"The less I have managed myself, the less capacity I have and the less I've engaged with self-care, the more likely I am to submit to other people's demands...In order for me to be really clear, for what I need to do, I do need that capacity."
- Leah Burkhart
Certified Wellness and Life Coach, Founder of The Healthy Sensitive
Episode 6: Supporting Highly Sensitive People
A Conversation with Leah Burkhart
Learn about what causes someone to be highly sensitive and how to better relate to and understand highly sensitive people. Are you a highly sensitive person? Do you have a friend of loved one who is highly sensitive? Listen in as Leah and Marcel offer resources and insights for effectively managing sensitivity.
In this episode, Marcel speaks with Leah Burkhart, a wellness coach, life coach, and educator. Over the past seven years, Leah has maintained a daily Yoga practice and studied Yoga philosophy with Marcel. She owns The Healthy Sensitive- a practice where she guides highly sensitive people like herself and helps to manage their own feelings and become more effective in their own lives. Leah and Marcel share revelations from their own experiences of being highly sensitive people and discuss strategies that have worked for them as well as their clients.
If you are a highly sensitive person interested in yoga or yoga therapy mentoring with Marcel, visit his Yoga for Practitioners web site.
Here are some highlights from the conversation with Leah to help you better understand high sensitivity:
According to psychologist and researcher Elaine Aron, about 15-20% of people are wired with a more vigilant nervous system.
Being highly sensitive is not good or bad. Highly sensitive people can experience challenges because they live in an environment built by the other 80% of people.
Cultivating a language and an awareness around high sensitivity can help people navigate certain situations more easily.
The less time invested in self-care, the higher the chances that people can fall prey to being overly sensitive.
Here are four phrases that Leah uses to help her clients, also called the Four I's
Inflate: adopt strategies to recapture your health and vitality
Insulate: plug up the energy leaks that are making it hard to stay afloat
Imagine: envision a life that would be inherently energizing so that you don't have to constantly refuel
Implement: take your vision and make it a reality
If you haven't listened to Episode 5, with Megan Murk, please check it out! This is another episode with a discussion about self-care, capacity, and setting boundaries.
Leah Burkhart is a health educator as well as a certified wellness coach and life coach. She specializes in helping professionals who identify as introverts and/or highly sensitive who are suffering from burnout. Leah aims to help people engage in work that makes them come alive while keeping their vitality intact.
The Healthy Sensitive
The Healthy Sensitive offers coaching for highly sensitive leaders who want to work on themselves so they can better serve their clients. The Healthy Sensitive has resources and aid to help you revive your passion and balance your health alongside a lucrative career.
Doing Differently - Episode 6 - Transcript
*Please excuse any typos or imperfections. This transcript was created with AI software.*
Marcel: Hi, welcome to doing differently. I'm Marcel Allbritton. In today's conversation, we have Leah Burkhart. Leah and I are friends and colleagues, and we have worked together over the years studying and practicing yoga, and we're going to talk today about highly sensitive people and what that is, and how to work with highly sensitive people.
So if you're one of those you'll be able to identify yourself by our conversation. And we're going to talk about also how we have a practice for ourselves, a regular practice, and how that benefits us in everyday life. So Leah, welcome to Doing Differently.
Leah: Thank you Marcel. So good to be here.
Marcel: Yeah, you're welcome. Why don't, why don't you start out by just sharing a little bit about yourself and the work you do. And then I'll talk a bit more about the work we've we've been doing together over the years.
Leah: Fantastic. So, I am a smorgasbord of things. Most of my time is spent as a wellness coach or life coach, some sort of standing at the intersection of both of those. And I work with highly sensitive professionals who are trying to figure out how to do two things at once. Because, and we'll get into this later, of course, but sensitive folks are often given a false choice or at least their perception is that they have a choice. And that choice is I can either have my health and my vitality, or I can have a professional career, a mission- I can be of service, but I can't do both of those. So I've got to pick. And so what I'm really hoping to support folks through is figuring out how to do both, have both their health and vitality as well as a sense of purpose, meaning, mission, Dharma, if you will. So, yeah. And when I'm not busy doing that, I'm also a health educator. And so in that context, I might be working with hospitals or doing classes and things of that nature.
