Ep 142. Be Your Own Superhero

I am Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 142, Be Your Own Superhero.

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? Happy last Thursday of May 2024. I am recording this on a Tuesday morning. I just finished a group coaching session. I’m getting ready for my next one. And I had this on my planner to record this morning and you know how I always obey my planner because I always obey myself, because I am my own superhero. That’s what it looks like. Because the good news and the bad news, my friend, is that no one is coming to save me, and no one is coming to save you. We get to save ourselves.

And I know I tell you things like this every single day but I’m here to remind you once again. I love the idea that I am my own hero and I don’t need anybody besides me, which is a phenomenal way to live at 63 because I live a very happy, thriving, empowered life. And I have lots of plans that I make every single day, and look so forward to my future. I’ve been doing a lot of coaching on codependency because women my age, which is all of you, women in the second half of life, we can call it midlife, the best half of life.

We have been raised to be codependent, and I just see it from an empowered point of view right now, because I’ve been teaching a lot about it, studying a lot about it. And there’s just so much information around the idea of codependent relationships. And I just have come to terms with, I doubt that there is a woman in the second half of life who is codependent free. So, the opposite of a codependent relationship would be a very healthy clean relationship.

And I like to look at it, I’m just going to tell you the little story about my marriage with Jeff. So, we’ve been married for 40 years, 4 0, you guys August 4th, 2024, we will have been married for 40 years. So, we’re anticipating this great celebration. We are taking our kids and grandbabies to Hawaii in June. It’s coming up. As you’re listening to this, we’re getting ready, we’re buying clothes. We have great airline flights and we’re all very excited about this trip.

We’re going to make so many fun memories, and we’re going to celebrate this massive occasion of a 40 year wedding anniversary. And I’m telling you, it has been a reinvention on our part, mine and Jeff’s part over the last 40 years. When we first decided to get married, and we had been dating for four years before that because we met when we were just out of high school, our first year at junior college in Bakersfield. And I know I’ve told you in a past episode or several maybe about how we met.

I was a cheerleader at the college. Jeff was a football player. We were both adorable, and we just couldn’t help but fall in love. We were meant to be just kind of like Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift, you can liken us to them. We were just so in love. And we did all four years of college. We had a quick little break up in there and then we got married. And we were both very church oriented, very strong ‘Christian’ kids and we basically wanted to have sex and so we got married.

But we were counseled by our college, what is it called? Our college pastor, our youth pastor. We were counseled by him because he’s the one who married us. And we have been lifelong friends with him. He’s an amazing man. But he told us both that the way to be happily married is that we learn to meet each other’s needs and to basically make each other happy so basically, be each other’s superhero. But I’m telling you, it worked for a while, but then it didn’t work once we got into the weeds of all of that.

He was bad at making me happy. He was very busy in his own life building his career. I was very busy originally building my career. And then as it goes, me quitting my career and having babies and staying home with babies and then having little mini careers in between because I’ve always been very energetic and ambitious. But I wasn’t free to think the thoughts I wanted to think and be who I wanted to be because I had all these beliefs about the kind of wife I was supposed to be.

My goal was always to be just a really good wife and be a really good mom, and I have always been a really good mom and a really good wife, and then a really good friend and a really good daughter and all of that, all the roles that I played. Then midlife hit me and I’m going to just say around 50. I was like, “I am definitely not happy.” The kids were gone and I didn’t know what in the world I was going to do with the rest of my life.

And I didn’t really have any good examples of what it would look like to be my own superhero, to be an independently happy 50 year old, 60 year old, 70 year old, 80 year old woman who was independent of her husband and yet happily married. And who wasn’t overly involved in her grown kids’ lives, who let them live their own lives happily and go through their own journey, building their own lives. And I was doing something that I wanted to do.

I didn’t have an example of that where I could just think for myself and believe anything I wanted to believe. I was still under the umbrella, under the thinking of all the roles that I played and what it meant to be all of these roles for the rest of my life. And it seemed so boring to me. It seemed like something I was not looking forward to at all. And so, I had to decide for myself who I wanted to be and how to make myself happy because my husband did not know how to make me happy.

