Month-at-a-Glance

This month we’re sharing stories about four different types of permission:

Last week, Sofia Kavlin, the visionary behind the Unsent Letter Mailbox, gave herself permission to ASK for support, and in walked her creative soulmate, Bonnie Blue Edwards. Listen HERE

Coming up, Sarah Nelson of Sexual Empowerment in Midlife spent 30 years believing it was her job to keep everyone else happy. In midlife, she gave herself permission to DESIRE. Sarah Kauss took S’well from $30k in savings to over $100 million, then sold it. In midlife she gave herself permission to SLOW DOWN.

And this week, !

spent decades as a creative director in advertising and then a tech industry writer, all while being the primary earner, caretaker, and support system for her family. She was good at being good for everyone else.

Then she turned 50. She ended her marriage, burned her AARP card, and one day, in the shower, she had a vision: a print magazine for Gen Xers who are kicking ass in the second half and have exactly zero interest in being told where to retire. She would call it Geezer.

Like so many of us, Laura spent most of her life with a voice in the back of her head saying she was good but not good enough. Reliable, but not capital-C Creative. That voice kept her in the back seat of her own creative life for decades, making things for other people because it was safer than tossing her innards out and asking, “Is this okay? Am I all right?”

Founding Geezer was the first time she dared to come out as the badass creative force she always was. She didn’t hedge her bets, either. She took all of her stock options, laid them on the table, and Geezer mag was born. The result is a lushly printed quarterly by and for Gen X. It’s grand in scale, its stories and art are wildly ambitious, and you can get a copy of every issue by subscribing to her Substack, so go do that now!)

Geezer magazine

Geezer is the only print magazine for Gen X exploring the agony and ecstasy of aging—because midlife is weird in ways no one warned us about.

By Laura LeBleu

5 Ways Laura LeBleu Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Start with the resources you’ve already earned. Laura didn’t start from zero. She brought thirty years of creative experience, business knowledge, and yes, stock options to the table.

2. Name the limiting beliefs and move anyway. The “good but not great enough” voice didn’t disappear when Laura launched Geezer. She just stopped letting it make the decisions.

3. Lead with “I don’t know what I’m doing.” It sounds counterintuitive, but Laura’s greatest community-building tool was radical honesty about her knowledge gaps. People want to help. Let them.

4. Have a strong POV. Geezer is polarizing by design. Some people love the name; some hate it. A strong point of view repels the wrong people and magnetizes the right ones. You can’t make something true enough to move people while also trying to please everyone.

5. Ask yourself: if not now, when? This was Laura’s throughline. Life is short. Do the big, brave things.

Lift Her Up:

Go subscribe to Geezer Magazine at geezermagazine.com. Use code UPLIFT15 for 15% off your first subscription.

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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.

Hi friends,

We made it to June. School is wrapping up, summer is stretching out ahead, and as always, this community has been busy doing big, brave things. Here is what’s in the batch this month.

In Community

A huge thank you to everyone who came out to our Shopping and Sangria evening at TTH Vintage benefiting Hearts of Gold.

I am so excited to announce a new benefit for our paid subscribers: Monthly Lift and Be Lifted meetups. Once a month, starting Tuesday, June 16, we will capture some of the magic of Uplifters Live on Zoom to do what this community does best. Midlife women with decades of careers and roles and hats worn between them are wildly, freakishly resourceful, so we will use the time to move further and faster, together. We are really pretty magical.

Subscribe now

On the Pod

May was for mothers, money, and menopause.

🎧 Four very different takes on motherhood from Ruthie Ackerman, Katie Horwitch, Sarah Gormley, and Shayla Martin. Listen HERE.

🎧 Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD, a doctor and certified wealth manager, on how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause. Listen HERE.

🎧 Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick. Listen HERE.

🎧 And Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer. Listen HERE.

June is for the permission we wait for that only we can give.

Way back in episode 79, Kerry Brodie shared that when she had the wild idea to start a nonprofit to help immigrants get into the workforce, she also had a million reasons she wasn’t the right person and it wasn’t the right time. Her husband asked, “Whose permission are you waiting for?” She realized she only needed her own. Today she and Emma’s Torch have served over 500 students and created more than $21 million in increased wages for graduates.

This month the pod brings stories about four different types of permission:

Sofia Kavlin, the visionary behind the Unsent Letter Mailbox, gave herself permission to ASK for support, and in walked her creative soulmate, Bonnie Blue Edwards.

Laura LeBleu spent 54 years telling stories for everyone else, sure she wasn’t creative enough to make her own publication. In midlife, she gave herself permission to BEGIN, set her AARP card on fire, and published Geezer magazine.

Sarah Nelson of Sexual Empowerment in Midlife spent 30 years believing it was her job to keep everyone else happy. In midlife, she gave herself permission to DESIRE.

Sarah Kauss took S’well from $30k in savings to over $100 million, then sold it. In midlife she gave herself permission to SLOW DOWN.

New Friends

The Uplifters podcast is built on the idea that Uplifters rise higher together, that when we pool our midlife wisdom we can do remarkable things. Each guest nominates a woman who inspires her, which means I get to talk to amazing women all day, every day. Here are a few of the uplifting women I met this month. Follow them. You will be so glad you did.

• , a rest and ritual teacher whose work centers on purpose and stillness.

• , the filmmaker behind Ramona in Midlife, get it now on Prime and Apple.

• , an author, attorney, and executive leader who helps people redefine success and navigate change.

• Kristina Godfrey, who has run Godfrey Social PR since 1997 and is devoted to helping women grow into their best selves.

• Christine Despres, a longtime nurse turned brain health and wellness coach helping midlife women age well, including those caring for aging parents.

• Jessica Hansen, a voice coach and performer exploring what happens to our voices in midlife.

• Jennifer Shay Carta, an accomplished actor turned author writing her way through midlife.

