Episode 166: You Learn From Your Setbacks And Challenges, Not Your Successes With Barb Betts
What if your biggest setbacks were actually the foundation for your greatest success? Barb Betts, a dynamic professional speaker based in Southern California, opens up about her remarkable journey from teenage motherhood to thriving careers in accounting and real estate. In this inspiring conversation, she shares how knowing her “why” helped her navigate life’s toughest challenges while staying grounded in both family and purpose. Barb offers powerful insights on turning setbacks into opportunities for growth, reminding us that self-discovery often begins where comfort ends.
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You Learn From Your Setbacks And Challenges, Not Your Successes With Barb Betts
Meet Barb Betts, Real Estate Expert & Speaker
Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs, where I interviewed Barb Betts. She's a sought-after keynote speaker, CEO, and relentless advocate for building businesses rooted in relationships. With over twenty years of experience, she blends authenticity and strategy to help professionals create lasting success while staying true to themselves.
As an entrepreneur and CEO, Barb equips leaders and business owners with the systems and strategies to leverage relationships for growth and success. Through her award-winning podcast, Relationships Are Your Superpower, she shows how trust-based connections lead to more referrals, loyal clients, and sustainable business models. Outside of her work, Barb enjoys life in Southern California with her husband and two children, believing the strongest relationships are those nurtured both personally and professionally.
During this episode, we discuss her background, including becoming a teenage mother and how she navigated the challenges to build successful careers in both accounting and real estate. Throughout all of these setbacks, Barb understood her why, and why it was important to her to balance family life with professional aspirations.
She encourages others to view setbacks as opportunities for personal growth and self-discovery. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you like it, please hit like on our show, subscribe, and also leave us a review. Forward it to a friend whom you think this could be helpful to as well. I want to thank you for taking your time to read Barb’s story.
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Welcome to this episode of Breaking Beliefs. I'm excited to have Barb Betts. Barb, do you want to give a little intro of yourself before we go?
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation. My name is Barb Betts. I'm from Southern California. I have a very unique background and history, which I'm sure we'll talk about. I have spent over twenty years in the real estate space and industry as a sales agent and then a broker. I owned my own company and worked with my amazing husband.
Through that journey, I started doing a lot of speaking and training inside the real estate space. That has fully morphed into a professional speaking career, both inside the real estate industry and mostly outside in other industries, on all kinds of stages, and all kinds of audiences, all centered around the power of building authentic relationships with yourself and with others.
I love it. Let's get started on your story, then. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do for a living?
I grew up in Long Beach, California, which is South of LAX. My dad was a cop, and my mom was a nurse.
Did you have siblings?
No siblings. I am an only child.
Tell me a little bit about your dad. How did he end up becoming a police officer?
That's a great question that I don't know the why behind, but that's all I ever remember. I know he started out with the Lakewood Sheriff's Department, which is the LA County Department, and then moved to Inglewood PD, which is where he met my mom. He then moved to Seal Beach PD as a detective and then worked his way up through the state of California doing insurance fraud.
What was it like growing up with a police officer? Did you ever feel any fear? What were your thoughts?
I wouldn't say there was. I'll be honest, if it were today, probably, because so much more is televised and public. Growing up, we didn't sit around and watch the news. My parents watched the news, but as kids, we didn't have access to it. I wouldn't say there was fear. I grew up in a very safe household. I was a rule follower. I was always afraid to break the rules. That's probably how it was influenced in my childhood. I was always the safe girl. I was always wearing my seatbelt when others weren't, and those types of things.
I was the same person.
I grew up in the ‘80s, so I grew up with the Night Stalker, for those of you who are young enough to remember the Night Stalker. We didn’t have the windows and protection that we have in our homes now. Alarms weren't popular. We didn't have air conditioning, so our windows were always open. I remember being terrified to go to sleep at night. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go look up the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez. He’s very famous. Any girl who grew up in the ‘80s remembers that time. When you asked me about fear in my childhood, that's what immediately comes to mind.
That's where your head goes. Your mom, being a nurse, where did she work?
She was always a nurse. She worked at Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, which is where she met my dad, and then at Downey Community Hospital for most of my childhood and young adult life. She was also an educator for the LA City Fire Department. She would take the paramedics out of service and do education and CE. She also taught at a paramedic school that I don't even think exists anymore. It was a paramedic school that was attached to a hospital.
Did you ever see her speak or train?
I remember going to the paramedic school because I wanted to be a teacher my whole life. I remember going to the paramedic school in the summer and hanging out. I was not necessarily watching her. I was always there when students weren't there, but occasionally, they would be in there, and I would run Scantrons through the machine and think I was a teacher. I would go play school in the classrooms with all the CPR dummies. I had no idea what the words meant.
