00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 184, "Excited About Middle Age." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:20 

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. So happy to have you here with me. I hope that you had a great Christmas, a great New Years, and that you are ready to start this year with a bang. I think it's so fun that we get to this New Year time and it's just such a natural time for our brains to start thinking about "what do I want, what do I want different this year, what do I want to create?" And if you were able to get my end of year review, please take time to take care of that and to work through that if you haven't yet. It is such a brilliant exercise. It really helps me when I get clear on how my last year has been reviewing my last year and there's some great questions on there to really help you clarify a lot of things: relationships, and how you're spending your time, and your job, and all those kinds of things really helps to clarify for you what direction you want to go in the next year. I just really, really love that experience and that exercise and I hope that you will take a few minutes to do that. 

01:27 

So we are going to start talking today about being excited about middle age. Now the reason I kind of wanted to choose this at this point is I think that very often we feel like we are stuck in middle age, and here's what I think is going on. I think for many of us, the last two, three, four decades we have been very distracted from our own lives. Obviously we're living our lives. We're doing things. We're accomplishing things. But I think many of us have gotten distracted by all of the responsibilities of those 20s, 30s, and 40s. We've gotten distracted with raising children and all of the time and attention that that takes. And maybe "distracted" is the wrong word because we want to do those things. It's not like we're doing something that we don't enjoy and something that we're not committed to. But we lose the focus on our own hopes and our own dreams. 

02:25 

I remember being in my 20s and having so many ideas about what I wanted to do, what I wanted to create, how I wanted to contribute to the world and impact the world in a positive way. And then got started having children. And so much of that just got put on the back burner, got set aside, so that I could take care of things that seemed so pressing. And they were very important. And I'm so grateful that I took the time and the years to do that. But what happened in the meantime is those dreams of mine started collecting dust over there on the shelf and I didn't look at them for a long time. And I always felt like there was more out there of things that I wanted to do, but I didn't know how to get there. And that's kind of how I felt as my kids started growing into high school, getting older, moving out, me not being needed so much. I just felt like a little bit stuck, and being stuck can be very draining, and it's very self perpetuating. The more we're stuck, the more that we think we're stuck, the more that we think we're stuck, the more that we get stuck because thinking that we're stuck creates us being stuck. Let me show you how that works. 

03:40 

If we put that in a thought model, right? If the thought is "I'm stuck," the feeling could be a lot of things, but let's say that in for this instance, the feeling is frustrated. "I'm stuck and I feel frustrated." And then the action is that I shut down. I don't try very hard. I stay doing the same things. I don't push myself. And then the end result of that is that I actually stay stuck. I don't move forward. I don't start progressing and moving into something that I really want to do. One reason we start feeling stuck in middle age is because we have stopped dreaming of our future. We started dreaming for our children's future, right? Because that's kind of what we do when we have kids. We start dreaming about what they're going to become. And to put it into the coach terms, we start creating manuals for their lives of what they should do and how they're going to do it, and they're going to get married, and they're going to go to college, and they're going to do this. We start creating all these manuals and start dreaming for their future when really we need to let go of the manuals for them. And we need to stop dreaming for them. It's not to say we don't have great hopes for them, but we need to start looking at and dreaming of our future again. 

04:55 

And like we said before, most of us didn't feel stuck in our early 20s, because we had these dreams and ambitions. We had these ideas of what we wanted to do and how we wanted to go. We had these dreams for our future, but many of us set those dreams aside in order to manage the craziness of our daily lives. And so it's time for us in middle age to get back into the practice of dreaming about our future. This is how we're going to get excited about middle age, resurrecting those dreams, bringing them back to life, and dreaming new things that now we didn't even know existed back then. If I were to go back even five years, I will tell you, I did not even know that podcasts existed five years ago. I had never listened to one. They weren't even on my radar. And now look at me, almost three years in of podcasts and I listen to probably anywhere between 10 and 20 podcasts a week. 

05:52 

And so now, I mean, we need to get back into not only our old dreams, but also our new dreams. And here's the thing, we are in control of our thoughts, we're in control of our dreams. We get to dream whatever we want. Nobody gets to tell us what we get to think and what we get to dream about. But since we've gotten stuck, many of us, and we've stopped dreaming, sometimes we don't even know where to begin to start dreaming again, but we don't even know how to begin to start getting unstuck. 

