Pat Wetzel is the host and creator of Bump in the Road podcast and author of the new book by the same name. Having faced down cancer, divorce and business betrayal, Pat talks about finding resilience on life’s tumultuous roads, the exuberance of soaring in her sailplane, what meditation provided and finding joy in all of it.
Ever wondered about the power of resilience in navigating life's bumps? Prepare to be captivated as we explore this and more with the remarkable Pat Wetzel, pilot, adventurer, author and podcast host of Bump in the Road. Pat's life is a rich tapestry of domestic and world travel, marked by immense joys and formidable challenges--from growing up in a globetrotting, food-loving family to a Wall Street career to facing a cancer diagnosis, divorce and a business betrayal. As she pulls back the curtain on her adventurous life, you'll discover the delicious thrill of soaring in Whiskey Oscar, her sailplane; her love of “indigenous,” pre-Google travel; and the transformative power of perspective-pivoting.
In an enlightening chat, Pat delves into the heart of her life's adversities, revealing how she found joy and positivity amidst turmoil. Through tales of resilience, we investigate the importance of self-care and the necessity of stepping out of our comfort zones to truly understand our strengths and weaknesses. Listen in as we discuss the importance of shifting perspectives, and explore how Pat employs meditation as a tool to quiet her mind and make conscious choices. She offers a unique lens on travel as a means of resetting and discovering inner strength, and her approach is sure to inspire you.
In our final segment, we explore the importance of meaningful conversations about life's challenges. Pat extends an invitation to you, our listeners, to join her on her website for more inspiring stories and to chart your own adventures. Prepare to be inspired to dream big, evolve and keep moving along, no matter what bumps you encounter on your road. Embrace this delightful opportunity to dive into an enlightening conversation about travel, life transitions and the power of resilience.
(Show notes written with some help from PodiumGPT.)
Places mentioned:
Prescott, Arizona
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Paris, France
Calistoga, California
Lake Tahoe, California
Minden, Nevada
Las Vegas, Nevada
Phoenix
Sedona, Arizona
Flagstaff, Arizona
The Badlands, South Dakota
Los Angeles, California
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
Wall Street
Silicon Valley
Upper Saddle River, New Jersey
Links
Bump in the Road website: https://bumpintheroad.us/
Bump in the Road podcast on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bump-in-the-road/id1515348427
Bump in the Road book (Amazon affiliate link): https://a.co/d/6amkuaA
8 Minute Meditation Expanded: Quiet Your Mind. Change Your Life. by Victor Davich: https://www.amazon.com/Minute-Meditation-Expanded-Quiet-Change/dp/0399173420
Pat’s interview with Erik Weihenmayer, Blind Visionary: https://bumpintheroad.us/erik-weihenmayer-blind-visionary/
Pat’s interview with Gary Hensel, The Spiritual Warrior, on YouTube: https://youtu.be/7\_UAUC5zNbg?si=z3p4zsWH\_K9RZJAy
The Way of Wisdom with Gary Hensel: https://bumpintheroad.us/the-way-of-wisdom-the-spiritual-warrior/
The Way of Wisdom with Gary Hensel and Deborah Toyias Kozich on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umEV\_LexKME
Moving Along podcast website: https://movingalongpodcast.com/
Contact Christi Cassidy, host and creator: christi@movingalongpodcast.com
Christi Cassidy: [00:00:00] Welcome to Moving Along. Pat Wetzel is the author of Bump in the Road and host of the podcast by the same name. She explores the obstacles people face in their lives and how we can overcome those bumps in the road, be they minor nits or major problems.
Pat herself has faced some major challenges along the way, including a cancer diagnosis and recurrence, divorce, a severe betrayal in the business world, and much more. But she has lessons for us that I think anybody can put to good use. She grew up in Northern New Jersey in Upper Saddle River and like her father went to the Wharton School.
From there, she went to work on Wall Street. Welcome, Pat.
Pat Wetzel: Hi. Thank you for having me here.
Christi Cassidy: It's great to have you. What did [00:01:00] travel and moving mean to you as a child?
Pat Wetzel: Well, I grew up in one town my whole life, just about my whole life, but my family traveled a great deal. We'd spend a few months a year overseas and things like that.
So, it gave me an opportunity at a really young age to know that it's a big world out there. There are a lot of different people and different cultures, and for me, it was all fun. I grew up in a very food oriented family. So, you know, we were eating our way through Michelin three star restaurants throughout France .
I mean, travel for me is just kind of a magic place. And I think part of the lure of travel. Is the fact that you are very present, you're in an unknown environment, you're doing something different. And that creates, I think, focus and presence. And that opens the door to all sorts of things.
Christi Cassidy: Were you an only child?
Pat Wetzel: No, I had a younger sister.
Christi Cassidy: You traveled as a family?
