356: Power-FULL Aging (Part 1): Embracing Change

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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. And as always, I’m really grateful you’re here. And today, I would love to dive into what is going to become a four part series all about powerful aging. This is a topic that is so near and dear to my heart. Because I’ve been in the wellness space now for what, almost 30 years, and the majority of that time has been spent working with midlife women. And I think that aging is always a relevant topic no matter what age you are. But because of a lot of things that happen at midlife, aging becomes more front of mind, at midlife, and so getting older, of course, is not negotiable. If you have the privilege of staying alive, you’re going to age.

Courtney Townley 1:22
The good news is while you cannot prevent the aging process as hard as you may try, you do have some serious poll in the quality of your aging process. So you could certainly make it a slog, you could make the aging process absolutely miserable. Or you could make it a very power filled experience. And I hope you’re a champion of that. I hope by the end of this episode today, you are more of a champion for that.

Courtney Townley 1:56
So like I said, today’s episode is going to mark the first episode in a four part series about powerful aging. And we are going to dig into why change especially during midlife is an invitation to uplevel both your grace and your grit. So whether you’re changing jobs or leaving a job, you’re making some big kind of shift in your living accommodations, you’re working on relationships, you’re tweaking your health Game Change can really be an opportunity to step into your power and own it.

Courtney Townley 2:35
And again, I think this invitation is stronger than ever at midlife, because we are losing resilience on a cellular level, quite literally. And it’s becoming more apparent at midlife. And so there’s this invitation to change, or to start to sort of speed up the aging process in ways that really don’t need to happen.

Courtney Townley 3:06
The four parts of this series are going to be as follows. Today, we’re going to talk about embracing change. So cultivating an attitude about the aging process that helps you rather than harms you. In the second part of this series, we are going to talk about renovating your approach to aging. Because let’s face it, the things that you were doing in your 20s and 30s are probably not going to work as well for you in your 50s and 60s. And so we have to get radically honest about the strategies that we’re using to ensure that we aren’t creating more unnecessary stress. In part three of this series, we’re going to do a deep dive into supporting your biochemistry to age powerfully.

Courtney Townley 3:51
What that means specifically is we’re going to talk about how to help you generate power on a cellular level. And then in part four, we are going to talk all about expressing yourself. I’m a huge believer that self expression is such a power full part of aging powerfully.

Courtney Townley 4:12
And at the core. This really means doing what needs to be done to show up as an authentic and fully expressed human, whatever that means for you. So I hope that sounds good to you because that’s where we are headed over the series of these next four episodes. So why even a series on powerful aging?

Courtney Townley 4:31
Well, like I said before, I’m very passionate about this topic because it seems to be the thing I’m coaching on, even though it looks like a lot of different things. So powerful aging looks like a lot of different topics that I discussed with my clients. And I already mentioned that midlife tends to bring more awareness to the aging process because we’re feeling things in ways that we haven’t felt them before. Both physically mentally, emotionally and all the ways and we’re more aware err than ever that time is passing. And we only have so much time left. And certainly time isn’t even guaranteed. I also find this a really compelling conversation because we are shifting what wellness wellness means to us around midlife.

Courtney Townley 5:21
In our earlier years, we are often chasing physical pursuits, we’re trying to mold our bodies into things that our, you know, people will appreciate. And yeah, we’re almost trying to find our worth, through the outside appearance of our body. I think many women have made that mistake, I certainly made that mistake. And I’ve talked about that extensively on the show. But in the last episode of the Podcast, if you didn’t listen to it, it was called beyond the surface. And it was all about what deep health really is. And I think it’s the thing that a lot of people are pursuing around midlife, we’re starting to realize the error of our ways that just approaching health from a superficial level, basing it on how we look basing it on the opinions of others, even basing it on just our fitness level is not really wellness. Wellness is deeper and more encompassing than any of that. And so I think that comes to the forefront of midlife. And then also the majority of humans are not aging. Well, I think that’s pretty obvious.

