that they haven't come to terms with or not at peace with, and that's why they're being triggered. That's more than I have time to get into in today's episode.

Speaker 1: 34:44

So back to my story. As I was working with my mom's spirit and she was admitting these things to me and developing more compassion for herself, she could develop more compassion for me as she did this and I could see the progression over these nine months. At the very beginning, when she was very unwilling to admit certain things or talk about certain things or address certain things, as we continued our back and forth conversation through the psychic medium, there was a softening and an opening and I could see more compassion on her side and more acceptance towards me. I could see the truth of why she reacted the way that she did towards me and I could see, through this unfolding, how much she truly did love me and these were things I did not fully understand before and through this unfolding, how much she truly did love me. And these were things I did not fully understand before.

Speaker 1: 35:35

And through this journey of understanding and unpacking the puzzle pieces and seeing the bigger picture and seeing the shadows underneath it all and processing the emotions that came with it. Because there were lots of emotions that came up Anger, grief grief of not having the positive, supportive environment that I could have that would have helped me to thrive as a highly sensitive person. And anger towards her for not providing that for me. And I had to move through those emotions to get to the other side without attaching to the emotions. So it's really important with emotions big emotions as you're processing, like anger and grief not to suppress them, not to avoid them, but then also don't hold onto them and grasp onto them and attach onto them so that they don't move through you.

Speaker 1: 36:26

When you're able to move through this process and let this move through you, you come out the other side feeling more whole. And that's what I experienced for myself is this process of moving through, integrating these mother wounds so that they were no longer controlling me, so that they were no longer controlling the inner voices in my mind that were preventing me from having compassion for myself, all of that inner judgment you're too sensitive, there's something wrong with you. Stop being so weird, stop being so woo. You don't know what you're talking about. All of these things controlled me and they controlled my decisions. They controlled how I showed up for myself in the world, in my relationships, in my business, and I can definitely say that there have been some relationships in my past that have been predominantly motivated by these wounded parts of myself.

Speaker 1: 37:24

And so can you see that your level of self-compassion is not only about helping to support your nervous system and helping to connect with your intuition, but it also impacts your whole energy system. It impacts how people perceive you because of that electromagnetic frequency that you put out, because all of this impacts your heart rate variability and level of coherence, and it impacts the level of confidence that you exhibit in how you show up in the world and how you make your decisions and choices. Are you making decisions and choices because they feel aligned with your soul and your purpose, or are you making decisions and choices because you're trying to control your external environment and the people around you so that you can feel safer. So people pleasing, for example, and perfectionism Studies show that perfectionism behavior naturally eases the more self-compassion that you have.

Speaker 1: 38:23

Can you see how? It's not about trying to change who you are. It's not about trying to change the people pleasing or change the perfectionism or change your sensitivity. It's about accepting yourself and having compassion for yourself and who you are and being human because humans are by nature imperfect and accepting this about yourself. And when you do, these survival, coping behaviors naturally ease because as you develop more self-compassion, your nervous system regulates, you develop higher coherence and you move out of survival mode. And when you have this inner self-compassion for yourself, it creates a positive, supportive environment. And again going back to the research, when a highly sensitive person puts themselves in a positive, supportive environment, then they thrive.

Speaker 1: 39:25

Then all of the negative aspects and challenges of being highly sensitive, right, the overstimulation, the over emotional reactivity, all of these things that can feel like challenges to us actually start to diminish the more you are in this positive, supportive environment and more of the positive aspects of sensitivity come out, like your keen pattern recognition, your connection to intuition, your connection to your creativity, your unique out-of-the-box thinking that solves problems and creates innovative ideas that most people don't see, perceive or pick up on. And so for me and my story, as I worked with my mother spirit and worked through the processing of unconditioning from all the programmed beliefs that I had been operating from, these beliefs that I'm too sensitive, these beliefs that I need to put other people's desires and opinions and expectations before my own Once I unconditioned from that and started to create this deeper, more compassionate relationship with myself and I reparented myself and I supported that little inner child who needed that positive, supportive environment. And I learned how to have this new relationship with myself because of these huge perspective shifts that I gained through these conversations with my mother spirit. And when I did these things and went through this process, that's when my intuition woke up. All of a sudden, I started noticing that I was picking up on things that I never used to pick up on. All of a sudden I was starting to notice, when I was in client calls with them, I was seeing visions and picking up on ideas and concepts and objects and words that were showing up in the bottom right hand corner of my periphery in black and white, and it was very obvious that it wasn't physical reality what I was seeing. It was some other type of vision that was going on. It kind of makes me think of if you've ever watched the television show the Good Doctor and he'll look up and stare into the abyss and you can see that he's kind of like putting puzzle pieces together and it's all kind of like in black and white drawings. It's kind of like that but a little different, and it's more in the lower right-hand corner of my periphery and at first I was scared of seeing these things. What are these things that I'm looking at? Why are they showing up?

