Patty Oliver Of Body-Mind-Spirit Healing Arts: Second Chapters; How I Reinvented Myself In The Second Chapter Of My Life

An Interview With Jake Frankel

Don’t spend money on marketing or advertising until you fully know your target audience and have proof of concept of your business. I’ve seen entrepreneurs who never bother to create a business plan or ensure they’ve nailed their niche and target audience before spending thousands of dollars on advertising, especially on social media, which is a sure way to go broke very quickly.

Many successful people reinvented themselves in a later period in their lives. Jeff Bezos worked on Wall Street before he reinvented himself and started Amazon. Sara Blakely sold office supplies before she started Spanx. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was a WWE wrestler before he became a successful actor and filmmaker. Arnold Schwarzenegger went from a bodybuilder, to an actor to a Governor. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc was a milkshake-device salesman before starting the McDonalds franchise in his 50s.

How does one reinvent themselves? What hurdles have to be overcome to take life in a new direction? How do you overcome those challenges? How do you ignore the naysayers? How do you push through the paralyzing fear?

In this series called “Second Chapters; How I Reinvented Myself In The Second Chapter Of My Life “ we are interviewing successful people who reinvented themselves in a second chapter in life, to share their story and help empower others.

As a part of this interview series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Patty Oliver.

Patty is a transformational energy healer and spiritual advisor. For the past 14 years she has helped clients around the world align to their soul blueprint and manifest abundance by clearing karma in their Akashic Record and teaching them to balance their chakras and manage their energy field. She has created several online courses on energy healing and Akashic Records, and also offers private soul coaching.

Patty is a featured columnist in several publications writing about energy healing, Akashic Records and soul empowerment. She has contributed to a multi-author book titled “Intuitive: Speaking her Truth” which is available on Amazon, and has recently released “Akashic Truth Oracle,” an oracle card deck connecting you to the wisdom of your Akashic Record.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we start, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

I grew up in the Midwest in the 1960s and 70s. It was a time when most people stayed in one job working for the same company their entire career before retiring. It was also rare that a woman had any kind of job, let alone a full-time career, outside the home. So I was definitely breaking new ground when I chose to not only have a full-time career, but eventually one that is spiritual in nature.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Fear regret more than failure,” by Taryn Rose. I’m now at an age where I probably have more years behind me than in front of me! I’ve also seen friends and loved ones who’ve passed away without attempting to make their dreams a reality, and that is simply not what I want for myself. A few years back, I decided that I would rather risk failing at reaching my goals than never trying at all. I want to look back at the end of my life and know that I did everything I could to choose my highest potential and highest joy in this lifetime — something I teach my clients every day.

You have been blessed with much success. In your opinion, what are the top three qualities that you possess that have helped you accomplish so much?

1. I do not give up easily. I’ve always been able to pull myself up and out of negative energy. Some situations have taken longer than others, but I’ve always been able to shift from the negative to the positive aspect. I think this really refers to mindset and the ability to shift to an empowered mindset whenever possible, because then you can see all of the options available to you at any given time to change your circumstances. This is always why I teach mindset during my healing sessions and in my courses.
2. I believe that the light always wins. Yes, there is darkness in the world, but there is also light, and we must consciously choose the light if we want to live a happy life. We come into this physical world with free will; we can choose either the positive aspect or the negative aspect of anything we are faced with, and our life experience is the sum result of those choices.
3. I’m disciplined and able to sacrifice for what I want. When you want to reach a goal, you have to narrow your focus and the actions you take to get there. This often means saying no or putting off gratification for later, and this takes discipline and the ability to think beyond the present moment.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about ‘Second Chapters’. Can you tell our readers about your career experience before your Second Chapter?

I spent about a decade in the advertising agency industry. I went to school for corporate communications and journalism, and one of my first jobs out of college was for an ad agency working with small and mid-size clients. I eventually moved to a large, well-known advertising agency with clients who had multi-million-dollar budgets, most of them in the technology arena. I helped them with brand awareness, package design, and print advertising. This was well before the internet and social media.

And how did you “reinvent yourself” in your Second Chapter?

While I was good at the agency work and had strong relationships with my clients, I didn’t enjoy the work. It was mostly for a paycheck, not fulfillment. When I decided to re-enter the workforce, I knew it had to be something I was passionate about, and I set about to make that happen.

Can you tell us about the specific trigger that made you decide that you were going to “take the plunge” and make your huge transition?

That trigger was a diagnosis of an aggressive form of breast cancer back in 2007. I was age 41 at the time and had two small children under the age of 3. That life-lesson quote suddenly came speeding back into my mind: Fear regret more than failure. There’s nothing like a life-threatening diagnosis to make you stop and think about what you want your life to be like! I could have chosen the negative path and let it bring me down and keep me there, but as I mentioned earlier, I don’t stay down for very long! It never occurred to me to give up. Rather, it helped me find the courage to simply go for it. Why not? What did I have to lose except regret?

