Use Your Intuition to Build Trust - Interview with TERRY WILDEMANN

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Shedding the Corporate Bitch, the podcast that transforms female corporate executives into powerhouse leaders by showing them how to shed the challenges and overwhelm along with any fear, insecurity, self-doubt, and negativity holding them back. I'm your host, Bernadette Boas of Ball of Fire Coaching, bringing you powerhouse experts each week to share tips, advice, and sometimes tough love that will allow you to create the riches in your work and life you deserve. So let's do this. Today we are diving deep into understanding how leaders are the hub for setting up trust and changing habits in an environment that then allows their folks to tap into their intuitive side which ultimately leads to less stressed out, burned out, and unproductive employees. Our guest today is Terri Williman, founder of Intuitive Leadership, and she's going to help us answer the question: What habits are creating distrust, stress, and burnout for both leaders and their teams? Let's welcome Terri to the show. How are you, Terri? Hello.

Hello, Bernadette. How are you doing?

I am doing— I am doing fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So before we dive into the business stuff, let's get acquainted and let's help our audience as well learn about Terri. So tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well, I'm an Intuitive Success Navigator, and my passion is working with entrepreneurial leaders to assist them to clear the self-sabotage that gets in the way of them crossing the finish line. You know what I'm talking about? You keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, and you get right there, and it's like, Yikes! You freeze or something happens, or there's always something that gets in the way of crossing that finish line and grabbing the gold that you deserve because you work so hard to get there. So let's get rid of that baggage that doesn't serve you.

What makes it so difficult for people to really focus, spend time, and address those self-sabotaging Thoughts, words, actions?

Well, a lot of it is programming. It's programming from when we were kids. It's programming that we get from our society, programming that we get in school, teachers, classmates, whatever it is that's going on right now. And what happens is instead of pushing it away, you know, not allow it to, to affect us, we end up owning that stuff. So those kinds of behaviors create emotions within our bodies. Everything is energy. Everything. You cannot get away from it. I mean, everything is energy, and our thoughts are energy, right? So whatever we keep telling ourselves— I'm not good enough, I'm not worthy, I'm guilty, why is she manipulating me, why isn't my boss trusting me, why am I being so disrespected— those thoughts create an energy that if we don't clear that stuff out, we attract more of that.

Yeah, letting those self-sabotaging beliefs go, we're feeling more confident. Is that it? We're feeling—

it is, yes. It's confidence, competence, and credibility. They're not affecting us anymore. You know, I'm certified in a lot of different holistic modalities to clear out a lot of this gunk. And when this gunk lives inside of us and we keep revisiting it, it affects us in mind, body, and spirit. So people respond to us with the message that we send out. So if you wake up on the wrong side of the bed and you choose not to shift and you choose to stay in that bad mood, people are going to be responding as such every single moment of every single day. Yeah. Confidence, competence, and credibility. When we believe in ourselves, In the workplace, it does not allow us to use our gifts in that manner. I've got my angels on this side and I've got my left-brain books on this side. I sit right in the middle. Yeah. And I teach entrepreneurial leaders how to integrate the practical, tactical, and logical with the emotional, the energetic, the spiritual, and the intuitive. And when they do that, they are harmonizing the spiritual, the personal, and the practical sides of business.

Right.

You become coherent because the more you integrate all of that, it affects your level of confidence, your level of competence, and your credibility.

Yes.

When you treat your people with trust, honor, respect, integrity, loyalty, and frankly, love— oh, God forbid I say that word in the workplace— love. Okay, that's what's going to happen. They're going to follow you off the cliff.

Yeah.

Your employees are going to be loyal to you.

Right.

Stop treating your employees like things. They're not robots.

Right, right. I want to go back to intuition. I want to make sure that a lot of professionals, corporate or entrepreneurial, they don't spend time in this space really trying to understand the inward part of how their inside affect their outside. So what do you mean when you say intuition?

Intuition comes to everybody differently. As a leader, if you trust your intuition and you allow your employees to trust their intuition— imagine a team setting, imagine how you're putting a project together. You allow your intuition to come up, something inside of you, or images that you're seeing, or words that you're hearing, is taking you to a specific part of that project and it needs to be looked at. That leads you to a place where you're asking open-ended questions to discover what's not right with that. That helps you not get a product out that is going to get you into trouble. Yeah.

