Ep 107. Personal Responsibility

I’m Kym Showers and this is Reinvented After 40, episode number 107, Personal Responsibility.

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 friends, welcome back to the podcast, episode 107. I love this. I’ve gotten up every morning this week and worked out on Orangetheory at 5:00am. My alarm is set for 4:00am but I wake up on the dot you guys at 3:48. I just love that. I think that’s just insane that our body knows and just automatically wakes up. So I know you probably have stories like that too, but I coached a lot this week on personal responsibility. I didn’t use actually these words.

But what I wanted to remind my clients of is what is going on with them as clues for personal boundary work, which in other words is personal responsibility, which means that we take ownership, you guys, of our entire life experience, 100% of it. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually said those words before to you or if they have, you didn’t really listen and really take them seriously. But today I really want you to take them seriously because it is such powerful information.

And when we own our entire life experience, 100% of it, you guys, all of it, I’m saying it doesn’t matter the circumstances. It doesn’t matter what’s going on outside of you, it really doesn’t. What matters, which you have control of, is how you think and feel and show up to your life every single day. That’s personal responsibility.

So if someone’s being mean to you, if something sad is going on or bad is going on, whatever is going on outside of you, if your kids aren’t acting right, if your husband’s not acting right. If you’re feeling like the world is crumbling. If something’s going on with your health. Whatever’s going on in your home, whatever’s going on with your relationships, whatever’s going on with your money.

You guys, all of this experience, all of the way that you’re viewing it, the way that you’re feeling about it, the way that you’re responding to it is 100% up to you and I love knowing this. So if you’re annoyed with someone, if you’re mad at someone, if you’re feeling resentful of someone, I want you to know, you’re creating that. And I’m not making you wrong at all, I just want you to know that you are creating those feelings for you. It’s not them. They’re just being them. But we get to decide how we want to intentionally respond to every circumstance in our life 24 hours a day. This is so powerful.

I just want to slow this fact down for you. This is a fact my friends. I’m 62 years old and after trying all different ways to live a life that I love, this has been the most brilliant way, me taking ownership 100% of the time, me owning my entire life experience. So this week I gave my clients some examples of what they might be struggling with and what they can do about that.

So if you hate letting people down, if you have that thought and you keep saying yes to things because people in your life are expecting you to and then you end up resentful. You end up not doing the things that you’re here to do, the things that you plan to do, the things that you want to do. So you end up feeling burnt out. You end up feeling taken advantage of. You do a lot of saying yes when you really don’t want to do the thing. Those are clues, you guys, that you are not owning your life experience. You don’t like the feeling that comes along with ‘saying no’ to people or ‘letting people down’.

So most women my age, most women in the second half of life, we have literally been trained to be really good people pleasers. And so we think that our joy comes from making other people happy. We think we’re here on Earth to make other people happy. We’ve been told and trained and taught to put ourselves last and to put everybody else first.

So we end up at 62 years old, resentful and bitter and mad about where we are because all we’ve done our whole life is not honored ourselves actually, put everyone else first and did our best to make everyone else happy. Which means we didn’t do the work in the world and do the work in our own life to bring so much satisfaction to ourselves, which means so much value to the world.

That’s what happens when you as a 62 year old woman, a 42 year old woman, a 52 year old woman, a 72 year old woman, you start waking up, being aware of what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling about it, how you’re interacting with people. All the times you are blaming and shaming people because they do not return all of your favors. You spend so much time trying to please them and yet you feel resentment because of it. And yet you feel burnt out because of it. And yet they’re not even happy. They don’t even appreciate it.

And then you just feel like you have spent your entire life spinning your wheels. What for? It doesn’t pay off. It’s not our job to take responsibility for other people’s emotions. I know you guys that I cannot let anyone down, their thoughts let themselves down. My thoughts let myself down. If I have an expectation of someone and they don’t meet that expectation and I feel disappointed, I feel let down, that’s on me. But I’m not saying it in a bad way. I’m saying it, I see what’s happening here. I thought that they were going to do something else.

