The Art of Living Big | Subconscious | NLP | Mindset

Honestly, to announce this week’s episode of The Art of Living Big, we just want to say LISTEN. This one addresses one of the most common questions women ask themselves and ask Betsy. She offers new ways to evaluate this situation; understand what children are actually living in, and how they read tension at home.

Transcript:

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

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the show today. Okay, so today, I’m gonna do a show,, I’m gonna say, I’m gonna say it like, like this. Today, I’m gonna do a show that I don’t wanna do. I know. It’s not that I don’t wanna do it, it’s that I know it’s tricky, and sometimes it’s hard to do a show on something that’s tricky because things in life are so nuanced.

So we can move forward together and do this show with the understanding that things are nuanced. This might or might not apply to you in your situation. You’re allowed to disagree with me. I’m not the overarching truth of all, of all truths. I’m offering some thoughts and some new perspectives here. So what I wanna talk about is about when you stay in a marriage for the kids, and I get messages, I get a lot of messages about this.

And there is this version of one message that I get sort of over and over again, like a couple times, I was gonna say a couple times a week, but sometimes it’s a couple times a day, you know, who, from people on Instagram or, or, you know, people who found the podcast and then they go to Instagram. And they’re, they’re very careful in how they write these messages to me, and I can see,, I can feel all the pain behind it.

And what they say is either, like, “I’m ready to go. I, I want to leave my marriage,” or, “I just decided to leave, and now we have to tell the kids,” or, “We told the kids, and it isn’t really what I wanted. It’s not how I wanted things to go. You know, even though I know in my heart of hearts this is the right choice for me, it’s really painful because I don’t know if it’s the right choice for my kids.”

And that’s the one that I hear all the time. And, you know, before I go any further, I wanna pause. I wanna pause for just a moment because I’m, I’m coming in here, m- you know, as a, as a trained master coach. I’m coming in here as a podcast host that’s had a podcast for 10 years. I’m coming in here as a woman who actually left a marriage with a four-year-old.

So I have done this also, and I know that it’s not easy. I could tell you a, a lot of success stories. I could tell you my own success story. My son’s dad is truly one of my closest friends. It’s not that I talk to him all the time. He’s remarried and has kids that are young teenagers now, but, but when we talk, I know he’s known me, like, the longest of almost anyone I know.

He’s known me since I was in my 20s, and so… And he’s the father to my kid. And so, you know, years ago, he was on the podcast, and we, we removed a lot of podcasts that were interviews from early on. We did, like, a lot of interviews, , business people or o- other things that weren’t really relevant, and a lot of those people didn’t even have their businesses anymore, so it just wasn’t relevant.

But I did a podcast with him, and I should bring that one back as, like, a special event. He’d probably come on today and talk, but I- I will do that. Th- you’ll see a podcast that will pop up that won’t be at the regular time, and we’ll just put that one in between because I think sometimes when we have evidence that things don’t have to go sideways, even if they start sideways, they don’t have to end sideways, that things can get better and be better.

So, but I wanna get back to these messages that I get, right? So, you know, the last part is always like, even though I know, like in my heart of hearts I know this is the thing, I, I feel terrible about it. And so- You know, in those messages, I hear, like, two things sort of that are sitting right next to each other.

One is, she knows, and she feels sick about it, and both of those can be true at the same time. They don’t cancel each other out. And, and, and here’s another thing that I wanna say before anything else. I had a lot of… This episode comes to you with a lot of disclaimers. But the other thing that I wanna say is, is guilt is not evidence.

Guilt is not a signal that you made the wrong decision. Guilt very often shows up when a woman does something for herself after a prolonged time period of not doing that. So your body does not know the difference between wrong and unfamiliar. It just knows that this is not what we usually do here. So

we’re gonna have this talk today about the kids, and I wanna be really careful about how I do it. And so I’m not gonna be telling you what to do. Like, I don’t know your marriage. I’ve never met your husband. I have never sat at your kitchen table on a Saturday night and watched what happens, you know, when he comes in in the afternoon.

And, , a- and I’m not here to hand you any kind of verdict. And so if you have been listening to me for any length of time, you know that that is not the work. The work is that you decide. Not me, and not your sister, not your therapist, and you know that. You know that. But what I’m doing today is a little different, and so I want you to just know what you’re getting.

I think that a lot of you are running one calculation in your head, and you’ve been running it for a long, long time, and it hurts every time you run it, and you keep running it anyway because you think that is the only calculation that there is So here’s an idea that I use with my clients a lot. I- in this, like, picture, okay?

So you are down in the brush, right? You’re lost, okay? You’re lost in it, and you are sure that there is one pathway out, and you have been hacking at that one path so long that your hands hurt. And I’m upstairs, I’m in a helicopter, right? I cannot tell you where to go. I genuinely cannot see your life from up there the way that you can see it from down there.

But I can see that there’s more than one path, and that is all I’m doing today, is offering you a couple of other paths, not because your thinking is wrong, but because the way that you’re thinking about it right now does not feel good to you. You’ve told me that in a million messages. I’ve gotten a million messages, and you’ve all said that.

And you tell me that in every message, and I believe you. And so Here is the sentence that I hear the most, is people say things like, “We stayed,” or, “I stayed because of the kids.” And I want to ask you something that I think people forget about, and that is what are they staying in? What are they staying in?

Because when we say we stayed for the kids, what that usually means is that we kept the house intact. We kept the location the same. We kept the Christmas card looking like the Christmas card, right? But your kids are not living in an address. They are living in a home with two people in it. The kids are the best readers of a room on the entire planet that I have ever met in my life

They have to be, ’cause it’s a survival skill. They cannot leave. They cannot pay rent. They cannot drive. And so they get extremely good at reading what’s happening inside that house. And you know this. You know the way your house is when it’s fine, and you know the way it is when it’s not fine. And you know that your kid can tell from the way that you walk in and throw your keys on the counter.

So think about what happens to your voice when his car pulls in the driveway. Like, does it change? Does it go up a half a step? Do you get careful? Do you sigh a lot? Do you scramble around and start picking stuff up? Do you jump off the couch if you were sitting down? Because they hear that. They’ve always heard that.

They don’t have a word for it. You could ask them about it, and they wouldn’t be able to identify it, but they have years and years of data. And so here’s what I think is the actual thing, is your kids are not learning about divorce from you. They are learning about marriage every single day. You are the template.

That is the model in the house, and that is the only one that they have gotten to see up close, likely. They have gotten to see what a woman is allowed to want, whether a woman gets to be tired, whether she gets to be loud or quiet. They get to see what you do when you’re unhappy for a decade, which is apparently nothing.

You just get really quiet, according to the messages. And that is their curriculum, you know? Whether you label it that way or not, that’s what they are learning. So the question is, if your daughter came to you when she was 45 years old and described your exact marriage to you, sentence for sentence, right? N- n- just exactly what you are living, and asked you what she should do, what would you say to her?

This is not me giving you an answer. This is just a question that I think a lot of us need to ask ourselves. If she came to you, what would you say to her? Right off the top of your head, what would it be? Okay, so now there’s another side of this, and this is something that I also hear a lot, and I wanna say it also very clear, ’cause I think when we hear it out loud, something shifts, right?

And here is the fear, and this is a real fear, so it’s not something silly. I’m not making fun of this, okay? But this is what I hear. “If I stay, if I stay, then I’m in the house, then I can see if something negative is happening. I can smooth it over. I can get in front of it. If we split up, then he has them every other weekend, and I’m not h- I’m not here.

I can’t fix it. I don’t know what he’s gonna say to them. I don’t know if he’s gonna lose his temper. I don’t know if he’s gonna be sharp with them, if they’re gonna cry. There’s gonna be nobody to take care of them. I do not know what kind of mood he is gonna be in, and I will not be in the room.” Fair.

It’s valid. So I wanna walk that f- you know, I wanna walk through that with you What you just told me, and this is something I hear all the time, okay? So what you just told me is that time alone with him is the thing that you’re worried about. That’s the risk that I hear named all the time, and the solution to that risk is to have them around him 100% of the time instead of 50%.

I wanna say that again. Your solution to that is to have him be around that person 100% of the time instead of 50% of the time. So, like, the math right off doesn’t work, but I know what you’re saying in your head, so just bear with me here. The math doesn’t work, so if exposure is the problem, more exposure isn’t the fix.

Now, there is this version of what I just said that is wrong, and I’m gonna talk about that. If what you are describing is danger, like actual danger, like if you are staying because you believe your kids are physically unsafe with him or because you have seen him do something that scares you, that is not a, a mindset conversation, and I am not the person for it.

That is documentation. That is a lawyer. That is a custody arrangement built by somebody who does that work, and there are people who do that and are really good at it. So don’t let anybody, including me, talk you out of a real safety concern. But if your gut is telling you something different, then that’s what I wanna talk about.

I wanna talk about today is way more common, and it’s the one where he’s not dangerous. He’s just not good at it. Mm-hmm. He’s just not good at showing up for his kids. Like, he’s checked out, or he’s short with them, or he’s on his phone, or he gets on video games or whatever, or he just goes cold for days, and nobody really understands why.

And that’s the one where that math actually matters. Because I don’t think that, that the fear is that he is bad. I think your fear is that you are the translator, and you’ve been standing in the middle for years. You’re able to, you know, soften things that he says at dinner. You explain him to them in the car when you’re on your way to practice.

“He’s just tired, honey. He just has had a long week.” You watch his face, and you get ahead of it, and you d- redirect the conversation before it can get bad. So you are essentially, like, the shock absorber in the house. And honestly, of course you’re tired. You’re tired. That’s an impossible job to have, and, and, and I promise nobody has ever said, “Thank you for doing that.”

‘Cause that’s a job that is, like, an invisible job, right? It’s an ultra important and very invisible. Because if it was visible, you’d have to acknowledge that something was going wrong. And so when you imagine not being in the room, you’re not imagining him hurting them, you’re imagining them getting the unbuffed or unbuffered version of him, the one that you have been standing in the middle of and translating for years and years.

