Unleashing Your Inner Light With Pati Hoyt

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Meet Pati Hoyt, a Strategic Coach on a mission to guide business owners in uncovering and conquering what holds them back from the extraordinary success they deserve.

Pati's passion is illuminating the inner light within each of us. She believes that by recognizing this brilliance, we gain the empowerment to chase our dreams and cultivate happiness from the inside out. As the host of the "The Art of Being Podcast”, Pati shares wisdom that's sure to inspire and uplift.

Pati's own journey beautifully illustrates the power of embracing our feelings. Like many, she learned to tuck her emotions away, leading to a struggle with chronic physical pain. Through her experience, she discovered the importance of acknowledging and processing emotions.

Join us in this powerful conversation as we delve into the profound impact of embracing your true self and unleashing your inner light. To connect with Pati, visit her website https://www.patihoyt.com/

Watch Pati's Story

Transcript

Jennifer: Welcome to the I Don’t Give a Should Show – a podcast exploring ALL the ways that women SHOULD all over themselves. How many times do you find yourself acting out of obligation or doing what everyone ELSE expects from you without stopping to consider why? Where do all those beliefs that are driving you come from? If you’re tired of feeling resentful, overwhelmed, stuck, exhausted or pissed off you’re in the right place.

Shoulding all over yourself is a real thing, but it doesn’t have to be in the driver’s seat.

I’m your host Jen Sherwood, and I spent waaaaay too many years trying to prove that I was good enough and worrying what other people thought while avoiding conflict at all costs. Today, I don’t give a should – well not as many anyway and neither should you. I’m talking to women like you who figured out how to stop shoulding and start LIVING.

Today, my guest is Pati Hoyt - as a Strategic Coach Pati helps business owners go inward, uncover and overcome what is holding them back from achieving even greater success and go after their true dreams. She is passionate about guiding people to see and feel the light inside of them. They can feel empowered to pursue their dreams and be happier from the inside out. She's also the host of the podcast, the art of being you can find that wherever you find your podcast.

Pati, thank you so much for being here today. Welcome - thanks for joining me.

Pati:

Thank you for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here with you. I admire you, and oh, with you?

Jennifer:

The feeling is so mutual and clearly because before we hit record, we know we can both talk about the shoulds. I'm so happy you're here, so let's just dive right in.

So Pati, let's talk about it - what was it like for you when you were living under the shoulds?

Pati:

A lot of suffering, a lot of pressure.

That should re-create so much pressure in my life and that started very young, I grew up with a lot of brothers in my house, and each one of them had a lot of issues. My mom had her hands full, and for some reason, as a little girl, my head was like, you should be the good one.

You should be a good girl, you should not bring any issues to your mother, she has her hands full. I decided to be that good girl and not bring anything. What happened is then I kept all my feelings inside of me and I’d put so much pressure on myself and I grew up like that.

Jennifer:

Oh, I can imagine there are so many heads nodding as people are listening to this. This is not so uncommon, particularly girls take that on it. I think there's that societal message about we are caregivers, and we don't want to rock the boat. We want to make things easier, and so this makes so much sense to me.

You're the only girl in the family, right?

Pati:

I'm the only girl in the family, and I want to take care of everybody.

I wanted to make sure that they were not suffering.I put pressure on myself, nobody else put that pressure on me. Not only I'm not going to bring issues to my mom to add to her load and I'm also going to help solve everybody's problem.

Jennifer:

Yeah.

You're going to fix everything and everybody can depend on you but that's a lot of waiting for a young girl and then eventually an adult woman to carry.

I'm curious Pati, as you're navigating this as you're growing up, how so you said there was a lot of pain, maybe you can talk a little bit more about how you felt?

Then how would you say this affected your decision so you don't want to be a burden to your mom, you don't want to bring issues to her. You don't want to make anything harder because your brothers are taking all of what she has. It sounds like so, talk a little bit about how you felt and how this impacted what you did.

Pati:

It impacted my entire life in the journey of my life.