And bless his heart, he tried. It wasn’t that he didn’t try. But we were so wrapped up in this codependent, I do for you, you do for me relationship. And he had all the power because that was the religion that we were in and he was the leader and he made the money and he got to make the final decision. And I was to submit to him and all of that nonsense. I am telling you, it is nonsense. And what I have found out is that he is thriving when he figured out how to make himself happy and I am thriving when I figured out how to make myself happy.

He gets to be his own hero. I’m not his hero. And I get to be my own hero. He is not my hero. And we actually have different dreams, different ideas, different thoughts, different personalities, different ways of doing life. And that is actually perfect for us. That’s why we’re happily married, getting ready to celebrate 40 years of marriage and 44 years of being together. And it’s because really, truly, you guys, that I have found this thought work when I needed it the most in my early 50s, figuring out how to just do it my way.

I needed to give myself permission to go out into the wilderness and discover and reinvent and refurbish who I am, who I’m becoming, how I want to think, what story I want to tell. And that’s exactly what I did and I literally became my own superhero. And I get up every single day over and over and over, put my cape on and live the exact life that feels so brave to me to live.

And what I told my clients this morning, I read this quote last week and it’s been on my mind. Listen to this, my friend. You cannot live the life you want to live when you keep feeding the life you don’t want to live. I’m going to say that again. The reason you are not living the life you want to live is because you keep feeding the old life that you don’t want to live. And this is true for all of us. It’s hard to change. Our neural pathways, by the time we’re in midlife, are deep and we have a lot of fear. And we are very much restricted by our codependent tendencies.

We are very wrapped up in what other people are thinking and how they’re feeling and how we can help them and what they’re struggling with and our worries about them. And I want you to know, that’s the old life that our brain keeps wanting to feed. And that’s why we are not living the superhero magical, new reinvented life that we want to live as independent women in our 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond. So literally awareness around your codependent tendencies is all you need to make huge shifts in the direction of your dreams.

And it takes a superhero woman to be able to hop out of old habits, be willing to let people down, be willing to let people go. Let people go. Stop hanging onto relationships because you’re so afraid of being abandoned. The only way you can ever be abandoned, my friend, is if you abandon yourself. And I want you to stop abandoning yourself. I want you to stop letting yourself down just because you’re too afraid to let someone else down. I want you to let people be wrong about you and judge you and complain about you. That never has to be a problem. It is definitely not a problem for me anymore.

I am willing to let all of that happen because I’m so busy being my own superhero in my own magical life that I get up every single morning and create on purpose. I’m always trying new things. I’m always willing to fail. I am not concerned about what anyone else is doing, what anyone else is thinking. I just don’t even think about that anymore. I’m so busy creating, creating, creating. And I just love that and I want to just pass these ideas on to you this morning, my friend.

You get to be, even in all of your relationships, I want you to see, you get to be independently true to yourself in all of your relationships. And this is what actually creates a healthy, thriving, life giving relationship instead of a stuck, controlling, frustrating, codependent relationship. You have to be willing to jump out of these relationships. And the way that we do that, and this is what helped me the most is, after I made new agreements with myself and I got this from that little magical book, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. I’ve told you about this several times.

But be impeccable with your word is the first agreement. And if you’ve never been super honest with yourself, that’s a really healthy place to start. It is so hard, but it’s work worth doing because you’re going to find out how often you lie to yourself. You tell little white lies to yourself to make yourself feel better. And in the end it actually makes everything worse. So, to clean it all up, we start being impeccable with our word. We stop telling little white lies.

This is how we build a very good strong superhero relationship with ourselves. We just get super truthful, super honest, super brave with ourselves, look at the situations and tell ourselves the truth. Take full responsibility for the entire life experience in all the relationships that you are in. That’s step number one, be impeccable with your word, with yourself first and foremost, and then with especially the people you love the most, the relationships that mean the most to you. Everybody else after that, you can let them go. Everybody else is pretty disposable after that.

It’s your spouse. It’s your grown kids. It might be your parents. It might be a couple of close friends. But everybody else, you can pretty much let go and they’ll return if they’re good, healthy relationship people and if they’re willing to take responsibility for their own lives. And this is how you break free from codependency, from resentment, from feeling so stuck and not being able to move on and create this big old magical life for yourself and create your dreams. And get real brave with putting yourself out in the world and doing really good work in the world.

