Reinvented After 40 with Kym Showers | Unreasonably Optimistic

As women in the second half of life, we’re told to slow down and make ourselves small until we eventually die. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that this message does not resonate with me. I believe this is our time to shine, and one thing that’s helped me thrive at 63 years old is being unreasonably optimistic.

We play it safe and throw in a mix of pessimism and reality for safe measure in our daily lives. But why not go all-in on everything great that could happen? I am unreasonable in my optimism every single day in how I show up to my world and think on purpose, and I have yet to see a downside to living in this way.

Join me this week to learn what it means to be unreasonably optimistic, why women in the second half of life tend to play it safe, and how being unreasonable in my optimism has completely transformed my life.


Join me for one-on-one coaching or in my next group starting Tuesday, July 9th, 2024 at 9:00 AM. Don’t miss this opportunity to work together! Sign up here.


WHAT YOU’LL DISCOVER IN THIS EPISODE:

  • Why my intention is always to be unreasonably optimistic.
  • What being unreasonably optimistic means to me.
  • Why we try to be realistic in our day-to-day lives.
  • How being unreasonable in my optimism has changed my life.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

FEATURED ON THE SHOW:

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

I am Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 141, Unreasonably Optimistic.

Welcome to the Reinvented After 40 podcast. I am your host, Kym Showers, and I’m a certified life coach for women in the second half of life. Each week I’ll bring you direct advice and inspiring, practical wisdom to help you live your very best life and create a future you’re absolutely obsessed with. It’s going to be fun, let’s get started.

Hello my friends in podcast land. How are you today? I am so excited about this episode. I love the title of it alone. I like to just think about being a woman in the second half of life who’s actually 63 years old and who strives every day to be unreasonably optimistic. I do not see a downside to the way that I live my life, the way that I think on purpose, the way that I show up to my world every single day. My intention is to be unreasonably optimistic. I love those two words together.

I love optimism. I love a dose of optimism every single day. I do not see a downside to it. There is no downside for me and I don’t see a downside for me to show up as an unreasonably optimistic woman. I don’t see a downside to the people that I interact with every day. So, this is what unreasonably optimistic means to me.

First of all, I got the idea and I’ve talked to you about this before, and I even have a podcast episode and I don’t know even what it was called, but I use the word unreasonable because of the book that I read by Will Guidara called Unreasonable Hospitality. And he in this book gave me this idea of a new way that I could live a new way to describe the feelings that I want to create for myself every single day, no matter what.

Well, he started as a busboy in a restaurant in New York, worked his way up to actually becoming the owner of a five star hotel. And the way that he transformed this restaurant from a two star to a five star, I’m not really a restaurant kind of person, but I can’t remember what exactly. He made the top list of restaurants in the world. And he may even became the number one on this magical list that the big people put together. But anyways he transformed this two star restaurant into the best restaurant in the world by over-delivering to his clients, to his customers, to his patrons.

He created this unreasonable hospitality way of delivering to his clients, to his customers, to his patrons of his restaurant, absolutely blowing their minds. So Unreasonable Hospitality gave me the idea that I could be unreasonable in any area of my life that I decided I wanted to be unreasonable in. So reasonable, by a reasonable woman of optimism would be just kind of a normal amount of optimism every day.

Play it safe, throw in some reality there, a little bit of pessimism just for safe measure so that you don’t get too disappointed if things don’t turn out the way that you’re thinking they’re going to turn out, the way you’re hoping they’re going to turn out. So, the way that I think now is why not go all in on everything great that could happen in my life not only today, but tomorrow next week, next month, next year, for the rest of my life. I’m going to go all in on the way that I think about it in a very optimistic way.

I’m going to just assume 100% on purpose that every single thing in my life will get better and better and better. That’s the way I think. That’s the way that I think on purpose, is absolutely what I believe at 63 years old. And I have lots of evidence to prove that when I think like that, that’s exactly what happens in my life. If you look at pessimistic people, let’s think about reasonably pessimistic people. They’re the ones listening to the news, talking about the stock market, reliving the things that happened in their past that weren’t good just to keep themselves safe.

A reasonably pessimistic person, the conversations, the words that will come out of their mouth, this is what it kind of sounds like, yeah, stock market’s down. It’s just a bad time for investors. It’s a bad season to buy a house. The rates are so high. The world is kind of a shit show right now. Everything going on overseas, it’s just not a good time to travel, not a good time to buy. Just a good time to just hunker down and play it safe. That’s a reasonably pessimistic person. I would never say any of those things. I would never ever even talk about any of those things.

I am thinking about what I’m creating today in my own life that is helping the world. I am unreasonably optimistic because I don’t read the news. I’m not talking about the things that other people are reporting as news because they don’t report good news. You don’t read newspapers, the headlines are never good, rarely good. So, I don’t read the news.