Pat Wetzel: Yeah, usually as I got older, I really didn't want to travel with my folks as much. So I started staying [00:02:00] home and not going on some of the trips.
Christi Cassidy: Oh, interesting. So I always think when I have five siblings, right? And and we didn't travel like you did, right? But it, it always seems to me when there's somebody you can share that experience with, who's not an adult, who's not, you know, your parent, that it makes the experience different.
Pat Wetzel: Maybe, i, I think that for me, this was my normal, you know what I mean? It wasn't anything extraordinary. It may sound extraordinary, you know, in retrospect and from the outside looking in, but for me, that's just the way life was. You know, I, I knew Paris better than I knew New York.
Christi Cassidy: Is it still one of your favorite cities?
Pat Wetzel: Oh, there's so many great places in the world. I, I don't think you can choose 1 or 2 or even half a dozen. I think different places bring different qualities and they're all great.
Christi Cassidy: You said somewhere, I always say I have to follow the smell of wafting [00:03:00] garlic when I travel.
Pat Wetzel: Absolutely, I mean, if there's garlic being cooked somewhere, you know, there's good food,
Christi Cassidy: it's good food. And there's some kind of experience, right? To be had whoever's cooking it,
Pat Wetzel: there are worse ways to plan your itinerary.
Christi Cassidy: Exactly, exactly. Do you ever do Airbnbs and so that you can cook like the local food from the farmer's market and that kind of thing?
Pat Wetzel: These days traveling, I do a lot of Airbnbs, but I don't really look to cook when I'm there. I want to go out and, you know, see what's out there. For example, up in Washington, I stayed at a. Beautiful Airbnb on Whitby Island. That was it. And it was just gorgeous. The sunsets were extraordinary and not too far away on the coast was an oyster farm. So I'm not going to cook or if I can go to an oyster farm, you must be kidding me.[00:04:00]
Christi Cassidy: That sounds heavenly. I love Whitby Island, and I don't know about any oyster farms. Maybe next time.
Pat Wetzel: No, it's on the Oregon coast on the mainland, not or was it Washington coast? At any rate, on the coast. And you go down this winding road with trees everywhere and you come to a railroad track and you have to cross that and it's just a working oyster farm, but the oysters are super fresh and you can order whatever you want and you sit out there and some old picnic tables and just eat oysters to your heart's content.
Christi Cassidy: How do you discover places like that? Are you a guidebook kind of person? Are you a word of mouth person? Are you, now do you just like Google everything?
Pat Wetzel: You know, it's interesting. In the days before Google, travel was much more of an adventure.
You could do some homework, but it was much more experiential, and you didn't know what you were getting into. For example, when I took my sailplane cross country obviously the Badlands are just off [00:05:00] whatever it is, Route 70 or whatever in South Dakota. I didn't know that. I wasn't, you know, I, I hadn't planned every piece of the trip, so I pull over the Badlands are extraordinary.
I meet some helicopter pilots. We go flying, you know, things like things that just kind of serendipitously happen that. You can't plan for, and I actually think travel used to be much more of an adventure before the world found out that you can plot every footstep and buy all your tickets in advance and wait six hours in line. My early travel experiences were much more indigenous, if you will, and I really prefer that type of experience.
Christi Cassidy: Me too. I have to say, and the first time I saw the Badlands, it was because we were in a bar in some biker bar in in Colorado. And we said, where should we go next? We were making our way from LA to New [00:06:00] York and 6, 000 miles, all blue highways, let's put it that way. And they told us the way to go up through the Badlands. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. I just and and you too just kind of stumble there. It's incredible place. Talk about the sailplane. Whiskey.
Pat Wetzel: Whiskey Oscar.
Christi Cassidy: Whiskey Oscar. Yes. Talk about your, you don't fly anymore, but you did for a long time, right? For about 10 years.
Pat Wetzel: Whiskey Oscar was a 15 meter A. S. W. 20. A. She was built for Carl Street to fly in the world. He came in 2nd. And after that, she went to 2 racing pilots. And then she went to me, the joke was that Whiskey Oscar was being put out to pasture with me. And actually, Whiskey Oscar are my contest letters. I wanted Whiskey Sierra. You register your plane with contest letters for flying.
And Whiskey Sierra was taken, so I ended up with Whiskey [00:07:00] Oscar. And that's how she came to be named that. But she was an extraordinary plane. She had these long, beautiful white wings with winglets at the end, and the wings were really flexible. I mean, you could just bend them up around the canopy practically.
It was just an amazing set of experiences and Whiskey, Oscar and I well, she knew how to fly. I, she taught me to fly. We went cross country. We stationed out of Minden, Nevada, which is one of the best places in the world to soar and just had many adventures t together.
