She Watched It Burn

She was watching TV when she smelled it. By the time the fire department arrived, the flames were above the roof of her house — and instead of panic, she felt a peace she still can't fully explain.

Carol Hodges lost her daughter and couldn't speak of it for twenty years. She lost a fortune to a single high-risk bet. Then she lost her home to a fire in October 2023. In Part 2 of this conversation, she walks through the night itself, the strange calm that came with it, and how being forced to list every possession she'd ever owned turned into a full life review — and the question she now builds her work around: who am I now.

This is Part 2. Part 1 is a separate episode — listen to that one first if you missed it.

Chapters  

[00:00] Introduction [03:30] Carole's Journey After Loss 
[07:00] Discovering Personal Growth & Coaching 
[10:30] Financial Lessons [13:30] The House Fire 
[17:00] Life After the Fire 
[20:00] Dream Building & Coaching Women 
[22:30] Resources & Closing

About Carol Hodges Carol Hodges is the author of The Menopause Millionaire and works with people in the second half of life on rebuilding identity and designing a life they love. 

Find her at https://lifechangenavigator.com and on LinkedIn (Carol Hodges, with an e).

Watch the full conversation and subscribe on the Rise From The Ashes YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@risefromtheashespodcast

Transcript

Women 50+ Coaching: Personal Development After Loss Begins

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Rise Many Ashes. We're on part two with Carol Hodges. And in the first part of this, she went through a journey of, and this is going to be a huge understatement, a horrific awakening into a reality with people and a daughter she loved. She came through it. She now helps other people ascend and give knowledge to other people from her own horrific experiences. This is why this podcast exists, because of people like Carol, who share their journeys and their stories in the hopes to inspire others. Arise from the ash, the ashes moment. Carol, thank you very much once again for joining me.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Yes, happy to be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

This wasn't the end of the story, was it? Because as happens in life, the universe loves to throw out curveballs. And they come in many shapes, sizes, and forms. Could you please share about uh a bit about the curveball that happened a bit later on after the uh horrific loss of your daughter?

Women 50+ Coaching: Personal Development After Loss BeginChoosing Growth Over Tragedy | Emotional Resilience After Losing a Child

Money Lessons After Loss | Financial Mistakes & Risk Awareness for Women 50+

House Fire Survival Story | Fallbrook California Fire Recovery Experience

Finding Peace During Crisis | Emotional Strength After Losing Everything

Identity Reinvention in Midlife | Who Am I After Loss?