Courtney Townley 6:32
There are so for a lot of people, their chronological age is actually younger than their biological age. So your biological age is really the age at which your cells are aging. And for many people, their cells are aging faster than they are. So you can have a 30 year old with the cells of a 60 year old because of lifestyle choices. Of course, I also love the conversation of powerful aging, because I think it’s really a call to grit, there is going to be a natural decline over time. That’s what the aging process is. And if we are unwilling to get uncomfortable, if we are unwilling to pursue discomfort on purpose, you’re really going to struggle to slow the rate of decline. So for all those reasons I wanted to have do this series. And I hope that excites you. Because these again, these are things that I’m constantly talking about with my students and my clients.

Courtney Townley 7:34
So again, today’s episode is all about embracing change. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but from the day you’re born, you’re embarking on a process of change. That change tends to get amplified at midlife, like I said earlier, because we’re feeling things like we haven’t before, because largely, there’s a big shift happening. We have built in all these responsibilities to our life, while simultaneously hormones are starting to leave the party. So we’re trying to balance a lot of stress at midlife, while the hormones that help us to manage stress are starting to leave the party. Namely, I’m talking about estrogen and progesterone.

Courtney Townley 8:17
I was recently at a party just to kind of give you an analogy for this, where I was I was sitting with a friend on a couch and we were watching somebody load their plate at this kind of buffet table. And they had these like flimsy paper plates. And as the person was loading the plate, you could just see the integrity of the plate starting to disintegrate. I mean, to the point that we felt like we almost needed to rush over there and catch the food. And I looked at my friend and I kind of giggled and in gest. I said man that kind of feels like midlife, we’re loading our plate with all these responsibilities. And because estrogen and progesterone are starting to decline, the integrity of our our biology is struggling to carry that weight.

Courtney Townley 9:06
And I don’t want you to hear that as a downer. What I do want you to hear it as is there’s a call to action. There’s a call to do what you can to make your biology more resilient. And so anyway, I don’t know if that analogy helps you at all, but it was just something that came to mind as I was putting this show together. And I was like, oh, I should share that because some people are just such visual learners. And maybe that will help you to kind of grasp the concept.

Courtney Townley 9:36
So again, midlife brings more awareness to the aging process, because we are feeling things like we’ve never felt them before the joint pains, the weight gain, the weight is where we’re carrying our weight on our body is shifting. We’re starting to experience sleep challenges, maybe some emotional challenges like depression and anxiety. We’re struggling to have clarity of thought like we want Did we might even have some memory challenges, the list goes on and on. But combine all of that with our culture’s obsession with youth. And it can really seem like midlife is the beginning of the end. And yes, you could look at it that way, you can even argue that that’s true. But it’s not useful to a powerful aging process.

Courtney Townley 10:25
And that mentality is absolutely a choice. So let’s get clear on what aging is. I of course, I always like to look up words, just because I find it fascinating how one word can be defined in so many different ways. But looking at a lot of different definitions of aging. Basically, aging is the progressive loss of physiological integrity, leading to impaired function, and increased vulnerability to death. That’s what ageing is. And it’s common for all of us.

Courtney Townley 10:58
But now for a second, let’s just talk about what power is I talk about power a lot. And power is an interesting word to use with a lot of women because a lot of women have almost an aversion to the word. Because they look they kind of can think of power over so they think of someone dominating them, or they think of, of course, the abuse of power. That is not at all what I’m referencing. When I talk and teach about power, I am speaking about it, from the perspective that power is the ability to act. It is your ability to show up in ways that keep you in integrity with yourself. It is your ability to produce an effect in your life. It’s basically your ability to influence yourself, your thoughts, your emotions, your behaviors. I also like to stress that power is the ability to be a creator in your life, because that’s what you are, you are creating your life experience. And that can feel really daunting, and also super exciting. I like to think of power as mastery of self.

Courtney Townley 12:21
And at the end of the day, I love to think about it as your lifeforce your capacity to feel fully alive without artificially altering yourself. Because man, we’re really good at that we’re really good at bringing in the things that make us feel alive temporarily. The sugar, the alcohol, the Netflix, the shopping, the gambling, the porn, like we go on and on. That’s not what I’m talking about. Your capacity to feel fully alive without artificially changing anything. So can you create a life that brings you to life? I love looking at power through that lens. So then we think about these two things together, what is powerful aging? Well, powerful aging is a mindset for sure how you think about the aging process, how you think about your ability to influence your own aging process. Managing your brain in a way that allows you to show up to do the work that will allow you to age well. And you got to define for yourself what aging well means because it means a little something different to everybody. Powerful aging is also resilience. Its resilience physically, mentally, emotionally from cell to soul. So again, my paper played analogy from earlier.

