Melody Wilding 0:04
Sensitivity, when leveraged, when channeled, can be your biggest superpower. The thing you have thought for your entire lifetime has been your weakness can be your greatest strength.

Blake Schofield 0:28
Hi, I’m Blake Schofield, founder and CEO of The Bridge to Fulfillment, mom to three, USA Today top 10 professional coach and former corporate executive who got tired of sacrificing my life for a comfortable paycheck. My mission is to expand women’s perspectives and empower them to achieve greater impact at home and work without sacrifice. This is the Bridge to Fulfillment.

Blake Schofield 1:03
On today’s episode of the Bridge to Fulfillment, I’m introducing you to my guest Melody Wilding. She is the best selling author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work. She was recently named one of business insiders most innovative coaches for her groundbreaking work on quote unquote sensitive strivers. Her clients include CEOs, C-level executives, and managers at Fortune 500 companies such as Google, Amazon, and JP Morgan, among others. Melody has been featured in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal and is a contributor of Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Psychology Today, and Forbes. She’s a licensed social worker with a master’s from Columbia University and a professor of human behavior at Hunter College. And I am so excited to be able to introduce you to her, and to really dive into how you can really use your emotions to work for you, and really leverage that for more success in your job. All right, so welcome this melody. I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today.

Melody Wilding 2:10
I am thrilled to be here.

Blake Schofield 2:11
Thank you so much for having me. You and I both share a passion for helping women get out of cycles of burnout, but be really teaching people how to use their emotions to work, I like to say how to use their emotions to work for them, as opposed to their emotions driving your life. And so I’m really excited to sort of dive in, in what your personal experience has been, how that journey really taught you some really critical skills and how you can share some of those today with the audience.

Melody Wilding 2:40
Yes, I’m excited to dive in.

Blake Schofield 2:42
Awesome. So can you share a little bit with us about sort of your background? And what led you to do the work that you’re doing today?

Melody Wilding 2:49
Yeah, I’ll start on the professional side, since I think most of us are used to identifying ourselves with our careers. So I’ll start there and work backwards. So my background is as a social worker, and I began my career as a therapist. And in my work over and over again, I continue to see the same constellation of issues, particularly among women, things like burnout, but some of the behaviors that were fueling that overthinking perfectionism, lack of boundaries, being too hard on yourself. And I just kept seeing that pattern over and over and over again. And what I came to realize, and, you know, Blake, maybe you can relate to this is that often we are our best client. And I don’t think I really clued into that until I was a bit further in my coaching journey, realizing that I was teaching what I most needed to learn because all of my life I was that gold star striving for the a plus in everything, wanting to be the perfect Good girl, not to necessarily be the best, but so that people liked me and thought I was good. And that behavior worked really well for me. I did well in school, I got into a good college, I worked very hard. But then early on in my career, I landed in a severe burnout to the point where it was almost incapacitating, I was having heart palpitations, my hair was falling out, I would spend all weekend in bed because I just had no strength and no motivation to do anything else. And it really came to a turning point where something had to change, or I was literally going to end up in the hospital. And that was really a wake up call for me to not only see that, yes, at the end of the day, the job I was in at the time was not a great fit for me. But it was really my own habits and patterns that had landed me in that place. My own insecurities, my own tendency to overextend myself. And what I came to realize was that these qualities of being someone who thinks and feels so deeply someone who is so sensitive to the world, it was like I was just exposed to the world at all times, I had no sort of self protective mechanisms or rather self preservation mechanisms. And so I had really just completely depleted myself. And it was, again, we teach what we most need to learn. So it was very handy to use my therapeutic training, and gradually use those tools on myself. But then over the years, turn that into a coaching business working with people who are also in this position.

