custom post types and page names can't be the same…then what can i do here?

I have a custom post type called ‘projects’ and I have a page called Projects which displays the Projects template.

The problem is when I use WP_PageNavi to incorporate pagination and click on page 2, I get an error 404. I read somewhere that this is because custom post types and pages can’t have the same name.

But when I change the name of the custom post type, that gets reflected in the url. So if I change the custom post type to ‘my_projects’ instead of just ‘projects’, the url now looks like this: mysite.com/my_projects/

Likewise, I can’t change the name of the page to ‘My Projects’ for aesthetic reasons.

So how would I get around this?