Ep 117. Lovingly Unattached

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 117, Lovingly Unattached.

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.

Hey, my friends, welcome back to the pod. I am so happy to be here with you this morning. It is Thursday, the Thursday after Thanksgiving. And the Thursday, the day before December 1st, 2023. This year, what a year, you guys. I know I’ve told you before but this has been the year of my life. I have changed. I have grown. I have expanded in ways that I have always wanted and have worked for and dreamt about. And I did it, I absolutely did it this year and I’m so dang proud of myself.

I want you to have this kind of feeling about you, of course I want you to have it every single day about you, and it takes intentional work. It takes a willingness to be uncomfortable. It takes courage to do really brave, hard things. I’m telling you, I’ve done so many brave, hard things this year. I’ve been talking to you a lot about breaking free from codependency because I’ve seen so much goodness in my own journey in this area in how much progress I’ve made. And I think even the most progress of all has been this year for some reason.

And so I’m just wrapping up this 2023 on such a high note for myself. And going into 2024 with so much motivation and inspiration and encouragement in my own body for what is possible for me next year. I think I’ve broken through so many things that maybe I felt a little bit afraid about, and I just don’t feel afraid about them anymore. And I want you to be able to say the same thing about your life. The reason I titled this lovingly unattached is because I’ve made so many decisions about who I am moving forward.

I am lovingly unattached to things outside of me, validation outside of me, love from people outside of me. And I am lovingly attached to me. I am lovingly attached to my own thoughts about myself and giving myself all the validation I’ll ever need. So I’m not attached to anything outside of me that I don’t have any control of. So I’m no longer people pleasing at the level that I’ve always people pleased. I know there’s traces of it in me still, and I want to always be aware of that, to keep cleaning that up. But it’s definitely not a problem for me anymore.

I have broken free in so many areas of codependency, some things have risen to the surface this year for me. And I have been working on those things in my own life. Really, you guys, as much as other people bring it out in us, because, of course, codependency means that we are trying to get something from someone else.

Basically we over-function in someone else’s life or other people’s lives. Usually as women with grown kids, we’re over-functioning in their life when we should not be even functioning at all in their life.

I think the healthiest way to be is to be over-functioning in our own life and pouring out all of our energy into our own growth and building something creative and amazing and happy and vibrant in our own life. And then just trusting that our grown kids are on their own journey and they get to experience the 50/50 of life as well. And in their suffering and in their consequences of choices that they’ve made, it isn’t our job to relieve them of that. We can be lovingly supportive and lovingly and unattached. We do not have to go in and rescue them ever.

We can support them, we can love them but there’s such a healthy way of doing that. It is never at our own expense, that is the difference. There’s just such a different way of relating to the people that we love the most. And I just feel like for the first time it feels so clear to me about who I am as Jeff’s wife, as Jeff’s partner. And really I just think of myself as his partner because the old idea of wife, I totally reject now. And I just take my seat up at the table. I am his equal partner. I have just as much say and my opinion is just as important.

I am just as wise and strong and smart as he is. Everything that we have, we have 100% built together. I’m so confident in who I am in this partnership. And that does nothing but lovingly support our marriage. I love being married to him. It has been so good for me and my growth. But I’ve had to break free from trying to fix him.

There’s nothing to fix about him. Anything that he wants to change in his life, that’s 100% up to him. So anytime I have thoughts like that, that he’s doing it wrong, I just turn it all back on me.

What is it that I need, that I need to give myself? If I have a request to make of him I’m very confident and I make requests of him all the time and that’s fine and great. And usually he honors them, but it’s never about him. It’s always about me and the same with my grown kids. It’s never about them. It’s always about me. We want to blame our kids, our husband or other people that we spend a lot of time with. We want to give them credit when we are feeling bad.

But the truth is, you guys, we need to just take ownership of everything that we’re feeling bad about. Figure that out, get some coaching on that. Take responsibility for it. And start making the inside changes that we need to make, un-attach ourselves lovingly, un-attach ourselves to any outcomes that are outside of us, which means our kids. Anything that they’re doing, any ways that they’re acting, however, they’re living and how they interact with us, that isn’t about us at all. That is about them.