06:25 

So here's some thoughts that are going to help. Okay, rather than saying, "I'm going to do something big," we can just start even with stepping into the idea that "I cannot be unstuck." So six thoughts that will help you do that. 

06:39 

"I'm learning how to get unstuck. I want dreams to be part of my life. I don't want fear to get in the way of what I really want. I want to be the kind of person who knows what she wants. Thinking about what I really want in life is fun. And I deserve to have fun even in middle age, even in midlife." So there's six thoughts that we can even just start toying with and playing with that will help to get the juices flowing a little bit. That will help to nudge that ball so that we can start doing it because we can be very resting at dreaming. But I want you to ask yourself this question: "what if middle age is only the beginning of the best part of our lives? What if it's just the start?" I really, really believe that this is the best part of our lives. And yet so many of us choose to stay stuck. We choose to be in the doldrums of the same thing day after day after day instead of pushing ourselves. I think that middle age is the perfect storm. All of our efforts, all of our time, all of our talents, all of our experience and our expertise, all of our lives, have come to this point where we understand things that we've never understood before. We have a perspective on life that we've never had before and our children are moving out of the home and we get to start dreaming again about what do we want to do about so many things that we have set aside. It is the perfect storm. Middle age love it so much. It is time to start to create our greatest impact and our greatest contribution in the world. This is what middle age is for. So here I'm going to give you today nine secrets to get unstuck and to get excited about your life again in middle age. So here we go. These are going to be great. You'll love these. 

08:48 

Number one: I want us to start paying attention to our thinking. Notice how do you close down your ideas? How often do you say things like, "I can't do that" or "I can't have that" or "I'm too old for that" or "it's too late in my life" or "I'm stuck and I don't know what to do"? Pay attention to your thoughts. Become a watcher of your thoughts. I want you to know something. You are not your thoughts. Thoughts are not you. They're just things that we are thinking. They don't dictate what we're capable of. So some things that you can do to help pay closer attention to your thinking. You can journal, you can do thought downloads. Put your thoughts in a thought bubble, a place away from you. And then look at your thoughts. Like see what's coming out of your brain and then stand back and go, huh, what about that thought? Is that thought serving me? Is it pushing me forward? Is that one of those thoughts that's keeping me stuck? Or is that a thought that is pushing me into a greater version of myself, into the next best version of myself? We have to start looking at our thoughts and we need to see which ones are serving us and which ones are not. And go from there. That's one of the first things that we can do. Start paying attention to what's going on in your head. 

10:13 

Number two, I want you to start noticing your feelings as associated with your thoughts. When you think thoughts like, "I can't do that" or "I can't have that" or "it's too late," how does that make you feel? Maybe discouraged, maybe shut down, but think about what's possible. Think about what could happen in your middle age. Think about stepping into dreams that you've always had, resurrecting those dreams, and then notice the feelings that you have then. And notice that those  feelings, those excited feelings come from thoughts and we get to create any feeling that we want. So my friend, learn to supervise your mind to create the thoughts that create the feelings that you want. Feelings of being motivated, feelings of being excited. Okay. And, but here's the thing, you can't trust your mind when it's out of practice and most of us get to middle age and our minds are out of practice of dreaming. So here's a little exercise that I want you to try to go along with this second secret. Okay? Make a list of three feelings that you want to feel. Do you want to feel excited? Do you want to feel motivated? Do you want to feel...oh, I don't know, my brain's drawing a blank right now. Do you want to feel trust for yourself? Make a list of the three feelings that you want to feel. Identify the thoughts that are going to create those feelings and then start implementing those thoughts. Become the boss of your brain. Tell your brain what to think. Don't let your brain run rampant. Don't let your brain run away with thoughts like, "I can't do that. That's too much. I'm too old." You're not too old. We are in the prime of our lives. This is the best time of our lives. We still have 30, 40, good, maybe even 50, good years ahead of us to do amazing things. So become the boss of your brain. Start telling your brain what to think instead of letting your brain think whatever it wants and use those thoughts to create the feelings that are going to move you forward. 

