In this episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy explores what it really means to upgrade the energetic “software” running your life. Just like your phone or computer needs updates to function smoothly, your inner system … your beliefs, identity, emotional patterns, and energetic boundaries… also needs regular upgrades.

Betsy unpacks how outdated energetic programs (like people-pleasing, scarcity, or over-responsibility) quietly run in the background, draining your power and distorting your clarity. She shares how to identify when your system is glitching, those moments of burnout, confusion, or repeating cycles — and how to consciously install a new energetic framework that supports ease, alignment, and expansion.

You’ll hear stories from Betsy’s own recent upgrades — the subtle shifts that changed everything in her business, relationships, and daily rhythm — and practical ways to recalibrate your own system.

This episode is a guide to clearing energetic clutter, stabilizing your power, and reprogramming yourself for the version of you who lives bigger, freer, and more grounded in truth.

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 everybody. Welcome to The Art of Living Big. I’m excited. I’m excited to be here with you today, , and I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna talk about this a long time, and if you’re new here, you’re like, what? We don’t really care about your teeth, but last week I said I was getting these stupid brackets, my Invisalign off, and that did not happen.

There’s more to do. So anyway, that’s the update on that. I just, I know this sounds really. Stupid probably, but I felt like guilty. ’cause I told you that. And I know you don’t care. I know you don’t care, but I like to be truthful, so I wanted to let you know that I didn’t get ’em off. So if you see me online and you’re like, she still has those.

Brackets on her teeth. She’s still wearing the Invisalign. Ugh, I am. But it’ll be over soon and it’ll be so worth it. So anyway, I’m excited to do today’s episode and as we get started, I just wanna remind you that we’re in November. Do you remember I was telling you and I was telling people on Instagram about Cozy Earth and.

Amazing bathrobe that they sent me. And I wanna remind you that it is November. So right now my code live Big Betsy on Cozy Earth gives you 40% off, which is like a special thing. And I think it only goes to the middle of December. But here’s the thing about that is that bathrobe that they sent me is, it’s a

puffy I, I turned it into a sticker and I use it on all my Instagram stories. It is the most amazing. Uh, thing ever. I, it’s funny, I was on, , I was on Marco Polo with a girlfriend of mine and I left her this big message and I was getting ready for nighttime, , and recording and she messaged me back.

She’s , I just love you’re in that puffy house coat. I know. You’re so happy. ’cause I am so happy. It is like a quilt that they turned into a bathrobe and I think on their website it’s called like the quilted house coat. It is., , Really one of my favorite things. And if you take a bath and you put, if you take a bath and you put it in the dryer and then you put it on after, it’s like the coziest most amazing thing ever.

, They sent me that bathrobe and they sent me these cozy socks. , I don’t know, maybe like a month or six weeks ago, they sent, I had, I think I had maybe had talked about it on the podcast when my daughter was in the hospital. To help when she came home is I had her apartment cleaned and I went over with my cozy Earth sheets ’cause they’re so comfy.

And I was like, I’m gonna let her use my Cozy Earth sheets. Anyway, they sent me sheets for her, so she has her own Cozy Earth Sheets and when they did that, they sent me this bathrobe and the socks, and I’m telling you. The socks are like, , they say they’re lounge socks. I wear ’em with like my Birkenstocks, , with like clogs.

But anyway, make sure you use the code ’cause now you can get 40% off, which makes it like insanely inexpensive and really good gifts. Those cozy socks, lounge socks. I got the three pack with the three like pinky colors and they’re so cozy and comfy. So, anyway, I, wanted to say that as I got started, because.

It’s the coupon is now, so you could get it for Christmas. Okay. And if you hear this like in February, you could still use Live Big Betsy, but I think it only gets you like 20% off typically moving forward. So that’s a big deal. All right, so today I wanted to talk about energetic operating systems., I know it’s kind of a random topic, right?

But here’s the thing. More and more and more in my life over the last eight weeks, I think I have been really leaning into energy and you know, I talked a few weeks ago about the energetic, the energetics of making a decision, and I have been thinking for myself like, okay, let’s say , that we are an energetic operating system.

Right? Let’s, let’s just assume that is true. Then how would we update the software? Like I, I’m like, , how could I get an update? I think we go through times where life is hard, right? And then we grow and that’s an update. But also I would like to, I would like to update without all that, I’d like to skip the hardship and just go right to the growth.

I know that’s not how life works, but I think there is a way to. Identify earlier, like when your system is glitching and consciously install a new energetic framework that really supports where it is that you wanna be. And so that is something that I have been working on over the past eight weeks. Life has been kind of hard.

And I post about this sometimes on my Instagram stories, but. Every day. I typically post like my good things, a list of good things, and I find this so important for our energetic operating system to reprogram our brains to be looking for good things. But also there are times where I post about something that’s going hard, right?

Because life happens. There’s always this stupid growth. So life happens and I do wanna acknowledge that too. And so, , today I posted something, , about life being hard and my daughter’s back in the hospital for the fourth time and like things aren’t simple and there is an energetics around it that I can use to help.

So that I don’t do this pattern again, whatever patterns I’m playing in this, right? When something bad happens, whatever it is, take my situation out of it. But whatever it is, we have a pattern, right? We feel like a victim or we get overwhelmed or we shut down or whatever our pattern is, , so today, let’s talk a little bit about.

About this upgrading of your energetic operating system. So,, the new iPhone came out and so I noticed that my iPhone is lagging, right. And it’s because well, it’s because Apple is trying to get me to buy a new phone, I’m sure. But it’s because there the software needs to be updated. The new iOS came out.

Mine wasn’t working right. I’m like, oh, I need to upgrade my software so that it’s running the same thing that all my apps are running on, and your energetic operating system is made up of beliefs of patterns. Of emotional codes that really determine how you move through the world. It is like an unseen blueprint about what you think is possible, what you think is okay to tolerate , what you magnetize into your life.

And most of us were running on a code that was written years ago or decades ago, or when we were little kids. And so let’s just talk here first about this operating system , and how to even know, well, actually, let’s just talk a little bit about the unseen blueprint. And, I kind of touch on this in every episode and I’m sure I’ve done a deep dive about this in one, at one point or another.

But if you’re new here, I just wanna give sort of an overview of this. So, , I say this like unseen blueprint, you have this blueprint, the way that you do things. Our unconscious mind, our unconscious minds c create habits, right? That is where our habits are stored. It’s where our micro expressions are stored.

It’s where everything, every memory, everything I’ve ever experienced is stored. And in all of that, it creates a blueprint of reality. And that reality is like a set of sunglasses that I put on. And everything that I see in the world is through those sunglasses. So I grew up in Vermont in a little small town.

My dad worked outside the home. My mom was a homemaker and was super involved in our lives. I had a sister and my grandmothers were important to our family. Education was huge. My dad worked at the university and that was something that we talked about all the time. So all of those, we had pets and that was important.

My dad was active in the community. My whole family was active in the community. That was important. Taking care of each other was important,. It’s so this whole like framework became my glasses that I put on. Now when I look at the world, I see it through that frame, right, of what’s important, how do we take care of each other?

How do we show up in relationships? What does life look like as a friend or a sister or a daughter? Like all of those things. That is my sunglasses now. Somebody else could have grown up in the same town with different parents, different experience, maybe. They were with, , parents that were, that worked weird shifts, right?

Worked their butts off, but weird shifts. And so family didn’t appear to be, I’m gonna say a priority, but that’s probably a judgment. , Didn’t, wasn’t played out in the same way mine. Right. So their framework is a little bit different. Their sunglasses are a little different. Or if somebody grew up in Chicago or grew up in la, , do you know what I mean?

And their parents were surfers and life was like, chill. I mean, that’s a coolest set of sunglasses, right? But everybody’s got their own, you know, even my sister that grew up in the same house as me, with the same parents as me, got parents. Who were a certain age at a different age than I got them. Does that make sense?

She’s an older sister. When she was 14, my mom was, I don’t know, 35. Right? Whatever that is. And then when I was 14, my mom was 48, like it was different. Or 38. My mom never lived till 48. 38, right. So we got a different experience. Her sunglasses are gonna be different. Also the way we process information makes our sunglasses different.

Even if we experience the same exact thing. You go through a trauma with somebody or you’re in an accident, you see it differently than the person you were with. Why is that? Well, it’s because they have their own set of sunglasses that now , is shading everything. So does this make sense? All, of the incoming information you’ve ever had in your whole entire life creates your sunglasses, your unseen blueprint.

Nobody can see it. Nobody knows exactly why it is you’re reacting or interacting the way that you are, but it forms. Every single view of what you think is possible, what you think you’re supposed to tolerate, what you think is important, what you think you need to react to, how you show up, all of that, it’s your operating system.

So you were probably handed that I’m using air quotes, like handed that. Like you probably didn’t sit down and go, okay, that I would like that belief and oh, that seems really good to have. Like, no, none of that. You just were given it. And when we’re really young we just believe everything. Right? That’s actually until we’re about seven, we just take it all in and use it to create our reality.

Okay, so now. How do you know when your system is due for an update? , It’s when life starts to glitch, so maybe you feel like you are running into the same problem over and over again, like hitting the same wall inside your business, right? Or the same kind of relationship. It keeps showing up just wearing a different face.

Right? Or you keep doing the same things inside the relationship you have. You’re like, we’ve been married for 22 years. Why am I still doing this stupid thing that we do? Right? Maybe you’re exhausted, even though you’re doing like quote unquote all the right things. So these are all. What I would call like energetic error messages.

It’s your system saying, Hey, the version of you that wrote this code doesn’t fit who you are anymore. So it’s gotta have an update. , Your old operating system maybe was built around safety. Don’t rock the boat. Keep everybody comfortable over function. So nobody gets mad sweep stuff under the rug.

, It doesn’t matter. I’ll just deal with it. That version of you probably kept you really safe way back then, right? When? When you developed that code. Maybe That was really good. I actually remember my mom saying, I mean, I was young and my mom saying that I was a people pleaser, as if it was a really good thing, like Betsy knows how to do the right thing and or make people happy or however she said it.

I remember that moment actually, and I remember thinking she seems happy about that, but the words didn’t seem like it should be happy, but she was happy about it. So I felt like I was doing a good job. So we have these versions of us that kept us safe back then, right? That felt good back then that we go, oh, okay.

I guess that’s right. ’cause mom is happy with me. But now, , it’s like trying to run new software on an old computer. It’s like trying to run this new operating system of on my iPhone, that’s the old iPhone and it’s glitching. I can’t expand if I’m still trying to protect. The old identity of me, I have to upgrade.

So every operating system has these components. It has a belief, right? It’s the root code. It’s what you believe about yourself, about money, about love, about possibility. It also has emotional patterns. So these are feelings that reinforce that code. Maybe it’s pride, right? Happy. Like I’m happy, I feel good that I do the right thing.

Maybe it’s guilt, maybe it’s fear, like I don’t wanna get in trouble. I find myself that thinking that a lot, like am I in trouble? And then I’m like, no, I’m a damn a dull. I’m not in trouble. Right? Or like a low grade anxiety of like, I don’t wanna be too much. It also has an identity. So it’s who you think you are.

Inside that system. So the good girl, the strong one, the fixer, the victim, like whatever that is. And then boundaries. So how you filter energy in and out, that is your energetic firewall. So you’ve got beliefs, emotional patterns, identity and boundaries. And when we start upgrading, we have to rewire each of those elements consciously.

One file at a time. So how do we do this? So how do you actually upgrade your energetic operating system? So here is the process that I use and how I teach people inside the Navigate method. But number one is you’ve got to notice the lag. Like where do you start to feel. Where do you feel resistance?

Exhaustion. Here’s a big one for me, is I feel confused. I get really confused. , And that’s usually where my code is outdated, where I’m like, oh, something’s not operating right. Why do I feel confusion around this? Right? Because I’m smart, I can figure things out. Why does this feel overwhelming to the place of confusion?

And then what I wanna do is, step two is to pause autopilot. So I don’t wanna go swoop in and try to fix this, right? I, want to get still, and I did an episode on this maybe like maybe a year or so ago. I did one on the thinking couch. And this is a thing that I go back to, and you’ll hear me talk about this a lot, and now I have a thinking chair, but where I, just sit and think.

I think about it. I think about the problem, which we avoid a lot of times, right? But I really wanna figure out what is the pattern and where did this come from? Like, , who wrote this code? Who, gave me this? And what were they trying to protect me from? What was I trying to protect myself from?

And usually that old version of you was doing the very best with the tools that she had. This weekend, my daughter got mad at me for something that I did. Hypothetically, I don’t, remember. I don’t remember doing it, but that I did when she was younger and I said something or it was like Christmas time and she felt dismissed or whatever, and she thought about it and she told me, do you remember when you did that?

And why were you doing that? And I’m like, you know what? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t remember that, but I’m sure if you do that it happened, right? ’cause I don’t need to argue about that. But what I will say is I’m sure I was doing the best that I had with the tools that I knew. And if that situation were to happen today, I would probably do it so much different.

So. There is an old version of us that’s trying really hard, right? And is, trying to create safety, is trying to do the things that think they’re keeping our mothers proud or whatever that is. So notice the lag, pause that autopilot, don’t swoop in and try to fix it. Just pause and say, who wrote this code?

And then the third thing is to choose. So you’re gonna be choosing the new frequency. So. I don’t want this to be, well, if I’m actively looking at it, I’m gonna be making a choice. But what I wanna do is I wanna actively choose from the upgraded version of me. Last year I talked about how I did a thinking couch, a meditation, and there was a point where I felt this upgraded version of me come.

Sit down in the chair next to me and I could feel her take my hands. And she told me exactly what was gonna happen in my life and how it was gonna unfold. And I remember her with her. I remember how it felt like with our hands touching, and I knew that I was getting so much amazing information. And then she stood up and walked away.

I thought, why is she walking like that? That’s what I remember from the miraculous download about my life. What I remember is how she was walking, but here’s what I didn’t totally recognize then that I recognize now. Last week I went for a walk and I realized that it felt different when I was walking, and so I asked myself, what’s different? What is different? And I realized that I had been walking likely for a decade or more looking down. I was very hunched over and I talked about that in that episode. My daughter described it as walking quite masculine, leaning forward, charging forward. But this time when I went for a walk, my head was up.

I was really leaning back my. I was walking from my hips, like my hips were swinging. It felt much more feminine. Now, the feminine, the masculine, doesn’t matter as much as this was a different version of me, she felt much more confident and sure of herself. So there is an upgraded version. So when we get to step three, choosing that new frequency, what would the upgraded version of me believe instead?

The version of me that got up and walked away and I was like, who is that? That one thought totally different than the one that was still sitting in the chair. Maybe she believes she doesn’t have to prove her worth to be chosen. Maybe she believes that having ease is really safe, that it’s okay for other people to step in and take care of things.

She doesn’t have to do it all. She can hold both power and rest. So this belief. Or the set of beliefs become your new code. And when you fully embody those, you’ll start to see the ripple. You’ll act different, you’ll walk, different people will respond to you, different opportunities feel lighter, right? So when we can start to shift and live in alignment with where it is we wanna go in this new operating system, then.