Speaker 1: 42:04

Especially when I was connecting with a client and as I continued my own inner healing and developed more acceptance and compassion for myself and developed a sense of inner safety within myself, I decided that I was going to start to speak up and ask my clients hey, I'm seeing something right now and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but would you like me to tell you what I see? What happened blew everybody's minds. I would start to explain what I was seeing and instant light bulb moments of oh my god, that's exactly what I needed to hear. Oh my god, you just solved a question problem issue that I've been trying to figure out for months or years, or sometimes they would break down in tears, joyful and appreciative, because that was the exact thing that made everything make sense. And the more I got these reactions, the more I started to trust. Oh, this is a thing. Oh, I see. This is my intuition, this is clairvoyance, this is my ability to pick up on things outside of, maybe, physical reality. And, as my husband puts it, because when I told him what I pick up on, he said that doesn't surprise me at all. You're a highly sensitive person and now that you've accepted your sensitivity, you're able to pick up on more and more nuanced stuff that most people can't see, but it's there.

Speaker 1: 43:34

The reason why I'm using this story today is because doing this inner healing work to develop more self-compassion for myself was a key that unlocked a gate. I had already done nine months of training to connect with my intuition and while there was some progression in my intuitive knowing doing the work that I did in that nine month coach training program, what happened once I did this inner self-compassion healing work? All of a sudden, it was like my intuition blew wide open. And that's the difference between, say, for example, just doing nervous system support tools or just relying on, maybe, some of the foundational power tools that I gave you in the first three days of this training. They're going to help you, and if you don't have inner self-compassion for yourself, they're only going to take you so far.

Speaker 1: 44:32

This is why, on day four, mentioning this concept of compassion for yourself is going to be the next key that unlocks even bigger breakthroughs for yourself in terms of connecting with your intuition, in terms of coming up with the business ideas and decisions and making the most aligned decisions for yourself that set you up to be doing business on your terms, to be connected with your sole purpose, to be doing work that not only is successful but delivers profound and deep satisfaction, while also leaving a meaningful impact that you know that you want to be making. Because if you're a highly sensitive person, you feel the suffering in the world and, likely, you want to contribute to making it better. And this is a secret key it starts with you always, if you want to contribute to collective healing, collective harmony, collective peace, collective betterment of well-being on any level within humanity, it always starts with you. And one really important piece of this puzzle is self-compassion and connecting with your intuition, because when you do these things, you increase your coherence and this puts you in a state of heart rate variability that will impact not only you but everyone around you, and it impacts your choices and it impacts your behavior and it impacts your level of emotional regulation and it impacts those of the people around you through example, through electromagnetic frequency and through a whole other series of factors that likely, we don't even know how to measure yet. When you develop this level of coherence within yourself, through compassion, through connection with your intuition, through supporting your nervous system, this is known as heart-based living, and there are more and more people speaking now about how important this is in terms of making a change in humanity. This is in terms of making a change in humanity, making a change in the world.

Speaker 1: 46:52

So many of us tend to be operating from our intellect, from our mind and, as I mentioned in day one, that's only going to take you so far and a lot of survival-based thinking and protective-based thinking is coming from thinking and operating from intellect first, whereas studies have shown that your heart actually picks up on things before your mind and intellect does. And so, if you are operating from a heart based place in your body in a highly coherent state, you're going to pick up on things way before somebody who's operating from a mind and intellect place only, and there's also this whole concept of when you're operating from this heart-based place. You're operating from a place that's aligned with your purpose, with your values and this is so important Instead of operating from a place of survival and needing to try to grasp onto power and control externally, because the truth of the matter is we are all powerful beings and your power, the most important power, comes from within. When you are connected with yourself, when you accept yourself, when you are compassionate with yourself, when you are connected with your values, when you are connected with your soul purpose, your values, when you are connected with your sole purpose. It starts with you so that then you can connect with others and radiate that compassion outwards towards others, without judgment, without pressure, without needing to control anything or anyone. Because you understand the bigger picture, then you understand you are not your thoughts, you are the observer of them. You are not your ego, it does not control you. Should you choose not to let it control you, you come to understand your level of power within yourself because you are living, breathing stardust, literally, and as so you are a powerful, key piece of a greater collective puzzle that includes us all. And in the end you see that I am you and you are me. This is level four, consciousness, and in this level of consciousness there is no good or bad, there is no right or wrong. It it all is. But there is this manner of heart-based living, connected with integrity and your values and your deepest soul, mission and purpose, and that's what guides you. But survival and fear can keep us from seeing all of these facets, and it's the survival and fear that can keep us from achieving our fullest potential, and especially as highly sensitive people.

