369 The Thinking Couch

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PODCAST

This week I went to California for a mastermind I’m part of and had the opportunity to speak to a group of my peers and I wanted to share with you today what I shared with them.
Transcript:

Betsy [00:00:05]:
Welcome to the art of Living big podcast. My name is Betsy Paik. I’m an author, a speaker, and a trainer of NLP and hypnotherapy. And I’m focused on helping you understand and design your life with the power of the subconscious. This podcast is designed to help you think differently about what could be possible for your life. Now, let’s go live big.

Betsy [00:00:32]:
Hello, hello. Hi. Welcome. Welcome to the show today. Welcome to the art of living big. I am Betsy Paik, and I’m excited to be with you here today. So if you’ve been here for a little while, you guys, I am showing up on video, and I have been doing it now. I’ve done it.

Betsy [00:00:49]:
I’ve done it like three times now. It’s pretty impressive. So if you haven’t gone to my YouTube channel, go just Google the YouTube and you will see it. But I’m pretty excited about it because it is hard sometimes to be a beginner. You know, it’s hard to do something new. And even though I have been doing video for a long time, I haven’t been doing video when I do this show. And if you’re new here, when I do this show, typically I get an idea and then I just talk, which is how it’s always worked really well for me. But when you’re showing up on video, thinking about things while you’re talking is just, I don’t know, it’s a little bit different.

Betsy [00:01:28]:
So lots and lots of new things and new challenges in my life. And I have said many times, like, if I have a problem I’ve never had before, I’m like, this is exciting because I’m going someplace new, new problems. And that’s kind of what’s happening. Being a beginner can be hard and just something new and can feel, like a little bit of a problem sometime. But I’m just really. I’m just really pleased with myself. I’m going to sing. So, so happy to be here with you guys today.

Betsy [00:01:58]:
I wanted to talk about my past week I have been in California. If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen that I was at an event this past week in California. I went to Huntington Beach. I live in Atlanta, Georgia. But I love California. And anytime that I have an opportunity to do any training, even if that training is up the street, I will try and attend the version that’s in California. I just really love it. I love the beach anyway.

Betsy [00:02:27]:
And I love, like, the ocean vibes. And I think the vibe in California is just really cool. With. I mean, we’ve got some, now that I live inside the city in Atlanta, we do have some cool stuff. You know, I love a good smoothie bowl place, and I feel like those are in abundance in California. You know, it’s just like, different stuff that’s available, different parts of the country. And so, anyway, I was thrilled because I was going to get to go, and I went actually for two, well, it was two events. My coach that I have had off and on since 2018 has a mastermind.

Betsy [00:03:08]:
So, for example, if you have been inside my program, the navigate method, I came into their initial program, and then they had a mastermind on the back end program. And what I mean by mastermind is it’s a group of entrepreneurs that come together for guidance and companionship, you know, to be able to really help each other and to come together in a smaller group to be able to help each other. And so this particular coach has two different levels, I’m going to say, of their mastermind. And I was in one for a long time and then have moved up. I’m going to say moved to a different one. Okay, so there’s one that’s maybe a little more in depth, let’s call it that. So I’m in the more in depth one, which gives me access to both of their events. So I can be in the first one and I can be in the more in depth one.

Betsy [00:04:05]:
There are live events. Okay, so all of that to say, I went to California because they have those live events back to back. So I got to go to the first live event, which was just so fun. You know, it’s people that I’ve been interacting with, and then you guys probably have communities like this, right? Like you’ve got people that, you know from the Internet or from online or from, you know, your online world. And then to get to see them in real life was really, really cool and really fun. It was funny because the first night, kind of the kickoff, they have like a cocktail party, and then the event is like the next two days. And so at the cocktail party, I was walking around and I was like, I know that person, but I need them to have, I needed people to have the, their Zoom background, like on a stick, they could just hold behind their head. So when I looked at them, I knew exactly who they were because of the background.

Betsy [00:05:02]:
Do you know what I mean? You know how you see people in a certain way for months and months and months or years, and then you see them in real life, and it’s like you’re out of. It’s out. You’re like something this isn’t. The context is different, so. But it was really fun to get to see everybody. And at that initial event, I got to speak, which is always really fun. I love that. And, you know, one of the things that I talked about in that was about when I first moved into my house here in Atlanta.