Christi Cassidy: You kind of stumbled into the flying, right? I guess in Calistoga in 1989, you had a divorce on the horizon and there was a sign for glider rides.
Pat Wetzel: Yeah, and actually, Calistoga back then was not at all glitzy. It's not, you know, wine country back then was not an alcoholic adult Disneyland. It was much more rudimentary. So I'd rented a white Ford convertible a [00:08:00] Mustang convertible and I'm driving up, you know, through these beautiful rows vineyards in the side.
And I ended up in Calistoga for the night and the next morning, I'm out walking and there is an. Airstrip in town that intersects the main street that goes right through the center of this nice little town. It was so curious. So I went over to see what the story was and they were giving glider rides. So I went up for a ride.
It was fine. I mean, it's beautiful looking out over all the vineyards up in the hills and everything, but it didn't really knock my socks off or anything. So I continued on my trip, went back East. And I'd heard about some lawyers that were flying gliders out of a a private airstrip on weekends. So I invited myself out, I tracked them down, invited myself out, flew for three straight days, and I was hooked.
That was it. It was for whatever set of reasons, it just, everything came together for me that weekend. And I learned to fly with a [00:09:00] World War II naval aviator, Sam, who was an extraordinary pilot. There's a two seater training plane, I knew I was doing well when Sam was snoring in the back.
Christi Cassidy: That's great. When your teacher can fall asleep and trust you that much. You weren't meditating by that point, right? So you this, but did you consider this like kind of a spiritual experience or was it just an exhilaration,
Pat Wetzel: a little of each and almost an out of body experience in that you're up. Soaring all day long and you come down and you land and then you have to transition to earth life and I would get in my car and drive on these bumpy winding roads back home and I felt like I was still flying. I mean, I couldn't get that sensation of flying out of my system for many, many miles. It was just and I really unexpected side trip in my life that [00:10:00] really took over my life for about a decade.
Christi Cassidy: What made you stop
Pat Wetzel: my risk parameters were changing during one three year period. 25 people died in the soaring community. One gentleman was shot in San Francisco, but all the others were aviation deaths and the community is not that big. It's a few thousand people worldwide. So you're not more than maybe two degrees removed from anybody.
So those deaths kind of hit you hard and. I've been through a number of pretty close calls myself, including an encounter with a thunderstorm. That was really not funny. And I just, I think I've used up all my goodwill and luck in the air, and I realized I was a good pilot, but there were pilots far better than me that had died.
And I really got to thinking about, is this what I want to be doing flying out several hundred miles in the middle of nowhere, not maybe having the lift to get home gets a little bit old. I, I think that it was just time to move on to some different things.[00:11:00]
Christi Cassidy: What replaced it for you?
Pat Wetzel: Nothing will ever replace flying. I started playing tennis. And that was Fun, you know, developed a lot of skill there. I mean, I was living right near Tahoe. So I was skiing and hiking and kayaking and doing all sorts of wonderful things. I missed flying. Letting go of Whiskey Oscar was very hard for me, but it was just, it was just time. And she found a great home.
Christi Cassidy: That's great. That's always nice to know, right, that it's not like you, she really went out to pasture. Was cancer in 2009 was cancer your first big bump in the road.
Pat Wetzel: Oh, no. I had some serious illness as a young person. Myasthenia gravis. My divorce was a massive bump in the road for me.
Cancer was interesting in that. Certainly it's a bump in the road, but it also really reframed my life. Through cancer. I started meditating, which has been a game changer. And [00:12:00] strangely, I found an enormous amount of joy just joy in so many simple things in life that had eluded me before that. And I have to say between the meditation and the sense of deep appreciation of so many little things, that was a really positive thing to come out of six years of cancer.
Christi Cassidy: Yeah, I would say so finding joy. You find it wherever you look.
Pat Wetzel: Yeah. I mean, it's something that travels with you. It becomes part of your outlook. It's like meditation. Peace becomes part of your outlook and ability to let things go by an ability to choose your reactions or not react. It's a good way to live.
Christi Cassidy: I wanted to ask you about the deceit. And this is on the heels of your cancer and then it returned, right? And you wanted to share what you had learned, right? And you created a platform. You were ready to bring this to the world.[00:13:00]
Pat Wetzel: It really dealt with long term illness because what happens over years of illness is you become very isolated. I mean, people are there for the first month with casseroles and things, but then they get on with their own lives. And this is not unique to cancer. It happens again and again in many venues in life, but it's very hurtful, actually, and you can feel very unsupported.
So I developed call it an app that would address all these needs over long periods of time. I went down to Silicon Valley to see if there could be some interest and. Bringing in some money to really develop this. And I did get some interest, but I needed a beta platform. So I hired a company to do that for me.
