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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them. Not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now. As she breaks down the fairy tale health story, you have been chasing all of your life, indispensable action steps and lasting change.
Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley. As always, I’m thrilled you’ve decided to join me today. And I hope you’re doing well. And if you’re not doing well, if you are rumbling in your life right now, in a big way, I hope you are extending yourself buckets of compassion and grace. Now, a lot of you who travel frequently inside of the grace and grit circle, you listen to the Podcast or you following me on social media, you’re well aware that next week, I am hosting my free five day event called Healthiest Year Yet. And you can tell by the sound of my voice that I’m really congested right now. So it’s kind of an interesting time, right? Like someone’s playing a joke on me here. I’m teaching Healthiest Year Yet. And I’m not feeling my healthiest. But I bet I will by Monday, I bet this will be a quick turnaround.
Courtney Townley 1:20
The reason I’m sharing this with you. Number one is if you’re not registered for the event, now is the time to get yourself registered. This is no cost to you. This is five days of impactful lessons that will help you travel the path of wellness with a lot more grace and ease. You’ll be a part of a community you’ll have opportunity to win prizes, there is so much support. And I think you’re going to love it. So you can register by going to graceandgrit.com/healthiestyearyet.
Courtney Townley 1:53
But in regards to my congestion. A few months ago back in October, my husband decided to put in a humidifying system for our entire home. Because we live in Montana, it’s very dry here. Certainly in the winter, we have all the hot air blowing around, so it’s even more dry. And we definitely needed humidity in the air. But we’ve had a lot of challenges with regulating the humidity in our house. So it’s either way too high, or it’s way too low. And in the midst of sorting out this humidity challenge, there is clearly either allergens or mold or something blowing around in the air, which my son and I are really taking a hit for.
Courtney Townley 2:38
I’m telling you this because we are realizing that in order to make this system work, we have probably some bigger renovation work to do in our home, we need to clean the air ducts out, we might need to pull some paneling off walls to see what’s going on behind the walls. There is definitely renovation work in our future. And if you have ever renovated a home, you know that it takes time and patience. And a lot of decisions need to be made. It’s a very resource heavy activity.
Courtney Townley 3:17
And look, my husband and I are both self employed. We are already wildly busy and time crunched. So we don’t have a lot of extra time in our schedule for something like a home renovation. So this is not a very welcomed invitation. And to be honest, this is how I think a lot of women are traveling through midlife.
Courtney Townley 3:44
This is how they feel about the invitation that is midlife, that invitation being to change the way they have been living in order to accommodate a changing hormonal landscape. So think about it. mid life offers so many unique challenges, a lot of which I talked about on this Podcast, one of them being that the hormones that are helping you to manage stress are declining. While simultaneously, life is affording you more opportunity than ever to add stress into your life. And here’s the truth about midlife to move through it in a way that keeps you well. That helps you to maintain your personal power. Renovations are going to have to be made to your life so you can better manage the stress in your life. Especially in the presence of less hormones.
Courtney Townley 5:05
And the wonderful part of this because there is a wonderful side, I know it sounds like just, it’s all awful. But it’s not. The wonderful part of this is just like when you renovate a home, you get to reinvent your space. And the same is true of the midlife renovation work. So while I’m feeling a little inconvenienced about having to do this deeper work in my home, because of the time, because of the energy, we’re going to have to put towards it because of the cost. I’m also really excited about reinventing my space. And that’s really what I want to talk about with you today. Because you do have an opportunity ahead of you to reinvent your life. So it feels very congruent with how you want to be showing up.
Courtney Townley 6:01
And this is a lot of what we’re going to be talking about in the Healthiest Year Yet event next week. So if what I tell you today lands, if you’re feeling like, Man, I feel like she’s speaking right at me. To me, this is resonating for me, get yourself registered, once again, graceandgrit.com/healthiestyearyet.
Courtney Townley 6:24
So why do we need to do renovation work in our life at all? Well, you don’t, the truth is you really don’t. You can choose not to change anything about your life, just like my husband and I can choose not to do anything about this air filtration system. And there will be a consequence, there will be a price for not renovating. Now the cost to us in our home is that I’m going to keep having sinus issues. Right and I don’t want to be sick, I don’t want to feel like my body is working hard. Unnecessarily I want to put that effort, my body has to give towards things that I really care about, not towards constantly fighting things like allergens. And I would really encourage you to consider by not renovating your life by not making some changes, what is the cost going to be to you.
Courtney Townley 7:34
I bet you have some sense of that you already have some sense of what that will cost you. So, when we are aging, there are a lot of factors that make us less less resilient to stress. I already mentioned the hormonal piece, right perimenopause and menopause, that the natural byproduct of that process is we are less resilient to stress on a hormonal level. But also, the aging process itself makes us less resilient on a cellular level.