One of the things that happened is since I kept my feelings inside right I couldn't express any of my feelings: sadness, anger, nothing. I put it inside and kept it inside, and what happened was I started having physical pain.

I developed this as a growing up teenager into a young adult. I developed this chronic physical pain, pain would show up anywhere in my body and one day it was my shoulders and my back one day was my hand it was crazy and no doctors could identify what happened, what was going on. I learned how to keep my feelings inside.

Let's not feel the feelings because it's not safe. The message that I received, you know, I read the story that I had in my head. I should just keep this feeling because it's not safe. and it really affected my life and that affect the physical pain, chronic pain, affected my work affected my my personal life like I was limited to I want to go hiking love nature love being outside a love, enjoying life and going dancing in this, I love those things. I was limited on how much I could do because of my physical pain and working sitting all day in the chair. It really, I needed to go in the bathroom sometimes and cry with my pain and put myself together and come back to my desk. I'm like, okay, nothing happens, so let's keep on working so it affects my entire life.

Jennifer:

It's amazing to me, what the mind can do to the body, and how holding that stress and never letting it out. All the effort it takes to keep those emotions clamped down, that it's coming out in this physical pain.

It doesn't surprise me for a minute that the doctors couldn't figure out what was going on with you. It's also interesting that no one thought to ask you about your emotional or mental well being, although I don't know if they had. I don't know if you would have been open to talking about it at that time, do you think?

Pati:

Eventually, one of my physicians, I had been seeing for 10 years and every year, I would complain a little bit about my pain because I even didn't want to tell him all my pain because I thought he was going to think I'm crazy.

I have all of this pain because I have heard from some of the specialists like you're too young. You don't have anything else like I don't care if I'm too young ,I'm feeling this pain.

Jennifer:

Yes.

Oh my gosh, to be dismissed like that, that's terrible. Here, you're actually trying to figure out what's going on and you're being told, man, you can't have that.

Pati:

Yeah, you're too young, you can not have that.

Eventually after seeing my physician for 10 years, I remember exactly like it was yesterday, doing my annual checkup at the end of the year and all my blood tests are amazing, you know, and he's giving me like stars.

He closed my chart and back then was like paper.

Jennifer:

For the youngsters listening, there used to be charts that were actually paper.

Pati:

He asked like, do you have anything, any complaints and I was like, well, doctor, you know, I still have some physical pains, always minimizing my pain and he started going through all the pages of those 10 years as I was talking to him.

After I finished, he closed the charts again and said, I'm gonna tell you something that most of my patients when I say this, they ignore it. They don't do what I tell them to do and I was like, oh my god, what is it? Yeah, you're worried at this point? Like, oh, my god, what is it?

He said, you have depression and I was like, what do you mean, I'm the most positive person, my slogan is enjoying life, I'm not crying, I'm always positive, I'm always smiling, what are you talking about. Depression does not manifest only in crying on the bed and not being able to get up and being sad. The pressure can also manifest in the physical pain and I was like, whoa, my mind was blown. I was like, what 's crazy? What can I do - tell me what to do so we can fix this.

I think holding those feelings inside and having that pressure is just saying just shuffling down those feelings. Having to deal with that pain 24/7 and holding myself up to function in our world - it created depression and then they became a cycle. The more pain I had, the more depression I had and what depression I had, the more physical pain would show up and then became this crazy cycle.

I went to a psychiatrist and I went to an amazing psychologist that did a fantastic job talking about the mind. What he did with me was cognitive behavioral therapy. He went through what my thoughts were, and he gave me one exercise that I needed to write down every single thought that I have throughout the day. I saw some negative thoughts there and that I would I was not aware.

Jennifer:

I love that exercise.

I love that so much and when you might do that just kind of work with your clients as well but I love when I assign that to my clients, and then they come back and they're shocked. They're almost horrified when they see it on paper like they don't you just those thoughts just run on this quiet loop in the back of our minds.

