Sarah told me that for most of her life, she was so good at reading what other people wanted and providing it that she lost track of where she ended and other people began. She edited herself down to the version that would cause the least friction.

What changed everything wasn’t learning to understand others better. It was learning to be honest with herself. “We think that great relationships come from understanding the other person,” she told me. “They actually come from being honest with ourselves.”

When I ask Uplifters about lifting and being lifted, it’s easier for most of us to support others than ask for what we actually need. We are excellent at support. We are out of practice at receiving it.

Which makes sense. Research shows that girls’ confidence drops by 30% between the ages of eight and twelve, and a big part of what we learn in that window is that being good means making other people comfortable. Asking for what we need, taking up space with our actual desires, starts to feel risky. Selfish, even.

But the hiding doesn’t protect us. It just makes us harder to really know. And being really known, in all our complexity and contradiction and need, is where the closeness actually lives.

This week in Cocoon, we’re going to practice. We’ll each name one thing we actually need right now, whether that’s accountability, a sounding board, a cheerleader, or just someone to sit with us in the uncertainty. We’ll treat asking like the muscle it is, one that gets stronger every time we use it.

Join today’s Cocoon for co-working

When: Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom to deep work or close the loops for the week. Whether that’s self-care, organization, or your boldest creative projects. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions together

• 10:15 - Three deep breaths, then dive into deep work

• 11:00 - One-song dance party to shake things loose

• 11:03 - Second deep work session

• 11:59 - Close and celebrate showing up for what matters

Read more

It’s officially spring 🌸, so we are celebrating new beginnings all month long. Here’s who’s on tap:

— a transformation teacher and somatic guide, who helps us finally confront all the sh*t we’ve been avoiding. She was nominated by the incomparable . Listen HERE

— a memoirist, organizational consultant, and psychotherapist who joins us to talk about her years inside Siddha Yoga, a near-cult experience that cracked her open and ultimately led her to a deeper understanding of who she is. It's a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we're afraid to tell anyone else, and what happens when we finally do. Listen HERE

Then, science journalist shares her extraordinary midlife experience with face blindness, memory, and how we make sense of the world in Do I Know You? — one of the most fascinating conversations we’ve had on the show. Listen HERE

We’re closing out April with legendary VCs and Katie Cella, in conversation with Whipnotic founder Tracy Luckow, at Uplifters Live.

I am not comfortable talking about money. I feel like a dunce when talking about investing. But, for so many reasons, we need to be talking about money and investing. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. We are actually better at investing than men. Research from Fidelity and Warwick Business School shows women outperform men as investors by up to 1.8% annually. We trade less impulsively, diversify more carefully, and stay the course when markets get rocky.

2. Our money is how we build the future. Private markets are where real wealth is being created right now, and the returns are flowing almost entirely to men. If we are not investing, we are not at the table where the future gets decided. Someone else is building it for us.

3. If we don’t, our daughters will pay for it. As Katie Cella said on stage in today’s episode: “If we do not open up our checkbooks, our daughters and our granddaughters will be back in the kitchen.” The companies getting funded today are the culture, the technology, and the economy our kids will inherit. We get to have a say in that. But only if we show up.

4. The gender wealth gap compounds every year we wait. Women already retire with significantly less than men. Every year that we leave money sitting on the sidelines rather than investing it, that gap gets wider. Starting small and starting now matters more than waiting until the moment feels right.

5. Our money is our voice. Investing is not just a financial act. It is a values act. When we put our dollars behind female founders, mission-driven companies, and undervalued assets like women’s sports, we are voting for the world we want to exist. That is power.

Today’s episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Uplifters Live on March 13 in Manhattan. I talk to three powerhouse women about money and investing:

Lorine Pendleton, Founding Partner of 125 Ventures, a VC fund investing in sports, media, and entertainment at the intersection of tech. She is the co-host of the business, innovation, and culture podcast "The Conversation Lounge." She is a former entertainment attorney who represented legends like Prince, Chaka Khan, and DMX, and a tech operator. She's invested in 35+ early-stage companies, including Oura (now valued at $11B), Maven Clinic, Madison Reed, and Perplexity AI. Forbes, Worth, and SportsTechX have recognized her as one of the most influential investors in the game.

Katie Cella, a Venture Partner with Koru Capital, an early-stage investor in AI for legacy industries, with investments ranging from Groq (acquired by NVIDIA) and Data Bricks to SpaceX and Synchron (Brain-Computer Interface). Katie is also an investor educator, activating executive women as angel investors and LPs, with a focus on expanding capital access for underrepresented founders. She brings a rare operator’s perspective, having been a startup founder, CRO, and executive advisor to global enterprises.

Tracy Luckow, Co-Founder and President of Whipnotic, a new whipped cream company that’s disrupting dairy through flavor, color, use, and health. She’s an entrepreneur with expertise across consumer packaged goods companies, including everything from innovation and consumer insights to building and developing high-performance teams. She spent decades honing her passion for innovation on R&D teams at brands like Pepsi, Danone, and Sabra.

Listen to this episode if...

• You’re interested in investing, but don’t feel like you have enough money or knowledge

• You want to see more women at the top

• You’re building something in midlife and are curious about raising funding.

5 Ways Katie, Lorine, and Tracy Show Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Start before you feel ready, and start small. Katie’s first angel investment was $1,000. Starting small and learning as you go can be a great strategy

2. Vote with your dollars. Financial returns on investments matter. Getting a say in which companies get to exist and which future gets built matters just as much. Your investment is a vote. You get to cast it, or you get to let someone else cast it for you.

3. Eat the no. Lorine built a fund and a thesis in a space where people told her no one was interested. She found her investors by going past everyone who didn’t understand what she was doing yet. No’s are information, not verdicts.

4. Use what you know. Tracy’s decades in consumer packaged goods companies were a great foundation for entrepreneurship. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last few decades, probably is too.

5. Use all three kinds of capital. Lorine named them: financial, social, and human. If you can’t write a check right now, make an introduction. Share your expertise. Open a door. Being an Uplifter is not always financial. Sometimes it is making the right connection at the right time.

Continue the Conversation

How comfortable are you talking about money and investing? Should we do more episodes on financial literacy? Let me know in the comments or by replying to this email.

Leave a comment

I’ve been on a lot of planes this month, traveling to speaking gigs, talking about midlife women’s unique coaching needs. On one of my recent flights, somewhere over the Midwest, after hitting refresh 50 times to try to make the wifi work, I gave up and just let my mind wander. I thought about how cool it was that a company was flying me around North America to speak at its conferences, when that had been a wildly audacious dream just a few years ago.

Researchers at Washington University found that idle time — the kind that opens up on long flights — allows people to think about things in new ways. The “aha” moment, they found, tends to emerge when we’re doing something else entirely. And a creativity researcher found that “over and over again, people describe being most creative when they’re in motion. Whether they’re running or swimming or on a train or an airplane, just moving, the body physically in space moving, seems to unleash something in them.”

As I sat on that flight, lost in the clouds, I started to think about my big dreams. Because as much as I do that with my coaching clients, I don’t always take that time for myself. Like so many of us, my to-do list, emails, and errands take precedence.

So, in this quiet, uninterrupted space, I imagined the future I’m building now. My youngest daughter graduates from high school in 2028. When she flies the nest, I want to be traveling with my husband, speaking at conferences and hosting workshops, seeing the world while in conversation with purpose-driven women.

My action items, to-do lists, writing, podcast, events, and community are what will take me there. Those things all inspire me, but looking a little further down the road made me tingle with excitement. It boosted my energy for all of those other things.

If your goals have been feeling like a grind lately, I have a hypothesis: maybe they’ve been stuck at task altitude. So close to the details that they’ve stopped feeling like dreams and started feeling like responsibilities.

What if we gave them a little boost this week?

Not a full strategic plan. Just a few minutes of wandering. The kind where you’re not trying to figure out how, just letting yourself imagine where you’re headed. It doesn’t take a long flight. A walk, a bath, a quiet cup of coffee before anyone else is up can all do the trick.

I’d love to know what surfaces when you do. What’s the dream underneath the dream that explains why all the little pieces matter so much? Hit reply or leave a comment and tell me.

Leave a comment

And if there’s an idea in the back of your head (or your gut or your journal) that you’d like to make real, that’s exactly what I do with my coaching clients. We get clear on the vision. We make a plan. We make it real. Reply to this email if you want to talk about working together.

See you up in the clouds, Aransas

PS Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts and an invite to our weekly Uplifters co-working Zoom/unhinged dance party.