I’ve been doing all these things for them, hoping that they would give me something in return and they didn’t. And now I feel disappointed, I feel let down. And maybe I’m even resentful towards them. Maybe I’m even feeling like I don’t even want to be in relationship with them anymore. I go to all or nothing thinking. But in actuality, when you’re in the habit of taking ownership of your entire life experience, meaning all of your relational experiences. When you feel disappointed or let down, you get curious about that instead of getting mad or resentful, you get curious.

You do not blame them. You don’t blame yourself. You just go, “Oh, I see what I did.” I was doing all these things for them or I did this thing for them hoping for something in return. But I’m telling you, my friend, we get to freely do things for the people intentionally that we want to without ever needing, wanting, expecting anything in return. Then we don’t get burnt out. Then we don’t get resentful towards them. Then we feel like everything is clean.

And because we’re humans, not everything’s going to be clean all of the time. This is a practice, a direction, a work that we continually are absolutely just trying out every day, every day, every day. So this is my work. This is the work I’ve been doing just to come from a place of 100% personal responsibility in my life, for all of my feelings, for the energy I bring to my day, for the thoughts that I’m thinking, even though my brain, you guys, and your brain 100%, my brain 100% loves to be dramatic.

Our brains love to make any situation a huge dramatic ordeal. So I’m aware of this and this is what’s so helpful. I’m aware that nothing has to be a problem, even if my brain wants to make it this big drama. I know how to manage my thoughts. I know how to calm my brain down. And I do it and I do it regularly. This is me taking 100% ownership of my life, of my days, my daily habits, my daily practices. I look at how I’m responding.

I rarely react to anything anymore because this has been a work of mine. I didn’t like reacting to things, getting upset about things instantly before I had some space to actually look at it and get curious about it. And you guys might do this too. I kind of just was attached to outcomes or attached to people and how people made me feel or how outcomes made me feel. I’m so unattached to all of that and I’m very attached to me.

And the way that I want to feel and the thoughts that I want to think and my plan for the day, the energy I want to bring to the day, the actions I want to take that I plan to take, that I am taking. I am the boss of all of it. That is personal responsibility. I’m just unattached to anything outside of me and I’m very attached to me and my life and everything that I have planned and all of my routines and the way that I’m thinking and what I’m focusing on, all of that, this is personal responsibility. That means that I get to create whatever outcomes I want.

I get to create whatever results I want in my life. So another clue that you’re struggling with personal responsibility, if you have a hard time making decisions. This is personal boundary work. So usually when you’re 62 years old, when you’re in the second half of life, you have deferred to other people’s opinions and other people’s decisions because you don’t want to let them down. You’re worried about what they’re going to think. And you don’t like those feelings that you have and you feel guilty.

I hear my clients say this all the time. They’ll say when I tell someone no, I don’t want to do that or if I set boundaries, then they tell me they feel guilty, they should be doing this for them. Putting themselves last keeps them from feeling guilty. And guilt is a feeling created by our brain. Guilt is a feeling that comes when we think we’ve done something wrong. But I’m telling you, when you are taking full responsibility for your life, 100% responsibility for your life, you are doing nothing wrong. You are doing it all right.

And when you feel guilty, that is a memorized feeling that you have created for yourself for the last 60 years or 40 years or 50 years or 70 years because we’ve been trained to feel guilty. So we feel guilty. It’s like if I do what I want, I’m being selfish, therefore I feel guilty. And I don’t want to feel guilty, so I acquiesce to everybody else. So we have to break that pattern. That’s the pattern we have to break.

We want to be self-confident women in the second half of life, creating lots of value in the world. We have so much to create but when we’re stuck in indecision because we feel guilty for anything that we want to choose, then we are not living our purpose, let’s just call it our purpose on this planet. And you guys, life is going fast, let’s make the changes right now. We get to decide, we get to get good at making decisions. We get to get good at dropping out of and popping out of people pleasing. And we get to get good at feeling all of our negative feelings.

The more we lean into them and feel them and process them and then move on and don’t get stuck in them, then the better we get at personal responsibility and self-confidence and self-love and generosity from a clean place without expecting anything in return.

