Brave Enough To Love Who I Was In the Past Artwork

S.O.F.T. and Strong: Midlife Women On A Mission

Midlife. The in-between years when you're no longer young but you're not old yet either. It's that time in your story when you're crying all the way home from leaving your kid at college. Or crumpling up your high school reunion invite because life has not turned out at all in the way you said it would. You're waking up in the middle of the night wracked with financial worry. You're going through a divorce or grieving your spouse or wondering who that man is across the table as you haven't really connected for years. It's exhausted caregiving and a waistline you don't recognize. It's staring out the window blankly and asking "NOW WHAT?" Hey - this is a transition when life doesn't give us the choice about whether we go through it or not. But...there are choices that are in our control. Life doesn't stop here. YOU are meant for so much more. And that's what this podcast is about. Instead of being known as a woman who is "menopausal", WHAT IF you could be seen as a beautiful Woman on a Mission? Someone who is taking all life by storm? Who doesn't back down? Who never gives up? Someone who knows what she wants and isn't settling for less. People know you as confident, intelligent, sensitive and intuitive. You get things done. You can be trusted to follow through. You're a woman with a vision. The antidote for sinking into all the inevitable midlife mindsets our culture trains us to believe is PURPOSE. I'm Bernice McDonald, Midlife Coach, and I'm here to guide you as you get your feet back on solid ground. Life shifts. Like winter to spring. So shift with it! Leave your past missions behind as they're done. Open up your heart and your mind to what's next. Your Next Great Mission. We all have one. And you do, too. Let's answer the Midlife Call. Find our next great mission. Live with purpose. Please come and join us!

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S.O.F.T. and Strong: Midlife Women On A Mission

Brave Enough To Love Who I Was In the Past

November 22, 2022 • Bernice McDonald • Season 2 • Episode 12

The woman you "were" - the one in the past - comes with you everywhere all the time.

You hear her voice, you feel her touch, you regret a lot of how she was. And wish she would have made different decisions.

But what about the strength she brings you?

YES! She brings you strength. This aging gracefully thing has to include making peace with the woman you have been all along your Path.

Want to know why she is vitally valuable to you right here, right now where you are today?

And how to embrace her? That's what I'm talking about here in this podcast.

Find the beautiful part of who you were and you'll find the incredible parts of who you are today.

Download here: FREE e-Book: How To Find Your Passionately Personal Midlife Mission

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Are you in the struggle of navigating midlife with grace and power? I hear ya!

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"The Way of the Beautiful Warrior." Our brief daily emails provide insights and inspiration, turning the challenge of midlife into an empowering adventure.

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(00:02):

Hello, lady Adventurers. I am so excited to be with you today. Back on the Soft and Strong podcast. I've been thinking about this episode for this whole last week. It's been just percolating. Uh, I've been doing a lot of, uh, processing, self-coaching, we call it from my, the coaching, uh, program that I am deeply involved in using it to transform my life. It's so amazing. Anyways, what a part of that is, which I have learned, it's sort of cemented a lot of the things that I've learned from the past, uh, about 15 years ago. And coming forward, suddenly I see how it's all linked together, this whole concept. It''s the concept of now what I call the ripple effect, which is how, uh, you know, when an event happens, we have a response to it, and we think a thought, we feel a feeling because we think that thought, and then we take action based on that thought, based on that feeling, which is not always a good thing, and we get a result.

(01:26):

Really, when you think of it, every single thing we do in life stems from this process. It's amazing. Even 15 years ago when I was first introduced to it, it was like, oh, this little Christmas light bulb came on, you know? And over the last 15 years the light's been growing, and now all of a sudden it was like a big spotlight came on.

(01:55):

My life has not always been in a place I'm proud of. And a lot of that is because I beat myself up. And the thoughts that I think actually create a ceiling over top of me so that I keep on rising and bumping my head against it. So at this point in my life, on this day in 2022, I am looking forward to actually leaving my paid job. Now, I retired a year ago, a very brave thing for me to do. However, I was invited to come back and fill in a temporary position, which was only supposed to be for a few months. And that temporary position is now extended for over a year.

(02:48):

We are hopefully filling it now so that I can actually take this step into "retirement" but really, that Is a key word for me into becoming a full-time coach. This has been a very difficult journey for me because I have had so many beliefs about myself that tell me I'm not good enough that tell me I'm not meant to do this, that say, I'm just meant to stay small, because that was kind of my destiny because of the family I was born in, the situation in my life, all the things that have happened.

