“If you have the same damn thoughts, you’re going to have the same damn day,” Meadow DeVor.

Welcome to Midlife Woman Redefined, a podcast for women near retirement who are ready to step into a new chapter of freedom, travel, and fulfillment. If you’re ready to focus on figuring out who you are and what you really want, this is the place for you. Here’s your host, master certified life coach, travel addict, and midlife maven, René Washington.

Hello, midlife mavens. I’m C. René Washington, your life coach and your midlife maven, and we are here for episode 17 of Midlife Woman Redefined.  And this week’s episode is a pause. We’re in the midst of the series End Like You Want to Begin, end this year like you want to begin the next year, 2020.

And I’m taking a pause because, by the time this episode airs, there will be 55 days left in the year – 55 days. This is the 17^th episode, and all of the episodes to date have been some variation on getting your mind right because I know, from personal experience, and from coaching many, many women and from just observation, that mindset is the foundation of everything. It’s the key to you getting the life that you want, or getting whatever you want.

It may just be a particular thing, not your whole life that you want to change. But change your mind, change your life is real; it’s not just a saying. And I want to pause in the midst of the series to ask you again, what is your why? What do you want? What is your big why?

Because not only do we have 55 days left in this year, we have 55 days left in this decade. And for me, I don’t know, that’s just been so hugely impactful to think about it in that way. And I have been doing a lot of reflection and I’ve been working with women who are deep in reflection too about how they want to enter the next decade.

And if you’ve been following the show, the three components that I focus on, who am I, what do I want, and how do I get it? And these first episodes of the podcast have mainly focused on the who am I and the what do I want, helping you let shit go and dig into the limiting beliefs and mindset blockers that have been holding you back and keeping you stuck.

And I highly, highly encourage you to go back and listen to all the previous 16 episodes. They’re not long. I really focus on keeping them to less than 30 minutes, and typically, they’re around 20 minutes. Do a binge because if you are serious about stepping into 2020 in a brand new way, then you want to leave a lot of crap in 2019, because after we finish this series, I will be focusing on let’s get it; taking action to get what we say we want, moving, no more dithering, doing what you need to do, whether it’s focusing on improving your relationships, maybe there’s a relationship that needs to end, a friendship, a marriage, some type of partnership.

I don’t know, whatever that is for you, maybe it’s work, maybe you still want to be a contributor or you’re coming to the end of a career and you’re starting to wonder about what the next phase is, or you’re in a career that you do love but you don’t love where you are and it’s dragging you. Or maybe it’s your health.

I don’t know if you watch the show New Amsterdam, the hospital drama.  If you don’t and you have the ability to go back and watch it, I highly recommend that you watch the episode – we are in the last week of October, so the week of the last week of October, whatever that episode is. I highly recommend that you go back and watch it.

It was a pretty amazing show. There was a group of women on a tour bus and the bus crashed and all of these women up in New Amsterdam – and these were black women, and every one of them had some life-threatening condition.  And I’m not going to tell you anything more about that because there is a little twist to the story.

But what really struck me about that show is how we, as women, our health, we put ourselves last. We don’t focus on ourselves in the way that we should. And particularly as black women, there is a whole thing about how black people are not getting the same medical care as white people are. And it’s not based on economic conditions. It really doesn’t matter. Studies have found that med students think that black people can withstand pain more than other people can, just the craziest crap.

But anyway, it impacts our level of care. And then there’s the whole thing about access to healthcare, you know, where you live, if you are living in economically depressed areas, you may not have the same access to good healthcare. And this show brought all of that into play. And it’s just a really, really powerful episode about how we really need to be paying better attention to ourselves and demanding better treatment and better care.

And whether you are focusing on your health or not, I would just urge you to do an assessment, go get checked out, whether it’s the mammogram that you’ve put off or the annual GYN visit or just some condition that you’ve had that maybe there’s some spot on your body that you’ve just ignored. I mean, some of these women were ignoring some conditions that they just weren’t dealing with.

