103. Stop Coasting and Reclaim Your Power in Midlife

Autopilot In Driving And Life

Cheryl Fischer 0:00

Have you ever driven a familiar route, maybe to work or to school or to the store and gotten there and suddenly realized you don't remember the route, you don't remember the drive at all. Somehow you were on autopilot. Yeah, you have, because once you've been driving for a period of time, this is what happens sometimes, you're basically hypnotized. And we talked about this in a couple of episodes on the podcast about hypnosis. So the thing is that this also happens in life. We do it with our careers, our relationships, our daily routines. We drift on autopilot, and we need to talk about it. If midlife was only about hot flashes, 3 a.m. wakeup, silly injuries, and worrying about everyone from aging parents to adult kids, we'd all be unhappy and isolated. And that's just not true. Whether you're frustrated at work, stressed about retirement, or just looking for the phone that's already in your hand, you're in the right place. Let's change the story around midlife and start loving this chapter. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast.

Listener Reviews And Quick Thanks

Cheryl Fischer 1:12

Okay, before we get started, instead of a sponsor spot for this episode, I want to thank you for the reviews you've been leaving as we celebrated a hundred episodes. Oh my goodness. So cool to see these. ESAN SCD said, smart show with interesting topics that will make listeners think. SSDC20 said the topics are relevant to what I'm experiencing in my life right now. It's always nice to get validation that you're not alone. ISHL29 said, as an over 50 woman, this podcast has been so helpful. The episode about shooting on ourselves, uh-huh, really impacted me and I've told others too. And then Maj 8614 said, hats off to Cheryl for creating a much-needed show that is actually fun and interesting to listen to. She's a great conversationalist and gives listeners so many great ideas and great things to think about. Oh my goodness. And there are more. Thank you. Thank you so much. In case you're not familiar, leaving a review, whether on Apple or via some other platform, tells the podcast app that people actually really like this podcast and they should maybe show it more broadly to more people. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you haven't left a review, head over to the main Mind Your Midlife page on Apple, scroll down, you'll see where you can rate and review. Thank you so much. All right, back to the show.

What Drifting Really Means

Cheryl Fischer 2:44

Let's talk about what we're here to talk about, right? Okay, drifting. What I want this episode to be is basically a heads up for us. And I include myself in this because we all drift through life, sometimes just forever, sometimes periods of time or certain aspects of life. And so we all need a little shakeup, a little snap out of it. And I need that too, right? Everything that I talk about, I deal with this too. Nobody's perfect. So the problem comes once we recognize that we're drifting, and we're going to talk about what that looks like, that we start to blame ourselves and we tell ourselves that we're lazy, or we just are a procrastinator, or we're such an idiot to stay in this situation, or our minds are against us. How could we ever win? None of that stuff is real. That's not what's going on. So we're going to reframe that today. Your brain is not out to get you, it's just trying to keep you safe. All right. So, what does it mean to be drifting through life? Well, if I say that you're a drifter, this is probably like a 70s or an 80s term, right? But we think about someone who maybe doesn't have a home and is drifting around. That I think didn't the word used to mean that? I think it did. We're gonna say it did. And along with that, if we sort of look underneath, maybe they're not taking care of themselves, maybe they're lazy. There's just all these things attached to this, right? They're not doing anything. Maybe they're uh having to have other people help them. There's all this stuff. But Napoleon Hill, who is the author of Think and Grow Rich, talked about drifting in one of his books. And he says that drifting through life means that you're just accepting whatever life throws at you without putting up a fight. He also said it means you don't have a definitiveness of purpose. Now that's a little bit old-fashioned wording. So how would I say that now? I would say we're just getting up every morning, we're doing whatever we do in the morning, we're going out to go wherever we go every day, we're coming home. At some point, we're feeding ourselves, we watch some TV, we go to bed. We get up the next morning, we do exactly the same thing. We get up the next morning, we do exactly the same thing. Sometimes maybe we complain about it, but we take no action to change it because it's comfortable. It's a rut. And being in a rut happens because you kept going always in that same way, right? Until it gets so deep that it's hard to know how to get out of it. So it doesn't matter if you're the CEO of a company, you're an entry-level employee, you're a busy parent, you're a straight A student, you're a struggling student, it doesn't matter. If you're just reacting to what's around you and following the same path every day, fulfilling other people's expectations without actually thinking about what you want, you're kind of drifting through life. And it's not an ideal way to live because we often reach kind of points in life, and midlife is one of them, where we have this realization that how the heck did I get here? It's exactly the same thing as you drove to the grocery store and you're about to get out of your car and you're thinking, Well, how the heck did I get here? It's the same thing, but with life. Maybe you are in a career that you never intended to stay in for 30 years. How the heck did I get here? Or in a relationship that unfortunately is not going well. How the heck did I get here? Or you're doing some sort of activity that you never really wanted to do, and you're unhappy and you don't want to do it anymore, but you're still doing it. How the heck did I get here? There's a period in midlife of these realizations happening because the path forward is starting to change, right? We see that there's a there's less time left in our lives than the time we have already lived. And that's not meant to be dire. You probably have 50 years to go. And gradually it's less than what you've already lived.

