389: The Autopilot Trap: Why Midlife Women Feel Stuck

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Courtney Townley 0:00
Have you ever caught yourself just going through the motions, feeling like you are sleepwalking through your life? Well, today on the Grace and Grit podcast, we are going to get real about that midlife autopilot mode that so many of us fall into. I’m going to share with you some honest truths about how to wake up and actually start writing your own story again with intentionality and purpose.

Courtney Townley 0:24
So no more letting life just happen to you. It’s time to really go after the life that you want. So grab your coffee or your water, take a deep breath and let’s talk about how to bring some intentionality back to your everyday life.

Courtney Townley 0:37
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, into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 1:05
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. My name is Courtney Townley, and I’m the host of this show. Thank you so much for being here. I know that there’s a large sea of podcasts you could be listening to, so I do not take it lightly that you’ve decided to spend a little bit of time here before we get into the show today.

Courtney Townley 1:21
I do want to remind you that a few months ago, we created a Resource Library for podcast listeners. And what the Resource Library is is exactly what it sounds like. It is a base for resources that we have created specifically for podcast episodes.

Courtney Townley 1:39
So for today’s episode, which is titled Life on Purpose: From Autopilot to Authorship. If you join that Resource Library, you will see at the very top there is a PDF that gives you some summary notes of the show. It also gives you some exercises to consider. It’s basically just a companion to this episode to help you make more out of it. So it’s completely free. There’s no obligation on any level from you. It just requires your email address, and once you have access to the library, you will get access to all future resources. So it’s pretty awesome. Again, it’s totally free. I hope you will take advantage of it. You can access it by heading over to graceandgrit.com/resources. Once again, that’s graceandgrit.com/resources

Courtney Townley 2:35
So there’s two real reasons I wanted to do this episode today. The first reason is a personal one in that I feel like a whirling dervish in my life right now. I think I shared this on the previous episode, but this is a season of my life where there is just so much coming at me from every direction. I think a lot of listeners know that I’ve been caretaking for my father in Texas, as best as I can, being someone who lives in Montana, so I’m taking frequent trips down there to check on him. I have a retreat in Portugal coming up for my clientele in a couple weeks. I have a book coming out this fall. I have my everyday life with my family and a business to run. So I am definitely feeling it right now. And to be totally honest and transparent, I’m feeling very untethered and like I’m on the edge of overwhelm.

Courtney Townley 3:30
And I know for me, because I have been in this space a few times in my life, and I know that the answer is to ground myself and to get crystal clear on what is most important so I don’t lose myself, and I need to make some hard decisions. In other words, I need to trim the fat of my life. Anything that isn’t really in alignment with what is most important right now needs to go and I also need to be asking for help, letting people know how they can support me, and basically get back to being fully present in my life.

Courtney Townley 4:08
Because I don’t know about you, but when I have a lot coming at me, I am anything but present. I am literally just in survival mode, going through the motions, trying to get through my days. And that leads to very unfulfilled living. I don’t like how that feels. It’s not gratifying.And so I am definitely in a space of recommitting to very purposeful living. And so I hope you’ll join me in that endeavor.

Courtney Townley 4:35
The second reason I wanted to do this podcast is because I work with so many women who at some point in our coaching relationship will say to me, Courtney, I’ve just lost my purpose. Or, Courtney, I don’t know what my purpose is now that I’m retired, or the kids have left the house, or fill in the blank, and the thing that I always remind them of is five. Finding your purpose isn’t really a thing. Deciding your purpose is a thing. So you are literally one decision away from living more purposefully. What do you want to be doing on purpose? What do you want to dedicate your life resources to on purpose. That’s the way to be confronting that challenge, not waiting for life to deliver a purpose to you.

Courtney Townley 5:33
So we get really stuck in midlife when we are waiting for purpose to find us, or we are waiting for that moment to just have this big epiphany about what our purpose is, when, in reality, we simply need to make a decision about what we want our purpose to be and what purposeful living actually looks like for us.

Courtney Townley 5:58
And one of the barriers to that, one of the many barriers, of course, is that we so often find ourselves living on autopilot, and autopilot is basically navigating through life with unconscious patterns and routines, rather than making deliberate choices aligned with our authentic desires and man the brain makes it so easy to live on autopilot because your brain has built in mechanisms, literally called Habits, that allow us to function based on past experiences, based on past responses.

Courtney Townley 6:41
So our brain has this incredible mechanism to operate from a place of habit, rather than from a place of intention, and that often comes from falling into societal expectations. Because a lot of us have practiced that, especially by midlife, we’ve practiced that a lot, and also other people’s definitions of success. We kind of fall into that as well, because at an early age, we’re often pressured or influenced by the people around us to pursue what they think success means. And then as adults, we never really pause to question whether that actually resonates with our own values and our own truth.

