In this episode of The Art of Living Big, host Betsy Pake asks us to replace the term starting over with starting wiser as we never truly start over. We build on our life experiences, which make us wiser and we recognize our past as we continue with our present and future. Life is an evolution, not a series of restarts.

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 everyone. Welcome to The Art of Living Big Today. I have a thi, this is like a theme that keeps coming up and so I thought there’s gotta be something in this, right? Like any, anytime something keeps coming up, I’m like, alright, maybe I need to slow down and really think about what is happening. And what the lesson is in that, for me, typically I try and figure out what’s the lesson in this for me?

And then , if it’s any good, then I bring it to you in case it’s like a universal. So here’s how this started. So my daughter [00:01:00] is going back to school. So if you’ve been here for a long time, you might remember she went to scad. She is 23. So she went to SCAD like three years ago, four years ago. And she did amazing.

She was on the dean’s list her first semester, her second semester Dean’s list. The third, well, they do like, it’s a little different, but in the, the way they divided up, so , in the fall when she started Dean’s list, Dean list, then in the spring dean’s list, and then that last bit of the school year, it was like April.

She just like crashed out. It was so stressful. And, uh, there’s a lot to that story, but she just was like, I hate this. I can’t do it anymore, basically. So she decided to leave school and it was really, it was disappointing, but I also felt really sad for her and she was like, I gotta figure out what I’m supposed to do, you know?

So in the meantime, she’s had a couple jobs that she’s [00:02:00] really liked and she’s really liked the people. The one job she had actually led to the second job and , she felt like she was moving up right, getting new opportunities and felt really good about it. But I think there was always something sort of gnawing at her.

And maybe you’ve had this happen too, where you’re like, I made a decision to stop doing what I was doing. And now I’m in a holding pattern. I haven’t really moved on to the next thing. I’m just in this like in between. And with her, I think there was a feeling of I’ll know when I know, and also a little bit of like maybe I’ll never know.

So she would kind of go back and forth between this. Okay. So over the years, since she was like six. She has loved Anthony Bourdain. It’s been her screensaver on her phone like for years. I think it’s one of her earliest memories that she talks about is watching [00:03:00] Anthony Bourdain on TV with her dad, and it’s like such a good memory.

And so she has talked about being a chef, about maybe I should be a chef. It would be fun to be a chef. There’s not really any culinary schools here in Atlanta. Fast forward. About two months ago, we were chitchatting one day and she said, I looked up culinary school and the culinary school where Anthony Bourdain went is in New York, and you guys may know of that, the Culinary Institute of America.

And she decided that she wanted to apply. Now I really decided she needed to figure it all out. I wasn’t gonna, not that I wasn’t gonna help, but I wasn’t, I was gonna let her figure it out. ’cause I wanted to see if the drive was strong enough to move through some of the hard parts of figuring it all out.

And she did. She figured it [00:04:00] all out and she got accepted and she’ll be hopefully starting in a few months. She’s going up in just a couple weeks to look for an apartment and really her whole life is about to shift. She’s moving into the next phase out of the in-between and into what’s next. And she said something to me about how she sort of regretted that maybe that she left SCAD years ago or that she even started, like there was this.

I’ve wasted time and I could relate so deeply to that, right? And you guys probably can too. There’s a million different things where we think, oh my God, I’m starting over., Maybe you got left. Let go from your job and now you’re gotta start over. Maybe you’re really wanting to shift careers. Maybe you’ve gotten divorced and you’re starting over.

Maybe you suffered a really big financial [00:05:00] hardship and you’re starting over. Whatever it is, it feels like you’re starting over. And when I was talking to her, I totally understood that feeling and that she was coming from, but also, you’re never starting over. It’s a myth. It’s a myth that you’re starting over, you’re not starting over.

You’re starting wiser. And I felt so strongly about that with her. It made me take a look at some things in my own life. Now, here’s a really quick little story, but I have a really nice camera that I bought during COV and I have never really, I’ve never really figured it out. Last summer, I hired a photographer to help me, teach me all the ways, and she made a PowerPoint for me and I have.

Information to reference. [00:06:00] And I practiced a little bit after, but this weekend I thought, I want to figure out the camera, maybe I’ll pull it out again. And then I was like, ah, I’m gonna be starting over. And it reminded me of that conversation with my daughter and I was like, are we ever really starting over?

And when I say this is a myth, you know, we have this idea that. Of, I’m gonna say it this way, many of us, maybe not you, if, if it’s not you, I’m so jealous. But of this like all or nothing. I know I have had that over the years. I feel like it’s something I’ve begun to get under control over the past few years.

But this all or nothing, so. If I’ve screwed up, I have to scrap it all and start over. Like if I’m doing something and I mess up, I’ll just start again next week. Like, I gotta start on a Monday. I gotta start on the first of the month. I gotta wait till New Year’s. I gotta like, it’s, it’s done. But the truth of [00:07:00] that is, is not that it’s done.