Upgrading isn’t just a one time download. Like I didn’t sit there last year and get this like download from this future version of me that knew the whole path. ’cause she had lived it, , my brain magically took it away from me. I could just see the evidence of it in her walk. And what I had to do was I couldn’t just get a one time download.

I had to. I had to shift, become aware and notice over time when something feels heavy or glitchy again, and shift and become aware and notice when it feels glitchy and shift and become aware. That’s your, cue for the next update. And from last summer sitting on the couch to this year going for that walk, there’s been, , 254 versions of me that have evolved.

To get me to that. And the more that you practice this, the faster that you catch it. , You’ll start to recognize, oh, this isn’t about that, that one person or that circumstance, like this is just my system trying to run an old code. And then you relieve yourself of the guilt of not doing it right, right.

Or going backwards or whatever that is. Because the awareness is what you need because when you get the awareness, you get a chance to breathe and ground yourself and choose differently, and that’s how you stay in the flow of the new operating system. So maybe today, take a scan of your system. Where do you feel friction?

Where are you ready for a totally different energetic file, right? One who supports who you’re becoming? What is that version of you that would sit down on the couch with you today and say, this is that version of me. And you know what I was thinking this morning when I was writing down some notes of what I wanted to talk to you about?

I was thinking, am I fully that version that was walking different? No, but there’s evidence of her now. There’s evidence, solid physical evidence, and so. There’s more to do, and there’s also another version, right? The version of me right now and the version of me that maybe is her, that maybe comes in a week or a month or two months, that version of me also will grow.

And to do what? I’ve gotta notice those glitches. So I want you to scan your system. Notice where you feel friction, where you’re ready for an upgrade, because the energy. Is the, architecture of your reality. It is your sunglasses. And when you upgrade it, everything is gonna start to shift. Everything, your relationships, the way people interact with you, your work, your body, how you look, how you show up, your sense of peace.

So where you are isn’t bad, you’re not broken, you’re, not struggling. Even if you might be like, I’m on the struggle bus. I say that sometimes I’m on the struggle bus, but , I’m not broken. I’m, ready for an energetic update. Right? You’re ready for a higher version of yourself. I know when I’m on the struggle bus and we all struggle, so this is

not in an attempt to be toxic positivity at all. This is an attempt to be like, how do I grow through things that are really hard? Because life is gonna hand us hard stuff all the time. And the cool thing is, that if we use it right, we get to grow. If we turn to avoidance and we stop participating, that’s when we get stagnant, and that’s where we start to grow mold, and that’s where we get yucky.

So you’re not broken. You’re just ready for a higher version of yourself, a higher energetic version. All right. Thanks for being here with me today. It was so good to have you. And if this episode called out to you and you think somebody else could be helped by it, please share it with a friend.

If you haven’t already signed up for our fireside chat, we’re doing it November 9th, but we’ll do it again in December. So. You can just message me on Instagram, or comment on anything. Just fire and we’ll send you the link. And we’re also gonna have that put onto our website. If you haven’t been to the website recently, it’s new.

It’s new and updated. , And there is a link right now inside my Instagram bio. So you could just go right to my bio and click on that. Come. It is just a place for community. We’re gonna be meeting on a Sunday night and just joining together in community. So no pressure. You don’t have to turn on your, zoom face if you don’t want to, although I’d love to see you.

But it’s just a place to share and to just kind of not feel so alone in the world right now. Feels. Heavy as we move into an energetic update. Okay, until next time, I love you guys 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.

You know that moment when you find yourself in the same situation again… just with different names and faces? Maybe it’s a new job that feels oddly familiar to the last one, or a new relationship that somehow has the same emotional dynamics. In this episode, Betsy unpacks why that happens, what the universe (and your subconscious) are really trying to teach you, and how to finally integrate the lesson so you can move forward…not in circles.

This episode explores:

It’s an invitation to stop asking “Why does this keep happening to me?” and start asking, “What in me is ready to be healed?”

Transcript

 You know that moment where you find yourself in the same situation again, right? Different names, maybe different faces. Maybe it’s a new job that feels oddly familiar to the last one. The situations that happen are the same, or it’s a new relationship that somehow has these same emotional dynamics. All right, today we’re gonna talk about this.

Why does this happen? What does the universe, and of course, your subconscious. Really want you to know, and I’m gonna teach you how to integrate the lesson so you can start moving forward and you don’t get stuck in circles. Okay? Alright, let’s go. 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 everybody. Welcome to the Art of Living Big. I’m Betsy. I’m happy that you’re here today. All right, a couple quick updates. ’cause you know, I like to give you a couple of quick updates. So this week, tomorrow, in fact, when you’re listening to this, if you are a subscriber and you listen in the morning when this comes out, while you’re listening, I’m getting my brackets taken off for my Invisalign, which the last couple weeks, the liners that I’ve had have made me.

Like Lispy and it’s so hard to talk. I took them out to do this episode, but it is something that I’m really excited about and I’m happy that my teeth are perfect and it’s like just something to celebrate. So I wanted to celebrate that with you here. If you follow me on Instagram, then you may have noticed, , every morning I do like a good things post.

So thank you guys for loving those and for liking my outfits. You know, it’s kind of funny because nobody sees my outfit all day ’cause I’m, because I’m at work from home, but you guys, when I post, so it makes it fun to get ready and I like to get ready. Someone did ask me that, like, why do you get ready every day if you work from home and nobody sees you?

And I know this sounds kind of strange, . There’s no judgment if you don’t do this, but I do it because I believe that it makes me show up as my favorite version of myself, and I think my clients deserve that. So I like to get up and get ready and feel good and start my day. So if you have been watching those, you may have noticed earlier this week I posted something about the portal 2025.

So. Typically this time of year, I do some special things for people that are coming into the Navigate Method. So we are gonna be taking a handful of people through the regular process, but there’s gonna be some additional. Things that we’re gonna do. And the reason that we’re doing those is two parts.

One is because it’s funky, it’s a funky time of year to do the navigate method because there’s breaks for the holiday, right? So, , like the week of Thanksgiving, we have a group, but it’s earlier the week of Christmas. Christmas falls on a Thursday, right? , And that’s when we meet. So like there’s changes to the schedule.

So because of that, I like to make it a little bit more. Fun for the people that go through and I have some extra things that we’re doing to support you. I also think right now is the most important time of the whole year to go through this, and the reason is because we kick the can down the road so much for so many things in our lives.

I mean, I know I do it for things too, right? There’s things that we want and things that we said in January that I’m not gonna live another year like this. Whether, whatever that is for you in this job, in this relationship, in this uncomfortableness, in this body, whatever it is, right? Things we wanted to do different, and now it’s, now it’s showtime, right?

You still have an opportunity to make a lot of the changes that you wanted to make. The truth is a lot of the things that we set out to do at the beginning of the year really don’t take that much time because once you start there becomes momentum and then that just becomes the way that you live, right?

And so I wanted to invite you in if you are that woman that you are, the kind of woman that you’re, like I said, I wasn’t gonna do this another year. Last year, the year before, the year before. And I’ve gotta do something different. And one of the things that I posted earlier today was just about change.

And someone asked me about asking our husbands to change and they were like, I don’t wanna ask him to change. And, and I kind of laughed ’cause I’m like, you’re not asking him to change. You’re asking him to be aware of who he is. You’re asking him to notice the things that he does that create disconnection and struggle, like you are just , asking him to be aware because you can’t shift anything if you’re not aware that you do it.

And so it sounds to me like so many times women are caught in this back and forth because they’re like, I don’t wanna ask him to change. I should accept him the way he is. And I, you’re not asking him to. Change who he is. You’re asking him to recognize his patterns that aren’t helping him to live the way that you guys decided to live together.

And it may be that he can never do that, that’s a possibility, but you don’t know unless you do things radically different. And that’s what we teach you inside the Navigate method. Okay? So I didn’t mean to go off on all that. I just feel like that’s important and important for you to know that we’re doing that right now, so you could get in on it and you know, if you’re listening to this and it’s December or even early January, there’s still ways for you to get in on that.

And , we have special ways for you to be able to still participate in the things that we’ve done for the holidays. So, okay, so let’s get into this episode. We are gonna be talking today about something that I think that we’ve all felt at some point, and it is that feeling of, wait, have I been here before?

Like I’ve done this before. You know, the details might change. It might be a different relationship, like I said, or a job or a new city, but somehow the emotions, the dynamics, they all feel the same. And you’re like, why haven’t I learned the lesson? Like there is a lesson for me to learn and I never learned it, but what is it?

And it’s, it can feel like. The universe keeps sending you this same test. I hear people say that a lot, like it’s just a test until you finally learn the material. And the truth is,, it sort of does. It’s not really a test, but we’re gonna talk about this, all right? I used to think that if I worked a little bit harder, or I got a little bit smarter, or if I made better choices.

That I would stop ending up in the same emotional places. But what I learned is that , the universe isn’t punishing us, but it is partnering with us. It’s showing us again and again. The places where we’ve abandoned ourselves, right? , The parts of us that are like seeking attention or validation, and it will keep showing up until we are ready to see it differently.

So first, let’s just start with what’s actually going on, because I think that this. This is an important thing to notice. , Anytime I talk about the universe, I’m using air quotes like the universe. I do believe in an energy around things, and also there’s always a way to track it back to your subconscious mind.

So here’s what’s really going on from that level. So our subconscious mind runs the show about 95% of the time, and what I mean by that is. It is the thing that is reacting, deciding, sifting, and sorting through what you are consciously aware of. We think we have free will, but we only have free will enough to the 5%.

The other place that we can impact our free will is by understanding our subconscious mind, and I think this is so important if we want to be and experience new things. Otherwise we become where we are running this track, right? That kind of runs the same thing over and over and over again. And that is actually really helpful.

Biologically, it’s really helpful because we don’t have to remember everything. Like I know exactly how to brush my teeth. I don’t even hardly remember doing it until I realize I’ve done it. It is a habit. It’s unconscious. And if I had to remember everything or look at a YouTube every time I wanted to put pants on, like it would become, life would become very hard, right?

So our subconscious is running the show and it loves things that are familiar, even if the thing that’s familiar really hurts. So if deep down we believe that love means taking care of everything, right, or safety means just pushing it under the rug, or just ignoring things. Then our subconscious mind will keep creating circumstances that feel like that.

And I’m gonna say this in a different way. It’ll keep showing us, remember. ’cause not everything is being shown to us, but it’s gonna keep showing us circumstances that feel like that. It’s not because it wants to sabotage us, but it’s because it wants us to reconcile what has been unresolved. So every.

Repeated pattern , it’s like your soul’s way of saying there’s something here for you. There’s something here for you that you haven’t fully understood yet. And , I don’t know what you think about why you’re here or the world or the universe, and maybe you’ve thought different things over the course of your lifetime.

I know that I have, but I believe that we’re here. To experience certain things and to grow, and that we came here for the ups and downs, right? So the downs, the times that are really hard, our soul wants to work through it. I believe that’s part of why we’re here. And so. Anytime I do that, I work through it or I do something that I have struggled with for so long and I finally broke out of the, , I wanna say the hypnotic trance that kept me stuck.

I feel like, oh my God, my soul just grew. I feel like I got to some new level in the video game. Do you know what I mean? Like, I did it and so. I think that as we look at this, we gotta look at it as though our brain is wanting us and our soul is wanting us to evaluate this, right? To understand something in a different way.

So here’s how you’re gonna know when you’re in a loop, and that is when your body reacts faster than your mind. So. I, this is why I always say to women in my program, like, pay attention to what your body’s doing. I know your brain is gonna try and sort through this or make sense of it, or even excuse what’s happening , and I want you to pay attention to your body first.

Because when you feel that familiar feeling of like dread or frustration or that urge to fix somebody else or whatever it is that spike of fear, , when you go to speak up, that is not, it’s not just right now. It’s not just this moment that is the past replaying over and over and over again through your nervous system.

Okay. And so this is where if you can have an a level of awareness, it really becomes your superpower. , When you can name it, oh, this is just my pattern of trying to earn love again. You, shift from being inside that story to stepping outside, or I almost think of it like being above and looking down on the story, and you were an observer of it.

Sort of like a fly on the wall, and then you’re like, oh, , I can see that I pushed a lot of things aside, or I accepted misogynistic behavior because I wanted to be loved so badly, right? Like I accepted all kinds of crap. But then when you can see it from that vantage point, then all of a sudden you have choice, right?

That’s where your choice really begins. And so. Once you notice the pattern, the goal isn’t to shame yourself for it or to like, feel guilty about it or, to be mad that you spent so much time in the pattern. It, is just to bring it to your awareness. That’s the goal. Notice the pattern, bringing it into your awareness, and give yourself a lot of compassion.

One of the things that women say often in my program, oh, I’m gonna say often, I’m gonna say, every woman says this at some point, right? Is like, oh my gosh. Now that they see it, they’re like, oh my gosh, why did I do this for so long? And there is a feeling of loss and a feeling of shame sometime. And regret is a huge feeling in this awareness and.

I always say like, you didn’t see it because you weren’t ready to see it, but now you see it because now you’re ready to see it. All things are happening at the spot, in the exact spot. When you’re ready. This is why I always say when people find me and they’re like, oh my God. It was like I was so done and then I found you.

Well, yeah, ’cause you were ready. I was probably lurking about in your newsfeed or whatever for a long time, but it didn’t click with you or you didn’t see it or didn’t resonate. Because you weren’t ready. So once you notice the pattern, don’t regret it, don’t shame it. None of that. Just give yourself a ton of compassion.

And then there are some questions to really ask yourself. Because once we see the pattern, I always think of this as like, , I wanna be friends with it. Do, you know what I mean? Like this thing that I’ve been doing. It, was here to serve me. It was trying to keep me safe. And so I can ask myself like, what is happening in this situation that is being mirrored back to me?

Right? What is this reflecting to me? What do I actually need right now that I have been trying to get externally? Right? So. I had someone once in my program who said that their husband said it’s about time that they, , that they were in the kitchen acting like a wife. Now, she said, I used to laugh about that, but then all of a sudden it wasn’t funny and I could see it for what it actually was.

And so the important part actually isn’t. Why he’s doing it. That’s his own crap. The, thing to decipher here is a, why did you feel like you had to sweep that under the rug for so long? That’s your work, right? And so once I see it, I can ask myself, what’s the need that I’ve been trying to get externally in, in sweeping that under the rug?

And how can I give that to myself? And how can I respond in a way that honors who I am becoming, not, just who I used to be. , And then this is the really important part and the part that can feel really scary. . And I’m gonna do a episode on, nervous system regulation. I, I know I said that last week.

I really am., I’ve been thinking a lot about it and how is the best way to do this? , But this is really important because when you see it and you ask yourself those questions, you have to do something different, right? It, might be that you pause before reacting. , That is doing something.

You, you could say no when you’d actually say yes, right? Whereas you, , where you would have laughed or just ignored it. Now you can say, don’t talk to me like that. You can let yourself rest instead of trying to prove that you’re worth something more than that, and that little tiny shift, that’s how the universe knows.