Why Midlife Triggers The Wake Up

Cheryl Fischer 7:09

All right, so your brain is a big part of this. And why would that be? Your brain really loves the status quo, because your brain really loves safety and comfort. And one of the things that I don't love about the way this gets described sometimes is that your brain always skews negative. Our brains do often skew negative, but it's not because your brain is just a snarky monkey inside your head that's always trying to be mean. That's not really what's happening. It sounds great for a clip on social media, but it's not really what's happening. Your brain is trying to keep you alive. And status quo tends to equal safety. And so there you go. Keep safe equals still alive. And in this whole quest to keep you still alive, there's energy involved, right? The brain is part of your body. This is interesting. The brain accounts for 2% of your body weight, two, but uses 20% of your energy. And it uses that energy to make decisions, forge a path, take a risk. That requires, believe it or not, a lot of metabolic energy. So if your brain is tasked with keeping you alive, it's going to try to conserve energy as much as it can. It's just one piece of what's going on inside you that we really don't think about. So if that's the case and your brain is conserving this metabolic energy, then drifting or coasting through life is kind of like skiing downhill as opposed to cross-country skiing or skiing uphill. It's coasting. It doesn't take extra energy. If you're defaulting to the known pattern, the easiest option, that is energy efficient. That is your brain-saving energy. So that's one reason. The next reason, like I said, is your brain wants you alive, which means your brain wants you safe.

The Brain Prefers Safety And Saves Energy

Cheryl Fischer 9:29

And that's good because who knows what we would be out there doing if our brains weren't wired to keep us safe. Oh my goodness, you can only imagine. And at the same time to your brain, a known situation, a known option, a known person equals safe when compared to something new, something different. Safe is the known quantity. And so your brain prefers that because it knows you're gonna be okay in that situation. It knows how to handle that situation, and unfortunately, sometimes your brain is even gonna choose situations that aren't healthy for you, that aren't safe for you, but you've been through those situations before. So again, it's a known quantity. Your brain knows that you can figure it out and you can be okay. So there is a tendency to do the same thing over and over and over again. Not because your brain is your enemy, because your brain is trying to keep you safe and keep you alive. What's the ultimate in safety? This is what I always say: you on the couch, wrapped up in your snuggie, is the ultimate in safety. Nothing is going to happen to you. You are going to be okay, but that life is not going to be a great one because on the couch under your Snuggie feels good for, I don't know, an hour, a couple hours, even a day, a weekend. There's a certain point where that becomes, this is what my life is, and it's not great. So we understand how this is happening. We understand that safety is very powerful, that your brain is trying to conserve energy for you. And also there's always fear, right? There's always fear of the unknown, again, because of that safety. And so you might be running up against fear of failure, fear of somebody judging you, fear of being embarrassed, fear of not having enough money, fear of poverty. All of those types of risks can keep us paralyzed because your brain wants the safe option. So if there's some chance that it's not going to go right and it's going to feel uncomfortable, your brain doesn't want that. Now, how do we get to age 50 something and we realize that we've drifted through our career or we've drifted through our relationship or we've drifted through taking care of our bodies or whatever it

