How do you navigate personal growth? Do you feel isolated or unsupported on your journey? Are you constantly searching for real, unfiltered insights on life and business?
Join Bella Vasta on a deeply personal road trip from Phoenix to Tucson, Arizona, in this unique podcast episode.
As Bella navigates the open road, she reflects on her partnership with Liz Illg, co-founder of Pet Care Team Training, sharing the importance of having supportive and complementary relationships in both business and life. Recorded live and unedited, this episode offers an authentic glimpse into Bella’s thoughts and feelings, making you feel like you’re right there in the car with her.
Bella discusses the transformative power of community and friendships, drawing from her own journey through trauma and healing after her daughter’s premature birth. She opens up about the significance of inner courage, personal growth, and the necessity of having a support system. Whether she’s passing cows or crossing border checkpoints, Bella’s raw and unfiltered storytelling invites you to reflect on your own life, encouraging you to find and cherish the people who help you thrive.
Don’t miss this engaging and inspirational episode that blends business insights with heartfelt personal experiences.
Timestamps:
[02:16] Bella and Liz’s business partnership and friendship
[06:44] Bella’s experience of isolation and survival mode after her daughter’s health challenges
[09:40] Bella’s journey of inner child healing and personal growth
[13:29] Advice on reflecting on why certain things trigger strong reactions, and the importance of self-awareness
[23:44] Importance of building a supportive community and not trying to do everything alone
[26:33] The value of having close friends who can support and challenge you
Notable Quotes:
“It takes courage to constantly grow. It takes courage to put your ego aside and think about, well, why does it hurt me? Where does it come from?”
“Sometimes you just need a witness to be like, ‘Damn girl, you’ve come so far, because six months ago, you would have handled this a completely different way.'”
“Asking for help is really difficult for a lot of people, because we were told not to ask for help. We were told to be seen and not heard.”
“You have to have a reciprocal energy flow. I’m going to put it that way, right? Like you pour into someone, they pour into you, and it has to be circular.”
“I feel like all these Facebook groups, they’re really great. However, there’s a bunch of keyboard warriors on there. How great are the Facebook groups really? How much of an intimate connection are you actually able to make?”
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Transcript:
Hello. This is going to be a little bit of a different episode if I actually post it. Hi, this is Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting. I’m currently going about 80 miles an hour on the I ten, heading from Phoenix down south of Tucson to a small little town where there’s wine country. It is where my co founder of pet care team Training, Liz Ilig, resides and on her farm. And going down there because we are planning for the fourth quarter of the year and then just doing some projects and filming some stuff. It’s actually been a year since I’ve been down there and you know, I’m not really sure exactly where this podcast is going, but we’re going to download it and get you show notes from AI when I am done. But I thought I would just talk to you.
Is that all right? And this is also kind of like russian roulette because you have no idea what could come out of my mouth. There is no editing. There is no let’s stop and re record this. So if I publish this, I’m going to publish it in its entirety. It’s just like it’s me talking to you as I’m driving. It’s currently 09:00 in the morning. It is about 100 degrees, which is actually very cool for Arizona. As I drive south, it’s actually close to the border to the point that I get these messages on my phone that says, now entering Mexico and not really, and there is a couple of border checkpoints that I go through.
If you guys have never been through that stuff, I go through it quite frequently. When I do actually drive to the beach in Mexico, it just gets down to like one lane and you go slowly through, you roll down your windows, you say hi to the guy and just kind of roll on through. But anyways, hi. I was reflecting on some stuff, something that you may or may not know. First of all, Liz is not just my business partner for pet care team training, where we certify pet sitters and dog walkers to be pet sitters and dog walkers and give them CPR first aid certifications. So two certifications. But we also are very good friends. We have this app called Voxer V, like Victor O X E R.
For any of you guys who are verbal processors who like to talk a lot, I really highly recommend it. They call it a walkie talkie app. Basically you can leave up to 15 minutes voice messages. And the difference between using that on, say, an iPhone, because that’s the only thing I have that I know, is that you just press it and then you can take your hand off the button, and you can just talk. Talk. So, usually what happens, believe it or not, I’m getting really personal, is that every morning, we both get up and we take our walks. I do, like, two laps around my block. She does, like, a three mile with her dogs.
She’s in, like, a rural area. She does a weighted vest. She’s such a badass. I hope that’s okay to say that. And we talk. And we talk about our intentions for the day. Like, she leaves me a message, I leave her a message. We talk about, like, things that we’re getting done.
