123. The Real Midlife Crisis: Thinking You Have More Time Than You Actually Do

Topics Covered: Midlife crisis, running out of time in midlife, living your best life now, midlife women coaching, Top 100 list

Episode Summary:

You know that insatiable urgency you feel in your 40s and 50s — the sense that you’re running out of time and need to do all the things before it’s “too late”? You’re not imagining it. But here’s what host Laurie Reynoldson wants you to know:

The real crisis in midlife isn’t buying the sports car or having an affair — it’s believing you have more time than you actually do.

In this raw and honest episode, Laurie shares the story that cracked her wide open — losing her dad at 66, just five months into his retirement — and the wake-up call that made her realize someday isn’t a strategy.

You’ll learn:

• Why so many high-achieving midlife women keep waiting for “someday”
• How deferring your dreams until the kids are grown or the mortgage is paid is the real crisis
• Why the passage of time hits different in midlife — and what to do with that clarity
• How Laurie’s Top 100 List is not a bucket list, but a living blueprint for your best life
• How adding physical challenges (like her three mountain marathons in three days!) helps her live her best life, not just dream about it
• Why putting in the reps now means you won’t wake up at 65 asking, “Who am I?”

One Big Takeaway:

“The real midlife crisis isn’t running out of time. It’s living like you have more time than you actually do.”

Your Challenge This Week:

Write down one thing you’d put on your Top 100 — not a “bucket list” thing to do before you die, but a life list thing to do while you’re alive and becoming the woman you were always meant to be.

DM Laurie your Top 100 item — she wants to hear it!

Links & Resources:

✨ Join the waitlist for the next Gap Year cohort
✨ DM “GAP YEAR” or “TOP 100” to Laurie on Instagram: @schoolofmidlife
 

Share This Episode:

Know a woman who keeps postponing her life for “someday”? Send this episode to her. We’re done waiting. Now is the time.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Quick question for you. Are you secretly worried that you're running out of time? Maybe you've hit your forties and fifties and suddenly you have this insatiable urge to do all of the things before it's too late? Here's the thing: the real crisis in midlife isn't that the clock is ticking. It's that you keep believing you have more time than you actually do.

In this episode, I am going to share with you how you can stop postponing your dreams for someday and start living your best life right now. Let's get into it.

Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson.

This is the podcast for the midlife woman who starting to ask herself big life questions. Like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work. Each week we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school and we're [00:01:00] figuring out finally what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best life. 

Hey friends. Welcome back to another episode of The School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson, and today we're tackling one of the biggest hidden stressors for high achieving women in midlife, and that is this pervasive, gnawing almost panicked feeling that you're running out of time. If you've hit your forties or fifties, and suddenly you feel this insatiable urge to do all of the things before it's too late, I see you. And I wanna help you flip that script. Flip that panic into purpose. And that's what we're gonna talk about today.

Because here's what I believe: the real crisis in midlife isn't buying a sports car or having an affair. It's [00:02:00] believing that you have more time than you actually do.

And I feel like I should at least take one step back and clarify something about the term "midlife crisis," midlife crisis in air quotes there, because if you've been around here for a while now, you know that I don't really believe in a midlife crisis. I believe that there is this story that society tells women to explain away the feelings that we're legitimately having in midlife about our bodies and our health and our lives.

And it's almost like it's the patriarchy wanting to poo-poo away our symptoms. Um. And the very real changes that we're experiencing. So they've just labeled it a midlife crisis when in fact, it's really more of a midlife opportunity, a midlife awakening, a midlife becoming of the woman who we were always meant to be before society told us who we should [00:03:00] be.

Regardless, the waiting until the time is right, until the kids are out of the house, until retirement, until the time is perfect, until someday, whatever you're waiting for that waiting, that's what creates or potentially creates the midlife crisis.

I'm gonna tell you a story that shaped how I feel about this. I mean, it, it changed how I look at it forever, and it's a story about my dad. Some of you probably have already heard this story before, but it's always good to hear it again. My, my dad died at 66 super young and just five months into his retirement. And for me to say that it cracked me wide open, that might actually be an understatement.

It changed everything for me, it changed how I viewed my career, how I viewed my life, how I wanted to spend my time. What suddenly became important to me. [00:04:00] I, I noticed you know, where was I wasting my time on things that didn't really matter, was I, was I staying in a job that was sucking the life out of me just because of the paycheck? Spoiler alert, yes, I was.

But because you don't really expect your parents to die so young. He was, he was 66. He had retired from his second career on his 66th birthday because he wanted to maximize his social security checks in retirement. Not because he needed the money, but because he'd spent decades paying into a system that was supposed to take care of him in retirement, right?

I mean, dad was of a different generation. The one where you were supposed to work for a company for your whole life, retire with a pension, and then in retirement, figure out how you wanna spend your time. So put in the work and then kind of be rewarded in retirement with time that you get to do what you want.