Blake Schofield 5:30
That I can still appreciate that I was always a great students thoughtful plan for the person in my house that always had the money, I would always save my money, right, all of the responsible things. It’s funny, I had a coach once told me that some people don’t like the word responsible. And like I left the word responsible to me, that was how I would have defined myself and I went down a very similar path to yours, and that my very first kiddo was born when I was 28. I had been in the corporate world for six years, and I had been put in what I like to call like this guinea pig job, they had decided they were going to start this new career path, and I was the one that should do it. And it was a job I did not feel super well suited to. And I came back to that job brand new boss brand new job I’ve never done before. And within, I can’t remember if it was a month or two months of maternity leave, I ended up getting shingles at 28. And that was the first sign of like, something’s very, very wrong. But I really thought I handled stress well. And I think many of us like that, that grow up being very high achievers, we think that we handle stress and multitasking very well. So I was like, I’m great at handling. And I’m totally good, because my normal was so high. And I wonder if you’ve experienced in this, but I think often it’s hard. Well, we often talk about, it’s hard to see the label from inside the bottle, that what is normal to us may actually not be what we’re functioning as on a day to day basis may actually be really close to the line of burnout. And we just don’t even know that because it’s what feels normal on a day to day basis. Do you feel like that was how you were operating, too?

Melody Wilding 7:06
110%. I relate to that fully. And I see this all the time with clients do with other people who are wired the same way we are that they’re 100% is other people’s 150%. So it takes a long time to almost detox from that just running on constant adrenaline. And even now I still am constantly working on trying to relax trying to enjoy my downtime, just because I’ve been so conditioned that that is not okay that I’m not doing enough. And it’s been a lot of unlearning to realize that that is exactly what I need to do to take care of myself. And that when I get brain fog when I when I can’t think clearly anymore. My usual mo used to be will push through work harder. You just have to get past this. And now it’s I take that emotion in that feeling as a signal of Oh no, this is precisely when I need to stop, because I can come back to this later. And that time will be so much more better spent and well used. But that’s it’s very counterintuitive for us and it takes a lot of unlearning.

Blake Schofield 8:15
Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. To your point earlier of like, I might phrase it slightly differently, I see it as like, our greatest challenges in life often become the thing that becomes our calling, or our ability to make a big impact for other people. And for sure, the business that I run is born of a 20 year journey personally, to work through all of my lack of fulfillment, going through cycles of lack of fulfillment, my career cycles of burnout, cycles of hoping that the next job would finally make me happy that ultimately led me to realize all of the things I was missing all of the things I was doing wrong. And some of the same exact things that you’re saying. And I think the thing people don’t often understand is we just say, Well, I’m just a perfectionist, or I’m successful, because I’m successful, because and I say this all the time, I’m successful, because I work harder than everybody else. And because I will look at every angle before I make a decision. So I’m quote unquote, responsible. And I really believed for so many years that a that was true, but be that it was unchangeable. just who I am. And today, I can tell you, and I think it’s a really important thing for people to understand is that very few things in your life are unchangeable. Like you can’t change physical attributes, necessarily, although you can work out and change how your body looks. But when it comes to patterns of behavior, or belief systems or the way you work, almost all of that is malleable. And to your point, some of it is unlearning. But some of it’s also being able to actually uncover like, where did this belief come from? And wasn’t actually true? From the very get go or if I’ve just been perpetuating this lie my entire life. That’s actually been the thing that’s been keeping me stuck. Do you see the same?

Melody Wilding 9:57
Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I was. just having a conversation with a client, right right before this, talking about how personal development self growth is sort of on a teeter totter, if we go too extreme in any one direction, we can become too rigid in our behavior. Or we can become like we were talking about before just being so exposed, having sort of no self discipline, but almost no self care that you just throw everything to the wind, and you don’t care about your own development. So I think it’s finding the middle ground of when working with people and I’m sure we’ll talk more about this concept of being a sensitive striver. But it’s using the strengths and these qualities to your advantage, trying to reap the upside of you, we’re talking about thinking deeply, exploring all various angles, that can be a huge strength and come in very useful in your career. But you need to be mindful to not fall into the patterns of overthinking that can come with the shadow side of that strength or that attribute. And so yeah, it’s all about balance and getting away from the extremes, all or nothing.

