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Looks like she made it, look how far she’s come! This episode marks a decade of The Art of Living Big, and in it, Betsy shares 5 things she has learned during that time. Well, let’s say she narrows the many things down to 5 stand outs. She asked me (Joy) to edit some of the ending but as you listen, you will know why I couldn’t. We don’t need to be shielded from emotion, because as we have learned from Betsy, that is where the real connection is made and when we get to see our growth. Speaking of connection, we really hope to see you in Punta Cana in January for the next 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. Okay, so you already saw the title, so you know. This is a really special show, probably not as special to you as it is to me, but we, you and I, have been doing this show for ten years. Ten years. I mean, ten years is a decade.
It’s a whole lot of change. When I started this show, I was in my 40s, early 40s. I had just sold my CrossFit gym. I was married. I owned a house out in the suburbs. I mean, I’ve moved many times. I’ve been to… on lots of trips to many countries, changed a lot , grown a lot. So many things. Ten years of me sitting down with a microphone every week and talking to you.
And I’ve been thinking, you know, about what to say for a couple of weeks now because I wanted this to be something good, you know? Something that was worthy of ten years. And I kept trying to write things out or think about, like, this big anniversary episode, and maybe I would have clips from earlier episodes and, and then I ran into all kinds of issues with that.
And then I thought maybe it’s an episode where I tell you everything that I’ve ever thought that I never said. And then I thought, you know, I’ve gotten a lot of lessons over the last ten years. Lessons about podcasting or life or business or whatever. And when I really, really sat with this, the only thing that I actually wanted to say is, what I’m about to say, and I’m gonna cry probably when I say it but you, you were never abstract to me.
Not once. Not in 10 years. I never sat down to talk, like, to an audience. I’m using air quotes. I ne- I never once pictured a number or a download or a, a abstract person. I, I pictured you. I pictured one person, usually in your car or walking or standing in front of the sink with headphones on because it was the only, you know, 10 minutes that you got to yourself every day.
And there’s so many… I’m gonna cry. There’s so many episodes where I wanted to hold your hand when I talked. You know, I wanted to have coffee with you. I wanted to hear what was really important to you. And so in this episode, I thought maybe the best way to do, a 10-year episode , is to say that and to let you know how important it’s been to me that you’ve been here with me.
And I wanted to share with you some things that I have learned in the last 10 years, and every single one of these things is actually about you. So I’ve got five things. So my first lesson here we go here. You have to start where you can start. So here’s the thing that I think most of you don’t know is that the first 50 or so episodes on this show were me interviewing people.
I just reached out to people I liked, and I interviewed them. That’s all I did. And those episodes don’t even exist anymore. You, you can’t find them. They’re gone. If you went looking right now, and I did, I went to look, the, the archive just starts later after those episodes. And for a long time, I felt kind of embarrassed about that.
Like, oh, well, in the beginning of my show, it did exist, but now it’s just gone. And the sound was bad, and I was interviewing people a lot of it was about business, I think I was interviewing other people because I , did not believe I had anything to say. But that’s not actually what was happening. What was happening is that I started where I was really comfortable. I couldn’t start with my own voice yet. I wasn’t there yet. And so I started with somebody else’s voice because that was the door that opened into this podcast room.
And so I had to do it like that. I had to sit in that chair like 50 times before I could sit in the chair and do it alone. And nobody tells you that the first version of the thing is allowed to be a bridge. It doesn’t have to be the destination. It’s not even supposed to look like the destination.
It’s just supposed to get you up from where you are to where you can see the next step. And so I want you to think about your own life for just a second and where you’re waiting to start until you can start the right way. Because 50 episodes that no longer exist, which is almost a year, that’s the reason this show exists.
That had a bad sound. You could hear me breathing. I used to get feedback from people on iTunes. Like, “I really like her show, but I can’t stand the breathing,” the nervous questions, like the whole thing. That was the tuition that it cost me to get in the room with you And we don’t get to skip that part, and I don’t think I would have wanted to.
It got me so much more comfortable, and it helped me know what I wanted to talk about, and it showed me how much I actually had to share. , It was such a great bridge, and you have that in your life, too. Okay.
Lesson number two is, that I am the worst judge of my own work. Okay. So some of my very, very favorite episodes, the ones that I worked the hardest on, the ones where I thought, “Oh my God, this one is so good,” those are not the ones that you guys really liked. They’re not the ones that you guys wrote to me about.
The ones that you wrote to me about are the ones that I almost didn’t publish. I have episodes where I got up in the middle of the night at, like, 2:00 in the morning and took it off auto-publish for the morning, ’cause you know we post them in the morning on Thursdays. And so I would set it up, and then I would get this, like, feeling of like, “Oh, my God, I don’t know if this is any good.”
