The answer is no. And The Uplifters will prove it.

This is a space for purpose-driven women who want to do big, brave things in the second half of their lives. I’m Aransas Savas, and I’ve spent 20 years at the intersection of behavior change research and coaching, helping people turn “someday” into “I did it.”

Listen to this episode if...

• You are the person everyone calls for help, but you can’t remember the last time you asked for help.

• Compliments make you squirm.

• The voice in your head is unreasonably critical.

• You’ve ever asked yourself who you are when you are not doing things for other people.

• You love someone who seems unable to accept their own goodness.

  ---

There is a Rose of Sharon in my yard that grew unevenly this year. One branch leafed out early and was quickly loaded with big, beautiful blossoms. One area grew in later, but stayed patchy, and another section never bloomed at all.

Google confirmed that this can happen when a plant sustains an especially rough winter. Today’s guest confirmed it’s a pretty perfect metaphor for Developmental Trauma.

Developmental trauma is what happens when a child grows up without the comfort, safety, and delight she needs to develop fully, so parts of her never get to grow, and she builds survival strategies around the gaps.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to spot the signs, why affirmations and positive thinking cannot reach this psychological layer, and how our guest’s five domains of development help women move from “I’m a people pleaser” to “belonging to themselves.”

Host note: When I met today’s guest, I had no idea what Developmental Trauma was. By the end of it, I’d armchair-diagnosed myself, my children, my foremothers, and most of my friends with it. I’m excited to hear what you think!

Today’s Uplifter

grew up as the tenth child of a Holocaust survivor, in a family built on survival instincts. As a kid, she sensed that something was missing in her home.

She remembers taking the subway down to the 42nd Street Library as a young girl and walking the shelves, hoping a book would name what she could feel but was unable to name. That search became her life’s work. Today she is a developmental trauma theorist and clinician with nearly two decades of practice in New York, and the creator of the Developmental Trauma Decoded framework.

What she describes will sound familiar to anyone who has ever been the dependable one. (Ahem, willing to bet that describes most of us reading and hearing this.)

Developmental trauma isn’t necessarily a single dramatic event, like an accident or a war. It’s also childhood experiences that interrupt development in quieter ways, like family secrets, growing up with addiction, or a shut-down parent. The child doesn’t feel comforted, delighted in, wanted, cherished, or protected. She calls these sins of omission, meaning what didn’t happen leaves as much of a mark as what did.

Those missing pieces leave parts of us underdeveloped, and we adapt around them. Zipa Leah describes these adaptations as survival architectures. In adult women, it often shows up as hypervigilance that looks like anxiety or depression, a harsh inner critic, and the inability to take in kindness while giving endlessly.

But it’s not a life sentence. Because the problem is interrupted development, the healing happens by redeveloping what was missing, and that is possible at any age.

Her courage practice

The practice Zipa Leah begins with is deceptively simple. Instead of asking whether you are worthy (a word she says gets bandied around until it means nothing), she asks whether each part of you is welcome. Do you belong to yourself?

Most women tell her they don’t. Many women between 45 and 60 feel deep shame about not knowing who they are, as if we should have figured it out by now. Zipa Leah sees it as a signal that parts of us were never mirrored back, and those parts can still be developed.

She describes the payoff as a kinder relationship with yourself, deeper relationships with others, and the chance to break generational cycles so the next generation does not have to work so hard.

Lift her up

You can find Zipa Leah and her free resources at ZipaLeah.com, and sign up to receive her workbook on belonging, coming soon.

If you loved this story, listen to these stories next

• Kristy Halvorsen on learning to belong to herself.

• Sarah Nelson on sexual empowerment in midlife

Last week I was honored and oh-so-grateful to attend The Gathering, an invitation-only summit for women shaping the future of new media at AARP’s headquarters in D.C., curated by absolute powerhouses Amy Nelson (The Riveter and ) and .

We talked about money and power and influence, what’s working and what’s broken. , author of Wild Courage, encouraged us to be obsessed, weird, and bossy. We banded together to create impact.

I left feeling braver and bolder and more energized, which is what always seems to happen when I spend time with other midlife women who are doing things that stretch them instead of just thinking about doing those things.

I talked to so many people who had come to the same conclusion: nobody does big, brave things alone.

Research on self-efficacy, our belief in our own ability to do something, shows that one of the most reliable ways to raise that belief is to watch someone a lot like us do the thing. Whether it’s running a marathon, starting a business, or embarking on a creative project, when we see someone we relate to follow through on something we’ve only dreamed about, it changes our sense of what’s possible for us. That belief is directly linked to whether we actually take action.

If you’ve found yourself spinning out on the details and neglecting the big picture, getting stuck on what isn’t working, or feeling lonely as you work on a dream or goal, there’s a damn fine chance you’d find it easier to do it with other people who are doing big, brave things too. But sometimes finding those people is really freaking hard, especially in midlife when there are fewer structures for organically creating support. Having interviewed over 100 women about how they’ve built a supportive crew, here are a few of the best ideas I’ve heard:

Go where people are making things. Look for experiences built around working on something together, like a workshop, a class, a mastermind, or a co-working group.

Say your thing out loud over and over. Tell the person next to you what you’re working on and what scares you about it. I’m constantly surprised at the connection and support that other people offer when we are brave enough to admit we have goals. Go figure! It also helps us build belief in ourselves, and research shows that belief is directly linked to future action.

Reach out to someone whose work moved you. Reply to the newsletter that made you think, or send a note to the podcast host you keep recommending, or DM the playwright whose show made you feel seen. Be specific about what landed, then ask them a small question. Most people are thrilled to hear from someone who really cares about their work. (Quick soapbox: As a podcast host, I get LOTS of these emails every day. Only about 1 in 50 have actually listened to an episode, so really do the homework instead of just reaching out with an AI boilerplate).

Look sideways as well as up. Find other people who are on a similar mission and at a similar stage. So many cultural messages tell us we should compete with these people, but the most successful women I’ve met collaborate with them, learn, grow, and amplify one another along the way.

Make a standing date. I love a special moment, but while they often inspire, they rarely lead to action. A recurring time on the calendar, even 30 minutes, is how we work through the little things that can otherwise send us off-course. Everything I’m doing right now can be traced back to weekly dates with friends like .

Take stock of your current circle. Notice who you leave feeling energized and who leaves you feeling depleted. You don’t have to cut anyone off, but you can choose to invest more time in the first group.

Come hang with me and other Uplifters this week. If you’re near NYC, the kick-off brunch for The 261 Effect is Friday, October 30 at 11 AM at 441 9th Ave. It’s the first in a series of national conversations from 261 Fearless, honoring the 60th anniversary of Kathrine Switzer’s 1967 Boston Marathon moment and exploring the ripple effect of women’s empowerment. Get tickets or donate here.

Become a paid subscriber of this Substack. We do all the things I listed above! Here’s what you get:

• A WhatsApp with the women in our community, where we share wins, questions, and ideas every day

• A monthly Lift & Be Lifted session, where we actively support each other and swap ideas

• A weekly meetup for accountability and co-working, for accountability, camaraderie, and support

Subscribe now

Every dollar from paid subscriptions goes back to the community, supporting the organizations and the midlife women’s brave projects we feature on the show. Last week I was thrilled to donate on behalf of the Uplifters to one of those projects, and I’d love for you to join me in helping it reach its goal in this final stretch.

You might remember Gisela Sanders-Alcántara from Episode 88. She’s a filmmaker and a true dreamer-in-action.

Through her son, Simón, she felt called to turn her years of filmmaking expertise toward something bigger than herself, helping disabled people author their own stories, in their own voices, rather than being spoken for.

That became Echoing: Disability Reflections, a documentary she’s now working to finish and make fully accessible. She’s in the middle of a grassroots campaign to carry it across the finish line.