That’s how your unconscious mind goes. Okay. We’re doing something different. You got it this time she, got it. She picked it up. So I wanna say this, and I say this with so much love, I’m gonna take your hands. Sometimes even after you get it, it’ll come around again. It’ll come around again, but it’s not as a punishment.

I always think of this as like a confirmation. It’s sort of like the universe saying, Hey, I just wanna make sure that wasn’t luck. You actually integrated that lesson, right? So you might see the same pattern, but I want you to notice how you’ll start to feel it differently. Remember I said, your body is gonna know first, and then your brain’s gonna do whatever your brain’s gonna do.

So when you see the pattern, you’re gonna notice that you feel different. It won’t hook you the way that it used to. You won’t be activated by it in the same way at all. And so you’re gonna notice that your nervous system. Stays calm. Your response feels a lot cleaner and , your peace doesn’t, depend on anybody else.

Like somebody else could say that to her, like her husband could say that it’s about time you, whatever it was in the kitchen. Stay in the kitchen and act. Act like a real wife and all of a sudden, like she feels like none of that is about her. Because the way she feels about her has nothing to do with somebody else’s reaction to her.

And that’s when you know that you’ve actually graduated. And now the more lessons come. Now it’s like a never ending school. But the cool thing is, I, whenever this happens, I’m like, oh, I graduated. I just had a little bump. Right? A little bump in my activation in my life force energy. Like I am growing, I, am doing what I came here to do.

So if you are listening to this and you’re like, oh my God, I do this all the time, I’m in the same thing all the time. Like I’m kicking the can down the road constantly ’cause I don’t know what to do. Just give yourself a big, deep breath, nervous system regulation, big deep breath, and just make sure you know.

This is a really important thing, and I did a whole episode on this about starting over, but I want you to know you’re not back at the beginning. You’re just being shown this next layer of your own evolution. You know, I don’t think of the universe as like I, I think of the universe as just constantly reflecting back ourselves, so I don’t think it’s.

Making choices to punish you , I really don’t. None of that. But it doesn’t, I’m gonna say it like this, the universe isn’t recycling pain for no reason. Like your unconscious mind isn’t showing you the painful thing for no reason. It’s, showing you opportunities. It’s, recycling opportunities.

For truth and for boundaries, and for you to show up as yourself and for you to evolve and for you to become more of yourself. And every single time that you do it, every single time you respond differently. Even if it’s just in a small pause. Even if you blow up after, right? But, you have done a little something different.

You are telling the universe, I’ve learned, I’m learning. I’m ready for what’s next. Right. So today, instead of asking the question of like, why does this keep happening, ask yourself this. Ask yourself, what in me is ready to be healed? What’s in me that’s ready to be healed? And that’s where we get into the truth trigger.

That’s where real change starts happening. So take a moment. Look through your day, ask yourself, where were those opportunities that maybe I missed, and can I start to notice them tomorrow? All right. Thanks so much for listening. If this episode resonated, take a moment, share it with somebody that might need to hear it too.

And remember this. Hard work of looking at yourself and your own junk and recognizing that everyone else is just reflecting back something going on inside you. I think that is when you start to live a big life. Alright, I love you guys so much. I’ll see you next week. 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.

 This is a good one yall…Betsy explores the energetic shift that happens when we make a decision and how to pay more attention to our subconscious and rely less on logic alone. If you have been circling in indecision, big or small, this one is for you! Betsy invites us to think less about what to do and more about who you want to be.

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 everybody. Welcome to the Art of Living Big. I missed you last week. It got to be a crazy, hectic week, and then by the time that I had to have everything recorded, I just was like, you know what? I’m going to take a bath and get a massage and everyone will forgive me because I was really overdone. So I’m excited to be here this week though, and I have, I an episode for you that I think might be interesting, like no matter where you are in your life or what your challenges are or what’s.

Coming up for you. We all have decisions to make, right? Things that we have to choose between, and the more that I live my life, the more I think that decisions are not just, in fact, probably less logical thought out. It’s more energetic. So today I am gonna talk about something that could really change everything, not because it gives you more to do, but because it helps you to shift the energy that you are being while you do it.

So we’re gonna dive in here to the energy, be behind decisions. So, okay. I think when we think about decision making. We think about it as something we have to do in our heads. You know, I talk to people all the time and they’re like, I have done so many pros and cons list, and we even hear that as a strategy to make a decision, make a pros and cons list, which I think just makes me circle in even more chaos making a pro, because both lists seem good, right?

Which I could go into my whole. My whole diatribe about how there is no right decision. There’s no right or wrong, right? And that’s how come a pros and cons list doesn’t feel right, because there’s no right or wrong the universe isn’t going to. Punish you with a bad outcome if you choose the wrong thing.

Like that’s just not how it works. No matter which choice you make and which road you go down. Both roads, , have bumps and both roads have flows, you know, and so there is no right decision, but I believe that deciding is an energetic act. It’s not just a thought, but it’s a frequency shift, and when you can do it from that layer, then your cobblestone road doesn’t seem so cobblestoney, right?

You’re able to handle the ups and the downs in a way that feels so much more aligned because you are energetically. On the path that you’re on, instead of energetically being on one path and your brain being on the other path or hopping back and forth between paths. We always hear people say, you know, the universe isn’t giving you what you want because you’re not being clear.

And I think a pros and cons list gives us that not being clear because both sides could make sense. And , you’ve probably felt this before. It’s like this moment. Where you finally decide something like fully decide after you have been circling and rehashing and thinking about it forever, right?

Maybe it’s deciding to leave a job or to say yes to something new or to stop trying to fix something that isn’t working, but that moment that you decide there is a click. You can feel your whole body relaxes. It becomes way less anxiety ridden, even though you haven’t even done the thing. You’ve just made the decision to do the thing.

Your mind gets quiet, you just feel lighter, and that is not a coincidence. That is energy reorganizing itself before you make a decision, your energy is scattered. It’s like trying to tune. Like a couple radio stations all at the same time. Right. , I am imagining in the car. You know, , and I don’t know why, because I haven’t had the kind of tuner in my car where you turn the little knob and the little dial moves.

It’s like a analog radio. But that’s the image in my mind. Right. And you can’t tune it to two stations. Like you gotta turn it to one or the other. Otherwise , you won’t get anything. So when part of you says, I want this, and another part of you says, , but what if that’s the wrong choice? Again, thinking there’s a right and wrong.

The universe can’t line things up for you because it doesn’t know which signal to follow, and your subconscious mind can’t either. So remember, whenever I talk about the universe, I love talking about the universe and energy and all of those things, and I believe that there is a. Greater force out there for us.

And I also know that we can line up the way our brains work to how we talk about the universe. So your subconscious mind cannot look for the right things, right? Look for the coincidences and the things that it could be looking for that would bring you down the path you wanna go if it doesn’t know what it’s looking for.

Your subconscious mind wants safety above all else. So when it feels that indecision, that like hyper wobble, it interprets that as danger, right? So it says, well wait a minute. Hold on, let’s not move forward till we totally know, but , we never totally know. And so. This feeling, and I’ll hear people say this sometimes inside the Navigate method, , they’re like, I just wanna know.

Like I just wanna be certain. And I get that. Like we would wanna be certain, but certainty doesn’t come before the decision. It comes after, like that’s the paradox. And when you make a clear, energetic decision. You’re not just choosing a path, you’re shifting your identity. And I we’ll talk about that a little bit more, but what you’re saying to the universe and to your subconscious is this is who I am now.

This is the choice that I have made. This is the path I’m going down. And that is when everything starts to move. Right? And I see this all the time with clients , and I’ve lived this myself, right? When we’re in that in-between place, what I sometimes call the wobble, or sometimes I say it like feels crunchy, right?

It feels like hell, really. It’s not that you don’t know what to do, it’s that you’re afraid of what happens after you do it. Fear of loss or the fear of change, or you know, the fear of no longer being who you were. And it’s not just about roles. When I say identity, I’m not talking about roles. Like I’m not saying you as a wife or a coworker or a mom or a, like, I’m not talking about your role as much as you are, who you are, being right, how you’re showing up what you are energetically embodying.

As that identity. So when we have this choice to make, , our conscious mind says, I want something new. Like, I don’t like what’s happening. I want something different. But your subconscious mind says, but that sounds really unfamiliar. So you know, that might not be safe. So maybe not. And unfortunately, you know, your subconscious mind always wins.

It always wins. Until you decide differently, because that decision is what reprograms the subconscious. It’s what tells your inner system it’s totally safe. Now we have chosen, right? And without that choice, your brain just keeps hopping back and forth between these two pathways. Right? It stays is the pros and cons list or the this path or that path.

Like both roads could work. It just depends, like which adventure you wanna go on. And if you keep going back and forth, you’re gonna keep finding new evidence to stay stuck. You know, I hear people all the time, they’re like, I just need a sign. I just want some clarity. I have somebody in my program that can’t even say the word clarity.

She’s like, I, it is, that’s like a hot potato word. Like I just can’t even say it makes me sick to my stomach. But clarity isn’t gonna come before her decision. It’s gonna come, it’s gonna be created by the decision. So, all right, so here’s what happens energetically when you decide, I wanna talk about this.

So when you energetically make a decision, basically you are. Collapsing all the other timelines. Right? If you could think of your life as like, I mean, in infinite number of choices you could make, think about the number of choices you make in any given day. And you might be thinking like, well, I made like six or seven choices today at work.

But no, you made a choice of when to take a drink, when to walk down the hall, when to make a phone call, when to, like, there was prob, there was infinite number of choices you can make in every single day. Right? And when we. When we choose those other options that could have been potentials out there basically collapse, right?

You stop and it collapses because you stop entertaining though, well, what if that road, what if that road right? You are not even looking at those anymore. And so they essentially disappear and all of your energy comes home. It stops being scattered across all those different possibilities and it starts to flow in one direction, and that is when something really magic happens.

So that is when we feel momentum. And that’s when people go, Ugh, I feel so much better. I feel so much better. It’s when , synchronicity start showing up, right? The, right people, the right conversations, the , people will say , oh my God. All of a sudden this thing showed up and then I’ve gotten email, and the email linked me to this and that, and all of a sudden it’s so magical.

And I love, love, love when that happens. I love the magic. But it’s not actually because life suddenly changed. It’s actually ’cause your energy lined up. It’s because you changed your frequency and you became the person who has already chosen and you can feel that shift. Right? There’s a calm, like a confidence to it, really.

And here’s the part that I think surprises people is that even when the decision is hard. Even when the decision hurts, your energy feels lighter because indecision feels really heavy. It, drags your nervous system right through this like constant evaluation and re-looking at things and second guessing and doubling back, and spending a lot of time doing the same things, and your body doesn’t know how to relax inside that.

And so when you decide your system. Like finally exhale. So it’s kind of like, ugh, ugh, good. We can move on from that. And I could go down 500 rabbit holes around nervous system regulation. I have learned more, and that’s probably an episode I should do for next, week. But I have learned more about my nervous system, my own personal nervous system in the last year.

Of living on my own and seeing how I regulate and self-regulate and what causes me to feel dysregulated. It’s been like the biggest education and so fun and amazing, and at times really hard and really cool. You know, I have learned so much about nervous systems just in my work and in my training over the years and years of doing this work, but to actually.

Put it into a practice in a totally different way. Over the past year has been really cool, and I actually have a lot of things to share about that, so we should talk about that too. So, all right, so let’s go back. I said I was gonna talk a little bit about identity. So this is where I think it gets a little deep, right?

So, , I’m gonna say it like this, like every decision, , here’s how I wanna say it. Every decision that you make is a vote for the next version of you. So when you decide, you are saying, I am no longer the person who doesn’t know.

I am no longer the person. Waiting to be rescued or waiting for permission or, waiting for somebody to treat me right or waiting for anything. I am the person who moves. I saw a quote recently and it said that your relationship is a direct reflection of how you feel about yourself. And I thought, oh, that’s so good.

’cause I think there’s so much validity to that. You know, the women that come into the Navigate Method, they’re feeling differently about themselves. Their identity is changing, and so they’re no longer willing to put up with what they used to put up with. Like they’re drawing a line in the sand and saying, this isn’t, what I’m worthy of anymore.

And I think once you embody that new identity, then your subconscious starts working to make that true. It starts scanning for evidence that supports this new story. Like I’m worthy of more, which many times women in my program, they’re, they get closer to their husbands, their husbands react to that new identity, right?

It will attract the right resources and ideas and people who align with that energy, like all kinds of things line up and that’s how come you can’t wait to feel ready. I hear sometimes people say, . You gotta, fake it till you make it. And I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think that’s it. But I think you, you become it.

You have to become it. And when you become ready because you decide, and I know, , sometimes the decision that you’re facing doesn’t have a clear right answer. Right. And I don’t think there’s any right answer. And maybe you’re deciding whether to stay or go right in a relationship or in a job or in a city.

That’s one I’ve been thinking about. So you might be waiting for the perfect sign, like the magic thing that just tells you exactly what to do. , And I wish that was like how energy worked, but it’s just not. So the energy of decision isn’t about having a perfect choice. It’s about. Your energetic commitment to move forward in alignment with who you are becoming.

So even if the external decision isn’t final yet, you can decide internally, and I always say this to my ladies, like, you can decide and not take action so you can decide. I will no longer stay in confusion. I will no longer postpone my peace. That’s an energetic decision. And from that place, then your mind quiets down.

You can get a handle on your nervous system. All of a sudden, your unconscious mind starts working for you and the path starts to reveal itself. I got a message from somebody not long ago, and they said that they. Found me and it was all like a kismet of crazy circumstances that brought them to me. And I smiled to myself because I thought, no, she made a decision that she was, done and she needed help to figure out what to do.

And the path began to reveal itself. So I have experienced this. Myself in many, many different ways, but in my own marriage, right in the thick of deciding whether to stay or leave. And I spent years in that energetic wobble, analyzing and journaling, like hypnotizing myself or meditating to oblivion, just to try and figure it out or to get myself to just stay.

I told myself I was doing the work, . What I was really doing was avoiding the feeling of making a decision because I knew that once I decided everything was gonna change, and at that time, that terrified me. But the moment that I decided, I actually know the exact moment that I decided energetically decided.

And it was like something just clicked and it was done. Like I, it wasn’t that I suddenly knew all the answers ’cause I didn’t, but my energy shifted from what am I doing to this is what I’m doing. That shift changed my whole life. It wasn’t easy, but I stayed really grounded in it, right? Calm and aligned, and I could see what to do next because I wasn’t vibrating in confusion anymore.

I, I always say to my ladies, , we calibrate on action, not on words, right? We’re calibrating on what is actually happening. And in that, I could really see how powerful that. Decision energy really was, it organizes your internal world in a different way, and then your external world has a chance to catch up.

So, and I think this is true, not just with big decisions like marriages or job career changes or things like that, but I think it’s for small stuff too. If you’ve been stuck in small decisions, joining a program or setting a boundary, it’s the same energy. But the moment you decide, your subconscious mind starts catching up, your nervous system begins to calibrate with a new identity.

Remember, it’s not a role. It’s who you are, and because you’ve shown it by making that choice that it’s safe to move forward. You might be wondering like, how do I actually do that? Here’s something I wanna say is that decision energy is less about doing, it’s more about being, and I know I keep saying that, and if you’ve listened to this podcast over the years, you know I’ve said that.

