Is it too late for me to...?
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 have a dream you’ve been quietly carrying for years (or even decades)
You’re exhausted from trying to meet everyone else’s expectations
You want proof that you can be powerful and unfinished at the same time
You’re worried about what other people will think if you do the thing you’ve wanted to do
The allies and openings you need will appear, but only when you begin speaking your truth.
Picture a bar in Miami in 1996. Denise has just ended her engagement, and in that crackly, open space where anything feels possible, she tells her friends about a film she wants to make. It’s a documentary about the identity challenges of belonging as a first-generation Latina. She has a feeling that if she makes it, it will change the world.
She puts it on her vision board. For the next sixteen years, she keeps putting it on the board.
Denise was an at-home mom who knew basically nothing about filmmaking, so her strategy was to tell everyone she met about her dream, believing that someday the right person would hear her and figure out how to turn her dream into reality.
Her dream easily could have withered in those 16 years, but because she kept telling people about it, seeing their reactions to it, her conviction grew stronger and stronger.
Eventually the right person heard her. At a play date with a friend she’d only met a couple of times, she gave her pitch for the thousandth time. The other mom said, casually, that her next-door neighbor was an Oscar-nominated documentary producer, and offered to introduce them.
Denise was so scared that it might fall through that she didn’t call her friend about it for five months.
The producer saw her vision, and together they made the award-winning film Being Eñye. In 2016, the trailer dropped and got a million combined views. The White House invited them to screen it. The film won the People’s Choice Award at the Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival, and speaking requests poured in. Now, at 55, Denise has spoken on more than 400 stages, delivered two TEDx talks and a SXSW talk, and written her debut book, What Will They Say?: Confront Cultural Taboos and Discover Your Inner Power.
Each time she told more of the truth, the doors opened wider. Editing ourselves is exhausting, and so is code-switching, and all that hiding drains the energy we could be putting into our big, brave things.
5 Ways Denise Soler Cox Shows Us How to Build Our Courage Capital:
Say it out loud in the most ordinary places. Parties, sporting events, playdates, the grocery line. Don’t believe the advice about not telling anyone your wish. It is the worst advice ever.)
Keep one sentence ready. Figure out what you really want people to hear about your dream and say it until it becomes a part of you.
Turn your dream into specific, tiny steps. Her whole plan for a film was two words on a to-do list, “Call Claire.”
Choose the bravest truth. You’ll hear how Denise shared things on stage that she’d never said out loud, and how it freed her and connected her in ways she never imagined.
Let yourself be powerful and unfinished. In the hardest year of her career, Denise kept writing and let it all onto the page.
Lift Her Up
Buy What Will They Say? and if you can open doors to groups of women, reach out to her and tell her what you have in mind. Denise’s Instagram.