Marcel: Great. So Leah and I have been connected for, oh, at least seven and a half years or something like that. Seven or more years. And I am Leah's mentor in the study and practice of yoga, but I originally we met because I was helping Leah using yoga therapy and she liked it a lot and it helped her a lot.
And then we started meeting regularly whereby she has a regular practice that she does and she also was interested in learning more about yoga and how it works. So we began meeting regularly and studying classical yoga, if you will, and how and why it works. And we are both, both Leah and I are very interested in taking a lot of these anxious teachings and practices and translating them into a modern context.
So we're going to talk about highly sensitive people today. And I think that's kind of like a term that is a catchall for people that tend to be things like hypervigilant or overly sensitive, or I don't know where you, you pick up a lot of things. So what, what do you, what do you mean when you say highly sensitive or how does somebody identify for themselves?
Whether or not they're a highly sensitive person?
Leah: Yeah, I- when I'm using the term, I'm using a researcher named Elaine Aron, I'm using her work. And the- her means by which, you know, how she organized this concept. And I stumbled upon her work when I was in graduate school. So I was, I mean, it's a classic irony. I was studying holistic health education and the aim of becoming a health educator.
And I was suffering from insomnia, anxiety, which after enough time of that can lead to depression. You know, it always makes me chuckle a little when specialists or doctors say, oh, well maybe your- your insomnia is due to depression and I'd have to say, no, my depression is because of my insomnia. I'm cranky.
So, I don't even remember what it was that I was studying. It was a project of some sort. And so I'm in the library and I stumbled upon her work and thought it was just interesting. And did a sort of dog ear of it and it mentally, oh, highly sensitive people, huh, whatever. And then I stumbled upon it a couple more times after that.
And finally just said, well, I'll pick up the book and read a little bit more about it. And it felt like reading my personal autobiography, but through science. And so this woman is a PhD in psychology. She's a researcher, clinical psychologist, and the way she organized this, the information around this or the data was simply to say there's about 15 to 20% of people,
and as it turns out 15 to 20% of hundreds of species on the planet, that appear to have, or are wired to be more vigilant, or they have a nervous system that's just more vigilant. And that manifests in a myriad of ways, but the four primary things are depth of processing: so we like to chew on things longer than the average person.
Over-arousal: so what I like to say is this is a group of people who were very easily amused, but they're also easily over mused. They'll ha be delighted by a piece of artwork on a wall, won't love if in an art museum, there's tons of crowds. So it's that sort of thing. And then emotional sensitivity and then sensory sensitivity, which is, you know, the senses.
Marcel: Yeah. So for me, what's really interesting about this in my work over the past 15 years as a yoga therapist, you know, you're, you're expressing how people are wired that way, but what I've seen is it's- I've noticed it's often a combination of people that have experienced trauma or abuse in some way.
And also they are kind of just wired a certain way and they're more sensitive. But what I've observed, particularly from working with the yoga therapy is that when we're in some kind of environment that's dysfunctional or abusive, we- we get programmed for most of our attention to be placed outside of ourselves rather than inside of ourself.
And we do this to be safe. But what happens is we get conditioned where most of the time our default set is to scan externally rather than to scan internally. And so you know, I've worked with people over the years that had what you're describing, I love those four concepts, as this type of sensitivity.
And often it was a result of being in some kind of dysfunctional or abusive environment. And then, and then later on, they're not in that environment anymore, but they're still functioning that way.
Leah: And so the conclusion that many of these researchers are drawing from that is, you know, joy feels extremely joyful. Sorrow feels extremely sorrowful. So it's not necessarily good or bad. It's just if- if you have a system that is naturally more sensitive, that's going to mean that in positive environments, it will feel even better.
And in challenging environments, it will feel even harder. And so the challenges that this cohort seems to have as it relates to being in the United States, for example, is that we're a culture that celebrates gregariousness.
We like people who were kind of ballsy and are gonna, we like balls. And we, it's not to say that we shun people who are quieter, but we don't celebrate them in the same way. And how that translates into an environment that we then build is you see things like the celebration of places like, think of the candidates we vote for president and so on. So these folks will then have challenges because they're living in an environment that was built by the other 80%, which isn't good or bad, but it does make it more challenging for them.
Marcel: Yeah. So it's like in a way at, at a real simplistic level, we're talking about people that have a nervous system that is more sensitive than, than, than the norm. And I think also another part of- to add to what you're saying, it's, it's also not just that the, the professional sort of behaviors of successful people are often more expressive and overly over the top a bit.