Those were the episodes that you loved, right? There have been episodes where I hit record on some random morning. I did… Do you remember I did a series of episodes where I was like, “I have no idea what I’m gonna say. I’m gonna turn on the mic and see what comes through from the divine “? And it was always something good.
It’s when I just said what was actually on my mind, and then I sat there afterwards thinking, like, “I have such a vulnerability hangover. That was too much,” or, “That was too small,” or, “That was something nobody will care about.” And then, you know, four years later, I get a message from a woman who said, “Hey, I just listened to that one, and I sat there in my driveway and I cried.
And then I went inside and said the thing that I’ve been wanting to say.” And she heard that one years later. And so what I have learned is that we are a terrible judge of our own work, right? I bet you are a terrible judge of yours, too. And the thing that you think is unremarkable about you is actually the thing that somebody else really needs.
The part of your story that you’re embarrassed by is the part that makes somebody else feel less alone. You know, we just can’t see ourselves from the from the outside. I, I just don’t think that’s how it works, which is why you have to put the thing out anyway. Like, not because you’re sure, but because you can’t be sure.
And so that is not a real option. We’re never gonna be certain, and you’re never gonna be a good judge because it’s too close to you Okay. All right, lesson three. You’re allowed to change the whole thing. This show is not what you thought it was. In the beginning, it was about all kinds of things, adventure, and business, and mindset, and living big in a big, huge, wide, general, very generic way.
And as my life has changed, the work that I do has changed, and I started spending my days with, with women who were making really big decisions, and eventually women who were sitting inside a marriage trying to figure out whether to stay or whether to go, women who were exhausted from being agreeable.
You know, women who have disappeared, I think, a little bit, you know, a little bit, and a little bit, and a little bit over time, over a lot of years, and they can’t quite trace themselves back to when that started. And so the show got more specific, you know? And I know some people left. They did. When you get specific, some people go, and that is genuinely okay because the women who stayed got something, I think, a little bit better, and they got a show that was actually about them.
And here’s the thing that I want you to take away from that is that you are allowed to change the whole thing. You’re allowed. You’re allowed to be 10 years into something and saying, “Eh, this isn’t it anymore. I’m not gonna keep performing a version of this that used to be true.” That’s not quitting.
That’s paying attention. That’s listening to yourself. That’s moving forward. And I think a lot of times we get confused because we have been taught that consistency means never changing your mind about anything. But consistency isn’t about staying the same. It’s about continuing to show up really honestly, even when being really honest looks different than it did before. I remember how hard it was to say on here that I had finally left my marriage. Do you know if you listened in the very beginning, at the end of every podcast my former husband would say…
I don’t even remember what he would say. It was a clip of him going, “That’s it. Woo. Woo. That’s it.” And I had that clip on there for a lot of episodes. I hated it. I hated that he was part of it even back then, if I’m being honest. And I remember there was something that happened in the world that allowed me to take that off because that felt so frivolous.
Compared to what had happened in the world that I was talking about. And then once I took it off, I couldn’t bring myself to bring it back. And people would ask me about it. People liked it. It was kind of funny. It was his one humorous piece, you know, that he offered to the whole thing. And then I remember when I left the first time, and then when I left finally, and I had to say it on the show, it was hard.
So we’re allowed to change and show up as authentic and real, and to say the things we need to say, ’cause the right people will go, and the right people will stay. All right. My lesson number four, showing up every week is the, like the whole thing. This is the least glamorous one, but I think this one might be the most important, honestly.
You know, through a divorce, through moving several times, selling a house, going to an apartment, going to a different apartment, buying a house, selling a house. I mean, like, all the things. Rebuilding my entire life from the ground up at an age where people told me that the building part was supposed to be over.
You know, through days when I did not really feel like it even a little bit. Days early on when my daughter at the time was sick, and I had to show up and do this show. And I’m not saying that to impress you. Everybody has hard things in their life. But I’m saying it because I think it’s the actual answer to a lot of the questions that you guys ask me.
Women ask me all the time, “How do you build trust with people?” People ask me that all the time, like in entrepreneurial groups, like all kinds of things. “How did you get so many people to trust you, to believe you?” And you just have to keep a promise over and over and over again for a really long time. You have to do it when nobody’s watching, and there’s not any big reward for it.
I remember my first few episodes, I had seventy-nine listens, and I could not believe I had so many people listening. I couldn’t believe it. And then when it got more hundreds and thousands, I couldn’t believe it. And so I was not gonna not show up for those people, even 79 people, even if it was 15 people that were counting on me to show up, didn’t mean I had to talk about the same thing.
