The Art of Living Big | Subconscious | NLP | Mindset

Oh WOW, this one hits different for sure. In this episode, there are many ah-ha moments as Betsy outlines three signs to watch for when your partner promises change. Is it performance change, or real transformation? This podcast will leave you with the clarity you have been craving. You may even want to take notes during this one!

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big. Hi everyone. Welcome to the show today. Our trip to Belize has been finalized, so if you heard me on last week’s episode, talk about this retreat that I’m doing the Reimagined Life in Belize this July. It’s the 23rd to the 27th, please join me. There is a link, on my website. In the header bar if you go to live, and I’m posting about it every day on Instagram. I think we got, we opened yesterday afternoon and we’ve already got a really great group of women coming, so I am so excited. I’m like thrilled. This is gonna be just really so much fun. And we had our first live coffee here in Atlanta, and that was so fun to see everybody. I was planning on going to California in May, and I was gonna do one of these in May, and then my trip got changed. But we are still looking at all of these and, and trying to plan. Times to go. And also, and also why is the airlines, the flights are so expensive ’cause of gas. It’s so exhausting. I remember years ago when I took that trip to Iceland, I flew from Atlanta to London and it literally was like. 30,000 delta points, what would translates to like 500 bucks. Now it’s like 1500 bucks. , It’s just so sad. And so to kind of circle back to Belize, I know that if you come to Belize, I know that it is a challenge and I’m gonna show up for you. There’s still, I think, one spot left, maybe not by the time you hear this, but maybe, , for the VIP swag bags, so, you know, get in there and who knows it. Maybe all the early people that get in right away will get a swag bag like that. So we’re working on all that stuff in the background here too. So today though, what I really wanted to talk about was this thing that I have posted about online. And it’s something that people ask me about all the time. It is something that many women have seen me post about. And so when they have seen that particular post is when they decide to investigate working with me. And then they go through the whole program. And then when it happens to them, I think they’re like, oh my God, what? What is this? And I’ll tell you, it. It is a really, really hard thing when you have been working so hard and fighting for your marriage and not feeling as if you are heard to then get to the heart wrenching decision that you can no longer stay intact as a human in this relationship. To then decide to leave, to ultimately save yourself, and then to have your partner go, Hey, I’m gonna do the work. And so I wanna talk about that moment because it is something that I have a lot of thoughts about. And also, even as I go to talk about it, I wanna preface, and this is something I say inside my program all the time. Is that there is no right answer here. It’s just about what’s right for you and honestly, what’s right for you today may not be the same thing that’s right for you six months from now, , or two years from now, and you’re allowed to move through things and change your mind and lean into hope and get your bearings and make a decision. Like all of those things are really, really valid. And so even as I say all this, I just wanna say there’s no right decision, and I am certainly not coming here telling you what to do because if I knew what to do, then I would be, I don’t know, sucking on a pina colada somewhere in, in the deep Caribbean. But my point is that if I knew what to do. Then that would have made my whole journey easier. I was in indecision too. So I understand deeply this place, and I think that this place of indecision has value. I know that sounds so crazy, but I think there’s something to learn in every single part of our lives. And so I wanna talk about this and I wanna talk about this specific moment where you get to the place where you decide you wanna leave. So first of all, I wanna talk about. What is historically what I have seen and what I have experienced in my own life experience of what happens before you get to this moment. Now, I believe you can choose to believe differently, but I believe that women will stay long after it has fizzled out for them because they want to have. A partner, . They wanna have a partnership. They wanna have a life that they had hoped and dreamed about. , When women get married, we want this vision. We, have an idea of what partnership will be, what it’ll be like to possibly raise kids with that person. What our vacations will be like and how we’ll make joint decisions and what all of those components of building a life with somebody actually entail. And when those things are never realized, I truly believe women. I’m using a lot of blanket statements here. I get that. So if you’re a man listening, this can go both ways. , I work with women, whether they’re married to a man or a woman. So I’m just talking from a woman’s perspective here. I believe that women will just try to make things work and they will try. If the vision that they had doesn’t work, they’ll try to adapt to a new vision. I don’t believe that it’s that women only want their way or the highway. I really believe it’s that they’re trying to navigate, well, what does this mean? And when there’s communication issues or when hard decisions are being avoided, or when they as human beings aren’t being seen and met. It becomes this really confusing swirl of, I don’t know what to picture from here, because this isn’t, not only not what I imagined, but it’s also not clear what it is. And I think that moment for a lot of women is where the indecision and the circular thinking about it sets in. Because they can’t make a decision to stay or go when they don’t fully understand what they have. Some moments he meets them where they’re at some moments he doesn’t he’ll, ask for what they’ll need and he’ll say that he’s going to do it and then never does. So that confusion starts to really set in. And so, , the men in my comments sometimes get really angry with this particular post. Because of their own experience with it. But I believe that when you get to this moment where the woman says she’s gonna leave, there is a whole lifetime of work and exhaustion and pleading and trying and adapting that happens before they ever get to that place. And so when they get to that place. It is really a moment where they’re throwing their hands up and saying , I don’t know what else to do from here. And I believe it is a moment where their life force energy is rising up and saying, I will not be lost in this. I cannot be lost in this. And I think the women that really get to the place where they are grasping for their own air in this. And so now here you are. You have been through it trying to get him to hear you and step up and do things differently and become a partner. Even if it’s not the partnership you had in mind. You are willing to adapt and to discover and to create something different, but you never get any clarity or any communication. To tell you what this is, and now you’re taking your one last big deep breath of air before you feel like you just will drown and you say, I can’t do this anymore. I’ve decided that this marriage no longer works for me anymore. And what I see so often in my program is, there’s a moment he maybe takes a beat, maybe he gets mad, maybe he just ignores you. But what I have found in the program is that there is always a pause of some sort, and then it sort of settles. And as it settles, he begins to understand that his experience is about to change. And when that awareness happens, when he recognizes that you are no longer willing. To just keep doing things the way that you had been. Then he wants to show up differently. He wants to talk. He wants to go to therapy. He’s reading the books. He’s saying all the things. Maybe he’s even crying, which you haven’t seen maybe in years. He’s asking you what is it that you need, and he’s telling you that he’s willing to do it. , He will do anything. He’s telling you I am changing. Like it’s been three days. And he’s like, I am changing. , I’m looking at this book, I’m reading this, listening to this podcast. I’m whatever. He’s just telling you to give him a chance.. And so what I wanna talk about today is what, that is what happens inside you when that happens, and how to tell the difference between. Real change and , the same kind of pattern, maybe showing up a little bit differently. And I think most importantly, how do you hold onto what you know to be true without turning into a shell of yourself trying to do it right? Because I think that’s the trap, right? Like in order to protect yourself and your clarity, you think, okay, well I’ve got. Get hard, like I’ve got a armor up here. And so you think that you, need to stop feeling stuff because it is a shell shock. It’s like you got whiplash from it. And so what I wanna talk about is how to move through that whiplash and finding where it is that you really need to go. So I wanna talk about what is actually happening. Inside your body when this change happens, right? When he says this is gonna happen, and when he says, I’m already changing, I’m already doing the work. And maybe he’s learning some words, right? He’s learning some new vocabulary words that make it sound like hopeful and that maybe it’s true and. So that version of him, , that’s showing up. Now, this engaged version, the one who wants you to know, the one who wants to listen, right? And the one who wants you to know he’s changing that version, is the version that you have likely been asking for years, maybe decades, , depending on how long you’ve been doing this. And your nervous system does not know what to do with this. So when I say nervous system, if you’re newer here or not, in my circle in my world, our nervous system, what do we see? What do we hear? What do we smell? What do we like? These are all the ways that my nervous system takes in information and inside my body it’s how I’m processing what’s happening. So I’ve got like cognitively what I’m thinking about it, , Ooh, this sounds like everything but what’s happening inside my nervous system. So your body remembers. Every single time that you begged him to, listen, right? Every conversation where you tried to explain yourself or, , felt defeated and, cried about it every moment that you made yourself smaller. And when I say smaller, I mean like where you realized that asking for something. Was met with avoidance and so you learned to not ask, but instead to just internally turn inward and just get tiny so that the relationship could keep working. And every time that you told yourself, , maybe it’ll change maybe after the holidays or , maybe we can work on this after the kids’ graduation, or once this project at work settles down, or whatever it is. And now you have gone come to this painstaking decision and now he’s here doing the thing. So , , it scrambles you, right? Internally? Of course it does, because one part of you, the part that was holding on for years is going like, oh my God. He’s finally, he finally gets it. He finally sees me. And then there’s this other part of you that, finally was able to stop holding on it. Like grasping for air is going. , Wait, I, just put this down like I finally made a decision and put this down. And you are caught between those two things. And this is like your whole history colliding and, dealing with this new present reality. And honestly, it feels terrible. It feels terrible, and I don’t think that. The person, the partner who is all of the sudden showing up recognizes how terrible it is. I don’t know how they could, , because if they had been ignoring you for so long, then how could they just suddenly understand? And if they truly understood, then they would know how terrible it felt and they would stop asking you to do something that you’d finally decided to do. So. The question , that I want you to sit with in this whole thing is like, why? Why? Why is it now? Why now? Because the things that you are leaving over have been there for a long time. You’ve been saying them, you’ve been asking him to change or her to change. You’ve been signaling it right? In a lot of different ways. So why are they showing up now? And there’s a version of this that I think can be true, absolutely can be true, which is like they finally heard you, they finally get how severe this is, and that is possible. , There’s the version where maybe they finally did it, understood it, or