In this episode Betsy talks a bit about midlife and 3 things women who are ready to make their mark in midlife typically do.

Transcript:

410 reinvention in midlife

Speaker: [00:00:00 ] Welcome to The Art of Living Big, where we explore how to live intentionally and with more joy. I’m Betsy Pake, your host, master, coach, and creator of the Navigate Method. Here to help you listen in to your true desires, elevate your standards, and live life to the fullest. Now, let’s go live big.

Hi, welcome to The Art of Living Big. Hi, everybody. I have, I have a couple things to share with you as we get kicked off today, and I wanna do this episode really about being in the middle, the middle midlife, and being in the middle of all the things, the middle verse as I like to call it. And. You know, I, and, and before I continue, I also wanna just remind you, we are doing another fireside chat.

If you go to my Instagram in the bio, so if you go to my Instagram [00:01:00 ] page and you click on the links, there’s a link to the next fireside chat, and it is in January. It’s a Sunday night, I think it’s the ninth, if I remember right. And we really just get together and talk about things that are coming up in midlife.

So I have some. Thoughts to share this time. Last time it was just really lovely and I think there was like, I don’t know, 40 people or something there. So, so put it on your calendar. Go check that out. Um, come and join us and today we’re gonna talk a little bit about midlife and all the things. And I’ll tell you, I have the most midlife story ever.

So I got this idea. I have been really actively working on all the little things that bring me joy. I have the belief, and you probably have this belief too, that hard things happen and the things that make hard things easier is having a lot of little micro happiness, right? [00:02:00 ] Little things that can support you through the hard times.

This year has been like one of the strangest years. I need to do a podcast on this year, like, like an incredible, incredible transformational year for me, and I can feel myself like. It’s like I’ve gone through the portal, like I can feel myself like just being ejected from the portal. I know this summer I kept saying I’m in the birth canal, like I feel like I’m in the birth canal and I am definitely out now, but the most midlife thing to ever happen to anybody ever on the planet ever happened to me.

So I have this idea. About these little things that bring me joy, and one of the things that I really like is I like to color on my iPad. Okay? I like to listen to audio books, right? I want somebody to read me a story. I like to do puzzles. Okay? I haven’t done a puzzle in forever, and I really like doing puzzles.

I like [00:03:00 ] doing like, like those small focused things while I’m listening to music or while I’m listening to. Uh, like I have a YouTube channel that I love that is like my comfort show and. I also like to do it when I listen to audio books, right? So, or podcasts, you know what I’m saying? So something. And so I decided I was gonna get a puzzle and I was really excited about it.

I went to the store and I was like looking at all the puzzles and trying to figure out one that would be hard enough, but not too hard, and. Anyway, I found one, it’s like these stickers you would put on a suitcase, right? So it’s all like these travel stickers. So I was like, that’ll be fun. It’s cute, it’ll be easy enough because there’s so much uniqueness to it, right?

So each of the pieces will be unique. So. I get it home. I mean, I have it all like laid out. I’m sorting the pieces. I’m like, I am like a professional [00:04:00 ] puzzler at this point. And so I get to work. I got an I or I got a, an audio book going like, I mean, I’m feeling good about this, right? A, a couple hours go by, I’m standing up because I’m like leaning over the table and organizing it all, and I got the whole like outline together and I’m starting to get like the second and third row of the puzzles and then I’m like, man, I’m getting tired.

Like I’ve been doing this puzzle for like three hours and then I go to stand up and I realize that I have been leaning over, sort of like if you were brushing your teeth for three hours. And this midlife back was very unhappy. It was just tired. Do you know what I mean? I, there’s nothing bad that happened, but it was so tired that it was starting to spasm on one side of my back.

I mean, I was like, are you joking? I don’t know if you’ve been here for a long time. You might remember I had that back spasm when I was in Iceland like four years [00:05:00 ] ago. It was that same spot, right? So I just about died, but the thing that I learned from Iceland was not to put ice on it. I needed heat. So I laid on a heating pad and I made it through, and I’m feeling better, much better today.

