“This is my life. It is my one time to be me.” “I want to experience every good thing because success is loving life and daring to live it.” Those are two quotes by the late, great Maya Angelou.

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 maven nation, this is C. René Washington, your life coach and your midlife maven, here for episode eight of the Midlife Woman Redefined. And today’s episode is accommodations for the daring life; accommodations for the daring life.

And before we delve into that, what do we do? We celebrate. What are you celebrating today? Something, remember, it has to be personal to you, some personal accomplishment, big or small, that you can take a moment to pause and say, “Yes, I did that. I’m glad about it.”

For me, I am celebrating great health. And I’m celebrating that the work that I’ve been doing to enjoy great health, I’ve found out that it has paid off. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes. But yes, please take a moment, pause, breathe, and focus on something that you have done for yourself that you can celebrate because we need to take those moments every day.

And as women, we do sometimes find it difficult to do that because we are so focused on taking care of other people and other people’s priorities and celebrating what they’re doing. This is about you.

Okay, so let’s delve into accommodations for the daring life. And as I have been talking about, I went on this epic adventure to Europe and North Africa in celebration of my 60^th birthday, and I am now 60. I turned 60 on August 23^rd, and I’m still celebrating.

And one of the things that, as I’ve said, I’m celebrating is great health and the trip was a two-week journey and it was a high-activity journey. I mean, we were going from sunup to sundown doing amazing things; some things we knew about, a lot of things we didn’t know. We were continuously being surprised by the amazing travel agent Tracey Friley of Tracey Friley Travel. Follow her, she is something else.

And it tested us in physical ways. The trip hit all of our senses. It continuously surprised us, as I said, and it was just beautiful, amazing, wonderful, all the things. And when I returned, you know, I’ve been talking about all the great things that happened. And I want to say this too because everything, of course, was not perfect.

And at different points during the trip, because we were kind of going from sunup to sundown, that we got tired, some of us dealt with some health issues that popped up; nothing major, but some people had some gastric issues. I had some swelling issues with my legs. And when I returned, my legs swelled up pretty badly while I was over there.

Thankfully, a friend had a diuretic and that helped me to relieve some of that issue so that by the time I got back on the flight, a lot of the swelling had gone down. But it was concerning to me because I have a medical history of having had a mini stroke several years ago.

So when I returned, I made an appointment with a vascular doctor that I had seen before, just to make sure that everything was okay. And in the meantime, I turned 60 on a Friday. That Sunday, I woke up feeling a little dizzy. And the dizziness went away while I was lying in bed, but when I got up, the dizziness returned and it hit me pretty hard; hard enough for me to stumble and almost fall.

And long story short, I made an assessment that I probably needed to go in and get that checked. I Googled stroke symptoms. Dizziness is one of them. And it said that if you have any one of the warning signs for stroke, you should be seen. So I went to the hospital.

Thankfully, in the city that I live in, we have a hospital, the University of Alabama at Birmingham. It’s an internationally known research hospital. And it’s also a stroke center for the region. I went there, treated wonderfully by every person that came in contact with me. It was really a great experience. They did all the tests, every test they could do. And that’s how I found out just how healthy I am. And the conclusion was that I was dehydrated, which that made sense because during that time, we were going a lot and we didn’t always know where an available bathroom would be.

So you know how we as women we can be. We can be a little squeamish about where we go pee. So I probably did not hydrate as much as I should have. And I was very grateful. Dehydration can be serious, but I was thankful that it wasn’t anything more serious than that.

And I was very thankful to find out that my numbers are excellent, that for – I knew I didn’t have high blood pressure or anything, and I still don’t. I’m not diabetic. I’m not hypertensive. So I was glad to find all of that. They checked me for, you know, a possible heart issue. They said it wasn’t even detectable.

So I’m saying all that to say that we, as women, really want to stay on top of our care for ourselves. And you know, we talk about self-care. Typically, we talk about it from a surface perspective of going to the spa every now and then, getting our nails done, our hair done. But self-care goes much deeper than that. and so we want to be sure that, as midlife mavens – and remember, the word maven just means expert – we are experts in rocking midlife, and that we want to have a strong foundation of health so that we can live this life of joy, adventure, happiness, pleasure.

We want to do all the things. As I said at the beginning when I quoted Maya Angelou, it is our one time to be who we are and we want to experience every good thing. I know I do. And I’m talking to them women who want to be on that train with me. And that’s why I’m talking about living the daring life and how you can accommodate.

Because I did have, you know, a few people tell me, “Well, you just need to sit down. You may not need to travel as much.” And yes, I did need to sit down, I agree with that. And I knew that. You have to rest. You can’t just go, go, go, go, go. So I’m onboard with that.

But to change how I roll in a way that would diminish how I roll, that’s not happening. That is not happening. So I am talking about making accommodations for living this life you want to live. And I have four suggestions for doing that.

The first one is to free your mind. Free your mind so that you are open and aware to what’s going on with you and around you, to you, that you’re just always aware, that you are tapped into your body compass enough to know.

Remember, I talked about the body compass in episode three. You can go back to crenecoach.com/3 to hear the episode on body compass and the importance of merging your inner compass with your brain so that they are working together to serve your best interest. So, free your mind. Get tuned into what’s going on with you, who you are, and who you need to be in any situation.

Number two is, know your numbers. Know your medical history.  Know what’s going on with you. And self-advocate. I was so grateful to receive the kind of medical care that I received, and I can also give you examples of situations where we don’t receive that care because the medical system is jacked up in so many ways, and sometimes, you aren’t taken care of in the way that you should be.