there’s a version where they finally felt consequences to what they were doing. And those are different sides of the stick because when someone changes because they heard you, that’s change coming from them seeing you. When someone changes because they heard you, that’s change coming from them seeing you. When someone changes because they felt consequences. That’s change coming from them feeling the loss of what you provide. And you have to be honest with yourself about which one this is, because one of them is a response to fear and one of them is real change that you can actually work with. One of them deserves hope and one of ’em is the same pattern, running in a different way. A response to fear lasts until the fear goes away, which, happens the moment you decide to stay or they feel safe enough that you’re going to stay, that you’re not going to leave. And so when you think about this, you have to get honest with yourself about what is he actually responding to. Is he responding to you like the whole you, the, you that maybe he hasn’t really. Paused to look at in years? Or is he responding to the possibility of losing his life as he knows it? And those look the same from the outside, right? The words are the same. The going to the podcast and going to the therapy and finally getting a coach and doing all that. All of that looks the same, but they’re coming from completely different places and they go in completely different directions. So. I wanna talk about how to actually tell the difference, but I also wanna, interject this thought too as I’ve been talking. You know, when we think about values, like what’s important to me, what’s important to me about a relationship, what’s important to me about a friendship, what’s important to me about work, what’s important to me about any of the number of things that I do in the world? Those are my values. Now, if I had a, friend, even a coworker that came to me and said, what you are doing is really upsetting me, I would pause and I would say, help me understand because I don’t wanna upset you. Now, if it was a partner, absolutely I would stop everything that is in my value system. I would be like, wait, what? That’s not how I’m gonna move forward. And if your partner didn’t do that, that’s a difference in values. And a difference in values is a whole lot different than we just like different things for dinner. This is like. How we actually operate and how we experience the world is different. Okay, so now how can you tell if this is like a real change? So I’m gonna give you a couple things to watch for, not to analyze him. I don’t want you putting him or her on trial. I just wanna give you something to look at when your nervous system gets this overload and you are like, I don’t know what to think. Okay, so number one is that real change is actually slow. Real change is slow. , If inside two weeks he has become a totally different man, like that is not change. That is the performance of change. Performance of change is really fast. Real change in a human being, especially around patterns that are decades old, don’t happen in two days or two weeks. It doesn’t even happen in a month. It happens over a long time, and it has a lot of, I’m gonna say like reflection or ugly, messy parts. Right. There’s like, this is what I want to accomplish. This is what I’m trying to figure out. I’m trying to understand myself and why I do this. Oh my gosh, did I do it again? Tell me how that felt to you. This is what I’m thinking about. This is what I’m afraid of, like there are backslides, there’s discomfort on their side about who they used to be. Like they get a, a realization. Of the pain that their behavior has caused. Right now, so many women in my program say, but I get it. Like his family was, you know, he had the, it’s okay, you can understand it, and his behavior can still cause real harm. And if he thinks he’s changed in two days, because you said you’re gonna leave, that is performance change. And so if what you’re seeing is super. Smooth, , super polished. I want you to pay attention to that. Okay. So real transformation with a person that’s really wrestling with their behavior. And, and, and potentially being embarrassed of themselves, of getting it wrong. Like that person is showing up much differently than someone that’s like, Hey, I’m doing the work. I know I’m a Apex man. Or whatever the, the bro podcast say. Okay. So number two is, and this one is, this one’s tricky. Okay. But number two is that real change isn’t about you. It’s not about you. It when he is doing the changing to accommodate you, to make you happy, to get you to notice how he’s doing things. If every gesture is aimed at you right when he’s doing it, to get you to change your mind. When every single thing is about how he’s going to be different for you, that likely isn’t change. It’s just a more, I’m gonna, I’m gonna say like sophisticated reason or sophisticated version maybe of making you responsible for him. Right. Now you are responsible for his behavior instead of him being responsible for his behavior. Real change when someone actually is doing the work, it includes them going and getting themselves help. That has nothing to do with you, right? It’s not a. It’s not you guys sitting down and just talking about stuff. It’s him working on his own stuff, his own shame, his own patterns. Just like you have likely done, right? This is why you’re listening to this show, stuff that has its own separate life outside of your marriage, because if the entire project of him changing is happening because of you, then it’s all aimed at you and the minute you are not there, or the minute. That project stops then it’s not his, it’s yours, and then you are still carrying it. But just in a different way. Just in a different way. And I have often thought when I hear the stories and my own lived experience, like if you really understood what you’ve done, you wouldn’t be asking me to do anything different than what I’m doing. Okay? So number three is that real change doesn’t pressure you. In your decision. Right. Just what I just said. This is, this one is, big and I think sometimes confusing, right? Real change looks like him saying like, oh my God, I’m getting it. And I understand why you have decided what you’ve decided. And I’m gonna go do this work because it’s mine and I’m gonna do it. Whether you stay or don’t stay. And I am so sorry. And maybe someday we will meet again and you’ll meet a different version of me performed. Change looks like him saying, you know, look at, I’m trying, look at, I brought out the garbage. I did all this stuff for us. Right? Please don’t. And they’re like, please give me a chance. You owe me a chance. The kids need you to give me a chance, right? I don’t wanna live without you. I don’t wanna do this without you. And on one of those aspects, , there’s this person that you decided to do your life with, that you want to be with, and the other one is treating your decision. Like something he’s in charge of that he gets to decide what you do and you’ll feel the difference in your body. You know you’re gonna feel it. One of them leaves you feeling more spacious. I always say , if you can feel your chest expanding, that’s likely the direction you wanna go if you feel yourself constricting. That’s a lot of really good information and so. , Even if you listen to those three things that I said and you’re like, okay, he fails all of those, I can see clearly that this is a, you know, it’s fear. It’s not real change yet. All the things you are still gonna feel like you wanna stay. It’s totally normal. It is not like a sign. You’re making the wrong decision. It’s just a sign that you’re human. So it doesn’t mean that you’re making a right decision. It doesn’t mean you’re making a wrong decision. It just means that you are a human being who loved someone for a really long time. , You built a life with this person. You possibly had children with this person. You shared pets and history, and maybe inside jokes or a house. You know, you both love the holidays the way you do them. Maybe you have coffee with them in the morning. Maybe there’s parts of him that you’re like, he can be a good friend. And the pull is that part of you doesn’t wanna lose that world. And that part of you isn’t bad. It’s not weak, it’s not wrong. It is just the part of you that knows how to love. Then you don’t wanna get rid of that part of you. You just don’t want that part of you to be the one making the decisions. When the pull comes, I, want you to do something. I want you to stop and let it speak. You know, Elizabeth Gilbert has this really good line in her book, big Magic about Fear. And how it can be in the car with you, but it can’t be the driver. It can’t operate the radio. It has to sit in the backseat. Will you decide? So don’t argue with it. Don’t try to put it down. Just put it in the backseat and let it say whatever it is he wants to say. It’s gonna say things like, I love him. It’s gonna say things like, but what about the kids? What about if this is a wrong decision? Or I’m scared, I don’t wanna go through this. What if he can change? What if I don’t know who I am without him? Let it, let it say all of that, and then when you get in a really settled place that you have worked so hard to get to, you get to answer that. And whatever way is a right for you. , I’ve talked about my own journey here. I, I decided, I, I got the bravery. I mean, it took me a long time to get the words to say I’m gonna leave, and he said, I’m gonna work on it. And I leaned into hope, and I think that’s so important. And I stayed for a few more years until I had the wisdom to see that the change in my experience , wasn’t real. It wasn’t the way that I wanted to move forward, and so I finally had the wisdom to leave and to not turn back and to just keep going down the path that was right for me because you can still love him and leave, like you can still get to the place where you are just like, I can’t continue to live in a container. Where I feel like this all the time, loving him and staying are two different decisions. And I know that sounds really confusing and if that doesn’t feel right to you, that’s okay. I think we can love someone, who is the, parent to our kids. Somebody who we have experienced a lot of life with and not love who we are in the relationship with them. So I wanted to talk with you about how to get through this without like, turning into a shell of yourself really. So here is something that I see women do when their husband start fighting for the marriage after they decided to leave, is that they just go kind of cold. Like they, they don’t even know what to do. They kind of get like frozen, you know? They get distant or they armor up and they don’t know what’s real and what’s not. And I totally get that because I think the pull can be really, really strong to be, to keep going the path you had decided, which was painstaking to come to, and the pull of being afraid you’re making a wrong decision, but you don’t have to just turn. Into a shell of yourself in order to make any decision. The, feeling of being frozen is, just a, sign that you’re afraid. That’s all. It’s not a sign that you’re unclear. It’s not a sign that maybe you were wrong about your decision. It’s just a sign that you’ve got fear. So I think. That if you are in this right now, I want you to know that I know it’s hard and I know you’re freaking exhausted. I know it feels like you can’t really find any solid ground anywhere, and I know that there is a part of you that’s wondering if you should just go back. If you should, just give it one more try. Lean into hope and just see what happens, and I would never tell you what to do, but my job is to help you hear yourself. And so I want you to do that. I want you to know what you already know before any of this started. That’s how you ended up at this decision. It didn’t come from nowhere. And you can give yourself the space of seeing if the change is real or if it’s performance, and you get to decide that you don’t wanna go through that as well. Both options are fair because it’s up to you, it’s your life and you get to keep what you know. Nobody can take that from you, not his fear, not his change, not his pleading, not even your own pull back and forth. You get to keep the clarity of what you know, and I think that is how you live a big life, not by getting cold. And not by winning an argument, but by staying with yourself, even though every single thing is gonna try to pull you out of it. I love you so much. I will see you guys next week. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today. You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.

