391: 5 Steps to Reclaim Momentum at Midlife

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Courtney Townley 0:01
What if I told you that the strategies that brought you success with your health and well being in your 20s and 30s are the very things that might be holding you back from attaining better health at midlife. Welcome to the grace and grit podcast.

Courtney Townley 0:16
My name is Courtney Townley, and today, in this episode, we are going to be talking about why so many smart, capable women feel stuck and a little disoriented with their health and well being at midlife. And more specifically, I’m going to be introducing five essential steps that will really help you to reclaim momentum. Look, this isn’t about turning back the clock or following a restrictive plan. It’s about something far more powerful, learning to work with your changing body rather than against it.

Courtney Townley 0:50
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 1:19
Once again, welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. I am so delighted that you’re here. The sea of podcasts is expanding by the day, so I do not take it lightly that you have tuned in to this show. For those of you who are regular listeners, there was not an episode last week, which I deeply apologize about. There was a little bit of snafu, because I was traveling.

Courtney Townley 1:39
I was actually in Portugal for the month running our annual grace and grit retreat, which was amazing, and I cannot wait to tell you more about it in next week’s episode of the show. But there were some wires crossed and things that just didn’t work out technically. So we did not have an episode last week, but I promise we are making it up to you this week and in the future weeks to come.

Courtney Townley 2:02
Today, like I said, we are talking all about these five steps that you can use to reclaim your health and happiness at midlife. And these five steps are going to sound very familiar to some of you who’ve been around the Grace and Grit block for a while, because these five steps are really the core tenants of the work that I teach. In fact, these five steps make up The Consistency Code, which I’ve taught as a foundation of my work for years. In fact, if you don’t know, I have a book coming out November 5 called The Consistency Code, a mid life woman’s guide to deep health and happiness. And so we’re going to touch on a few of those principles, today.

Courtney Townley 2:44
And I also want to share with you a couple of resources that you might be interested in if you enjoy this episode. First and foremost, The Consistency Code course, which is a four week course that I’ve been teaching for over a decade, is launching on September 8, so in just a few weeks. So if you are someone who really wants to kind of dig your heels in to what we are talking about in this episode today, and you would like to be a part of a community that helps to hold you accountable and where you can get some additional coaching support, I would highly encourage you to check out the course page by heading over to graceandgrit.com/thecode. Once again, that’s graceandgrit.com/thecode.

Courtney Townley 3:28
The second resource I want to bring your attention to is we don’t always have time to listen to a full episode of the podcast, or we listen and we wish we had been taking notes, but we were driving or we were doing laundry, we were distracted in some way. So we have created a resource vault for podcast listeners that houses a lot of summaries of the podcasts that I have most recently done. So if you’d like access to today’s kind of Cliff Notes, all you have to do is head on over to graceandgrit.com/resources, and you will register for a free library of these PDFs that we are creating, and we’re creating them every other week. And once you gain access to that resource center, you will see a litany of different resources in there. So you’re not just getting access to today’s Cliff Notes. You’re actually getting access to a lot more content that we have created for you. So once again, that’s graceandgrit.com/resources.

Courtney Townley 4:35
Let’s get into the show, because there’s so much to cover, and I don’t like these episodes being very long, because I know that we’re all busy and we have other things to get onto in our lives. So in essence, I am a big believer that midlife is really a call to approach health and happiness a little bit differently than we have at other times in our life. Yeah.

Courtney Townley 5:00
I think that’s especially true for women, because we are going through so many physiological and emotional shifts at midlife due to life responsibilities, shifting hormonal landscapes, changing increased responsibilities, and also having a deeper understanding of what truly nourishes our body and spirit. I think at midlife, we tend to know ourselves a little bit better. There’s that famous quote. I don’t remember who said it, but the first 40 years of your life is really just research, and I think there’s so much truth to that, and midlife is this incredible opportunity to take that research that you have already done and really start to cultivate a life that honors what you have learned.