My goal was fulfillment, and for me that meant I needed to have my own business. I missed working after starting a family, but I also wanted to spend time with my kids. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew entrepreneurship would be the only way for me to have the type of business I wanted as well as the ability to create my own schedule so I could be home with my kids. I also knew that I did not want to go back into advertising, even though it would have been easy given my experience.

I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do for a business. I wrote down each of the things I enjoyed doing, along with a potential business idea for it. But I wanted to focus mainly on the type of environment I would be in, because that is what was lacking so much in my advertising career: I wanted to work one-on-one with people in a relaxing environment where they could feel better about themselves. I had to discover what type of business I would enjoy and do well in but would also align to that environment. One day a friend of mine treated me to a facial, something I had never experienced before. It was an ah-ha moment for sure, because I absolutely loved the entire process start to finish! Yes it’s indulgent but from a work environment perspective, it had all the things I was looking for! I quickly looked into the type of training that was needed and found a school nearby that offered night classes. It was all falling into place so quickly! My spouse at the time wasn’t fully onboard, but I knew I had to do it then or it wouldn’t happen at all. There is no “perfect moment” to do something. It was one of those disciplined decisions and sacrifices I had to make and I’m so glad I did because it went by very quickly and I opened my business in 2009, just two years after my diagnosis and treatment. I found a location in my community and was immediately busy and successful with clients.

What did you do to discover that you had a new skillset inside of you that you haven’t been maximizing? How did you find that and how did you ultimately overcome the barriers to help manifest those powers?

Honestly, I just stopped being afraid to make big decisions. While I’m a disciplined optimist with the ability to choose positive over negative, I often deferred to my family or spouse when it came time to making big lifestyle decisions. I hated rocking the boat and felt it was selfish to put myself first, so I rarely did. But I also became very unhappy and unfulfilled, which can happen when you put your true desires aside. I think the cancer was a message from my body and my soul that I needed to start making my happiness a priority. Even though I was scared and didn’t know what changes would come as a result of going back to school and opening a business, I felt I had to try, or I would forever wonder what could have been. The diagnosis and the potential for regret are what pushed me to find the courage to make new decisions. Developing some new skills was going to be necessary, but opening a business in skincare also helped me use my natural abilities of organization, attention to detail, budgeting, relationship building and customer service that I hadn’t been fully utilizing.

How are things going with this new initiative? We would love to hear some specific examples or stories.

My esthetics business worked tremendously well! I developed some unique offerings for the area I was located in, and I always delivered my best quality service. I loved what I did for a living every day, and I made it flexible enough that I worked while my kids were in school so I could always be home for dinner and their activities. It was a very busy time and I had to juggle a lot, but it was an easy tradeoff to make in my opinion.

However, unbeknownst to me at the time, the action of opening my business would eventually lead to a career in energy healing! This is the process of manifestation and the law of attraction: when you embody the energy you wish to be, the universe sends you an equivalent match. Albert Einstein said “When you match the frequency of the reality you want, you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way.” My goal was to be financially independent, and the route I chose was esthetics because it brought me so much joy. But the universe knew I had latent skills I wasn’t aware of, which were intuition and healing. Once I decided to own my power and take my life in the direction of my highest joy, the universe deemed it time to send me a nudge that would continue my highest joy, and that was to create a fated meeting with an energy healer very soon after I opened my business. I attended a last-minute networking meeting and met a Reiki master. I had never heard of Reiki or energy healing, but I had one treatment and I couldn’t believe the results. My life shifted again, and I knew I had to study energy healing and add it to my business. Once I did, it opened me up to the financial freedom I sought in the most meaningful way possible for me, all because I trusted the process. It’s what I teach my students and clients, and why it is so important to remain open to possibilities instead of being so firmly set on a specific outcome.

Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

It’s that energy healer that I met! What’s interesting is that I was never able to get in contact with that person again. I called and left messages and tried to book more appointments, but it never materialized, and I wonder if that was part of the bigger plan for me because it forced me to start looking deeper at what I wanted. So instead of looking to have more healing sessions, I started looking for ways to receive training so I could just do it myself! I lived in a small remote community and I wondered how it would ever happen that I could receive training without traveling. I shouldn’t have worried, because not long after I set the intention to receive training, I learned of a group training that would take place the following month less than an hour from my house. It’s really magical to experience manifestation at work! I attended that training, along with three more levels of training, and eventually taught the modality myself for several years.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started in this new direction?

About 5 years into my esthetics and healing career, I started attracting more and more energy healing clients. I was feeling another nudge, this time to do the healing work full time. So that meant either selling the skincare business or hiring someone to run it. I didn’t want to have employees so after much consideration, I decided to sell the business but also worried about finding the right person with the right training and certification to take over the business. Once again, the universe delivered — it was only a short while after I decided to sell the business that someone literally walked in and asked me if I would be interested in selling. I hadn’t even publicly listed the business yet! Yes, it was that easy and I knew I had made the right decision. When you’re on the right path, everything just starts falling into place.