They never did the platform. They took my intellectual property, registered it with a patent office as their own, and essentially said, Sue us. I was dealing with somebody who was on the board of two publicly traded companies. I mean, these were not lightweights or anything. I. Couldn't afford a lawsuit.
The lawsuit my very [00:14:00] expensive lawyers told me that a lawsuit would involve at least three years would cost in increments of half a million dollars and there's no guaranteed outcome. So, at that point, I had just had it. I mean, I've just gotten through all 6 years of cancer treatment 6 years. I mean, this is like a lot and I just so had it.
And I decided to just put my house up for sale and go hit the road for a while. I didn't know where I was going. I was concerned my cancer was back. There were a lot of indications that it was. If indeed it was back, I figured I had 18 to 24 months based on past experience. And I was not going to spend it sitting in a hospital with some chemo dripping into my veins, stewing over somebody who totally screwed me over.
So it was just time for a new start wherever that led me.
Christi Cassidy: What was your initial reaction when you learned what had happened? How did you find out that they registered it?
Pat Wetzel: I had to sic lawyers on them. They wouldn't, they wouldn't refer my calls, my emails [00:15:00] or anything. One of the better things that ever happened because it's always better to know early on rather than later if somebody is not on the up and up. And it opened a door for me to kind of go back to my past, if you will, when I was younger, I thought I would write and when I went traveling, I started a blog called Cancer Road Trip and I published at least every week. I got into photography. It opened the door that eventually really led to both the podcast and book where I am now.
Christi Cassidy: I don't think you're necessarily alone in this, but it just strikes me that. One of your first steps in finding a life of greater authenticity, value and meaning is to pivot your perspective.
And that's what it feels like. I hear you finding joy through the six years of the cancer, finding the positive and the completely new outlook with the deceit, we'll call it from the coders from [00:16:00] the company that you hired. Has that always been your way of seeing the world as like, Oh, I can find the optimistic, brighter way of seeing things. Or is this a learned experience through all of. Your bumps in the road through the experiences.
Pat Wetzel: I think it's more learned. I think I'm inherently pretty positive But I think a lot of that is learned to some degree I look at it this way you take an event in your life Okay, write about it write about it from a perspective of gratitude of anger You know of half a dozen emotions and you can write a story any way you want to write it When you start writing your story in several different ways, you realize all those perspectives have some value, but it's just a story.
What do you want to take with you? What story do you want to tell? And I think that you have choice in that and you can certainly be a victim of circumstances, but that's not going to take you anywhere in life. And I [00:17:00] think that you have to overcome that. And you have to forge ahead and create something new.
I'm the sort of person, I take in a lot of information, I love information. And I connect the dots in unusual ways. And for me, that has been one of those creative strengths that has really led me through my life.
Christi Cassidy: Do you think that's something people can learn?
Pat Wetzel: Good question. I don't know. I think I'm just kind of that way. I think we all have our strengths and weaknesses. I'm not a detailed person. I'm a strategic person. I mean, that's a strength and a weakness right there. And I think we all have that. And I think you have to find what it is within you that most suits your perspective on life. And I think you also have to ask, why do I have that perspective and is there something better?
Christi Cassidy: Right. Is there something better? I think it's hard for some people to ask that question, because sometimes life just feels too overwhelming.
Pat Wetzel: And it requires [00:18:00] that you get out of your comfort zone, which is not a comfortable thing to do. But the more you practice getting out of your comfort zone, the more comfortable it becomes. And when you're out of your comfort zone, that's where creativity can happen. It's not going to happen when you drive the same way every day, you'll eat the same food and you watch the same TV programs, you know, you have to shake up your life a little bit and introduce some new energy to find some new realities.
Christi Cassidy: You had a great suggestion in one of your five steps. About release, rewrite, rebuild, about introducing one new food per week. You can keep everything that you love, but just one different one per week, not even per day.
Pat Wetzel: Well, that really came out of my cancer experience because I became intensely interested in what really creates nutrition. I went through a period where I couldn't eat. It wasn't life threatening per se, but it took part of the life force out of me. I'm a food person. And [00:19:00] so every bite had to count from a nutritional perspective. And that was a very different look at food than I'd ever had before. I think that it was partly a source of control, if you will, because you can control what you choose to eat.
And in an uncontrollable circumstance, that gives you some control. But I had a website at the time, Anti Cancer Club, which was very well received. And one of the things I suggested was just what you talked about. If you just choose one new food a week, say you take Swiss chard this week, make it twice or three times.
If you don't like it, you never have to eat it again. But if you like it, you know, put in your repertoire and week after week in doing that. Several things are going to happen. You're going to find new things. You're going to shake up your life a little bit and open your world. You're going to slowly without even realize it start making healthier choices because the healthy food will naturally push out the food that's not as healthy, and you'll be rewarded for it, you'll start feeling so much better. So [00:20:00] I think incremental change in a lot of aspects of life is really the way to go about it sometimes cataclysmic change. Is what we experienced and we have to deal with. But in reality, I think we have control over our habits.
