Transcript: Thanks, Allan. This is David Brower with Your 20 Minute Podcast. Our special guest today is transformational coach, Betsy Pake, from just outside of Atlanta. And Betsy, welcome to the show. How are you?
Betsy Pake: Hey. I’m great. Thanks for having me on.
David Brower: You are absolutely, I’m thrilled to have you here. Just a quick bio and most of your titles are above my pay grade, so we’ll get into what all this means, but Betsy is a Master Neuro Linguistic Programming Coach. She’s a certified emotional freedom technique … she’s certified in emotional freedom technique. Certified hypnotherapist. A nutrition certification. She’s got a degree in psychology. Author of several books, oh my Lord, and man, you are one busy girl.
Betsy Pake: I like to learn. I like to learn stuff, and one thing sort of leads to the other, you know? I guess that’s sort of how the path unfolds. So, yeah.
David Brower: That’s, I agree with that. That’s why I do these podcasts, so that not only we can share some interesting things with folks, but I love learning new stuff and what a great way to do that.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, yeah.
David Brower: So tell me what a transformational coach is and how you got into this magic. And I mean that with high regard, it’s not …
Betsy Pake: I like that, I like being thought of as a little alchemist.
David Brower: Yeah.
Betsy Pake: Well, so many times we want, we reach out. We want coaching or we want some sort of feedback on what we’re doing and I often say to people, that is very much on the behavior level. Like if you think of our New Year’s resolution time. Right? You’ll set a New Year’s resolution. You’ll have ideas of how you’re gonna change your behavior, and you probably have ideas of how you’re gonna change your environment, right?
David Brower: Sure.
Betsy Pake: You’re gonna join a gym and you’re gonna food prep. As your behavior, you’re gonna do these things, but what happens is that it doesn’t last. Right? But I’ve found-
David Brower: Because it’s all about behavior, right?
Betsy Pake: Well, it’s all about what you think you are subconsciously.
David Brower: Okay.
Betsy Pake: So you can’t go against what your subconscious thinks you are, and if you have always been a non-exerciser, and you have always been somebody that yo-yos in your diet, then that’s who you’ll always be unless you change on the unconscious level. So, you know changing your environment and changing your behavior, that’s all really great, and that obviously has to happen, but you have to back it up with change in your subconscious, and that’s what a transformational coach does.
David Brower: That makes all the sense in the world. You don’t have an opportunity to be all in, unless you do the kind of work that you’re talking about.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, I mean it’s really hard to fight against what you think you are, and if you think about it, let’s just say we met an Olympic Athlete, and we went on vacation. And we said to the Olympic Athlete, “We’re going on vacation.” What’s the first thing they’d say? “Well I’m gonna have to find a place to train,” because they are an Olympic Athlete. But if you took like a regular person that started a New Year’s resolution, they’d say, “Well, I’m gonna take a break for the weekend, because I’m going on vacation,” right?
David Brower: Right.
Betsy Pake: But, well who you are at that I am level, whatever comes after when you say, “I am,” you know, I am a mom, I am a all of those things that, little clues as to what is going on in the background.
David Brower: How fascinating. And you change, if I remember what I read right, you help people understand how they think. Is that right?
Betsy Pake: Yeah. So that’s-
David Brower: What does that mean? Is that part of the subconscious conversation?
Betsy Pake: Yeah, you know Neuro Linguistic Programming, NLP is a lot of that. The way that people talk gives me a really good clue into how they’re actually thinking. So, the different words they use. I can tap into that and say, “Ooh, the metaphors you’re using.” Your subconscious works in metaphors.
David Brower: Okay.
Betsy Pake: So, if you’re saying things like, “I just can’t wrap my arms around that.” That’s different then saying like, “I just can’t seem to get a grasp of that.” Or, “I just can’t seem to see what you’re saying.” You see how I use different things.
David Brower: Absolutely.
Betsy Pake: One is my eyes, my vision and one is my senses, my hands. So if I can listen to somebody and understand how they’re thinking, how their brain is processing stuff, then we can begin to manipulate what they want, using how their brain already works.
David Brower: Fascinating, so do they know what they want, or do you help them discover that?
