725: Special Series - Protecting Yourself at Work as an Empath

Empaths, you have a gift in your workplace. It's a secret superpower, but you also have what I call an Achilles Heel of vulnerability. Today we're going to dig into how you can use the superpower part of your gifts to your greatest advantage, as well as how to stop using your empathic ability in ways that devalue you or get you left out of all of the important stuff. We're going to talk bosses, co workers, staff, and all the roles you're in or you encounter as you navigate your career in this world. Right now on Flow Dreaming Still Kinda Woo Woo the podcast Flow Dreaming Still Kinda Woo Woo is just what it sounds like. An escape into the world of woo. Also a ride into you and how to feel happier, wiser and more self aware in every way. It's your ultimate journey into personal growth and inner power. We'll explore ideas like how your energy self influences the kinds of opportunities you encounter, or how your personal growth can drive your business growth, or even how that feeling of being stuck is really always coming from something else. We just have to figure out what. That's right. We're a dash of woo woo. A sprinkle of self care, a heap of problem solving and pattern busting, and a giant cup of encouragement. We're going to relight so much passion, purpose, self love and confidence in you that you practically stagger. I'm Summer McStravik, your host and welcome to Florida. Slow dreaming still kind of woo Woo. Welcome back to the second of a special series on empaths making money in the workplace and doing all that material stuff in our lives. I hope you enjoyed the last episode on Under Earning Empaths. I think. Well, I hope it made some really good points and pivoted you a little bit into understanding why and how you may be treading water in the land of income and material wealth. However, we're shifting gears a little bit to where you earn all of that material wealth. We're talking about the workplace now. Years ago I had an episode called Career ptsd and I swear that episode reverberated through the decades. In fact, I even did a recap, a new version of that episode not too long ago. And one of the things that I brought up is that those of us who are very sensitive, who are empathic, who are intuitive, we have this sense about us that we have, for whatever reason, honed and sharpened in our lives or even tried to bury and cover up. But it's still there. And in our workplace, the place where we spend the majority of our lives, it can't help but show itself meaning. The workplace is a nest for us. It is a place where, yeah, we can encounter trauma, but we can also encounter something beautiful. It can be one of the biggest places in our lives where we learn to stretch, gain power. Inner power is what I'm talking talking about. Not power over others, but our own inner power. And frankly, to manifest, to learn, to describe to the universe what it is we want and the experiences that we want to encounter as part of our growth. So many of you know me as the queen of manifesting. I have been teaching and preaching manifesting for going on 20 years now, using my specific technique of flow dreaming as the basis for both a technique as well as an entire philosophy about what it means to guide and shape your life through energetic means. The flip side, the side that I haven't really talked about as much, but I have a sneaky feeling that in the next 10, 20 years I'm going to be balancing the scales. Is your intuitive self the ability to read information, to take in information? When you manifest, you are creating. You are by definition putting information out into the world you are describing. You are the one writing the novel. But when you're intuitive, when you're an empath, you're the one reading the words in the novel. You're the one taking in the information. But you know what? It's just two sides of the same coin. And just about all of us have a percentage of each. Some of us are pretty balanced in the middle, though that's uncommon. Most of us fall more into one side or the other. Those of us who are constantly reading things always sort of aware of our antenna are up. Well, we call ourselves empaths or sometimes highly sensitive people. Now when you get into the workplace, it can seem like anathema to an empath. Anathema, I love that word. It basically means the absolute horriblest, most terrible opposite environment of what you should be in. Because a workplace oftentimes carries the energies of so many other people. And they're not people that are united except by only one thing. A job or a corporation or a company or a business. And yet we are sort of bobbling around in this milieu of energies and people, seemingly random people for eight hours a day or 10 or 12. Now I recognize that a lot of us work in places that we love. Maybe you are the county biologist and you spend all of your time up collecting water samples of in mountain streams. And your, your co workers are the sun and the wind and the birds and my God, that sounds amazing. But I also know that a lot of you are restocking the shelves at your local supermarket and you are sitting in the desk at the dentist's office checking in patients. And you're working in a big boxy building in a cubicle with gray scrubby walls around it. And what you're feeling is there is a lot of people's energies here and I can feel all of them. And it shuts me down and it makes me want to crawl up into a little ball and go home and put a cup of tea in the microwave and pet my tog and go to sleep in behavs. I want to help you out here because you're navigating the world with an extra sense tuned up, I want to say turned on. But frankly, everybody has this extra sense, every single one of us. If you