Your Intuition Has Never Been the Problem

This episode is the honest conversation I wish someone had with me when I was younger. We’re talking about what actually happens to your intuition when you’ve been doing the work, why you can feel something and still not trust it, and the specific reason the guidance that’s supposed to be the most natural thing in the world feels like trying to get a signal in a dead zone.

What we cover:

• Why the intuition conversation, as it’s currently being had in the personal development space, is missing the most important piece
• The belief I carried for years that kept me dismissing my own signals as too small and too ordinary to count
• What the sequence problem is and why insight alone, even really good insight, cannot reach what’s running underneath
• What shifted when I stopped outsourcing my own access, and what that actually looks like in real life

Mark your calendar, June 18th at 7 pm Eastern. The Awakening Session is a free 90-minute live experience on Zoom where I’m going to show you exactly why everything you’ve tried at the surface level hasn’t been able to reach what’s actually running underneath,  and then lead you directly into your own energy so you can experience what it feels like when the signal finally comes through clearly. Registration opens soon. Follow the show so you don't miss it.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Limitless Life Podcast. I'm your host, Brenda Johnson. With two decades of advertising and color marketing, I understand exactly how people make decisions, what moves them and what doesn't. In the last 12 years, I've been in the subconscious and energetic transformational space, which means I can see through the noise faster than most, and I know what's actually working under the surface versus what just looks like it is. I'm not here to inspire you. I'm here to show you what's really running things and give you the tools you need to change it. If you're a founder or a leader who thinks deeply, does the work, and still hits walls you can't quite explain, this is your show. We go beyond the strategy, beyond the mindset work, into the subconscious, the body, and your energy so you can lead and build from who you actually are. So let's get into this. Welcome back to the Limitless Life Podcast. Okay, I'm diving into things because that's what I do here. And can we just be honest about the intuition conversation for a second? Because I think that it's one of the most overcomplicated, over-mystified, and frankly unhelpful topics in the entire personal development space. And I am saying that as somebody whose practice includes helping women work with their intuition and their inner guidance. But here's what I mean. We have all been told to just trust it, to follow it, to lead with it. You've probably been in rooms where somebody made it sound so simple. Just tune in, just listen, just feel into it, trust your sacral. And you've sat there nodding away, and at the same time, you're wondering, why doesn't yours work that way? Why does it show up sometimes and not other times? Why can you feel something but you can't quite grab on to it? Why is that guidance that's supposed to be the most natural thing in the world, why does it feel like you were trying to get a signal on your cell phone in a dead zone sometimes? And then, and this is the part that really gets me. You probably started to feel like it was a you problem. Like some people just have it and some people don't. Like the person teaching is more special or more connected to something greater, or maybe, maybe it's because you need to meditate more, or clear your energy more, or find the right person to attune you, or just trust more. As if trust is the thing that's been missing this whole time. I mean, it is a piece of it, but it's not the whole picture. I had a mentor once who made herself seem so special and all-powerful because she could connect directly to the creator. Spoiler alert here, uh, we can all do that. It does take practice and patience, though, especially if you haven't mastered the foundational stuff first. Listen, we have to walk before we run so we don't completely mess up our nervous systems. Anyways, I digress. I've always been able to feel things. I always could. There were moments, flashes really, where I just knew something, not because I'd thought it through or because somebody had told me, just there was this sense of knowing that would land and then it would be gone before I could grab onto it. What some people call downloads, transmissions, insights, call them whatever. I had them. But the thing nobody ever told me or explained to me, and this is what kept me spinning for longer than I would like to admit, is I had this belief somewhere underneath that everything related to intuition and inner guidance was supposed to be big, like unmistakable, the kind of thing that stops you in your tracks and rearranges your entire life in an afternoon. I'd heard stories, these women who woke up one day and just knew this moment of crystal clarity, a voice that changed everything. And what I had didn't feel like that. Or sound like that. It actually sounded like my own voice in my own head. And so it was really easy to talk myself out of recognizing it as intuition at all. And so I did. I talked myself out of it over and over and over again. I felt the signals, I heard the messages, and decided they probably didn't count because they were too small, too ordinary. And it was supposed to feel way more magical than this. So I thought. And they would tell me I was so extraordinary, extraordinarily gifted, so intuitive, so powerful, have such a strong signal. And I want to be honest about how that felt because I think a lot of you know this feeling, and I think a lot of you have heard these same things. It felt incredible. It felt like being seen, like someone finally recognizing something in me that I hadn't been able to see clearly in myself. But what I didn't understand at the time, and again, I'm saying this as somebody who spent two decades in advertising, literally studying how people are influenced. What I didn't recognize was that I was completely inside of a dynamic that I would have spotted immediately in any other context. I was being told I was special in a way that made me feel temporarily seen and in a way that also created dependency. The gift was being named, but never actually handed to me. The power was being acknowledged but never transferred. Every session left me more certain that something