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Do you ever feel mad at yourself for committing to something that you just don’t want to do? I know you know what I mean. You just don’t have time and no one will miss you if you aren’t there, but you committed and you aren’t that person who doesn’t follow up on her commitments. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s OK to change your mind.
Recently I found myself feeling down and I came to a major realization about why. That is a much longer story, but one of the issues I was having was that I had committed to a few things that I just didn’t want to do. Nothing big, but they were preventing me from making plans for times that seemed like they were going to be much more fun. Now, I am the girl who always shows up, even when no one else does. I am dependable. If I say I will be there I will be there. And, I know that’s a good quality.
However, that “I never let anyone down” piece of me had gone way too far. I had become too rigid. I was not enjoying myself as much as I should have been because I was actually being overly responsible (I know that sounds crazy). I was becoming a Debbie Downer within my own mind! It was just silly.
Then, within a matter of minutes, I changed my mind, and it was OK. I changed a couple of plans and I had a great evening with friends I lightened up the reigns on my dating life and found that every date doesn’t have to be over thought. It can just be a date and now I am having lots of fun again. And, I figured out that every decision I make isn’t set in stone. It was just a decision and now I am making another one. All of this has changed my life! Really!
Of course, I am not advocating ditching important commitments and loved family and friends, but I am suggesting that, if you are like me and sometimes too rigid, it might not be a bad thing to throw caution to the wind and change your plans. There is absolutely no reason not to when it comes to your happiness. Sometimes it pays to make a change.
Try it and let me know how it feels. Do you feel a little naughty? Good. Oh, by the way, the photo above is yarn and knitting needles: I canceled going to a knitting group because I didn’t have a project to work on and was feeling guilty. Problem solved!
Read MoreThink about the beginning of the year. January 1st. It’s a time when we make plans for the next 12 months. We promise ourselves that we will do all the things we didn’t do last year. Then we don’t, and so the cycle goes.
Well, I would like to suggest that we treat September like January and see how much we can accomplish in the next few months. Here’s my thinking: the lazy days of summer are behind us and we have a while before the holidays kick us into high gear. Why not make this time a productive and exciting way to say goodbye 2019!
Remember last January when you made big promises to yourself, only to fall short on the follow-through a little? Now, it’s easy to say to ourselves, “Well, I’ll just wait until the beginning of the year to (fill-in the blank). It might be to lose weight, get in shape, become more organized, learn Spanish. Whatever you didn’t get to this year, you can just push it off until after the holidays. No no no, not good enough!
What better time could there be to become more organized than the end of the year, rather than waiting until you have your head in a vice trying to pull together your 2019 records. Or, if you want to get into better shape, why not get started before the holidays so you have some wiggle room going in? Want to learn a new skill? How proud will you be of yourself when you are already on your way by 2020?
As women over 50, 60 and 70, we should be keenly aware of time flying by: we all experience the feeling. I get mad at myself when I do, don’t you? So make a plan to accomplish just one extra thing before the end of Q4. Just one. Whatever it is. I feel happier just thinking about being able to play Silent Night on the piano for my family. And, I can if I make the call to start lessons in the next week or so. I am going to do it. And, I hope you will, too. Don’t let October, November and December slip through your fingers without making the best of them. Your accomplishments will be mood lifters for sure!
What are you going to do to make good use of the last few months of the year? If you want to go deeper into this topic, join us on the Starting Over at Sixty Sisters Program private Facebook page for weekly videos and to-dos to help you propel yourself forward. And, it’s all free in September.
Read MoreRepost from 1/20/2016
Sometimes you are freed from something that you didn’t know was holding you back. That’s me. And it’s not just the age thing. I’ve never been one to worry about my age that much. My Mother died at 49 (cancer) and my Father died at 55 (stroke). So I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have the opportunity to turn sixty. To be here with my kids at sixty. To get to see them as young adults and beyond. I am a grateful girl at this point. I love sixty!
It is a great time to be unhitching my self from my husband. I had no idea how beat down I had felt for years (not physically, let me make that clear). I was oppressed by the lack of trust in my marriage and that darkened everything in my life. Waiting for him to come home, maybe, and not knowing what that was going to look like was torture. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it always dropped eventually. I built a fortress around myself for protection. I had no idea the enormity of the weight of that fortress and it is gone. Read…my…lips……..gone!
And, while I was living with that, my business was oppressive because I really just didn’t like it and wasn’t good at it. I did it to impress him. It did not. I have been carrying too much weight because there had to be some “place” of happiness and ice cream was that place. I was drinking too much, well, you know why. I was living in a big house on a golf course because I thought that if we moved there maybe my husband would like me better. He just likes golf better now.
