00:02 - Mark (Host)
yo hey, hey can I ask you a question?
00:06 - Stacey (Host)
I'm here to answer it how old are you, mark?
00:09 - Mark (Host)
I'm timeless. You, you are timeless. That's a great answer.
00:12 - Stacey (Host)
I'm gonna use that I stole it from one of our podcast guests.
00:15 - Mark (Host)
Actually somebody said that marlin sounds.
00:17 - Stacey (Host)
Oh, marlin said that that was.
00:19 - Mark (Host)
Yeah, he was, that was a great, you got to check out that episode. We're talking about?
00:22 - Stacey (Host)
no, no, we're digressing, we're digressing. I know marlin's episode.
00:24 - Mark (Host)
We're talking about another one. No, no, no, we're digressing, we're digressing. I know Marlon's episode was great, but so is this one with Jennifer Artherton, a woman who believes that, even in your third stage of life, that that's actually the stage where you are your most powerful. Yeah, yeah, fascinating.
00:38 - Stacey (Host)
Menopause is a gift, according to Jennifer Artherton. And I know many of us would not necessarily agree with that, but when you listen to her. What are you talking about? You don't make enemies, sorry.
00:50 - Mark (Host)
I love you, honey. If you're listening, he's talking to his wife, not me. Just so you know I love you too. So what was the core of her message?
01:00 - Stacey (Host)
The core of her message was really that just because you turn a certain age 40, 50, 60,- does not mean that life is over. It could potentially mean that life is just beginning.
01:12 - Mark (Host)
Yeah, because you can step into the passion that you've been. What did she say? You put it at the bottom of your list with the dust that you never get to. You put yourself last your entire life as a mom or as a dad or as a parent and as a corporate employer, an employee. You never step into what you want to do, and maybe at the third act is when you have that opportunity, when you still have 30 some years to go, and her story too, where she suddenly woke up one day, she she was 50.
01:43 - Stacey (Host)
She was divorced, she was an empty nester, she was unemployed and she was bedridden. It's like the quadrifecta, that's terrible and after a brief pity party she realized that life wasn't over and she started again. So it's inspiring.
02:02 - Mark (Host)
And she has a podcast called you know you love it. Old Chicks Know Shit. It's a great title, but she found that moment when she was bedridden as the piece that she needed to really figure out everything she figured out. It's an inspiring time. You're going to enjoy listening to her. Very articulate woman, very intelligent.
02:19 - Stacey (Host)
So everybody listen to Jennifer Arthurton.
02:28 - Mark (Host)
Hi, I'm Stacey and I am Mark, and this is the Gurus at Game Changers podcast. Welcome everybody. You know, as we get older and we reach a certain age maybe we cross 40 years old, maybe we cross 50 years old, mark you start to feel maybe a little bit less relevant to the world. Part of you thinks maybe you're not as important to the people around you or even less hopeful about your ability to accomplish more in that what is typically called your third act of life. But another part of you you know it. It knows that your knowledge and experience that you have gained all these years can benefit so many people that you're more important and probably more capable and in fact you might be entering the prime of your life. But you have to see it that way right, and a lot of people don't. That's the reality. They start to check out at a certain age and then they kind of just say I'm going to coast to the finish line. Well, today's guest, jennifer Arthurton, already knows that you're capable of more because she's living it.
03:24
She is the host of a podcast with a fantastic name called Old Chicks Know Shit. That's true, that's facts. Facts Sums it up beautifully, and this is where she shares stories from real women who have done exactly that. They've reinvented themselves, they chase their dreams, they're tackling challenges that they never thought were possible, all in that third act. So her message is not one of it's never too late, it's actually. This might be the ideal time for you. So, if this is the time you've been waiting for, this could be your chance to focus on what's true and meaningful to you, because you have that time. But you have to see it that way, and Jennifer is here to help us all do exactly that. This conversation, hopefully, could give you a spark men, woman, person of any age. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming on. Gurus and games happy to have you here.
