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Don’t you just love a quote that sticks and you can replay it for yourself over and over? Well this episode of The Art of Living Big is chock full of them, but here is one that stands out… You’re not gonna forget and you don’t need anger to keep you safe. You already have the thing that keeps you safe, and it’s you. It’s the you who maybe you haven’t been listening to, even when you were talking right over her. So you already know. You’ve always known. Now the work is just how do I trust her?
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 a couple quick updates, and then I wanna get into what I’m gonna get into. But I’ve had several people that have reached out to me and asked me about my trip to Florida and, like, what the decision was. And I gotta tell you, I’m in a really weird space with it, and I’m just allowing myself to be here.
If you’re new here, thank you for indulging me while I while I give you a personal update. But if you’ve been here for a little while, you’ll remember that I went down to Florida to check it out. We talked about that, I think, on my birthday episode. And, uh, you know, I’ve wanted to move to the beach my whole life, and I have always thought it was gonna be California.
And then, , for a lot of logistical reasons, I thought it’s worth checking out Florida, and there were some things I really liked about it A- a- and my thought was, you know, as I’m recording this, it’s early June, like June 1st or 2nd, and my thought was … My lease isn’t up at my place until mid-February, so I could move beginning of February or January, whatever, or I could break my lease and move in August.
And the reason I thought August was because I had some time. I have a retreat in July, and then there’s a lot of things going on in the fall, and so I thought, “I have some time.” Well, then I start … And so then I went down, and a- again, the beach is lovely. I don’t know. The trip was quite rushed, if you remember me talking about it, and, and lovely.
Like I, I h- I had a good time, but I don’t know that any place made my body go, “This is it.” I think I felt most alive in the, , marina area of St. Pete, but there wasn’t anything that made me, like, really jump for joy. Now, does that mean there isn’t anywhere? No. It just means there isn’t anywhere that I necessarily went that made me feel super alive.
So that’s information, and n- you know, I always say my body is an oracle and I do what my body says, even if I don’t have the words for it, even if it doesn’t make sense. And so I really just decided I don’t have to decide and move in August. Like, I was breaking my lease. I just don’t have to do that, so really I have until mid-February before I have to do anything.
And honestly, it’s my life, and I can go month to month in my apartment if I want. Do you know what I mean? Like, there’s nothing te- like, this is the beauty and also the drama of it, is that there’s nothing making me do anything. And so I decided that I was just gonna ask the universe to make it apparent, to just show me how can this be easy, how can this be in flow, and just see what happens.
, When I started thinking about moving in August, I immediately started thinking, “Okay. Well then, – in November I’m gonna have to come back for Thanksgiving, and in December I’m gonna have to come back for Christmas because my son is here. And, , for whatever reasons, it’s easier for me to travel than for him.
And so then I had these ideas of, okay, so this is the, I guess, confusion of, or the next challenge I guess you could say, because as soon as I go down there I’m gonna hardly be settled and I’m gonna have to turn around and come back. And then where do I stay? What do I do with Dean Martin?
Do I bring him? Do I… I wanna be with him on the holidays, do you know what I mean? I don’t wanna bring him to a kitty hotel. I have a kitty hotel here that I love. Do I bring hi- Like, it started feeling really heavy, and I was like, “Okay, there’s nothing making me do anything.” Also, I’m going to London, and I’m gonna be posting a coffee get-together when w- I’m in London.
I’m gonna be posting that in the next couple weeks. You’ll see that on the website, and I’ll tell you here on the podcast and on Instagram. But I’m gonna be going to London, and so then I was… I thought I was gonna be moving so much. I was so certain that I bought a plane ticket to London from Tampa. I’d already bought the plane ticket.
But then I’m like, “I’m not… I don’t think I’m going before that.” So I refunded my ticket and changed it, or changed it to just to Atlanta. And that’s fine. Whatever. Th- everything is figureoutable. But there’s nothing that’s saying to me like, “Oh, my God. This is it. This is it.” And if it’s not a hell yes, it’s a I don’t think, I don’t think it’s a yes at all.
So does it mean I’m not going to St. Pete? No. It just means it’s not a hell yes yet, and there’s more to do. I’m gonna throw a, an insane twist into this. I said to my sister the other day, about a week ago, I said, ” sometimes I wanna live in Key West.” I really love Key West. “Sometimes I wanna live in Key West, and sometimes I wanna live in New York City.”
And I think the combination of those two things is California, which again, I keep going back. And I’ve had several people… I was gonna go visit last week, and whatever, plans got changed around. But , I keep thinking if I go there to look, it’s gonna, that’s what it’s gonna be, and, it’s so complicated.
