Building A Powerful Boardroom Through Intuitive Leadership with Terry Wildemann

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Building A Powerful Boardroom Through Intuitive Leadership with Terry Wildemann

I have a wonderful guest with me that’s joining me, Terry Wildemann. She owns her own consulting business called Intuitive Leadership. She’s a high performance and business accelerator coach. She’s also a speaker and a bestselling author. She works with socially-conscious CEOs, small business owners, and leaders to take their business to the next level. If you are one of those people, this woman is going to show you how to go to the next level with speed, calm, ease, and flow. She has 40 years of business and leadership experience owning a manufacturing company, an image consulting company, and a leadership and holistic education center. I want to welcome Ms. Terry Wildemann to the Game Changer Mentality podcast. Welcome to the show, Terry.

Thank you so much, Rodney.

What’s going on in your world? How are things going?

I’m doing great. Life is flowing. There are lots of surprises when you least expect it, which is a lot of fun. I have the perspective of when I wake up, it’s like, “Let the miracles begin. Let’s see what happens.” It’s a lot of fun to see where life takes you. It’s not always where you think it’s going to be.

I’m sure a lot of readers have experienced the not so good parts of it. I’m sure you have, too, with some of the companies and business people that you’ve worked with in the past. What are some of the common issues that you see with leaders and business owners? How do they handle those moments where life isn’t so good?

Your show is called the Game Changer Mentality. The question you asked me about is the mindset. Here’s the deal with mindset and changing the game. You have a choice to look at the challenges that are in front of you and the choices are to look at them as a negative thing or to look at them an opportunity. I choose to look at it as an opportunity because what I’ve found is when I look at the situations, and this is how I work with my clients, I get them to look at things that aren’t working right as opportunities. The reason is something is telling you that it’s not right. Take a step back, look at the big picture, and look at the entire 360 perspectives. Go at 30,000 feet and then go back at sea level. Look at everything from all directions. If it’s still hard, take a step back. Go take a walk. Go grab some lunch. Go grab some dinner. Go do something else to click your brain out of that negative and get into the opportunity mode.

I teach that. You’ve put a lot into that answer to the question because what I’m hearing is to get present. It’s not just a challenge. It is a challenge, but there could be more of this meeting the eye. We may not be seeing the big picture, the opportunities. I love talking about positive potentials. There’s a positive outcome and perhaps there is a negative outcome and you’re filling that negative outcome. I like to look at these situations and see what’s positive about it. Harvest the good about it. The injury that I suffered and all of the challenges and obstacles I’ve experienced in my life, I like to look at the positive potentials out of them. I call them my PPs.

What are my positive potentials, my positive possibilities? When you’re in that place, those positive potentials, those positive possibilities, that’s where the opportunity lies. It gives me an opportunity when you’re in that place because that’s what happens. When we’re in a place of struggle, it seems all hope is lost. It seems we don’t have the opportunity that we want. It may not go the way you want it to go.

Sometimes the detours are much better. The detours have so much potency to them. The thing that a lot of us forget is that something may be hard and challenging. What is the learning there? Learning is what will lead us to the opportunities. I’m a holistic practitioner. I integrate the practical and the logical, the emotional, the energetic, the spiritual, and the intuitive. That’s what I teach leaders to do, to integrate it all. There’s a lot of scientific work behind the stuff I teach. One of the things is when you’re fully present in the moment and you’re listening with your eyes, your ears, your heart, your soul, your mind.

When you are truly listening with your body, you are integrated in a way where you get the information that you need to get to the next step. We live from here up. When we live from here up inside the brain, we allow our mind to control everything and we disconnect from our heart. That’s a dangerous thing to do. That old adage of leaving your emotions at the door, it’s wrong because our behaviors are driven by our emotions. Even the most practical person who says to me, “Emotions, no. I’d make every single decision on the practical and logical,” that’s an emotion.

