Ep. 156: You Don’t Have to Blow Up Your Life to Take It Back

If you’ve ever looked around at your life and thought,
“Why doesn’t this feel like enough—even though I have so much to be grateful for?”
 This episode is for you.

In today’s conversation, we’re talking about the quiet, complicated truth of being a high-functioning woman in midlife… and what it really looks like to reclaim your peace, your clarity, and your energy without blowing everything up to do it.

I’ll walk you through:

• Why so many of us are stuck in the cycle of saying “I’m fine” when we’re not
• The difference between coping and actually caring for ourselves
• 3 simple things you can do today to start reconnecting to what you really need

Plus, I’ll share the free tool I created to help you decode what’s really going on under the surface—so you can stop performing “fine” and start living with more honesty and ease.

Get the "I'm Fine Decoder" HERE

Get some powerful mantras to inspire, encourage, and life you up when you need as little something intentional to focus on.

We have a beautiful pdf download of the 6 Mantras For Intentional Moms you can keep or print. Request them right HERE.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Midlife Challenges
• 0:56 Breaking the Cycle of Self-Sabotage

Transcript

All right, well, hey, friends, if you have ever looked around at your life and thought, why doesn't it feel like it's enough? Or why can't I seem to feel like everything's okay? I have so much to feel grateful for. This is the episode for you. So in today's conversation, we're going to be talking about the quiet, complicated truth of being a high functioning woman in midlife and what it really looks like to claim your peace.

to take it back, to reclaim your clarity and your energy without blowing everything up to do it. I'm gonna walk you through why so many of us are stuck in this cycle of saying, I'm fine when we're actually not. We're gonna talk about the difference between coping and actually caring for yourself. And I'm also gonna share three simple things that you can do today to start reconnecting with what you really need. And I'm gonna share a great tool that I have too.

to help you kind of figure this all out. You'll hear more about that at the end and it's down in the show notes as well. So we're gonna really help shed some light on what's going on underneath the surface so that again, you can stop pretending everything's fine and start kind of living with more honesty and more ease. So let's start here. How many times have you said, I'm fine when you weren't? Whether you said it to someone else or to yourself.

How many times have you kept all of those plates spinning and smiled along at the same time when you didn't feel like smiling? When you have powered through, just powered through, just muscled your way, just white knuckled your way through something when your soul was begging for rest? And what I've come to discover about midlife women, myself included, is that by the time we get to midlife, we're kind of masters at this.

We've spent decades managing families, managing relationships, managing careers and homes and expectations. And somewhere along the way, fine just kind of became the safe answer. Because stopping long enough to tell the truth, even to ourselves, it feels risky and it feels maybe vulnerable. And I know for me at times it has felt like if I start to unpack this, it's like a thread.

that's gonna like all start unraveling. Like if I just don't tug it all, everything will just kind of stay in place, right? Because I'm afraid that everything's just gonna come spilling out and unraveling and then I'm gonna have to deal with it all. But here's the thing, pretending that you're fine when you're not, it doesn't protect you. It actually postpones that peace and calm and contentment and joy that women

reportedly are missing so much in their lives today, maybe more than any other time, I'm really not sure on that, but this wears you down, right? It wears you down mentally, it wears you down emotionally, it can wear you down even physically. So what I've learned again, personally through coaching, coaching that I'm receiving, coaching that I'm giving to other midlife women and women in general is that

We often confuse coping mechanisms with actual care. We think we're caring for ourselves, but we're really just coping. We do things like over commit. We overdo. We zone out. We scroll. We snack. We snap. We pour a glass of wine. We clean out the pantry at 10 PM. We do this not because we're weak, but because we're tired. Because something underneath...

is asking to be seen. And when we don't know how to meet that need directly, we do whatever we can to cope. We do whatever feels like it will put a bandaid on so that it feels better in that moment. And really, this is where real transformation begins, right here with us today. We're not going to be judging ourselves. We're looking to become aware.

But in my work with coaching clients, when we start to have these realizations as women, a lot of times we can kind of go into this panicky mode and we can feel like, my gosh, my life is a disaster. And this is where this idea of I've got to start completely over, right? I've got to redo everything. I've got to rethink everything. I've got to recreate everything. I've got to.

figure everything out all over again because everything is so different. Everything feels so different. But in reality, you don't need to start over. You just need to start listening. You don't need, to put it this on practical terms, you don't need a new house, you don't need a new career, you don't need this dramatic midlife reinvention of yourself. You just need to stop ignoring the signs. And some of these signs might be this kind of

quiet discomfort. At least it starts out quiet. It's that feeling of being off. It's that voice inside that says, I don't want to live on autopilot anymore. When you start to notice yourself thinking and saying these things to yourself, this is when you know to pay attention. And when you know, again, you need to start becoming aware. You need to start listening. Again, with the goal of not burning everything down and starting over, but

to kind of begin again with a different vantage point of yourself. So if this has kind of hit home for you, here are three things you can do right now. Number one, you need to name what's not working. We can't fix what we don't understand. We can't make better what we don't identify. And so you need to really

call out what isn't working in your life right now without sugarcoating it. Maybe it's any one of these things. Maybe it's a combination of a few of these things I'm going to list off here, but know that this is not an extensive list. It just kind of gives you a place to start digging and start uncovering from. It could be your energy, right? Your energy is not working. It could be your mood. It could be your relationship with food. Could be your mornings. It could be your evenings.