It’s complicated to move that far away for a lot of reasons for me. Could I do it? Yeah, anything. I can do anything I want. And it feels heavy It, does it feel heavy? I wanna make sure I’m saying that right. I wanna make sure I’m being honest with myself. It feels exciting. It feels exciting, and it also feels expensive, and not expensive to live there.
That’s not what I mean. . Moving there feels expensive. Do you know what I mean? Like, to actually move that far away, , there’s a million layers to that. I have done a lot of research. Even just moving your car. Do you know what I mean? Like, how long does it take? Gas price is so heavy, and then all of a sudden you gotta stay at a hotel room all the way acro- like, so then is it easier…
It’s cheaper for me to buy a flight with my cat and have my car transported. So, I mean, I’ve done this work. But then also, with my business, you know? H- what does that look like? So all this to say, I could go down a million rabbit holes. All this to say, the update is that there’s no update. But the update is that I’m asking the universe to make it apparent.
I’m asking the universe to show me the way, and I’m putting it aside. I’m not worrying about it at all. It is a fun adventure that will come my way. And when I think about how I want New York City or Key West, then I think maybe going to, to New York City is a worthwhile adventure to see how my body feels.
And so I’m gonna do that. This weekend I’m going to Vermont for a long weekend, and then in the next few weeks or m- within the next month, I’m gonna go to New York City and see how I feel. And that will be the agenda, just to see what my body says. So that is the update that you didn’t really ask for.
Thanks for letting me share. Okay. So I have gotten a lot of messages lately, and I keep, I keep thinking about them. Lots of times it’s really hard for me to, , reply in a message. Well, like somebody will ask me such a layered, complicated question, , and although I want to, like, swoop in and tell them all my thoughts, it would be way too much to type, and it’s not, an appropriate thing to do if I’m not their coach.
D- do you know what I mean? And so there are some messages that I get that I think about a lot, and I wonder maybe that is something that could be a universal that helps more people, and we could talk about it on the podcast. So I wanna tell you about this kind of thing that people have been writing. And, I’m not gonna tell it to you word for word ’cause- It doesn’t matter, but I’m gonna give it kinda close, because there’s been probably four or five messages like this, but one this morning that I read and I said, “Okay, I’m gonna do, or I’m gonna do a podcast on this.”
And the woman wrote and she said, basically, like, “I’ve been divorced a few times now.” Very chic, okay? I’m adding that part, the very chic. She’s been divorced a few times, and basically now she didn’t know how to tell if somebody is worth her time, like, how to trust her own read on it.
And I feel like I’ve gotten a version of this kind of question more than once in the last little bit, and I think it stuck with me. This morning I read it while I was on my walk, and, uh, , and so here’s what I wanna talk about today. I know for sure That I will never make the same mistakes again in relationships that I have made in the past.
I know it the way that you know your own phone number. And for a really long time, I thought I knew it because I was still angry. So let me explain what I mean. So, , I think that when we decide to leave a relationship that not only doesn’t serve us, but perhaps was damaging to us, it can be really hard to see or understand the depths of that damage when we’re in it.
I believe our brain mutes a lot of it out, because to fully understand it and to see it plainly would overwhelm our nervous systems. And so when I left my relationship, I’m not gonna say which one, I’ll leave that vague- vague. But when I left my relationship, it was in the months that followed that I began to get so clear on how bad it actually was.
And so I spent a lot of time rehashing or framing new decisions I was making or new situations that I was encountering around the old. So I would, you know, I’d lay there, and go back over a conversation, like what I should have said, or, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that happened. Why didn’t I do this thing?”
Right? And I’d run that loop over and over again. Or if I made something in the kitchen and, uh, you know, there was always a joke that I couldn’t cook, which we’ll do a whole episode on that. Um, I ha- I, I started recording a vlog for YouTube, and I’m gonna do it on that, ’cause, ’cause I am changing so many things, and it’s been really fun.
So, but if I would make something and it wouldn’t be that good, or I would burn something, I would loop back in my brain around all the times that I was…, that we joked that I was a terrible cook and, you know, that I should be in the kitchen more, and that’s my place, and that’s my office is the kitchen.
Like, I would, I would go over these things, and so I would frame new experiences around old things. And so if you had asked me, “Why are you doing that?” I don’t think I could have told you, but it just felt like I couldn’t put it down. I would be in the, in the bathroom, and I would be in the shower, and I would think about how I never used to get h- hot showers ’cause the shower would run so long for the previous person.
Like, a million things. It’s like I couldn’t have a original experience without framing it against what had happened. But what I see now was that I was, like, keeping the file open. I was keeping all of it right there in front of me so that I wouldn’t forget.
Because if I forgot, if I let myself soften, if I got fuzzy in the way of memories, then I thought I might miss it next time. Because I was fuzzy when I was in it, right? So I might not see a sign coming. I might not catch a red flag. I might make the same mistakes again. And so my anger constantly being reframed around every freaking thing I did was doing a job.
