Ep 100. Best of Reinvented After 40

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40 episode number 100, The Best Of.

Welcome to the Reinvented After 40 podcast. I am your host Kym Showers, and I’m a certified life coach for women in the second half of life. Each week I’ll bring you direct advice and inspiring practical wisdom to help you live your very best life and create a future you’re absolutely obsessed with.

It’s going to be fun. Let’s get started.

Hello my friends and welcome back to my show and my 100th episode celebration. I can’t even believe it. This was such a dream for me. Back when I first started this out of thin air with just an idea and a dream, 100 episodes seemed so impossible, so far away, honestly it did. But here I am and that’s just how it works when you are committed to something that you believe in and you keep showing up for it. It’s the beauty of the compound effect. So one episode at a time and all of a sudden I have 100 episodes.

And my beautiful, amazing production team had the idea to do the best of, which I think is thrilling and extremely exciting. So that’s what we have prepared for you today and I can’t wait to listen to it. I know I’m going to learn a bunch of stuff because they actually put it together. So they chose the parts of all the episodes that they thought were the most meaningful to them and the most useful to them, which I so can’t wait to listen to. And it will be just packed with so much goodness.

And I just so appreciate you for showing up week after week. Not only is this my 100th episode, you guys, but this podcast just crossed 100,000 downloads, which is incredible and remarkable in itself. So as you can tell, I am extremely emotional about all of it because I’m just really proud of all of us for being brave enough to create something that matters, and it does, it all matters.

So I love you for showing up today and for listening and to celebrate you guys, I have purchased three pairs of AirPod Pros to give away to you. So this is what you have to do.

Listen, it’s not going to be hard, so don’t let your brain talk you out of it. So I want you to enter this AirPod Pro contest. It’s going to be going on for the next two weeks. So what you have to do is go to www.kymshowerslifecoach.com/giveaway. Don’t make it complicated, www.kymshowerslifecoach.com/giveaway and it’s going to give you all the directions for the contest, which is going to be so fun.

And then you’re going to go to Apple Podcasts and you’re going to follow, rate and review the show. So just follow the directions once you get to my website /giveaway and then you’re going to go follow, rate and review the show. That’s what you do to enter your name into this 100th episode contest that we’re celebrating. It’s a party and you’re all invited. Let’s have some fun together. So I love you for showing up today to listen to this. I know it’s going to be beneficial for you.

I love everything that I teach. It has literally reinvented my life over and over and over again, week after week, after week. I feel like a completely different woman than I was when I started episode one. This podcast has literally transformed every single thing about me. And I hope it has done the same thing for you. I’m pretty sure it has. So I love you. Enjoy my show today and I will see you soon.

I’m just a big believer in living your best life. And when things stop working, it’s time to find new ways to move forward, new beliefs to believe, new thoughts to think, new actions to take, totally reinvent yourself in just such a brave new way. And kind of midlife took me by surprise and I’m so glad that it did. And I’m so glad that it was difficult and challenging and that I had to do a lot of work to figure out what I wanted, who I am and what I wanted moving forward and what kind of life was available to me.

So I think that if we look at it that way, if we just stay open and kind of expect there will always be times of change and kind of wondering what the next direction is and just be willing to pivot. That’s what creates a life we love living.

When we learn to manage our mind, we can shift our brain away from things that are not our business and away from things we have zero control of and away from thoughts that are not helpful or thoughts that are not useful. We can focus it back to the here and now and get busy taking care of our own responsibilities in our own life. We can think thoughts on purpose that feel better. The way that I’ve found to help me do this is the discipline of staying in my own lane, staying in my own business and focusing on what’s my responsibility.

Getting out of everyone else’s, when you get good and practiced at it, you reach your goals so much faster with much more energy and clarity and a lot less drama. When you want to change and grow and become your highest, truest, best self, you’ve got to think different thoughts than you’re thinking now. You must become aware of the thoughts your brain is offering you that are distracting you from your own work. It’s a practice and a mindset that will be helpful and keep you creating a life you love.