I sold the restaurants, I moved to a one room, 1000 sq. foot loft apartment: my husband wanted to keep the house because living on the golf course makes him feel like a big man: you’re welcome. I probably drink less but Have fun more. I am never going to like working out, but I am doing so for way better reasons than to try to make my husband like me again. Funny, I seem to have lost about 195 lbs. (you get my drift I’m sure).
Hooray for me! Happy Birthday!
Read MoreI have written about this topic ad nauseum, but here it comes again: Labor Day weekend is coming up next week and it is my least favorite holiday of the year. Yuck! It signals the end of the summer, the beginning of the busy fall season and worse, it’s usually not a weekend for which I make plans. But that changed a couple of years ago.
I had nothing happening for the long weekend and had no worries about it either. I thought I would just relax and hang around my place. Well, I live downtown and downtown is a ghost town on a holiday weekend like Labor Day. So, stopping into my neighborhood pizza and beer joint was just plain sad. There no one on the street. There was no one in the hallway. There was no one, period!
I could not wait for that weekend to be over and I vowed to myself that I would never spend that weekend with no plans again. And, I’ve kept my word. I didn’t have anything going on this year so I made a plan, and that’s what I want to pass on to you; if you don’t make plans for a time when you know you may be lonely, you are not doing yourself any favors.
I went from dreading the first Monday in September to now looking forward to it and here’s what it will look like for me: I am heading to visit one of my best friends in my hometown, Cincinnati. I haven’t seen her for a while and I can’t wait to have some regular time with her, without any events to bring us together. Maybe we will go to a movie, maybe some pool time, but whatever we do, it will be fun and away from ordinary life.
So what I want to tell you is that if you have a time coming up that starts to bring you down in your thinking, then make your own plan. I am not spending much money to get away, but the feelings of anticipation are so much better than the feelings of dread the week before a weekend in which the highlight is walking my dog.
Please please please, listen to this: you have the ability to change your thinking about what’s ahead by planning it for yourself. Try it and I promise you will be glad you did.
Read MoreWould you want to spend time with… you? That’s a strange question, isn’t it? But I’m serious. The way you present yourself when you sit down for coffee at the local coffee shop or the way you introduce yourself to a possible love interest; would you look forward to hearing what you had to say? Let’s look at this.
I spend time with lots of single women over sixty and one thing I can tell you about us women, single or married, is that as we age, we get a little grouchy (the same goes for men but I don’t care about them right now). Let tell you the things we gripe about immediately when we sit down to a table of, well, anyone who will listen: the weather, the heat, the sore ankle (knee, hip, elbow, foot, shoulder, wrist, neck), what’s on the menu that causes gas, bloating, heartburn, acid reflux, diarrhea, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammation of anything, swelling of anything, insomnia, and general pain. And, we can’t stay too late because we have to get home before dark because we can’t see to drive in the dark. The humidity makes my hair frizzy. The humidity makes my hair flat. The humidity makes my feel swell. I can’t sit here at this high top because it hearts my knees. The air conditioning is blowing on my neck. It’s too cold. It’s too hot in here.
This is all before the first glass of water has been served! You think I’m kidding: I am not. I have heard every one of these complaints when women have just arrived at the table to sit down. Who wouldn’t to spend time with that? I wouldn’t. I don’t. I don’t want to spend time with that woman and I don’t want to invite her to another opportunity to waste my time with her moaning! I just don’t.
Here’s the thing, most women who hit the ground running with this dialogue don’t even know they are doing it. They just moan on and on and wonder why their phones aren’t ringing off the hook (that’s an old fashioned expression, isn’t it?) with invitations to more get togethers. Well, wonder no more, it’s because that’s not fun to be around. That isn’t happy one bit. And, why would I want to be around that again?
Guess what, everything we just said as we strolled up to the table is true. Everything does hurt and it is hot outside and our hair is a collective mess, but, no one wants to hear that. No one cares, at least no one cares right off the bat.
I don’t want to talk to that woman and neither do you and neither do any men who she is considering for a relationship. And, I am not saying we have to be fake. That’s not the message either. Here is the message: if you want to continue to be social and active, if you want people to invite you to join them for various outings, if you want to be asked on a date, you need to present yourself in a way that makes them want you around.
I am working in my Sisters Program on this very topic and I am working with a couple of clients in the WingWoman program on the same. I think it is making a difference in how these woman are being perceived and will continue to make a difference as they work on creating m ore and more relationships.
In order to remain socially active, we must each put our best foot forward. We must be women who others enjoy spending time with and with whom others want to engage.
So, for the rest of the month and into September I am going to be focusing on how we want to present ourselves to others and what we can do, how we can reframe our conversation, to make others want to spend more and more time with us. So, I go back to my original question: would you want to spend time with…you?
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