Who are you being, and I want you to imagine the word, the word being with B, capital. B, capital E, lowercase ING. Who are you being right? Is about becoming a woman who decides it’s about becoming a woman who has clarity. It’s about a becoming a woman who is decisive. So maybe take a little breath and ask yourself, who am I being in this situation?

Am I being a version of me? Who’s afraid of the unknown? Or am I being a version of me who trusts herself to handle whatever comes? You feel the difference in that? I always say, you don’t have to know what is gonna happen. You just have to trust yourself. You don’t have to trust anything out there. You just have to trust yourself that you can deal with whatever is out there.

And so when you start tuning into that version of you, the version of you that’s already decided. And your nervous system is calming and you start to feel grounded. You might even start to feel a little excited. It’s like a momentum. You could feel it in your body, right? Because your energy is finally getting someplace solid to land and, that’s the place really where your subconscious can start to follow new commands.

We talk about those like affirmations and saying stuff. If you haven’t done all this other stuff, like the affirmations are just words. When you get to that place where your subconscious is, paying attention, it begins to open doors you didn’t even know were there. And because your subconscious now believes you’re capable, it starts looking for the places that you can move to the next phase and the next phase.

The subconscious mind is always listening. I always say this, it doesn’t care about logic. It cares about your energy. So if you keep repeating, I don’t know what to do, I’m so upset this isn’t working, I’m so frustrated if, that is where you are, it, , doesn’t know what to do, right? It’s gonna take that as a directive and just create more confusion for you.

But if you settle into, I am decided, I just don’t see the full picture yet. Then your subconscious begins scanning for proof that’s what’s true. And so the words that you say really matter. I know I, we’ve said words are like a spell, right? That’s why they call it spelling it. It really is because it is like a spell on your subconscious telling it what to do, and you can literally retrain your subconscious to believe that clarity is safe and train your nervous system to believe that clarity is safe.

I mean that’s, we’ll talk about that next week ’cause I really have a lot to say about that. So one of my favorite practices. Is to close my eyes and take a big, deep breath and imagine pulling my energy back from all of the what ifs. And to say out loud, I get to choose this. Even if I don’t know the full path, I get to decide the energy that I’m standing in.

And I always tell my ladies, when you have your hand on your heart to say, if nobody got hurt. And money didn’t matter. What would I choose? And that moment in your body that you feel that’s an energetic shift, claim it. And then that begins a chain reaction. So sometimes I think we’re afraid of decision because we associate it with some kind of finality, right?

Like once we decide, then we’re trapped. But that is not true decisions, not a cage. It is a key. And it unlocks movement. And when you have movement, I think that is how you live a big life. So if you have been circling an indecision, big or small, I wanna just invite you to think less about what to do and more about who you are being.

Are you the woman who’s waiting or are the you, the woman who knows? All right. I can help you with anything. You know where to find me. Also, make sure I will say this before you go. We’re gonna be doing some fireside chats, a place for us to all get together as a community, not a training but a community gathering.

I am really gonna start trying to do those often. I’m gonna be announcing them on my Instagram, but also on my email list. So get on my email list if you’re not already. And we’re gonna be doing a monthly training, like a monthly webinar. So the fireside chat is more of a community gathering, and then we’re gonna be doing a monthly webinar where you can learn a little something different and some of the steps for you if you are in indecision and you’re trying to figure out what to do next.

So make sure you’re on my email list or follow me on Instagram so you can get all the deets on that. And if this was helpful to you, share this with somebody. I love it when you guys share it. I appreciate that so much. It’s how we get the word out, and I will see you all next week. We’ll talk about nervous system next week.

All right. See you guys then. 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 a world that glorifies visibility, productivity, and constant sharing, what does it mean to rest…not just physically, but spiritually? In this episode, Betsy explores the radical act of reclaiming your privacy and stepping out of the performance of being “seen.” This is about choosing peace over proving, stillness over striving, and alignment over approval. You’ll learn how to recognize the subtle ways you’ve outsourced your worth to validation, how to create sacred boundaries around your energy, and how rest becomes a reclamation of self-trust. Betsy shares her own reflections on quieting the noise, finding comfort in solitude, and remembering that your life belongs to you—not to the algorithm, the audience, or anyone else’s expectations.

Listen if you’re craving:

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. Hi. Welcome to the show today. I took out my Invisalign. I took out my Invisalign to be able to talk to you. I am almost done, you guys., I’m like three weeks out from getting these brackets off my teeth and getting to be done with Invisalign. , But it, it does make me sound a little lispy, so I am.

I’m proud of myself for remembering to take them out before I’m like halfway through this recording. So I’m excited that you’re here with me today, Invisalign free. I wanted to talk to you about something today and it’s been something I have been thinking about and I was really trying to think about like, [00:01:00] how do I explain this in a way that makes sense , and I’m gonna just be really honest.

It doesn’t make me, . I don’t wanna seem like there’s more self-importance in this topic than there needs to be. ’cause that’s not my intention. But I think the gist of it, you’re gonna get, because I think this is a universal, although the experience may be a smaller segment of the population that has experienced this, I think , the intent of it is something that’s universal.

Let me explain what it is that, I mean, so really what I wanna talk about , in the essence is about, is about rest and privacy and visibility. , And I think that I wanna talk about social media a little bit. I think that right now there’s so many things happening on social media and I think it can be so depleting.[00:02:00] 

I wanna talk about what happens when you are really seen on something like social media. You know, a few years ago I had a post that went viral. It, was a series of posts really. I had, I mean, a lot of posts over a million views, but I had one post in particular that I would say went mega viral. That’s how I would describe it.

Now, even as I say this, I’m like, you may have had a post that went more mega viral. , You may know people that have had way more mega viral posts than me, but I had, a, a lot of posts that were over a million views. And then I had one in particular that was 9 million, 8.9 million, so almost 9 million.

And it wasn’t something that I expected. It happened really fast when I started posting about the Navigate method and about women being unhappy in their [00:03:00] marriage and just trying so hard to make things happen. So I knew that it would resonate. I figured, I hoped that it would resonate. I didn’t expect it to resonate in the way that it did, and I didn’t expect the viralness and I, I didn’t try to to make that happen.

It just sort of caught fire. And in that one post I got, I think it was close to like 19,000 new followers essentially overnight. And I remember this really strange mix of emotions about it, like excitement. It was exciting. I remember one of the very first posts that I posted on this subject and it, I remember it was like at eight.

Thousand views and 9,000 views and 12,000 views. I remember it got to 13,000 views and I messaged with one of my friends and I was like, oh my God. This is [00:04:00] crazy. , It just keeps going and it’s wild. Now. That was just about two years ago. I get 13,000 views regularly in a day, so that doesn’t even phase me.

But I remember at the time having that creep up , , and feeling like excited and gratitude , , and if I’m being really honest, I think a level of overwhelm that I didn’t really know how to name at that point. It was. Beautiful and dizzying all at the same time. I was so, so happy with that. My message resonated, although simultaneously sad that it resonated because it was really about people being frustrated, extremely frustrated in their marriage and at their wits end.

But I was grateful that I helped people feel seen through that, you know. But what happened from there, I think was really something that I didn’t anticipate. And when that many people [00:05:00] suddenly have opinions about what you say and who they think you are, you know, it starts to change how you think. I started wondering what people might expect of me.

I felt like I had to keep showing up and explaining myself, and I felt like there was a lot of people in my real life who were unhappy or didn’t understand, but didn’t try to either, and I was living in this space , it was. It was kind of like being waterboarded by eyeballs as you, I mean, that’s the only way I can describe it.

So it was connection. Totally. And I felt seen because I was posting something real to me at the time, but it also had a underlying feeling of pressure. Right. You know, at first one hand it feels like a dream. I wanted my message to be seen. I wanted my message to reach people. [00:06:00] I loved the conversations that were happening.

It felt like real impact. And I had been in my business for a long, long, long, long time, like a decade, more than a decade before this post. So it felt like, oh, I’m, the hard work and the hard and the good work that we do is finally getting access to have a real impact. And over time I started. To realize how easy it was to kind of get caught in the performance of being helpful, you know, and to start creating from an expectation of, I’ve gotta have another big post instead of just from my intuition.

You know, during that time where things were really getting hectic , and people were really seeing my posts, it was a good like 10 months probably, where this was like ramping up sort of, I guess you could say. And I noticed , I would wake up sometime in the [00:07:00] middle of the night just to check messages.

It got, my nervous system was really activated from it. I checked notifications before I checked in with myself, and sometimes I would rewrite posts and I would think about all the different ways people could take this the wrong way and then try to rewrite so that it would land perfectly right? And little by little I started to lose track of what was mine and what was sacred and private and what had become part of this.

Exposure or this show. And it’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just what happens when you have like a piece of your life that becomes visible, right? So maybe you haven’t gone viral online, but maybe you know this feeling right? It’s this feeling of being needed everywhere by everyone all the time. It’s the same energy.

So you give and you give and you give until you [00:08:00] don’t know how to stop. Then, you know, for me, I was posting all this stuff. I mean, a year goes by, right? I had my own life that shifted. I went through my own divorce. So, you know, as divorce is like a, a really, really hard thing combined with a ton of relief, you know, and honestly, this changed me in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.

It gave me access to healing that I didn’t even know that I needed. And over the past year. I have learned and grown and become quite a different person than I was when I posted those very first viral posts several years ago. You know, this last season, my daughter has been struggling with her mental health, and if you’ve been here for , a long while, you know we’ve talked about this.

She and I have talked about it on the show. She’s an adult. [00:09:00] This particular season has been a long, ongoing season, and I have been helping her and fighting through this. Well, we try to hold other things together and that has also changed me, and what I realized was that. I started caring less about being understood and more about being grounded, less about how something looked and more about how something felt.

I didn’t wanna keep explaining my life to strangers online. I wanted to live it quietly. For me and for people who really know me. And there’s something really humbling about that. You know, when life hits you really hard and you stop caring about optics, and you start caring, , caring about energy, about peace and the things that actually sustain you.

So here’s what I wanted to bring to you because for sure you’ve had these seasons too. [00:10:00] And what I found myself asking is what’s actually important. Where does my energy go? Who actually gets access to me? And I realized that I’ve been pouring from an empty cup, you know, for a long time as we do as women.

Like my story isn’t unique , and it’s, it’s manageable, right? And I think that’s what happens is it’s manageable, so you just keep going. But we can’t keep pouring from an empty cup. And when you’ve built a rhythm around being productive or being available, slowing down feels a little bit like betrayal and you probably know that too, right?

You’re juggling work, you’re drug juggling, family, emotions, responsibilities, right? And it all feels like if you stop, everything’s just gonna fall apart. So you keep on running, right? Even though you’re tired. Even though you’re exhausted and you tell yourself, [00:11:00] I’m gonna rest later, like this weekend, maybe I’ll have a chance to slow down.

But then that never really happens, right? Because somebody needs you or something happens, and underneath it all is this quiet question that’s asking you, how long can you really keep this up? So for me, somewhere along the line I realized I didn’t want to disappear. Like I don’t want to just opt out and run away, but I do want to be intentional about living differently.

I wanna stay connected to my purpose. The work we do at the Navigate Method is so impactful and I see so many women. Say to me like, my life is different than I ever would. And , I will tell you that is the, that brings me more joy than I could possibly even tell you here. Like just, , it’s the greatest thing.

It, the navigate method [00:12:00] comes from years and years of, my own healing and work. And so to see , that was. Something that created change, not only for myself, but somebody else is really fulfilling. So it’s great, and I wanted to stay connected to that, but I also wanted to have a level of peace, and so little by little I was pulling back, not disappearing, but just being way more intentional and taking time to listen instead of perform and to rest instead of explain.

I used to think that my success was all about reach, like how many people heard my message, and now I think it’s about depth. It’s about how true can I be in what I share. Even if fewer people see it, I still wanna help people. I still wanna speak truth, but I wanna do it in a way that’s authentic and [00:13:00] sustainable, where I’m allowed to grow and change and to make different decisions, right?

Because we are multifaceted people, we have angles and layers and seasons, and we all evolve, like we should all be allowed to evolve. So if you’re listening to this, maybe you are in your own redefinition right now, so maybe the life that you have built doesn’t quite fit anymore. Maybe the goals that you once felt really motivated by just don’t even feel aligned anymore, and that can feel really disorienting.

And I also think it’s a really powerful piece of evolution. When I first stumbled upon this feeling and had to get true with myself, there was a feeling of being crushed. Like everything that I thought isn’t what I thought, but now I realize it’s actually an opening. It’s actually better. And I [00:14:00] started asking myself this question, and it might be worth asking yourself too, but it is, what is it that you truly want right now?

And I’m gonna explain a little more about this because I, I don’t want you to ask yourself like what you’re supposed to want, not what once made sense, but in this season right now, what matters in the navigate method? Lots of times I’ll tell women, put your hand on your heart and just say, if, if nobody got hurt and money didn’t matter, what would I choose right now?

About any decision you could do this with any decision, try it. Put your hand on your heart. If nobody got hurt and money didn’t matter, what would I choose? And when you strip away the audience and the approval and the pressure, what’s left is your truth, and that’s your compass. So what do I want right now?

Maybe it’s [00:15:00] not to be seen by 9 million people, but it is to be known. Not to be everywhere, but to be home. And for me, that means peace. It means being present with my daughter. It means work that feels honest. It means having a smaller circle, but a deeper one. It means knowing where I have the bandwidth and where I don’t, and being able to say no and surrounding myself with people who honor that.

It means quiet mornings, giving myself extra time, going for walks. Having deep conversations that don’t have to go anywhere. So success for me, how I’m defining it, is aliveness. I feel an expansion in my chest, and that’s how I know that I’m there. It’s not a rush from eyeballs or attention, but it’s the calm of alignment.

[00:16:00] Maybe this is where you are too, right? Maybe you have given so much of yourself that you feel depleted, you can’t stop, but you don’t wanna keep going like this either. And so I wanna just offer you an invitation to pause. We don’t have to exit our lives. A girlfriend reached out to me from home and said, how are you doing?

Can I do anything for you? Just knowing what a hard season I was in and I said, can you help me fake my death and we can move to the beach? And she said, I’m sure there’s a way to do that. And when she said that, it almost was like the permission and it made me realize that’s not really what I want. But I do want to check in.

I do want to pause. I wanna ask myself, where does this end? And so I wanna ask [00:17:00] you, maybe more importantly, where could it begin again, but differently. Slowing down or stopping doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re listening. It means you’re evolving. It means you’re making room for what’s next. You’re allowed to change your mind.

You’re allowed to want peace to want less noise. You’re allowed to build a life that fits the person you’ve really become. When I think now about the things that I post online, if you follow me on Instagram, you’ll notice the post might feel a little different. I’m really leaning into what feels good to post, like what’s authentic.

And if you notice in my stories, I’ll post my outfit with my good things. That’s like one of my most favorite things to do. It gives me that feeling of expansion in my chest and I get so many messages about it. And so I know when we are in alignment, that’s what reaches people. [00:18:00] That’s what was reaching people.

