Ep.70 Intuitive? You Are Not Weird

Hi, my name is Elise Lebeau, I’m the Left Brain Intuitive, and your intuition is calling.

Let’s see what it’s got to say!

I love to talk about all the intuitive experiences I had in my life. I’ve been a professional intuitive for 20 years. But I’ve also been a software engineer for the same amount of time.

I was a single mom, I went to work, there were people around me who knew nothing about intuition. They didn’t even know I was a professional intuitive. And that’s why I talk about intuition really, is because it’s still taboo. We’re still afraid or embarrassed to say that we have an intuitive hunch. Now, there’s a lot of people who feel comfortable talking about their intuition, but they don’t usually use that word.

People like Steve Jobs or a CEO who is turning his company in a new direction based on a hunch. That’s intuition too.

I want to talk about my intuitive experiences because I think you have very similar ones You might have nobody that you know that is willing to talk about this. And our first episode was called You Are Not Alone, and this one is You Are Not Weird.

Or if you’re weird, then we’re weird together. I guess it makes it a little bit better. We have a little community of weird intuitive experiences. So the fear of being weird was very present in my mind when I first became aware of my intuition. And for me, this was an overnight process. It’s not like I was mostly intuitive when I was a little kid or a teenager.

I was, I was pretty deaf to intuition as I was growing up because I was swimming in so much internal negative self talk. And, and drama and physical pain. I was very sick as a child. And so it’s, it happened overnight. I was pregnant with my son and one morning I woke up with like my intuition on a 10.

So for me, it was a very jarring sanity questioning experience. And it was very clear to me when I started to talk about what I was experiencing that people were reacting to that in a very defensive way, or they were concerned, they didn’t want me to talk about it.

So here are the, some of the weird ways that my intuition was talking to me.

It was not in words necessarily in the beginning. It would come in the form of, for example, a very, very strong emotion that would really overtake me, like I could not suppress it. It was so strong. So I get really, really angry.

But sometimes I was by myself and I was really angry all of a sudden. So clearly it was not that somebody had made me angry.

It was not the external stuff that was triggering this. It was internal. And I ended up realizing that I was thinking about things and a lot of times I was asking questions in my mind.

Why is this so hard? And then I would be very angry all of a sudden. And I didn’t put the two together initially. The anger was mostly just distracting.

I thought I was super reactive. I had an anger problem all of a sudden. And but really what this was, was a very the basic way that my intuition was trying to tell me what you’re thinking or saying or doing is not in alignment with what you want. So when I was asking, why is this so hard? my intuition was answering with this massive anger.

Now, of course, this is a very crude way of communicating because right now there is no way that I can understand that message, right? And that’s the problem that I had initially. I could not understand how my intuition was talking to me. It was very confusing. Now there was one particular instance when my intuition was very, very clear.

And it’s when other people asked me a question and I think maybe it’s because I was, you know, I’m a woman, I was socialized to prioritize the needs of others. And if somebody asked me a question, it was my responsibility to get the best answer that I had to articulate to them in words, right?

So if somebody asked me a question and a lot of times, they were asking for my advice as Elise, not as an intuitive, because they didn’t know, and I didn’t know that I would become a professional intuitive, but this is what it would look like.

They would say something like: I had such a hard time at work today, I don’t know why this person gets on my nerves so badly.

And then something would come to me. The thing is, though, in that moment, you have to use words to communicate with the other person, right? And, and so I was forced to translate whatever emotion or image or sensation I was having into words.

And I remember this particular interaction, it was really early on, and I said: Because she is suppressing how she feels every day. And so what she’s saying and what she’s actually feeling is completely different. And this looks a lot like lying. So every time you interact with her, you feel that she’s lying to you.

And this triggers you because lying is a great fear for you. Like being lied to and being around somebody who is trying to manipulate you and backstab you. This is very scary for you because of past experiences. So you react to her incoherence, you know, between what she’s saying and what she’s feeling.

You react to that.

Now, the thing is that she was not necessarily lying. She was just working in a corporate environment, doing her very best and suppressing probably her own anger but, but that’s why she triggers you.

And I remember my friend coming back later on and saying, you know what, since you said that to me, when she talks, I remind myself that

she might not be lying, that she is doing her best in communicating what she can. And then my anger went away. And she stopped having a problem with this coworker.

Isn’t that cool? Like, how much time do we spend being upset at someone? Right? It can be consuming. And it solved the problem. And I remember thinking, wow, this, this was awesome.

I’m really glad I was able to help her. And I think this is how I accidentally put my finger in the, in, in the little mechanism that would turn me into a professional intuitive because I wanted to do it more and more often and with more people.