It's also that so much about our media and even music and, and movies, and it's all, like, it pushes over the extreme a bit. It's like, it's, it's activating the extreme. It's like it's designed for people that are almost slightly numb, I guess, in a way. So, yeah, there's more challenges. I I've always thought of it like, so, it's not like you can just say, well, you don't have to be sensitive anymore. You can just not take things as, as, as seriously. And you know, but what I see, what I've observed is that what's necessary to sort of help these folks in everyday society is for them to have experiences where their system through experiences.
Leah: The first thing I would say is cultivating awareness and creating a language. I think that's what I love most about, you know, looking to researchers. They do have a measure of credibility once again, especially in the U S we love alphabet soup after people's names, makes us feel warm and fuzzy. But I think the primary value I got from doing the research around this group, wasn't that, oh great now I have all the answers, but it did provide me a language. So as an example, when I'm speaking with friends who invite me out to do things that I don't want to do, I can now get a little bit more crafty with the way I communicate that. And I can be assertive without, you know, I can be assertive instead of either aggressive, passive, aggressive, or just passive.
Marcel: Yeah. You know, when you describe this, what it also makes me think of is what's also necessary there, is a certain level of understanding yourself and how you're wired and, and knowing yourself. And in addition, in the, in the scenario you described, what's also, there is, what's also necessary there is a kind of a level of capacity to communicate that way, you know, so it's, it's it's and here is almost the rub in a way.
One of the things that often happens with highly sensitive people is they easily get overwhelmed. So if they're not managing that sensitivity for themselves, they don't have much capacity. So, you know, it seems like this is where all the threads come together. So in a big sense, what you're saying is that there, there needs to be an awareness and, and a language and an ability to communicate.
And I'm kind of complementing that with yes, and also I guess this is an extension of the awareness, not just awareness of the situation, but awareness and knowing of yourself and how you're functioning and, and capacity to communicate that. But there's also this idea of capacity to, to, to watch yourself to see yourself, right?
So so how would you, how would you say that you work with that, that issue of, of capacity and understanding yourself?
Leah: Yeah, You know, I, as you were talking, what I was thinking of too, is what people imagined to be true is that the more overwhelmed a person would be, the more likely they would be to hold up a boundary, but with highly sensitive people, exactly the opposite is true.
Marcel: It makes sense to me because I am one. Well, yeah.
Leah: Yeah. Okay. What I've noticed about myself, at least, so I can't, I don't want to speak for all folks who identify as being sensitive or who relate to some of this, but I can absolutely say that for myself, the less I have managed myself, so the less capacity I have and the less I've engaged with self care, the more likely I am to submit to what other people's demands to be more focused on my external environment.
And part of the reason for that is in order for me to be really clear about what I need and what I need to do, I do need that capacity. I need it desperately. And I, well this, so this is what often I do. And what a lot of people I know will do. They'll say that they're tired and the more tired they are the more porous their boundaries seem to be.
And so let's say now someone comes in and says, hey, can you do this thing for me? Can you go to this event with me and do the thing? If I haven't been taking care of myself, I'm going to revert back to patterning. And the patterning I have and that many highly sensitive people have is, oh, I just want to make people happy because conflict can almost feel physically painful.
So I'm going to, my, my patterning of being a pleaser is to just make everyone else happy, because if they're happy, I don't have to worry about feeling their feels and dealing with that. And then that at least means less for me to manage. But ironically, of course, the more I keep doing that, the more I'm subjecting myself to environmental factors that will continue to deplete me.
And then the more likely I am to keep being the pleaser and so on and so forth. So what a lot of highly sensitive people that I've worked with at least will say is, oh, but I can't because I, I need to make sure that everyone else is okay because that if they are okay, I'm better. And I completely understand why they feel that way because it is hard to be, to have to engage in a conflict and be assertive. So that now this is me answering the question finally long-winded but I, I put together an acronym that, and I just call it stronger. And this is by no means comprehensive. I'm sure there are things that I didn't think of that other people could add into the mix, but this has been able to capture the primary elements that I'm checking in for when I'm working with folks.
