Ep 113. Magical Thinking

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 113, Magical Thinking.

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.

Hey, my beautiful friends, happy Kym Showers retreat day. Okay, it is Thursday morning November 2nd, 2023. I am hosting my second retreat for my clients. My first one was in May of 2023 and it was a total success, an unbelievable blast and so valuable for all of us, so important. This is why I have retreats, you guys. Zoom is where we meet weekly. This is where my clients get coached, so oh my gosh, so grateful for Zoom, love Zoom because I have a client in Australia because of Zoom. I have clients on the East Coast of the United States of America because of Zoom.

I have clients all over the United States because of Zoom. So they’re all flying in. My beautiful Kylie from Australia got here yesterday at 10:30am. And I scooped her up at the airport and took her to our darling hotel, Avila Lighthouse Suites, where I am hosting the retreat. And they are so good to me and to all of us. They accommodated her so she could have her room really, really early in the day and she could get all settled and caught up.

So let me tell you about Kylie. I know I told you about her before but she is so extraordinary and I’m so inspired by her. She was so committed to coming to this retreat from Australia. So I don’t know if you know how far away Australia is from where I live in Shell Beach, California but just to give you a little perspective. She flew out from Brisbane, Australia on Wednesday morning, at 8:30 Wednesday morning. And she arrived in San Luis Obispo, California, which is just 10 minutes away from my house, the San Luis Obispo Airport at 10:30 Wednesday morning.

She flew and traveled for an entire day. So she gained a day. She flew out Wednesday morning and got here on Wednesday morning. And then I’m going to take her back to the airport on Sunday. So she flew in on Wednesday. Our retreat is Thursday, Friday and Saturday. And then she’s flying all the way home on Sunday right after the retreat. She flew here just to be up-leveled. That’s how much she values her growth. That’s how much she wants to fall in love with herself and her life at the age of 50. She turns 50 in February of 2024.

So she just gave herself the gift of this retreat and the six months working with me so that she can go into the second half of her life at the next level, tapping into her potential. I’m just so proud of her, and it’s just such a delight to work with her and to work with all my clients who are so committed to their growth. Anyway, so when I take Kylie back to the airport on Sunday. So she leaves Sunday evening, flies out. I can’t even do this math. Oh my gosh, it explodes my brain a little bit, it hurts my mind a little bit.

But she lands in Brisbane, Australia, so she leaves here on Sunday and lands in Australia on Tuesday. So she doesn’t even get a Monday. So that’s crazy. Oh my gosh. But I love her so much and I just celebrate her and honor her for her commitment to herself and her growth and her future self. I love that so much. And she’s just going to have the time of her life here and I’m going to make sure of that. And of course all my other clients who are flying in, they have that same commitment. They’re showing up for themselves. I can’t wait for us to be together.

We meet at five o’clock today for the very first time, most of us, for the first time in person. And being in person, as opposed, or in connection with Zoom. So we know each other on Zoom but when we see each other for the first time in person, it does something magical to us. And it just automatically lifts us up to our next level. It’s the energy, my women come and work with me because of my energy, because of the way that I think and feel and show up for myself every single day and I call it magical thinking.

I definitely have magical thinking on purpose. So we all kind of have imaginary, I would say, most of our lives are imaginary because it’s all our perception. Our lives are our perception. So if you’re stuck in a pond, remember I like to call it a pond, of all the same rinse and repeat routines, habits. No one’s growing. You’re not growing. Everything’s just kind of ho hum, our ho hummery lives, which I refuse to live in. I love the rushing river. I’ll always choose the rushing river. But you can be in that pond and think that there’s no way out of it.

And that I call is imaginary thinking because it’s just your perception. You can get out of it anytime you want. You can tap into a limitless potential that you actually have everything that I believe, you can believe too, every way that I live, you can live too. You can borrow anything that I’ve created for myself, and you can create it too for your life. It’s not just for me, it’s for you too. And the only difference is because I make choices every single day to go beyond just ho hummery, my ho hummery choice, my brain, your brain wants us to live.

The familiar wants us to stay safe, does not want us to venture into the unknown and that’s what I call the river. The river is a life of the unknown and I love it and it is scary, but it is magical. It gives me this exact life that I want to live. Hey, it isn’t for the wimpy and the whiners and the complainers at all, for sure. And so if you find yourself, you witness yourself being a whimper and a whiner and a complainer you can see yourself doing that and you want to be one, okay, totally fine. Then the way that I teach and coach and the life that I live isn’t for you.

But if you are listening to this podcast, I think that you want to hop out of that ho hummery life and think magically like I do, think more optimistically like I do, create positive energy in your body every day like I do. And live and go beyond the safe and the familiar and the boring and what everyone else is doing and venture out on your own so you can build self-confidence and self-love and self-trust and a whole different vibe for your life. It is all available to you, my friend.

