Have you ever experienced that one life event that completely changes everything? That moment where your life shatters and you’re forced to go deep within yourself to rediscover who you are. How do you navigate such a transformation and come out stronger on the other side?
In this empowering episode, I am joined by Elizabeth Soto-Baez, the founder of Launch Your Life Coaching. Elizabeth is a life coach, women’s empowerment coach, and trauma-informed breathwork facilitator specializing in helping divorced or separated women. With nearly two decades of experience building communication lines between children and families, she now focuses on empowering women to reconnect with themselves and others.
Today, she shares her own story of realizing her marriage was over, the challenges she faced, like financial struggles, loneliness, and finding herself again outside of marriage. She also shares how she helps her clients through similar journeys, using mindset coaching and breathwork to turn grief into empowerment and growth. Listen now and start your journey toward a more empowered life!
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Coming Out Stronger After Life’s Toughest Moments with Elizabeth Soto-Baez
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, I want to talk to you all about something that a lot of us are going to encounter in one form or another in our lives, and that is that one life event that really changes everything, that one life event that really shatters what your life was and forces you to go inside, look a little bit deeper into kind of who you are in order to create what’s new in order to discover yourself on a whole new level. My guest today, Elizabeth Soto-Baez, specializes in helping women going through divorce, which is oftentimes a situation where they have their world that was just completely shattered by this event and suddenly no longer with their partner and need to kind of learn who they are outside the context of their marriage. She is the founder of Launch Your Life Coaching. She is here today to talk to us about her experience with her clients.
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Elizabeth, welcome to the program.
Stephen, thank you so much. I’m excited to be here and to chat with you.
Definitely. And so you started your business based on a personal experience.
I did, I did. So, in 2019, I realized that after 13 and a half years of marriage, it wasn’t working. It hadn’t been working for a really long time. When I got married in my early 20s, I committed to being a married person. I really wanted what the idealized marriage is projected as, a partner, someone you grow with, your best friend, someone that you do all the hard things and all the wonderful things with and celebrate with. And I came from a family background where divorce was prevalent. All of my aunts and uncles had been divorced except for one.
Wow.
Many of them had been divorced more than one time. And I thought, okay, my family doesn’t understand how to do relationships. Cool. I’m going to be better. What I didn’t account for in my own thinking and my commitment to do marriage well was that the person you marry has to also be committed to that.
Yeah.
They also have to want to grow and change and celebrate and work through hard things and be open and that wasn’t the experience that I had. And, in 2019, I had a revelation and I was like, this is not what I thought it was going to be and I’ve done every single thing that I know of to make it good, but if he doesn’t cooperate, whatever that looks like, I’m just dragging myself through the mud. And so I let them know I’m really done, there’s no saving this anymore. We’re all done, and similar to the conversation we’re just having. Then he was ready to go to therapy with me. Then he was ready to talk about what was it, and I thought, I hand wrote you many, many, many letters, go find the letters that I hand wrote you and read them. In all of them, you will see what it was that happened. And so, moving through that, meeting other women who wanted to know about this, so this is where it really like, oh my gosh, I’m not alone in this. Women calling me. “Hey, so I saw you did this thing and I think I might need to get divorced too,” or, “How did you know you needed to be divorced?” or, “Aren’t you scared? What are you gonna do?” And I thought I’m not alone in this.
But it was so eye opening to have people call me when I thought and, in some spaces, I was being criticized for my decision but then also to be celebrated in a sense, like, “I wanna do that,” or, “I wanna know more,” or, “I’m afraid that I need to do that,” and that was kind of the spark for me, like I can support and love on and hold space for women who feel how I feel. And so I dove into some coaching trainings, I got a breath work certification as well so I can use the mindset and the somatic pieces together to really help women find themselves again after they go through this really hard, challenging transition. Even when they’re the ones who ask for it, it is still — there is grief and sadness and deep healing that has to happen.
Oh, for sure. And you said you got married in your early 20s and that’s always an interesting thing to unpack because there was a time historically when that was the norm. I mean, people can even look to Romeo and Juliet which is 17th century and I think the characters were like teenagers, 13, 14 years old, it was considered normal at the time, and, nowadays, that’s considered really young. So, if someone does get married that early in life, do you feel like they’ve never fully explored themselves prior to the marriage? Or is that most common or do you feel like it’s more common, at least in the people that you observed and the women that you work with that people lose themselves, you talk about 13 years’ worth of marriage, you can end up losing yourself, even if you knew who you were before that?