And that stronger acronym includes: So S is for a spiritual practice. Are you regularly engaged in some kind of a, either spiritual practice or if people feel a little bit reluctant or uncomfortable with that, that terminology, I'll say, what is your something larger? So what is something you link to that's bigger than yourself?
And that helps kind of dilute the, the intensity of things. And then T is treat yourself, which is really about pleasure. Are you engaging in some capacity and things that cause you to feel real true pleasure. R is relationships, so are you engaged in relationships that feed you or relationships that seem to deplete you?
Are you, do you have effective communication strategies in your pocket? O is an outlet. So an outlet for creativity in particular, you know, how do you take your broken heart and turn it into art? And as nourishment or nutrition, you know, are you balancing your blood sugar? Are you feeding yourself in a way that would help give you more capacity?
G is growth. So, are you engaged in something that makes you feel like you're living in service or you're feeling like you're growing internally or you know, we, if we're not growing, we're dying, that's true for a lot of humans. Like we, we really do need something to help us grow. E is exercise. Are you moving your body? And R is rest, you know, are you prioritizing rest on a regular basis?
And so that's the foundational piece that I'm looking at when folks that I'm talking to come to me and say, I'm really struggling. Even if they tell me they want to write a book or they want to become a CEO or something that seems completely unrelated. You know, I want to get out of my marriage even. It's like, that's all well and good, but let's not even go there just yet.
First of all, are you meeting these sort of elements in your life in some measure? And if the answer is no, that's where I start.
Marcel: Yeah, this, this resonates with me because I mean, ultimately what we're talking about is state of the system here. It's like, what's the state of your system? How is your system functioning? Like you use the term space suit or earth suit. How is your system functioning? And it's the way I think of it is someone may have a problem they're trying to solve, but the real question is, okay, where are you trying to solve that problem from? What kind of state?
And you know, that seems to be so key for me in terms of this from a yoga therapy perspective, which is what I do and yoga is that the state you're in influences very much that the experiences that you have, so you can't really often control what's going on in your environment. You know, what's going on is going to make you anxious or nervous or calm and relaxed, or what have you, but you can't really control what's going on there, but you can actually do some movement and breathing and have an influence on the state of your system.
Not only at the time in what you do that, but if you do it regularly over time. And so, you know, this has been one of the, of the ways that I have helped people that are similar to what you're describing with the highly sensitive label in that they have a practice, which it helps them gain capacity, but it helps them also be more intimately connected with themselves, so they can understand with more clarity how the experiences they're having are affectiving them.
And then they have the capacity to actually communicate or behave in a way that changes the experience. So in a way they're learning how to use their own mind, body emotion and senses to, to, to understand what's happening with the experience and also see the sensitivity that's there, but also be see beyond the sensitivity in themselves and then be able to either act or communicate in a way that has some level of influence on those experiences.
Leah: Yes.
Marcel: So what's your, I mean, how do you...how would you, how have you helped yourself with your sensitivity?
Leah: Hmm.
I think it will, frankly, to begin with, I want to give, I want to celebrate you and the practice of yoga. I- when I was battling or yeah, I felt like a battle, so I'll use that word. I'll say negotiating. I was trying to negotiate my insomnia and my anxiety. And what was interesting about me is I'm kind of a cartoon character.
I mean, I'm wildly enthusiastic and I'm ambitious. I'm eager. I've got lots of traits that are celebrated by our culture here in the US. But I also have the sensitivity. And so what I was doing for so long was leaning on that call, that those parts of me that were more celebrated by my culture. And I wasn't addressing at all the part of me that needed some measure of recharge or recovery, or even addressing it.
I didn't know how, you know, no one I wasn't seeing anywhere where I can say, oh, I, I, I wasn't thinking folks who are doing it well, and I would have tried anything. It was part of what led me to want to get a master's degree in holistic health is I thought I may be something in here while I'm studying will help me fix me.
Marcel: Hmm.
Leah: And some of it did, so to begin with, you know, I, I worked with nutrition and I was really vigilant about exercise. I did all that was probably, I was surviving during that time period because I was engaging in all these sort of self-care practices, but I was still not getting enough sleep. And the lack of that sleep mixed with the anxiety that was coming on, just from a nervous system that was tapped out, was getting really overwhelming.
And I would have tried eye of newt or toe of tiger if I thought that it would have gotten me one night of decent sleep. I was trying doctors, acupuncturists. Someone told me once that if I go to a chiropractor and they realigned my spine, that might help. And I thought, sure, I dunno how that's related, but I'll do it.