• Dara Steinberg, an occupational therapist and menopause coach who helps highly sensitive women slow down and heal.

• , founder of Relationality, mapping how teams make decisions to build healthier, better-matched cultures.

• Robinson, a film producer, writer, and director, and the creator of the film Late Bloomers.

• Tori DaCosta, author of No Name Bastard, on what we can actually control, manage, and influence.

• Adora Winquist, a modern-day alchemist working in vibrational medicine, energy healing, and essential oil alchemy.

• Wendy Richardson, a real estate agent and coach.

• Rebecca Cohen and Seema Aghera, the co-founders of Brooklyn Book Bodega.

Uplifter Updates

Every month I ask our community to share their wins and the ways we can lift each other up. Here are a few highlights:

is getting close to launching her first product. She credits this community with giving her the confidence to chase something that had been sitting on her someday list for a long time. It is a set of hair bands with a message, designed to be meaningful reminders throughout the day, and she is preparing for an Amazon launch. She is looking for product testers to give feedback. If you are interested, reach her at jaclyn@whereheregear.com.

Rachel Josephson of Fils & Poisson hosted her first pop-up shop!

Jodi Miller is making the t-shirt every woman needs. The Lift Heavy Club is for those days you are having a hot flash while taking over the world. I think they’d be the perfect thing to wear while reading .

’s career book, Closing the Fulfillment Gap: How to Design the Work Life You Want, is out September 15. For anyone feeling stuck, unsure of the next right step, or simply ready for a boost in purpose, this one was written for you. Pre-order it here, and look for Helen on an upcoming episode.

created Love Is Community Suppers, a passion project where she brings her love of cooking, baking, and hosting to the table. Guests come as they are for a free meal, dessert, and real conversation. If you’re in Westchester, check out her events.

(episode 6) completed her first 100-mile run. Her fourth memoir, capturing the journey of the JFK 50 Mile Race, is out now.

(episode 7) is building out her coaching work with couples and a group for women in relationship transition, and hosted her very first retreat. She is also in the early stages of a writing project on communication and resilience.

(episode 43) had her podcast, Well...Adjusting, featured by Apple Podcasts. She is still acting in a business where “no” outnumbers “yes” by roughly three bagillion to one, and holding it all a little more loosely. Follow her at @realrobhops.

got resourceful. After years of needing an extra set of hands at work, she found a way to bring on a couple of contractors who start this week, plus a side gig to help fund them.

Kimberle Lau (founder of Bake Me Healthy) is co-hosting the first Long Island Female Entrepreneurs (LIFE) and Lattes event with Elizabeth Kressel. If you are building a business, growing a side hustle, or just want to be in a room with ambitious women who get the journey, this is your space. Come for the cappuccino, stay for the community. Register here.

Michelle McGovern is celebrating her twins turning 6. They were born in May 2020, at the height of COVID in New York City, while Michelle was seven months pregnant and COVID positive. Happy birthday, girls.

Want to be included in next month’s Good Batch and stay connected to what other Uplifters are building? Join us as a paid subscriber and come find your people in our chat.

With love, Aransas

I keep this print by the graffiti artist Steve Powers, AKA ESPO over my desk at all times to remind me. Every week will have lights, and every one will have darks. And every week we will meet up on Zoom to remember one good thing and one worry or challenge from the week, because celebrating the good stuff and working through the tough stuff is how we keep doing big, brave things.

You’re invited, and we’d love for you to join us at the link below.

Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions and reflect together

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

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

• 11:03 - Second solo work session

• 11:59 - Close and pat ourselves on the back

Read more

Month-at-a-Glance

Way back in episode 79, Kerry Brodie shared that when she had the wild idea to start a nonprofit that would immediately help immigrants get into the workforce, she also had a million reasons why she wasn’t the right person and this wasn’t the right time. Her husband asked, “Whose permission are you waiting for?” She realized she just needed her own, and now she and her nonprofit, Emma’s Torch, have served over 500 students and created over $21 million in increased wages for program graduates.

I’m writing about this idea for my forthcoming book, Courage Capital: It’s Not Too Late to Do Big, Brave Things, so this month on the podcast I’m sharing four stories about the permission we wait for that only we can give.

Sofia Kavlin is the visionary behind the Unsent Letter Mailbox. Her idea was big, but there’s only so far one person can carry an idea, so she gave herself permission to ASK for support. In walked her creative soulmate, .

spent 54 years telling stories for everyone else, quietly sure she wasn’t creative enough to make something of her own. In midlife, she gave herself permission to BEGIN, set her AARP card on fire, and built Geezer magazine.

Sarah Nelson of spent 30 years believing it was her job to keep her husband and everyone else happy. In midlife, she gave herself permission to DESIRE.

Sarah Kauss took S’well from $30k of savings to over $100 million, then sold it. In midlife,she gave herself permission to SLOW DOWN.

On Valentine’s Day 2024, Sofia Kavlin dragged a wooden mailbox into Washington Square Park and asked strangers to write down unexpressed thoughts and longings and hopes and griefs and regrets and everything in between, and drop it in. In exchange, each person got to read an anonymous letter written by someone else. Fifty letters came in that first cold day. They were not all about love. They were about everything.

More than four thousand letters later, the Unsent Letter Mailbox has traveled to Austin, Houston, and Chattanooga, and been featured by The New York Times, NBC News, and The Kelly Clarkson Show. It is, in Sofia’s words, “a radical reclaiming of intimacy, a small, analog act of trust in a world that keeps pulling us apart”.

Sofia is a visionary, and she will tell you plainly that she is brilliant at conceiving things and not great at breaking them into the bite-sized, itemized steps that actually move them forward. A big idea will only travel so far on one person’s back, so she put an unsent letter into the universe declaring her desire for a creative soulmate.