(03:33):

But it is so NOT true. And I've been working really hard these past months and growing my belief in myself and in my future. And part of that is what I want to share with you today, because unless you do this, the fiery fear dragon will come along and keep you, hold you captive in the castle of your heart. Your heart is a beautiful place, and your castle is a place that's the inside of you, where you live.

(04:10):

That castle is all of who you are. But if you hide in that and don't bring that out into the world, if you are like, I like to think of it, a princess standing on the balcony, looking out like Rapunzel, remember she couldn't get out of her tower. She was looking off into the distance, wondering what it's like out there. If you stay there, you will never, you'll get to the place where you never come out.

(04:40):

I don't want that for you. And I know that you don't want that for you. So I began to really believe that. And I have done this over the course of the last 15 years. I don't want to spend the rest of my life, the second half of my life, dying. And honestly, that's what a lot of women do. They give up or they believe that the path of life takes them into a place where they just get old, they get sick, they get worn out, they put themselves on the shelf, and they put themselves on the shelf.

(05:22):

It's not that they, that society necessarily puts them on the shelf, though sometimes that is what we feel, but that's the thought, you see. So, in that case, the event would be that you feel stuck on the shelf. The event is very neutral. So it's like you're getting older and your thought is, "I'm being put on the shelf". Your feeling is "useless:. I feel useless.

(05:53):

Your action then is to sit down in your chair and crochet, watch tv, have your routine, not move your body much. And you end up getting sick and you end up getting old. And then you, the result is that you ARE useless. Your thought creates your result, and the result always ties back to the thought.

(06:18):

Anyway. I don't want to be that person. Thinking about actually leaving my paid job and retiring has led me to a place where I have to think, and this has been the big word in my head for the last 10 years. HOW do I do this? HOW do I become a coach? How do I make this coaching business work?

(06:45):

What I have discovered is the amazing thing we talked about a couple of podcasts ago - last one, too, - I guess it's not about how, it's about who I believe I am. It's about my identity and how I deal with the fear stories that my fiery fear dragon, who's flying around my castle, telling me to stay safe, stay in my castle. It's how I respond to that.

(07:15):

But the how is actually about who I am, and in my mind, am I a wimp or am I a warrior? Am I going to let fear be the boss of me? Or am I going to be the boss of my fear? And so really, that's the journey I'm on now, becoming this brave woman that I know I am and I can step into. And every one of us has one of those brave women living inside of us. Every one of us.

(07:50):

There's not one of you out there who does not have that side in you. The side in you that can make a decision to just be courageous. And when you decide to be courageous, your courage shows up. You take a step, your courage shows up. You see that that step wasn't as bad as you thought, or you see that you can handle wherever that step took you. And boom, the courage is there.

(08:20):

So the question I was always asking is how, but as we talked about, the thought that I need to have and that you need to have, is that it's not about how we do anything in the world. The how will come after the "who", it's the "who that I am" that I'm going to bring out into the world. Who I am can handle anything. Now that makes me feel amazing. It makes me feel strong. And really, in this part, if you're breaking this right down into tiny bits where it's really going to help you and you're going deep, you need to just put one emotion in this line. And when I say, "The who that I am is, is what I bring to everything I do", then the thought that comes is I feel confident.

(09:28):

And out of that confidence comes so many different actions in my life. Now, this is specifically in a roundabout way. We are finally here. I want to tell you three things that that leads me to in my life that have been so important. And I believe they're important for you too.

(09:50):

First of all, I'm grateful for the person in my past who lived through it all imperfectly and is making me the woman I am today. How many of us get stuck in the past? We regret the past. We can't accept the decisions that we made. We've done some pretty crazy things, made some really bad decisions, right? I know I have. Stalking a man. That's gotta be one of the biggest things during my, between my divorce and my remarriage. Oh, I cannot believe that that was me. But we do what we need to do to find love.

(10:33):

You will even overcome your values. You will step around, find a way around your values in order to meet your needs. That's what I was doing. I needed love. I needed to feel significant. And so I stalked this man because I thought I just needed to persuade him to love me. And I know you're all going, oh boy, shaking your head, that was a bad thing to do. Yes, it was.

(11:02):

But you know what, as I look back at the woman in that short of time ago, I look back at the girl in my teens. I look back at the crazy, the crazy girl in my twenties, the lost girl, the woman in my thirties and my forties, who was coming into her own and making her decisions about who she was going to be. I look back at all those different sides of me.