And a colleague of mine recommended you to me and said, you know, I think this is someone that you should be, that you should speak to. And so naturally it's like, okay, I'm on it. And it was a combination of things that one was having a practice that I could rely on regularly. There is something about having a staple, some kind of a routine, something that is in this, you know, it's it is a mindfulness practice it's movement with breath.
It's really pragmatic and having that at the very least it was doing no harm. So, and it was at the very least helping me to regulate. And I think the second part of that was that there was a larger philosophy, a system that provided a much more robust and comprehensive language for me to use in navigating my challenges.
So and, you know, you use this language and I love maybe you would probably say it better than I, but you know, there's the symptom itself. There's how you manage it. And then there's your relationship to it. Yoga gave me something to lean on in every- all three of those areas. It helped the symptom itself because it helped to regulate the system just by having movement with breath, there's that pragmatic quality. It was also a means of managing it. And it allowed me to talk about my challenges in a way that moved from wow this really sucks to huh, this is really interesting. You know, seeing the challenges I was facing, not just as being a martyr or being a victim, but instead each challenge becoming an opportunity to find out more about myself.
Marcel: So it changed how you were identifying with the, the, the challenge you were having and how you were relating to it. Yeah. Yeah I often describe it. I think it's...as you said, it's the- it's the- the circumstance or the situation that you're dealing with, or health issue, health problem. And then there's how you're relating to it in terms of how you're understanding it.
And then there's also this idea of, of your ability to, to manage it, meaning, manage meaning: your communication, your choices, these sorts of things. Yeah. So it's a, and I think all of this often comes back to this idea of capacity. So in, in your work with people how do you support these folks that you, you, you coach them right with, that are highly sensitive people.
So how do you work with them and support them?
Leah: Yeah, sure. What I, I, when I self identify, I'll often say I'm a burnout coach. It helps encapsulate things easily for folks. They go, oh, I know what that word means.
Marcel: It's pretty- pretty immediate. Yes.
Leah: Yes. And what I'll say to people is well I, I work in, I kind of help people in four phases and I call them the four eyes. Again, I love acronyms and organized content because it's easy to remember.
So that's just my, my stick, but there's inflate, insulate, imagine, and then implement. Inflate is, you know, when you're on burnout mode and that's what a lot of highly sensitive people are coming to me in terms of a grievance, that's their grievance. It's like, I'm tired, but I'm wired. I'm exhausted, but I can't get to sleep.
I'm beyond burnout. I don't know what to do. And I don't even have capacity to think about what the right thing would be to do. It's like that real true sense of, I just can't even. So, you know, the inflate part is that stronger element I was talking about like kind of looking at their, how they're, you know, and everyone is different, but everyone needs to have each of those elements met in some way, in a way that looks like them.
And so it's, are you engaging in regular practices? So for me, yoga therapy was a huge part of that and it continues to be. In fact, I would say yoga therapy could apply to all four of these, but at any rate. And then, I'm working with that person and they've got these routines in place and they're starting to feel like, okay, I've got a little bit of juice.
I've got a little bit of fuel in the tank. The next thing I'm looking at is insulating them because what a lot of times people will realize is man, I've got just enough energy, but the energy I've got, I'm immediately spending. I've got a leak somewhere in other words. And so that's when they start making discoveries like, oh, maybe I'm in the wrong job.
Maybe, maybe I'm in the wrong marriage. You know, maybe the reason I'm so exhausted all the time is because I'm plugged into something that's stealing energy away from me as quickly as I can put it in. No wonder I'm so tired. And so that's when it's more about, you know, making changes in life that remove the leaks, insulating them a little bit better. And it's only, then that I'll start asking questions like, well, if you could paint a picture of what a perfect life look like, what would that look like? That's when things like affirmations, visualization, that's when it starts becoming helpful. If you start doing visualizations or affirmations, when your
tire is flat, I think you may have been the one to use this language, you know, whatever decision you make will reflect the quality of mind you had when you made it like or what the outcome of any decision you make will likely reflect the quality of mind you had when you made it.