Take a few minutes to watch the trailer. If you’re able, a gift (or even a share) would mean the world.

Donate or learn more here.

With so much gratitude,
Aransas

Have you ever gotten stuck in the “I have to figure out how to do this before I can do it” loop?

In our latest episode, you’ll hear a pretty great story about how fate and The NY Times intervened to move “Start a newsletter” to the top of Rachel Lipson’s “Do Eventually List.”

I hope you’ll also get a sense of why I love Substack so much that I decided to do an entire episode just dedicated to talking about what an awesome place it is to start and grow a community (or even a business).

When I work with clients to build a thought leadership platform, one of the first things we do in many cases is start a Substack. So many of you have reached out with questions about starting your own newsletters, so today, I’m talking to two of the top voices I look to for inspiration.

has been a friend for 20-ish years and was one of the first guests on this podcast. She started Blue Balloon Songwriting School in 2008 as a one-woman music school in a studio apartment. It is now a network of 75+ teachers and hundreds of students a week. Once she’d handed much of the leadership to her team, she turned her focus to her Substack about traveling with points and miles. Rachel and have been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Condé Nast, among others, and consistently rank in the Top 40 in the travel category on the platform.

Erin Shetron spent years as a marketing director at startups, loved it, but burned out. Then she met her first Substack client, and word got around, dubbing her The Substack Whisperer. She has now worked with more than 100 Substack writers in 10 countries. I hired her to audit my Substack and got so much out of it that I have probably sent a hundred people her way myself. She also writes , a personal essay project on Substack.

Between us, we run the gamut: from the first scary email to ways to make a welcome page work harder, find a community of readers and writers who share your passions, and earn some money along the way.

If you’re Substack-curious, this one is for you, and even if you’re a Substack super-fan like us, this is a must-listen. We all learned something!

Beyond Substack

Both Rachel and Erin closed with a similar message. Erin said that you will have the most lasting success if you hone in on what you can offer and tune out the noise of best practices. Rachel said to stay the course, because most things that “don’t work” just weren’t done long enough. It reminded me of a rule I’ve made for myself: no more one-and-done. If I create something, I’m not allowed to give up on it until I’ve successfully done it three times.

Lift them up

Subscribe to Rachel’s invaluable newsletter, .

Read Erin’s , and if you want a second set of eyes on your own Substack, find her at ErinShetron.com.

Your turn

What’s the thing you keep dropping to the bottom of the “Do Eventually“ list? And for those of you on Substack, what are some favorite tips we missed in this raucous love-fest?

That big thing you keep not doing is probably not about laziness. It might be that your brain is running worst-case scenario movies on a loop.

I’ve now interviewed more than 200 women about midlife transformation, and the single best tip I’ve heard for this came from the amazing filmmaker Mandy Fabian, creator of Jess Plus None. She told me about it on episode 151 of the Uplifters, and I have thought about it countless times since. She calls it a therapeutic tantrum.

The tantrum

Next time you’re spiraling out (probably at 3 am) on all the reasons you can’t or shouldn’t do the thing you want to do, set a timer for five minutes. Write down everything that could go wrong, or if writing isn’t your thing, leave yourself or a friend a voicemail with permission to delete it later without ever even listening to it.

Catch all the wacky things your brain worries about: money runs out, time runs out, your family disowns you, Joe from sixth grade thinks you’re a loser. The more ridiculous and unhinged the worries get, the better, because that usually means you’ve gotten past the polite ones and down to the ones that have actually been driving.

University of Chicago researchers had students write out their worries before a big exam, and those students scored higher than the ones who didn’t, especially the most anxious ones. The theory is that worry hogs working memory, and writing it down gives that space back.

What I found when I tried it

I didn’t have Mandy’s great name for it back then, but I did something very similar when we moved to the beach. On one hand, it was a dream come true. On the other hand, the prospect of working through a million changes to our work, the kids’ schools and extracurriculars, and literally everything else felt completely overwhelming.

So I wrote it all down. Turned out that most of the things I worried about could go either way, helpful or unhelpful, depending on how things played out. Some really did need careful consideration. And a lot of them, once I saw them on the page, I didn’t actually care about at all.

The pile that had felt like one giant, unmovable thing turned out to be a bunch of smaller things in different sizes, and the specificity made it infinitely more manageable.

Your turn

Pick the one thing you’ve been circling. Set a timer tonight. Throw a tantrum.

Then hit reply or comment and tell me how you unscramble your worries. I read every one and learn so much from your ideas!

With so much love and a very full notebook,
Aransas

Dr. Evelyn Carter is a social psychologist with more than 15 years of experience helping organizations, from higher education to financial services to professional sports, learn to detect, discuss and interrupt bias. Her clients have included American Express, Burberry, Nike, the NFL, Uber and UCLA.

Recently, Evelyn was working inside a company, leading its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Then the company renamed her team and changed what she was allowed to do. She could no longer use the words she had always used to describe the work, and she could no longer build the programs her research said were needed. She says it was eating her alive from the inside out, so she and the company parted ways.

She went back to consulting, leading workshops for managers who want to build inclusive teams. Working with many organizations lets her sustain the work financially, and the companies still calling and emailing keep her going in a soul way too. People say this work is dead. Her answer is that it will not be as long as she is still alive and holding the torch.

Her new book Was That Racist?: How to Detect, Interrupt, and Unlearn Bias in Everyday Life is that torch, and it is one of the clearest and most practical books I’ve read on the subject of racism in America. It also happens to have one of the best book origin stories I’ve ever heard.

In this episode, we go deep on both.

Evelyn’s mission is to give people who feel overwhelmed and hopeless something they can actually do about racism.

What the Research Says

Evelyn explains in the book and in our conversation how we can apply growth mindset research to bias.

When we believe change is possible, we are more likely to speak up when we see bias, because we think it will make a difference. We are also more likely to accept feedback without hearing it as a verdict on our character, because someone telling us we did something harmful is also telling us we can do better.

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

1. Check your own mindset first. Before you decide someone cannot change, ask what makes you so sure. Your belief shapes whether you even try.

2. Make it safe before you step in. Evelyn sets the stage, tells people what to expect and reminds them they can handle it. You can do the same for yourself before a hard conversation.

3. Plant the seed. You will not change a mind in one conversation, but if you never plant anything, there is nothing for the next person to water.

4. Let shame be short, and then share what you learned. Evelyn reminds us that shame is meant to isolate, and that talking about what you learned turns a painful moment into a shared one. She is also clear that your tears should never matter more than the harm to the person you hurt.

5. Stay in alignment, even when it costs you. Evelyn left a secure job rather than doing the work in a way that didn’t feel true.

Lift Her Up

Buy the book or borrow it, hire Evelyn to speak with your organization, or simply talk about this stuff at your dinner table. You can find her at evelynrcarter.com on Substack at and on Instagram.

Evelyn nominated her mom, Anne Carter, as our next Uplifter, so stay tuned.

Hey, Uplifters!

Last Wednesday night, I stood on stage in Red Bank, New Jersey, and gave a TEDx talk. The theme of the night was Intelligence, and my talk is called The Genius of Midlife.

For decades, the media has popularized a common belief that we peak intellectually around 20. But recently, a team of Australian researchers decided to settle the question once and for all by doing a meta-analysis of research into intelligence conducted over lifespans. When considering the full spectrum of intelligence, including judgment, emotional regulation, moral reasoning, financial literacy, and cognitive flexibility, people peak between 55 and 60.

I attribute this to three things that collide in midlife.

The first is clarity. Identity certainty peaks in midlife. We know ourselves well enough to stop performing for other people’s approval and putting energy into what doesn’t really matter. (Ahem, fewer fucks 40s.)