This is such a fun life. It’s such an amazing way to live. So break up with the habit of people pleasing. Break up with the habit of doing things that you don’t want to do. Break up with the habit of saying yes when you really mean no.

Break up with the habit of going along with things just to keep the peace and not rock the boat. I say, get good at rocking the boat. That’s what we need to get good at in the second half of life, especially as women. Just remember, when you feel resentful, when you feel taken advantage of, I want you to own that. I want you to go, “How did I create this?” I positioned myself to be ‘taken advantage of’.

I want you to get some awareness around that because I’ve been saying yes and making offerings and being accommodating when I knew it wasn’t what was best for me. And actually you guys, it isn’t best for them. Your people need to take ownership of all of their lives and responsibilities. We’re not here to fulfill other people’s needs. We’re here to fulfill our needs. If I’m taking care of me and you’re taking care of you, we’ve got a very healthy, happy, high vibe, very productive forward moving relationship going on. I want you to see that.

So personal responsibility is a real thing. It’s a way of creating a life that you’re obsessed with every single day. It is the way in the second half of life of living a long healthy, vibrant, amazing, beautiful life that you love, love, love and that you feel so energized by. And I just don’t see that many women my age doing it. So if I’m the leader, so be it, I’ll own that and I’ll love it and I’ll do it the best I can. I want you to come with me. It’s so worth the work.

This is a work and it is a direction, as Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey say, it is a direction. I can’t remember if I told you last week or not but Build the Life You Want is a book out that was written by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, that is so worth listening to, so worth reading, so I highly recommend that book. Arthur’s been on several of my podcasts. He was on Simon Sinek’s interview. That was so beneficial, you might want to listen to that. I’m obsessed with Rich Rolls podcast. He was just on Rich Rolls podcast, such a good interview.

Arthur C. Brooks is worth paying attention to right now because he is a happiness scientist of sorts. He teaches a happiness course, I believe, at Harvard, but he has a lot of science backed information about happiness. And let me tell you guys, everything I teach, all the tools that I teach in my coaching practice, I mean, that’s what they’re talking about. And so I have never felt this validated. So I am more confident than ever in what I’m doing and the way that I show up to my life every day just validates that even more.

I keep growing and changing and evolving and growing my capacity, you guys, to do hard things. I’m in the middle of a lot right now and I love it because it was all intentional choices that I made. I wanted to just double down on everything this year and I have. And so my whole practice of managing my thoughts around it, creates so much momentum even when I’m in the middle of it. I can pull myself out of it and get perspective, think thoughts on purpose, create the feelings I want every day. I don’t have to numb it. I don’t have to hide from it.

I don’t have to spiral down or get stuck ever, because I’m so determined to live the exact life I want and to keep growing and evolving and changing. And that, my friends, is taking personal responsibility for your life, creating a life you absolutely love in the second half of life. And you are capable of it, 100% capable of it.

I don’t know when this episode comes out, but I think it’s before October 4th, happy October if it comes out in October. But I do believe that you still have time to join my October 4th group. It will be so worth your while. You will be 100% glad you did it. The things that you’ve been wanting to change that you keep giving up on yourself about, I will help you make so many changes. And you’ll be so glad that you’ve shifted your mindset and taken action on things that you’ve just been wanting to do and you just can’t get yourself to do. I know exactly where you are and I’m 100% sure that I can help you move right out of that.

And get some momentum in these last three months of 2023. This is my last group offering for 2023. And by the time January 1st of 2024 gets here you my friend are going to be changed. I promise you, in three months’ time you can make so many amazing changes in your relationships, in the way that you think and feel about yourself, I want you to come to my November retreat in Avila Beach, California.

If you sign up for this group, you will be invited. I’m going to teach you all about up-leveling your self-concept, your self-confidence, your self-belief, how to believe 100% in yourself. That’s a real thing and I just can’t wait to teach that to you. Alright, my friend, I love you for showing up. You’re amazing, I am amazing and this life is awesome and I will see 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.