That is a myth. It is a myth that you erase. The slate and the slate is wiped clean. Right? That’s a myth. The slate isn’t wiped clean because you have experiences, you have knowledge, you have new ways of doing things and seeing things. You have new neuro connections from the first time that you learned how to do it or took an interest in it or tried to figure it out or took the leap or whatever it is.

You’ve got new skills and so. Recognized because so often we don’t recognize it necessarily in ourself unless we pause, right. To really notice. But I recognized it when it happened to me because of the conversation that I’d had with my daughter and that language of, ugh, I’m starting over, can feel so disempowering.

It was so easy for me to look at her [00:08:00] and say, oh my God. Of course you’re not starting over. You have all this new information, right? Life is a progression. Each thing really builds on itself. You’re not losing anything, and that thought that there is something that you have to start over means there is some finish line and there’s just never really a finish line.

There’s not a reset button because it’s a continuum. There’s not a start and a stop. It’s, I’m always learning lessons and I’m always changing how I’m seeing things, and I’m always growing, and I’m always being exposed to new things. So the idea that you have to restart, you could think of it instead, like I’m relaunching.

And that’s what she’s doing. She’s relaunching with loads of upgrades, loads of skills that she didn’t have before, a maturity she didn’t have before. [00:09:00] Her brain has grown a whole lot, right? ’cause she’s almost 24. So her prefrontal cortex wasn’t even close to being completed when she started school before.

Now it’s close to being completed. So I want you to be thinking. About the ways that you’re disempowering yourself by thinking either about things that have already happened or things that you perceive will be happening or that you’re fearful of happening because you think that this is a starting over.

But really the skills and the lessons and the resilience begin to stack up even if the setting changes. So I wanna talk about a couple quick things that I want you to be thinking about that might give you a different perspective. So a couple things that you could, almost like a checklist in your mind.

Right? The first thing is emotional [00:10:00] intelligence. So this is a hidden asset and we learn a lot about ourselves as we grow older. If you’re paying attention at all, which I’m guessing you do, pay attention ’cause you’re here, right? If you’re, you wouldn’t be listening to this if you were not paying attention.

So our emotional intelligence, the more we pay attention and the more we grow and the more we get to know our ourselves, the older we get, it’s such a gift. To be older and have challenges is so much easier I think. I think, than being really young in a lot of ways. So. One of the hidden assets that you probably overlook is your emotional intelligence.

Just how much you’re able to conceptualize and understand things and see things in a new way, and. Relate to people in terms of that challenge that you have, that opportunity that you have, you probably have a way bigger network now, and connections. You know, I even, my daughter found that, [00:11:00] and she’s only 24, right?

Where she was like, oh, you know, I know somebody that knows somebody. And you know, the, the front, the front part of. The Culinary Institute, when you drive in, there’s like this huge plaza, it’s called Anton Plaza, and there’s like a big fountain and the Antons donated all this money, right, to have it. We know them.

They gave Olive of baby clothes when she was young. Olives nano worked for them for years and years and years and years and years, so. All of a sudden we’re putting all these things together, right? These networking and connections, and you have those too with things where you’re like, oh my gosh, there’s so many connections I didn’t even realize like I lost my job, but now I’m looking for a new job and I’m realizing the place I wanna work that I’ve always wanted to work has like three other people I know.

There’s just things that come up when you open your mind to it. . This perspective, I’m gonna say this perspective and maturity that [00:12:00] you have can really empower you to think of this as not a start over, but a movement forward. A relaunching with upgrades, right? And so I want you to just think about your toolkit.

Think about the things that you have that you didn’t have when you went through something similar, right? That you didn’t have last time you had this challenge. And then I want you to think about looking at your own story and finding the through lines. Look at the things that have happened and say what’s similar in all these, like what are the times where I went through something really hard and now I can draw on the experience , that I created with the success at the end?

And it doesn’t mean the experience went the way you wanted. But it means that you moved through it. That’s a success at the end. So what was it that you had to think about or believe or surround yourself with or change your [00:13:00] mind about and start bringing in that piece of that through line of that old story into your new story?

Use it as fuel for the experience that I can move through this thing because I’ve moved through other things that were challenging too, and all I did in that experience was grow. Like that’s what happened to me. We either have success, right? I’m using success in air quotes, I’m using air quotes, like we either have this success, which is things going the way we wanted.

That’s all that means, right? Really things going the way we thought they should have, or we have growth and learning that maybe sets us up for a bigger success, a greater success, something that we really desired even more an experience we wanted even more. And so it’s never really about starting over because you can never get rid of all of the great things that you’ve learned already.[00:14:00] 

It’s not starting over at all. It’s starting from a place of being wiser. It’s starting from having all of these resources that you never had. So when you start thinking about your challenges, your problems, maybe as challenges, and then move those challenges into what are the opportunities here so that I can see how my past story is actually creating.

A huge avenue for success for me moving forward. I think when you can do that, that is when you live a big life. All right. Thanks so much for being here. 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. [00:15:00] You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pay 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.