This is a phenomenal question, Stephen. So I think the big, big answer, the super broad stroke in this is it really depends on you. It depends on how you were raised. It depends on your self-worth and your value in yourself, because I know couples that got married very young, late teens, early 20s, didn’t know each other for a long time, like my ex-husband and I dated for a total of 10 months when we got married.
I actually have a thing I tell everybody, I say all four seasons before making a full commitment. You need to know someone in every season of the year.
I love that so much. Thank you for sharing that. I’m going to steal that one. Those couples that I know, they truly love each other. They have done the work to be together and in the hard spaces, in the growth spaces, in the celebratory spaces. Now, I do believe that there is, in our early 20s, we’re still figuring out what we love, what we don’t love, what we want to include, what we don’t. That isn’t to say that you don’t change, so that’s the other piece that I didn’t know going into my marriage, like I’m committed to do this thing but I didn’t realize that I was going to change.
Yep.
I was going to grow. I was going to love things and then decide that I didn’t want those things anymore. I was going to try things and then let some things go and be okay, like that isn’t what I want in my life anymore. I didn’t realize that that was going to happen. And when those things started to happen, there was a rub because he wanted things to just be the same and I was like, “I’m suffocating and you’re not listening.” So, typically, what I recommend now, again, recognizing it’s a broad stroke, but I recommend being in a committed relationship in your 20s is great, also recognizing that you’re growing. That you’re still an individual human even though you’re in a partnership and you still have to pay attention to what you love and what you need and what you’re called to, and that person that you’re with, one of the ways you’re going to know it’s a good fit is if they support you, if they encourage you and you to them. And that wasn’t my experience. Do I say early 20s is a bad time to get married? It might be. And also recognizing what marriage is really about. And I’ve been doing a lot of reading and growing and marriage now is not what it was, like you said, like in the times of Romeo and Juliet. I mean, even 50 years ago, 60 years ago, marriage was a different thing. Women were not allowed to open bank accounts or have credit cards, we couldn’t be financially independent, we had to marry someone to survive, to be a thriving human and society. That is no longer the case. And so recognizing that marriage is something different now. I like the word “partnership” better because it really suggests that you and I are doing life and negotiating and in the ebb and flow and recognizing that things aren’t static and that I’m an individual, even though I’m part of this with you, and those were not things that I understood or that were taught to me while I was married and so when these ebbs and flows and things were happening, I’m like, “Why does this feel so bad?” And it was because I didn’t know it and then-husband wasn’t interested in growing, wasn’t interested in changing or working with me or getting curious about where I was or what I needed in our partnership. It was like, “We’re fine. We’re married now. All is well in the world,” and I’m like, “All is not well in the world.”
Well, and that’s another thing I was going to ask you about is we all kind of grow and it doesn’t even necessarily stop in your 20s, you have experiences in your 30s, your 40s, even your 50s and 60s, that really kind of cause you to change, to reevaluate and stuff, and so is it also important to still kind of on the before the divorce happens part of the story to look to your partner to see if that person has a similar or the same interest in growing as a person because you talk about being married to someone that seemed to just be happy with the way things are and there are some people who are, maybe two people or both “I want things to stay the same” people and they can kind of just roll with it but if you’re a person that’s really interested in personal growth, really interested in exploring, interested in looking like, “This is what my life is like now but how can I make it better? How can I evaluate it? Am I feeling good on the different areas of life? Am I feeling in alignment with what I really feel my purpose is?” If you’re someone that really likes to look into it, to look at your partner and say, “Hey, is this someone that also kind of is working on themselves?” because then they’re more likely to understand and they’re more likely to both support you and also have their own growth mission together?
Yeah, 100 percent you need to check in for that. And I just listened to a book, I guess I haven’t learned that yet. It’s by Shauna Niequist, and one of the things in there is she shared about what her husband was thinking about proposing, he asked a mentor who was like if she’s a grower, then this could really work. And I wish that I had thought about that or there were so many things I didn’t know, Stephen, in my 20s and I didn’t have people to teach me because my family hadn’t had successful partnerships so I didn’t have someone to speak into that for me. But part of finding a good partner is spending time, like you said, be with them for the four seasons, watch what they’re really like, the heart bubble stage, like hearts in your eyes, heart bubbles every time we talk, everything’s amazing, we never argue, oh, my god, it’s so amazing, like that phases out and then you’re in real life.