SPEAKER_02 1:29

Uh yes, there's kind of a transition into this because after losing my daughter and starting work two weeks after at a new job where he didn't really tell people what was going on, I recognized that I had been a part of my own life and still trying to figure out why. In other words, what was my part in all of this? And as it happened, three different people invited me to go to a landmark forum weekend. And neither none of them knew each other. And I always say, hey, you know, three different people, that probably means something. So I went to the weekend. During that weekend, everyone's learning to tell their story without embellishing just what were the facts. So you've already heard my facts. And so I kind of waited. And the third day I told some of my story, not even all the detail, but I told some of my story with the facts, and people kept coming up to me saying, I'm so sorry. I decided in that moment that wasn't how I chose to live my life. I wasn't gonna be the one that people just felt sorry for. So I did not tell the story for a long time. I later wrote about some of it, but I couldn't do that for another 20 years before I could tell the story. But what did happen is that set me on a different path of learning more about not only myself, but other people. I then went into a variety of things. First of all, I heard about Harv Ecker, the millionaire mind intensive. And I went to one of his weekends, and it's like, I have to learn this. I have to learn this. So I signed up for his quantum leap. I became one of his first coaches. He had a success tracks, and I became one of his first coaches. I became fascinated with what he was doing on stage. It's like, how do you come in at eight o'clock in the morning and then at 11 o'clock at night, you're still rah-rah and jumping up and down. And I thought, what is that? And I learned something about NLP, neurolinguistics programming, which is just a study of behavior, really. A behavior and the words that we use that I found gave me more access to understanding myself and others and communicating. And that was just the beginning. I learned about personality styles. I learned about men and women and how we think and act differently, how women can help support men. This was for women. So women help understanding men, help men help understand us because we part of what's the learning is that uh men do not think the same way we do. True. And how do we honor each other? So I began to learn that and became a coach. Did quite a bit of that for a number of years until I had some learnings around money, big learnings, taking a large chunk of money and putting what I now understand was a highly risky endeavor. And the the long and short of it is for everybody out there. Know the difference between guaranteed income, between things that may grow slower over time, between what is guaranteed and what is not. And I suggest you not put all of your money into a high-risk endeavor, thinking there'll be greater returns. Because I got no returns. So I'm in the kitchen. There's nothing on in the kitchen. Ran to my office, nothing on in my office. And my husband said, Well, I'm gonna go walk the dog. So he walked out the front. I ran upstairs. No, it's not up there. I went into the back storeroom and it was stronger. The smell was stronger. All of a sudden, I see a puff of smoke, smoke come through the wall. In the back of our house, there was a workshop that was attached to the house. And smoke came from the direction of the workshop into the house. So I went running outside, telling my husband I had a phone in one hand, a fire extinguisher in the other, and ran back to the workshop. My husband got there first, opened the door, and a smoke came out at him. So he got down on his hands and knees underneath the smoke to look. There was a fire about two feet high under a bench in the workshop. So immediately he turns to me and says, Fire. I mean, just drop the fire extinguisher. I'm on the phone calling 911. Now, there were a lot more adventures than that because I got put on hold. Who knew? You know, you could be put on oh my gosh, I live in an out-of-the-way place, Fallbrook, California, where a lot of times GPS does not work. And so I'm waiting and waiting. We're well, meanwhile, we got animals out and safe, got them over to another house. We had some uh workers who lived in a trailer behind us. We got they were asleep already. We got them out and safe. We got their car out and safe. And then I thought, well, let me just open the front door because my car is right here. Maybe I get the car keys and move it because we still didn't have the fire department there. I opened the door and so much smoke hit me that I thought, okay, my purse is only about 10 feet away. Maybe I could take a deep breath and go in. And then I realized even outside the front door, there was too much smoke. I couldn't get a fresh breath of air to do that. So I said, okay, um, the last thing anybody needs is for me to pass out on the inside of the house. So the car will just have to take care of itself. I'm leaving that one alone. Well, I have a picture which was just before the fire department got there. There's no fire department in the front of the house, and there are flames now above the roof. The whole back of the house, it was above the roof. We got them in there, and as soon as once they took over, they said, Okay, everybody out of the way. So we said, Well, can we sit over a little ways? There were some some outdoor chairs. We sat out of the way and watched. And my husband looked at me and said, We've lost everything. Then I turned and said, I can't explain this, but I'm feeling a real sense of peace. And he said, So am I. I had the recognition that night, it was as though Spirit stepped in and said, Hey, stop what you're doing. And if anybody's been through a fire, you understand that's exactly what happens. So the fire department, most of them had left, and we went up to the front door just to see what we could. And a fireman accompanied us, he's he would not let us in. There was a couple inches of water on the ground. Yeah, it's a two-story house, and uh, so we're looking up the everything is covered with smoke. All the white walls, everything is black. And the ceiling is on the furniture. They put it out with fire, and that's what happens. The ceiling comes down on the furniture. So I said to the fireman, uh, well, I can't go in, but could you go over that 10 feet and get my purse and bring it back to me? So he did, and on the way, he took a sticker that was on the back of the front door, and he smiled and he handed it to me. I'd forgotten that I hand had these around the house. It said, How can I enjoy this moment even more right now? So the two of us had a good laugh. And he told me, he said, There are two kinds of people when there's a fire, and he said there are those who are absolutely inconsolable, and he said then there are those like you who recognize that this is just stuff, and they they go on and they go into recovery. So I I took that and that that day became the first of you know of a couple months of of going through everything because we did have insurance, but I did not know insurance worked quite this way. We had renters insurance, and we had to list everything. You had to have the name of it, when you bought it, what it was worth now, a receipt if you had it.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

Really?