You know, it took a couple days, but I was like, is this not the most midlife thing to ever happen? That I have a puzzle injury, like I puzzled too close to the sun and I had a puzzle injury. With that. I wanna talk this week about being in midlife, but also this reinvention and why this time of our lives.

I really believe with the wisdom that we have and. The life lessons that we’ve learned and the experiences and the things that we’ve gone through. We are actually in one of the best possible places ever to have a real invention, reinvention that [00:06:00 ] creates like amazing change and an arrival of something really new for us.

You know? So let’s dive in here. You know, I think. As I was thinking about this, I was like, you know, I, I think when I think about midlife, you know what I think about, I think about. The guy with the sports car, right? Isn’t that what we kind of always think about? At least when I was younger, that’s what I thought about.

Like the guy that got a younger girlfriend and had a red sports car. And I also think there is something that we are meant to believe about women in midlife. Which is that we’re going through all these crazy hormonal changes and everything is different and it’s something that you actually have to survive, like something that you have to really get through or endure.

And I also think until recently it was something you were supposed to endure like silently. You [00:07:00 ] weren’t supposed to talk about anything actually happening biologically in midlife. That was sort of taboo until recently. I think even like the last five years, maybe 10 years, but like five years probably.

But I am wondering, and these, this is the thing that I always talk to the ladies inside the Navigate Method about is that what if midlife is actually the most incredible, powerful portal that you will ever step into? N not because it’s easy, magical, like birth canal, but because things get stripped away and now you get to tell the truth.

And I think every woman that I work with reaches this moment where the performance of life and being a woman, the performance of being a [00:08:00 ] woman, right? Like I. Of how you’re supposed to be a woman. Let’s say it that way. That performance stops, right? You stop performing stability, you stop performing the roles that you had to, and your roles change.

Like maybe you had kids and now your kids are moved out, like you, you, you know what I mean? All these different things happen. You stop pretending. That everything in your marriage is fine or that you can just sweep stuff under the rug that it’s it like it’s fine. Like that. You can stop pretending that the life that you built, even if you put a lot of effort into building it, you get to stop pretending that it still fits.

And I think this is a huge breakthrough because we are refusing to whisper. Because we are refusing to stay the same, and we are in a [00:09:00 ] world that really wants us to stay the same. It wants us to still look 20. It wants us to still have the body that we had in our twenties. It wants us to still be performing all the things and all the tasks and have the energy and all these things, but that’s just not our lives anymore.

And I think that, you know. Men in a lot of ways are allowed to age. We say even when men get gray, it’s distinguished. I, I can’t, I, I feel rage. I feel rage even now as I say that. It’s distinguished, but women are supposed to. Sit and put chemicals on your hair, and if you want to do that, I salute you. Do it like I love it.

I’m thinking about getting some Botox because I want to, but probably because I’ve been told that I need to do, you know what I mean? Like probably my eyelids are heavy, so I have this idea that I could get some Botox and lift my eyelid a little bit so that I wouldn’t have to get surgery on my eyelids, which a side note I think will probably be a medical [00:10:00 ] procedure at some point soon.

But the point is. That there is a difference between what we do and what we are supposed to do and what men do and what men are supposed to do. Men are supposed to just age and women, we have to evolve in a totally different way, and I feel that too. I haven’t colored my hair in years, but I still look in the mirror sometime and like should I, would I look better?

How do I define better? I’m not sure, but I think it has to do with being younger. I think it has to do with looking youthful. And of course I want those things, but why do I, and so I think that this, that midlife starts to feel like a collapse, right? There’s this point where all of your old coping strategies sort of lose their oomph.

[00:11:00 ] So I think that this, this point of midlife is a reinvention, but it’s not a reinvention of starting over. I think it’s a reinvention about becoming the version of you