If you can change your habits just a little bit day after day, it makes a difference. You know, do that three mile loop. It's not that far. And all of a sudden you'll be doing six mile loops on the weekend, but you can't do it from zero. You have to work at it.
Christi Cassidy: Yeah. Yep, exactly. You don't talk about Santa Fe too much in your book, but you talked about it in one of the interviews I heard you do. When did you live in Santa Fe and did you do the three-mile loops in Santa Fe?
Pat Wetzel: Well, I do three mile loop here in Prescott over by one of the lakes. It's near where I live. I ended up in Santa Fe when COVID hit, so I was kind of there. Santa Fe is a beautiful town. New Mexico is absolutely gorgeous. And I was very grateful to be there for a [00:21:00] period to experience the arts, the opera and everything else.
Christi Cassidy: So you were there for the three years of pretty much COVID. That's when you started the podcast, right?
Pat Wetzel: Yeah. You know, with, without travel I was stranded. So it occurred to me, I could travel virtually and I started the podcast. I didn't know anything about podcasting. I didn't know anything about distribution. I didn't know anything about the equipment. I didn't know if I could get anybody on the podcast, you know, I just kind of dove in and the idea of bump in the road came to me. So it started and after about a year and a half of doing the podcast, I was absolutely bowled over by the wisdom of my guests.
The wisdom in these stories is amazing and I have this unique perspective. I kind of sit up here at 30, 000 feet and I get to hear every single story. So what started to emerge were common themes and traits and practices of the people who navigated really unbelievable bumps. And that's what [00:22:00] generated the idea for the first book, Bump in the Road, which is 15 stories.
And the next. Book will be Bump in the Road: Strong Women, and I'm planning to do a series of books, you know, Bump in the Road: Sports, Business, et cetera over time because I have so many great stories. And I think that maybe by grouping them in some common themes that will be beneficial to people.
Christi Cassidy: I liked the thematic idea, especially the next one, the strong women.
Pat Wetzel: Everybody seems to like that. And, i, I just think women are remarkable. They do so many things in life and they have to be so strong on so many different levels. You know, you could say, Oh, business, you know, do you have to achieve in business?
You have to do this, this, and this, but really I think some of the greatest strengths come from personal situations, situations with kids and the self knowledge that comes from all that. And so I, I think that that's going to be a really interesting book.
Christi Cassidy: I agree. Childbirth alone and I've never had kids. It's like, [00:23:00] no, if you can make it through that, you can do anything.
You were talking about strong women. What does resilience mean
Pat Wetzel: to you? Oh, I think it's just the ability to pick up all the pieces when everything's falling apart and continued moving ahead.
And I think that as you do that more and more, you start to discover your own strength and resilience really is about inner strength.
Christi Cassidy: So picking up the pieces, it seems to me like for you, one way to do that is
Pat Wetzel: to travel. You know, travel's my little escape, my reset, and I realize a lot of people, would not choose that, but it, it suits me.
When you
Christi Cassidy: travel, we were talking before about, you called it an indigenous approach to travel, right? I imagine there's sometimes you travel and you kind of plan where you're going and sometimes you travel and you don't have you follow the smell of the wafting garlic.
Pat Wetzel: Right?
Absolutely. [00:24:00] I think I like to plan ahead to have a place to sleep. I think that's important because particularly these days traveling, you can not find a place if you haven't planned for something. So I think that there is some planning that goes into it. Okay. But I'm not somebody who wants I don't like tours.
I don't want to fill up my days with that kind of thing. I want to wander and see what I see. And I think partly because I traveled so much as a young person. I don't feel like I have to do everything. I feel like there will always be another trip another time and, that works for me. The idea that if I go to Florence, I have to stand at every line that there is to see every possible piece of sculpture.
It just does not resonate.
Christi Cassidy: You pretty much travel alone still, right? Yeah,
Pat Wetzel: absolutely. I like traveling alone. I mean, it can be fun to travel with people, but when you travel by yourself, you don't have to Think about anybody else's likes or dislikes or desires. You can do what you want.
Christi Cassidy: Have you ever had an experience while traveling that? It might be [00:25:00] considered a bump in the road.
Pat Wetzel: Actually, I was in a, a sailplane race from Los Angeles to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And the 1st day out, the 1st leg was from an airfield north of LA to Las Vegas. So, you know, kind of. An interesting flight, no engine or anything.
Right. And there was a very, there was a cold weather front that come in and really the race should have been postponed because of the weather. But for a variety of reasons, it wasn't. And somebody died the first day out. And that was a terrible bump in that it really cast a pall over the rest of the trip.
