You're listening to Women in Fuse Radio, while Women in the Marketplace connect with purpose and series, where the conversation covers all things women, business and fascinating faith. And now your host, Kristi Lynn Olson. Hello and welcome to episode 23 of the Women in Fused Radio Podcast Show. Today's show features an interview I did with Betsy Laven, one of our co-authors of our Women in Fused 2 Volume book series entitled We Walked By Faith and Not By Sight, Women of Faith in the Marketplace.
Betsy wrote her chapter in Volume 2 of the series, so make sure you get the book and read her entire story, available now on Amazon.com. I want to welcome you here to the Women in Fused community and let you know that the complete, uncut, full-length interviews for our We Walked By Faith series are available exclusively on the Women in Fused Network Broadcast app, which you can download if you haven't done it already, it's a free download available on Apple and Android. Just go to Womeninfusedapp.com, there's a link down in the show notes, and we'd love for you to join our community of spirit and purpose-filled Women of Faith, where you will find relevant VIP broadcasts in the areas of faith, lifestyle and work, plus a free Bible app and study tools that will help you dig deeper into God's word for yourself. When you download the app, all you have to do is register, log in, and then search for the Women in Fused podcast channel, and there you will be able to download a free copy of our bonus devotional ebook, The Loved Notes of Encouragement for Women of Faith in the Marketplace.
This is our free gift to you. In it, you will find more words of wisdom from the co-authors of our book series, plus a space to journal and pray over each specific topic mentioned by the author. We pray that this ebook will bless you, inspire you, and encourage you in your journey of faith as you walk out your unique assignment in the marketplace. Let me introduce you to today's guest, Dr.
Betsy Levin. I first met Betsy when she and I went through the same Christian training program I want to say about 10 years ago. She has such a gifted woman of God, led by a strong sense of purpose in calling for her own life. Author and speaker Dr.
Betsy Levin is passionate about developing confident Christians personally and professionally. Her signature coaching and speaking platform, God's masterpiece, unveiling your spiritual gifts to reveal your true potential, has created a movement to help you as a Christian man or woman, embrace your God-given spiritual gifts and strengths so that you can live with focus and clarity of God's call for your life. Her six-hour spiritual gifts workshop is specifically designed for churches who are ready to experience their spiritual gifts on a deeper and more personal level. She is also the author and creator of the Christian Life Plan program, Find Your Beautiful, discovering God's divine design and purpose for your life, and she welcomes group or individual coaching programs.
She enjoys sharing her inspiring message of, You Are God's Masterpiece, Reveal It and Use It through motivational speaking around the United States. Betsy is also a doctor of chiropractic with 25 years of experience in health and wellness, and she specializes in nutrition and acupuncture. She lives with her husband Pete on a four-generational farm in rural southwest Minnesota. Let's listen in now to our interview.
Today I want to welcome my guest Dr. Betsy Levin, and she is definitely someone who belongs on Women and Puse Radio, and I'll tell you why in a minute, but Betsy, welcome to Women and Puse Radio. Well, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Well, this is such a fun series for me to do because as you know, we recently released the book We Walk By Faith and Not By Sight, Women of Faith in the Marketplace. Betsy, you definitely have a unique situation that I think a lot of our listeners are going to be excited to hear about. You really have had two careers going side by side for a while now. So I was wondering if you could share a little more, how does that fit in then to the way God designed you?
And the second part of the question would be, have there been any challenges in running two careers side by side? Well, it's definitely a challenging situation. I'm a chiropractor and I've been a chiropractor for 25 years and still in practice, and I'm also a Christian life coach. And so I'm lucky in the fact that I can do all of these things either in my home or in my wellness center.
And I think that the two together really once I resolved the fact that God wanted me to not only just work on the physical part of people's body, he wanted me to also work on their spiritual and their emotional mental, all of those things as well and to look at taking a whole body approach. That really changed how I connected the two businesses together. And it's been such a blessing, but of course, like you said, there's challenges and probably the greatest challenges in the fact that it's hard to put all your focus into one without letting the other one suffer. And it seems like there's always demands from one or the other.
And so to be that multitasker has become quite challenging to make sure each business is doing its own thing and to be able to sit back and forth every other day has been kind of challenging. Well, and I can see we wear a lot of hats as women anyway in the rest of our lives. And so if you're talking not only, it's not just a job, you own two businesses that you're trying to keep the balls rolling. So even though they are connected in that whole body, mind, spirit arena, you definitely have to look at two different pieces of that.