So in order for a leader to instill their team to use their intuition, they need to tap into their own.

That's what I recommend because it's the ripple effect, right? If the leader says, because they're seeing something or hearing something, something isn't right here, let's go to this, let's go to that. They're empowering their employees to do the same thing without necessarily calling it intuition. They're modeling it. They're allowing their employees to be able to work with every single skill set without fear. Yeah, they're in trust of all of their skill sets, their intuitive side. They're working with everything from a 360 perspective. So you've got a leader at the top of the boardroom, all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, something doesn't feel right. My gut's saying this or that. What do you guys think? What are you guys sensing? Are you getting any intuitive hits that may complement why I don't think this feels right? What does that do? It creates trust in other people to be able to say how they think, feel, or what they're seeing or what they're hearing. It also gives them faith that they are being trusted.

Yeah.

Again, this will— and what are you doing? You are reducing burnout levels.

Sure.

This reduces stress, right? When people feel respected in the workplace, their stress levels begin to drop.

Absolutely.

Yours truly burned out multiple times. I got certified in stress management because if this happened to me, I really— I'm a pretty smart cookie. I couldn't figure out how to stop this stuff. Right, right. But when I started that inward journey, and it has to start from the inside out, right? Start on the outside. It's amazing how things fall into place.

It is.

Life becomes easier.

Right, right. It does. Okay. But that individual leader who listened to this and have some idea that it's woo-woo, and because they've never really spent the time focusing on it, if they're not paying attention to the voices or the images or the words or the gut, how can they learn? What are some tips for them to start being able to pay attention to their intuition?

Well, the first thing I tell them if they're not listening, I want them to look at every single project, every single thing they've done where they didn't listen, and I bet they live to regret it. The project became harder, the situation became more difficult unnecessarily because they didn't listen to their intuition. So it's about looking at all of that first.

But how do they know that it was intuition talking to them?

Because again, it's a gut thing and they chose to ignore it and they keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Okay, okay.

Second step is to take a moment to pause, and this is a little exercise I call it Quick Shift, and this is my gift for your people who are listening. You can go to quickshiftzone.com and you can download it. The Quick Shift is a technique that I've been using for 22 years. I use it morning, noon, and night. Quick Shift connects the brain in the head with the brain in the heart. The brain in the heart, the energy field of the heart, can be measured 6 to 10 feet away from the body in a 360-degree circumference. The brain in the head is 2 inches. Okay, and you can learn more about this research at the HeartMath Institute, heartmath.com and heartmath.org. That's H-E-A-R-T-M-A-T-H. So all of this is scientifically based. So what people call woo isn't woo, it's actually starting to become very practical. Yeah, I mean, hey, look at these big companies who have these meditation pods, right? Paper last week, they had meditation pods because meditation gets you into the heart, meditation gets you into your body, meditation allows you to reduce your stress levels. And the science behind meditation right now is extraordinary. And people say, oh, I don't have time to meditate. Guess what? You don't have time not to meditate.

I used to be one of those people. Nah, I don't have time. I can't do it. And now I do it every day.

You can actually meditate 60 seconds. That's what the Quick Shift is. And what that is doing scientifically, it is lowering your cortisol levels and increasing your DHEA levels. You keep adding more DHEA, more goodness, more calmness to your body, which allows you to think better, get clear, get out of the fog, make better decisions, and it starts to heal your body. Because the more you reduce your cortisol levels, you allow your body to begin to heal itself.

How do you really use intuition to build that trust and to build that type of environment? You, you've mentioned a few things.

I had a summit yesterday called the Intuitive Leadership Summit. It was supposed to have 7 speakers. The last speaker didn't show up, and it happened 20 minutes before she was supposed to go on.

Oh wow.

