Start in the Middle

The Power of Self-Growth in Midlife

• Kristi Ballard Falany • Episode 107

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Hear me out, what if reinventing ourselves in midlife isn't about a complete overhaul but a journey to self-discovery? What if we redirect our energy towards self-growth and embracing our true selves. It's about finding your passion, joy, and authenticity amid the chaos of life. 

In this episode, I am sharing with you the difference between a Reinvention at midlife and a Midlife Rediscovery. You get to decide for yourself which one will work best for you. 

Now, imagine having a partner in this journey of rediscovery? That's where working with a life coach becomes invaluable. Together, we'll strive to create a life that's not merely a product of societal expectations but one that truly resonates with your authentic self. We'll nurture relationships that bring joy, love, and understanding. And to get you started, I'm offering a free discovery call. We'll discuss your current life situation and how my coaching program could aid your personal growth. So let’s reignite your passion, embrace your midlife, and start the journey towards living authentically. 

Connect with me at: Kristi Falany Cocahing.com

Thanks for listening. Follow me in Facebook and Instagram.

Kristi:

Hi, I am Kristy Ballard Fellini. I am a certified life coach who found herself at 42, freshly divorced kids off to college and having never dated in my adult life. I was starting in the middle. If you haven't yet hit start on your middle time in life, let's do it together. Let the journey begin. You are listening to Start in the Middle, episode 107. Hello, my friends, thank you for meeting me here today. I hope that you are having an amazing day, wherever it is that you are at in this world. If you and I have not been acquainted yet, I am Kristy Fellini and I am a trauma informed certified life coach.

Kristi:

I help midlife women who are ready to just stop letting life pass them by. What I have discovered is that sometimes we do this when we feel unhappy and we just don't know why. Sometimes this looks like just everything on that outside looks perfectly fine. Our families look perfectly fine to other people, our jobs look perfectly fine to other people. Our Instagram, our Facebook shows that everything is perfectly fine, but for some reason, you have an unsettling feeling in your body that feels like unhappiness and you just don't know where it's coming from. At midlife, this is also a time when we start to notice some changes going on within our relationships, within our self, and it causes us to have a feeling of either just being lost just I don't know where I fit in, I don't know where my place is or even feeling stuck. You feel like you're in a part of your life where you just don't know what the next opportunity is or what the next step is for you. Sometimes midlife can leave us feeling unhappy, can have us feeling lost, can have us feeling in a state of being stuck. This is exactly what I help my clients get through. I help them to renavigate a life that they feel fulfilled in, a life where there is joy, a life where they feel an inner peace on the day to day. And if they find themselves feeling uneased, they know and they have the tools to help them navigate that feeling and to be able to recreate a feeling that they actually want.

Kristi:

So today I have a question for you. I want you to ponder. So what is it that you think about when you hear the word reinvention? Is this kind of popped up to me and I've seen it in a couple of different spaces where I follow other midlife groups, because I like to be in spaces of other women who are like-minded, who have the same aspirations, who have the same goals, who identify with themselves as the descriptors that I gave at the beginning of the podcast People who are looking to figure out why it is that they are feeling unhappy or dissatisfied, lonely even with their life at midlife, and so I often hear about wanting to reinvent themselves at midlife.

Kristi:

So I want to talk about that today, because I want to talk about what people are actually saying when they are saying I want to reinvent myself. I've done some research around this area, just as I am putting the finishing touches on my newest coaching program, because the women who go through my new program, I want them to feel differently about who they are as a midlife woman Once they reach the end of our 12 weeks together. I want them to feel empowered and grounded in who they are. I want them to love who it is that they are becoming as they explore new and different aspects of themselves. My hope is that they walk away from the experience feeling lighter and that they can handle anything that life has to throw at them. My hope is that they will embrace their authenticity and all of the opportunities that midlife has to offer them. They have all of the skills that it takes to build the strong, lasting relationships that they want. So what I'm talking about is embracing the process of self growth, and I'm going to tell you that you can't do that through a reinvention.

Kristi:

Okay, I know that there's a lot of talk about reinvention at midlife. I'm going to reinvent who I am. I'm going to set some new goals, maybe take up some new hobbies, maybe even change your look or finally get serious about eating better to detour that extra menopause weight. But let's talk about what reinvention really is. You see, a reinvention is when something changes so much that it appears entirely different. It means to redo completely, that it is no longer recognizable. So everything changes in a reinvention. So I want to ask you is that what you're looking for? Is that what reinvention is to you?

Kristi:

Because here are some problems with reinvention, you see, because changing everything sounds hard, and if you followed me for any amount of time, you know what your brain does with things that it thinks is hard. There's procrastination, there's resistance, there's flat out oh, just forget it when your brain thinks something is going to be hard. So, without coaching and accountability, you're less likely to follow through, or even let alone try it, if your brain thinks that it's going to be hard. So when you talk about tearing down everything and redoing everything, you're more than likely going to allow your brain to think that is going to be hard. Okay. So that's the first problem with reinvention.

Kristi:

The next problem with reinvention is that when you say that you want to change everything, you're telling yourself that nothing is good about your life. When you say nothing is good, you may as well tell your brain that you're not good and that there is nothing good about you, nothing worth salvaging. And I pray that that is not what you're thinking and that you know that this is not true. Okay, because that's what reinvention does. Reinvention says that there's nothing salvageable because you're tearing everything down and you're starting new, you're redoing everything, and so what happens is your brain starts to think that, well, if we have to redo everything, that there's nothing good to keep. Okay. So that's the second problem with reinvention.

