Latest / All The Light She Found / Why Being a Beginner Again Might Change the Second Half of Your Life
Transcript
- kelly: Well, hello friends. I am so glad you're here with me today. I am your host, Kelly McGurk, with all the light she found. Well, this week, what a great week. Actually, this week was a little rough, I'm not gonna lie. had a little crink in my neck. I'm not gonna say little, I'm gonna say life altering for no reason, and it's been a little bit difficult, but With that said, I still had a great week. And I hope you did too. was thinking about the podcast and kind of what's happening in my life, and I'm gonna intertwine them with conversations with my besties and conversations with some of my clients who I just adore. It it's interesting how We get to a point in life where we decide we're no longer a beginner. It's like we were supposed to have shown up, become who we were supposed to become, been the most successful version, done all the things, and now you're like, okay, so I've just landed, or what does this look like? What what does new beginning even look like? You know? And I have clients going through that. I've gone through that in the last couple of years. I have friends going through a life change where we're starting something brand new and it just seems like Beginning sounds so scary. Starting something new sounds so scary, but what if we made it like more exciting? I mean, what if the life you haven't even lived yet requires you to be bad at something first? I just started asking why do we get so afraid of beginning something new? Like, do we tell ourselves, I already know what I like, I don't need to try that, or that's not really my thing, or I'm too old for that, or I feel stupid going in there and not knowing what I'm doing. But I wonder if there's something else underneath it. Because when you think about it, beginning requires us to give up control over how we're perceived. We have spent most of our lives, most of us, becoming competent and being a beginner at anything can threaten something in us. Like I'm gonna go back to basics, right? Like when I started pickleball, I didn't know the rules. Or you go to a foreign country and you don't know the language. it starts you start getting questioned like what what if this is awkward? What if I go you know, out with this new friend and we don't have anything to talk about and it's awkward. I think we have to be willing to temporarily become someone who doesn't know what they're doing. And that is super hard for grown people who have spent their entire lives kind of getting in a pattern of comfort so that we know what we're doing. Competence is fantastic. Let's be honest. Who doesn't love to feel competent? But eventually we start choosing things partly because I think we already know we'll succeed at them. You know, like the same work, hanging out the same people, the same restaurants, the same vacation, the same routines. There's comfort in that. You know, it's comfortable to go, I know myself. But there's a question underneath that. Do you know yourself or do you know the version of yourself that you've practiced the longest? Cause there are parts of you that can't emerge in your existing environment. I mean, let's be honest, you can journal about who you might want to be until your hand falls off. You don't know you're brave until you're scared and you do it anyway. I mean, you don't know that you're adventurous until you're standing somewhere unfamiliar. You don't know that you can walk into a room full of people alone until you do it. Identity doesn't come just from introspection. Sometimes identity comes from experience. I talked about that in one of the episodes about borrowing courage with when I was talking about the dentist. You know, I I was thinking about this. I was thinking anything worth becoming requires, I'm just gonna call it a beginner's tax. I mean, we have to suck first, sometimes. You know? I want to play pickleball, the beginner's taxes. Maybe I'm gonna miss balls that appear physically impossible to miss. And that's gonna be frustrating. If I wanna start dating again, the beginner's taxes, awkward conversations. If I want to start a new business, the beginner tax is doing things inefficiently because I haven't learned them yet. I mean, let's be honest. I want to change my life in some way. My beginner's tax is I'm gonna feel like someone who doesn't quite know how to live in the new life yet. It's so interesting. We want a new life without the awkward period where we don't know how to live it. I talk to my clients about this all the time because it comes up and it comes up and it comes up. When there's growth happening, when we've made decisions to do something new or different, when we've decided to shift gears in our life, there's gonna be that uncomfortable middle, right? Where You're not the person you were, but you're not quite the person you're gonna be. And I think I've brought this up before, but it's like if people can just recognize that, you know, when you're going through a life change, retirement, divorce, dating, finding new friendships, starting a new career, you know, I have a friend that's starting a new job after 25 years, you know, like that. beginner feeling, it doesn't matter how old we are, it's still that uncomfortable. Am I good enough? This is humbling. This is embarrassing. What if I don't do it right? And it's so interesting because we're sitting here in middle age and we're still worried about that. The thing is, I want to talk about like I think this is the very reason sometimes that people stay in lives they've outgrown. Because beginning again can mean something much bigger than just picking up a new hobby. Starting divorce, it's liberating and scary, right? Starting over after losing someone. you know, that you've been with your whole life. That's scary. Going back to school, changing careers in our forties or fifties, making new friends after moving. I mean, things are just coming to my head. Learning how to live alone. Building something that maybe the people around you don't quite understand, learning how to be alone after your kids leave home. I mean, there are so many stages where we have to do something that's uncomfortable. And you're a beginner at that part of your life. Nobody talks about how strange it can feel when you're incredibly competent at the life you used to have and completely inexperienced the life you're walking into. I think There's some grief in beginning again. I wanna say that I've like to in my life frame beginnings that's exciting, fresh start, a new chapter, reinvention. But something still ended. And I talk about this a lot in therapy. Like, even if the thing that ended