12:38 

Number three, I want you to start noticing your excuses. And this is kind of go along with number one, where we just are paying attention to our thoughts. But here, notice your excuses. All too often we focus on what we can't do rather than on what we can do. For example, we'll think that we're too busy. We're too old. I don't have enough money. We talk ourselves out of what we really want by making these excuses. So I want you to pay attention, and I want you to notice the five most common excuses that you use. And then I want you to again, pay attention. How do you feel when you think these excuses? Write them down. And then I want you to create five new thoughts that will counter these excuses. Okay? One way that you can do that is start using the phrase, "I wonder;" I wonder if I'm not too old. I wonder how I could do that without so much money. I want you to start catching the excuse and then I want you to start questioning the excuse. Catch it and question it. Catch yourself making excuses and then question it and move yourself out of it. 

13:56 

Number four, I want you to notice how you are unique. What about you is so special? We often have not asked these kinds of questions for decades and your lens on the world, how you see the world, your perspective of the world allows you to contribute in ways that nobody else can. You can do things and impact the world in a way that nobody else can because of your uniqueness. So I want you to start looking for themes to see what you're attracted to. What are you good at? Okay, I know that as as I've looked back over my life and done this kind of an exercise for me, I've noticed that that over the years, anytime I wanted to go into, a kind of a job or a work or serve or do something, I noticed themes of always wanting to help people live more fulfilling lives, to help them have better relationships, to help them be healthier physically and mentally and emotionally. And this is what eventually led me in my middle age to become a life coach and to start a podcast and to start coaching people, because I saw this pattern of behavior of something that was unique about me, that I wanted to help people up level their lives, step into their next best selves. And I found that life coaching was such a brilliant fit for me in that way. So how are you unique? I have some friends who are just drawn to music and they love music and they want to do things with that. I have other people who are drawn to young children and education and books and that kind of stuff. How are you unique? And start asking yourself, "how can I can use this uniqueness to contribute to the world?" 

15:50 

Alright, number five, I want you to start looking at what has always brought you joy, what has always attracted your attention. This is kind of a second step to number four. Your past joys will be a key to your present and your future joys. Here's another really fun exercise that you can do. I want you to go back to age 20 and I want you to start dividing your life into seven year increments. So you would go from age 20 to 27. What are some of the major things that happened in your life during that time? What are some of the things that made you the most joyful during that time period, the things that brought you the greatest joy, the greatest satisfaction? Okay, and then I want you to look at the next seven years. So from 28 to 35, do the same thing. What things brought you joy, what things made you feel really fulfilled? Look at that time period and start and then just keep doing that up until your current age. And I want you to start looking for common trends. It's really kind of a brilliant exercise to look back in chunks of time like that and look for common themes in each of those seven year increments. Okay. What have you always loved? What have you been good at? What have you really enjoyed doing during those time periods? And then ask yourself this question, "what is missing in my life today that would incorporate those things? What could I do to create more of that joy and satisfaction?" 

17:30 

Alright. Number six, I want you to start paying attention to and honoring your mini dreams. Okay, so sometimes we think  that dreams have to be these big, huge enormous things, but what about the little things that come up on a day-to-day basis? These are thoughts that push us out of our ordinary life and they're just little small things. They're ideas to help us get started. Maybe you want to develop a talent. Maybe you hear somebody sing a beautiful song and you think, "oh, I always wanted to be a better singer." There's a little mini dream right there. "I always wanted to know how to cook such and such." There's a mini dream. Our dreams do not have to start off huge, ginormous, and outlandish, right? Sometimes our dreams, these mini dreams, are some of the best way to just get us moving. So maybe you want to develop a talent. Maybe a mini dream is having a more connected relationship with your spouse or, like in my situation, having a relationship with someone, having a marriage with someone that is intimate and connected. Maybe it's healing relationships with your children. Maybe it's working in a certain field. Maybe it's writing a book, something like that. What are some of these mini dreams? Maybe you just want to write an article for a magazine to start off with. Maybe you just want to start journaling every day, right? There are so many things that you can do, little mini dreams that come up that you think, "oh, I would love to do that. That would be fun." So when these ideas come up, I want you to start writing them down and entertain the mini dream. What if I started taking voice lessons at age 53? What if I started doing that? Then what? Like, how would that fulfill me? How would that push me? How would that help me to start moving into this middle age with more grace and finesse and excitement? Okay, so entertain that mini dream. 