Betsy Pake: Well, some people know what they want, and some people think they know what they want.
David Brower: There you go, that’s where I was going, yeah.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, and so really being able to get to the bottom of, like what that really means. You know, I started out, I used to own a gym, and so I did nutrition coaching.
David Brower: Sure, that’s hand in hand, right?
Betsy Pake: Yeah. The coaching piece that I’m in now. But I realized was that people, you know it so often it wasn’t about what they were actually eating. It was about what they were thinking about what they were eating. “So, I deserve a reward. I worked really hard today. I deserve that glass of wine.” Right?
David Brower: You read my mind or what’s going on here?
Betsy Pake: Yeah. And so it if you can change how you view that glass of wine, then all of a sudden, the choices you make become different.
David Brower: Right, right.
Betsy Pake: So it’s really about breaking down how you’re thinking about stuff, what you’re thinking about stuff, and then reorganizing it so that it actually supports the goals that you have.
David Brower: So, in your bio it says that, the Neuro Linguistic Programming Coach basically designed to impact the three most influential components in the human experience. Neurology, communication, and programming. So, you make all three of those things work together by visiting with people?
Betsy Pake: Yeah. Yeah. And I use some of my hypnosis in there if they’re game for that. That’s a really quick and easy way to access the subconscious, and implant some new thoughts or behaviors. I really like to implant behaviors so if someone says to me like, and I’m using the weight loss thing just because that’s a common thing people can understand.
David Brower: Absolutely.
Betsy Pake: But if someone comes to me, and they say, “I really wanna lose weight,” so that’s different. Like what, do you wanna fit into different clothes? Like you just want the scale to be different? Or do you wanna feel different? What does that really mean to you? What does wearing different clothes mean to you? Does that mean self confidence, does that mean self worth? Does that mean commitment? Like what does that mean? So then I ask them, then I ask, “Well if that means self confidence, describe to me what the actions are, that a person takes who is self confident?”
And I’ll just keep probing and probing til we get a big list, and then I hypnotize them and implant that those are the behaviors that they already have. And it’s remarkable to me how quickly people begin to make changes. They’ll call me the next day, and they’ll say, “I can’t believe, like I’m doing things I never would have done.” Like, “I never would have made my lunch,” or, “I never would have spoken up in a meeting. I never would have done those things, and I found myself compelled to do them.” And so doing the hypnosis is just an easy access into your subconscious, and we can just put whatever we want in there.
David Brower: The probing is fascinating to me, because I think more often than not, when any of us are asked a question, except possibly you because you get it. When most of us are asked a question, it’s what we are thinking at the moment, and it’s not necessarily the truth. It’s what we believe in that second. And then when you ask the follow up questions, “Well, yeah, what I really meant to say was, oh yeah. I’m really thinking about that.” So your probing is fascinating to get down to the core of what they really think, they really believe, and it may be an epiphany to them.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, someone who’s listening may be thinking, “Oh I know some actions that I would wanna take. I know what that would look like. How can I do that?” You know, it is great to have a coach and it is great to have somebody else weed through those things with you, but if you know, you can do it yourself. And I can tell you how. When you go to-
David Brower: Right, you can lead them down the path.
Betsy Pake: Well, I’ll tell you right now. It’s really simple and easy, okay?
David Brower: Okay, yeah.
Betsy Pake: So in the morning, first thing in the morning when you wake up, like before you’re even out of the bed, and at night when you’re just about to fall into sleep, those are the moments where your brain waves are just like they are when you’re in hypnosis. And so if you can create what I call a mind movie, so I’ll create a mind movie of what I would like my next day to be like, or how I would like to behave the next morning. Or, like if it’s a movie, almost like creating a video of yourself doing the things you wanna do, and play that to yourself, when you’re in that state. It actually is either in the same brain wave state and it will start to adhere much more than if you were thinking about it at three o’clock in the afternoon.
David Brower: Makes perfect sense, in fact much to my surprise, as I’m thinking through what you just said, I started doing that a few years ago with gratitude. So, when I go to bed at night, I express my gratitude for what’s gone on in the day and what’s around me and those kinds of things. And when I wake up in the morning, I express my gratitude for where I am in life and what my family means to me and those kinds of things. And then my day is just, it’s filled with gratitude. Everything’s an opportunity to recognize being grateful about something, you know. I’m grateful to be able to take a break from this and go walk my dog. You know what I mean?