A few months after Sofia wrote that letter, a producer named Bonnie Blue Edwards sent her a one-year plan. There’s lots more magic to this story, which you’ll hear all about in the episode.

If you are a visionary who is tired of trying to do it all alone, I hope you hear in this conversation a path toward finding the support you need and deserve.

5 Ways Sofia and Bonnie Show Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Name what you need before you know who will answer. Get specific about the feeling, not the mechanics, and put it out loud where the right person can hear it.

2. Look for an amplifier, not a replacement. You don’t have to hand over the vision to get help carrying it. Name the gifts you’re missing and find the person who has them.

3. Make the ask scared. Bonnie pitched a one-year plan to an artist she barely knew. The worst anyone can say is no.

4. Hold your people with open hands. Protect the vision and stay non-possessive about the humans inside it. You can’t control whether someone stays, only whether you treated the partnership with respect.

5. Let your grief become a gift. Instead of waiting for the hard season to end, pour it into something other people can use.

Lift Them Up: Follow the Unsent Letter Mailbox at unsentlettermailbox.com and on Instagram at @unsentlettermailbox. Go to an event if you can, subscribe to their Substack, look out for Mailbox Society (their forthcoming IRL writing meetups in collaboration with New York Poetry Society), and if you lead a team, ask Sofia and Bonnie about Letter Labs, their workshop that helps coworkers and groups actually see each other. Find Sofia at @sofia.kavlin and Bonnie at @bonnieblue952, and pick up her book Stressed Out & Scatterbrained.

If you loved this story... This episode exists because of , who nominated both Sofia and Bonnie. Thank you, Lia. Listen to her episode HERE. And get ready for the women they’re lifting up next: Kelby Clark, founder of the creative salon Opus House and a gifted poet and writer, and Catherine Burns, a brilliant creative and storyteller.

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When I was 12 years old, I self-published my first book. Jaye Edwards illustrated it. I was definitively a Writer.

My paternal grandfather was a war correspondent in Pearl Harbor and taught journalism at the University of Hawaii, so I had this sense that writing was in my bones. I’d send him letters, and he’d tell me I was carrying on his gifts. Awww, I really was a Writer!

When I was 13, I won “best poet” in my middle school. When I went up to the stage to accept my award (the only one I received as a decisively non-athletic kid in a suburban Texas town), Mrs Pauletta McConathy, a poet and my Texas history teacher (yep, we had dedicated Texas history classes), wrote that, “Her feet didn’t touch the ground… Her beamer came unwound”. I was overcome with pride and purpose. I was a Writer.

When I was 15, I was a regional winner in a national essay contest sponsored by former POW Captain Gerald Coffee. I wrote about a woman who inspired me, a real-life hero. We went to a big fancy hotel and I read my work from a podium. I was an earnest girl, dressed in a dowdy old-lady suit that made me look more like a Victorian schoolmarm than a 1990s student, but I was also a Writer.

When I was 19, I wrote a play about a pawn broker, modeled after my grandfather who ran our family pawn shop. I got a good grade in my class. I wrote, but I wasn’t a Writer. Writers were something else. Something tortured, or at least compelled to write to survive. That wasn’t me.

From 20-50, I was many, many things, but never a Writer. I was a good student, a bad influence, an actor, a corporate ladder climber, a mother/daughter/wife, and more recently a podcast host and coach, but even though I have written my Substack every week for 4 years, I wasn’t a Writer, merely a person who writes.

Then, I was offered this big book deal and made a commitment to write a whole entire book. I introduce myself at parties as a Writer now. I did a Google search last week on “writer hats”, because I think I want one (though I haven’t found any I like, so if you find a cute one, please hook a girl up). I became a Writer not because of the book deal, but because I’m writing. I became a Writer by choosing to spend my time writing instead of doing other things. I became a Writer by sitting at my kitchen table and writing three pages each morning for the last year and a half to teach my brain how to stop editing. I became a Writer by blocking my calendar every Tuesday to do nothing but write, even as my brain tries to wriggle out of it and do easier things.

We treat identity like a license issued to us by an authority (a publisher, a contest judge, a grandfather with credentials) once we’ve proven we deserve it. We wait to be granted the title. We wait to feel like the thing before we’ll claim the thing.

That’s not how identity actually works though. There’s a wonderful old idea in social psychology called self-perception theory. The psychologist Daryl Bem figured out that often we don’t know who we are from the inside. Instead, we watch our own behavior and conclude who we are from the evidence of our actions.

So when I sit at my kitchen table each morning and fill those three pages, my brain is taking attendance. It notes: this is a person who writes. Again the next morning, and the morning after that. This is a person who writes. Eventually the evidence is conclusive: I am a Writer.

For many of us, the destabilizing chaos (and fewer fucks given) in midlife create time and space to go back to older versions of ourselves and check back in on those girls to see how they’re doing, and to wonder if maybe they’re ready to stop hiding in the wings.

I didn’t discover a new self at 50. I went back and gathered up a self I’d exiled at 19, when I decided Writers had to be tortured and I was disqualified for being basically fine. Re-integration isn’t becoming someone new. It’s calling home the parts of you that you sent away because they didn’t fit the life you were building at the time.

So no, the book deal didn’t make me a Writer. The book deal just gave the 12-year-old with the self-published book, and the 13-year-old whose feet didn’t touch the ground, a reason to come back to the table. I became a Writer the way anyone becomes anything that matters. Not by being chosen. By choosing, on a Tuesday, when my brain would much rather do literally anything else.

Now I just need the hat.

P.S. I’m currently offering my workshop, “Carrying Invisible Loads,” to organizations and ERGs during Mental Health Awareness Month and beyond. If your team is in that “everyone is at a breaking point” season, this is for you. Reply to this email to learn more.

P.P.S. 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.