Childhood Dreams Of Becoming A Teacher
What made you want to be a teacher?
I always wanted to be a teacher. I honestly don't know. It started when I was little. I think it started when I would play house with my friends. That was a thing we did. I don't think kids like to play house anymore, or maybe they do. Maybe they play with dolls. We would play house where someone was the mom and someone was the kid.
It was probably my love of school, my love of being in the classroom, and my love of my teachers. I can remember most of my childhood teachers’ names. First grade was Mrs. Garrison. She was probably one of my favorite teachers. I had kids very young. When my son went to the same elementary school I went to, Ms. Garrison was still there, which was crazy to me.
What was it about her that stuck out to you?
Looking back, like kindness, sweetness, loving, and all those things that make a good teacher and a good nurturer. As a little girl, what I remember the most is playing school in my bedroom. I had my own chalkboard. I always say that I didn't want to go to the toy store for rewards. I wanted to go to the teacher supply store and get the grade books, the stickers, and the seating charts. I would put the mean people next to each other and give them bad grades. All of my own feelings for other kids. By playing school, I would stand in my room, talk to myself, and line up all my Cabbage Patch Kids dolls.
Life Takes A Turn: A Teen Pregnancy Story
That's funny. Did you go to college to be a teacher?
No, I did not, but I would have, for sure. I graduated from high school young. This was back when California had the December 2nd cutoff date for school, which was very famous for many years. My birthday is November 30th. I was the only smart, independent kid, so they sent me to school. I graduated at seventeen, and I was going to college. I was going to go to a community college. Back then, my parents didn't have the resources to send me anywhere out of state.
Honestly, my parents never emphasized college. We didn't talk about college. It's not like it was a thing. It was like I graduated and was like, “I need to go do something next.” I was ready to go to a community college, and then I found out I was pregnant. I graduated in June. About the first week of July, I found out I was pregnant. That changed the trajectory of many things that I thought I was going to do with my life. That's when teaching and college got put on the back burner. Lots of life happened after that.
When you found out, what did that feel like? Who did you talk to?
When I found out, the first person I called was my best friend. She was coming over. I don't know if I called her. She was already on her way over for something because we hung out all the time. I remember telling her, and then I remember calling my boyfriend. He came over, and I told him. Honestly, I haven't blocked it out, not intentionally, but I can't remember it. People ask me all the time, “What was it like telling your mom?” I'm like, “I have no idea.” I do not remember. It's like a blur.
It was panic.
Probably subconsciously, I have blocked it out because it was a traumatic time in my life. It's that moment where you wake up and realize your entire trajectory of your life and everything you thought about yourself has changed. That is something I speak about in my keynotes when we talk about our relationship with ourselves.
I remember telling his parents more than I remember telling my own parents. For his parents, we waited a while. His dad used to sit down every evening and read the Bible with a literal pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. We waited until he was doing that. We figured that was a safe time. Both of them, at the time, were avid smokers, which was very common back in that generation. The thing I remember about his mom is his mom saying, “I need a cigarette.” That is probably the line that I will remember for the rest of my life from his mom. Other than that, I don't remember much about the period of telling people.
What were your next steps? How did you shift your thought process and figure out what survival looked like?
A lot of family support and a lot of decision-making. People always ask me the elephant in the room, which is, “Did you ever think about adoption or any other types of things?” The answer is, what seventeen-year-old wouldn't? We did for a second. My boyfriend and I were very close. We were, at that point, planning on staying together, even before I got pregnant.
When I say staying together, he had a Division I baseball scholarship to play at the University of Oklahoma, so he was going away to school. I remember his dad saying, "Are you still going to go to school?” Before my boyfriend could even say anything, I was like, “This baby needs a future, so he's going to school.”
Breaking news, we are still married to this day, 28 years later. We're getting ready to celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary with those two little teenage kids. My father-in-law at the time was worried that we would pull the plug on everything he was going to do, too. I was the one who was like, “Absolutely not. We're going to figure this out.”
From your husband's standpoint, or your boyfriend at the time, how was he feeling about going about his life while this was happening and making this commitment?
Good. It was very much like, “We're going to figure this out. We got into this. We're going to get through this. I'm going to go to school.” He went away to school in his freshman year, so he left in August, right around his birthday. My son was born in March. I stayed in Southern California because I needed family, support, and everything around me, so I stayed home. I had our son in March. My husband's coach was very nice and let him fly home for my son's birth, which was in the middle of baseball season. My husband came home that May from school, and then we got married in July. I moved with him and our son to Oklahoma in August of ‘97.