I’m not listening to anyone else’s negative brain, because this is what I know about our brains, and especially those of us in the second half of life, we’re just trying to be ‘realistic’. We want to sound like we know what we’re talking about. So, try and play it out an equal amount of negative and an equal amount of positive. I think that’s fine if that’s who you want to be, equal amounts of negative, equal amounts of positive. But I think we do that to protect ourselves from disappointment. That’s what I think we do.

I think we think that other people might think that we’re Pollyanna’s or we’re not even smart about what’s really going on in the world or any of that. Oh no, I am 63 years old, there is no possible way that I don’t really know what’s going on in the world. And also, I know there’s nothing new under the sun, 100%. So, when I was in my 20s, the things I was believing that people were saying about what was going to happen in the year 2000, let me just tell you that, let me remind you of that.

I mean, there was so much fear about what was going to happen when the clock struck midnight and we turned over to the year 2000, so much fear. The news was pouring out all the ‘pessimistic’ realistic people in the world were telling us that we needed to be afraid of. We needed to prepare for them. Nothing happened. Not one of those things happened. So, I was like, wow, so many examples of that in my last 63 years, nothing new under the sun. What do I choose to believe? What’s useful for me? How do I want to think and feel every single day?

I want to be happy. I want to put out good vibes. I’m going to create lots of good stuff in my life that’s helpful to anybody that needs the kind of thinking, the way that I think, the way that I produce, the things that I’m putting out in the world, anyone that wants more of that. This is why I do what I do and mostly for my sake. Mostly because it makes me love my life and show up and get up every morning and be so excited about what I’m producing in my life, what I get to create, what I have to look forward to. I don’t see a downside to that at all.

I want to stay unreasonable in my optimism. And the way that I choose to see life and choose to see people and choose to see what’s possible and choose to see opportunities, this is unreasonable optimism. And I’m an unreasonably optimistic woman at 63 in the second half of life with so much zest, so much energy, so much positive love. And I even like to think about, the reason I left the church is because all I ever heard about was how our job was to learn how to love people unconditionally, unconditional love. And I saw very little of that happening in the church.

I saw a lot more critical love. I saw a lot more pessimistic love. I don’t see how love is even pessimistic so that’s made up. I saw a lot more controlling kind of love and conditional love. If you do this then I’ll love you. I saw very little unconditional love, which means we are the ones that transform into loving other people no matter what, no matter what, no matter how they show up. I am just the one who loves. I don’t have to get any love in return. It’s very unconditional and that’s how I feel about unreasonable optimism.

I get to be the one transformed by optimism, by optimistic beliefs and thinking that everything you, guys is, going to turn out. The way that I think about my future is no matter what, it’s all going to be good, no matter what it feels like even right now. I keep pushing through it and I’m not afraid to feel negative feelings and that has become my superpower.

Unless can I just mention Taylor Swift to you right now? Oh my gosh, no one right now is spurring me on and encouraging me, inspiring me more than she is and did in 2023 and is doing in 2024. A shout out to my friend Erica Tingey, who is my dear friend, who is my client, who is a friend, coach. She’s my partner. She’s such a great coach and her and I are both obsessed with Taylor Swift. And she went with a friend of hers, she flew to Paris, you guys, and saw back-to-back Taylor Swift concerts. She not only went to one, but she went to two.

That was her third Ares tour concert that she went to, and when I saw that she was going, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this makes me so happy. I love you so much.” And just thinking about the difference that Taylor Swift is making in the world for all of us women. Her work ethic is unreasonable. Let’s just for sure agree on that, her work ethic and the way that she uses her pain points and her suffering and her heartbreaks to encourage all of us. I’m 30 years older than she is and she is my teacher right now as far as producing what she’s here to produce, being a creative in the world.

She just had her, I think 90th concert. She put out a double album. She just keeps creating even in the midst of a lot of negative feelings. I’m sure she’s learned how to feel them and not make herself wrong for having negative feelings. And that’s become my superpower, as I’m able to keep pushing through and feeling my negative feelings and not making myself wrong.

So, I’m not afraid to be unreasonably optimistic in my life at 63, because even if I am disappointed that things didn’t go the way that I thought they were going to go, or hoped they were going to go or planned that they were going to go. I can feel disappointed and be okay with that feeling, process it and move through it and keep staying the course. My friend, this is such a superpower. This makes me even more and more unreasonably optimistic. It’s just the way that I choose to live every single day. And I know that you can too, if I can do it, anyone can do it. How hard can it be, really?