So again, you have to be so tuned into your body that, if you’re just dismissed, you have to know, “No, this is not that, something deeper is going on with me.” And you have to fight and push until you get the care that you deserve.  So don’t dismiss yourself if medical personnel are trying to dismiss you. So know your body well enough to know that something is not right and it needs to be addressed until they find out what it is.

And again, I know examples of people who have gone into the emergency room, been sent home, and they later died. So you want to be highly tuned into your own care.

Number three is let shit go. That’s always going to be in the mix if I’m talking. And let shit go mentally and physically. So if you want to live a life of, as I mentioned in a previous episode, of snowballing your joy, of stepping out and testing yourself, challenging yourself, experiencing new things, then you have to open your mind to that.

And you have to free your mind, as I talked about in number one, you have to also free your mind of weight that you no longer need to be carrying. That’s the work that I do as a coach with women. I help them let go of their shit, whether it’s mind crap or even physical crap.

So one of the things that Tracey kept telling us about this trip was don’t over-pack, don’t over-pack. You’re going to be doing a lot of moving around and you don’t want to have to lug around a lot of heavy stuff. And this is what we do in our everyday lives. We lug around unnecessary shit.

We carry around negative messaging in our minds and we are programmed to do that. We have to be intentional about releasing ourselves from that. And we also carry around a lot unnecessary physical clutter. So we weight ourselves down with things that no longer serve us. And this gets in the way of our living the lives that we want to live at the level we want to live them.

Number four is assess your accommodations and don’t boo your accommodations; bling your accommodations. So remember I said that I had already made an appointment with a vascular doctor to check on the leg welling, and when I went into the emergency room, they did do a test on my legs to be sure that I didn’t have any clots. I didn’t, thank goodness.

I still kept the doctor – I had a doctor’s appointment a few days after that I and I kept that appointment with the vascular doctor. He did the test again, still no sign of clots. However, he told me, “What you have is a compression issue. You have a compression issue.” And he recommended that I wear compression socks every day.

Now, if you’re familiar with compression socks, you know that they are not the most comfortable thing to wear. And I do wear compression stockings when I travel. That’s typically the only time I would wear them is when I know I have a long trip, either in a car or a plane. But he was telling me that I needed to wear them every day.

He said, “When you wake up in the morning, you need to put them on.”  Which is another little tip that I found out that I didn’t realize is that even though I had been wearing them for travel, that I was wearing them incorrectly because I was wearing them at night and then I would take them off in the morning.

He said, “No, you don’t need them at night. Your legs are elevated at night. Wear them when you get up and you need to wear them during the day.” I was like, really? Yes.

So I quickly wrapped my mind around that and I went immediately into, okay how could I make this work for me? Because not only are they not the most comfortable things, they also are not the cutest things.

So I’ve already been gathering websites for compression hose that are a little more stylish. And if you have seen me, you know I rock these big ear bangers by this artist Yogi Dada. She’s amazing. And I’ve already told Yogi, I said, “Okay, Yogi, you’re going to have to get a license for the company that makes these socks because I need some Yogi Dada compression hose.”

So yes, you want to bling your accommodations. Don’t boo them, don’t ignore them. We’re at an age now where – I was teasing with my friends. I said, you know, my bounce back is a dribble back now. I don’t bounce back as quickly as I used to.

And so we have to acknowledge where we are at this stage in life and work with it. Work with it. So, if you wear eye glasses, I do, and I wear some badass glasses, yes I do. I have a local company in Birmingham Alabama; IIIs, who I love. They have the funkiest glasses. So that’s how I accommodate wearing eye glasses.

If you can no longer rock high heels, thankfully now they’re making more stylish lower heel shoes. Your pill case, bling your pill case. Water bottles come in all kinds of designs now because it is so important to stay hydrated. Even if you’re not traveling, every day we need to stay hydrated.

And so there’s an old saying, “Stay ready so you ain’t got to get ready.” And so we want to do that for ourselves. We want to know our accommodations, bling our accommodations, and be ready for what our life has waiting for us.

So this is how you can make accommodations for the daring life. And if you’re listening to this thinking, “Well, I just wouldn’t travel as much,” or I just wouldn’t do whatever the thing is that you love to do in your life and for some reason you think now you need to dial it back or temper it, then this probably isn’t the podcast for you because I am so about the how; how can I do it? How can I say yes to myself? How can I say yes to my life? How can I help the women I coach say yes to what they want in their lives?

We are living the yes life as midlife mavens. We’re going to be wise in it. We’re going to be wise about how we do it. But we are going to do the thing. So that’s how we accommodate the daring life. One, free your mind. Two, know your numbers, know your history. Three, let shit go, mentally, physically, environmentally. Four, don’t boo your accommodations, bling your accommodations. Work with what you got, sisters.

So I hope this has been helpful. I hope that you are doing what you need to do to keep your foundation in such a state that you are ready for all the wonderful things that life has for you.

Okay, so this does end episode eight of the Midlife Woman Redefined, and as I always ask, please take a few minutes to rate and write a short review about the Midlife Woman Redefined. This helps me and the show become discoverable, which helps me to continue to show up for you and many more women.

And so to rate and review, if you’re an iPhone user, go to the Apple Podcast app. Android phone users will go to the iTunes app on your desktop computer.

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And as I’ve also been telling you, I do have an incentive for you to do this. And in episode 10, I’m going to start giving away the first of five $100 Amazon gift cards. So get those ratings and reviews done to get in the drawing for them and to get directions for how to rate, review, and enter the drawing, go to crenecoach.com/podcastlaunch. And the link is provided in the show notes for you to do that.

Remember, if you have a dream and you need a plan, each week, I’m sharing tips, resources, tools, and real-life examples of making your dream life a reality because living well is the only option for midlife mavens.

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.