We hold each other accountable. Loosely, right. And we’re kind of like. We’re both single, so we’re both kind of like each other’s person, and we’ve been doing this for a long time. And it’s just. I just. I go on these love affairs with her sometimes, and I just tell her how much I appreciate her, because I think there’s something to be said when you have someone in your life that you can completely be yourself with, when you can literally just go on a mind journey, a verbal diarrhea of the mouth, if you will, and you’re not judged and you’re supported, or you’re reminded of who you are, or you’re giving questions that really make you ponder and think. And I guess this episode is going to be about her and I and the place that she is in my life in hopes that I inspire you to think about who is in your life.
I did an episode on who are your CEO’s or all my CEO’s, and I talked to you about my CEO’s. Those are, like, the really close people in my life that I can go to with anything at any time. And they’re all very, very different. And that’s the point I wanted to make about Liz and I, and it’s why we make great business partners, because everything she’s good at, I’m not. And everything I’m good at, she. I don’t want to say she’s not, but she doesn’t prefer to do right. Like, we are a left and a right brain. Together make one brain.
I am an organized chaos. She has everything written down. She actually did a presentation to my community, and she was talking about how she even has, like, she has sop for her household, and she needs to. I hope she doesn’t mind me saying so much, but because she has chickens and goats and dogs, inside dogs and outside dogs and cats, and I don’t know if I’m missing anything, but she’s a lot of souls. She’s got, like, 36 souls on her property, and she was talking to my community just about workflows, and, like, what happens if something happens to you? And she has it all the way down to how to work lawnmower for her home sops. Okay. I throw away the instruction books. My dad laughs at me all the time for it, and I’m like, why do I need to keep this instruction book in this cabinet somewhere for, like, one time that I’m gonna need it? Like, all of these instruction books are in a PDF online.
And I also, you know, I’m not like, oh, I live on a farm with 36 souls to take care of what happens if something happens to me? So it’s a little different, right? And when we talk about things, you know, our life couldn’t be any more different. We often joke around about doing an anonymous podcast about her life and my life, because it’s just so unique. But I’m telling you all of this, like, as if we’re just friends and you’re in the car with me driving right now. Because there was a time in my life where I didn’t have a community before I got married, before I was. I was in 2014, and I was doing my business. I had my friends. A lot of them were actually from networking. I did a lot, like, four times a week networking, and I made a lot of friends that way.
They were all my same age. We kind of got married, had kids the same time ish. However, when I went through everything with my daughter, and if this is one of your first times listening or you just joined us. Hi. I’ve had birthed one of the smallest surviving female babies on the planet. At 12oz, she was born ten years ago July. We spent 182 days in baby icu Nicu, fighting for her life. She was on a vent in a trach.
We took her home after six months. She was on a 50 foot oxygen concentrator. She was on oxygen and a feeding tube that went down her nose into her belly that I had to shove in her and stick to her face. It was horrifying. It was traumatic. I was wrecked. I pushed everyone out of my life, including my own parents. And so when I say that, you know, I had friends, and then I didn’t have friends, I was in survival mode.
I don’t even know what it was. I didn’t know what survival mode was. I just knew that I literally. It was like I was a tree and I had to cut off every single branch just to maintain the stump and keep the stump alive. And, you know, sometimes that’s what you got to do. I think that made me a better coach today because I can identify. You don’t have to have a twelve ounce baby to be in survival, survival mode or have trauma. You could stub your toe and that could be traumaful.
It’s however you perceive things in your life and our body, you know, really takes it in. And so going back to this all, you know, I knew what it was like to be so isolated and to be alone in my thoughts. And it’s because of that I’m able to feel so, so supported and so grateful to have people like my CEO’s and Liz in my life where I know they’ve got me. It’s very rare these days in life. You know, we have a lot of friends online. We have a lot of pet sitting friends online. We’re in pet sitting groups. We’re part of all this stuff.
But to actually have someone that you can just talk to or call up or be like, I need you to remind me of who I am. I’ve. And also to witness things. I’ve gone through a lot of healing the past year. I hope I never stop because I’m never going to be perfect. But one of the biggest things that I’ve learned this year, a couple of things, is inner child healing. I always heard about it. I never really understood it.
I, like many of you, have generational curses or generational patterns that I really became aware of and that I didn’t want to perpetuate. And in order to change that pattern, especially for my daughter to be the mother that I wanted to be to this miracle child that I get the privilege of spending my life with, I needed to make some intentional decisions and choices. The thing about growth and the thing about learning things is that it takes courage. It takes courage to change. And I’ve always said that your personal matches your business, right? So anything you’re struggling with in business is a reflection of your personal because it’s the same thing. Okay. But it’s. It takes courage to go through this stuff.