Courtney Townley 8:22
The energy systems of our cells, those little mitochondria are not producing energy at the caliber that they did in our youth. And while our tolerance to stress is declining, like I said earlier, many of us are simultaneously stacking more stress in and some of that is by choice, even if it’s subconscious choice, and some of it is with it was out of your control. I think of you know, parents aging, or, you know, having to manage a household and a career, maybe making a job shift. Not all stress is avoidable. And not all stress is bad. That’s really important to remember, stress is a beautiful thing, until it’s not until we drown ourselves in it.
Courtney Townley 9:27
If you don’t take responsibility for managing stress where you can your system, your biological system, your biochemistry in midlife will break down faster than it needs to. So you’re not doing yourself any favors by not learning how to better manage your stress. And you can look at this fact, as a royal pain in the ass. Because I know an awful lot of women look at it that way. Oh or you can choose to look at it as an amazing opportunity to restructure to reinvent your life. And obviously, I’m an advocate for the latter, I hope you are too. And the message we’re always hearing right is that well, in order to improve my tolerance to stress, I need to exercise more and eat better.
Courtney Townley 10:28
And of course, food and exercise can play a role in our unnecessary suffering at this stage of life, no one’s going to argue that. But what I have found over a 20 year career working with a whole lot of women in midlife, is that an awful lot of unnecessary stress is actually stemming from a woman having a lack of self respect, a lack of boundaries, a lack of knowing herself, or she has a habit of compromising what she does know about herself, to meet the demands of everyone around her.
Courtney Townley 11:08
She is creating unnecessary stress by not being conscious of her belief system. And making sure that the way that she is thinking is conducive to helping her to create the life she really wants to live. A lot of women are creating unnecessary stress by having overflowing to do lists by never giving themselves an opportunity to rest and recover by not healing and resolving problems in relationships by not taking risks. And that sounds wild, right?
Courtney Townley 11:52
Like, Well, Courtney, if I take risks, that’s actually creating more stress temporarily. Yes, I agree. That’s, that’s true. But I work with a lot of women who are tolerating a tremendous amount of unnecessary stress, because they’re unwilling to make a decision to make a change. And decisions are temporary risks. And they feel really risky. Mostly because it’s perceived stress, we just don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And we don’t like not knowing. So we stay in a relationship we stay in a career, we stay in something for a really long time, because we aren’t temporarily willing to get uncomfortable.
Courtney Townley 12:39
I’ve come to believe that when a woman crosses into the midlife arena, not only is she being presented with an opportunity to reinvent her relationship with herself. But because she is more sensitive to stress than ever, she’s being presented with this amazing opportunity to look around and really examine the parts of her life that need renovation, in order for her to stress less for her to nourish herself more deeply. And a lot of the things that I actually see inside of my community, that are helping women to stress less, and nourish themselves more deeply.
Courtney Townley 13:29
Yes, some conversations around food and exercise. But it’s really what I hear a lot more of is women giving themselves permission to make decisions that they have not been making for years. Having tough conversations with people that they’ve been putting off for years, changing careers, taking adventures, really giving themselves the grace of exploring their passions, and their creative spirit. These things are just as nourishing to the body as food and exercise. So I like to think of midlife. You’ve probably heard me say this before if you’ve been a longtime listener, but midlife is a lot like pregnancy. So pregnancy is this period of time where something new is being born. Right. And in midlife, hormones are shifting a lot like hormones shift in pregnancy, they’re different hormonal shifts.
Courtney Townley 14:39
But when a woman is pregnant, most of us have an understanding that she probably needs a different level of self care to honor what her hormones are doing and to honor the growth of this new life. And I just want to propose that I think if we approach Just menopause in the same way, we would travel with a lot less stress. There’s nothing wrong with you that you’re going through this shift. It’s normal. Why aren’t we looking for ways to support ourselves and nourish ourselves like we would if we were pregnant. And you don’t have to have ever been pregnant or even wanting to be pregnant to understand that pregnancy demands a different level of self care, and so does midlife. So I want to give you just a few tips for starting to embark on your own reinvention process for starting to pick up the tools, and getting to work on the renovation of things that are probably going to help you to stress less at midlife.
Courtney Townley 16:00
So the first thing I want to encourage you to do is to date yourself, quite literally date yourself. Spend time alone with yourself. Dating is a practice of getting to know someone, right? That’s what it is. And hopefully, we go on dates, because we want to fall deeper in love with that person, or we want to see if love is even an option. But I often hear this language coming from my clients language like I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m passionate about, I don’t even know who I am. I don’t know what to do. And none of that is true. They do know, they just aren’t making time to listen to the answers. They’re so far removed from themselves because they’ve been putting all their attention outward towards everyone else’s needs. That they have neglected their relationship with themselves. So we turn the attention back in. It doesn’t mean every moment of every day has to be all about you.