Do you use words in everyday communication that make you smaller? In this episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy shines a light on the little things we were taught as children that we may not even catch ourselves doing as adults. Betsy invites us to catch this reflex, claim our accurate self worth, stop using apologetic language, and maybe we can collectively eliminate shrinking once and for all. PS, who wants to join us in Belize?

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big. Hi everyone. Welcome to the show today. So, alright, before we get started, I wanna tell you about this show that I have been watching. I have a hard time, and maybe you’re like this too, but I have a hard time finding a, show to like chill out and watch that isn’t. , I’m gonna say like scary. I don’t want true crime. Like I’m pretty careful about what I put in my brain, you know what I mean? And so it’s hard for me to find something that I actually really enjoy that feels light enough that I’m not stressed out before I go to bed. And , I talked a couple weeks ago about how I got that bed jet. I swear this isn’t. It. I’m not sponsored. I want to be, but I’m not. But I got this bed jet and you turn it on. It’s like this. It blows hot air, basically. Hot or cool air. But my favorite thing in the world is to take a shower at night, get all the pollen off me from the day, turn on turbo mode so that when I get in bed, it’s like cozy and warm and then put on a show and watch a show for 30 minutes or something, and then go to bed. This has become like my, I, it bring, this brings me so much joy. Okay. But what do you watch? Because I don’t wanna be stressed out. I’m not really into reality shows. Like it’s just, I, , maybe I’m super picky, but, I found a show and I started watching it, and it was just so quirky and weird and fun. And then it never ended. I was like, why is this, how am I still watching this show after days and days and days? And I realized there were two seasons. And so it’s a great show to watch ’cause there’s like eight episodes but two seasons and it’s just gets kookier and crazier. So the show is called Palm Royale and it’s on. Apple tv. It’s totally worth getting Apple TV for it. I think , if you’re like me, did you ever see that show the residents on Netflix? It is a Shondaland mystery about a murder at the White House, and it’s quirky and weird like a clue. Remember that board game Clue. , Anyway, this reminds me of it, Palm Royale, but it’s set in Palm Beach, so it’s in the sixties and it’s just quirky and weird and really fun. So anyway, that’s my hot tip for a show if you like to watch something light and not get stressed out before bed. So I’ve got some fun things that are coming up and one of them. Is that we are going to Belize. I know. It’s so fun. I’m so excited. So I don’t have the exact dates, but by the time this airs, it should be live on my website. If you go to betsypake.com and you’ll see live events in the menu and it’ll be there. But we found this place that you’ll fly into the main Belize airport. And then we’ll pick you up and put you on a little plane and shuttle you to like a little island, and we’re gonna spend time together, chilling out and recreating your life. , I’m so excited about the little workshops that have got planned for us. So be on the lookout for that. We’re gonna do it in. July. I think it’s gonna be around the 24th. I don’t have the exact, like I said, I, met with them on our final appointment yesterday to finalize everything. They were gonna confirm everything. The people that I hired to do this, and it will be live hopefully by the time you’re listening to this. So I’m like so, so excited to get to see people and hang out and spend time together at the beach. And just like that place I heard is like amazing snorkeling. It’s like going into an aquarium. Anyway, it’s gonna be amazing. I haven’t had a beach trip yet this year, and , I need to have a beach trip before it hits like hurricane season. And so anyway, I’m super excited and I hope, that you can join me, which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about today. We’re gonna talk about something that I think that every single one of us that’s listening has probably done. Maybe you’ve already done it today, multiple times. And I wanna talk about all the ways that we make ourselves smaller, and I don’t mean physically, although we have been told to do that too. But I mean, in the way that we shrink our opinions, dismiss ourselves the way that we use words to make ourselves appear more submissive or. Smaller, you know, your, your needs are not as important and you’re just asking, you’re just suggesting you can dismiss my thought if you want, and maybe this is something that you’ve got good at and you’re not doing anymore, but I noticed that I did this yesterday and when I did it, I was like, oh my gosh, I’m doing this thing. So here’s what happened. I’ve been working on this retreat with this really lovely company that’s helping me plan it, and I’ve been working with this woman and she set up like a preliminary page for our retreat, and they asked me, like for my bio, and I sent over the bios that I have and pictures of me, stuff like that. So she puts all the information on there. And when I’m looking at it under my name, it says Coach. It says coach, speaker, and writer. And that is what’s in my bio. It’s like a media bio that we sent her. But it said, coach and I looked at it for a long time and look, , I am a coach. But it didn’t feel right. To me, you know, I’ve been coaching since 2012. I’m a certified master coach. I’m, trained up to the level of trainer. I can train coaches and therapists to do what I do. I have multiple certifications and I’ve gone in deep with those. I’m highly, trained and I have spent over a decade doing this work. I have built a program, I have had a podcast for nine years. I wrote a book. I have another book that’s. In process right now, I have helped thousands of women go through some of the hardest decisions of their lives, and when I looked at it, it said coach. And so when I went to write her an email. And I thought, I’m just gonna ask her to update that. , It should at minimum, say, master coach and I don’t need to have all my credentials and the letters after my name and all that stuff, but , I needed to have it, not just say, coach, that wasn’t accurate. And I started the email and I wrote, I know this is gonna sound silly, but. And as soon as I got that out, I was like, oh my God. I, was at a coffee shop and I like sat back at the coffee shop, looked around the room, like I looked around the room actually at women and men that were there, and I thought, would the men do that? , And this has nothing to do with. Our chromosomes. I’m not, it doesn’t have anything to do with our gender. It has to do with our socialization. Right? Would men do that? Why is this silly? Like, why did I wanna say, I know this sounds silly. Why am I pre apologizing for asking to be accurately represented? Why am I padding a, completely reasonable and totally professional, not even remotely complicated request with language that immediately tells the other person that I don’t fully believe that I deserve what I’m asking for. And so I deleted the email, deleted the opener, changed it, sent the email, and just said, Hey, I see that I’m. Posted and listed as Coach. Would you mind changing that to Master Coach? Done. But I kept thinking about that moment because of the, I know it sounds silly. I know it sounds silly. That wasn’t for her. She didn’t need it. She probably didn’t even notice. She didn’t care. Like she doesn’t, okay. Master coach, whatever that language was for me, it was a reflex a, habit, right? That is. I think so deeply grooved in the way that it ran before I even noticed it, like before I even consciously noticed it. I typed it out. That language was for me. And so that’s really what I wanna talk about today. So here’s what I want to make, , I wanna make clear, here’s what I would like you to understand in this. Making yourself smaller isn’t humility. It’s not being humble. It’s just a habit, and it’s a habit that most of us have been practicing since we were really little. It’s a habit that kept us safe, that we were taught like explicitly and implicitly that confidence is arrogance. Boys aren’t taught that. We were taught that taking up space is really selfish and that being proud of yourself or being proud of what you’ve built or who you are means that you think you are better than someone else. And so we learned to pre-frame everything, , almost like to pre apologize, to downplay every accomplishment that we have. So we say things like, I don’t know if this is right, but, and this is probably a dumb question, I’m just wondering. I’m just a mom. I’m just a coach. I’m just a woman trying to figure it out. Just I’m just, ugh. And I feel like that word is doing so much damage. We use it to. , I wanna say like even cut ourselves down before somebody else gets the chance to, in my comments a couple days ago, I have been doing these posts once a week for the past three weeks, and it is a carousel post on Instagram where I share something about how I’m rebuilding my life in my fifties. So the first one was sort of like an overview of how I got here. The second one was about how I am choosing to rent instead of buy, and the reasons why and why I think that can be a really good choice for people. And the third one was about doing things on my own, like doing things with friends and doing things on my own, traveling even. And a woman wrote, this is just life. You’re not so special. It, actually, I mean. Comments on the internet don’t bother me at all since I was hypnotized two years ago, to not have them bother me, but that’s another story. But I just thought it made me so sad for her because this isn’t just like a personal habit, it’s social, it’s cultural, it, and women do it to each other. She felt like she needed to police me probably because she didn’t feel comfortable with it. It made her uncomfortable to see me sharing so openly to not try and dim my own light or to say, I know this is probably isn’t a big deal. I know probably everybody has this experience, but everybody has a different experience. Everybody is special., I’m not saying I’m more special than anybody else, but of course I’m special. You are special. That lady is special. She had no profile photo and her whole profile was private. I don’t know why. , I’m sure she was thinking like, this chick just rubs me the wrong way. And I’ve had that happen where I’m scrolling and I’m like, why does this woman bug me? Like why does this irritate me? And I start to ask myself Now, is it because she’s confident? Is it because she’s showing up? In a way that makes me uncomfortable because I don’t feel like I can do that either. And you know when we hear that, , I don’t know why she just rubs me the wrong way. When I ask myself or I ask somebody else, what is it they really mean , I really want to ask that lady. What do you mean? What do you mean? This is just real life. You’re not so special. What do you mean she is? Uncomfortable with me being comfortable with who I am and when I see someone that is showing up fully as themselves and I notice she’s totally comfortable with who she is, she’s not apologizing for it. She takes up space and she doesn’t look around and make sure that everybody is okay with it. , She’s not checking to make sure men are okay with it. And that can be really unsettling to people who were never given permission to do the same thing. We were all kind of handed this book of rules, right? Don’t be too much. Don’t think too highly of yourself. Be humble. I remember years ago on the internet and Facebook, I wrote, , I posted a Kanye West Post. And, , like a Kanye West quote, and I don’t even remember specific, I could probably Google it, but the quote was like, everybody tells you to be humble. Be humble, but also be great, be amazing, be spectacular, whatever it was. But the quote was, everyone tells you to be humble. Be humble. And be great. Be people. People I know. I mean friends, I’m using air quotes like friends. People I knew from high school that I haven’t seen in, , 30 years were so bothered by that. Some people wrote me long messages about their grandfather taught them about being humble and it was like the weirdest thing. It really bothered people when I first started my business like 2012. And I would post on the internet showing up fully as me. , It, it pushed a button, ? And when someone breaks that rule, when someone just is without shrinking. There’s a part of us that can get activated. It happens to me too, not because that person did something wrong, but because they are doing something that we haven’t let ourselves do yet. And that is all about you. It’s all about me. When I see that, I’m like, oh, that’s a me thing. And these people posting and commenting in my comments. It was a you. Them. It was a them thing. It was a them thing. And so when I think about this woman who said, you’re not special, I knew that, , my content isn’t claiming to be special. All, all it’s doing is saying , I figured something out my way and I wanna share it. Maybe it will help you. That’s it, that, that’s the whole thing. And the response is, who do you think you are? And. Who do you think you are to share this? Who do you think you are to have an opinion? Who do you think you are to take up space? On my feed, in my day in my life, and what I have learned is that the people who throw these comments are not mad at what I said. They are mad that I said it out loud. They are mad that I didn’t stay small. They’re mad that I took up space that they never felt like they were given permission to take, and that’s their own work to do. So what I wanna talk about now is really about claiming your own space and what that really looks like, because I think we’ve really confused. These two things that aren’t the same, like arrogance is believing you’re better than other people. , I have no qualms about knowing I’m not better than anybody. Accuracy is knowing who you are and being willing to say it. I’m a master coach, not just a coach. I’m willing to take up that space. I’m willing to go against the pre-programming that tried to make me minimize myself. And so when I ask to be listed that way, I’m not saying I’m better than anyone. I’m saying I have earned this credential and I would like it to be represented correctly. It’s not ego, it’s accurate. , When I share content about rebuilding your life in your fifties, I’m not saying my life was harder than yours. I’m saying I walked through something and I have something to say about it. It’s not arrogance, it’s sharing it’s contribution. When we have been taught that any form of self, when we have been taught that any form of self acknowledgement. Is vanity, then you can’t do anything because any form of visibility is showing off. Any form of confidence is something that we actually have to circle back and justify or soften or, you know, say just you can know your worth and you can still be kind. You can take up space and you can still be really generous. Those two things aren’t opposing. I always say to the Navigate, ladies, like two things can be true at once. You can be proud of yourself and proud of what you’ve built and still be humble about how much you have to learn. Those things are not opposing. Posing. This idea of humility that we were handed isn’t actually humility. It’s more like erasing part of ourselves. I have been reading this book, and I think I talked about it before a few weeks ago. It’s called On our Best Behavior, the seven deadly sins , and the price women pay to be good. That’s what it is. . That’s one of the sins, right? Don’t show up. Don’t be proud. Don’t be, don’t be too much. And I think about all the ways that women were taught these pride. Greed, lust, envy. Gluttony. What else? Wrath and sloth. Sloth is one I see. Show up all the time where people are like, I can’t rest, but, pride. You’re allowed to feel proud of yourself. You, likely have done amazing things at work. You’ve raised amazing kids. Perhaps you’ve built great friendships. You have a great sense of humor. You have a sense of style. You’re funny, you’re there. You have so many things. You have so many things. When you dumb all those things down and you make them seem unimportant, and then you’re like, I don’t know who I am anymore. Well, yeah, no, no shit. No shit. ’cause the whole world told you to shut up. It doesn’t just feel uncomfortable like socially to claim your space. , For a lot of us, it can feel really dangerous. Right. If you grew up in an environment where too much got, being too much, got you punished, whether it was like just a parent being critical or a teacher being critical. I mean,, my, teachers always said I was chatty, but luckily my mom thought that was a fine thing to be, so it didn’t end up bothering me. But I know there are people that were told the same thing, that it really impacted the rest of their lives. You may have been told a lot of things from church, anything where you learned that visibility had a cost, it may be relationship. Gosh, I know I learned so many things about how much I was allowed to be in relationship, and then your nervous system starts to calibrate to that, right? It files it away as a threat. And , one of the things I see all the time in the Navigate method is women that come in and they say, my partner , , would ignore me or , push away whatever it was I was, that was important to me, or dismiss my thoughts. Or I could even say things and they would be right there and they wouldn’t even recognize me. So your nervous system starts to learn that I have to be small ’cause that will keep me safe. Because being dismissed is not a good feeling. Like your body goes though, this isn’t supposed to be happening. Why is this happening? I must be doing something wrong. What could I do different? Right? So we learn in all these different ways to be small. And so your brain trying to protect yourself gives you this language. , I know it sounds silly, but. Could you change that to master coach? I’m probably wrong. This probably isn’t a big deal. I don’t wanna ask too much. I don’t wanna be a pain. But would you mind changing that? Like that language? Is your nervous system actually doing what it needs to do? It thinks it’s keeping you safe, right? It’s trying to help you avoid punishment. That visibility once cost you, and I see it. I’m gonna say cost me, but it doesn’t really cost me ’cause I don’t care. But this person saying, you’re not special. This morning I got, , a note on the internet, , that said, you’re the worst woman in the world. I was like, wow, I wanna be good at something. So I just blocked delete and block. But that, that’s the kind of thing that can trigger a shame reflex. So. Your work here is just to notice it, to catch it right. To hit backspace and say, I’m not gonna do that. I see that you’re trying to minimize yourself. I know why you’re doing that, and we’re gonna do something different today. And I think that when you can start doing that, catching yourself first, then starting to make shifts. Believing that you’re worthy of being seen, of being visible, of taking up space, of having an opinion. I think when you can do that, that is how you live a big life. So thank you so much for joining me today. . I’m hoping I’ll get to see you and give you a hug in Belize. Nothing could make me happier. I was on the internet and got fully influenced to buy a bathing suit the other day. This woman was so cute and she had on this little one piece red bathing suit, and it was so cute, and I was like, oh my God, I need that. So I bought it and she was tall and blonde and skinny, and I got the bathing suit and I was like, mm, why doesn’t it look like it does on the internet? But it’s so cute and I’m gonna bring it to Belize. We can snorkel and do some work together and have a cocktail. All right. It was so good to be here with you today. I love you so much. I’ll see you next week. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today. You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.

