Brenda 00:00:02 Welcome to your yes build life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle, educator, healer, speaker, guide and fierce advocate for your. Yes, I help sensitive and successful men and women find, reclaim and live from their full embodied. Yes. Through empowering you to understand your energetic hygiene, establish healthy boundaries and heal your nervous system. You'll be able to create your yes filled life and move through your days with more freedom, more ease, and more joy. You'll hear inspiring stories of people who found their full bodied, yes thought leaders who pursued their own dreams and are living life on their terms, and learn new ways to find the courage, joy, ease and freedom to more fully step into your yes filled life. Say no to the good so you can say yes to the great. Join me on this journey to discover your yes filled life. Whether you're looking to break free from the golden handcuffs. Start a new business, find your dream job or simply live with more intention and mindfulness. I've got you covered.
Brenda 00:01:15 Let's explore the possibilities together and make your dreams a reality. Ready? Let's do this. Let's get you to your yes filled life. Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. Thank you for being here. Whether it's your first time listening or you're a long time listener. It just means so much to have you here. Today in the podcast, we're going to be talking about why you might want to increase your intuitive access as a leader. And I'm going to give you a customizable strategy to do that. So the strategy will not be one size fits all. You'll be able to make it mold and work for you. But before we dive in, I want to tell you a little story. And this is a story from my own personal journey, moving from a high achiever to who is high, achieving everything in my life to the life that I have now. So at one point in time, I was working full time in the public schools as a music educator.
Brenda 00:02:22 I had one choir in the public schools. I also directed a prestigious children's choir program for Opera Idaho. And at that time I had four choirs underneath me that I had built that program. I had more than tripled the size of the program in my tenure there. And at one time I also was a children's church choir director all at the same time. Oh, and by the way, I was running the business. So as high achievers do, the more stressed we get, the more we try to control and manage and be available and create systems and flows and emails and texts. And it wasn't before. It wasn't very long that I was doing all of this work, that I began to experience some health problems, but I just ignored them. And I kept telling myself that every time a parent emailed me because my the parents were basically my stakeholders in that role, every time a parent emailed me, it was of absolute critical priority that I emailed them back, you know, within 8 to 12 hours.
Brenda 00:03:33 Well, if you're working full time and two part time jobs and running a business, that's not always possible. But I made it possible. I multitask all the time. Every time I had a break from one job, I was logging into the email system or checking my phone for texts of the other 2 or 3 jobs. It was constant and it really felt necessary and urgent and critical, and it felt like it was high stakes and like I had to get back to everybody in a certain period of time or. Dot dot dot. Doom music. Dun dun dun. Who knows, right? Can you relate to that at all? Now, whether or not you've ever been in a role as a music educator, perhaps you can. I was working with one of my high level VIP clients over the last couple of weeks, and she owns a very successful business and has multiple arms of the business, and one of those arms involves a group coaching program. And inside the group program, inside the group coaching program.
Brenda 00:04:42 There was a challenge that arose over the last couple of weeks that caused my client, I'm going to call her Victoria for purposes of the podcast. That's not her name, but for the purposes of the podcast, we're going to call her Victoria. And that caused Victoria to go into the same kind of frenetic, I have to respond to this right now kind of emergency thing. And by the way, as this is all unfolding, she's on a really epic trip with her family. So you can imagine the stress level. She's got this very successful program. She's got multiple employees that work for her as part of this group program, and she's got multiple clients that she is that she is supporting, like well over 100 clients in this specific program. And so as this event began to unfold, she became more and more and more tied to her phone, and she became more and more reactive and trying to get ahead of this challenge that was happening within the group program. And as we allowed the events to unfold as they would, and in the meantime, she's texting me and boxing me, and we're communicating about all the ways that she might be able to manage this program energetically.