When things get hard, we don’t quit, we keep going. The whole key is being woman of grit is being future focused, not past focused. If you think about your past, I want your story to be of all your gains in the past, all the things you’ve overcome in the past to become the woman of grit you are today. And then we set our goal for what we want to create, who we want to become in the creation of the goal, because it’s not, and this is what I tell you all the time. It’s never the goal because we know it’s not how we’re going to feel at the end when we reach that goal, it’s who we have to become to reach the goal, we have to become a woman of grit.

How can you romance yourself in such a way that you just love being in your life and you just love who you are and how you’re showing up in your life? This is what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the romance, the secret to self-love, romancing ourselves. It’s a thing. It’s a reality. It’s something that we can do so that we stop looking for it from our spouse, from our husband, from our partner, from our friends, from our parents, from our grown kids. It is not their job to romance us. It’s our job to romance ourselves. It’s a thing to give ourselves everything that we need.

I would not be who I am today if I did not have a coach, if I was not a coach, if I did not have all of these skills and tools in my toolbelt every day, and especially if I didn’t have this disciplined mind that I have. I just am the boss of my mind and I have so much self-discipline. I do not let my mind run my life, if I did I would not be who I am with so much going for me and so much optimism and momentum and all the great feelings that I feel every day.

You’ve got to learn how to manage your thoughts and your emotions so that you can live the exact life you want to live. Because so much that is going on in your life and troubling you right now, I promise you, it’s out of your control. You have zero control over it. So if you learn how to discipline your mind and stay in your lane and control the things that you can control, this is what coaching does for you. Oh, my goodness, you can let go of so much that is keeping you feeling very stuck right now.

I’m just in awe and wonder of this journey and this life that I feel like I’m thriving in every single day, I never feel like I’m just surviving it or just getting through it. I always feel like I’m thriving and I say that completely without even hesitation and it just really keeps getting better and I know it’s because of my mindset. I know it’s because of my perspective and the way that I think about things, but I want to say the way that I choose to think about things every single day, my days are full of choices. And I’m always choosing something that feels useful to me on my journey in this thriving life, in this life that I can’t wait to get up every single morning to get started on.

It is so possible for you to be thriving in the second half of life wherever you are, if you’re in your 40s, if you’re still raising kids. You’re just getting started on this amazing mindset journey where you are going to be allowed, you are going to be encouraged. You are going to set yourself free to love yourself exactly the way you are. That’s freedom, that’s a life you can’t wait to get up in the morning and live.

My extraordinary life and my extraordinary future is all created by the way that I’m talking about it to myself, the possibilities that I’m dreaming of and thinking about that really I can make possible. I really do know I will and I can and everything is possible for me. And my life just keeps getting better because of it. So this is the story that I tell, this is my reality and anyone who knows me in real life will tell you this is exactly who I am and I refuse to let anyone tell me anything different.

I am in charge of my life. No one else is in charge of my life. I don’t let anyone insert their opinion about what’s possible for me. I get to decide that, you get to decide that. Quit letting people tell you what’s possible for you, if you think so much more is possible for you. I want you to listen to your big ideas, listen to your big dreams, they’re extremely valid. And I want you to get in the habit and practice of being present. I want you to get in the habit and practice of knowing what your brain is up to. Your brain is wanting always to pull you away from the present moment. And there are so many benefits to being in the present moment.

I don’t have any bad habits. My life is nothing but good habits, isn’t that something? Isn’t that incredible? I don’t think I even realized that until now. I literally have zero bad habits. So what I want you to get out of these thoughts of mine and these practices of mine is I want you to evaluate your life. And I want you maybe to shift the way you think about good habits. You might have a mindset, you might have some thoughts, you might have some resistance even to good habits.

Even thinking about good habits maybe spirals you into shame because you might not be thinking of yourself in a way that is beneficial to you and that positions you for creating good habits in your life. You might not even think you have good habits because you’re not in the practice of realizing exactly what they are. But I want you to know you can create a life that you absolutely love where you have absolutely no bad habits. I just want you to know you can do that, you just fill it with good habits and everything that you do on a daily basis is good and it’s getting you where you want to go.

Here we are, you guys, us women, us beautiful, strong, independent women in the second half of life, creative, loving, kind, generous, compassionate. Here we are saving ourselves because no one is going to come and save us. That is the best news I can ever say to you and think for you and help you to understand. Something in us is waiting kind of quietly and hoping that there is going to be someone that comes and offers us what we want, someone outside of us, but that’s not true.