Yep.
And in the real life space is where you see are you pursuing personal growth? Are you looking to be a better version of you today than you were yesterday? Are you giving yourself grace and space to not be perfect all the time but also to say, “I can’t stay here”? When I got married, this is another thing that I’m like, “Don’t do this.” It was unintentional but it was like the checkboxes of life. I’m a Hispanic girl, I grew up in a Hispanic and like what we would call a minority space and I graduated high school and that was a win, and I got my college degree and that was a win and I’m just checking off these boxes. I got a master’s degree and I was like, “Look at me living life, making it happen,” because that’s what the perception of being successful in life was. School, check, master’s, check, good career that has opportunities for growth so I can make good money, check, and I was like, okay, next checkbox is find your guy, find the person that you want to be with. And so I had unintentionally done these things and I met him and he seemed to be so many of the things that I thought I wanted. Also, if you don’t get past the honeymoon stage, people can seem some way, and then, with time, you begin to see the true colors of who they truly are in the world and what they really are like, because we all have masks and it’s unfortunate and we’re trying to get rid of the masks, but we all have them, and he had some and I missed it within literally weeks of being married, that I was like, “Oh, shit, I think I messed up.” And in that space, so much shame, so much disappointment, so much fear. We just had a wedding, how can I possibly tell people that I think I made a mistake? And so I had to shove it out, like I had to sweep it under the rug, and then this became my mantra, which is unfortunate. Marriage is hard, you have to work. It takes work to have a good marriage. It takes work to have a good marriage, marriage is hard. But at 13 and a half years when I’m still saying, “Marriage is hard, it’s work. You have to work hard,” I’m like, wait a second, where’s the fun? Where’s the joy? Where’s the connection? That isn’t to say there weren’t pockets and I have to be careful of that, there weren’t pockets of like laughter and joy and appreciation. It wasn’t like pure 100 percent darkness and misery. But the overarching space of that was I’m suffocating.
Yeah.
I don’t have room to spread my wings. I’m not allowed to do things. I’m not accepted in my marriage. What is happening? I needed to be done finally, and then, of course, like side note, the first year marriage was misery, like absolute awfulness. And I told my mom, I was like, “Mom, I think I have to get divorced,” and she’s like, “Okay,” and I was like the first year and she’s asking me questions so I’m like, “The first year was so bad, mom, I should have left,” and she’s like, “Why didn’t you?” and I’m like, “How am I supposed to do that? First year, everybody says the first year’s the hardest so I just went with that,” I didn’t listen to my intuition, which is something I talk a lot about in my programs and coaching. I didn’t listen because I had been conditioned to not listen, to outsource and to just, I just need to be a good wife. You need to be better. And that was kind of the road that I chose.
And that’s why it took 13 years for the divorce to actually happen. With that intuition, and this is something that I’ve actually personally been working on as well as see a lot of other people working on as well, what do you think is the source of that conditioning behind where so many people are conditioned to not trust their intuition, because that same 13-year period, if I look back, there’s a lot of things that I had intuition on that I let society’s norms, what I call living by the script, which is what you were talking about with all those checkmarks, kind of override only to suddenly, over time, somehow realize that those intuition was actually spot on, way more spot on than the official narrative that society tells you so where do you think that conditioning that leads so many people to believe that they’re wrong, they’re crazy, that their feeling’s not valid, they’re alone, all these things you’re talking about comes from?
As you’re saying that I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, Stephen, I know every single one of those things that you’re saying right now,” I’m like I felt all of that. The conditioning is, quite frankly, so old. It is generations of conditioning for women, that we are the nurturers and that we are not the breadwinners and our job is to take care of children and take care of the home and be the cook and we’re beginning to shed that but it’s conditioning so it is deep in who we are. If you watch old movies or read books like historical fiction, you’ll see how the female characters are often squashed, like you’re not allowed to feel that or have that or nobody’s going to accept you if you do these things and the women that did step out were often shunned and lived in shame, even though they were living authentically, we can say. It takes a lot of self-love and self-trust to be able to say, “I’m choosing to not live in the expectations that you,” and that could be you family, you religion, you culture, you country, “are putting on me. I’m gonna do this thing that when I checked with my body feels really good to me.”