04:17 - Stacey (Host)
Thanks for having me so at 50, according to what I've read and heard, you found yourself divorced in an empty nest, unemployed and bedridden with a serious illness. So what? At that time, it's a lot. What, at that time, were you telling yourself? And then, how did you climb out of that trench?
04:38 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
yeah, so, um, I honestly thought this was that my life was over, like this was the beginning of the end. Because you know, the cultural narrative about what it means to be a 50 year old woman is, you know, riding off into the retirement sunset, you know, with a pot of gold under your arm, on the arm of a handsome man, and I'm like none of that was my reality and you know, I wallowed in it for a good while, like I truly believed that you know, if I wasn't a wife, if I wasn't a mother, corporate executive, and all of the roles and titles that I had taken on, that if I wasn't any of those things, I wasn't anything, because I had invested so much of my life in becoming those things, because that's what they told me I should do, and I had never actually like checked in along the way to see if that's what they told me I should do and I had never actually like checked in along the way to see if that's what made me happy, right, if that's really what I wanted to be doing.
05:30
I was just kind of like doing the thing and so you know, after it all fell apart, I felt a little lost. I had no idea who I was like underneath the roles and titles. Who was the woman? I had no idea because I had never actually really checked in with myself along the way.
05:46 - Stacey (Host)
I am literally right now trying to figure out what's my next step, what's my next move Like, what am I going to do? Because it's not like there's 20, 30 years left here. Do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's not over. You know what I mean.
05:58 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Like we're still young in this society, you know Well exactly, I threw myself a big old pity party for like a really, really long time, like a really long time. And when I look back on it now, what I actually see is I was grieving the loss of my life like the way that I thought it was, and I'm really really glad, looking back, that I allowed myself that time. What I call the pity party was actually me working through the grief of everything that I had lost. And you know, when I kind of got through the other side of it, I started thinking like okay, wait a minute, I'm 50. I've got 30 or maybe 40 years ahead of me. Am I literally just going to sit around waiting for the end for like 30 years? Like that feels a little absurd to me.
06:47
So I really started turning my attention to building a relationship with myself to figure out what it was like. First of all, who was I and what is it that I wanted from my life? Because, as I mentioned, you know, we are handed the rules of the game, especially as women, early and we go along and we check all the boxes. You know, be a good student, be a good girl. You know, get good marks, go to a good college, get a job, work your way up somewhere in there, get married and have a kid, you know, do all those things Right. And as I was checking all of those boxes, it never even occurred to me to say, well, is this really what I want to be doing? It was just what I was told I should be doing.
07:24
So I really saw it as an opportunity to to really dig into what did I want from my life, and that was about really going inwards. And luckily, you know, I was forced into a place of stillness. Most days I was too sick to get out of bed and all the things that kept me busy in my life were no longer available to me. So I was forced into this place where I literally just turned inwards and I would ask myself questions like from the smallest of questions, like what do you want for lunch today? Right, like you know, what do you feel like doing? You know I was felt called to write. I had never written anything in my entire life. I just started. Whatever came up, I just started following it.
08:04 - Mark (Host)
How did you end up defining yourself, or I should say, redefining yourself, because up until that point you defined yourself as a wife, as a mother, as healthy, you know if you want to go down that road. So you had these realizations that, ok, that's not what I am, I need to be something else. So I'm going to be blank.
08:21 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Yeah, it wasn't a question of making a decision about who I was going to be. It was about finding those parts of myself that had gotten buried underneath all of got buried underneath life, really right. And so, you know, I started recognizing that I'm actually a very creative person. Had you asked me before that, I would have been like, yeah, no, I write corporate strategy decks, that's what I do. I now recognize that. You know, being creative is core to who I am as a human being and gives me energy and it gives me life.
