Ep 87. What Do You Do with an Idea?

I am Kym Showers, and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 87: What Do You Do with an Idea?

Hey, friends. Welcome to Reinvented After 40, a podcast for all you women in the second half of life who are ready to take responsibility for your own well-being and create a life you love living.

I’m your host, Kym Showers, and after spending the first 40 years of my life people-pleasing and following all the rules, I was exhausted and ready for a change. I reinvented myself. I stopped outsourcing my happiness. And I’ve been brave enough to live a different kind of life.

I’ll be here each week to help you do the same thing. It’s going to be fun. Let’s go.

Hey everyone, welcome back to my show. How are you today? This is, what day is it today? It’s May 2nd, this is Tuesday May 2nd. And I am recording this episode that will come out after my retreat which I am so excited about. My retreat starts this Thursday. In two days I get to meet for the very first time in person, all of my clients, my beloved, beautiful, amazing, inspiring clients and I am very much looking forward to it. I had this idea a couple of years ago that I was going to this year build into my business, retreats, in person live events.

It was an idea that I had because I loved going to my coach’s live events and I knew it made such a difference being with her in person. It was so inspiring, so motivating and being with other women who kind of just wanted the same things I wanted in life, because we do feel a little bit out on our own when we are wanting to change. We’re usually surrounded by people like our husbands and our friends, our groups of friends and our family who maybe aren’t thinking the way that we think and are not wanting the same things we want. And don’t have the ideas that we have.

And so it’s really important to be together so that we don’t feel alone, so we can just take an idea, a dream, a goal we have and put it out in the universe, put it in motion in our life, it’s so valuable for us. So a couple of years ago I had this idea that I was going to have client retreats and I am now in the week of hosting my very first client retreat.

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 you know I love books. I am so madly in love with books. And I used to have a huge library before I moved to the beach. And I gave mostly all of my books away but I kept a few. And the few that I have kept are so meaningful to me.

And I pulled a few out this week to kind of go through when I’ve been working on what I want to offer my clients this week at the retreat. I’m going to tell you quickly today what these books are that I’ve been going through because if you haven’t read them, I’m going to highly recommend that you purchase them, you either listen to them or you read them. These are actually real life books, paper books that I have in a very scaled down little, tiny library that feels like gold to me. They’re just my old treasures. And I can’t get enough.

Every time I read a chapter or read a page even, I get something new pops out at me because I have changed so much since the last time I read it. So I’m going to tell you real quick what books that are so meaningful to me that are just sitting right here before me. Because I love when someone else that I trust and know shares how they get their ideas, what books they’re reading, what books have changed their life, has brought lots of transformation in their life. And these books have definitely done this for me.

So The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz which I have talked to you about several times. This book has changed my life and it keeps changing my life. I keep reminding my brain, my new agreements, the four most important agreements to me and I just keep shifting how I live because of this book. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. I love the book, Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes. This is one of the books that I kept. And let me tell you, I went from 1,000 books down to literally maybe 25 books. So these are very important to me for different reasons.

But The Year of Yes by Shonda Rhimes is so worth reading. It’s so good. You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero, literally changed everything that I thought about myself. And I just keep practicing her mindset, her beliefs, her self-concept, her self-confidence. She’s created so much for herself. Her life has totally transformed. And she is a coach. She is an author and a coach but she’s been so inspiring for me. And this book, so worth reading, You Are A Badass by Jen Sincero, I highly recommend it. I know I’ve told you about it before.

And then I talk about this book all the time, Atomic Habits by James Clear. You guys, if you don’t have a copy of Atomic Habits, get a copy of Atomic Habits, habits, our habits are everything. The way that we create a life we love living is by creating atomics habits that we love practicing. All these little, tiny habits that we have every single day, whether they’re unconscious habits or conscious habits are shaping our life. They’re the reasons that we either love our life or we’re disappointed with our life.

And he gives so many great examples and ideas, new ideas for habits, anything that resonates with you that you can just start practicing that you can start adopting. So this continues to be an important book of my life, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

And then the title of this podcast and this may be a book that I’ve mentioned before and it may not be but I kept this book and I keep buying it for people, whether you’re a child, whether you’re one of my babies or whether you’re a 62 year old woman like me. I love giving this book as a gift. It is called What Do You Do With An Idea. And it looks like a children’s book. It is actually sold in the children’s book section of Barnes & Noble and that’s where you will find it. And it’s written by Kobi Yamada and illustrated by Mae Besom. I think that’s how you say her last name. But oh my gosh, you guys, What Do You Do With An Idea is for every single woman on the planet.

And I forgot, oh my gosh, I didn’t mention Big Magic. Okay, let me just skip back. Listen, Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a book called Big Magic, I forgot to mention Big Magic. Probably my favorite book of all time. I resonate with it. I relate to it. The way that my imagination works and my kind of magical way of thinking. I mean every word in Big Magic, the book, Big Magic is so helpful for me. And just reinforces the way that I think and feel and show up every day to my life and the relationship I have with myself and the relationship I have with ideas and dreams and even with all my people.