Have you ever been asked this? Which way does your intuition want you to answer? In this week’s podcast, Betsy asks her listeners if they are fully committed or loosely involved and how that outlook can apply to the everyday choices we make. She encourages us to ask ourselves if we are bravely invested or a little wishy washy, because we may be in mid life but we don’t want to be mid. Also, if you are local to Atlanta, please consider meeting up for coffee on April 11th. All of the information is on betsypake.com.

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the podcast today. Welcome to The Art of Living Big. How has your adventure been going over the past week? I am suffering from the pollen, so you may kind of hear it in my voice. Pollen in Atlanta right now is unhinged. It’s always really bad. But right now it’s really unhinged. I am taking Zyrtec or Claritin, depending on the day.

Flonase. I have a air purifier in my apartment. I’m wearing a mask, like an infected person walking around outside to keep the pollen out. I am Netty potting every time I go outside and come back in. I shower before bed and wash my hair and change my pillowcases, and I am still really suffering. It’s really bad.

I got one of those memberships to get your car cleaned because the pollen was coming into my car. And so every other day, I am going to bring my car. It gives me, it gives me a project. You guys, it gets me outta the house, but I’m going to wash my car, go through the car wash because. Everything is just covered in yellow.

It’s just insane. So anyway, I will keep this one short ’cause I know my voice is a little funky and , that may be really annoying. It may not have been annoying if I hadn’t said it, but now that I’ve given you permission to have it be annoying, you won’t be able to not hear it. But let’s, just move along with the show today.

Okay. So in the spirit of keeping this one short today, I have a. A thought. Something I was thinking about this morning when I was getting ready for my day and I was thinking about this possible move to California. I was thinking about how. I realized I really need to be consistent with my working out and not from a, like I need to lose some weight perspective or I need my body to look different.

It’s actually ’cause I need my body to work a little bit different. I had a massage therapist come this morning, early. Early. She came at eight o’clock in the morning. I was barely awake. This is a woman that I’ve used for years and she just comes to my apartment. It’s, it sounds luxurious and it is that she comes to my apartment, but, , she’s really not any more expensive that if I went to a spa, , ’cause she just works for herself and came over.

And I told her that I sit so much for work and I do try and sit stand throughout the day. I have one of those standing desks, but I sit so much that my back is just, it’s just tight. My lower back is tight, my shoulders are hunched ’cause I’m working away my keyboard, , looking down all the time and I’m like, I really need to be.

Getting a lot more activity for my posterior chain, , for like all down my back. , I need to have my hamstrings engaged. The bottoms of my feet have been hurting, and I’m not walking, I’m sitting. But it’s because everything is just tight from being kind of like folded like a lawn chair, you know?

I was thinking about that and about how I need to just move my body because it needs to be moved, not because the mood has hit me, or I suddenly have a goal for something. And I was thinking about all these choices that we have in our lives and how committed we are to those choices. And I remember years ago I used to ask coaching clients when we would come up with goals.

For things is, this was before the navigate method, but I would say, are you hammer eggs? Are you hammer eggs? That was the question. And they would say, Hmm. It feels more like eggs. Eggs is like, you know, , an egg is, you know, the chicken doesn’t have to die to have to give you the egg, right? It’s, it’s the egg, ?

But if you’re ham, you’re committed. You’ve committed so much to breakfast that you’ve given your life for breakfast. So is it eggs or is it ham? And I was asking myself like, oh, if I’ll think about it that way, am I hammer eggs with this moving my body? And I’m, I’ve moved into ham because it has to be ham.

I was eggs before, so I moved, uh, you know, I worked out, I had my little workout thing I do once or twice a week when it, the mood struck. I was thinking about this move to the beach. Am I ham or eggs? I’m not sure. I’m, I’m leaning into ham territory of like, I’m going to make a brave choice. And so I started thinking about this with everything that we do, and if we put it in the perspective of what is it that I really want and do I really want anything?

That’s just eggs. I wrote something on social media a week or two ago and so many people resonated with it. And what it was, this idea of being, having a life that is mid. I like, I’m in midlife, but I don’t want a life that’s mid, that’s how I explained it in the post mid is eggs. Mid is eggs. It’s not, it’s not ham.

Now, I know this is kind of a silly little thing, but I wanted to share it with you this week so that you can just think through my choices. Think through your choices. Am I ham or eggs? Am I wishy-washy or am I committed? , Sometimes it makes sense to be eggs, and sometimes you choose eggs when it’s time to be ham.

So. I think when you know the difference, that is how you live a big life. All right. I will see you next week with a much more lengthy episode when I am feeling like my brain is back in my body. All right, y’all, I love you so much. Don’t forget, in uh, , in Atlanta on April 11th, we’re having a live coffee live.

We’re gonna all meet up for coffee. And the point of this is so. That I get to hug you, but also so you meet other people and make friends, and that could be a really cool thing. So you can find out all the information on my website. It’s right in the header. It’ll say like live events, and just choose Atlanta Coffee, and I will see you there.

All right. Bye y’all. See you next week. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today.

You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.

Do you remember the ‘choose your own adventure’ books? In this episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy explores the idea of living out our choices in life just like the books we remember from childhood. What if we decided to go to an Early Bird Dance Party? What if we moved to the place we always dreamed of living? What if you only thought about those things but never acted on them? If you have pondered an idea over time and need a little nudge, this will be it! Enjoy it on a walk or a drive and be sure to join us for our Fireside Chat on April 5th and if you are close to Atlanta, come have coffee with Betsy on April 11th.

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the show today. Okay,, I wanna tell you about the Early Bird Dance Party. Before we get started, I wanna tell you about this thing that I went to. You know, as I have talked over the past, like couple years about recreating my life as a single person in my fifties, and how I’ve found friends and the things that I have been interested in and discovered about myself and all of those things.

And , like me, , you probably get most of your information from Instagram. And I got an ad that kept being shown to me for the Early Bird Dance Club and it is a. Idea that these two women had about wanting to go out and dance, but not wanting to start the night at 10:00 PM and get home at three.

, They had stuff to do in the morning and so they created. These events at clubs like all over the country where you come at six and it ends at like 10, I think. So it’s like for women who want to go out but still have shit to do in the morning, I think that’s the tagline. So I had seen it and then my friend Elizabeth reached out to me and she’s like, do you wanna go to this with me?

The tickets sell out really fast. So if we wanna go, we gotta get tickets. And this was like in January, and so I was like, yeah, let’s do it. So we got tickets. It was me and my friend Elizabeth, and my friend Dina. Now I’m gonna pause for one second. ’cause I wanna tell you, if you listened to my episode about how I was rebuilding my life in my fifties as a single woman, I talked about going to those time left dinners, Elizabeth.

Somebody that I met at time left and then she invited me out for dinner with two of her other friends a few months later. And this woman, Dina was there. So I went out to the early bird dance party with Elizabeth and Dina. I’m, connecting the dots there. Just so you can see, and I know this sounds silly ’cause you’re probably like, I know how we make friends Betsy, but for me that.

Can, that was not an obvious thing. I just thought like, I’m, I,, I don’t know how to meet people, but that’s how, so you meet, I went to a million time lefts. I met several good friends from there, and then. , They had other friends and so we all met up. So I will have Elizabeth meet my other friends and we’ll go to dinner together too, so she can meet them.