was there, and less certain that I could access it without help or without being activated in some way. So I kept going back. Of course I did. Which in hindsight is a little like deciding your own cooking isn't good enough, and then you spend years eating at restaurants that keep telling you how incredible your palate is while never actually telling you how you can learn to cook. And look, not all of these situations where people were bad. I mean, a couple weren't so great, like the one who led a mastermind and left the Zoom room so she could activate our healing hands powers while we all sat on the call not knowing what to do or what she was actually doing. It was very weird. But there is a particular flavor of spiritual gaslighting that uses such powerful language, such powerful empowerment language, that it takes you a while to notice that you're not actually going anywhere. Because you leave feeling so lit up, and you come back the following time, sometimes a volume week, month, who knows, when that signal, when your signal has gone quiet again, and then it repeats. You leave feeling lit up again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And you start to wonder if maybe this is just how it works for you. It's like, huh. Maybe I do need the support. Maybe I'm not quite ready to access this on my own. For me, that frustration built very slowly. Um it was like this accumulation of evidence that something wasn't adding up, especially when everything eventually came back to, well, you know, if you want to get to the next level, you need to buy into the next program. And then something shifted that I didn't expect, and I couldn't tell you why it shifted because I I don't really know thinking back, but something shifted. It was like my own intuition, my own inner guidance now that I'm sitting here talking about this. That's what shifted. I started listening to myself. Um, I stopped questioning myself and I started questioning them. I started wondering whether what they were seeing in me was actually real, or whether it was just a very convincing story we were both taking part in. Whether the gift they kept naming was genuinely there, or whether I'd become very good at showing up in a way that confirmed what they expected to find. And once I started seeing it that way, I honestly could not unsee it. Which then brought me to the question that I had been very carefully not asking myself, am I actually any closer to trusting myself than when I started all of this? No. That was the answer. Genuinely, no, no, I wasn't. And again, I want to be honest about how that shift actually was because I think we've all been sold the idea that the turning point is supposed to be some dramatic thing. It wasn't. It was actually a conversation with an amazing mentor who instead of telling me what to do, asked me what I thought. And then she waited for the answer. Not as a coaching technique, but because she genuinely wanted to know what was coming from me rather than what she could hand me. And it sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but for somebody who had spent years being told directly or indirectly that the answers live somewhere outside of myself, it felt like being handed something I didn't know I'd been waiting for, which was permission, permission to do it my way, to trust that there wasn't some specific formula or framework that I had to follow, to trust that what I was sensing was real and didn't need to be validated by someone with a more impressive connection to divine source energy than mine or a much larger bank account than mine. And what I started doing looked nothing like what I had been told it needed to look like. I got serious about my energy, not as just like a concept, but a daily practice. It's the foundation of everything I do now. I learned and practiced and became very aware of what was mine and what I've been absorbing from everybody around me. I learned how my own energy was actually designed to operate and started living from that rather than against it. Energetic hygiene became non-negotiable. Not because somebody told me it should be, or because it was coming from fear, but because I could feel the difference when I did it and when I didn't. And let me tell you, the not doing it made me feel like a big ball of crap. And slowly, not all at once, because that is not how trust actually works, I started building a direct line to my own knowing. And I used tools along the way, the same ones I use with clients now. Muscle testing was one of them. Not because I needed that external authority to tell me what was true, but because I needed something to bridge the gap between the knowing I could feel and the trust I hadn't fully developed yet. I needed a way to practice listening to myself before I fully believed what I was hearing. And that bridge matters because trusting yourself after years of outsourcing, that isn't a decision you just make once. It's a practice. And it's uncomfortable in a way that is completely different from the discomfort of following somebody else's template or framework. And this discomfort is so uncomfortable because it's about finally being responsible for your own direction. But here's what I want you to notice about everything I just described. I'm never going to tell you how to just replicate it step by step. And it's not because I'm gatekeeping or holding something back, it's because the specifics of how your signal comes through, what's been covering it, what you need to clear first, that isn't something I can hand you in a podcast episode. And honestly, it's not something anybody should be handing you from the outside at all. But what I can do is I can show you how to access it yourself directly in your own body in real time, which is exactly what we're going to be doing on June 18th, but I'll get to that in a little bit. Here's what I eventually understood to be true, and what has since become the foundation of everything I do. The reason I couldn't access my intuition and my inner guidance consistently had nothing to do with my level of gift or how ready I was or where the planets were. It was because something underneath was creating interference, and everything I'd been doing, as real as some of it genuinely was, had been working on the surface. Your subconscious mind is not sitting quietly in the background like a well-behaved little assistant. It's active, it's running right now as you're listening to me talk. It is filtering your reality, shaping what you perceive as possible, what you