08:53
You know, I've found, like, skills that I didn't even know I had, right, like you know, around coaching and mentoring. You know, the podcast like, if you told me, you know, 10 years ago that I'd be having a podcast, I would never, ever have believed you right? So it was a question of following, you know, the little things that excited me, like those little nudges that we all have inside, those little inklings. It was about really exploring those things and figuring out, like, what made me happy, like what you know, ignited little sparks of joy in me, versus the things that I tried, where I was like, yeah, no, not for me. And so it's really has become about defining myself on who I am as a person, as opposed to what I do.
09:40 - Mark (Host)
Do you feel like you need to reach a certain age before you can have the perspective that you now have? Can a 30-year-old woman in the heart of defining who she is as a wife, as a mom, as a corporate or non-corporate worker at some level, can she have the perspective? Or do you really need to go through life to say OK?
10:03 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
I get it now and here's who I should be.
10:04 - Mark (Host)
Here's who I truly am.
10:06 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think it's possible for anybody, right, it just become. It involves a level of awareness that you know, over time you become, you understand yourself better. I think you know when it happens to us in midlife it's actually by design. It's perfect timing Because you know in the previous chapter of our lives, as I mentioned, where we're doing everything for everybody else, this chapter of our lives is about focusing inwards, on what we want, like, first of all, who we are as our most authentic being, and focusing on what we want. So you know, if I had to do my life over again, like I, you know, it took a bit of a break in the head for me to get the message that, hey, things are changing and I need to change with it.
10:47
Had I listened to to my own inner voice before that? It was, it was niggling at me all the way along, but I was, wasn't paying attention, like I would find myself often, you know, in a boardroom full of people, half listening to a meeting and thinking to myself is this? It Is this what I worked so hard for? Like it's. Like you know, you climb this mountain. I invested everything that I had to get to this place and then you get to the top and you're like, oops, I don't think this was the mountain I was supposed to be on. That's amazing.
11:18
Right, but you didn't check in along the way, and so you know part of the reason why I didn't and why we often don't listen to that inner voice. So, first of all, I had invested a lot to get to where I was and I wasn't about to just, like you know, chuck it all in the garbage and start over. And the second part was like, if it wasn't this, what was it Right? Like it was, it was too scary for me to even contemplate, so I would tell the little voice to shut up and go sit down somewhere, so I could get back to work.
11:47
Right, and then you know that little, what is it they say First you get, first you get a push, then you get a shove, and if you're still not listening, you get the brick in the head. Yes, Well, that was that's me. I'm the brick in the head kind of person. But I tell people all the time it doesn't need to be, you don't need to get to that brick in the head moment. You can start paying attention to those little, you know, inner voices, that little inner niggling that you have you can pay attention to that a lot earlier.
12:18 - Stacey (Host)
So now you actually do help people right, so you're coaching people in the same thing. You have a coaching business. How did you did that just organically happen, or how did the coaching business sort of come about?
12:27 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I discovered about myself along the way was my like I really wanted to have an impact. I wanted to make a mark, you know, on the world and you know it first started with the podcast because when I first came out of my pity party and started looking around like, okay, where are all these like amazing kick ass women doing incredible things in their 50s and 60s, kick-ass women doing incredible things in their 50s and 60s uh, there wasn't much like what the media reflects back to us about. Being a woman in that stage of life is like bladder leakage protection, meal replacement shakes and, you know, waiting for retirement and I was like, okay, all very well and good, but like there has to be more, like there has to be something else.
13:08
So I started searching for inspiration for myself and started coming across all of these women doing incredible things in the world and I'm like, why aren't we hearing these stories anywhere? Which is what prompted me to start the podcast, because it was the inspiration that I needed to figure out what was possible. Right, like, we think about our careers at the end and we think about retirement, but the retirement part is like a bit of a blurry thing, right, like you don't really know what it is. It's just kind of this blurry. I reach the end and then something happens, you know, and then the credits start to roll, but I don't really know what that is, and so we never actually think about our lives in terms of possibilities for this chapter.