It takes courage to keep standing up to it and facing it and facing the shadows in your life, the demons and having other people point out the blind spots. Sometimes the messages or the deliverers of the message or the lessons of the message aren’t presented in a way. Oh, I’m passing some cows right now. That’s really cool. There’s like, probably, I don’t know, ten cows on the back of that truck. Yes. You are road tripping with me today. I told Liz that I should do this.
See, guys, this is literally me just chatting with you. I told Liz, I was like, maybe I should record a podcast. I told her this on boxer before I started doing this. She goes, you should. You should do it on the way down, and you should do it on the way back up to your house. And I was like, all right, so, see, like, that is helping me do this. Okay, but back to. Sometimes our messages aren’t delivered in the way that we wanted to.
And it takes courage to put our ego aside, our hurt feelings, the way that we want to be. Like, I can’t believe that person said that to me. Right? Maybe they were the worst person ever to say that to you. Maybe their delivery was the worst ever. But I think where the courage comes from is thinking, is there any little bit of truth in that? Is there something that I can learn from that? Is there something that I can grow from that? Is there something? And it’s not beating yourself up. It’s not thinking like, oh, I’m not good enough, or, oh, yeah, that was bad of me. It’s like, oh, you just said this word. You know, you said this sentence to me, and I want to say, how dare you say that? That was terrible.
You’re a horrible person. You just want to. But in reality, if we’re able to take that offense, that ego, and push it aside and think about, wow, why did I just react that way? How did it make me feel? Wow, that made me feel incredible. Incredibly unheard. I don’t feel like they heard me. Okay, why is that bad? Well, if they didn’t hear me, then I feel like my voice doesn’t matter. If my voice. Why does that matter? If my voice doesn’t matter, it goes into, like, my core belief of who I am, right? And maybe was there some other time in my life that I felt that same way? Is that sentence that they said perhaps triggering me in some way? So therefore, it doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t matter what they say.
It more so matters what it triggers inside of you. It’s less about them and more about what’s going on inside. I hope you’re staying with me here, because I know that this is not an outlined podcast. This is nothing. Five steps to know. This. This is me just talking to you. Let me even look right now.
Oh, it’s only 13 minutes. Wow. I feel like that’s been, like, 25 minutes so far. Perfect. So when it takes courage to come to this growth stage. It takes courage to constantly grow. It takes courage to put your ego aside and think about, well, why does it hurt me? Where does it come from? Right. I can tell you straight up, I’ll be so upfront and honest with my, my own things I grew up in.
And I want to say all this with the preference of, I am 42 years old. I love my parents. I’ve accepted my parents for who they are. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I understand and have reflected on the times that it was when they grew up, you know, and, and that they were. I mean, I had my daughter ten years after they had me, right? So I was a lot more mature. I mean, there were babies having babies, basically, and trying to figure it all out. And so when I grew up, my perception that I had to understand, oh, my gosh.
And now there’s like a plane that is doing these crazy tricks. I wonder, I don’t think. I can’t take a picture, but it’s like, it’s like a trick plane because we’re in the middle of like, fields. Oh, I wish you could see it. Okay, anyways, do you guys like this format or not? Okay, add anybody. So I grew up and I have these spoons and like I said, I’ll be completely honest and transparent with it. Why not? It is things like being seen and heard. When I was little, I was to be seen and not heard.
My parents told me to MYob. It was an acronym for mind your own business. And I was told that so much. I was told that I was too much, that I was too loud, that I was too bright, that I was too. I was too everything, right? And so I tried to put myself in a box, I tried to shove myself in there. I tried to be a good girl. And I know there’s a lot of you guys listening that also went through the same thing because guess what? That was like the times my parents were just the deliverers of that message. And once I understood that, and once I understand, you know, and then I went through this stage of, guys, I’m getting so personal with you.
Once I went through this stage of, well, they’re just, you know, they’re my parents and they should have been perfect and they should have given me everything that I ever wanted and needed once I understood that they’re just humans themselves. Okay? And this day and age, we get to talk about psychology, we get to talk about inner child work, we get to talk about gentle parenting, we get to talk about all kinds of stuff like this, right? Because it’s not taboo. Back then it was taboo. No one was talking about that. It was dictatorship, right? I mean, I’m even reminded right now as I see all the political stuff going on. Luckily I was born in 1982. I wasn’t privy to things like very close to when I was born. Women were only then able to rent apartments.