That's a big change.
Eighteen-year-old transplant. People ask us how we've been married for 28 years. We got married young. We had all of these cards stacked against us. Every card you could play was playing against us, and yet we still, 28 years later, are the best of friends. We love each other to pieces. Our friends joke that we've not been married for a long time. We actually like each other. Our friends will tell other people, “They don't even fake it. They like each other.”
I always say two things. Number one, we were best friends. Number two, my husband is a saint. Number three, the most important, is that we grew up together. We didn't know anything. We didn't bring separate lives together to share them. We didn't bring separate ideas, like how to balance a bank account or how to live in a house together.
We didn't have our own lives, so we literally grew up together. We figured everything out. We figured out our first credit card, debt, how to pay bills, and medical issues. Everything that you would do in life on your own as a young adult, we figured that out together. There was no social media, so there was no ability to dive into another world. It was just him and me.
Setbacks: We didn't bring separate ideas on how to balance a bank account or live in a house together. We didn't have our own lives, so we literally grew up together, figuring everything out.
You couldn’t compare yourself.
Correct, so we figured it out. Probably, our biggest blessing was moving away because we also didn't have parents hovering over us telling us how to raise Chris. We figured it out on our own.
How Early Parenthood Shaped Their Lives
How did this change you?
In so many ways. Our friends tell us all the time we're old souls. Yeah, because I had to grow up at seventeen years old. There was no easing into it. There was no young adult party life or live carefree and recklessly. We had to figure it out. I grew up overnight. My husband as well. We made a lot of mistakes and had to figure it out. There was nobody there to save us. There was nobody there to pick us up.
Setbacks: We made a lot of mistakes and had to figure it out; there was nobody there to save us.
We had support. We had all those things. It also showed us we can get through anything. It showed us how to communicate, how to work through challenges, how not to give up on each other, and how to still pursue our dreams. It changed everything. I don't know how it changed me, meaning who I would have been.
How about what your plans were?
Everything. My husband knows this. He would have no problem knowing that I'm telling the world this because I tell people often. The only time I've ever had any animosity towards my husband for being able to go to college and pursue his dream, and I didn't, was during his junior and senior years of college. There is a long story why.
He had transferred to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. We were living in Las Vegas, and he had some younger coaches who had become friends of his. Instead of going to class, he would ditch and hang out with them, even though they were his coaches. There's a whole other story to unpack there. That was when Starbucks was becoming a thing, which is funny to say. They would get coffee and go hang out. He'd go sit in the coach's office instead of going to class.
That's when I lost my Kool-Aid. I'm like, “You are getting paid to go to school, and you're throwing it away. I would love nothing more than to go to school right now.” This was in the late ‘90s, when there wasn't Zoom and online ed. That was just becoming a thing. If it were what it is now, I'd have three degrees. I was a lifelong learner. It didn't work out that way for me. In those moments, I was mad. I was very resentful of what he was doing. He now knows. He corrected it very quickly and recognized, “I'm being a total you-know-what.” That's the only time I can ever remember.
Because of that, not going to school and not pursuing teaching like I thought I would, my adult career journey started when I stayed back at home to have our son. I had nothing to do. His parents owned a commercial landscape company, so I went to work for his mom and helped her with bookkeeping. I learned bookkeeping and QuickBooks and got good at that.
When we moved to Las Vegas, we were like, “I can make enough money to pay for daycare and go do something with my life or do something with my days.” I got a job in accounting. I was good at it. Eventually, we moved back when he finished school. I got better at accounting and had various accounting jobs. I worked my way up in a company when I was 21 years old. I always use this number because it gives people a perspective. I had no degree. This was 1999 or 2000-ish. I was making $48,000 a year. If you do the math, and this is easy math for you to do, that's a lot of money years ago.
I graduated in accounting in ‘96, and my first job offer was $28,000 plus overtime at a Big 6 firm at the time.
People are like, “How did you survive?” I'm like, “It’s because I got good at something.” I was talented. I got in with the right company. They valued me and couldn't live without me. When I talk about how we survived, that's how we survived. Long story short, he played a little bit of independent baseball and blew out his knee. Two knee surgeries later, he ended up getting into land surveying in the union. He started doing well for himself, so we were able to start getting our own house to rent and doing different things. I kept working my way up in that company, and then life happened. I ended up in real estate, and the rest is history.
How did you end up in real estate? What was that shift?
From Accounting To Real Estate: A Career Pivot
I ended up in real estate because by then, I had a daughter. My son and daughter are 3 years and 11 months apart, so just shy of 4 years apart. We decided to have her because we were like, “We started young. We don't want our kids to be 10 or 12 years apart.” I had zero siblings, and I was adamant, “There's going to be more than one child in this family.”