Courtney Townley 5:50
The other thing that I want to mention is the problem with applying strategies that you may have used earlier in your life, in your 20s and 30s, using strategies from that period of time in your 40s and 50s can be hugely problematic because they don’t necessarily account for the hormonal shifts or the increased responsibilities or the accumulating stress, and they also don’t really account for the deeper wisdom that we have of ourselves as we age. So getting right into this, I really don’t want to waste any time. The first step in really helping yourself to gain momentum with health and happiness at midlife is number one, you have to start honoring how behavior change really works.

Courtney Townley 6:40
And you know, I always laugh at this idea that it takes 21 days to change a habit. That’s actually not a proven fact. It is. It’s just an idea that came from a gentleman named Maxwell Maltz, who wrote a book called Psycho Cybernetics. Many of you may have heard of it in the book, he basically speaks to the fact that people who had undergone cosmetic surgeries or amputations kind of adapted to their new physiology within three weeks. And then that was interpreted a little further to create this claim that all behavior change must take three weeks, 21 days, and that is absolutely not true. So there is more current research that has been done that really speaks to the nuance of behavior change, depending on what kind of behavior change you’re trying to create in your life, it can take anywhere from like 60 days up to a year, and sometimes longer.

Courtney Townley 7:47
Like how many of you listening to this show today have embarked on some kind of behavior change, you have really put time and effort behind that behavior change, and a few years later, you still have to apply time and effort to stay the course with that behavior change. So we just need to ditch this idea that takes 21 days to transform or change habit, because I think that ideology gets us into a lot of trouble, because when we aren’t successful within 21 days, we then convince ourselves that something’s wrong with us. We must be failing. You’re not failing. The idea itself is just garbage.

Courtney Townley 8:28
The other thing that we have to honor if we want to really transform our life in meaningful ways is that dramatic overhauls are really not your friend. And what I mean by a dramatic overhaul is any kind of protocol or program that asks you to radically change your life overnight. So remove entire food groups, start exercising every day of the week when you haven’t really been exercising at all, eliminating massive things from your life, cutting back on things that you were spending time on that you really enjoyed. When we overhaul our life in really big ways very quickly, it is very confronting to the way that we live our life. It can be very confronting and jarring to our nervous system, and we aren’t necessarily successful in the long run. I mean, think of all of the extreme programs that you’ve done in your lifetime. How many were you actually successful with? And just to clarify what I mean by successful, you’re still able to sustain the results you got from those programs.

Courtney Townley 9:39
Probably no one listening to this show is actually, has actually sustained the results from programs they got for programs they did that got them extreme measures right, or took extreme measures, because this show obviously is about creating behavior change in sustainable ways, and if you had done that. So you probably wouldn’t be listening to the show.

Courtney Townley 10:03
I also think it’s really important to honor that sustainable change truly requires incremental progress versus intensity, right? Sometimes we’re so eager to change, we want transformation so badly that we go in really hard and fast and furious to our approaches. And then, of course, we can’t sustain that energy.

Courtney Townley 10:25
We can’t sustain that level of commitment. And then we falter, and then we make up story lines about our capacity and ability, and we basically end up right back where we started. So we need to recognize that making small shifts, giving ourselves permissions, permission to enter the water easily and gracefully does not mean you aren’t capable or serious about success. It actually means you probably are, because that’s truly one of the only ways that we can create sustainable change in the long run. Okay, so step one again, is honoring how behavior change actually works.

Courtney Townley 11:11
Step two, to getting some momentum with health and happiness at midlife is we absolutely must cultivate deep self awareness. So what exactly is self awareness? Well, it’s really simple. It’s knowing what you do and why you do it. It’s taking accountability for how you’re showing up in your life and why you’re showing up in those ways. So simple in theory, but not so simple in practice, because we’re really busy. We don’t necessarily like looking at the truth of our life, because it doesn’t feel good, and we don’t make do. We simply just don’t make time for it. So it’s really easy to live life reactively, which is not necessarily self aware. So self awareness, I just want to give you some like, really basic things that you could start paying more attention to, to become more self aware. So one of the most basic practices of self awareness is really just noticing where you are. It’s that simple.