And I was flying with a friend of mine and we ultimately decided to leave. Just as we were getting into Texas, I think. And. Went up to Santa Fe, you know, six hours later, we're sitting out at Geronimo's having margaritas. It was much better than dealing with the whole hall of death that was hanging over this trip.
Christi Cassidy: Wow. It takes courage though, to leave and in the middle of [00:26:00] something that you've thought you had committed to also.
Pat Wetzel: Very much, but the trip started shedding some people because of the way it was being run because of the decisions that were being made because of the death.
It really was just unraveling in a number of ways.
Christi Cassidy: You said that you have relocated cross country, moved cross country twice, right?
Pat Wetzel: No, I'm just once from the East Coast to the West. And ever since then, I've lived in the West Coast, one place or another.
Christi Cassidy: The West really does. Draw you, right? You're attracted to the mountains, to the, to the landscape, or is it something beyond that?
Pat Wetzel: Well, I think the wide open spaces are incredibly appealing. When I moved out West, I was immersed in soaring. I lived in one of the best places in the world to soar. Lake Tahoe is gorgeous. I mean, it's hard to beat that.
So I think that for me, I always say I spent the first half of my life on the East coast and the second half on the West. And I think the outdoors, the sports the endless sky, [00:27:00] all those things really appealed to me. Whereas back East, I think things are a lot more regimented. The scales are smaller, you know, smaller houses, smaller mountains.
There are beautiful, beautiful places on the East Coast, but I love this sense of openness out West.
Christi Cassidy: How did you end up in Prescott?
Pat Wetzel: I decided to leave Santa Fe. A friend of mine had moved here and it's a beautiful area. I don't really want to get into all the reasons for leaving Santa Fe right now.
Even though I loved it. It wasn't a place I could live. And so I came to Prescott thinking I'll give it a try. I've been here a little over a year now and it's really a beautiful community.
Christi Cassidy: They have, I know they have one good radio station at least because that drive from, I think I told you that we lived in Santa Fe for about a dozen years, right?
And there's that drive from Phoenix, if you're going north toward Flagstaff
and
then yeah, Flagstaff and then back, [00:28:00] or if you want to stop in Sedona, whatever, but there's, There's a whole stretch where there's kind of nothing. And if you're tooling around on the radio, there's one station and I had thought it was pronounced Prescott, Oh no, no,
Pat Wetzel: no, no, Nevada is not Nevada.
You don't say that it's Nevada, you know, and it's interesting when you hear these commentators on TV or whatever mispronounce these things.
Christi Cassidy: It's true. It's very funny. Do you want to talk about the five steps to finding a life of greater authenticity, value and meaning? How did you come to this point? Is it like a natural distillation or was it born of the podcast? All those
people.
Pat Wetzel: Now, actually, these are common traits. That I found in the podcast among all these people with that 30, 000 foot view, I have such a unique [00:29:00] perspective on all these stories. And 1 of the things I found was that everybody. When they hit a bump in the road was able to pivot their perspective. thEy were able to see their situation in a different way.
I'm a story after story, and I think a lot of that goes to issues of identity, being willing to unwind your identity and to really decide who you are. That goes to authenticity, which is the 2nd piece of that. And I think that every 1 of my guests ultimately found themselves in a quest for authenticity, where something in their life really wasn't working and they had to find, they had to dig deep to find out what their strengths and their values were.
To move forward you know, part of that is being willing to let go of what's not serving you anymore and to choose a new path forward. And you do have choice. And that's something that I think many of us don't realize we're formed by a society that tells us how we should dress, what schools we should go to, what our career progression should be, [00:30:00] you know, Name your set of issues that go into identity and how many of them are really real.
And I think for a lot of my guests, when they hit a bump in the road, they really started to peel away these layers of inauthenticity. To really pursue who they are. The mind game is the fourth part of that. I think that is probably one of the most important. I'm a big believer in meditation and meditation doesn't have to be going to Tahiti and sitting cross legged and not talking for two weeks.
I mean, you can find meditation everywhere in your life. You can find silence through sound. Some people use sound to get into a meditative state. You might find it walking in nature. There are lots of ways to pursue this. But I think the mind game is important because when you learn to quiet your mind, now you can actually review and you can watch your thoughts, you become conscious of your thoughts.
And when you become conscious of them, now you have an opportunity to choose what your thoughts are. Your [00:31:00] thoughts may not be, you know, the neurotic part of your brain rattling on about this or that, you know, is that really what you want to choose? You have a choice. And I think that as you start this pattern of observation.
You have an opportunity to reflect to become more conscious and ultimately with meditation, one of the reasons meditation is so powerful and this mind game matters so much is your frame of mind really sets your life and. Meditation is experiential. The way I try to explain meditation to people is imagine you've never had chocolate.
