You don't need to blow up your life to change it. Today, we talk about the one small step back to the part of you that you buried. 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 Cavita with your Thursday check-in. On Monday in episode 320, we sat with the real cost of burying a passion. What it quietly takes from you to keep the truest part of yourself folded away. If you haven't heard it yet, please go back and listen first because today grows right out of it. On Monday, we named the cost. Today I want to give you the way back. And my friend, it is so much smaller than you think. Here is what stops most women. You believe the way back to yourself has to be enormous. But you have to quit the job or upend the family, disappoint everyone who counts on you, and gamble the whole house on a dream. And when the only way out looks that big and that terrifying, you do the most human thing there is. You do nothing. You stay exactly where you are, and the passion stays buried for another year. So let me take that fear off the table right now. You don't need the grand gesture, you don't need the five year plan, you don't even need to know where it leads. You just need one hour. Let me show you what one hour actually looks like because I don't want this to stay as a nice idea. I want you to see it. When I first uncovered that this work, my coaching, the speaking, the podcasting, was my ikigai or reason for being, I didn't quit my life and announce a new career. I spent one hour learning how to, for example, use a microphone. That's it. I sat at my desk with a piece of equipment I didn't understand, and I fumbled through it for an hour. That one hour became this podcast you're listening to right now, and that's where I started. And the woman I told you about on Monday? The scientist who had buried her art and her music? Her first hour was simply picking up her instrument again after years of it sitting untouched. Just playing it for one hour, for no reason other than she loved it. Another of her hours, later on, was opening up a small online shop to put her art into the world for the very first time. One hour to set it up. That was the whole leap. I think of another woman I worked with, the one who had climbed the top of her corporate career and felt empty it at the top. One of her first hours was spent doing nothing more than researching design schools around the world. She wasn't enrolling. She wasn't quitting her job. She was just letting herself look for one hour, at a door she had never allowed herself to even glance at. So do you see it now? Not one of them blew up their life. Each one gave a single hour to the thing that was calling her. And here's why that hour matters so much more than it looks. When you give yourself an hour on something you truly love, you release a different kind of energy. We call it anabolic energy, that alive, expansive energy that is the really opposite of the heaviness that we sat with on Monday. And it doesn't stay inside the hour, it spills into the rest of your day. My one microphone hour gave me the energy for the next hour and the next. Her one hour with the instrument gave her the courage to publish her music on YouTube. One hour becomes the first step, and the first step shows you the second, and that is how a path lights up. Not all at once, one run at a time. Now I have to be honest with you about that one hour because on Monday we talked about why the passion got buried in the first place. All those years of being practical, of doing what was expected, of putting everyone else first. So when you sit down to take your hour, an old voice is going to show up. The one that says that this is selfish, this is indulgent. Who do you think you are? There are a hundred more important things to do right now. I want you to expect that voice. And I want you to take the hour anyway. Because that hour is not selfish. That hour is you finally answering a part of yourself you've been kept waiting for years. You haven't given decades to everyone else. You can give one hour to you. So here is your invitation this week. And notice how small I'm making it on purpose. Find one hour. Not every day, just one this week. Give it to the one thing that you have buried. Maybe your hour is pulling out an instrument you have not touched in years. Maybe it's signing up for one class. Maybe it's researching something you've always been curious about, the way she looked up those design schools. Maybe it's putting one piece of your writing or your art or your baking out into the world. Maybe it's just sitting with a sketchbook and letting your hand move. Whatever it was that used to make you lose all the track of time. Don't attach a goal to it. Don't try to turn it into a plan or a business. Just give yourself that hour and pay attention to how you feel while you are in it and afterwards. Because that feeling is your answer. That feeling is the part of you that has never actually gone away. That one hour is your first step back to yourself. It is the smallest thing and is also the thing that changes everything, because it proves to you what you have been afraid to believe all along. The way back was never a cliff you had to leap off. It was a step that you can take today. And if you want a hand turning that one brave hour into something steady, my free twenty eight days to building confidence guide is made exactly for this. It is simple daily practices that build a quiet, growing certainty one day at a time. The link is waiting for you in the shots. So remember my friend, you get to decide what comes next. So say it with me, and say it with confidence, it's my time now.