Midlife women with decades of careers and roles and hats worn between them are wildly, freakishly resourceful. Every week on our Uplifters co-working Zoom, someone shares what’s blocking their path, and before they finish the sentence, somebody else has a different angle on it, or a tool they’ve been using for years, or just the exact reframe that makes things clearer. We get out of our own way together and it’s really pretty magical.

So today, whether you can join us or not, here’s what we’re doing:

Start with what went well. One good thing from this week. That’s it. Especially right now, when the news is heavy, anchoring to something good is extra valuable. (Aside: I removed social media from my phone this week thinking it would free up lots of brain space. Instead, I ended up looking at the news more often, which turned out to be more harmful than helpful. Not the lesson I expected from this experiment, but a goodie nonetheless.)

Then: what’s getting in your way? What’s slowing you down or making it harder to move forward? It’s usually a thought, a feeling, or a belief, not a circumstance.

And then ask: what could make this easier? Is there a different way to look at it, from further back or up closer? Is there someone whose experience might put it in perspective?

If you want to work through it with the nicest, funnest (who will sign my petition for that to become a word), warmest little group of midlife women you can imagine, we’re here. Join us at the link below. And if this time doesn’t work for you today, mark your calendar for next week, but take a few minutes today to check in on your week, and let us know your good thing in the comments.

Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Connect and share

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

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

• 11:03 - Second solo work session

• 11:59 - Close and pat ourselves on the back

Read more

May is for mothers, money, and menopause

This month’s stories:

🎧 Four very different takes on motherhood from Ruthie Ackerman, Katie Horwitch, Sarah Gormley, and Shayla Martin. Listen HERE

🎧 Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD, a doctor and certified wealth manager, discusses how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause. Listen HERE.

🎧 Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick. Listen HERE.

🎧 And Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer.

Many of us spend our whole lives with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake when it comes to our dreams and goals.

We know what we want. And we know exactly how to talk ourselves out of doing anything about it. The timing isn’t right. What will people think? Who do I think I am? estimates that 90% of the people she’s coached over her career are living this way. The hardest moments of life have a way of shaking loose every reason we had for waiting, though. They can clear the noise, show us what matters most, and give us the courage to move forward.

In today’s episode, you’ll hear from two women who took their foot completely off the brake after cancer diagnoses.

After her breast cancer battle in 2020, Jacque looked back on her life, her experiences, her skills, her passions, and she asked herself, “What’s mine to do?” In other words, what problem am I uniquely well-suited to solving? To figure it out and find more empathy and compassion for other humans, she committed to having a thousand cups of coffee with strangers. She discovered that storytelling was the through line of her journey. That understanding gave her the courage and conviction to share her vision with Monique Ruff-Bell, Chief Program & Strategy Officer, TED, and to launch the Gateway Gathering and PitchFest five months later. Now, she’s created a platform for spotlighting speakers and talent to connect them with opportunities. It’s taken lots of bravery, but every time her heart starts pounding, she looks at the bracelet she wears from her cancer journey and says to herself, "This is not as scary as cancer.”

Christy Kercheville was diagnosed with leiomyosarcoma, a rare and incurable cancer, on March 5th, 2020, four days before the world locked down. Six years later, she has walked around Amsterdam in loose-laced shoes (the only pair that fit with the water retention from chemo) because she was not missing the tulips. She has rented a van and road-tripped with her sons. She works in ways that fit her body’s needs now, raises money for leiomyosarcoma research, and gives herself as long as she needs to wallow before asking: what’s the next thing I want to do?

What the Research Says: Studies on what psychologists call mortality salience, the acute awareness of our own death, consistently show that it doesn’t make people retreat. It makes them bolder, more willing to act on what matters, and more able to release the fear of judgment that was never really protecting them anyway. In midlife women, this effect is compounded by the neurological shifts of perimenopause and menopause, which research links to increased risk tolerance and stronger identity clarity. We are all one day closer to death every day that we live. Remembering that reminds me to seize the moment. My grandma ran until the last days of her life. Like her, I want to run all the way to the finish line. Remembering that life is short can be a powerful motivator to go do the big, brave things we’ve been putting off.

Lift Them Up: Find Jacquelyn at JacquelynFletcherJohnson.com to learn more about The Gateway Gathering and PitchFest. Find Christy on Instagram and TikTok at @christychronicleslms, where she’s sharing her journey and raising awareness for leiomyosarcoma. And if her story moves you, consider donating to the Leiomyosarcoma Direct Research Foundation at LMSDR.org.

If you loved this story... You’ll want to go back and listen to last week’s conversation with Rebecca Bloom, author of When Women Get Sick, about navigating serious illness with agency, support, and the self-advocacy tools most women don’t know they have.

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I try to start every Friday morning by looking at my calendar from the past week, just to remind myself what actually happened, even on those weeks when it feels like nothing went to plan. It helps me show myself a little grace when that snippy, judgmental girl in my head starts wagging her finger at me.

This week, I made a few really silly mistakes. Judgy girl had a heyday with that, but she softened up when I put things in perspective for her. It was a big week: my daughters performed at a poetry open mic, I gussied up and hit the town for the Moth Ball, I went to the premiere of the E. Jean Carroll documentary with (please, please go see it and support this incredible film). It was a lot. And I am tired. And making mistakes is the price of that, but I wouldn’t trade a second of it.

Research says reflection is one of the most valuable things we can do. For productivity, life satisfaction, resilience, you name it. And yet most of us blow right past it. Every Friday, we close out the week together with a little reflection, some focused work, and a teeny-tiny dance party. It’s work time, but it’s also play time.

You’re invited, and we’d love for you to join us at the link below.

Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoom. Here’s our flow:

• 10:00 - Set intentions and reflect together

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

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

• 11:03 - Second solo work session

• 11:59 - Close and pat ourselves on the back

Read more

May is for mothers, money, and menopause

This month’s stories:

🎧 Four very different takes on motherhood from Ruthie Ackerman, Katie Horwitch, Sarah Gormley, and Shayla Martin. Listen HERE

🎧 Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD, a doctor and certified wealth manager, discusses how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause. Listen HERE.