And yet, every single morning, I bump into some knotty thread in the manuscript that feels impossible to detangle. And I want so badly to walk away and deal with it tomorrow, but that’s not how these things work, is it? So, I force myself to read what I’m writing about courage, about women who did scary things anyway, and somehow they seep into my brain and get me to the next paragraph. And then the next. And then sometimes I hit a flow and feel like the queen of the world and like I should get a prize for being a master detangler.

And then I close my laptop and the next morning do it all again.

All of which is to say: if you’re in the middle of something hard today, you’re not alone. I believe in us. I really do.

And if you want to exhale for a couple of hours with some genuinely lovely midlife women, come to Cocoon this morning. We’ll work quietly alongside each other, dance for three minutes midway, and then maybe — just maybe — close our laptops early today, because honestly? We already did the important stuff. Didn’t we?

Leave a comment

Join today’s Cocoon for co-working

When: Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom to deep work or close the loops for the week. Whether that’s self-care, organization, or your boldest creative projects. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions together

• 10:15 - Three deep breaths, then dive into deep work

• 11:00 - One-song dance party to shake things loose

• 11:03 - Second deep work session

• 11:59 - Close and celebrate showing up for what matters

Read more

It’s officially spring 🌸, so we are celebrating new beginnings all month long. Here’s who’s on tap:

— a transformation teacher and somatic guide, who helps us finally confront all the sh*t we’ve been avoiding. She was nominated by the incomparable . Listen HERE

— a memoirist, organizational consultant, and psychotherapist who joins us to talk about her years inside Siddha Yoga, a near-cult experience that cracked her open and ultimately led her to a deeper understanding of who she is. It's a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we're afraid to tell anyone else, and what happens when we finally do.

Then, science journalist shares her extraordinary midlife experience with face blindness, memory, and how we make sense of the world in Do I Know You? — one of the most fascinating conversations we’ve had on the show.

And we’re closing out April the best way we know how: live. Join us for a conversation on funding our dreams with legendary VCs and Katie Cella, in conversation with Whipnotic founder Tracy Luckow, at Uplifters Live.

Let’s go.

This story begins with today’s guest at her local Safeway in DC, shopping alongside the person she knows best, her boyfriend and future husband, Steve -- a man who cares deeply about food quality and only ever buys the best. She grabs a jar of generic peanut butter from his cart and brandishes it like evidence in a trial. “Since when do you buy generic?” He stares back at her, horrified. His face morphs and contorts like something from a horror film. Over the next few seconds, she realizes the man she’s teasing is not Steve, but a Steve-shaped stranger who has no idea why she’s interrogating him about peanut butter.

This is how , longtime science journalist and author of the memoir-meets-science book Do I Know You?, discovered at 39 that she had prosopagnosia. Face blindness. A neurological condition that affects an estimated one in 50 people, most of whom have absolutely no idea. Sadie had spent nearly four decades assuming that the comedy-of-errors quality of her social life was just... her personality. Her quirky story-prone nature. It never occurred to her that her brain was simply working differently.

I read Sadie’s book in pieces, slowly, because every few pages I had to stop and tell someone what I had just learned. My kids. My husband. Whoever was nearby. It was part of every conversation I had for two weeks. It is that kind of book: wise and hilarious and bravely honest, and the kind of thing that makes you reconsider every assumption you’ve ever made about why people act the way they do.

After years of extensive testing, Sadie learned that face blindness was only one part of the picture. She is also stereo blind (meaning she sees the world largely in two dimensions, which is why she’s been knocking over glasses her entire life), and she has no real autobiographical memory, which means her inner life doesn’t include a replay reel of her past. She can’t visualize. She can’t re-experience moments. She learned all of this by going down the research rabbit hole after the Safeway incident, getting recruited into study after study by scientists who found her brain extremely fascinating. (One researcher is writing her entire PhD dissertation on how Sadie can’t navigate her own neighborhood.)

What makes Do I Know You? so remarkable is not just these discoveries. It’s what Sadie does with them. Because this story is not actually about face blindness. It is about what happens when you spend decades adapting to a brain you don’t understand, building skills you didn’t know you were building, becoming someone you couldn’t have planned to become, and then finally getting to see yourself clearly.

Sadie’s journey raises a powerful question: when is knowing yourself better actually freeing, and when does a label weigh you down before you have the foundation to carry it? In this episode, we talk about all of that: how her brain shaped her life in ways she couldn’t see, what she learned from finally looking, how the midlife happiness curve plays into this, and what it means to stop hiding our deficits and start working with the brains we have.

What the research says: The U-shaped happiness curve is one of the most replicated findings in psychology. Most people hit their happiness low point around age 45, then watch it rise again. This holds across gender, socioeconomic status, family structure, and human cultures worldwide. It even shows up in chimpanzees and bonobos when zookeepers rate their wellbeing. Researchers don’t fully understand why, but what Sadie and I both observe in midlife women is a shift from productivity as the primary value to purpose, a growing ability to care less about things that don’t matter, and an increased willingness to see themselves clearly. The courage to know yourself, it turns out, ripens over time.

5 Ways Sadie Dingfelder Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Turns confusion into connection. Rather than treating her face blindness as a social liability, Sadie built a practice of treating every stranger like a potential best friend. When you don’t know who someone is, you can choose to be curious about them anyway. That practice, born of necessity, became one of her greatest professional and personal strengths.

2. Names the thing she couldn’t see. It took Sadie until age 39 to understand why her social life had the quality of an M. Night Shyamalan movie (obvious in retrospect, baffling in real time). The act of finally naming it, face blindness, stereo blindness, aphantasia, wasn’t about collecting labels. It was about being able to stop blaming herself and start understanding herself. Naming things accurately is a great step toward self-compassion.

3. Lets go of the hero’s journey she planned. Sadie set out to write a triumphant neuroplasticity story. She wanted to learn to recognize faces, see in 3D, visualize her memories. She largely failed at all of it. What she wrote instead is richer: a story about accepting the brain she has, building with the materials available, and discovering that the detour is often the destination.

4. Builds systems instead of pretending. She takes pictures of new colleagues. She keeps her friends’ kids’ names in her phone. She logs the information her brain won’t hold for her, so she can be fully present instead of constantly managing anxiety about what she can’t remember. This is courageous because it requires admitting, over and over, that she works differently. Most of us would rather keep performing.

5. Practices becoming process-oriented in midlife. Younger Sadie was intensely goal-focused. The work of her midlife has been learning to enjoy the journey rather than just sprint toward markers. She calls this the hardest new skill she’s tried to develop, which tells you something about how countercultural it is for high-achieving women. And how necessary.

Lift Her Up

Read Sadie’s book, Do I Know You?, which is out now (and in Italian and Korean, no South Korea book tour yet, but we are rooting for it). Find her on Substack at and on Instagram at @sadiefd and TikTok at @sadiedingfelder. If you read it and love it, please leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon. It makes an enormous difference.

If you loved this story...

You might also love our conversation with Gisela Sanders-Alcántara, a 13-time Emmy-winning TV producer and disability advocate who explores neurodivergence through storytelling, and Maysoon Zayid, a comedian and disability advocate whose work on changing how we see difference is unforgettable.

Your Turn

Have you ever discovered something about how your brain works, late in life, that reframed your entire story? Or is there something you’ve been quietly adapting to that you’ve never named? Share it in the comments. I want to talk about this nonstop, please and thank you.

Leave a comment

Most of us recall Sally Field’s 1985 Oscar acceptance speech as “You like me, you really like me!” What she actually said was: “I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me.”

We’ve been misquoting her for forty years. And I think it’s because a woman admitting to being wanted and chosen reads as thirsty. Too much. So we turned it into a joke, and missed the whole point of what she was saying.

Good girls are grateful. They don’t ask for too much. They accept what they’re given with grace and gratitude. That’s what I grew up learning, anyway. A raise? Oh, yes, thank you! A promotion? For little ol’ me? An opportunity to work harder for you? Sign me up! Every promotion, every high-priority project, every time corporate daddy patted me on the head and said yes, we want you, my heart fluttered. Not just with pride, but with something deeper and more desperate. I must be worth something.

What I didn’t understand was that I had handed the keys to my self-worth to corporate daddy. And corporate daddy, bless his heart, will always eventually leave.

When I lost my corporate role at 46, I was terrified. But I was also, for the first time, being handed back the keys and asked: okay, but what do you want?