Blake Schofield 11:07
I love that I often say your greatest strength is often your Achilles heel. Yes. Which is exactly what you’re talking about, that there’s a shadow side of everything if it’s overused, and that there needs to be finding your own sense of harmony and balance is huge. And there’s grace in that process too that I think often as strivers or high achievers, we struggle to give ourselves and yet it’s the very thing that will enable us to be even more successful. You mentioned the search sensitive strivers. I’d love for you to share a little bit. What does that actually mean? And how do you know if you are one?

Melody Wilding 11:23
Being a sensitive striver means you’re someone who is wired to think and feel everything more deeply. We could talk a little more about the biology behind that. But also that you’re a striver, you are someone who is driven to achieve, not necessarily because you want to climb to the top of the ladder and get to the C suite and make all the money. But because you have a deep yearning, to constantly be better to be learning more to grow. And so that drive to succeed can be very powerful. But you may also put pressure on yourself. So in a nutshell, that’s what it means to be a sensitive Stryver. Now, I will say the concept of sensitivity itself is not new. It has been well researched for about 3040 years now. And it refers to having a more attuned nervous system. So there’s a spectrum of sensitivity just like there is with many other traits, introversion extroversion, what have you, every one is on the spectrum of sensitivity. So people who have high sensitivity tend to be more perceptive of their environment. So if you’re someone who tends to notice subtleties, details that other people tend to miss, if you experience emotions at a level of depth and complexity that you notice other people around you don’t seem to do if you are highly empathetic, meaning you are very good at sensing other people’s needs emotional states. And that’s not some sort of spiritual concept. This is very real, because what studies have found is that people who are more sensitive have more active mirror neurons. So that’s sort of the empathy neurons in the brain, where ours light up more, which means we’re sensing and we’re observing and processing other people’s behavior more deeply. Other hallmarks of sensitivity are thinking before acting. So if you are someone who needs time to wrap your head around something, to adjust to change, if you like to deliberate before you make a decision, or have time to prepare before you share your thoughts. That’s a good sign of high sensitivity. And now on the Stryver side, where these two things intersect is this idea of achievement. So being someone you’ve probably wanted to exceed expectations your whole life, you enjoy pushing yourself to achieve high goals. But on the other hand, you may often say yes, too much, because you may want to be overly responsible, loyal, dedicated, you may have trouble turning off your mind at the end of the day, because it’s constantly filled with thoughts and ideas or worries, you may hold yourself to high standards, because nothing is ever good enough for you or you feel like you need to get things just right. And a big thing I see is judging yourself or taking criticism and feedback to heart that those types of comments can stick with you for days, if not weeks, or sometimes months.

Blake Schofield 14:36
Yeah, I think those are by and large, what you share are things that I personally experienced a lot of my clients personally experience and think that there are far more of us than many now I remember, as a little kid, my mom used to call me an old soul and say I was like six going on 16 But I remember when I was in high school, she said to me, once you have so much empathy for people I worry for you. And I think that there are a lot of women like that who feel so deeply and wants so badly to help save, and help support everyone around them that they have almost nothing for themselves. And to your point, they have no clinical like armor going out on a day to day basis. So they are processing and taking in everything. And I think this is a really important topic because so few people are talking about this. And the work environment, especially if you’re working inside corporate America, by and large, most large companies a, they’re set up in a way that actually doesn’t maximize your productivity, it actually kills it instead of the opposite of how you’re naturally wired to work, which can be very difficult with a lot of sensory input for very sensitive people. But be another thing to understand is your brain is only processing 25% of the sensorial inputs you’re getting on a consistent basis. So to your point, Melanie, right, if you’re somebody who naturally gets even more, there’s so much information coming at you on a day to day basis that you don’t even know is coming at you that you’re trying to process along everything else, that it kind of causes sensory overwhelm, in a way that I think many of us don’t understand. And so we’re living life on adrenaline and sensory overload all the time. And then it’s no wonder we go through these cycles of burnout or exhaustion because we don’t have the right boundaries, habits processes in place to be able to understand how to take care of ourselves.