Courtney Townley 14:03
We all go through a period of our life, where we really are testing our resilience, we’re feeling we’re not feeling resilient. We’re getting sick all the time. We feel like everything is hard. We have tons of self doubt. Right? It’s like loading up that paper plate to the point that it can’t support it. They can’t support the the food. So, resilience to cellular dysfunction is something we definitely want to focus in on. And what I mean by that is we want to prevent things like oxidative stress, inflammation, we want to promote healthy mitochondria. We also want to be resilient to stress, physical and mental stress. So we’ve got to build strong bones build strong muscles build a strong nervous system. We also need to maybe learn some new skills for helping our brain to become more resilient, with its capacity to remember to recall, to create, to be clear to stay focused, but also to think thoughts that actually help promote a vibrant aging process. So I would say it’s, you know, powerful aging is a practice of becoming resilient to aging itself. It’s not saying that you won’t age, but that we do what we can to maintain vitality as long as possible through the aging process.

Courtney Townley 15:51
Powerful aging is also definitely to me it’s connection. Connection is power throughout your life, and certainly through the aging process. And when I say connection, I don’t I mean connection to self. I mean connection to a purpose. I can’t tell you the number of women I coach who feel like they don’t have a purpose, they don’t know their purpose, they’ve lost their purpose. And that ages us faster ladies. Because it again, it suppresses our vitality, rather than feeding our vitality. It’s also connection to other humans, right building strong relationships. Powerful aging is intentional effort. I said it before, but I’ll say it a few times throughout this episode today.

Courtney Townley 16:42
Powerful aging is flexing and fortifying your grip muscle often much. It’s also flexing and fortifying Your grace muscle, which we’re going to talk a little bit about here in just a second. And ultimately, powerful aging is a daily recommitment to the life that you have yet to live. And nobody knows what that is, you might have a year left and you don’t even know it, you might have 65 years left and not even know it. So you don’t get to know how much time you have left. But you can absolutely wake up today, tomorrow morning, the next day, and recommit to whatever time you have left, you’re going to make the most of it. So living a long life does not necessarily mean you have aged powerfully. And gosh, I see this more than ever these days, where modern medicine is able to keep people alive for really long periods of time. But the quality of their life is horrible.

Courtney Townley 17:49
So I think it’s really worth mentioning here that you can have a long life without being healthy. That is possible because you can medicate the hell out of yourself. Right. And we have machines and gadgets and gizmos and surgeries and treatments and all these things that can keep us alive. But there’s not a lot of quality to our life. You can also live a short, healthy life. So we all know people who’ve died prematurely for all kinds of crazy reasons. And they were really healthy. Right, so you can live a short, healthy life. You can also live a long life with health. And that, of course is what we’re all aspiring to. Right.

Courtney Townley 18:37
And this is Peter Attia does a great job of talking about the difference between lifespan and health span. If you don’t know Peter Attia, he’s definitely a great one to know. He’s a physician who specializes in basically longevity. He talks a lot about the practices that will help us to live longer. And he wrote a book last year maybe it was two years ago now called out live. Probably one of my favorite health related books that I’ve ever read. But he does a beautiful job of talking about lifespan as being simply the period of time between birth and death. So your lifespan could be 10 years, 50 years, 100 years. The time period between life and death is what defines your lifespan. But your health span is the ability to maintain physical and cognitive capacity. Right the length of time that you are able to maintain physical and cognitive capacity. So you can have a health span of 20 years but a lifespan of 60 years. You can have a health span of 50 years and a lifespan of 100 years. But my hope for you is that your health span is equivalent to your life. then that you are healthy for as long as you are alive. So powerful aging is doing the work that needs to be done to live as long as possible with as much physical and cognitive capacity as possible. In other words, lengthening our lifespan while expanding our health span. We want both.

