#332: How to Use the September Reset to Reconnect With Your Purpose in Midlife

Have you found yourself standing at the turn of the season, wondering if this is really the life you meant to be living?

For most of your life, September was a reset that belonged to everyone else. This year, with the house stiller and the old work no longer lighting you up, that familiar thrill may be replaced by a sinking feeling. That ache is not a flaw. It is a signal pointing to the gap between how you are living and the woman you have become in your midlife life transition.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why the restless end-of-summer feeling is not something to push away, but the clearest sign of what needs to change next
• A simple way to walk through your days and see honestly where your outer life still fits you, and where it no longer does
• The two questions, "who am I now" and "what do I really want", that begin to open the door to your reason for being and your next chapter

Press play to make this the September you finally reset for yourself, and take the first honest step toward the next chapter that is truly yours.

If this is meeting you where you are, take the free Ikigai Clarity Assessment to see which of your four dimensions, strengths, passions, values, and contribution, is alive right now and which has faded into the background, then book a Complimentary Clarity Call with Kavita to name your very next step in your midlife career and life transition.

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Take the Ikigai Clarity Assessment and find out which of your four Ikigai dimensions may be out of alignment.

Schedule a Clarity and Next Chapter Call with Kavita

New episodes every Monday and Thursday.

This podcast explores career and life transitions, helping women find clarity, confidence, and purpose through Ikigai and self-discovery. We cover navigating change, overcoming self-doubt and limiting beliefs, finding your purpose-driven career, and building the courage to start your next chapter - whether you're facing a career transition, life transition, or midlife reinvention.