Several years ago when I finally was posting my truth on online, I used to think that my power lived in how people saw me. But now I know in a visceral way that my power lives in how deeply I see myself. And so if you’re tired of performing or explaining or keeping everything afloat, I wanna give you a permission slip just to rest, to be private, to let life belong to you.

Again, you don’t owe the world constantly. Any part of you, you owe yourself. Your own presence to take a deep breath and to exhale and to be home. And I think when you can do that, that is how you live a big life. Thank you so much for being here with me. [00:19:00] I love you so much. If you know somebody that needs a permission slip to rest that has been doing everything and juggling all the things, has too many balls in the air and they just want a moment.

To decompress. Send them, send them this episode. It is your permission slip, permission slip to finally settle and to rest. All right, my cat is calling. I’ll 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 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 [00:20:00] reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.

We love to tell ourselves that some people are just lucky, born under the right star, in the right place, with the right opportunities. But luck is not magic, and it is not as random as we think. In this episode, Betsy explores the science and psychology of luck, and why what we call “good fortune” often comes down to patterns of thinking, awareness, and action.

You will learn:

This is not about superstition. It is about training your brain to see and step into opportunities. If you have ever wondered why certain doors keep opening for some people, and how you can make that happen in your own life, this episode will change how you think about luck forever.

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 Art of Living Big. Welcome to the show. Happy Thursday. I have been thinking about luck. I’ve been thinking about luck, and I wanna say I’ve been thinking, well, I’ve been thinking about this for like 54 years. I have always thought of myself as really lucky. You know, things always work out for me.

I always know that in the end, things are gonna go the way that I want. I am lucky enough to have. Really cool experiences and synchronicities [00:01:00] happen and many times I win things that are unexpected. When I was in high school, I won a gift card to $500 worth of shoes at a shoe store that I didn’t even remember putting my name in the fishbowl.

You know, which $500 of shoes back in 1988 was a pretty significant amount of shoes. I had shoes for years. I have won iPads at events and iPods at events. I have won everything under the sun from cakes and cookies to chicken sandwiches. I have always found a way to get the good stuff. I feel like I’m really lucky and not to mention, I think that it’s kind of luck how I grew up.

Who my parents were that they had money to send me to college. Like there was a lot of things that I think you could lean on and say those things were really [00:02:00] lucky. Privileged in many ways, right? And not to confuse those two things, I wanna stick with luck, but I just wanna point out that a lot of things weren’t necessarily something that I did Now.

If you’re already feeling like kind of some pressure here, I wanna tell you another quick story and then I wanna really talk about this because who doesn’t want more luck? Right? Why not? Why not have luck on our side? So years ago, probably five years ago, I took a class and in the class it was a business class, like a coaching class.

And in the class somebody mentions it might have been me, mentioned something about luck. And there was another woman in the class that got really upset and she said, I am not lucky. I work really hard for everything that I have. And I thought it was so interesting because she was so adamant about it. I just never thought that [00:03:00] my luck took away from my hard work.

’cause I work hard too. But honestly, if I could work in ease, like I. I don’t know that my goal is to like work really hard. I would like things to just kind of happen and have it be fun and flowy, right? Who doesn’t. But I remember how much this woman who was great, I really liked her, but I remember how much she fought to hang on to the idea that she wasn’t lucky that everything that she got was simply.

A matter of her hard work and determination, and I think both things can be true. But what I wanted to talk to you today about is really the idea that we could think about life as a little mystical, a little bit out of our control, and a little bit lucky and.

You know, sometimes you’ll hear [00:04:00] people say like, Ugh, she’s just so lucky, or, I never get those lucky breaks. Well, I wanna flip that story around because I don’t think that luck is nearly as random as we have been taught. And so I wanna talk about the science behind luck, why some people always seem to land on their feet, and more importantly, how you can make yourself luckier.

So this isn’t about like superstition or. You know, carrying a rabbit’s foot around in your purse. This is about mindset and about awareness and about action. Okay, so let’s get into it here. When we hear this word, luck, I think what a lot of us default to is that we think that it’s chance, right? Like winning the lottery or.

Stumbling upon the right job or meeting the right person in line at Starbucks. I mean, we watch romantic comedies that create these magical run-ins that seem [00:05:00] totally like Chance, and I believe those moments do feel that way. I think they do feel random, but the truth is that there’s a lot more patterns behind them.

And so I want you to think about the last time something really, really good happened to you. So did it just fall from the sky or did you put yourself in a position where it could happen? So most of the time, luck isn’t something that just randomly strikes you down in the driveway. It’s really about being in the right place with the right mindset, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about and actually recognizing something as an opportunity when it shows up.

Sometimes inside the Navigate method, somebody will talk about something that’s a problem, and I always like to call it something different. Is it a problem? Is it an opportunity? It’s an opportunity to [00:06:00] learn something new. Learn something about you. Learn something about somebody else. Learn a new way of doing things, and you might think it doesn’t matter what I call it, like you could call it not a problem, but it’s still a problem.

And I would say that you can call it whatever you want. But which one feels better in your body? If you say out loud right now, maybe you’re in your car driving ho, hopefully not like in an elevator with a whole group of people, but I want you to just say, I have a problem and I want you to feel how your body feels.

Does it kind of constrict a little bit? Maybe you feel that in your chest, but if you say, I have a challenge. How does that feel? A little bit better, right? Like it’s something I’ve gotta work through, but it’s a challenge. But what if you say, I have an opportunity. I know for me, I feel like my chest really [00:07:00] opens.

I almost feel like I’m sitting up a little bit taller. Like that feels different. And you might think that the way that you feel doesn’t matter. It absolutely matters because your brain and your body are talking, and when you notice that you feel something, that’s how you can recognize what your brain is actually talking about.

Sometimes people are like, how do I know what my unconscious mind is thinking if it’s unconscious? And I say, how do you feel? How do you feel? That is gonna be the gauge that’s telling you what’s going on upstairs, and I wanna be. In an expansive, open place in order for me to be able to see the most opportunity, the most synchronicities, the most ways I can solve this problem.

Look, there are infinite ways to solve every problem, but the more constricted you are, [00:08:00] the more narrow your focus becomes and the harder it is for you to be able to see. Other options that may be right under your nose. When we start to see all these options, what do we do? We go, God, I got lucky. I got lucky.

I just happened to walk in when there was a sale. Right? Maybe there was a sign a week ago that there was gonna be a sale, and you didn’t notice it consciously, but your unconscious mind did. These little things happen all the time. There’s a guy on the internet, there’s a guy on YouTube. Darren Brown, Darren, D-E-R-R-E-N, I think is how you spell it.

Darren Brown, and he is an illusionist, but he does some incredible things with putting out, he does these elaborate, I’m gonna call it a hoax, right? Elaborate. Experiments where he puts out little tiny signs all along somebody’s [00:09:00] path, you know, their drive to an event, , in the parking lot. Little things you’d never notice, and then he can get them to.

Say a certain song based on all of the different signs that they saw. They don’t remember seeing any of those things yet when they show up and he has them come up with any song they want, they say the exact thing that he has been dripping out to them throughout the day. So our brain is constantly picking up information.

Check him out on YouTube. His videos are fascinating. He’s fascinating. But I want you to be thinking like if my brain is always scanning for information and it’s gonna be scanning, like opening or closing, depending on what I’m telling it, then wouldn’t it make sense that if I told it that things were magically happening all the time?

And that there was constantly opportunity and that things always worked out for me. Doesn’t it make sense [00:10:00] then that they would, I’ve seen this trend on TikTok, it was probably a year ago, called Lucky Girl Syndrome, and basically it was the idea that the more luck you think you’ll have, the more you have it’s science.

It makes sense. So there is a science of luck and there’s this researcher named Richard Wiseman. He studied people who call themselves lucky versus unlucky, and what he found is that lucky people aren’t magically blessed, but they do think and act differently. So here’s what really stood out in his research, he found that lucky people.

They’re really open to new experiences. So if things don’t go the way they think they’re gonna go, they go, uh, well, what could be, what could be, what could happen for me here? Right? They don’t shut down before things begin, right? We have things that go sideways every single day. That’s just life. But if you close down [00:11:00] or you go, oh gosh, darn, uh, here we go again.

That is telling , your brain, and the universe that you’ve gotta constrict and get really narrow. But what we really wanna do is we wanna open up to new experiences. He also noticed that lucky people tend to notice opportunities that other people missed, and that’s because they’re relaxed and they’re paying attention.

Again, if you think about it, when you get really stressed or we get hyper-focused, everything narrows, right. We get really honed in. I mean, if you think about it from a biological perspective, this makes sense. If I am walking down a dark alley and. I see something that is a danger to me. I’m gonna get really high, like I’m going all of my attention, my peripheral vision’s gonna come in.

Everything’s gonna come in so I can really like focus in and fight or whatever it is I need to do. Right? Lucky people. They’re more relaxed. They [00:12:00] have a calmer nervous system. This is why we teach this inside the n, the Navigate method. They, know how to operate their nervous system, and so they notice things that other people would just let pass right by.

Again, when I say other people would just let pass by, it’s not that they’re trying to ignore things or they’re just letting things go, they literally don’t see it. You could be. In the same exact spot as somebody else. One person thinks they’re lucky, the other person doesn’t, and they will see and notice different things, different opportunities in the same experience.

The other thing about lucky people is they trust their gut. More importantly than that. ’cause I hear, I talk to people all the time. They’re like, I have an incredible intuition. And then when we are talking and then they’re like, Ooh, but I knew I should have done that, but I didn’t. So the trick is they trust their gut, but they actually follow it.

Gosh, this sense that we have [00:13:00] is so important, and I think we miss all the time. We think it’s not as important as our hearing or our seeing or our smelling or our tasting, but that gut feeling, that thing can be honed, that thing is important. It tells you so much. And the other thing he found is that.

Lucky people carry an expectation that things are gonna work out, which weirdly makes them more likely to act, and those actions create more luck. So I actually asked on Instagram, I put a poll and I said, how are you lucky? That’s what I asked. Are you lucky? Are you not lucky? Or do you think that luck doesn’t even exist?

14% of the people that filled out my poll that chose to interact said that there’s no such thing as luck, which I also wonder how are you defining it, right? 22% said they’re [00:14:00] not lucky, and 64% of people said they were lucky. Now the people that see themselves as unlucky. Are more likely, according to this research, to be stressed out or anxious or focused on what could go wrong.

So they get this tunnel vision. That means that they don’t even really see some of the good stuff that might be right in front of them. So here’s the thing. A lot of what luck is is really tied in to how your brain is wired to pay attention. So we have this thing called the reticular activating system.

You’ve probably heard of this, right? It filters what we notice. I think of it as like a little guy in a mail room and the male is coming down the chute, right? And the little male guy is looking at it and saying, is this important? And it tosses it to your conscious mind. If it is, if it’s not important, it throws it behind him and goes, eh, that’s not [00:15:00] important.

But this. Reticular activating system that’s constantly filtering is determining and deciding what you consciously notice. You’re unconsciously noticing everything. So, you know, I noticed this like when I bought a new car and I’ve noticed it. Every time I buy a new car, I’m like, nobody has this car.

I’m so unique. And then I drive down the street and I’m like, why is every car in the parking lot the same exact car that I got? Right? So your brain is gonna be showing you what matters to you, and it determines what matters to you based on what you spend the most time thinking about. Repetition or what has the most emotion.

So pause for a moment and imagine if you are worrying. Highly emotional, super repetition. Now what? Now your brain’s like, show her more of that or him more of that. [00:16:00] So lucky people are essentially programming their brain to look for opportunity. They just expect good things. And so their brain says that little filter, the little male guy says, Hey, look at this one.

Look at this one. Here’s another one. And the filter of the unlucky. People just expect the opposite, and then they get more of that. So it’s not just what you notice, either luck actually really favors action or motions, right? So if you’re taking little small risks, you’re saying yes, or starting conversations, you’re, you’re doing things different.

I know one of the things I’ve really been focused on, hyper-focused on is, um, I’m gonna say it like this, but Neville Goddard, if you are familiar with Neville Goddard, I should do a whole. A whole podcast on him, uh, inside one of my programs, um, Voyager, which is for people who have already made the decision or [00:17:00] decided to stay or leave in their marriage.

We, every other week we dive into some concept and Neville Goddard is one that we’ve been working on, and really, Neville Goddard talks about being in the feeling, again, remember what our feelings are doing, right? So being in the feeling of it is done. Whatever it is you want, that’s the outcome that you have.

It’s done. You just have to linger in that feeling, right? So luck really loves this. Because as you linger into the feeling of it is done, you’re, first of all, you’re not worried anymore, you’re totally relaxed and your brain is looking for like, how did this happen? And suddenly you’re gonna be feeling like doing things.

So I have been hyper-focused on Neville Goddard, and I have been living in the future in terms of how I’m feeling. The goals that I have, they are done. And I have [00:18:00] noticed that I am way more apt to do things that I would have put off or been shying away from because I’m already living in as that other version of me and that other version of me had to do those things to get there.

And so. You dramatically increase the odds of bumping into something good when you’re taking different actions, right? You’re seeing totally new things ’cause you’re taking different actions and when you believe that those things are gonna work out, you’re more likely to follow through. Right? I’m doing those things because I believe it works out.

’cause I know what it feels like to be at the end result. Essentially, you’re turning possibility into reality. Okay. So if you’re with me on all that, let’s just talk about how you can actually become luckier. So here’s some practical shifts that you can make. One of the things that I think is super important is to [00:19:00] pay attention to the people that you surround yourself with.

So when we surround ourselves with people who are lucky, right, who see opportunity, who think differently, we begin to become like them. So they say, you know, we are the top. We are the average of the top five people that we spend the most time with. This is why I think groups like I’m in a, I am a coachee.

I’m being coached in a group that I have been in for a long time. The people that are in there are really big thinkers. They create their opportunities. They don’t wait. They are excited about life. They want to have new experiences and. That’s important for me because I will become the average of the top five people I spend the most time with.

So I wanna curate who I’m spending time with. I don’t want it to just default. Now, you may [00:20:00] be working at a job where you don’t like it, or the people you work with are just. Terrible or makes you unhappy, like all of that stuff is fair. You might be in a relationship that doesn’t feel like it’s feeding your soul.

You might feel, you know, just really unhappy and unsettled in that. And so in those experiences, if you’re like, I can’t do anything about that. Like I can’t just pick and choose everybody I spend time with, sometimes the people are picked to by my boss and who I have to do projects with or all those things.

I can still curate my group, and I do that sometimes by checking on podcasts, who do, whose voice do I wanna be hearing? I do it by reading books. I do it by attending different groups or events, saying yes to invitations. So every new connection that I make is [00:21:00] essentially a doorway to a different possibility.

Almost like I could open the door, look through and be like, do I like this one? Mm, that one’s probably not for me. Find another one. So expanding your circle can actually make you luckier because you’re gonna be exposed to different people. The next one is shifting your state. So stress, like I was saying, makes you really blind to opportunity, but when you start to regulate your nervous system, this is, this is I, I swear this changed my life.

Really knowing how to regulate my nervous system and doing it every day, you can actually start to see opportunity that’s in front of you because you’re not constricted and laser focused. So this is why we teach this to women inside the program because. You need to be able to see opportunity if you’re unhappy in your marriage.

