Every transition is asking you a question. And most of us spend years avoiding the answer. Today, my friend, let's answer it together. Welcome to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast, a podcast helping women in career and life transitions achieve clarity on their next steps so they can transform uncertainty into an energizing next chapter. I'm your host, Kavita Ahuja, and the founder of It's My Time Now Coaching. If you're wondering what's next in your career or life, you are in the right place. Through solo and guest episodes, you'll gain practical tips, tools, and inspiration to help you uncover blocks, gain confidence, and be, do, and have what you want. I rediscovered myself after the age of 50, and I know you can too. It's my time now to help you do just that. I'm so excited you're here. Let's dive in. Hello and welcome back to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast. It's your coach Kavita with your Thursday check-in. If you were with me on Monday, we went back to the very beginning of my story. The journey from India, Punjab, India to Kenya, to Canada. The courage my grandparents and parents passed down to me without me realizing they had passed it down at all. The inheritance I had completely forgotten was running through me until something in this midlife chapter of mine asked me to remember. And if you haven't listened to it yet, you can go back to episode 308 to get the full picture. But there is one thread from Monday I want to pick up and follow further because it deserves a conversation of its own. And here's the thread. Every transition in our life is, underneath everything, a conversation with our values. And the conversation it is asking us to have is this. The values that built who you are until this moment are not necessarily the values that are calling you forward into who you are becoming. And making that distinction is not a betrayal of where you came from. It is the next chapter of where you are going to. Let me make this real with my own story. For many years I lived by every value I had inherited from my parents and grandparents. Hard work, achievement, education, family, being the daughter who succeeded, climbing the ladder my parents had crossed oceans for me to climb. And those values were beautiful, and they served me. They built a life I am proud of, skills I am grateful for, and opportunities I would not trade. And then there were the values I absorbed along the way without choosing them status, recognition, looking successful from the outside, not rocking the boat. The story that says you have made it, if you have made the title and the salary and the life that everyone around you agrees is a nice life. There is nothing wrong with any of these values having shaped my earlier chapters, and there is nothing wrong with the values that would have shaped yours. They worked. They got us here? The question is not whether they were good or bad. The question is, in any transition, is whether they are still the values that are leading us forward. And somewhere in my forties, something started to shift quietly underneath all of it. The same values that had carried me for decades were still there, but a new value started knocking on the door. A value I had not yet given myself permission to name, and that was a value of giving back, of using everything I had built to help women navigate the very transitions I was secretly already inside, of leaving behind something larger than my own success. If I had not listened to that new value, I would not be sitting here recording this episode for you today. And so I want you to think about your own story for a moment. What were the values that drove your earlier chapters? The ones you inherited and the ones that you absorbed? And what value is starting to knock on the door to this one? Because here is what I've come to understand. In your earlier chapters, success may have looked like climbing the corporate ladder, the title, the salary, the recognition. And then somewhere along the way, that same word success has started to ask a different question. What if success now means giving back? What if it means using everything you built to help the people coming behind you? What if it means building something that is yours rather than something that looks impressive? That is not the old value being wrong, that is the value evolving. And this is also the quiet work that lives at the heart of Ikikai, your reason for being. And it lives at the intersection of four things your strengths, which you are naturally good at, your passions, what really brings you alive, your values, what matters most to you, and what the world needs right now that only you can bring. When all four of these circles overlap, you find your ikigai. And here is what most people miss. Your ikigai is not a fixed point you arrive at once and then keep forever. It is a living conversation between those four circles, and all four of them are shifting through every season of your life. Your strengths evolve as you grow, your passions deepen as you live, your values move, and what the world needs from you at fifty may look very different from what it needed at twenty five. This is part of what I started to understand in my own transition. The world was no longer asking me for what it had been asking me for decades. The questions changed. And the only way I could hear the new question was by being willing to ask it. What does the world need from me now in this new chapter? Not what did it need from me twenty years ago. What does it need from me now? If your values shift in a transition and you do not notice, your Ikigai goes quietly out of alignment. Your strengths and passions might still be there. What the world needs from you might still be calling, but without your values leading them, something starts to feel off. The work you are doing might still be impressive, but it stops feeling meaningful. The life you have built might still look right, but it stops feeling right. And you cannot put your finger on why. The reason is that your values have moved, and yet you have not let yourself follow them. So the shift I want to leave you today is this. You do not have to throw out the values that built you. You get to honor them as the values that brought you here. And in the same breath, you get to decide which ones still belong in the chapter you were walking into now. Naming what you value now is not selfish. It is not a rejection of those who have raised you. It is the most respectful thing you can do for everything they pass down. Because their courage, their sacrifice, their bravery in choosing the unknown, they do not do all this so you can remain frozen in their value system. They did it all so you could grow into yours. So here is what I want you to sit with this week, my friend. Take a quiet moment somewhere you will not be interrupted. Write down five values that have led your life until now. They might be the obvious ones like family or hard work or education, or they might be the less obvious ones like being respected or being needed, being seen as successful. Whatever they are, write them down honestly. Then look at each one and ask yourself gently, is this still leading me forward or is it have become a weight I am carrying out of habit? Which of these values do I want to keep walking into with this next chapter? Which ones with love and respect have I outgrown? And what new value is asking me to lead now that I have not yet been willing to name? You don't have to act on the answers today, you only have to notice them. And the noticing is the work. The choosing comes after. And one more thing before we close. This whole month we were doing something different here on the podcast. I'm sharing my story episode by episode and inviting you to share yours back. Ask me anything. If a question is rising in you about my journey or your journey or anything in between, send me an email at Cavita at it's my timeowcoaching.com. I will be answering questions in the episode ahead. I'll see you back here on Monday, where I'm going to take you into the years where I lived every value I had inherited. The years where the playbook felt perfect until quietly it didn't. If you have ever lived by a story that looked exactly right and somehow stopped feeling like yours, Monday's episode will be for you. And remember, you get to decide what comes next. So say it with me and say it with confidence. It's my time now.