Betsy [00:05:34]:
And if you’ve been here for a little while, you know that I sold my house in the suburbs about three years ago, moved into the city into an apartment with the intention of staying in that apartment for a year. And life as it does took other turns, and I ended up going on some adventures. And you can listen to some of those episodes around, like the Iceland episodes. You could, you could search for Iceland. Betsy, pick Iceland. It’ll come up. But it kind of culminated with that event of me going to Iceland for a month and really doing months and months of a lot of soul searching and a lot of healing of stuff to be able to come back. And then once I came back to that apartment, the lease was going to be up any minute, and it just made sense to stay for another year.

Betsy [00:06:27]:
So, you know how you stay someplace and then you’re like, I’m going to be here for a short time, and then, you know, fast forward two years and you’re still there. So it was only about a year ago that I moved into my house in the city. And so we bought this house in May and couldn’t move in until July, until June. So the previous owners kept occupancy for a month. And in that month, I had a huge leak in my apartment. And there’s an episode about that. It’s, it’s last May, probably. You could find that.

Betsy [00:06:58]:
And, I mean, I really, I really dismantled what it was that caused that leak. If you go back, I might need to go back and listen to that episode. But just to reflect. It’s always interesting to reflect. But, I mean, I broke down what was happening from a quantum level that created an environment for that experience to happen. And then we moved into this house. And inside my office, I put an old couch. Now, in December, I redid my office and got rid of that old couch, and I got two really cute gold chairs that you may have seen on Instagram.

Betsy [00:07:36]:
And those chairs, now I call my thinking chairs. But at the time, I had the thinking couch. And so in my talk, and I was talking to entrepreneurs, so I was talking about so many times, you know, and this can be whether it’s, we’re entrepreneurs or we’re working on our relationship, or we are working on our. Any kind of relationship, friendships, relationship with our children, whatever it is, co workers, so many times. And I know I do this, too, so I’m not immune. But we will go outside of ourselves to get answers. I don’t mean to learn something new. I mean to get the answers for what’s right for us.

Betsy [00:08:23]:
But the truth is that we know what’s right for us inherently. We may not consciously be able to connect to it. And that’s okay. That’s why we have the thinking couch. But so often what we’ll do is we’ll go to other people. And I see this. I mean, I talk to women every day that are like, I can’t make this. I can’t make certain decisions on my own right, or I don’t know, or I need to check with a friend or my husband, or none of that is inherently bad.

Betsy [00:08:58]:
Unless you don’t realize that you’re asking for somebody else’s glasses, their frame of the world, which includes every thing that has ever happened to them, every belief system they have, every value, every thing that they internalized that every parent, teacher, principal ever said to them, those glasses on your life. And if you don’t recognize that, you are asking somebody else for their view of the world, because what we do is we go, what should I do? What should I do? The truth is, the only, you know, because it’s your life and your lens and your experiences that are going to be the thing that matters. Now, I think it’s absolutely fine to ask someone’s view of it, but that’s different than somebody’s advice. Does that make sense, that distinction? Like, what’s your viewpoint of this based on your life and your experience? What does that mean? And I think the other thing really is this idea that we don’t know. Like, that I can’t. I don’t trust myself. And honestly, I think that’s a lot of what it is, right? It’s that I have had experiences where I was burned, and now I don’t know if I could trust myself. And so I have to shift that responsibility to somebody else because that feels more comfortable to me.

Betsy [00:10:38]:
It feels more comfortable to my nervous system. It helps me feel more content. And even if I get a life that I didn’t intend and that I don’t like, then at least I haven’t had the responsibility of trying to untangle it. And then what happens? Or to get here, and then what happens is I try to untangle it and it’s tangled up in someone else’s beliefs and values and decisions. Now, it is absolutely normal for that to happen in our lives. And I think a lot of that’s because we’ve been told, you know, like, to. We’ve been socialized, right, to talk about things with our friends. And I don’t mean don’t talk about things with your friends.

Betsy [00:11:22]:
I mean be hyper aware of what you’re actually asking for. And then the other side of that is to know yourself and trust yourself enough to be able to make a right decision for you so that you are actually leading a life that’s yours, right? That you are leading a life that’s yours. Because what can happen so often is that we are leading a life and it doesn’t feel good. We might not even really know why, but when we look back, we’re like, oh, well, I changed my art major to business because that’s what my dad thought I should do, right? And I got married because the wheels were already turning and that’s the direction things were going and it was the right time. I knew they’d be a good dad, right? Whatever those things are for you, jobs, relationships, it doesn’t matter. Are we living a life that’s really true to us? And I. I believe. This is my belief.