It's, it's kind of like a reverse [00:05:00] 80 20 rule, right? You spend 80% of your life working to be able to enjoy just 20% of it in retirement. And that's 20% if you're lucky enough to have a long, healthy retirement. Unfortunately, for my dad, that wasn't in the cards for him. Instead, he'd played by the rules his whole life. He worked hard. He provided for his family, he saved for retirement and he kept saying, " someday when I retire." If I had a dollar for every time he said, "someday when I retire," followed by whatever it was he was talking about. I would've been in the financial position to retire myself years ago because dad had so many plans in retirement.

Move back to Boise to be closer to Mike and me. Play the drums in a garage cover band. Learn how to fly fish. Golf every day, get back into snow skiing. Finally get the first stamps in his passport and travel to Europe. He wanted to see the Eiffel Tower [00:06:00] in Paris and ride a double decker bus in England and drink beer during October Fest in Germany. All great plans for retirement.

But here's the problem for dad, the guy who spent years making plans for someday when I retire. For dad someday never came. Instead, he died just five months after he retired. So those social security checks that he was so interested in collecting, the ones that he had paid into his whole life.

Well, he received five of them. Five. He worked 46 years of his life and was rewarded with five months of retirement. That's when I realized that the real crisis in midlife is postponing the life you want, the life you really wanna live until someday. Because someday may never come. Someday is something that you may never get.[00:07:00] 

That's the crisis. Because what if that later, that someday that you're waiting for, what if that never shows up?

I will tell you this is a dangerous pattern that I see over and over again with high achieving midlife women. These are women who have done everything right. They went to the right school. They had the right career. They, they got married. They, they bought the right house on the right street with the right address. They had kids, they raised them up. They were always looking for the next goal. How do I achieve the next checkbox? It was, it was always this, what's next for me?

I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to. What's next? And maybe that describes you too. You keep promising yourself that you'll live your real life once the kids are grown or once you retire. Or once you hit that magic number in your retirement savings account. [00:08:00] Once your calendar finally lightens up, but then what actually happens?

You keep waiting because let's be honest, there's always one more project. There's always one more thing to do. There's always more dollars that you wanna see in your monthly statement in your retirement account, so you don't run outta money in retirement. I get it. But, Life always has a way of lifeing.

Just when you think you're ready to take the next step or move in the direction of your dreams, or finally start making decisions that put you first, something happens invariably. A parent falls ill or passes away. A friend gets a bad diagnosis or needs your help navigating a messy divorce. Your kids move back home. There's always one more work project that you don't need to do, but you kind of wanna be selected to do it because the guy down the hall who you don't really like, he's also up for it. And your competitive side , [00:09:00] doesn't want him to get it, so, so you step up 'cause you decide that you want to do it.

Any of this sound relatable there. There is always another reason to wait. There is always another something that comes up, which means you keep deferring your dreams. You don't mean to. You just tell yourself that the timing's not right. It's not right now anyway.

You tell yourself that you'll finally be able to move in the direction of your dreams when things settle down a bit, but they never do, do they? Something will always come up, but it doesn't have to be that way. Midlife can be a time when you decide you are going to stop deferring your dreams.

It's when you finally get to ask yourself. If not now, then when.

Here's a question for you that, that maybe I should have asked at the top of the episode, but I might as well ask [00:10:00] it now, and that is, are you more aware of the clock ticking now? Do you feel like, do you ever feel worried about running out of time? Like you're finally realizing that even if you're lucky enough to have a long, healthy retirement, you are now closer to the end of your life than the beginning of it?

Anyone else spend time thinking about that or, or just me and it? It could just be me given my experience with my dad, but I'm guessing that it's not just me. Who knows?

I'll, I'll actually confess something here, and I can't believe I'm admitting this, but when I hear that someone younger than me has passed away, my first question always is, what happened? Not, not because I want the gory details, but because I'm acutely aware that they were younger than me and that time is passing faster, quicker.

None of us is getting any younger. So, and I know that this is awful to admit, but [00:11:00] there is some sort of relief that I feel if they died because they were sick. Or they were in an accident or they died by suicide. Awful. Right. Awful. I know. I know. It's awful. But I also know that I'm not the only one who goes there, and it's because we're way more aware of the passage of time in this season of our life.

So no, you're not imagining it . There is a lot more heaviness and pressure. Because of time right now and the fact that we're running out of it. And that's not morbid, that's just clarity. It's, it's a fact. We're all dying as soon as we're born. We all want more time. We all expect to live long healthy lives.

And in fact, it's because of that expectation that we tend to coast a little in life. We live the same day over and over again for weeks and months [00:12:00] and years. And then we get to midlife and it's almost like this collective wake up call. Like we're halfway. We're closer to the end than to the beginning. And it finally feels like it's time to ask ourselves, what am I waiting for?