Melody Wilding 16:26
Yes, yeah. And I actually call what you’re referring to, I call this the honor roll hangover. Because I find that that conditioning that be the good girl, get the A pluses always strive for the gold star, that sort of conditioning. That honor roll mentality follows us into our careers, where we want to check all the right boxes, we want to make everyone happy in the workplace. And it may have served us at one time, but it starts to take a toll like you were saying always living on that constant adrenaline. And so that honorable hangover, I find tends to show up in three ways. So the first is perfectionism that you expect flawlessness from yourself. But more importantly, you overemphasize your weaknesses, and underestimate your strengths. So you feel like you have to be perfect, you have to get everything right, or you’re a failure, that all or nothing thinking we were talking about. And then there’s people pleasing, putting everyone else’s needs ahead of your own, adjusting your opinion, changing your thoughts to sort of keep the peace and be the consensus seeker, which can be great, but again, can hold decision making back. And then last is over functioning, taking on more responsibility than is yours, doing things for other people rescuing situations, always being the first one to volunteer for a project, because you feel this outsized sense of responsibility to do something. So I just offer that because I think it’s helpful if you can identify some of these specific behaviors coming up for you. That gives you more power to say, Oh, here’s the honorable hangover showing up for me again, how do I make a more conscious, intentional choice? That’s not just from that old programming, or those unhelpful habits?

Blake Schofield 18:11
Great. So what would you say to someone who’s like, ‘Yes, I can relate to all of this, I am finding myself doing this type of thing.’ What would be the first step or two you would tell them to take?

Melody Wilding 18:16
Well, you and I were talking before we started recording about our shared love for helping people channel and leverage use their emotions for them instead of against them. And one way to do this is to identify situations where you are feeling a outsized sense of resentment. Resentment is a very, very strong emotional signal that you have overextended yourself, you have agreed to something that is no longer aligned with your values or your energy. And most of us tend to push those feelings down and away. We tell ourselves to stop being so sensitive to get over it to work harder, other people are facing worse things, you should be able to handle this by now, a good professional would be able to handle this and fit this into her schedule. And what we resist persists. And that’s where that depletion can come from. And so using our emotions as a guide, looking for areas where do I feel resentment towards a person towards the situation a commitment can really guide you to where you need to start saying no, or setting stronger boundaries.

Blake Schofield 19:28
Yeah, I think the this piece is super important. I talk all the time that in order to live a fulfilling career in life, you need self awareness, plus empowered action and self awareness starts with listening to the inner voice and listening to your emotions and listening to the patterns that are happening in your life. And often I find that when you are finding yourself in cycles of burnout when you’re unfulfilled, a huge part of that is that you haven’t listened to yourself or you’ve been overriding it or you’ve been telling yourself the way that you feel is not okay, a And it’s an interesting thing when you finally begin starting doing this work. And this is the thing I think people don’t often understand is, I think we’re taught as children, like, it’s okay to have all the good emotions, but it’s not okay to have the bad ones, right. And it’s the whole thing of like, well just suck it up, get over it, it’s not that big of a deal, you should move on. And so we stuffed down all of these emotions, but we don’t actually realize that that energy stays in your body, you have to actually release and let go of that energy, which means I have to acknowledge it, I have to process it, and then have to do something about it. And so what I find for many women, especially that are like this high achievers sensitive have a lot of these feelings is that you may kind of be like, I don’t even know what I feel, because you’re so emotionally disconnected, because for so long, you have not listened to how you actually feel. And so if you struggle to actually recognize the moments of when you are feeling angry, or resentful, or sad, or exhausted, or whatever those feelings are for you, it first starts by actually making enough space so that you can do that. Because if you’re just constantly running, running, running, running, running, you’re not feeling anything, you’re just like on complete and utter autopilot. And I think that’s important to say, because there may be some people listening to this who are like, Yeah, I know that I can think right now about when I’m resentful. And yep, I remember an instance, I remember this instance. And then I did this thing. And then I was angry, I did it. And I’m sorry, I did it. But there may also be some people listening who are like, I don’t know, I go, I’m a complete blank. Right. And if you are a complete blank, what I want you to understand is part of the reason why is because you’ve not been listening to yourself for a really long time. And that’s okay. Right, we have to start with awareness. That’s okay. But also understand that when you do start listening, you probably have a lot of things come up that you’ve been stuffing down for a while. And it’s okay to process whatever those big emotions are.

