Overcoming Midlife Stuckness with Gratitude: 3 Empowering Reinvention Strategies

🎙️In this special Thanksgiving episode of Reinvention Rebels, we dive into how gratitude can be a powerful ally in facing midlife challenges. Let’s unlock joy and growth together and kick midlife stuckness to the curb!

🌟 Key Highlights:

• Gratitude and Midlife Struggles: Discover how being thankful can help you tackle self-doubt, fear of failure, and concerns about others’ opinions. Gratitude can be your guide to a more fulfilling reinvention journey.
  
  
• Failures as Stepping Stones: Learn why failures aren’t setbacks but valuable lessons. I share how my own failed experiences, like those as a health coach, led to creating this podcast. Embrace failures as opportunities for growth! 🚀
  
  
• Wisdom and Resilience: With age comes wisdom! Explore how accumulated experiences boost your confidence and resilience, paving the way for reinvention.
  
  
• Support Systems Matter: Celebrate the power of supportive relationships. My good friend Wendy, and namesake, is one of those people. We all need mutual encouragement in midlife to help us get unstuck. 🤝
  
  
• Resources for Reinvention: Get inspired with resources like “100 Ways to Reinvent in Midlife.” These tools can help you find purpose and chart your path forward.
  
  
• Reflect on Gratitude: I invite you to reflect on personal gratitude. What are you thankful for? Your insights might just open up new possibilities for growth. Follow the journal prompts to explore how gratitude can help you get unstuck in midlife.

Join me for a journey of gratitude and reinvention. Listen now and take the first step toward a more fulfilling midlife adventure and say goodbye to midlife stuckness! 🎧

Mentioned in the Episode:

Prior episode: Cultivating Midlife Friendships: How to Create Joyful, Authentic Connections with Wendy Hutchinson 

How to get unstuck in midlife:🎁Download my free gift, 100 Ways to Reinvent in Midlife. Kickstart your reinvention with 100 ways to overcome midlife stuckness and find midlife joy and purpose.

Podcast Recommendation: What am I listening to these days? Women over 70: Aging Reimagined. Inspiring stories of women who have reinvented after 70. It's like a cousin of the Reinvention Rebels podcast. 😊

Transcript

00:10 - Wendy Battles (Host)
Welcome to Reinvention Rebels stories of brave and unapologetic women, 50 to 90 years young, who have boldly reinvented life on their own terms to find new purpose and possibilities. 

00:24
I'm your host, Wendy Battles. I need to kick your fears to the curb, do it scared and step into who you are meant to be in midlife and beyond. These amazing women, these reinvention rebels, can help light your reinvention path. Come join us and let's get inspired together. Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Reinvention Rebels podcast. I'm your host, wendy. I'm so excited you're here. This is the place to come for information and inspiration about getting through midlife stuckness, when we feel mired in all things midlife and sometimes we have a hard time moving forward. This is the place to come for all kinds of possibilities about what we can do to overcome our midlife stuckness, to find midlife joy and purpose as we reinvent ourselves. And I have the pleasure of interviewing the most extraordinary women between 50 and 90 who have done just that. They've figured out their reinvention path, they've reinvented in inspiring ways, and their stories are here to help us see what's possible. 

01:52
And today I've got a little solo episode. It's around Thanksgiving time. It's that time we're often thinking about gratitude and giving thanks, and I thought this would be a great episode to share with you today. The thing is, we all have an inner rebel. We all have this amazing woman itching to come out. If she hasn't come out yet, or maybe she's partly out and partly still in there and you're working on finding your best self that certainly is me. I continue to reinvent, I continue to challenge myself, I continue to do things that scare me and aren't always easy, but really help me grow, and I want to encourage you to be thinking about that yourself. By the way, I don't know if you caught the episode a couple weeks ago with my friend, Wendy Wendy Hutchinson, but she is amazing. She's the friend that I met on Instagram. We have shared episodes together, inviting each other on our podcasts. We met for the first time last month when I was in Texas for a conference for work and just truly hit it off and this idea of support and friendship. Well, that's part of our conversation today, when we think about gratitude. 