And now one of the things I think helps you probably is we all try and play to our strengths. And I talk a lot about the Strength Finder 2.0 assessment. And I know you are definitely someone who teaches on gifts and strengths. What do you think?
You told me your strengths were Maximizer, Achiever, Learner, Strategic, and Futuristic. As you're balancing these two careers, what one of those strengths or maybe there's a combination of them have kind of risen to the top and really helped you the most do you think when it comes to being successful? Oh, no doubt the Maximizer is my greatest strength. I love the other ones and they're all kind of in the background.
But as a Maximizer and for those of you that don't know what that is, that means that everything that I do is to a level of excellence. Some people will put in an average amount of work into a situation or into a project and they're content with that. I have to make sure if there's something already strong and doing well, I love to go in and just transform it and to make it into something superb or excellent. That's what drives me.
And so I tend to search out the best in everybody. What are they really good at? Whether it's myself or other people? And then I like to nurture it.
I like to challenge people with it. And so if I can help them capitalize on their strengths, but they're really good at versus let's forget, no, it's not focused on what we lack. To me, that's what energizes me. And so if I can go in and I get my staff in my chiropractic clinic and I get them working and excelling at what they do best, they're so happy and that energy is just vibrated out to all of the patients that come in.
If I can help the patients in helping what they're really good at and the same with my coaching and that's by far the greatest thing is once I realize that teaching strengths and spiritual gifts is my greatest gift, what God has really called me to do. It's allowed me that confidence that we lack because we're always doubting am I good at this? I'm not good at it. And so for me, maximizing it, taking what people are good at and really making even better excelling is really what I'm so thankful that I learned early on.
That was one of my strengths. You know, and you brought up an important point. It's not only important for us to discover what our strengths are and our gifts are and use them, but to claim them as divinely designed to claim them as ours and kind of step into that space. I know I've talked to you a couple of times and I recently mentioned that I'm 54 years old and I feel like I still haven't done all the things I need to do.
And part of that journey for me was acknowledging I haven't really boldly claimed all the gifts God has given to me. So why is it so important if you could share for other women, why is it important for them to not only discover their gifts, but to claim them as their own? I think it's what gives us the confidence to know that they're God and they're God given. It's okay to say, well, yeah, I'm natural at leading or I'm natural at this.
But once we make that flip in our lives and truly just claim those gifts, it gives us our life purpose. It defines it for us. And so whatever it is that whoever's listening today, they're really, you know, if they kind of have an idea what their gifts are, but not real sure, I would just say, claim them. Really discover what your top gifts are so that when you can claim them as, oh my gosh, God gave me these.
I must be significant. If he gave them to me, he doesn't want me to leave them sitting on the wayside. He's created me to be his masterpiece. He's called me and equipped me to serve.
And so just to know that they're God given gives us permission to step out more boldly to have more confidence. I think when we're using them. Have you ever felt guilty for saying no to something that really fell outside the realm of your gifts, but because we're all high achieving women, right? Oh, but we can do that or we can learn that.
Oh, absolutely. I used to do that. I kind of learned of course I did because I just, you know, you want to please everybody and you want to be everything to everyone. And instead, no, I just, I really have no problem saying no to things that aren't in my gift in this.
Not to say that there's places I serve. Of course I do in my church, I serve in different areas that we have to step in two months in a while. But when it comes to my business and even in the workplace, I really just really hone in on what my strengths are and what I'm good at. And that way I don't feel, I feel more energized and left defeated at the end of the day.
So Betsy, I know that we're talking about gifts and strengths, but I also know you're really good at helping women discover their spiritual gifts. And I think sometimes with spiritual gifts, we tend to think, oh, they're only good for use in the church. But I kind of have always had this feeling that no, I think we also have to use them out in the marketplace. Can you share a little bit about can we use our spiritual gifts effectively in the marketplace and what would that look like?
Oh, sure. So absolutely. In fact, I think more than ever we're called to use them out in the secular world. And I think that as believers, we're called to serve, we want to serve and we're equipped to serve, but we have to do it beyond the setting up the walls of our church.
I think we have to step out in our community. I think our Christian believers were searching for purpose, were searching for significance more than ever. And we want to make a contribution. And we can do that, but we don't always know what to offer, how we should serve.
And so spiritual gifts, knowing them, especially your primary gift and kind of what your ministry gifts are, will just give you that focus and direction. Oh, this is what God wants me to do. Because you can use your spiritual gifts in the grocery store. You can use it with every relationship that you encounter.