Melody Wilding 21:55
Yes. And what’s so interesting is that, in those times, where earlier on in my career, when I hit burnout, it was my body stopping me, it was my body saying no more, you can’t do this anymore. And even now, when I noticed, I’m starting to get to that point, things show up for me, physically, I get a lot of tightness in my hips, for example, or my shoulders, and we hold those emotions in your body, which is why just as you’re saying, we have to move through them to get past them, you can’t avoid it, that emotional processing, especially as someone who is sensitive is all the more important for you than it is for other people.

Blake Schofield 22:36
Because you’re dealing with probably 20 to 30, or 40% more emotion than everybody else. And I think this is the piece where there’s been so much in the last number of decades, where we understand the mind body connection, we understand right? That these emotions actually can make you physically sick, it can cause cancer, and heart attacks and all of these things. But I think for those of us who are a little bit older, who grew up in environments that were not so focused on mental health, or emotional intelligence, or some of these things that certainly there wasn’t a lot of discussion about that when I was a kid growing up, or even in my first 15 years of corporate work, sometimes we don’t connect the dots between all of these things to understand. So I love that you said it also comes in your body, because I think that’s really important. I can tell you actually, the majority of my time, when I worked in corporate, I had these humongous knots on the back of my neck, because that’s where I hold all of my stress and tension. And it would be so bad melody, I would go I would literally go to a massage place and they would not be able to get them out there like these are some of the worst nights I’ve ever seen and had to go multiple times and they could not get them out and I had just it had become my normal. Well, that’s just the way that it is right. And it was all signs and symptoms that the level of stress I was carrying on a day to day basis was not okay, but it was my normal. And so I just had accepted it. And I venture to bet that every single person listening right now has something that they’ve just accepted as normal, some physical pain, some ailment, some emotion that they don’t like dealing with something they’re doing on a week to week basis, that doesn’t feel good. And part of this process of being able to truly create more of what you want in your life is to stop tolerating this stuff that’s no longer working for you and to your point to appreciate the gift that you’ve been given. So I’m interested to hear your perspective. And Melody, obviously, you’re sensitive Striver and this is how you came and learned this about yourself. How have you been able to learn how to use your ability to recognize and understand your emotions and other people’s emotions? How have you used that and really turned it around to be your superpower?

Melody Wilding 24:48
Such a great question and I will say it’s a continuing journey again, I wrote a book called trust yourself and I think I took myself on that on on a journey while doing that a big part of it has been learning To read listen to myself. So you were talking about that inner voice. And I think for many of us, our inner voices, a Inner Mean Girl is very highly critical. But what I had realized is that I had totally lost that sense of intuition. I was outsourcing all of my decisions, all of my confidence to other people. No, if I had a decision to make it was, what do you think? What are other people doing? Before really discerning? What did I actually want here. And that gets back to what you were saying earlier about, we don’t ever stop, we’re just on such autopilot, we are. And I’ll speak for myself hear that I was so externally oriented, that I had really shut down all of those positive internal systems. So especially running a business now, where I’m really the sole decision maker for almost everything, I really had to re strengthen that sense of intuition that hunch that gut that deeper knowing about the direction, the vision for the company, who we work with how we work with them. And I think intuition tends to get a bad rap as being very woowoo and soft. But it’s really the culmination of all of your experiences. It’s sort of that very quick decision making that pulls from all of that deep knowledge and wisdom that you have. So you can quickly make an assessment about a situation. And I’ve really had to rely on that much more.