Brenda 00:06:05 Because that's what I do, is I help people manage things energetically. I was realizing in tracking in her a sense of exhaustion and overwhelm that was coming from being on. And when I say on, I'm like using my little air quotes, being on all the time, like waiting for the next communication from a difficult client, or waiting for a communication from one of the coaching staff talking about this particular circumstance. And as a result, I'm just going to cut right to the chase. We realize that some of the stress that she is experiencing is as a result of not only her phone, but how she's structuring her time, which led me to do a deep dive into some time blocking strategies that she could use for herself and in her business. And so that's why I want to bring this to you. So as a high achieving leader, time blocking is not just a productivity tool. It's a way for you to reclaim control over your schedule, to create spaciousness for strategic thinking. And as far as our purposes today, most importantly, it's a way to deepen that intuitive access.
Brenda 00:07:22 So if we look to entrepreneurial experts like Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, who wrote ten X is easier than two X, or Gary Keller and Jay Papazian who wrote the one thing. There are some things that I'd love to share with you about the importance of blocking time. So there are five big things that we're going to be talking about. And then I'm going to share with you the strategies about how you can implement this into your own life and schedule. So number one, if we think about ten x thinking in the book, ten x is easier than two x. Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy talked about how in order for you to actually move the needle ten x, you have to completely get out of the box because the two x thinking like I'm going to do twice as much is actually holding you back. So instead of focusing on incremental gains, we want to block time for transformation. And in order for that to happen, we need to prioritize 20% of the action that drives 80% of the results.
Brenda 00:08:33 Meaning you want to be sure you're leading from your genius rather than managing from your exhaustion. I'm going to say that again. You want to make sure you're leading from your genius rather than managing from your exhaustion. So number one is we want a time block for exponential growth. And the reason we want to do that is we want to create time and spaciousness so that you can have time to access your genius, your intuitive access, the part of you that already knows the solution to everything. If we just give the intuition, time and space to come forward. Number two deep work and intuition. Inspired by the one thing invitation to dedicate focused time blocks on your highest value activities. Now, I'm not talking about business strategy here. I'm talking about integrating your intuition with your decision making. And in order for this to happen, we want to create a system so that you can access your gut instincts to allow you to lead and scale with ease. And sometimes that's going to mean doing something different than what your team suggests.
Brenda 00:09:56 What your coach says is, is, is the next step for you. Or even what conventional wisdom says is convention. But in order for you to get that that deep insight, we need to allow some time for that to happen. Number three, the benefit of time blocking is to eliminate distraction and create flow. So both of these books that I mentioned, ten x is easier than two x. And the one thing they emphasize protecting your focus by minimizing context switching. So when we talk about context switching, in the last solo episode that I recorded, we were talking about distraction and we were talking about the amount of time it takes to refocus. And in that episode, I shared that research suggests it takes 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. So you need to create some time where you will absolutely not be reachable by your team, by your family, by any other demands on your attention, so that you can create this deep focus, this deep work, deep flow for energetic alignment and intuitive downloads.
Brenda 00:11:05 And that is going to need to be without the constant pull of team requests or urgent but important tasks. And when I say urgent but important tasks, I'm talking about like the challenges that come up, for example, in my client that we called Victoria's Group program, those were absolutely urgent, but they weren't emergent, right? In other words, they needed Victoria's attention. She really did need to deal with it in a time sensitive way. And also, it didn't have to be at 9:00 at night that she was dealing with it. Okay. Number four, the benefit of time blocking is what I'm calling the CEO. Schedule shift. Time blocking is not about squeezing in more. It's not about doing more. It's about subtracting. So instead of being the bottleneck in your business, you can use time blocks to shift from doing to leading. There's a real subtle difference there, but it's impactful. You can trust your team more. Stepping away for creative and strategic thinking, and ensure that you're making high impact decisions from a place of calm, not from a place of chaos.