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Transcript

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Today, you'll discover how to turn that restless, end-of-summer feeling into the clearest sign of what needs to change in your life. 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. In this episode, you'll discover three things. First, why that restless sinking feeling you may get as a season turns is not something to push away, but something to listen to. Second, a simple way to tell whether your life on the outside still matches who you are on the inside and what to do if it doesn't. And third, why this September of all Septembers might be the one where you finally choose a reset of your own. Stay with me to the end because I want you to walk into this new season feeling something you may have not felt in a long while, which is excited about what comes next. Hello and welcome back to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast. It's your coach Kabita. If you're new here, welcome to the Midlife Reinvention Podcast family. Something brought you to this episode, and I'm so glad you're here. And if you are a returning listener, thank you. I don't take it lightly that you've chosen to spend this time with me here again today. I'd like to start today by picturing you right where you are right now. Because I remember clearly how I felt as September approaches. Where I lived, there was a distinctive change in the air, a slight refreshing coolness that was really unmistakable. Aha, that's September. And whatever the weather is doing where you are, something in the calendar has probably shifted. There are signs of a fresh start everywhere that you look. The back to school displays went up weeks ago, the new notebooks, the pencils, the lunchboxes, and there is that particular feeling in the air, the one you have known since you were a child, that says a new season is beginning, and it's time to begin again with it. The season could be about the change of weather or about summer winding down and the realities of work and life coming straight at us. Because this pull we feel in September, this sense of a threshold of a year turning over, almost all of us carry it, no matter what it looks like outside our window. Most of the world grew up on a calendar that makes September a beginning, and that stays in us long before we even recognize it. And so for many years, that beginning may have belonged to you too. September was a reset. You may have had children to get ready for rhythm to return to a whole household to point towards the new year, and there was a thrill in it, even in the busyness. New shoes, a fresh calendar, everything starting fresh together. But this year it may feel a little different. Maybe the house is stiller than it used to be. Maybe your children have grown and gone off to school or off to lives of their own. And the rooms that used to be full of noise are empty now. Maybe you're standing in a kitchen that doesn't need you the way it once did. Or maybe you are looking at your work or your job you return to as the season turns, and you notice that the old excitement is not quite there anymore. It has run its course and you have not quite let yourself say it out loud. And so this September, instead of that familiar little thrill, maybe there's something heavier, a sinking feeling, a sense of everyone else seems to be starting something new, and I'm just here. Wondering how another year has turned, wondering if I'm honest, where I am right now, and what exactly am I doing with this one life of mine. If that is you sitting where you are with your coffee going cold, I want you to know that I see you, and I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you for feeling it. I felt that too, and that feeling is a signal, my friend. Last week on the podcast, we talked about emotions and how they are not problems to push past, but information to listen to. And this feeling, the same September ache, is information too. It's not a sign that you are ungrateful or that you have failed or that something is broken in you. It's a signal. And it's a gap between how you're living and who you actually are. And this season of all seasons has a way of making that gap impossible to ignore. So I don't want you to push it away. I want us to turn towards it together. And I'll tell you something. September is actually one of my favorite months of the year. It always has been. I love that feeling of newness, and that is also somehow settling. And this year I feel it more than ever because I have just turned 60, and rather than the ending our culture told me 60 would be, it actually is feeling like a new beginning. A whole new decade to become more of who I am. So when I tell you that the season can be the start of something rather than the closing of it, I'm not saying it from the outside. I'm living it right now, and I want the very same thing for you too. As I'm speaking to you right now, I'm sitting at my window looking out at the trees in my backyard, and I'm watching the leaves. They're still bright green, but they're ready to turn. And it really struck me that everything outside is about to change. The green gives away, the light goes golden, and the whole landscape becomes something new. Nature does this without apology every single year. It doesn't cling to summer, it lets the seasons change because that's what time is supposed to do. And here is a question that came to me as I looked out my window, and I want you to sit with it. The world outside your window may be changing, but my question is: is the world inside you ready to change too? Does your life on the outside still reflect who you have become on the inside? And I want you to notice something. Often we get a nudge from the environment around us. The leaves have fallen, and those nudges remind us to look inwards. And I'm here encouraging you to listen to those nudges inside of you also. The real change was always going to have to come from the inside. Because so often that is really the source of the ache. It isn't the empty house itself and it's not the tired job itself. It's that your outer life, the rooms, the routines, the role, the calendar, was built for a version of you from years ago. And you have kept living inside of it, out of habit or duty, out of not stopping long enough to notice. But you're not that woman anymore. You have grown and changed and softened in some places and deepened in others. And your life may not have caught up to you yet. And that's not a failure. Let me say that clearly. It's the most natural thing in the world. But it is an invitation. The gap between your outer life and your inner truths is not there to shame you. It is there to point you towards what wants to change next. For your whole life, September's reset was handed to you. It was set by the school calendar or by other people's schedules, by everyone who needed you to get them ready for their fresh start. Your reset was never really about you. It was about organizing everybody else's. But this year, for the first time, it can be yours. This can be the first time or the first September you reset for you, not for the children or the household or for the job, for you. And when you look at the quiet house that way, it stops being only a loss and becomes space. The first real room you have had in decades to ask what you actually want. So here is what I would love for you to do this week. And it's a small thing, but I want you to really do it. Walk through your own life the way you might walk through your home at the turn of the season. Look at your days, your rooms, your routines, the way you spend your hours. And in each one, ask yourself honestly, does this still reflect who I am now? Does this fit the woman I become or is it the woman I used to be? You're not trying to fix anything, you're just noticing. Noticing where your outer life matches you and where it has stopped. And as you notice, there are two questions that might be rising up underneath all of it. And these are the two questions that everything I do comes back to. Who am I now? And what do I really want? You have heard me asking these questions before, but don't let them slide because they are far bigger than they look. And most of us has never really truly stopped to answer those questions. Who am I now? Not who you were. Not who everyone expects you to be. Who are you now in this chapter? What are you actually good at today? And I mean today. Not the skills you trained in twenty years ago, but the things people come to you for now. The things that come so easily you have stopped counting them as gifts at all. What genuinely lights you up now? The things you do where you look up and an hour has gone by. What matters to you now? Because it is not what's mattered perhaps at thirty-five years old. The things you once fought for may not move you at all now anymore, and other things may have taken their place. And what does the world need from you now? With your particular life and your particular gifts that you are here to offer. That is who you are now. And it's a far richer question than at first appears. And then the one I really want you to be honest about is what do I really want? Because so many of us have never once answered that without editing it out first. So let yourself want, honestly, with no one watching. Maybe you want more. More money. And there's nothing wrong with that either. More influence, a wider reach. And if that's you, then who is it you most want to reach? And why? Maybe you want to travel. To finally see the places you keep putting off. Or maybe honestly you just want to rest because you've been going for decades and you are tired. Maybe you want work that actually fits the woman you are now, or maybe you love that work you already have and you want to go deeper into it, or maybe even better at the thing you already love. And underneath all of those are the quieter ones, the ones that are harder to say out loud. To stop being so hard on yourself, to repair a relationship that has gone cold, to finally take your own health seriously after years of putting everyone else's first. There is so much in there, and these are not questions you answer in an afternoon, and you're not meant to. But this is a season to begin asking them, and to ask them honestly because the answers are the beginning of your reason for being, the thing that will make you wake up in the morning with something to move towards instead of something to get through. You can begin asking these on your own this week, and I truly hope you do. But most women find that when they sit down to really answer them, they come up against years of noise, all the rolls and the shoulds, and the voices that were never theirs to begin with. And it becomes genuinely hard to hear your own answers underneath all of it. And that's the work I do, helping you cut through the noise so you can finally hear yourself. And I've something to help you to begin also. It's called the IHIGUI Clarity Assessment, and it takes you through the four dimensions of who you are right now your strengths, your passions, your values, and your contribution. And it shows you honestly which of them is alive in your life right now, and which one has faded into the background. It only takes a few minutes, and it is really a very clear starting place. And once you can see it, if you wanted someone to help you make real sense of what it shows you, bring your results to a complimentary clarity call with me, and we'll look at them together and find your very next step. And I want to say this plainly because I really believe this. If not now, when you have four months left in this year. You could let them pass the way the last several have, waiting for some better moment that never quite announces itself. Or you could let this season be the one where you actually begin There is a reason the name of everything I do is called It's My Time Now, because there's always a reason to wait, and there is never a perfect moment, and the truth is that the moment is simply the one you decide to claim. And I can't think of a better one than this. So let me leave you with the three things that I most want you to carry out of today. First, that that restless, sinking feeling you may have as the season turns is not a flaw and not a failure, it's information. A signal pointing to the gap between how you are living and who you have become. Second, that this is a perfect moment to ask whether your outer life still reflects your inner truth, and that where it does not, you have found not a loss but an invitation. And third, that for the first time in years, this September can be a reset you choose for yourself, rather than one handed to you for everybody else. So here is the now. This week, notice where your life still fits you and where it no longer does. Then take the Ikigai Clarity Assessment to see it clearly, and bring what you find to a call with me so we can make sense of it all together. Both links are waiting for you at the top of the show notes. Thank you so much for being here, my friend. And remember, you get to decide what comes next. So say it with me and say it with confidence it's my time now.