Let me ask you something. When was the last time you stepped away from your life to actually focus on your life? No emails, no group texts, no one asking, what's for dinner? Just space. Just time for you.

If one day sounds like a dream, imagine what an entire weekend could do. 

I am inviting you to join me for the next Best Life Retreat in breathtaking Sun Valley, Idaho, a luxurious, intimate escape, designed specifically for midlife women like you .

We will spend the weekend diving into powerful group coaching sessions that help you reconnect with who you are, what you want, and what your best [00:13:00] life looks like right now. And between those breakthroughs, you'll enjoy sunrise hikes, spa treatments, gourmet meals, curated cocktails, and the best gift bag you've ever seen.

This isn't a vacation, it is a turning point. One woman has even described the weekend as: that retreat changed my life. Space is limited to just eight women, and when the spots are gone, they're gone. So if you're craving some space, clarity, connection, and maybe even a little magic, click the link in the show notes and grab your seat right now. And I'll see you in Sun Valley .

That's why so much of the work that we do at the School of Midlife is about living your best life right now. Not someday, not after retirement, not when the conditions are perfect, but right now. Because the conditions will never be perfect. The time will never be right. If you keep waiting, you might just find that you've run out [00:14:00] of time.

And if there's any lesson in the story I told about my dad, it's that your best life isn't guaranteed. It's that you can work and wait, and you might be rewarded with a long, healthy retirement, but you might not. That's just facts.

Not, not to mention what happens if you put off until retirement, a life that you're imagining, one that you've built up in your head. But it turns out it's not for you. It's not fulfilling.

Let's say you dream about retirement in the south of France, which, which I do, So this is not that much of a stretch for me to think about when it comes to imagining my retirement. So south of France, you have this very romantic notion of what your life could look like there.

Morning walks along the Mediterranean Sea .Stop by the markets around midday to pick up fresh food for dinner. You, you cook that up every night. You get a beautiful baguette. [00:15:00] That goes in the basket of the bicycle that you're going to ride home. You're gonna pick up a fresh bouquet of flowers for the table. You're gonna drink wine on the terrace each night as you watch the sunset. To me, that sounds great.

But if you get to retirement, travel to the south of France for the first time, you don't know the language, you don't like the pace of the life. All of a sudden you realize that this dream that you had about your life wasn't really your dream at all.

Turns out you're a big city girl. The slower pace of a small town in the south of France isn't interesting to you. Wouldn't all of that be better to figure out right now, while you still have time to make some plans about how you wanna spend the second half of your life? When there is still opportunity to decide what you actually want, not what you've been conditioned to want, or what you saw [00:16:00] in a romantic movie one time.

Trust me your future self will thank you for starting today.

I've seen this with so many of the women I've coached over the years. They thought they wanted something and it turns out they wanted something completely different. They thought that they wanted something because they'd been following that success checklist to a T in their life up until now, and they have a sense of what their retirement should look like because of conditioning and programming and because of societal pressure.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Think about putting in the reps right now, figuring out what you want, what success means to you, what your best life actually looks like, so that when you get to retirement or empty nesting, you're not starting from scratch. You're not waking up at 65, wondering who you are, what you [00:17:00] want, how you wanna live your life.

Why? Because you're already living it. That's the difference between women who keep repeating the same year on autopilot, and women who are living with intention right now, they're not waiting. They're really going for it right now. It's not about filling up your calendar with more tasks. It's about becoming the woman who makes her life feel meaningful right now on an ordinary Tuesday, just like today.

One of my favorite tools for this is something that we use in my coaching called the Best Life Top 100, and it is not a bucket list. Let me be clear. We don't do bucket lists at the School of Midlife.

Bucket lists are all about doing stuff before you die. Like you've waited to live your life and now there are all these things you wanna do and see and experience and learn and become. All of these moments you want to have before the end.[00:18:00] 

The Top 100 is not about that. The Top 100 is about how do you want to live while you are alive? What does it mean to live your best life?

So those do, become, learn, experience, sure. It might include doing things, but it's also about becoming things. It's about the you who lives her best life. How does she spend her time? And that's what the Top 100 list is. It's, it's dreaming with intention. It's your living blueprint. It's your permission slip to stop waiting.

This is live your life on purpose, in alignment, and with intention while you're alive. It's not about checking another box or chasing a dopamine hit. It's about infusing every day of your life with meaning and curiosity and fun and connection, and beauty and growth and [00:19:00] soul. It literally can be the blueprint of your best life.

And it's not just making a list of 100 things you wanna do, like visit Paris or try standup paddle boarding, although those might be on there. But it's, it's also a list about who you want to become. Things like, I am an exceptional wife, or I am a woman who sets and holds healthy boundaries, or I am a woman who experiences full body joy on purpose.