You have to love yourself so much and you have to trust yourself and those are not things that are readily cultivated in our culture. Share on XThose are actually really, really hard things to cultivate because we’re so conditioned and taught and pushed to take care of everyone else. I mean, even in the recent past, while I was still married, my mom, who is a beautiful human, would be like, “It’s time for dinner, why don’t you go serve your husband?” and I’m like, “Time out, lady, he’s got legs and arms, he is not an invalid. If he wants to eat, he can come and serve the portions that feel good to him, I don’t have to serve him dinner.”
Yeah, so that conditioning was still in her words.
Oh, and I mean, my parents are not married because divorced and when we do events together, she’s gotten better but she would still serve him food even though they are not that married. What are you doing? What is happening?
That’s a bit strange.
It is wild to me, but when you zoom out, when you look at the big picture, there’s a cultural component, so we’re Hispanic and so the women always serve the men, and habit, like this is just what I do, I don’t even know that it’s a story, it’s just what I do.
It takes a lot of self-awareness, self-love, self-trust to begin to step out of what people expect you to do or be. Share on X
That makes sense. And I also want to cover a little bit before we shift gears about kind of the current state of whether we call it marriage, partnerships, because you talk about how it’s evolved from what it was 50 years ago, what it is now, and one of the people who I recently read is a woman named Esther Perel who often talks about the state of our marriages now, we’ve kind of almost developed these partnerships where we expect our partners to be everything and that’s her basic thesis is that we expect our partners to be everything and, therefore, we’re setting a lot of our relationships up for failure because there are naturally always going to be things that you need to look to other people in your life to do. You may have a time period where you and your partner are both very insecure, going through something and you need some outside help or you may have interests that the other person just doesn’t share and that you’re naturally going to do with other people or find other interests but that so many people try to make it out to be like, okay, we’re this couple, we do everything together and we share every interest and that’s not possible. How often do you observe that kind of creating challenges and even breaking marriage that now we’ve gotten out of the, “Okay, you need to serve your husband,” expectation with the new generation but we have that like, “Oh, well, you can’t go do this with another person, especially like another person of the opposite gender, because our partnership is supposed to be this,” when those things are actually quite natural?
It’s like the pendulum swinging and I talk about that, like we have this one thing and then we swing way too far over, expecting that, okay, I’m not going to serve you, now we’re equals, but in that equality, we do all the things, and that is really unrealistic and what I’ve read a lot about and I’ve begun to embody in myself, a future partnership is the idea of separateness in the togetherness. Separateness in the togetherness. We are always still individuals. We are always still us. I am me and the things that I love and who I want to be and you are you. When I’m in a partnership, I get to honor who my partner is and what he may love or enjoy. It is important in my viewing of it to have connections, an intimate enjoyment together of things that you love so you’re living your life together with that human. It’s also actually kind of a requirement in my viewing of it to have things that you do that are not about them, that are not with them, that maybe you do on your own or maybe you have your group, like I have a women’s book club, that is my jam. My partner would not be in that with me. Maybe he would ask me about the book or ask me about how the club is going or ask me and he would be interested and encourage me to be part of that, recognizing that I need sources of connection that are not about him. One of the things that I teach and I talk to all of my clients about is when we’re healing and transitioning and evolving, we need our tribe, we need our people, we need our little bubble of humans that love us in the wonderfulness and in the hardness of it. Your partner is potentially one of those people but not the only person. It’s not possible to rely on them for all the things. That is definitely a recipe for disaster when you put all of that weight on someone else to have to be or do all of these things with you, for you. Even if I just sit here and think if someone did that to me, I would be miserable. And it did happen to me, now that I’m saying this aloud. My ex-husband expected me to bring him happiness and joy, to be all of these things for him and it’s like, man, you need to cultivate that in yourself and when you cultivate it and I cultivate it, then we bring our joy together and then it’s like double joy, but not this whole like you have to be my all and everything and all the time and that sounds exhausting. That’s not sustainable.
And one of the situations you talk about with the women that you work with is someone who needs to discover themselves, right? And it’s like, okay, I’ve been in this partnership and this relationship and I haven’t really figured out who I am outside of that. Now, would cultivating these outside interests in the relationship the way you’ve kind of described, like we’re bringing our joy together but I still have these people, I still have this activity, I still have this thing that doesn’t involve you help kind of safeguard against that particular possible scenario?