Marcel: Yeah. What I- what I learned about affirmations in working with them with people is that if they affirmations are really best, when you already have some of the quality you're trying to affirm. If you, if you don't have a certain amount of that quality, the affirmation actually has the opposite effect. It reminds you of the lack rather than helping you to build more.
Yeah.
Leah: Yes. I agree completely. And I think, you know, not that we need to talk about, you know, research, but you know, all those who have researched it all say the same thing. You have to actually believe the thing you're saying. And in order to believe it, there has to be some measure of the thing you're affirming.
You can't affirm that, which isn't true.
Marcel: Yeah and your system that you're describing now, it's also following very much what we were talking about with respect to capacity.
Leah: Mhmm.
Marcel: It's like, you have to like build the capacity first in order to be able to have that, to work with the challenges. Otherwise your you're like you're- you're a person that's continually overwhelmed trying to figure out how to not be overwhelmed.
Leah: Yes. Well, or like thinking of some of the examples I brought up with trying to insulate yourself just as one example of this. If you try and leave a marriage when your tires are flat, the likely scenario is going to be that you just find another relationship that will have the same problems. If you try and leave a job that wasn't a good fit, you'll probably end up leaving it for yet another job who will produce all the same problems. So it's like, you have to build that capacity first, so that insulating and starting to build those boundaries actually looks like what you want it to, otherwise, you're just going to keep wanting, it's going to be on repeat.
And so yeah then once you've got those two elements in play, and then you do the visualization-affirmation then, and only then am I going to start to say, all right, well, let's put some experiments into practice then, now you know what you really want now let's start making moves toward it because you've got the capacity for that heat and that friction you've got some capacity to get cooked
Marcel: Yeah so this, so now we're going into the next to the latter two parts of your process, right?
Leah: Yes. Yeah.
So yeah the inflate insulate and then you know, imagine, imagine what it is you really want to create. What would it look like to be able to have meaningful purpose, service, be helping the world in some way that, you know, you were put on this earth to do and also have your health and vitality, what would that look like?
And once you have a visual for that, and it can evolve and change, of course, but that's when then it's like, all right, well, now that you've spent some time really sinking into what you want, what is something you can do a goal, an experiment you can run that will move you in the direction of that vision?
And then those actions are going to give you some feedback that they're going to give you some new experiences like, oh, I tried this thing. It was really hard, eek. But now you've got more capacity to go: it's okay that it's, you know, instead of, wow, that was hard, that means I can't, instead it's wow, that was hard, but I can do hard things.
Marcel: Yeah, yeah. You know, this, this makes me think too of I've just observed this kind of natural progression with people in their transformation, in their healing. And the progression is that you start with whatever the big problems are or the bottlenecks or the big challenges. And you sort of work with those and you bring them to a level that that is you know, that you can, that's manageable for yourself.
And then as a result of that, you start- you've managed those problems. You then are able to more effectively start looking at causes in yourself, like for yourself, like, why am I this way? Or why does this happen for me? And you start to understand more about the dynamics of whatever those problems were and your own patterns or conditioning and understanding of yourself, how that's related to that.
And those problems may or may not be things that you have control over. You know that they may or may not have been self-created, but by self created, I mean, you know, in, in the path of your own actions and life, but what happens after you deal with the problem and start to work with the causes you, the whole time you've been developing your capacity for regulating yourself. And so you start to then be able to, like I say, you move into this sort of focus on optimization in a way. It's like, okay, I understand the bottlenecks. I've worked with those. I've worked with some of the causes. So now how do I, now that I've worked on those, how do I function more effectively in my life?
You know, and so it kind of maps to your last two stages. And then, like the other thing that made me think of is we start out dealing with a lot of our own stuff, like our own beliefs about ourselves. And we, we developed to where we start to get into a better relationship with ourselves and we change.
We start to like, like ourselves more. Or even move towards loving ourselves, but then like your last part that you're getting to reminds me of, once you've worked with the problem and the causes and start to optimize, then you start to more heavily influence the kind of experiences you have where you are and who you're working with and what you're doing.
And if that's more aligned for you, you start to actually, your, your earth suit starts to have more experiences where it gets validated externally, not just internally and like that. Like you've done the work a lot with working on yourself in an internal way, but then because you're aligned and moving towards what's what's appropriate for yourself and your own development, your experiences actually start to really change you.