The second is depth. When researchers measure intelligence, they distinguish between fluid intelligence — processing speed, which does begin to decline as we age — and crystallized intelligence: knowledge, pattern recognition, and expertise accumulated over decades. Crystallized intelligence doesn’t decline until our 70s. We don’t just know more. We know how to use what we know.

The third is judgment. A Dutch study found that middle-aged adults scored higher on wisdom than both younger and older adults. Our capacity to hold complexity, see past bias, and make sound decisions when the stakes are high increases with age.

A long-term Yale study of adults over 65 found that almost half of them improved physically, mentally, or both over time. But here’s the catch. People with more positive beliefs about aging were significantly more likely to show those gains.

In other words, if you believe you’re capable of thriving in the second half of your life, you are probably right. If you believe you’re destined for decline, you’re probably right about that too. When my grandma passed away last year, countless people reached out to tell me that she helped them believe they were capable of doing big things in the second half of life. My deepest hope for this talk is that the research and the stories of my grandma and the other amazing women who have come before us will help lots more people believe in their capacity for midlife genius.

Getting to share the night with former Uplifters Podcast guests like Kerri Kennedy and Cristina Jiménez, , and comic host , and seeing family and so many friends in the audience made it truly one of the most unforgettable and meaningful nights of my life…so far.

The video comes out in a few weeks, and I have a big goal for it. I want to get it in front of at least half a million people. When it drops, I am going to ask you to help me pass it along, because can you imagine what would shift if even a fraction of those people believed their capacity for growth and impact didn’t end in later life?

In community: Lift & Be Lifted

Once a month, Uplifters gather on Zoom for Lift & Be Lifted. Everyone shares one goal for the month and one thing that would make it easier, and then the room responds with offers, ideas and introductions. If any of these land for you, please reach out. One email can change everything.

Susannah Ludwig Susannah is shifting her work toward finding meaning in the muck, and she is starting to share her own story publicly. You can see her first video HERE. This month she would love emotional support, reflections, and questions about her story. Find her at her website, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack.

Melanie Cohen Melanie helps midlife women get back their time, energy and space by clearing physical, digital and mental clutter. She would love someone to look through her social media and tell her whether that message comes through loud and clear. Find her at her website, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack.

Tracy Siri Tracy is growing the ElevateMy.ai newsletter, which helps business owners figure out where AI fits and where it doesn’t. She would love more subscribers and business owners who would like to be featured for how they use AI. Find her at ElevateMy.ai, CWM, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Sara Axelbaum Sara is a hands-on operator who loves stepping into a messy problem and fixing it. She is looking for a chief of staff or operations role, or more fractional work, and would love introductions to leaders who need someone like her. Find her on LinkedIn and Instagram.

Rachel Josephson Rachel’s micro boutique, Fils et Poisson Cie, is ready to meet the right buyers, and she is building community in Manhattan. She would love Instagram follows, ideas on where to find her people (holiday markets looking for vendors are at the top of the list), and coffee or co-working with local Uplifters. Find her at her website, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Jessica Hansen Jessica is a voice coach building a social following big enough that a publisher will take on her voice coaching book. She would love follows across platforms, referrals to a social media manager, and fellow coaches to join her on ProPass. Find her at jessicahansen.net, Signature Sound, Instagram (voice coaching), Instagram (performer), Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Nia Bonson Nia is growing Mavenhood Society, a media platform and community for midlife child-free and childless women, so she can attract sponsors. She would love Instagram follows, newsletter subscribers, and word of mouth to the child-free and childless women in your life. Find her at Mavenhood Society, @mavenhoodsociety, @niabonson, and LinkedIn.

Gerilynn Berg Gerilynn is growing her fitness and coaching business for women 50 and over. She would love clients for her two-month coaching special ($300), and connections to magazines or online media for coverage. Find her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Dawn Halkuff Dawn is getting her book, Becoming Unlikable, into readers’ hands, and getting herself speaking inside organizations. She would love introductions to women’s groups and ERGs, book buyers, and follows. LinkedIn and Instagram.

Jen Dary Jen is filling and funding Creative Days, her women’s creative retreat, April 4 to 7 at Bishop’s Ranch in Healdsburg. She would love sponsor ideas, or introductions that could cover travel for the artists who will teach. Plucky Website and Writing Website.

Hannah Hubert Hannah is securing funding for the Trudy Ederle Foundation, which supports pro athletes in their post-sports careers. She would love introductions to philanthropists, and help refreshing her homepage. LinkedIn and Ederle Foundation Website.

Other good things Uplifters are doing

Love is... supper. Our Uplifter Risa Crandall is bringing people together around the table again, with the next love is... supper on October 13 at 6:30 at LOR AINÉ 1986 in Larchmont. It is at capacity right now, but you can join the waitlist here.

Mavenhood goes live. Congratulations to Nia on Mavenhood Society’s first live event. It was so great to be among other passionate, creative midlife women, and I cannot wait to see where she takes this community.

What I’m reading. Hormonal Hangover is so funny and insightful, and it is the perfect gift for every woman in your life who is in the thick of it.

Welcome, new paid subscribers

We are so glad you are here. Meet the newest members of our community.

Lynn Harris is a legendary comic, an advocate for women in comedy, and the founder of GOLD Comedy.

Jen Dary is the author of an amazing new memoir, I Believe in Everything: A Memoir of Illness, Motherhood, and Magic, and the founder of Plucky, where she coaches tech leaders.

Nina Saporta is a website designer and the force behind Wild Bloom Websites. If you need a site that feels like you, she is the one to call.

Barbara Boldt is a communication coach, keynote speaker, and author who helps introverted leaders speak with clarity, confidence, and executive presence. She spent 16 years teaching communication at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and has worked with leaders from more than 35 countries.

Devon Vernetti is a midlife coach who supports women over 40 through perimenopause and menopause. Her Root to Rise Method™ blends Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Five Elements with modern coaching, and it starts with regulating the nervous system.

Join us

Subscribe now

Paid subscriptions are just $8 a month, and every dollar goes back into the community, from events to scholarships to book purchases to donations to the nonprofits we feature. As a paid subscriber, you get the monthly Lift & Be Lifted Zoom (the next one is Tuesday, October 27, at 7 PM ET), Friday Co-Working Cocoons, and our WhatsApp community, where members get to know and support each other.

With so much gratitude, Aransas

Listen to this episode if...

• Your voice feels scratchier or different in midlife

• You’re tired of trying to sound “right”

• You’re rebuilding your image of yourself

It’s Menopause Awareness Month, and it seems there’s one symptom nobody is talking about yet: what happens to our voices! And yes, I mean both the physical voice and the “speaking our minds” voice. Also yes, I’m writing this as I drown myself in hot water with honey and lemon to preserve my voice before my big TEDx Talk. (By the time this message reaches you, I’ll hopefully be breathing a giant sigh of relief and screaming like a banshee just because.)

But the day I recorded this episode, I spent ten minutes hyping myself up to ask someone to describe their payment terms more clearly. Ten minutes for one polite, perfectly reasonable question.

My voice has been a character in my life since before I could spell my name. When I was five, a bus driver asked my mom if I was a little person or a child. I was a baby Lauren Bacall, and eventually my vocal cords made it into textbooks because they looked like those of a retired opera singer.

Research shows that Midlife is when many of us loosen the grip on both our words and voices, which is why I wanted ’s help understanding all of it.

Jessica spent eight and a half years at NPR as a staff coach and the voice of the brand. When Jessica was laid off, her first weeks were “A great big kettle of emotions. Grief, excitement, overwhelm, confusion, and an early flicker of possibility.” She spent some days out in the yard weeding and realized that what she really wanted was something more creative.

She has been an actor since she was five, so being “not an actor” was a big departure. She had to let go of her definition of who she was, and let herself play again.

Now she is writing two books: a novel series that picks up Shakespeare’s heroines whose stories ended badly, and a guidebook to your voice. She also sings with a jazz combo.