can manifest and co create, you can also receive information. Like I said, they're two sides of the same coin. You hold both. But some of us are more aware. And so I'm going to speak to you. Your workplace can feel beautiful or it can feel tragic. When it feels tragic, when it feels grueling over a long period of time, it wears you down. Not just mentally, not just physically, but it wears down your psyche, your energy, your spirit, your inner being. Because you are always on a defensive position. You are always gauging, calculating, wondering. You're always getting mixed messages. You know that feeling of confusion that you sometimes go to work with, Like I don't know what's going on here. It feels weird. Does my boss like me? Is this person, is this co worker nice or are they backstabbing me? They say one thing and they do another and I just feel overwhelmed. This, my friends, is what happens to empaths who are constantly on, constantly reading the room, constantly picking up other people's stuff, and oftentimes the stuff you pick up isn't even your own. That question you have about, you know, Janet two cubicles over and how she always seems like she hates you, Turns out Janet hates her mother and her mother has been calling her and harassing her and Janet is exuding a foul plume of energetic smoke all the time and you think it's about you because you don't know it's about her mom. We pick up other people's stuff and we tend to personalize it as well. We tend to confuse it as being directed to us or at us when oftentimes it isn't even at all. So this is a big overview and maybe a few of the things I've just said, you're like, yeah, I've experienced that before. Well, let's figure out how to work with some very specific situations. We're going to start with one that I have encountered a lot with my own students and clients. This is the boss that you don't know what they are thinking, if they like you, if they like someone else, if they're listening to other co workers who may be saying things about you, the boss that you can't figure out. So first of all, remember, empaths, those of us who are sensitive, we are aware, we are picking up on emotions, we are picking up on another layer. This means that a person can say something, they can be nice and polite and all that stuff. And yet some other part of us has a bell ringing. Ding, ding, ding, ding. Something is off today. Something doesn't feel right today, something feels and off we go. And then we puzzle on it. And many of us get stuck up in our heads and we just think, my mind, if I had the feeling, right? My empathic self, my heart self, my energy self, receives something and then we boot it up to our head, right up to our mind. And we're like, well, we got the signal. You know, the bat signal's in. But brain, it's your job to figure this out. Can you like, put this in position with all the other puzzle pieces? And then the brain starts going round and round and round and round and it says, well, we probably should worry about this. This probably doesn't look good because you know what? Our brains typically do this. Our brains oftentimes are set a little bit toward the side of negativity bias, Right? Lack thinking. It's a protective measure. It's a biological protective measure. Look for danger first, look for pleasure second. And then we get stuck there and then we go back to work the next day and we do the same thing until eventually we feel worn down as an old pencil eraser, right? And you keep trying to erase and it's just, you're just scraping up the page. Here is what we do. First of all, when you enter your workplace, you're going to recognize I'm walking into an office full of other people and every single one of them is doing the equivalent of dragging behind them a bunch of boulders attached to strings on their shoulders. Just imagine for a second, everybody you work with, and they all have these big boulders and these big ropes attached to them, and they're just sitting there. Every time they get up to get coffee, they're dragging them around. Now what are these boulders? It's their junk. It's the stuff they brought in from home. It's the argument they had with their partner the night before. It's the worry that they have about something not feeling right in their body. It's their stress that they think the boss doesn't like them, they are not performing, or someone else doesn't like them, they're clouded with this. You walk into this and imagine you can suddenly see it. Some people don't seem to have boulders quite as big. They carry around pocket full of marbles. And you kind of like those people. They're brighter to be around. But there's one person or people that you can't quite figure out, and that's the boss. And the reason you can't quite figure them out is this. You have a vested interest in this person. You want to show up a certain way to them. You want them to see you in a certain light, to like you, to appreciate you, to sense your value, to give you opportunity to take you under their wing. In other words, you have this energy of yearning and desire with them to a much greater degree than you have with anybody else. But it's there. Imagine that this now is a wall of color. And every time you encounter your boss, you're looking at them through this tint and they come across with a beautiful blue hue or whatever this tint color you want to make it up to be as. What it means is that when you try to see them as they are, the field is distorted. It's distorted by your desire. So when they do things, you're trying to interpret them through a sort of distortion field, right? Like when you, you ever put on somebody else's pair of glasses? Something you do? Like when you have friends over and you've had a cocktail too, it's like, let