It’s dangerous, especially when you’re in a place where you want to change your life. You want to transform, but you’re programmed into this way of living and being. It’s hard for those types of people when they’re in that place to come out of that. They stay in that and then they get into this loop because that’s a habitual way of being. Whenever you’re living that way, you’re not open. You’re not even listening to what your heart and your emotions are saying related to the challenges and obstacles that you’re going through.

What I add to people is to bring their emotions with you, leave your drama at the door. Nobody needs the drama.

Let’s be real with that because that’s a little difficult for some people. Some of these challenges and obstacles can be debilitating. Some people wake up with this stuff every single day. I want to impact those people. I want to speak to those people as well. When it seems they’ve been in this forever, they can’t get out of it. You’re saying, “I need to lead my emotions at the door.” They may come back and say, “Rodney, that’s BS.” Let’s make this practical for them. What is your response to that?

What I’m going to say is bring your emotions with you. You never leave your emotions at the door. You always bring your emotions with you. You will leave the drama at the door. That’s a whole different concept.

I misspoke, I stand corrected. Someone may say, “Leave my drama at the door.” It’s as easy as changing my emotions. What is your thought on that?

You can leave the drama at the door. I’m going to share with you an example of what I’m talking about and how leaving your drama at the door can help you shift. We’re going to get into health for a moment. If you’re an entrepreneur or career person, without your health you have nothing. In my twenties and 30s, I was sick with all kinds of issues. I had allergies and migraines. I come from a family of doctors and my family doctors are constantly focusing on what’s wrong with me. They’ll be the first ones to say, “Get a prescription. Do this, do that.” That’s what I grew up with. When I started learning about the Law of Attraction, I realized that I spend an awful lot of time talking about ill health. I spent an awful lot of time telling the whole world what was wrong with me.

What I realized was, “Who the heck wants to hear that stuff? Who wants to hear the drama of my physical health?” I shut it down fast and I stopped talking about ill health. I started focusing on what I wanted, which was fantastic health. I want to be healthy. I want to be vibrant. I want to be able to live into my 60s, 70s, and 80s with wonderful health. That’s what I chose to do. That’s what I chose to focus on. If there’s any drama, it’s the drama about I watch what I eat. I watch what I drink. I watch what I put in my body. I take care of myself. I don’t talk about it with the whole world. It’s my personal, private business. At my age, I’m in my 60s, I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been in my entire life because I changed my drama perspective.

Congratulations to that. That’s what happens when we are in those situations. We tend to keep talking about it. “Life sucks,” you find those people that live from Monday to Friday and they complain all the way from Monday to Friday. You don’t give yourself the opportunity to look forward to something different because you’re always looking forward to what you don’t want.

I have to say this because I have several clients who have been in this boat. How sad is it when you go to a job and all you’re waiting for is the weekend? You’re miserable when you’re driving in the car. You’re miserable when you wake up. You’re miserable choosing what it is you have to wear. You’re driving, talking about how you have to deal with everybody. You’re not eating right. You’re working constantly and all you’re thinking about is how you dislike the boss, you dislike your coworkers. You get back in the car, you go home, and the whole thing starts all over again. It’s the weekend. You do it, too, on the weekend on Sunday night, “I got to go and do it all over.”

That is such a poor way to live. It makes me sad when people are in that place because they believe that they don’t have the power to make a change. They do and there are all different levels that they can make changes in. From the perspective when they first wake up in the morning to the perspective of their employees, their bosses, and coworkers, to the perspective of the drive to work from the perspective of feeling stuck and shifting how you choose to feel stuck. One of the things about being stuck is oftentimes we are the ones who chain ourselves to that stuck place. We have energy. We have the power. We have the opportunity, but it’s our choice whether we choose to take it or not.

Sometimes being stuck is a mentality, it’s a mindset. You haven’t awakened to the opportunities that are in front of you. When you find opportunities, you’re not resilient enough to take those opportunities. As soon as something happens, they make it appear that it’s not going to work or it’s not going to work out for you. You shut it down and you go back to what’s convenient.