My husband and his siblings are very close. They're all two years apart. We were like, “We've already waited a couple of years. We don't have the money. We shouldn't be having a second kid at 22 years old, but you know what? We're going to do it because we already messed up the traditional path. Why not screw it all up even more?”
By then, I had my daughter. She was a year or two old. We ended up buying our first home together at a very young age, which gratefully was because he got a work comp settlement from his knee injury. We never would've been able to buy a home at 22 or 23 when we bought our first home. We had an awful experience. We bought from the listing agent. It was a horrible experience. I was doing the contracts. Clearly, I have that kind of brain, doing accounting and bookkeeping. It was awful.
I didn't think much of it, but at the time, I had moved to a new company. I worked for a female. I thought working for a female would be great, but no. Not a female who doesn't prioritize family. I felt like I was working for a drill sergeant. I was working for someone who put a career before everything else. When my daughter was very little, she got a very nasty viral pneumonia-like infection. I remember the pediatrician saying, “You either go sit at home with her on a breathing machine or I'll put her in the hospital. Let's see how this goes. I'll give you a couple more days at home. She needs this regimen, medicine, and all the things.”
I'll never forget this woman, whose name was Carol, telling me that this is why I need a nanny at home. I thought, “Absolutely not. I thought nannies were for low-grade fevers and the sniffles when you can't go to daycare. Nannies are not for when your child is on the border of being put into the hospital.” I went home to my husband and said, “I can't keep doing this. I don't want to work for this person, and I don't want to be told how to raise my kids.”
I thought, “I'm at this crossroads where I have no degree, and I'm making a ton of money. Everyone who's going to school around me in the accounting world, let's call it. They come out of school and keep passing me by.” I might work my way up somewhere, and there are stories out there, but I knew I had an uphill battle. I knew I was probably going to stay status quo without the degree. I thought, “What can I do where I can get a license, a certificate, or something where I can go become an expert in something?”
Going through that awful real estate transaction, one day, I said to my husband, “If he can do that bad of a job and make that kind of money, I can do a better job and make more money.” I can't tell you how many agents I have talked to in my twenty-plus-year career, where that's their story, too. I got my license, and I did it quietly. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't tell my family.
My husband was the only one who knew because I knew I'd get the “Real estate? You're going to go into sales?” I didn't view it as sales. If I did, I never would've done it. I got my license, so then I called my lender at the time and said, “I need a credit line on my house for my net take-home. Not my gross. That doesn't matter. I just want my net, so that if I don't close 1 deal for 12 months, we can at least pay the bills, and then I'll figure it out.”
That's what we did. We got a credit line. I needed my job to get the credit line. I'll never forget the day he called me and said, “It's closed.” I already had my letter of resignation. I walked into Carol's office, handed her my resignation, gave her a two-week notice, and was out of there. I started building my real estate business. I used the money that first month for daycare, and then I never touched it again. We ended up using it to put in new windows. We used it for a house, which is what you're supposed to use the credit line for. We ended up using it, but not for what I thought I'd have to use it for. I haven't looked back. I've been an independent contractor, business owner, and entrepreneur ever since.
Unpacking Confidence And Purpose In Entrepreneurship
Where do you think you get your confidence from that you've been able to look inside and take on these challenges?
I don't think I was always a confident person. The confidence I've built over time was through lots of things that have happened in my life. The reason for my success was always based on my kids and my family, and never wanting to go back to that lifestyle where someone told me what to do all day long. Once I started getting a taste of being at the 11:00 AM Halloween parade or being able to go on the field trip, it was so important to me that I would get through any obstacle that was put in my way. I would work the late hours if I had to on the nights and weekends that made sense. I would do all the things that nobody else wanted to do because I never wanted to go back there. I wouldn't say I was confident. That's the crazy part.
That's good positioning for people, even when you're not feeling confident, to have a vision of why you're doing what you're doing. If you can keep bringing that up even in the hard times, you know why you're doing what you're doing.
I've learned in my sales career that when you have a big enough why, you can endure any how. That's a saying that's very common. That's what I did. It wasn't even the job. It was someone telling me how to raise my kids, someone telling me when I could be with them and when I couldn't, or being put in a position where you might have to lie about where you are.
It was watching how it was transforming my kids' lives and how excited my son would be. My daughter didn't know any different because she was so little, but my son did. He was probably in 1st or 2nd grade by the time all this started going. When I would be standing on the playground, when he got out of school instead of his aunt, that kind of stuff was worth everything I was going through.