03:17
Today, we are exploring how gratitude can help us overcome midlife stuckness to find our midlife groove, to find our midlife purpose, to really find the things that light us up in new and empowering ways. So here are a couple questions for you. Have you ever been more concerned about others' opinions than what you want? Have you been swayed by someone else's advice? Do you ever harbor self-doubts about whether you can make your dream a reality? Are you concerned that you might fail so you never get started? Those are some questions I want you to be thinking about today, because they have everything to do with this idea of overcoming our midlife stuckness, and we're going to talk about three reasons that we can be grateful. In the midst of those feelings of uncertainty or fear or I don't know if I can do it there are three things we can be really grateful for in the midst of our mental stuckness that can help us move forward. Number one is being grateful for our midlife failures. You know, midlife failures provide us with really valuable perspectives, which, of course, when we're failing it doesn't feel like it does it, but those failures can absolutely help us move forward, even in challenging circumstances. 

04:53
And I think about this a lot because in my 40s I decided I was going to study to become a health coach and then quit my corporate job, which I did. I didn't even have a good plan and I was not very successful and it was really for a lot of different reasons. I really didn't have a good business sense. I didn't understand that just having clients wasn't enough. You have to find more clients, you have to market, you have to do bookkeeping, you have to do all these things, and I wasn't really prepared for it. And I wasn't also prepared for the isolation of having a business, when I was used to being part of a team in work settings and I thrived on that and ultimately, after a couple of years, I started to realize that it really wasn't working out for me. I wasn't ever doing anything more than breaking even. Yet I felt so disappointed in myself because I felt like I put all my eggs in this basket and I was going to be so successful and I was so not, and that gave me such a sense of failure. But I can look back now and see that I have such gratitude for that experience because I learned that's not the only way that you can be successful. There are many different ways to run a business and it really laid the groundwork for me creating something new, which was the birth of the Reinvention Rebels podcast, and if I hadn't failed at health coaching, I wouldn't have taken other steps to go back to having a full-time job, which then led me to, over time, having that aha moment, realizing that I wanted to create something again, but different, that would be inspiring, empowering, that would get women into action in midlife. So that failure led me to this success. So I am grateful for that midlife failure that propelled me forward. 

06:50
Not everything works out perfectly the way we want it to. I believe that when we can embrace our midlife failures or disappointments, maybe it's not as big as a failure, but a disappointment about something. It's what we need to move us forward. It can help us see new possibilities, and I'd like to think them as detours. You know, failures, detours, whatever you want to call them, but it's always leading us to something better. I like to think about this or something better, and that's what I've learned from my midlife failures. They're always a catalyst for something more different and better. So that's reason number one let's be grateful for our midlife failures that can help us with our midlife stuckness. 

07:34
Reason number two is to be grateful for the wisdom that we've gained from these experiences that haven't always worked out the way we wanted to, or maybe they have, and we've gained wisdom from those as well. But we've all heard the term with age comes wisdom, and we've all heard the term with age comes wisdom. And we've all learned lessons along the way through our midlife experiences that, honestly, have shaped us. They've shaped us and helped us with resilience. They've helped us become knowledgeable individuals. They've helped us with our confidence in different ways. So it's not for nothing that we've had these experiences, and what I know for sure is especially things that haven't worked out as well as I'd liked, those things have informed my future decisions. They've helped me pursue things with more confidence and clearly avoid past mistakes, and I'm going to give you an example of what I mean. 

08:28
My failure as a health coach really did a number on my confidence at the time. But one of the things I learned about running a business is that you have to be persistent. You can't just give up. You can't just be like, well, that didn't work out and I'm not going to do it anymore. Okay, I did that after two years, but part of it was it wasn't my passion, so I didn't have the desire to keep going. But what I really learned is that when we find the thing that lights us up and for me that is podcasting, inspiring, empowering. When we find the thing that lights us up, we can persist. So I learned from before that I gave up too soon, but what I'm applying now is this idea of persistence. It takes time to build something. We have highs and lows, but if it's what we really want to do, if we are jazzed up, if we love it, we will persist. 

09:29
I've gained wisdom from my midlife experiences that have informed my thinking, my decision making and impacted my confidence in powerful ways as I've stepped into my current reinvention as a podcast host and really building something that is sustainable. Something that is sustainable. So those experiences aren't for nothing and I bet we can all look back and feel grateful for different things that have happened to us that have helped fuel where we are right now or where we want to be, if we're trying to figure it out and we're in that space of midlife stuckness. Okay. So that's two reasons to be grateful for. One, to be grateful for midlife failures. Two, to be grateful for the midlife wisdom that we've gained. And the third thing is to be grateful for our support systems, my friends and family. They are everything. The communities I belong to. That is everything in helping me, stay positive, move forward, have faith and determination, get that little push I need when I feel like giving up on myself or I'm losing confidence. 