It was, it was acting like a bodyguard that I hired to stand there at my new front door and make sure that I never got fooled like that again. Now, I don’t think that the anger was wrong. I think it was an important part of my process. I do think it was protecting me, and it was the best tool that I had at the time.
But here’s what changed. What I came to see was that I don’t actually need a bodyguard. Not because some fool couldn’t come walking through the door again The door always needs watching, but because something shifted in me where I recognized that I can watch the door myself, I can trust me, I can listen to myself, and I can, I can lean on me, I can rely on me.
And when that went all the way down, when I really felt that, the anger, it,, it just didn’t even have a job anymore. You know, I did an episode called When a Relationship Deflates. I think that’s really around the time that I noticed, or when I wrote that episode, or when I had the thought for it. It was around the time that I noticed that I wasn’t framing anything around them anymore.
It wasn’t my anger that was keeping me safe. Now it was my growth. It’s my growth that keeps me safe. It’s the version of me who can feel things in her own body, but not talk herself out of it. And I reinforced that with myself over and over and over again on purpose. I’m gonna talk about that. But every time that I listened to me and it worked out, I noticed it.
I, said it out loud. I marked it. I, you know, I would do a little dance in the kitchen and go, “Look at that. I knew, I knew, I knew.” You know what I mean? So I wanna give you some actual examples because this is not a thing that happens like a- I don’t know, like I imagine like a big scene in a movie where I’m like, “Look at this thing,” and now suddenly I’m, I’m cured of this, like rehashing.
I think it happens in a lot of little, teeny, tiny ways, and because I am such a journaler and because I have the podcast, I can kind of like look back and be like, “Oh, I remember that was a moment. When I did that podcast, that meant something,” right? That deflation was like when it finally went away and disappeared, you know, all along the way.
And so if you wanna go back and listen, in episode, 386, it, it’s called… I think it’s called Do You Know Your Truth? And in that episode, I talk about going to The Bahamas, and I was down in The Bahamas, and I went by myself, and I was having a really nice time. I was down there, I, I don’t remember exactly.
If you listen to the episode it’ll tell you, but I think it was a Thursday to a Monday. I had points. The whole trip cost me like 54 bucks. I went down by myself. I had a great time. I got a, like bought a seat at the pool, ’cause you could– there were some pools you could like buy a seat, and I’d ate french fries by the pool.
Like, I ordered out- I ordered like o- e- every food they had on the me– like I just did anything that I wanted. And then on that Sunday morning or maybe even that Saturday afternoon, I thought, “I’m done. I’m ready to go home,” and I didn’t leave till Monday. And when something said in me that it’s time to go home, the old me would have argued with that.
A- and I wanna say, if I was with people, I would have stayed, right? I, like I wasn’t there to… It wasn’t that important, except that I decided in that moment that nobody else was with me. There was no reason for me to stay other than it had been– it was paid for, even with points, like it still was paid for.
And, you know, the old me would’ve been like, “It’s another day at the beach.” Like- Find something fun to do. Just stay. Uh, but I felt it, and my body is an oracle, and I was like, “I don’t wanna be here. Like, I’m just done. I’m not mad. I’m just I’m just done.” And so I trusted that. I packed up and I went home a day early.
Okay? That is one time that was fairly big. So I think this starts to happen in really tiny ways and then in big ways, and I knew even when that was happening, this is an opportunity for me to, uh, create an experience for my brain. Like, I, I thought through it even in the moment. And then, y- you know, a couple weeks ago, I talked about in episode, um, 423, it was my birthday Q&A, and I talked about getting asked out on a date, but something in my whole body was like, “No.”
I was in the shower that morning, and I was angry because they were asking me to, like, drive 40 minutes, and I just it’s… Which there’s nothing wrong with driving 40 minutes. There’s nothing wrong with meeting for lunch. There’s nothing wrong with any of it, but for me, my body was like, “No, no.” Like this, I don’t want this.
This isn’t… I, I don’t know if there was, like, something familiar in it where my body was like, “Oh, we’re not gonna do this again, this thing of meeting for lunch and…” I, I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. I didn’t have to know. I just knew my body was like, “Ugh.” And so instead of overriding it the way that I used to, the way that I had been trained to my whole life, and I could come up with a million reasons.
It’s fair. We’ll just go to lunch. It’s not that far. It’s only 20 minutes more than I wanted to drive each way. It’s the middle of the day, but it’s fine. I work for myself. It’s o- I, I can make my own schedule. It’s fine if I’m not getting done all the things I wanted to get done. It’s fine if I had no intention of meeting somebody for lunch but wanted to go out for cocktails.