And that’s, you know, that- that’s love, you know? I wanna say that. That impulse to do that is love. And, and I want to show you that the cost of it is still real. So two things happen when you are the translator. One is that they never learn how to read him without you. They never get to have their own relationship with their own dad, with his actual, like, being-ness, his actual temperature, right?

They never get to form their own opinion about it. You’ve been handling that for them. And the second one is, and this is the one I really want you to hear, is that they are watching you do that job, and they are learning that this is what a woman does. She manages a man’s weather, temperature. She stays alert.

She stays small so that the room stays calm. Your daughter is taking notes on that. Your son is taking notes on that in a different way. And what he is learning is that somebody will always do that for him. You call it protecting the kids, and I wanna offer you that it might also be managing his emotions, and those are not the same thing

Okay, so I wanna talk a little bit about the language that I’ve heard people use for this, and I mentioned it a little bit before. But I think that the words actually do a lot of damage. Now, you know I’m, I’m a lover, I’m a lover of words. I’m constantly looking in the dictionary for definitions of stuff, but this is what I hear people say.

I hear them say, “I, I don’t wanna blow up the family. I don’t wanna break up the family, or destroy the family. I don’t wanna ruin their childhoods.”, What else have I heard? Oh, shatter is a word. I, like, “I don’t wanna shatter this for them.” And the words people use to describe this, and I get it, I get it, but those are, like, explosion words.

Like, those are words for, like, a bomb going off in a building, and maybe even as I say that, you’re like, “Well, it is like a bomb, a bomb going off in the building, Betsy.” But what I wanna say is that when that is the language that’s running around in your head, of course you cannot make a choice. Of course.

Nobody detonates their own house on purpose. And so you stay, and you stay, and you stay, and you stay, and more time goes by. And so what I wanna do is I wanna offer you a different sentence, and this is one that I actually really believe. You are not blowing anything up. You are just changing the way that it operates.

That’s it. That’s all you’re doing. They still have a father, they still have a mother, and honestly, they might end up with a better version of both of those, because when you are a woman who can hear yourself, then you become a better parent than the woman who is disappearing every day in the middle of the kitchen.

A family is not a building. It’s not where everybody sits at Thanksgiving time. It is a group of people who belong to each other, and belonging does not require one common roof and you’re not deciding whether your children get handed this really hard thing. They already are in a hard thing. They are already living in a house with careful voices, and tiptoes, and walking on eggshells, and arguments perhaps, and all of the things. It’s you deciding that’s the hard thing and, and deciding whether this has an end.

So again, I am not telling you to go. I wanna be really clear. I don’t know anything about your marriage. It may be that just the version of your marriage you’re living needs to go, and you could rebuild it depending on where you are. It’s what we do in the Navigate method. But this is me telling you that the comparison that you have been running is not fair to you, because you are comparing a, a happy, intact family to a broken one, and neither one of those are the choices. The real comparison is exactly what it is for however long it’s been against something else that you haven’t let yourself imagine yet.

So compare the real thing to the real thing So let me come back, let me come back to the messages that I get where people tell me that, you know, they need to have this conversation with their kids, and they’re trying to come up with a plan, and they just, they don’t wanna fail. Or they message me and they’re like, “I think I totally screwed this up.”

And so what I wanna say is that you cannot grade yourself on the delivery of one conversation. Your kids aren’t gonna remember one sentence. Almost nobody remembers the sentence. In fact, a lot of kids don’t even remember the conversation. But they remember the next two years, you know? They remember whether the house got calmer.

They remember whether you seemed really happy, you know? They remember whether you were around at 9:00 at night when they wanted to chat about it. You know, and the second thing is about repair. You know, n- if you have a conversation with your kids and it doesn’t go the way that you want, you get to go back.

You get to go back, walk in their room and say, “You know what? I don’t like how that conversation went. Like, that came out wrong.” We don’t have to be perfect. We’re human. You know, I say this to my kid all the time. I’m just a girl. It’s my first time here, trying to figure this out. But do you know what that teaches your kids when you go back and you say, “That came out wrong.

I kinda screwed up. I’m just learning. Can I try that again?” Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how many grown women that never once in their entire life have ever had a parent come back and redo a conversation? That’s the thing that your kid’s gonna remember, not the one bad sentence or the conversation in the car that didn’t go right.

It’s the coming back. It’s the repairing. It’s the you having and finding joy again And, you know, it may be that your kids ask for some truth. You know? Maybe you hedge the conversation, and they ask the question, “Are you gonna, are you gonna get divorced?” And you answer honestly, a real answer from their mother.

Your kid is not gonna remember how you said it or what was happening around it. They’re gonna remember that you didn’t lie to her, even when it cost you something. So I know some of you are listening to this in the car right now with your hands, with your hands at 10:00 and 2:00. That’s how I drive all the time, with your hands at 10:00 and 2:00.

And, you know, you’re listening, and this is just getting filed in the back of your brain. You’re not gonna do anything about it today, and that’s totally fine. Like I, I’m not asking you to. I just want you to notice which part of this that you kinda argued with me when I was talking ’cause that’s the part for you to figure out.

And like I said at the top of the show, you get to choose. You get to choose what part of this works for you, what part of it doesn’t. Maybe it’s some new thoughts. Maybe it’s all things you’ve already thought before. But I want you to notice if there’s something you argued with in your brain about, with me because maybe that’s just some place for you to explore because we don’t argue with things that we know are true.

We just go, “Eh, they’re wrong.” We argue with things that push on a bruise. And so I want you to just think about that one. That’s something that you can sort through. And, you know, this is the work that we do with women inside the Navigate Method. So, you know, book a call with us, and we can talk you through that.

And, you know, if you just wanna get really honest, did you know on my website,, under self-paced courses, like in the menu bar, there is something called The Bridge? It’s like 79 bucks, and it’ll walk you through how to get really honest with yourself about lots of things. Maybe that’s a place to start.

All right. Before we close up, I just want to let you know that our retreat is gonna be live next week, next Tuesday. If you’re on the email list, you’re gonna get an email about it. It’s gonna be in Punta Cana. It’s gonna be on January 21st to the 25th. It includes everything but your transportation, and it is gonna be amazing. It’s gonna be a real adventure. I think we’re gonna dive deep into some really cool things. We’re gonna really develop a life that you really want. We’re gonna think through a lot of hard things that maybe you’ve been rolling around in your brain.

And for those first 10 people, you get 400 bucks off. So make sure you’re on the list, ’cause I think it brings the price way down to like, I don’t know, 24, 2,500 bucks with that, with that discount. So make sure you’re on the mail list, or follow me on Instagram, ’cause I’ll be announcing it on Tuesday, and come with me to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, January 21st through the 25th, 2027.

And if you’re listening to this long after that, we’ll probably doing it again. We, we got a lot of them. Every… T- twice a year probably we’re gonna do them. So I would love to be able to see you and talk about all this stuff in real life. All right. I think when you can look at all that hard stuff and be really brave, I think that is how you live a big life.

All right. I love you so much. 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 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.

On this week’s episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy shares some big news and while doing so, notices her reflex to downplay this news that makes her proud and happy, almost so that it can be smaller. Are you editing your feelings? Are you minimizing your accomplishments to make them more comfortable around others? Betsy shares steps to recognize when we are doing this and advises us how we can turn it around. Also, stay tuned near the end for the announcement of the 2nd retreat!

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 show today. I have had a really busy week. Tomorrow… Well, I’m recording this on a Wednesday. You guys’ll hear it on Thursday. And tomorrow I’m gonna be on NBC. So I did this last year, and I’m recording a couple episodes, doing something live for them for their noontime show.

You know how, how cities have, like, their local Atlanta station and then they have, like, a little local show? Whatever. It’s still very exciting, and I’m trying to pick out my outfits, so, that’s my big personal update that I’m doing. But I, I have had this conversation, and in fact, I’ve had this same conversation a couple times with a couple different friends, and I think it kinda came up initially because we were talking about this NBC thing.

I know that it’s not- Well, I, I’m about to say something, and what I’m about to say is the exact thing that I’m trying to teach you not to do. Okay? So I noticed that when I was talking about it, I was explaining that, you know, I recognize it’s, it’s not like I’m on Oprah. It’s, it’s the local daytime Atlanta show.

Do you see how I tried to make that seem less? Smaller? Just, like, a little bit not as big of a deal? ‘Cause I don’t wanna feel like it’s a great big deal. It’s not that big of a deal. But also, it is, and it’s really fun, and it’s, like, a cool thing that I’m so grateful to be able to do. And I love the host of the show.

She’s so fricking cool. And last year when I was on, it was so fun, and it was nice to get the video and to have it for my website, and I’m talking about two different topics, you know, in related to our, our work here. And it, seems exciting. I love to talk about it. We’re gonna talk about when you drop your kids off at college and you have nothing to say to your husband on the way home.

And for a recorded episode for later, we’re gonna record a segment on why women are turning to AI. So conversations I really wanna have. So why am I trying to make it smaller? Why am I doing that? And I was talking to this other friend of mine, and we were just, like, catching up, and same kinda thing, and she was talking about some things she was doing and some big trips she was doing, and she tried to make ’em seem a little bit smaller.

And a lot of the women that I know are entrepreneurs, because I’ve met them through entrepreneurial groups, and they’re all really successful. Like, I look up to them so much. And this one friend was talking about how she … how much money she makes and what her goal is for the year and some struggles that she was having.

And I noticed that she was trying to- Like, uh, dummy it down a little bit, you know? And it was just the two of us. Like, we’re on the same page. We both want her to be wildly successful. And, you know, when she noticed that she’s around people who have less successful businesses or maybe make less money than she does, that she does things to try to make her life sound smaller than it is.