Courtney Townley 20:27
So what are some of the themes of our our bar health span? So we just talked about how you can live a long life but without health. And why does that happen? Well, it happens for lots of reasons. But the reasons directly within your control are, these are some of them. Again, not an exhaustive list. But these are some definitely worth noting. Lack of movement, right lack of moving your body.

Courtney Townley 20:54
There’s a great quote, I’m probably going to butcher it, but it says something along the lines of, we don’t stop moving. Because we age, we age because we stop moving. And I love it. I love that so much. Because we have evidence all around us. We have we see people in their 80s and 90s, who are crushing it physically, they’re moving all the time. And they’re still able to get on and off the floor and hang from things and do their athletic pursuits. And then we also see 50 year olds who can’t get on the floor or off the floor or get out of a chair. So you’re not your movement capacity is not dependent on your age. Your age is dependent on your commitment to movement. It’s to some degree, I’m not saying it’s the only thing, but to some degree, that is that as a player.

Courtney Townley 21:48
Also undernourishment or over nourishment can definitely be a thief of our health span. So when we’re eating a lot of things that our body doesn’t recognize as food, or we’re eating way more than our body can utilize for energy, or we’re massively under consuming ladies, I know that we always have this fear of eating too much. But I can’t tell you the number of women I have worked with who had been chronic dieters their whole life. And now they’re struggling massively. With things like osteoporosis, they have fragile bones, they have virtually no muscle mass. So they are metabolically obese, even though they’re really thin, they don’t have muscles, so most of their muscle mass or their body mass is made up of fat mass.

Courtney Townley 22:39
And all of this, of course, has negative implications on our health. So when we think of nourishment, it’s not about always eating less. It’s about fueling your body appropriately, to keep bone and muscle and tissues and systems working at optimal levels. Other themes of your healthspan can be things like lack of sleep, dear Lord, like this comes up in every conversation that I’ve ever had with any health practitioner. And I say it like this is the way I summarize it, the magic of health largely happens when we’re sleeping.

Courtney Townley 23:20
So if you are undercutting your sleeping hours, you’re not doing yourself any favors. And I’ve done many podcasts on this, you can always go to the Grace & Grit website to the Podcast page and just drop in the word sleep. And you’ll get a lot of episodes on the importance of sleep. A rigid mindset can absolutely cost you your health span. Because a rigid mindset, also known as a fixed mindset, will prevent you from doing new things, believing that you can change or you can improve. And of course, that’s a detriment to the aging process. Emotional and flexibility can cost can cost you your health span.

Courtney Townley 23:59
One of my favorite parts of Peter Attia’s book out live was at the very end, he got into the very real. The truth, I guess, for lack of a better way of saying it, of how much our emotional capacity affects our health. And we’re you know, we’re seeing more conversations about this all the time. Emotion needs motion. And when we aren’t allowing ourselves to feel emotion, emotion gets lodged in the body in a lot of crazy places. And it festers, and it breaks shit down. And it ultimately costs us in terms of our well being and certainly our health span. And I would also say just lack of connection, lack of connection, like I said earlier, not just to other people but to ourselves to our environment. A lack of connection on every level can cost you your health span.

Courtney Townley 24:58
So let’s talk about some Things that to consider that might help you to really embrace the aging process, or maybe look at it through a different lens than sort of doom and gloom deterioration, the beginning of the end these kinds of things. So that the thing I always invite all of my clients to do is to create what I call a power vision. And we’re going to call it in this episode, a powerful aging vision. And this really just boils down to asking yourself some simple questions. What do you want the quality of your aging process to be? Like, what do you want to be able to do? As you age. And the way the Peter Atea frames this, which I think is so great, as he talks about our marginal decade, your marginal decade, is the last decade that you will be living. And nobody knows when that is okay. Like you don’t know for sure when your marginal decade is going to be, but let’s just assume it’s going to be in your 90s. Or even in your 80s or your hundreds go to that place. And consider in the last decade of my life, what do I want to be able to do?

Courtney Townley 26:16
Well, I’m guessing you probably want to be able to feed yourself, you want to be able to maybe go for a walk with your loved ones, you want to maybe still be able to travel, you want to be able to get up and down stairs, I don’t know, like, ask that question to yourself, and really envision yourself as the oldest version of you. What are you still doing physically? What are you still doing creatively? How were you able to process mentally? How do you want to be showing up in that final decade of your life. And here’s why this is so important.