Brenda 00:12:19 The decisions you make are going to be very, very different. When you're calm and centered and grounded and accessing your intuition. Because if you're not in that calm and grounded place, and you try to deal with these urgent things that come up, whether it's a client that's having a challenge or a team member that's having a challenge, or a family member that's having a challenge. If you're in that reactivity mode, everything feels like a crisis and it's really hard to dial back. And if you have any experience of trauma in your life, no matter how long ago, no matter what type of trauma, if you have an experience of trauma in your life, you already have the neural pathways to go immediately from zero to crisis. You just have it. That's what's happened in your brain. And so I say this as someone with trauma informed certifications in multiple modalities, that we want to acknowledge that it's really easy if you have any trauma to go from zero to crisis. And so we want to create some spaciousness in your schedule so that you can dial back the feeling of crisis.
Brenda 00:13:31 Because if you can use some semantic practices to release the stress, anxiety, tension, overwhelm in the body, you can come back to center and then make decisions from this place of true aligned leadership. And the fifth benefit of time blocking is intuition focused time blocks. So this is not your typical productivity advice okay. Instead, it's somatic coaching approaches that integrate your deep body wisdom. So we're not just blocking productivity time. We're not just blocking creativity time. We're not just blocking team time or content creation time. We're actually blocking somatic practice time where you can use some breathwork or somatic movement or somatic sound to get into the body, to make sure that your nervous system is regulated before you even begin. Why is that important? Because it's going to make your intuitive access even easier. And you'll find that when you create these blocks of somatic integration, that not only are you going to feel better as you make the decision, but you're going to be pleased with the long term outcome of the decision in a really different way.
Brenda 00:14:50 So I promised you that we were going to talk about some strategies that you can customize that can be unique for you and your needs. And we are. But let's talk about the importance of trusting your intuition. So when you get the little whisper and when I say whisper, I'm really speaking metaphorically. Although it could be an actual whisper, depending on how you access your intuition. It might come through as something you already know that you can't explain how you know it. It might come through as an image, a visual picture in your mind. It might come through as something that you hear. It could come through as something that somebody else says. And then you draw a connection. Intuition comes to us in many, many, many different ways. And so opening to the idea that your intuition could be speaking if you feel a twinge somewhere in your body, or you have this sudden sense of knowing, just open to that and then treat it as though it's real, treated as though it's true and a little.
Brenda 00:15:58 We'll go into this deeper in another episode. But you know, the difference between a fear and intuition is the speed that it comes in and the feeling that you get when you have it. So if this is truly an intuitive hit, it's going to feel, kind of smooth, like it'll come in smoothly and you will not initially have an emotional response to the intuitive hit. You'll be like, oh, I think this or this is the motivation or this is what I should do next. It'll be certain smooth and there won't be an emotion attached to it. The emotion that comes from an intuitive hit comes after. So you'll get the intuitive hit and then you'll have an emotional response to it, whether it's like, oh my gosh, this is such a great idea. I can't believe I didn't think of this. Or maybe it's like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I almost talked myself out of knowing that this is not an aligned fit. Whatever it is, the emotional response comes after. If it's a fear because this is what you're worried about, right? You're worried that you won't know the difference between something that is scaring you coming in versus intuition.
Brenda 00:17:12 If it's fear, it's going to come in kind of jagged or bumpy, and it's going to be very, very fast. It's not going to be smooth, and you'll instantly feel a sense of fear in your body. And you might need to notice what's happening in the body to notice that it's a fear. So maybe you feel your heart rate increasing. Maybe your palms begin to sweat. Maybe you feel sensation in parts of your body, like oftentimes one of the first places that I feel fear is either right in the pit of my stomach or in the backs of my arms. And so just kind of pay attention to where does fear come in for you? Because it may not be the same place that it comes in for me. So the difference, again between intuition and fear, the intuition is going to be smooth, certain, not a lot of emotion attached to it in that moment. The emotion comes after fear is fast, kind of jagged, a little bit harsh, and you will feel an emotion as it's coming in, and you'll notice that there's like fear or anxiety in the body.