We're not consciously aware of it but you and I both know, the subconscious is fully aware of it. So when you bring those to the light, and you see like, oh my god, this is the dialogue I've been sitting in, it's shocking. I love what you said about this, this cycle of the body being you know, the depression, and then the pain, as you were saying this, I was thinking to myself, at some point, our mind and body says, enough, enough, enough, we're gonna we're gonna get your attention one way or another.

Yours just decided we're gonna go back between this physical pain and emotional pain and back and forth and back and forth until it's, you know, sort of beating you over the head with a stick, like, come on, Pati, pay attention to us. It's so fascinating to me that you were in enough pain that you would go hide in the bathroom at work and try to, like, get yourself together. Yet, you were minimizing your pain to your doctor so thank goodness, he picked up enough on the pieces to put it all together because it sounds like once he said that to you, you were like, okay, let's do it and that's when you started taking action.

Pati:

Yes, that's when I started taking that action, that's I in that, how I really started my journey of really getting to know myself from inside, right inside and be able to allow myself to go inwards, which before that was not safe to go inward.

We are not getting connected with the heart, we are not getting connected feelings. I started this journey to go inward and really understand myself and that's when I really started my personal development, personal growth by they're getting to know me and yeah, I love and of course, that throughout the life, you know, I went, I got better, but throughout the life, I could see my pain coming back.

I started seeing that my pain became my physical pain became a thermometer for what was going on in my life at that moment. I was like, oh, the pain is here so what's going on, is there something that I am doing that is not in alignment? Is there a job that I'm doing that I'm just forcing? Am I not listening to my heart? You know, it became a thermometer, and I became very good at overcoming the pain because I'd stop listening to the pain to listen to my heart. Listen to where we are getting the alignments again. Before, I didn't even know what was getting aligned.

Jennifer:

Well, you know what, I was just thinking, as you said that I know what you mean but do you want to describe what you mean by that? What does it mean to you just for our listeners who may not be familiar with that? What does it mean to live in alignment?

Pati:

I was let's say let's go back a little bit.

I designed what I noticed my body was one thing, and the thing that I rejected because I saw it as a defective thing. My mind was a different thing. And my spirits at the time did not exist. Or so you thought like what is that you know, so it completely it was a three parts of me that was not in touch with one another. When I started doing this work, what I realized a big my body I became really aware of my body and I sat with my body and I was able to sit with my body and be even if it was painful, I sat with my pain even if I was in the middle of a crisis, right an episode I sat there and I got in touch with my body because I realized our physical bodies such a intelligent system that I had to ignore for most of my life.

Now I can get clues from my body and then I got in touch with my heart and then my mind like we were just talking about the subconscious I became so much more aware. What was the tape? Yeah, like an old person like the tape running in the background, right? So what is like playing the background of my mind that I bring to the front, and be conscious about higher walls and then connect it to my spirit. Once I had all of those three parts really connected and speaking to one another, that's what I became relaxed, I became peaceful. I started feeling joy and it was just telling myself that Joy from Inside Out now from outside sources, right, let's go out and this oh, I'm I'm being I'm having fun over there that is outside things like how can I feel joy from inside.

That's what happens when I have all those three parts of me connected and speaking to one another, I start filling all of those things.

Jennifer:

I love this, I think so many people live from the neck up so we just live in our heads. We try to think our way through things and we don't really realize, I don't think it's a common language for most people growing up that there is inflammation in your body and this crucial piece like you're saying of reconnecting all these parts of yourself.

I imagine once you reconnected, then maybe when you found yourself out of alignment, you can tell me if I'm in the ballpark here. I would imagine you would find yourself out of alignment when you're back doing what you thought you should, or things that didn't feed you in the way that you wanted to or that is that is that.

When you're out of alignment now, is that what it looks like?

Pati:

100%

I used to do a job before I became a life coach. I got trained to do the sales job and there were so many shoulds, right, I follow the best salesperson in the company. I was like, I should be like him, I should do what he's doing, I should do what she's doing, and what they were doing.