Betsy [00:12:35]:
You don’t have to believe this, but I believe that’s sort of what happens when we, like, hit our forties or our late thirties. All of a sudden we’re like, hold up, hold up. This isn’t like, I don’t know that this feels so great. Have I been the one that’s been making decisions or have I been deferring to other people? It’s not bad either way. It’s just good to know because once you know and you get that awareness, you can take a different step, right? You can start to do things differently. And I think that, you know, one of the things that I talked about when I talked about, and I was talking to entrepreneurs specifically, but I was saying, like, stop looking outside for the answers for things that you need to know about the deep work that you do. So the people that I was talking to were mainly coaches. And so I’m not saying don’t learn skills from other people or don’t get strategies.

Betsy [00:13:37]:
That’s not what I’m saying. But when you’re trying to make big decisions about how you want to run your business, what if, what if the way to get to where we want to go is totally. Now, some of you, I’m going to, I’m going to ask you to just suspend judgment for just a second. Okay? All right. So what if the way to get the life that you really love, and I don’t mean like, it might be your career, it might be like, I mean, you are like, my life doesn’t mean bad things aren’t happening, but it means my life is going exactly the way that I want. This feels really good. What if the way to do that was by trusting your gut? Like, we’ve been told to, like, weigh the options, make a pros and cons list. I mean, none of that is bad, inherently bad, but I’m offering you the thought that none of that’s inherently bad as long as the ultimate decision comes down to your gut feeling.

Betsy [00:14:39]:
Now. Now, you might be like, throwing hands and being like, no way, no way. But what if you could really trust your intuition, that gut feeling, there’s something in your body that says yes or no. One of the things we teach in the navigate method is to how to know what’s a yes and what’s a no in your body. There’s a specific thing that happens to you. Think about something that’s such a yes right where you’re like, that is an absolute yeah. Going to the beach. Absolute yes.

Betsy [00:15:13]:
Thought of living at the beach. Like, absolute yes. Over here. Now think about what’s a no. Like being in a dark alley by myself. This is a hard no, right? Being out on my porch when there’s a ton of hornets around. Like no. How do I know the difference between those things and can that, are there nuances? Like, as you narrow that, like, I think of, if you’re watching the video, you can see my hands but this wide.

Betsy [00:15:46]:
Like yes or no on either side. But as you narrow that and your hands come together, right. And it becomes narrower and narrower. Can you understand the nuances? But can you get the nuances of a yes and a no? Do you know how to follow your intuition? And I think there are really strategic ways that we can start to do that if we’ve lost touch with it. And one of the things that I was saying last week when I was in California was, you know, one of the ways is to just sit. Like, just sit. Get yourself a thinking couch, or use the couch you already have, declare one cushion, the thinking cushion, and spend some time thinking about the things that you would go to somebody else to make the decision. Now, if you’re like, there’s no way I can make certain decisions without my partner, without my friend, or without, you know, checking the Ouija board, whatever that is for you.

Betsy [00:16:45]:
Like, do that, but know what you want to so that then you’re making a decision that’s got all the parts covered, right? All the bases are covered. And so what I was saying was, there are questions you have that you already, deep down, know the answers to. Again, I’m not saying don’t go learn things. That’s not what I’m saying. This is different. But when you are looking for, like, what do I do with my life? And what I was talking about in California was like, how do I share with my perfect client? And one of the things I do on Instagram is, well, pull up my journal. I pull out my journal and look back to three years ago, four years ago. I mean, I could look back ten years ago.

Betsy [00:17:42]:
I can get ideas of how I felt, and so I can write about those things. And I think anytime that we get absolute clarity on who we are, like, so many things in life become easier. The other thing to do when you’re coming against something that is causing you to be uncomfortable, we all have those things, right? Like, I just don’t even want to think about it. And so I push it away and push it away and push it away. And what happens? What happens is that thing comes back and comes back and comes back. Like, you cannot push stuff away. Your unconscious mind. It’s like scanning for crap in the background different times that could remind you of it.

Betsy [00:18:28]:
It’s so much better to just sit on the thinking couch and be like, I’m going to think about this for 15 minutes. And when I get to the bottle of bottom of it, when I noodle through it all, it’s not nearly as bad as it was when I was avoiding it. And I think we can avoid stuff in order to protect ourselves, to create a sense of safety. Not to create safety, but to create a sense of safety. But safety is really, really knowing who you are and being able to sit in it and to sit with the hard things. And I think to have tools to reprogram your subconscious and your nervous system. Right. How to tell your body that it’s safe.

