Ep. 7 The Messy Middle Nobody Talks About When You Follow Your Heart

What would change if you stopped waiting for someone else’s approval and just… did the thing?

In this deeply personal episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on the story I've never fully told publicly, the one I wrote in a book chapter about giving myself permission to create. From a tiny kitchen moment at age five that quietly taught me staying small was safer than wanting things, to building a wildly successful six-figure business that felt like a golden cage, to five years in the wilderness of self-doubt and debt — this is the origin story behind everything.

If you’ve ever felt like you needed someone else to say “yes” before you could move forward, this episode is going to hit different.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

• The moment at age 5 that taught me staying small was safer than wanting things
• How I built a seven-figure business in a golden cage — successful on the outside, suffocating on the inside
• The business divorce that led to five years in the wilderness of self-doubt and debt
• What my coach asked me  at 50 that cracked everything wide open
• Why following your heart sometimes leads you straight into the messy middle — and why that’s actually part of the process

Key Takeaways

• The rules you learned as a child about staying safe were never meant to follow you this far
• Keeping your dream “just far enough away” is a protection mechanism — and it’s costing you
• The wilderness is not the end of the story. It’s the messy middle.
• You don’t need permission from anyone. The permission was always yours to give.

Mentioned in This Episode

Rachel is opening a very small group called The Knowing for midlife women who are done dismissing themselves and are ready to take action. Only 5 spots available. Email rachel@rachelaperry.com for details.

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a midlife woman in your life who needs to hear it. And don’t forget — you are not done yet.

Transcript

Welcome To Not Done Yet

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Not Done Yet, the podcast for midlife women who know deep down their story isn't finished. I'm your host, Rachel Perry, and here we're gonna talk about what's really happening in this season of life: the identity shifts, the quiet questions, the courage it takes to listen to yourself again, what it actually looks like to step into what's next, and why our boobs are hitting our knees. If you've ever looked at your life and thought, wait, is this it? Girl, you're in the right place. Because midlife isn't the end of your story, it's the moment you start paying attention to it. So take a breath and let's talk about what's really going on and what you want to do with it. Because, sister, you are not done yet.

Besties, Reviews, And Real Talk

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of Not Done Yet. Y'all are bringing it. Seriously, thank you so much for being a listener. Thank you for those of you who've left me a review. You're my favorite. Okay, we're besties. Actually, we're all besties, even if you don't leave me a review. Um, but I so would appreciate it. You guys, I just have to say that this has been bringing me so much joy. I also want you to know that if we are friends in real life, that when we go out or we hang out, you don't have to worry about our conversations making it onto the podcast. I mean, I might have you sign a form saying you don't care. No, I'm just kidding. Seriously, I'm I'm a safe place now. You don't have to stop hanging out with me because you're afraid you're gonna make it onto the podcast. I went out with a couple of friends the other day and we were joking about that. So I thought I would share that here. Um, but I do think it's important to have these conversations, right? Like that's why I've created this podcast because not enough is talked about. Not enough of this is talked about, you guys.

Midlife Changes And Self-Doubt

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Why do I have to paint my hair every morning? Why? Why is there so much gray? Why do I keep dreaming that I'm losing all my hair? Because yes, my hair is thinning and I don't like it. I don't like it. And it could be because I'm on a GLP one, it could be because I'm in perimenopause. And seriously, y'all, I mean, it started thinning in my early 40s. And I remember telling my doctor, and she was like, oh, this is just part of getting older. BS. You know what I'm saying? Like, no, if we'd fixed my hormones back then, I might have more hair today. But anyway, we're not here to talk about hair. Okay.

A Personal Chapter On Permission

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Today, what I want to share with you is something really personal. And I know I'm always personal on these episodes, but this is actually something that I wrote in a book. I was invited to write a chapter for a book that my friend published just about different experiences and different things. And mine was focused on giving myself permission to create. And so I kind of wanted to share a little bit about that, about what I wrote, because, you know, like I said in last week's episode, these first 10 episodes are kind of foundational for this podcast. And we've talked about, you know, your buried spark, we've talked about the experience that you're dismissing, we've talked about the dangerous phrases that women use in midlife before they even let themselves explore an idea. And today I want to go deeper and I want to tell you about where all of that comes from, and not in a like this is what happens to women way, but in kind of like a this is my story way. Because I think when you hear where I started and where this pattern began for me, you may recognize yourself in much of it. And I think that recognition is gonna change something, it's gonna move something.