And we all can do that. And so this is the time for us to really take a good hard look at ourselves. Where are you right now as far as your health, your emotions, your mental state? Do you need to go talk to a therapist? Do you need a life coach? Are you suppressing things?

You know, I’ve talked in the past about, particularly at this midlife stage, suppression does not work. It’s going to keep nudging you, keep showing up in some form or fashion. And the whisper will become a scream and you don’t want to end up in the hospital. Stress does impact us negatively. It impacts our health. And stress can kill.

So you really want to pay attention. I myself have been thinking a lot about this entire decade. And since I was born in ‘59, I pretty much have gone through my 50s in this decade. And I just turned 60 and so much has happened in this decade, losing my mom. My ex-husband died unexpectedly a few months ago. I mean, that was just a huge, huge shock.

The only thing that has shocked me more than that was my mom dying because her death was unexpected. And I think about life and death a lot, just because I’m always focusing on how can I better use the time that I have? Am I wasting time? Am I not utilizing time, which is just the best gift that we have?

And I have been looking at different areas of my life and making sure that I’m going to leave some shit in this decade that I do not want to carry over into the next decade because 2020, I already have my word, you know, that word for the year. Well my word for 2020 is fearless; fearless.

And I know that when we hear that word, the connotation that’s been put on it is that you don’t have any fear. And I look at it differently. I look at fearless as being just that; fearing less, less enough to take that next step, less enough to make that move that you’ve been afraid to make. And so, in 2020, my focus is going to be on courage, being courageous, being brave, doing the thing that scares you and excites you.

And I have been doing a lot of self-assessing. I’ve looked at forgiveness, you know, who did I need to forgive, what did I need to forgive? And first on the list is myself. I needed to forgive myself for all the things that I’ve beat myself up about, you know, whether it’s been how I’ve spent money or maybe I didn’t show up in the way that I wanted to show up fully in a relationship, or how I have just procrastinated about some things.

And so I’ve looked at that area of forgiveness and forgiveness is not about excusing anything. I take full accountability for the things that I’ve done and I hold myself accountable and I’m going to hold other people accountable too. But I’m also going to let some shit go as far as recognizing that most of us are just doing the best that we can in that moment.

And like Maya Angelou used to say, “When you know better, you do better.” Giving people the benefit of the doubt, giving myself the benefit of the doubt. And so a lot of things that I beat myself up about and then we project. So I’m married, so Mr. Washington, I blame him for things. Letting all of that go because why wouldn’t I? How is that serving me?

I love ongoing learning and education and coaching. I am a coach and I get coached. So one of the areas that I really focused on this year was money mindset drama. And I went through two coaching programs, one with Keisha Dixon, the Tapping Queen. I’m going to have her on the show. And the other one that I’m in now is this course on money shame, this coaching program on money shame with Mary Houston. She will also be on this show.

But both of these women are amazing at parsing out all the ways that money guilt and money shame and money habits can impact your entire life. It’s amazing how this stuff can really just track back to childhood and all kinds of things that you didn’t even necessarily connect it to. And it’s just been some really powerful work.

I’ve been focusing on visibility, being afraid to put myself out there. You know, I’m a business person and I’m promoting this show, my coaching business, and so I’ve gotten on stages that scare me. I’ve done different things that scare me so that I can strengthen that visibility muscle so I can show up for myself in the best way possible.

And the other thing about visibility, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about this in an upcoming episode, this showing up for yourself and taking a stand, taking a stand for yourself, taking a stand maybe on the behalf of others.

And one real quick example, this show Modern Love that everybody’s raving about and I’m raving about it too, it’s six or seven episodes, it might be eight episodes, all about these love stories.  It’s based on the New York Times columns Modern Love. And they’ve made it into a television show. And as I was watching it, I noticed that there were no black women that were the protagonists as far as being in love in any of the episodes.