No one can give us what we need, what we want, except for us. I keep figuring out what I want and I keep creating it for myself. I have never been happier in my own life, more challenged in my own life, more stretched beyond what I thought was possible for me. I keep dreaming bigger dreams and imagining, I know that I have a brain that limits me, I know that now. And so whatever I’m thinking, I know that even more is possible for me.

What we focus on, grows, gets bigger, we just keep creating more of it. So we have to know what we’re thinking about, we have to know what we’re focused on. If we’re focused on problems and we’re so used to complaining on a daily basis, those problems are going to grow, instead of get smaller and fade away.

So if we want things to be better, if we want to have more happiness and more joy and more enthusiasm in our daily lives, we have to focus on more joy and more happiness and more enthusiasm in our daily life. That’s how we do it, what we give our energy to. So the things that we’re thinking about, the things that we’re talking about, the way that we’re spending our time, those things matter and they just keep expanding. And so it’s so important, you guys, to know this, that what we focus on, grows.

Being in a good mood is completely up to you and it is an absolutely brilliant way to live, it’s an extremely productive, powerful way to live, it’s a very fun way to live. If you want to be in a good mood, if you enjoy being in a good mood, I’m not telling you, you have to be in a good mood. If you are not even sold on that then you get to be in whatever kind of mood you want to be, but me personally, I really enjoy being in a good mood as often as possible.

Okay, so you are doing so much better than you think you are, I promise you 100% you are and I am too. I’m doing so much better than I think I am and this is a very good thought to think and to believe on a regular basis. Learning how to give yourself credit, knowing how worthy you are of all of your dreams, of everything that you want. What you want now you’re capable of so much more than that. Just go get what you want now, but once you get that, know that there’s going to be a whole new door that opens up showing you all the possibilities for the next year, for the next five years, for the next 10 years.

This is just super fun to live this way and to really believe and be, to know that you’re capable of so much more, that you are so much more beautiful and smart and stronger than you think you are. You are doing so much better than you think you are and maybe you’re doing better than anyone else thinks you are, it doesn’t even matter. What matters is that you know that you’re doing so much better than you think you are. And you’re just getting to work creating the life that you absolutely are obsessed with and you cannot wait to get up every morning to live. That’s what’s possible for you.

Once I found out that my circumstances do not create my feelings, that my brain creates my feelings, which was total news to me at the age of 55, 56, 57. No one had ever told me that before. I thought it was all the people in my life that created my feelings. I thought it was all my circumstances that created my feelings and it’s not ever our circumstances. Our circumstances are neutral, they’re just the facts of our life.

The reason we have particular feelings is because of the way that we think about the people in our life, the words being said to us, the circumstances of our life. We have thoughts about everything in our life and our brain likes for some reason, the way our brain is wired, our primitive brain is wired to be a great problem solver, to look for problems to solve. So it really does want to drum up problems on the regular. If you have a problem it doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t get to get what you want in life because you have this issue.

I want to tell you, you can get what you want in life because there’s a solution to the issue. Your brain will tell you, “We can’t possibly do that. We’re too nervous to do that. We’re not good at this.” And I’m telling you, absolutely you can do it, you just have to be very determined and very consistent and you have to put your beautiful, smart brain to work coming up with the solution.

You are worthy of your dreams, you deserve all of your dreams, anything that you can dream up, anything you’ve been longing for in your life is not too big, I promise you it’s not. You are supposed to create whatever it is you’re dreaming of, that is available to you. And you’re 100% worthy of the biggest dream you can imagine. You guys, most women in the second half of life have never really learned how to dream big, big dreams. And that is kind of surprising to me because I’ve always kind of been a big dreamer.

I don’t know if I’ve had subconscious thoughts and I probably have, that I obviously have been unaware of, that maybe I’m not worthy of the biggest dreams I can imagine. And so maybe I don’t dream as big as I could. I think I have overcome that. I have recognized because of this thought work in the last five years, oh, my gosh, I have awakened so many times to these unconscious, subconscious thoughts that have kept me playing so small in my life.