So I think it, it’s like just a nice way. And I see women doing this all the time including, , we’re, we’re not in a circle, we’re in a horseshoe. Everybody’s welcome in. And so that’s who we went with. So back to the story. So Elizabeth is like, let’s go me and Dina and you will go. So you get there at six o’clock, you get there at six o’clock, you dance your little heart out, and we ended up leaving at eight 30.

Dina had to get up really early in the morning on Saturday, and Elizabeth I think was heading off on a trip , out of state or out of the country. She travels a lot, so. We went. I mean, I gotta tell you, we got there right at six. We were the first ones on the dance floor. ’cause we basically just walked in and walked right to the dance floor.

The songs in the beginning, I’m gonna be honest, weren’t the best. Like they had a work in nine to five when it hit the work in nine to five. I was like, okay, , we gotta, we can, do better. We can do better. That’s a good, it’s a banger, but it not. Really what I want for my dance party.

Disco balls are going, you know what I mean? All the lights and it really did get better, but it was a lot of like nineties music. The place was packed., It was women only, so it was just like packed with girlfriends having fun. , It was just so fun and so nice. And then it was so fun. But we were all pooped and everybody had to stuff to do in the morning.

We left at eight 30. We got outside. I was like, first of all. I’m really proud of everyone’s knees in there because people were doing the low, low, low, low, you know, apple bottom jeans and the boots. I was like, how are people getting so low? ’cause my knees, I just will not. And then when we left, Dina was like, oh my God, it’s still light out.

It was still light out, but it was really so fun. So if you have a chance to go to the early bird dance party, go to that. It’s really fun. And just like a cool thing, , if you haven’t seen my Instagram stories, we are having a coffee. In a bunch of different locations, live coffees where you can come meet me for coffee.

It’s less about meeting me and more about meeting other people in your community, right? So like other women that follow me or whatever, , have come across the page and want to come and meet and make friends. So we’re doing them in Atlanta. It’s April 11th in Atlanta, and. On my website, there’s gonna be a link that says coffees, and then there’ll be a dropdown with all the different locations.

I, Atlanta is up there. Now the other ones are being put up as we get the date, but it’s gonna be Atlanta, San Diego, New York City, Nashville, London, and I think there was one other place. Maybe that’s it. We’re thinking, I know I get a lot of requests for Chicago, , and maybe we’ll do something in South Florida.

So just a way to be able to get together, grab a coffee, come and meet people, and then you have meeting people in your community. You know what I mean? Which I think is so fun. So be on the lookout for the coffee and community events. And then of course our fireside chat is live this month and it’s on the website.

You can get to it. On the menu we’ll have it put like events so we can have all of that underneath. ’cause I don’t want you guys to get confused. But the fireside chat is virtual. It’s on Zoom and it’s on Easter. It’s at night on Easter. So I get it. If you can’t, if you got family stuff, but you might have family stuff in the morning, and then by 7:00 PM Eastern, you’re done with family and you wanna come join me or you don’t have any family stuff going on, and then you have a chance to come and do something and be with other people.

You know that also are free at 7:00 PM Eastern. So that is just like a non-scripted, not recorded zoom time for everybody to get together and just have community no matter where you are. So those are some of the events that you could come and join me, which I would love. Okay, so now I have a story and I’m gonna tell you this story.

With a caveat. And the caveat is the same caveat that I tell women in the Navigate method, which is everything is written in pencil. Like we get to change our minds, we get to shift, we get to learn more information, we get to go back, go forward, whatever it is that we need. Okay. So as we move forward in the months ahead, I want you to keep that in mind because it’s.

A little risky that I’m telling you this, but it’s also true and it feels really true. And so I wanna tell you this weekend I was. Free most of the weekend I had my dance party, and then Saturday I ran errands. And then Sunday was just meant to be like a rest day. And on Saturday morning I was making my coffee.

And I do this thing that I do, which is I make my coffee and if I don’t have a message from a friend, lots of times I have two girlfriends that I. Voice memo with. And if I don’t have a voice memo to listen to, I call it my morning podcast. I pretend I have a roommate and I listen. , But if I don’t have one of those, then what I do is I talk as if I’m standing in the kitchen of my beach house and I’m talking to some friends who have come to visit and they’re planning their day.

And I’m asking what the beach plans are for the day. I’m letting them know if they walk right out the back door on the beach and they take a left, there’s a volleyball tournament. , Sometimes I let them know that I get done at three. If they wanna meet up for cocktails, I’ll have cocktails. Sometimes I say , I’m gonna have Chef Greg come.

I know, I know. This is crazy. I’m gonna have Chef Greg come. At six. So you guys have your whole day at the beach, and then if you wanna come home and shower and then just be ready, chef Greg’s gonna make sushi or whatever. I decide the meal is gonna be okay. So I’ve been doing this for months, months, talking about my beach house and welcoming my friends.

It’s the most fun, like it puts me in the best mood like it. I just love it. Now, if you’re fairly new here, you might not know for the past, , 40 years, I have wanted to move to the beach. Why don’t I live at the beach? Well, there was always a lot of reasons and , I, my daughter was here, she was growing up, she, her dad lives here and I was married to my former husband who is an attorney and he’s licensed in Georgia.

So then we thought about moving to the coast of Georgia, but that’s not really the beach I had in mind. Like so many things. It just never was the right timing. And , there was a time. When I very first left my marriage where I thought, I don’t wanna move to the beach. , That’s not what I want. I think it was just the beach was the place where I felt relief from my marriage, like when I felt relief from all this.

And so I thought, , I have relief now because I’ve, left and I don’t really need the beach. But as I healed and, my nervous system started regulating and I really started to feel more like myself again. , I used to have this joy that I have now, but I used to have this real joy and like zest about life.

And, , 20 years ago, let’s say, I, I, really, I loved a lot of things and I, was. A lot more charismatic than I was when I was married. I think I just got very, very small and I started to lose touch with what I really wanted. Now, that’s not his fault, that’s my fault. I, that was my reaction to things that were happening, and so I thought, well, maybe I don’t really wanna move to the beach.

Maybe the beach was just my vision that I needed to have to escape where I was. And over the last few months as I have been rehearsing. Owning a beach house. I started thinking about why I am where I am, and I started to think about those books that we had as kids that were the Choose your Own Adventure books.

I loved those books, and you could have a million different stories, , you could choose. A, B, C, or D as the path. Or you could choose A, D, B, C, or you could choose A, C, B., Like every, you could make a million different pathways. And I started thinking about our lives and every time we make a choice, a whole new A, B, C, or D shows up.

Then we make, we choose A, and then a whole different A, B, C, or D shows up and then we choose C, and it’s a whole different A, B or C or D that shows up and the path could be played out a million gillion, different ways. And I started thinking about my choose your own adventure and from a spiritual perspective, would I redo this?

If I could, and I’m, not talking about regret. And that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t believe there’s any right or wrong. Not in my story, not in yours, but I believe there is adventures. And if I were to do it again is, are those all the adventures that I really wanted? Now what I mean by that is are they the adventures that I would choose or were the they, the adventures that were the default.

There’s nothing I can do about the adventures that I had, but now here I am. I’m in year two of a lease of my apartment, which means I am free. I’m free. I can do whatever I want. I can make whatever choices I want, and I don’t hate it here. I actually really like Atlanta. I’ve grown to really love Atlanta, especially over the past year.

I have friends here in community, I’m volunteering places. , Doing things, it’s like greatest thing to be right near a big airport, like all these things. But am I, is it just that this is the default? Is it just that this is the adventure that’s right in front of me and if I zoomed way forward to being 90 years old, is that the adventure that I would be happy I took?

Or would there be an adventure? I wish I had sought out and I thought to myself, I will always be disappointed in myself if I never live at the beach. Always, always, always. It might not work out. I’ll tell you, there’s a million reasons even now where I’m like, oh no, I can’t go. It’s so expensive. It’s a lot more expensive.

Taxes are bad. I could, , I don’t wanna live in Florida, like for whatever reasons I have, right? North Carolina, my body has a negative reaction to even saying the name of the state. , I don’t want, like, what is it that, where is it that I could actually go, , one of my girlfriends has been begging me to move to.

Connecticut where she lives and she’s like, there’s beaches here, but it’s not, I’m not standing in my kitchen with my friends visiting . I mean, the vision I have is like the strand in California, you know? Now you might do what my brain just did, which was like, that’s expense.

Where do you think you’re gonna have $12 million to get a house on the strand? I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know, like how do I know, how would I ever know if I’m here in Atlanta? How would I, how would I ever know? And , I don’t think there’s a whole lot of instances, even the people that have those $10 million homes on the Strand or in California in general.

I don’t know that any of them came from someplace else and just bought that. Like they probably lived there. They lived in other houses that were smaller and moved up and. I don’t know so the ridiculousness of my reasons why started to become really apparent as I framed it , if I was choosing my adventures, what would I choose?

And the adventure I’m on right now is not bad. In fact, it’s good, but I don’t wanna miss the adventure. I wanna choose because this is good enough. . This is not how I’m building my life from here. This isn’t what I’m doing. And is it scary af to think about moving? Yeah, I’m like about to be 55.

I’m gonna be 55 in another month, so I’m gonna be 55 moving to someplace where I don’t know anybody. But you know what? The people I hang out with now, I didn’t know a year ago. I have Dean Martin now. My cat, like a lot of things can happen. And so I started thinking, okay, what if all of the big reasons that come in my brain, .

This weekend, I couldn’t even think about it. Like the idea of, well, I, tried, I got, I helped with chat GBT and I was like, we were trying to find a beach community that I would like. We went through every freaking town in Florida, back and forth, back and forth. I like the taxes in Florida, but , we went , all over the place.

. , I’d been a lot of places in Florida. My dad used to live in Florida for 25, 30 years. I just, , I know what I don’t want ’cause I feel it in my body. I don’t have to understand why. And finally I asked my body like, is it Florida? And it was like, no. My brain logically was like, yeah it is.

It’s so close you could drive home. And then I thought, well what if I just go to. Georgia. I live in a state that has coastal communities, and I looked at that. I felt my body, my body was like, Nope, that’s not the adventure. When I’m 90 years old and I look back at the adventure, the, version of me that goes to Georgia Coast or goes to Florida is the version of me that’s, copping out, that isn’t taking the full plunge.

Even as I say this, I’m like, oh my God, what if I decide not to go? If I decide not to go, it’s ’cause it’s a full body. No, but when I got real with it, I was like, you know what? I really do wanna go, I’m scared as all get out, moving all the way across the country, all by myself, but there’s no other path.

I have to do it. And I have to do it because this is what. I’ve been rehearsing and this is what feels like the next right step. Now we don’t have to know. I don’t have to know what I’m gonna do in 10 months. Like I don’t have to know. I just have to know what the next right step is. This is the entire pathway that I teach people inside the Navigate method.