Brenda 00:18:22 So if that fear comes in, that's telling you that there's something that needs your attention, whether it's a protector part or a child part. And what I mean by protector parts or child parts are the parts of our personality, of our our bodies that are holding on to older, unhealed versions of ourselves. And so if we have these child parts or protector parts that are coming out and they're in control, we can make some misaligned decisions, which is another reason we want to really tap in to that intuition. And I'll create an episode in the coming weeks about the inner child parts and the protector parts to give you some more information about that. So be sure that you've subscribed to the podcast wherever you're listening so you don't miss that episode. But for the purposes of this episode, where we're really talking about accessing the intuition through the strategy of time blocking, we don't quite have time for it. So just make sure you're subscribed. So now let's talk about how you can customize time blocking and which time blocking technique might be best for you.
Brenda 00:19:34 So I will say, first of all, you know yourself best. You are your highest authority. And what I'm going to offer you today is just some strategies, and I'll be really transparent and tell you that I use all three of these strategies interchangeably. So when you look at my calendar over the course of a day, a week, a month, a quarter, you'll see evidence of all three of these types of time blocking in my calendar and in my planner, because that works for me. And for me, those different types of time blocking represent different kinds of activities. So maybe the same is true for you. Or maybe you just like two of them. Or maybe you hear one and you're like, that's mine. That's the one I want. So give yourself the grace of being able to explore and see which one actually is best for you. So there are three ways that we can think about time blocking. The first way is deep work blocks. The second day is. Excuse me.
Brenda 00:20:44 The second way is whole day. Focus. And the third way is a combination approach with both time blocks and theme days or whole focus days. So let's unpack each of these and talk about who they're for. The deep work block would be a 2 to 4 hour focus block. So in this case you would put your phone on airplane mode in your computer too. If you're if your phone never rings through on your computer. So everything goes on airplane mode and do not disturb because if you're connected to Wi-Fi, you can still get notifications coming through. and you know, if you are saying, well, I can't possibly put my phone on airplane mode or Do not disturb because I'm worried that so-and-so might need me, this is an opportunity for you to make sure that you just take 2 or 4 hours so that they don't need you. Maybe that means asking for help. Maybe you need support. Maybe you need someone else to be the go to call person in case of an emergency. Because, you know, the thing is, you are turning your phone on airplane mode every time you get on a plane and it's so easy to think, oh my gosh, I'm going to get off this four hour flight or whatever, and I'm going to have missed so much.
Brenda 00:22:05 And you and I both know that when you turn that airplane mode back on, you have worked up this thing where, oh my gosh, I've missed so much. And then there's like four notifications and then two texts from the person that you're going to meet in that location. Right. You're not going to miss that much. This is part of dialing back that crisis mentality. And it's really important to challenge the thought that I can't possibly take 2 or 4 hours to focus, because you can. You just have to want to and you might need to need to ask for support. So if you've got kids at home, maybe you ask for someone else to be in charge for those 2 or 4 hours of answering the phone in case of an emergency. And you know, I did this as a single mom. I was a single parent from the time my daughter was five, and she's currently 23, so her entire school experience was just me. And so when I needed deep focus blocks, I would just ask for support.
Brenda 00:23:05 I would ask a friend to watch her. I would ask a friend for 2 or 4 hours and like I would say, you know, don't call me unless like, she's bleeding. And then it it never happened. It never happened. So ask for help if you need it. Okay. So this is ideal for you if you want to do high impact tasks that require deep focus. These would be things like strategic planning, content creation, or intuitive decision making. So this is where you'd you'd set up a time block of 2 to 4 hours. So here's how you would do it. You would block 2 to 4 hours for a singular focus and make sure there's no interruptions. You would create, ideally, a pre routine to signal your brain that it's time to start. So maybe that's a short meditation, a little breathwork practice, or even journaling for a moment to set an intention. And when I say pre routine we're not talking about an hour. We're talking about five minutes. How can you use five minutes to set the stage in your brain and body for this deep focus? My recommendation would be that you use some breath in through the nose, out through the mouth to set a timer for five minutes, and you'll be amazed at the clarity that comes from that.