There was a black woman in one episode. She was the friend. We get to be the friend. But the other thing too is that it’s in New York City and even in the background, you really didn’t see a lot of black people.

There were two men that were love interests and the love interests of white women, and that’s fine, but balance it out. And so I felt a little invisible as I was watching the program because black women fall in love. Black women love romance. Black men do love black women.

And I did a Facebook post about it and that’s one way to take a stand. But I wanted to go further than that, so I’m going to be doing some interviews with black women who are in love relationships and are happy in love, because we are here. We should not be invisible in that space.

And the example that I gave in the post is that if you want to see black people in New York City, then look at any Law and Order episode. You will see plenty of black people.  Because this isn’t the first time this happened.

Seinfeld got dinged for this. Friends got dinged for this, the lack of black people in the shows. And even Sex and the City didn’t have a lot of black people in the episodes. Girls didn’t. New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world.

So I know I’m digressing a little bit, but I’m just sharing that example to say that this is the stage of life where we really want our voices to be heard. We have a wealth of experience. We are powerful women. We know stuff. We can do stuff. And we need to be counted in every demographic, and to even dial it down just in your day to day.

You know, if you’ve been somebody who has allowed people to kind of step over you or look over you or say anything to you, it’s really time to let that shit go and to stand up for yourself in whatever way that looks like for you.

The other area that I’ve looked at is the life and death thing because – not from this morbid, “I’m afraid of death,” perspective. But again, just because I want to live this life as fully as possible. And I want every woman to do the same.

 And I focus on women because, again, we are the nurturers and the caretakers and we focus so much on taking care of other people that I really want you, by the end of this decade, within the next 55 days, if someone asks you, who are you, that you can say it immediately, you can tell someone, who you are and it doesn’t include mom or whatever your job title is or volunteer, that you can speak from the essence of who you are.

Because that is what’s going to determine the trajectory of the rest of your life. That’s what’s going to connect you to the dreams that you have. Whatever you want to make a reality in your life, whatever you want to manifest in your life.

You know, I call you mavens. Remember, maven simply means expert. And I want you to be the expert of living your best life. What will you do in the next 55 days? Who do you want to become in the next 55 days? That’s what we will be focused on in the next few episodes. That’s what I’ve been focusing on in the first 16 episodes.

And I have one more announcement which I didn’t do the celebration at the beginning, so I’m doing it now. You remember, we celebrate something that we’ve accomplished, something that is personal to us. And I am celebrating interviewing my first guest for the podcast.

Now, this episode 17 was actually supposed to be that interview, but because of a storm here that knocked out the power, I had to reschedule it. And I’m sharing that because when you’re on the path to creating something new or doing something different or living out a dream, the road is not always smooth.

And we can take ourselves out of the game before we even get started because we think of all the things that could go wrong. Well, let me just tell you – and you know this – things always go wrong in life. Life is not a smooth path.

We have change. We have difficulties. We have negativity and we also have all the joy that we can stand if we choose to live seeking what brings us joy. So again, I ask, what will you do with your next 55 days, these last 55 days of this decade, the last 55 days of this year? Who do you want to become and how do you want to live?

I leave you with those questions and I ask you to tell me the one thing that really resonated with you in this episode. What’s your one thing? And I’d love for you to share that by rating and reviewing the podcast and you can do that by going to crenecoach.com/podcastlaunch and I am still giving away – I have a few more giveaways. And you get either a 90-minute coaching session with me, which is invaluable, I guarantee. Or you get a $100 gift certificate to your favorite spa.

So please, take a few minutes to rate and review, and be sure you subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any episodes. And share, share, share, if you love what you’re hearing on Midlife Woman Redefined, please share with your girlfriends. That’s what we do. We share the good stuff, and this is good stuff.

Thank you for listening, and remember, living well is our only option.

Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of Midlife Woman Redefined. If you’re ready to learn more and reclaim your time, head over to crenecoach.com.