What is about us is deciding who we want to be in the relationship. We want to be the highest version of ourselves. We’re so in tune, overly in tune, this is codependency, to their mood. And we’re under-in tune to our mood. So we want them to be happy at our own expense. So we meddle in their lives, we give them opinions that they don’t ask for, we try and fix things for them to try and get them to be happy. But let me tell you something. Your only job in your life is to figure out how to make yourself happy.

Your only job in your life is to take care of your health, your wealth, your inside job wealth, your heart, your mind, your spirit, the way that you think and feel in your body every day. I want you to get some awareness around yourself. Take all that energy, all that awareness, all that intuition that you have about other people that you love the most and I want you to turn all of that back on you. This will change everything for you moving forward, I promise you.

So this is such good news and it’s so inspiring to think about life this way. Instead of complaining about what’s going wrong and complaining about why you feel bad and talking about why you can’t do, you don’t have the life that you want. Why don’t you stop all of that, my friend and why don’t you just get to work feeling good. Figure out how to feel good every day. Figure out how to create a life you can’t wait to get up every morning and live. I promise you, that is what all my energy is spent time on.

I spend all my energy on creating the feelings I want to feel every day so that I can get everything done that’s on my planner for the day, do it at such a high level of optimistic energy and love and wellbeing and steadfastness. That is contagious because there’s not very many women who are willing to do this work in the second half of life and I have the secret. This is it, and I don’t even want to call it a secret because I want everyone to know about it. So don’t keep it a secret.

Share this episode with any woman over 40 who you know could use any of this, but don’t do it unless you’re doing the work too. I remember and I think I’ve talked to you about this before, but when I used to go to church, I would sit in church every Sunday and think about all the people that could use what the pastor was teaching that Sunday instead of knowing for sure that all of this was for me. And recognizing that my brain was doing that, was deflecting.

So you’re going to find your brain deflecting too right now, like my daughter could really use this or my next door neighbor could really use this. I wish I could share this with my mom. So when I first started coaching and I always say six years ago, you guys, I’ve been saying six years ago for a while. But I do think it’s six years ago. I think when it was five years ago, I started saying it’s six years ago. So, I think for the last two years I’ve been saying six years ago, but I did start coaching six years ago.

And my life has done nothing but expand since then because I can’t coach my clients past my own growth. So I am so motivated by my business every day. And I just remember, when I first started coaching, I had women contacting me not to hire me for their changes and their growth, but they wanted to hire me so I could coach their daughter so she could change and be different. So I want you to be onto your brain, that’s what all of our brains do.

I want you to get lovingly unattached to your grown kids, lovingly unattached to maybe your mom, your best friend, to your spouse, your partner. And stop being in their business. Stop trying to get them to think differently and feel differently and act differently. And be completely, lovingly attached to you, to what you want to work on, what you need to change about yourself. What you want to change about yourself. The kind of woman that you want to create for yourself next year.

And a year, you guys, makes a huge difference because 2023 I am a different woman than at the beginning of the year. I’m going to spend some time and listen to some podcasts from when I first started. I haven’t done that in a while, or even at the beginning of the year, listen to January 2023’s podcasts. So that I can just really detect the difference in who I am on the inside. Oh my gosh, I truly feel like a different woman. So that’s all I can tell you right now.

But I am so much more confident. I’m so much clearer about everything. I have very little anxiety. It’s a crazy, miraculous miracle. It’s a miracle. I literally do not think about what other people are thinking about me because I am so dialed into what I think about me. I’m so attached to useful thoughts that keep me growing and moving forward in confidence and compassion for myself and love for myself. And it just shows in every single thing that I do. It shows in the way that I feel every day in my skin when I wake up in the morning.

It shows in the way that I show up for myself, the way that I trust myself. I don’t promise myself I’m going to do something and then not do it. So I coach a lot on that. Most women who hire me come in and say, “I’ll show up for everybody else, but I won’t show up for myself.” So I want you to flip that. Not that I don’t want you to show up for everyone else, but don’t do it until you’re really good at showing up for you. Show up for you first. That’s how you break free of codependency.

And that’s literally how I did is I just decided I had to figure this out and how to be the most important person in my life, to be the boss of my life, to still love my people. But be unattached to these old un-useful thoughts that I had that I somehow needed to keep them happy, somehow needed them to like me and validate me and tell me I’m doing a good job. I don’t need any of that anymore.