So I had a choice: either freak out— okay, what am I gonna do now?— or do a quick shift, get very quiet, and put the intention of, tell me what is the best way to handle this. And I got very quiet. I didn't get upset, nothing. Everything happens for a reason. I got very, very quiet, and all of a sudden I got a very clear image. And what it was is at 7 o'clock we were having a panel. I picked up the phone, I called one of the women who's supposed to be on the panel, who's one of the speakers. I said, can you come in at 6? In just a few minutes, the last speaker isn't there. We're going to do a love seat session. And she said, I'll be there. And we ended up doing 2 hours of doing hot seat sessions with 4 individuals who were there for the summit, where that was absolutely transformative. Transformative. But I got very quiet first, and I did a quick shift, right? And, you know, if I didn't know how to do that, I could have allowed myself to totally lose it. Yeah. And overreact, which a lot of people do. They become drama queens, and I could have gotten upset with this speaker. You know, stuff happens. And I knew in that moment— I have 3 computers going for these summits, one over here to the right, one up here that had the, uh, the run of show that had all the speaker information. This one, the computer over here had my, um, the guy who was supporting me, my VA, and then the one, the computer I'm working on here, plus my phone. So I had all these things going to run the summit. So I'm getting messages from the speaker's VA, I'm getting messages from my guy in Norway, right? And I'm interviewing a speaker all at the same time, right, right, right. What is blowing up? And when I was able to finally get it, I immediately knew because I've trained myself. Yeah, because the moment we go to our heads, right, we become reactive. Yes. Right.

And that's where all chaos breaks loose. And then all of a sudden that trust is broken down because all your people are seeing is you reacting. And oftentimes it's in a very desperate, anxious, stressful way. Okay.

So pausing is huge. It's the pause. Yeah, it's the Quick Shift. It's getting very quiet, putting the intention, I need an answer to what I'm going to do at 6 o'clock, getting very quiet and just allowing the answer to come. And the answers came in, bam, went into action. I did this, this, this, this.

You can find it at quickshiftzone.com. You know, we all have major hiccups and let alone disasters and challenges that hit us all of a sudden out of the blue.

Sure.

And let's focus on pausing. I love that. And focus on taking that 60 seconds. Focus on even using the Quick Shift. Focus on being intentional about not wanting to react because the impact to your team is—

they are watching you in action. It's actually shifting to the positive. You put the intention. I'm asking for the answer. That's the intention.

Right.

Bring me the answer. It's not about what you don't want. You don't want to focus on what you don't want. You want to focus on what you do want, right? That's law of attraction energy.

Yeah, I, um, I talk a lot about the fact that— and it's similar to the quick shift, it's not that quick though in 60 seconds— but that my morning routine is— because I found myself when I did get out of bed on the wrong side, I would go out agitated, tired, you know, just anxious. And then when I really started paying attention, everything that happened to me that day, or that I, you know, ran into that day, was as a result of that state of mind. So my morning routine is actually, you know, the minute I open up my eyes— yes, I don't put my feet on the ground, and I just sit there and I do it like a toe to head, head to toe, you know, spiritually, financially, emotionally, mentally, you know, physically, and just say, okay, so where am I a little off, and what do I need to do to shift? And the Quick Shift, though, I'm going to look up the minute we're done here, because that is a tool I can carry around in the car. You know, I could just basically do anywhere, right?

You know, Bernadette, I'm going to— I love to tweak your morning routine a little bit, if I may. Okay. Because when you wake up, I invite you to do Quick Shift in bed before you get out.

Oh, that's what I do.

Yeah. And you shift into your heart. But here's the added piece. Thank you, pillow. Thank you for being there for me. Thank you for the people who made my pillow. Thank you for my wonderful mattress. Thank you for my sheets and my covers. Thank you for my amazing husband. Thank you for my bed. Thank you for my wonderful— so it's gratitude.

Yes, I— yes, gratitude every morning.

Gratitude and appreciation for what I have in my life. That gratitude and appreciation has such a high vibration on the emotional scale that it shifts you out of any negativity into a very positive perspective before you get out of the bed.

Absolutely.

And then when you go into the bathroom to do your morning routine, in the shower, thank you for the water, thank you for the hot water, thank you for the soap, thank you for the shampoo, thank you for the brush for my— I mean, so I'm in constant thanks, right, for that, so that I can And it may sound silly, but guess what?

Oh my God. It's transformative, isn't it, Terry?

It is absolutely transformative because those positive emotions set the stage for what you will be attracting the rest of the day.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so you also talk about intuitive leaders' inward journey. So help us understand what that looks like and what can our viewers and listeners start doing right now to go on their own journey?