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Yeah, well, the where we kept the receipts was in the workshop, and that was no longer that didn't exist anymore. So bit by bit we were going through everything, and it turned out to be really eye-opening because if you have to touch everything you've ever bought, important things that may mean something to you, they have meant a special award, they could have been mementos. I lost all the little handmade ornaments that my mother had made. Gone. And yet, and sometimes you have things that you still want to get rid of. It's like, oh, the you know, why didn't I get rid of that junk a while ago? But the fact is, you learn a lot about yourself and about the people around you. I think I had an easier time because you heard about my earlier losses. Yes, and this was just stuff, but it was like a life review. What it did was it opened the door to me to begin, uh connecting the dots in my life to say, you know, because there is a sense with something like this is who am I now? Okay, where I lived is gone, and a lot of my furniture stuff is gone. Well, but who am I? And recognizing that I'm the person having my life experience. In other words, nobody else is looking through my eyes except me. So I have remarried, I have a new husband, but even even he is looking through life through his own lens, not mine. So we each have that uniqueness.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Yeah.

Dream Building for Women 50+ | Designing Your Second Act

SPEAKER_02 15:41

And it was at that at that point, I didn't know exactly what would happen. We had a friend offer an opportunity to watch her 90-year-old mom and have a room to move into. Well, we didn't have a lot of furniture, it's like that this was a a great opportunity for us to really stop for a bit and say, What what are we all about? So that's what I did. And in that that process, um, I began studying with with Mary Morrissey, dream builder. Now, in one sense, it's you say something like dream builder, and a lot of people it's like, oh, you know, this is a tough world. How does one create dreams? But I will tell you, for the first time, everything I'd ever learned and my life experience began to make sense. I could look back and say, why I I write a lot now. Before the fire, I had written the menopause millionaire, and that book is not about getting rich. Some people think it is, and it's not all about uh menopause either, but I do touch on both health and money, as well as relationships, because menopause is a time, the middle of life. Now I've had men read it and say, why the heck did you put menopause in there? It's uncomfortable for men, but that's okay. Because I wrote it for women and I do share some elements of dating again in midlife, and believe me, that's a kick and finding new relationships. But I called it menopause millionaire because I'd also realized that a million dollars no longer means you're rich. No, uh I mean it means you might qualify to buy a middle-class house in California.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Yeah, that's about it.

unknown 18:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

So it is about getting real with yourself, however, about having the experience to look back, connect the dots in your own life, and start again saying, Hey, my kids are grown, my life is changing. I'm looking for retirement, is closer now than it would have been. And what do I need to know to live fully?

SPEAKER_01 18:40

That is one of the most profound things I've ever heard. What do I need to know to live fully?