Courtney Townley 26:58
Remember, the aging process is a natural decline. And what is happening unfortunately, because of modern day culture, you know, sort of the culture of comfort is we have no runway for decline. Because people are already arriving at midlife broken down with no resilience, because of the way they’ve been living their 20s, their 30s and their 40s. So if you want to be able to go up and down stairs, in your 90s, you’ve got to have a runway for decline to happen. So you need to be able to climb mountains in your 50s. Right, you need to be able to have a tremendous amount of leg power, because you’re going to lose some of that power over time. So we have to really consider what needs to be done now, in order for me to be able to do the things I want to be doing in the last decade of my life. So where are your gaps?

Courtney Townley 28:08
Where when you consider that power, that powerful aging vision, where you want to be, but you also consider where you are right now? Is there any room for decline? And if there’s there’s probably not much for a lot of people listening to this. So where might I need to fortify my life? build myself up, create more resilience to allow for there to be more of a of a gradual decline? Where are your gaps? And this is just an exercise of radical honesty. You know where they are? Right?

Courtney Townley 28:51
A lot of people like to answer this question. Oh, I don’t know. Yeah, you do? Sure you do. We just don’t like to admit it to ourselves. Because when we admit it we’re calling ourselves in. We’re calling ourselves into work. So I would like to kind of kind of spend the last few minutes of this Podcast episode just talking about the roll that because I said at the beginning of this episode, that the aging process, especially powerful aging is a real invitation to uplevel your grace and your grit. And so I just want to speak briefly to what I mean by that.

Courtney Townley 29:28
So the role of grace, in my opinion in the powerful aging process is that you have to be able to forgive yourself for any past mistakes and not knowing better. Because when I’m coaching clients in their 40s 50s 60s and beyond, a lot of them are hung up on all this regret and frustration that they didn’t know better, or that they didn’t do better so sooner. And I just want to tell you right now that’s not useful to you Oh, there’s nothing about that. That is going to help you age more powerfully. So this is where you get to put your hand on your heart. And just say, You know what, I forgive you for not knowing, I forgive you for not doing better. But now that we know better, we’re going to do better. Grace is also accepting where you are right now. So some of you listening to this, you’re like, Man, I’m 45. And I struggled to get up the stairs.

Courtney Townley 30:27
You know, forget my marginal decade. I can’t even do that right now. Okay, there doesn’t need to be any judgment around that. We call this meeting yourself where you’re at, this is where I am. I’m just going to own it. This is where I am. It doesn’t need to be where I stay. It’s just where I’m starting. Because I can’t actually lean in to an effective approach, if I’m not willing to acknowledge where I am right now. Not where you were when you were 20, not where you were when you were 30.

Courtney Townley 31:01
Not where you want to be. But where are you? That’s grace. compassion for yourself. Life is hard. Losing hormones is hard. diagnoses are hard. The death of loved ones is hard. There’s so much hardness to life. And are you giving yourself compassion within that. Because again, it’s really easy to judge yourself and berate yourself for being where you are. But there’s a reason you are where you are. And I always remind people, that you didn’t sabotage your way here. Sabotage is like intentionally inflicting harm on yourself. That’s not how you got to where you are, you didn’t intentionally do that. You were just reacting to life with the best coping skills that you had at the time. That’s it. But now, you’re recognizing that, hey, you know, maybe I need to learn some new coping skills. Maybe I need to learn to start managing my stress in ways that are more effective for me for my well being for my aging process. No judgment needed. Just compassion.

Courtney Townley 32:18
Grace is also letting go of things that aren’t serving you probably never did. But you might have borrowed some beliefs from people, your parents, your teachers, someone said something to you when you’re 10 years old, and you’ve like, almost adopted that as a part of your identity. And if it’s a part of your identity that’s holding you back. And causing you to not do the things to take better care of yourself, it’s time to let that stuff go. It’s time to maybe let go of some relationships that are more toxic than they are nurturing. It’s time to let go of some vices that you’ve been using to buffer emotion, which basically just means not feel emotion. It’s time to let go of the shooting what other people think you should do, and it’s time to start taking agency over your life. What do you know you need to do to age well, not what other people think you should do? What do you already know.