And so, we don’t want to exist, we don’t want to just exist. We want to thrive. We want to go all in and just get the juice out of life. And that’s what I am about every single day. I would love to help you. Every woman in the second half of life needs a coach who can help her sort out her thoughts in her brain and teach her how to process all of her feelings and how to actually pinpoint what her limiting beliefs are, what’s keeping you stuck. I am a ninja at this. I am so good at this.

I’ve been doing this for seven years now and I’ve helped so many women become so much more optimistic. I don’t know anyone personally who has quite the level of optimism I have on a daily basis. I have to say I’m probably the most unreasonable woman that I know personally. But I know there’s a lot of unreasonably optimistic women out there doing big things in the world and you could probably give me a whole list of them as well. But we know who they are and they keep producing, they keep creating, they keep showing up 100% to their life. And I want to help you learn how to do that no matter what age you are.

We’ve all been given a story that when you’re a woman in the second half of life, there is just a certain way that you need to slow down, make yourself small and live until you die. And I’m the opposite of that. I’m like, “This is our time to shine. Let’s go.” And if you’re a woman who resonates with that kind of idea, that kind of hope, where you just want to get up every morning and be energized and be creative or practice something that you’ve always wanted to be good at, but you didn’t know how to stay consistent with it. I am a genius at consistency.

I mean, come on, 141 episodes, 141 weeks, I keep producing podcasts. I just sit down with my microphone and I talk to my friends in podcast land. There’s not fear around that anymore where there used to be fear. I’m so optimistic about this podcast. That’s why I keep doing it. It just brings me so much joy, so much good energy, so much purpose in my life. And then of course, my business, oh my goodness, my business is thriving, growing. I keep getting the best clients.

Right now, I’ve opened up to a lot more one-on-one coaching spots. I’m so excited about that, kind of going back to private coaching as well as continuing growing my group coaching program. If you’re a brand new client, you will receive my beautiful, very useful, very helpful, very practical workbook in the mail as soon as you sign up. You can go to my website and you can actually get on a consultation call with me right now. You can email me at kymshowerslifecoach.com and we’ll set up a time.

If you’re interested in working with me one-on-one, I’d love to set up a consultation call with you. If you already know you’re all in on it, you can just go purchase it right now and you’ll hear from me right away. I’ll send you my workbook with all of my tools in it. And then we’ll find a time that works best for you and I and we’ll meet once a week for eight straight weeks for 50 minutes, almost an hour. I’m going to teach you so many useful tools that you can put into practice right now. You can stay in your own lane. You can get out of codependency and people pleasing.

You can start creating a very happy, healthy body, change your thinking, change your story about yourself and your life and your relationships. And most of all, your future, what you’re capable of as a woman in the second half of life. And this is just the beginning of your journey, I promise you. And if you’re interested in group coaching, you can get into my next group which starts Tuesday, July 9th, at nine in the morning California time. We will meet every Tuesday from nine to ten California time. And you will get lifetime access to the recordings. You will also be invited to my private client portal.

And you as well will get my workbook that will be so useful and so helpful for you. And you will get two private coaching sessions with me during the six months together. So, so many ways that you can up-level your life and become a very optimistic person. I can help you so much with that and start getting the results in your life on a daily basis that you really want to get, that you just haven’t seen any progress in. I’m so good at getting you unstuck.

I mean, there’s just no better way to spend your resources, to spend your time, to spend your money, to spend your energy than back on yourself, and building an optimistic mindset. And then even up-leveling to that, up-leveling an optimistic mindset to an unreasonably optimistic mindset, why not? What are we holding back from? What are we afraid of? So, I’m just like, “Well, if I’m loving my life so much right now, what if I could love it even more?” That’s what I’m talking about when I’m like, “Well, this is a reasonable amount of loving my life.” No, I want to go all in.

I want to make it unreasonable. I want to make it over the top. I want my life to be something that I’m so proud of and that just blows my mind every single day, week, month and year. These years are flying by. I can’t believe it’s already the middle of May, almost the end of May, by the time you guys hear this episode, going into June, halfway through 2024.

If you decide to sign up for my group program, I will take you all the way into 2025 and get you set up for the next year, whatever you decided that you want to create for yourself this year, and you find that you haven’t done any of it. That’s what I want to work on. Let’s get going on that. And we’ll start that July 9th, Tuesday morning, 9:00am, jump into that group. You will be so happy you did and it will change your life forever.

Alright, so cheers to being a woman in the second half of life, even at 63 years old, who is committed to being unreasonably optimistic for the rest of my life. Won’t you join me? It’s the best. It’s the best life that you can ever imagine. I love you. Thanks for showing up today and I will talk to you next Thursday.

If you love this podcast, I invite you to come work with me. Go to kymshowerslifecoach.com, sign up for my next group and retreat, and let’s create your dream life together.

ENJOY THE SHOW?

Don’t miss an episode, listen on Spotify and follow via Apple Podcasts.