Jessica’s mission: She wants every woman to feel empowered to use her whole voice, in an easy, accessible way. In this episode, she teaches us how.

Her Courage Practice

Jessica described going into an audition years ago, thinking about what the people in the room were probably looking for, and then trying to be that. Her practice now is to walk in as her whole, quirky, specific-to-only-her self, say, “Here is what I bring, and let it be a fit or not. If it is a fit, great. If it is not, thanks for your time.”

Jessica says a lot of her trying to fit in over three decades is what held her back. She says trying is the enemy. The effort is what gets in the way. And nobody wants a fake version of anything.

Lift Her Up

Follow Jessica on Instagram at @at_home_in_your_voice (voice coaching) and @jessacts (performing), connect on LinkedIn and Facebook, reach out if you want to find out what your voice is capable of, and if you know a great literary agent, tell her about the Shakespeare novels.

Jessica was nominated by Sadie Dingfelder. Listen to Sadie’s episode next:

Last week I wrote about the regrets we carry from choices we already made and how they can shape the choices we make in our next chapters. My DMs, email, texts, and voice notes filled up with people whispering their regrets to me, confiding in me about things they wished they’d done. Clearly we want to talk more about this.

So this week I want to look forward, because one of the most powerful ways regret can serve us is by trying to avoid it.

When I was working on innovation at Weight Watchers, we did research on what actually moves people to change. We tested plenty of motivators: hope, health scares, vanity, social pressure. But one of the strongest predictors of real, sustained behavior change was the fear of future regret. People who could clearly picture themselves five years from now, still stuck, still having not tried, were far more likely to act today than people motivated by almost anything else.

In the 200 interviews I’ve conducted to understand midlife transformation, I’ve asked women how they managed uncertainty and resistance to do epic shit. Over and over, their answers have been the same. “I knew I’d regret not doing it more than I’d regret doing it and making a mess.”

The research backs this up. Psychologists call it “anticipated regret,” and it turns out imagining how we’ll feel about a choice later is one of the most powerful levers we have for making a different choice now. It’s more motivating than fear of failure or the promise of reward. We are, it seems, more moved by the person we don’t want to become than by the person we hope to be.

So here’s the question I asked people over and over last week: What are you not doing, or only half-doing, right now that you might regret someday?

Maybe you’re waiting for someone else to give you permission, or hedging your bets on your audacious goals, or only whispering them when you really want to shout them.

For me, I’m doing a TEDx talk tomorrow that I feel like I’ve been working toward for my entire life. It’s a celebration, through science and story, of the way my best friend, my grandma, shifted people’s beliefs about what’s possible in the second half of life. Research shows us that we are significantly more likely to improve mentally and physically in the second half of life if we believe that it’s possible. My grandma did that for everyone she met. And it’s my deepest hope that my talk will do that too.

I’ve set a goal of reaching half a million people with this story, because I believe it’s what I was born to do, and that it’s the best way I can serve the legacy of the women who came before me and those who are coming up behind me. I don’t want to look back in a couple of years and feel like I squandered the gift of this moment.

So, I’m committing to you right now not to half-ass it, but to full-ass it (if you’ve ever walked behind the women in my family, you’ll know that we are literally quite full-assed, so it seems appropriate). Part of that will be asking for your help getting the word out when the talk releases, so consider this my heads-up that I’m a woman on a very full-assed mission.

It feels very, very good to be all-in, like traveling as the crow flies instead of wandering a mysterious and cloudy path.

As last week’s pod guest Kristy Halvorsen challenged us, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?”

September’s episodes are all about new beginnings.

Listen to this episode if you’ve...

• Been curious about full-time solo travel

• Wondered how people really make a nontraditional life work, from safety to money

• Found yourself bracing against change instead of embracing it

A month after a breakup, Kristy Halvorsen was crawling across her kitchen floor in tears. The sadness was overwhelming. So she called her mom and asked for help.

Her mom, lovingly, set her straight. “Yes, you miss him. But I think you believe he stole your dream to travel full-time. I think you believe you can’t do this alone.”

The moment she understood the real source of her deep grief, she started cleaning out closets, making piles for Goodwill, and making plans to sell her house. Within two months, she was living on the road.

Before the breakup, Kristy was a firefighter in Southwest Florida, working in a male-dominated field where she had worked really hard to build her career. Then a difficult stretch of illness and a torn ACL left her wondering whether she would even make it to retirement, and what shape she’d be in if she did. So at 35 she asked herself: why not live my dream now? She bought a camper, left her job, and hit the road.

It wasn’t instantly magical. She had imagined staying in campgrounds and RV resorts, and discovered she didn’t like them, but she didn’t yet know what she did like. The first year was hard enough that she thought she’d made a mistake and wanted to quit. She stuck with it, kept getting curious, and eventually figured out that what she wanted was to go fully off-grid: solar panels stacked on the roof, a composting toilet, deep forest and open desert, all by herself.

Nearly nine years later, Coddie, her 28-foot Airstream, is still home. Kristy has written a riveting memoir from her journals. It’s called Perfect Unfolding: Seven Years of Life-Changing Solo Adventure, One Year That Broke Me Open. It’s about full-time solo travel, but it’s really about trust in yourself, other people, and serendipity.

In our conversation, we get into what to do with fear, how she makes the money work, and so much more.

Her Courage Practice

When Kristy is stuck on a decision, she asks herself one question: if I knew I couldn’t get it wrong, what would I do? Or, in another version she loves, if I knew everything would turn out just fine, even if I don’t know what “just fine” means, what would I do?

Her theory is that the decision has usually already been made. We’re just talking ourselves into something or out of something, because the logical part of our brain has taken charge. The question isn’t about good or bad, right or wrong. It’s a way to get quiet and hear the answer underneath. And she says the answer is usually really simple.

As I said to Kristy, most of us have put so many layers between ourselves and our intuition that it sounds like a foreign language, so a question like this helps fine-tune our radar.

Lift Her Up

Read Perfect Unfolding, then hand it to a friend, because that’s the biggest thing Kristy asked of us. If you have a book club, she says it’s a perfect pick, and if you happen to know someone connected to Oprah, Jenna, or the Sunshine Book Club, she’d love an introduction. Find Kristy at PerfectUnfolding.com, on Instagram at @kristy.halvorsen, and on LinkedIn.

The latest episode of This American Life, The Argument, is a must-listen. Ten years ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a piece in The New York Times Magazine that went viral and sparked nationwide conversations about the inequities in our education system. Nikole and her husband chose a neighborhood public school for her daughter, Najya, inside one of the most segregated school systems in the country, a school most wealthy and middle-class parents went to extreme measures to keep their kids out of, to create systemic change from the inside.

This week, she revisited that choice in a series of conversations with her now 16-year-old daughter and Chana Joffe-Walt. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll tell you this much: Nikole has some regrets. She was doing something she believed in. Now, with more perspective, she sees things differently.

It got me thinking about one of my own biggest regrets: breastfeeding my daughters.

At the time, my career was on fire. I was the girl you could count on to show up every day in every way, first one in, last one to leave, kind and cheerful no matter what. Then I had a baby, and I heard the good thing to do was nurse her for every meal of every day for a full year. That sounded hard. But I was a girl who could do hard things.

So every weekday for the first year of my daughter’s life, I strapped her to my chest and rode the subway to a daycare a mile from my office. I’d nurse her one last time at drop-off, fingers drumming, anxious about being late to work. I’d hustle for an hour or two between conference rooms, then squeeze into a cramped pumping room, trying to mask the mechanical thump-thump-thump of the pump while sounding like a boss lady on a conference call. At noon, I’d slip on running shoes, speed-walk a mile to daycare in my fancy clothes, feed her again, and speed-walk back while shoving a granola bar in my mouth (if I’d remembered to bring one in my zombie haze).