It's not about achievement for achievement's sake. It's about aliveness. It's not do these things before you die. It's live your life in purpose, in alignment, and with intention while you are here, while you're alive. Because when you get intentional right now. You don't have to scramble later. You don't get to retirement and think, ah, [00:20:00] I wish I would've done this a little bit differently.

There's a whole process that I run my clients through when it comes to creating the Top 100. Obviously, we don't have enough time to go through all of that in this episode, but you get the gist of it. What are the Top 100 things that will help you live your best life? And how can you start living that life, living that list right now?

This week, I'm actually putting my list into practice. At the time this episode drops, I'm heading to do an endurance hiking event: three mountain marathons in three days. Yeah, you heard that right? Three marathons, So at least 26.2 miles each day. But because it's in the mountains, Of course it will be longer than that.

Three days, so I'll have 12 hours to complete the marathon course each day.

And it's in the mountains of Park City, Utah. So lots of elevation gain and loss each day, about over 6,000 feet of elevation loss and gain each [00:21:00] day.

It's a big event and you might be wondering why the hell would you sign up and pay a lot of money to do that? And it's because it's another way, I remind myself that how I spend my time right now is important. I've always known that physical challenges for me, they create discipline: physical discipline, mental discipline, even schedule and time discipline.

They stretch me in a way that I'm, I'm not usually stretched in everyday life. They help me reframe what I think is possible. They make me plan my life differently. They keep me alive to the idea that I am in charge of how I spend my time and my energy. Not later, but right now.

So if this is hitting you in the gut-- [00:22:00] Good. That means you are awake, and if you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and actually get started doing this work, I want you to know that the next round of the Gap Year is coming soon.

The Gap Year is the scientifically backed results proven framework for figuring out what you actually want in life, what success means to you. And it gives you a chance to really figure out what your best life looks like. And while it's self-paced, so it fits seamlessly into your already busy life.

Each time we start a new cohort, there is a six week live accelerator, which is absolutely incredible. The energy, the breakthroughs, the way women are able to get clarity and start living their best lives in just six weeks, it's, it's amazing.

Originally, I had planned to open the doors for the next cohort in September when the kids are back in school and everything seems to get back into more of a routine. But you know what I've been thinking? [00:23:00] Summer is as loose as your schedule gets. You have time now, so why don't we get started now? Why not?

Why don't we get started in August and by the time summer officially ends in September? You'll have been able to create a life that you don't need to take a vacation from. You'll already have your Top 100 lists and you can just start living it.

We'll be kicking off in early August, which gives you some more time to put in the reps to figure out what you want, define success for you and start living your best life on purpose. Not someday, but, but right fucking now.

More info will be coming about the Gap Year soon, but I've gotta get my ass up three mountains first. More soon, I promise.

Last week's episode was so long that I'm gonna cut this one a little bit shorter today, so I wanna leave you with this. The real midlife crisis isn't running out of time. It's living like you have more time than you [00:24:00] actually do.

So whether or not you believe in the legitimacy of a midlife crisis, is it a thing? Is it not a thing? Is it a label that some man used to describe all of the changes a woman experiences in midlife?

Even if it's not a thing, it can absolutely become a midlife crisis. If we continue to delay living the life we really wanna live. One that feels most aligned to us. We don't wanna delay that until it's too late because the next thing we know we'll have run out of time.

But the good news is, you don't need to live through a midlife crisis. Instead, you can choose to live your life differently. Right now. You can choose to stop waiting to do the things you've always wanted to do to become the woman you always thought you were meant to be. You can choose to do those things right now.

So here's my challenge for you this week, pick one [00:25:00] thing that you would put on your Top 100 list. Remember, this isn't a bucket list item. The Top 100 is a life list item. A best life list item. Say that fast, six times. It's hard. A best life list item. Something that would make you feel more alive, more aligned, more you. And if you're inspired, don't limit yourself to just one. Keep going. Make the list as long as you'd like.

But, but this week, start with at least one. Write it down. And then will you do me a favor? Will you please DM me and tell me what it is? I, I wanna hear it. I've been collecting top one hundreds for a while now because while every woman's Top 100 list is different, sometimes it's helpful for other women to have examples of what could be on their Top 100 list to help them cut through the conditioning, to help them think bigger, to help them imagine a life outside of the box, [00:26:00] or to help them create a life that's different than the one that they think they should be living.

So, what's one thing you'd put on your Top 100? Write it down and send me a note about what it is. Thank you so much for being here today. I'll see you right back here next week when the School of Midlife is back in session. And until then, don't just dream your best life, Go live it. And of course, as always, take good care.

 Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, [00:27:00] that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the School of Midlife is back in session. Until then take good care.