434: 3 Things I Needed to Know to Redesign my Life

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

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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