🎧 Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick.

🎧 And Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer.

I was only a few pages into Rebecca Bloom’s book When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need when I decided that I needed to buy ten copies and hand them to everyone I love.

Women in their 40s and 50s are disproportionately carrying the coordination load of healthcare, for aging parents, for children, and for themselves, often while navigating perimenopause symptoms that are unrecognized and untreated. Studies on patient advocacy in healthcare settings consistently show that women who have support navigating the system have better treatment adherence and measurably better outcomes, largely because they are less overwhelmed and more likely to ask the questions that change the course of care.

Rebecca has spent 27 years at the Bay Area Cancer Connection Center, guiding women fighting breast and ovarian cancer through the maze of insurance systems, workplace rights, and the loneliness and frustration of being sick in a system that was designed to make it harder on them. She is the woman you call when things fall apart. And she’s spent the last few years translating everything she knows into this book so she can be there even when you can’t reach her.

Rebecca’s career began as a very successful benefits attorney at one of New York’s most prestigious law firms. There, she learned how to work an impossibly complicated system, how to think through layers of regulation and stakeholders and incentives.

When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she found herself looking at that same system from the other side. Even with health insurance, all of this background knowledge, relative financial security, an excellent medical team, and lots of support, the system felt impossible to navigate. So she left her big, fancy job, moved across the country, and began figuring out how to make it easier.

The healthcare system was not designed to make things easy for patients. It was designed to make it hard for patients to get through and easy for third-party payers not to pay. Women are more likely to be in medical debt, more likely to delay care, and more likely to quietly absorb the cost of being sick in every sense of that word.

But Rebecca says that we have more power than we think. Think an appeal to your health insurer is a waste of time? She says people win more than 50% of them. Feel like taking a leave of absence feels like begging? It’s yours. You’ve earned it. It is part of your compensation. Her book is a playbook for what to do, who to call, what to ask, and how to build the team around us before we need it so that when we do, we aren’t starting from scratch.

“If my book does nothing but make a woman think, ‘I’m worthy of help, and this helped me figure out how to ask for it,’ that would be enough for me.”

Lift Her Up

Pick up When Women Get Sick: An Empowering Approach for Getting the Support You Need wherever books are sold, or better yet, get two and give one to a woman you love (because she probably won’t buy it for herself). And leave a review on Amazon. It helps authors reach more of the people who need their work.

If you loved this story...

Listen to last week’s episode with to understand the true cost of menopause. It’s probably a lot higher than you expect. Listen HERE.

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Do you remember The Monster at the End of This Book? Grover spends the whole story desperately trying to keep you from turning the page, because he’s terrified of the monster waiting at the end. And then you get there, and the monster is Grover.

I was Grover this week.

I spent two deep, locked-in writing days with my book, chasing down research, and tightening up narratives. There were moments of flow, and feeling like, “Damn, I was really born to write this book”. And then I started thinking about sending the first section to my editor.

My editor is not some gatekeeping Oz. She’s someone who has shaped books I love, who is passionate about this topic, who genuinely wants this to be the best book it can be. She is exactly the partner I dreamed of for this project.

And I am scared out of my mind to send it to her.

Wednesday morning, I texted : OK, having an existential crisis right this very second. The one that sounds like: this entire thing is totally shit, and no one should ever see it. All triggered by the idea of someone reading my work and having opinions on it. Which is exactly what I want. I cannot write this book alone. I do not want to write this book alone. And yet.

Meanwhile, one of my clients, a CEO, got unsolicited feedback from an industry insider that landed like a finger pointing straight at the heart of everything she’d built. Another, a first-time agency founder after decades as an executive in other people’s companies, hit a rough patch with a client relationship and spent a few minutes in the full spiral: what if it’s all wrong, what if I made all the wrong choices, what if I’m the problem?

We were all, in the same week, crumpling under the weight of being seen.

Here’s what I think is actually happening, for us and for so many midlife women building things for the first time that are truly, unapologetically theirs. Research on how girls are raised shows we’re more likely than boys to be praised for our attributes, for who we are, for being good, being kind, being easy. Not for what we do or build or attempt. The consequence, as psychologist Carol Dweck’s work makes clear, is that feedback on our work gets processed as feedback on our worth. We weren’t trained to separate the two.

So in midlife, when we finally stop building other people’s dreams and start building our own, the feedback stakes feel existential in a way they didn’t before (well, not quite as much). The antidote, it turns out, isn't toughening up or caring less. It's wanting something different from feedback entirely.

I asked Rebecca Bloom, author of When Women Get Sick, what it was like to hear feedback on the impact of her work. She said, “It’s a moral rush, not an empty-calorie candy rush, but a moral rush, because it makes me feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. You wake up every morning asking, ‘Am I on the right path? Am I using my gifts? Am I moving the needle?’ And when someone tells you yes, that’s your answer.”

The women I’ve interviewed who have had unprecedented impact, women like M’Lis Ward and Kathrine Switzer, who did things nobody like them had ever done, they weren’t asking what does everyone think of my performance? They were asking how do I do this as well as it can possibly be done?

One orientation is about protection. The other is about impact. I want impact.

The monster at the end of the book is me. But so is the courage to turn the damn page anyway. I’m printing the manuscript this weekend. Reading it on paper. And then I’m sending it.

What are you sending this week, even a little scared?

P.S. If you’re in New York, I’d love to hang out with you on May 28 while shopping and sipping sangria, all in support of the wonderful nonprofit Hearts of Gold. All the details HERE.

P.P.S. I’m currently offering my workshop, “Carrying Invisible Loads,” to organizations and ERGs during Mental Health Awareness Month and beyond. If your team is in that “everyone is at a breaking point” season, this is for you. Reply to this email to learn more.