The Moment People-Pleasing Began

SPEAKER_00 3:39

So it started way back when, when I was, this is one of my first vivid memories of being a pleaser. And I was five years old. We were living in Northern Ireland, and I was helping my mom bake a cake. And I remember saying to her, Mom, I know your anniversary's coming up, like, and I'm gonna get you a present. And I was so excited about it. And I remember her sort of saying, you don't need to worry about that. And hello, let's be real. Like when you have a five-year-old helping you bake a cake, like, is there really any help happening there? Right. And plus, she also was probably really overwhelmed with whatever was happening in her adult world that day. I was the oldest of three. My little sister was probably being a huge problem. Just kidding, it was probably my brother, right? And she may have come across as a little gruff. So it's not what she said. It was more of like how she said it. And it doesn't even honestly matter. Like there are so many things that we say to our children, right, that are sending them to therapy. And we don't mean to, we don't know what we're doing, right? And to an adult, you may, you know, as you hear that, you may think, oh my gosh, that was such a small moment. But for me, as a five-year-old who so desperately wanted to make her mom happy, make everyone happy, who wanted to do the right thing, who wanted to be good, it felt like I'd done something really wrong. And honestly, I have had a hard time remembering their anniversary since. Isn't that weird how that happens? But in that moment, in that tiny ordinary kitchen moment, I learned something that would follow me for the next 45 years of my life. When everyone is happy and okay, I'm safe. And when I do something that disappoints someone, when I get it wrong, when I'm too much, when I want the wrong thing, that is literally the worst feeling in the world. So I learned to stay small. I learned to stay safe. I learned to color inside the lines and wait for permission before I moved. And a lot of my life moving from, you know, various countries, we we moved from England, I don't remember that, to Scotland, to Northern Ireland, to New York, back to Northern Ireland and then to Virginia. And I was always sort of the one that didn't fit in. So I wanted to keep myself small because I thought maybe then things would be better. They would be easier. And you know, those people who've always been dreamers, and maybe you're one of them, the ones who always have big ideas and just go for things, the ones who don't seem to care what anyone thinks. I never saw myself as one of those people growing up. And I am one of those people. I was more concerned with staying inside the lines of life than letting myself explore what was outside them. My sister, y'all, she was different. And she's coming on the podcast. Y'all are gonna love her. I just have the best time with her. But she said whatever she thought. She did whatever she wanted. And I remember watching her and thinking, gosh, that must be nice to have that kind of freedom, right? I mean, she did get in trouble at school. The teachers were like, whoa, can you stop expressing yourself? But to have that freedom to just be yourself without worrying about what everyone thinks was so dreamy for me. I was like, wow, that's nice. But what I didn't understand at the time was that I was putting myself in a box again, a people-pleasing, approval-seeking, waiting for permission box. And I was choosing to stay safe, to stay in it because it felt safe. I was a rule follower, the girl who desperately wanted to be liked and had figured out that the way to be liked was to never be too much, which is so sad because those of you that know me know that I am so much. I am so extra. Try putting Rachel in a box. Come on. But I carried that box with me into adulthood, into every relationship, into every business decision, into every single moment where I had an idea or a want or a dream.