I have to add something to that, and that is those patterns are often installed in us at a very young age, under the age of five. They’re what we call self-sabotaging emotions that are hidden. These are hidden emotions that different events that happened at the age of five and under the age of ten that literally trigger us and live with us our entire adult life. Once we get rid of those hidden emotions and those self-sabotaging emotions, it gives us such freedom and such light to be able to then move into where it is we want to go. Sometimes there are reasons why we keep repeating the pattern over and over again, and they’ve often trapped emotions from when we were kids.

Let’s talk about that because maybe that’s bringing up some emotion, maybe that’s bringing up some past experiences for some people. Maybe some people are right there, exactly where you explained. How do we turn to the curve? How do we begin to change that, to deprogram what’s there and create some new patterns?

There is a term called energy psychology. Energy psychology is being able to work not with the emotions but the energy behind the emotions. You have some wonderful tools. There’s a couple that I like to use and one of them is the Emotional Freedom Technique, which is also called EFT and it’s called tapping. What it does is it works with the same points that we use in acupuncture. That goes inside the eye. You tap outside of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, under the chin, on the collarbone. If you touch under the arm underneath the woman’s bra strap, our sides can be sore. A lot of our military men and women come back with very sore sides because we hold a lot of our emotions here.

There are different techniques. You can look this up online. On EFT, there are a lot of videos. There are many tapping and Emotional Freedom Technique professionals on YouTube that can walk you through these techniques of releasing a lot of these emotions. There are usually three rounds. The first one focuses on the negative emotion. The second round focuses on the negative emotion, the emotion that you want. The third round focuses on what you want. It releases the energy levels of those emotions way down. That’s one of the tools that I work with.

The other one is called Emotional Release Technique, where I use a form of kinesiology and I can tap in. Highly intuitive through our discussion, I can zero in on the emotions that are in the way and I can clear them out using several clearing techniques that I use. What I have learned is that once we begin to release a lot of these trapped and hidden emotions, people’s resilience and health tends to escalate in a good way. A lot of times we’re not even sure why it is these specific things are happening.

Since I’m a businesswoman, I also became a holistic practitioner because I wanted to heal myself. What I do is I ask my clients, my business people, “Do you have extra pains anywhere?” I use where their aches and pains and what their challenges are as a roadmap to guide me. For example, if they have a lot of issues with their throat, this part of the body is about not speaking your truth. Oftentimes, if you’re an introverted person and you’re too scared to share what it is that you want to share, we can work on that, so you can say what you want to say.

If you have challenges with your eyes, it could mean what do you not want to see? If you have challenges with your ears, it could mean what do you not want to hear? If you have challenges with your shoulders, maybe you’re carrying too much. If you have challenges with your knees, it’s about flexibility and moving forward. Hips are about moving forward with large projects. When I wrote The Enchanted Boardroom, seven months into writing the manuscript, my right hip was killing me. My chiropractor was like, “I’ve never seen you with this pain before.” MRI, the whole nine yards. My regular doctor wanted to do a hip replacement and my chiropractor knows me well, so I kept telling him, “It’s just a book.” He said, “Okay, I got it.” My regular doctor thought I was a Looney Tune. A week after I turned in the manuscript, my hip pain disappeared. Imagine if I let my regular doctor do my hip replacement.

Intuitive Leadership: What happens with intuition is we get the messages constantly but we’re too scared to listen to them.

What was that? Can you explain that experience?

It was abject fear. I was petrified of writing this book because this book was my coming out of the spiritual closet, my coming out of the angel closet with business. I worked with angels. If you noticed back in my office there are angels all over the place. I’ve been working with angels since I was a little girl. I came out of the angel closet in this book, The Enchanted Boardroom: Evolve Into An Unstoppable Intuitive Leader.

