There was a season in my life when everything looked good on paper, I had everything I wanted but I was so unhappy. I felt unhappy and kind of ashamed of it because I thought, who am I to complain? Just get on with things….And I also thought it’s just me. I am the problem, there’s nothing for a therapist to fix, there’s a part of me that isn’t fixable. I thought maybe it was genetic, that I was going to be burdened by the same darkness my dad experienced—a depression that he privately carried.  It was at that time that I found coaching and it didn’t make my life perfect, because lives AREN’T perfect….what coaching did was so much better. it helped me to see my own life more clearly and experience it differently. It was like putting on a new pair of glasses. 

Now, that was my story, but you have yours. Everyone has a story. I want you to really hear that. Because we can feel alone in our stories, thinking everyone else has life figured out. But I know now, for sure, that is not true. We are here on this planet to learn and grow and how will we grow without obstacles? How would you ever get better, or become more wise or become more masterful at life? It would be like saying I want to play tennis but I don’t want the net or boundary lines and I want to win all the time. No, the obstacles are what create the experience, that IS the game. So, now I have the good fortune of helping other women transform their stories and put on a new pair of glasses.

And here’s what I see, with smart midlife women….they are carrying an emotional load that they’ve never questioned. For decades now, they’ve been carrying an invisible pressure.  They have been the ones who made sure everyone was okay. They’ve kept the peace, picked up the slack, looked composed. They’ve mastered looking calm and cheerful on the outside—even when they are depleted on the inside.

This episode is for all of you….those of you who have felt that quiet exhaustion……You can’t change anything you aren’t aware of, so today we are going to name the invisible pressure you’ve been carrying, we are going to bring it up into the light… and we’re going to explore what life can feel like when you finally set it down.

So what are these pressures that are so common to the midlife woman’s experience? Okay, so to prepare for this episode, I took out my GoodNotes files of all my clients over the last few years, and I brought each of these women to mind—these beautiful women, and I asked myself, what was she carrying? What was she experiencing that was making her life harder ?   And I came up with a list of four major things….see if any of these resonate, maybe you have some others.

·      She tries to look fine while holding it all together.
So if this is you, you’ve been praised for being steady, competent, patient. So when you're not those things, you tuck them away and you carry those episodes when you didn’t have it all together with shame and regret—when you yelled at the kids, drank too much, or overreacted. Holding it together is good, falling apart is bad and you quietly carry the bad parts.  

·      She Measures her worth by productivity. Rest feels lazy, unless it is earned. Slowness feels wrong. There’s a voice that whispers, You should be or could be doing more.. What else needs to be done? Have I done enough? And the answer is always no. There’s never enough when it comes to how much she can accomplish.  So she thinks she needs more time, but she secretly worries about having too much time on her hands because she doesn’t know who she is if she doesn’t have enough to do. And it creates pressure. And she carries the pressure, day in and day out.

·      She is grieving life not going as planned. She is in mourning over who she thought she’d be now, or how she had hoped her kids would be. She’s mourning the marriage she wanted, or the marriage she used to have, she is  grieving a health diagnosis, she is  regretting choices she’s made…..and I just want to add, I have never coached a woman who was grieving her ambition. I mean, maybe that’s just a function of the women I coach they aren’t thinking, I wish I had been partner, I thought I’d be further ahead by now, or I wish I had done the harder thing, they are thinking, I wish I had given myself permission to be MORE free. Now, I have had clients who are thinking about retiring and they are nervous about it because they don’t know who they will be, they don’t know what they’ll do with their time and it scares them.  Anyway, I just thought that was interesting when I thought about what people were grieving.

·      She is Still trying to be good.
This is such a big deal, it doesn’t matter if you’re 10 or 20 or 70, most women are still trying to be a good girl. Meaning, if you do things “right,” life is supposed to reward you . And to do things right is to not disappoint anyone, not show your anger, get all your work done and more, overextend yourself, minimize your needs, so you’re trying to abide by the rules of being good and you go to a lot of trouble to be perceived as being good.  And then the reward you are consciously or subconsciously expecting doesn’t materialize. You feel misunderstood. You feel unappreciated. You feel like your time isn’t your own. You’re shocked when you’re not treated well because you did all the things—you were so good. And mostly, no one is telling you otherwise, it’s you, WE do this to ourselves. . We are the judge and jury. We behave a certain way and then we tell ourselves if it was good enough.  We internalize the rules of being good and bad, we insist that we uphold them and we become our own enforcement squad. It’s an efficient system, self perpetuating and completely contained.