It turns out I was good at real estate. I was good at taking care of people. I had mastered the transaction. I was great at the contracts, details, and paperwork. We grew up in our area, where we were living, so we were household names, if you will. My husband and his brother were like the baseball kings of our area, so everyone knew our name.
You were back in California?
Yeah, we were back in California, our home city. We bought our home in the area where we grew up. I got good at real estate. Frankly, it was easy. It was hard work, but it was not like I was out there begging people to buy and sell with me. It then started morphing. Since I'm a lifelong learner and I love learning and getting educated, and I still love it to this day, which we met through a mutual group where we learn, I’m constantly in a personal growth and development mode. I learn everything. I want to get better at everything. I want to be the best at everything. That is who I've always been. I told you. Usually, the heart of a teacher has the heart of a learner first. You typically don't want to teach if you don't like learning.
Setbacks: The heart of a teacher is first, the heart of a learner.
You work from home teaching.
When people are like, “You didn't get to become a teacher.” I'm like, “I teach adults every day.” Every listing appointment I go on and every transaction I go through, when I'm telling you, “This happened. These are the next three things you can expect,” that's teaching. When clients call you and ask you questions, you are teaching when you regurgitate back to them what the next steps are. That's all education.
I was educating people on the real estate transaction, the real estate deal, and the biggest investment they're going to make in their lives. It turns out that it was exactly what I wanted to do my whole life, but in a different box or a different container. I still don't like to say I was in sales, but I was in sales. I got good at sales. I studied sales, human development, and why people say yes to things, and then it kept growing from there.
I want to go back to one thing you said, though. I was thinking to myself at that same stage. I went in and had my own accounting practice when my kids were little for the same reasons. I want to see if this was true for you or not. Even though I had the joy of being able to take days off at the time I lived in South Florida, so I could take them to the beach and so forth, I would be nervous the whole time knowing there were clients that needed me, or there were things left undone that needed to get done. I remember that time period of my heart rate being high all of the time. I never felt like in either place, I could be fully present.
The Power Of Building A Referral-Based Business
I always say I felt guilty when I was at home. I felt guilty when I was working. When you're working, you want to be at home. When I explained to people why I started developing a business and a practice by relationship and referral, it was 100% because of what you said. You're different. You have a time period and a part of the year when you don't have a choice. I didn't have that. I tell people the power of doing business the way I choose to do business. By then, my husband had joined me in sales. Because our clients were connected to us somehow, when I said, “I'm sorry. I'm not available. My son has a 3:00 baseball game. I can meet you at 1:00 or I can meet you at 5:00. What works for you?” They didn't question me. They didn't say, “I'm sorry. I'm going to call someone else.”
When you are doing business by relationship and someone has some kind of connection to you, and it's not a transaction to them, you get more grace and compassion than you get typically in what I saw my other friends dealing with. They had to be at the open house on Saturday at 1:00. If they didn’t, they didn't get any leads for the week.
Instead, I was like, “I'm not doing open houses because they interfere with baseball games and dance recitals. We're not going to do open houses unless I have nothing going on.” I didn't have to worry about an internet lead who doesn't care about me at all. All they care about is getting the house. The difference I made was that I built a business where the client cared about me. I happened to be the conduit to them getting a house. Once I figured that out, the power of having a connection to another human and how that changes your relationship and your working relationship, I realized, “I'm never going to do business any other way. This is the key to balance in life.”
The other thing I will say is I sold a lot less real estate than I could have during those years. It was a choice not to be slinging. Back in those days, I would do, on average, probably 30 to 40 homes a year. I could have been doing 50 or 60, but what consequences would those have come with? That’s something my husband and I always talked about. I would compare myself to other agents and be like, “They're selling 100 homes a year.” He's like, “They never see their kids,” or, “They don't have kids.” Those things were always important to me. I would always ground myself in that and be like, “Am I making enough money to take care of my family?”
I would always tell other agents that I would nurture, mentor, and guide that there are only a couple of things I care about in life. It is how much money is in my bank account and whether it is enough to provide the life that I want for my family and myself, and what my kids say about me. I didn't care about the top producer award. I didn't care what number I was ranked. I cared about what my family thought of me and what my bank account said. If those two things were aligned, then I didn't care about anything else. Everything else, in my opinion, could wait for another season.
That makes sense. There's another piece of that that's important that people get uncomfortable with that you said, which is to communicate. You weren't trying to hide from the client. You were being very specific in how you work. This happens all the time in the professional services world. Expectations are not set up front.