At night, I’d work into the wee hours with a baby attached to my chest, then wake up and do it all again. I was being a good mom and a good employee. I could run on no food and no sleep for a few years, powered by sheer commitment. Worth it, if it meant being good. Right?

I was hungry and exhausted, nursing and dieting and training for a marathon at the same time, because God forbid I keep the baby weight or fall behind on my training. No surprise that the blissful bonding I’d been promised never showed up. I was too resentful of the obligation, feeling drained one precious drop of milk at a time, all in the name of doing the good thing.

Of course, it isn’t really the breastfeeding I regret. It’s compromising myself, and the people who mattered most to me.

But here we are, 5 years after I graduated (well, got fired) from my corporate career. I host an annual conference that brings together the community I created to help midlife women lift and be lifted, host an award-winning podcast, lead retreats, speak on stages about things I’m deeply passionate about, coach women and teams to do big, brave things, and I’m writing the book that I feel like my foremothers and my whole life have been imperceptibly guiding me toward my whole life.

I still work long hours, because I’m deeply engaged in my work, doing what really matters to me. I’ve created a life that is good for me instead of just doing things because someone else tells me it’s good.

Studies of midlife women’s regrets teach us that women who had regrets about earlier choices, and did something about them, ended up with far more well-being than women who had regrets and did nothing. Researchers call these “midcourse corrections.” The women who made them were happier, more satisfied, and psychologically healthier, even more so than women who reported no regrets at all.

Regret, it turns out, is useful information about what matters, a tool to guide our decisions, if we use the data.

Maybe we all have some things we wish we’d done or not done or done differently. And maybe this is the time to take a close look at what those “if I had it all to do it over again” stories are saying to us about what we most want to do with the time we have left.

September’s episodes are all about new beginnings. We kicked things off talking about ending the last thing well, because that’s the first step to starting the next thing.

Listen to today’s episode with Tori DaCosta if...

• You are trying to build a second act while keeping your full-time job intact

• You find yourself trying to control people you can only actually influence

• You are scared that telling the truth about your life will cost you everything you’ve worked so hard to build

Tori DaCosta was an executive at a Fortune 50 company, two months from finishing her executive MBA, when an idea crossed her mind that she couldn’t shake. She wanted to write a book. But she was also pretty sure she didn’t have a story or anything to say.

So, she wrote down the key moments that shaped her life, looked for the lessons in them, and discovered she was using the same principles in both her life and her work.

Her book, No Name Bastard: How Our Lives Teach Us What We Can Control, Manage, and Influence, teaches readers how to transform past and present challenges using a practical framework.

• Control: Focuses on your own attitude, effort, discipline, and direct responses rather than outside noise.

• Manage: Helps you handle ongoing responsibilities and everyday obstacles constructively.

• Influence: Guides you on where your impact matters without carrying blame that does not belong to you.

Tori wrote her book and is building a speaking career while continuing her executive career, so we also get into the challenges and opportunities of managing two high-demand careers simultaneously in midlife, and the complexity of sharing family secrets and stories that were long hidden.

Tori’s mission is to help other people stop carrying shame for things that were never theirs to be ashamed of in the first place, and to give them a simple, usable framework for the rest.

Tori’s Courage Practice

Tori shuts her screens down at 8 pm. Sleep is the most practical thing she does to manage her emotions and thoughts well. When you are rested, showing up as your best self in a hard conversation, a big meeting, or a stage in front of strangers gets a lot easier.

She also runs a quarterly reset: every 13 weeks, she sits down and plots out her personal and professional goals together instead of siloing herself.

5 Ways Tori DaCosta Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. She let the story surface instead of forcing it. Tori didn’t sit down and decide to write a tell-all. She got quiet, stayed reflective, and let the first true story rise on its own. Sometimes the bravest thing is patience, not a plan.

2. She was strategic about who she told, and when. Tori protected the book while it was still a seedling, choosing carefully who heard about it before it was finished. Not everyone earns early access to your dream.

3. She reclaimed a word that used to carry shame. By putting “bastard” on the cover, Tori drained the word of its power over her. She did the research, found she was one of millions, and decided the shame was never actually hers to carry.

4. She built a team instead of trying to do it all herself. She hired a director of operations, a publicist, and soon a virtual assistant.

5. She protects her sleep like it’s a strategic pillar.

Lift Her Up

Read No Name Bastard at journeystone.com or toridacosta.com, and follow along on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn (@ToriDacostaLeadership) for more.

My grandpa, Papa, grew up on a farm during the Great Depression, and perhaps because his family had food while so many others starved, he always believed real estate was the only sound investment. His doctrine:

I was thinking of him last week as I interviewed Wendy Richardson, who has started over more times than most people do in three lifetimes. She has been a pregnant college student at 19 whose professor told her girls like her never finish their degree, navigated two divorces, two stretches of homelessness, and an immigration process that collapsed twice. Now, at 67, she’s rebuilding again. She just published her second book, and she’s launching a real estate coaching business.

Every time she started over, she did what my Papa preached by putting herself in places she wanted to be, but didn’t quite feel at home in.

I’ve found myself saying some version of his mantra over and over again to clients lately, who are stretching their beliefs in what they’re capable of, walking into rooms they aren’t sure they belong in, and doing things nobody has given them permission to do.

Our instinct is almost always to look for the room where we’re already the most capable person and where risks are lower that somebody is going to see us fumble.

The smallest house on the best block means putting ourselves in rooms where we are surrounded by people who are further along than we are.

There’s research behind this. Economists tracking young workers found that a 20% increase in the quality of the coworkers around a young worker led to a 3.7% rise in earnings five years later, and those gains held for at least a decade, even after the worker changed jobs. Being around people who are more skilled or experienced than we are changes our expectations of ourselves.

This is exactly what we Uplifters do for each other.

At our monthly Lift and Be Lifted Zooms, we stretch each other and help figure out the hard parts. Join us by becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

At our annual retreat, we challenge ourselves to say what we really, really want, not just what we think we’re capable of, and then figure out the steps to make that big thing a reality.

Kristy, who’s been twice, put it better than I can: “I will never not attend this retreat. Everything I put on my vision board and the plans I make there changed the entire year for my business and my life. Instead of spending the first six months trying to figure out my priorities, I launch into the year refreshed and ready to go.”

Our next one is December 4 to 6. Red Bird House, Bethel, NY. We have just three spots left.

Details and booking →

Let’s go do some risky, brave things this week!
Aransas

September’s episodes are all about new beginnings. We kicked things off talking about ending the last thing well, because that’s the first step to starting the next thing.

Listen to today’s episode with Jennifer Shay Carta if...

• There’s something you want to start, but you don’t feel qualified to do

• You fantasize about starting a new career even though your current gig is pretty ok

• You feel like you need permission from gatekeepers to share your creative work

Jennifer Carta spent decades getting really good at bringing other people’s words to life, building a career most actors only dream of, with Broadway runs in Side Man and Proof.

Acting was the thing she’d always been good at, the thing people book her for, and the thing that paid her rent.

In midlife, she decided, like so many of us, that she was tired of bringing other people’s worlds to life, and decided to create her own.

Jennifer didn’t have any of the credentials she thought a “real” writer was supposed to have. But, she had an idea she couldn’t get out of her head. The result is What Happened to Annabel Taylor, a gripping psychological suspense novel about memory, identity, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

So many of us are trained to believe there’s only one door to the thing we want, and if we don’t walk through it on schedule, we’ve missed our shot. Jennifer’s story is proof that the door can show up decades later, looking nothing like what we expected, and still be really enriching.

What the research says

Psychologists find midlife women to be uniquely capable of embracing what’s called “possible selves,” visions of who we could become next, and research shows we’re actually better equipped for identity pivots later in life. We carry more wisdom, intention, and, crucially, less ego threat than we do at 25.