Courtney Townley 7:29
So living on autopilot, I do want to emphasize also, I think becomes especially common for midlife women for a whole host of reasons.

Courtney Townley 7:40
Number one, we have spent decades at this by this stage, prioritizing other people’s needs. So many women spent their younger adult years caregiving, whether that was for children or community members or friends or family or partners, and that can create deeply ingrained patterns of putting others first, to the point of abandoning ourselves. And so we kind of arrive in this midlife space feeling wildly disoriented, not really knowing what brings us joy, telling ourselves like I don’t know what my purpose is, and also even playing the Compare and despair game right, looking around and convincing ourselves that everyone else has it figured out at this stage of life, but me.

Courtney Townley 8:34
I also want to offer that this autopilot mode can be especially easy to fall into for midlife women because of societal conditioning, we have been socialized to accommodating, avoiding conflict, keeping the peace, prioritizing harmony over authenticity, and we’ve made defaulting to autopilot a survival mechanism in the face of overwhelming responsibility. We’re so busy focusing outward that it’s just easier to be on autopilot, because a lot of purposeful living can sometimes almost create friction with those responsibilities, because we start realizing that what we actually want is something different than what’s right in front of us.

Courtney Townley 9:29
And I also, of course, think that decision fatigue at midlife is very real for a lot of the reasons I just mentioned, there’s such a mental overload for a lot of women because we’re carrying household responsibilities, not in all cases, but for many women, they are. We have relationship challenges and career challenges, and all of this depletes our cognitive function, making defaulting to autopilot a survival mechanism as well. Right? So again, there’s that. There’s we’re so it’s so easy to default to the survival mechanism of autopilot, we don’t have to think it’s less effort.

Courtney Townley 10:12
There’s a lot of benefit from being on autopilot in terms of preserving energy and resources. But if we live there for too long, obviously it becomes incredibly problematic. So the danger lies in how autopilot can become so normalized that it kind of feels like the only option. It just feels like the way of life. This is just the way things are at this stage of life, and I hear a lot of women in my coaching calls really alluding to this autopilot mode by kind of expressing this profound disconnection from their own desires and intuition after years of external focus. So they really feel lost to figure out what intentional living might look like for them at this age and stage of life.

Courtney Townley 11:14
So how do you know if you’re living in autopilot mode, like, how do you know that that’s kind of the space that you’re operating your life from? Well, I think a few signs are things like feeling like you’re checking boxes on an endless to do list. So life just feels like a to do list rather than a get to do list. It feels like obligation more than it feels like living. It feels like a list of have TOS rather than a list of get tos.

Courtney Townley 11:51
I would also say a sign is that you make decisions based on what you’ve always done, rather than getting really inquisitive about what you actually want, so you keep creating the same reality for yourself, even though you’re feeling unsatisfied. I would definitely say that that is a signal to you that you’re living on autopilot.

Courtney Townley 12:14
Or maybe you’re someone who has difficulty articulating your personal values and desires when asked. And this is, I think, one of the benefits of working with a coach. A good coach will ask some really good, pointed questions, like, what do you want? What lights you up? What brings you joy? What are you excited to get out of bed for today? And when I ask those questions to a lot of women, they are either greeted with blank stares, you know, kind of a deer in the headlight, like I have no idea, or I hear things like, oh my gosh, Courtney, I literally just don’t know. I don’t know what I enjoy. I don’t know what I would do with myself if I had a whole day to myself.

Courtney Townley 13:02
To me, that’s all very, very much a sign that someone has been living in autopilot for a while, or maybe you feel resentful just in general, and you can’t really identify why. I think that’s a great cue that you are probably not living with purpose and intention. Or maybe you’re somebody who finds yourself saying you just don’t know what you want on the regular, or you’re just not happy. Or maybe you’re someone who just complains a lot. I think complaints often disguise uncommunicated desires, and so really getting inquisitive about what’s underneath the complaint can definitely help you to access what you really want how to live your life on purpose.

Courtney Townley 13:59
Many midlife women that I work with are in motion without meaning. So I want to say that again, they are in motion without meaning, which essentially means they’re incredibly busy and also simultaneously feeling incredibly unsatisfied. To me again, a telltale sign that you have fallen into the pit of autopilot mode and you’re not living with intentionality.

Courtney Townley 14:32
So I’m going to give you some really concrete examples of things that have kind of shown up in client work that really tells me, as the coach, that we need to have some conversations about intentional living and purposeful living, and I want to share these with you, because you might see yourself in some of these I know I certainly have over the years.

