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Thrive in 2025
Adventure
- living a better, bolder, brighter life
Day One -
Check-in
Hello and welcome to Day One of your Thrive in 2025 Adventure!
I'm so happy to have you here... but also thrilled that you are taking this time to invest in yourself.
Women in midlife are the busiest, and least supported cohort of society, and it's easy to be on constant "output" mode with very little input.
This week I'll show you how to input without having to go full Eat Pray Love on your life!
Below is a short video to say hello and explain why today's theme of Check-In is so important.
"As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.”
Maya Angelou.
Day 1 -Check-in with your mood
For women in midlife, it’s so easy to open our eyes, roll out of bed with a groan like someone who is embarking on a marathon but only done 10km in training. It’s easy to feel already held hostage to all the demands and expectations of the day, our peace of mind hijacked by reacting to the external, rather than responding from the internal.
Checking in - really taking a beat to think about how you are, means you take a moment to choose how to respond to the day, rather than constantly react to the day.
The most important conversations you have each day should be the ones you have with yourself first and last thing. To check in and see how you are. To cheer yourself on for the day ahead, champion yourself for getting through the day in one piece, or give your energy a direction of your making rather than get hijacked by all those external demands.
How are you? Where are you? Who do you need to be to yourself today? Cheerleader? Mother? Friend? Coach?
Then to ask yourself - what do I need from today? And how di I want to feel today. This is not about negating feelings or being falsely positive! It's about acknowledging how you are, and then deciding how you want to feel.
Triggers and Glimmers
We all know what a trigger is - the little thing / comment / experience that shifts our mindset into a more negative state. And once there, we all know how caught up in it we can be!
A glimmer is the opposite - a little experience or action that shifts your mindset into a positive state.
The triggers will always be there to catch you off guard. Being aware of your glimmers - the things you can intentionally do to change your mood positively - means you have more options to be in a mood of your choosing. That can mean letting something go that while annoying, isn't actually important.
Checking in to first of all recognise your mood, and then actively decide what you might need to support that mood or change to means you are in charge, not the day.
Thought for the day: What do you need from today based on your mood? Given the context of the day, how do you want to feel? How can you be more intentional throughout the day of investing in your mood?
Task: In your journal, make a list of glimmers that can turn your mood around - smells, sounds, tastes, memories, touches, movements, moments, connections. How many of those can be brought more intentionally into your routines and day?
I’ll leave you with a thought from one of my favourite authors, Maya Angelou:
“As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.”
You are always the hand on your own back.
A little extra reading below if you want to know more about the context.
Who are you?
Mid-life - now a decades-long stage - is a magnificent time. We are a unique generation of women with unprecedented opportunities and choices, with an extra 20/30 years of life expectancy - to be lived in midlife, not old age. As I say in my book, Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter, we now get to redefine the out-dated version of middleage - redefining careers, marriage and kids (we don’t even have to have them if we don’t want), post-marriage life, post-marriage relationships, travel, learning (so many women I know going back to college or retraining in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s!). So much is now possible. Instead of raising a family and then being fecked into the corner to knit, desexualised and devalued, we now get to continue to live vibrant, valiant lives in our own right 💪
However, as the generations who are transitioning from a patriarchal system towards one of equity (and we're not there yet) it can also be mayhem, incorporating and juggling so many changes and challenges for women: single life, marriage, fertility issues, periods, children, parent-care, child-care, partner-care, divorce, menopause. We are constantly asked ‘How are you?” but how often do you really take a beat to really answer it? How am I now? Who am I now? Where am I now? At this age and stage of life, whatever that is.
I liken women to the Nesting dolls. We start with our innate core - our intrinsic selves. Then we quickly take on the first layer from the family, time and culture we’re born into. Then we take on another in terms of the career we choose. Then another perhaps as a partner, Then another perhaps as a parent. Until the outer doll is the one we show to the outside world. And often, especially in the that mayhem of things we go through, those layers can smother your core, rather than the core colour and form the layers. Staying connected to yourself means your core shines through the layers, rather than be smothered by it.