Fear And Known Patterns Keep You Stuck

Cheryl Fischer 12:15

is? It doesn't happen overnight. You never woke up one morning and said to yourself, eh, I'm not gonna really go for anything big in my life. I'm just gonna just put one foot in front of the other every day. Nobody gets up and makes that decision. Or at least it's unlikely that you did that. It's a series of tiny little compromises. And one piece of this is procrastination, right? We put off the scary decision because that's unsafe, unsafe in in air quotes. It feels scary. So we say, you know what? I am not happy with my job, but soon I'll think about whether I should do something. We say next week, next month, next year, we say when the kids are older, we say once I'm married, we say once I'm not married, we say once I'm whatever. I'll do it then. And I wrote an email, I've referred to this email so many times. It's funny. I've wrote an email this summer to my my subscribers saying, you will not have more time when the summer comes. Meaning, I can't tell you how many people, especially when I used to be growing my direct selling business, I can't tell you how many people would say to me, I'm gonna do that thing when I have more time this summer. And a lot of times I was talking to teachers. I was a teacher at the time. And so, gosh, the summer seems like it's gonna be this amazing stretch of two and a half

Tiny Compromises And Procrastination Traps

Cheryl Fischer 13:55

months of free time. No, never. Let me tell you, every teacher has a list of summer projects. I had a list of summer projects. I also had two kids that I wanted to spend time with. That was part of the reason I was a teacher. And so we had a lot of stuff we were doing. And that always happens in the summer. Always happens in the summer. No one ever gets all their projects done. And if you've said about 10 different things, I'll deal with it in the summer. It's not gonna happen. Or if you've said, you know what, in the fall I'm not as busy. Or next month my job won't be as busy. So I'll be able to think about this. Or once I blah, blah, blah, then I won't be as busy. I'll be able to think about this. All of that is not true. It's a trap that we fall into so easily because it seems right now like everything is a lot. And then it won't be, right? Okay, another thing that sometimes is going on, how we start to get into this drifting and let it go for a long time, besides procrastinating on these little things. If you don't actively decide on a purpose, a goal, your environment kind of fills that gap for you. So if you don't pick a lane, a route, a path where you're headed, and you just get in your car and you start driving. I mean, we don't do that. So it's kind of hard to imagine what would happen. If you get in your car and you know where you're going, you're probably gonna get there most of the time. If you get in your car and you have no direction, you're gonna start being impacted by the people around you, the people in the car, people wanting you to run an errand for them, all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with what the purpose of that car trip could have been for you to start with. So hopefully that metaphor actually hung in there. It was limping a little at the end, but you start absorbing other people's opinions, other people's fears, limiting beliefs from other people around you, and you stop deciding for yourself. You start letting all of that absorb into you. And I think this has gotten to be a bigger problem because we're letting this come from social media as well. And I recognize that I'm on social media, so I can feasibly be part of the problem, but I try at least not to be part of the problem. I try to be part of the help, the solution. But there's a lot. If we just leave it be and we don't have any goal or any decision, it's gonna come from somewhere and you won't have as much control

Letting Others Choose Your Path

Cheryl Fischer 16:39

over it. So that's a piece of what's happening as well. And the other thing, and this to your brain feels like safety, is it's easier to find something to blame and then just sit in that. That's safer from a brain perspective. So blame the economy for whatever's going on with your money or your job or something like that, your stress. Blame your boss, blame your spouse, blame your partner, blame your upbringing, blame your parents, blame your friend, blame whatever's going on in your situation. It's easier to do that than to take ownership. And that means we've sort of given up our power. We've given up our agency to use a bigger word there. We've basically told ourselves we don't have any control over this situation. It's X, Y, and Z's fault. So let me just drift along. There's the drifting. If you don't have any power, one foot in front of the other, drift along. But that's how it happens. It's not one decision, it happens little bits at a time. So now that I've made you concerned, now that I've stressed you out about that and you're wondering, what am I drifting through in life? Let's talk about what you can do. Because there are things that you can do. And the first thing, and this has been such a powerful concept for me, and I think this came from Bob Proctor when I was learning from Bob Proctor and Sandy Gallagher about lots of different mindset and goal setting and success habits. He says, one of the first things you have to do is take 100% responsibility for everything in your life. And when I

Blame Versus Ownership

Cheryl Fischer 18:31

first heard that, I thought, well, what about like the people who were in charge when they were responsible for something? Or what about the situation that I was in? Or what about like a medical problem? You're saying I need to take 100% responsibility for things that happened to me that I didn't actually control. I couldn't control with any decision. It's weird. But the idea is this no, we don't get to control what other people do, and we don't get to control what medical situation happens to us necessarily, and we don't get to control things like that, but we can control what we do now, right? We can take responsibility for how we act now in that situation. We can take responsibility for how we look at it, we can take responsibility for the decisions we make, we can take responsibility for moving forward in a way that we want to. I would love for you to sit with that because to me that was one of the most empowering things that I've heard in a long time. No, it's not your fault that you are in a situation. Maybe it's someone else's fault, but it doesn't matter. We're gonna leave all the fault and we're gonna say, here I am, and I'm taking a hundred percent responsibility. So what am I gonna do? How am I gonna be? And that doesn't mean you can't