When I was speaking about the leaders and we're journey yesterday on my summit, I took them on a journey of everything that happened in my world and how the outside world was influencing my inner world. The inward journey begins with seriously looking in the mirror, and the first time I really looked in the mirror, I I did a DiSC profile and I got my report and I sat there reading my report and going, that's not me, that's not me, that's not me, that's not me, that's not— okay, that's me, I'll take that. Two weeks later, I'm sitting in my comfy green chair, I had my report in my hand, I just put the girls to bed, I'm reading this report and I'm looking at the report going, oh my, I did this. I did this, I did this. And I, and I'm looking at this going, oh, I don't like this. And to make a long story short, I ended up training in DiSC. I got certified in DiSC. And what it allows me to do is to understand every behavior style sphere. And I have been able to incorporate it into understanding what their, where their stressors are. And so by looking at their stressors, looking at their values, that's the other thing that a lot of leaders don't do. They don't look at the values of their employees. They end up hiring people that are just like them, which is a huge mistake because if everybody is just like them, you're never going to get anywhere. You really have to be wise to hire the opposite of you. But the difference is with similar values, right? When you go to that space, You've got a really powerful team that can look at a project, the team, from a 360 perspective. So what that did was that was the beginning of my inner journey looking at DiSC to say, oh man, I need to change these things. I have been on a journey of self-improvement every single day and I work on it every single day. I created an accountability program called the Shiftology Accountability Matrix, and it's part of our Big Limitless Prosperity Business Program for entrepreneurs. And the goal is accountability. It's to change the bad habits.

Right.

We have lots of habits every single day that don't really serve us.

I definitely wanted to talk about how the habits that we have, and again, since they're habits, we don't really spend a lot of time assessing them as to whether or not they're adding or draining our lives and the people around us. So help us understand what we should be looking at when it comes to our habits.

Well, for example, how much time do you spend on social media every day? How much time, you know, your emails? Okay. This is a challenge for me and I am working on it really, really diligently. I turn off my email every day. I read it in the morning. I made a conscious decision. I'm taking it off my computer and I will leave it on my phone. I am writing my task list. I am making sure that I work with a with a piece of software that allows me to be accountable. I use my own accountability.

When it comes to the habits that individuals have, your suggestion is take a good look at what is serving you and what is not serving you.

If you're an entrepreneur, take a look at your daily activities. Is it making me money? Is it not making me money? Is it putting me in service to others? Is it not putting me in service to others? Is this a waste of time? Time equals money. Time equals life.

When someone says they're struggling— so I'm sure when your people come to you and you're— and they're like, I'm struggling, and you say, well, let's look at like a day in the life, and you all of a sudden start assessing their habits, you must find that, well, guess what? It could be because of these things.

Well, exactly. Start the conversation with self-sabotaging emotions, right? Correct.

Yes.

For some people it's drugs. For other people it's alcohol. For some people it's social media. Sure. Absolutely. It's their drug of choice.

Sure.

To dampen the pain, to dampen whatever it is that's not working. My goal and the way I'm trained is to get in. The results that I get is I help to get rid of, I help to clear out and dissolve the self-sabotaging emotions that poor habits love to live on.

Yes. Oh, I love that.

And those self-sabotaging emotions are often created from our life experiences, from childhood, from high school, as I was talking about earlier. I have stuff that comes up when I work with clients almost every single day. I get stuff that I'm clearing out from the age of 5, from the age of 2, and it's like, oh my God, I can't believe how much lighter I feel. They've been carrying that around with them for 40, 50, 60 years. Absolutely. Wow. And I use muscle testing, by the way. It's one of the things I'm certified in— Emotion Code and Body Code, NLP. I became a Reiki master in 1998, and I incorporated it all in my very practical, tactical, and logical business.

Okay.

I've been a caregiver for 10 years, and there was always an energy that I couldn't clear. And again, I'm being very, very transparent here. I never understood what it was. So I have this big event yesterday, but there was something still in my solar plexus. I couldn't figure out what it was. And a friend of mine who is also highly intuitive like I am, and a professional trainer— she does what I do also, a lot of what we do— we're— she's also a military spouse, personal professional development. She said, Terry, I'm— when I think of you, because I happen to mention I still have this weird feeling, it's like a cork that I can't dislodge, right? And I've been there for years. I haven't been able to find just the— I know it's an energy, but I don't know what it is. And she said, discredited. The word I'm getting is discredited. And at that moment, it was the shudder, the shakes, the chills. It's like, huh, you got to be kidding me. And I got a flash because I get images. I do all of this, by the way. I get the images, I get the— I hear things. I feel things. I— and I saw myself at the age of 3 with my dad, and then the exact event where I was first discredited.