Yes, it would, like recognizing that you have these other things and that you are part of these other things and that’s communicated in this partnership.
Even with someone who’s so supportive of you, they’re still hard conversations, they’re still spaces where we have to like work through stuff, but there’s a mutual understanding that I’m still an individual even though I’m in this relationship with you.
Well, and I’ve observed a lot of relationships where there’s kind of this like pendulum swinging almost within the relationship back and forth between that togetherness and separateness, in a way, kind of like in almost every area of life, you’ll have these period of times where you realize, okay, whatever, things got busy, I wasn’t really thinking things through that much and things kind of just moved a little bit too far in one direction and now we need to kind of course correct and so maybe you’ve had a period where you’ve cultivated a bit too much togetherness and you need to go do your separate thing or you’ve had a period where you’ve had some time in your separate interests and you need to kind of reconvene and have more of your kind of joint together activities.
A 100 percent, and I had a friend who had a weekly conversation with her husband and they called it the red dot conversation, which I thought was amazing. So you go to the mall and you find the map and it’s like, the You Are Here dot, it’s red.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And it’s like, “Oh, this is where you are,” and so they would have these red dot conversations and it’s like, “Where are we now in our relationship? How are we doing?” And they had a series of questions that they would ask themselves in these conversations every week and I thought that’s genius, because it’s easy to get lost in life, in the minutia, in the busyness, especially after you have children and tiny humans take up a lot of energy and time and they were committed to these conversations where they could say, “Hey, this is how I feel or this is what this was like for me this week,” and they can course correct on a regular basis because you do get off course, it’s just normal life.
That even works individually, let alone in a relationship.
Oh, 100 percent. We need to have our own red dot, like the individual red dot conversations, like where am I? Where do I want to be? And that’s something that we don’t do and that actually is how a lot of women end up working with me, like I don’t know where I am, I don’t know how I got here, I mean, I sort of do but I kind of don’t, and I don’t know how to get to the next thing. What is the next thing anyway? And so having these conversations with themselves, they’ve never done that. That’s part of how we get together.
Obviously, we’ve talked a bit about what to do in the relationship before it ends but, of course, there are going to be situations, you’ve had one, sounds like a lot of your family has had those situations and the women you work with have had those situations where it’s time to either end it or their partner decides it’s time to end it. What is the typical experience you have with these women? First of all, yeah, why they come to you and what their usual challenges are in kind of navigating that whole emotional self-discovery process?
Yeah, so when I typically get the women, when we meet and end up working together, it’s a few things that they’ve had realizations on that they really don’t know what to do with. One is financially. You come from a joint income household and now you’re single income. Child support somehow is in there if you’re a mom, and it becomes really hard to navigate finances and financial intelligence isn’t something that we’re readily taught. A lot of women struggle with this because they feel ashamed that they don’t know how to manage money or how to track their income or how to make investment. Then retirement becomes like, oh my god, am I going to have money at retirement and it’s like, whoa, hold on, take a deep breath, let’s just talk about right now before we talk about then. Working through how to manage finances is a huge thing and that is like basic needs kind of stuff. They really need to understand how to take care of themselves and their children in a way that doesn’t feel stressful and cause a ton of anxiety or keep them awake at night. And then we talk a lot about loneliness. They were often lonely in their marriage, but now they’re in a new kind of lonely and what does this mean? And am I going to find somebody else? Is there somebody else? Tons of comments on dating in your 30s and 40s come up in that. We laugh about it. but there’s also this fear, like, “Oh, no, what if I’m alone my whole life?” and how do we navigate loneliness and transform that or reframe it to like just empowered singleness. Being alone doesn’t have to be lonely. That doesn’t mean that we won’t occasionally experience some loneliness, but to live in the loneliness, we really need to work through that. And then we talk about what’s next. So what do I do now? Who am I really? Because all this time, I’ve been a wife and a mom and now I’m not a wife, and for many of them, and I’m working hard to get this phrasing out, but they’ll say, “Well, I’m a part-time mom,” and I’m like, time out, you’re never a part-time mom. You’re a mom 100 percent of the time. My children, for example, are not with me right now but I’m still their mom, I’m still mom. And understanding what’s possible in this season. And Launch Your Life Coaching came from the how can you launch in this spot where you are right now? Because we all believe we have this story like, “Well, in my 20s, that’s when I do things. And if I didn’t do it then, hope is all lost for me,” and it’s like, wait, no. Hope is never lost. There’s layers, right? But it’s the money piece, it’s the loneliness piece, and then it’s like, “Well, who am I and what do I do now?” piece.