I just learned that because I’ve never had that perception of life, you know? And anyways, I’m probably going off on tangents here. I am going off on tangents. But my point is that I think having friends, having confidants, having a community around you is so important. They offer a really great mirror and a really great reflection as to what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, how far you’ve come. Sometimes you just need a witness to be like, damn, girl, you’ve come so far because six months ago you would have handled this a completely different way. It’s one of the reasons why I love the file that we have inside the mastermind. We have these threads, everyone has their own thread. And you can put your own questions on there and you can look back hundreds of comments, you know, a year or two ago and you could see like what you were, what you were going through before, what you were like trying to figure out before.
And then I, what you’ve overcome. So you’re like, oh my gosh, yeah, that was my problem back then. That was such a silly problem. Like, I’ve overcome that. Like, I’m way beyond that now. And so sometimes, like, you know, friendships can do that for you. So do you have the courage to, like, really think about stuff when things really get, next time something gets you upset, can you think about, why is this hitting me this way? Sometimes just talking it out helps. Maybe you don’t have someone that you can box or just talk to.
Maybe you can just get out your voice note app like I am right now, and just talking in my car as I’m driving and just get your words out. Sometimes just talking to yourself helps because it gets all of those thoughts and that energy out of your brain and just out, it moves that energy out. So, yeah, I guess that’s what this podcast today has been about. Truth be told, it’s really hard to figure out what to title these podcasts sometimes because I want to tell you what they’re about, but I also need them to be interesting enough that you want to click on it and listen to it. And it’s, you know, we have hundreds of downloads every single week. But I don’t know who a lot of you are, and that’s vulnerable and that’s scary. I mean, I just shared some little, some little icebergs of my own inner workings because you’re on a road trip with me right now. You’re just road tripping with me.
And it’s just my hope for you. If you are out there and you’re feeling like you’re alone, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re feeling beat down, maybe the kids are just stressing you out. You feel like you’re being the worst parent, maybe you didn’t get to the gym, or you’re not moving your body as much as you want. You feel like you should be, but you’re not sure how. Or you just feel like you’re so overwhelmed or you’re so tired. That’s the last thing you want to do. You want to just scroll TikTok and just check out. You want to go through McDonald’s today because tomorrow you’ll cook some food.
Guys, everything is tiny. They’re tiny little changes. It’s tiny. Right now, I’m learning all about seed oils and, oh, my gosh, Liz is actually, she does this full and fulfilled. It’s the starch solution. She lost a ton of weight on it. She’s very healthy. She’s a really good resource for me about healthy stuff.
And it’s pretty overwhelming to me because I love my, I’m a salty and fried kind of girl. I love potato chips. I love, you know, cooking with extra virgin olive oil, which I just found out you’re not supposed to heat up. Like, what? Can I change all this stuff overnight? No. A year ago, I changed all my plastic tupperware to glass. I was terrified. I was thinking I was just going to break glass. I had this weird thought in my head that I was just going to break stuff.
What? Guess what? I, knock on wood, I haven’t broken anything in a year. What I’m saying is that, you know, you might be aware of the voices in your head. You might have things that you’re beating yourself up for. Consider writing down the thoughts in your head just for 1 hour. Just for 1 hour in the day. Write them down in your phone. And then I want you to look at those, and I want you to think, would I be friends with myself, or would I say this to my daughter or my son or my spouse? Spouse or my best friend? Would I say these words to that person? Would I judge them that way? And the first thing is you really just got to become aware of your thoughts and your feelings and what you’re doing. It’s just.
It’s the most tiny steps. Tiny steps build momentum. Tiny steps build bigger, bigger changes in your life. You. I can’t just go in and just throw away everything in my cupboard and redo it. It would be overwhelming. I would paralyze myself. I would get.
And then I would resist it, and then I would say, screw it, and then I would get all my other stuff back and I would say, see, it didn’t work. I can’t do all that at once. You got to be. You got to be nice to yourself. Gotta be realistic with yourself. And I’m not saying I’m just using this because this is the most recent thing in my life that I’m going through that I’m learning. But this could just be about just catching yourself every single time you beat yourself up in your brain. It could be putting an elastic band around your wrist and snapping it every single time that you realize you’re doing it.