Brenda 00:24:23 And again, I can't highlight enough the importance of putting your phone on airplane mode, closing the emails, notifying the team, your family, whatever so that you can really eliminate those distractions. And then this is really, really an important thing. You want to allow for integration time at the end. And that would be again probably like 5 to 15 minutes. Maybe that's more breathwork. Maybe it's taking a walk. And when you do that, you're allowing all those insights to really land. And then you kind of have this feeling of being closed out and you'll actually retain the things that you focused on in a really different way. And you're going to be amazed at the intuitive insights that come through for this. So an example of how you could use the deep work block would be Monday, 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. would be strategic visioning and CEO decisions. So that means like your monthly planning or maybe your quarterly planning, or maybe you're looking at your profit and loss chart. Or maybe that means you're looking at the team performance.
Brenda 00:25:29 Or maybe it's looking at your content creation and analyzing Losing everything. Analyzing. Like, how is my social media content landing? What's my email open rate. All of those types of things. Then on Wednesday, again, this is just an example. On Wednesday from 2 to 5 p.m. to you're going to do intuitive business and strategy planning. So you're just going to set the intention that you're going to create a strategy based on what you think intuitively is best for you in the business. And this might mean you journal with pens. And I love a gel pen. And so I get them in all different colors. And when I do these types of intuitive business strategy and planning sessions, I'm using all the colors. And sometimes there's, you know, linear and there's a key and sometimes it just looks pretty and has lots of different colors. Go with whatever works for you, but really just set aside time to access that intuition. And then another example might be Friday from 8 to 10. It's your content creation where you're working on any upcoming talks.
Brenda 00:26:35 You're working on any pitches that you are sending out to maybe be on podcasts, or maybe you're working with brand deals and so you're pitching for those. Or maybe you're preparing for your own podcast or writing your own articles. So that content creation, when you're actually creating the content that goes toward the business. Okay, let's move on to number two, which is whole day focus or theme days. These are ideal for creating deep flow states by dedicating an entire day to a single theme or a type of work. So the way that this would work is you would assign either a specific day of the week for a specific focus. And I'm going to give you two examples of how you can use focus days okay. So in example one we're going to streamline your whole week so that each day has a different type of focus. And so that's what we're going to talk about. First We're going to assign a specific day to a specific category of work, and then you're going to protect these days fiercely. No random meetings or tasks.
Brenda 00:27:42 Which task switching on these days. So the example structure would be Mondays would be your CEO and Strategy Day. Tuesdays would be your clients and team day, where you have client delivery calls, where you have your one on ones. Maybe you have your team meeting. Wednesday would be your creative and content creation day, where you're working on anything that you're writing your podcast. Any talks that are upcoming Thursday would be your intuitive and deep work day. Maybe with somatic practices, visioning, writing, journaling, just accessing the intuition. And then Friday might be operations reviews and team growth. Okay, so here's my my take on this. My take on this at my stage of business is I'm not really at the stage where that feels aligned for me. You might be. And so that's why I offered it to you, because maybe that is exactly where you are for me. What I need is more like a combination of the focus days and the theme days, the whole focus theme days, and the way that that works for me personally is I have a specific day of the week that I talk to people who have applied to be on the podcast, and so they can only book in on those times.
Brenda 00:29:03 I have a specific day of the week where I don't see clients before 3 p.m., and so I can do my deep focus work working on the podcast, content creation, social media captions and that kind of thing until three. And then at three, I switch into client mode and I have one on ones and. But then I do need some whole days for different kinds of tasks. So examples of that would be I need a day to plan each quarter. I also have decided and started to implement a podcast batching schedule. And so I'm batching all of my podcast episodes on specific days each quarter. So like for example, for the podcast, we've already prerecorded all of the episodes through the middle of the second quarter. They're already recorded their chosen. The show notes are written for most of them, and they're uploaded, scheduled, ready to go. Because I batch those podcast days, which gave me the benefit of just being able to simply be a podcast host for those days. I didn't have anything else on my schedule those days.