Blake Schofield 26:29
I love hearing you say that, because to me, one of the greatest gifts we can have is to understand who we are, as people understand our inherent strengths, the value that we bring to the world and the people around us and to be able to trust and make decisions from our own inner compass is huge, because when you realize that it’s it reminds me of the the old wizard of oz saying you always had the power mighty or you just didn’t know it. And I think that’s true, I see that consistently true. Having worked with hundreds of women now is that you actually do have so much more power to create what you want in your life. But in many cases, I think the way you describe it’s dead on right is that we’re outsourcing that to everybody else. Because we A, we have an IT guy, I totally agree we beat ourselves up. And a huge part of that is you have to I like to describe it as most of us have been driving our car cross country for 20 years and never got a carwash. You have to clean the windshield, right? All of those patterns, behaviors, beliefs, the inner critic, the inner bully, right, that has to be resolved and removed. And when you get that out of your way, then you can actually begin to listen to the true inner voice, the intuition, the direction, the guidance, the knowledge. And I love that you said right, it can be seen as woowoo. But it really isn’t. Think about it, we have intuition because sometimes we need to react faster than our brain can process how many times that people been saved, because in that moment they walked they had knew that they had to move or the car was going to hit them. We don’t ever judge that as we say, Wow, that just saved my life. If we also understand that our brains cognitively are only processing 25% of all of the sensory stuff we’re taking in, then what that tells me is from an intuition standpoint, that intuition knows more than my brain does, because it’s actually processing all of the things. And I think it can be hard when we work in environments. And I don’t mean this in a negative way. But corporate environments are still they were built for men. And they haven’t adapted that much in the last number of decades. And so I think often as women, we get told, when we believe something is right, well, you need to prove it, you need to have all this data and you need to XYZ and so part of that sometimes teaches us I can’t trust my intuition. Instead of saying I can’t trust my intuition. How do I just come up with some facts to be able to cooperate as opposed to saying, intuition is not right or not good enough. And I have to only rely on data. Because once you can really begin to like I said, clean the windshield, actually tap into the intuition and the wisdom that you have, from the experiences, knowledge, all of that stuff, you’re processing your brains not knowing I have found that my inner intuition is always right. And I’ve also found and I challenge those of you guys listening, how many times have you believed something? And then you didn’t follow your gut instinct, because somebody else told you it was wrong. And then well, you were right. And then you’re mad at that person and you’re mad at yourself because you didn’t do the thing that you thought you should have done. And sometimes I think it’s a process of just allowing yourself to listen to what it is that you think is right. And then I’m a high data person I think a lot of us that are strikers are because we’re right constantly tracking. But I started tracking this for years. What my intuition told me what happened when my intuition told me what happened. And it became very evident. After a while you start looking at the data and the data says to you, hey, this is actually accurate. This is actually accurate and even if my brain can’t process exactly why I feel this way, I can trust it because I have history. If that proves it to be true, and I think that many of us have never gone through that exercise. And to your point, we’re so externally focused because we don’t trust or believe in ourselves. And so part of this process is a beautiful one and stripping away all the lies and all the conditioning and all the stuff that’s actually stopped us from understanding who we really are, and being able to realize that we have the ability to create the life that we want, we have the ability to make good decisions, when we can actually tap into the intuition, knowledge, experience, skills that we’ve been gifted with.

Melody Wilding 30:32
You hit the nail on the head. And what I would add to is that is such a confidence booster that exercise at looking back on when am I encountered something difficult? In my past? What helps me make a decision about that? What can I translate from that experience to what I’m dealing now to realize that you are resourceful, you do have capabilities. Again, I think that’s part of that external orientation is that we are always looking to other people to say you’re okay, you’re, you’re good enough, you’re good. Instead of actually internalizing that sense of confidence and self trust for ourselves.