Courtney Townley 12:28
So right now listening to the show, where are you physically? Are you in your office? Are you in your car? Are you walking through a park? What do you see? Can you look through a window? Do you see a family in front of you, a dog nearby trees in front of you? What? What do you see? What do you hear? Obviously, you hear my voice if you’re listening to the show, but I’m willing to bet that there’s some other sounds that you might be aware of. I know for me, I hear a fan running in the other room. Often when I’m recording this podcast, I hear dogs barking in the background. What are you touching right now? Are you touching the steering wheel? What are you sitting on? Are you standing? Are your feet in the grass? Bringing your attention to your five senses is simply a practice called orienting. I first learned this practice from Irene Lyon, who has been on the show many times. She’s a nervous system expert, and she talks a lot about ways to regulate the nervous system. And one of the most foundational practices that she teaches is the practice of orienting, just noticing where you are, and getting in touch with all five senses. So that’s a really simple self awareness practice.

Courtney Townley 13:51
And other self awareness practices that I teach as a coach are certainly self awareness of your emotional landscape. So can you feel your emotions without running away from them? Can you describe your emotions? Can you name your emotions? Emotions have so much Intel for us about how we’re living our life and what’s working for us and what isn’t. But if we’re constantly retreating from our emotional landscape by drinking, eating, netflixing, social media, scrolling, we never really get to experience the truth of our life. And that can be problematic for a whole host of reasons.

Courtney Townley 14:39
Another self awareness practice that I love to teach is just becoming aware of the quality of your thoughts. You have 1000s of thoughts that run through your brain every day, many of them are on repeat, and when we start shining a light on the quality of those thoughts. We can get very clear on whether or not that level of thinking is working for us or against us, and of course, if we find that it’s working against us, we have this amazing ability to change the quality of our thoughts. That’s a big part of the work that I do as a coach. I help women to improve the quality of their thinking. And one more that I’ll offer you in this conversation around self awareness is starting to become aware of certain behaviors.

Courtney Townley 15:35
So a lot of times, a client will come to work with me and they’ll say, gosh, I have a terrible relationship with food. And I’ll say, Okay, well, describe your relationship with food, and they’ll give me their lowdown, their little their description on their relationship with food. And then I’ll take it a step further and say, Hey, this week, I want you to actually track your behavior around food. Let’s just see if the story is matching what’s actually happening. Because I can’t tell you how often those two things don’t match up. A woman is saying one thing, but what she’s doing is actually something very different. So we can learn a lot about ourselves when we start really paying close attention to our behaviors so we have step one in building motivation and momentum for midlife wellness is honoring how behavior change really works. Step two is cultivating deep self awareness.

Courtney Townley 16:38
Step three is learning how to plan your days in a way that is energy aligned. What the hell does that mean? Well, basically it means that you do not have the same resource availability at all times. Resources, meaning time, energy, mental bandwidth, nervous system regulation, hormonal regulation, those things are not always the same. 24 hours a day, 365, days a year. Man, if they were, life would be so much easier. But that’s not how human biology works. We sometimes don’t get a good night’s sleep, or we didn’t eat very well, or we have a lot more stress in our lives, or we’re contending with a lot more curveballs coming at us, at light in life, and if we don’t honor that, those things change our resource availability, and we’re always trying to exercise in the same way or apply discipline to the same degree, we actually generate a lot of breakdown in our bodies and in our lives. So planning in a way that is energy aligned, means that you really honor that the nervous system is going to work best when it’s regulated, and when your nervous system is regulated, you’re actually making better decisions. You’re more able to follow through because you have more capacity to lean into hard things.