13:46
And so starting the podcast opened the door to all of these different possibilities. And then, you know, that turned into what? First it was a blog, that it was a podcast, and then I had women. You know where I thought I was alone. I had all of these women reaching out, going me too, me too, me too and then it kind of rolled into well, how did you do this? Like, what do I need to do? Like all of this. And then that evolved into the coaching and masterminds that I run.
14:11 - Stacey (Host)
Awesome, I just joined your Facebook group, so watch out. I'm in there, so for our audience, what are three things you say to women who are feeling stuck in middle age? Are there three things that get them out of their stickiness?
14:25 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
First of all, connecting back with yourself is so incredibly important. There are the three S's that I talk about all the time, which are silence, stillness and solitude.
14:38 - Mark (Host)
Hey guys, thanks for listening. If you like what you're hearing, please leave us a review, give us a follow, subscribe, all those things. All those things. We love it because we read each and every comment and it helps shape the show, so we would appreciate it.
14:51 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Please, and back to the show connecting back with yourself is so incredibly important, Right, and the reason for that is just so that you can hear your own voice. You know, the world is a really noisy place and there's always demands on us and unfortunately, we tend to fall to the very bottom of our to do lists, the part where the tumbleweed and the dust bunnies are like. That part we never get to. That's where most of us are on our own to do lists. And so, you know, spending some time in silence, stillness or solitude even if it's, you know, it could be a meditation, it could be a walk in nature, it could be spending 15 minutes having your coffee alone before the rest of the house wakes up Just creating a little pause, a little pocket of time to be able to hear your own voice.
15:41
The other thing I tell women all the time is to check your stories about who you think you are, Because we tell ourselves stories all the time. Well, I'm just this or I'm just that. I'm an accountant. I don't do this. I'm, you know, I'm a mom. I, you know, I could never start a business.
15:51
We tell ourselves stories all the time about who we think we are, and those stories keep us stuck. And so when we find ourselves telling you know, saying, well, I'm just you know, we need to be asking ourselves, well, is that true? Could I learn it? Is there a possibility which I could be right and just start challenging the stories that we have, Because I mean a lot of them.
16:15
Those stories came with us from childhood. Like I, when I was a six year old child, I had I was really bad at printing and my, my letters would always go outside the lines and I had a teacher, when I was six, told me I was a really bad writer. I carried that through up until like my 50s where I was like I'm not a good writer, I'm just not a good writer. And then when I finally realized I'm like, oh, but wait a minute, I am actually a good writer. My printing is still not the best, I will tell you. But, like, those are the types of things that we carry with us and 99.9% of the time they are not true, they are just stories in our heads.
16:51 - Mark (Host)
Can you share a couple of success stories of some of the women that you've worked with and some of the realizations and cathartic ahas that they've had.
17:03 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Yeah, I had one woman who was she worked in the insurance industry. She was also a very gifted artist, but she never actually like. She came to me because she's like I, just it's draining me, it's sucking the life out of me, you know, like I don't know what else to do with my life and she had never seen the possibility of spending more time with her art. In her mind that was just a hobby that she did. And after, you know, we talked through like what are the things that lit her up, like what really felt meaningful to her? And she, what she did, what she was, was actually an indigenous artist. And you know she had said I want to tell the stories of my history through art. So she actually ended up selling paintings, originally like until she left her job and when she retired, like that actually became her full-time gig is telling stories through indigenous art. But she had never actually connected the two. And then another in the mastermind groups that I run I always have.
18:10
Every woman who comes in has to voice her dream or her desire, because there's so much energy and power in saying things out loud. So you know, I had one woman in the group who you know she didn't want. She didn't want to say it. She's like you know me last, I'll go last, I'll go last.
