I had a special guest on the podcast this week, Elaine Blais, who I recently met. And I just love what she’s all about and what she is here to talk to us about today. Elaine is a life coach, and the title she goes by is The Midlife Troublemaker. 

A midlife troublemaker is typically a woman who decides in the middle of her life to disrupt the status quo and stop being a people pleaser. This is because things are not feeling how they should or how you’d like them to. And so you reach a point in your life where you know something has to change.

I think so many of us can relate to the people-pleasing aspect, and that’s normal.

It’s normal to want to be loved.

And what’s so great about turning 40, 50, and beyond is you start realizing, “oh wait, this is my one life. Do I really want to live it for other people, or do I want to live it for me?” 

So many of us women are trained up to be pleasers, to be nice, to smile, and to be compliant. This isn’t necessarily bad in and of itself, but we tend to put our own needs aside, and we tend to put our own dreams aside because we’ve learned to be responsible for everyone else. And truly, we are only responsible for ourselves. I mean, unless you have little children that need your care. But overall, we are always growing and expanding and changing. So It’s time to get honest with yourself about where you aren’t meeting your own needs. And those changes can be really scary. 

But it’s the little steps along the way that add up to that moment of thinking, “Okay, well, if I can do this, I can do that.” The more you trust yourself, the more you can learn to connect with your body and feelings. Then you can let your feelings guide you instead of control you.

So much of that is trained out of us when we’re younger, so when you start to come into your own in midlife,  it’s really about learning to understand the intelligence and wisdom within your body and within yourself that’s always been there.

What’s also important is the idea that everything in life is happening for you instead of to you. So we think all these things happen to us and external circumstances somehow control our lives, but that is not true. We create our lives through our thoughts, feelings, and actions. We are life living itself through us. So we are never victims. And so I love to take women through this process of loving their discontent because often, we don’t know what we want for ourselves. After all, we’ve been so focused on other people that we need to start with what we don’t want to get to what we do want.

Exercise One

An exercise that you can do is imagine for a moment that you’re in an experience where you feel discontent, whatever that is for you. It could be a conversation with somebody else, or it could just be something that you think about yourself. But imagine that you are in that situation, and you allow it to kind of play out in your mind like a little movie. Notice what you feel. Notice what you feel in your body. Notice where you feel it in your body and just be with that and allow it to be it. Emotions and feelings don’t last very long. They’re like 90 seconds if we allow them to move through us, but most of us resist and hold on so much that it feels bigger than it really is.

Emotions are like a wave. They come up, peak, and then go back down. They recede. And if we just allow it to flow, it’s so much less traumatic.

Exercise Two

Another thing you can do is to journal. Write down how you feel, what you feel, and what it looks like. Give it a name so you can own that, and allow it to be something you can see. Almost make it tangible. And then from there, go back to that same situation and this time imagine what you would love to have happen, what you would love to experience, and notice all of the same things. How does that feel? What’s happening? How does that feel for you? And usually, that feeling is very. It brings up feelings of lightness and joy where the initial feeling is heavy and tight. And the point of that is to understand that you have the wisdom to create that better situation, that ideal situation for yourself. So once you allow yourself to go there and tap into that wisdom and feeling, you are open to inspired action to new possibilities. 

The simplest step that you can take right now is to sit back, breathe, and do nothing. But, unfortunately, we often think we have to do things and hurry up and get somewhere, and we don’t give ourselves time to just be, and that’s where the inspiration comes in.

If you push these emotions down and you keep avoiding them with busyness, then you can’t ever envision that next step. You can’t feel what direction you need to go in. If you’re always busy, there’s no room for change or inspiration to come in.

So taking that important first step forward will make all of the difference.