Courtney Townley 18:25
So if you are planning your days, you’re trying to jam so much into a day with little to no regard for what resources you actually have on board. You’re not going to live with a regulated nervous system. You’re actually going to throw your nervous system into dysregulation because you’re generating a whole lot of unnecessary stress. So we want to make sure that we’re planning our days. We are committing two things in our day that actually work with our resource availability, not ignoring it, and that that is a game changing skill set. I mean, I spend a lot of time working on this with my students and clients, because we just often operate our scheduling as with as if we have this endless supply of resources, and then we wonder why. We’re burnt out, we’re pissed off, and we’re using things like food and alcohol to make ourselves feel better. It’s no mystery. We’re just planning in a way that does not respect our nervous system. All right.

Courtney Townley 19:34
Step Four in helping us to regain momentum at midlife is we have to fortify our self trust. So self trust erodes at midlife for a lot of women, and it’s kind of been a slow drip throughout their life where that that self trust erosion has been happening, but I think it becomes really apparent for a lot of women at mid. Life, how little they trust themselves. And there’s a lot of reasons that we stop trusting ourselves. Number one, our culture, especially the wellness culture, is largely telling you you can’t trust yourself. You need someone else to tell you what to eat, how to move, how much sleep to get, how you should be scheduling your days all the things, we’re constantly outsourcing how we should be living our lives. And that does not fortify self trust, that erodes it. I think we also are often kind of guilty. I don’t want to say kind of we are guilty of committing to certain things in our life, for ourselves, especially around self-care.

Courtney Townley 20:47
We promise ourselves we’ll do certain things, I’ll exercise, I’ll walk, I’ll eat a certain way, I’ll put myself to bed, and then we don’t follow through. And so what happens when you’re in a relationship with someone, and they consistently don’t show up for you. They don’t do what they said they would do. You stop trusting them. And I see that happening all the time with the clients that I work with, and I have experienced this, of course, in my own life as well. So in order to fortify self trust, we have to make commitments that we can actually keep, and that often means committing to smaller things, not so much out of the gate, learning how to commit at a time of day where we’re more likely to follow through, learning how to coach ourselves through discomfort, because there will be a lot of opportunity to talk yourself out of doing the thing that you promised yourself. And these are all skill sets in fortifying self trust.

Courtney Townley 21:55
And finally, the fifth thing that I want to mention, the fifth step in rebuilding momentum at midlife is developing what I call adaptive resilience. A lot of you’ve heard me call this structured flexibility. They’re basically one in the same. But adaptive resilience is really the ability to maintain your core values and commitments while flexibly adjusting your approach based on changing circumstances, especially during midlife, because man, there are there’s so much opportunity at midlife to adjust and adapt right? Because we’re change was often we’re having shifts in our career. We’re taking care of family members, whether that’s kids or friends or aging parents, we are dealing with a ever shifting hormonal system, and all of this is requiring some adaptability in how we show up to take care of ourselves. So key elements of adaptive resilience include but are not limited to things like the capacity to pivot strategies while maintaining core values.

Courtney Townley 23:11
So an example of this would be recognizing when a high intensity exercise routine might need to shift because of hormonal fluctuations. And I’ll tell you someone deep in the throes of perimenopause, I contend with this every month. The week prior to my cycle starting, I am depleted. I do not have a lot of energy. My body does not have a lot of motivation. I’m contending with fatigue and anxiety and so intense, aggressive exercise is really not my friend at that time. Now I can force myself to do it. I did it for years, and it just further broke me down. So I just now kind of roll through my month expecting the week before my cycle starts, I’m gonna be pulling back a little bit. And I know my reasons. I like my reasons, and to me, that’s what self-care looks like at this stage of my life. So adaptive resilience also looks like viewing disruptions in your life as an opportunity for growth, rather than looking at it as failure. Because, man, there is so much shifting at midlife, I see a lot of my clients wrestling with this idea of changing careers, or stepping back from their career, because their life demands are increasing, so they might again have family members that need a little bit more attention than they have previously, or there are just certain things in their life that. Are demanding more of them, and so they’re having to reconsider the way that they’re working.