I didn’t really know how to answer that, because I hadn’t ever really asked myself.

Self-determination theory calls this introjected regulation, the experience of being motivated not by what we actually value but by the need to maintain our sense of worth through others’ approval. It looks and feels like drive and ambition. But the power belongs to whoever gave it, not to us.

The counter to it is called individuation, the act of replacing other people’s authority with our own, and studies show that it peaks in midlife for women. The same hormonal upheaval rewiring our sleep, our bodies, and our patience for small talk is also setting us up to be true leaders in our own lives.

I’ve spent years coaching women to figure out what they actually want and say it out loud. To stop waiting for someone to notice them and start asking for what they want and need. I am, genuinely, very good at this.

And yet, it’s still hard for me. When I was offered a contract for my book, I was delighted. My beyond-my-wildest-dreams publisher and editor saw the value in my concept, my writing, me. Yes, yes, yes!

But, there was just one little thing…I didn’t have an agent to fight for me. Part of me wanted to run and find one, to outsource that terrifying self-advocacy to someone else. But another part of me wondered: what if this is the moment I learn to really advocate for myself? What if this is a high-stakes chance to practice honoring my own desires and value?

My old self would have low-balled. Would have acquiesced on the terms, made the most of what was offered, celebrated the opportunity, and called it enough. Thank you, so grateful. The fear in me wanted it signed fast before the universe changed its mind.

But I hired a wonderful lawyer, and we looked carefully at every single letter. We went back and forth countless times. Every rep of asking for what I wanted made the next rep a little easier. Just like lifting weights. Just like any practice. The muscle of wanting out loud got stronger every time I used it.

And it rippled. Into asking for a higher rate for a recent speaking gig. Into asking the woman at the airport coffee kiosk to replace my tepid drink with an actually hot one. It’s all the same muscle.

My daughter is applying to colleges right now. Her strategy has been to go where she’s most wanted. The most scholarships, the most emails, the swag. It’s wise. It protects her from the sting of not being picked, and it’s important data about where she’ll belong.

But I keep telling her what I’m still learning: your desires are data too. Not just theirs. Yours. Where do you want to be?

The midlife advantage that I’m only now understanding in my bones is that we’ve been picked enough times to know that being chosen doesn’t guarantee belonging. We’ve also been passed over enough times to know we survived it. The disappointment didn’t finish us. We can afford to want things out loud now. We’ve already paid the tuition.

Leave a comment

Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts and an invite to our weekly Uplifters co-working Zoom/unhinged dance party.

See you Friday!

Aransas

It was comforting to hear from so many of you this week about how it feels existentially scary and hard to put ourselves out there in midlife, whether it’s to promote our art, our ideas, or even just forge new relationships. But, also, I am so done with this for all of us. So, my response to most of these emails sounded something like, “Let’s fuck around and find out what happens! What’s one brave ask or invite you can make TODAY?”

Let’s share them here! What did you do? What are you still scared to do?

Leave a comment

Join today’s Cocoon for co-working

When: Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom to deep work or close the loops for the week. Whether that’s self-care, organization, or your boldest creative projects. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions together

• 10:15 - Three deep breaths, then dive into deep work

• 11:00 - One-song dance party to shake things loose

• 11:03 - Second deep work session

• 11:59 - Close and celebrate showing up for what matters

Read more

It’s officially spring 🌸, so we are celebrating new beginnings all month long. Here’s who’s on tap:

— a transformation teacher and somatic guide, who helps us finally confront all the sh*t we’ve been avoiding. She was nominated by the incomparable . Listen HERE

— a memoirist, organizational consultant, and psychotherapist who joins us to talk about her years inside Siddha Yoga, a near-cult experience that cracked her open and ultimately led her to a deeper understanding of who she is. It's a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we're afraid to tell anyone else, and what happens when we finally do.

Then, science journalist shares her extraordinary midlife experience with face blindness, memory, and how we make sense of the world in Do I Know You? — one of the most fascinating conversations we’ve had on the show.

And we’re closing out April the best way we know how: live. Join us for a conversation on funding our dreams with legendary VCs and Katie Cella, in conversation with Whipnotic founder Tracy Luckow, at Uplifters Live.

Let’s go.

I love watching movies on airplanes. It’s rare that any book could trump the immersive joy of watching a juicy action or romance on a tiny screen with earplugs crammed in all the way to my eardrum to drown out the engines and crying babies. But on a recent long flight, I read Blair Glaser’s entire memoir, This Incredible Longing. In one sitting. Because it’s that good. It’s so full of surprises and twists and honest emotion that I found it difficult to even talk about on the podcast because I didn’t want to spoil it for you. So mostly we talk about how Blair came to write this book.

Her story isn’t a simple “I was lost, then I found myself” arc, and I think that’s exactly why I love it. She describes herself as a “professional vocationalist, ”someone who is compelled to walk every chapter to its fullest point and then, when the boredom and the antsy feeling arrive (and they always do), find a way to move on. Some of the titles she’s held so far: Actress. Drama therapist. Licensed psychotherapist. Leadership and organizational consultant. Memoirist. Aspiring fiction writer.

The through line in all of it is her ability to sit with someone in emotional distress, help them find their footing, and hold steady in the middle of hard things. She discovered those gifts, of all places, inside Siddha Yoga, a spiritual organization some have called a cult. And then, over decades, she kept answering that question in new ways.

Menopause, she told me, was actually the thing that pushed her out of being a therapist and into consulting. As her hormones shifted, her desire to sit back and absorb and validate just evaporated. She wanted to get in there and say: here’s what I see, here’s where you need to go, here’s how to make this better.

And now, in her 50s, she’s taking it a step further by publishing a memoir that exposes her most personal chapter to her professional world.

In this episode, we talk about what it actually takes to tell the whole truth of who you are and where you’ve been. We get into how midlife is often when we go back and excavate the earliest chapters, and why that’s not nostalgia but actually a key mechanism for moving forward, and how to stand up to the inner bully who tries to talk you out of being fully seen.

What the research tells us

Memory researchers and psychologists have found that the reason so many of us in midlife become obsessed with our early twenties is that we’re actually training ourselves to move forward. Midlife is a kind of blank slate: the careers we were building and the children we were raising no longer organize every hour. So we look back to locate ourselves, to see who we’ve been and who we still want to be. Looking way back down the road, it turns out, is one of the most effective ways to see clearly where you’re going.

Her Courage Practice

In the middle of the night before we recorded this episode, Blair woke up with a familiar fluttering in her chest. She lay there asking herself, is this fear or excitement?

When she felt into it, she realized it was fear. And not just low-grade nervousness. It was her inner bully, the one who shows up in the schoolyard of her own mind and starts putting her down. The one who tells her she’s going to be scrutinized. That she’s going to be exposed. That this is going to be bad.

And she said, out loud, in the dark: “No. You get out of the way. Don’t fuck with me.”

Blair’s point, which I think is one of the most important things in this episode, is that inviting the fear to tea and being with it is okay for a while. But at some point, when the fear is throwing its clothes on your living room couch and making itself at home, you have to kick it out. Not with anxiety or self-improvement or a coping strategy. With sovereignty. With the deep-voiced, embodied, protective voice of the person who has survived everything that fear predicted would destroy her.

4 Ways Blair Glaser Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Follows the signal, even when it costs her. When menopause shifted her desire to be the absorbing, validating presence her therapy clients needed, Blair didn’t override the signal or white-knuckle her way through. She upskilled into consulting, studied business models and leadership, and followed where her gifts were actually pointing. The financial stress is real. But, she decided that was worth it.

2. Holds two truths at once. Her experience in Siddha Yoga was both formative and flawed. Writing the memoir meant refusing to flatten the story into something simpler. For those of us in midlife who have complicated histories (and that’s all of us), she models how to honor your own experience without submitting to the pressure to make it all bad or all good.

3. Looks back to move forward. Blair spent much of her 50s writing about her early 20s, and found that memory researchers would call this adaptive: midlife is the natural time to excavate early chapters as a way of locating yourself for the next leg.

4. Names the inner bully and sends it home. Rather than a soft practice of sitting with fear, Blair has developed a very specific, embodied, don’t-mess-with-me NO that she deploys when the fear starts performing. This isn’t aggression. It’s sovereignty. And it moves the needle in a way that endless evaluation doesn’t always do.

Lift Her Up

This Incredible Longing is available wherever you buy books. Buy it, read it, tell someone about it. You can also follow Blair on Instagram and LinkedIn at Blair Glaser, visit her at blairglaser.com, and find her beautiful writing on Substack at The HI Stack (human intelligence, as opposed to AI, she calls it, which, yes).