reach for, what you pull back from, based on programming, based on conditioning, that was largely in place before you were even old enough to question it. When your intuition sends a signal, when your inner knowing tries to come through, it passes through that filter first. And if the subconscious is running a program that contradicts what that signal is trying to tell you, it gets intercepted, muffled, static. It gets repackaged into something that feels more like feelings of anxiety or overthinking or just this like general low-grade confusion, like you're sitting in the fog. It's not that you can't hear yourself, it's that something else is louder. This is what I call the sequence problem. And it's the reason that the insight, even really good, really accurate insight, doesn't produce lasting change on its own. The work most people are doing, even the good work, is happening at a conscious level. And the conscious can't reach what's underneath. Your subconscious doesn't reorganize all of a sudden because you had a breakthrough in a room. It doesn't just respond to understanding, it responds to something different entirely. It responds to precise, targeted work at the level where it actually lives. I'm sorry, but you cannot think your way through a subconscious filter. And I say this as someone who is, by nature and by training, a very strategic thinker. I tried to think my way through it for years, extensively. Now, here's where it gets really interesting, and this is the part I want you to sit with. Most women, when they realize the surface work isn't reaching what's underneath, go looking for deeper work. Been there, done that. And it makes complete sense. The problem is that most of what passes for deep work is still working from the story. Still talking to the lair that you can already see and explain. It's still addressing the patterns you've already identified. And you cannot release or clear or shift what you haven't truly seen. Not the version of it that you've explained to every practitioner you've ever sat across from, or the narrative with all the insights already folded in, like the actual thing. What is really running underneath, the beliefs that feel so normal, you've stopped recognizing them as beliefs, the programs that feel so much like just the way life is, that the idea of questioning them has never even occurred to you. Before anything can actually shift, before your signal can come through consistently, before the knowing you've always had can become something you actually trust, you need an accurate picture of what is actually blocking the signal. That's the first move. Not more practices or daily rituals or trying to just access a higher vibration. You also don't need another person telling you how gifted you are, unless they're also going to help you map out what's going on underneath. So you can use that gift. Because here's what I know from my own experience and from working with women at this level the moment you see it clearly and you experience it, something immense shifts just from that. Before you've cleared anything, before you've done any formal work on it, just from seeing it accurately for the first time, what is actually going on underneath, things shift. That's not a coincidence. It's how your system works. When you stop managing the view and you actually take a real look. So let me ask you something, and I want you to sit with this. I don't want you to just think past it. When you tune in right now, not to a memory of a clear moment, not to something somebody once told you about yourself, but right now in this moment, what is there? Is there a signal? Is there static? Is there silence? Maybe a soft voice or a feeling. Maybe there's something you can feel or sense, but you aren't quite sure you can trust that it's actually happening. But whatever is there, that's your starting point. It's information. And information is powerful and it is the most useful thing you have because it tells you something very real about what is running underneath the surface. Now I want you to imagine what happens when you stop outsourcing that. When you stop waiting for somebody else to tune in on your behalf. When you stop running your decisions through everybody else's framework first, and you just know. This is what happened for me when I finally stopped. Decisions, it used to take me weeks. They just started resolving in hours, sometimes minutes. And it wasn't because I was thinking harder, it was because I stopped overriding the thing I already knew. I stopped waking up at 3 a.m. second guessing myself. And no, it wasn't because life got simpler. It was because my signal got a lot clearer and my trust got stronger. I started building things, my business, my relationships, my daily life. I started building things that actually felt like I designed them. Because I did from the inside out, not from somebody else's template. And that's not a personality thing. It's not something some women have and other people don't. It's what becomes available when the interference clears and your own signal can actually come through. If this is landing, if you are recognizing yourself somewhere in what I've described today, I want you to mark your calendar for June 18th at 7 p.m. Eastern. That's the date of what I'm calling the awakening session. It's a free 90-minute experience. It's live on Zoom. I'm going to show you exactly why everything you've tried at the surface level hasn't been able to reach what's actually running underneath. And then I'm going to lead you directly into your own energy, in your body, in real time, so you can experience what this is like, so you can access what's been blocked and leave with a level of clarity about your own life that thinking alone has never been able to give you. Not my clarity about your life, yours. Access through your own inner guidance. Registration will be opening soon. So make sure you're following the show so you don't miss it. Or keep an eye out on Instagram. It'll also go out in my emails. This experience is going to be like nothing I've ever done before in this type of setting. So I'm pretty Freaking excited about it. If this episode resonated with you, I would love to ask you to share it and leave a review. Let's get this into the ears of the women who need it. Be sure to tag the guest as well as myself so we can connect with you. This show exists because of you, and it also grows in the same way. So thanks for being here with me, and until next time, here's to creating your limitless life.