And getting good maybe in, I don’t know, I think about Kate Hudson and what she’s doing right now. She goes from this amazing acting career to now she put out an album and now she’s a singer and she’s a songwriter and it’s good for you. And she’s coined this her second act. And I’m like, “Yes, that’s what it’s all about.” And of course, are there probably people judging her and criticizing her? Of course, because that’s the human condition. That’s the way our brains are wired.

But there’s probably a little part of her that maybe gets a little hurt by it or a little troubled by it but that’s not going to stop her because you know why? Kate Hudson’s her own superhero. She’s not going to let herself down. She’s not going to let her dreams die just because maybe not a lot of actors are becoming big, what do you call them? Music sensations. But man, she’s talented. And the more she does it, the better she’s going to get. And I can’t wait to see her in concert. I can’t wait to listen to more of her music. And I’m very inspired by her and that’s how you do it, my friend.

So, there’s never a time in our life where we would give an excuse about being too old, it’s too late, we’re too old. No, that’s all nonsense. Today is the day that we become whoever we want to become. It doesn’t matter how old we are, in fact, our age is our superpower 100%. I have never felt more alive, more ambitious, more future focused, stronger, happier than I am right now at the age of 63. I am literally just getting started on what I’m going to create. And I just own the whole experience.

And I’m not worried about the judgers or criticizers because I’m the girl in the arena and I’m only interested in other girls in the arena playing the game, working hard, busy in their own lane. That’s who’s inspiring me right now. I’m not worried about the girls in the cheap seats, throwing criticisms at any of us girls in the arena there who are actually doing the work. So, we’re not even thinking about them anymore. We’re thinking about what is on our planner today, what goals those activities align with.

Listen, this was just a dream, this podcast was just a dream to me a few years ago. And this is my 142nd episode. It is just one day at a time, one week at a time, one month at a time. And we just keep building life and momentum and bravery and excitement and good work in the world. And like I told you last week, I’m just so optimistic about life in general at 63. I’m so over the top optimistic about my future and about your future.

Anybody who’s willing to take responsibility and want something better, we can always make ourselves better, our life better, our relationships better, our future better if we want to, if we own it and we actually do the work. And stop being lazy and stop making excuses and actually stop listening to our self-doubt, we all have it. We all have self-doubt. Don’t think I don’t have it. I actually do have it, but I do not feed it. And that goes back to that quote I told you. I am not feeding myself doubt. I used to feed it. I used to play the victim. I used to not be my own superhero.

I used to think my friends should be doing more and my husband should be doing more, my kids should be doing more. I don’t think that at all anymore. I just love being me. I’m owning my life experience. Anything that I want, I know it’s up to me to create. And there’s no better way to be than the creator of your own life in the second half of life. And my friend, if this sounds amazing to you, I want you to come work with me right now, let’s get started this week, today. Let’s get started. Go to my website.

You can come work with me privately if that sounds more appealing. We will cover so much in your life and get so much done in eight weeks together, working for one hour every single week for eight weeks. You will get my workbook. I will teach you so many tools that will help you build so much resilience, so much optimism, so much enthusiasm for your life, help you jump out of codependent tendencies and become your own superhero.

This can happen with private coaching with me one-on-one and this will also happen in group coaching with me because my groups are over the top magnificent. You will love it. And my next group starts Tuesday, July 9th at 9:00am California time for one hour every week for 20 weeks. So, I will take you straight into the New Year. We can finish 2024 on such a powerful superhero note for you, creating so much goodness, so much magic in your own life. There is no downside, only upsides to coming and working with me.

Everybody needs a life coach, especially all of us women in the second half of life. And there’s no better life coach than me for you. You will love it so much and you’ll wonder how in the world you got along until now without a life coach. So just like everyone needs a dentist, we all need a life coach. There’s no downside to having a life coach. There is only growth and magic and aha moments and learning how to love yourself and be independent and take care of your own wellbeing and take care of your own happiness first. You have to take care of your own happiness first and that starts changing everything.

Okay my friend, thanks for showing up today. This is a magical podcast. I love sitting at this microphone and talking to you. Have the best week 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.