Okay. And you go do some research and you find, Oh my God, there are all these different types of chocolate. There's milk chocolate. There's dark chocolate. There's white chocolate. There's nuts. There's no nuts. There's, there's just many types and qualities of chocolate. But with all this knowledge, you don't have a clue what chocolate's about, do you?
Really? Nope. Then you eat it. You eat that piece of chocolate. Oh. New world opens up, right? [00:32:00] Well, meditation is experiential, just like chocolate. You have these experiences of deep peace and all of a sudden that's a reality for you. It's experiential and the more you do it, the more it becomes a part of you and you start to bring that into your everyday life.
So that's why I think the mind game is so important until you start paying attention to your mind, what it's saying and deciding to make conscious choices. You're going to be chasing your tail in your own life and it's going to be harder and harder to get out of that. Routine that safety net that you've created for yourself.
And maybe you don't want to get out. A lot of people don't, but I think that authentic living really lies in dealing with some discomfort and growth. And then the last part of that is uniqueness. Finding your own uniqueness. We are all different. That's really cool. We're all unique. I love that. And I think what's really important [00:33:00] is to find what resonates with you and what is unique with you and.
Let that out into the world. I think that is a path that ultimately we all want to be on.
Christi Cassidy: You mentioned in finding your unique purpose, you mentioned Joseph Campbell and his belief that we're seeking the experience, right?
Pat Wetzel: I love Campbell. I think he's so wise and I don't have the quote off the top of my head right now, but he essentially said that what we're really seeking is the experience of being alive. And he's talking about that experiential piece.
Of life, and you don't get that in your day to day, right? You got to step out of it and you have to be present. And I think that experience of being alive is exhilarating and it comes from presence, attention, mindfulness. All those sorts of very ancient practices and traits that are meaningful in today's life.
Christi Cassidy: Would [00:34:00] you say that meditation is one way into that experience of being alive?
Pat Wetzel: Absolutely.
Christi Cassidy: Yeah. I haven't meditated since I was a teenager. But I know people that do, and most people I know who do. Had someone teach them how to do it. You mentioned a book
Pat Wetzel: Eight Eight-Minute Meditation. When I got into meditation, I got into Transcendental Meditation and I learned that from somebody who had studied with Maharishi, but there's a book Eight-Minute Meditation by Victor Davich, .
It's a brilliant book, skinny little paperback available on Amazon. The reason I like this book is he takes you through a different type of meditation every week. And so every week you're having a new and different experience with meditation, and he asks you for eight minutes a day. That's all. So what you're doing is you're experiencing as you go through his practice, [00:35:00] you're experiencing all these different types of meditation to see what might resonate with you.
And you're building a new habit. At the end of the period, you have a new habit. What do you want to plug in there? And I think that's a brilliant way to approach something like meditation. Again, it's baby steps, small steps towards a new habit or practice.
Christi Cassidy: We'll put a link to that in the show notes, you say bringing fresh energy into your life is one way of navigating the bumps, right?
Pat Wetzel: Absolutely.
Christi Cassidy: And for people that want that fresh energy, I don't think everybody knows necessarily how to. Change their perspective, especially if they have children, have a job or have, certain kinds of commitments in their lives to family in particular, but. It sounds to me like one of the things you're saying, it's kind of like the chocolate or the introducing one new food or eight minutes a day, right? Is that one way to bring the fresh energy [00:36:00] in or there are other ways?
Pat Wetzel: I think particularly for women, they are always taking care of everybody else and they're running themselves ragged between work and kids and everything, and there's often just not any me time in there. And every soul needs me time.
And I think that if you could carve out that little bit of time for yourself, whether it's a meditation or walking or whatever, carve it out for you and make it a priority. That alone will start you on a path with a little more energy, a little more inner reflection. And chances are, if you're that overwhelmed in life, and most people are, you need that inner reflection to really think about where you're heading next.
And none of these things happen fast. They do not happen in a week or two or even a year. A lot of these things take years to unfold. So I think setting the stage with good self care, good mental self care, which I think of is meditation as being a part of that, but it might be a sport. It might be, you know, going for a walk every [00:37:00] day for yourself, whatever it is, you know, eating well.
I think that carving out room in your life for you as a priority is really important. And I think from that, you will find the energy to take new and different directions if that's what you choose to do.
But most people won't. Most people will not choose it.
Christi Cassidy: Is it because we're just, it's too easy to sit in our ruts?
Pat Wetzel: Yes, it's far too comfortable. And the other aspect of it is, and I have to attribute this to Erik Weihenmayer who was a guest to my show. He points out that the vast group of people in the middle who he calls campers.
He's a mountain climber and he calls them campers. And he points out that they may just be beaten down by life and they don't want to stick their head out of the fox hole anymore. And I think that's true of a lot of people self reflection and all the possible changes that go with that can be pretty terrifying.