And if I don’t do it, ’cause I’m scared, what kind of leader am I? And so I pulled up my lease. To see if I could break the lease. I can. It’s like a couple grand Whoopy do. And so now I can, I have two options. My lease, I’ve got until February. I mean I have almost, , 10 months.

It’s the middle of February. So , I’d probably wanna move now. So this is what my brain, the gymnastics that I do. Okay. I’m thinking about my year. My year is pretty scheduled out. I have a lot of things planned and I’m going to London in November, the end of November into December for a week.

And flying from California to London doesn’t sound fun to me. I’m like, oh my God, that’s a way longer trip. And so I thought maybe I’ll just stay. Until the London trip, ’cause the summer’s gonna go fast and then we’ll be into the holidays. It’s all gonna go really fast, so I need to be planning now.

And then I thought, well then it’s Christmas time and then my lease is up. So why don’t I just get all my ducks in a row and get a plan together? If I get the feeling again, I’m going off of the feeling of my body that I need to go. It may be June and I’m like, I gotta skedaddle. Then I will. Then I will.

And right now I’m still feeling it out. I’m two days in y’all. I’m two days into this realization that I, this is something that I need to, an adventure that I need to have. So do I bring all my stuff? Do I give away stuff and buy new stuff when I get there? Do I get a furnished apartment? What does it look like?

I don’t know. It will unfold the next right step and the next right step. In the meantime, there’s a couple things I wanna get done. My car is almost paid off. I wanna pay my car off. ’cause that’s gonna save me a ton of money. Right. I’m being responsible in the decision making and , I’ve talked to my family, they’re all on board.

My sister is moving to France. My dad was totally on board with it. Of course. I mean, what’s he, , he’s never stood in my way of anything and even my kid. Was like, I think you should move to the beach, but if you do, it should be California. ’cause that’s where you’ve always wanted to go. And I thought, you’re absolutely right.

And so . I’m gonna be in San Diego in May and I’m gonna check things out. , I have friends that live in la, I have friends that live in Orange County. I’m gonna map out my next, the next right step, the next right thing, right in front of me now. The thing I wanna point out is that I think that we assume indecision and I had been in indecision, , do I go to the beach or not?

What do I do? Blah, blah, blah. I think we assume that means we don’t have enough information. If we did some more research, a little more thought about it, like we’d finally be clear. But I’ve been talking on this podcast about going to the beach for 10 years. Now, I wanna say again, I had real logistical reasons why there, it, wasn’t a choice that I was gonna make to leave.

I was clear on my choice to not go to the beach at that time. And, last year I really needed to do a lot of healing and this apartment in Atlanta was the best place to do it. And it taught me a lot about myself and it taught me a lot about what I was capable of. And it taught me that. I can build and create a life wherever and whenever I want.

And so I think when we think indecision means we don’t have enough information. What’s, actually happening is we’re trying to find a version of that decision that doesn’t cost us anything. I was trying to , I didn’t wanna go to California ’cause it was so far. And so then I was looking all over Florida and then I was like, yeah, but then I’d have to drive and this is a long drive and if I’m gonna fly and how long I was trying to figure out a version of my decision that didn’t cost me anything.

And, every real decision is gonna cost you something. Not money necessarily, although it’s gonna cost, it’s gonna cost me money. It’s not just logistics. It’s not just like energetically what I’m gonna have to put out to make it happen, but it costs you your other life. If I stay, I lose that version of me that gets to live by the ocean.

, I’m not, I can’t do that. And if I go. I lose this really good life that I’ve started to build here. And so instead of choosing, what happens is we hover, we research, we make pros and cons lists. We, ask everybody we know. I mean, everybody I know that lives in California, where do you live?

Where do, blah, right but what we’re really doing is delaying the moment where we have to let one version go and., What I’ve started to see is I don’t need more clarity. I have been rehearsing this moment., We talk about vision boards and manifesting like my nervous system is acclimated for this new reality.

So I need to decide which life I’m willing to live knowing that there’s no right and there’s no wrong if I chose to stay, not at a default. But if I choose or chose to stay, I’m already saying it in past tense. So I, it’s just a choice. It’s, just which adventure you’re choosing. It’s not right, and it’s not wrong.

It’s not wrong if I decide to stay, it’s just that I have to be willing to let go of the version of me that stands on my. Patio and explains the best spots at the beach that’s laid out in front of me, and I don’t know how that could ever, ever come true. I recognize that’s a expensive dream right there, but I don’t have to know how.

I don’t have to know. That wouldn’t be, that would be a step so far down the road. The only step I need to know is this one. So I don’t need more clarity. I just need to decide which life I’m willing to live knowing that it’s not gonna be perfect. And when you think about it that way, I think you know, something changes.

It’s your adventure, it’s your choose your own adventure. It’s not about making a right choice anymore, it’s about taking a decision and making a choice. I can stand behind as who I am and who I am is an adventurer. Who I am is somebody that’s going to take this life and eat it all up. I’m not gonna be the kind of woman who in her old age says, I really just wish I had tried that.

That is not me. It’s not gonna be me. It was me for a long time and it went so far against everything about. My core essence of who I am. And I bet you’re like that too. Like I bet if you’re listening and you’re feeling something about it, you’re like that too. I don’t wanna keep circling things that matter to me.

I don’t wanna wake up five years from now or , one year from now, or 20 years from now, and realize that I stayed here just because it was easier to maintain. So. The question for me right now isn’t, is this the perfect decision? The question is, which version of my life do I respect myself the most for choosing?

I don’t have to have every detail figured out, but I do know this, that I’m not waiting for the decision to feel perfect anymore. I’m just choosing the one that feels the most alive. So I think when we can do that, is how we live a big life. And if you live in California, Southern California, please hit me up.

Let me know. Get me some guidance. Tell me where you live. And if you have a friend that has a beach house that I could practice. Alright, y’all, I love you guys so much. I hope that you can touch base with that version of you that is choosing her own adventure instead of just living at default. All right?

I love you so much. See you next. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today.

You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.

In this episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy shares some profound insights on grief. She explains that it’s not linear and how we can grow bigger than it. How relationships with those we have lost can change form rather than end, and why hope is a brave decision. This one will move you. Oh, and who doesn’t want a bed jet?

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hello. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Art of Living Big. I’m excited to do this episode today, which when we, as I say that, when we get to the topic, you’re gonna be like, wow, you’re excited about talking about this really heavy thing, but I, promise there’s hope in it, and I think that’s the really important part in all this.

So last week I did an episode where it was really just me breaking the seal of coming back. So thank you for to so many of you for listening. I am so just so grateful that you accept me back into your ears while you go about your daily tasks. And,, and let me talk with you. I. Wanna tell you a couple other things, and again, if you’re new here, you’re gonna be like, why is she telling me this?

I, I don’t know if you’ve been here a while, you’ve kind followed along the journey whether you wanted to or not. And so I’m gonna give you a couple quick updates. My teeth are complete. That is one of my updates. If you remember last year I had dental work that had to be done. I had, , cap and I had a couple weird teeth things.

I don’t even remember now what it was, but it was a lot of stuff and it was stuff that I had kind of put off for a couple years. Anyway, once I had that done, I got Invisalign because I had a lot of strange gaps in my teeth that I didn’t have most of my adult life. It, just started happening as I really started clenching my teeth these past few years, and so I.

Got my Invisalign. The Invisalign is over, and then I got two new front teeth, I guess I got bonded so that the little space between my teeth was. , Filled in, I guess you could say. I don’t know, I think, I don’t think anybody that meets me that doesn’t know me would notice to me. It looks like I have a couple of chiclets in my front, two front teeth, but I’m getting used to it and it does feel really good to have like a even smile, you know?

And I see my teeth so much because of how I record on Instagram. So anyway. My teeth are complete. And it just feels really good to have that journey done. I mean, it’s been like a two year journey to get my, to get them teeth straight. And now I have this really incredible mouth guard that I can wear at night that is, I don’t know, it’s just space, age and amazing.

And , I’m happy about that. So that’s keeping my teeth from ever moving again, and it feels really good. So, if you’ve been here for a while, you know that I am. A big fan of sleep, like I really like my bed and I like to sleep, so I wanna tell you about something that I bought. It is not sponsored. I tried to get them to sponsor me for a year.

I was messaging and filling out forms on their website. Never, did they reach out to me, which I was like, I am the perfect person to talk about this because I’m obsessed with sleep for one thing, and I. Have a whole audience of women who are right where I am, where you likely need this thing. Now I’m gonna tell you what the thing is, and I’m gonna tell you my honest to God truth about it.

But first I just wanna talk about sleep and how much I love it. Okay? So, if you’ve been here, you know, cozy Earth is one of our sponsors. You can get 20% off anything on the website. , You use the code live big Betsy, and you can get 20% off, but. Yeah, that’s neither here nor there for this episode.

What I really wanna tell you is that if you followed, you know that I’m obsessed with their house coat. Okay? So this is like my routine. Are you ready? Because if you really want some insane, , cozy sleep, I’m about to give you all the things. I have an aura ring and that gives me my sleep score, right? So if you’re familiar with that, I routinely get 94, 96 sleep scores.

I don’t know what happens when you get a hundred. I have a feeling I’d there would be a parade outside for me if I got to a hundred. But my point is I get really high sleep scores now. It. Is it one thing or another? I don’t know. But I’m gonna tell you all the things because there may be a piece of one of these things that helps you.

Okay. Enough of the lead up, let me tell you. So there is this, and again, none of this is sponsored except for Cozy Earth isn’t really sponsored. They give us a, they sponsor this show, not this particular episode, but I love them. So what I do is I have this. Bath salts. That’s a magnesium bath salt, and it’s called flu, F-L-E-U-D fluid.

I have a subscription, I don’t know, it’s 20 bucks a month and I get three of them. So I do a fleud about once a week, and it is like a high concentration of magnesium, but different from Epsom salts. It makes me feel so chilled out. , There’s other stuff in it, but it is amazing. I put it in my tub and I set a timer so that I stay in there at least 20 minutes and those nights,, and I typically notice this will last four or five nights, and then I notice I need to do another one, or that it makes my sleep better if I do another one.

So what I’m about to tell you, the rest of the, this is why I could never have a partner ’cause of all, the things I’m about to tell you. So I take my fleud bath, I put on my cozy earth. House coat, that’s what it’s called on the website. It is basically a comforter that they cut into the shape of a house coat.

I put it in the dryer. Okay. I put it in the dryer so it gets warm, and then I put it on when I’ve just gotten outta the shower or gotten outta the bathtub. Okay? Now I walk into my bedroom and I turn on. Turbo. Turbo mode of my bed jet. Okay, so the bed jet is the thing I was saying. I was trying to get them to sponsor me and they didn’t.