18:27
When she finally came around to her and she started to speak, she said I know this is a really dumb idea, this is really really silly, but I'm just going to say it anyway. And she laid out this idea that she had for this chair she was in the beauty industry of this charity that she had to help underprivileged women feel beautiful. And you know she laid this all out. And at the end she said See, I told you it was really silly. And then I said to her look, will you look around the table at the faces of this woman that you just told her this to, and look at their reactions and tell me now if you think it's stupid. In that moment, when other people witnessed her desire that had been only in her head, in that moment it became real.
19:08 - Stacey (Host)
Why do you think that we're not the middle-aged women of our mother's and grandmother's time? Like what's different about us?
19:15 - Mark (Host)
Good question.
19:16 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Yeah, we are the first generation of women to have held down really big careers and had kids, so we've kind of had all of the responsibilities, you know the home life, the business life and everything else and you know where our mothers and grandmothers were maybe more content to just kind of coast into the finish line. We are young, we are, you know, have have more energy, we have more ambition, we're more vibrant now and you know most of the women who come to the you know the end of their careers are like okay, there's got to be something else, like they want to. They have the energy to do something else. So we're not just content to sit and, you know, visit the grandkids, like we want to do something that's meaningful and important to us. That's's awesome.
20:01 - Mark (Host)
So you had your eureka moment at a very low point right and you were divorced, so you were alone right At some level. That might have been a benefit you could do this on your own and not have potentially an obstacle in your way, somebody, a spouse, in your way? What would you say to the women who are knowing in their head I'm not living the life I wanna live, but my husband is going to fight me tooth and nail if I try to.
20:29 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
And so I tell all of my clients is to take the tiniest possible step that you can in the direction that you wanna go.
20:38
And so, if it is starting a new career, for example, and your family's not on board with it, like how can I find ways to like to research that thing, or to volunteer doing that thing, or just taking like small little bites?
20:52
But I think the most important thing that we can do is to honor ourselves. In fact, we have to. It is we owe it to ourselves. It's our responsibility to honor ourselves and who we are, because our dreams and desires for our lives are not random, like they are parts of us that want to be expressed. And so you know, we have to find ways to honor that expression. Again, it doesn't need to be all at once, but I think we also have to sit down and have conversations with our families, with our spouses, about you know, this is important to me and to honor that. And again, maybe you don't do it all or nothing, um, but maybe you're taking tiny steps in that direction, but you have to come to a point where you are ready to put yourself first on the list that's hard for a lot of women it is it is but I think it is necessary really and I have a feeling that the next generation's coming up.
21:42 - Stacey (Host)
I don't know if you have daughters. I have an adult daughter who's 23. I think the next generation's coming up. See that more clearly because of us, right, exactly Now, shifting a little bit of gear right here.
22:03
I've heard you say that menopause I'm sorry, mark, I don't know if you mind talking about this like as a man. I know, necessarily, not really something. Um, menopause has a very negative connotation. Yeah, correct, and it's just. All the things that you hear about menopause are changes in your body that you don't want. You know, things that are happening to you that you don't love, and there's never I really have never heard anyone but you put a positive spin on menopause. So tell me what it is.
22:26 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Menopause. I consider it to be kind of a little bit of a pattern interrupt. So you know, most often, when people are going through menopause, your threshold for anything that doesn't feel aligned with you is about this big Right, and so you have to start making important decisions about what is for you and what isn't for you Right. It also is about turning us inwards, because you know, for most of us, the ways that we have lived our lives is no longer serving us when we reach these times of this time of our life and so when we can recognize what is not serving us versus serving us and realign our lives. Like you know, I I am not any less busy now than I was pre menopause, but I do things in a very different way because my body can't, you know, nor my emotions or my mental state can't, withstand the same level of stress anymore. So, yes, I accomplished all the things, but I accomplish it in a much more sustainable and nurturing way.