Oh wow. Wow.

She was actually able to see where the energy was in my body. I did the healing. She was the observer. I cleared it out. And I can honestly tell you that has been dogging me for all these years.

Wow.

The feeling that I have— I'm unstoppable right now. I don't feel that in my, in my solar plexus anymore. And I've had it forever. I'm not different than you or anybody else, right? This stuff happens with everyone. I just happen to learn all of these skill sets.

Yes.

These different techniques to heal myself first, because I can't do the work that I am meant to do in this lifetime if I don't do that.

Because there are so many of those skill sets and there's so many that make up our listeners and our viewers, you know, universe. What would you say in our last minute or so? What would you say would be one thing that you would suggest that they start focusing on or working on so they can start really building a trusting environment by using their intuition?

Easy. Use Quick Shift. Ah, that's simple. Because when you connect with your heart, your heart is the core of your intuition. And Quick Shift takes you into your heart organ, right? And it connects you with the brain. Because when the brain in the head and the brain in the heart are connected, you're in a coherent space. You're working with two brains instead of one, right? So you're working with both brains. You're working with the practical side and the emotional and spiritual side. Yeah. So when you shift here and you shift into your heart, that's the most powerful tool that you have. It truly, truly is. And when you begin to do this and trust it and recognize that the power of it, your leadership is going to shift, your management is going to shift, your health, your wealth, and your spirituality are all going to amplify, and your relationship.

I was going to add that if you hadn't, because that was my transformation. That is awesome. And I want to remind everybody, you can find that Quick Shift at quickshiftzone.com. So be sure to check that out. And like she said, it's 60 seconds, right, Terry?

In the very beginning, it may take you a little bit longer because you got to read the guide and you got to learn it.

Right. It takes 5 minutes. You all have 5 minutes a day or even multiple times of the day.

That's exactly right.

When you're starting to feel something crappy or something That's self-sabotaging yourself. Take 5. Right, exactly. Terry, thank you so much. It's been an awesome conversation. Awesome. I so appreciate you being part of it.

Thank you so very much. I always love being with you. We've been together. We've been on each other's podcast for what, the last 10 years?

Yes, I think so. Yes, it's great. And I so appreciate you. And thank you so much.

Take care. You too.

Wow, wasn't that a great conversation with Terri? How awesome is that? All right, this is what I took away from it, and I wonder if you did too. I took away that there's a lot of ways that we're self-sabotaging and the impact that it's having on our lives and even on our work. And Terri provided a lot of tips around what you need to do to stop that self-sabotaging. And one of the things that she mentioned is, I kind of said it's her 3 C's, but she talked about confidence, competence, and credibility, and just exactly how you can establish all 3 of those by working on your inner self. So the leader's inner journey that she talked about. And then one great, absolutely great tip, and I made note of it, and I will be going and researching it as soon as we're done here, and that is The Quick Shift Method, a 60-second tool that you could be using every day. But at first, if you haven't kind of been familiar with these type of tools and techniques, then it might take you a little bit more time. But like I said, even if it took 5 minutes a day, 5 minutes to really center yourself and kind of make the most out of every single day. And that is Quick Shift. And you can find out more at quickshiftzone.com. And we'll put all this in the notes as well. Lastly, she also talked about understanding your stressors and your values, and she does that through her DiSC assessments that she provides to her clients, which is very similar to the work that I do as well. So that is absolutely awesome. All right. So a lot to unpack there. So if you need to, even go back and watch or listen to this episode because it was absolutely fabulous. And if you have any questions that even go beyond of what we're talking about, If you're looking for ways to really become that powerhouse leader and to understand your strengths, your weaknesses, and the gaps and what it's going to take to get there, then be sure to schedule some time with me at coachmebernette.com/discoverycall and let's get you moving forward. All right? So until next time, you could always go to Shannon thecorporatebitch.com for all of our episodes. Be sure to like, follow, share, and tweet. Um, but until next time, have a wonderful, wonderful week, and I will see you soon. Bye!