Meet Brandi Fleck

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brandi Fleck a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Brandi, thank you so much for making time for us today. We’re excited to discuss a handful of topics with you, but perhaps the most important one is around decision making. The ability to make decisions is a key requirement for anyone who wants to make a difference and so we’d love to hear about how you developed your decision-making skills.
Decision making can be hard. And if you’re freshly out of an abusive and/or neglectful situation, it can be even more complicated. You can feel disoriented and wonder how you ended up where you are in the first place. This questioning leads to you wondering how you can ever trust yourself to make great decisions again, right? But, it doesn’t have to be that way forever.

This has happened to me and many of my clients as well.

I used to say things like, “the torture of a choice!” And then I would freeze.

I don’t say and do that anymore though. Here’s how:

First and foremost, develop your decision making skills by giving yourself a break—extend some self compassion and grace to yourself. It’s okay that you are where you are in your journey.

Then, rebuild your ability to listen to and trust your intuition.

When you’ve been through trauma like my clients and I have, hearing your intuition can take work—you have to know the difference between when your hyper vigilance is talking and when your intuition is really talking.

Your intuition is often quiet, calm, subtle, and comes in complete love. Hyper vigilance is usually based on the past and comes in fear. It’s usually loud.

There’s a time and place for both intuition and hyper vigilance, and if you’re in true danger, they may both come out. But, once you’re safe, if your hyper vigilance keeps coming out, it can start doing more harm than good. You might feel stuck in fear and like you’re always reactionary, leading to feeling like you have no control over life—like it’s happening to you instead of for you.

If you’re living in a constant state of hyper vigilance, you can start calming it (as long as you’re actually safe), by identifying and neutralizing the triggers that are dysregulating your nervous system.

Here’s a free workshop for that: https://www.brandifleckcoaching.com/self-healing-the-root-workshop

You can also remember what already helps you feel safe and calm, and return to those resources as much as you need to. For instance, if you know breathing or putting your hands on your heart calm you down, do those things. Walk in the grass and notice the specific physical sensations on your toes—is the grass cold? Wet? Dry? Warm? Spikey? Soft? Ground into the present moment.

Once you’re better able to regulate and feel calmer, other things you can do to make decisions easier are:

Identify and prioritize your core values. Then, make sure that when you make a decision, they are aligned with your most important core values.

When you say yes to something and really mean it, notice how it feels in your body. For example, do you feel light, warm, tingly? Does your mind go quiet? On the other hand, notice what it feels like in your body when you say yes and really mean no. Do you feel heavy? Dread? Anxiety? Those sensations and emotions are directing you to more aligned choices that serve you better. Pay attention and then react accordingly.

If you say yes and really meant no (or vice versa), remember that it’s definitely okay to change your mind later. Communication is key here, so if others are involved, be sure to let them know the truth—for example, you thought you’d be able to say yes, but it turns out you need to take care of yourself and say no.

And, if another person is asking something of you and you need to make a decision to give them an answer, pause before you commit. Respectfully communicate that you need time to think about it. And if there’s pressure to decide now even though you’ve requested time, then the answer is automatically no (at least for me).

Nothing is permanent, so a mistake really is a learning opportunity. It’s a chance to practice making another decision. Practice—going out and doing the thing that you want to get better at—makes you better at it.

In other words, the more you respect yourself by choosing yourself through aligned decisions, the more you’ll start to trust your decision making capabilities.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I help people self heal trauma and feel like themselves again. I’m a trauma-informed certified life coach who specializes in trauma recovery coaching. I became certified in 2022 and opened my own private coaching practice in Feb. 2023.

I work with trauma survivors who struggle with living life on their own terms because the past has taught them that doing so isn’t safe. I help them recognize the root of the issue and heal it so it becomes easier to move forward in a way that actually feels good.

My coaching style is focused on transformation—getting to the heart of who my clients truly are, to the root of what’s problematic for them specifically, and then integrating new, heart-based solutions, beliefs, and ideas that we uncover, holistically through their lives.