So Big Magic is so inspiring, so motivating for any dream, any idea that you have. So back to What Do You Do With An Idea by Kobi Yamada. So I am actually going to read this book to you. I want you to stick with me, hang with me because it’s short, it’s very much illustrated. It’s a beautiful book, but what I want to tell you today, he says it so much better I think than I do. But I’ll talk to you a little bit about it once I’m done.

Okay, What Do You Do With An Idea. So there’s a little picture of a little, I’m going to call her a little girl. And she’s just looking at this little, it looks like a little magical egg, like a little golden egg with a crown. She says, “One day I had an idea. Where did it come from? Why is it here I wondered? What do you do with an idea? At first I didn’t think much of it. It seemed kind of strange and fragile. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I just walked away from it. I acted like it didn’t belong to me but it followed me.

I worried what others would think. What will people say about my idea? I kept it to myself. I hid it away and didn’t talk about it. I tried to act like everything was the same as it was before my idea showed up. But there was something magical about my idea. I had to admit I felt better and happier when it was around. It wanted food. It wanted to play. Actually it wanted a lot of attention. It grew bigger and we became friends. I shared it to other people even though I was afraid of what they would say.

I was afraid that if people saw it, they would laugh at it. I was afraid they would think it was silly and many of them did. They said it was no good. They said it was too weird. They said it was a waste of time and that it would never become anything. And at first I believed them. I actually thought about giving up my idea. I almost listened to them, but then I realized, what do they really know? This is my idea I thought. No one knows it like I do and it’s okay if it’s different and weird and maybe a little crazy.

I decided to protect it, to care for it. I fed it good food. I worked with it, I played with it, but most of all, I gave it my attention. My idea grew and grew and so did my love for it. I built it a new house, one with an open roof where it could look up at the stars, a place where it could be safe to dream. I liked being with my idea, it made me feel more alive, like I could do anything. It encouraged me to think big and then to think even bigger. It shared secrets with me. It showed me how to walk on my hands because it said it is good to have the ability to see things differently. I couldn’t imagine my life without it.

Then one day something amazing happened, my idea changed right before my very eyes. It spread its wings, took flight and burst into the sky. I don’t know how to describe it but it went from being here to being everywhere. It wasn’t just a part of me anymore, it was now a part of everything. And then I realized what you do with an idea, you change the world. The end.

You guys, the most precious, magical story that is so true, so powerful, so motivating. 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. And whatever it is, whatever the creative thing that you really want to do that you’ve been so afraid and you’ve been hiding from and running from and keeping it a secret. This is the thing that I today, I want to just challenge you with, to bring it out into the open.

What do you do with an idea? You let it take flight and you put it in motion in the world for the benefit of all of us, whether it be writing a book like all these authors that have literally transformed my life, for becoming a life coach who has a podcast. This is my idea. One day I’m going to write a book. And I have so many ideas for my future. And my idea for this year was to create a retreat, a live event and that’s what’s happening this week. And I’m so proud of myself for the benefit of not only me and my clients but it’s such a ripple effect for all of us.

All of us women in the second half of life, we are the wise ones. This is our time to put our dreams, our ideas into emotion and to think bigger and more braver than we’ve ever allowed ourselves to think before. We don’t want to argue for our limitations or our weaknesses ever again. We have to stop complaining about what we aren’t. And we have to be courageous enough to fuel who we are and believe something even better about ourselves and what’s possible for the next year, for the next five years, for the next 10 years.

I mean oh my gosh, everything keeps expanding in my life because of this way of thinking and all the courage that I keep investing in and keep calling out and keep putting into motion even though I’m afraid. It’s not about not being afraid and not feeling anxious about it. It’s expanding your capacity to hold fear and feel the anxiety and do the thing anyways and feed that idea anyways even when we have self-doubt. That’s all a normal part of being a human and we’ll never not be a human, but we can expand our self-concept, expand our self-confidence and what our abilities are.

So this is what I want to encourage you with today. I want you to read all of these books in the next year. They will be transformational, I promise you. I want you to sign up for my May group that starts in a couple of weeks. Go to my website, get in this group. Do not miss it. You will change your life by coaching with me every single week for the next six months. It will be life changing for you. You will think differently about yourself. You will put your ideas out into the world so that they can take flight and be bigger than the little, tiny idea that you’ve been ignoring and been too afraid to even fuel.

So everything that you can imagine, everything that you have been hoping, dreaming of for the rest of your life, for the second half of life, all of it is so possible. And being in my group container will be the fuel that you need to change the way that you think about yourself, change your relationship with your dreams, change your relationship with you, with your dreams, with all your people. And give you courage enough to step away from other people’s opinions and trust yourself most of all, trust your opinion most of all. And know that you have all the answers already inside of you, my friend, you 100% do.

So go to my website, kymshowerslifecoach.com. Sign up for that group and you will hear from me immediately. You have a spot in that group that starts in a couple of weeks. It’s Tuesday mornings at nine o’clock, do not miss it. You’ll love it so much. Your only regret, I promise you will be that you waited so long to do it. So I know there’s so many of you out there that are humming and harring. But this is the group to be in, this is it. Take the leap. You have this idea, fuel it, feed it, give it some life and change your life forever.

Alright, I love you so much, have the best week and I will see you next Thursday.

Thanks for listening to Reinvented After 40. If you want more information or resources from the podcast, please visit KymShowersLifeCoach.com.