It was not good for me and for the person that I am and the more I try, I should do this, I'm going to do that, because that's how I'm going to be successful. When I was there, and the pain would show up, pain would show up immediately. It is when I was in the shoulds, and I was forcing something that was not good for me.

Jennifer:

It may be that people are listening, maybe they don't have the physical pain like you had, but I think once we start reconnecting at least the mind and body, we've got to get the spirit in there too. When we start listening, there are so many clues in our body that we've just been pushing down and ignoring.

I just want to offer anyone who's listening, start paying attention to when something just doesn't feel right in your body, that physical pain can be telling you something, but then you can reverse engineer that too. If you're not in such a great headspace, if you're not in a good mood, what's going on? Start tapping in both directions to figure it out. This place of alignment that Pati is talking about, it's being real and true to yourself.

You don't have to be a coach, you don't have to be a yoga teacher, you don't have to be a meditation guru, you can just be like, you know, a normal person, average everyday person, but who is listening to their body and paying attention to their physical pain, their emotional pain, and what clues that's giving to us.

Would you say that's true?

Pati:

That is 100% true.

Nowadays, I guide my clients, too and they may not be like you say it's a pain, but it's a sensation in the mind. It can be a sensation about it, right? Like the little nut on your stomach. A little tightens in your heart. You know, pay attention. What are you doing?

By now, that is not really in alignment with who you truly are and that's it, it can be just as simple as that sensation in the body.

Jennifer:

It's such a good description that you've given to that knot in the stomach, the tightening of the heart. I think so many people can relate to that, so I love that so you mentioned your work.

This is a perfect segue so how did what you experienced in your life and the shoulds you said you left that job that had sales. We know you're a coach now.

How did your own life experience influence the work you're doing now?

Pati:

I became a life coach because I used to live in what I call a prison, and that's how I live my life. I put myself in a prison, and I was living in that suffering.

Then I opened the cage and I became this amazing free bird, flying with joy and then I started realizing how many people live in that cage. Agreed that we're everywhere selves in it, and if they can just open that door and allow themselves to get out of the cage, the prison, there's a whole new world that is gonna make us all so much happier.

We're like, okay, how can I guide people to go through that, and I was doing that on the side with friends with even my coworkers, you know, and the other job. I was doing that because I want to check like, I can see now we can identify the right people when we go through something we overcome. We identify, we see projections like, oh, that's where I used to be. So much better on this side is so much more enjoyable, and like freedom. That's how I felt - freedom when I got out of that, and I want everybody to feel the freedom.

Jennifer:

I love that.

You've decided what really seems to work for you is with business owners so what is it for you because this has to be in alignment with you.

What is it about helping people create that business that lights you up?

Pati:

Yeah, and I think because my mind is still so busy, you know, I had so much experience in different jobs in my entire life.

I can identify with another business owner, I understand first what life they're going through, you know, more or less, even if they're working for a company, or if they're an entrepreneur, right. The struggles that we go through either the company telling you, you should do this, this and that, or as an intrapreneur, we put ourselves that should should, should, should, should you should be, you're a successful entrepreneur.

I relate to those types of people. I want them to be successful in their business. In order to do that, we need to look at the inside of a person, we need to look inside of ourselves. Because if we live in the should in order to be successful in the business, it's not going to take us anywhere or if it takes somewhere, you're going to be suffering inside.

You might be successful on paper, but there's a lot of suffering that comes with that success. It sounds like what you teach people is that they can be successful and happy. Joyful in alignment. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

That's why I'm so passionate about helping those people. Because there was somebody one, I was going through different jobs to help me.

Jennifer:

Yeah.

It worked out the way it was supposed to, and it sounds like. Pati, I have just enjoyed hearing your story and I'm sure our listeners are as well.

I want to share that if anybody is looking to connect with you, which I think absolutely will connect with Pati. You can find her at her website: https://www.patihoyt.com/

Pati:

I love being here.

Thank you so much, I could spend hours talking to you.

Jennifer:

Alright - thanks for joining me. See you next time I Don’t Give a Should.