Take 100 Percent Responsibility

Cheryl Fischer 20:02

pray, you can't ask for guidance, you can't get help. Of course, you can do all those things. And that's you taking responsibility, right? You're taking actions that are powerful in this situation. That is the biggest mindset shift that you can do because it affects everything. And that's why I'm kind of pausing and like letting us absorb this. And you'll have to shift again, and you'll have to shift again because you'll find yourself blaming, you'll find yourself drifting, you'll find yourself complaining. We're humans. And this, as my very first success coach said, this is the work. Those constant shifts and resets and resets and resets, this is the work. You can't just get an A in this class and then go forth and live perfectly. The work is the little reset, and that's okay because you now you know how to do it. All right, so once we catch ourselves drifting, we work on saying to ourselves, okay, I am 100% responsible for everything in my life. What do I want to do? Another thing we want to do is we want to kind of disrupt this drifting rhythm. Do things differently. And at first, this might not seem related, but it's kind of a powerful brain exercise. And that is just picking small things to do differently. Drive a different route to work. Don't drive in the automatic route that you don't even have to think about. Do something different in the morning. If you always got up and you went straight downstairs to get coffee and then you came back to take a shower, whatever, do it in the opposite order. Do something different, go for a walk, whatever. Even down to if you

Disrupt Autopilot With Small Changes

Cheryl Fischer 21:54

are right handed, you probably brush your teeth with your right hand. Try brushing your teeth with your left hand. Change it up. Because when you do that, you're forcing your brain off of autopilot. And even on what seems like an unrelated little thing, it will make a difference. It is not unrelated. It will make a difference. Force your brain out of autopilot, and you're going to notice things that you might not have noticed before. And maybe then this is an opportunity to say, oh, wait a minute. I want to have 100% responsibility in my life. And what am I doing here? And then the last thing I will say, and this is something that I often talk about with my coaching clients, is emotionally charged thoughts have really surprising power. And this is why

Emotion Makes New Thoughts Stick

Cheryl Fischer 22:52

you will, I guess we haven't talked about this in a while, but you'll hear me talk sometimes about affirmations and tapping, either or and if you start saying an affirmation, let's take a funny one. I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me, to quote Stuart Smalley from years ago. If you quote it to yourself regularly in this way, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, people like me, well, that is not going to help you at all. Because the way that our brains rewire themselves are constant spaced repetition with emotion. You gotta feel good about this thing you're thinking. You gotta add emotion to it. So if you're going to do an affirmation, make sure you feel it. See that thing being true, feel it. That's how it gets absorbed. That's why tapping is pretty cool because you're smoothing out the flow of energy and emotions in your body. And you can find more about that, or you can reach out to me, go to CherylPFischer.com/ recharge, set up a free call, we can talk

Notice Your Drift And Reset

Cheryl Fischer 24:04

about it. My challenge for you then thing I want you to remember is to just try to notice in your life where you're drifting, where you're on autopilot, where you're not really paying attention. You're just doing the same thing every day, and you're not really making any decision. You're following the path someone may laid for you, or you're following the path you laid for yourself. Notice kindly. Think about it in the sense that you know what? I am uh 100% responsible for here, right now, where I am. And what do I want to do? And then let's start waking your brain up a little bit. Change one thing today that gets you out of this hypnotic drifting state. Brush your teeth with your left hand. And you're gonna laugh when you're doing it, and that's a good

Follow Next Week Plus Sponsor Notes

Cheryl Fischer 24:52

thing too. As we wrap up, make sure you've hit the follow button on your podcast app because next week's episode is gonna be so cool. I am talking with a professional photographer about how you can actually like your pictures and why you do want to be in the picture, and you're gonna love it. And in the meantime, if your brand or business is looking for ways to reach savvy midlife women, there are a couple sponsorship slots available towards the end of this year on Mind Your Midlife. Go to Cherylpfischer.com / M Y M sponsor info and take a look. I'll put the link in the show notes.

Closing Reminder For Midlife Care

Cheryl Fischer 25:30

And keep remembering, midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself. On the outside, your body, the people you spend time with, and on the inside, what's going on in your mind? A little bit more care makes a big difference.