Our program does. It doesn’t mean you, you stay and it doesn’t mean you go. It means you get to really see, and you get a totally different vantage point so that you can make a really clear [00:22:00] decision. So, shifting your state, noticing when you’re dysregulated and knowing how to shift it into a regulated state life, changing it, it’ll, that’ll shift everything.

The next thing is to really practice optimism. You know, if you follow me on Instagram, you know, almost every day I post my outfit, nobody sees my outfit, but you guys, because I sit in front of the computer all day, I joke that I do it for that one picture every day, but it, it makes me feel good, right?

That I’m dressed. It is a creative outlet. It helps me feel motivated and like I’m ready for the day. But if you notice when I post that picture. Because nobody really, ’cause, well, some people care about my outfit, but nobody really cares. So on the side I put all these things that I’m thinking about that are good things.

So every day I have a list of good things and I try and think about stuff that I never would think of, you know? ’cause I can say [00:23:00] like, well, it’s a good thing to have a paycheck. It’s a good thing to, like, there’s things that are obviously good things, but what about the things that we forget about? So the things that I tend to post are like, uh, I go into my kitchen and I just flip a switch and clean water.

Clean water just comes pours into a basin in my kitchen. Do you know how many people would kill for that? Like that is insanity. I can go into a grocery store, like it’s a giant warehouse full of food. Like every kind of food I could think of. Do you know how many people. Would be in. Complete awe of that.

Like there are magical, , lucky things happening all the time. So train your brain to practice optimism and gratitude and noticing those three things. You don’t have to write ’em down, but you could just have a rampage of appreciation. You know, sometimes I’ll take my coffee and I’ll be like, [00:24:00] I love this coffee.

I love that it’s the perfect color. I love that it’s warm. I love that I get to drink it, and it feels good. I love that it wakes me up. I love my mugs. I usually will pick a mug based on my mood, right? So I get to pick my mug and how cool is that? And I have different mugs, like, do you see how it’s simple?

Simple. But this is what lucky people tend to do just automatically. They also, they micro risks, so they try something, right? They have a, a competence enough to make little, small, bold moves. Then they end up stumbling into like a lucky break, right? Like that was lucky. Well, I mean, she did 19 other things before that thing happened.

So taking micro risks to reach for something, to go for a goal, and when it doesn’t work, those other 18 times that it didn’t work and it goes wrong, ask yourself, what was I [00:25:00] learning here? What, door might this have opened? How. Did this actually work for me? That’s a question I love to ask. How is this working for me?

What are all the ways that I’m learning new things from this? How is this gonna move me forward even faster? I always think this with my setbacks. Not always. Often I think this with my setbacks, like, this is actually working for me. How are all the ways this is working for me? When I ask a question like that, then my brain.

Has to answer the question, how is all the ways this is working for me? Instead of, wow, why does this always happen to me? Do you feel the difference again, feel it in your body. Expansive or constrictive. So here’s the thing, with luck, you can just choose. You can choose right now, you can be like, I’m the luckiest person ever.

’cause it’s not about fate, it’s about focus. [00:26:00] So you don’t sit back and wait for luck, you create it. And I think about that lady that said I worked really hard for everything I did. Absolutely. And that’s why you’re so lucky. So I wanna leave you with the challenge. So I want you to notice one opportunity today that you might have overlooked.

I want you to say yes to some really small thing that normally would’ve dismissed, and I want you to just see what happens and pay attention to your body and how it feels. So when you can do that and you can start to create and be the creator of your life, I think that is how you live a big life.

Alright, it was so good to see you. Thanks for being here with me today. I love you guys so much. And again, if you want some help, you wanna join the Navigate Method or even Voyager, just reach out to us. You can message me on Instagram or just go to my website. You can book a call with us right there and I’d love to talk with you.

See you guys next [00:27:00] week. 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 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.

I.

In the 3rd and final podcast in the series entitled Finding Clarity in Your Marriage, Betsy talks about the importance of inner strength and how we can create it for ourselves. Betsy goes over the ‘ladder of change’ and offers listeners practical exercises like stability statements to help us train our brains to create stability from within.

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy P, 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 and welcome to the show today. So this is part three of the three part series. This is lesson three, making Confident choices in an Uncertain World. Look, the world feels so unpredictable and really kind of scary in a lot of ways. People feel really divided, and it’s hard to find your grounding. So in this episode, we’re gonna talk about how to do that, how to find that, and a tool that you can use.

All right. I hope you enjoy. Welcome back. This is episode three of How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage, even when the rest of the world feels uncertain. So far, we have covered in episode one why this uncertainty sort of feeds indecision and why your brain keeps you frozen. ’cause your brain works really well, right?

It’s keeping you alive. So that’s a great thing. And in episode two we talked about the hidden cost of waiting. How postponing decisions actually costs you a whole lot more than you think, right? Energy, peace, self-trust, all of those things. And now in this final episode. What I wanna do is give you a bit of a path forward.

So this is where the fog really starts to clear, and this is how you’re gonna learn a little bit more about creating stability inside of yourself. So that you can start making confident choices, even when the world outside is so unpredictable. So let’s start off this episode with talking about why stability actually matters, right?

So let’s start with the truth, and that is that clarity doesn’t come from your husband changing. I know this can feel really hard because like me, you’ve probably thought at some point or maybe many times, if he would just change. If he would just listen to me. If he would just hear what I had to say, if he would just take into account how I see the world, right?

However it is that you say that, then things would be better. But the truth is that it doesn’t come from him changing. It doesn’t come from your kids needing you less. It doesn’t come from the world calming down. Clarity comes from you. It comes from you feeling stable enough to trust yourself, but that’s why you felt stuck for so long.

Because without stability, every choice feels like danger. But with stability. You can finally see clearly. So I want you to think of it this way. Just imagine that you’re standing in the middle of a storm holding an umbrella, right? The storm is wild, like there’s rain coming in sideways, there is wind toweling.

You can’t stop the storm. But if your feet are grounded, if your grip is really good, if your umbrella is steady, then you can stand there without being blown away or drenched. That’s what inner stability does. It doesn’t take the storm away, but it does let you stand in it and feel confident. So one of the things that I wanna frame here as we talk about a shift that I want you to make, and this is really an identity shift.

This is the root of really all the work that I do and have ever done. I want you to think of our, our brains as a ladder. So I want you to just imagine a ladder leaning up against the side of a house, and this is gonna be one of those, it’s gonna be one of those decorative ladders that you put towels on.

Okay? So a smaller ladder, just a few rungs. But I want you to think about the very first rung of that ladder is environment. It’s your house. It’s where you are. It is the gym. It is an environment. Okay? The next one, the next rung up is your behavior. The things that you do, the patterns you run, the way you show up.

Now I’m gonna go up one more level and this, this level, this level we’re gonna call capabilities, right? What you think you’re capable of. Now, behavior and environment are very conscious. You choose those, right? I’m gonna choose to go to the gym, I’m gonna choose to meal prep, for example. So my behavior is the meal prepping.

My environment is the gym. Right. So if we’re thinking about our family life, so the environment is my home, my behavior is the patterns that I run. I might notice those things, right? And those are conscious. I’m aware of them, I’m choosing them. I’m making dinner. That is something that I, my behavior that I’m doing at night, at the house.

Okay. Now when I move into this next thing, potential right or capability, this starts to get unconscious. Now what is unconscious? What does that even mean? It just means things that operate without me thinking about it. When I go brush my teeth in the morning, I don’t even hardly remember. I just know I’ve done it right?

It’s sort of unconscious. I don’t have to watch a YouTube video first. I know how to do it. My body just sort of does it right. It’s unconscious. I know how to do it so well that I don’t have to think about it. So I’ve got my rungs on the ladder. I have my environment, I have my behavior, I have my potential or my capabilities, what I think I’m capable of.

And then the next few rungs up are gonna be my values, my beliefs, and the very tippity top is gonna be my identity. Now the cool thing about this ladder is that whatever is above it influences what’s below it. So as I get into my beliefs, my beliefs don’t matter as much as my values matter. Those are generally really deep seated things, right, that I probably learned as a little kid.

And then when I get into my identity, it’s who do I think I really am? And this can be because it’s unconscious. Can be hard for you to figure out or to identify, but many times it’ll come from when we say something like I am. That’s like my deepest part of my identity. If you could think of an Olympic athlete that was prepping for the Olympics, would it matter if they were in a room?

With a whole bunch of Sweetss, like, probably not. ’cause they’d be like, I am an Olympic athlete. I don’t eat that kind of food. I eat the kind of food that supports my sport. So my identity, who I think I am an Olympian, impacts everything below it. So with that said, the way to make real long lasting change.

The kind that is like brushing your teeth that you don’t even have to think about is by going to the top of the ladder. It’s by changing your identity and who you think you are. So when we start thinking about what happens when I delay, and in the last episode we talked about that cost of delaying I am creating over and over and over, and reinforcing.

My identity isn’t a one of someone who makes decisions, who is worthy of more of all of those things. And when we’re living in this kind of situation, we are in reactive mode. So I talk to women every day that say they react to their husband’s moods, um, their scanning for how he feels every day. They react to their own fears, right?

They have their own thoughts about fears or things that could go wrong. Typically, they’re not spending a lot of time thinking about all the things that could go, right, right? And that’s normal. But they’re reacting to their own fear, thoughts, they’re reacting to politics or the economy. All of these things outside of themselves.

And when you’re reacting, you’re always chasing that stability someplace outside, which is impossible. So the shift is to become intentional. It’s to stop waiting for the outside, to calm down, and to start creating calm inside. By becoming the identity of the person who doesn’t matter what’s happening outside, inside, all is well, and I control how I respond to things and what happens to my life.

So that shift again is to become intentionally intentional. And the best way to make that shift is to ask yourself, what do I wanna model for myself and for my kids? And if you don’t have children, or your children are grown, what do I wanna model for myself? How do I want to show up for myself? Because here’s the thing, whether you realize it or not, you’re teaching your kids right now.

My daughter is 23. She sees everything I do. She notices every little nuanced side comment that I make that I think doesn’t even matter, and she’ll see it and say something. That’s the kind of relationship we have, but she’ll point it out and it just makes me realize how much they’re really watching. I talk to women every day who are the best moms and want good things for their kids.

When we start talking about their kids, they say, I don’t think they really know. They don’t know that we’re unhappy. And I, I disagree. Even if they don’t know the extent that you’re unhappy, they feel the tension. You know, when you walk in a room and you can feel that they watch you freeze. They watch you postpone.

They know that you’ve put your life on hold for things, right? They learn that that’s what adulthood looks like, and maybe you learned that by watching somebody else, right? We come by all of these things. Honestly, the one thing I know about our brains is that it wants to do the thing that is looking out for us, right?

It wants to do the thing that it thinks is safety, and so. Although what happens might not be good for you, your brain thinks it’s good for you, and I think that’s a really important thing to notice. You’re not doing any of this stuff to harm yourself. You’re not doing any of this to harm your kids.

You’re not doing any of this to make life harder for anybody. You’re doing it because that’s what your brain is telling you is safe. And so if your kids watch you. If you watch, you freeze and postpone and put everything on hold, then you learn that’s what it’s supposed to look like. That’s what relationships look like.

That’s what adulthood is. But if they watch you stabilize yourself, if they watch you ground your energy, if they watch you move forward with with intention, they learn courage, they learn resilience, and you get to live that, not just hope for it. I wanna share a quick story. Uh, we have inside the Navigate method, after, after people are done with the course, they move into our alumni group.

And our alumni group gives them continuing access. To get help, and we have groups every single month to support them. So the program is done, they’ve completed the program, but we still get together. And I always joke that this is really for me because I grow so attached to everybody, but inside one of our groups a few months ago, someone said that when they started, they came so overwhelmed, right?

Overwhelmed by her marriage. Overwhelmed by money, stress, overwhelmed by what was happening politically. And she said, I, I, I felt like I couldn’t make any decisions. Like I just kept thinking I’ve gotta wait for things to calm down. But I mean, the truth is things didn’t calm down right. And the longer you wait, the louder it gets.

And she realized that she couldn’t keep living like that. Like it just wasn’t working anymore. And so through this work, she started practicing. Little small acts of stability, journaling, telling herself one truth a day, making one small choice instead of circling, becoming curious about something her husband said, and something shifted.

She said Everything didn’t get less chaotic. I just got way more solid and once she felt solid, she could finally see her marriage clearly, and that clarity brought her relief. Okay, even before she made her final decision. So I wanna give you the same practice that she used. It’s a stability statement, and so every day you’re gonna write this down and you’re gonna finish it.

Okay? So, and I sometimes will have this, depending on how chaotic things feel in the world. I will write it on a post-it note, and I’ll just put it on my mirror. So when I brush my teeth, I see it, right? So that’s just a really good way to create a habit. Because I’m stacking it onto a habit I already have, which is brushing my teeth.

So now when I go to brush my teeth, I see the little post-it note, and then after a while I didn’t even need the post-it note. But what it says is, even when the world feels uncertain, I choose to create stability by and then just fill it in with something different that you’re gonna do every day. So having a real conversation instead of avoiding.

One of the big things we work on is creating a space between if you start having a conversation and you feel yourself, right, getting activated, creating a space so that you can just be quiet and listen, and then have your response so powerful. It makes you feel so steady and solid. So having a real conversation instead of avoiding right, courageous conversations.

Going for a walk to clear my head. Right When the world feels uncertain, I’m gonna create stability by making one small decision instead of spinning, reminding myself that I am capable of handling whatever comes. So one of the things that I say all the time in group is you don’t have to trust that it’s gonna work out.

How about that? You don’t have to trust that it’s gonna work the way you think. You just have to trust in yourself. You just have to trust that you’ll know what to do. When the next right thing happens. So here’s why this statement works. It’s because your brain is always scanning for safety. And so when you start to give it evidence that you can create the safety, it relaxes.

And when your brain re relaxes, then clarity can come into focus. So do this for a week. Put that little post-it note up on your mirror. You won’t even need it after a while, and that will become your default thinking. It starts to become your identity. So you’re gonna notice after you do it for 5, 6, 7 days, you’re gonna feel so much lighter.

It’s not magic. It might be a little miracle. It’s not magic though. It is you training your brain to see yourself as stable instead of waiting for the world to stabilize for you. So let’s step back across these three episodes and just kind of talk about what we’ve gone over. In episode one, we talked about why uncertainty freezes you in indecision and how to start with 5% more stability every single day.

In episode two, we explained why waiting isn’t neutral, right? It’s actively costing you energy and confidence and joy, and I will just say it again, even though I know I talked about it in episode two, but the confidence piece that is just so far reaching. It’s so far reaching, and I think that might be the most heartbreaking.

I think that was the most heartbreaking thing I saw in myself, right? And maybe that’s why my heart breaks for women when I talk with them, and I can see how much that’s corroded and they may not even notice. And then episode three, this episode we talked about how to create inner stability with daily practice so that you can finally trust yourself to make decisions with confidence.