It just meant I had to be honest and I had to be consistent. So that’s it. That’s my whole entire strategy. And I think it’s the same in your life, by the way. The trust that you’re trying to rebuild with yourself, it doesn’t come from one big, huge, dramatic decision. That helps, but it comes from all of the small promises that you make to yourself and then you actually keep.
You don’t trust people who tell you the truth once and then do whatever they want. You trust people who tell you the truth, and on the hundredth and fiftieth time, they still are doing it, even though maybe nobody would have noticed if they didn’t. And you get to be that for yourself. Okay, the final lesson.
There’s so many lessons, but the final one for today is the last one, which is the, the big thing that I really wanted to tell you, and everything else was kinda just how I got here. But in 10 years, I have never once t-talked to an audience. I don’t know how to do that, and when people talk about growing a platform or building a following or reaching listeners, I understand that.
I understand that there’s like a, I don’t know, there’s some kinda like concept or strategy to it, but it has nothing to do with what I’ve been doing here. What happens here is that you are not abstract to me. I think about you. I, I think about specific people. I think about who you might be, and if you’ve ever reached out, I think about you.
I, I sometimes think about you years after you’ve reached out to me. I think about what you’re thinking about today, what you’re carrying, what you really wanna say to people. I think about the fact that you’ve probably been holding something for a really long time, and I wanna sit across the table from you, and I wanna buy you a coffee
And I wanna hear what’s actually important to you I don’t-. God, I’m such a baby. I- it’s not the update. I don’t want the summary that you give to people. I really wanna sit with you, and I wanna hear the real thing, you know? And I know I can’t do that with all of you. Oh- although you should come to my retreat.
But I, I know that I can’t do that with everybody, and so I do this instead., I get to be in your ears, and I know… God, I’m such a baby. I’m sorry I keep… Joy, mi- you might wanna delete some of my crying. But I get to sit in your ears, and you’ve told me that we’ve lost weight together, and we’ve made big decisions together, and we’ve decided to leave jobs and take new jobs and decided to have kids, and all the things.
And so the fact that you put me in your ears makes me wanna talk to you in the way that I would if you were right here, and that’s why I don’t do this in a polished way. That’s why I just cry on this show. And that’s why I stumble, and I go backwards, and I tell J- I tell Joy to delete it, but she doesn’t.
Because that’s what it sounds like when a person is actually talking to another person instead of performing on a podcast. And you were never abstract to me, not in year one when I was just doing interviews and not now. Every time that you emailed me or you sent me a DM at midnight and said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but…”
Every time you sat in a parking lot and you didn’t go home yet because there was an episode that wasn’t over, and I felt that, and I know, and I know about those moments, and I have thought about them a lot over the past 10 years. Ah. So, all right. So let’s land this plane. You’ve probably got a version of those 50 missing episodes in your own life, right?
Some stretch of years that you think you’ve wasted, a marriage or a career or, you know, a whole personhood, self that you built for somebody else. And now you look back and you go, “Well, that’s gone. I don’t even know who that person is anymore.” Well, what if that was just the tuition? What if you couldn’t have gotten to the part where you use your own voice without first spending all that time borrowing somebody else’s?
You know, you didn’t waste that time. You were learning. We were in Earth school. And Earth school is hard. And now, here you are at the precipice of the next 10 years, and I hope we can do them together again. Same promise every week. I will still show up here. So, thank you. Thank you for the 10 years, truly.
I don’t take one single week of it for granted. Ugh. And thank you for helping me to live a big life. I love you so much. I’ll see you guys next week
And before I go, I do wanna pop in n- back now that I’ve got my, my wits about me, and tell you that our next retreat is live. It’s in January in Punta Cana. It’s the 21st to the 25th, and we are making you the architect of your own life. You can find details about how to join, but the first 10 people, and I think there’s like five slots left, four slots left, gets VIP, which is like extra coaching with me before the event.
You get a discount, and you get a special VIP swag bag. So you can find the link for the retreat on Instagram in my bio. You can find it on my website, and you can message me, and I will send it to you happily. It’s in my Shop My… It’s everywhere. So think about it. Join us. Make a decision before the end of the month so you can get that discount.
And then I can sit with you in real life, and I don’t have to just pretend I’m having coffee with you. We can have coffee together every morning for five days. Okay. All right, I’ll see you there
Thanks for joining me on The Art of Living Big. I hope today’s episode sparked something within you, maybe pushed you to dream a little bit bigger and live a little larger. Don’t forget to subscribe. Leave us a review and share this podcast with someone you know who might need a little inspiration today.
You can find me over on Instagram at Betsy Pake and on my YouTube channel. Remember, the world is vast. Your potential is endless, and your life, it’s yours to shape. Until next time, keep reaching, keep exploring, and keep living big.