I promise you, it all boils down to the story you’re telling yourself in your head about what’s possible for you, what you’re capable of, how you see yourself. Old stories that you’re telling yourself maybe even from childhood that you’re bringing with you, I’m not good enough. I’m too old. I’m not smart enough. No one will support me. No one will believe me. I’m not good enough. Whatever all of that is, it’s all nonsense. I will always tell you that. That is a way of thinking that keeps you so small and keeps you in a ho hum life that is so boring and isn’t thrilling whatsoever.

But it feels safe and familiar and you get to just do the same things every day and talk to the same people. And you can complain when you want and you don’t have to do any rigorous training to be different. To build self-confidence and self-trust and self-love and self-worth and put yourself in a room of women like the women that I work with every day, and the women that are showing up at my retreat because we want to change. We want to grow. We want to be the next best version of ourselves. We want to see what’s possible for us.

We have an unlimited amount of potential that we are just tapping into, just barely tapping into. There’s so much more for us in the second half of life. I was telling Kylie yesterday as I was driving her to the hotel from the airport. She was telling me her birthday was just a few months away, her 50th birthday and she’s just thinking about that and this was her gift to herself. And I said, “This is the perfect gift for you.” So I’m going to teach all about self-love and self-worth and growing our self-concept and changing the old stories about ourselves at this retreat. And it’s going to change us. It’s going to make us so much braver with our lives.

And I told her yesterday in the car, I just said, “You have another 50 years. Think about it like that.” This is magical thinking that will serve us so well. I have another, I always say because obviously I’m 12 years older, almost 13 years older than Kylie. She turns 50 just about when I turn 63. But I think of it like that, I’m just getting started. And so I call it magical thinking. I think it’s my super power. If you say, “Well, that’s not realistic. How many women live to be 100?” I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. What is realistic and why do we have to think quote ‘realistically’?”

We’re all thinking in our imagination anyways. We’re all telling a story. So we might as well tell a magical story, something that gives us hope and love and energy and excitement every day. Because I look at my 70 year old self, I tell you this all of the time. Because the power of your future self and having her in your imagination and having her as your north star and your coach and your therapist. She is your highest, most beautiful, strongest, best self in your future.

And she is just calling you on when you need a dose of bravery and courage. When you’re doing something outside your comfort zone and you so want to cancel and you so don’t want to show up because it’s just taking too much time and too much money and too much energy and what will they think about me. Those are all fearful thoughts that keep us so stuck in the pond and keep us from showing up for ourselves and growing our self-confidence and growing our self-concept and growing our self-love and learning how to think in a way that feels magical every single day when we wake up.

And that’s how I do it. It’s rigorous work to live the way that I live. I am a badass. I am very persistent. I am very focused and I am relentless. I deserve to live my best life and so do you. And I love myself enough to show up for myself no matter what, even when my brain doesn’t want to do it, even when my brain is resisting it and is afraid. I’m like, “It’s okay, it’s okay to be afraid, we’re going to show up anyway. We’re going to stay in this river and we’re going to just sail on to the great unknown and keep pushing past all of our resistance and create an amazing magical life for ourselves.”

And that’s what I keep doing and my life is beyond anything I could have imagined 10 years ago. So I want you to know this is absolutely possible for you. And what it takes though, it takes persistence. It takes a focus. It takes a clarity of what you really truly want and who you want to be. It takes an awareness of when your brain is giving you excuses and you’re buying them. You’re actually buying them when your brain is just like, “I don’t really want to do it. I don’t really feel like doing it after all.” And you cancel on yourself and you don’t show up.

And then another year goes by and you want to do it, but you’re not committed to doing it and you haven’t made the decision to do it. There’s such a difference between wanting to do something and deciding to do something. When you decide to do something, you’re 100% no matter what. You’re going to show up no matter what, as if you’re going to lose something so valuable if you don’t show up for yourself.

And I tell you, you do lose something so valuable, you lose a piece of self-trust, you lose a piece of self-worth, a piece of self-love. Where you just don’t hold yourself to the highest level of accountability and when you live the way that I live that is just unacceptable. And I want you to know you are worth holding yourself to that level of accountability, where you show up for yourself every day and even when you don’t feel like it, you do it.

You do the thing every single day and tell it’s just who you are and that takes you to this new level of perspective, of insight, of self-love, of self-trust, of self-worth, of self-value. And you will never ever go back to who you were before then. This is what I call magical thinking. It is our responsibility in the second half of life to live like this. It’s our responsibility to be the example of what’s possible in the second half of life. Other women don’t know this. This is a new thing, it’s new. It’s unusual for me to be me right now.

This is so unchartered territory but this is why I’m doing it, it is thrilling. This is who I’ve always wanted to be. I just didn’t know how to get here. I had to practice letting go of my old stories about myself. I had to let go of a lot of relationships, a lot of people. I had to let go of even my old self-concept to build a new self-concept, a new self-story of who I am. I had to legitimately fall in love, passionately, madly in love with me and put blinders on. And just suspend all my self-doubt and suspend thinking about everyone else and think about me and give myself exactly what I need. Because I didn’t know how to do that and now I know.

And I am so glad that I learned how to do this and I’ve learned how to think differently and think magically about myself and my life and see it from a perspective where it is worth the work. And also it’s worth the rest. It’s worth the rhythm of this rigorous life. Sometimes it’s super hard and I let it be hard and I show myself so much respect because I’m so capable of doing hard things.

And the thing is, you guys, if you’re really struggling with taking things personally and thinking about other people’s judgments, you know what the answer is? The answer first of all is to come get in one of my coaching groups. Come get in my January group because I’m going to teach you a new way of thinking about yourself. And when you think about yourself differently, you know what happens? You are able to put blinders on and not think about what other people are thinking about you, which is such a relief and it gives you so much momentum in your life.

You just carry on as if no one’s even thinking about you. I don’t think about it anymore. And it used to keep me so full of anxiety, I can’t even tell you. And if you’re a woman like I used to be, I have the answer for you. It is self-love, it is self-worth, it is self-concept, growing your self-story, changing your self-story. When you change your story, you change your life, you let go of all the old nonsense, all the old stories that are no longer serving you. And you pick up and recreate who you are in your mind.

And then you show up relentlessly as her every single day because you have your beautiful future self, cheering you on. And I like to think, and this is what I will have told my clients this weekend, because you’re going to be listening to this the week after the retreat. I am going to just blow their minds with just a few things this weekend. We are not trained and we are not told and we are not given permission just to be everything to us. I am going to tell them that they are everything. You are everything to you.

I am everything to me. I look myself in the eyes every day and I just say, “I love you, Kym Showers, you are everything to me.” And it is so dear and it is so precious because I am filled with love every day because of it. And I want you to feel the same way about you. I give you permission to be everything to yourself in your life. I’ve grown to this place and all it does is benefit all the people in my life because I am not looking to them for love. I am not looking to them for acceptance and for validation and will they like me and will they see me and will they save me a place.

I don’t think like that anymore because I give all of that to myself. When I show up, I am nothing but love and good energy and magical thinking because I’ve risen above all of that nonsense. So I am unattached to anyone’s opinion of me. So I can teach you how to live this way and it’s just this amazing, beautiful, satisfying way to live. So fall in love with yourself is the way to really recognize that we’re making all of it up. So we get to just think how we want.

If we want to think magically in the most positive, optimistic way. Why wouldn’t we? If we have choices to live a ho hum life or an awesome life. Why wouldn’t we choose awesome every single day? I choose it every single day and there’s no one that can tell me anything different. It’s all so beautiful. And I love waking up in the morning. I love living my life. I can handle anything that comes my way. I don’t make it mean anything about me.

And I just accept all of it with gratitude and with peace and knowing, I just rise above anything that could grab a hold of me and maybe make me feel a certain way that I don’t want to feel, I rise above it. And I’m just like, “I see, this is all supposed to be this way. This is all fine and good. And here we are now and everything is wonderful.” And I love to be present with it. I love to think magically and optimistically. And all it does is keep opening up my life to more beauty and awe and wonder.

And I notice things that I didn’t notice before. And I un-attach the things that are not useful for me moving forward. And all I am is just here to enjoy my life and to enjoy the people in my life. That’s what I’m here for. And that’s magical thinking. I don’t complain. I don’t gossip. I think the best of people. I hold people to the highest standard and treat them as such. And I don’t react to anything. I just respond intentionally and I hold myself to the highest standard, which means I value myself up mostly. I value my time.

I value my worth. I value all the things that I’m really good at and I show up that way. And that’s the way that I see my clients, my family, my friends, and it gives me the very best life and I want that for all of us in the second half of life. We don’t have to waste any time stuck in ho hummery ever again. I want you to think magically about yourself and your life every single day and choose the best for yourself, you’re worth it. And choose an awesome experience for yourself because you’re worth it. You have choices every day, all day long.

So I want you to choose what’s best and trust yourself and stop hanging out with people who don’t want that for you too. You’ve got to stop hanging out with people who are not living their best life and come hang out with us. Come join my January group. Come hang out with me and you’re going to change everything about yourself forever. And you will come and be with us in person the first week of May 2024. Six months goes so fast so May will be here in a flash of an eye. And being together is everything and you are everything, my friend.

I want you to take yourself seriously. I want you to know your worth and your value and know that you are magical and treat yourself as such. Alright, 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.