Leah: Yes, absolutely. But you know, I'm thinking of, you know, so often when we look at I'm thinking of the movie, The Secret and the book as well, or when people talk about what you attract and it's like, Yeah, just manifest your reality. And it always kind of cracks me up cause I do- I get it. I'm not, I'm not mocking it and saying that it's not a thing that you can't attract things to you.
But I think there were, I don't remember who it was that said this line, but it's, you know, you don't attract what you want in life. You attract what you are. And you know, another easier example, perhaps, you know, a little bit more tangible is, you know, you learn a new word and all of a sudden you people say, God, it's so funny, you learn a new word and then you hear it five times that day it's magic.
Marcel: Right.
Leah: It's that now I can see them. It's not the job opportunities that suddenly come my way weren't there before, but now I know to look for them and to self-advocate and to say, hey, I'm just letting you know I'm here and I'm interested, you know? So it's, it can feel when people say things like, oh, that's just woo-woo.
It's like, it's really not. It's really pragmatic. It's lot of numbers. It's about what's, you know, it's about being able to collapse all of the options available to you and be really clear about the ones that are going to resonate most effectively.
Marcel: Yeah. And I mean, part of what we're talking about is that your relationship to yourself, your understanding of yourself translates into what you see and what you experience and what you don't. For example, I always know when people are making good progress in their healing, when they're in some kind of situation where they're stuck, but they can start to see options.
All of a sudden, they, for the first time, they start to realize that they have options because those options were there, but they weren't- they weren't seeing them or they weren't allowing themselves to see them, right?
Leah: And in a more prag- like daily experience example, I might be speaking with someone who for months and months says to me, man, I'm really struggling with my marriage right now, or I'm really struggling at home. And let's see one option is for me to stay in the current job that I have, but my husband really doesn't like it so I can keep going and stay in the job. Another option is to not do the job because then that will make my husband happy.
And then another option still is maybe I could, you know, not work altogether or I could do this or that. And every single one of them though includes the husband. And then one day they say, huh, you know, I don't think I realized it, but another option is to drop the husband. Huh? I didn't even think about that,
Marcel: Right.
Leah: Which is not me saying by the way that if you're having trouble in your marriage, everyone should just leave.
But I mean, it's just, when you're doing this kind of work, suddenly that becomes an option. And I'm like, why didn't even see that before.
Marcel: Yeah. So what's the fourth stage again?
Leah: The fourth stage is impliment.
Marcel: Okay.
Leah: Yeah. So inflate, insulate, imagine, so spend some time sinking and visualizing affirming, like, what is it you want to build? And then the fourth stages start putting forth some actions. Go do a thing. So it's great to visualize a on your entrepreneurial pursuits. You know, a lot of highly sensitive people actually do very well as entrepreneurs because they're creative.
They're adaptable. They're very, very conscientious. But, you know, and they can often do in six hours, what it takes, maybe the average person to do eight or 10, but they do better when they can work on accordance with their own rhythms. So maybe they work really well from 6:00 to 8:00 AM. And then again from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM, and then again from 6:00 to 8:00 PM or something,
Marcel: And it's sort of what we've been talking about in this conversation, in that the, the state of the system is as important as the experience that it's having. And they're, they're so related to one another. So where do folks go if they want to learn more about your work and get in touch with you?
Leah: Absolutely. So I have a website. It's called The Healthy Sensitive.com or www.thehealthysensitive.com. And there you can find access to my online community. You can schedule appointments with me as a coach at one thing I should say too, anytime that I'm engaging with a potential client, I always have a 90 minute session followed by a 60 minute session and both are complimentary on purpose, because it gives us both plenty of time to identify whether or not we're appropriate for each other. And then if at that point they want to continue with coaching that's when we talk about the logistics and you know, how long you want to be working with me, et cetera. But I do like to put that out there and say, anyone who's interested there's a no strings attached 90 minute session followed by a 60 minute where you can really do a deep dive and see if this is the work you want to do.
And then beyond that, it's up to them if they want to continue.
Marcel: Great, Leah, thank you so much. It's been so lovely talking with you and are having this conversation and I'm really already looking forward to having you join me again for another conversation in the future. Thank you.
Leah: Oh, no, thank you. This has been an absolute delight. I'm tickled all the way into my bones.
Marcel: Wonderful. Well, take care. Thanks.
Leah: Thank you, you too.
Marcel: Alright, great.