Brenda 00:30:09 And it really changed the quality of my interviews. Like, I'm so proud of them. And I know that that wouldn't have happened had I not been batching days. So the combination approach can be I have these three days per quarter that are podcast batching days. I have one day per quarter. That's a That's a planning day for the upcoming quarter. I have one planning day per month to plan the next month and then I use the focus day. Excuse me, the deep work block for the rest of my time. And so you can also think outside of the box and create your own method around this. Now, one of the ways that you could also do this combination would be to create some broader focus blocks. This would. The combination approach is ideal for balancing structured focus blocks with your broader, spacious days. So you can use theme days for the high level categories like your SEO work, your creative work, or team days. And then within each day you have deep work blocks for priority tasks.
Brenda 00:31:18 And this is my really favorite way to do it. And then you can also reserve one day a week or one day every couple of weeks for a flex day to catch up. do any overflow or any free flowing creative time. So an example, if you were to use this might be Monday would be CEO and deep strategy work from 9 to 11 for financial planning and then team sinks in the afternoon. So an example might be that you have one day a week that has no meetings, and it's just flow where you can go from content creation to content creation and allow some intuitive time and some time just to journal and create an idiot. And then you have other four days of the week that have meetings, whether it's client delivery or team delivery or you're doing your your CEO kind of tasks, and then an operations review time also in that week. Or you can do like I do where I have things spaced out, where I have those theme days Periodically throughout each quarter, and then within each week I have deep focus blocks.
Brenda 00:32:33 So here's how you can choose which method might be best for you, because that's probably your question now, right? So if you struggle with focus and you know that it's that maybe you have ADHD, maybe you have a lot of irons in the fire, maybe you have a lot of responsibilities both at work and at home. The deep work blocks might help you create some traction. And so if you were going to do that, you'd focus on the 2 to 4 hour blocks. If you notice that you really get stressed out by context switching, like moving from task to task, like let's say moving from, having a team meeting to client delivery to then you're recording a podcast, then you'd want to really look at how you can incorporate whole theme days or those, Those whole day focus days. And if you find that you need a little bit of structure and you also want a little bit of flow, you can create your own approach of using a combination so you can blend the productivity with your intuition, intuition and your ease.
Brenda 00:33:45 So here's the thing. Your time is not just about productivity as a high level leader. It's about creating the spaciousness for strategic thinking, deep work, and intuitive decision making. Time blocking helps you eliminate decision fatigue, which we talked about in the last little episode two. This is a big thing. It also helps you protect your energy from distractions. It increases your clarity and creativity to help you make better and more aligned decisions, so that you can lead with ease instead of overwhelm. And I can't wait to hear. I can't wait to hear from you. If this has been helpful, and I am so committed to this that I've actually created a download for you, and I'm going to put the link in the show notes so that you can download it for free, so that you can do a little worksheet and determine which strategy is best for you, and also give you some ideas on how you might be able to do this time blocking for intuitive leadership. So I don't yet have it created at the time of this recording.
Brenda 00:34:53 So you're going to need to go check out the show notes to get the link. But I do have this download for you and I can't wait to share it. I am interested in knowing what kinds of questions come up for you about accessing your intuition as a leader. Where do things feel really easy and in flow, and where do things feel more challenging? And I really do want to hear from you. Just DM me on Instagram at Brenda Winkel. DM me on LinkedIn. I'm there at Brenda Winkle, and if you want to send me an email, you can do that to Brenda at Brenda Winkle. I really do want to hear from you, because I want to create the content that is going to be the most beneficial for you, and I can do that best when you tell me what it is that you're that you need. Where are you feeling challenges. Where is it going? Really well. Thank you so much for listening to your yes filled life. I have another gift for you.
Brenda 00:35:48 It's called the Energy Audit and this literally has been game changing in my life, my business and for my clients. So go download the energy audit at Brandon Winkle for audit. Audit. It's specifically designed for busy leaders. So it will take you ten minutes. And it'll give you a picture of what's draining you and what's fueling you, so that you can do more of what's feeling you and less of what's draining you. Thank you so much for listening to your yes filled life. If you found this episode helpful, would you please share it with a friend? Bye for now. Until next time.
