Live Your BIG Life with Betsy Pake (Video)

You’ve got work, family, commitments … where would you even find the time for dreaming?

Surely adult life is about sacrifice and making realistic choices, not fantasizing about roads not taken.

If that’s you, then this YBTV interview is about to change your mind.

Life coach Betsy Pake, author of Start Small Live Big, wants you to see that your “Big Life”—the life you’ve always dreamed of—is more accessible than you realize.

With the courage to take small steps in the right direction, you’ll be amazed at how far you can go.

Get your free C.H.A.S.E. worksheet

What You’ll Learn

When you start to become aware is when everything can change for you.”

Betsy Pake noticed something.

She would see “people talking and saying things that constantly undermined where they really wanted to go … and they wouldn’t even recognize it.”

As a life coach, it was her job to help people get to where they wanted to go. She’d experienced professional success in her own life, through years in corporate America and a stint as an owner of a CrossFit gym, and now she wanted to help others achieve their dreams.

People have this unlimited, vast amount of power that they shove to the side and say, ‘The life I have right now is all that’s here for me.'”

So what sorts of things was she hearing?

She was hearing the kinds of things you’ve probably said yourself.

Have you ever scrolled through your social media feed and envied pictures of someone’s else life? Maybe you thought, “That must be nice.”

It’s a completely normal reaction. But it pushes away the possibility of having that kind of life for yourself.

Betsy explains, “That is your brain saying, ‘That’s good for somebody else, but I’m not good enough to have that.'”

When you see examples of the kind of life you really want, but you tell yourself that you can’t have that, you block yourself from reaching for your dreams.

It’s those little things you say to yourself that tell your brain, which creates a chemical reaction in your body, which manifests in the things you do.”

We stop ourselves from dreaming of a bigger, better life for a reason:

It’s terrifying to contemplate stepping into something big.

“Our brains are actually built to stop us from doing anything,” Betsy explains. “Our brains want to do every single thing exactly the way we did the day before.”

Not to mention the fact that our dreams can feel so big and so far away that we haven’t a clue about where we’d start.

“Our brains want to stop us from doing something different,” Betsy says. “And so, in order to tiptoe past that part of our brain, we need to do something really small. And if we can start doing small things, we can start to push that threshold.”

That’s why she developed the C.H.A.S.E. Framework, “a process to break down a big idea into 5-minute actions.”

(You can download Betsy’s free C.H.A.S.E. worksheet here.)

To see how this process works, take a dream you’ve always had—like going on that amazing vacation. What is  preventing you from doing it?

Chances are, you’ve gone over this line of thought many times. You can’t do it because you don’t have the money, can’t get the time off, don’t have someone to travel with, etc.

But Betsy urge you to ask yourself a different question:

“How could that happen?”

Make a list of all the possible ways you could achieve your dream vacation, even if they’re extremely unlikely. “That opens up a whole new realm of possibility,” she explains. You’re starting to think about how it could be possible, rather than dismissing the possibility entirely.

Then look at your list and ask yourself: “What could I take action on RIGHT NOW?” Does anything jump out at you?

Betsy recommends The 5 Second Rule by Mel Robbins for more inspiration on the importance of taking small, aligned steps in the direction of your dreams.

When you start small, it helps you get over the part of you that doesn’t really want to try. What if you fail? What if your life has to change? What if you get your dream but it’s not as good as you imagined?

But maybe that’s not your problem.

Maybe you don’t even know what you want. Or you have lots of things that you want, but nothing you want badly enough.

That’s okay, Betsy says. Your dreams change as you do. An easy way to spot positive changes you’d like to make in your life is by noticing what your problems are. What don’t you like about your life? How could you change that?

We have this idea that problems are bad, but you will always have a problem. You want a different problem … and you don’t get different problems unless you’re doing something a little bit different.”

Along with personalized coaching, Betsy offers several programs to help you achieve the life you want. Her Infinite Soul Project is an online course that helps people identify “what their beliefs are, how it affects their life, and how they can start to change it.”

Betsy’s “60 Days of Transformation” is an 8-week online group coaching program that helps participants hone in on one specific goal and take steps to achieve it with the support of a community behind them.

If nothing else, Betsy urges you to stop dismissing your dreams. When you see something you’d love to do or have, don’t tell yourself it’s not possible and forget about it. Ask yourself, “What if it were possible?”

And then do something about it.

Jump to Topics of Interest

2:23 Betsy’s personal mission
3:32 The things we tell ourselves that keep us from reaching for our Big Life
4:41 The repetitive nature of our thoughts
5:58 Breaking down a big idea into small actionable steps: The C.H.A.S.E. Framework
7:17 How you could use this framework to go on the vacation of your dreams
10:27 How this is different from The Secret/Law of Attraction
11:51 How to overcome resistance to making those changes in your life
13:40 What if you don’t know what your Big Life would even look like?
15:09 Infinite Soul Project
15:44 60 Days of Transformation
16:26 Importance of having support
17:20 When you’re struggling, that’s the time to take your first step towards your Big Life