Courtney Townley 17:19
I’m talking about really dedicated intentional time that you spend with yourself, and it’s going to feel awkward until it doesn’t, until you actually start craving more of it. Because think about it, when we’re dating someone, the practice is literally getting to know them. And when we get to know them, we have more respect for them. And when we respect someone, we’re more likely to actually get to know them even better. And then we start to like them. And who knows, eventually, maybe you fall in love with them. But it starts with a willingness to date. So start dating yourself, I don’t know what that looks like for you. But I would challenge you to get really curious about what that might look like.
Courtney Townley 18:14
How could you create some time a little bit of time and space, we’re not talking about epic amounts of time, because I know a lot of you don’t have it. But just starting with 10 15 20 minutes a day of you getting straight with you. The second thing I would encourage you to do is to really start reframing your future, I encounter a lot of women who are acting as if the best of them is in the past. And you have all heard me talk about this so many times. I mean, it’s practically the tagline of my business, right putting your best years ahead of you and not behind you.
Courtney Townley 18:50
And the truth is, if you believe that your best is in the past, you will always find evidence that that is absolutely true. So you have the ability, you have this amazing part of your brain, your executive center, your prefrontal cortex, that allows you to choose your thinking. You get to decide what you believe. So even if you have been practicing, believing for years that your best is in your past, I want to offer that at any time you can decide to start practicing thinking something different.
Courtney Townley 19:28
And a thought that is practiced over and over and over again becomes a belief and a belief that I want to offer you that is way more useful is that the best is yet to come and look for evidence of that. You are so much better equipped at midlife to step into the woman you have always wanted to be because you have more understanding of life. You have more skill sets you have more resilience on some on a level levels. Maybe not on a cellular level or hormonal level, but you do have resilience mentally, physically, probably, to some degree. I see so many women stepping fully into their power at midlife, and it is such a beautiful thing. And I really want to see more of it in the world, because I think it’s it is to the benefit of the world.
Courtney Townley 20:28
Joan Rivers who I did have the privilege of meeting years ago, I mean, I think I was like, 16, I met her in New York City. And I saw quote of hers a few years ago, it’s always stuck with me, which is, you know, life doesn’t get easier. It gets better, you get better. And I love that life doesn’t get easier, you get better. And you get better by making a conscious choice, to make yourself better. To stand face to face with all the hard things and solve them and heal them and move your life forward.
Courtney Townley 21:10
Alright, the third thing I’m going to suggest is that you acknowledge that you have probably normalized stress in your life. Because something I often hear people say is, well, I don’t feel stressed. And yet, their physiology is clearly telling them that they’re stressed. It may not be that they perceive the mental stress. But they are not sleeping at night. They are constantly turning to food for comfort. They are very reactive. There’s a lot of ways that stress shows up. It’s kind of like hunger.
Courtney Townley 21:53
A lot of women will tell me I never feel hungry. And when I asked them well, how do you? How do you think you like what do you think hunger should feel like? And they’ll often say, Well rumbling in my stomach. And that’s not at all how I know I’m hungry. I identify hunger, by lack of focus, by getting really irritable. You know, by definitely not having any energy in terms of the activities I’m doing in the day. Those are all indications to me that I’m hungry. And when I helped coach a woman through looking for other ways that she might be hungry, it always comes to light that Yes, she is indeed likely not eating enough food.
Courtney Townley 22:35
And I think this is very true of stress. That with stress, it’s really easy to think that it only feels like one thing. But if we’re really open to looking at all the ways that our body might be communicating to us that we are stressed, we are so much more likely to see it. So what are your indications of stress? What is your barometer of stress? How are you measuring stress. The fourth thing I want to encourage you to do to start on this renovation and reinvention journey is giving yourself permission to start making some hard decisions. I always call this trimming the fat. Letting go of things in your life that are weighing you down unnecessarily. I just did a whole masterclass in Rumble & Rise this month about unnecessary labor. All the ways in which we’re creating unnecessary work for ourselves. And not deciding is one of the ways that we create a lot of unnecessary work for ourselves.
Courtney Townley 23:48
So I have women who are not making decisions about their career, right? They’ve been miserable. They’re they’re completely done with the career they’re in, or the place that they’re working, but they still haven’t made the move. I have women who are really rumbling in relationships, whether it be their marriage, or with friends or family or co workers that they aren’t resolving. They aren’t making decisions around those things. They’re just consistently reacting. They’re consistently complaining and that’s never going to ease stress, it’s only going to create more of it. I see people at midlife, often making decisions to let go of some relationships because the resources they have to dedicate to being in that relationship no longer feels like a trade off they want to make. So certain people in their life have served a purpose and the relationship just feels complete.