Now. Now you know, now you know how to get unstuck. You know how to stop circling and how to start moving, and you know how to begin to build a foundation of stability that’s gonna hold you steady no matter what’s happening around you. So here’s a little truth. These tools I think are really cool. They happen really quick and easy.

They’re not hard, it’s not complicated or a lot, but they’re just the beginning. So having a framework. Guidance, it’s gonna make all the difference. And that’s what we do inside the Navigate Method. We do not tell you whether you’re gonna stay or go in your marriage. We have lots of people that decide to leave, and we have lots of people that decide to stay and they see things with fresh eyes.

But what we do is we give you a proven process to clear that fog, to build the stability, and to make decisions that feel solid and true to you. Here’s my invitation to you. You’ve got some momentum here. You don’t wanna let that die and you don’t wanna go back to the way things were. Remember, that’s how your brain is gonna work.

It’s gonna tell you that’s the safest thing, and what we’ll do is we’ll book a call with you. It is a clarity call and it is a time for us to help you get really clear on what’s really going on. If we think we can help you, then we will explain to you how that can work. And if you book the call before your week is over, you’re gonna get some special incentives.

So we’re gonna see that you booked it before your call, your time expired, and we’ll make sure on the call to give you those new options. So don’t keep waiting, don’t let indecision keep costing you more days of your life. You already know now how to create stability. So let’s walk this out together. So if you go to betsy pay.com/ let’s talk and you can book your clarity call there.

This is your moment. Let me know what you decide. Thanks so much for being here with me on this three little mini podcast episodes. It was really nice to be with you. Talk to you soon. 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.

Here is part 2 in the 3 part series entitled How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage. In part 2 Betsy delves into how waiting impacts one’s unconscious mind which can drain energy and erode self trust. Stay tuned until the end when Betsy offers an exercise to identify the effects of waiting.

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 and welcome. Welcome to the show. So this week, if you listened to the last episode, we are doing a three part series. This one is lesson two. It’s the hidden cost of waiting. It’s the things that actually happen to your unconscious when you choose to delay. I hope this gives you some new thoughts, new ideas, and helps you along your journey.

So without further ado, here’s the show. Hello everyone. Welcome back to episode two of How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage, even when the rest of the world feels uncertain. So last time we talked about why your brain keeps you frozen and indecision and how to start stabilizing yourself. And today we’re gonna be talking about something that most women don’t ever really see clearly, and I include myself in that.

This is a hard thing to see. When you’re in the middle of it, and it is the cost of waiting. So today’s episode is called The Hidden Cost of Waiting, and Why Delaying Clarity hurts you way more than you think. I think this is, I think this is such an important one, especially as women because we handle so much stuff, right?

We are the ones that are handling so many of the things in our families. And for our children, for our homes, just to keep our homes running. And we’re also working and making decisions at work and being counted on for things. And so all of this starts to build up. And when on the background, like we learned in the last episode, there’s this.

This underlying current of I’m not making a decision. I’m allowing things to stay in a way that does not feel good to me. And I will go to the liberty of saying, and that’s what I deserve, right? Because if we thought we deserved more, that’s what we would get. And so I think there’s an illusion here of safety.

When you say, I’m gonna decide about that later, or I’m gonna push that off till after the holidays, or I’m going to wait until somebody graduates from college or high school or dance, or whatever it is. It feels like you’re hitting pause, right? Like you’re giving yourself a break. But waiting isn’t a pause.

It’s still playing in the background. It’s not like you shut this off or you stop thinking about it. You just have delayed a decision. And what that does, because it’s still playing in the background, is it begins to drain your energy even when you are going about your day. So now, if you could think about this, if you have a hundred percent when you wake up in the morning, your battery is on a hundred percent, which whose is?

’cause you’ve probably spent half the night tossing and turning thinking about this. In the back of your mind, so, but let’s just say you wake up at a hundred percent, but 20% of your brain is still thinking about the fact that you’re putting this off, or it won’t be that much longer. Or you might be calculating or thinking, or wondering or changing your mind, going back and forth.

You’ve only got 80% to do everything else that you’re doing. And so this is what this looks like. It’s gonna show up like thinking about your marriage like on a loop, right? It’s gonna show up as feeling really distracted or disconnected from people that you actually really love and that you wish you were closer to.

It’s gonna look like carrying tension right in your body. ’cause you’re avoiding decisions. So you might notice your shoulders are like up in your ears. You might notice that you’re breathing really shallow. You know you’re gonna start to notice that you’re waking up in the middle of the night. Maybe you’re tossing and turning, or you get this idea in your head and then you just can’t let it go.

And it’s gonna manifest in ways that maybe you’ve got a lot of headaches or you’ve got belly aches. Or before you go to bed, you like grab the Zillow and you’re like, I’m just gonna look up just to see what it would cost. So like your brain needs that moment of relief, right? And so what ends up happening is a compound effect.

It’s like adding. A stone into a backpack every single day, and at first you kind of don’t notice. You’re like, it’s okay. I mean, it’s fine. I know it’s on my mind. But after months or even years, you are completely bent under that weight and it starts to erode your self trust because every day that you don’t choose, you reinforce the idea that you can’t choose.

And it robs you of a lot of joy you could be having in the present, right? Because you can’t fully live in today when your mind is tied up on what ifs. You can’t fully enjoy the time with your kids. ’cause in the back of your mind, you’re scanning for something that could be going wrong, that you’re gonna have to handle, or that you wanna see if you can have a preemptive strike against, right?

Some way that you can start to control things so that things don’t go outta hand. And so. You are constantly churning on the sidelines thinking about this, and so you can’t be fully present. You can’t be fully enjoying things because you’re always in scan mode. Now, here’s the truth is that waiting is actually a decision.

It’s not neutral. It’s a choice to stay stuck. Once you know you’re stuck, it’s no longer a habit. It’s a choice. And it costs you way more than making a move ever Could. Once you begin to make any kind of decisions about anything, the angst is really in the lead up, not in the actual doing, and I’m sure you find that over the course of your life.

I even remember way back when I was in college, I’d have a paper to write. Writing the paper wasn’t as bad as the two weeks that I put it off and thought about it and let it stick in my craw if I had just done it and got it over with, things would’ve been a lot more simple. Right. So the decision is being made, the decision is waiting, and that is not a neutral thing that has a high cost to it.

So what I want you to do is I want you to grab a piece of paper and I want you to draw across on the paper that makes four quadrants, and I want you to label them like North is Thoughts, south is feelings. East is actions and west is results. And in each quadrant I want you to write what waiting has created in your life.

Okay? So the thoughts might be like, I don’t know what to do. The feelings might be anxious or frustrated. The actions might be procrastinating, or I have to have a glass of wine every night just to like deal with what’s going on. Or I’m venting to my friends all the time, whatever that action is. And then the results still stuck.

Less energy, less joy. I feel drained, I feel nervous, I, whatever that is, what are the results? And I think that when you see it mapped out, you can’t keep telling yourself that waiting. Is harmless. There’s no way to look at that and walk through that and see that there’s no impact. I believe that when we can get really honest with ourselves, that is when we can start to create change, because we can’t, if we’re still living in denial, like I was saying, once something is seen, it’s no longer a habit.

Now you’re choosing. It may be that even as I say this, you’re like, I’m not gonna do that little exercise because I already know. I already know I’m drinking a bottle of wine every night, or I’m. Just opting out or I know that I’ve shrunk. I know that I’m like getting smaller. I know that I’m overeating to compensate to make myself feel better, which that too makes a lot of sense once you understand your nervous system and what happens when you eat to calm your nervous system.

There’s so many things here. So although we think I’m being safe, I’m I’m, I’m gonna wait until conditions are right. The conditions are already wrong. Well, you’re waiting because that choice isn’t a choice that’s actually healing or moving you forward. So I really want you to do this even if you’re like, I, I don’t need to do this.

I already know. Do it on a couple different things, right? What is the thought that you have? And maybe there’s a thought that you have, you can look back on like last night, what was it like in the evening last night, and what were the thoughts I started to have? Or during the day, maybe you’re at work and a thought comes into your mind.

Use that our unconscious minds present information to us so that it can be healed. And it presents it at the time that it believes you are ready to deal with it. That’s why we get so many thoughts when we’re driving in the car or we’re standing in the shower because we’re having a moment where our brain isn’t full of other stuff.

And so the information that’s being served up to you, the ideas, the thoughts, the concerns, they are so important because they are things that your unconscious mind has sifted and sorted through and decided this was important and. She’s ready to deal with it. And if you push it away and say, I am not ready to deal with it, you’re telling your unconscious mind that it is wrong.

You are not ready. And the more you tell yourself you’re not ready, the more and more deeper you get stuck. So. Do this today. ’cause in our next episode, we’ll, we are gonna cover the path out. So how to create inner stability and finally make really confident choices in a really uncertain world. 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 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 3 part podcast titled Finding Clarity in Your Marriage, even when the rest of the world feels uncertain, Betsy explores how we can find inner stability when the world around us feels chaotic. Betsy offers a helpful tool at the end of each podcast in this series so listen into part 1 and enjoy.

Transcript:

 Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy P, 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 Art of Living Big. I am doing something a little bit different this week, so I created a three part series called How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage, even When the rest of the World feels Uncertain. Now, you could take the like clarity in your marriage and input anything, so if you don’t have.

Non clarity in your marriage. If you’re not confused about your marriage or wondering if you should stay or go, this still may be helpful information to you because it’s really about resting your nervous system and how to get centered when the world feels like a little crazy on fire, right? So. What I’m gonna do, I created this three part series and I was offering it on, on Instagram and it, I had it set up as like a, a private podcast.

I don’t necessarily know why I did that, other than I wanted to keep it like this three part series that people could enter into to get this information. But the truth is more people will get it if I just put it on the podcast. I, I, sometimes I try to make things more complicated than they need to be.

So we’re gonna do this, it’s gonna be three episodes, but I’m going to give it to you all at once. So that you can get it all at once, so you can just listen if you want. So altogether, it’s maybe only like 45 minutes, so it’s kind of like one big long episode. But I do think it may be helpful to listen to one of the mini episodes and then try it.

Because I give you a tool at the end of every single one. Um, and then the next day, maybe listen to the next one. So even they’re all available. So lesson one is really about why uncertainty feeds indecision. So we’re gonna talk about like what’s really happening inside your body. The second lesson is about the hidden cost of waiting.

This is something I don’t think we think about very much, whether it’s your marriage or anything else, like what that indecision is actually doing. And then our third lesson is about making confident choices in an uncertain world. So how on earth do I make decisions about things big or small when I don’t know what’s happening?

Right? And the truth is we never know what’s happening, so we will, we’ll teach you how to find some certainty and get grounded. I think you’re gonna really like the episodes. I hope you do. So without further ado, we are gonna give you these next few episodes all at once, and let me know what you think.

All right, see you in a See you next week. See you next week. Hi everybody. Hi. Welcome to our private podcast mini series. This is called How to Find Clarity in Your Marriage, even When the Rest of the World Feels Uncertain and Uncertain is probably such an understatement. So I’m really happy that you’re here with me.

I hope that this gives you a lot of value, gives you some new ways of thinking about things, and some tools to be able to shift a little bit. If you’ve listened to my podcast, the Art of Living Big, or been around me or in my vortex for any amount of time, you know that I believe that these shifts that we can have, these little aha moments can happen.

Without any kind of delay. They can happen all the time, and they are little pieces and reminders that miracles happen all the time, and so I’m happy that you’re here. Let’s have some miracles here together as we spend the next three episodes together. If you’re pretty new here, my name is Betsy P. I’m the founder of the Navigate Method, and I’ve hosted the podcast, the Art of Living Big for like the past.

Eight or nine years. So it felt like a really good idea to be able to do this private podcast for you and share this information because that’s the format that so many of you have heard me and listened to me over all these years, and I feel like this information. Can really be a big shift in how you’re experiencing the world.

And you know, when I say like, even when the rest of the world feels uncertain, like uncertain is probably like a huge understatement, right? So over the next three episodes, I am gonna walk you through why you feel so stuck. Indecision and probably about a lot of things. You know, we’re gonna be framing this around your marriage, but it’s probably a lot of things and there’s a real reason for it, a biological reason for it.

It’s not your fault, it means your brain’s working really well. So we’re gonna dive into that. In the second episode, we’re gonna talk about the hidden cost of waiting, how postponing decisions actually drains way more from you than you realize. And finally, the last episode, we’re gonna talk about your path to inner stability so that you can start making confident choices no matter what’s happening outside of you.

And I wanna say. And I will reiterate this as we get to episode three, but that is a practice. It is something that you learn and you continue to practice and get better and better and better at it. So if you have been circling the same questions like, should I stay? Should I go? What’s happening? What if I go and I regret it?

What if I stay and I lose my life? How long do I stay? When is this gonna end? Can it get better? Look, all of those things. Then this series is gonna give you some relief. Finally understanding why you’re stuck and how to start moving forward. And by the end, you’re gonna know exactly what steps to take to stop living in limbo and start building stability in your life whether the world comes down or not.

Alright? So right now I’m gonna state the obvious, which is that the world feels really chaotic, right? There’s politics, there’s the economy, there is the news cycle. I know when I go on social media, maybe I’ll get on TikTok and I try to swipe really fast if it’s not something that will bring my vibe up, right?

I try to teach the algorithm that I really want fun, happy things in cat videos, you know, because I go there to get away and to have an escape, but it’s inescapable. Right. There is constant division and there is constantly people telling you their side of things in a very authoritative way that. Then leads everyone in the comments to begin arguing, right?

So many times we see this and you know, people comment and argue in the comments around CAT videos as well. So it is just everywhere. And then I go to Instagram or I go to Facebook and people are arguing there. And gosh, sometimes it’s people that I’ve known my whole life and I think like. How do I disagree so deeply with what they’re saying?

And so we’re seeing all of these things all the time that that cause us to feel constriction. If we watch the news, we feel constriction there. And then if we have constriction at home in our own marriage, just over little things that are happening or big things in our lives, right? So the truth is you really just cannot get away from it.

It’s everywhere. And when the world outside feels really unstable, it’s natural to tell yourself, now isn’t the time to deal with my marriage. Like I have to wait for things to settle down. I think this makes a lot of sense, and I hear this from women over and over and over again. Like, I need to wait till I know what’s happening in the world before I deal with this.

But here’s the truth. That is that waiting actually isn’t the thing that gives you safety. Waiting’s actually the thing that’s keeping you stuck and that stuck feeling. That is a really exhausting place to live. And the longer you stay there, the more depleted you actually get and the more depleted you get, the less able you are to be able to cope with what’s happening.

So. Let’s talk about why we get stuck in the first place. So when the world starts to feel really unpredictable, right? Our, our what we’re seeing out in the world, but also inside, right? When our world, the world, our world, our brain naturally defaults to survival. So. I have said probably on the podcast a million times, but I, I like this example because I think we can think about this from a biological perspective.

If I am walking through a field and there’s a rustle in the grass, I have to know that there’s a tiger, right? I have to know that there’s something that maybe unsafe to me, something that might harm me, and so I begin to become, become acutely aware of the rustle in the grass. But the truth is now I can go outside and walk my dog and I don’t have to worry about a tiger, right?