19:37 

Then ask yourself if you've some bigger questions. What would you do if you won a large sum of money? I want you to take the very first thought that comes that we that our brain is often like "oh no no I would never do that," and I want you to push away. Sometimes we push it away because we think "oh that's selfish" or "that's not the kind of person I want to be," but I want you to take that first thought. So maybe if you want a large sum of money your first thought would be "I'm gonna go buy a corvette." Right, and then immediately my brain would say "no I don't. I just want something practical." Well, why did my brain then first say a corvette? What's going on in my brain? What do I want? Entertain that idea of the corvette. That doesn't mean you have to go buy one, but entertain it. Look at it. What's going on with that? Okay, start asking yourselves questions like "what if I could have my dream job? What would it be and why? What would I do if I won the lottery? What would my dream house look like? Where would it be? Would it be on an island somewhere? Would it be up in the mountains somewhere? Would it be in a resort town? Would it be out in the middle of nowhere? What would I do with my time if I didn't have to work?" What a great question, right? "What would we do? Where are three places that you would want to visit and why? What would I do?" Start asking ourselves some of these amazing questions. "What is a regret that I have? What is a regret that I'm afraid of having? What famous person would I love to have lunch with? How come? What talent or gift do I wish that I had? What did I want to be when I was a child and why? What do I value most about my parents, about my favorite teacher, about my favorite person?" Start looking at the answers to these questions and realize that these are doorways into your mini dreams. And your mini dreams help us to understand ourselves so that we can then start dreaming on a larger scale. And we can start being excited about middle age again because we can start seeing our capacity for engaging with life in a completely different way. 

22:07 

Alright, number seven, let's waste less time. Let's start being more mindful of how we use our time. Wasting time can make us feel busy, but I want you to understand that busy is just a thought. So let's take a time on it. Let's look at what we do and how long it takes and let's reflect on it. Okay, so for example, sometimes I will sit down to do a podcast and something that should take me two hours max beginning to end will sometimes take me four hours. Well, how come? Let me look at what I'm doing. Well, sometimes I'll stop and I'll go check my email and sometimes I will stop and I'll check my Facebook to see if I have any Messages from anybody, and sometimes I will you know, I will get on and I will do all this stuff. I will waste a lot of time. Two hours. It will take me four hours to do something that generally should take me two hours. So I need to look at that time, and I need to look at how I'm wasting my time. And then make some conscious decisions of how do I want to use my time and I need to create a plan? 

23:19 

Here's the thing about time. Small, incremental nudges will make a huge difference. Sometimes we plan all day Saturday to clean our house. Well, here's the thing. What if I took a 10 minutes in the morning before I had to leave for work. I've got 10 minutes. What if I just went in and wiped down my bathroom really quick? Or what if I just went through my fridge really quick and pulled out all the old food and and dumped it down the disposal and got those dishes put in the dishwasher? What if every day I did that two or three times? Just had ten minutes of time that I didn't have anything and used that ten minutes to accomplish something. Then Saturday would come and guess what, I may be down to just one or two jobs because I'm  doing I'm using those small chunks of time. And that's just house cleaning. We could do that with anything. Doing a thought model...what if I have ten minutes and rather than just sitting there and kind of spacing out or jumping on a game on my phone or checking Facebook, what if instead I just did something a little bit productive? I know I'm going to clean out my storage room. So what if I just gather three or four boxes and take them down to my storage room? Get started on that a little piece at a time. So let's waste less time. It's a great way to start getting excited about middle age. 

24:48 

Number eight, I want us to not be so scared of when we feel envious of other people, and here's why. I think we often think about envy as being really bad, but envy can be a really great Instrument to help us see what we desire Okay? We can use it as an opportunity to identify things that we want in our lives. So when you feel a little bit of envy come up, "oh that person gets to..." stop for a minute and go "oh, that's interesting that I'm envious about that. What about that makes me envious?" Is it a desire to have a quality, a characteristic, a possession, or an attribute that belongs to someone else? When have I felt inadequate or envious around somebody else? And if I can start to identify times when I feel envy, see what desires I have that make me feel envious. Is it the activity? Is it the time? Is it the money? Is it the confidence? Stopping to do this and not being so afraid of our thoughts and feelings that create envy, but getting curious about them instead? This is a great way to teach us so much about ourselves, about who we are, about what our dreams are. 