Her Courage Practice

The practice that stood out to me was Jennifer’s refusal to force her new creative impulse into an old, familiar shape. She had every reason to assume this idea was another screenplay, since that’s the only form she knew how to write in. Instead, she let herself notice that it felt different, and she respected that difference instead of steamrolling it. I weirdly equate this to gluten-free bread. Sometimes the thing you loved isn’t a good fit anymore, but you can find something that meets the same need without hurting you. Jennifer found her gluten-free bread in the novel form, and it gave her back a version of creative expression she thought she’d lost for good.

4 Ways Jennifer Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. She wrote with zero expectations attached.

2. She chose self-publishing on purpose, not as a fallback.

3. She’s learning to hold both praise and criticism and choosing to keep going rather than letting either make choices for her.

4. She’s slowly claiming the identity of a “writer”.

Lift Her Up:

The best way to support Jennifer is to read or listen to What Happened to Annabel Taylor and leave a review.

Then, if you love this episode, listen to , who nominated Jennifer and introduces this episode.

Hey, Uplifters!

Last year at our Uplifters retreat, we carried on our annual tradition of creating vision boards. We spend the weeks leading up to the retreat distilling our ideas for the future and what we’ve learned from the prior year to ensure the things we put on our boards focus, energize, and stretch us.

I had three focus areas on my vision board.

✨Health: reimagine my self-care habits to match my midlife body, and release the things that worked for my 20- and 30-year-old self to make space for what works now.

✨Family: celebrate 20 years of marriage with Andy, support Sav through the college transition, help Derby get settled into new routines.

✨Work: book and give a TED talk, write a book I’m really proud of.

Looking back at that board now, nine months later, is honestly a little bonkers. One girlie is in college. The other was cast in her school play this week. Andy and I have a trip planned in October to celebrate the anniversary. I’m feeling stronger than I have in years and am participating in the first-ever Super Age Games in November. I finished writing my book last week, and I feel really proud of it because it’s good (that’s fun to say) and because I know it’s a book only I could have written, with the roots of my foremothers’ stories, my research, my community, my gifts, and my experiences. I’m giving a TED talk on October 7 about how midlife is a time for genius because it’s when many of us stop the BS stuff we were conditioned to do and start doing the things only we can do (you know, like writing this book!).

Someone asked me yesterday if vision boards actually work. Here’s my honest answer. The board itself doesn’t do anything. It’s paper and glue. The magic is in spending the time to get really clear on what you actually want, clear enough that it excites you enough to go after it with focus and vigor. The board is just an anchor. It’s there to remind you not to get distracted by the interference of shiny objects, uncertainty, and doubt. It’s there to remind you how energized you felt when you were brave enough to say what you really wanted.

If you want to do that work for yourself, we have 4 spots left for this year’s retreat. More info HERE.

September on the Podcast: New Beginnings

Maybe you’re deep in the back-to-school, clean slate, who am I becoming mode, even if nobody in your house is actually going back to school.

September’s episodes are all about new beginnings. We kicked things off talking about ending the last thing well, because that’s the first step to starting the next thing.

Lift & Be Lifted Recap

One of my favorite parts of this community is watching what happens when a room full of midlife women introduce themselves and ask for what they need. Here’s who showed up last month’s Lift & Be Lifted, and how you can support them.

Nia Bonson runs Mavenhood Society, a media platform and community for midlife childfree and childless women and their empty-nester sisters. Through their digital magazine, weekly newsletter, and Substack, they cover money, career, relationships, health, style, and culture, all from a midlife point of view. I am honored that Nia has invited me to be a facilitator for their first live event in NYC event on September 24.

Tickets and more info

Melanie Cohen is a clutter coach, physical, digital, mental, emotional, all of it, and hosts the podcast Lighten Up: The Art of Living Clutter-Free. She runs a 3-month group experience, 30-day challenges with daily prompts, and monthly live declutter sessions. If you know a woman who feels overwhelmed, but might not use the word “clutter” to describe it, send her to Melanie. thoughtfullycoaching.com

Jess Kaplan is an actor, writer, and host of Nopes and Dreams, a podcast about rejection and normalizing failure in creative fields. She just started her book proposal and is craving accountability for her writing practice, plus help getting the podcast out into the world on social. She’s based in Miami. nopesanddreamspodcast.com

Tracy Siri needs art submissions for the Art Enclosure Contest she built for a local animal sanctuary. Kids draw the art, winners go up on the animal enclosures, votes are $1 donations. Zero cost to submit. Get your kids, nieces, nephews, and art-teacher friends involved. https://alpine-acres-enclosure-art-contest

Adena Artale is an actor, writer, and IT sales rep in the middle of a big transition. Her sister’s cancer diagnosis cracked something open in her, and she’s been pouring herself into a book about what she wants for her children’s future. She needs external motivation and community to keep going when the pull between corporate life and creative life gets heavy. imdb.com

Karey Edwards spent 25 years as an operations executive and is now a stained glass artist. She’s developed stained glass privacy panels that slide into a metal channel on window frames, requiring no permanent install, making them swappable by season. She also designs the full hospitality wrapper around events, communications, visuals, flowers, music, gifts, everything that makes guests feel like they matter. Looking for connections to community organizers, workshop hosts, corporate offsite planners, architects, and interior designers. She’s also looking to connect with anyone who has worked with a specialty package designer they recommend as she creates custom packaging to ship her work. kareyedwards.com/

Tara Thurber runs Defined Talent, fractional HR and leadership development for small businesses, and is also a life and professional coach. This year has been brutal for her. Her ask was simple: positive energy. definedtalent.com, tarathurber.com

Nina Saporta is a web developer relaunching as Wild Bloom Websites, which went live the day she introduced herself to us. She’s a single mom of three trying to make a decade of web work into something sustainable. She needs clients, referrals, and advice. wildbloomwebsites.com

Gabriella Caracappa just graduated with a film and television degree, with a background in photography, video, audio, social, and Canva. She’s looking for freelance work, project based or ongoing, in the New York and New Jersey area or remote, though she’s open to moving. If you need help with your podcast presence, Instagram content, or video editing, she’s your person. linkedin.com

And an urgent one. Gita Vallenki, the founder of Neeshi, had her listings pulled from Amazon last month over a filing issue from one of her labs. She has spent years building this brand, and losing 80% of her subscriptions could mean the end of it. If you’re a subscriber, please resubscribe directly at neeshi.com. If you have creative ideas for navigating the Amazon issue, reach out to Gita at hello@shopneeshi.com.

Want in on conversations like these? Become a paid subscriber and you’re in for monthly Lift & Be Lifted calls, weekly Co-Working Cocoons, and our group chat, where a lot of this connecting happens in between the big moments.

Subscribe now

Around the Community

For the first time in 70 years the best women baseball players in the world are competing on a professional stage. The WPBL named Alli Schroder captain of the Boston team! Alli is a professional baseball player and a Canadian wildfire firefighter in the off-season. I write about her in the book and interviewed her back in episode 86.

I also spent an afternoon at Trudyfest, honoring Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, who trained in the waters of my small town before her historic 1926 swim, beating the men’s world record by nearly two hours in the process. I met Trudy’s niece, along with HannaH Hubert Executive Director of the Trudy Ederle Foundation, and a remarkable midlife woman who swam the Channel herself on the anniversary of Trudy’s original swim. We’ve started working on an audio documentary to tell her story on The Uplifters. Stay tuned.

For anyone looking to pitch a script or series, , a new Uplifter in our crew, has a few seats left in her Build & Pitch Any Idea course, taught by Ryan Cunningham, an Emmy and Peabody award winning producer whose credits include Broad City and Inside Amy Schumer, and basically every other show I’ve ever loved. Here’s my affiliate link if you’re interested.