If you loved this story...

Start with Sari Botton, the founder of , who nominated Blair and has spent her career championing honest storytelling. Then explore other conversations with women doing the brave work of telling the truth: Melissa Petro’s episode and Kate Tellers’ episode, Peabody Award-winning storyteller and Director at The Moth.

Let’s chat about it!

What’s the most complicated chapter of your own life that you haven’t quite let yourself own yet? The one where you’re still sorting out what was good and what was harmful and what it all means? Drop it in the comments, or just tell us you have one.

Leave a comment

My daughters have a name for girls who bend themselves into pretzels to get chosen: Pick Me Girls. I kinda think that for most of my life, I was one. Not in the way they mean it by putting other women down to seem more desirable. My version was more like: Work really hard, do a good job, then wait with a smile on my face for someone to notice and invite me to the table.

Most of us have been conditioned, from very young ages, to let our work speak for itself and trust that the right people will notice. To self-advocate is to risk being seen as too much, too aggressive, or (gasp) not nice. A Harvard study found that even when women and men scored identically on a performance test, men rated themselves a 61 out of 100 while women rated themselves a 46. And even when told a potential employer would use that self-evaluation to determine their hire and pay, women still promoted themselves less.

So we wait. And we hope. And we keep doing excellent work and then wait and hope some more.

During Uplifters Live, when I was moderating a panel of founders and VCs, I asked how they dealt with constant pitching and rejection. didn’t hesitate for a second. “I eat no’s for breakfast,” she said, and the whole room erupted. I have thought about it every day since. I want to get so comfortable with rejection that the fear of it stops running the show.

But it’s freaking sneaky. I'll just keep doing great work, and the right people will find me. I don't want to seem pushy. If it's meant to happen, it'll happen. So demure, maybe even admirable? But research on rejection sensitivity tells us that the more we've been conditioned to anxiously expect rejection, the more we avoid any situation that might trigger it. We don't ask. We don't pitch. We don't reach.

This week, I interviewed and who are building . Bonnie attended one of Sofia’s events and loved it. She saw big potential in it, so she just... reached out. Said: I see what you’re doing. I love it. Can I send you a one-year plan?

Bonnie didn’t wait to be invited. She made an invitation.

Sofia said yes, obviously. What creative visionary wouldn’t? I was so moved by the badassery of that ask — the willingness to put out a specific, generous offer and risk getting ghosted or rejected. That’s the move so many of us skip. Our best ideas quietly simmer while we wait for someone to notice them. Or maybe we put them out there once or twice and nobody bites, so we hide them away in their safe, dark little corners telling ourselves that it’s just not the right time or the right move, or we are not the right person.

So, here’s the irony in all of this. The thing I’m actually best at in my work is helping people stop wishing and start doing. I am really, really good at this. I’m the woman people call to help them convert worries, uncertainty, and waiting into forward motion.

And it is still hard for me to do it in my own life. Every day.

So I’m practicing. A coffee invitation here, a collaboration pitch there, a hand raised for something I’m not sure will get a yes. Each one is a small deposit into my no-tolerance fund. It gets easier. It doesn’t get easy.

But, friends, what we know for sure from 156 episodes of this podcast is that the women who do the biggest, most meaningful things aren’t the ones who waited to be chosen. They’re the ones who kept making asks, kept extending invitations, kept collecting no’s until the yes finally showed up.

We don’t have to be pick me girls. We can be badass invite girls instead.

What would you do this week if you were eating no’s for breakfast?

Leave a comment

Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts and an invite to our weekly Uplifters co-working Zoom/unhinged dance party.

See you Friday!

Aransas

Join today’s Cocoon for co-working

When: Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom to deep work or close the loops for the week. Whether that’s self-care, organization, or your boldest creative projects. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions together

• 10:15 - Three deep breaths, then dive into deep work

• 11:00 - One-song dance party to shake things loose

• 11:03 - Second deep work session

• 11:59 - Close and celebrate showing up for what matters

Read more

It’s officially spring 🌸, so we are celebrating new beginnings all month long. Here’s what’s on tap:

This week, meet — a transformation teacher and somatic guide, who helps us finally confront all the sh*t we’ve been avoiding. She was nominated by the incomparable .

Next week, — a memoirist, organizational consultant, and psychotherapist who joins us to talk about her years inside Siddha Yoga, a near-cult experience that cracked her open and ultimately led her to a deeper understanding of who she is. It's a conversation about the stories we tell ourselves, the ones we're afraid to tell anyone else, and what happens when we finally do.

Then, science journalist shares her extraordinary midlife experience with face blindness, memory, and how we make sense of the world in Do I Know You? — one of the most fascinating conversations we’ve had on the show.

And we’re closing out April the best way we know how: live. Join us for a conversation on funding our dreams with legendary VCs and Katie Cella, in conversation with Whipnotic founder Tracy Luckow, at Uplifters Live.

Let’s go.

There’s a conversation I have with myself every January. I sit down with my journal in the early morning, coffee cooling beside me, and I write out everything I want. Everything I’m going to do. The big changes I’m going to make. And then I wait. Because if I’ve learned anything in twenty years of studying how humans actually change, it’s that winter is for dreaming and spring is for doing.

So many of us spend the early months of the year feeling like failures because the bold new chapter we promised ourselves hasn’t materialized yet. But we weren’t failing. We were preparing. Contemplation is a precondition for action. So, now that we’re here, I’m excited to finally share a conversation and I had in the first days of the year about how to make this the year we actually do the hard things we keep putting off.

Ally came to us through , one of the most quietly powerful women I know (and one of the most succinct nominators I’ve ever had — her five-word case for Ally was: she’s my best friend, and she is THE best friend). Ally has spent more than twenty years teaching people how to get their minds, emotions, and bodies on the same page. Her work spans practice development, spiritual leadership, and somatic regulation — which is a fancy way of saying she helps people stop running from themselves.

What I didn’t expect was how much of this conversation would be about me. About the nice coat I sold because my midlife body has changed so much. About the conversation I’d been postponing with someone I love. About the manuscript sitting on my desk with an October deadline and the open tabs on my computer that multiply like rabbits every time I’m avoiding the hard thing.

What I love most about Ally’s work is that she doesn’t ask us to be more positive or push through our feelings. She asks us to get curious about them, to maybe even embrace the ugly bits. To stop trying to reframe our way out of discomfort and instead ask: what is this protecting? What am I holding onto?

We talked about avoidance — not as a character flaw, but as a teacher. We talked about the difference between procrastination and preparation. We talked about imaginary stress (the kind where we rehearse the argument that hasn’t happened yet, or the rejection that might come, and that our bodies can’t tell the difference between real and fake). We talked about what it costs to have too many open tabs — not just on your computer, but in our nervous systems.

And we talked about the great hunger Ally is seeing in her students right now: a hunger for real nourishment. Not quotes. Not content. Real connection and real depth.

Here’s what I have thought about almost every day since this conversation: the things we avoid don’t actually go away. They queue up. They become lingerers. And some quiet, patient part of us keeps tending to them, even when we pretend we’re not. Closing a loop doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be a text that says, I want to talk when you’re ready. It can be three pages in a journal. It can be any tiny, specific, completable thing.

What the Research Says

Emily and Amelia Nagoski's research on stress cycles offers a useful frame here: the body doesn't just need to process a stressful event — it needs to complete the cycle. Without that completion, stress accumulates. It doesn't dissolve on its own just because the situation resolved. What Ally describes as closing loops is, in essence, exactly this — giving the nervous system the signal that it's safe to release what it's been holding.

Her Courage Practice

Where most of us are taught to sit with discomfort or breathe through it, Ally argues that the body doesn’t need meditation. It needs completion. A real stressor (the hard conversation, the overdue email, the thing you’ve moved on your calendar four times) gets metabolized once you do something in response to it. But an imaginary stressor (the fight you’re pre-having, the rejection you’re pre-grieving) just pools in the body as unspent stress chemicals.

So her practice is simple and not simple at all: she takes inventory. What is she actually avoiding? What is she imagining versus what is real? And then she asks: what is the smallest, completable action that closes this loop?

Not the whole conversation. Not the whole project. Not the whole relationship repair. Just the first tiny thing that lets the nervous system say: I did something. We’re not just sitting in it.

She does this for her students, for her own procrastination, and for the lingerers — the things that keep coming back up, keep getting postponed, keep quietly siphoning energy from everything else we’re trying to build.