Courtney Townley 24:52
And of course, I always encourage women to really start making some decisions. Around the things that light them up, like allowing themselves to bring more of what lights them up into their life. Maybe that’s music, maybe it’s weekends away. Maybe it’s a sport, maybe it’s a creative pursuit. Maybe it’s reading, maybe it’s learning a foreign language. Make a decision to pursue that thing. And see how it starts to shift your world, how it starts to help you unload unnecessary stress, because it does. I also want to encourage you, in this midlife reinvention, to give yourself permission to reteach people, how to be in relationship with you.
Courtney Townley 25:55
You know, what’s amazing about being an adult, right, is that we could change our mind at any point. But often, we’ve been in a relationship in a certain way for so long, that we think we just always need to either tolerate the way someone is treating us, or we just need to always be showing up in the same way. And you get to change, you get to change those expectations, that conversation at any time. Because your needs in your relationship, I bet at this stage of your life are not the same as they were 1020 30 years ago. And people are taking the lead on how to treat you based on what you’re tolerating, and what you’re allowing.
Courtney Townley 26:49
And so if what you’re tolerating, and what you’re allowing is creating a lot of unnecessary stress for you. It’s time to reinvent that it is time to start doing the work in those relationships. to reteach people, how you would like them to be in relationship with you how you would like to be treated. Now, they don’t have to honor your request, right, you don’t get to control how they respond. But you do get to control the willingness to ask.
Courtney Townley 27:23
And the final thing I’m going to share with you today is just that I of course am going to encourage you to learn how to love yourself really hard and hard in that you love yourself fully and unconditionally. And that is not an overnight process for a lot of the reasons that I talked about earlier. If you’re not even dating yourself, if you’re not even spending time with yourself, how could you possibly ever expect to fall in love with yourself. And I’m not talking about falling in love with yourself in a conceited and self centered way. I’m talking about falling in love with yourself for the very unique human expression that you are. And to be able to take care of yourself on the regular no matter how you’re showing up. Right?
Courtney Townley 28:18
Because so often we’re withholding the self care, we’re withholding the self love, because we don’t think we deserve it until fill in the blank. Right? We prove ourselves to ourselves or other people in some way. And unconditional love is that you show up. Regardless, regardless of anything, you are worthy just the way you are of your own love and your own self care and your own support. So it starts with dating. It moves into that phase of respect. Eventually there’s like more curiosity because you’re spending more time with yourself. there becomes a likeability you start to like yourself, and eventually love starts to make its way in.
Courtney Townley 29:14
I always say that’s never the starting place. Because Self Love is a really big ask for people who haven’t even been dating themselves. But it is an aspiration. It is something I would encourage you to work towards. Because we do show up for the things that we love unconditionally. Like I can’t imagine not feeding my dog. He doesn’t have to earn it. He doesn’t have to, like, greet me a certain way to be worthy of being fed. He deserves love and support all the time because he exists. And how much would your experience of stress how much less stress Would you carry? II, if you treated yourself with the same regard, love is a very powerful stress reducer. And I know you’re dishing it out in other spaces and places to other people.
Courtney Townley 30:17
But if you’re anything like a lot of the women I work with you rarely, if ever reserve any for yourself. And for some of you just even the concept of self love feels like an impossibility. And that is absolutely something to be examined and to be healed in order to move into your second act in a much more powerful way. So as you grant yourself permission to renovate, we start removing things that are really taxing us unnecessarily and we start adding more of the things that make us feel more alive.
Courtney Townley 31:00
The hormonal dance is going to happen. But the severity of the hormonal dance, especially at midlife is definitely going to be reflective of how you are showing up for yourself and how you are treating yourself through this space. So if what I said landed, just like I said at the very beginning of the Podcast today, and you want a little bit more support and education and some real skill sets around how to start doing this work. Join me for Healthiest Year Yet we start on Monday.
Courtney Townley 31:38
This is assuming you’re listening to the Podcast anywhere near February 13. Because the event is February 13 through February 17. You can register by going to graceandgrit.com/healthiestyearyet. I really hope I will see you there and bring friends.
Courtney Townley 31:55
If there are any women in your life, who you see really rumbling hard in midlife or rumbling hard along their wellness journey in any way, shape or form. Struggling to extend themselves self compassion, struggling to bring things back to simplicity. This is an amazing event for all of those things. So I hope I will see you and I hope I will see the women in your life that could use that help on the inside. Alright, I’ll see you next week. Thanks so much for being here. Take care.
Courtney Townley 32:32
Thank you for listening to the grace and grit Podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story. And it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self-care You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit anything is possible.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