It might have been feeling unworthy, it wasn’t for me, maybe I don’t deserve this big of a dream, I don’t know. But now where I am something, clicked in the last five years. And I know without one doubt I am worthy of the biggest dream that I can conjure up in my mind.

If you are in the second half of life I want you to know and this is a belief of mine, this is a practiced thought of mine, we are just getting started. Really, truly we’re just getting started. I think that all the time. I’m like, “Oh, gosh, this is so exciting, I am just getting started.” The best years are yet to come and that we get to own every day of every year yet to come and it’s our privilege and responsibility to live it to its fullest, to my fullest and to all of my potential. I am just getting started at the age of 62, I really do feel that way every single day.

And I want you to adopt that thought, retrain your brain, it’s you and you, it’s between you and you. We’re just getting started. When your brain offers you all the fears, all the thoughts, dang, all your best years are behind you. Now what are we going to do? You’re not very good at very many things, all you do is raise your kids. Who’s going to hire you now at 40, at 50, at 60? You’re too old really to create a whole new life or a whole new job or a bunch of new friends or you can’t really afford to do anything. Listen to your brain when it’s offering you all of these thoughts that you are just accepting as your reality. None of those are true.

So what do you do with an idea, what do you do with a dream, what do you do with a possibility, something that feels a little out of reach for you, a little impossible for you? You give it some fuel, you give it some life, you give it some attention, you give it some food. So we have these treasures, these dreams, these ideas in us. And it’s our responsibility to bring them out into the world, it truly is. So everything that you can think of, you can create, it’s something that you can give attention to, that you can feed, that you can be empowered by.

This is a relationship that you build with all of your magical ideas that you’re here to create for the value of the world. That’s why we have them, it benefits everybody. When we give our dreams wings to take flight, when we’re brave enough, literally, you guys, this is what it takes. It takes courage to bring these ideas to life and you have to just be able to trust yourself and know it’s here for a reason.

But you have to find your fears first, you have to be intentional about your life and stop squandering your days playing second fiddle and riding people’s coattails, we all have to do that. And the more I create big things, the more I bet on myself and take risks on myself and go all in on me and never let my brain talk me out of it. The fiercer I get, the braver I get, the more confident I get, the more I create. And the more magical and enchanting and extraordinary my life becomes, the more expansive it becomes, it’s undeniable.

And it’s inevitable when we find our fears, and we’re willing to take the risk, to take the chance and jump off of the coattails and pull out the fierce in us and develop it and become it. While we’re creating our dreams, while we’re doing the work of getting clear about what we want.

I want you to see how powerful this thought is that I’m the lucky one and you are the lucky one. And then I want you to get to work finding evidence that that is absolutely true. My friend, if you are a woman in the second half of life you are the luckiest one of all. This is everything and you’re the lucky one because of all the goodness you put out in the world every day and because of the way that you’re working so hard to make changes in your life that benefit everybody in the world.

You are already the lucky one. You don’t even need any more luck, it’s already here for you and you’re just taking advantage of it. We’re both the lucky ones. This is so powerful to think and live like this and to show up this way every single day, all good things happen to us lucky ones.

You have to know who you are, it is so much fun. Once you really get to work, it’s actually pretty easy to live like this with so much clarity about who you are, what you value the most and protecting those values. The problem in our life in the second half of life is that we don’t know who we are. We’ve just become kind of chameleons for who everybody else has wanted us to be, has expected us to be, has needed us to be, we’ve gotten really good at that. But what I want to challenge you with today is getting really good at knowing who you want to be, who you are moving forward in your life.

This is your life, this is nobody else’s life, it’s yours and yours alone, truly. It’s so life changing and life giving, it expands our lives so much when we put ourselves first and we know who we are. We decide who we are. We get clear about what’s the most important thing to us. How can we be our best selves and stop trying to make everyone else their best selves, stop trying to make everyone else comfortable? What if we just decide, I’m going to make everyone as uncomfortable as they want to be while I am creating a life I love, I value, what makes me the happiest, what makes me the most comfortable and powerful?