And so my life was certainly never like that before, but it has been the last few years, and I didn’t put that piece together until you just said that. It makes all the sense in the world to me.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, yeah you feel it much deeply-
David Brower: Oh, my gosh.
Betsy Pake: … and you probably act on it in a different way, yeah.
David Brower: Yeah, yeah absolutely. And a CPAP machine helps. You know.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, that so, yeah it probably helps your wife too, right?
David Brower: Oh my God, that’s a true story right there. Absolutely right, well said. So your website’s fascinating because people can go on there, learn about the art of living, via listen to your podcast, which you’ve got well over what, 130 of those available right now. You’ve got all kinds of tools for people to check out. You’ve got some free stuff on there for people to really kind of get an insight into who you are, what you do, how you do it. So if they, you know they might be timid about this, right?
Betsy Pake: Yeah, I mean I think that there’s this idea, especially when I say the word hypnosis, there is this idea of like the carnival, you know where they pulled people up and make them dance like a chicken or whatever. And that is, those people that are volunteering to go up and do that are the people that are the life of the party. So they’re the kind that would do that, even if they were not hypnotized. Right?
David Brower: Well, yeah I mean they’re accepting that, because they are the life of the party and they wanna see what happens.
Betsy Pake: Yeah. Yeah and it’s fun and so they release, right? They allow that to happen. But your brain protects you, so you’d never do anything that you’re not okay with doing. So if you’ve ever watched one of those, so if the hypnotist tries to take the glasses off of somebody that needs glasses, they’ll immediately snap out of it. Because their brain goes, “No, no, no. We need glasses to be safe.”
David Brower: Oh, fascinating.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, so I always tell people, don’t see that and think that’s hypnosis, because when you are in hypnosis, all it is, is it feels like you’re about to fall asleep, and you’re totally in control, and it actually feels really good. And when you come out of it, you actually have a lot of energy and you feel really alert and really good. So, it’s not scary or like whack-a-doodle at all. It’s actually really pretty simple, so yeah, so I think that sometimes some of those words scare people, but it’s really a fun process, and you can actually see changes so much quicker that make it extra rewarding.
David Brower: That’s very cool. I’m thinking back to the movies that you mentioned, and that I unknowingly am doing, that I do have more energy, I am more active, my wife, you know I go hike with my wife in Rocky Mountain National Park. I never used to do that. And so it’s fascinating. So just taking the simple steps of creating your own movie to benefit you in some meaningful way, every day and every evening, is a great way to start. And reaching out to you, to learn more specifics about what you can do with people, to help them learn how to think and really develop their own subconscious if you will. That’s fascinating to me.
Betsy Pake: Yeah. You know, my podcast is, episode 100 is just about NLP, with a lot of exercises, and that’s a really good one to start at, if someone’s interested in this. Because it gives you kind of an overview and you get kind of tested out, and you realize that you use these skills all the time probably unknowingly, so when you can just pull it in and harness it and use it for a goal, it works really well.
David Brower: Fascinating. And you can get all this information including access to the podcast, at Betsy Pake, that’s B-E-T-S-Y P-A-K-E, betsypake.com. And you’ve got some of the free stuff, freebies and downloads as you say, there’s a worksheet, there’s a Live Big challenge, there’s an Induction Only, there’s Cord Cutting Meditation. All kinds of things on there to pique people’s interest and go, “Hmm, I think I need to talk to Betsy about this, because it didn’t make sense to me.”
Betsy Pake: Yeah, you know that Induction Only thing you can download, that was from a podcast that I did. But that you can actually download. That will hypnotize you. And then you can just play the movie that you have in your head. So you could do it like at your lunch break or something.
David Brower: Oh, my gosh. Well, I’m on that. That’ll take the place of my afternoon nap.
Betsy Pake: Yeah. See.
David Brower: Now you have some books out there too. Let’s talk about those. What books do you have out there and where can people get them?