She’s not lying, but she’s just not saying it all. She’s, like, editing. You know, trimming down the things she’s getting to do or saying, you know, “It’s not that big of a deal, it’s not Oprah.” I mean, the same things I’m talking about, and it’s so fascinating to me, like, why we do that. And even here when I’m trying to tell you about this and teach you something about it, w- I only te- I always am talking, I am…

If you have been here a little while, you know this, but if you’re new here, I am with you on the journey, so I am teaching stuff as I’m learning it or things that I have learned along the way. But this is something that is continuing to come up, and I think a lot of us do this in little and small ways.

So I wanna talk to you, and I want you to think about the last time that you, like, almost said something and then you didn’t. And not, I don’t mean something mean, but not something you’d regret, but something that was true. And, you know, maybe it was about how you actually feel about your, about your marriage.

Maybe it was about how much money you make or how much you want to make. Maybe it was somebody asking you how you’ve been, and you had a real answer that was, like, right there in your mouth like marbles and you wanted to say it. But instead, you’re like, “You know, it’s been busy. The summer’s busy.” You edited it.

Edited? Yeah. You edited it in, like, a nanosecond, and it w- it probably happened so fast that you didn’t even experience that as a decision. And, and, you know, it was an unconscious decision, not really a conscious choice. And the thing that I want you to notice about that is that you didn’t edit it bec- I’ll never get used to saying that word.

You didn’t edit it because it wasn’t true. You did it because of how it might sound, and that’s a, different thing entirely So I think we have a word for this. We call it humility. You know, don’t brag, don’t make people uncomfortable, read the room, you know, be, be gracious. Nobody likes a woman who takes up too much space, you know?

And look, you know, there is a real version of humility. There is. It’s the thing that keeps you, you curious. It’s knowing that you might be wrong. It’s, it’s not needing to be the center of every room that you walk into. It is a version that is good in that. And so I don’t wanna argue against humility as I just described it.

But somewhere along the way, a second thing got handed to us that we call humility, and that second thing isn’t about being curious or being open to being wrong. It’s about being small. It is a version of you that says, “Whatever you have, don’t say it out loud. Whatever it is you want, keep it to yourself.

And whatever you are carrying, carry it in a way that doesn’t inconvenience anybody.” And that’s not actually humility. That’s, I don’t know, some really heavy form of management. And so I wanna ask you to ask yourself who exactly is that managing? And here’s how I’ve come to think about it, and I’ve been sitting on this one for a little while.

If you guys have been here, you’ve heard me talk about how I read that book,, it’s called The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. And in that, she talks about the seven deadly sins, how we think those are tied to the Bible, but they’re not. It’s actually tied to the patriarchy, and they are a way to keep us in check, to keep us in line. So a woman who makes herself small is a woman who is easier to be around.

She’s easier to be married to. She’s easier to employ. She’s easier to have as a sister or a mother or a friend. She doesn’t disrupt anything, and she takes up exactly the amount of space that’s already been allotted to her and, and doesn’t ask for anything more than that. And that is really useful. It’s, it’s just not useful to her.

But it is useful because think about what actually happens when you downplay your life to make someone else comfortable. Nobody gets richer. Nobody gets happier. You know, the, the person that’s sitting there across from you doesn’t feel better about their situation because you shrank yours.

All that happens is now there are two people in the room being smaller than they are, because if you stayed big, would they grow to meet you? You didn’t give anybody anything. You just, you just modeled something. And if you have daughters or nieces or younger women that watch you, you know, they, they learned it, too.

They learn it quick. We learned it quick, right? And you don’t have to actually name it or, like, say a thing about it. We pick it up And here’s what I want you to think about this, because a lot of you listening are in the middle of a decision about your marriage, right? Some of you have been in the middle of that decision for years.

I like to think I’m not alone. When I was in indecision for years and years, and years. But I want you to consider that this same habit is running inside that too. So I want you to think about how you talk about your marriage, like to your friends or to your sister or, you know, even, like in your own head when you’re just, like, going for a walk or you’re in the car all alone.

Like, do you say it like it is? Or do you tell it in a way that sounds reasonable? Because there is a really particular thing that I think we do, and I hear it all the time, is that she will describe something that is genuinely painful, and then she’ll immediately follow it up with, “Oh, but he’s a good dad.

But it’s not like he’s a bad guy. But I’m sure I’m not easier to live with either, you know? I know a lot of people have it worse.” And, you know, I, I mean, every single one of those things might be true. I think that’s what makes this little pattern so sneaky. Because if you watch what the words are actually doing, it’s, it’s taking the thing that you just said and shrinking it back down to a size that doesn’t require anybody to do anything about it, including you.

And that is the same, same reflex, you know? It’s the same move. Now, I know a lot of you are, are deeply fair people, and you’d hate to be unfair about a man or a job or whatever that you have spent decades with. I get that But I wanna offer the idea that being accurate is a different job than being fair.

And you can be super fair and be wildly inaccurate about you. You know, people describe to me all the time, like, so many years of loneliness, so many years of frustration. I remember in my own marriage, that was how I would describe it. That was the biggest word I would use, is I mean, insanely frustrated.

I could not understand why what felt like very simple asks were n- being completely disregarded. Like, it, it just seemed, it was, like, m- crazy-making. And I hear other women saying the same thing. They will describe years of loneliness, and then spend the next, you know, four paragraphs out of their mouth making sure that he still sounds okay, that they have been fair.

Then, and, you know, we tell a lot of stories in which our loneliness was, or our frustration was just, like, a detail in the story, but how he appears becomes, like, the whole point of the thing. Again, I wanna be really careful how I say this, ’cause I’m not saying we need to be unfair, and I’m not saying everything’s all his fault.

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the softener that you’re doing isn’t kindness to him. He’s not even here when we’re talking. The softener is for you. It’s for you to make sure that what you said doesn’t sound like too much. And so here’s kind of the question that I have been asking myself as I tell the story about how I’m not gonna be on Oprah.

And I wanna offer it to you. What would I be saying right now if I weren’t worried about how it sounded? That’s, that’s it. That’s the whole thing What would I be saying right now if I wasn’t worried about how it sounded? Not what’s the right answer, not, like, what would a good woman say. What would I say if I didn’t seem like I

thought I was too much? I don’t want people to think I think too much of myself or that I’m so great. That is, like, such a thing, right? So just strip out the part of me that’s monitoring this whole thing, and what is left? And I’ll tell you what I’ve noticed when I do this, is that the answer comes really fast.

It, it’s n- it’s, it’s really obvious to me. It’s sitting right there, just, like, a half an inch below, below my voice box. And the sentence that I was about to say, which tells you something really important, which is we already know. We’re not confused. I’m not confused And even as I’m, I wanna say, like, I’m not confused about being on NBC tomorrow.

It’s so fun. What a cool thing. There was a version of me 10 years ago that would have dreamed of this, to dream of picking out my outfits, you know? Like, how fun. I know from last time when I was on, we got millions of views. Like, that’s amazing marketing. Like, why would I try and make that sound less? And it is a habit.

So it doesn’t always feel like it’s suppression. It feels like I’m being humble. It feels like being mature, right? I’m not making this too big of a deal. It’s no big deal And so how do you know if you’re being, like, I don’t know, uh, genuinely gracious or if you’re just shrinking? ‘Cause I think they look the same from, like, the other side of the table, you know?

And here’s what I found. There are some things that we can check, and we can check them super quick, okay? So I want you to notice the speed. So real consideration takes a beat. Like, you think about the person, you think about the moment, and you make a choice. Shrinking is instant. It happens before the thought.

So it, happens really, really quick. It wasn’t a decision. It never came into your consciousness. It was a reflex, okay? So real consideration is I’m talking to somebody, and I’m like, “I know they just lost their job, so I’m not gonna talk about how I just got a raise.” Like, I’m gonna just… Right?

That’s real consideration. Now, doing it shrinking is when you are talking to somebody who’s doing great, and you’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s no big deal. I mean, I got a little raise, but whatever. Everybody got one.” Do you see what I mean? You notice a little difference, right? Here’s the second thing, is you’re gonna notice how you feel afterwards.

When you have been genuinely kind, you feel good about it, right? They just lost their job. I’m not gonna talk about how I just got a raise. You know? Maybe you feel a little proud of yourself. But when you make yourself small, you feel something else. You feel kinda flat. Sometimes I feel a little tired, I’ll notice, and there’s sort of, like, ugh, I wish I didn’t do that, and that feeling, I think, is the data, right?

It’s the feeling of, like, there’s a room I could walk into, but I’m not gonna walk into it because I don’t wanna look like I wanna be in the room. So silly. And then number three is, like, who’s more comfortable in this? Like, real, like, graciousness, I’m gonna call it, it, it usually costs you something small, and it gives somebody something that’s really real, you know?

Shrinking costs you something real, and nobody cares. Nobody gives you anything. So if you look at the room afterwards and you’re like, “Nobody benefited. Nobody benefits from me saying, ‘Well, it’s not Oprah.'” Like, nobody cares. You guys will… You’ll get off this podcast, and you’ll never think about how I’m on NBC again ’cause who…

‘Cause you don’t… You know what I mean? ‘Cause you got your own life. So it’s not me being humble. It’s me being safe or not wanting to seem too big or like I’m, like I think I’m d- so great instead of just owning this is a really cool, fun thing I get to do, and there’s no shame in that. And it isn’t Oprah, that’s true, but you don’t get to Oprah until you get to this.

It’s on the way. I don’t know. Is it on the way? It- you know where I’m on the way to Drew Barrymore? That’s where we’re headed, folk. If I could be on The Drew Barrymore Show, I just want her to sit on my lap while we talk. That’s what I want. So I’m not gonna go tell you to, like, announce your new raise and your new salary over a giant dinner party.