I have such a wealth inside of me of this certainty, this trust, this love, this wholeness, this wellbeing, it’s really a well inside of me, of confidence in who I am, where I’ve been, who I am now and where I’m headed. And this is everything. And so what it does, it keeps me swimming in my own lane which is such a useful helpful thought for me. I just stay in my own lane when my brain tries to drag me over into someone else’s lane. It’s like, no, that’s not my lane. Come back to your lane, what are you supposed to be doing.

No one can distract us without our permission. No one can distract you without your permission. So just know that, notice that. You’re not the boss of your life when you let other people just bombard you any time of any day and call you into their lane. When you’ve had plenty of your own laps to swim in your lane and yet you are letting them and maybe the fear that they’re going to be disappointed or the fear that they’re going to get off track themselves. And you are the one that needs to keep them on track.

So let me tell you something. I’m going to tell you something really important, so listen up. You don’t have to keep anyone on track except for you. You keep you on track. That’s your one and only job. It’s your kids’ job to keep themselves on track. It’s your husband’s job to keep him on track. They get to be in any mood they want to be in, but at the same time, your home is yours. You get to decide what mood’s in your home.

I have clients who are trying to get their semi grown kids out of their home and launch them off on their own, they keep coming back. Listen, my kids don’t even get to spend the night with us. I’m like, “No, this is not good for us.” And I talk about this all the time, to get those grown kids out of your house. You get to live in your house the way that you want to live in your house. It’s no one else’s house, it’s your house. You get to determine the vibe in your house.

And I’ve always known this about me, and I’m so glad about that. So even now when Jeff comes home from work, I’m not really vibing with his mood anymore. I mean, most of the time, he comes home in a good mood or a fair mood or whatever. But I’m telling you, before I knew this work, I was so up in his moods and so affected by him, so affected by mostly everybody’s moods, and especially with Jeff I had the thoughts, ridiculous thoughts like somehow something has gone wrong, somehow he might be mad at me. I might have spent too much money.

I might not be the wife he wants or needs me to be. He used to come home when we lived in Bakersfield and turn the air conditioning off or turn it up so I would get really nervous about that. I forgot to turn the air conditioning up so I could kind of fool him in that we hadn’t kind of been living in a warm house all day. We weren’t staying in a cool house. Even though he had to go to a really cold office and work in a cold office all day. He didn’t want to pay a high PG&E bill. So I would get really anxious about that and try and fool him. But some days I forgot to turn it up.

I was just coaching a client on this yesterday. So we all do it. I know that we do it and I know I’ve told you I used to hide shopping bags in my trunk of my car. Just all that nonsense, I don’t do any of that anymore. I’m like, “Well, if he doesn’t want to be married to me, he doesn’t like the way that I am. Well, he has a decision to make.” I’m just going to keep being me and living my best life and being completely honest about it. I’m not going to ever, ever, ever make myself small again to make someone else comfortable. I don’t even care who they are. I will never do that.

So I want you to be aware of your codependent tendencies. I want you to be lovingly unattached to the opinions of the people you love the most, the moods of people you love the most. That’s totally on them 100%. Your mood on a daily basis is 100% on you. No one creates your mood for you without your permission. So I just am calling you out on that. I want you to know for sure, you can be in whatever mood you want all day long with practice. And that’s exactly what I do. I’m so tuned into my moods and my body and my thoughts, and I love that about myself.

It just creates so much goodness in my life, in my daily life, and then all the days add up, and then all of a sudden I have this year that has blown my own mind. And I want to be able to teach you how to do the same thing if you’re a woman over 40, a woman in the second half of life. It is so possible for you to learn how to be lovingly attached to yourself 100% and lovingly unattached to all the people that right now you’re leaking all of your energy to and you’re feeling so much resentment about it because they are not cooperating.

They are not giving you back what you need because they were never supposed to. Only you can give yourself what you need. No one is coming to save us, my friend. We get to save ourselves. If I’ve done anything in the last six years, I’ve learned how to save myself. It has been the most fabulous, the most magnificent, the most extraordinary six years of my life. And especially this year just tripled, quadrupled all of it.