This, she says, is how the big goals and dreams actually get to exist.

Listen to this episode if...

• You’ve been telling yourself you’ll have that important conversation “when the time is right” for several months now

• You have more open tabs — literal or metaphorical — than you can count, and the whole thing feels like a low hum of overwhelm

• You want to want things but feel paralyzed by how big the wanting is

• You’re trying to reframe your way to self-acceptance and it’s not quite working

• You know what you should do. You just can’t seem to make yourself do it.

Lift Her Up

Visit allybogard.com/events to find out how to study with Ally — she works with individuals and groups on somatic regulation, inquiry-based practice, and helping the mind, emotions, and spirit get on the same page. You can also follow her at @allybogard on Instagram.

If you loved this story...

Listen to Elena Brower’s episode.

Each month, I gather up the best conversations with women over 40 doing remarkable things, the ideas fueling our courage, and what I can’t get enough of right now.

This week marked three years since The Uplifters Podcast aired its first episode.

Since then, I’ve gotten to host 156 conversations with women doing the most meaningful work of their lives. So for this month’s Good Batch, I asked all of them: Where are you now? What’s shifted? What’s launched? What are you building next?

I’m excited to share their answers with you, but truth be told, reading their updates made me feel like a bit of a slug at first. Maybe I won’t be the only one who reads these updates and simultaneously thinks, “Damn, these women are amazing, and then, agghhhhh what am I doing with my life?”

I mean, in just a couple of years, Denise launched two films about menopause and got her tea line into Target. Kathrine expanded her nonprofit to 14 countries and was the honorary starter for the Women’s Olympic Marathon in Paris. Susie grew her YouTube channel to 1 million subscribers while opening pop-up shops in 250+ stores across 7 states.

My brain immediately went to: Well, you didn’t produce any films, you slacker. Never mind that I wasn’t even trying to produce a film, so it’s hardly a fair or relevant comparison.

Then challenged me to do my own update. To actually look at what I’ve accomplished in three years instead of what I haven’t.

So here goes:

I’ve produced, recorded, edited, and promoted 156 podcast episodes in 156 weeks. Somewhere in there, I kinda figured out what I’m doing. They’ve been downloaded well over 100,000 times and have been supported by amazing sponsors like Nutrafol, Midi Health, WABC and Join The Tryb. This Substack reached the top of the charts in Substack’s Health & Wellness category. I’ve hosted 3 sold-out Uplifters Live events and 2 retreats. I got a book deal with my dream publisher and editor to write about what I’ve learned from these 156 women. I’ve spoken on big stages and facilitated workshops, sharing lessons from these conversations. I've coached dozens of midlife women through the messy middle of building something new. And thanks to paid subscribers of this newsletter and event attendees, we’ve donated over $10,000 to nonprofits featured on the podcast.

All while grieving, trying to raise good humans, moving homes, and navigating perimenopause.

That feels like a lot.

But, at first, my brain forgot ALL of it, so I’m passing Kara’s challenge on to you: What have YOU done in the last three years? I bet it’s more than you realize.

Where They Are Now: Updates from Uplifters

Click on the names to hear their stories

#3: Susie Jaramillo

We hit 1M subscribers on YouTube and are launching the new Canticos series “The Stories Behind the Songs” on YouTube on April 3rd. We’ve also launched Canticos popup shops in over 70 stores in 5 different store chains in 7 states, and will be in 250+ stores by the end of 2026! So proud of my team and thrilled at how we can be there for families and they are there for us!

#7: Susannah Ludwig

I’m continuing to build my coaching offerings, working with couples and running a group for women in relationship transition. I created my first retreat which is happening in two weeks. I’m creating more video content to share my messaging about communication and resilience and am in the beginning stages of a writing project about those same topics.

#11: Sonya Weisshappel

Seriatim continues to grow in a positive direction. We’ve significantly improved the website experience and partnered with a strong Colorado-based firm to refine our messaging and launch a monthly newsletter. I’m focusing on building B2B relationships with wealth managers, trust & estate attorneys, and divorce attorneys who serve high-net-worth clients. Our emphasis is on educating these professionals on how to properly account for tangible assets through comprehensive inventories, effectively putting clients’ objects back on the balance sheet. Additionally, I’ve launched Chaos Whisperer as a collaborative planning tool to help clients navigate life transitions with greater clarity and calm.

#19: Maureen Spataro

Since our interview, I launched “Stephanie’s Sanctuaries” through the Stephanie Nicole Parze Foundation. I meet with Police Chiefs throughout New Jersey to ask for an interview room that we can make into a sanctuary that will only be occupied by DV/SA victims in need. Once the room is designated, I go in with a team to repaint, furnish, fill with personal items like clothing, underwear, and socks, as well as snacks and beverages. We hang artwork and inspiring quotes, and turn the space into a safe and supportive room for anyone going to their local PD to report abuse or running from an abusive relationship. As a result, my book Press Pause has gained more readers. The program will be extended to hospitals in the not-too-distant future!

#29: Sarah Dusek

I’ve now launched my second travel company Few & Far, helping people take adventures in wild, amazing places around the world and we’ve opened our first wilderness lodge in South Africa, Few and Far Luvhondo, set in 100,000 hectares of extraordinary biodiversity in northern South Africa. Our guests get to have extraordinary experiences in nature all while helping preserve and rewild incredible destinations. My book also came out in October 2024: Thinking Bigger: A Pitch Deck Formula for Women Who Want to Change the World, written to tell the story of growing and scaling my first company and to help other women also think and build bigger.

#32: Denise Pines

Launched a menopause movement with 2 films: The (M) Factor: Shredding the Silence (October 2024) and The (M) Factor 2: Before the Pause - Perimenopause (March 19, 2026). Tea Botanics teas for menopause are going into Target on May 20th, and I’m hosting the 11th WisePause Wellness in Los Angeles on August 22nd.

#55: Kathrine Switzer

My main focus has been on expanding the international growth of non-profit 261 Fearless to 14 countries, empowering hundreds of women’s lives through running and educational programs. This continuing activation is captured in the documentary Tough Old Broads, a 4-year project about 3 activist women. I was the honorary starter for the 2024 Women’s Olympic Marathon in Paris, and in 2025, I annotated and archived all my 60 years of papers, films, etc., for the Syracuse University library, which honored me by raising my famous Boston bib number 261 up in the rafters of the ‘Dome’ athletic arena. I continue to run well and regularly at age 79.

#60: Sandy Samberg

What began as an idea that I mentioned on the podcast has grown into something much bigger than I imagined. The University Psychedelic Education Program (U-PEP) is now a national program with over 170 Faculty Fellows across 30+ states. We’ve launched a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Psychedelic Education Partnership, to educate both the future and current healthcare workforce about the evolving field of psychedelic science and its applications across healthcare. I’m energized by the thoughtful, collaborative community that’s come together around this work. Next, we’re launching the Psychedelic Educators Network to broaden access to credible education. To learn more, visit www.upep.org.

#69: Eliza Factor

I’m thrilled to announce that Lonely Worm Farm now offers a five-day-a-week, year-round arts & agriculture program for adults with disabilities. For info on that, go to www.lonelywormfarm.com. To support the farm, coo over goats, ponder the links between nature and inclusion, go to Wayward Utopias at elizafactor.substack.com. Also, I’m looking for a literary agent for both fiction and non-fiction work. If that’s you, I’d love to talk!

#90: Aditi Sethi

Emberlight: Center for Conscious Living & Dying is evolving and is devoted to community-centered care at the end of life. I’m honored that The Last Ecstatic Days is now airing on PBS, helping bring these conversations to a wider audience. I’m grateful for deepening partnerships and the emergence of a living ecosystem around this work. Learn more at www.emberlightway.org and www.aditisethimd.com.

#92: Candy Motzek

I’m proud to have just released episode 378 of She Coaches Coaches. It’s now ranked in the top 2% of podcasts, helping coaches build thriving, values-aligned businesses with consistent clients. I also ran a global survey after questioning industry reports that didn’t reflect what I was seeing. We invited 700 coaches. 115 responded across 10 countries. The insights became the 2026 Coaching Business Growth Survey. What’s working, what’s not, and where to focus instead. Get the report: candymotzek.lpages.co/business-growth-survey | Podcast: she-coaches-coaches.captivate.fm/listen | Website: stepintosuccessnow.com

#109: Shannon Russell

Since the podcast, I have continued to build my business coaching biz Second Act Success and I launched a second business, facilitating team building and strategic planning workshops for companies and teams using LEGO® Serious Play® with Build Better Teams Consulting. I even launched the Build Better Teams Podcast to accompany it.