Christi Cassidy: Right. I listened to that interview. That was pretty amazing. Yeah, isn't it? The three [00:38:00] kinds of people. Is that how he identifies them?
Pat Wetzel: He divides the world into three groups of people and these groups are fluid. We can all move between all the groups and we all have and we all will. The first group are quitters, kind of self evident.
The vast majority of people are campers. They do not want to get out of their comfort zone. And I saw this in the cancer community as well. People would go through, you know an existential. Situation like cancer, and they just want to go back to their old world. Things couldn't change.
And then after the campers come the climbers, and those are a very small group of people who perpetually seek greater visions, if you will, in life and will push themselves and climbers can be campers. You know, you're not in any category all the time, but I think that that desire for most people to be in that camper category is. Really a shame because they're not pursuing, or they're not allowing themselves to pursue what really makes their hearts sing. It doesn't mean you have to quit your job [00:39:00] or anything like that. You can do this again in incremental ways, be curious, explore, because life goes through stages and you want to be setting the groundwork for the next stage.
I think a lot of women, when they hit their early forties, their kids are now a little bit older, they've been running around at soccer games and school this and that, and they've been working and they have a spouse and what about them? And all of a sudden they're hitting a point of. What about me? You know, and they there's how do you even handle it?
And I think the easy way to handle it is to not take any risks, let everything go on, keep your job, etc. A lot of people come to a point or some people come to a point where they just have to change. And I think that's really where the fun is. It's not easy, but it's very, very interesting.
Christi Cassidy: What role does money play in this?
Pat Wetzel: I think that money provides you a safety net. And so that's attractive, but it's not limitless for most people. [00:40:00] So you have to be thoughtful about, you know, where you're going to spend money or not. But I think that it definitely provides you a bit of a safety net.
However, there are so many remarkable people who grow up in really awful circumstances and they find a way to create an amazing life. So I don't think money is a barrier. I think it really comes from within. And I think that people need to dream big.
Christi Cassidy: Is that about the scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset ?
Pat Wetzel: Oh, I think so. And I also, I mean, why not dream big? You have nothing to lose really. And you'll probably propel yourself farther than you would have if you'd set these really smaller, tinier goals. I think it's an interesting world. And I think you have to kind of ask yourself, what do I want to do in it? And that can change over time. It's not static.
Christi Cassidy: When we first started talking, you started telling me what's on your horizon, what's coming next.
Pat Wetzel: The book series is in process. Obviously the [00:41:00] podcast keeps going. One of the things that I, I think Bump essentially is about life wisdom.
And as a result, I'm starting to do some different things. I just had Gary Hensel and another guest on my podcast where we talked about his books that are just a compendium of amazing wisdom and we called it the Spiritual Warrior and that's up on YouTube. That was really fun to do. So I've decided I may do. The Way of Wisdom as a sort of a sub series, if you will, and the next one's going to be flying stories. I'm getting some pilots together. We're all going to tell our hairy fun stories. And I think we'll call that Flight Wisdom or Flight Lessons or something like that just because it's fun. And I think that there's so much wisdom in every piece of life, and if you can get together with some like minded people here and there. You can really come up with some fun stories that I hope resonate with people.
Christi Cassidy: That sounds wonderful. The Way of Wisdom. So this'll [00:42:00] be a podcast series.
Pat Wetzel: Yeah, it's actually, it started Gary and Deborah's episode is up on YouTube. It's also out as a podcast. It's on the website. And it's being pushed through social media and I'll do the same with all the others.
Christi Cassidy: That's great.
Pat Wetzel: I think that as we hear these stories, we can relate to them. And when we relate to them, we can take that bit of wisdom and try to make it our own. And that really expedites our own evolution in our own journey. And I think we need to listen to each other.
Christi Cassidy: Well, you sure do a great job with that in Bump in the Road. It's just a terrific podcast. So many interesting guests and people who have. Explored their own, pushed their own boundaries in so many different ways.
Pat Wetzel: My guests are amazing. I am so grateful. I get to have meaningful conversations every week. My guests, I can't say enough about them. I'm just in awe of them.
Christi Cassidy: Is there anything else you want to say that I didn't ask you? Oh, there's a ton of stuff I didn't [00:43:00] ask you about. I know.
Pat Wetzel: Come on over to the website BumpintheRoad.us. It's the best starting point. We're on all major podcast platforms, YouTube wherever you like to listen, that's where we are.
And explore the website because there's a lot there. There are pictures and videos and things that don't show up elsewhere. And it's a fun way to kind of browse and think about other people's stories
Christi Cassidy: And our own next adventures
Pat Wetzel: Absolutely.
Christi Cassidy: Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Pat. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you.
Pat Wetzel: Likewise. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the chance to be here.