P.P.P.S. 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.

How are you ending this week? Are you actually ending it, or are you just... carrying it into the weekend, a million tiny pieces still floating around, waiting for your attention while things that felt more urgent kept nudging them aside?

What would you do if I had a focused two-hour retreat right now to set the urgent stuff aside and just work on what actually matters?

If you’re a paid subscriber, you don’t have to just imagine it. Our weekly co-working Cocoon starts right now. Same time, same place, same silently supportive container. We show up, say a quick hello, and then we get that shit done.

Come as you are. Bring your project, your mess, your half-finished thing.

Every Friday from 10-12 ET, on Zoo. 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

May is for mothers, money, and menopause

This month’s stories:

Four very different takes on motherhood from Ruthie Ackerman, Katie Horwitch, Sarah Gormley, and Shayla Martin. Listen HERE

Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD, a doctor and certified wealth manager, discusses how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause.

Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick.

And Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer.

The last few years of my corporate career were tough. I had trouble concentrating. I couldn’t remember anything. I relied on solving new problems with old solutions because my groggy brain couldn’t dig into data for very long without dazing off. I stopped raising my hand for more responsibility, and people stopped seeing me as someone to promote. More than once, on Zooms with a chronic mansplainer, I felt a boiling rage so intense that I had to turn off my camera and audio mid-sentence to avoid saying to him what I then screamed into the void of my apartment (small blessings of a pandemic). I took all of this as a sign that my career had run its course, that it was time to graduate from that chapter and explore what was next, and to spend less time under fluorescent overhead lights, which were surely the underlying cause of my inability to concentrate.

I’ve been at the center of conversations about menopause and hormone shifts for five years, and it never once dawned on me until talking to Karissa Pfeffer and , that my 18-year corporate career probably actually ended because of undiagnosed perimenopause symptoms.

It turns out I paid a very, very high Menopause Tax.

In today’s episode, you’ll meet , a double board-certified physician, certified wealth manager, and founder of . She has spent her career caring for women through the menopause transition, listening as they described at visit after visit how their symptoms affect their work and their financial decisions. In this episode, you’ll learn about the Menopause Tax, the cumulative financial toll women, usually unknowingly, pay in midlife. It breaks out into 3 main segments:

The care costs, like increased doctor visits, co-pays, supplements, acupuncture, fitness solutions, psychiatric care, and so-called pink taxes (the well-documented markup women pay for the same products and services men get for less), are the ones that are often easiest to see.

The career costs sneak up on us. Turning down contracts. Cutting back on clients. Quietly stepping out of the leadership pipeline. Every one of these decisions feels responsible in the moment. There is a research-backed 10% decline in earnings approximately four years after a menopause diagnosis, combined with an average loss of 10 productive workdays per year for symptomatic women. For salaried employees, that adds up to roughly 20% of annual income. For self-employed women and independent contractors, it’s closer to 25%.

The compounding costs, which Kim calls the silent part of the equation. These are the small yeses and nos we say now that accumulate into six and seven-figure losses later. Most financial advisors are not trained to factor in this phase of life at all.

In this episode, we talk about the three costs of the Menopause Tax in detail, how to calculate your own number, what to do with this information at any age, and what companies need to hear about the talent they are quietly losing every single day.

What the Research Says

Research from the Menopause Society and peer-reviewed studies on midlife women in the workforce shows that symptomatic menopause has measurable effects on work performance, earnings trajectory, and retirement savings, particularly in the years surrounding diagnosis. A 2023 Mayo Clinic study found that menopause symptoms cost U.S. women an estimated $1.8 billion in lost working time annually. The women most impacted are those in peak earning years, the same women most critical to their organizations and most vulnerable to compounding retirement losses if they step back now.

Listen to this episode if...

• You’ve been wondering if you’ve lost your ambition, or if something else might be going on

• You’ve never thought about menopause as a financial planning issue and want to know what you might be missing

• You’re an HR leader or company executive who wants to understand the real cost of ignoring this

• You’re 20 or 40 or 50 or 60 and wondering whether it’s too early or too late to start thinking about this (it is not)

Lift Her Up

Visit menoandmoney.com to sign up for Kim’s upcoming live, small-group working sessions to help you actually tackle these costs. Only 10 spots. Register here with code UPLIFTERS2026 to save 10%.

Follow her on Instagram and Facebook at @menoandmoney and connect with her on LinkedIn, where she posts actionable strategies for mitigating the menopause tax.

If you loved this story...

You’ll also want to hear from Julie Gordon White, CEO of MenoWell, on building a menopause wellness company from personal experience, and Denise Pines, founder of WisePause Wellness and the FemAging Project, on why midlife women deserve research designed specifically for them, and Karissa Pfeffer, who shares even more specific guidance for company’s to better support women through midlife.

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It feels like everyone I’ve talked to recently is hitting a breaking point. Two former corporate clients called to bring me back to their teams with almost identical messages: our people are not okay. A close friend whose mother is declining and whose teenager just got a diagnosis. A client whose workload tripled when three colleagues left and weren’t replaced. A woman in our community simultaneously caring for a newborn, a grieving partner, and her own career reinvention, with a smile on her face in every single photo. And underneath all of it, the constant static of wars, politics, alarming AI predictions, and a news cycle that is specifically engineered to keep us anxious.

We are carrying too much. Researchers call it the Invisible Load, the mental and emotional labor of anticipating needs, organizing routines, worrying about the wellbeing of others, and managing the endless logistics of life. And it falls disproportionately on women.

I’ve been delivering workshops at companies this month that help people understand and manage their loads, so I wanted to share some of it with you here, you know, in case your sh*t is feeling heavy too.

