The Art of Living Big | Subconscious | NLP | Mindset
The Art of Living Big is a weekly podcast designed to help you think differently about what could be possible for your life.
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The Art of Living Big | Subconscious | NLP | Mindset
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The Art of Living Big | Subconscious | NLP | Mindset
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437: 10 Year Anniversary Episode
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Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:39:32 +0000
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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.]]>
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436: What Do I Tell The Kids?
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Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:15:00 +0000
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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.]]>
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435: The Thing You Almost Said
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Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:15:00 +0000
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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 hi