People come in with different perceptions of what that client relationship is going to look like. If you're not very specific about it and let a client opt out or not afraid of a client opting out because that doesn't work for them to not have open houses, then you can go forward being honest and having a collaborative relationship. When you try to hide those things and then they're not happening, that's when people get frustrated.
I always say, “Did I ever miss an inning of a baseball game? Of course, I did. He played thousands of them. Did I do my work from the stands of a baseball stadium? Absolutely. Did I take phone calls when he wasn't at bat? Of course, I did.” It's also how I built my career. I built my career in the lobby of a dance studio and the stands of baseball fields. I always say that there were times I had to leave a game early because of the only time we could get into the house. There were times I came to a game late, but there's never a time when I put my real estate business in front of the priorities of my family and my children.
I'm also very clear in understanding that there are plenty of moms and dads out there who can't do that. They didn't have a career that allowed them to do that. It's what I ended up in. If I had been a school teacher, there are plenty of games I would've missed by having to be at school until 3:00, and he's got the 3:00 high school baseball game. I would've been late.
That's life. Plenty of parents around us still loved their children, prioritized their children, and made it all work. The reason I say it was so important is that the industry I was in is plagued with families and parents who let the business overtake their family. That's what I didn't allow to happen. It's, frankly, most of them.
I call it personal purpose, or your why. We don't spend enough time on that personal purpose. To the same point that if my purpose is that I'm working for the satisfaction of a career, but also in order to have freedom with my family, I've got to specifically state that. It rolled into the second thing that you said. It’s not about how much I can make, but it's how much I need to make to be able to serve that purpose. This happens even in the speaking world. Someone's like, “I had 100 speaking events.” I don't want 100 speaking events. People will do that, and then you start feeling bad about yourself.
You feel less than.
You can ground yourself.
The thing I learned the hard way was that you cannot compare your season to someone else's. I'm a perfect example in the speaking world. My children are 28 and 24 years old. They do not need me around every day anymore. My husband does most of our day-to-day sales in our real estate business. He has a life, a career, and a business where he can travel with me and go beyond the road with me when we have these times where I'm busy.
Setbacks: You cannot compare your season to someone else's.
Navigating Career And Motherhood: Different Seasons Of Life
I want to be doing 100 gigs a year. If I were a professional speaker when my kids were younger, I'm so glad I wasn't, because as a professional speaker, you're going to miss things. You can't say no to all your business because you're trying to get to every baseball game through a four-month baseball season. That's not reality.
For instance, in the real estate industry, I got very involved in the volunteer side of real estate. Through the associations, I'm a director at all levels. I'm involved in advocacy in our political side of real estate. I've been doing that for over ten years. My son is 28. My daughter is 24. That means I didn't even start doing that until she was close to high school, and he had already graduated.
I say that because when I speak about real estate, I'll have women come up to me. They look at me and what I do. They have no conscious idea of what I chose to do when my children were little. They'll say, “I have little kids. How do you balance all the volunteering and all the travel?” In the real estate industry, those volunteer things I told you require about five weeks out of my year on the road.
These women will say to me, “How did you do it? How did you volunteer so much when your kids were little?” My answer is, “I didn't.” They don't like hearing that. I say, “You can do what you want to do.” They’re like, “What would you have done if your kids were little?” I said, “I probably would be a volunteer in one of the four I am. I would pick one.” My opinion is that you can't volunteer at that level when you have little kids at home because you are going to sacrifice so much of your children's formative lives.
My son lives across the street from me. He bought a house across the street from me. It’s the best thing ever. Tesla was having problems. He said, “Mom, can I borrow your car?” I go, “I'm in Nashville. You can borrow my car.” He’s like, “You're not even home?” I'm like, “No.” He’s like, “Okay. I’m borrowing your car.” My kids can't keep up with where I am. He's like, “I'm so sorry. I’ll bring your car back. I borrowed it this morning.” I'm like, “I'm in Nashville.” He's like, “Okay.”
My kids don't need me. However, my daughter is going to graduate from grad school in May 2026. She's not sure of the date yet. They haven't announced it yet, but I know it'll be in this 2 or 3-week window in May. It's already completely blocked on my calendar. If I get a speaking engagement request for May 2026, I'm going to say, “I've got to check on a date first.” I still prioritize the most important things in my kids' lives even as they are adults.
Another important point you made in your story still comes back to communication, but it's with your spouse. You both have to be coming in and saying, “What am I going to do, and what are you going to do to make this work?” It's very hard in a relationship to say, “I'm going to go speak that much and do all this advocacy work and volunteerism,” if he didn't decide to say, “I'll take care of the real estate business while you're off doing that.” That has to be a compromise. There are always going to be times, like when you were supporting him with his baseball. These things shift and change. We don't talk enough about how we have to ask for what we need.
