Every so often I use a client story to talk about how women today navigate this time - a time when we have so much, but often it feels really like we’re just doing too much. We’re overwhelmed with meeting expectations but feel underwhelmed for what we feel we get back.
I had a client recently, let’s call her Joy, who came to me to see if she could get going on her own life again. She doesn’t know how, and can’t seem to get the energy to do it. Her days are all go-go-go but she can’t get going on herself.
Joy is feeling a bit lost. Through circumstance rather than specific intention, she stepped back from a career to raise her family. Now, at 56, she has no financial independence, has no real community around her because they recently moved, and has stopped seeing friends because apparently she has nothing interesting to say to her old friends when they ask, “So, what’s new?”
(This reminds me of another client who lost touch with her three main pals and felt so stuck in a rut in her own life she wouldn’t call them as she felt she had “nothing to offer.”)
Often when I probe a bit deeper we find that life is so much on the go, there is no energy, motivation or inspiration to press Go on themselves.
So let’s take all three: energy, motivation, inspiration, and let’s take three different clients.
Energy:
One of my earliest clients was a women in her 50’s who kept saying to me “I’ve no energy.” She wanted to “get going” on her life now kids had left but she had nothing left to give to herself. When she recounted her general week to me, it certainly seemed she had energy because there was a lot on: she worked from home in the morning, then visited her ageing mum, then tried to tackle a mammoth project involving sorting out a large back building full of boxes of (her husband’s!) files so she could convert it into an office. She felt deflated and a failure because she was getting nowhere. I asked her to track her energy throughout a day, and then pointed out that when she was most energetic (the first half of the day) she was sitting having tea with her mum. When her energy levels where lowest (early afternoon) she was faced with the most demanding task which defeated her and de-energised her even further. A sense of failure is one sure way to cut your enthusiasm off at the knees.
I asked her if it was possible to swap the shed organising with visiting her mum. The routine was so deeply cut, she immediately shook her head. I encouraged her to at least ask and lo and behold, when she did, her mother said it suited her better to swap but she’d never wanted to ask! So she got up - started investing in an exercise routine which also boosted her energy - worked and then tackled the hard job before her natural energy slump hit where she went and spent time chatting to her mum, before resting for an hour and then finding a whole new lease of life late afternoon and evening.
In order to get going on herself, she had to rearrange the go-go-go of her life to benefit her better.
Motivation:
This client is the one who felt she couldn’t contact friends because she had nothing to say. She ran her own business, had single parented her child and was now in a good relationship. But she had run aground. Totally run out of steam. She was in a rut with her business, her relationship and was finding it hard to adjust to her daughter soon becoming an adult. So we played a little coaching game I love to play. “Who do you want to become?” She had a big birthday coming up in four years and that was a perfect landing spot to redefine the life she wants to be living - what kind of relationship does she want to be having with her partner, and her by-now adult daughter? What kind of way does she want to be feeling about her work and the shape of her weeks? What kind of events and connections did she want to have in her diary? When she had a clear vision of who she wanted to become over the next four years, it gave her the motivation to make the changes she needed.
In order to get going on herself, she had to redefine and repurpose the current go-go-go so it took her in the direction she wanted to go.
Inspiration:
This client had given up work to raise her daughter. She feels she has nothing of herself on display, only the mother role. She wants to create a new life for herself so her daughter can say to her college friends “My mum’s out at work or doing her class.” But she can’t get going. She has let go of so much of her self to become the roles of wife and mother, she hasn’t the springboard to launch back into herself. So I came back to that comment about wanting her daughter to see her differently. Her daughter won’t be in college for another three years, which coincides nicely with a big birthday. So not negating the love and devotion she has role-modelled to her daughter until now, what does she want to role-model going forward to her daughter? What life can she lead that will inspire her daughter (and really, the point is, herself) to see that mattering to yourself is the most important goal of all? She has a plan and a purpose now.
In order to get going on herself, she had to find a way to look beyond the go-go-go and get inspired towards a getting going on a different path.
What all these clients, and Joy, have in common is there is no joy directed towards themselves.
Joy (the energy, not the client) doesn’t have to mean dancing naked on a beach, or hanging from the chandelier. It means mattering to yourself. Not in relation to who you are with or to others, but who you are to yourself.
And I likely don’t need to tell you, this midlife can kick the shit out of our internal joy sometimes. The relentlessness of the busyness can be utterly joy-quenching.
My work with all of these women was not to blow up their lives to find the joy, but to help them access, and then build, a really strong relationship with themselves.
For each of the ones I’ve mentioned, and many of my other clients who come to me wanting an answer to some existential crisis - a once off solution to make their lives feel less meh - I start by helping them see it is a process. A process that involves exploration of themselves; an excavation of their resilience, joy, passions; a check-in of who and how and where they are at this age and stage whatever that is; an evolution of who they are becoming.
It means becoming you own inner coach, to energise, motivate and inspire yourself.
We all know the critic. And as I’ve explained here, often times that voice is not actually yours.
Our inner coach, or champion or witch (yes, I have a fascination with the women who were labelled witches and the way they seemed to rebel against the system and have an embodied connection to themselves and nature) or even your wise-woman self is the one that is there under all the patriarchal conditioning, under the layers of roles and responsibilities, a sense of self separate from the nay-saying nattering in your head.
I like to think of mine as the wise-woman, living in a beautiful cabin in the midst of nature. I have no fucks left to give, and also have so much love and excitement about the life I am living. I am free from the expectations of being perfect, and a “good girl” and I live life on my terms (this does not mean I’m not still a loving, caring, generous person.. I’m just doing it from a place of strength, not desperation.)
I am ageless in this vision of my wise, witchy self. I am all my ages, past, present and future; I am simply my wise and beautiful self. I look to her for advice when I know what I want but the go-go-go of my life is pushing me under the water. I look to her to help me find how to get going, keep going, be energised, motivated and inspired to go forward for me, as much as everyone else.
And as you tap into your inner wise-woman, when you realise you are shifting from the role-laden self to a better sense of your self, you start to drop the go-go-go fucks, and it clears the mental space so that you get going on thinking differently. I love watching these women find glimmers and shades of themselves, see themselves in a new way. Not in a ‘is my bum look big in this?’ way, but in a ‘which shades and hues do I start colouring myself in with after years of ghosting myself?’ way.
There is always a feeling of loss and grief for the stages that went before, and that is ok. But with the grief comes space to have new priorities and purpose.
It’s so easy to ride the to-do list because it stops you actually thinking about what is missing in your life, but when you are brave (and wise-woman enough) to allow the space to let the thoughts come, then your focus shifts. Perhaps the joy finds a foothold and starts to build.
Stay ok as you sit with the real discomfort of not knowing what’s next yet in order to start learning and remembering and finding and discovering. And as the process continues, you start cleaning out unhelpful beliefs and cleaning up the mucky baggage and letting go of the go-go-go until you realise you are making a go of you.
I absolutely love hearing from you, and I’d love to know how you feel about your inner coach, so please join me in the comments below (if you’re reading this in an email, please click on the link below to go through to the website to join the conversation.)
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