Ep 168: Reverse Aging

At some point in life, many of us quietly stop imagining.

We make the big decisions—where we live, what we do for work, whether we partner or have kids—and then without realizing it… we start maintaining instead of creating.

We stop setting bold goals.
 We stop asking who we want to become next.
 We stop imagining what’s possible.

In this episode, we flip that pattern.

We talk about reverse aging—a way of thinking about your life where instead of your most exciting, expansive, alive years being behind you… they are still ahead.

Where your future is more interesting than your past.
 Where you are still becoming.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• How we unconsciously “lock in” our identity after making major life decisions
• Why stagnation happens when we stop imagining new possibilities
• The concept of reverse aging—living as if your best days are still ahead
• How “being ridiculous at first” helps suspend disbelief and unlock creativity
• Why blue sky thinking is essential for innovation in your life (not just business)
• How to re-engage your imagination to create a more expansive future
• Questions and lenses to ask about the future to open up possibility 
• Five areas to reimagine with the lens of the best days still to come 

Let yourself be ridiculous at first.

When you let yourself imagine again—without limits, without immediate realism—you reconnect with possibility.

And from that place, everything opens up.

So this week, ask yourself:
 What would my life look like if I were reverse aging?

And then let yourself begin.

How to connect with Marie:

• On the Web | The Local Bloom
• Instagram: @the.bloom.coach
• All Things Marie on LinkTree