In doing that, I was petrified. When I was writing the paragraph or the chapter on angels and business, I was on my knees in abject fear of how people were going to respond to the book. I had this image of rotten tomatoes being thrown at me. That was the fear. It was truly in fear of writing this book. We’re doing the sequel. I have no fear of doing the sequel. I’m over that. It was interesting how the hip pain disappeared. My chiropractor sits there like, “I’ve known you for how many years,” and it amazes him. My regular doctor still thinks I’m nutty.

Is this your first book on resilience?

This is my second solo book and I am a co-author of six other books. The third solo book, the sequel to The Enchanted Boardroom will come out in 2019.

You’re doing a lot of work in this area of holistic education, high performance, and business acceleration. Why is teaching resilience important to you? Why do you do all this work?

I burned out multiple times and it’s not fun. I’ve been a businesswoman for a long time and I’m all about serving. What happens is when we serve too much and don’t put up boundaries, the people we hurt the most is we? That trickles down to our families. I’m big about entrepreneurs putting up boundaries and recognizing those boundaries. For those I coach, we set up their vacation schedule at the beginning of the year to force them to take vacations because entrepreneurs are famous for not doing that. The mind, body, and soul cannot operate well when you are exhausted. I was burned out. It was the same pattern over and over again. I didn’t understand what was going on.

That’s when I signed on with the HeartMath Institute in 2001 and became a licensed practitioner with them. They taught me how to connect with my heart and how the emotions are our drivers when it comes to stress management. When we don’t listen to our intuition, when we don’t listen to our body, the only person we’re hurting is our self. Our fears get in the way. The hip, this was all about fear. Trust me, I know how to heal all this stuff but I was that fearful. I allowed it to control me instead of me controlling it. That was a couple of years ago and I know this stuff inside out. Those of us who teach and teaching what it is we need to learn for ourselves. This is a constant, daily realignment of me in order to be able to walk my talk.

There are not many people out there that do that. I appreciate you even saying that and levying that responsibility upon yourself. I’m not going to say us because I like to live.

Who am I then to help anybody else if that doesn’t happen?

I’ve been doing some studying on peak performance and one of the hot topics, the main topics of peak performance is the recovery by surprise. A lot of people look for it to be something else, but recovery is one of the most important things when it comes to peak performance. I appreciate listening to the body, taking time to recover, and putting it in the schedule up front before you put all the other things that are going to go with it that have to be done. That’s critical. Do you find that stress gets in the way of people listening to their intuition?

It’s not the stress because the stress is created by our mindset and emotions. It’s our perspective that gets in the way. It’s the, “Go, go, go” attitude. It’s the, “Have to, have to, have to” attitude. It’s the, “Need to, need to, need to” attitude. That’s what gets in the way of living a fulfilling life and that is what creates the stress. Your perspective of what happens creates words and thoughts. Those words and thoughts create your emotions. Those emotions then create your behavior.

It’s like a belief system. We create a belief system around the things that are going on in our lives, whether it’s going well or not.

Let me share with you an example of how perception is different for everybody. Imagine that you are looking down on a street intersection and you have a person standing on each corner. As they’re standing there, an accident happens in the middle. Each person has a different perception of what happened based on the direction that they’re looking, how perceptive they are, how in the moment they are, and what they’re feeling, seeing, and thinking. It’s up to you as the facilitator, as the police officer or whoever it is, you’re at 35,000 feet. It’s about getting each of their stories and then putting everything together so you get the actual picture of what happened.

Does it mean that one person’s story is wrong and the other one person’s story is right? Absolutely not. Does it mean that one person’s story is right in the other one is wrong? Absolutely not. It’s that based on perceptions from where they’re standing, they may see, hear, or feel things differently than you do. This is what happens in teams. This is what happens in the workplace all the time. It’s based on how we were raised, our different experiences and scenarios, and who it is that we are from the inside out. Where resilience is concerned, if you lived in a high-stress family, those behaviors are going to follow you. If you lived in a family where things were calm, cool, and collected, you have a choice to take that calm, cool, and collected environment with you.