#130: Tracy Keibler

After 14 years proving what works, demand for crisis navigation for seniors is rising. START continues to step into the most complex cases, situations with no clear path forward, and guide seniors from crisis to stability. That is what I’m most proud of. We’re hiring to double our advocacy team, expanding our ability to meet that need. At the same time, we’ve been selected to contribute to a national effort studying solo seniors and elder neglect, bringing what we see on the ground into broader solutions. No one should have to go through a crisis of aging alone. Ever.

#134: Catherine Clark

I’m 18 months into my new brand consultancy, CREATRIS! The team is established, along with a culture and a flow. Now I’m working on developing my messaging, reaching more leaders, and seeking to build a healthy, self-sustaining operation. I also became a certified Gyrotonics instructor, and teaching others when I can has brought me a lot of fulfillment. I’m gardening more and more in Vermont. Every day I learn more about how everything is connected, and how to participate positively in that cycle of life. Thank you for asking for an update!

#147: Ruthie Ackerman

I’m working on my next book! And gearing up for my 6-month Book Builder class for those working on their own books, which will launch in May. I’m most proud of the fact that The Mother Code was named a best book of the year by NPR and Elle.

Your Turn

So here’s Kara’s challenge, now passed to you:

What have you done in the last three years?

Not what you haven’t done. Not what someone else has done. What have YOU done?

Write it down. All of it. The big wins and the small victories. The things you’re proud of and the things you almost forgot about. The dreams you launched and the hard things you survived.

I bet it’s more than you realize.

And then ask yourself: What’s possible in the next three?

Here’s to three years of conversations, courage, and community. And here’s to everything still ahead.

With love and gratitude,

Aransas

Ways to Be an Uplifter:

• Listen to any of the 156 episodes

• Support the businesses, books, and nonprofits of the women featured above

• Take Kara’s challenge and share your 3-year update in the comments

Join today’s Cocoon for co-working

When: Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom to deep work or close the loops for the week. Whether that’s self-care, organization, or your boldest creative projects. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions together

• 10:15 - Three deep breaths, then dive into deep work

• 11:00 - One-song dance party to shake things loose

• 11:03 - Second deep work session

• 11:59 - Close and celebrate showing up for what matters

Read more

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re featuring midlife women who are making history through small actions.

Corinne van der Borch and Edwina White, whose documentary subject, Miss T, a Brooklyn crossing guard, teaches us how tiny moments can have a deep and lasting impact. Listen HERE.

Rebecca Wells and Carolyn Broullon, who ran against each other for mayor in a tiny New Jersey town. They’ll show us how proximity and face-to-face engagement can reconnect communities - and why your backyard is the place to start making change. Listen HERE

Kerri Kennedy, a global peace leader, who has spent two decades challenging authoritarianism worldwide. She’ll teach us the specific actions ordinary people (especially midlife women) can take right now to protect democracy - no political experience required. Listen HERE

Three years ago, I launched this podcast because I believed that women in midlife were doing some of the most important, most underrated work in the world, and that if we could just hear each other’s stories, we would all be braver. Three years and 155 episodes later, I believe that more than ever.

So I wanted to close out this Women Making History series with someone who embodies everything The Uplifters stands for. Someone who didn’t set out to change 40,000 lives. Someone who just saw a young woman sleeping in a park and got brave enough to walk over and say hello.

Her name is Deborah Koenigsberger. She’s 65, she’s been running Hearts of Gold in New York City for over 30 years, and she is one of the most energized and energizing people I have ever talked to in my life.

Deborah started her career as a fashion model and stylist. In 1989, she started her own boutique, Noir et Blanc, a French-themed women’s clothing shop in Manhattan.

Then three things happened almost at the same time, like the universe was making a point.

One: She was attending a Stevie Wonder concert, seven nights in a row, third row dead center (of course). His song “Take the Time Out” kept rattling around in her head. What did it mean for her?

Two: Walking her usual route between home and the boutique, she started noticing a young woman sleeping in Madison Square Park. Deborah finally got up the nerve to approach her. The woman was 19. She’d been molested at home, gone to a shelter, been molested there too, and decided the street was safer than any of her options. Deborah, who had grown up surrounded by community, aunts, cousins, always a couch, always a chair, always somewhere safe to land, couldn’t process it. Nineteen years on this earth and not one person had cared enough to protect her.

Third: a makeup artist she’d met on vacation reached out. It was Bobbi Brown, who was just starting to build her name, and she’d been volunteering at a women’s shelter, making the moms feel beautiful. She invited Deborah to do a seminar with her about what to wear when going out. That shelter, it turned out, was between Deborah’s home and her boutique. She had walked past it every single day without knowing it existed. A few months later, she asked the executive director: What do you do for Christmas? They went to the 99-cent store and filled a big bag, and each child got to pick one toy.

Deborah thought: That is not Christmas. So she used that season’s proceeds from Noir et Blanc to sponsor a big Christmas party for all 135 kids and their moms. But it was at that party that she got her real education. A little girl ran to show her mother what she’d gotten, and her mother said flatly, “So what. Ain’t nobody ever done nothing for me”. It gutted Deborah at first. Then she sat with it. The mother wasn’t ungrateful. She just didn’t know what this was. She’d never had it. And if she had never felt cared for, she couldn’t do it for her kids. So the work got bigger. Not just Christmas, but Easter, every holiday, every moment that says: you belong, you are seen, someone thought of you. And eventually Deborah understood: it was the mothers who needed support most of all. If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. A magnet from her own mother’s fridge became the philosophy of Hearts of Gold.

Studies consistently show that women over 40 experience a significant shift in motivation, moving away from external validation and toward meaning-making. The challenge isn’t finding the energy for purpose. It’s giving ourselves permission to act before we have the whole plan.

Her Courage Practice: The Knot Principle

Imagine a piece of rope tied into a hundred knots, Deborah says. They look impossible. You don’t even want to start. But once you work that first knot loose and thread the loop through, you can get to the next one. And suddenly you realize you can do the whole thing.

She calls this taking baby steps, but I think it’s something more specific than that. It’s not about shrinking the goal. It’s about refusing to look at the whole rope at once. Today’s problem is this. Let me see if I can help them with this. And then the next thing. And then the next.

For 30 years, Deborah has untied the rope one knot at a time for thousands of families. The audacity of that, when you look at the full picture, is staggering. But she never looked at the full picture. She just worked the knot in front of her. That’s it. That’s the whole practice.

What would you be able to do if you stopped looking at the whole rope?

5 Ways Deborah Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Engages instead of averts. Deborah walked toward a young woman sleeping in a park when every instinct says to look away. That single act of engagement started a 30-year movement. The next time you feel the pull to scroll past something hard, consider: what happens if you look up?

2. Acts on what she has, not what she lacks. She didn’t have a nonprofit infrastructure. She had a fashion boutique, a Christmas spirit, and a credit card. She sponsored Christmas for 135 families with what was already in her hands. What’s already in yours?

3. Teaches by living, not preaching. Her sons grew up watching their mother do this work, not hearing lectures about it. Her younger son was five years old when he found money on the street and immediately asked if he could give it to the kids in the shelter. Courage is caught, not taught.

4. Redirects worry into energy. Worrying is energy too, but it’s energy that stays inside and reaches nobody. When she feels overwhelmed by the scale of homelessness, she doesn’t sit with the feeling. She asks: what can I do today? Then she does it.

5. Asks for what she needs and makes it easy for others to give. Her Road to a Million campaign is a masterclass in accessible generosity. Get ten friends to donate five dollars. Drops of water fill a bucket.

Lift Her Up

Visit heartsofgold.org to make a donation to Hearts of Gold’s Road to a Million campaign (even $5 makes a real difference), sign up to volunteer your time or professional skills, or donate clothing to the TTH Vintage thrift store at 40 West 25th Street in Manhattan. Follow along on Instagram at @heartsofgoldnyc.

And if you’re local to New York, I’m planning a little shopping party at the store. Come thrift with me and support something real. Details coming soon on Substack.

If you loved this story...

This is the final episode in our Women Making History Through Small Acts series, and it joins a constellation of conversations about women who saw a gap and decided to fill it. Start with Terry Grahl’s episode, founder of Enchanted Makeovers, who transformed shelter spaces for women and children escaping domestic violence, then visit Kerry Brodie’s episode, founder of Emma’s Torch, which trains refugees and survivors of human trafficking in the culinary arts.