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

Transcript

Redefining Reverse Aging Within

Why Milestones Shrink Our Imagination

Adventure On Purpose With Curiosity

Be Ridiculous First For Breakthroughs

Adventure Goals And Saying Yes

Body Confidence Health And Style Upgrades

Friendships Marriage Sex And Kids

Career Reinvention Plus Lifelong Learning

Share Your Take And Join Bloom Room

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to the Bloom Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, Certified Coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to episode 168 of the Bloom Your Mind podcast. It is spring break around here, y'all, in my house, and it is hopping. We have already been on a camping trip with the whole third grade for my son's school out in the woods. It was so much fun. I've talked about this before. We're not really like camping people for the sake of camping. We have just experienced over and over as people who live in an urban setting how cool it is for our kids to get out into the world in an environment where they can like disappear for four hours and we have no idea where they are. I literally will not see my kids for so long. And how when the group of parents and kids all do this together and we're like cooking breakfast and making pancakes, and then all of a sudden there's a line of everybody else's kids waiting for pancakes and we're feeding them, how it just builds trust and builds community and builds that feeling of being a village. It's so cool. So we saw this a long time ago when my daughter was in first grade, and so we keep doing it with all these different classes, and I've talked about it on the podcast before, but there's a lot of episodes now, so I'm saying it again that it's such a cool way to be a little village around your kids' other families if you uh have kids. And if not, it's a really fun thing to do with other friends and with friends who have kids. If you want to build a relationship with kids, it's really cool. And it's such a great way in this world where there's lots of if you don't live in a place where your kids can run around and um not see you for hours without you feeling stressed, it's a great way to do that. So we're having a blast, and we're putting together an impromptu road trip for next week that's pretty fun. So the whole family's planning it together. So we're in the middle of all of that. Just got back from lots of big events last week, which I talked about on the podcast, and got really sick also, and so I am just kind of settling back in to having a healthy body and some time off with the kids, and that's where I'm at. How are you? Today we are gonna talk about a concept that I love so much, and that whenever I say it to others, specifically to other women, anywhere in the ages of their late 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, their eyes get wide and they say, I love this. Now I think that this can apply to anybody, whether you identify as female or not, but I just notice that women tend to love it, slash I tend to talk to women a lot. So maybe that's why. But this concept is this idea that I have been building for a while and kind of building some work around and doing work around in the Moxie and in my other groups that's called reverse aging, but not in the way that you hear about it normally. So you'll hear people say, Girl, you look like you're reverse aging. And they're talking about the way your squint, your skin quality, or you know, how many wrinkles you have. They're talking about your face or your body and how women can take care of themselves now and look like they're reverse aging, which is all fine and well, but I am way more into the idea of reverse aging on the internal level. So that's what we're gonna talk about today because I am all about this. It's like my whole life is built around reverse aging. So let me first tell you that in general, I like to think about this human journey, right? As the way our society is built right now. We have these milestones, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, that are things we need to figure out in our life. Society tells us we need to figure out whether or not we're having kids, what we're gonna do with our career, where we're gonna live. Are we gonna buy a house? Are we gonna, what other are we gonna live in a trailer and travel the country? Are we gonna live on a boat? Like, it's like what you're gonna do, what your family's gonna look like. Are you gonna get married? Who are you gonna get married to? Are you not gonna get married? Like these questions that are kind of out there as things to figure out. And then a lot of times people figure most of these things out and they're in a career and they're in a some sort of family system or relationship system, and they live in a certain place, and then their imagination kind of dwindles, and they start to get a little bit bored, and they stop having things that are exciting in front of them to do and to put their energy into, and that light them up and then give them a feeling of purpose and motivation and identity. And what I love to do is to ask the question of people well, if you're aging in reverse, how do you look at these things differently? Because a lot of what happens is just psychologically, we feel like we don't have these decisions to make anymore. We feel like our energy is going to decrease. We tell ourselves that we already made these decisions, we already have this life, we already did the big things, we are past those now. And then we're in this life and we forget that we can reinvent ourselves as many times as we want. We are not stagnant creatures. If we are in our 30s or 40s or 50s, we have like, like, there's science and technology is increasing at such an incredible rate that if we participate in our own health and make decisions around our own health based on the knowledge that we have, we can live to 100 for sure. Like I feel like I could live to 100, which means I'm not even half of the way there. I better still have some exciting ideas for what I want to do with my life. Because if I'm thinking that from here on out, in my mid-40s, I am like gonna just age and everything's gonna go downhill, I'm gonna have a very boring life. And I am hearing people call themselves old in their late 20s. I'm like, what are you talking about? If we feel like we're aging from our late 20s and after that things are going downhill, what the hell are we gonna do with our lives? So, my question for us today is how might we think about different areas of our life from the perspective of reverse aging? Okay. So I like to think about the stories that I hear about some of the most fascinating people, like Barack Obama. One of the things that I always heard about him is even when he was in this back-to-back schedule with all of these, you know, political democratic missions that he was on in different countries and he was having meeting after meeting, he would always stop to check things out in terms of travel and exploration and adventure, depending on where he was. He would add into his schedule a trip to the pyramids. He would add into his schedule a trip to investigate whatever thing his curiosity was piqued about in the geographical region that he was in. How what might we always keep this adventurous spirit that's like, what am I interested in? What's lighting me up, no matter how much responsibility we have in our life? And the reason I think of him is like the amount of responsibility, the amount of excuses he could have that his schedule was full, that he was doing enough already, might dim down his curiosity about the world, his desire to have adventures, his desire to have experiences based on just what he wants in the world. So if he can do it, we can do it, right? So let's think first before we ask ourselves the question, and I'm gonna give you a few different areas of how to think about reverse aging. Let's think first from the blue sky thinking lens of being ridiculous at first. Okay. So it's a lens, it's a perspective that I'm gonna offer us as a filter that we're looking through. So you can like imagine that you're putting on a pair of sunglasses, and the lens in the sunglasses is I'm gonna be ridiculous at first. That way, our ideas that we come up with are gonna be things that actually break through our occurring reality. So one thing that happens when we begin to come up with ideas is that we just look through the lens of the life we're already living. And often we're very constrained. We won't step into possibility thinking because we're like, well, our brain is immediately gonna introduce constraint and shoot down our ideas. So we want to be innovative here and we want to think from the idea from the lens of being ridiculous at first. And the whole point is that we'll come up with some wild ideas. It's not that we're gonna do them all, but it will expand our thinking and we may end up doing one or more. Every idea that really changed the world or that