Success That Still Felt Like A Box

SPEAKER_00 7:36

And I'd heard that little voice say, But are you sure? Like, what are people gonna think? Is that really appropriate? Is that the right thing? Is that is that what you should do? When I started building my network marketing business after leaving teaching, because yes, I was a teacher for nine years before all of this, y'all. I followed every rule to a T. I did everything my upline told me to do. I figured if I just followed the directions and I said what they told me to say, I would become the leader I wanted to be. But what I didn't realize was that I was putting myself into yet another box. And because I was so busy following everyone else's directions, I wasn't allowing myself to actually shine or grow or figure out what I actually thought. Even when things didn't feel right, even when something inside me was going, wait, wait, wait, wait, this isn't quite right. I pushed past that discomfort and kept following what everyone else told me to do because they knew what they were doing. And I certainly did not, I thought. And then I found myself in the most successful box I'd ever been in. So my business partner and I started teaching network marketers how to build their businesses. So I shifted from being a network marketer to training network marketers. We were accidental entrepreneurs and found success so quickly. It was in the magical time of organic growth. And we joined a mastermind with like a really high-level mastermind. We learned the formula in quotation marks. We ran challenges, we launched programs, and we and it worked like clockwork. We made hundreds of thousands of dollars in one launch. I remember our first launch, it was like $300,000. We had no clue what we were doing, but we were following, we were following the formula and it worked. Y'all, there were wigs involved. There are still wigs involved sometimes with me. We had the best time we were trailblazers in our pla in our space. We had the fame, we had the recognition, we had women all over the country following what we were doing. And I was suffocating. Not because it wasn't successful, it absolutely was. I mean, y'all, Mark and I built a screen and porch on our house. We redid our bathrooms. Life was good by every external measure, but I didn't feel creative. I didn't feel confident in my own ideas. And I knew that my business partner and I were a really great unit, unit, but I wasn't happy because it wasn't what I actually wanted to do. It was another box, a beautiful, profitable, successful box, but still a box. And I didn't know how to give myself permission to want something different. So for months, maybe years, I had this conversation in my head that I couldn't bring myself to have

Leaving The Partnership And Fallout

SPEAKER_00 10:23

out loud. And I had people who were thought leaders in the industry saying, Rachel, you should go out on your own. But I kept myself in that box. And then one day I decided to step out. I was sitting in my office staring at my business partner's face on a Skype call because yes, this was the Skype era. And words came out of my mouth before I could talk myself out of them. I said, I think it's time for me to move on. And then immediately, because I am who I am, I added, Oh, you know what? I don't know. Maybe I'm not, you know, maybe I'm not sure. Maybe I don't know. I don't know. I just don't love what we're doing anymore. Because in that moment of finally saying the true thing, I was still softening it. I was still apologizing for it. I was still trying to make sure nobody was too disappointed. It's okay if I'm disappointed, but I don't want anyone else to be disappointed. And I'll never forget her face was just like blank. And every part of me wanted to take it back. But I couldn't breathe in the business we'd built anymore. And something in me knew, even though it was terrifying, that I had to go through this to get where I was actually meant to be. And what followed was devastating. It was like a business divorce. Lawyers, a friendship that crumbled under the weight of decisions and hurt feelings, letters. It was hard and messy, and I hated every single step of it. But I knew I had to go through it anyway. And here's the part of the story that I think nobody really tells you about.

The Wilderness And The Messy Middle

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Following your heart doesn't always immediately lead you somewhere great. Sometimes it leads you straight into the wilderness. For I would I was gonna say for four and a half years, but I think maybe five, five and a half years after leaving the partnership, and it's been six, okay, I struggled without a business partner to bounce ideas off of. Everything fell on me. And frankly, that was terrifying. I was paralyzed with self-doubt, compared myself to everyone. I wondered constantly if I'd made a terrible mistake. And instead of following, following my instincts, which were telling me to serve women in a different way, to figure out what's next, I fell back on what felt safe. I went back to serving network marketers. Not because I wanted to, though I loved every client I worked with, but because I knew that world. And the other world, the world of what I actually wanted, was scary and uncertain. And what if it didn't work? It's so, and we talked about this in the last episode. It's so easy to have this idea of what you want to do far away, like, oh, one day, right? Or maybe I'll do that one day because it feels safe. I kept my dream just far enough away that it stayed possible, but not close enough that it required anything for me, because close meant risk. And risk meant I might find out something about myself that I wasn't ready to know. Because what if it failed? What if I did this thing that I wanted to do, but then it didn't work out? And then what would I have? The lowest point came, probably about four and a half years in. I had built up significant business debt. I was making less money than when I'd first started out on my own. And I felt like I had proven to myself and everyone else that I couldn't do this. I wasn't a business owner. I could not be successful. I clearly needed someone else to do it with who was better than me. And it felt like it was a self-fulfilled prophecy. Like I'd always known somewhere deep down that I wasn't capable of standing on my own. And now I had the evidence. That was a hard time for me. And I want to be really honest about that because I think a lot of women are in that place now, in their own version of the wilderness. And they think that means they were wrong to try it, or that it means that they should go back to what was safe, but it doesn't mean that. It means you're in the middle of it, the messy middle. And that's always the hardest part.