Tomorrow is the 3rd anniversary of The Uplifters Podcast! 154 stories of brave, badass midlife women who believe we rise higher together.

68 people have rated the show on Apple Podcasts. 67 of them left a 5-star rating (thank you!). A single person left a 1-star review (thank you?).

I have thought about that single rating way more often than I am comfortable admitting. Did they misunderstand the rating system? Did I offend someone? Am I actually awful at this, and nobody else has bothered to tell me?

I know, I know. This is crazy talk, but it’s what my brain (and maybe yours?) does sometimes, especially when I’m thinking about something I really care about.

I heard it from other women again and again this week. A woman in a career transition told me she’d gotten genuinely enthusiastic responses from three potential collaborators and one lukewarm reply. She was fixated on the lukewarm one, turning it over and over, looking for what it meant about her readiness, her positioning, her worth. A client who just launched her own business has a growing roster of happy clients who keep coming back…and she still lies awake wondering if she’s actually adding value.

This saps our energy to keep doing big, brave things. And it isn’t (just) a confidence problem, or a mindset problem, or something we can fix by making a gratitude list. It’s biology.

Our brains are running software that was designed for a world where missing a threat could kill us and missing a compliment was completely fine. Neuroscientists call it negativity bias — the brain’s tendency to register, store, and replay negative experiences with significantly more intensity than positive ones. Bad feedback gets processed in the amygdala, our brain’s threat-detection center, which is why it feels urgent and sticky and real in a way that good feedback often doesn’t. Positive feedback, by contrast, requires what researcher Rick Hanson calls “active installation” — we have to deliberately hold it in awareness for at least 20-30 seconds for it to move from short-term experience into long-term memory.

In other words, the glowing responses wash over us. The neutral and negative ones take up residence.

This is especially acute for midlife women who have taken real risks. When we’ve built something genuinely ours — a business, a community, a creative practice, a family, a new career — the stakes feel personal in a way they didn’t when we were executing someone else’s vision. The critical voice isn’t just commenting on the work. It feels like it’s commenting on us.

So what do we actually do with this?

First, name the ratio. Out loud, or on paper. 67 to 1 is data. One data point inside 67 is also data, but it is not the whole picture, and our nervous systems need us to say that explicitly because they will not arrive there on their own.

Second, get curious about the source. Not every piece of feedback tells us something useful about our work. Sometimes it tells us something about where the other person is — what they’re ready for, what they need, what they’re carrying. Learning to ask “what is this feedback actually about?” is one of the more useful skills in any reinvention.

Third, actively install the good stuff. When we receive genuinely positive feedback, don’t just note it and move on. Sit with it for thirty seconds. Let it land. Tell someone else about it. Write it down. Our brains need the extra time to file it somewhere retrievable.

And finally, this one is for my client who’s wondering if she’s adding value; look at the behavior, not the feeling. Are people coming back? Are they referring others? Are they implementing the insights? Behavior is data too, and it doesn’t have the same negativity bias problem our brains do.

I’m feeling pretty great right now, thinking about the joy and privilege of sharing 154 women’s stories, and the many thousands of hours listeners have spent with us, and all that I’ve learned from creating this community. That is the best data of all.

Thanks for being here.

Leave a comment

Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts to help you slow down and soak in the good stuff.

See you Friday!

Aransas

Read more

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re featuring midlife women who are making history through small actions.

Corinne van der Borch and Edwina White whose documentary subject, Miss T, a Brooklyn crossing guard teaches us how tiny moments can have deep and lasting impact. Listen HERE.

Rebecca Wells and Carolyn Broullon, who ran against each other for mayor in a tiny New Jersey town. They’ll show us how proximity and face-to-face engagement can reconnect communities - and why your backyard is the place to start making change. Listen HERE

Kerri Kennedy, a global peace leader, who has spent two decades challenging authoritarianism worldwide. She’ll teach us the specific actions ordinary people (especially midlife women) can take right now to protect democracy - no political experience required.

Deborah Koenigsberger, a former model, who started Hearts of Gold, which has helped over 45,000 homeless mothers and children since 1994.

When Ruperto Vicens Marquez, a beloved husband, father of three young children, and the chef and co-owner of a beloved small-town restaurant, was taken by ICE last October, he went quietly. But his community got very, very loud.

Seeing how a vital member of the community who had been in the U.S. for nearly two decades, who had valid, current work papers, could be taken from his home, work, and family brought a national crisis that might have once felt abstract into very clear focus.

What if his neighbors never knew? What if the story only spread in whispers, distorted by whatever voice happened to repeat it?

But that’s not what happened. The townspeople organized. They moved strategically. And ultimately, a few weeks later, Ruperto was released.

This wasn’t a fluke or an accident. It was because there was a leader who enlisted a team of experts to write press releases and activate media contacts to galvanize local, state, and national government. Her name is Kerri Kennedy.

As I sat across from Kerri on this episode, I kept thinking: she is a template. Not because her credentials aren’t extraordinary (they very much are), but because the tools she used are tools any one of us can build.

Kerri is the International Associate General Secretary at the American Friends Service Committee, where she oversees peacebuilding, humanitarian response, and migration programs across four regions and more than 20 country offices. She’s appeared on CNN, Al Jazeera English, and NPR. She co-edited the book Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She’s trained women members of Parliament in Afghanistan while moving from safe house to safe house because most of her trainees had death threats issued against them. She founded two PACs in New Jersey to get more women elected. She has talked with Desmond Tutu. And she grew up in a small house in Union, NJ with five brothers, which, she says with a grin, is where she learned to be a peacebuilder.

Kerri doesn’t think of civic engagement as something extraordinary people do. She thinks of it as something ordinary people do together. The science of civil resistance (and yes, there is actual science) shows that we only need 3.5% of a population, acting in a sustained, nonviolent way, to create meaningful change. Not everyone, every day. Just enough of us, enough of the time, doing whatever we can from wherever we are.

Her Courage Practice

Kerri calls it the Porous Choir.

When she’s describing how to sustain any movement over the long haul, years and decades rather than days and weeks, she uses this image: a choir where every individual voice matters, but no single voice has to carry the whole song. When your voice is tired, when you’ve given everything you have and still feel like it’s not enough, you rest. The choir doesn’t collapse. The sound continues. Others hold it while you recover.

It’s one of the most useful frameworks I’ve ever heard for the ongoing work of showing up in the world, whether that’s in a community, a family, or a workplace. We don’t have to be heroes. We don’t have to show up every day at full volume. We just have to be part of the choir, contributing when we can, resting when we must, trusting the collective to carry what we can’t.

What the Research Says

Science tells us that midlife women are uniquely positioned for exactly this kind of civic engagement. By our 50s, our identity certainty is measurably higher than at any other point in our lives (increasing toward a peak around age 65), which means we act more decisively from our values with less second-guessing. Kerri describes this shift vividly: she no longer ponders, she acts. She sees the problem, she mobilizes, and she’s okay with failure if it comes. Research on mirror neurons also shows that we can actively train our brains to expand our sense of “ingroup,” moving from narrow tribal identity toward broader community connection, which is exactly the skill democratic resilience requires.

5 Ways Kerri Kennedy Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Acts from identity certainty, not performance. Kerri has always known her values, and she’s spent decades narrowing in on where they intersect with her skills. She doesn’t try to do everything. She shows up where she’s strong and pulls in others for the rest.

2. Builds the fear threshold incrementally. She’s not fearless. She’s been moving from safe house to safe house with women who had death threats, coordinating humanitarian responses in active conflict zones, and standing up at local town meetings in a politically divided community. Each act of courage builds capacity for the next. She describes it like a muscle: you stretch, you rest, you grow.

3. Translates paralysis into a menu. When people tell her they don’t know how to help, Kerri doesn’t give them one answer. She gives them ten, calibrated to different levels of risk and resource. Spend with your values. Sign a letter. Call your representative. Show up to a vigil. Go to a Know Your Rights training. Join a mutual aid network. There’s always something that fits where you are right now.

4. Practices the “opposite” as a default. Watching too much news? Turn it off and go outside. Feeling isolated? Call a neighbor. Feeling overwhelmed by the global? Do something local. The antidote to overwhelm or paralysis is almost always in the opposite direction from where the spiral is pulling you.

