#20 - Plan To Make Your Past Something To Smile About

We're going to look at our lives from the perspective of our past - 20-30 years from now - and think about whether we are happy with how we lived.

The biggest takeaways from this episode:

• Why it's never too late to make start making your past something to smile about.
• How trying to keep things the same can get in your way.
• Why age is a privilege.
• Questions to ask yourself about how you want to live.

  Hey there, Thanks for being here today! Welcome to the Style With Intention podcast. In today's episode, we're going to look at our lives from the perspective of our past - 20-30 years from now - and think about whether we are happy with how we lived. Ever since I decided to get divorced (way back in 2003), I've been thinking about my life this way. I decided that I would like to look back, as an 80-year-old, and say to myself "well, THAT was an interesting ride!" rather than looking back and saying to myself, "wow, you were a really good compromiser!" Listen in today for the questions you can ask yourself to more quickly get into this frame of mind and think about whether you're living the way you want to live - and whether your life will be something that yoou look back on and smile about. As always, my goal is to make it quicker and easier for you to access more ease, joy, and intention in your life...because happy looks really, really good! Enjoy the show!        

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If you’d rather read, than listen, here’s the

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE #20

PLAN TO MAKE YOUR PAST SOMETHING TO SMILE ABOUT

Welcome to the Style With Intention podcast, where we talk about how to use your personal style choices as a tool to create a life you love. We believe choice is empowering, complacency is boring, and happy looks really, really good! I’m your host, Annie Kip, and I’m so glad you’re here today! Today, we are stepping into the perspective of your future self and we’re looking at our past and deciding if we lived the way we wanted to live.   Time goes by so quickly - often we don’t want to look at the reality of that or our past - and that our days are whizzing by and they’re adding up into years. We don’t see ourselves as middle-aged - it just doesn’t feel like that! In fact, I hesitate to use that word when I’m titling an episode. Nobody wants to hear “middle-aged.”   Even me - I used to feel sorry for people whose kids had gone off to college. You know, I wondered - what they do all day? It just seemed sort of sad without the purpose of young kids and getting them off to school. Do they have anything to do? Are they drifting? I saw their wrinkly knees and their gray hair and I wondered - are they depressed? How could they let themselves go like that?  

And now I know that age is just a number - right?

  Well, the numbers don’t lie - 50 is half-way to 100. I resisted this fact for awhile. I put a lot of time and effort into holding onto the appearance of youth - and I was losing the battle!   You know one day I was commiserating with a friend about color oing our hair. There were reasons we felt we had to keep doing it: So other people wouldn’t think we looked old. So random men would think we were pretty - which we realized was really ridiculous, because we really only cared what our partners. Then we also thought we do it because we don’t want our kids to be embarrassed of us. It was ridiculous. It wasn’t who we wanted to be. It certainly wasn’t who I wanted to be. And literally after that conversation, I stopped coloring my hair. I considered it my 50th birthday present to myself.  

We all do things that make us feel the way we used to feel.

  Everyone has their own strategy - it could be hair coloring, it could be exercising, it could be flirtations, fast cars, designer clothes, competition, or distracting yourself. There are lots of perfectly acceptable ways to cope and it’s all good until it doesn’t feel right anymore.

At this point, we have a sense that we might be losing our chances to make our lives good.

Sometimes, there’s a sense of urgency to that - and we feel like we need to make decisions and make changes, so we don’t lose our opportunity to finally make our lives the way we want them to be. People do all kinds of crazy (and not so crazy things) at midlife - like quitting their jobs, moving the the country, leaving their relationships, and buying stuff that makes them feel good. They hold on really tightly sometimes, not wanting things to change. They resist what “those young people are into” and they don’t want to get involved with the “new technology.” They stick to routines more than ever and they’re angry sometimes that the world is changing around them.   They’re hoping they can maintain the status quo, which can end up feeling sort of restrictive and controlling to the people around them. And sometimes, that brings about changes in their relationships, and their jobs, and their friends that they are trying so hard to avoid.  

This is a time for clarification for all of us.

We all have to look at ourselves and decide if this is how we want our lives to be. No one want to look back with regrets.   We’re standing in this unique place where we can look back at the past and see how we didn’t actually appreciate how young we were 10 years ago, and we can look forward and see that someday, we might wish for the way we feel right now, in spite of the wrinkles and the gray hair and the aches and pains.  

I’d like to suggest that age is a privilege.

  It gives us the unique ability and perspective to choose our battles. To figure out what really matters. We don’t have to resign ourselves to becoming irrelevant and invisible, just because we’re at middle age. Time is going by, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We’ve lived long enough to see that, no matter how hard things might seem - even when the stock market crashes - we will get through them. All good things do show up, out of nowhere sometimes, when we least expect it.  

It’s taken this many years to become who we are.

We should be proud of that.   Now is the time to really zero in on what we like about ourselves and what we want. Refining our vision, we can finally be who we want to be. We can own it!   When our kids were little, we had to put our needs aside. We couldn’t even lift our heads up to look around and think about our lives. The days were so long, I remember, but looking back, the years were short. It’s okay now to think about what we want. We’ve paid our dues in a way.   Yeah, my kids still need me. I think they’ll always need us and we’ll always want to be there for them, but the endless little league games are no more. And those school concerts, which were so tortuous, and driving to activities is behind us. We can start to kind of pick our heads up and look around and take stock.  

What’s going to be next for us?

Who do we want to be in our kids lives? What’s the trajectory we’re on, because we will probably become more of the way we already are, unless we choose to do something different.    

The next half of our lives could be the best half.

What if we genuinely believed that? How would that change how you live everyday? What do you think that would do for your mind and opening it up to new possibilties and new opportunities and solutions you’d never considered before? What would that do for the moments? How would you live them differently? Would you appreciate them more? Would you walk away from fights? Would you love more?   This podcast is about creating a life that’s based on feeling great - and all the benefits that naturally come from that - confidence, style, deep connections, self-awareness, manifesting, and feeling happy every day. It’s about living the truth - choosing what you do and think intentionally and owning your own brilliance.   I have plenty of insights and tips and real life stories and interviews coming up, but this is an evolving project and I always want to hear from you - what you do and don’t like, and what serves you best.  

I’m sort of on a mission to make middle-age our new prime.

If you’re not happy with your life, this is the time to make it better. Figure out what your vision for yourself is and figure out how you’re going to make it real. Start with how you want to feel - start with yourself. This is the sweet spot. Become the person who lives that life you see for yourself and the possibilities will open up. It’s never too late.  

The truest “you” you can be, is the best gift you can give your family and friends.

  On the podcast, we’ll keep strategizing about what would move the needle toward happier. We’ll tease out what’s weighing you down, we’ll figure out how to get the gumption to do what the thing we think we cannot do. Together, we’ll look at what requires us to dig deep, when it’s worth it, and what you need to let go of sometimes.  

We’ll figure out where you can shine and what you can do to shine more.

  What would it be like to stop pushing so hard? And let your enthusiasm just sweep you along. The things you’ve been putting off may be the most rewarding. The solutions may surprise you with their elegant simplicity.   Whatever it is you do, do it for yourself at this point in your life.  In the end, there is only you. You’re solely accountable for your one small life.  

Any age can be your prime.

Let’s walk away from all the years of striving, and start to enjoy and embrace who we’ve become - and get excited about where we’re headed next. It’s about time.  

When your past is all you have left, will you smile at yourself?

Let’s make sure you do!

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Be sure to download the Bonus Content for this episode!