Because guess what? When you associate it with that, you’re going to stop a whole lot faster. Guys, you are meant for so much more. You get to do this business. You started doing this business because you wanted more time and financial freedom. I know you did because that is everyone’s basic, basic desire. It’s because you wanted time and financial freedom. And if you don’t have time or financial freedom and or financial freedom right now, then there’s little things that need to start changing. And if you have not been successful doing it by yourself, then you need to reach outside of yourself.
You don’t need any more books. You don’t need any more courses. You need people in your life that are aware of what you’re trying to do. You need people in your life that you can call and say, you know what? I really don’t know what to do with this project anymore. I need help getting out of my head. I need to brainstorm. I need your help. Asking for help is really difficult for a lot of people because we were told not to ask for help.
We were told to be seen and not heard. You see, you gotta get people around you. You got to get people around you. Whether it’s a life coach, business coach, a friend, an actual community don’t. Also, I feel like all these Facebook groups, they’re really great. However, there’s a bunch of keyboard warriors on there. How great are the Facebook groups really? How much of an intimate connection are you actually able to make you only are limited by the words that people put in there, and you don’t actually get the full entire picture. It’s like a peep show.
And so while that’s good to break the ice, it’s really important to really build those relationships deep with people. Of course, I can help you with that, but I’m not always the answer for everyone either. But I’ve done it, and I’ve helped facilitate it for people, and I know what it takes. That’s why we have rules for our accountability partners in my community, and we have guidelines that you can adopt or suggest or bend to your own liking. But I’ll tell you, I’m going down to see one of my best friends today. Today, and I’m so excited. I haven’t seen her face to face for a year, but we’ve been. We talk every single day.
We’re on the camera all the time. She’s been on the podcast, too. So much respect for her. And that’s the thing, because I have respect and love for her. I know that I can completely be myself, and I know that she will accept and love me, and I also know that she’ll tell me when I’m acting like a damn fool, but she’ll still support and love me through it. And that is more rich than you can ever accumulate in businesses, according to me. I feel that way. I feel like.
And it took a while, guys. I went from NICU, having no one in my life, to having to make a conscious effort to cultivate. I was knocked down to my stump ten years ago, and it took my therapy, my cognitive therapy, my talk therapy, my EMDR therapy, my spiritual therapy, all of it. There was a lot of different modalities that I went through, and then I still go through, because I’m never healed, I’m never perfect. There’s always more things to lean into. There’s always more things to learn and grow. It’s an ebbing. It’s an ebb and a flow.
But it’s, you know, I started intensely that healing. Four years into it, five, six years into it, started cultivating some friendships and really making it a point to be like, you know what? I’m going to start reaching out to this person. I really like them. And I would reach out and reach out and reach out, but then I would also watch and I would see if they also would reach out to me, because I’m a giver. I’m a giver and a cheerleader. And you would probably know this if you’ve listened to any more than one podcast. And if someone just cut me off, that’s cool. You go, we’re all going to get there.
At the same time, you have to have a reciprocal energy flow. I’m going to put it that way. Right. Like, you pour into someone, they pour into you. Right. And it has to be circular. I think a lot of listeners, I think a lot of people in the pet industry, because a lot of people are empaths, they’re nurturers, they’re people pleasers. That’s why we’re in this industry, right? Because we can.
We can feel the animals, we can feel the pet parents. We want to be helpful, which is a very beautiful trait. The world needs more people like you, but we also need to protect that, and we also need to make sure that we’re getting filled up, too. I can’t wait to see what AI says this episode is about because this is a very long rambling. Wow, 29 minutes. Oh, my gosh. I want to know if you’re still listening, truly, because the doubts in my head are. They’re not listening.
All you did was ramble. This is ridiculous. This is so outside of your norm. You shouldn’t be doing this. Like, who’s going to listen to something this long? What did you just say? You got too personal. People are going to take this offensively. How dare I tell them what they should be thinking or feeling? So I’m open, guys. I.
More than any other episode I’ve ever done in over 400 episodes, 400 plus episodes. I want to know what you think about this one. I want to know, and depending on if I’m feeling the moment, if I’m feeling it, probably be a little bit more structured. Maybe I’ll do another one on my drive back home. Thank you for allowing me to be in your ears. If you’re still listening and not have my professional microphone. And I just want you to remember, like, you get to. You get to run this business, you get to figure out what kind of life you want to live.
You get to figure out what your mindset is. I’ve been feeling so strongly that after so many years of always keep jumping, I feel like my tagline might be moving slowly into. You get to. Because you get to. I love you guys.