5. Sets medium-term goals for long-term work. She talks about 1% better every day, but she also maps out where she wants to be in one, three, and five years across work, family, health, and joy. She does semi-annual check-ins to see if her time reflects her values. It’s the same goal-setting wisdom that applies to weightlifting applied to the work of building a more just world.

Lift Her Up

Kerri’s work is through the American Friends Service Committee at afsc.org, where you can find volunteer opportunities, nonviolent movement actions, and congressional alerts organized by issue. You can also connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Instagram.

If you loved this story...

This episode is part of our Women’s History Month series, and it pairs beautifully with Amy Cohen’s episode, the co-founder of Families for Safe Streets, who turned devastating personal loss into landmark legislation. For more on women leading from the front lines of public life, check out Rev. Ann Kansfield’s episode (FDNY chaplain and author of Be the Brave One) and Laura Kavanagh’s episode, the first woman to serve as NYC Fire Commissioner in the agency’s 157-year history.

Your Turn

How do you take a tiny step forward when you feel overwhelmed? Share it in the comments.

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Something happens to me every March. The light shifts, the birds get loud, the first green shoots push up through the mud, and apparently my brain interprets all of it as a signal to want to start seventeen new things simultaneously. Maybe yours does too.

There’s a reason for that. And it’s not a willpower problem.

Our brains’ dopamine systems fires hardest not when we get the thing, but when we anticipate it. Novelty triggers a hit. The new idea, the fresh start, the blank page of a different direction — all of it lights up our reward centers before we’ve done a single thing. And in midlife especially, when our identities are in flux and the old roadmaps don’t fit anymore, the pull toward next and new is even stronger.

The problem isn’t the curiosity. The problem is when curiosity becomes the strategy.

I say this as someone who loves her shiny object syndrome. I love the exploration phase of a project or relationship. I love the creativity and discovery of it. I also know that real depth and impact only come from strategy. That’s why every year I give myself clear filters to decide what gets a yes and what doesn’t. Something that makes it easy to look at the pigeon’s wig and say — with clarity, not longing — nope, not today.

That filter has to be built from the inside out. It starts with knowing what actually energizes you versus what just looks energizing. It requires getting honest about what you’ve already built, what has real momentum, and what you keep returning to across every context of your life. It means naming the 3-5 things that matter most this year — not everything that might be fun, cool, or interesting, just what really matters — and deciding in advance that those are what get protected when the inbox fills up and the opportunities start arriving and the wig is on sale.

I’ve been taking my clients through what I call the Big Picture Blueprint to map out their year and clarify their filters. It’s not about making a rigid plan (that sounds boring and totally impractical). It’s about asking questions that help them find what they already know. Once we have a strategy, shiny objects don’t disappear. But it does get easier to see them for what they are.

Here are a few of my favorite questions I ask clients when we work on their filters:

• If you could only accomplish 3-5 things this year, what would they be?

• Is this aligned with something already in motion, or are you starting over again?

• Are you drawn to this because it’s right, or because it’s new?

If you're feeling the spring itch to get clear, I'd love to help you build your filter. I have a few spots open right now — reply and tell me a little about where you are, and we'll figure out what fits.

Paid subscribers, I’ll see you later this week with a series of reflection prompts to help you get clear on your filters.

See you Friday!

Aransas

Earlier this week I shared what happened when we gathered almost 100 purpose-driven midlife women in one room and asked them to name what they have in spades and what they need.

Today, I thought we could go a little deeper with that practice.

These five prompts are designed to help you build your own Courage Capital — the resources…

Read more

In honor of Women’s History month, we’re featuring midlife women who are making history in big and small ways.

Corinne van der Borch and Edwina White whose documentary subject, Miss T, a Brooklyn crossing guard teaches us how tiny moments can have deep and lasting impact. Listen HERE.

Rebecca Wells and Carolyn Broullon who ran against each other for mayor in a tiny New Jersey town. They’ll show us how proximity and face-to-face engagement can reconnect communities - and why your backyard is the place to start making change.

Kerri Kennedy, a global peace leader, who has spent two decades challenging authoritarianism worldwide. She’ll teach us the specific actions ordinary people (especially midlife women) can take right now to protect democracy - no political experience required.

Deborah Koenigsberger, a former model, who started Hearts of Gold, which has helped over 45,000 homeless mothers and children since 1994.

Listen to this episode if...

• You’ve been feeling powerless about the state of the world and wondering how to make a difference

• You’ve thought about getting more involved in your community but don’t know where to start

• You’ve ever talked yourself out of running for something because you didn’t feel qualified enough

It was a Tuesday night in November, and the firehouse in Highlands, New Jersey probably smelled like coffee and nerves. Two women stood inside waiting for election results. The walls were lined with gear and history. It was a male-dominated space, in a male-dominated profession, in a male-dominated field, politics, and yet here were two women who had each decided that this was their room too.

Their names are Rebecca Wells and Carolyn Broullon. Rebecca is a lifelong Highlands resident whose family has shaped her town for generations. She became the first woman ever to serve as fire chief of the Highlands Fire Department, served five terms on town council, nearly two decades on the housing authority, and still serves as Deputy Chief and on the Board of Education. Carolyn found Highlands in 2002 while looking for a vacation home, and like so many of us, never left. She and her wife Donika have poured themselves into this place, streaming town hall meetings after Hurricane Sandy so displaced residents could still have a voice, leading the effort to bring nonpartisan elections to Highlands, and winning the mayor’s seat three times, including this most recent race.

When I saw the photo of the two of them standing in that firehouse, I felt something shift in my chest. Not because one of them was going to win and one was going to lose, but because both of them had shown up. In a moment when national politics feels like a spectacle we’re watching from the outside, these two women were doing something different. They were saying: this is our community, and we are willing to stand in it and fight for it, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when it’s personal, even when the margin is just 66 votes.

What struck me most about this conversation was how much these two women agree. They both want Highlands to move forward while protecting what makes it special. They both care about keeping the town affordable for long-term residents and welcoming to new families. They both believe that local engagement is where the real change happens. And they ran against each other anyway, because that’s also democracy at its most functional: giving people a choice.

In the end, Carolyn won with 51.35% of the vote to Rebecca’s 48.28%. Just 66 votes separated them. About half the town voted for one, and half voted for the other, and roughly a thousand people who showed up to vote for governor didn’t bother to go all the way down the ballot to vote for their mayor at all.

What the Research Says

Research consistently shows that women are twice as likely as men to rate themselves as not qualified to run for office, even when they have identical credentials. They are also far less likely to have ever been encouraged to run in the first place. And yet the Edelman Trust Barometer, which has tracked public trust longitudinally for over 25 years, tells us something important: our distrust of institutions and systems is only challenged by proximity. Face-to-face time with another human being, shared values, shared goals, these are what rebuild trust. Which means that the most powerful thing midlife women can do right now may be exactly what Rebecca and Carolyn did: get out of their houses, knock on doors, and show up in person.

5 Ways Rebecca and Carolyn Show Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Show up with your body, not just your opinion. Rebecca walked her town at 6 a.m. with flashlights. Carolyn opened a store on the main drag to be present with her community. Both of them know that real trust is built face-to-face, not through a screen.

2. Bring the next generation with you. Rebecca brought her kids door-to-door. Carolyn works to bring newer residents onto committees so they learn the ropes and eventually step up themselves. Creating the conditions for other people to lead is its own form of courage.

3. Let grief be a reason to keep going, not a reason to stop. Rebecca lost her father just before the election. She ran anyway, partly because he’d told her not to quit. Grief can be a north star if we let it.

4. Hold your convictions without demonizing the opposition. These two women ran against each other and still share a vision for the future of their town. They disagree on some things and agree on most things, and they say so openly. That is rare, and genuinely brave, right now.

5. Start in your own backyard. Neither of them is running for president. They are taking care of their town, their neighbors, their kids’ schools. As I mentioned in the episode, Helen Arteaga’s father taught her to focus on her own backyard, and that small piece of advice eventually carried her to leading a health system serving millions. It starts local.

Lift Her Up

If you’re in Highlands, look for Rebecca’s community group forming to bring neighbors together outside of social media and political affiliation. And if you want to see what Carolyn is building, attend a town council meeting or connect with local government in your own community.

More broadly: vote in your local elections. All the way down the ballot.

Your Turn

What would it take for you to get more involved in your own community, even in the smallest possible way? A town meeting, a school board meeting, a neighborhood cleanup, a conversation with a neighbor you’ve never actually spoken to? Share in the comments. Your answer might be exactly the nudge someone else needs.

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