Kristi:

But the truth is and as I have cautioned you before, you've got to be really, really careful with the things that you say to yourself, that you allow your brain to bring up for you. You have to be careful about challenging the things that your brain tries to say about you. Because when you just allow your brain to automatically think what it's going to think without any amount of challenge, it's going to bring up sentences that it believes is keeping you safe. It's going to bring up sentences to help you figure out what's the most pleasurable thing and how Can we, above everything else, avoid pain. So can you see how, when you just allow your brain to run amuck, you're not making any changes, you're not making the changes that you want in your life. You're staying stuck, you're feeling lost, you're feeling lonely, you're feeling unhappy, all right. So we've got to get into the posture of questioning the thoughts that your brain brings up for you, trying to get curious and understand where they're coming from and why are they coming up at this point, and, just overall, having a better understanding of how your brain actually works for you.

Kristi:

So, rather than saying that I want to reinvent who I am at midlife and all that reinvention truly entails, which is a complete overhaul, to not be recognizable, to aspire to something that your brain will tell you is going to be a lot of work and really hard, and that you need to tear everything down because none of it is good. I want to offer you something different. Okay, because when I think about reinvention and what reinvention actually means, it kind of makes me think of the celebrities. You know the celebrities who gone through the process of having plastic surgery because there was something about themselves that they didn't like right, and when they came out of the plastic surgery they were so unrecognizable, okay. So when I think about the process of reinvention, it makes me think of that. It makes me think of how, when they came out of that surgery, that they were no longer recognizable. So I use this, you know, just as an example, so that you can truly see what I'm talking about when you use the word reinvention.

Kristi:

Here is how I want to help you shift your perspective around this. Rather than a reinvention, I want to challenge you to a rediscovery. Just think about that word and how it already feels so much lighter. A rediscovery, and I love that it has that root word in it discover. Yes, that's the English teacher in me coming out, but it has that root word discover. And when I think about that word, discover, like it almost brings up like a little bit of a tingling feeling in me. It embodies that word that I love to use curious and curiosity and it opens up for me, my mind and my heart to the opportunity of new things. And so I want you to really think about a rediscovery versus a reinvention, because when you commit to rediscovering who you are at midlife, you get to look inside of yourself and really determine what it is that you do like about you. You get to determine what you want to keep or what you want more of from yourself and for yourself.

Kristi:

We're not tearing anything down and starting over. We're enhancing the best part of you and rediscovering the parts of you that may have been tucked away for some time. You see, maybe there's a part of you that you feel like you have lost, and this happens often as we go through motherhood, as we become a spouse, as we are being a good employee, or even as we experience empty nest. We start to discover that there is part of us that we feel that we may have lost, and sometimes we discover that there is a part of us that used to be there that we no longer tap into. We no longer utilize that part of us for, whatever the circumstances may be, and there are parts of us that we absolutely loved about ourselves but, for whatever reason, is no longer a priority when our life started to shift and life started to get in the way. You see, rediscovery gives you an opportunity to dust yourself off and discover who you are now, and in what ways do you want to be better Now.

Kristi:

I'm not talking about changing your hair color or losing some weight to be better. I'm talking about learning how to bring more fun into your life, to stop feeling like life is passing you by. I'm talking about embracing opportunities that you don't even realize you have at midlife and, most importantly, building the strong relationships that you would love to have at this point in your life. You would not believe how many women over 50 that I have talked to that tell me that they would like to have more friendships at this point in their life and that they often find that making friends at midlife is really, really hard, and so rediscovering how to create those strong relationships and embracing all of the things that you love about yourself and creating a safe space to be a good friend and to have good friends in your life, rediscovery gives you an opportunity to find your own authenticity and to realize that, no matter what the circumstances are in life, you are not a problem and that there is nothing wrong with you. You just haven't yet embraced who you were authentically meant to be. You see, each of us has a predestined identity, and what happened is that you stopped believing in yourself. You stopped listening to your inner guide of what was best for you. Maybe you started making others expectations of you more important than your own, and maybe you don't know how to give yourself permission to love who you are and who you were actually meant to be. You guys, this is what rediscovery looks like at midlife, and this is exactly what my brand new program is centered around. It's called Midlife Rediscovery, and here's how the program works.

Kristi:

When I work with my clients, I am going to take them through three different phases in a matter of 12 weeks. These three phases are going to be the perfect roadmap for rediscovering who you are. At midlife, you're going to discover more of who you were meant to be. At this point in your life, you're going to discover that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. You may have just taken a short detour from your own authenticity. You're also going to be making some decisions. You're going to be thinking about where it is that you want to go and really getting to the truth of the matter of why you haven't decided that path just yet, and the last phase is going to be about designing her. You're going to be rebuilding and redesigning your life without shame and without guilt, so I encourage you to come along with me through rediscovering the woman that you were meant to be at midlife.

Kristi:

Hey, if you want to know more about my program and about how you can work with me, all you have to do is go to ChristyFelaneyCoachingcom that's K-R-I-S-T-I-F-S-N-F-R-A-L-A-N-Y-Coachingcom On my website. I offer you a free discovery call where we can talk about your particular situation, talk about where you're at in your life and talk about the things that aren't serving you at this point. I'll also give you all of the information on how this new program can work for you. This new program is going to give you opportunities for personal growth. You're going to explore new facets of your identity. You're going to find the freedom to shape your life according to your authentic self. You're going to finally start building the relationships that you crave, that nurture you during this time in your life, that bring you joy, love and understanding. I promise you that this program is going to bring you lasting impact that is going to enhance your life experience and create meaningful change in your life, so I look forward to connecting with you Again.

Kristi:

It's KristiFelaneyCoachingcom. Click on the Work With Me page and schedule your discovery call today. Who is your life coach? I would love the opportunity to work with you as you are rediscovering the woman you were meant to be. Visit KristiFelaneyCoachingcom for more information on how we can work together to ignite that passionate, enthusiastic woman who may have been tucked away for some time. Let's start in the middle together.