I missed the esthetics practice, but I was so happy doing the energy work that again it was the right tradeoff to make. There was really no down time because I had a waiting list of clients, and slowly built it up to financial success as well.

But then another interesting thing happened: I started receiving lots of intuitive insight during my healing sessions. I could sense what was going wrong for them and I started sharing my insights with my clients during their sessions. Then one day I had a client with significant issues in her lower body, and I received insight that her issues began in a past life. This was new! I immediately did a lot of research on past lives and came upon the term Akashic Records, which is the record of the soul. It records every choice we every make from our moment of origination from Source. It also holds are soul gifts, our chosen life experiences and our karma. Once again, I knew it was the path I needed to study and follow. I sought out mentors and training and began to do past-life karma clearing in one’s Akashic Record, and that has been my primary focus for almost a decade.

Did you ever struggle with believing in yourself? If so, how did you overcome that limiting belief about yourself? Can you share a story or example?

I used to struggle a lot with believing in myself, especially before I decided to reinvent myself in the second half of my life. I think that’s why I deferred those big lifestyle decisions to other people. But once I started letting go of that struggle and reminding myself that I didn’t need to have it all figured out before I started, I was able to be more in the flow of life. I told myself that I could course-correct at any time and that I would be okay with whatever the outcome would be — and I was! I think the lesson is to allow for imperfect action; taking action toward your dream is better than no action, and you’ll be amazed at what you can do and how resourceful you can be if you just start.

In my own work I usually encourage my clients to ask for support before they embark on something new. How did you create your support system before you moved to your new chapter?

You won’t always have support before embarking on something new, and I think that is actually what holds people back sometimes. People will think you’re crazy for wanting to leave something that is stable for the unknown, and there will be a lot of naysayers which is why you have to develop an empowered mindset and discipline to see things through.

I do, however, feel that it is wise to ensure you have all the important items checked off your list before you start something new: have your finances in order, understand all the potential challenges you might face and be prepared to work ten times harder than you think will be required. That way you minimize surprises and have money to fall back on while you’re trying to develop another revenue stream.

Starting a new chapter usually means getting out of your comfort zone, how did you do that? Can you share a story or example of that?

Everything I did was outside my comfort zone! From that first decision to become an entrepreneur to going against my less-than-supportive spouse to following each nudge to drop what I was doing to move to the next healing modality. Each step required utmost trust in the universe and in myself to follow through and make it a success. This is actually a requirement for a solid manifesting process, which is taking inspired action outside your comfort zone because you can’t create something new by doing the same things you’ve always done. It’s certainly safer, but it won’t create the fulfillment and success you seek.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me before I started” and why?

1. Plan to work 10 times harder than you think will be required. When you become an entrepreneur, the entire success or failure of the business is on your shoulders. You will do all the planning, research, execution, implementation, and follow-up necessary to run your business, and it all takes much more time than you think it will so plan now to work harder than you ever have, but also to be more excited and fulfilled than you ever have too.
2. Have at least 6 months of expenses saved up before you begin. In your first year of business, be prepared to generate little to no profit or the ability to pay yourself. You will slowly create a revenue stream, but it will most likely be just enough to cover your operating expenses and your start-up costs. You can reduce your stress by saving up at least 6 months of expenses so you can focus totally on growing the business and not on worrying about how to pay the bills. The other way is to keep your day job and build your dream business on the side.
3. You have to be strong in all aspects of business, from accounting to customer service and everything in between. I know so many entrepreneurs who are great at what they do, but they don’t respond back to customers in a timely manner, can’t manage their cash flow or respond well to problems. If you aren’t strong in a certain aspect of business, then get assistance or advice from someone who is, or your business will suffer for it in the long run.
4. Don’t spend money on marketing or advertising until you fully know your target audience and have proof of concept of your business. I’ve seen entrepreneurs who never bother to create a business plan or ensure they’ve nailed their niche and target audience before spending thousands of dollars on advertising, especially on social media, which is a sure way to go broke very quickly.
5. Remember to create balance in your life as much as possible. As hard as you will work to get your business started, never take for granted everything you already have such as your health and your family. Make time for these important things in your life. Be sure to exercise, eat well, rest and spend time with loved ones too. Time goes so quickly, so make the most of it by taking care of yourself and those who are supporting you.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?

I would love to inspire a movement of self-empowerment. Everyone needs to know they have the power to change the direction of their lives at any moment by simply making a new choice. When you empower yourself, you raise your vibration and change what can flow to you as a result. This is also why I’m so passionate about my work in the Akashic Records, because I believe it is the most powerful spiritual tool available to each of us to manage our energy and manifest abundance, and why I created a course on how to do this.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them. :-)

One person I admire and follow is Dr. Joe Dispenza. His work on heart coherence has had a profound impact on so many people around the world by helping them recognize their empowerment and ability to heal themselves.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

My website is http://www.pattyoliver.com

Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!

Thank you so much, it’s been a pleasure!