That’s not what I’m saying, but I think you need to catch it. You just need to, to notice it. You don’t have to even fix it, just notice the moment where you were about to say something that was true and something reached in and sort of changed the dials a little bit, and notice how many times a day it happens.

Most of the time, I think… I think this is accurate, most women would be shocked at how many times they do it. In little ways you will shrink yourself. It might be with your husband. It might be with coworkers. It might be with yourself. You’re just talking to yourself and you do it. So just let yourself know the answer.

Just let that exist because I don’t think we can make real decisions about our life using this edited information, and if the only version of your life that you have ever said out loud is the version that was pre-approved for everybody else to be comfortable with, then you have been trying to decide something enormous based on like a, a, like a kernel of it that you have created for somebody else.

Like, no wonder life feels like it’s a slog, and no wonder we’re not getting where we wanna go. Don’t you think, honestly, if I was declaring I wanted to be on The Drew Barrymore Show and I was just talking about it all the time, like thinking about it in my own life and allowing it to be available to me, don’t you think if I was owning internally the fact that I’m gonna get to practice and be on NBC and do live, live TV, like that’s freaking cool.

Atlanta’s a big market Like, don’t you think that would help me? And everything, if you’ve been here a while, everything you know about our brains and how our brains work, and how we actually create, don’t you think me owning it would help me to see a possibility in the future where the next thing I wanted would be available to me?

Where the stretch didn’t seem that big. Because I’m creating a bigger space between me and Drew Barrymore by making this seem really small. If I made it seem bigger, the gap would close. Do you see what I mean? So I want you to think about where you’re doing this, where you’re keeping yourself from the next level of things that you want in an effort to be attainable in this version of you, in an effort to be eaten.

Do you know what I mean by that? I don’t know why that’s the word coming to me, but it, to be absorbed, you know? You don’t wanna be too big of a chunk. Nobody’ll be able to chew it. So you try to make it really tiny. You’re not too much. You never, ever have been too much. You just learned early that by being a little bit less, you were safer, and you got so good at it That you forgot that it was a skill that you were taught and not a fact about who you are.

So when you can start to do that, that is how I think you live a big life. All right, one last thing before we go. Punta Cana. We’re going to Punta Cana, you guys, January 21st to the 25th. We’re going to Zelle Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. The tickets are gonna go on sale one week from Friday, so September 10th, tickets will go on sale.

It’s gonna be so fun. You don’t wanna miss it. If you were at the previous retreat or you’re inside one of my programs, you’re gonna get pre-sale stuff, so you could get a ticket early. We’ve got some special stuff for the first 10 people that come in. We’ve got special swag bags. You’re gonna get to work with me before the event, and we are going to design a life that you really love.

So if you’re not on my mail list, please check. Get on my mail list. Just go to my website. All the way down at the bottom, just add your name and add yourself to the mail list. If you don’t wanna be on my mail list, that’s okay, too. You can just check next Friday, and I will post about it in my stories on Instagram, and we’ll do a post in the feed probably, too.

So join us, join us. You don’t have to have ever worked with me before. It’s so, it’s so fun, and I’m telling you, last time we all connected. I mean, everybody stayed an extra day. It was so fun. So I definitely want you there. You’re included. Don’t shrink it down. All right. I love you guys so much. I will 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.

If the following blurb from this week’s podcast doesn’t hook you, the fact that Betsy closes with an easy exercise that could help you make the change you have been waiting for will. Here it is…’You don’t have to have it all sorted out before you’re allowed to claim it as yours. You can be in the middle of the mess and still build something with an intention and a purpose. You already know what your habit list is, so say it out loud.’ See?? Take a listen and enjoy.

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 show today. All right, so, so today’s episode is, is sort of, I don’t know, specific, I’m gonna say. Aren’t all the episodes specific? But I got a message on Instagram, and, you know, sometimes I’ll get messages, and they are like other messages that I’ve gotten. So it’s easy to do, like, a podcast episode on them because it’s a really common question or a common thing people are going through, or it’s something that I know from my own life, right?

And so when I got this question, though, I was like, “Oh, that’s actually a really good question, and I don’t know if anybody’s actually asked me that before.” And so what it was, it, it wasn’t like a coaching question. It was more like a logistics question. So what she wanted to know was she wanted to know how I did it.

So she said, “It seems like you’ve rebuilt your life, and it seems really happy. But it also seems like you’ve rebuilt your whole life. How did you know what to build?” I was like, I mean, I didn’t even know what to say, ’cause how do you answer that? How do you… H- how did you know what to build? So, I kept thinking about it, and I thought, you know what?

That likely deserves its own episode because the, the honest answer is that I, I did not know. Like, there was no plan. I think sometimes people look at my life now, and they assume that there was some kind of blueprint, and there was not. But there was about a year of me getting it wrong, I say wrong with air quotes, in a bunch of different directions, and so that’s what today is.

So today I wanna name you a couple things. Three things I picked, even though I could come up with, like, 15 things, but three things seems like a good amount for a podcast. I wanna give you three things that I wish somebody had said to me at the very beginning of all that, because I think they would have saved me a little bit of time.

And honestly, this is the work that I do, right? I went through something, and I wanna save everybody a bit of time by explaining it. And so, you know, I think that when we make a decision, I remember when I made my decision to leave my husband, I gotta tell you, e- every day over the past couple weeks, I’ve been like, “I’m so glad I did that.

I’m so glad I did that.” But I think when we get to that place where we make that decision, at least for me it was not this. Like, I don’t even care what happens. I mean, of course I cared, but I don’t even care. It’s just not this. I was fully, fully 100% on board with just living my own life as a single woman, like, happily forever, and that is great for me.

You know, will I be single forever? I, I don’t know, but I… That’s the way I wanted to build my life, right? So it wasn’t like, “I’m gonna leave this big hole here for somebody to fill. I’m gonna do everything but this thing and hope somebody else h-” Like, uh-uh. Like, I was gonna f- build my life. I was gonna make my health the way I wanted.

I was gonna make my financial life the way I wanted. I was gonna make my home the way I wanted. I was gonna make my friendships the way I wanted. I was gonna make my activities the way I wanted. Like, I was gonna build my life for me. And so here’s the thing If you are sitting somewhere in your house or in your car, I know you’re in your car.

You’re sitting in your car in the driveway, but a lot of you do a lot of thinking in your car, and you may have had this feeling that the life that you’re living was designed by somebody that was a, a younger version of you, somebody that you don’t totally recognize anymore. And maybe it’s not a bad life, you know?

That sometimes is the part that can get really confusing, because it might not be that anything is, like, wildly on fire. It’s just that when you look around and you look at your calendar and you look at your house and you look at your weekend plans and your friendships, you can trace every single piece of it back to a decision that you made a long time ago for reasons that were probably good reasons, probably good reasons at the time.

But now you’re standing in the middle of this, like, midlife, which I kinda hate when we’re, like, midlife. Ugh, like it’s this big thing, but it is. It is. So now you’re standing here, and in the middle of all of this saying, “Would I choose this again?” Right? Would I choose this again? And I know some of you are listening to this from inside a marriage where you have not decided anything, and you are not sure if you want to. You know, redesigning your life is not the same thing as leaving your life. Those are two really different projects, and I don’t think we have to get them all tangled up together.

Some of the biggest redesigns that I have ever had in my own life and that I’ve watched other people have happened inside marriages, inside relationships, even inside marriages where people stayed. You know, the- the woman that- that changed everything about how she was living, and she did it without moving out of her house, is a possible, is, it, that is a real thing.

So take these three things and put them, like, wherever they fit in your life because I’m not pointing you in any specific direction. Stay, leave, maybe you’re single, like, all the things. Okay. That is my disclaimer ’cause I never tell you what to do. Okay. All right. So the first thing that everybody tells you when your life comes apart or when you decide to take it apart, you know, on purpose, is to get clear on what you want.

I had this conversation with somebody the other day, like, being really clear and having a clear vision. You know? Making the list. Do the vision boarding thing. Like, what do you want your life to actually look like? And I sat down with a blank page and that question, and I could not answer it, and I don’t mean, like, I struggled with it, and I don’t mean, like, I wrote a couple things and they weren’t quite right.

I mean nothing. Nothing came I just sat there, and there was no big idea, no big yearning or pulling. I just remember thinking, “Ugh.” Like, I just… I’m, I’m getting out of something I knew was a no. No. Hell no. I knew that, but I didn’t know what was next, and I remember thinking, “Oh, is this a problem? Like, is this the problem?”

Because I had been answering that question on behalf of other people for so long that I did not have my own answer anymore, and every time I tried to write something down, I could hear how it would sound to somebody else. I could hear my ex, I could hear my family, I could hear the version of me that was supposed to be handling all these things.

And so the list that came out started sounding like a woman being really reasonable. It did not come out sounding like me. And, you know, I think a lot of you have had this exact experience, where you thought, “I don’t know what I want, , and, and I can’t get to the core of it, and that must mean something’s wrong.

Must mean something’s wrong with me.” You know, like, you’re the woman who can’t figure out what she wants, but that is not it. I don’t think that’s it. If you have spent any amount of time, you know, 20 years, whatever, being the person who gets to make sure that everybody else is okay, of course you cannot produce your want list on demand.

Like, that is a skill, to be able to imagine something different. I mean, imagine something different. Like, it’s not just imagining something you’ve seen other people do, okay? So hang with me. You can imagine things that you’ve seen other people do, and you could be like, “Sure, I could see that as being a thing.”

But what about imagining something different? Something you’ve never seen anybody do, in the way that you wanna do it. And that skill is a skill, and it’s probably got really quiet ’cause you stopped using it. And so here’s what actually worked, and it, it was the opposite of, like, direction. I stopped asking myself, “What do I want?”

And I started asking, “What am I saying yes to out of habit?” Because that was a question that I could answer. I could answer that one immediately. I knew, like, immediately. I was like, “Oh, well that’s a habit. This is a habit. That’s a habit.” And I had a whole list of habits in, like, just a couple minutes. ‘Cause you always know.