The first thing I teach is that stress is not a mindset problem. It’s a physical response developed back in the good old days of charging lions. When our brains perceive a threat, they release cortisol and adrenaline to prepare our bodies to fight or flee danger. The problem is that our lions today are inbox zero, a sick parent, a country in upheaval, and a calendar that allows no margin. There’s no distance we can run to actually escape those stressors, but our bodies don’t know that. The stress response gets activated and then just stays there, spinning.

Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of the wonderful book Burnout, found that the stress cycle needs to be completed, and the most efficient way to do that is through physical movement, anything that gets your body going. Not because exercise is virtuous, but because your body genuinely needs to complete the biological loop it started. The cortisol has to go somewhere.

In Manoush Zomorodi’s new book Body Electric, she looks at what it’s costing us to spend our lives almost entirely online. TL;DR it’s destroying our hearing, our vision, our relationships, our focus, our creativity, basically everything. The best thing we can do to counteract it? Take a short walk.

And for those of us in perimenopause or menopause, since our cortisol levels are already spiking, this is an even bigger and more urgent issue. That’s why you probably (hopefully?) keep hearing experts telling you to reduce stress and walk more.

And yet we keep trying to think our way out of overwhelm. We make lists, we prioritize, we try to be more efficient, we read one more article about productivity. We treat the invisible load like an emotional problem when it’s actually a physical one. Our bodies are trying to outrun a lion and we’re asking them to sit still and think it out.

Movement is the most efficient way to complete the cycle, but it's not the only one. The Nagoskis also found that a genuine belly laugh, a 20-second hug, a good cry, or even a real conversation with someone who loves you can do it. Which, not coincidentally, are exactly the things we tend to skip when we're most overwhelmed. The invisible load doesn't just weigh on our bodies. It crowds out the very things that would actually help.

On the days I get out for even a short walk in the morning, the static quiets enough that I can hear myself think. On the days I pin myself to my desk chair, no amount of rearranging my to-do list helps.

So, yea, if your sh*t feels heavy, maybe go take a walk around your house or phone that friend who actually makes you feel better (not the one who doesn’t, she can wait).

With you in it, Aransas

P.S. I’m currently offering my workshop, “Carrying Invisible Loads,” to organizations and ERGs during Mental Health Awareness Month and beyond. If your team is in that “everyone is at a breaking point” season, this is built for exactly that moment. Reply to this email or visit www.aransassavas.com to learn more.

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P.P.S. 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.

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.

In the Mirror

As usual, the rich life, the one I get to enjoy at 51 because I spent the last decades layering it with tastes and textures, and filled it with an ooey-gooey center, was marked with highs and lows and learnings.

I got to learn first-hand what everyone is talking about when they hit the first anniversary of losing someone they love.

My daughter picked a college, and now every day moves us a little closer to reimagining our family unit. I cry about it pretty much daily, while also seeing how ready she is and knowing that someday we will be too.

I sat on panels alongside doctors talking about how midlife women think about their bodies, while being, honestly, a little unclear on how I think about mine. But I’m getting clearer. Turns out, writing about it HERE and HERE helped spark the conversations I needed to have (with myself and others) to get a little clearer.

And several of my speaking clients made their debuts this month. Two took the TEDxAsbury Park stage. Watching midlife women find and share their wisdom and experience is something I never get tired of. If you have something to say and want help shaping your story, reach out.

Looking ahead, I'm spending most of May inside companies that are marking Mental Health Awareness Month by bringing me in to teach their teams about invisible loads, the stress and worry, and responsibilities we carry but rarely name. If that sounds like something your organization needs, let's talk.

In Person: Uplifters @TTH Vintage

Shopping, sangria, and socializing! If these are three of your favorite things, this one’s for you. Come hang with us.

TTH Shopping & Sangria Evening — May 28, 6–8 PM in Manhattan. Free, but spots are limited, so grab yours if you’re interested in an evening with women who believe in lifting and being lifted. Shopping at TTH Vintage directly benefits Hearts of Gold, a New York City nonprofit that has been supporting mothers and children experiencing homelessness for over 30 years.

Can’t make it? You can still support Hearts of Gold at heartsofgold.org.

On the Pod

April was all about new beginnings.

Ally Bogard — 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 Elena Brower. Listen here.

Blair Glaser — a memoirist, organizational consultant, and psychotherapist, joined the pod 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.

Sadie Dingfelder — science journalist and author of Do I Know You?: A Faceblind Reporter’s Journey into the Science of Sight, Memory, and Imagination, shared her extraordinary midlife experience. One of the most fascinating and talked-about conversations we’ve had on the show. Listen here.

And we closed out April the best way we know how: live. A discussion on funding the futures we want with legendary VCs Lorine Pendleton and Katie Cella, in conversation with Whipnotic founder Tracy Luckow, at Uplifters Live. Listen here.

May is for mothers, money, and menopause.

This month’s stories: four very different takes on motherhood from Ruthie Ackerman, Katie Horwitch, Sarah Gormley, and Shayla Martin.

Dr. Kimberly Derezil, MD, a doctor and certified wealth manager, discusses how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause.

Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick.

And Jacquelyn Fletcher Johnson and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer.

In the World: Uplifter Updates

, from episode 133, is a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Memoir.

Dr. Kimberly Derezil is the only MD and certified wealth manager focused specifically on menopause cost reduction, and she’s launching her first small-group working sessions to help you actually tackle those costs. Only 10 spots. Register here.

Katie Cella, who joined us at Uplifters Live to talk about funding our dreams, shares that nearly 10 women have made their first-ever startup investments through her recent AI deals. One is already tracking toward a 3x return in under a year.

Corinne and Edwina, the team behind I Got You, have secured fiscal sponsorship with the IDA, making donations to the film tax-deductible. They also have an editor and an incredible team of women, all working to bring this project to life.