26:11 

When I would look at people who had amazing relationships, I would always feel so envious of that. Not in a way that I wished that they didn't have it, but in a way that made me wish that I did. And I would just think that's what I want. That helped me to understand what my dream was and as I focused on that the last year or so and really started to clarify what it is that I want. What kind of a relationship do I really want? I've been able to start moving into that and finding people who have helped me to move more in that direction. I get to ask myself what kind of person would I have to become to have what I envy? If I want that kind of a relationship, what kind of person do I need to be? And that's the person that I have really worked on becoming this last year. And I'm finding myself in a relationship that where I am showing up that kind of a person with someone who also shows up that way. Kind of brilliant. So don't be afraid of being envious. Be curious about your envy. Curious about what that tells you about yourself and what you want. That's an indicator of your dreams. 

27:33 

And here's number nine: I want you to just change one small piece of your life. I will tell you that growth is challenging and it can be scary. But the biggest factor to getting unstuck is to start moving. One percent change that small little nudge. When is the last time you made an intentional change in your life? Today's the day, my friend. Decide what you're going to do and 

do it. You may not know what your big dream is yet. But I promise you, if you ask your brain, your brain knows something that you can do. One small nudge that you can do to start moving in the direction that you want. Decide right now what came to your mind when I told you that and I want you to get off of this podcast and I want you to go do it. Don't wait. Don't think you're going to do it later, because I promise you you'll forget. If it's to make a phone call, if it's to clean out one drawer, something to get you moving. Change one thing, one small thing. Think of it as a 1% change. A nudge in the right direction. You nudge yourself enough. Guess what? Eventually you're going to be exactly going the direction that you want to go. 

29:06 

So there we go. Nine things to help us get unstuck and to help us become more excited about middle age. To start dreaming again. To start moving into this place where we love our lives. Where we love where we are. This is what I want to help you create. This space of being so in love with your life, you can hardly stand it sometimes. There are days that I my whole body tenses up and I make these fists and I'm just like, "I love my life so much. I love what I am. Love what I'm creating." And I just, you know how sometimes when you would look at your little kids and you just wanted to squeeze them so hard because you had so much love inside of you and you just knew you couldn't squeeze them that hard because it would hurt them. But you just had so much love inside of you and you just felt like you couldn't get it out? That is how I feel about my life right now. Like the energy is just so powerful and I want you to feel the same way. I want you to have this sense of "I love my life so much I can hardly stand it sometimes." That's where we can be. We can be that excited about middle age. 

30:32 

But we have to start intentionally choosing to dream again, intentionally start choosing to nudge our lives and to make small changes and to create something that we haven't created ever or for a very long time. And if this is overwhelming for some of you are gonna go, "I can do this. I can do this, I can move this." Some of you are just gonna be like "whoa, whoa, whoa too much for me." That is where I can come in as a coach. I can help you step into this. And not just with accountability. Could I be just an accountability partner? Yes, I could. But you have friends who can be accountability partners for you. What I do is to help you discover yourself, discover your dreams, discover what you want. I can help you with this process. If you feel like you get started and then you just get stuck, you get distracted, this is what I do. I can help keep you from getting distracted. And I promise you, I will ask you the hard questions. I will help you question yourself. I will help you get curious about yourself. This is what I am trained to do as a coach. I'm not gonna tell you what you should do. I'm not going to tell you what your dreams are, but I help you discover it. I help you create it. And I help you move forward on it. I help you start nudging yourself. And I help you start making those changes that are going to help you be excited about middle age. That are going to help you love your life so much that you just can hardly stand it. This is the beauty of middle age. It is available to us to love our lives so much. 

32:17 

If you're struggling with that, I can help you. It's what I do. And it's what I'm good at. Okay? So you can reach me at tanyahale.com. We can get a 30 minute consult set up for you. The beginning of the year, this time is the best time of year to do this coaching, to get started because our brains naturally move toward progressing and moving forward and creating something new and exciting and brilliant. So if you're ready to move forward, go to tanyahale.com, book your free consult and let's chat and let's get you moving. Let's help 2022 be the most incredible year of growth ever in your life. I can help you do that and you have what it takes. I promise you, you have what it takes to create that. Okay. That's going to do it for me, my friends. Have an awesome, awesome week and I will see you next time. Bye. 

33:16 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.