Betsy [00:19:13]:
So last week I was talking about this. I was talking about this idea of the thinking couch. And so I wanted to come in here and offer that thought to you as well. What is it that you’re avoiding? What is it that you need to look at in a new way? And what is it where you just need to sit down? Sit down and just listen? You know, everything doesn’t have to be really hard, even hard things don’t have to be hard. And the more that I think about current problems and I don’t avoid and I sit with it, the more current problems become blips, easier to figure out and the simpler my days become. And I think being in the groups like I am makes all of that so much easier, because you get attuned with who you are and what you want, and then you get skills and new ways of thinking, and you make a decision on what you adopt and you add in to who you are and what you reject because of your values and your beliefs. And then when you sit on the thinking couch every day, you’re being expanded, right? So now you’ve got new things to contemplate. If somebody gives you their thoughts, their viewpoint on your life, take that to the thinking couch and say, does this fit in with my view of life? Would this lead me to where I want to go? Is this getting me to a life that feels really joyful and good? I was saying to my daughter this morning, we were talking, and she was saying about how this summer, she wants to, like, experience some different things.

Betsy [00:21:12]:
And she said, which what she said, I think is really common for a kid her age, right? A young woman her age, 22. I feel like I’m behind, right? Have you ever felt like that? I have. I feel like I’m behind. And I think that still, sometimes I’m like, at my age, I should be farther along. I don’t even know what that means. Right. That’s fodder for the thinking couch. But she said, I feel like I should be farther along.

Betsy [00:21:37]:
And I said to her, what if you don’t have to worry about where you’ve been and you don’t have to worry about where you’re going, but all you have to do is think about today and make choices that bring you where you really want to go. So, like, every day it’s saying yes to joy. And maybe you make that your thing for the summer. Every day I’m going to find something that brings me to joy, to happiness. But you won’t know what that is if you don’t know who you are, right? We got to spend time with ourselves. And I think she’ll make some mistakes and she’ll learn from those mistakes, but as long as she’s making those decisions, I thought this would bring me joy, but it doesn’t. And now I have contrast and I have more information. So now, tomorrow, when I’m sitting in tomorrow, I can bring that to my experience and say that I thought was a yes, but it was a no.

Betsy [00:22:49]:
And where’s the, where was the disconnect? And how do I fine tune that for today? So all of those thoughts be around a group of people that expands. You know yourself enough to discern where you want to take on that information and what you want to reject. Stay present, find some joy. And when you make a mistake, I’m going to. I’m using air quotes. Make a mistake. When you have a spicy decision, doesn’t turn out the way you thought. When you get contrast and you go, I thought that was going to bring me joy or thought that was going to bring me where I wanted to go, and it didn’t make it mean nothing other than information and thoughts you can bring back to the thinking couch to know yourself at an even greater level.

Betsy [00:23:40]:
All right, I hope this was helpful. If it was, then please share it with somebody that you know and love. All right, thank you guys so much. I will see you all. I will see you all next week. All right, I love you. Bye.

Betsy [00:24:01]:
Hey, thanks so much for listening to today’s show, and thank you for sharing.

Betsy [00:24:05]:
The show with your friends. I love when you guys do that. I appreciate it so much.

Betsy [00:24:09]:
And thank you for leaving me a review on iTunes. I know that it matters because when I go to find a podcast, I.

Betsy [00:24:17]:
Always look to see what the reviews are.

Betsy [00:24:19]:
So it really means a lot to.

Betsy [00:24:20]:
Me that you take a minute to.

Betsy [00:24:21]:
Like, figure out how to even make that happen.

Betsy [00:24:24]:
Now, if you want to find me.

Betsy [00:24:25]:
Find me on social media. I’m usually on Instagram, starting out on TikTok. It’s just my name, Betsy Paik. And that’s my website, too, betsy pake.com. And you can find out all about the work that I do, having me speak for an event that you might be helping to plan or getting trained inside my alchemy institute. But to make it really easy, if you want me, just shoot me a DM. Shoot me a direct message on Instagram.

Betsy [00:24:51]:
And I will be at your service.

Betsy [00:24:53]:
Thanks again for listening, and I will.

Betsy [00:24:55]:
See you all next week.

HI, I'M YOUR HOST

Meet Betsy!

I'm Betsy Pake!

*Ocean obsessed

*Probably hanging out with my dogs

*Optimist

*Deep thinker

Hey There!

About Betsy

Hi I’m Betsy and I’m a subconscious change expert.
By day you can find me digging deep into the unconscious beliefs and identity of my clients so they can move past self-sabotage and lack of confidence and gain traction in their career and life.