I’m gonna tell you, the bed jet is like a machine that goes underneath your bed and there’s a hose, like a vacuum cleaner hose that goes into a sheet, a special bed jet sheet. Okay. This sheet lives above your top sheet and under your comforter. Okay? And it’s got these channels that go all the way up through the sheet.

And on the bottom part of that sheet, it’s like a, it’s like a envelope. Do you know what I mean? It has two sides. The bottom side is porous, and so the air comes out. From the bottom onto you, and the comforter that you have on top keeps that air contained inside the bed. Okay? So they have turbo mode and it’s 10 minutes of hot air and high fan, and it heats your little bed up to the coziest thing.

So now I have on the cozy earth housecoat, I am deliciously relaxed because I’ve had a fluid bath. I’m cozy. I turn on turbo mode, it gets everything all set up. I get in and it’s warm. It’s not too hot, it’s warm. It’s really great. Now. Now the next thing I do. Is I have a special pillow for between my knees, so my knees don’t go knocking together.

’cause I sleep on my side. I, have, I didn’t realize how ridiculous this was until I started really telling you I have a purple bed, which is a specific kind of bed and that I love. I’m obsessed with it. I have a friend that told me to buy one. She bought one for everybody and her family, they’re amazing.

Again, no sponsorship. I should have one purple bed. The pillow that keeps my knees from knocking together. I have a NOD pod, which I’m a huge fan of the Nod Pod. A couple years ago I spent $3,000 at Christmas time on Nod Pods for people I love. So the Nod Pod is a weighted eye pillow that goes over your eyes and helps your parasympathetic nervous system and helps you relax into a deeper state of relaxation.

So here I am. I’m in the cozy bed. The fan is off now ’cause it’s been 10 minutes so Turbo Mode is done. I’m in the purple bed. I have the Nod pod. I also have a Nod Pod body. I will tell you, I bought the no brand one on Amazon, but it’s, , a weighted blanket that’s just the size of your torso. Okay, so now I got this weight.

I got my mouth guard in. Now I hit the dry button. On my bed Jet, it has cool mode, but it also has dry, which just rotates the air around so it’s not too hot, it’s not too cold. And then when I get really hot, , as one does at one o’clock in the morning, I press the cool button. The, remote control is huge and lit up, and , the words are big.

So I don’t need my glasses and I can hit cool in it. Sends like shot a shot of cool air around the inside of my bed and it is heaven. So I know that’s a lot of things. What did I say? Food bath. The. Housecoat heated housecoat turbo mode on the bed jet, the purple bed, the nod pod, the nod pod body, and the custom mouth guard.

But I’m telling you what like it is. It is really good. It is really good. I sleep really good. Okay, so what was that like 10 minutes of telling you all my crazy, sleep schedule. But we do what we have to do. I do believe that sleep may be like one of the most important things. To keep ourselves healthy and to keep ourselves going, , and to have the energy to be able to do all the things we need to do every day.

So anyway, that is my crazy sleep story. But you can get your cozy Earth stuff. Make sure to use the coupon code ’cause it’s 20% off, which I think is great.. I’m a big fan of the Cozy Socks too. Anyway, this episode is not sponsored by them, but I’m obsessed, so I feel like I, they’re like, which episodes do you want us to sponsor?

I’m like, it don’t matter. I’ll just be talking about it all the time. ’cause I really like it. I’ll tell you, I get sponsorship opportunities now all the time, and I never take ’em very, very, very rarely. The ones I want are like Veg Jet. Nobody calls me, but. Because I only want stuff I really, really love. I don’t wanna tell you to buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need.

Okay. All that stuff you need, come over to my house, spend the night, I’ll get you set up. Okay, so now, for kind of this other part of the show that I really wanna have this discussion with you. Okay, so this past week I woke up and I, it was a Wednesday on St. Patrick’s Day and. I felt so weird, like heavy.

I just felt heavy grief in a way that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was real weird and I got up and I,, did my thing and got the shower started. And then I was like, what is this? And then it dawned on me that it was the anniversary of my mom dying and I actually had to ask Sury. So I had to, ask her what is 2026 minus 1988, and when she said it’s 37, I just, cried in a way that I can’t explain 37 years since my mom died. 37 years. And it’s funny, , that book, the body keeps the score. I think, your body keeps the score.

My body knew, I feel like every day, I have no idea what the date is. I should probably know, but I’m like, I don’t know what date it is. I just know it’s like Wednesday or Thursday or whatever and sometimes I don’t even know that. And so I wasn’t really paying attention. I knew it was coming because , of course, ’cause it’s St.

Patrick’s Day, so everyone’s talking about St. Patrick’s Day, but. It really hit me in a different way than it has before. And I started thinking about grief and how I don’t think it’s, , I know for sure it’s not linear, and I know that because it’s been 37 years, and if it was linear, I wouldn’t have had the reaction that I had

when my computer said 37. I was like,. I made a sound, , like a painful sound. I almost heard myself and thought, what is that? And it was just the shock of 37 years. It’s been a whole lifetime and it’s not even like a, it’s almost her entire lifetime. For one thing. I hadn’t thought of that till just now.

She died at 41, so it’s almost her whole lifetime, but it is. A lifetime. , By the time someone’s 37, they’ve given life. Like it’s, just so long. And I thought it’s been that long since I’ve seen her or asked her a question or smelled her or heard her voice. , It’s not like now where we have video.

Like when I go, my kid’s gonna have video. He’ll be able to listen to me any moment, , for decades. We don’t have that from 1988. I never, ever texted with her. I never know what that was like. I wonder what she would even think about all the technology now. I wonder what she would think about what I’m doing now.

And , if you’ve been here a while, you’ve heard me talk about this, but my mom died one day when I was in high school. I went to school and she went on a trip with my sister. There was a guy from our hometown who was a hockey player, and he was playing at the university on his final game before he went into the NHL Felt special, and my mom was spontaneous and she liked to celebrate things and to make things special, and so she and my sister decided they would get in the car and drive to his last game.

How cool that would be to be there and to be able to cheer him on. And he went to the college where my sister went and my dad worked. And so off they went that morning. They left early before I even woke up. And when they were driving, they got to New York. I lived in Vermont at the time. That’s where I grew up.

And the game was in Ohio. So they were in New York. Right around Watertown if you’re in that area. And long story short, my mom got off at a wrong exit. They stopped at a little store and said, how do you get back on? , Sometimes you get off on the highway and then you’re like, I can’t get back on.

, There’s no entrance, there’s just an exit. And he said, oh, this happens all the time. You have to take this little access road. And when you get to the end of the access road. Then , you’ll see the entrance ramp to the highway. And he said, just be careful ’cause it’s a twisty road. And my mom said, it’s okay, we’re from Vermont.

And they got in the car and , it was March and it was cold and it was icy. And as my mom was turning around a bend, the car skidded off the road and kind of down and in little embankment. And , as. Cars do. When you kind of pick up momentum, you know, faster, you go down a little embankment, you pick up some momentum, and there was one tree in the middle of this field, a whole field.

And of course, she hit the tree, hit the tree. My sister climbed, got outta the car. She had, broken her jaw and they both had their seat belts on, but. She climbed up the embankment and someone was driving by and they stopped and looked at her and just said, I’ll call the ambulance. And my sister said, thank you.

And the ambulance came and they took the jaws of life and they helicoptered my mom to the closest hospital where she had surgery and died about 12 hours later. , I think about that tree a lot, and historically I have, because it was just like a one tree in the middle of a field. There was a lot of places you could go.

It was like a parking lot with one tree. But you know, she went where she was looking. , That’s what you do when you’re driving, but that is what you do in life. You go where you’re looking, you go where you are mulling things over. You go where you’re worrying, you go where you’re putting your attention.

And I have often felt over the years that my mom and I were creating my business together, that perhaps before I was born, before she was born, we had a pact that I would be her daughter. And she would have some dramatic exit where I would be devastated to the place where I had to find meaning in it in order to move forward.

And that meaning would create a lot of good. And so that is how I think I got to where I am , and even became a coach, , back in 2012 and started doing this work. . Here’s the thing that I think when I look back, and someone asked me recently about what is a belief that you have about life?

And I knew it ex immediately. I was like, oh, I know. Which is a funny thing that I would know, but I was like, oh, I believe things can change in an instant. Like things can change in an instant, and I know that to be true because of my mom. But the weird thing. Is, I never took that to mean things could go bad in an instant.

It’s always been a thing that brought me hope. It’s always been when things are going sideways where I’m like, man, this won’t last. ’cause things can change in an instant. My brain did the opposite. For some reason, it, rewired. To this can turn around any second and it doesn’t even need an explanation.

And I really think that’s my superpower. When one of my friends was asking me this, it was actually a client, a friend, client, an old client now a friend. And I was like, I think that’s what it is. , I think that’s like the whole basis of how I operate in life. So, , there is specific moments.

In my life where that belief has saved me when hope felt irrational, but I held onto it anyway and I didn’t pay any attention to what was happening. And you’ve probably heard me say this on the show over the years, , I don’t care what’s happening. It’s not real. It’s my old vibration showing up, and now I’m thinking about something else.

, Every. Every day. And I did the, I do, , , I did a podcast episode on this back in January, I think, where every day I write as if it’s a day in the future. And typically what I do is I pick a day at the end of the quarter. ’cause that’s how I do my goals, is like quarterly goals. And I pick a date and then that’s the date that I write about.

So like every day. A day every day. This year I have written, it’s now March 31st and I am, and then I write all the great things that are happening. And the really interesting thing, and in that process as we’re getting close now to March 31st, is I wrote some crazy stuff and it’s almost all come true.

It’s almost all come true. And I noticed when I would be taking chances, like risks, but they were calculated risks or I was. Trying to shift to do something different or bring in something different into my business or whatever it was. And I know it’s because my brain was like, well, to get to that we have to do this thing.

Like we’ve got to add in this thing. We’ve got to take this risk. We’ve got to pay somebody to find this person for us, or whatever it was. And I just think those two things together. So that when I was writing every day, it, could change. . Things can change in an instant, and turnarounds don’t require any reason.

There’s no reason, just like this bad thing didn’t really require a reason. Symmetric, sym symmetry of chaos, I guess you could say, ? It just all came together, and I think things can all come together all the time. I posted on Instagram that day about grief and about how, I don’t think it’s linear.

I think it’s access. I think it’s as you’re going through bigger things, you have more access to grief. As you learn and grow and get to know yourself better, you have more access to grief. The amount of access I had at 16. To understanding grief and, working through it or even experiencing it was different than my experience.