23:21
And this is about like menopause, because, you know, I, like most people, considered my body to be the stick that held up my head, and my only real thought was how can I manipulate it into some shape or form that I want it to look like Right, I didn't really pay much attention to it beyond that, through menopause I have actually gained a relationship with my body that I didn't even know was possible. We're partners now, right Like, where we work together and we still get tons done, like I'm still in the gym, I'm hiking, I'm doing all the things running the business, doing all of this stuff, but I'm doing it in a way that feels nourishing and sustaining for me. So it's really. Menopause is a pattern interrupt to waken us up to what's working and what's not working in our lives, like physically, mentally, emotionally and even, you know, in our physical surroundings.
24:10 - Mark (Host)
What advice would you have for somebody just starting their young adulthood fresh out of college, based on your experience and your knowledge, you know what's interesting?
24:20 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
although my community is called old chicks no shit I'm actually surprised on the daily about how many women who are under the age of 40, they're in the community. I did a post actually the other day on Instagram and it was women in your fifties what's your advice for women in your thirties? That post got more traction than anything that I've done in a very long time, and there were so many women who are like oh, I'm in my 30s. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
24:45
This is all amazing, amazing, yeah, but the thing that I would tell women much earlier on is to prioritize themselves and their desires much, much earlier. Like, you don't need to be. You don't need to be on the bottom of your list. In fact, you shouldn't be on the bottom of your list. And to the point that you made earlier, I think the women coming behind us are much better at this than we are, because we are the role models we came from, our mothers and grandmothers, who bent over backwards and did everything for us, right. So my message is to honor yourself. Follow your passions, right, like the idea that we have work and we have passions as separate things isn't doesn't need to be true Right. So follow your passions and really get to know who you are.
25:32 - Stacey (Host)
What do you think is the biggest misconception about women in midlife?
25:37 - Mark (Host)
I can't come up with one.
25:39 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
As soon as you cross the threshold of a certain number, right Like you, all of a sudden become less relevant, invisible, when I mean we all know that the reality of that is just. I mean it's just absurd. Right Like you have all of this knowledge and wisdom, right, and that you know midlife women are content to just fade into the background and make space for other people to come and do the thing, to just fade into the background and make space for other people to come and do the thing. Right, and I don't know about you, but like I'm not spending the next 30 years of my life, just watching other people do stuff.
26:11 - Stacey (Host)
There's lots of men that listen to our podcast as well, so I would really like to. What would you say to the men Like how can they support women at midlife?
26:18 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
I think a lot of men want to jump to that. I want to fix this for you. I want to make it better when the reality is they can't. And so just being open to listening to the experience and, you know, holding that space for the woman who's still trying to figure out OK, where, where do I go, what do I fit, how do I fit and you know, just holding that space and allowing her to have that exploration, I just think is so incredibly important.
26:41 - Mark (Host)
Where can people reach you? What you know? How they find your website. Give us all the information on you.
26:47 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Yeah, so old chicks, no shit across the board. So it's wwwoldchicksnoshitcom. The podcast is by that name and I'm also. There's also a Facebook group, a Facebook page, all of the same name, so it's easy to find me on all the socials.
27:05 - Mark (Host)
Hey, what's the name of your book? Is it coming out? Is it in the works?
27:08 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
It's in the works. I do not know what the name is going to be yet. It'll probably have the same title to be honest, it probably should. Yeah, it should.
27:18 - Stacey (Host)
It's a very memorable name. This has been wonderful. You're amazing. You're such an inspiration Like. I'm following you now All the things that you're talking about me and my pod of friends need, so I appreciate you Amazing.
27:34 - Jennifer Arthurton (Guest)
Thank you so much for having me.
27:36 - Mark (Host)
So many takeaways for our audience. I really appreciate it.
27:47 - Stacey (Host)
You're still here. You're still listening. Thanks for listening to the gurus and game changers podcast while you're here. If you enjoyed it, please take a minute to rate this episode and leave us a quick review. We want to know what you thought of the show and what you took from it and how it might have helped you. We read and appreciate every comment. Thanks. See you next week.