Speaker 1: 49:31

The studies prove that when you do positively support yourself, both with your inner emotional environment, through self-compassion, through self-acceptance, through self-nurturing, as well as putting yourself in an external environment that supports your nervous system, needs that you will achieve your fullest potential, that you can be operating from this place where your sensitive gifts are just that. They are gifts that you can leverage over and above your professional skills so that you can help people in more ways than just what your professional skills can deliver. You can help them through entrainment and attunement from your high level of coherence. You can help them to lift their own consciousness, because you have done so with yours. You can help them through using your intuition to help facilitate even bigger breakthroughs than logic alone can deliver. Can you see how important this is, not only for you, but for your business, for your relationships, for your family and for humanity? And this is why it's so important to develop self-compassion and to accept your sensitivity and support it and nurture it, instead of reject it or try to mask it or hide it or push it away or try to force yourself to be someone that you're not, force yourself to try to operate in your business maybe the way 70 to 80% of the non-sensitive world is operating in business. First and foremost, have compassion for you. So you can see from my personal story, this is an example of the deeper layers that underlie what's really going on.

Speaker 1: 51:22

Now. I always start with teaching some foundational tools like nervous system regulation. I didn't get much into nervous system regulation in this particular training series. I wanted to focus more on the tools to help you to connect with and understand the language of your intuition, which I've shared with you, and gave you a tiny snapshot in the first three days of better understanding your intuition and trusting it, so that you a tiny snapshot in the first three days of better understanding your intuition. And trusting it so that you can use it in your work and so that you can use it to help you make the decisions in your life and in your business that are going to feel most aligned for you, so that you can operate in a way that helps you to feel energized as opposed to drained, so that you can make the decisions that connect you with work that lights you up, that you're passionate about and that makes a real difference in the world, while also giving you financial success because it pays well. But, as you can see, there's something deeper here and it's when the deeper layers are addressed and supported. It's like a magic key that makes everything unfold and open up so much more quickly. And I've given you a tiny snapshot of understanding what I mean by this with my own personal story.

Speaker 1: 52:39

Right, I tried you know all the different exercises during my coach training program to connect with my intuition and it did help to a degree. But then, when I did that inner work, when I connected with my mother spirit, that's when I developed that self-compassion for myself and that's what I was lacking before and it was once I developed that self-compassion for myself. It was like a key that unlocked a door, and I see this over and over again with my clients. When there are aspects of them that they don't accept, when they do lack self-compassion, when there are parts of them where their protective parts are controlling them, when they are putting inner pressure on themselves, if they're carrying guilt or shame, if they are hard on themselves, if they don't trust themselves, if they're carrying guilt or shame, if they are hard on themselves, if they don't trust themselves, if they feel like their sensitivity is a flaw or there's something wrong with them or they feel like there's something about themselves that they need to fix or hide, then all the nervous system regulation tools in the world are only going to get them so far. And usually they've come to me, especially in previous iterations of my work. They've tried all the things. They've tried all the strict therapeutic diets. They've tried all the medical treatments. They've tried all the herbal treatments. They've tried all the detoxes, all the things to help, to support and help them get control over their chronic illness symptoms.

Speaker 1: 54:05

When I was working with women with autoimmunity and endometriosis and it was once we started to explore developing more compassion for themselves, accepting themselves and letting go of all that inner pressure. And the process that I would guide them through was the process that I went through when I was connecting with my mother spirit. It was almost like her and I together intuited a whole process to heal from all the things that prevented us from loving and accepting and having compassion for ourselves, both her and me. And so that process that I guided people through which I later decided to call the inner liberation method, because once I would guide a client through this process, they would come out the other side and they would tell me that they finally feel free. They feel liberated from all the shackles of inner pressure and judgment that were holding them down, keeping them tied, holding them back from living their lives the way they wanted to live it, from enjoying their lives, and once you liberate yourself from that, life opens up. It's like a lock that opens a door and everything blows open in magnificent ways.