Courtney Townley 33:18
Grace is permission to rest and restore. Because power is a limited resource, we get to utilize it, but we also have to regenerate it. And if you are neglecting sleep, you are neglecting time off, you are neglecting decompression during the day. What you’re doing essentially is constantly spending power without resupplying it. And then you wonder why you burn out it is not a mystery.

Courtney Townley 33:46
Grace is also setting boundaries, not just with other people. But with yourself. We live in a world where we can have as much as we want whenever we want with whatever we want. That is a problem. So if you cannot practice setting boundaries with yourself, or you always think that boundaries are a punishment, that’s a problem. Boundaries, in my opinion are an act of love. I love myself enough to set the limit here. I care enough about this relationship that I am going to voice what is and isn’t okay. So boundaries with yourself and with the world around you. is grace.

Courtney Townley 34:33
Giving emotions a seat at the table. So allowing yourself to feel emotions, that’s grace. We don’t feel emotions. We do a lot of things. We avoid them. We numb them, react to them, judge them tell stories about them. We are not so good at feeling them. And that creates a lot of problems with powerful aging. It ages us faster. And if you are really interested in this topic, specifically I just want you to know if you’re listening to this, that we have a masterclass that anyone can purchase. That’s basically the essentials of emotional wellness. And the class does a deep dive into talking about what it means to feel emotion. And, and basically how that applies to your wellness process. So if you want to find out more about that, just head on over to graceandgrit.com/masterclasses and you’ll see it on the list of master classes available to you. And it’s a great class. And it is such a cornerstone of the work that I teach with my students who really want to create a state of deep health, we have to address emotional health.

Courtney Townley 35:46
All right, I also want to say that grace is also giving yourself permission to begin again, as many times as you need to, because progress is not linear, you’re going to screw up, you’re going to take wrong turns, you’re going to do face plants. And it’s okay. It’s normal, it’s human. So there’s a reason I named my membership site Rumble & Rise, because we do face plants all the time. Your success isn’t determined on how many face plants you do. It’s determined by how many times you’re willing to get up after you faceplant. That’s the rising. And then I also just want to offer that grace is asking for help. Just realizing that a lot of this work aging powerfully is a team sport. We need people on our team who can help us when we’re struggling to find the next right move, or we’re struggling to do the work we’ve called ourselves to do asking for help as a grace filled act.

Courtney Townley 36:46
Okay, now quickly, I want to talk about the role of grit and powerful aging, because I did allude to it a few times earlier in this episode. Grit is awareness. And a lot of people will hear that and be like awareness isn’t hard. Oh, no, it’s not awareness is not hard. But it is because it requires you slowing down. It requires you to be introspective, it requires you to be radically honest with yourself. And that is not something that we are normalizing in our culture. In fact, I would say it’s something that we are completely bowling over. We’re reacting to everything because life is moving at such a fast and furious pace. That slowing down becoming aware, feels really hard. But it’s a practice. And any practice requires grit. Radical Honesty, I just mentioned it.

Courtney Townley 37:42
But in my brain, it is a practice of grit, because it’s calling yourself into the work that will help you to age powerfully. Without making it mean terrible things about yourself. We all have work to do. There is nobody I have ever met who doesn’t have work to do along the journey to aging powerfully to stay in a space of aging powerfully. It’s ongoing work. So let’s talk about it. Let’s just be honest about it. These are my gaps, no big deal. Everybody has them.

Courtney Townley 38:17
Grit is leaning into intentional discomfort. And to me this is a very big part of aging powerfully, you’re going to have to learn new things, you’re going to have to learn new practices, you’re going to have to do things like build muscle tissue, which is quite literally the intentional practice of pursuing discomfort. So we have to we can’t we have to titrate it we can’t like try to, you know, we don’t want to suffer with discomfort. But we do need to start leaning into it in small doses. So we can reap the benefits on the other side. And as we believe in with small doses, we’re able to expand our capacity and tolerance for discomfort. It’s a huge part of the aging powerfully aging process.