It's just there to be used all the time. And so to me, I guess that's my main new messages. God's calling me to really kind of join a spiritual gifts movement to help people take their gifts, you know, in the church as well as out of the church. That is so encouraging.
And I'm so glad to hear that because I think we need more women. First of all, we need more women like you step into that marketplace space and say, hey, you do have spiritual gifts that we need to start working on. But more importantly, you can kind of show us what that looks like by example, to be salting light into the world and definitely that we do that. We accomplish that by using our gifts and our spiritual gifts.
So I definitely want to make sure we have a link in the show notes and maybe as an extra addendum if people want to get a hold of you and kind of talk to you about how they can go about doing that. It would that be okay with you? Oh, absolutely. Yes, I love that.
Great. And this brings me back to my point about being salt in light. You know, part of your story in the book was when you first started your career, you really put yourself in a very vulnerable position about being salt and light. You tell us a little bit about what you wrote in the book that, you know, how did that look to you as you stepped into a new business?
You were in a small town. I think it's a small town rural Minnesota. How you became more of an overcomer. Can you share with us a little bit of your journey?
Because I think a lot of us think, oh, everyone just showed up in this perfect position and they were this perfectly educated, great family, nothing ever wrong kind of person, but that's not the case for most of us. So can you share a little bit about what your journey looked like? Well, my journey, I guess, you know, started probably when I was 16 and I became a teenage mom. And so I learned early on the responsibility and all of those things and helped more choices affect our lives.
But it was actually when I was 26 that being a single mom of a 10 year old boy, I kind of hit rock bottom. I'd been divorced, just divorced and lost everything, my home, everything. And got pretty much called me to go back home and to do something really super hard. And that was to go become a doctor of chiropractic.
And at that time, I was deep in debt. I thought, how am I going to do that? How am I going to go to school for, you know, college for six years? But of course, you know, lit my way for me.
And I asked for a lot of health along the way. And so six years later, I managed with the health of my family and friends and all kinds of people. I did open my chiropractic practice back in my hometown, which, you know, people that are in small towns, they know everything about your past and you're just that little girl growing up. So I had to, you know, really kind of prove that I was now this responsible doctor.
And I was so well received. It was so grateful that people could see past, I think maybe because we all have mistakes that we've made and we do change and grow up. So I do give things that, you know, people were willing to come back and look beyond my past and support me. But it definitely, I had a lot to survive there.
I, you know, I had my strengths and my guests, of course, are as a leader. And so it was, you know, I really relied on those strengths to get me, you know, build out of my chiropractic practice. And I love how you said in the book that your light of your past didn't diminish the future. I think that's so important for another woman to hear who may be feeling like she's less than acceptable or, you know, she could have just gone through a divorce and needs to start a new career that it's due.
There's hope. I mean, that's what I hear in your story, not only overcoming, but there's hope and you can be salt and light. You stood true to what you believe at the time and you knew God was putting a light at your path. It was humbling.
You had to move back home. You had to just, you know, allow people to maybe gossip. I don't know if they did or not, but being in a small town, I'm sure there was a part of that. But you really gave hope and that's part of what being salt and light is.
It's more through our actions than our words, I think. Right. It is. And if there is anyone out there that is doubting, do you have the skills or have, is my past just too overwhelming that I can people aren't going to get past it?
They will, if you do. And once that woman realizes the past is there for a reason, learn from it. What did God teach you? What did he want you to walk away with?
What character trait or what value and embrace that and put it to work in the future? And so for me, just overcoming the past for my past was, we're not perfect. Nobody's perfect. But I still had, I was still able to go back to school and get my doctor degree, even though I was a teenage mom.
And we could all overcome with the help of God, of course. Absolutely. And that is really encouraging. So, you know, you had to juggle a lot of things.
You have a child, you have school, then you became a doctor, now you have two businesses. How do you structure your time? You're a self-admitted purpose-driven overachiever. I love that phrase.
Give us an example of how that classic overachiever syndrome might kind of play out in your life. And what things did you have to shift in order to really be successful? Well, the greatest step that I made lately is just to have patience and to give time for God to do his work. And as a maximizer and achiever and a strategy and a futuristic, all of those strengths could get me wrapped up to being such a, you know, purpose-driven person.
Instead, he is really, I don't want to say forcing. He's really making it a point of that. I need to be more patient. I have to wait on him.