So, inadvertently, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Yes.
Okay, so what I saw was like kind of going up that hierarchy, like the first thing, because money is kind of the means to which to get that basic bottom layer and that’s what you always have to handle first. If you’re hungry, if you’re thirsty, if you don’t have shelter, you’re going to worry about that before you worry about anything else. Then you get that community, that connection, that worry about loneliness. And then you get into the other pieces that eventually roll up to self-actualization so it seems like what we’re going up that pyramid.
That’s funny because I was gonna say Maslow’s hierarchy and then I was like, well, let me just keep it simple here, Liz, keep it simple, but that is really — that’s really what this is about. Once you feel safe and secure in the super basics, then we can move through how to get to that space where you’re living the life that you want to be living because that is always an option to be working towards. It’s always something that you can access.
And you talk about this idea of a life path, part of living by the script, I believe, that the 20s is when you go out and party and then you’re supposed to get serious when you’re in your 30s. Do you ever encounter clients that have some sort of regret around having never done certain things, say, before getting married, that are usually reserved for that particular portion of life?
I do. So two things come up a lot. One is about money, like, “Ugh, I should have learned this in my 20s and now I’m suffering and I can’t figure this out.” And two is, “I gave up all of those years to this mess and now what am I supposed to do? I’m a mom now. I have to work now. The adult responsibilities, they shroud the possibility that I could still do exciting and wonderful and adventurous things.” In our 20s, the idea is like traveling or potentially single and free, I’m at the bar every Friday night or I’m at all the happy hours, I’m dating all the humans, I’m just doing all these and that’s the perception of adventure. That isn’t necessarily what they want now but the idea of how am I going to have fun and adventure if I have to take care of humans or if I’m not making enough money to just be alive? So those are the two that come up a lot.
There is regret and shame and working on self-forgiveness and self-compassion in those spaces is a big part of what we do together. Share on XSo forgiveness, self-compassion. I talked about at the very beginning of the podcast kind of all the situations that we all can encounter, maybe you’re not a woman, maybe you’re not getting divorced, maybe you’ve never been married but we all are going to at some point encounter that situation that just kind of ruptures your life, maybe it’s the loss of a longtime job, maybe it’s the loss of a parent, confidant, someone that you’re really close with or anything similar to that where you’re going to have to kind of go deep inside yourself and so some of these themes are going to apply similarly to a lot of these other situations and that self-forgiveness, that compassion, I think, is a part where a lot of people stumble. I still regret to this day how I handled high school and then the subsequent three chapters of my life past it to make up for how I handled high school and I will just leave it at that.
I had a conversation with someone recently about the self-forgiveness piece and when I made the decision to end my marriage, I’ll never forget, it was like December 31, 2019, I was in the darkest part of that transition and I’m not like a meditative, prayer, spiritual experience, and in that experience, it occurred to me that I needed to forgive myself and I wasn’t going to be able to move forward until I forgave myself, because, at the end of the day, I can be sad and disappointed about how my ex-husband showed up or didn’t show up but I also was part of that relationship and I didn’t always show up as my best self and I wasn’t amazing all the time either and I had to forgive myself for ignoring my intuition that year. I gave up on myself, really, is what happened. And I realized that if we don’t do the work of forgiving all of those versions of ourselves, it’s going to be really hard to launch and take risks, to do something new and different, because it’s beautiful, there’s a risk when you try something new. What if it doesn’t work out? What if I don’t get the result that I hope? You can’t get there if you are not gracious and loving and compassionate with yourself and that starts with forgiving yourself for how you showed up, for what you didn’t know. We all have those like, man — actually, I was talking to somebody recently, she’s in her 20s and we were talking about what happens in your 20s and 30 is the new 20 and all of these things, and I was like I don’t want to go back to my 20s for sure, unless I can bring all of the things that I’ve learned with me, because there’s wisdom in all of the things that are happening and I understand now that I get to forgive myself and be compassionate to me, and I didn’t have that in those spaces.
And in your journey, so you said December 31, 2019, is when you decided to have the divorce, right?
Well, I decided in May. Actually, this month is like my five years. In December is when I was like, I don’t know, it just — everything crumbled, it was super dark, like that dark night of the soul stuff, it felt like that to me.