So because I’ve done big things and now I have so much confidence in myself to keep moving forward, think bigger, dream bigger, take bigger action, massive action. It just all sounds so much fun to me. But in the month of December, I’m so excited about this month because I know I’m going to have the best month of December I’ve ever had because I know how to manage my mind. I know how to manage my emotions. I know how to put myself first and take care of myself.

So I am going to just have a lavishly, darling, fun, twinkly, lit up month. I’m taking two weeks off for the first time in six years. So I’m so proud of myself. I am an example of what’s possible for women. And I just decided this is what I need, I don’t know if I’m going to do it every year, but this year I for sure, I’ve already told my clients this. It’s already marked off on my calendar.

Even my podcast that comes out the week of Christmas is going to be, my podcast editors are picking the one and introducing it. It’s an oldie but goodie, one of the ones that you guys have all loved the most. One of the top 10 as far as listenership goes. So I’m excited about that. Also I’m taking the week of Christmas off and the week of New Year’s off, two whole weeks of holiday. And it will be a staycation because Jeff and I always say, we call ourselves a working vacation just because we live in a resort town, a little beach town. We look out at the ocean every single day. We’re very chill.

We both work super hard. We love our work. And we add so much goodness to the world and also we get to stare at the ocean, we get to hike, we get to be with the people we love the most. We get lots of rest. So I’m going to definitely get my eight to nine hours of sleep every single night in the month of December. I’m going to work up until the week of Christmas and then I’m going to take two whole weeks off from coaching. My plan is to work ahead for 2024. I start a new group Tuesday, January 9th, and it’s nine o’clock California time and I have a spot for you.

I have lots of spots for all of you all, so come in. You’re going to love it so, so, so much. You can sign up right now. You can sign up today and get lots of extra goodness even before then, just get your year up and rolling. But our group sessions won’t start until Tuesday, January 9th, which is so exciting. So on my two weeks off because I can’t help myself, I love my work so much. And it just helps me so much as far as my expansiveness, my confidence, my growth.

This work is something I would do whether I got paid for it or not. This is what’s so fun about starting a business that you love because what will happen is you can’t help but evolve and change and grow into the highest version of yourself. But I want to be doing this for a long time. So I know that to make sure that I have longevity, which is my plan, is I need to really take care of myself, give myself lots of space, lots of rest, lots of time to power think, to super think.

And so that’s what I’m going to spend those two weeks doing, especially the week after Christmas is super thinking about my business, creating some new content for this podcast. Reflecting on the year 2023 and taking lots of intentional notes about it. And then thinking, really planning for 2024, what I want to create in 2024 for myself. I will be turning 63 the first week of March. And Jeff and I will be celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary the first week of August. So we have a big year ahead of us of celebrations which we can always find reasons to celebrate this fabulous life.

So you have this one precious life that you’ve been given. It’s just sitting here waiting for you to explore it, to enjoy it, to create it, to have some fun with it. I want you to learn how to keep doing the work of getting out of codependent people pleasing patterns. Break up the patterns, even if someone else wants you to keep doing the dance. You just stop doing the dance, because that’s all it is with your people. You’re just doing a certain dance with them.

Just grow your capacity to let them be disappointed. Let them be mad at you. Let them suffer the consequences of their choices. It doesn’t even matter. It’s none of your business anyways, if you have grown kids, if you have a husband. They’re all very fit to take care of themselves. They do not need you nor your opinions, which is really good to know and it is such good news. So you’re welcome, my friend.

Okay, I love you so much. If you are not a client of mine, I would love for you to be a client of mine. Go to my website kymshowerslifecoach.com. Don’t miss this January group. It will be phenomenal. The women in it already, you’re going to fall in love with. You’re all very like-minded. And you will all be coming to my retreat the first week of May 2024. And your whole life will change. You want 2024 to be your year. You want to be able a year from now to be saying the same words that I’m saying now about me in my life.

I promise you, if you start doing this work or if you continue doing this work and you show up for yourself and you give yourself all the validation you need, all the love, that wellbeing, that big wellbeing inside of you. I promise you, your life will just burst wide open with so much joy, so much love, so much excitement and motivation and happiness, I promise, promise, promise you. So happy first week of December 2023. It’s been a fabulous year. It’s going to be an amazing month and thanks for showing up today. I love you all, so very much. And I will talk to you next Thursday.

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.