Courtney Townley 39:04
Grit also is expanding capacity. It’s expanding your capacity to feel to show up for yourself to keep your promises to experience life without meaning it making it mean again terrible things. Can you experience disappointment without making it mean that you’re destined for failure? Can you experience grief without making it mean that this shouldn’t be happening? Expanding our capacity to feel to do to experience it requires grit, because we all want to run from that work. Taking risks, not easy requires grit and for you to be come in the second half of your life, or even the third chapter of your life. Your most authentic and fully ex brass itself, you’re going to have to take risks, you’re gonna have to have risky conversations make risky moves, you’re not going to know for certain how things are going to turn out. And you need to take action anyway, that takes grant you’re gonna have to face fake fears and failures.

Courtney Townley 40:23
Because life is peppered with them. But if we’re not willing to stand face to face with them, we can’t actually soften them. So I like to think of failures, I always think of success is stacking failures. Like if you’re not willing to fail, you’re not willing to succeed. Bottom line, and it sucks to fail. I fail publicly every day, all the time. This Podcast isn’t perfect, I’d love it to be it’s not my business isn’t perfect in any way I screw up in my coaching, I screw up with social media posts, I you know, I don’t grow as quickly as I should all the things. But I care enough about the messaging that just keeps showing up. I keep showing up. Despite the failures. It’s worth it, it’s worth failing for. And grit is essentially staying in the arena. Because this one precious life is so damn worth it. It is staying in the arena and fighting the good fight. Right. That’s how I look at powerful aging.

Courtney Townley 41:36
We’re gonna have to rumble because nature is pulling us down in the second half of our life because that’s just what it does. Everything in nature is burned, born and dies. But how we show up in that decline process? We have so much power in. So I want to wrap up this episode with a quote from Brené Brown’s art essay, midlife unraveling. I’ve mentioned this essay so many times. And I have mentioned different parts of it. But I just want to close with this.

Courtney Townley 42:14
So again, if you want to read the entire essay, you can go over to brenebrown.com and just type in midlife unraveling, but it says this. Many scholars have proposed that the struggle at midlife is about the fear that comes with our first true glimpse of mortality. Again, wishful thinking mid life is not about the fear of death, midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we have spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you’re going down. And after that there’s only two choices, you can stay down or under rebirth. It’s a painful irony that the very things that may have kept us safe growing up, ultimately get in the way of our becoming the parents, the partners and or the people that we want to be.

Courtney Townley 43:09
Maybe like me, you are the perfect pleaser and performer. And now all of that perfection and rule following is suffocating. Or maybe you work hard to keep people at a safe distance. And now the distance has turned into intolerable loneliness. There are also the folks who grew up taking care of everyone else because they had no choice. Their death is having to let go of the caretaking and their rebirth is learning how to take care of themselves and work through the pushback that always comes with setting new boundaries. Whatever the issue, it seems as if we spend the first half of our lives shutting down feelings to stop the hurt and the second half, trying to open everything back up to heal the hurt. Sometimes, when the tear the walls down and submit to death thing overwhelms me, I find it easier to think about midlife as mid love. After two decades of research on shame, authenticity and belonging, I’m convinced that loving ourselves is the most difficult and courageous thing we will ever do. Maybe we’ve been given a finite amount of time to find that self love. And midlife is the halfway mark. It’s time to let go of the shame and the fear and embrace love. Time to fish or cut bait. I love that so much. And I think it speaks so beautifully to the theme of this episode which is embracing change.

Courtney Townley 44:52
So that’s all I have for you today. My friends. I hope it sparks something in you. Like I said I will be back next week and we’ll be diving into Part Two of our powerful aging series, which is going to be all about renovating your approach. And yeah, and we’ll just keep going with us because I think again, this is just such a relevant and important topic to the people that I work with. And I’m assuming that you are probably one of the people that I would love to work with, right? If you’re listening to this show, like if you keep coming back there is something here that you’re interested in. And so I’m hoping that you feel that this topic is a relevant one for you. All right, have a wonderful couple of weeks and I’ll see you again very soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 45:43
Thank you for listening to the Grace & 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.