Betsy Pake: Yeah, you can find my books on Amazon. One of them is called Become a Nutrition Ninja. I wrote that several years ago, when I was a competitive Olympic style lifter, and it’s my diet for how I would diet to compete. And then most recently, I wrote a book called Start Small, Live Big. And that’s really a process of, you know you see people and you think, “Oh my gosh, how’d they get there? Like they’re so great, how did they get to be so great?” But you don’t realize that really it was tons of small steps. So this book kind of helps you break down your life, and how you can move forward on goals you have, and maybe goals you’ve had for a long, long time, but they’ve alluded you because you’ve been chunking them into two big of components. So, it helps you break it down.
David Brower: Boy that’s the true, huh? Learning how to keep things simple is gotta be a challenge for most of us.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, yeah. And people’s lives are so busy, right? And we wanna see results, and we get discouraged because things can be hard. If you go onto my website under that tools with the freebies, there’s something called the Chase worksheet, and it describes, if you download that, it’ll actually tell you how to use it. That the kind of the component in the book that I talk about. But this worksheet is so simple, but it’s bananas how good it is. But it basically helps you take a goal and break it down, and see it in a totally different way. I had somebody that downloaded it the other day, and they messaged me, they emailed me and said, “Oh my gosh, this worksheet is bananas.” And I especially like it when people describe things as bananas. So I was like, “Ooh, that’s good.”
David Brower: Well yeah. Anything that’s described with food, I’m all in. You know?
Betsy Pake: Yeah, right. Exactly.
David Brower: How fascinating. And the book again is Start Small Live Big: Thrive Through Change to Live the Life of Your Dreams. Change is a struggle for a lot of people. How do you work through that? How do you work through that, with the hypnosis?
Betsy Pake: Well, our brains are designed to not have us changed. We’re actually biologically created so that we find a way that we can stay alive, and then we do not want to deviate from it. And when we deviate from it, our brains will do a lot of things to try to stop us. And most of the time, we’re not aware of it. And so we just, we go, “Oh, well that felt weird, I’m not gonna do that anymore.” Or you know, “That seems scary, I shouldn’t speak up in the meeting,” or whatever it is. And so, one way is breaking it down, using that Chase worksheet. But I think the easiest thing and the thing that people can do right away, is start to become aware.
Many times, most of the time, I think people are working through their life, just on default. It’s whatever happens, happens. But when you can start to become aware. Like I walk in, I grab a bag of potato chips. It’s why? Why did I just do that? What was the image that flashed in my head, right before I decided I wanted those potato chips? So, when you can start to become just aware of why you’re doing things. The patterns will automatically begin to shift.
David Brower: And I’m a little weird because I love change. I embrace change.
Betsy Pake: Yes, I do too. I do too, yeah.
David Brower: I drive my wife crazy because she’s anything but change. And so, it’s fascinating when you get into conversations about that, because it’s just like, “Well, yeah. Let’s go do that.” And fortunately she’s the practical one.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, I like adventure, and, well that’s probably why you work well, right?
David Brower: Yeah. Absolutely. Oh my God.
Betsy Pake: So it’s nice to have somebody that’s practical and someone that’s spontaneous.
David Brower: Yeah, practical and way out there. That would kind of describe our marriage.
Betsy Pake: Bananas?
David Brower: Bananas. I like that. I’m seeing T shirts. Folks this has been Betsy Pake. It’s betsypake P-A-K-E.com. A lot of free stuff on there. Check out the books, check out the worksheet. Check out podcast number 100, and just spend some time with Betsy on this website. You’ll be fascinated by what you learn, by what you’re able to pick up, much more easily than you could even imagine. And then reach out, you know reach out to Betsy. There’s lots of ways to reach her on the website, and hopefully we’ve touched a little bit of a nerve in somebody, and they’ll be able to be transformed, thanks to your abilities. So, nice job. Really loved talking with you today. It was great.
Betsy Pake: Yeah, thank you so much for having me on.
Allan Blackwell: Your 20 Minute Podcast with David Brower has been brought to you by Audible. You can listen to any of David’s Podcasts anywhere podcasts can be found, including iHeart Radio, the Spotify mobile app, and the davidbrowervo.com/your20minutepodcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.