Save the date: 826NYC’s Trivia Night for Cheaters is back on Tuesday, November 3 at 7pm at Brooklyn Brewery’s Barrel Room. Co-hosted by comedians Josh Gondelman and Alison Leiby, this is Brooklyn’s greatest game of chicanery, and all proceeds support the 3,500+ young authors who come through 826NYC each year. Reply to this email if you’re interested in joining our team! More info at 826nyc.org.

We talk endlessly about how to begin things, especially in September, when we’re flooded with fresh-start stories. We rarely talk about how to end things well, which is the real key to starting the next thing well.

Today’s guest, , just made the bold move to close her thriving retail business, to “end it before it ended her” and free herself up to live and work in a way that’s better suited to where she is at this stage in her life.

She could have just hung a shingle that said “closed” and gone on with her life, but she chose instead to end it in a way that nurtured the joy and connection she and her work are known for.

This conversation is a masterclass in ending things well, whether it’s a career, a relationship, or anything else.

Lisa is best known for her colorful, graphic style and her exploration of themes of joy, liberation and inclusion. She makes art for clients around the globe, including The Library of Congress, The U.S. Postal Service, Amazon, Google, Warby Parker, Comme des Garcons, Peets Coffee, REI and MoMa, among many others.

Lisa exhibits internationally and is the author of ten books, including Art Inc: The Essential Guide to Building Your Career as an Artist and Find your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic.

Lisa is self-taught and didn’t achieve momentum in her career until she was 40 years old. Despite her untraditional path, Lisa has achieved recognition, not just as an artist, but as a leader in the industry for her work in social justice, mentoring and teaching. In 2021, she was named “One of the 50 Most Inspiring People and Companies According to Industry Creatives” published by AdWeek. In 2026, she was named to the Eames Institute’s Curious 100 for her work addressing social justice.

Listen to this episode if...

• You’re sitting on a decision that looks irrational from the outside but feels right on the inside

• You’ve built something that “works” but no longer feels like you

• You’re the person everyone else depends on, and you can’t remember the last time you asked what you need

• You don’t yet think of yourself as a creative person, but something in you keeps asking to be let out

• You’re trying to figure out what ambition even looks like for you now, at this stage of your life

5 Ways Lisa Congdon Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. She let herself be a beginner again, decades in. Lisa didn’t pick up a paintbrush seriously until her late thirties, and she still talks about how radical it felt to claim a creative identity.

2. She replaced the goal with the why. When cycling stopped delivering constant personal records, and when her career hit its ceiling, she didn’t quit. She went looking for a new reason to keep going, one rooted in feelings instead of performance metrics.

3. She closed the door before it closed her. Instead of waiting for burnout to force the decision, she made it while the business was still thriving, which meant she got to close it with love instead of resentment.

4. She trusted her team with the truth. She assumed her employees needed her to keep the business running. She was wrong, and giving them the real reason gave them freedom to make their next moves.

5. She’s rebuilding structure on her own terms. Lisa knows she needs structure to feel calm, so instead of throwing it out for “flexibility,” she’s redesigning her days around the things she wants more of.

Lift Her Up: Follow Lisa’s essays on her transition at her Substack and on Instagram at @lisacongdon.

What’s a door you’ve been afraid to close, even though some part of you already knows it’s time?

We’re closing out our 3-part series on Fulfillment this week.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Listen to this episode if...

• You’re mourning an old version of your body.

• You have tried and quit the same fitness or health goal more times than you want to admit.

• You spend more time thinking about who you once were than who you want to become.

Heike Yates is fierce and determined. She’s the kind of person who powers through and doesn’t take no for an answer, so when an arthritic knee threatened to end her running career, she tried everything to keep going. But nothing worked. Eventually, she had to stop running. With it, she lost her community, her routines, and a sense of herself. She spent a full year grieving these losses.

Now she is 65, turning her decades of fitness, nutrition, and mindset work into something gentler. Her book Pursue Your Spark and her SPARK Framework are for women who are stuck in the gap between who they were and who they want to become. Her mission is to get women out of the trap of wishful thinking and into motion, without guilt, extremes, or starting over.

Her courage practice: The 10-year Reset

Every decade, on her round birthdays, Heike asks what’s next. The rule is simple: don’t discard what you learned. Keep the building blocks, toss what no longer serves you, and decide what you want now. Mourn as long and as hard as you need to for what you’re leaving behind. But then celebrate where you’ve been and focus your energy on where you’re going.

Lift Her Up

Heike’s book baby is out in the world and she would love your support. Get Pursue Your Spark in paperback, e-book, or audiobook. If you love it, leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble so more women can find it. Find her at heikeyates.com and listen to the Pursue Your Spark Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.

We’ve been talking a lot about fulfillment on the podcast lately. , , and Sue Moser each shared how they rebuilt their careers around what actually matters to them.

Then shared her journey from full-time attorney to a portfolio career that lets her bring more of herself to every room.

Later this week, we’ll keep the thread going with , a midlife fitness expert, author, and creator of the SPARK Framework, who helps midlife women stop dimming their light and rebuild strength, energy, and confidence without guilt, extremes, or starting over.

A recent study in the Journal of Career Development found that the midlife women they interviewed described their earlier careers as ones they “fell into”, stayed in for financial security and social recognition, while their deeper values went unmet, until some triggering event finally forced a shift.

The traditional metrics society celebrates, like salary increases, prestigious titles, and external recognition, often start feeling hollow around midlife. If we’re going to stop measuring life by other people’s metrics, we need our own.

When I start working with clients, one of the first questions I ask them is, “How do you know you’ve had a good week?” The answers are rarely quantifiable. They’re things like calm, peace, balance, physical energy. Felt things. Knowing your definition of what good feels like, and paying attention to how it shifts in different situations, is one of the most clarifying practices I know. (Spoiler: when one measure goes up, another often comes down. They’re all connected.)

My measures of success right now look like this:

Doing at least one thing that really scares me every week. Usually asking for what I actually want, sharing my true feelings, or reaching out to someone I’m pretty sure won’t respond the way I’m hoping. I know it’s working when I feel a little jolt of fear before, and a twinge of bravery after.

Taking care of my body in ways that make me feel strong and sturdy. Not skinny or small or empty. I know this is working when I feel ease.

Having relationships with people who cheer me on and challenge me to be better. I know this is working when I feel supported.

Doing work I love. I know this is working when I feel proud.

Appreciating what I have and tending it with care. I know this is working when I feel rich.

I chose words that are evocative on purpose. The best felt metrics trigger a physical response: a smile, shoulders dropping, an exhale.

To build your own success measures:

Ask yourself how you feel when things are going well. Aim for 3 to 5 things you can actually feel. Choose words that shift something in you when you think of them.

Decide how you’ll measure them. I use a ten-point scale: 10 is the highest, 1 is the lowest.

Check in daily or weekly, ideally at the same time. I do mine every morning when I journal. Reflecting on them consistently has taught me more about what works for me than anything else I’ve tried. It makes it crystal clear what is and isn’t working.

Notice the patterns. What behaviors, interactions, and thoughts move your numbers up or down? How do the metrics relate to each other? Change them as you go.

I’d love to know: what does a good week feel like for you? Comment and tell me.

Let’s go do big, brave things!
Aransas

This week we’re exploring what gets in the way of fulfillment. Our guest is .

Listen to this episode if...

• You’ve spent years being excellent at something that stopped feeling like you

• You’re carrying the weight of everyone else’s idea of who you should be

• You’re afraid that letting go of your title means losing your value entirely

• You have whole sides of yourself you haven’t let out in the open since childhood

Who are you, really? Like, really, really?