You know, you know that one. You know the thing on your calendar that you dread, but it’s always there. You know the friendship that you have that you keep just out of loyalty or ’cause you’ve had them for so long, even though you feel like the version of the friendship that actually felt good was gone a long time ago.

You notice the way you spend your Sunday afternoons, the things you wanna participate in, the way you keep your house, right? Nobody asked you to keep your kitchen or your bathroom or any of those things the way that they are. So you know exactly what those things are. And I think this is why this works a little bit better, is because you can’t design a new life while the old one is fully running.

You know, I, I, I wanna… I don’t wanna get too far down a rabbit hole of how our brains work. If you’ve been listening here for a while, you’ve heard me talk about this, but, but you can’t fit anything else in when the old program is, like, fully installed. There’s no room. So the wanting shows up in the space, but if there’s no space, there’s nothing to want with.

I hope that makes sense. You gotta have space. So the first thing, I don’t think is the vision. The first thing is noticing. Noticing what are you still doing, only because you’ve always done it. And so don’t do anything about any of that yet. Don’t quit anything, don’t cancel anything, don’t have some big conversation with anybody.

Just write down what’s on that list, and then notice it, ’cause that list is actually the starting point. It would be great if we could have some big delulu vision. I know we talk about that all the time, but I think the starting point is actually noticing where you are and everything about what leads into that Okay, so the second thing, the second thing that I did to redesign my life, and this is one that, I don’t know, I think this is probably the most useful thing that I’m gonna share if I had to look at the list.

But you can want something. Like, you can want something, you can choose it, you can be totally right about it, and you can be absolutely flattened with sadness about what it costs you. Now, when I left my marriage, I was not sad about the marriage ending. I was thrilled. I, I n- I don’t… I honest to God, by the time I’d made that decision, I did not shed a tear, like not once.

And I don’t say that… Uh, uh, that’s sad to me, like that’s sad to me, but I was so absolutely done, and the fact that I stayed so long was the sadness that I had to deal with You know, uh, uh, when I started noticing that, like, my first thought every single time was like, “Oh, my God, w- why did I wait so long? I made such a mistake in delaying.

I wasted years.” And I could be having a completely good day, like a good day, and then I would be somewhere and I would think, “Why the heck didn’t I leave a long time ago?” Now I’m 52, 53 years old and doing this, starting over. Like, I gave up so much to get out, and I walked away from so much to choose myself, and that’s what I chose.

I chose myself. And so I had to go to the place where I was sad that I didn’t do it with hindsight. Like, we get to the place where we have hindsight. W- what do they say? Hindsight’s 20/20, right? And then you look back and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I coulda done it here, I coulda done it here. When I left the first time, why didn’t I stay go- gone?”

I knew. Like, I knew. When I came back, I knew. I, I, I just came back ’cause I was tired. It was easier. And so, you know, I, when I would feel that, like, sadness, I would just be like, “This is just a, a grief that I have to deal with.” It’s not a review of my decision. I didn’t leave when I didn’t leave because I couldn’t leave.

I left when I could. I wasn’t ready. And I think some of you might need to hear that. Like, it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s because I wasn’t ready, and we can’t do things until we’re ready, and that’s okay. And grief just means you recognize what that cost you. That’s all it means. I was sad because something real I felt was taken from me, time, and that means that I think my life is important, and that means that I am so happy I chose when I did and I didn’t take any more time That’s the grief.

That’s what I had to come to grips with. But I think we have this thing where we feel like there’s this, like, pros and cons list. Like, we think if we can just get our feelings to settle down, right? We’ll know we did the right thing. You know, we’ll know this was the choice. Uh, like, it’s never gonna be right, wh- whatever right is in our minds.

Like, it’s never, you’re never gonna score a perfect 10 on the exiting at the exact moment you were supposed to. If I had left five years before when I had left the first time, I probably would have thought I should have left five years before that. I knew right away that something was wrong. So my grief, my, my feelings, my mood, if you will, was telling me that it mattered It wasn’t telling me anything else.

And I think once I understood that things can matter, and I can still move forward, and I’m learning about myself, and that the timing was when I could, then I think that grief started to integrate and lessen, and instead I started to become appreciative of where I was and who I was. You guys might remember in a earlier episode, and I won’t tell the whole story, but I got up on New Year’s Day and I was mad at my ex, and I had to sit with that and recognize I wasn’t really mad at him.

Why would I even be thinking about him still? Like, I was mad at me, and I had to reckon with that. I had to reckon with those earlier versions of me who were l- God, she was hanging on by her toenails, doing the best she could. And I think honoring her and, everything she went through was to release her from some expectation that this version of me has, ’cause this version of me w- would not tolerate it.

Do you know what I mean? But I wasn’t this version. But I had to be that version to get to here. Okay, so my next one, the third one. Okay, so let’s say you le- you cleared some space, you stopped treating your feelings like they’re wrong, and now you actually get to the place where you’re like, “I get to build something.”

And here’s what I think made me, I don’t know, I, I wanna say, like, lost the most time. But for about a year, I think every decision that I made, I was really only asking one question: is this safe? Like, that’s it. That was the filter. Is this safe? Can I afford it? What happens if it goes wrong? What’s the smallest version of this I could do?

Maybe not quite. We could try that. I don’t know. And I’m an entrepreneur, and I’m, not risk-averse. I’m not. But I noticed I was leaning into safety. I needed to feel a certain level of safety. And I, I, I think that can be a valid question, but I also think if it’s your only question, then you start to build a very small life.

And then you will sit inside it a year later going, “Why does this not feel big enough?” Right? I did the hard thing. I got out, I rebuilt. Why does this feel like nothing? And I think- That, you know, when I look back, I, I left, well, I left in August. It took forever to sell my house. Moved into my apartment at the end of December, I think, and then it was probably the summer before I was like, “Oh, I’m doing this safety thing.”

And it made a lot of sense ’cause a survivor builds a shelter. She doesn’t build a life. Those are two different projects. And I don’t wanna say go be reckless. I’m not saying, like, spend money that you don’t have, or blow up your life, or take a leap. Like, that’s not what I’m saying. The point is that the question I was using was too small, and maybe it’s the question I had to have for several months just until I could feel that stability for myself.

I remember being so anxious all the time. I was anxious I would see him, like, walking the dog. He doesn’t live terribly far from me, I think maybe a mile or two. I was afraid I would run into him on the street. , I was afraid, and I noticed, like, I was trying to build a whole bunch of safety mechanisms around me in order to avoid that fear so that when I came back home I knew that it was safe.

Now, I wanna be clear. He wasn’t beating me or anything like that, , but it was not emotionally safe place to be. So What changed for me was switching to a different question, and this is one that I still use and I still like it for big things and small things. Here’s the question, and I’ve talked about this in another episode in another way, , when I went to Vermont, that episode.

But it’s who is the kind of person that I want to be? Not what do I want, ’cause we’ve already established that I couldn’t answer that one for a little while. It’s not what’s the safest, because I had been living inside that one. But who is the kind of person I wanna be? And then, would she do this? Because there is a version of you that chooses much differently.

She just does. You know, ask a scared woman whether to take the trip, and she’ll turn into the calculator in her phone and run the numbers and figure it all out and see if it makes sense and Google and ask ChatGPT, but ask the woman that you want to be whether to take the trip, and you’ll get an answer just like that.

And it’s not that she’s reckless, by the way. That’s not it, and that’s not what surprised me. The woman that I want to be says no to a lot of things. She says no faster than the scared version does, because the scared version negotiates things and explains and tries to weigh options and tries to be nice about it.

The woman that I want to be just doesn’t have that much interest. So you have to notice which version of you you’re living inside, because if, if it’s the one who just came through something hard, she’s going to design for protection. I think that’s normal. And protection is not the same. It’s not the same as a life.

It’s the first thing you need, but it’s also a terrible thing to organize the rest of your life around. Okay So if you wanna have actually something to do this week, here’s what I would do, and I’ve made it really small on purpose. I want you to write down three things that you are doing purely out of habit.

Not big stuff, just regular stuff, just ordinary stuff. And then look at each one and ask, “Who is the kind of person I want to be, and does she keep doing this thing?” You don’t have to change any of those things. This isn’t, like, a homework assignment where you have to have a life overhaul this week. I just want you to find out how much of your week belongs to a woman who made decisions about things, like, a long time ago for reasons that might not even be true anymore.

And I’ll tell you what usually happens when people do this, ’cause I’ve watched women do this, is that one of them is gonna seem really like, oh, my God. T- there’s always one where you go, “Oh, I already knew about that one.” That’s your first one to just really pay attention to, . So all right, one more thing that I wanna say before I go.

People assume that the story of the last few years of my life is a story that you can see online. It’s a story of me sharing nights out with my friends. It’s a story of me going on trips. It’s a story of me really discovering, like, what I like to wear and how I like to show up as myself. It’s a story of me helping women and building my business.

It’s, like, a beautiful story, but it’s not a story about how life got easier. My life is not easy. I’m renting. I got a cat that won’t shut up. I have a business and a whole lot of ordinary days, and there is a lot of things that I am still figuring out. It’s not that things got easy. It’s that I stopped needing it to be easy before I made it mine, and that’s the thing that’s available to you way, way, way earlier than you think it is.

You don’t have to have it all sorted out before you’re allowed to claim it as yours. You can be in the middle of the mess and still build something with an intention and a purpose. You already know what your habit list is, so say it out loud. Figure out your one thing. And I think when you can do that, I think that is how you live a big life.

All right, everyone, I love you guys so much. I will see you guys next week.

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

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

In this episode of The Art of Living Big, Betsy encourages listeners facing big decisions to believe in possibility, like the magic in the hat. Say your ‘abracadabra’ out loud and witness how expectation and willingness can build confidence over time. You don’t have to be certain of the outcome, you can focus on what you are sure of at present and speak it out loud. Are you open to that? Try it and watch what you begin to notice.