Courtney Townley 25:07
And to again, you could look at that as failure, or you could look at it as just an opportunity for growth and an opportunity for adaptability. I also think that adaptive resilience speaks to really learning how to cultivate discernment, of knowing when to push and knowing when to pull back, so when to apply grace and when to really dig into grit. I mean, if you’ve been if you listen to probably more than a few episodes of the show. That is not a new concept to you. You’ve heard me talk about that a lot, but man, I think that is one of the most powerful skill sets for a midlife woman, is to know herself so well that she knows when she needs to bend and she knows when she needs to push harder. And if we ignore that skill, if we fail to develop that skill, that is how we break, because we either push too hard for too long or we bend so much that we get trampled on. And neither bode well for health.

Courtney Townley 26:21
And I would say just in again, this isn’t a conclusive list, but one other thing I would speak to in terms of adaptive resilience, and what that requires is redefining consistency at midlife, because traditional consistency often focuses on doing the same thing every day, which becomes very unsustainable during periods like perimenopause and many menopause when energy, mood and physical capacity fluctuate dramatically. I would also say that true consistency in midlife really means honoring your changing needs while maintaining commitment to your well being.

Courtney Townley 27:10
So I am as committed as ever to my well being, but what that looks like is very different than what it looked like in my 20s and 30s, I’ll tell you, this past month was really interesting, because I literally didn’t work out for a month. Because I was traveling through Portugal, I was hosting a retreat, my life was just looking very different, and I could have forced myself to work out and made it happen. But I also know the cost of that, I would not have enjoyed my trip as much. It would have stressed me out, and I went into it giving myself full permission that this month is going to look different and I’m going to be okay with that. It’s why I train most of the year, so I can have periods where I don’t have to push as hard. That is grace, that is kindness, I would also say, and this kind of speaks to the whole theme of this episode, that redefining consistency at midlife really means creating a flexible framework that helps you to adapt to hormonal shifts, rather than rigid protocols.

Courtney Townley 28:29
And that’s really what The Consistency Code offers women. It doesn’t give you a protocol to follow. It gives you a framework to work within no matter what life is throwing at you. So if this is kind of landing for you today, if you’re if you are kind of nodding your head as I go through these different skill sets, and it’s sounding like, Man, I could really benefit from learning that.

Courtney Townley 28:58
Please join us for The Consistency Code course that starts on September 8. It’s four weeks. It is action packed. It is in a really fun filled, supportive community. And like I said at the start of this episode, there’s a lot of opportunity for coaching throughout the course, so I host group coaching calls. You probably won’t be able to come to every call. Nobody ever does, but even listening to the coaching calls that you can’t be on personally will bring a tremendous value to your process.

Courtney Townley 29:32
You can check out all the details of the course by heading over to graceandgrit.com/thecode, once again, graceandgrit.com/thecode.

Courtney Townley 29:43
And just to wrap this up today, I just want to review for you one more time the five steps that I’m really speaking to today in terms of helping you to regain momentum for your midlife wellness.

Courtney Townley 29:59
Number one, honoring how behavior change actually works.

Courtney Townley 30:03
Number two, cultivating the skill set of deep self awareness.

Courtney Townley 30:09
Number three, learning how to plan in ways that are energy aligned.

Courtney Townley 30:15
Number four, learning skill sets that help you to fortify your self trust, and

Courtney Townley 30:24
Number five, developing the skill set of adaptive resilience, meaning self-care will not always look the same. We can adapt, we can bend, we can reshape and remold our approaches to self-care, and that’s what true wellness demands. It isn’t going to always look the same.

Courtney Townley 30:47
So once again, if you want to do a deeper dive into all of that, head on over to graceandgrit.com/thecode and check out the details of my four week course the consistency code. I’ve been running it for 10 years. We always have a great time. I always love hearing the wins that come out of this course. And I really, truly believe in this work to my core, I have seen it change the way that women approach their health and wellbeing at midlife, so their process becomes so much more grace filled and so much more sustainable. If you have questions, you can always email me at Courtney@graceandgrit.com and I will get back to you usually within 24 hours. I hope this was helpful.

Courtney Townley 31:30
Thank you so much for being here, my friends and I hope to see you for our course that starts September 8. Take care.

Courtney Townley 31:43
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.