I think that it was necessity that allowed me to take the weird ways that my intuition talks to me.

I don’t think they’re weird. I’m just using that word because that’s maybe something you’re, how you’re labeling it to and turning them into articulated sentences, into a paragraph, and I could say, here’s the problem. And here’s what you can do, right? Because this is what we want for our intuition. And this is what it wants to give us, but it comes to us in this massive spike of anger.

Or it comes to us into a super weird image.

So I remember one time I was, I was having a really hard time at work. I, I felt really confused and very sad. And I would, but I would alternate with loving my job and then having a really tough time and kind of a ping pong match, you know, it was super uncomfortable.

And, and, and, I had developed a tennis elbow, so my, my elbow was so sore, it was really hard for me to do, have any kind of motion with it.

And I had done all kinds of therapies, you know, massage therapy, because I already went to get massage regularly, and chiropractic adjustment, and ice, and cold, and you know, all that.

Physical therapy to stretch it, and it was still there like six months later.

So those were two independent things that were in my life. And I remember thinking: I wonder why my elbow is not healing. I got an image in my head. And here’s another weird way my intuition talks to me. I got an image in my head and it was me with a blacksmith outfit, you know, the leather kind of thing, working on an anvil.

Like it was hot, there was a fire, there was an anvil. I had this massive hammer and I was hammering something. And I thought, what? What the hell is that? And it took me a while to decipher this. This was also in the very beginning. Now, I would instantly know what that meant. But at the time, I would have to go in slow motion to understand the meaning.

So this was, again, a message from my intuition in the form of an image. And what it meant was that I was struggling because I was working way too hard at that job. And for a very emotional reason, I didn’t want to let my boss down. She was a great boss. I had come to her when she had a tremendous need of me, but that wasn’t true anymore.

She didn’t need me as much as she used to. And I was staying anyway. I also felt that this was, this was more work than I was wanting to do. And so it was time to go and I was resisting it very much so. So I was working really hard. And it was. expressed through that physical symptom. So my body was holding onto that tension of me working really hard.

And the hammer was the motion explaining that or communicating that. And the day that I decided to quit that job, I hadn’t even told her yet, I just decided I was going to quit that job. My elbows stopped hurting within probably an hour of that decision.

This had been so painful that when it stopped, I went: Oh.

So, another weird thing that happens when we listen to our intuition, at least when I do, is there’s a lot of unexplicable symptoms that suddenly become clear and are I have gone through so many of these, because a lot of times when my intuition can’t figure out how to tell me something because I’m being stubborn, or because I’m afraid, or I’m distracted, all good reasons not to, not to hear our intuition, it will hit me behind the head with a pan you know, the cast iron type of pan, by having some kind of physical symptom, which is always kind of a metaphoric or it relates to the problem that I’m having.

So that’s another weird way that my intuition talks to me. I will get a physical symptom in my body. I will get an image that will pop in my head that seems to make no sense and I’ll think why am I thinking that?

Or I will get a really strong emotion. There’s another one that is also quite weird. Maybe you have that one too,

so that’s why I want to talk about these things because maybe you have these two and you don’t yet connect the dots, you know?

So, once in a while, a song will get stuck in my head. And maybe because I just heard it at the store or it’ll just literally come back to haunt me. So I grew up in Montreal and I’m French Canadian.

So I speak French and all the way until I was 27, I spoke French. And then after that, I learned English and then I’ve been living in the U S since then. So now I speak English.

Sometimes a song will pop in my head in French from, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago. And sometimes I just hear the, the music, just hear the, I don’t even remember the lyrics.

I don’t, I just remember the music and I’ve learned over time, because it’ll get stuck there, I can’t get rid of it. I learned over time that what I need to do when this happens, that I need to look up the lyrics.

So I go to, what are the lyrics to, and I try to, to find a way to remember who was the artist or what was the name of the song.

Sometimes I have to search for a little while to find it. And then I read the lyrics. And there’s usually one, sometimes it’s one sentence, or sometimes it’s a verse, and I go: oh my god, this is what I needed to hear. So much.

Let me give you an example. Recently, my dog who was a senior dog, she was 14, her name was Becca. She was getting older, and I was starting to wonder if it was time, you know, for her to go. But I was very hesitant to make that decision. It’s a heart wrenching decision. But I suspected that she was in pain, you know, and that’s where I draw the line.

I start to get the song in my head and I had to look it up, but it was a song That went Dooby dooby doop doop doop doop Woah oh Dooby dooby doop doop doop doop Woah oh.

