Tuning into Your Intuition for Lifelong Fulfillment with Tara McFarland

Intuition, often our inner compass, plays a pivotal role in life's decision-making. It's the unspoken wisdom that guides us, helping make choices aligned with our authentic selves. By utilizing it, it empowers us to make decisions that deeply resonate. However, how can we harness it to lead a more fulfilling and purposeful life? In this episode, we're joined by Tara McFarland, a civil engineer turned intuitive leadership coach. Tara discusses the importance of tuning into intuition, how intuition and logic must work together in engineering and coaching. Furthermore, Tara provides a sneak peek into the highly anticipated Rocky Mountain Young Professional Summit 2023. If you're ready to embark on a journey of self-discovery and transformation, this episode is a must-listen. --- Listen to the podcast here: Tuning into Your Intuition for Lifelong Fulfillment with Tara McFarland Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. This podcast, I always kind of describe as being a little bit of a fifty-fifty podcast in that 50 percent of it is centered around my hometown of Denver, Colorado, and 50 percent of it is with guests in some other places. In some of the more recent episodes, we featured some guests from other places but this episode is something we’ve kind of done before which we’re featuring a specific opportunity and event in Denver, Colorado, coming next month, October 13th, the Rocky Mountain Young Professionals Summit. In order to talk about that as well as her more recent endeavors is my guest today, Tara McFarland, intuitive healing coach, hopefully I got that right, and the founder of Create Conversation LLC. --- Tara, welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, I call myself an intuitive leadership coach. Intuitive leadership coach. I’m sorry, I tried to get that right. Yeah, no worries. Well, and I like the combination between the intuitive and the leadership because my background is in engineering and so a lot of the people that I work with are very analytical types and so when we talk about leadership, people understand what that means. The intuitive part is what they’re learning when they work with me. And one of your key endeavors has been taking people with a similar background to yours, engineering, and introducing them to kind of concepts that don’t necessarily come naturally to a lot of people with the engineering mindset. Tell us a little bit about your journey in that particular realm. Like I said, my background is in engineering and I was a civil engineer for over 20 years. Right about year 20, I hit a very major patch of burnout where I just completely shattered, had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. I thought my career was over. And this was predicated by being in a position where I had been a technical team lead, meaning I had been doing designs for most of my career, and then I shifted into a more non-technical program position and I became a project manager, program manager, I was suddenly leading multidisciplinary teams and I actually didn’t have any idea how to do it. Oh, wow. And I didn’t get the training that was needed to understand what the dynamics are within teams and really how to deal with people, like I had been evaluating dams almost 15 years at that point and now I’m having to lead teams and it’s a totally different skill set. And so I was on this project that was very high profile, it was politically sensitive, it was a really big project. It would have — like if I could have carried this project through to the end, it would have been a launching point for me to continue up the ladder. What happened instead was that it was just like a series of things that kept happening where I knew that something wasn’t quite right in the project but I didn’t know how to bring that up and I didn’t know how to bring it up to the project team and I didn’t really know how to bring it up to my supervisors and we were working with this third party and it was just this really odd dynamic of our core team, a third party, and their consultant. I was in that role for three years and, at the end of three years, eventually, what happened was that I finally got to a point where I was tired of hearing about how I needed to be more careful in meetings that I didn’t seem angry. Oh, wow. And as a woman in engineering, if there are any women in male-dominated industries listening, this might resonate really well because I have a very direct personality style. It was hard for me to hide emotions. So we would be in these meetings, it would be really difficult, nobody’s having fun in them, and it lands on me as one of the leaders of the project that I’m looking like I’m angry or I’m upset or whatever. That point, I just lost it. I literally couldn’t see any way out of this because I had been receiving this negative feedback and, actually, it was only really a couple of times but the problem was is that throughout my career, I had gotten really good performance reviews so there was never this thing about, “We really need to work on communication, I think we need development in this area,” there wasn’t this development of potential that people saw, it was kind of like a sink or swim situation and I just felt like I sunk. Yeah. At that point, I remember being so upset, couldn’t see a way out that I went to not my supervisor but actually my superior so his supervisor and I told her that I couldn’t continue on the project and that I had to go part time. I was done. I really had no idea where my next steps were going to be. So, I had a really supportive supervisor and superior and they agreed to let me go part time, they hired somebody to take my place, and I started to really look at what was it that I wanted to do with the rest of my life because I knew I wasn’t going to hang out where I was. I was like, I think I’m done with engineering. But I also want to help people who are in industries like this to start to understand and unravel all this stuff that we’re told all this conditioning that we take on and get to what does it mean to lead from the inside out. So when I call myself an intuitive leadership coach, it’s because it’s having people tune into their own intuition, what they see as their strengths and leadership that are often reflected back to them but we focus so much on the negative that it’s hard to see what the positives are sometimes, and then really to cultivate a career based on that. So you were in engineering for 20 years and I always think of engineering as having a kind of a more straightforward and linear approach and a little less, I don’t want to say touchy feely but a little less of like trying to tap into some of those things like intuition. My impression is that it tends to appeal more toward people who want to be exact and follow a direct procedure. For those 20 years that you were in that field and doing the day to day work, did you feel happy or was there another part of you that wasn’t coming out? I can safely say that I was not happy in my career. And you’re right, it was like being on train tracks. It was just a straight, linear, if I get to this destination, I’ll be happy, if I get to this destination, I’ll be happy. That’s kind of how I went through my career. So, if I had ever stopped to, say, hang out at a stop, at a little train depot for a minute and reflect on is this really where I want to be and what I want to be doing, the answer would have been no. But for most of my career, I just pushed that to the side. That was my intuition talking, there was always this little voice of, “This isn’t really what you’d like to do.” Yeah. I would just push it to the side and I would move forward and I would go for the next promotion or take on the next project or try to learn a new skill, a technical skill, not a people skill, and then prove myself. There was a whole lot of, “I need to prove myself in this situation.” And not everybody is like that, right? Yeah, for sure. I work with sure who really love engineering and they’re just needing to find their spot in it, like where to land where they feel supported by the company. They’re doing more of what they really like to do versus just putting up with stuff that they don’t like to do. Yeah, what’s energizing versus what’s draining. Exactly. When I started to tune into my own intuition which happened after this breakdown, at the time, I was very lucky to have a mentor who really helped me to open up to these ideas that seemed so foreign. I mean, you’re right. It’s not a touchy feely profession, it’s a profession where people don’t want to talk about emotions and feelings, they just want to get the work done but, underneath, there’s always emotions running the show and we just kind of tried to pretend they’re not. Luckily, with this mentor, I was able to start to open up to emotions are okay. I also have a therapist. I mean, like I was a teen, right? So emotions are okay and if I’m feeling drained all the time, if this stuff is so hard to get through, then do I really need to be here? Is this the environment for me to be in? And a lot of that work led me to using human design in my coaching because it helped me to really understand what is it that I’m doing that is draining and why is it draining. I’ve spent like a decade trying to figure out why I have like energy crashes at 2:30 in the afternoon, like so many people. Well, honestly, I think that one of the reasons why we have energy crashes at 2:30 in the afternoon is because we’re not supposed to work the way we’re working, none of us. Yeah. 100 percent agree. I even read that old book — well, it’s now old, from 2010, The Way We Work Isn’t Working [sic] by Barry Schwartz. Oh, I haven’t read that one....