I’ve found that many of my clients start out as identifying as their trauma responses. These survival adaptations have been going on for so long, they just seem like part of their personalities. But in reality, those particular things like anxiety, guilt, worry, inability to make a decision—those are all symptoms of a bigger issue. They’re not your personality. They are trauma responses.

That’s one reason why I recently released my Self Healing the Root workshop. It’s based on the exact steps I took to self heal my own trauma. It’s about identifying and breaking your trigger loops (the trauma responses keeping you stuck). It walks you through identifying triggers, regulating big emotions, thinking about your behavioral adaptations and creating a plan specific to you to start changing them.

It’s free for now and you can register here: https://www.brandifleckcoaching.com/self-healing-the-root-workshop

At the time of this interview, I also have several 1:1 coaching spots available. You can schedule a free consultation with me to learn more: https://calendly.com/brandifleckcoaching/free-consultation

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three skills that have been most impactful in my own healing journey have been my ability to:

-Recognize my triggers and break the loop
-Accept and let go
-Integrate new knowledge through action

Here’s my advice if you want to work on these skills too:

I never judge a coping mechanism (a.k.a. a behavioral adaptation triggered by a nervous system reaction) because it formed to help you survive. It had a very loving purpose, even if there were some negative consequences. So don’t beat yourself up for the ways you’ve coped in the past. Forgive yourself and love the parts of yourself that didn’t know what they didn’t know or that had needs you felt ashamed of. You did the best you could with what you knew and had at the time.

Then, once you know better or are in a better situation, that old coping mechanism likely no longer serves you. You know it’s time to thank it for it’s service and let it go when it causes more harm than good.

Letting something go can be as simple as making a different decision than the one you’ve always made. Over time, the positive impact that has on your identity and confidence can be worth the challenge you went through.

And, try to see the opportunity in the challenge rather than what’s happening or happened to you, even though you never deserved the bad things that happened to you. This will help you make meaning of your experiences and cultivate real gratitude (not the toxic kind that tries to avoid all negativity.) Finding real gratitude brings peace. Making meaning of your experiences helps you find your purpose, and finding your purpose and then living it is an ultimate healer.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
For me, being able to manage overwhelm actually starts with being able to make aligned decisions. By aligned decisions, I mean choosing the option that takes the most care of you and your real needs, not what someone else thinks you should be doing.

When you make aligned decisions, it can help turn down the noise of external pressures or perceived external pressures.

I’ve been working on doing this for at least seven years now in my own life and I feel so much better.

Based on that and the work I do with my clients, you can start working on the things I mentioned earlier that help develop your decision making skills, like focusing on your foundations—that is, identifying some triggers and behavioral responses that are keeping you stuck in that overwhelm. That way you can start regulating big emotions and taking action to change your trauma responses. In time, it can then be easier to make sure you’re saying no when you mean no and yes when you mean yes. This really helps with overwhelm.

Other strategies I would reiterate or add include:

-Regularly practice self compassion.
-Shift focus from the big picture and the uncertainty around it to the next best step.
-Let go of what absolutely doesn’t have to be done now and what you can’t control.
-Then, break that next best step down into the smallest achievable part.
-Then, take action on that smallest achievable part to make some progress.
-Keep track of your progress so you can see you’re moving!
-Ask for help when you need it, even when that’s hard.
-Rinse and repeat!

If you want more in-depth tactical tips, here’s a blog I’ve written about managing overwhelm: https://www.brandifleckcoaching.com/blog/dealing-with-the-overwhelm-of-everyday-tasks

And remember, it takes time to heal and change behaviors. Patience is a must.

If someone would have told me what I’m telling you now about seven years ago, all this information would have even been overwhelming.

Know that eventually, with effort, having options feels like freedom instead of torture.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Keturah Bishop (credit for headshots and my hands taking notes only) Image of desk with computer and flat lay of ipad with scheduling screen are stock photos that I edited.

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