Well, way to get it over with before COVID because I think a lot of people a few months later would have their dark night of the soul.
Actually, it’s funny, and I don’t say this very often, but COVID was in service of my healing because I needed to be isolated. I needed to not have the opportunity to mask or to cover up my hurts. I needed to heal. And, sometimes, what we do is we look for ways to avoid our pain and we look for things to distract us and I couldn’t do that in 2020. It was hard and I was exhausted with all the isolation, for sure. Because I had gotten to that place, okay, I can forgive myself, it almost was like the doors opened to, okay, now we’re ready to do this healing work and then the world shut down and I was like, “Oh, my God, I need this isolation.”
Unfortunately, one of the distraction mechanisms that didn’t cut off was excessive screen use, social media, but it did cut off the whole, “I’m gonna keep myself excessively busy, I’m gonna bury myself in my work, I’m gonna go to the bar every night, I’m gonna sleep around until I don’t feel anything anymore,” those typical aspects of it, and so now you’re sitting here five years later and so, five years after that, maybe four years after COVID, after that whole isolation period, how are you feeling now about where you are on your personal journey?
I love my life now. I love that I wake up with this embodied realization that I always have options, that I always have choices of how I want to live and how I want to show up in the world. I love that I’ve learned about reframing challenging experiences and I love that I’ve been able to forgive enough to have a healthy, positive co-parenting relationship with my ex-husband. Like I wouldn’t say we were friends necessarily, that might be too strong of a word, but it is safe and healthy and we parent together really, really well and other than our children don’t live in the same house, they have to move, a lot of things are going really well. That isn’t to say that things aren’t still hard sometimes. As a matter of fact, I am currently in a dip season. I’ve had some personal and professional challenges recently that have been really overwhelming, that kind of remind me of those spaces that I was at in 2019. Except now, I have so many more tools and more understanding and more embodiment of my truth, I trust myself more, that even though it doesn’t feel comfortable, I can still say I’m living my best life because I’m doing the things for me, I’m not numb anymore. I live like a robot, I was on autopilot for everything, and now I make conscious choices about how I’m going to be to take care of myself. And that feels really empowering to be able to do that. Because life is life, right? We’re not going to, you show up and you heal and you make all these beautiful things and you’re like, “Life is perfect now.” No, life is never going to be perfect. Divorce or not, grief and loss, pain and suffering are just part of the human condition, but having the tools, having that embodiment and having that mindset has been in service of me and I’ve been able to really continue to show up, even though it’s been challenging recently.
So, yeah, and I think one of the aspects of life that we all encounter is also those challenging periods. There’s going to be stuff that comes up, whether it be stress at your job, whether it be something going on in the family, whether it be something going on in your closest friends, your social circle, there’s going to be challenges, and so the real question is, first of all, how heavy are those challenges? But also, like you said, what tools you developed to handle it? Have you learned anything from working with your clients? Are there any aspects of that work that’s kind of given you ideas and tools that you’re kind of using now in your personal life?
So I learn from my clients all the time, because we all have wisdom, we all have experiences that have grown us and taught us things and so sitting with these women and having these conversations, I come away with ahas as much as they do, every time, and I love it so much. In terms of tools, I don’t know if I’ve learned a lot of tools from them, mostly because they’re coming to me in that similarly how I was, I didn’t have tools, I didn’t know anything, but what I have learned is once they have the tools and then they make the tools their own, they share with me how they’re using it and I’m like, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” And then I can take that piece and say, “Can I share that with other people because that’s really beautiful?” Because they’ve embodied stuff so now they can take it and make it their own and share it. And I love that. And so there is a space for me to learn from my clients but also learning from their stories and their lives and how they show up in the world and what they’re learning is always enlightening to me too.
One thing I wonder with anyone in that kind of role, including and especially therapists, for that matter, is how seeing and being kind of front row to all this pain and suffering and stuff like that can possibly take away on your own mental health.