It's interesting you mention that because my husband will have people say to him, “Is it hard that Barb is doing all these things? She's on all these stages. She's gone all the time. How do you balance it all?” What he always says, and I get emotional sometimes, even, is, “She put her entire life on the back burner for me so I could go pursue my dreams. I had my time. It's her time now.”
Every time I think about that, it's who he is. He's an incredible human being. Not all spouses have that relationship. Let's face it. He's also not stupid. He benefits from what I'm doing, and I benefit from what he's doing. We have a great life together. We've built an incredible family together. We do incredible things. I got hold of my calendar for Costa Rica in February 2026. He overheard me and my bureau agent on the phone because I had it on speaker phone. I hang up, and he goes, “I'm going on that one with you.” I'm like, “Duh.” We also benefit from what I'm doing.
I'm doing hard work. I'm doing important work, but I'm not exactly going to awful places. I'm not going in the middle of nowhere. Insert whatever state. I won't offend anybody. I'm going to some cool places. Nashville is one of our favorite places in the world. Do you know how many conferences happen in Nashville? He goes with me to Nashville. He comes down with me to San Diego. We're able to balance it all.
There are times when he doesn't come with me because he's busy here. It's a busy time for him. I will always go back to him, saying I, meaning me, put my dreams on the back burner for him. I did. It's a fact. Am I happy the way things turned out? Absolutely. Would I choose any other outcome? Absolutely not. The fact is that I did put my career and my dreams on the back burner.
There's always a give and take. That's a great story to be able to talk about because when you were putting your dreams on the back burner, you didn't know what it would look like when you did that. He didn't know what it looked like when you did that as well. That vision that you had to have to get through those times, you also have to have together in your next season of having kids as adults. What does that look like for the two of you? Are you in alignment with that?
I would never tell a 17-year-old, 18-year-old, or 19-year-old to get pregnant. I would never tell anyone to get pregnant younger or earlier than they're ready. I always tell my friends, “Bring me a seventeen-year-old. I will not tell them to get pregnant, but bring me a seventeen-year-old who is pregnant and I will tell them that their life is not over.”
Rewind. If this was me, if I was 17 years old in 2025 and this happened to me, you have every opportunity to do anything you still need to do because of the resources that we have in America to get these things done, such as degrees and education. Be a teenage mom influencer and go build a gazillion-dollar empire. The world has endless opportunities. There's more than there was when I got pregnant in 1996, for sure.
That’s such a great story of perseverance, vision, and a great support system as well. Anything you want to make sure before we close out that the audience knows, or you want to emphasize that we talked about?
Setbacks As Gifts: Learning Through Challenges
We didn't talk about it, but it is the theme of how I got through everything. We don't learn anything from our successes. We don't learn anything from the awards, titles, and accolades. You learn everything about yourself through your setbacks and challenges. I feel like the thing that's missing in life that I didn't even know until I started doing the work that I'm doing now is that these moments, where your entire identity is questioned, are where you figure out that authentic relationship with yourself. It's where you figure out who you are, what you're designed to be, and who you're designed to be.
Unfortunately, through life, we start layering performance and protection around us because we think we shouldn't be that person. If I went back, unwound everything, and looked back to who was I in all these moments of challenges in my life and setbacks, if I would've embraced that person sooner, I would've been much more confident and happy like I am now sooner instead of all the doubt, worry, fear, shame, and regret that I was living in.
I had the label and stigma of being a teenage mom. I wouldn't even talk about it. I would pretend I wasn't a teenage mom.. I looked like I was twelve. I felt like it was such a negative, bad thing that happened to me, but I realize the greatest gift I was ever given was that oops. You said, “How did you get through it? What'd you learn about yourself?” I now know what I learned about myself, but I couldn't see it back then. I wish everyone would understand that you need to look at your setbacks and challenges as gifts. That's when you figure out who you are.
I agree. That is the nice part of aging, to be able to look back and see, “I worried about things I didn't need to worry about,” but it's what gets you through it. Thank you so much for being on and sharing your story. There were so many great lessons for our audience. I appreciate it.
Thank you. I appreciate you having me.
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Now, my Mindful Moments for this interview that we had with Barb. I always find it interesting. Everybody's story is something that we can learn lessons from. I appreciate people's vulnerability and transparency when they come on the show and tell stories that were hard. Barb was talking about being a teenage mom, her boyfriend, and her making that decision to not only stay together but also how they were going to make a life together when Barb wasn't even eighteen at the time.