Like, it’s fine if I’m not gonna be able to dress up ’cause it’s lunch, when I wanted a different experience. And so instead, I just listened to that, and I trusted the no, and I was like, “No. I, I don’t wanna go.” And good for him because he dodged a bullet with me ’cause I wouldn’t have been I would, I wouldn’t have been in the place where he wanted to be if that’s what he wanted to do.
You know what I mean? Good for him. And there are friendships over the past year where I have put up big boundaries where I never would have had the spine for before, like big, big ones. Uh, one time, I, I… Just the tone in somebody’s voice made me go, “Okay, that made something happen in my body. I did not like how they talked to me, and I won’t do that again with somebody else.”
They’re not a bad person, and I don’t wish any harm on them. But for me, in where I was in my process, it was really important for me not to override myself in big or small ways. And here’s what I want you to know about, about doing that. I think that when you do it enough times, those big and small things, your body and your brain really start to experience the whole world different.
You know? You, you, you start to believe in yourself, right? And once you believe in yourself, you don’t need the anger anymore. You don’t need to keep the file open. You don’t need to reframe every single thing that happens in your life. You don’t need to go out with friends and go, “Oh, I remember when this used to happen.”
You don’t. You can just let it close. So- If you are, like, sitting in it right now, like you’re really trying to figure out whether you wanna stay or you wanna go, because I think, and I’m open to being wrong, but I think probably a lot of you are carrying anger or there’s, there’s anger h- I wanna say like festering.
It’s almost like we can’t let ourselves feel the anger yet, ’cause if we felt all the anger we actually feel, we would explode into the vortex. And so we c- we temper it, you know what I mean? Like, we push it down. We end up getting a lot of resentment. I think that’s easier to, like, I wanna say swallow, but it’s easier to, like, understand or feel.
And so if you’ve been carrying that for years, like somewhere in there you started to think that the answer is the anger. Like, if I can just stay angry enough, ’cause there’s moments where you’re not angry, and then you’re like, “Oh, well maybe I don’t know what to do,” so you think the anger is telling you what to do.
The anger is gonna keep me from going numb for, for talking myself back into it again. Like, if I can keep the anger then I’ll know for sure, even though I’m not making any decisions to leave or to stay. Like, I’m not making a decision to stay. Even if you’re there, you may not really be there, you know what I mean?
And so I’m not telling you to stay and I’m not telling you to go, ’cause that is not my job. That’s not why you’re here. But I wanna offer you this. Your anger isn’t your clarity. Your anger is your bodyguard. It’s like the thing that you hired because somewhere along the way you stopped trusting yourself to catch it on your own.
So the work, the real work, isn’t deciding while you’re furious. Ugh, I know. It would maybe be easier. But your real work is, is building your trust back so that you can put the anger down and make the call, you know, from a steadier place, from a part of you that already knows how she wants this to go And so, you know, women that are writing me that are divorced already one time, two times, three times, telling me that they don’t know anymore how to tell if they’re gonna date somebody new, if it’s worth their time or, or people messaging me asking if they should stay or go, that they’re so resentful and angry they don’t even know what to do.
What I wanna say is, you know, you don’t have to wait until you’re out to start building the scaffolding around you. You know, you build it now in the marriage, in the question. Like, in those regular moments where your body says something and you get to decide whether you listen, right? You get to decide which thing you listen to because that muscle that you build while you’re trying to decide, it’s the same muscle you use later to rebuild your life.
If you decide to stay, it’s the same muscle you use to be able to keep your relationship in a good place. It’s the muscle that lets me say today to myself, “I trust myself completely to make good relationship decisions for the rest of my life.” Friendships, people that work with me, y- you know, uh, r- relationships, romantic relationships, every relationship in my life, I choose well, and if I choose and it stops working for me, I will trust myself to walk out, totally.
And until the choice is obvious, I am completely content to be picky, whether it’s where I live or who I date or any of that, because I know what I’m worthy of. So if you’re sitting there wondering, running, running the file, as I say, going over that same thing one more time so you won’t forget, I want you to know you can loosen your grip on it.
You’re not gonna forget and you don’t need anger to keep you safe. You already have the thing that keeps you safe, and it’s you. It’s the you who maybe you haven’t been listening to, even when you were talking right over her. So you already know. You’ve already… You’ve always known. Now the work is just how do I trust her?
And I think when you have that down, that is how you live a really big life. All right, y’all. If you wanna dive in, we’ve got some calls on our calendar open this week. I think we have a couple left. Um, you can go to my website. Just hit book cook- Just let me s- let me say that again. L- just hit book a call.
Book a call. It’s a free call, but it is intentional for people who are looking to get help with this, and that’s for my program, The Navigate Method. And, you know, this is how you start to walk the path and figure it out. You don’t have to stay, and you don’t have to go. You get to decide in this 10-week experience.
So, 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.