me try on your glasses. You try it on, you're like, whoa, whoa. How can you see out of these? This is you walking up to your boss with this field of desire in front of you. Your boss becomes distorted. Now, how do you penetrate this? How do you stop misinterpreting things? How do you gain clarity on this? Well, first of all, simple self awareness. My boss is somebody I have a vested interest in because they can offer me something in the palm of their hand or they can withdraw it. But you know what? It is your choice to be here. Your choice. Your boss, yes, invited you in. Your boss, yes, allows you to stay. And it's true, your boss could ask you to leave at any point. But Every day, you're the one who shows up, and you're the one who could just as easily leave. So one of the first things we want to do as an empath is to diminish or decrease the amount of energy that it feels your boss has over you and your life. I get it. You need to pay the rent, you need to pay the mortgage. I understand. Maybe it's a company or a business that you love and you want to stick it out, knowing that new bosses will come in the future. But nonetheless, remember, the power is in your hands. You walk out that door and you could walk out forever. You hold it as much or more than your boss. Now, coming with that in mind, the next thing you want to do is recognize a lot of what my boss is feeling is probably not about me at all. But my vested interest helps me interpret everything as being about me. Every interaction must be about me. But again, it's not. Today, your boss has indigestion. Last night, your boss did not sleep well. The day before, your boss was worried about some medical tests. They got back, Your boss has a lot swimming through them. And here you are trying frantically to parse through all of this information, figuring out what parts about me. Now, most of the time, most people are not trained empaths. So you're receiving all this information, and a part of you, a deep part of you, is trying to figure it out, but you don't know how. You don't have rules or tools to help you. But now you do. Tool number two, probably what your boss is, what you're feeling from your boss has absolutely nothing to do with you. What do you think about them beans, right? You're like, wait a minute. But I'm talking with them. They must be judging me. Yes, of course. They're making impressions about you. They have an interpretation of you. Absolutely no doubt. But all the swarming, extra data, that's what I'm talking about. The day to day stuff, not about you. So you can drop it. You have permission to let it go. But you see, as empaths, we tend to take every little bit of information, every little drop, and we file it away. We're little mice, you know, putting our seeds away in the hole for winter. Oh, we got a little information that must mean something. What I'm saying is, it doesn't. It doesn't. Number three, here you are, you have to have an encounter with your boss. Maybe it's a really important one. Maybe it's a da, da da da performance review. Maybe it's Time to ask for a raise. Maybe it's time to ask for a special project or to be moved to a different part of the store or department or organization. What do you do? Because you've been trying to figure out what your boss thinks, but again, shaking that little, what do they call those eight balls, Those little kids, you know, party black eight balls. The answer is unclear. Yeah, we know that. But you still have power and you still have the ability to direct the flow of events and the flow of energy. And here is what's so important. Your boss is probably not doing any work, anything remotely like what you're doing. The power that they're holding is straight up regular old human power of shuffling papers and assigning staff members. They have the power to do things, physical things, move you here, pay you this, etc. But they're not doing what you're doing, which is recognizing the invisible energy exchange that goes on constantly between you. And that, my dear empath, becomes part of your upper hand. What I'm suggesting is before you walk into any important conversation with your boss, you do something that I call pre paving conversation. Now you can do this with your co workers as well. In fact, you can do this with anyone. I'm not going to going to go into great detail about this technique. It is a technique that I teach in my courses, including MI school, which is now currently closed for the foreseeable future. But I will be teaching this in greater depth again in other things that I have coming on down the road. But for the meantime, it kind of feels like this. You're gonna walk into that office, but before you do, you're gonna close your eyes and you're going to feel how gorgeously and wonderfully well this conversation goes. You're going to feel like, wow, it was so easy and everyone was in such a good mood and gosh, just the right things were said and the right questions were answered. Wow. Hot diggity. That was just so much easier and smoother than I thought. Wow, I had no idea I was going to be offered such good things. You are front loading your energy right now with an absolute blast of positivity. A fiery sun's worth of positivity, positive emotion and positive expectation. Now, our goal here is not to change your boss friend. In fact, in the work we do, we never change or overpower others. We just don't do it. Nobody appreciates that, nobody likes that. But we change ourselves instead. And fortunately, that's the easiest thing to do and the most potent thing to do. When you Front load your energy with this glorious, glimmering, clear, bright, clean positivity, this expectation of ease and flow, and you walk in. Then it doesn't really matter what state your boss is