changed a life sounded a little ridiculous at first. It has to, if it's going to break the barrier of what we're already living enough. Okay. So your job is to put on the sunglasses that have the lens of being a little ridiculous at first, as you ask yourself this question: how could I practice reverse aging? Set some goals, take on some things in relation to each one of these areas or at least one of these areas from the lens of being ridiculous at first and reverse aging. Okay. So this idea is you haven't experienced the best yet. The best in each of these areas is still to come. How is that true? And if you were aging in reverse, meaning like the best days are ahead of you, what types of things would you do in each one of these areas that you've maybe told yourself you couldn't? Okay, the first area is adventure. So we often tell ourselves that our adventure is limited by who we are responsible for in our lives, whether that's kids or a partner that we're married to that we need to bring along to everything, or our finances or our jobs. The constraint around adventure has a lot of determining factors with those or the limitations of our body. What if you are aging in reverse? Be ridiculous at first. What type of adventures might you have? Okay, so when I was thinking about this last year, I told my husband, you know what I want? I want to go on some wild girls' trips because I never make time for girls' trips and I never do that. I prioritize my family always. I go on family trips with my husband and my kids with my parents because I want to have these years with my parents when they can still, you know, really comfortably travel. I want to do it with them. And I was like, you know, I really have skipped girls' trips and I want to do that. And as soon as I said it to him, I was invited on multiple girls' trips and I've already gone on two of them. And then in September, I'm going on a trip to Italy with a group of women. I I only know two of them out of all these women. I'm not making any of the plans. It's expensive, but I just said yes. And once we say yes to something like this, then we just figure out how to make it happen. I figured out how to budget to save the money for it. I figured out how to take on a little bit of additional work to build the money for it. I figured out how to talk to my kids about being gone for so long. They are not fans of me being gone that long, but I'm gonna do it. And I'm like figuring out how to go on a trip for an international trip with a bunch of women I don't know, you know? And it's I don't know exactly what everyone's gonna be interested in. I don't know what the plan is, but it's expanding my horizon a little bit because I'm usually the one that plans everything and I'm kind of leaving this up in the air. So what would become possible if you started thinking about adventure with the lens of reverse aging? Would you take a class? Would you travel somewhere? Would you do something in the city that you live in that's different than it is? Okay, so from the lens of being ridiculous at first and reverse aging, how would you think about adventure differently? All right, next is your body. Your body itself. If you were to think from the lens of reverse aging, that the best years are ahead of you, how is that true for your experience of yourself in your body? Is it because you've never actually tried that hard to have a healthy diet or to exercise in a way that increased mobility, that increased strength? Like, have you never thought about it that much? Is that something you want to take on now? Is it because you have more permission to love your body and love the experience of being in it? Is it because all of a sudden you're gonna get into fashion? Because you've never actually had a three words to describe your fashion sense and then redid your closet to get rid of everything that doesn't apply to those three words, and then no matter what your budget is, go to clothing trades, clothing swaps, thrift stores, whatever it is, to redo your fashion because all of a sudden you're gonna be a fashionista. What would you do with your hair? What would you do with your jewelry? What would you do with your health habits? What would you do with your exercise habits if you were you knew that the best days of the relationship between you and your body are yet to come? Be ridiculous at first. Okay, what about your relationships? I've been having really fun discussions about this lately because I talk to people and they're like, it's hard to make friends as an adult. What if it wasn't? What if your closest friends that get you that hang out all the time, that are people where you just stop by each other's houses? What if you haven't even met them yet? What if you're about to meet them? If that becomes your reality, you are gonna be hell bent on finding them. Your whole system is gonna be looking for the people that you can recognize that that's true of. And I will tell you, I have talked to so many people that I know so many people so well that have their closest friends that they met way like later in life. We often think that high school and college are like the days when we're gonna meet our best friends, but it is not the case for most people. So that's one. Another one is what if you are more obsessed with your person than ever before? And you can come and grab the relationships course that I just built and ran, and you can still just buy it and do it on your own if you want some tips on how to create that with your partner. I definitely am more obsessed with my husband than I've ever been with a partner. And then we've been together for 15 years, but we cultivate that together. We build it really intentionally. What if your sex life was better than ever before? I have that, and I also have talked to many peers that are building that right now. It's something that you build, it's something that you put your intention into. You make it the goal or make it a goal in your life, and then you start putting effort toward it, and it absolutely happens. It's amazing. What about relationships with kids? I think about this a lot because my daughter's 13, and everyone around me is like, yep, that's when they just start hating you. That's when the relationship goes down. And I'm like, no. We love each other, and I'm gonna be the type of person that my kids can be around at every age. And I'm also gonna give them as much freedom and space as they want, but I am not gonna head into the teenage years with the mindset that my kid's gonna hate me and we're gonna grow apart. No way. And I'm the one, you know, that knows all the developmental milestones and that it's important for them to counter-identify and all of that. There's gonna be space for all of that. But I'm not gonna have the mentality that the best days with my kids are over. No flipping way. For sure. The best days with my kids are yet to come. And I'm gonna build that intentionally like I build everything else. So, what would you think of from the lens of reverse aging, from the lens of your best days are yet to come about relationships with your parents, with your partner, with your friends, with your kids? What becomes possible? All right, two more areas because I know you get the gist now. But I want you to think through each of these areas. What about your career? If you still work and if you don't, your volunteerism, your engagement, your contribution in the world. What if your best days are yet to come? What would you do? I coach so many women through totally shifting their careers when they thought they were like entrenched in their careers. We reinvent it all. And we reinvent things that are a total combination of passion, self-expression, contribution, financial abundance, all the things. Be ridiculous at first. What would become possible if your best days were yet to come? And lastly, learning and growing. And this is a big one because, like, we all say, Oh, it's too late for me to learn to ski, to learn to surf, to learn a musical instrument, to learn a language. Like, what? That is a crazy thing to say. Like, how long does it actually take to learn anything if you really apply yourself to it? You can get a PhD. Like, go for it. What would become possible if your best days of learning and growing were ahead of you? If you're gonna learn way more in the time that you have left on this earth than what you've learned so far. What becomes possible? All right, my loves. I want to hear everything that comes up for you in relation to this. We've been doing lots of fun stuff on it. I teach this in the Moxie, I teach it in all my groups. What becomes possible for you when you're you begin reverse aging? Take it on, baby. Reverse age with me. I want to hear it, so email me, DM me, whatever communication thread you have with me. Tell me what this brought up for you. And that's what I've got for you this week. So I will see you next week. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time. We'll see you in the Bloom Room.