Courtney Townley 14:56
So working with a client years ago. Who kind of started going down this rabbit hole of a conversation that she’d been wearing the same hairstyle for 30 years, not because she loved it, but because it was easy and it was practical, and suddenly she found herself questioning what other aspects of her appearance and life she had just been settling for. So I know that seems like a really surface level example, but I think it’s a great place to start, because it’s a surface level example.

Courtney Townley 15:32
Or I can think of a client who found herself saying, I’m totally fine all the time. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Oh my gosh, how often Ladies, do we find ourselves saying that I’m fine, but when we really dig underneath, and when I dug with this particular client, it was so clear that she was exhausted and she was overwhelmed and she was struggling and really helping her to recognize that she had lost her ability to communicate openly and honestly about her needs, and so often that happens when we’re always using I’m fine as a response.

Courtney Townley 16:14
I’ve worked with lots of clients who have felt stuck in careers that they really did not enjoy, that were demanding a tremendous amount of resources from them. A lot of people who’ve worked, you know, 6070, 80 hour work weeks, simply because it’s what they had always done and they couldn’t imagine an alternative, or they couldn’t imagine living leaning into the discomfort it would take to shift into something else, even something like many clients I’ve worked with over the years, who have always defaulted to their partners for financial decisions, despite having equal income and financial knowledge and finding later in life that they’re in this pattern with money and with their partner that no longer serves them right, all of that is just indicative of being on autopilot and Some different decisions needing to be made.

Courtney Townley 17:22
But we can’t make different decisions unless we wake up to the automaticity of our life, the spaces and places where we really are in automatic mode. So how do we do that? Right? How do we wake up to become more aware of where we’re just kind of going through the motions and not living with intention.

Courtney Townley 17:47
And I just want to offer that I think that a crisis can definitely do this. We see this happen a lot where someone gets a health scare or a diagnosis, or there’s a major life transition like a divorce or becoming an empty nester, or some kind of relationship change, and that kind of shock to the system can really wake us up and start recognizing, oh, my word, there is. There are so many things that I’ve just kind of been ignoring or going through the motions with, and that needs to change.

Courtney Townley 18:25
But I would also challenge you, because I don’t want you to have to go to through a crisis in order to live with more purpose, right? I mean, while that sometimes happens, it’s not necessary. What is necessary is absolutely to start asking ourselves some really good questions, which should come as no surprise if you’re a longtime listener of the show, I’m always challenging you to ask yourself good questions. So what are some great questions we can ask ourselves to start designing a life that allows us to live with more purpose? Well, here are a few.

Courtney Townley 19:01
First, where in my life am I living on purpose? So is that with your health? Is it with a particular relationship? Is it with your career? Is it nowhere? Where in your life are you living on purpose right now, not just going through the motions, not just living on default.

Courtney Townley 19:27
Another great question is, what daily routines Am I performing without questioning their value or purpose? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve done this in my business where, because I’ve just always done something, I just keep doing it and never pause to question its value or purpose in the business. And when I finally do pause to ask those questions, I realize that this system or this thing is outdated and no longer needed, and yet, because I wasn’t awake to it, I was wasting so much. Time. So where in your life are you doing things unnecessarily because they really don’t have a place or a purpose in your life right now, if I had complete permission to change one aspect of my life right now? What would it be that’s a great way to highlight where you might need to live with more intention.

Courtney Townley 20:29
What activities do I do out of obligation rather than desire? What feels like a have to rather than a get to what part of my identity feels most disconnected from how I’m actually living. So this always makes me think of like the masks we wear. We all wear masks, and masks are basically parts of our persona. And I wouldn’t even say they’re parts of our persona. There. There are ways we show up to please other people or appear a certain way to others.

Courtney Townley 21:05
And so what are your masks? Where are the spaces and places that you are showing up in authentically and you even have resentment about I think that’s a great thing to consider.

Courtney Townley 21:19
So let me give you a couple other things that I have found to be really helpful in my own life, but also with helping clients to live with more intention and purpose in their life.

Courtney Townley 21:30
Number one, I challenge all of my clients to create a power statement. A power statement is simply a statement, an affirmation, if you will, of the woman you are committed to being in the world. And the way that I invite my clients to consider this is I have them complete a statement. And the statement is this, as a woman living with power, purpose and impact, I am a woman who what? That’s it? There is no right way to answer that question, but I would challenge you, the listener, to really answer that for yourself.