Dr. Helen Krug von Nidda is releasing Closing the Fulfillment Gap: How to Design the Work Life You Want on September 15 and it's available HERE for pre-order now. If you're feeling stuck, unsure of your next step, or just ready for a boost in purpose, this book was written for you.

Alison Relyea launched her Substack, Mixtapes and Cover Stories, and her piece, about discovering Florence + the Machine at fifty and what it means to be a woman who keeps finding new music, is the kind of writing that makes you want to sit still and read slowly. Go give her a follow.

Denise Pines, from episode 32, was once again named to the Global 100 Trailblazing Leaders in Menopause. Exciting times ahead as she advances this women’s health challenge with legislative policy.

How about you? What are you making, dreaming of making, or cultivating the courage to make this month? We’re all freaking terrified, so let’s go do some big, brave shit this month anyway.

Happy Mother’s Day. Whatever that means for you in this moment, I hope this day affords you some time to do whatever you love doing with the people you love.

Aransas

May is for mothers, money, and menopause

This month’s stories: Four very different takes on motherhood from , , , and Shayla Martin. and certified wealth manager, on how to avoid massive financial losses during menopause. Women’s health advocate Rebecca Bloom on what happens when women get sick. And and Christy Kercheville on finding renewed purpose in the wake of cancer.

If Hallmark made an honest Mother's Day card for midlife women, it might read: You turned out fine. She would like some credit for that. Because by now, most of us have complicated relationships with this day, the women who raised us, and the choices we made or didn't get to make. In this special episode, recorded live at Uplifters Live, four midlife women share radically honest stories about motherhood, identity, and the inherited scripts we get to rewrite.

, author of The Mother Code and founder of Ignite Writers Collective, reclaims motherhood as a time of self-discovery rather than self-sacrifice and reminds us that we can challenge the patriarchal myths that have shaped our choices.

, founder of WANT (Women Against Negative Talk) and author of WANT Yourself, walks us through the inherited contracts behind our self-talk and how to rewrite our limiting stories.

, author of The Order of Things, shares how starting over at 40, through therapy, loss, love, and an art gallery, gave her the life she’d always been chasing when she was climbing ladders.

The episode closes with a sound bath, a little gift to you, whether you’re a mother, a daughter, or both, from somatic healer and breast cancer survivor Shayla Martin, whose entire life was changed when she healed her “mother wound”.

More Powerful Stories of Motherhood

These four stories are just the beginning. In 160 episodes, some of the most unforgettable moments on this show have been about mothers and mothering in all its forms. A few that have stayed with me:

Alex Stried, founder of Poppins, who is building something that actually makes life easier for parents.

Lia DeFeo, whose journey to motherhood was impossibly difficult.

Amy Cohen, whose grief after losing her son became the force behind national traffic safety legislation.

Rebecca Soffer, who lost both parents young and built Modern Loss so no one has to navigate grief without some humor and human connection.

And Deshi Singh, co-founder of Chamber of Mothers.

And so many more whose lives, purpose, and careers have been shaped by mothers and by mothering, whatever that means for them. Whatever it means for you, I hope you see yourself somewhere in these stories. Happy Mother’s Day.

xo,

Aransas

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I joined Weight Watchers at 22, and for better and worse, for the first time in my life, I had a tool set that gave me some semblance of control over a body I’d never felt good in. I’d been the chubby kid. I’d never exercised. And suddenly, I had a system. Rules I could follow. Proof that I could change things.

It all worked pretty well for a long time. For twenty years, I just kept feeling a little better in my body. I fell in love with distance running and ran 25 marathons. I had cute little arms and shoulders and a big curvy booty I tried to appreciate (though usually didn’t). Some women feel their hottest in high school and spend their lives chasing those days. That wasn’t me. I was like, thank goodness I had low self-esteem when I was young, because I think I just keep getting better.

My mid-40s changed things. A couple pounds before the pandemic, a couple during, a few more after. But if I was really “good,” I could move them. My clothes still fit. I didn’t worry too much.

Then, somewhere in the last year, my old tricks stopped working. Meanwhile, I’m lifting heavier and heavier, my shoulders and arms are getting bigger, my butt is getting bigger, and I literally hulked out of my favorite denim shirt and had to enlarge my favorite trousers (though I think maybe it improved them).

I tell myself over and over that this is my big, bold era for taking up space. And I think sometimes that it’s actually a genius strategy to be a bigger size in this stage of life. After all, our bones get more brittle with age. Isn’t it better to have a little padding to bounce off of when we stumble? (I’m choosing to believe this. Do not take it from me.)

A few weeks ago, I sat on panels alongside teams of doctors, there to help clinicians understand the mindset of midlife women as it relates to our bodies and weight. While privately not entirely sure what I think about my own body right now. One doctor said, “Chase strong like you used to chase skinny.” That sounds good.

And I feel good too. Strong and capable and powerful. I threw out my back last week and I still feel pretty freaking great. I’m proud of what my body can do. But unlearning decades of rules about what my body is when it’s “good” is a lot harder than I want to admit.

Weight Watchers didn’t teach me to respect my body. It taught me to follow rules written by someone else. Maybe that was what I needed then. Now I’m in the awkward, unglamorous work of learning to write my own rules. I mean, what is midlife if not this?

What if the real gift of this forced hormonal reset isn’t just learning new tools for this stage? What if it’s the chance to completely rewrite the story I’ve been telling myself since I was a chubby little girl? Like when your computer freezes and you finally have to shut it all the way down, and when it comes back up, it runs faster and cleaner than it has in years, because it finally had the chance to offload all the old crap.

I still don’t know how I feel about my body. But maybe that’s what writing your own rules feels like from the inside.

How about you?

*Big thanks to the Ideal Protein team for caring not just about menopause, but about the mindset of midlife women. Rare and appreciated.

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PS If there's a version of yourself you're ready to step into, one that's done running on an old system that stopped working, 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.

PPS 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.

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.

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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.

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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?

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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

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