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 show today. I’m excited to be here. I’m also recording it on a Tuesday, and I know that probably means nothing to you, but it does mean something to Joy, who edits these podcasts. So I’m quite pleased with myself. I’m celebrating. That’s, like, the big win. I’m on it, you guys.

I am on it. We missed a couple weeks because of Belize and just, like, all the things happening around that, and so I feel really good about being back on track and back with you. All right. So today, I’ve been thinking about this. There’s so many things. I wanna say, I, I feel like we need to have a… Here’s what I really want.

I want, like, a, a private podcast where you guys could come in, where I know who’s listening, and I can tell you all kinds of stories. Like, I have so many stories from the last six weeks, probably, crazy and amazing, and, the magical universe continues to unfold in wonderful ways that delight me. And so and so, I, because- I don’t know who listens, do you know what I mean, ’cause we’re not just in a room together.

When… This is why we need to have retreats. This is why I do the retreats. So today, I have had something I’ve wanted to talk about, and I’m trying to figure out, like, how can I talk about this? And so I’m gonna say something that might feel… Like, you might be like, “Ugh.”

You, you might turn this off, but hang with me, if you would. And if you’re new here, I promise I’ll make it about you at the end, okay? So everything has always worked out for me. I know. I know that some of you made a face. It’s okay. I don’t mean that everything went the way that I wanted it to, because it didn’t, and I have had years that I would, leave notes sometime in my journal that say, like, “Time travelers, do not return to this day,” you know?

I, I, I have had years that I wouldn’t sign up for a second time. You know, if you’ve been here for a while, you know the story about me going to school one day, in high school, and my mom dying in a car accident while I was gone. You know, so, it’s not that things went the way that I wanted. Right? It’s not that everything was magical and perfect.

You know, that whole deal with my mother, like that did not w- that did not work out, okay? And I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that it did or that there’s some, like amazing silver lining. There are things that have spawned from that that I wouldn’t have had, experiences I wouldn’t have had because that happened.

But it sucked, and I’ve had lots of other things that have sucked and I have had decades that sucked in a miserable marriage. And here I am, and my life is good, and I like who I am, and all of those things can be true at the same time, and it took me a really long time to understand that they could be.

And, you know, if you’ve been here for a while, I’ve done episodes in the past. You know, a few years ago, I think I did several episodes on magic, and not the kind of magic like, you know, where you’re cooking toadstools or whatever. But the kind of magic where you’re shifting your perspective, the kind of magic that we talk about in A Course In Miracles, right?

That a, a miracle is a shift in perspective. But I wanna tell you about a word. Abracadabra. Abracadabra is the thing that you say before the thing appears, right? That’s, that’s what it f- is for. That’s what people do first, right? The, the rabbit isn’t in the hat yet. There’s nothing up the sleeve. The magician has no evidence at that point, and he says it anyway.

He says, “Abracadabra,” out loud in front of everybody. And that’s actually the whole trick. It’s not the rabbit. It’s saying it first. And you probably used to be like that, right? You did. There is a version of you who wanted something and just said it before you had any reason to believe that it was coming the word itself, abracadabra, and you know I love w- you know I love the words. If you’ve been in the Navigate method, you know. People will say a word, and I’ll be like, “Let’s get the dictionary.” Like, what does it actually mean, right? But abracadabra stems from a meaning of I create as I speak.

And now somewhere along the way, you stopped saying the thing that you wanted. Maybe you stopped saying it first. Maybe you’ve just stopped. And now you wait. Like, you want something, and you keep it inside until you can see how it could possibly work. You wanna be able to explain it. You want a plan attached to it before you’ll say it out loud.

We create as we speak, and our words have vibration. So you want everything figured out before you’ll say it out loud or to another person. And it probably feels responsible. It does, right? But what you’re actually doing is waiting for the rabbit before you say the word, and it’s backwards. It’s actually not how any of it works

I think we do this because there is an element in us that is, that is tired. We are tired, and we don’t wanna be disappointed. And I hear people say, “I don’t wanna get my hopes up all the time.” Do you guys remember many years ago when I was looking for a house, and I wanted that mid-century modern house? I still get in bed and think about that , think about that house.

I think I offered, like, $100,000 more than asking, and I didn’t get it. Somebody else got it, and I was so disappointed. I see the benefit of it now that I didn’t get that. I’m glad. And I remember at the time knowing I really wanted it, like, knowing I was leaning in, knowing I was letting myself sort of get ahead of myself, and also knowing that I could handle the disappointment, that it felt so fun to be excited about it.

It felt so fun to dream about it. Now, without a doubt, I know that my perfect mid-century modern home is is coming. At some point, I don’t know when, I don’t have to know, but I know it’s coming because I lingered in that for so long. I lingered in it without the fear, and when I didn’t get it, it w- it was crushing.

My little heart was pulverized, and I handled it. I’m still here. It worked out just fine. I’m still dreaming. It didn’t squash my hopes or dreams. It didn’t take away anything. It just was a little blip as I talk to the universe and explain what it is that I want. Okay. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna ask you to just be a little delulu.

Be a little delusional. And I wanna be careful with that word ’cause I know the internet has been using it to mean, like, to pretend everything’s fine, and that’s not what I mean. I don’t want you lying to yourself, and I don’t want you calling a bad thing a good thing, right? I don’t want you finding the silver lining in, like, a shit sandwich.

Like, that’s not the goal. But delusional, to me, means that you refuse to require evidence in advance. You want the thing before you can prove that it’s possible, and you say it out loud. Say it with me. We’ll say it out loud, right? Do you guys remember when I went to Iceland, and I had … At the time, I had left my husband And I had decided I was just gonna travel around for like six months, and I wanted to really work on myself and get some space.

And I had gone down to Florida, and I had gotten an Airbnb for a month, and I was sitting in bed one night looking at TikToks, and I saw this TikTok of this guy who was snowshoeing. It was in Finland, and he was snowshoeing, and the video was like the northern lights swirling above him. And do you guys remember, I said out loud, out loud, “I want that.

I want that.” And the that that it was, it was, it was the feeling like life was magical. It was noticing like just the beauty of the world that I am so lucky to be in. It was feeling free, I think, and it was just like th- I just, I, I want that. I watched that video like 20 times. I remember thinking, “How many times have I watched this?”

over and over and over again. And like the music in the background was like … I was crying. So repetition, heightened emotion, clarity. I want that. Now, you know, I didn’t even own a winter coat at that time. So it wasn’t like I wanna go to the w- like cold. But if you guys remember, the very next day as I’m scrolling on Facebook, I see a post in a group I’m in saying, “We have one spot left.

We’re going to chase the northern lights in Iceland. Does anybody want it?” And I said, “Whoops, I guess that’s for me.” And it went against who I was at that time to just do that, and it gave me clarity, and it gave me confidence, and I believe it helped project me forward on my, on my m- mission in my life.

But I said it out loud, “I want that.” I ordered off the menu, and it came. And I’ve said that here before, and I’m gonna keep saying it, ’cause that’s what it is. You order the thing, and you don’t wait to find out whether the kitchen has it. You just order it knowing it’s coming. When I was pregnant, I, I got the room ready.

I knew it was coming even though I couldn’t see it. Well, I mean, I could I could feel it. I knew something was happening, but I prepared because I had belief. I didn’t know if everything would work out, but I had belief that it would.

Every time that you say it first and it works out, you get a little more willing to say it again. And that’s why it looks like everything works out for some people, right? It’s not that they’re the luckiest. I, I remember I was in a training years ago, I think I’ve talked about this on the show, but I was in this training and this woman said, “I hate it when people say I’m lucky.

I’ve worked hard. I’ve worked hard.” And I remember thinking, “I don’t wanna work hard. I wanna be lucky. I wanna be so lucky. I want everything to just work out.” And I don’t think that- People have more luck or less luck, I think that it’s what you’re expecting. It’s not that people get luckier, they’ve just been saying it out loud longer, and so they have more proof.

And so they say it faster, and they believe it more, and then they get more proof. And you can start saying that on… at any age. Like, you don’t have to start when you’re young. You could start right now, although we are young, right? But there’s no window on it. There’s no, like, you have to do this between 21 and 27.

Like, that’s the part that’s sort of magic about it. And, you know, I have said before that your whole life can change in a single day. I learned that. I’m so grateful for whatever my brain did as a young kid, however my brain was programmed. I, I, you know, I don’t know what made it possible, but when my mom died, when I went to school one day and my mom got in a car accident, and I thought, “Life can change in a fricking instant.”

Like, I, got up one day and life was good, and I went to bed and it was never ever the same. It will never be the same as it was that morning I got up. And so I knew, because my brain did something funky, that that could go in the opposite direction. I knew if I believed one, I had to believe the other.

And your whole life can change in a single day. You know that ’cause you’ve lived it. You’ve woken up as one person and gone to bed as another person too. Nobody warns you. You learned that the hard way. And so did I. But the ground isn’t unfixed in one direction. It’s just unfixed. And if it can all change in one way, it can all change in the other way, too.

It’s the same exact mechanism, which means that the thing that you could want could show up next week, and you would have no way of seeing it right now, where you’re sitting right now. And I don’t think that’s, like, optimism. I actually think that’s just how it works. Because if you believe that my mom died and my whole life changed in an instant, then you have to believe the other, that that’s how it works.

Okay. So now, if you are sitting here in this, like, big decision right now, maybe about your life or about your marriage or about your, where you live or whatever, I wanna say something to you, and that is that you cannot make that decision from a place where you believe nothing can change. Because if you believe that your life is fixed, then every door looks like it’s going someplace terrible.