Yeah, I definitely have to have a good energetic hygiene practice and movement practice. Some sessions are heavier than others, for sure. So I’m a breath work facilitator and I facilitate breath work but I also use it for myself to help cleanse and shift my energy. I have to do check-ins often when I’m with people, like an internal check-in, like is what’s happening right now in my body mine or theirs? Being able to come up with this intuitive space where I’m like, okay, that wasn’t mine and I get to give it back. And I exercise a lot, like I lift weights, I go on walks, I occasionally run if my knee will let me and that helps me to release some of those energetic pieces so that I’m not carrying other people’s energy, pain. I do a fairly good job of that. There have definitely been a few moments where I’m like, “Oh, I felt that too deep,” and I’ll need to talk to my therapist. But, you’re right, there needs to be intentional practices outside of those coaching containers to not let their energy or their experiences impact me in a negative way. Yeah.
And then of all the advice that you give and all the advice that you’ve kind of provided, little here and there throughout this conversation regarding women going through divorce, how much of it is applicable to kind of any of these situations that we talked about where you had this major disruptive life event and you need to kind of launch or relaunch something? Because it’s possible to think of life as chapters and each chapter is a new launch. You got a new job, you’re launching yourself at that new job. You got married, you’re launching your married life. You have a child, you’re launching your life as a parent. So how many of these are applicable to any of our launches?
I would say all of them. The seam or the storyline might be different but the underlying emotions and experiences are often the same. So you’re getting a new job, there’s some fear, potentially some loneliness, because you’re like, “I don’t have any friends. I’m starting all over. What do I do? How do I get in?” There might be insecurity. “Do I really know what I’m doing? Do I not know what I’m doing?” There can be a disconnection with self. “Should I trust myself in this? Do I talk to my boss about this thing? Can I have friends?” Even with parenting, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it wrong? Can I trust my intuition? Am I too tired for this? Is that what’s happening right now?” So, all of the things that I work on with my clients looking to relaunch their lives after a divorce are the same feelings and experiences that any human, man or woman, is experiencing when we have a significant transition in our lives, a significant shift or, like you said, a new chapter. Everyone is different, all the starting lines are different, and so maybe you already have, let’s say, meditation as a tool in your toolbox. So, good, use it, and, also, here are some other things that we can do. So some of us have some tools, some of us don’t have any tools, some of us need to revamp our tools because the feelings and experiences can overlap significantly.
So your website is launchyourlifecoaching.com. Anyone out there listening, if you’re a woman going through a divorce, need some help navigating kind of all the different aspects of it, from the financial to the companionship to the self-actualization, is that the best way to get a hold of you?
Yes, you can absolutely find me on my website. I’m also an Instagram at launch.your.life.coaching so you can come follow me there and let me know that you heard me on Stephen’s podcast. And I also have a freebie I wanted to give. That’s so funny that you asked about are these things applicable in other transitions, with other types of events. I have a freebie called The Five-Step Blueprint to Launch Your Life After Divorce and I share five pivotal practical ways to kind of recalibrate after divorce, but, really, after any big transition, to recalibrate your life and do these practical things so that you feel like you’re gaining traction again after being thrown off course, so to speak. And I’d love to give that to your listeners, if they’re interested in that five-step blueprint.
Oh, that’s awesome. Will that be found in the website or in the bio in the show notes?
I will give it to you in the show notes.
All right. So you can find the show notes at actions-antidotes.com. It’s where you can find any episode and it’s also where you can search for any episode and we have some categories for you to find whatever it is that you need to listen to today. Elizabeth, I would like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for telling us all about some things that we can really be thinking about any time that we undergo some kind of a life transition but also sharing your personal story because I love the fact that there’s the challenges that so many of us can really relate to but also you found a triumph that recognizes it’s not this Disney story book where it’s happily ever after, there’s still going to be challenges, there’s still going to be another thing that comes up months, weeks, years later, but once you get the tools you need, you can kind of navigate them better.
Yeah, 100 percent. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been wonderful sharing my story and chatting with you today.
And I would like to also thank everyone out there for taking the time out listening today. Hopefully, you’re more fulfilled by kind of learning about a new topic, a new kind of experience in the tapestry of human experiences. Oh, my god, that sounded so clichéd, but you know what I’m talking about. Have a wonderful rest of your day.
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About Elizabeth Soto-Baez
Elizabeth Soto-Baez is a transformational & mastery certified Women’s Empowerment Coach & trauma informed breathwork facilitator. She works with women in their 30’s and 40’s who have lost their identity, self-worth & passion for life. After losing herself in a 13 year marriage, numbing out and moving through life as a robot, Elizabeth now desires to draw women back to themselves. She works alongside them helping build the lines of communication within, igniting self-love so they can show up in the world empowered, pursuing their passions.