The Question That Cracked It Open

SPEAKER_00 14:22

So around my 50th birthday, I was talking to my one of my coaches, and she asked me something that stopped me completely in my tracks. She said, What if you did what you actually wanted to do? What if you didn't wait for someone else to tell you how to do it? What if you just did what felt good? And I was like, what? I have been. I totally have been doing that. Because you see, along this path, I had also been convincing myself that I was doing exactly what I wanted to do, right? To convince myself, to make myself feel better so that I didn't have to deal with the discomfort of recognizing and looking at the fact that I wasn't. And I remember looking at her over Zoom, because now we're we've evolved into the Zoom era. And I remember the feeling in my chest like something was cracking open. Like, what? I can do that. Wait, I'm allowed to do that. And I know how that sounds. It sounds so silly somehow, right? Like a kid finding out that they're allowed to have dessert before dinner. But that's exactly what it felt like. This sudden, radical, earth-shifting permission, somehow, to want what I wanted.

unknown 15:31

What?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

For 50 years, I'd been asking the wrong questions. Will they be proud of me? Is this the right thing to do? Will they think I'm doing a good job? Am I doing it right? Does everybody approve? And those questions were my drug, my measurement of worth. I didn't know how to move through the world without them. And it goes back to even being in programs and following their methods and thinking I can't deviate from those methods because they know better than I do. What? And in that moment, something cracked open and I thought, wait a second, who cares what other people think? Who actually gives a bleep if they don't approve? I'm doing what I want to do, what I am meant to do. And it was scary. Okay, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna lie. It was scary. Uh I need to be honest about that too, because I'm not gonna just paint a pretty picture that it was just perfect. Because y'all, I really did think it was gonna be like that. But it wasn't just freeing and magical. It really was scary because when you spent 50 years organizing your decisions around other people's approval, deciding to do what you thought they think was what you thought they thought was the right thing, deciding to stop doing that is legit disorienting, like taking away the scaffolding before you're sure the building can stand on its own. But I was also the most free I had ever felt in my life.

Building From Alignment Not Approval

SPEAKER_00 16:56

So here's what that looks like now. When I get an idea, a business idea, and honestly, it happens when I'm like walking outside or in the shower, right? Or at 3 a.m. in the morning when my brain finally gets quiet enough to hear itself. It's like a tuning fork being struck. You know that feeling when you hear a sound and it resonates at just the right frequency and you can feel it in your body rather than just in your ears? You know what I'm saying, right? That's what it feels like. There's this zing of alignment, this recognition that this is mine. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. And my heart beats faster, and I rush to my computer or my phone, or I just think about it and I start working it out. I start doing it. Not because someone told me to, not because it fits in a formula someone else gave me, but because something in me is vibrating with the rightness of it. And that feeling, that feeling of creating without anyone's permission, I didn't have access to it for 50 years. And now I cannot imagine going back. The work I'm doing now, this podcast, the conversations I'm having, helping midlife women figure out what they actually want and stop dismissing themselves. That's what I wanted to do all along. It's what I kept filing away as not yet, not right now, and maybe when things settled down. It's what I kept in the sky like a kite, just far enough away that it stayed possible, but couldn't require anything from me. And now it's right here in my lap, requiring everything for me. And y'all, it is the most alive I have ever felt. And I share this with you, not because I want to just talk about myself, though I do love to talk about myself. But I share this with you because I know I'm not the only one that put myself into a cage, I call it a golden cage, right? And if you're listening to this from your own golden cage, the one that might look really successful from the outside but feels suffocating on the inside, I see you. If you're in your own wilderness or your own messy middle right now, spinning out, wondering if you made a mistake, building up debt and self-doubt in equal measure, I see you.

Your Permission Slip In Midlife

SPEAKER_00 18:58

And you and I want you to know the wilderness is not the end of the story, it's the middle. If you're still waiting for someone to tell you that your idea is good enough, and y'all, I waited so long for someone to tell me and validate me. If you're waiting for someone to tell you that your idea is good enough, that you're qualified enough, that it's the right time, that you have enough permission to actually go for the thing that keeps calling you. I want to be that person for you today. Now you don't need permission. I need you to know that. You don't need permission from me or anyone else. You never needed the permission. Not from your family, not from your friends, not from the industry or the algorithm or the coach or the person or the therapist or whoever's approval you've been quietly seeking for years. The permission was always yours to give. I had someone tell me the other day: when you're looking for validation from others, you've got to first validate yourself. And I know that's easy to say and hard to believe because, sister, I spent 50 years not believing it. I spent 50 years being the five-year-old in the kitchen who learned that wanting the wrong thing was dangerous. Come on. But here's what I know now. That little girl got it wrong, not because she was bad or weak or broken, but because she was five and she was scared she was doing something wrong and she was just trying to do something good, right? But you're not five anymore. I'm not five anymore. And the rules you learned back then, the ones that said stay small and stay safe and wait for permission before you move, those rules were never meant to follow you this far. You get to create without permission. You get to do what you want. This is your permission slip that again, you don't need. You have to give it to yourself. It took me 50 years to believe that sentence. I get to create without permission. 50 years of coloring inside the lines, of waiting for approval, of keeping my real desires just far enough away that they couldn't disappoint me. Oh my gosh. And when I tell you that, I feel it so deeply because I remember that the day when I realized I was keeping everything at all my desires at a distance, like my business passion, because I was so afraid of being disappointed if it didn't work out. And I'm telling you now from the other side of that, the picture is so much better when you let yourself paint the way, and I'm not talking about painting your hair, but paint it the way you actually want it to look. Even if it's scribbly, even if it's all out of the lines, even if you can't even tell what it is, even if nobody else quite gets it, it's your picture, it's nobody else's. And you don't need anyone's permission to paint it.

Next Week Plus The Knowing Invite

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Next week, we're gonna be talking about something that I think is gonna completely shift the way you think about where you are right now in midlife. We're gonna be busting the it's too late, myth. Mm-hmm. Yeah, we're going there. And I'm gonna give you some real specific reasons why midlife might actually be the perfect time to start something. Actually, I'm not even gonna say might is the perfect time to shine. I really believe that midlife is like uh, y'all are gonna think I'm crazy, but it's Almost like it's this portal. Okay, maybe I shouldn't say this because you guys are gonna be like, okay, no, Rage, where are you going with this? But I do, I think midlife is the beginning for so really for all of us if we're willing to step into it. I'm just saying. So listen, you heard at the beginning of the episode that I am opening up a very, very small group called the Knowing for midlife women who are done dismissing themselves and are ready to take action. I really do only have five spots. It's gonna be a very small group. If you are interested in the details, just email me, rachel at rachelaperry.com, and I will give you all the details. And listen, if you loved this episode, I would so appreciate it if you would share it with another midlife woman in your life who needs to hear it. Because guess what? We are not done yet. We are not done yet. And there is so much more to come. So listen, thank you so very much for being here today, for listening, for messaging me after. I love it when you guys message me and tell me all the things and everything. Thank you for listening to my story today. This has been something that I've really never shared. I shared it in the book, but that's it. And I wanted to share it with you because y'all know you're my besties now. We're besties. So anyway, listen, take care. I love your face. You're not done yet, and I'll see you next week.