in, because you know what they're encountering right now? They're encountering warm sunlight spilling in their doorway. They're encountering light, bright beautiful butterflies swimming through the air. They're encountering bright and gorgeous expectation. Now, this may not be enough to budge them if they truly are sunk in the depths of something that's heavy or difficult. But if there is a balance that can be moved, a needle that could be slightly swayed, you bring that energy like an offering. And if they're open, they pick up. And then the conversation goes in the direction of, here's what's best for us both, here's what I need, what do you need? And away we go. Now, I mentioned this works not just with a boss, but your co workers. Let's look again at the organization. Wherever you're at, every business, every organization, any place you work, has a collective energy to it. And it's been really interesting because since people have started working from home, so much more post pandemic and during pandemic, it's changed a bit because we're dispersed now. We're not all collected together in one central hive as much as we used to be. Well, some of us are again. But a lot of people retain a lot of flexibility nonetheless. Every organization still has a distinctive texture, a flavor, if you will. They're all different flavored cakes in the bakery. One company tastes and feels like this, another company tastes and feels like that. And if you've ever jumped from job to job, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And partly it's the people who are there, and partly the bosses and partly the job description, but it's also something else. It's as if the company ethos sort of permeates the energy. The way things are done, the way people interact, the expectations they have about the place. It forms the undertones of the gossip in the break room. That's the energy that swirls through you every time you step in. Are stepping into this greater collective energy. And as an empath, it can feel overwhelming, it can feel crushing, like I mentioned at the start. But what do you do? Well, let's say you have a co worker and it's just sort of like when you're working with your boss, you don't know. This co worker maybe doesn't like you. This co worker maybe is working against you. This co worker is maybe doesn't really care about you, but they're always complaining. They are always trying to drag you into their negative assessment of the company and the people and etc. What do you do, dear Empath? Because you kind of have to work around this person, right? And I know all the old tricks that people have been hauling out for ages. Put the circle of bright light around you, put the halo of gold, put up the protection wall. These things work, yes, but the problem with them is how are you gonna get your work done all day while you're simultaneously trying to remember to put up a protective bu. You're not. I recommend something far more fundamental. Knowing that you're an empath, you have the ability to dial up or dial down what you're perceiving. This has to do. Think of it like a thermometer right in your house. Dial up the heat or dial it down. When you go to work, you spend a few minutes going into your being, going into your energy and acknowledging, yeah, yes. You say to yourself, I will sense a lot today. I'll receive a lot today. I'm not immediately going to boot it up to my head and say, figure this out. Is this a panic moment or not? No. I'm going to collect the information and I'm going to set it right over there. And you're going to point and there's going to be a bucket in you, in your imagination, in your flow, and you're going to say, we're going to fill the bucket with whatever comes. But everything in that bucket doesn't splash on me. It doesn't impact me. In fact, it has nothing to do with me. It stays over there in the bucket. So I'm describing to you a technique of disallowing essentially negativity to reach you. A way that allows you to kind of shut it off or capture it elsewhere. It's a kind of advanced technique and I'm happy and willing to teach you more about it. In fact, in my floaterbing mastermind, we do things like this. We learn stuff like this. But right now I'm just kind of sharing the overview with you. It can be done. So the upside of this is that you're able to go about your day not really feeling the impact of the swirling energies around you. Other people's garbage. The other upside of this is that if there is something you need to pay attention to, you've got is there. You did flag it, you did mark it, but it's like saving it for later. So your Skill is working for you now. Now, this is opposite of what we typically do when we're not aware. We walk in, we work for a few hours, we start to feel increasingly irritable and tired and then we can't wait to get out of there. And we're exhausted by the end of the day. And we say, God, my work really takes it out of me. And that's what happens when you are not aware. It's sort of like your abilities are just running on overtime. Nobody is in the control room, so your goal is to start stepping into the control room periodically throughout the day. I have flow dreams for this, by the way. Right. Flow dreams are energy activations. They kind of feel like guided meditations oftentimes, but they are different. And one that you might really like is called instant alignment. In fact, I give that one away for free. When you go to my website@flowdreaming.com you can just fill out my form. It puts you on my mailing list and I mail you, I send you instant alignment. It's five minutes. You listen to this. It's like stepping into the control room. It's where you're able to say, I'm moving back into my own alignment. I shed and release anything that