And I want to tell you, be a goldfish when we’re women in the second half of life, which we are, we’re women in the second half of life. I am 62, you might be in your 40s, 50s, 60s, even 70s, listening to this. We have a pretty good memory. We have habits of bringing, dragging, hauling a lot of junk with us in our mind, just dragging it along day after day, month after month, year after year of all of our past mistakes, holding on to them, clinging on to hurts and grievances of what other people have done to us or said about us. Or things that we have done to other people and we keep holding onto them and it is so pointless. It is so useless, it keeps us so stuck.

And if we can just be goldfishes in this ocean of life, we can let every single thing go that is in our mind that is not serving us anymore, we stop talking about it, we stop thinking about it, we stop kind of fondling like we do a little blanket, we stop giving it any air time. We literally, you guys, let it go and we pull all of our thoughts back to today and who I am today and what I want to think about today moving forward. If we learn how to do that, our entire lives open up and change for the better.

Strong, confident and happy, we can be women who are strong, confident and happy as the baseline every single day moving forward. Nothing creates a more productive, enthusiastic, motivated, inspiring life than a woman who knows who she is, who feels so confident in her own skin. So this is the work that we’re very capable of doing in the second half of life and this is what we all want. I promise you, you will not grow into a confident, strong, happy woman on a daily basis if you continue to argue for your beliefs, for your limiting beliefs.

So many people do that and so many people do it without even knowing they’re doing it. So many women in the second half of life do it without even knowing they’re doing it. I just open all the portals for everyone to get to dream big and create whatever they want and to become strong, courageous, competent, confident, happy, engaging, resilient and resourceful women. That’s who we are. Let’s normalize all of that in the second half of life.

Anything that you’re thinking about right now that you want to create for yourself, you can decide to do that. And then you can just figure out how to get to work, taking the first step and then the second step and then the third step. And you just figure out the path as you go, which is just so fun and your life becomes this magical color wheel that is so fun to live. It’s so fun to get up every morning and live this life that you’ve created by being brave and bold and taking chances on yourself. You know what’s best for you, trust yourself, you decide ahead of time and then stick with that plan, stick with that opinion.

And know that whatever you’re working on, this is why it’s so good to have a coach because I will just help you learn how to trust yourself and learn how to have an opinion and value that opinion and stick by that opinion, have your own back when you make your decisions. You guys, it is so much fun being a really good decision maker and deciding everything for your life ahead of time and not pulling other people and sticking by your decision.

If you don’t know what you want, if you’re living someone else’s idea of what you want, let’s say you’re living your husband’s dream life instead of your dream life or your kids’ dream life instead of your dream life. You’ve got to develop the skill, the practice, the habit, the discipline of knowing what you want. And then you focus your energy on taking the actions that are required to get what you want. That’s why we’re here.

Our life, you guys, in the second half of life, I’m going to just blow your mind today with some new ideas and new thoughts or maybe even thoughts that I’ve introduced to you before but I haven’t just pounded it into your brain. The second half of life, you guys, is way better than the first. This is not the time to take a step back and put our feet up and live on a little budget for the next 40 years. What in the world, who caused us to think in such a crazy way? This is a crazy mindset for the second half of life to think these are the years that we slow down.

So you’re telling me, I’m 62 years old, you’re telling me that for the next 40 years, because I am planning on living until I’m 102 and beyond. So for the next 40 years of my life, which for a lot of people that’s a full lifetime, you’re telling me that I am required to live on a budget. So I can’t ‘afford’ the things that I want, to live on a budget, to slow down, to be available, to support everybody else and to live a smaller life, a quiet life, that I’m extra vulnerable right now, that I’m getting old, this is what old people do. I’m telling you that is so much nonsense.

I am absolutely 100% sure that we need to change that whole script, that whole story because, you guys, this is our time to step up, to create more goodness and value in the world, to create more money so we can ‘afford’ to do every single dream that we’ve ever had. This is our time. We’re free. We are wise. We no longer have the constraints of having to raise a family. We are not raising anybody anymore. We have kids raising their kids, we need to stop raising people. We need to raise ourselves. This is our time.

Thank you for listening to my 100th episode. And don’t forget to head over to www.kymshowerslifecoach.com/giveaway to enter my 100th episode contest to win yourself a pair of AirPod Pros. Thank you and good luck.

If you love this podcast, I invite you to come work with me. Go to kymshowerslifecoach.com. Sign up for my next group and retreat and let’s create your dream life together.