Each Friday, a person who is making bold moves, living well, nurturing their creativity, following their passions, and making magic will be featured on Bold Living Today.
Today’s interview is with the warm, perceptive, big hearted Betsy Pearson. She is my kindred sister in the land of multigenerational living and she also appreciates a tasty – yet obscure – cupcake like yours truly.
Betsy is writer and coach who aligns nature with the ups and downs of daily living. Her coaching style connects the mind and body in a way that allows clients to identify and actualize their natural flow. What I love most about Betsy is her energy and laughter. She’s always up for a wacky project – even when I contact her at the last minute – and has defined bold living on her own terms.
Listen up to the gems Betsy shares in this interview.
question 1:
You talk about tapping into your incorruptible internal compass to navigate anything – even chaos. Tell us more about this.
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{Betsy}
First let me disclose that I’m a big fan of chaos! You know how the inviolable Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that every happening – including anything we do – always and only goes in a direction that increases entropy/chaos. Well my theory is that IF the universe somehow makes sense, AND the universe is basically a giant chaos generator, THEN maybe chaos has value.
Optimistic, yes?! And not that hard to believe — entropy is nothing more than disorder, and we’ve all survived a bit of that. In fact, scientists are finding examples of disorder being followed by levels of order greater than what existed before the disorder. That’s definitely been the case in my own life… BUT only when I’ve followed bodily sensations of freedom into and through that chaos.
I’ve learned that 1) our inner essential selves communicate through our bodies, 2) our bodies never lie (hence the efficacy of lie detectors), and 3) our internal compasses always point toward what feels free. And guess what: one way of describing entropy is as “higher degrees of freedom.” Isn’t that beautiful?
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{Kanesha}
Totally beautiful and such a nice reframing.
question 2:
You use life lessons from rivers as you coach your clients. How can someone use your “What Stream Type Are You” quiz to change course – and move closer to living a bold life?
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{Betsy}
I believe moving closer to living a bold life requires being ever more authentically YOU. The “What Stream Type Are You?” quiz is a fun way to metaphorically “see” and appreciate your own shape, dynamics, and beauty. And to remember that we change our forms many times during one life.
Of course, any kind of stream can get thrown off balance and start eroding or clogging up. “Restoration” may indeed require changing course or even stream type, but it depends on what’s happening. On my like-a-river.com blog, I’m having a blast translating different river restoration techniques into life coaching tools. I try to categorize each post by stream type and also link it to the appropriate stream type’s profile on my website so people can find topics most relevant to them. My book (see Q#4 below!) will make it easier to glean specific tips.
I always kind of had you pegged as a “D-a” type, Kanesha – as I described in a post about the immensely stable, calm, lush, but many-many channeled Saskatchewan River. Does that feel right, or are you finding yourself moving faster than that?
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{Kanesha}
Betsy, I think your “river description” of me is spot on. I am calm and I want to move fast all the time. I pretty much want to do everything at the same time – but my stable and calm thinking slows me down. You would crack up if you heard my inner dialogue. I mean – I laugh at myself all the time. Freaks my kids out a little.
question 3:
Your life plan worksheets are powerful to help people merge creative and practical solutions to find their way. Tell us what inspired you to create these amazing tools.
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{Betsy}
Well thank you – and funny you should ask! If you look back at my life coaching website, betsypearsonlifecoach.com, you’ll see I created these worksheets during our first week of the summer book-club-blog-hop that you founded (“On the Same Page”). I had just been blown away by yet another of your custom tools, by how it can be so clarifying to see ideas laid out graphically. So in fact I was inspired by YOU (unbeknownst to you) to create a hybrid tool combining the six main principles I’d been using with my clients. I wanted them to experience how some backward fun really can work better than straightforward goals:
Start at the end, with how you want to FEEL.
Really, really unpack the situations that create your ideal feeling. Find the basic situational elements.
Our bodies will unerringly guide us towards the right elements and our ideal feeling via clear physical sensations.
Infuse your ideal elements into your life now. Combine the elements in weird and wonderful ways if you want.
Keep track of what counts — not traditional milestones/goals but the little elements. [This “keeping track” – even with informal marks on the wall calendar – can be so powerful. Each tally mark’s a celebration.]
Only do and track TINY wonderful elements. Small steps won’t trigger those “oh no, change is bad!” alarms we all have inside our heads, but they WILL create your ideal feeling state and thereby energize you for more and more steps toward some traditional “goal.” Meanwhile, and more importantly, you’ve already achieved what you wanted – that feeling. You’re always done. And you never want to stop.
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{Kanesha}
Awww…thanks for that, Betsy. Sometimes I want to yell, “Is anybody out there???” when I create and publish worksheets and tools. But then I remind myself how much fun I have creating and that if I help one person, then it’s totally worth it. Based on inspiring you to make your worksheets, I’m giving myself a gold star today!
question 4:
What projects do you have coming up?
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{Betsy}
I’m working on a river-as-life-coach book. So right now, for me, boldness looks like holing up with my computer and a lot of truffles and oranges.
[PS, KLB -- Tell me which of these words does NOT apply to those shiny gold bags of Costco truffles!]
[PPS , KLB—See what I did there ? Hyphenated words counting as one? Mwah ha ha!!!]
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{Kanesha}
So fun and bold living enthusiasts always bend the rules. Thanks so much, Betsy!
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More about Betsy:
Betsy enjoys finding ways to mix and match life coaching, engineering, anthropology, parenting, yoga, and stream restoration. She lives in northern Wyoming with her family.
question 1:
