Inner Healing to Grow Your Ethical Business

In this soulful episode, I’m joined by healing guide Betty Cottam Bertels to explore how the blocks we face in business often stem from unhealed childhood wounds.

We talk about why part of us might resist the success we say we want, how patterns like perfectionism and procrastination are actually protective, and how tools like hypnosis and parts work can help us shift deeply and quickly.

This conversation is an invitation for quietly rebellious entrepreneurs to bring more compassion, clarity, and ease into their business — by starting with the healing within.

In this episode we discussed:

How Betty’s journey into inner healing began with an unexpected emotional release and how it now shapes her work with entrepreneurs Why feelings of “stuckness” in business are often rooted in unprocessed childhood experiences or early beliefs The subtle ways our unhealed inner child shows up in business through patterns like procrastination, perfectionism, and people-pleasing How to “update the software” of old protective patterns by dialoguing with the parts of us still running outdated beliefs Why deep healing doesn’t have to take years, and how working at the subconscious level can lead to fast, lasting shifts How hypnosis helps quiet the conscious mind so we can access and release the real root of our blocks What it feels like to start running your business from a healed, grounded adult self, with stronger boundaries and more ease How aligned, empowered decision-making becomes possible when we’re no longer operating from wounded places One gentle first step you can take this week if you recognize yourself in this conversation A sneak peek of what Betty will guide us through in the live workshop on September 3rd, 5pm CET, 11am EST.

Watch this episode on Youtube

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Speaker 2: hello, humane marketers. welcome back to the humane marketing podcast. the place to be for the generation that cares. this is a show where we talk about running your business in a way that feels good to you, is aligned with your values, and also resonates with today's conscious customers because it's humane, ethical, and non pushy. i'm sarah senecroce, your hippie turned conscious business coach for quietly rebellious entrepreneurs and change makers, mama bear of the humane marketing circle, and renegade author of marketing like we're human, selling like we're human, and soon also my third book, business like we're human. if after listening to the show for a while, you're ready to move on to the next level and start implementing and would welcome a community of like minded, quietly rebellious entrepreneurs who discuss with transparency what works and what doesn't work in business, then we'd love to welcome you in our humane marketing circle. if you're picturing your typical facebook group, let me paint a new picture for you. this is a closed community of like minded entrepreneurs from all over the world who come together in two meetups per month to hold each other accountable and build their business in a conscious and sustainable way. we all share with transparency and vulnerability what works and what doesn't work in our business so that you can figure out what works for you, instead of keep throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. find out more at humane dot marketing forward slash circle. twice per year, i host my signature program, the marketing like we're human, aka the client resonator program live. in a deep dive into the seven p's of the humane marketing mandala, you will learn to market from within. this program is for you if you want and need to get more clients, but want to share your message in an ethical and humane way. if you want to make a difference with your work. if you are just starting out, or if you have been in business for a while, but haven't really found the marketing activities that work for you. or also, if you are pivoting your business from business as usual to your life's work and want to radically change the way you get clients. find out more at humane dot marketing forward slash program. and finally, if you prefer one on one support from me, my humane business coaching could be just what you need, whether it's for your marketing, sales, general business building, or help with your big idea like writing a book. i'd love to share my brain and my heart with you together with my almost twenty years business experience and help you grow a sustainable business that is joyful and sustainable. if you love this podcast, wait until i show you my mama bear qualities as my one on one client. find out more at humane dot marketing forward slash coaching.

Speaker 0: hi, betty. how are you today?

Speaker 1: hello, sarah. thanks so much for having me. i'm very excited and simultaneously in a slight bit of discomfort in my lower back because i've been not looking after myself and sitting too much. so, my body's reminding me today. so, yeah. but very happy to be with you.

Speaker 0: yeah. it's good to have you. and yes, after our conversation, you need to go for a walk yeah. barefoot, ideally. yeah. that sounds good. wonderful. we're we're gonna go deep, again. i love going deep. so i i suggest yeah. we just go straight into it. and and maybe you can tell people, listeners a little bit about how you got into this inner healing and making that your focus for your business and yeah, kind of the work you do.

Speaker 1: yeah. thank you. so when i where to start? you never know how far back to go. i think i'll do a very quick zoom over, a bird's eye view of my earlier life, just to give a context. i think this is maybe similar to you, sarah. i'm not entirely sure, but i was very much, yeah, i think people would, the easiest way of describing it is a hippie. yeah. you know? so like this kind of travelling mentality. i never wanted money, success, business. you know, these were words that were very foreign to me and actually words i would run from in the other direction. and what i spent most of my life doing, well, early life doing, was travelling and getting jobs that i could easily quit. that was my priority. raising enough money so i could go to india, or so i could go travelling, have amazing experiences, and never really once did i think about growing anything of any meaning. and then i met my partner, rob, and fast forward, and we're expecting a baby. and we were living in barcelona on a very shoestring budget at this point. you know, we both we were both teaching english as a foreign language. and, and suddenly we're expecting a baby. and he was the same as me, you know, very kind of shoestring traveller, musician. we'd both been in bands and festival lifestyle, this kind of thing. and so suddenly we're starting a family. and this is like a new feeling, right, of like, oh, now i want stability. like, i'm aware of wanting to create something stable and grow something secure because it's not just about me anymore. so, i'd always been interested in therapy. but you know, it was very difficult to know there's so many types of therapy out there that whenever i thought about, oh, i could train to be a therapist, it just was overwhelming. i could never make a decision. it felt like there's just all these different things. and then one day i heard a podcast with marissa pia, if you know her. she's the- no. so she styles herself as a kind of celebrity therapist. and really, the reason that she's made it so big is that the method she's created is incredibly powerful and it really works. anyway, i heard her talking on a podcast and she did this hypnosis kind of guided meditation thing about upgrading the child. the idea of this being that you're kind of going back in time and you're taking the earlier version of yourself and you're bringing them to live with you, you know, in your own home as an adult. and you're gonna look after them now and they're safe now and i'm upgrading you, showing you everything that's available to you now that wasn't available to you then. and you show them all the technology and all the amazing things that they couldn't have possibly dreamt of. anyway, so suddenly i'm listening to this podcast. i was in the garden potting, i remember. one baby, i had two babies by this point. one was upstairs napping. and, suddenly i'm in floods of tears, sarah. and i didn't know that, like, i didn't know that i needed healing. i thought that my childhood had been great. you know, it was pretty i thought, you know, it it was avarice. you know, there was nothing no capital t trauma i was aware of. and so i didn't have this desperate need to heal. anyway, i heard about marissa and i had this experience and i'm crying. and suddenly i know this is what i have to do. yeah. and so but it's so funny because i had so little well, now i can see i had so little self worth that i wouldn't even invest and so little money, right, having come from having nothing, really. you know, we were just scraping by and making ends meet and we somehow managed to get enough for a deposit to buy a little house. and, anyway, we didn't have a lot. but i didn't even want to invest the money to have a session on myself before doing this. i was always somebody who put everyone else's needs first and i imagine many of your listeners can relate to that. and so i signed my partner up for a session where i said, you know, you should try

Speaker 0: this.' that's so funny. they're like, 'okay, you should go. yeah, you should go. i can

Speaker 1: track that. that was a pattern in my life where i take care of everybody else. but i hadn't noticed that when realised it was a problem, if that makes sense. anyway, so i signed up. i did the course. we dug deep to invest. it's not a cheap training program. and i, have lost track of the question that you asked me. but

Speaker 0: yeah. just kind of how how you got into it and and yeah. and your own healing journey. so you touched on that. okay. good.

Speaker 1: it's, like, on track still.

Speaker 0: yeah. yeah. this this this notion of not really knowing that we need healing right. is probably something that you encounter a lot with with clients. right? that you're somehow stuck, but we don't know why we're stuck.

Speaker 1: yes, exactly, sarah. you're bang on, really. and so many, well, so many people feel this kind of energetic barrier somehow. you know, that it's just not possible. but we'll we'll come back to that, in a moment. but what yeah. so i signed up and i did the training course, and i went to london. and i'm in this room with about 70 different mainly women who'd all signed up for this training course. and of course and and i was thinking, i've got here on the skin of my teeth. i don't deserve my place in the room. i'm not like them. i'm different. i've i've never had any kind of success in my life. i'm, you know, i'm a complete outsider, and i just couldn't believe i was even there. i couldn't believe they'd even accepted me onto the course, which now looking back is is bonkers. it's crazy. but that's that is how my core beliefs were. you know, a lot one of the when i finally did do a lot of the healing that i had to do because i was training in it, i had to do the healing on myself. otherwise, i never would have done. i was the one when marissa was leading the sessions, and we were all in hypnosis, like 70 of us, everyone's sitting there, you know, drooped, head drooped, and she's walking around and she's guiding this. the session, i was always the one crying the loudest, like sobbing and wailing, so much so that i was distracting everyone else. but i never had a sense that anything needed healing. it's so funny. and then when once i started to understand the power of this method, and honestly it's so powerful, you know, i was seeing in the training, i was seeing some live sessions and some recorded sessions of marissa, you know, working with a woman, for example, who'd shattered so many bones in her body after a car accident, she couldn't stand. and then by the end of the session, she's standing. you know, this is like miraculous stuff i was witnessing. and my entire world view had to reorganise itself whilst i was doing this training programme. like, everything just reorganised itself in my head. i and yeah. maybe i'll pause

Speaker 0: for a minute. yeah. in case

Speaker 1: you have

Speaker 0: a question. so so i'm happy that you shared how you got into this. and and i think what we now want to shift into is, like, yeah, the actual inner work. right? because that's what this, podcast episode we decided is going to be about. and so before i mentioned that a lot of us entrepreneurs yeah. you said there's this energetic block, but we don't know what it is. and so what you're saying, i think you're going to explain to me how it's different from inner child work, but you did mention to bring the inner child to the present and kind of like nurture it. so, yeah, tell us a little bit, i guess, tell us a little bit first how and why so often these blockages are going back to childhood.

Speaker 1: yeah. so it's not necessarily childhood that we go back to. it could be anything. okay. it could be a moment in your twenties. it could be a past life thing. it could be an ancestral thing. and now this is where some people have different beliefs around this. so i just tend to go with what the client presents and what they understand is happening. and you know, when we get into this relaxed state of hypnosis, we it's like we just tune out the noise. and we can really get very focused on what's real. and everything that's ever happened to us is is still there. we can access it when we get into this very relaxed, very focused state of hypnosis. and, you know, what i've come to understand is the body the human beings, we want to heal. you know? we know how to do it. we just need to decide, i think, is the first thing. so, i've i've forgotten the question you asked me again, sarah.

Speaker 0: yeah. like, if it always happens in the childhood or how do we know

Speaker 1: yeah. right.

Speaker 0: where yeah.

Speaker 1: yeah. so the reason that so much of this does go back to childhood is that between the ages of naught to seven, when we come into the world, we are a blank canvas. we and we have to come in like that because we have to learn the ways of our family, of our people, of our community. we have to be able but but because we need to fit in, you know, our subconscious mind, its job is to keep us alive effectively. you know, this is like a very it goes back to serious survival mechanisms. so it needs to learn what's dangerous. it needs to learn what to be afraid of. and you could that could be about certain animals or plants if you go back. but now it's like we we learn different threats from our parents. you know, what what do they find threatening? what do they find scary? we just we just have a sixth sense about that, really. we just download that automatically. for good reason. because we're trying to stay alive. part of us, the subconscious, is just trying to keep us alive. yeah. that's the question.

Speaker 0: and so i guess so what i know from inner child work is that a lot of the the coping mechanisms we create are there to protect us. right? and so i think what what your work is also or or what we decided we wanted to focus on is is this idea of how can we will open these blockages so that we can really reach our full potential without having, yeah, our inner child keeping us small and saying, oh, but you can't do that. it's too scary. yeah. so talk yeah. take us into that. so how

Speaker 1: we do it? how how we stop the child from having control? yeah. okay. so the first step is we have to decide that's what we're going to do. first, we have to know that there's a problem because, funnily enough, i've worked with people who didn't acknowledge the problem. and, of course, we can't we can't get anywhere without that. they have to be have a very real sense of what's not working and what they want it to look like when it's removed, when the block is removed. and then yeah. so the rtt, i mean, this is the method i learned from marisa peer, rapid transformational therapy. this method is incredible. so it's a type of hypnotherapy, but it blends a lot of different modalities together. you know, inner child yeah, this kind of inner child work and parts therapy, like internal family systems, if people are familiar with that. and, a bit of tapping. there's all sorts of yeah. she's just kind of taken a load of modalities and put them together to make this super therapy. okay. so how does it work? so we need to know what's stopping us. and then what we do is we ask the subconscious mind to take us back to the root cause of that block or that issue. and what happens is, say somebody's, you know, so if we're talking about business people, often the most common challenges are fears, if you like. can be visibility. you know, a lot of people come to me just so scared to be seen. so scared to be themselves. and they're presenting this artificial personality or they're presenting just like everyone else. but we know that we have to bring our full selves to the equation so that our people can find us. but that's so scary for so many because we've got this need to be liked and to fit in. and that, as we can see, goes back to childhood when it was this is such a deeply human thing. if you go back to tribal times, we needed to fit in because that was safety. safety in numbers. if you don't fit in with the tribe, you're exiled. you're not safe. you might get eaten by a tiger. this is a serious thing as far as the subconscious mind goes. the subconscious mind has zero sense of humor. so it takes everything so literally. so if i see somebody for visibility, let's say, and i would we'd always start by installing the core belief. so things like, i'm worthy, i deserve good things, i belong. you know, these are the things that are so central and affect so many of us. most people have this underlying belief, like, i'm not good enough. and so we need to attend to that. and once we've attended to that, we can we can look at this visibility wound. and what happens is so so often that we go back to school. when when we ask the client's mind to take us back to the root cause, they go back there. and i count them, you know, so that what actually is happening is they've they've got their eyes closed, they're lying down, and i'm saying, you know, on the count of five, four, three, two, one, you're going back. and what can you see? what can you hear? what can you feel? what are you experiencing in this moment? and then they're bringing to mind, a moment from their earlier life. and so often with a visibility wound, it might be that they're at school, they might be on stage. i had one recently, one lady, she was on stage, and it was just so uncomfortable and so unnatural. she just had these very bright lights shining in her face. and it wasn't, like, major trauma in this instance. it was just, like, we're looking for what we tell ourselves as a result of what happened. so it's not even about what happened. it might have been a very traumatic experience, but it might not have been. and each person will respond differently. so we're really looking for the meaning. we're looking for what i told myself after this event. and in this lady's she's a very successful woman. she's a doctor. and she's come to me to start her own business, and she felt so terrified of speaking about natural health, which is what she she wanted to talk about, the mind body connection. but she felt like this complete blockage in her throat around speaking up, around being, you know, just such fear that people would shut her down. and what we went back to, one of the scenes was, yeah, this being on stage and it just being so uncomfortable. and what happened as a result of that was we say to ourselves things like, 'i'd rather die than do that again', or, you know, i'm just what do we say? well, there's all sorts of phrases like that that become common. self

Speaker 0: shaming and basically negative self talk.

Speaker 1: yeah. yeah. and just that that was painful somehow.

Speaker 0: that's a mini trauma basically. yeah. you know, that that we then some times blow up in our own minds. right. yes. i remember so clearly i was in a in a kind of like a mastermind group and we were talking about all these kind of things and inner work and and people were sharing, like, real trauma, like losing their dance or, or, or. yeah. all kinds of usually related to some kind of grief. right. so i was like, well, i didn't experience any of that. like you, you're like, you know, i'm like, i don't have any trauma in my life. and then i started to make the difference between trauma with the big t and the mini traumas that we almost, like, blow up ourselves in our

Speaker 1: yeah.

Speaker 0: our emotions as well. right? it's it's not always something that happens. like yeah. you said, it's just, like, how we lived it. and that then does in our heads and and tells us that was not safe.

Speaker 1: you don't

Speaker 0: wanna go there again. and so what you're saying is through the hypnosis, that's what you can, yeah, heal.

Speaker 1: yeah. well, when you uncover it, when you understand it, it suddenly makes sense. then you go, oh, i see why i don't wanna do that. i see why i don't wanna go live on facebook right. because of this experience of when i was on stage or or what people said to me when i was a child when i was on stage. and then you can go, 'that is completely irrelevant. that's not going to happen now.' so then we do this thing called it's not me'. we just draw a line in the sand. we say, 'okay. well then i was five.' and that made perfect sense to respond in that way. and now i'm an adult and i don't need now i'm trying to grow my business and blah blah blah blah. and you give all the reasons why you do want to do it. and then we get into this kind of juicy and yeah, this is my favorite bit at the moment. i'm really enjoying doing this parts work where we can scan around the body because these traumas, these things, live in the body. and so in the hypnosis, we can find them. we can locate where the block is. and when it's i'm gesturing to my throat here when it's a thing around speaking out, when people have, you know, and sometimes we go back to witch, persecutions, all sorts of things. like sometimes people experience a hand around their throat. and you might wonder where that comes from, but that's not the point. it might be that something like that happened or not, but the point is it's there. and then we dialogue with it. it's so easy. we just ask it, why are you there? what happened?' and then we explain. and almost always, this part is trying to help. it's trying to keep you alive. it says, oh, i need to protect betty from speaking up because she did that once and she died, or she almost died, or if we're talking about past life stuff. or it was just really uncomfortable, or i just promised i'd never do it again, or i got beaten. there's all these things that it can be big t trauma as well. that does happen too.

Speaker 0: especially in past lives, right, don't we?

Speaker 1: oh, yeah. all sorts of things. but the thing to note is 99.9% of the time, these parts are trying to help us. they're trying to protect us. and they're they've just got this you know, if it's been there since you were two or even in the womb, some so often people go back to being in the womb. and so they they they haven't got many options available to them about how to survive or be good or be liked. but, you know, what they can do is create this kind of protective mechanism. but, to stop them from saying the wrong thing or, because it wasn't safe. and so what we do is it's so simple. we just give it a voice, sarah. we just say and then we say, ah, thank you. i see why you are there now. and your only intention was to protect me. hey, i don't need that anymore. i'm not two. i'm an adult. and then we say, you can go now. and you know, this is the most exciting part because so often i can see when the part leaves. i can see it in them. there's just this relaxation, this relief. and sometimes it doesn't leave, but we reintegrate it. it wants to stay, so we find it a better job to do. you know, i just go with

Speaker 0: i'm just laughing because, yeah, i just need to share this little story because i just literally yesterday until yesterday, i didn't know what ifs stood for. so internal family systems therapy or something like that.

Speaker 1: exactly. yeah.

Speaker 0: and so, so, we have a community and emily, in the community, during our expo, she hosted a workshop around, meet, meet all your parts or something like that. and so i, was privileged to have a mini session with her around these parts. and i, and i, what i brought up is that i always have the struggle between ambition and enthusiasm. so naturally, i'm a very ambitious person. but over the last five or so years, i wanna come to more transform it into enthusiasm and just, you know, be more in the flow and not be so hard, soft and, etcetera. and so, yeah, she was guiding me through this mini session. and then the the visual i saw, and i'm not usually a visual person, but the visual i saw was that ambition was like this friend who moved to another country. we're still friends, and i can still reach her and we can still talk over the phone or zoom. but she there's a distance between us now. and i felt such a huge relief that i can tap into the ambition if i need to talk to her. right. but it's no longer so close. and so that yeah. that that's that was my discovery with parts work yesterday, and it was just great.

Speaker 1: i love that. what a what a coincidence. synchronicity. synchronicity. right. that you had that yesterday. it's amazing. yeah. really. and, you know, just yesterday i saw a 73 year old man who was struggling. he was a healer as well, and he was just really struggling to he had an audience and he was struggling to show up for them. and we just we discovered there was a part that had been there since he was two that was, like his parents had left him too long on his own. and he had this abandonment thing. and and that was that had come in when he was two, and it was still there. and and it took literally less than ten minutes, and it was gone. wow. and he felt completely different. it was in his solar plexus. and it was gone. and he said, i feel so much lighter. and he was grinning from ear to ear. he was just so happy. and so really, the parts work is very exciting.

Speaker 0: so for people who are listening to this, well, first of all, we want to invite them to join us in your in our collab workshop on september 3. right? so if if you're listening and you're like, yeah. i need to i need to see betty in action, and you're you'll take us through a hypnosis. right? so yes. we'll actually do that, in the workshop. the same one.

Speaker 1: yeah. the same one that i heard. when, you know, my version of the one that i

Speaker 0: so we'll all be crying, but it will be a safe container.

Speaker 1: yeah.

Speaker 0: so, yeah, if you wanna join us for that, that's at humane.marketing/workshop. so on september 3. but if people, you know, can't join us, what would you tell them? where can they start this connection with their inner child or or their different parts? well,

Speaker 1: you could go to truewealthwithbetty.com. and if you go well, i'd love to invite people i'd love to invite people in your audience if they're intrigued by my work. i offer a gift session. so would it be okay to

Speaker 0: yeah. sure.

Speaker 1: give the yeah. so, i mean, we can presumably, we can give the links

Speaker 0: separately. i'll put the link in the show notes. yeah.

Speaker 1: yeah. if you go to truewealthwithbetty.com/ work with betty, you can find a link to book a forty five minute gift session. and, yeah, i love doing those. it's so much fun. see what we can uncover in just forty five minutes. and people have incredible experiences. yeah. and just i wanted to say one final thing, sarah, if it's okay, just why i've called my website true wealth with betty. because, you know, the name just came to me, and i didn't understand it at the time. i just said, this is what i need to call it. and i didn't really know. and it's the name of my podcast too, true wealth with betty. and then i realized that, you know, for my early life, as i said, i had this, i'd never had much money. i never wanted it. but what i got was this, like, understanding that wealth is not about money. you know, wealth is about an ability to enjoy our lives. and so that is what i help people with. they come to me for business. so, you know, this niche that i'm working in is helping entrepreneurs with a big vision, who feel stuck or scared about the size of their vision. but what happens, the side effects, is where they, we always score the different things we're keeping track of, and where they've come to me with like a one or two for overall happiness, they're leaving with a nine or a 10. everything in your life, i mean, everything's holistic, isn't it? we all know that. so when you do this kind of healing work, you might come to it for your business, but your relationship will improve. you know, your your just sense of happiness and your presence and your mothering or your fathering, you know, all of it improves. it's amazing.

Speaker 0: yeah. i think that's that's so close to my heart. i think i shared with you that i'm releasing the latest book business, like we're human and. and just on the last conversation for change, lisa, who was there, she was just sharing, we did a kind of a visualization around, the ubuntu tree realizing that we're all one, you know, humans, family members, ancestors, but also nature. and then she was sharing as a kind of reflection how small the business part really is in our life. if you compare it to the rest and how small of an importance we can also give it. right? yes. it has importance because we make our living with the business. but out of the big scheme of things, if you think about ubuntu and the moon and the stars and and nature and all of that, it's just a tiny thing. and, yeah, to really truly be happy, the business is just one thing, and there's all these other things involved.

Speaker 1: yeah. but, yes. and i think that that, you know, when we do sort out the business so that it can be profitable, so that we can relax, you know, because so many of us are in the early stages of business. it's it's stressful, isn't it? the rollercoaster, the up and down, and will we be able to meet the bills, and will i have to give it all up, and all of that. but yeah. so when we and the other the other main focus that i do in the sessions is about our strange relationship with money, because that was my my thing. you know? this thing about money won't buy you happiness was, like, this deep rooted understanding. so those are the kinds of things that can also be unpicked with this work. and, just welcoming in ease and more fun in the business and more flow. you know, i think when we do this work and when we're operating from the adult who, let's face it, is it okay to swear? who doesn't give, you know, a damn about other people, really. you know? that you're just operating how you wanna operate. you get to do things how you you get to do it your way. you know? and so often we're stuck in these shoulds, and then business isn't fun, is it? it's fun. and when we make it our own thing, then it can be it can be fun. yeah.

Speaker 0: tell people again where they can find you in the yeah. so the name of your podcast.

Speaker 1: thank you. so it's truewealthwithbetty.com. and you can navigate there to the tab at the top, work with betty, and you can find the link to book a gift session if you would like to. and also, wherever you listen to your podcasts, you can find the true wealth with betty podcast.

Speaker 0: wonderful. thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 1: thanks for having me, sarah. i'm so excited about september. me too.