doesn't belong to me, that belongs to someone else. I feel my energy lift, coalesce and grow stronger and brighter back to my core, back to my own personal, flowing, easy road. And you come back out of it. And now everybody's stuff is once again outside of you, not inside. So these are just some of the tips and practices that I myself have done. I worked in corporate, by the way, for 10 years. I know all about this. And of course before that, gosh, I worked in a cafe as a barista. I worked, my first job ever was as a house cleaner when I was a teenager. Believe me, I've been everywhere. I've been through the rough and tumble work world, but I made it where I am today. And it's allowed me now to teach you and kind of share with you so that you can understand who you are more. And the tools that you actually have in your hands, not ones you have to go look for, not ones you have to go earn or go through lessons for. Nope. These tools are already there and I'm urging you to pick them up and use them. They're free. They're free tools. They're already there and you can use them. So to sum it up, empaths, you have a beautiful gift. You have insights, knowledge about how people are Feeling and what they're sensing and what they're thinking. Way more than other people who don't have their empathic or their intuitive abilities tapped or open at the same time. When you have your ability running, but again, no one is up there in the control room, it's like a factory on overdrive. You're gonna get some weird, messy stuff output at the end and you're gonna be tired and a lot of your energy will be wasted putting weird things together that don't work because the foreman wasn't there. You are the foreman. You are the foreman. Keep this in mind when you think about your work and maybe even take the extra step, it's always worth asking, does my work fit me? Does it reflect the person that I've grown into and become? Remember a job that you started five years ago fit and aligned with the person that you were five years ago. But during that five years, you continued to grow, develop, gain wisdom, gain knowledge, and become something greater than you used to be. Your workplace likewise also grew and changed, moved. It's just like a relationship. Two partners can grow together or they can grow apart. So if right now you feel like I don't fit my workplace anymore, there's a good chance you're right. You're right. And does it mean you need to stay in it? That's a question for you. Maybe it's a question I should answer in a future episode, but you're allowed to ask it. We tend to think of work as just something that we show up and do and come home from. We forget that it has its own beingness. And that's why casting it in the role of kind of like a partner who's also on a growth, you know, direction, growth trajectory makes you understand maybe I do not fit this now, or maybe I fit it better and should go deeper in. Keep this in mind with that. I know I threw a whole bunch of chunky information at you today. I hope you enjoyed it. I always want to give you follow up resources. By the way, as always, I am delighted and happy to work with you. I work with a small group of people, mostly go getters, right? People who are really invested in moving into the next level of themselves and their lives. And I work with them up to four times a month actually. If you're interested in being someone like that, reach out to me. I call it my diamond private coaching program and we can completely remodel your life. I can say that with complete sincerity, having helped many, many people do this over the years and proven it to myself, even over and over. But I also love helping in smaller ways. I have the Flow Dreaming mastermind, which is a great way to get to know one another over time and pick up skills. And of course, at the very least, you can go listen to some of the Flow dreams. You can pick some up from my Flow Dreaming library and begin working on your career. Work on your work, get your dream job. I have Flow dreams for all of these and at the very, very least, Flow Dream on your own. Remember, this practice at its heart is completely free and it's here for you. It's like meditation. You do it and your life changes. I hope this has helped and stimulated you to get thinking and like, yeah, I'm gonna change some things at work. I'm gonna do this differently because if I've done that well, then I have done my job for the day. So I'm gonna sign off and send you all tons of love and hugs and wishing you a very, very happy work week. And coming up, we have yet one more special series on empaths, the workplace and money coming up next time. See you there. Hey friends, I just want to point you in the direction of a couple of resources that might just light up your day. First, I have an app, it's called Flow Dreaming for meditation and manifesting. And it has hundreds of Flow Dreams and playlists that you can use, download, enjoy to start sculpting these energies of your life now. Second, there is a YouTube channel for flow Dreaming. I know. Who'd have guessed the best thing you can find on that channel aside from. Also, this podcast is a tutorial. It teaches you how to Flow Dream. I'm right there on the screen with you, leading you through several beautiful and gorgeous Flow dreams that we do together. So go check it out. Look up flow dreaming on YouTube and have a good time. Enjoy yourself with these beautiful free resources and if you feel the urge, reach out to me. I am always available. Summerlowdreaming.com and I'll help you. And together we'll discover what may be a perfect personalized Flow Dreaming program for you. Could be like. To find out how to do that, just go Visit my website, flow dreaming.com until next time. Love to you all.