[71] You Are Powerful (Does That Scare You?)
Are You Afraid of Your Own Intuition?
Hi, my name is Elise Lebeau, I’m the Left Brain Intuitive, and welcome to Your Intuition is Calling. Today, we’re going to talk about something that was very surprising to me—about myself, really.
One day, I realized that I was not comfortable talking about the power of my intuition. It was also surprising when I started to reach out to women, which I’d never done before. People would reach out to me if they wanted an intuitive reading. But when I retired from engineering, I started to reach out to women on LinkedIn, particularly those I thought were intuitive.
It was shocking that the response I would often get was: “No, I don’t really want to talk about that,” or “I don’t want other people to know that we’re connected.” I tried not to take it personally. It wasn’t about me; it was about their own discomfort with being open about their intuition.
The Struggle to Accept Intuitive Power
It took me a while to unravel this for myself and to help my clients who were struggling with the same issue. I think fundamentally, this is about power—being comfortable with the fact that you are powerful. This is especially obvious because women are at such a disadvantage in the world. We make less money than men, we don’t have access to all the same jobs, and the number of female CEOs in Fortune 500 companies is staggeringly low. We don’t have a lot of role models of powerful women. I didn’t necessarily grow up with that. I’m in my 50s, and I grew up being taught to be mostly quiet and to care about the needs of others.
The Fear Of Being Weird
Even if we don’t subscribe to these kinds of beliefs anymore as we grow up, they can still be in the back of our minds. The big fear that I had when it came to my power was the fear of being weird. Because I was an engineer, and in case you haven’t heard my story, I was a software engineer for 20 years. During the same 20 years, I was also a professional intuitive. I was secretly doing intuitive readings online. People would reach out to me, and we didn’t know each other.
I was afraid that my employer would find out that I was a professional intuitive. When I retired from engineering at 47, I thought I would no longer be afraid to be visible and powerful in my intuition. But I was wrong. I was still afraid. There was a fear of being weird, of being different. Anytime I said to someone, “I’m an intuition coach” or “I’m a professional intuitive,” there was a moment of a blank look on their face as they tried to interpret that and attach it to something that made sense to them. Many people thought I was psychic, which I am not. There is a mystery around the word “intuition” because we don’t talk about it in school, and there is a fear of things we don’t know.
I used to take that personally because I am sensitive to energy. I would pick up on people’s fear at an energy level, even if they were polite with their words. I didn’t want to scare people or be seen as a monster, so I stayed quiet and invisible. Some people literally asked me not to talk to anyone about this because they were embarrassed to be associated with me. It was fear-based. People who loved me said that to me. It was out of fear that they would have that response.
Being weird and having people react negatively was the first big reason I was afraid to be visible and known for being a professional intuitive. But there was another reason too, which took more digging to figure out. I was afraid of being visible and powerful in my intuition. That combination felt dangerous. I was perfectly fine being intuitive and invisible. But to be up on a stage or talking to someone live who knows who I am was harder. It was also harder to talk about what I had accomplished with intuition because it is a powerful tool. I want to tell women that they have this power in their back pocket because all women are intuitive. By following your intuition, you can do amazing things because you have access to information that logic alone can’t provide. You can get exponential results by getting subconscious information that is not available through logic alone.
However, most of us are afraid of going into that place, and we step away from our power. We continue to be invisible. I realized I was not the only one struggling with this. I wanted to talk about the fact that I was able to retire at 47, even though I had been a single mom for 10 years without financial support. I started my life in the US at 27 with nine boxes of stuff. The chances of me ending up where I did, retiring early, becoming financially free, and then becoming a millionaire were against all odds. It was not because I saved money but because I made decisions based on my intuition. It may look random, but it was not.
I have healed physical symptoms that doctors told me were incurable. This kind of power can be intimidating, and I was afraid of talking about it and being visible about it. I got a lot of help along the way, and I wanted to understand this better because I realized I was not the only one struggling with it.
The Dangers of Intuition For Women
As a woman who is powerful with intuition, it’s okay and normal to be afraid. I realized that one day when I was asking why I was still afraid, despite all the personal growth work I had done. In that moment, I saw an image of women being stoned, drowned, burnt, and beaten to death by groups of people who were afraid of them. My vision is a bit broader because I see energy. This was my brain’s way of saying I was aware of the energy of those women. A hundred years ago, I would likely have been burned as a witch for what I do. Especially when I give a cold, intuitive reading to someone who didn’t ask me a question, and I don’t know anything about them.
The fear comes from not understanding. For those who can overcome the fear, intuition becomes really useful. I have had clients coming to me for readings for 15 years. But there is always that fear of not understanding how it is possible to do what I do. Women like us were persecuted for a long time, and although we are not anymore, the memory of that persecution remains. Our genes remember who our parents are, and there is an energy to that. There is an energy of all the women before us.
There are places I can’t go in the world. For example, I went to Mexico a long time ago, and there was a temple ruin that was a tourist attraction. Just mentioning the name of that place gave me terrible nausea, and I couldn’t go there because they did human sacrifices there. The energy of that place remembers their fear and agony.
Any object can store energy, and our bodies are databanks that remember things about us and the people before us. Although we don’t have conscious access to our genetic material, the information is there. One of the things I can do is interpret this energy into images and then translate those images into words. I connected the dots of why I was afraid to be visible and powerful in my intuition. It’s because it has been dangerous for a long time for women like me to be that combination. I stand on the shoulders of the women who continued to seek answers, making it safe today to be powerful and visible.
If you’re afraid of your intuition or talking about it, you might be experiencing that same instinctual protection. You might be afraid of your intuition without even realizing why. I want you to know that you are powerful, and it is safe for you to be visible. You can choose the terms of your visibility.
Knowing Your Intuitive Truth
It was important for me to overcome this fear so I could speak publicly about intuition. You don’t have to do that. If all you want is to make financial decisions using your intuitive insight, you don’t need to tell others. When I was a software engineer, I didn’t tell anyone I had an intuitive insight. I would say something like, “This doesn’t feel quite right,” or “I have a gut feeling.”
You don’t have to explain where your intuition comes from. You can decide to be powerful and visible only to yourself. No one else needs to know. If you feel called to open up to one person, you can do that too. By acknowledging your fear and understanding it, you can start to relax and decide how visible you want to be.
This is why I created my intuitive community. It is a private community where you have to be invited or ask to join. I wanted it to be a safe place for women to explore their intuition. It’s not available to the outside world, and people don’t see inside that community. The fundamental reason I created that community was for safety.
If you want to join me there, I would love to have you. You can find us at community.leftbrainintuitive.com. I’ll see you there!