It could be your relationship with yourself. It could be your relationship with other people. It could be the job you're in. It could be the hobbies you currently have. It could be any numbers, any combination of these things, and plenty of others. But just know that you need to name and uncover what's not working and literally name it. And know that naming it does not mean, and the goal here is not that you will fix it today, right?

Right here in step one, we are just naming it. Write it down, get it out of your head, out of your heart, and into the light so that we can examine it. I love to think about being curious, right? We're gonna pull it out so that we can get curious to learn more about it. So that's step one. Name what's working, what's not working without sugarcoating it, okay? Step number two, do something.

today. I don't care what time it is, what else you have going on, right? I've got nine kids and grandkids and a business and homeschool my kids and a life outside of all of those things, my own hobbies and interests and things like that. You're busy. I get it, right? Me too. But that doesn't change what step number two is. So step number two is to do something today that brings you back to yourself. Something that speaks a little bit of that

peace into your soul, into your mind. Something that quiets the anxious thoughts, the negative thoughts, the never-ending thoughts, the thinking and the overthinking, and the things that seem unfigurable. We want to start inviting peace and calm into one or two of these things. And so

Do something today that fills your soul and it doesn't have to be big. It can literally just be sitting in the quiet. It could be going out for a 10 minute walk, quiet. Maybe listening to something peaceful will help, maybe listening to something motivational will help, maybe listening to nothing at all will help. We wanna be able to turn down the noise.

And for us midlife women with a brain that is constantly overthinking, overloaded, always trying to figure things out, it seems, we want to be able to turn off that noise. What you're looking to do here is really take one step away from that autopilot that you've been running on and to move towards presence. Even five minutes counts. Like this does not have to be a big deal, okay?

So that's step two is to do something that brings you back to yourself. Step three, and I told you that I would share a tool with you that would really help. I've created a free simple tool that is gonna help you really get honest with yourself in a super gentle, compassionate yet powerful way. It's called the I'm Fine Decoder and it's down in the show notes. You can grab it free.

Know that it's not about fixing you. It's about helping you build this awareness that we talked about. It's about helping you see yourself clearly. Start to see yourself clearly, knowing that we're gonna have to look more deeply, right? We're gonna have to continue building this awareness. We're gonna have to continue pursuing curiosity.

But this awareness and this curiosity and these things that we're going to discover about ourselves, it's the first step really in taking your power back without blowing your entire life up, right? We're looking for just a couple of small little pieces that we can understand and try to offset. Know that you can grab that I'm Fine decoder down in the comments. It is absolutely the best place.

for you to start.

So know that you don't have to perform for anyone, right? And you don't have to pretend that you're fine, especially if you know that you're not. It's true that you also don't have to stay stuck and you don't have to do it alone. Coaches like me exist. I work specifically with midlife women. Many of my clients are midlife women because this is such

You know, I think myself, I thought that by the time I got to this point in my life, life would feel somehow easier. I'd have it all figured out. I would be at this place where everything would just kind of be settled. I would know how to put out all the fires and really all the fires. There wouldn't really be any fires that actually happened. It would just kind of be smooth sailing. All of the figuring out who I am and figuring out how life is going to work and figure out how to make life work and you know,

helping manage all of the things I manage, right? The home and the homeschooling and the business and the extracurricular activities and the things that I enjoy and pursuing my own focuses and interests. I thought that that would just somehow be on autopilot, but it's not. And really we don't want it to be either. Cause that autopilot with the things that matter, that's where we kind of just go numb. And that's when we step into this place of just kind of being

again, muted or numb to everything. And it's where we just start, we're so again, accustomed to just saying, fine, fine, everything's fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, it's gonna be fine, that we don't really even know that it's possible we're not. And we don't know how to go on this curious awareness discovery trip I just kind of laid out for you. So,

I'm here to help support you. This podcast is here to help support you. You can find me on Instagram. I speak specifically to midlife women there too. The intentional mom blog on Instagram is where you can find me there. So man, life, I don't know that we're ever going to get to the point where we're living on easy street, but it's a matter of doing what we can with where we're at. It's aware of, it's a way of always building this awareness and always just being curious and saying, what isn't working? And once I understand what isn't working,

What steps might I take to help it maybe work a little bit better? That's really what it's all about. And that's what I'm here to do for you. So thank you so much for joining me today. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye everyone.