So these are some of the things that we think are just the facts of our lives and we carry them. They create invisible pressure—it’s like a drag on our energy. It dampens the quality of our life, it dampens our joy. And what I want you to know is, nothing I have outlined here, none of these four things are unchangeable. None of them. It’s true that your past is what it is, the circumstances of your life are what they are, but you have a big control knob in front of you that has the ability to turn up and down the volume on the pressure you’re feeling. What is that control knob? It’s how you tell your story, it’s how you are thinking now about what has happened to you. The pressure isn’t a fact of life, the pressure is coming from how you think.  And that is great news, because if you want less pressure, you will need to go to the source. And the source of all feelings is your thoughts.   

So I want to share some of the most effective ways to turn down the pressure.

The first is you have to become aware of what is driving your invisible pressure. As I mentioned, you can’t change anything you aren’t aware of. With my clients, I question not just what they’re feeling but WHY they are feeling the way they do, meaning what thoughts and stories are driving their feeling. Bringing those thoughts and stories up into the light of day is always step one. You want to name it. There are usually stories running in the background of our minds that we just think are true, and you will be shocked at how malleable these stories are. They aren’t as fixed as they seem. But you’ve got to pull them up and look at them.

The second is your relationship with you is primary, and your relationship with anything is simply your thoughts about it. So tend to your own relationship—what do you think about you on the regular? What is your relationship with your past? What do you tell yourself about your past? How does it make you feel? If your past is over, how do you WANT to feel about your past? You are the storyteller of your past, and you are also the story listener. How do you want your listener to feel?  Like any good movie director, there are a lot of ways to tell a story and movie directors are trying to elicit certain feelings from their audience, and they are very aware that their narration will elicit different emotions. Decide first how you want to feel about your past, then decide how you want to think about it.  As a child, you were dependent on adults for your safety so of course you sought signals outside of you to tell you if you were doing okay. But as an adult, YOU are the voice of authority. Tending to your relationship with you means you learn to prize your own opinion over others because you are the authority now. It is no longer necessary to seek approval outside of yourself, you need to be the one who validates herself. And you may want to improve in some ways, but it’s not because THEN you’d give yourself permission to be think you are good enough. That’s old thinking, it’s a holdover from the past. You are already good. Now, what do you want to create? 

Spend more time thinking about the future. If you woke up with amnesia and you knew nothing about your past, what would you do with what you’ve got? Ya know, I saw a reel on IG the other day that I shared with my friend Nada—that is a lot of what I do on IG is share reels with Nada. It’slike we both laugh and cry at the same things, but anyway, I saw this reel where these women were saying that given all of the amazing advancements in health and longevity thanks to Western medicine, the chances ar enow very high that if you live to 60, you will live to 90. Now, we know nothing is guaranteed, but think of the mindset shift that creates. What are all the things you could do with the next 30 years? Where are all the places you’d like to live? What are the new relationships you could have? Could you be healthier at 70 than you are at 60? Do you want a new occupation? Go back to school? There’s a lot of life to be lived in 30 years time. It’s not that it’s guaranteed, but that kind of thinking changes how you think and feel NOW and that is really the point. The past is over, take your lessons, drain every bit of wisdom you can from your past, and spend more time creating your future. 

You can think that something shouldn’t have happened, you are free to think what you want but I don’t know why you would. If you are free to think what you want, I would encourage you to think things that make you feel better. That thought –that something shouldn’t have happened--will keep causing you so much pain.

We are free to plan our lives, but it is an illusion that things “should” go as planned. I think we have a certain amount of free will, but mostly, life just unfolds and your job is to learn and grow and become more masterful at riding the wave, going with the flow of life.  I think we would all be very wise to drop the illusion that our future should equal our expectations of the future. It makes us think that something is going wrong, but it was just the expectations we made up in our heads that were wrong. It’s like life is going to unfold and you are free to make up expectations but do not assume that they will match reality. Reality always wins, and the more you argue with reality that it shouldn’t be the way it is, the more you suffer. If your entire job is to learn and grow, Maybe your past is perfect for you. We will never be able to objectively prove that that is true, but that is the point. We are making this up guys. We are creating our experience by how we narrate it. You take the facts of your life, the facts of your past,  and use them to be better at life now, to enjoy your life more and turn down the knob of unnecessary suffering.

Okay my friends, that’s what I’ve got for you. If you struggle with some of these invisible pressures, I would highly recommend you give yourself the gift of A 12-week private coaching journey with me to help you turn this pressure way down, rediscover who you are now, and see the possibilities that are in front of you and  have some fun creating these next chapters of your life. Just email me, sheila@sheilatully.com to set up a time for us to chat to see what’s possible. I hope to hear from you, and I will see you all next time.