“Who are you, really?” is a hard question for many of us to answer because, since we were little girls, we’ve been taught to whittle away at ourselves, to sculpt some ideal version of girlhood and then womanhood that helps us fit in.

Research from The Confidence Code for Girls by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman found that girls were also found to be rewarded more by teachers and parents when they exhibited people-pleasing behavior. We learned early on that staying quiet, following instructions, and not asserting opinions was a more acceptable path. We learned that certain parts of us are acceptable and other parts should be hidden in the background. So we started editing ourselves.

Faye McCray started her career as a federal attorney. She was the first lawyer in her family. She had a “curated identity” with the right degree, title, suits, and professional presence. Then a government furlough sent everyone home and she started thinking about the parts of herself she’d set aside when she chose her career.

What she found, when she started writing in her off hours, was herself. “I was giggling while I was writing,” she says. A whole other world was opening up, one that she’d never let herself entertain because the lawyer title had become so impressive so quickly. She was meeting people she found fascinating. She wasn’t overthinking how she was showing up. “It felt natural to who I was.”

She didn’t quit law to become a writer. She became more than a lawyer, and became more Faye.

Today she is the founder and CEO of Culture&Quill, chief communications officer at the National Conference of Bar Examiners, a speaker at South by Southwest and Aspen Ideas, a TEDx speaker, and the author of the forthcoming “More Than Your Job,” out June 2027.

Research into midlife transitions helps explain why this expansion gets so urgent in our 40s and 50s. Developmental psychologists call it identity certainty: we begin to know ourselves more clearly, and that self-knowledge makes the gap between who we’ve been performing and who we actually are harder and harder to ignore.

5 Ways Faye McCray Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Follow the giggling. Joy is data. Faye didn’t make a strategic plan to become a journalist. She noticed where she felt like herself, and she followed it. Ask yourself not where you think you should find joy, but where it’s actually showing up right now.

2. Call it a pilot. Everything scary becomes survivable when you frame it as an experiment. You’re not launching a new career. You’re trying something. Low stakes, real learning, no performance required.

3. Name the grief. Letting go of an identity you worked hard to build is a real loss, even when you’re ready to go. Faye let herself feel it and understand it, because “you can’t busy it away or work it off.”

4. Negotiate your job title as hard as you negotiate your salary. One of the most tactical insights in this episode: if your title is so specific it can only live in one context, you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Build portability in from the start. Your next chapter will thank you.

5. Expand your identity before you need to. Faye didn’t wait for a crisis to start writing. She started building other streams of herself, and income, while she still had stability. By the time she made the full leap, she already had proof she could do it.

Lift Her Up

Subscribe to Faye’s Substack, where she’s exploring the ideas at the heart of her forthcoming book. Find her everywhere at @heyfayemccray. And put “More Than Your Job: Four Practices for Keeping Your Identity Bigger Than Your Career” on your list for June 2027.

What if it all works out?

A newsletter for firsts and aspiring firsts—combining inspiration and practical tips to ensure you never forget the visionary you are.

By Faye McCray

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Last week was a lot.

We went to two funerals that dredged up surprising new layers of grief over losing my grandmother last year. We moved our firstborn off to college. We celebrated my mother’s 75th birthday. My brother’s neighborhood in Kauai got pummeled by a storm that swept away so many of his belongings, and then we held our breath as the forest near his house went up in flames four days later. The chapter I was working on for my book felt like an indecipherable puzzle. Meanwhile, the regular things like work and cooking and cleaning kept going, and I expected myself to keep tending them as though nothing else was happening.

So many friends and clients are carrying a lot at once right now too. Broken bones, fractured relationships, disrupted careers, moving homes- all of it, all at once. Shouldn’t there be an agreed limit to how much one person can manage at once?

Maybe you’ve got a lot happening at once now too?

We’ve managed lots before, haven’t we? And we’ve survived it, so you’d think we’d glide on through this lot too, huh? And yet, we forget that we have to remind ourselves of these lessons every time we enter a new obstacle course.

We know what works: Remembering that we have survived hard patches before and that we’ll get through this one. Making room for mistakes, because they’re gonna happen. Letting the small stuff slide, because times like these remind us what really matters. Trusting that the things that aren’t top priority now will wait (or they won’t and probably weren’t actually that important anyway).

All of that is true. All of it helps.

But today? Let’s find some delight.

Not once things calm down. Right now, in the middle of it, while a ray of sun is shining on the plant that is still alive, even though we keep forgetting to water it.

Research shows that small moments of genuine positive emotion help us move through hard stuff faster. Today, for me, that looked like putting on a pretty dress with red lipstick and my favorite earrings, for no reason at all except that it made me feel brave.

That’s enough.

xo, Aransas

Paid subscribers, come hang with us. Our Monthly Lift and Be Lifted meetup is Wednesday, and our Co-Working Cocoon is Friday. If you’re not sure where to find those or want me to add them to your calendar, just reply to this email.

Y’all know this, but the whole “over the hill” thing is absolute BS. After today’s episode, you’re going to be extra, extra, extra certain, because we’re sharing the stories of three women who will prove to you that midlife is prime time for the most meaningful work of our lives.

In fact, our midlife brains are rewiring in ways that make our quest for fulfillment feel more urgent than ever. And yet. So many of us are sitting on our hands, waiting for permission or perfect conditions before we act.

This week’s episode is for the women who are done waiting.

Our three guests are each at a different point in her second act, each with her own story about what it actually took to close what calls the fulfillment gap.

Dr. Krug von Nidda spent more than 20 years in global human resources, including time at the United Nations, watching talented women arrive full of energy and slowly wilt. She went back to school at 50 to earn her doctorate from Columbia University, spent years researching why some women manage to recreate their careers and find real fulfillment while others stay stuck. Her book, Closing the Fulfillment Gap, releases September 15th. Go pre-order it now!

Risa Crandall spent 38 years in media and technology sales and marketing. When she lost her father, his last words to her, in a text, were “love is.” For a year she wondered what he meant. What emerged was Love Is, an in-person community supper program she founded, rooted in the belief that a shared home-cooked meal can foster genuine human connection.

Sue Moser was born with a cancer so rare she is the only documented case of that type and severity. Her fight since birth lit in her a refusal to exist in anything other than the truth. Today, alongside her thriving corporate career, she channels her fire into The Visceral Edge, where she helps high-capacity leaders learn how to use their natural intensity.

5 Ways These Three Uplifters Show Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:

1. Let your grief show you the way. Risa spent a year with two words, “love is,” before they led her to her new path. If you don’t know what your purpose is, the hardest parts of your story will often point you in the right direction.

2. Name what drains you, even when you’re good at it. Dr. Krug von Nidda left a career in HR that people celebrated her for, because she realized that just because you’re excellent at something doesn’t mean it’s the thing that energizes you.

3. Shift the question from “what am I doing” to “who am I being.” Sue’s path changed when she stopped organizing her life around task lists and started organizing it around the person she wanted to become.

4. Start before you’re ready. Instead of waiting to figure out all the answers for Love Is Suppers, Risa booked a venue, invited strangers, cooked dinner for 17 people on a Tuesday, and found out what worked. Like so many of the stories you’ve heard on this podcast, she found that the best learning happens through active experimentation.

5. You don’t have to choose. Sue is building The Visceral Edge while kicking ass in her corporate role, and she is better at both because she does both. When we ask ourselves either/or questions, we’ve usually missed the best option.

Lift them up:

Pre-order Helen’s book at with-helen.com and follow @with.dr.helen. Find Risa at love-is.com and @love.is.community.suppers — and if you know a foundation that would be a great fit for Love Is as it applies for nonprofit status, Risa would love to hear from you. Check out Sue’s work at thevisceraledge.com and follow @susan_moser17.

Huge thanks to this week’s guest nominators:

Thank you to for nominating , Betsy Parker for nominating , and for nominating Sue Moser.

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