And you look one way and you see the next 20 years of exactly this thing, and you look the other way and you see loss. And then people ask you, “How come you can’t just make a decision?” You can’t decide because nothing you’re looking at has any possibility in it. And I’m not telling you what to do.

I’ve never told you what to do. But I want you to notice whether you’re deciding from a life you believe can still change or from one that you’ve decided is probably just finished, that this is just how it is I got a message from a woman that went through the program, and she had celebrated her wedding anniversary.

Dinner out, great night. She said a year earlier, she never, ever would’ve imagined that she would be on the back of a motorcycle holding onto her husband, having the best day. And you know what she actually wrote word for word, here I’m quoting her, is that, “He didn’t suddenly turn into a knight in shining armor on a horse to swoop me up on a magical day.

I created the magical day by trusting myself to say yes to the experience that I wanted to have.” Wow, right? She didn’t wait for someone to hand her a magical day. She said it out loud first, right? So say it before you can prove it. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s the podcast. Say the thing that you want out loud in front of somebody.

Well, there’s nothing in the hat. Everything has always worked out for me, not in the way that I planned it, but it has. And I want that to be true for you, too. I want you to be able to recognize that you’ve got abracadabra- don’t let anyone who doesn’t have abracadabra take away any of your magic. And if you’re in a decision right now about your marriage, and you can’t hear yourself, and you don’t know how to find the magic, well, well, I made a free masterclass. There is a free masterclass you can go to, and it doesn’t tell you what to do. But it does tell you how we can help you. You can find it on my website, just at betsy pake dot com. But I want you to think about if I believed there was possibility, what would I do? I promise you wouldn’t stay stagnant. If you believed in the abracadabra, you would say it out loud, and you would notice what you felt called to do.

All right. And you know, when you can do that, I think that’s how you live a big life. I gotta finish with that every time, you guys. All right. If you wanna talk to us about coming into the Navigate Method, and I’ve got something else coming soon, if you’ve already left your husband or you’re never gonna leave your husband, I love that for you, too, I’ve got something cool coming.

I’m gonna talk about it in the next couple weeks. We’re gonna be launching the next retreat. Please, please come so I can tell you all the things I can’t say on the podcast. And yeah, I love you guys so much. I will see you, I will 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.

Betsy is back from Belize and back to giving us the advice we can all learn from. In this episode, she wants us to remember that our value is our presence, not our usefulness. Are you doing the work for you and for everyone else? Leaning back doesn’t have to mean becoming less, it allows others to show up more. Give it a try in your life and you might get pleasantly surprised.

Transcript:

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

Hello. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I have been missing for a couple weeks. We went to Belize for our retreat, and it was … Oh, my God, it was so great. I, I wish you could have been there. It was this group of people that came together. Some of them had worked with me, but most of them hadn’t. But everybody got along.

I- it was insane how awesome it was. It was girlhood, you know? We played in the pool. We did some work on ourselves. We d- you know, had drinks by the moonlight. I mean, it was just such a great, great trip. It, it was so fascinating to me how everybody just bonded, you know? And I think that’s just, … I, I always say, , I attract the best women.

Beautiful women, too. But I attract the best women. And so everybody just meshed. A, a, lot of people extended their trip. They had an extra day, and then some people changed their plane flight so that they could stay, and it was just amazing. And I’m so happy that we did that trip, and I’m gonna plan another one.

I got a couple things that I’m working on that I’m gonna finalize today. Hopefully today is the day. But I would really like to do something in January, so be on the lookout for that, because you won’t wanna miss it. Just the coming together, and it was like we’d all known each other for 20 years, you know, and it was like our annual girls’ trip.

I know that for me, I expanded so much, and I felt so great, and so it definitely made me realize that, , live events, it’s so important, I think, for us to get together live and to have that experience together. So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you today about, though, is I kinda have a, a short little thought, an idea, experiment that I have been running.

You know, it’s interesting, because, , in the last episode, I talked about how I had started dating, and I don’t, I’m not gonna be coming in here talking about dating every time. I, have to tell you that I resisted it for a long time, and what I’m recognizing is how much I have learned about myself in the last couple months of doing this, and how much I have grown, really, and how much I was able to notice old patterns and actually shift so that I know I have healed, because I noticed it and was able to move out of it.

And so there’s a little lesson in here that I have learned that I think might be helpful for you, and so that’s what I wanted to kinda share today. If you’ve been here for a while, you know that I- tend to say that relationships are a mirror, right? Every single one. Our friendships, our, coworkers, with our kids, you know, with the lady who does your hair, like the person that you’re standing next to in line.

All of this is a mirror about how we actually feel about ourselves, and we can learn a lot about ourselves from any one of those experiences. You know, I, I think some mirrors show us things that other mirrors couldn’t show us. And so I think that’s why this experiment has been so important for me on my journey.

And you know, I, I have been coaching for years. I mean, 2012. A long time. And I have done the work. I know myself very well. And I noticed when I started dating that there was this pattern that was sort of, I don’t know. I- if you had asked me, “Do you have that pattern?” I would say, “No, I can do, I can do it.

It’s n- I’m fine. I’m fine.” But what I recognized was that that pattern was so much in the middle of who I was that I actually couldn’t see it until I had the mirror to show me. , And so I’m gonna talk a little bit about that, because I think that every relationship that I had was old enough that the pattern was, like, already kind of baked in.

And so, you know, like when you walk into your living room, like you don’t notice the furniture ’cause it’s just been there. But dating put me in like a brand new living room. You know what I mean? With people who knew nothing about me, , no history, no established roles. Like nobody had an expectation of me that was already in, in place.

And I think that created this like blank space. And I watched myself do something within, you know, the first 24 hours of finding somebody, that I liked. Now- I’m, I wanna say, I’m gonna say I liked loosely… I, I, I liked everybody is my point. I liked everybody. I, met some really, really nice people.

But here’s what happened, is that I over-functioned. I think that’s the easiest way to say it. I met somebody, and I immediately started doing the work of the relationship. , I would carry the conversation, I would ask really good questions. I kept saying, “Everybody’s so nice, I could talk to them for hours.

And then I was like, wait, maybe that’s me. Maybe that’s me. , Not that they’re not nice, not that they can’t hold a conversation, it just made me realize maybe there’s something I’m doing here that is over-capacitating to, , an extent. You know? I, I found, , if something got awkward or if I noticed something made somebody uncomfortable, , I would immediately kind of smooth it over.

I, I would handle everything. I would suggest a plan when there wasn’t a plan. , I would explain myself so thoroughly, I would over-explain what I meant or what I was trying to say so there wouldn’t be any confusion. And what I noticed was that I was doing my half, right, my half of the relationship, and I did that really fast and I did it really well because I’m good at it, but then I also did his half.

And I think that there was this part where I felt like I had a connection with somebody, but looking back now, I realize that it was just me, , over-capacitating the whole thing. Like, when I look back at this, , I’m gonna use the word relationship, but we’re gonna air quote that. , I went out with somebody, , I don’t know, five or six times, and I realized I was doing my half and his half.

And that I built that whole thing. I have no idea what that guy would have built with me because I never left him any room to build anything with me. I would reach out. I would suggest things. And so here’s what I wanna do, is I think I wanna sort of name this thing because I think a lot of you are gonna recognize yourself in this.

You know, I, I am very good at walking into somebody’s complicated situation, understanding it, finding a solution for things, and making it better. , That is real. That is my gift. I can… It’s almost like a cosmic thing. When somebody explains to me what’s going on with them, I feel like I’m hovering above it, and I can see the, all the levers.

And so if somebody hands me a mess with a lot of moving parts and a lot of feeling attached to it, I can sort it out. I can see what actually is going on. I, have built a business on this, right? But somewhere, a long time ago, I think I must have decided that that was my value. Not like one of my qualities, but that was my value.

, That was the reason someone would want me around, like the, the price of my cocktail or whatever And I think once you believe that, you carry it into every living room you walk into, right? Every situation that you find yourself in. And so I would walk in kind of scanning for how I could be of value.

And you find the thing that you can be useful for, and then you get to work because you know being useful is how you have always understood that you belonged in that room. And I have been doing that for, like, my whole life and calling it, like, being a good person, I think. I have really evaluated, what does it mean to be a good person?

And, you know I, I think I am a good person. I think I am generous. I’m not gonna, you know, pretend that I’m not or not want to be. But I recognized in this interaction with this person that some of this was a bid. Some of it was me t- trying to buy my way in to closeness with someone. And, and the problem with buying your way in…

And you may be looking at your marriage or relationship with people at work or whatever and go, “Oh my God, I do this. , I over-capacitate in order to feel like I’m enough to be in this situation.” And, , so I think that the problem with that is simply that , if you get close to people by being useful, you can never stop being useful.

You have to continue to earn that spot, and you have to stay necessary, and that is not being close with someone in a relationship. That’s a job, and I don’t want to have a job with the people that love me. And so I recognized… And like I said, I went out on a bunch of different dates with a bunch of different people, and then I went out with one person, , I don’t know, four or five times.

Couple weeks. It was just a couple weeks. And I noticed that I was doing this. And so as I was learning about other people and going out with other people, I started doing something a little bit different. And I wanna describe this ’cause I wanna be really careful about how I say it And because the shift was important, but there- it’s also nuanced, right?

So I did not show up as being less, okay? So I’m not saying, , you need to dummy yourself down, or if you have a superpower, just keep that hidden. I’m not saying withhold your superpowers from people you love, . And I’m not saying that I wanted to pretend to be less, less interested in people than I was.

I- and I’m, and I wasn’t trying to make anybody chase me., I’m 55 years old. I, I didn’t have the energy for some big strategy. But I wanted to lean back, and I wanted to do my part and stop. So I am still funny. I’m still warm. , I will still point out the thing that nobody else will say. I can still be generous when I feel like being generous.

But I don’t need to m- make myself less capable, but I need to stop automatically spending all of my capacity. Does that make sense? So I don’t need to make myself less capable. I need to stop automatically spending all of my capacity. The capacity stays. I just stopped spending it before anyone asked.