Speaker 1: 55:21

I've since shifted and pivoted my work, and now I'm working with entrepreneurs who are wanting to align their work more deeply with what they really want and to connect more with their intuition so that they are making the decisions that are aligned for them and to use that intuition more confidently in their work. Nowadays, most of my clients have already done and gone through some level of inner healing and once they come out the other side whether they've gone through therapy or worked with coaches or done other types of personal development work they come out the other side and they see, wow, so much has opened up for me and I see that my business and my work is no longer aligned with where I am now compared to where I was before I did this inner work. But I always find that there's still some levels of maybe lack of acceptance or inner judgment or lack of compassion to some degree right, especially when questions like well, who am I to want to make these changes? I've already got a successful business or job. Who am I to want to make these changes just because I want to enjoy my work more, just because I want it to be more aligned with what I think my purpose might be right, and that also rings of some lack of compassion for yourself, because you're not making the decisions that fully support who you're here to be. And again, as a highly sensitive person, when you make the decisions to fully support who you're here to be and to fully support all the needs that come with being a highly sensitive person and you support them, starting first with your mindset and how you're treating yourself and how you're talking to yourself and how much you accept yourself for who you are and what you really want. Then that's when you thrive and when you follow your intuition to make the decisions to align yourself to what you truly want. It's not selfish, it's necessary. If you want to make that impact and humanity that you know that you want to be making, you need to align to yourself, align to your values, align to your purpose, align to what you truly want and who you truly are, not what other people are telling you that you should be or have to be. And it's when you do this work to fully align with yourself and trust yourself and accept yourself and have compassion for that and support yourself in that that's how you can make the biggest impact in the world for the people that you know that you're here to be serving and that's how they're going to get the best results from what you have to offer. As you can tell, I'm really passionate about all of this and I could go on for hours about this and I feel like this episode is already long enough. I know I'm going to revisit this topic again in the future.

Speaker 1: 58:17

Some reflection questions for you. How is your relationship with you? How much compassion do you have for yourself? Do you have supportive self-talk or are you negative and judgmental towards yourself? Do you criticize yourself and force yourself to soldier on in difficult experiences and difficult circumstances or in times when you're starting to feel overwhelmed or overloaded? Do you think that possibly your level of self-compassion for yourself, or lack of, might be impeding your ability to access your intuition? So reflect on those questions. I suggest you journal about them because when you get it on paper you can see it from a different perspective.

Speaker 1: 59:03

If you see that maybe there's some level of compassion that you could improve, to improve your inner emotional environment, to help you thrive even more as a highly sensitive person, then hopefully this has maybe been a helpful perspective shift for you and shed some light on maybe a layer and piece in the puzzle for you to address and work on so that you can develop even more self-compassion for yourself, because the more self-compassion that you have, the more positive inner supportive environment that you're going to provide for yourself and this is going to help you, as a highly sensitive person, thrive even more, and this is how you can help others to your fullest potential. And if you are seeing that there is some light shed on some layers and some pieces of the puzzle, then this gives you this opportunity, because you can't change what you can't see. And if you can see it, then you can choose to do something about it. In this case, maybe you decide that you choose to develop a deeper level of self-compassion for yourself, however you find is most aligned for you and I know, for the clients that I lead. I have developed this inner liberation method that I walk my clients through and guide them through. And I find, for fellow highly sensitive people, especially highly sensitive people who did grow up in an unsupportive environment where they were led to believe that their sensitivity was a flaw, then this particular method that I came up with with my mother spirit that helped me unlock self-compassion and unlock the next level of my intuition, this particular method works like magic for others in similar situations.

Speaker 1: 1:01:00

So I'll wrap up today's day four training.

Speaker 1: 1:01:04

I hope this gave you some food for thought and some things to consider and maybe shed some light on some things that might be helpful for you to not only deepen your connection with your intuition, but some things to consider so that you can really fully, deeply thrive to your fullest potential in your life, in your business and in the impact that you know that you're here to provide for humanity.

Speaker 1: 1:01:29

And if you haven't already signed up for this five-day training series your next intuitive business breakthrough I highly suggest that you use the link in the show notes to sign up so that you can catch up on all of the other trainings that come along with this day four training of the series, because they all fit together and so when you sign up, you'll receive one email a day for five days with a link to each of the trainings, along with some additional resources that are gonna help you move through the trainings and the exercises in the trainings. So that's it for day four, and I look forward to seeing you for the final day of this training series, tomorrow, day five. There's going to be some additional perspective shifts and some wrap up considerations that are going to help you take everything that you've learned over these four days and help you to put them into action so that you can have your next intuitive business breakthrough. I'll speak to you then.