Now at 54, almost 55, I’m having different things happen in my life and that door to grief is wide open and that’s why it hit me so hard that morning My. Child has, I say child 24 has a cat that they have had since they were 10, and tonight we’re going to put that cat down. He’s been in the hospital. It is just time.

And so we have access to handle grief in different ways. When we’re older, we have access to make different decisions about grief as we get older. And I think that there’s something really nice about never losing access to it. , I know that sounds kind of weird ’cause who wants to have grief? Like that feels, I’m gonna use the air I’m using.

Air quotes bad. Like it feels bad, right? But I have a lot of hope. I know it sounds weird ’cause I don’t have hope the cat’s gonna live. We’ve made the decision and we’re going over there tonight, but I have a lot of hope that there’s healing in it, that there’s evolution in it, that there’s purpose in all of it.

And that choice probably made unconsciously at age 16, , is still running in the background. Things can change in an instant. I know the situation with Sammy, the kitty isn’t changing, but I know the way we feel about it, Ken and I know things can shift. So here’s the thing when I posted this on Instagram is I got so many messages from people.

I mean, hundreds of messages and everybody can relate to grief. , It’s just such a human thing. I think the part that is harder is when you’re 16 or 10, 22 and you’re trying to relate to grief because you haven’t had enough life experience to be able to access it where you can really process it.

And so I have some thoughts of what I would tell someone who is. Loving someone who is losing a parent as a kid. Oh, y’all know I’m gonna cry. I’m not gonna cry. It’s gonna be fine, but I have some real thoughts.

So I have some thoughts. Maybe they’ll be helpful. Maybe they’ll be helpful down the road. I think the first thing is to recognize. That your access to the grief when you’re younger is going to change as you get older. And that’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t mean, oh my God, this is never going away because , that’s just a part of life.

It’s not whether it’s your cat, your dog, you know your parent. You don’t ever get over it. But what happens, and I think especially when we go through something when we’re young. We’re expanded and the threshold of our emotion is pushed in A way that doesn’t always happen in adolescence is that you get the opportunity to get bigger than it a lot earlier.

The grief doesn’t really get smaller, but that’s not a bad thing because you start to really expand around it. And I actually think in a way we don’t want it to go away because, I’m not gonna cry because it I is a reminder and it really helps us access the love as well. , There’s that idea of the light and the dark and the good and the bad, and you can’t put one into perspective in the same way if you don’t have the other.

So you don’t ever get over it, but you get bigger than it. And if it happens to you when you’re younger, you have an opportunity. I’m coming from my perspective. . If you had never lost a parent and you’re like, wait, what? But you have an opportunity to experience way more joy than other people.

If you can access the grief, you can access the joy in equal parts, and I think that is a superpower. I think that makes your whole life. Like I, I believe we came here as like spiritual beings to experience the ups and downs, not just to experience ups. Like we came here for all of it. And so this gives you access to all of it, and I think that’s a really special thing.

The other thing that I wanna say is the relationship doesn’t end it. Is our belief that when they are no longer in the physical form, that they’re gone. I’m using air quotes again that they’re gone, but I don’t believe that. I believe it changes form. I believe that the access, it’s like when my mom was in the kitchen and I was like in our TV room, and I would yell to her and she would answer.

I wouldn’t see her, but I would get the answer to my question. And I talk to my mom now all the time, even more so over the past few years than I ever have before. The other day I said to her, I want a miracle today. It was on her anniversary of her death. I said, have something happen today that is so crazy that I would never, ever believe it if it didn’t happen today.

Like something that right now, if you told me it was gonna happen, I’d be like, that’ll never happen, and I got that. I’ll do a show on it, but it’s not gonna be today. But I got the craziest thing happened, the craziest thing. And so I decided that was my sign and that there’s signs all over. And if that could happen, why not ask for something every day?

And you might feel like we don’t get to have miracles every day, but I think we do. What if we do? What if you’re wrong? What if we do? What if the relationship doesn’t end? It just changes form, and I’m still in a relationship with her and she can actually help me in such a different way now, and that when I don’t communicate with her, or I don’t ask her for what I need or I don’t show up, then I’m limiting myself and I’m cutting myself off from her.

It’s not her doing it to me, it would be me doing it to her and. There will be a moment. There is a moment, I think for me that happened years after my mom died, where I realized how much she shaped the way that I think, and not just in her being here, but in her not being here and.

There was so many lessons that shaped my life, which I really like my life. I really like my life, especially right now. I really, really like it, and it, her loss shaped it just as much as her being, and that’s legacy. That’s not loss, that’s legacy. And so I allow the lessons from her loss. To be attributed to her and to influence the way that I operate and the way that I enjoy my life, my sleep, I’m allowed.

We’re allowed to dive into the things that make us happy. It can be silly and whimsical and fun, and we can know how important it is because we can know how shitty it is when it’s gone and that it could be taken at any moment. My mom didn’t wanna go. I’m sure she would have changed her mind if she had an option.

All right. The next thing that I would tell someone that is witnessing someone losing a parent right now is to let them say the wrong thing. After my mom died, I was so devastated as one would be, and my dad was not. Super present in my life. I’m gonna say it. My parents were married, but my mom was the homemaker and my dad worked and he was also really active in our community and he volunteered for lots of things and he was busy and the way he interacted with us when my mom was alive was a lot different.

It’s not that he’s a bad man at all. He’s lovely and I. And now as an adult have formed a really, especially over the past year, he has been just a super rock star for me. So when my mom died, she’d only been dead a few weeks and I said something terrible to him about that. And so he let me, he, let me just say that shitty thing.

He never asked me to explain it. He never told me how it hurt his feelings, which I’m sure it did. He just forgave me really fast. And looking back, I think he was likely just aware that I was afraid, that I was afraid of him dying too. And that was my process, and he let me have it. So if you’re watching someone lose a parent, or they just lost a parent, let them say the wrong thing.

Let it go. And also you are allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to be fine. You are allowed to feel both of those things on any given day. And if you are losing a parent, you’re allowed to be angry, you’re allowed to be fine. And you’re allowed to feel both of those things on any given day. It’s just life.

It’s life and life is happening. And I think the more that we. Allow ourselves to define the box instead of live in a box, the easier it will be for us to be able to move forward and to get perspective on it, and to grow around it, and to grow bigger than the grief. And so here’s my thoughts on. All of this and on hope , as a bigger lesson, , hope as a practice.

I say lots of times to women in the navigate method that hope, I think is one of the scariest things. ’cause you have to trust almost something outside yourself. And I think most people treat hope like it’s something that happens to them when the conditions are good, like when it’s safe to hope. But I think one of the bravest things you can do is hope.

Hope for better, hope for clarity, hope for realizations, for peace, even when the conditions aren’t right, even when it doesn’t seem likely. And you know what my mom’s death accidentally told, accidentally taught me is that hope is a stance. , It’s a decision. It is a rewire. We can say, this awful thing happened and this shitty thing I went through and, that things can change in an instant.

It’s neutral, right? You choose to make a reason to keep going no matter what your situation, whether you lost a parent at 50 or you lost ’em at 10, or you never have at all. We all have. Things that we grieve. We grieve relationships and jobs and friendships. People don’t have to die in order for us to be grieving and for all these lessons to still be important.

And that choice, I think to, decide that you are going to focus where you wanna go. I feel really lucky that has quietly been chugging along in the background of my brain. And I don’t know if that’s just how I was wired long before my mom was born. And I have a lot of other flaws. Like, let me celebrate the one thing.

I do this really well and I make a really good, soft boiled egg. Okay, so let me have this. So, but I think that when we can do that. We can recognize what unconscious choices are you actually listening to and which ones would you choose, , in inside group. That’s one of my favorite things to do with people is to really dig down and find out what is it unconsciously that you’re thinking?

What’s the pattern that’s running, and do you need to rewire it? Do, does that pattern need to change? It’s okay that you thought that thing for a long time. It probably served you and kept you safe, but now what do you want to be thinking? What would you choose? How do you want to live this wild and precious life?

Because things can change in an instant and you don’t have to lose someone to learn this. But if you have, , I want you to know that the very thing that breaks us open can actually be the thing that keeps us going. And that, I think is how you live a big life. Just a reminder, we have our fireside chat this coming month in April on the fifth.

Yeah, it’s Easter. I know it’s Easter Sunday. The scheduling sometime chooses us. We don’t choose the scheduling. It’s all right, so it, you can’t make it. We’re gonna do it again early May. If you can make it, maybe you’ve spent the day doing Easter stuff. Maybe you won’t do any Easter stuff and you’ll just wanna come hang out with me.

It might be a smaller group, which will be really fun. We’re just gonna talk about. Some of these big decisions. There’s no real script for these. We don’t record them. They’re a place to be honest, and to share and to have a little community, when we feel so alone in some of our big decisions, especially around marriages, and that’s the work that I do.

It can be isolating and there can be a lot of shame in there. And so this just brings you to a place where everybody gets it and you don’t have to explain yourself. So come join. Come join me over there, fireside Chat. You can find the link in the menu on my website, betsy p.com, or just message me on Instagram Fire.

If you just shoot me a message, it just says Fire. It’ll automatically reply. The world of bots is amazing, but it’ll help me get it to you quicker. Also, if you haven’t followed along on Instagram, come find me there. It’s just Betsy and I’ve got something new that I’m working on. I’m really so freaking excited about these videos that I’m making.

None of them are live. I’m trying to figure out if I need to hire a videographer, but I have stories to tell and I wanna tell it in a new way. So I’ll still be doing the same content that I’ve been doing, but I have some other things just to share with you about what it’s like. To start over in your fifties.

There’s so many little funny stories every week that I have, and I thought, let’s, share these in a new way. So be sure to be looking for those. I really wanna get those out soon. So it, it is on my short list, and then next month please go to my YouTube because we are. Again, we’ve really done a lot of work.

I say we, it’s me and my cat. Enjoy my, operations bestie. , We’ve done a lot of work to create systems so that I can get some really good YouTube videos out for you. Longer form where I’m gonna be recording y’all. I bought gear. I got, a set up now. , You know you gotta come, you gotta come and visit me over there.

. I’ll let you know when it’s live, but be on the lookout. You can also just text me on Instagram or dm me on Instagram, YouTube, and it will send you the link so that you can follow along and get alerted when they’re live. Okay? All that chatter, just to say, I’m so happy that you’re here. Thank you for being with me on this journey, and I love you so much.

I’ll see you next time. Bye-bye. Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today.

You can find me over on Instagram at betsy pa and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.