But my brain. Still has that high alert and so it kind of like swoosh really up close. So now it’s scanning for patterns, right? Patterns of anything that I see that will also trigger that, oh, there’s a tiger in the grass. It might be a a. Something on TV or a comment or something that our brains are like, that’s the pattern.

And right now we’re being fed so much information that it can become really alarming and our brains don’t know what’s real, what’s not real, when to shut off. Uh, I will go from a horrific. Video to the very next one of somebody’s birthday party. And my brain’s not designed to go from tragedy to happiness in, in a swipe.

And so what happens is that fight, flight, or freeze kicks in and it kicks in at times where I, it may not have in the past. And in marriage limbo freeze can tend to really take over. That typically is the, the version of that that I see really, really often is just freeze. I get stuck. I don’t know how to make a decision, so I just stay where I am and I’m just doing everything that I can to maintain the status quo.

Like just to keep things like, so it feels like there’s an equilibrium, right? And so that looks like running through the same pros and cons list in your head. You know, I’ve even talked with people that have like a running list and a notebook by their bed, and every night they pull it out and look and add things to it and delete things.

Um, it looks like avoiding conversations, right? Because you’re really afraid of what the fallout is. Or you’ve had this conversation before, or you know, this doesn’t go anywhere. Or, you know, no matter how many times you try it, it’s not gonna make you feel better. And so when you feel that pattern start to happen, you just like opt out.

You’re just like, I’m gonna go in my own room and I talk to women every day that say. You know, right. As soon as dinner’s done, like I just leave, I go in my room, do my thing, he goes and watches tv. Like there is just this separation, right? Um, that can look like telling yourself like, I’m gonna figure this out, but it’s gonna have to be later because the graduation is coming.

Or it’s my son’s final year of school, or, I have that trip planned. Or Christmas, the holidays are coming, all of these things. But the truth is later just never comes. And every day that you stay in that purgatory. You’re spending energy that you’ll never get back, right? I mean, the day is done. You’ve spent the energy on those things, and you’ll never be able to get that back.

So here’s what’s really happening, is that your brain is actually wired for safety. So it’s not wired for happiness, it’s not wired for joy, sadly, that would be amazing. But our brain is actually wired to just keep us alive. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to our brains if we’re happy doing it, safety means stick with what we know, even if it hurts.

So when you imagine leaving, alarm bells go off, right? What about the kids? What if I regret it? What if I have to move to a different town? What if I, where would I go? What would happen? And when you imagine staying. There are more alarms, right? What if this is all there is? What if I waste my life? What if I, you know, turn 70 and then realize I should have left when I was 50?

Like, what if, what if, what if? And because neither way feels safe. Your brain decides that the safest option is gonna be to do nothing. It’s just gonna cause you to freeze, and that’s why you feel so paralyzed. So here’s the thing that I have recognized that most people don’t realize, and that is that indecision isn’t neutral.

It costs you sleep, it costs you energy. And I think from my own experience, one of the biggest things that it costs you is self-trust. So the longer that you sit in purgatory, the heavier that cost gets. I know when I was going through my own indecision for years and years in my marriage, I would have ups and downs.

I would try so hard to get myself to a place where I felt like this is sustainable. I just didn’t wanna be thinking about it every single day. But the truth was that it was taking up most of my brain power. And when I look back, I think of all the things I could have done for a decade. That I didn’t do, that I didn’t experience because I was frozen.

And I also can look back now that I am living a different life, which, we’ll, we can talk about, but I can look back and I can say, I. I, I hum. Like I got myself really in a huddle, right? Like, I didn’t go out and meet friends. I didn’t go out and create relationships that I wanted or have experiences that I wanted.

Now that might not be anybody, everybody, but what I’m saying is it starts to pull you in. This indecision starts to pull you into a protective pattern, however that looks for you. So it may be that you just get really quiet. It may be that you just disengage. It may be that you exit and you spend more time with friends because you don’t wanna be at the house.

Maybe you spend more time at the house ’cause that feels safe. So, however your brain is processing this, I just want you to notice that the indecision isn’t neutral. It’s causing you to do things that you wouldn’t do if you were on a stable trajectory. So here is the grounding question for you and the tool.

So we wanna start breaking down that freeze response. And so there are some practices and you know, inside the Navigate method, do we really teach nervous system regulation? And I think this is something that is, that everybody should learn. Everybody should learn because it serves you in so many ways. It change your life, being able to regulate your own nervous system.

And for this, we’re gonna give some gr a grounding question that is gonna be a way for you to start to get in touch with what’s really happening inside yourself. You know, we tend to have so many things on our mind and so many places that we’re being pulled. So when we get out of bed, the first thing on our mind is, I gotta get going.

I know that’s like the first thing I think is I gotta get going. And so then I get going. And if you’ve got kids at home, if you’ve got like just a busy schedule, if you’ve gotta get to work, if you’ve got multiple things that you’re juggling, then you’re moving forward into the future and bringing that instability with you.

And so it’s sort of shutting down this place that you. Could get grounded and starting your day off in a freeze state, right? Just doing what has to be done to be able to move forward and it becomes rote like the things that you do or the things you always do, and that’s how everything plays out. Yeah.

Then we start moving into all of these patterns that we play out in our relationship that create the same thing over and over and over and over again, right? So here’s how I want you to start breaking up this freeze response every morning. I want you to ask yourself, what would make me feel 1% more stable today?

Maybe it’s what would make me feel 5% more stable or 10% more stable. As you start to get a handle on what that would be, just kind of play with that. But giving yourself that percentage, what would make me feel 5% more stable today? And then write that down and then do it so it doesn’t have to be something big.

Maybe it’s go for a little walk and I tell people, start very small. Walk down your street and turn around and come back, right? Don’t leave your phone at home and just walk for a minute and come back. Maybe it’s telling yourself one truth that you’ve been avoiding. Maybe it’s something simple like cleaning out a junk drawer, right?

So that your environment feels calmer. Getting into work and really organizing your desk before you get going. Maybe it’s clapping your hands together and rubbing them together. You’ll notice, take a big deep breath when you do that, and you’ll start to feel a little bit calmer. So these small actions create an internal safety and the safety is the foundation for your clarity.

So that’s your challenge for today. Find your five. And in our next episode, I’m gonna show you why waiting feels like the safe choice, but it’s actually costing you way more than you think. And how to finally see the price that you’re paying for staying in that limbo. All right, I’ll see you over there.

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.

We all do it, what are you putting off until tomorrow that you could do today? In this episode, Betsy talks about some things she recently tackled instead of kicking them down the road and how empowering that can be. Sometimes we let fear and anticipation stand in our own way, so listen in, and consider something you want to challenge yourself to stop kicking down the road.

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, welcome. Welcome to the show everybody. So right before I started talking, I was like, I’m gonna take these Invisalign out. You guys know I’ve had this Invisalign now for a while, a couple of months. It. Lots of times people say they can’t tell I speak any differently, but it sure feels different to me.

So anyway, as I was taking them out, I was like, oh my gosh, it’s already September 17th as I’m recording this and I only have to keep this a couple until the end of October. Like I’m almost done. And I just started thinking about that when I went to go get [00:01:00] them. I had been putting this off. Like literally for years I had a bunch of teeth work that had to be done, a crown and a filling and all kinds of stuff.

And then this was like the final step right in me having glorious teeth. And so I had braces as a kid, but then as I’ve gotten older, my teeth were shifting like a lot. It was really bothering me. And so finally, I was like, I’ve gotta take care of this. And I really didn’t wanna go through it. I really didn’t want to.

But the time was gonna pass anyway. And , I gotta tell you, like I’m so glad that I did, and I know that there are sometimes things that we’re like, I have to deal with that, but I don’t want to. And I think the anticipation of it. Is way worse than the actuality of it. Right? This past week, if you’ve followed me on social media, you know, I’ve been posting about how I have been in the middle of a five day CLI Siri journey.

So [00:02:00] CLI Siri is a cream that you put on your face and the cycle is like five days. And I’ve heard other people have to do them 10 or , 15, 20. Like people do them much longer. And it is for pre-cancerous. AKs, I forget what the word is, but it’s like little scaly patches that show up on your skin.

And when I went to the dermatologist last time, she said, , there’s so many of these that were burning off your skin every time. Like we should just go do a big cleanup and have you do this five day Cly Siri treatment. And so I Googled it and it’s pretty new. I think they used to use a different kind of product before, but I think this is pretty new.

So there wasn’t a lot of people talking about it online or a lot of pictures or you know, journeys that were shared. And the ones that I did see looked so terrible. So I get this five day. Cream and it’s little packets. So you get five [00:03:00] little packets and you have to put the whole packet on your face every night for five days.

And the dermatologist said to me, you’re gonna do one. And then day two, and then day three, like right before you go to bed, day four, day five. And when you wake up day six, your whole face is gonna be red. And you know, it’ll take a few days to a couple weeks for it to feel better. And then when I Googled and I saw photos.

It was complete insanity and it looked terrible. I saw a woman on TikTok that actually like kept track of her journey, and she talked about how the pain was so bad that she just laid on her bed and listened to podcasts and had a fan on her face. Like it was so terrible. And so I kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.

I had the medicine, I paid for it, and finally I was like, I think I gotta just do it. Like if I’m gonna do it, do it. The time is gonna go by anyway. And if I do it now, I can be done next week. Right? Or I can keep [00:04:00] worrying about it and do nothing and the next week will still come. And so I started doing it and I have to tell you, and I, I’ve posted, so if you might have seen it online, but I mean,

it looks bad, I think it looks worse than it feels and. Tylenol took away the pain. I was never laying on my bed. Maybe I’m a complete badass, I dunno. But I was never laying on the bed with a fan. It was fine. I mean, it was uncomfortable and it wasn’t the greatest. And of course I can’t, nor would I want to wear makeup or anything like that over it, but you know, whatever.

I’m just living my life. The time would’ve passed anyway. And the worst part. Even now having gone through it, ’cause now I’m through, I’m like on day eight, I can tell it’s a lot better. The anticipation of dealing with it was worse. So sometimes it’s not the actual thing. It’s the anticipation of the thing that [00:05:00] we like, spend all this time really working up in our brains, right?

Making us feel like it’s gonna be so much harder or so much bigger when we actually just deal with it. When we’re actually like, you know what? I’m gonna roar. I’m gonna lean into who I really am and just take care of this. . I mean, I know it sounds so stupid. I’m gonna do the Invisalign. I’m gonna do this crap on my face.

I’m gonna take care of the things that medically needed to be taken care of. And I think we have this in so many parts of our lives. I think that this shows up in work. It shows up in hard conversations. It shows up in like having to deal with big things in our lives that have been big things for a long time.

And , I think the longer. We have those things, the harder it is because what we’ve done is built up a lot of momentum around the idea that it’s going to be really hard, right around [00:06:00] the idea that it’s going to be bad or uncomfortable. But the truth is you can deal with bad or uncomfortable. You can, all you have to do is trust that you can deal with whatever is gonna happen.

And I gotta tell you, I was so trepidatious about doing this Cly Siri cream on my face. I really didn’t want to. I almost didn’t. I almost was like, you know what? It was only a hundred bucks, which it’s a hundred bucks. It was only a hundred bucks. I’ll just trash it. Like I just, and then I was like, wait a minute.

What I’m doing is telling myself the deepest part of myself, the identity of myself, the part that I really want to protect, the part of me that I really want to enforce in the way that I want her to be. What I’m doing is I’m telling her, you know what? You’re not worth dealing with this. Medically, [00:07:00] like you have precancerous spots on your face, you’re not worth fixing that, right?

That’s what I would be saying. And more importantly, mindset wise, I’m telling her, you can’t handle it. Whatever happens, you can’t handle it. And I had to pause and say, what is it? It makes me think I can’t handle it. Now I know dealing with having Invisalign, I mean, my God, there’s worse things, right?

Dealing with having to do cly Siri cream, although I will say on day four when it was raw and red, red, red, having to put that cream on again was like, uh, I was like, I don’t wanna do it. I’m gonna do it. I don’t wanna do it. I’m gonna do it. Like it was so stressful, but I can handle it and you can handle it too.

You’ve got things in your life you’ve been pushing off, kicking the can down the road, right? Not dealing with the stuff you have to deal with. Maybe it’s a big thing, like something in your health. Maybe it’s something at work. [00:08:00] Maybe it’s a project you’ve been putting off. Maybe it’s something in your relationship, like a really courageous conversation that it’s just time that you have.

Maybe it’s getting your teeth fixed, whatever it is. Big or small, it’s important because if it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t be thinking about it. You wouldn’t be dreading it. I don’t have this kind of feeling when I go to brush my teeth in the morning. I don’t go, oh, I don’t want to. It’s not important. I just do it, , but when things show up like that, it is a sign that this thing feels scary to me.

So it’s important and it’s an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for me to grow, to change in this. And I did that episode a month or so ago about walking down the hallway, and about how we always, we’re constantly becoming [00:09:00] someone new. Every time you make a decision and when you choose to do the hard thing, you’re making a huge decision.

A huge shift in your identity, showing yourself and showing up like a really brave person that you most likely wanna be. You know, my daughter and I have had our moments like all mothers and daughters, and the one thing that I’m really proud of with her is that if I say to her, we need to have a courageous conversation, she can do it.

She can do it. She might not like it, but she’s able to show up and to keep her emotions in check, right? To understand herself. I think she knows that I’m a safe person to listen to her side of things, but we can have courageous conversations. Now, if I said I need to talk to you about [00:10:00] something, it would not go the same way, but by framing it as.

We gotta have a courageous conversation. Can you do this? Then she can. And I think sometimes there’s that moment where we have to say to ourself, alright, self, we need to have a courageous conversation. Like it’s important to me to be able to take care of pre-cancerous cells on my face and I can move through this and it might be uncomfortable, but that’s okay.

I can do it. I’ve done hard things before and I’ve come out on the other side, and I can do this too. I keep saying that. I don’t feel like the Cly cereal is that big of a deal, but it’s a good example, right? Sometimes it’s just about cleaning out your junk drawer, right? You’re like, oh my God.

Every time I go to that drawer, it makes me feel yucky. I get annoyed ’cause everything gets caught. I mean, that’s such a small thing, but that’s the same way. [00:11:00] How you do one thing is how you do everything. And if you can tackle that thing, you can tackle the big thing too. I really think that this is an important part of my growth and lessons of not pushing things off.

I think sometimes we get in situations where pushing things off becomes the norm, and then we have to really catch ourselves when we have the power to decide how things go. Do we push things off or are we ready to stand up and do the hard thing? And I think when you can do that, that is how you live a big life.

All right. Thanks so much for being here. You know, if you’ve been kicking the can down the road about your marriage and you really wanna fix it, or you wanna figure out what to do and get that clarity. We have that free video on my website if you just go to betsy pick.com. But if you’re ready to book a call, you can just message me and we’ll send you the link to our [00:12:00] calendar.

We can help you kinda walk through and get the clarity that you need on whether you need our help or if we can even help you. So if you’re ready to take that step, just reach out or go to our website and there’s a place to book a call there. All right. Have an amazing week. I love you guys so much. I’ll see you guys next week.

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 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.

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.