I just stopped spending it as a deposit to be wanted. So this is what it kinda looked like in practice. In practice, it looks like leaving when it’s time to leave. If I don’t make the plan, does he make the plan? If I don’t carry the conversation, like every message back and forth, I didn’t have to ask a question.

I didn’t have to… I could just say… I could just answer what they asked me and give them enough information that they could keep the conversation going. I- I didn’t wanna explain myself. I just said, “This is what it is,” and then I let them see if they leaned forward. Do they get curious? Do they ask me about themselves?

If I don’t smooth over an awkward moment, what do they do? Can he sit in an uncomfortable thing for a few seconds like a grown man? If I don’t tell him, this was the big one. One man asked me, “Well, what is it you’re looking for?” And I, I said, “Clarify what you mean.” And he said, “Well,, what kinds of things do you like?”

And I said, “I am l- liking learning about who you are and how you show up. I’m not gonna tell you exactly how I wanna be treated. I wanna see how you would treat me, and then we’ll know if it’s a match And, , I’m not gonna tell some man that I need you to open the door for me, but I’m gonna choose the one that does it.

I’m not gonna tell you that, “Hey, yeah, great, let’s go out. I need you to plan everything.” I’m just gonna choose the man that plans everything. I’m not gonna say, “You need to tell, that I look pretty. Don’t you think I look pretty?” I know this is so silly. Tell me I’m pretty and feed me.

But I, I… This person I went out with, like, five times or whatever could- never said anything, like, complimentary to me, and I realized I needed that. And so I’m not gonna tell you that I need that. In the beginning, I’m trying to figure out if you’re the right match, but I’m gonna just notice, and I’m gonna pick the one that does tell me.

So I think that leaning back let me learn more about people and who I wanted to invest my energy into, and made me realize that spending time with me… Now, this one’s crazy. If you are an over-capacitator like me, what I’m about to say is gonna make you so uncomfortable, but that me just being- spending time with you, was the payment.

D- do you know what I mean? , That was enough. , I am joyful, and fun, and curious, and I don’t have to fix your problem. I don’t have to pay for the drink or plan the date. I can show up, and that is my value, is me, is my presence. You get to spend time with me. This shift is so insane. Even as I’m saying it, I’m like, that feels weird.

What’s your value? , It can’t possibly just be that you just be you. But yeah, it can, ’cause the right person will be delighted in that. I have a man that I’m going out with, , the third time, and I’m, I’m not over-capacitating. I’m letting him show up, and he is. There’s another guy I’m going out with for a second time.

I’m not over-capacitating. He’s showing up. He’s consistent. They’re messaging me every day. One of them said, “I don’t want you to worry your pretty little head about it. I’ll take care of it.” I said, “Yes, sir. I will just lean back.” And I think that this is a really hard thing for women who are accomplished. I think it’s a really hard thing for women who have been taught that their value is serving others and taking care of everything.

So I think this is the thing that I, want you to hear, ’cause I really didn’t expect this, is that when I left empty space, men filled it.

Not all of them. Some of them left it empty right back, and that was really useful information, and then I moved on without any drama about it. Unmatch. Some of them stepped in, made the plan, made the reservation, followed up when they said they would, noticed something that I mentioned once, some little small thing, and remembered it, took care of things, wanted to take care of things.

And, you know, at first this felt really uncomfortable. , What do I do? , Should I offer something? Should I make this easier for him? Should I pay the bill? Should I say something, I don’t know, magical? I don’t know. Should I try to fix something? But nothing. That was the answer. Nothing. You do nothing.

, You say thank you, and you enjoy it. And there are men out there this whole time who wanted to take care of things, and I just never gave anybody the chance, because I was already doing it long before they ever even got there. I wasn’t attracting the wrong people, but I was crowding out the right people.

And I don’t think that our world teaches women necessarily how to receive. , We get taught, how to give until it, it is painful, and then we call that, , a vow or you know, loving. We get taught to be the capable one. We get a ton of praise for it. People tell you, “You’re so strong. You’re amazing.

I don’t know how you do it.” And that’s good for, , you know, I don’t know, 10 years. Then, then all of a sudden you recognize that receiving is its own skill, and that most of us are really terrible at it. I mean, watch yourself next time someone gives you something, even, , a compliment. “Oh, gosh, no. Oh, this old thing?”

Right? “Oh my God, I have so many wrinkles. No, God, that don’t even… I need a haircut. My nails, oh, thanks, but God, they… I gotta get them done.” Right? A compliment, a favor, dinner, help with something that you didn’t ask for help with. , Do you deflect? Do you immediately balance the books? Do you say, “Oh, you didn’t have to do that,” or do you start planning how you’re gonna pay it back before they even finished doing what they were doing?

I don’t think it’s being humble. I think that’s discomfort. I think receiving makes us feel like we owe, and owing feels dangerous. And so we wanna,, clear up that imbalance immediately, and then get back to a safe ground where we’re the giver, and I think that gives us a sense of control. So what if you just sat in it?

, Just for a second, just let it be uncomfortable and don’t fix it. I found this was so difficult until it wasn’t., At first I was like, “Oh, you don’t have to open the car door.” The guy, , you know, shut the car off, ran around the car door. , You don’t have to do that. But, but you can. But you can, and I found that nice and charming.

And then soon I found I was able to really lean back and let people show up, and they’re showing up in a totally different way than I have ever experienced before. It wasn’t because there weren’t men around me who wanted to show up. It’s because I was crowding it out. So I wanna bring this all the way home, ’cause I know a lot of you aren’t dating on the dating apps, and I know that.

But maybe you’re in a marriage and you can’t figure it out, or you’re in a friendship that just feels really lopsided, or you’re in a job and n- you’re carrying the team or a family where you have always been the adult, you know, since you were 10 years old. So here’s what I wanna say to you. If you’ve been over-functioning in something for 20 years, you don’t currently know what it is. You know what it is with you holding both ends of it. You don’t know what it is. You’ve been managing the calendar, and the moods, and the extended family, and the temperature of the room, and you have been doing that really well.

, You soften things so that he doesn’t get mad, and you anticipate things before it even happens. You’re brilliant. You’re so brilliant, people don’t even know half the stuff that you take care of, ’cause you do it before there’s a, a missing piece, before there’s loss. You do your half and their half, and you call that a relationship.

So when you sit down to ask yourself the big question of, “Can this relationship work? Do I want this? Is this enough?” You are asking about a truth that you likely built, and you cannot get a true answer from that place. So I’m not telling you to stop doing everything, and just see if ever- anybody notices, right?

That’s … would likely be more uncomfortable for you, ’cause you’d have a messy kitchen and a, a cluttered household, right? I’m telling you something much smaller and a little bit harder, and that is to pick one thing, one thing that you always do that actually isn’t yours. You know, that something that only gets done because you do it, and then not getting it done would be uncomfortable, and then just don’t do it.

Don’t announce it. Don’t make a big production. Don’t make it a lesson. Don’t turn it into a conversation about how you’re the one who does every goddamn thing, ’cause we know you do. ‘Cause I promise the conversation’s already happened. You’ve already done that, and it didn’t work. So just leave it empty, and then watch, not, not to catch anybody, but just to see them, to actually get clear eyes, to see what’s happening.

‘Cause you’re over-capacitating if you’re anything like me. You’re over-capacitating, and you think that’s real. But the truth is, if you just stay in your lane, you can see what they’re willing to do, and those are different, and your body knows which one you do regularly, so it’s gonna feel a little uncomfortable.

And maybe they pick up the slack. That happens more than you might think, and it’s great when it does. We had someone the other day in group, two people, one person in particular, that was like, “I can’t believe how different my marriage is when I created space. I can see how much he shows up for me.” Maybe he doesn’t.

Maybe it just sits there. But either way, you’re gonna learn something true, and I think that we are all pretty starving for something true. And, the last thing I’ll say, and, this is the part that I’m still practicing, is that it’s okay for you to just bring the joy. You don’t have to arrive with a solution.

You don’t have to be the most useful person in your family. You don’t have to earn your seat by fixing anything or anybody. You can show up funny. You can show up interested. You can show up delighted by the thing you saw, , during your day. You can order something good on the menu and just be a pleasure to be around and let that be the whole thing.

I know this is hard ’cause you’re like, “Well, I’m not going out on dates. I’m at home, and he does not see me as funny or interested or delighted by me.” But what if you felt that way about you? What would be different? ‘Cause that is enough. It’s always been enough. I don’t think there’s a ledger that we think there is.

I, I think 20 years ago if somebody had said, “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, I got it.” Somebody said that to me yesterday. “Just show up.” And I would’ve been like, “I can handle it. I can do it. I’m a feminist.” But now I’m like, okay, I’m not gonna worry my pretty little head about anything.

I’m just gonna get a cute outfit on and , go up and be joyful and happy and have fun, and enjoy the conversation, and spend time with somebody. I know that that’s not necessarily real life, it’s only a second date. But I think when we stop spending all our capacity on everybody else, we get it back for ourselves.

So everything is teaching us something, including all the things that you swore you were done with. I, I was done with dating. I said it out loud on the show. And it turned out to be the one mirror that could show me a thing that I had been carrying my whole adult life. You, you might already know where you do this.

You might n- even know as soon as I started the podcast, , might have been like, “This is what I do.” You know, there’s a specific moment in your week where you do something where you over-capacitate, and you don’t have to do anything about that right now, but just catch yourself when you start reaching and see if you can let yourself come back down and receive.

Maybe it’s when a friend says, “Oh my God, you’re such a great friend.” And you go, “Aw, you’re a great friend.” You’re not valuable because you’re useful. You’re valuable because you’re you, and anybody worth having close to you already knows that. And I think that is how you live a big life. All right. All right, everyone.

I love you so much. 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 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.