Blake Schofield 31:10
I love it. It’s such a fun journey. And I appreciate those of you guys here, because you’re here because you want to be a part of that journey. And you’re taking the steps to do that. And that’s a huge thing that many people will never do. And yet I often say that this journey to self awareness, empowerment, creating the life that you want, leading a more fulfilling life is probably for me, right and 45 At this point, last I started this journey when I was like 10 and 12, I started studying this stuff got a little bit off track when I was in corporate America for a while and then came back to it and been very heavily invested in it in the last five years. And it has been impactful to me in ways I could have never even imagined. And I think that if people actually understood what was on the other side of taking the time to develop yourself, personally, there would not be one person who wouldn’t do it if they really understood what was possible on the other side. So thank you for coming and sharing a little bit about your journey melody about how people can begin to identify, Hey, I am sensitive Stryver, Hey, I am going to these patterns that aren’t working for me and begin to take some steps forward to allow themselves to start to feel more empowered and give themselves more grace and appreciate more of the gifts that they’ve been given. With that said, I know our time is almost up. So I’d love to ask you is there anything I haven’t asked you that I should have? Or anything that you it’s just really on your heart that you want to share that you feel like is important to get out to the world.

Melody Wilding 32:41
I want to share that sensitivity when leveraged when channeled can be your biggest superpower, that the thing you have thought for your entire lifetime has been your weakness can be your greatest strength.

Blake Schofield 32:54
I love that so much. I had a boss once tell me that you only like to solve the hard problems as if that was a bad thing. And I thought to myself, and I actually said to her, why is that a problem? There are lots of people that start off easy problems. There are a whole lot less people that can solve hard ones. And I think that many times the messages other people are giving us we may be misinterpret. And I know for those of us that are really sensitive, often we’re told that you need to be less sensitive, and you need to care less. And why are you emotional about that commercial or that movie? I don’t know. But I’ve been out. So I totally will cry about all of that stuff. If somebody cries, I’ll probably cry with them. And it’s funny because I look back on the feedback that was given to me. And I realized that it was while while it was said in a negative way, it was actually highlighting some of my greatest strengths. To your point, right, that high level of sensitivity happened, my ability to solve really complex problems is one of my greatest values in life. Because it enables me to do things other people cannot do. And in the job I was in, they wanted me to do a lot of operational, systemic stuff that I found horribly boring and have no interest in doing. And that was our point is like I can tell you don’t want to do this work. But you should be passionate about doing this work, which I was not. And so I just challenge each one of you that’s listening to understand that because melody to your point, we can be so externally focused. And then we take that thing, we think something’s wrong with us. But now I look and I’m like thank you for highlighting that what you were doing was highlighting that I was doing the wrong type of work and that my greatest gifts weren’t necessarily appreciated or fully able to be leveraged in this role. And so if you have somebody tell you that you’re too sensitive and you should XYZ, maybe it’s an opportunity to say thank you for saying that to me, because maybe I’m just in the wrong place or doing the wrong thing. Or maybe I’m just not using this as a superpower when it really is. And those of us that have sensitivity have this capability. We have the opportunity to use this to change people’s lives to build amazing teams to be able to identify where things are going off the rails really early to be able to direct the path of organizations, businesses goals, in ways that people who don’t take in that input completely miss. And it’s a beautiful gift when you understand appreciate it, and then begin to say, how can I use this to my advantage? So thank you so much for coming to share. I really appreciate you and everything that you bring. Melanie, if people want to connect with you or learn more about the work that you do, how can they find you?

Melody Wilding 35:37
You can find me at MelodyWilding.com You can find my book, Trust Yourself, wherever books are sold. And if you would like a free chapter, you can just head to MelodyWilding.com/chapter.

Blake Schofield 35:50
Wonderful. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, have a great week. Thanks for joining me today. Rather than hope the grass will be greener identify what the right next step is. We can help you do just that. Get clarity on where you are in your journey to career fulfillment, where you’re headed, optimal paths to get there, and the right next step to take. Start your complimentary personalized career fulfillment plan at www.thebridgetofulfillment.com/plan  Again, you can get your personalized career fulfillment plan at www.thebridgetofulfillment.com/plan Thanks again for joining and have a great week ahead.