Written by Charles Noyes
Photos by Kelly Z Photography

Sponsored by Valley Home Improvement

Published in Northampton Living (January 2022)

When Sam Hudzik and Beth Pellettieri met at George Washington University in Washington, DC, they had no idea they would one day end up falling in love. “I was involved in AIDS activism at the time,” Beth began, “and his roommate was as well. So I knew of him for most of college, but we had never really met.”

But a month before graduation, they began to run into each other at more and more clubs and around campus and they began to foster a connection. Once they graduated, Beth was supposed to go to Bolivia for some time. “So we planned to break up at the end of summer,” she said. “Once we got to that moment, however, we realized we loved each other and didn’t want things to end that way.”

From there, their shared lives bounced around between Chicago and DC for years as they individually and collectively grew themselves, their careers, and their family. Sam worked in Public Radio doing political journalism and Beth helped hospitals become Baby-Friendly. After some years brought them their first child, Amelia, they began to wonder where they wanted to settle down. “My parents live near Albany and Sam got a job in the Pioneer Valley so this area was the perfect place for us while we were looking to have more children.”

Fast forward to today and they’ve had two more children, Tema, who’s 7, and Zeke, who turned 4 in December. Since moving to the Valley, they’ve come to enjoy going on nature walks together, especially since the start of the pandemic. Bike riding on the bike path is another favorite activity as it takes them to many of their favorite spots like Tandem Bagels, the lake at Mt. Tom, and the Local Burgy stand in Haydenville.

And since moving to the Valley, Beth has gone through a life-changing experience that lead to her to pursuing a new career. “For 15 years I worked in the non-profit world as someone who got things done,” she started. “I worked with everything from adolescent sexual health and reproductive rights to breastfeeding support and policy, but everywhere I went, I was the one getting stuff done on other people’s behalf. In all of these spaces I helped people deal with life’s curveballs with as much integrity and sense of agency as possible. One of the central questions for me wherever I go is how can we bring more agency into our life in different situations of equity or in different situations of wanting a big change versus it being handed to us.”

“But even though I loved the work,” she continued, “and I felt blessed by my success, I was getting really burnt out and not finding the answers I was looking for. We’ve all had that moment where what we’re doing isn’t working so we start trying other things and we don’t know what we’re searching for yet. While at a work conference in DC, a coach I followed, Martha Beck, had a last call for her coaching training. I was in the airport about to return home and I decided I should just do it. I signed up for the training with the intention of starting a non-profit consulting project and during the training I realized this was exactly what I had wanted to be doing the whole time I was in the non-profit world.”

This amazing realization lead to Beth beginning her own coaching business, Beth Pellettieri Coaching. Her coaching process primarily consists of individual sessions where she focuses on creating sustainable, growth-minded self-care routines and practices. “Clients will come in and complain that they can’t even meditate for 10 minutes per day,” she said, “and I can totally relate to that. It’s such an uncomfortable feeling for people who are givers, who are caring and empathetic and super smart, who find themselves hitting that wall. There’s a lot of frustration and self-doubt.”

She continued, “for many, our sense of self-worth is so often tied into our ability to give to others and when we start not giving as much to others so we can give more to ourselves there’s this natural reaction where we lose our self-confidence or feel an increase of guilt. Working with these individuals, I try to get them to redefine what it means to be enough in their lives and to the people around them.”

Beth described the journey of one of her clients in order to illustrate exactly how she changes lives. “A lot of my work,” she began, “comes from connecting the mind and body and trusting our intuition and redefining what success feels like so it feels authentic to us. I had a client who started her own business and was really struggling with all the ideas of what that should be and how to execute her vision. Working together, I helped her hone her vision through self-compassion. She knew what she wanted to do and why she wanted to do it, so I worked with her to set boundaries and to figure out exactly what she needed to drop in her life to achieve those goals.”

Ending our conversation, Beth added, “Whenever we start from a position of self-kindness, we do ourselves a favor. This is a time when many of us are making our New Year’s resolutions or we’re in the thick of them and starting to feel the challenges we’ve set for ourselves, whatever they may be. The question should be not ‘how can I get this done faster,’ but ‘how can I do this with kindness.’ This mindset actually changes our inner dialogue in a way that redefines what is possible for ourselves.”