(11:31):

And as I was growing, if I had not gone through all those experiences, it's that woman in every case that brought me through my past to today and makes me the strong woman that I am today. Gives me the strength to be who I am. And I am so grateful for that.

(11:54):

And because of her. The second thing that I wanna talk about that comes out of just feeling so confident, because I can bring who I am to whatever I do today, is that I have become so aware of my heart on this long journey. I have learned to feel my feelings, truly. That took some time. I can bring my heart to every situation because it's who I am. And I know what's in my heart. I know what I see. I know what I feel. I, I know what I care about.

(12:35):

I know who I am. But in order to do that, I had to learn to feel what I was going through. And I had to feel those feelings all the way through. What does that mean? When I felt despair, when I felt rejection, when I felt as if I was worthless, I couldn't just shove that feeling down or slam the door on that and run and binge eat anymore - that that was my go-to. Or go to three movies in a row in the theater, eating licorice and popcorn and everything just to comfort myself. I couldn't go to bed and take a sleeping pill, which is what I did a lot, again, between my divorce and my separation and my remarriage. That was pushing those feelings away. But instead, thanks to Rori Ray in her program, "Have the Relationship You Want". I learned to feel my feelings and be okay.

(13:52):

I learned to say how I was feeling. I feel as if life is worthless. I feel unworthy. I feel like I'm not enough. I feel like I shouldn't even be alive - even that was there. That was a thought and a feeling I've had since the time I was very young. As I felt those feelings, they started to dissipate. They started to get less. And I started to - the time I felt there, just sitting there in my feeling and feeling it, it started to have less impact on my life because I wasn't resisting it. I wasn't going out and reacting because of that feeling. Going out and getting angry at somebody, going out and, and hiding in some way in the food, in illicit relationships. Doing things I'm not proud of. Those were all deflectors ways that I was hiding from my true feelings.

(15:06):

So I am so grateful that that woman in my past brought me to this place where I can now bring my heart to every situation, because I know how to live in my heart and from my heart. I am so grateful for that.

(15:23):

And the third thing, last thing here that I wanna talk about, that has come out of believing this thought: "The who I am is what I bring to everything I do", I can live my life forward now. I don't have to live in the regret of even what I did yesterday. I'm not focusing on what I didn't do and what I should have done and how I wasn't a hundred percent, how I wasn't perfect. And how could I do that? What are other people gonna think? Your fiery fear dragon will bring all those thoughts to you to keep you from taking forward steps from living forward. Your living forward will actually be you sitting down and doing nothing. The last thing that I want to do. But I can live my life forward by NOT focusing on what I can accomplish, how much money I can make, who loves me and why.

(16:35):

Those kinds of things. I don't need to focus on the "how" to find my fulfillment and how to make this work. Instead, I can just focus on appreciating WHO I AM, the long path that I've walked, how far I've come, and how strong I've become, and how much I've cultivated so many of the good things in myself. That's what I bring to others.

(17:04):

That's what I bring as a coach. That's what I bring as a wife to my knight in Shining Armor. That's what I bring as a lady in our relationship - to be the lady love that he tells me I am. And I can be brave enough to just be okay being me where I am right here. Now today. This is the beauty of focusing on forward instead of on backward, on bringing the strength of that person in your past grew into the present and taking it into the future. This is the joy of knowing yourself, of knowing your heart and bringing your heart to the world.

(18:04):

So I just want to tell you, you know, if any of this is resonating with you, if you're wishing that you could just tackle some of those demons from the past, if you could break through the ceiling that's holding you down, holding you back from the life that you believe that you could live the picture of the life that brings you so much peace and excitement thinking of living in that life. If any of that is ringing a bell with you, please reach out to me and let's have a conversation.

(18:40):

See if coaching would be the answer for you. I believe it is because coaching is so great a process. But to see if that is a fit for you, reach out to me. Let's have that consultation and talk about where you're at and where you wanna go, how you wish your life could be, how you dream that it would be. Because if that dream is in your heart, that's a possibility for you and you need to go for it.

(19:18):

Okay? I am gonna leave you with that today. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you go over this again. You'll probably need to review it. The transcript will be on my website@www.bernicemcdonald.com. So check it out there and take this home and let me know@bernicebernicemcdonald.com If this has helped you at all, if you have any questions or concerns or if you just can't seem to get those thoughts to a place that, that are positive. All right, my beautiful ladies, go out there and be brave. Live a strong life, live in that warrior. Heart of yours, live from that heart, and I'll talk to you on the next podcast.