One of the things that we talked about was her sacrifice during that time in order to change what her future aspirations were, which was to be a teacher and go to college, and instead support her boyfriend, now husband, in his baseball career, moving along with him, and following him to these different colleges and universities where he played baseball.
We talked about why they stayed together throughout all this, because a lot of couples have trouble making it through something as hard as having a pregnancy and children at such a young age. The two things that she pointed out that I do think are important are that, number one, they were best friends, and they've stayed best friends. Friendship in a romantic relationship is so important, where you can have that vulnerability and honesty together and ask for support.
Second, growing up together, where you're not coming from two separate ways of doing things and two separate families. You're learning together to figure out how to do adult stuff. I do think there is a big difference when we grow up in relationships versus meeting people who already have not only their origin family, but other families that they're coming from, too. We all have patterns and routines, and feel we have the right way of doing things. It's much harder to mesh those two together than when you're growing up together and making those decisions together. I thought that was important.
Even if this is not the way your relationship is, it may be a mindset of thinking about how we look at our relationship as growing up together, even if we're in our 40s or 50s, and later on in life, and have had different family backgrounds. There's no right way. There's a way together. That came through in her story so many times.
The other thing we talked about was that during this time, she learned how to do bookkeeping. She then grew in her accounting career even without a degree and realized she was good at it. It gave her confidence in herself and the fact that she would be able to drive the income in the situation that they were in. When her husband came out of college, they were able to get that first house together.
There are always these moments that shape who we are as people. It can be a bad experience or a good experience, but what was interesting about her was that during her first experience of buying a house, it was such a bad experience that she decided that she was going to go into real estate and be able to help others in a better way through their real estate transaction. Through the confidence that she built up in herself from seeing how well she did in accounting, she started this new journey and pivoted into real estate.
This is important. One of the things that we talked about was that as she went into real estate, it was truly understanding why she was doing it. Why she was doing it was for her family so that she could be at her kids' school when she needed to be, or at their games, dance lessons, her husband's baseball, or whatever it was. That was a guiding light for her.
I talk a lot about personal purpose. Sometimes, we create our business goals, but we don't necessarily get grounded in our personal goals or our personal purpose of why we do what we do, why we get up in the morning, and what makes us tick. When we have to make decisions to not be the top real estate agent in an agency or work the most hours in an accounting firm, whatever that might be, we should be grounded in the why so that we can come back to that when we need to come back to.
We also talked about another important thing that she did in building her business. It was that she didn't just take any client. It was based on the power of her referrals and relationships that she built over time. That helped balance things and create a relationship where she could set the boundaries that she needed to set in her business life in order to create the personal life that she wanted, and make sure that she was making the amount of money that she needed to make in her work.
We talked about that. It isn't about how much money you can make. It is about, “How much do I need so that I'm clear and aligned with that purpose and not feel like I'm lagging behind someone else?” I thought she had a good line where she said you can't compare your season of life to someone else's season in life. You may see someone out there killing it, but they're in a different situation. There is a life difference as far as whatever support they have, whatever they need, and what they're driving toward. You can't necessarily compare yourself to that other person.
The other thing that we talked about was how important communication is, whether that is communication with your clients, your workplace, your spouse, your children, or your family. It is so that there's no missed perception of what people think that you're doing or should be doing versus being very clear and transparent on your boundaries, the clarity of how you work and when you work, and what the expectation should be of how you're going to be involved with the family and what things you're going to do versus what your spouse might do and so forth.
This is important when we think about not being too hard on ourselves and having that negative thinking. Maybe a lot of times, we don't even realize how hard we're being on ourselves because we perceive how people might feel about us. We might be wrong. We can't be sure. It's important to stay grounded in that personal purpose, communicate with the people around you about what you need, set the boundaries that are important, and live the life that you want to live.
I want to thank you for tuning in to this episode. I appreciate Barb being able to share her story with us, so that you could learn from her story as well. Please share this episode with anyone you think it could be helpful for. I want to thank you for taking the time to read this episode and for being a supporter of this show. It always helps to be able to write a review or let someone else know about it. I appreciate it because your support means everything in the work that we do at the B3 Method Institute.
As we close out, remember that your energy should be intentional, and how you feel is contagious to the people around you. As you're going back through your day, make sure you're taking these moments to be mindful about your movements through the day, how you're interacting, and how you feel. We’ll see you next time.
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Barb Betts
Barb Betts is a dynamic keynote speaker and CEO, known for her transformative approach to business through authentic relationships. With over 20 years of experience, she empowers professionals to blend strategy and authenticity, driving lasting success. Barb helps leaders and business owners leverage relationships to create loyal clients and sustainable growth.