You can tell I’m not a singer, by the way. But this is all I heard. This particular thing. And I had to go look at the lyrics, and in there, Annie Lennox sings No More I Love Yous.

And this song was written by someone else who when he explained the lyrics, he said: Well you say I love you to people and they say I love you back. And eventually they don’t, because they die, they move on.

And when I read that, I thought, Oh, it’s time for her to go.

So I decided, you know, made an appointment to the vet and then in the next few days her health deteriorated really quickly.

And there was one particular event that, that kind of confirmed for me that it was time. We were walking on our trail in the morning. And two other dogs were coming the other way.

And they both stopped and sniffed her. They stayed away because we were each on the leash, but they sniffed her.

And then they kept walking and I remember the owner turning around saying, well, that was weird. And I thought, yeah, that was weird. And then we got home and there’s a neighbor dog right over the fence. He’s a, he’s a big golden doodle. My dog is tiny. The neighbor’s dog usually barks at my dog just because he hears her there.

And, but that day, He crouched by the fence and he whined at her, like mmm, mmm, like that, when she was outside.

So, when it was time for me to go to the vet and have her euthanized, I knew that it was time. I had seen enough to know that it was time.

But it’s that song that made me think: ooh, I wonder if it’s time.

So, that’s another weird way that my intuition talks to me. In the lyrics of a song that I just remembered the tune.

Now, all these little whispers, right, of intuition, I could miss them. I could miss them. And I have. In my life, I have missed a lot of those whispers. And it’s too bad, because I have missed some golden opportunities because of that.

I’m sure that there was some bad decisions that I made where I had those whispers and, and I, I didn’t notice, but now I do, I do notice. And I don’t think that they’re weird anymore. I think that they’re awesome because what if I can get myself out of a bad decision before I even make it.

Or what if I can get out of a hole that I dug myself into really quickly because now I had an idea, I got a hint. It was really cool for me the day that I had, confirmation from science, because I’m an engineer, right? I had confirmation from science that I was not making this shit up. And here’s what happened.

I read a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. And in that book, he talks about an experiment that they did at the university of Iowa, where they had people come in to play a card game. And it was a gambling game. It was a social experiment. So people would come in, they would have two card deck in front of them, and one was red and one was blue.

And they would say, okay, so pick, pick a deck, pick a card, turn it around. And then depending on the card, you’re gonna win money or lose money.

So after turning about 80 cards, Everybody could tell you that you wanted to pick from the blue deck because the the penalties were really small and, and consistent.

And you could win money over time. The red deck was bad news because it was all over the place and you can have a really big penalty and you were pretty much guaranteed to lose if you use that deck.

But it took 80 cards to figure this out, right? For the logical mind to figure this out.

However, after 40 cards, they started to have a stress response when they reached for the red deck. So the one that was bad news.

And they were hooked up to machines that were keeping track of their heart rate and their sweat response, which are all involuntary ways that our nervous system responds to stress.

So when they were reaching for it, they had a stress response that was 50 percent faster than their logical mind.

So it, in half the time it took for their logical mind to say: Oh, I need to pick from the blue deck. Their intuition, what I call intuition, knew subconsciously that the red deck was bad news.

And it wasn’t I think somebody suggested to me once, well, maybe it’s because of the color, because it was red, but in the beginning, in the first 40 cards, there was no difference between the two decks and their stress response. It’s only after a while when the pattern had time to emerge.

This is why I want to talk about intuition, especially to women, because I feel it’s giving me a massive advantage in my life. I mean, I came here an immigrant at 27. I didn’t speak the language. I had nine boxes of clothes as my sole possessions, and I had, I think, 3, 000 of student loans still from Canada from the PhD in psychology I had been doing there.

This is what I came here with. And I got married, I had a baby, and then got divorced after 10 years and raised my son who was seven at the time, as a single mom, you know? There was some really tough times.

I didn’t have any financial support from my ex husband, and yet I managed to still retire at 47 with all with intuitive decisions, financial intuitive decisions, right?

This changed the course of my life. The fact that I was able to pay attention to those weird little things and call them something different.

I call them intuition now. And it changed the course of my life. And I want that for all the women out there, like you, that need a damn leg up in life, that need an advantage, that need an edge because you know, the, the, the deck is not stacked in our favor.

I worked in corporate America for 20 years, I know that. And so that’s why I want to talk about intuition. That’s why I’m doing this podcast and telling you about my experiences in hopes that you will also start to feel that you’re not weird. You’re intuitive.

And of course that leads to more questions, but it opens up the door to your superpower.

All right, that’s all I have for you today.
I hope this was helpful and I’ll talk to you soon!