I lived in an environment where it was high energy, loud Cuban parents. My father was loud, my mom was quiet. Their perception, the way they were raised is different than the typical Americans were raised. Outside of the house, I was a typical American girl. Inside the house, I was a Cuban daughter. There were a lot of different scenarios. I carried a lot of that high-stress perception because that’s what I was raised with. I’m very much my father’s daughter, a workaholic on and on, and all that stuff. I had to learn how to shift my perspective, look at things differently, and take control of my health. Own my mind, body, and soul in a way that I knew that worked for me outside of the way that I was raised. It was my choice to do that.

What are some of the things you did to make that transition?

I learned how to connect with my heart, believe in holistic medicine which my parents still don’t, learn how to look at natural things and look at other ways of healing. It’s not always the drug, it’s not always the Western medicine pop-a-pill type of thing. However, when there’s an accident, I’m grateful for the ER, believe me. This family has had their share of ER visits. I am grateful for that. I’m not saying poo-pooing Western medicine. It’s not where I’m going. What I’m saying is looking at things alternatively. I’ll go to a doctor if I’m not feeling good or whatever and it’s consistent and I can’t figure it out for myself. I’ll get the diagnosis and then I’ll work with it doing my own stuff. I don’t take drugs because I choose not to, because I know that my emotions create a lot of the stuff that happens in my body. I work with my own way of healing, and I do, like my hip.

Given that, it seems to me that you’re integrating your intuition with resilience. Why is that important? How can someone that wants to get involved with that do that?

What happens with intuition is we get the messages constantly but we’re too scared to listen to them. We don’t trust it. We poo-poo it because when we were little, it was poo-pooed. Have you ever said something to somebody that you intuitively knew you had to say it and they poo-pooed you? What happens is you lock it down and you don’t listen to it. The thing with intuition, some of us see images, some of us hear words, and others of us are cognizant. We know things. Others feel things. You know how you say, “I feel it in my gut. My gut tells me I need to do this.” That’s intuition and that’s accepted in the workplace.

However, imagine sitting in a boardroom and you say, “I feel it in my gut. That’s a great way to go.” They’ll accept that because that’s common. If you say, “I keep getting images that we should be doing this and this,” people are like, “What are you? A clairvoyant or something?” Imagine a boardroom where every single person identifies their natural intuitive gifts and integrates it with their practical and logical education, knowledge, and mindset and it’s all integrated. Imagine how powerful that boardroom would be. That’s what I write about in The Enchanted Boardroom. That’s what the book is all about.

Where can people find this book? This sounds like a very interesting book.

It’s at Amazon.com.

Where can people find you if they wanted to work with you, if they wanted to get to learn more about you and what it is that you do?

IntuitiveLeadership.com. Thank you for asking.

You’re welcome. Ladies and gentleman, Terry Wildemann here, intuitive and high performance and business accelerator coach. Thank you for the wealth of knowledge that you’ve given us. I want to thank you for joining us here. I appreciate that. What are some of the final things that you would like to say to the audience?

Always listen to your heart. It will not take you down the wrong path. It may be a little scary, but in the end, it’s always going to take you where you’re meant to be.

I want to say thank you to the audience. This has been a wonderful show. Thank you, Terry, for joining us and sharing your knowledge and your time with us. I appreciate it.

Thank you for the invite.

It’s been an absolute pleasure. I want you to remember as always, greatness is your birthright.

Important Links:

• Intuitive Leadership
• The Enchanted Boardroom
• Amazon.com
• IntuitiveLeadership.com
• Is Life Knocking You Down? Read Rodney’s inspiring story – Get Up! I Can’t. I Will. I Did… Here’s How! https://rodneyflowers.com/get-up-book/
• Recognize Your Positive Potential – Essential Assertions by Rodney Flowers
  https://rodneyflowers.com/essential-assertions-book/
• Get Access to Rodney’s Daily Inspiration in your Inbox Today
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About Terry Wildemann