Coming Out Stronger After Life’s Toughest Moments with Elizabeth Soto-Baez

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! --- Listen to the podcast here: 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. --- 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. One of the lies that humans say to themselves, that I’m the only one experiencing this or I’m the only one who has this emotion or feeling or sensation, it’s never true. You’re never the only one. 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,...