And so to structure my time isn't hard. I mean, I don't have any kid at home now. My husband, we're both self-employed. I can really schedule my schedule any way that I want other my chiropractic hours.
And so for me, it's the discipline of my mind. Okay, what am I going to do today to honor myself to do more devotional work, to do more prayer work, to do more exercising? And so I really have to mentally make that in my schedule. Otherwise, I'm so caught up in achieving, you know, my business goals, but I forget that I have personal goals.
Well, and personal goals are just as important as business goals, don't you think? Well, yeah. We'd like to think I'm safer. I know that and I know that and I, you know, teach that.
But you know, when you're an overachiever, you know, and especially when I'm doing something I love, oh my goodness, it's hard for me to walk away. When I'm still wrapped up in God's, you know, when I'm doing and I'm serving, it's so energizing that sometimes I forget, wait a minute now, you've got to take a minute and, you know, go exercise. That's hard. That is hard.
But the personal care, especially, I find that ironic that, and I find this in myself as well. You're a health care provider, you're a doctor of chiropractic on one side of the table, but the thing you find the struggle with is taking the time for yourself for that health care, you know, I mean, we're all, we're all like that. It's kind of like what we need to learn is what we have to teach other people so we can relearn it ourselves. Exactly.
That is exactly true. Now, one of the things that you talked about also in the book is as you're kind of now running an official Christian business because you never really shied away from the fact that you were a Christian, but sharing your faith and being graceful and truthful, you said on a spiritual level, you felt like sometimes you were an imposter. I think so many women, not just on a spiritual level, but women struggle with this whole imposter syndrome, I think, especially high achieving women. And so what has kind of helped you get over that and what has maybe even just tell us what the struggle has been?
Have you figured it out because the rest of us definitely want to know if we're struggling with it? You know, what does that look like for you? Well, and since even writing my story for the book, it has changed. You know, for me, if that, that transition that I'm in going from being a chiropractor, which is my reputation for 25 years, it's been my livelihood, it's been who I am.
And now I'm transitioning fully away from that into teaching spiritual gifts in churches and to Christian women. And so my, there's this imposter syndrome, they call that where, you know, the Satan will get in there and put that doubt in like, well, who are you to teach spiritual gifts? You're not a pastor. You're not a theologian.
You're just a life coach. And so, you know, he wants to place that, you know, imposter mentality that who do I think I am? And so I'd have to really just remember, you know, my verse is Ephes 2 10 that, you know, God is a called and equip us. And so I have to just keep remembering he has fully equipped me for the work that he's called me to do.
And he's called me first, then, you know, equips me. And so I have to, anytime I feel there's that doubt that I'm not qualified, I'm not good enough or I shouldn't be doing this. Who do I think I am? Instead of like, wait a minute.
No, I'm God's masterpiece. I'm fully equipped. I have a plan and he expects me to walk it out. And so I just, I have to remember that Satan give can put those doubts in me, but it's God's word that will ultimately what I have to just absolutely stand firm on for when I feel like that.
Hey, it's Kristi again. That was just the first half of my interview with Dr. Betsy Levin. To hear the full interview, don't forget, I want to invite you to download the Women and Views app where you will find full length interviews from our We Walk by Faith book series and exclusive bonus materials to help you walk out your own journey of faith in the marketplace.
You can download the free Women and Views app at Women and Views app.com. There's a link here in the show notes. There you will find the Women and Views podcast channel where you can find Betsy's full interview episode 23. You can also get your free copy of the e-book, Love Notes of Encouragement for Women of Faith in the marketplace.
There is a link to the free e-book devotional when you click on the episode 23 podcast. Could you also do me a favor? Could you tell all your friends to download the Women and Views app if you like this? And they can go to Women and Views app.com.
Our vision is to reach 1 million Women for Christ with Faith, Teaching, Lifestyle, Information and Practical Business and Leadership Principles for Women of Faith. And if you know anyone who you think would like to have their own broadcast channel on our network, please have them contact me directly at Kristi, at KristiLenn Olson.com. There's a link to my email on the show notes also. I'd love to chat with them about it.
Oh, goodbye for now. And remember, alone, you are significant, but together we are amazing. This has been Women in Views Radio, connecting women around the globe with purpose and spirit. And we want to connect with you.
Get your free gift, Unveiled Voices, six things you need to do to define your value, voice and vision. For more information on the free gift and links to join the conversation on social media, visit us at KristiLenn Olson.com.