Courtney Townley 22:15
Put pen to page and just write for 10 minutes as a woman living with power, purpose and impact. I am a woman who what? How do you show up? How do you take care of yourself? What do you do? What do you not do? How do you feel in your body? How do you communicate with people? How do you solve problems? What’s your self narrative sound like a power statement? Is something that then I can constantly return to as a filter for my decisions. Is this decision? Is this action? Is this commitment moving me closer to that version of myself? And if it’s not, probably isn’t something I should spend a lot of time on.

Courtney Townley 23:01
I would also offer, starting your day on purpose is a really powerful way to live on purpose. More often, we’ve done a lot of episodes on this the power of kind of waking up with intentionality. How do you start your day? What do you need to do at the start of your day? To feel grounded, to feel creative, to feel centered in the type of person you want to be. Most people I know don’t have a practice of that, right? They’re just letting life blow them around like a tumbleweed, and then they wonder why they feel so purposeless and kind of disempowered and not very satisfied with their life. I Yeah.

Courtney Townley 23:43
And what I love about the power statement and starting the day on purpose, even by looking at your power statement or reading your power statement, is again, it just reminds you of your commitment to yourself.

Courtney Townley 24:00
There’s a great quote. It’s by a guy named Ian Thompson, who I believe is an author. But I’ve come across this quote many times, and I think it’s just so perfect with exactly what we’re talking about here, he says, and every day, the world will drag you by the hand, yelling, this is important, and this is important, and this is important. You need to worry about this and this and this, and each day, it’s up to you to yank your hand back, put it on your heart and say no, this is important. And to me, that’s what a power statement allows you to do. It’s a way of bringing your hand back to your heart to say no, this is what I’m committed to. This is who I am committed to. This is the type of person I am committed to being.

Courtney Townley 24:52
Another thing that goes along with all of this is we can start the day with purpose. We can have a power statement. But if we aren’t checking in with ourselves frequently throughout the day, we can get really lost in the weeds. So just having 30 seconds here, 60 seconds there, to put your hand on your heart and just check in. Like, am I aligned right now with that version of myself, with my purpose, with what’s important to me right now? Or am I getting a little bit disoriented? And if you are getting disoriented, no need for judgment or criticism. We just pivot back. We just make a decision, one decision that moves us back in alignment with what we intended to do or who we intended to be.

Courtney Townley 25:37
All of this work, living on purpose, authoring your own life, Living by Design rather than default, which is a saying from you and Ewan McGregor, not Ewan McGregor. Ewan McGowan, Greg McGowan, Oh, my word. I’m so lost here. Greg McGowan, who’s the author of Essentialism, I think I do believe that’s actually the subtitle of his book, Life by default rather than a life by design rather than default. And that’s really what we’re talking about here, getting very intentional about how you’re living. And that demands constraint. It does require that you say no to some things so you have more resources to put towards the things that truly matter

Courtney Townley 26:19
And I know we hate that truth, because we don’t like saying no, and we want to be able to do all things at any time in as much dose as possible, as much dose as we want. But that’s not reasonable, right? Because resources are limited, so we have to constrain how we’re spending them. And on occasion, probably many occasions, you’re going to find yourself misaligned from what you decided your purpose was, or that person you decided you wanted to be in the world. And you’re going to feel like I shared with you at the start of this podcast. You’re going to feel a little untethered. You’re going to feel like a whirling dervish, and in that space that is just highlighting to you that it’s time to recommit.

Courtney Townley 27:06
It is time to realign. And how do we do that with all the things we’ve talked about in this episode so far, I get back to what’s most important in my life right now, I get back to spending my time on those things. I start getting rid of distractions, things that aren’t that and just in 24 to 48 hours, by doing that, you can feel much more anchored in your life, much more better, much better about your life. Sorry, my, my, my, uh, speaking, is all over the place today, but that just it’s, kind of goes with the theme, right? I mean, I was very open with you that I was feeling untethered right now, and I think I’m communicating that way today as well. So hopefully we can all laugh about that.

Courtney Townley 27:59
So all this to say, I do hope that you will challenge yourself to consider right now, do I feel like I’m living on purpose? Am I authoring my life, or am I in automatic mode, like, Am I just going through the motions and doing things without really considering if they are in alignment with what I want to be spending my resources on.

Courtney Townley 28:25
If you want more support around this again, go to the resource center in on Grace and Grit and access the free resources. Specifically, there’s a PDF by the same title as this podcast. So there’s a PDF at the top of that Resource Library that says Life on Purpose: From Autopilot to Authorship. It’s totally free. You can head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources to access it. I hope it helps.

Courtney Townley 28:55
I will see you again next week. Until then, take care.

Courtney Townley 29:04
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.