10:40
We need our supporters in midlife, and I was saying that this episode is really tied to the past episode that I did a few weeks ago with my friend, wendy, my namesake. Well, it's so key because we are relying on each other and many other people in my life for that boost. So when we got together in San Antonio in October, it was so magical. It was so magical to take this friendship that had been developing online, on Instagram and then talking on the phone or Zooming, to then seeing her in person and talking forever hours about the midlife conundrums and challenges we both are finding ourselves in. You know, it's not always easy in midlife. As we all know, there are so many different challenges and we're both faced with things and, interestingly, we're on some very similar paths. So that's been really enlightening to think about how we can encourage and support each other and that's really so key and I can think of so many people in my life that I am grateful for as I navigate these midlife challenges. 

11:50
So having our people, our tribe, our support system, can empower us to take bold steps. Those bold steps toward our goals when we know we've got people that have our back, that believe in us, even on the days when we don't believe in ourselves. Even if most days we're like, yes, I can do this, and then other days we're like, then again, I'm not sure. That's when we need our people, that's when we call on them, that's when they can encourage us so we can lean into our support system Plus, you know what else? We can be that same support system for other people in our lives. So I am grateful for the people that are helping me along the way. So three reasons why I'm feeling grateful in midlife, as I navigate midlife stuckness, that I have these amazing resources. 

12:51
So I talked about three things that I'm grateful for in midlife that help me navigate midlife stuckness indecision, doubt. What about you? What are you grateful for in midlife? What lessons have you learned that are propelling you forward? How can you apply those lessons to reinventing yourself, and how has sometimes, learning the hard way helped you grow? This is a simple exercise for you to noodle on this Thanksgiving, while you're off really any time but those questions can be clues into what you need, what you want what you already have, which is probably more than we even think, and how you could propel yourself forward as you think about going from midlife stuckness to midlife joy and purpose. How do we bridge that gap and how can gratitude help us do that? It's a definite food for thought. 

13:58
What I also believe about gratitude is that it fosters curiosity. It helps us open the door to new possibilities, and I think that once we can lean into all of the things we're grateful for, all of the things that have happened to us in midlife, it can spark new ideas, maybe ideas we haven't even seen, we didn't have the perspective to see. But stepping back and leaning into our gratitude can help us do that. So I want to encourage you to simply appreciate what you have and explore what's possible. Apply these gratitude lessons to your midlife goals and dreams and, if you're feeling stuck, using them to help you get unstuck. 

14:45
And, being that it is Thanksgiving, I want to offer up to you my free gift 100 ways to reinvent in midlife. If you are listening to this and you're thinking, I am ready to get unstuck, I'm ready to move forward, I'm ready for new ideas. I've got a hundred ideas for you, a hundred different ideas to spur your thinking. Now, of course, not all of them are going to resonate with you, but this will give you just the breadth of things you could possibly do as you work through midlife stuckness and embrace your midlife purpose. And I have found it to be a key in feeling activated and excited, energized. Also, this idea that when we figure out what that thing is, even if we don't know how to get to it yet, we're taking a stand about ourselves, we're saying I am worth betting on myself. And 100 ways to reinvent midlife is the catalyst for you to get started in uncovering what lights you up and going down that path to start betting on yourself, and I can't wait for you to download it and get started thinking about what's possible. 

16:10
Thank you so much for tuning into this special solo episode today. I hope this resonated with you. You have some nuggets in thinking about this idea of gratitude how we can use gratitude to help us with midlife stuckness and move toward midlife joy and purpose. And how we can find gratitude in our failures. How we can find gratitude in the wisdom we've gained in midlife. And how we can find gratitude in our support systems that help fuel us and will help support you as you reinvent. So please be noodling on all these things. Download this fantastic free gift that I have for you, and I can't wait to see you all very shortly for another amazing episode. 

16:58
And, as we're wrapping up, I wanna encourage you to stay connected. Let's connect on Instagram, if we aren't already. I am at Reinvention Rebels. Please share your stories of overcoming midlife stuckness. I want to hear them, and I got to tell you that I'm also really excited about the next episode. It's with a really extraordinary woman. Her name is Tricky Mickey and she is so freaking cool. You are going to love her fierce, fabulous reinvention story. I'll be back in a couple weeks. I can't wait to talk to you then. Until then, keep shining your light, rebels. The world needs you and all that you have to offer.