Imagination, AI & Reinvention | Creating a New Future After Setbacks

Owning Your Story | Personal Development After Loss for Women

SPEAKER_02 18:54

Yeah, and recognize it's unique. Exactly it's it's unique for each person, and it's in that context that dream building makes a lot of sense because when you are struggling in life, you don't dream, everything's about your circumstances. You know, how do I survive? How do I pay the bills at the end of the month? You know, how do I deal with my circumstances? But when you can actually take time and make that space where you can say, if everything worked out perfectly, what would your life look like? And look at that in all areas because you need health and well-being to have a life that you would love, you need relationships, and with who, and what would those relationships be like? A vocation, and it can be that can be your job, it can be however you find to express yourself, and finally having the time and money freedom. What is enough time and enough money freedom? And I've been blessed to find out that that is totally unique for each person, but it's learning a process that enables you to say, what is it for me? And also to understand those little uh hobgoblins that come in, the old ways of thinking, you know, that that yeah, and you can even be friends who will say, Hey, you know, you're just being too optimistic. What is all this? And yet recognize that anything that's actually been created in this world, big differences have come about because somebody was able to imagine the unimaginable. We didn't have electricity at one point, you know. If look at what that fuels now. My gosh, we're all way up to artificial intelligence. But without Thomas Edison imagining something that didn't exist, and people must have thought he was crazy. But everything has come from that, and so it can be little dreams, it can be big dreams, but that's what I do now, and I specifically work with women in the second half of life, and and you call that whatever it is, I've as I say, and and looking at all aspects of life and saying, how do you create what it is that you want? And I'm finding my clients have loved this, have found that sometimes it's just recognizing that one of the resources we have is time, and perhaps you could use it better. I'm not the one to say what these of my clients will find it for themselves, and yes, you've heard my story. So, how do you move past things that are part of your story that maybe you're not proud of? You can do that because you're you are more than that, you are more than one story. There's there's a a truth to you inside. So that's that's what I do, and and it I can put a few pieces of that I put together that I haven't even shared for years. I did musical theater, and I was terrified, I was absolutely terrified. I was already a mom, but somebody told me about this, you know, an audition, and I wanted to go. And I got there and absolutely froze. My hands shook so much I couldn't sign in. And I got to the middle of the stage, handed my music because I had to sing a song, went to center stage, and all of a sudden, I could not move. Almost no sound came out. It was a disaster. The minute the music stopped, okay, I could move again and I could leave. For most people, you would have said, obviously, you are not meant for this. I kept going. I kept going back. And even at the time, I wasn't sure what prompted me. But I kept going, and that's one of the pieces I put together. I love to speak for groups. I joined Toastmasters and I've I've been in it for like 21 years, and it's not because I don't know how to speak, it's because I feel more alive if I stand on a stage and I feel more alive. If I can say maybe that one little thing that encourages someone from where they're at to step forward into something that even if it frightens them, like auditions frightened me, you can do it anyway because you're ready for the result, and you can have that support to make it happen. So that's been that's been what came from the fire for me. I I it it it released it released something within me, and my whole world is is different, and it but it's one I choose.

SPEAKER_01 25:26

I love that. Carol, I just think you're an amazing human being. And I want to thank you for sharing your story, your openness, your honesty, your compassion, your love for what you do and for other people. Um, the you you are the reason this exists, and you are the reason that I love doing what I do every single day. Um, people like you inspire me to do even more. So thank you. Do you have anything to want to give the audience to send them to? It'd be a platform, a website, book, uh, an event coming up, whatever you wish.

From Stage Fright to Public Speaking Confidence | Toastmasters & Growth

SPEAKER_02 26:12

Absolutely. Uh, first of all, you can find me at lifechangernavigator.com. And I have there something I call Soul Shine. This is something that just came from my heart. It is daily inspiration, little short clips. And uh can I share a phone number? Of course. Okay. So if you're interested in that or you want to reach me for anything, um, my number is 760-3304865. And you can just call or text me at that number up in SoulShine if you would like that, and uh your email if you'd like it by email rather than text. And also, my book, The Menopause Millionaire, is available on Amazon. And I've got a special right now because I would love everybody to have it. So it's only 99 cents for the the Kindle version, and it's also comes in in paperback if you prefer that. But one of the things is I wrote that I made a kind of self-coaching along the way. So with each topic, you get a little background, some things that I have learned, and an opportunity to ask yourself some questions so that you have a better understanding of where you're at. And always love to hear from people your your ideas. So feel free uh to call me and I'm on LinkedIn, Carol Hodges, with an E. If you miss the E, you may not get me. But uh I'm available there, and that's probably the best way to reach me.

Resources for Midlife Reinvention | Menopause Millionaire & Soul Shine

SPEAKER_01 28:16

Awesome. Thank you very much for your love and energy here, Carol. I I love what you do and who you are. Um, such an inspiration. To everybody listening to this, do yourself a favor, share the message. This is about you understanding your own inner potential. Step into the fear, step into the version of yourself you're afraid to possibly do right now. This is Rice from the Ashes. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Remember, use a miracle. Keep it going. Till next time, my friends. See you soon.