needed to end or is a healthy ending for you, doesn't mean you're not gonna have grief around it. Right? Like It may not be the grief of what it was, but it'd be the grief of what you wanted it to be or you had hoped that it would be, or the grief of what's gonna change. Maybe in a situation like a divorce, you know, how are our friends gonna choose? who do we go, who gets invited, you know, in the friend group after a split? It's like something ended for something to begin. And even if you wanted the ending, you can grieve the version of yourself who knew exactly how that life worked. You knew the rhythms, you knew your role, you knew who needed you, you knew where you belonged. And suddenly I've been here, man. You're standing in a life that doesn't have much muscle memory yet. Don't get confused though, guys. Sometimes we don't miss the old life. We miss knowing who we were inside of it. Think about that. You may not miss the old life, but you miss knowing who you were inside of it. Because now we have to challenge ourselves. We have to step out of our comfort zone. We have to live in uncertainty. All the different changes that we all go through, you know, like the stages of our life where, you know, your adult kids might be struggling with something, or your best friend is dealing with cancer, or one of your friends lost their parent. There's so much happening in this stage of our life. Your friends, kids, and your kids are getting married, career change, menopause, anything that can change our identity, you know. and it can be hard. To start something new. I think we've been taught that confidence equals action. When I feel confident enough, I'll do it. That's kind of crap. Because to be honest, we've talked about this before, where we borrow our courage, where we can like, where we can make ourselves do hard things, right? We can do things scared. I've done it a million times. I remember when I used to have a bunch of graduate interns. And they would be so scared. And I remember that in my grad school. But I used to always tell them, fake it till you make it. Nobody knows that you don't know what you're doing, except for you. You know? And so you don't want to bring that energy with you, that scared energy. You want to fake it till you make it because you know that's how you borrow courage from yourself. You do something scared, nothing tragic happens, and your brain goes, wait, we can do this. Then you do another thing, and nothing catastrophic happens, and another, and eventually we start telling ourselves a different story. Confidence is not something you need before you begin. Confidence is one of the things beginnings creates. I don't need to be confident to go into it, but once I do it scared and it works out, I gain confidence. At some point in our adulthood, without realizing it, I think we, this is kind of a bummer, but I think it's true. I think we start accumulating less. The last time you carried your child, the last time everybody lived under the same roof, the last time we had a family vacation with a certain configuration of people, the last Christmas before someone died, the last time you walked out of a house you once called a home. Almost none of these moments announce themselves. Cause you know what, you don't know it's the last time. That's freaking life, man, right? if life contains less we can't control, maybe we ought to intentionally keep creating firsts. This is my thought now. This is kind of where I feel like I'm living in that space. I've lost so many people that I love and I wouldn't have planned any of it. I I wouldn't, yeah, I couldn't have predicted all of that. But I definitely feel like in this season for me, and part of the reason that I wanted to do the podcast is because I think we can shift our mindset from, my gosh, everybody dies, or my life is feeling so unpredictable, or when's the shoe gonna drop. I think maybe when I can intentionally do things that scare me, intentionally start new things, intentionally create experiences and relationships that I want moving into the next chapter. It gives me more of a sense of control, which we all know control is fake anyway, but it's like it's kind of like this liberating thing where you can go, okay, life threw me a pile of poop, and I can clean it up and move forward and do things that actually I want to do. So yeah, my chapter has transitioned from what I thought, but if I have a new chapter, what do I want it to look like? It doesn't have to be the old one. And I feel like that's something that's really fun right now, where I'm at, is trying new things, meeting new people. I don't know, finding new friends. I'm just enjoying my life right now. Maybe first are how we remind ourselves that our story is still moving forward. I think that's so important. I think, like especially in middle age. when sometimes our target is retirement or our target is, you know, who knows what yours is. But you know, maybe we've been working towards this goal of like financial security and you can just sit in the sweet spot, like, but doing maybe new firsts are how we can prove to ourselves that our life is still growing and moving. I think when you're 22, it's obvious you want to ask, who might I become? Who am I gonna marry? What do I wanna do? Do I want have a family? at my age, I think there's some expectation that we're supposed to just be like, here's who I am. I've achieved, I've arrived. But why? Like, why is that the case? I think I watched that growing up too. I didn't see a lot of people that in middle age that were super curious and were creating new exciting pieces to their life. So I'm wondering if maybe one of the greatest mistakes we make sometimes is as we age, confusing knowing ourselves with being finished. I think I can know myself deeply now and still surprise myself. And I love that. Thinking, like, imagine yourself 10 years from now. Not 90, not our deathbed, just 10 years. And imagine looking back at you right now. What do you think you'd say? Cause I'm guessing I'm not gonna say, gosh, I wish I would have been a little more careful. Gosh, I wish I would have done less. I think probably that 10-year-old version of me would be like, my God, we were so young then. I think that's the thing we never understand about the age we're currently living. We look backward and think, God, I was young. But we almost never look at today and realize this is one of the younger versions of me that I have left. Ten years from now, I may desperately wish I had the body, energy, the freedom, the opportunities, and the time that I have today. I feel like this isn't about scaring ourselves. I feel like it's about waking ourselves up a little bit. The question isn't am I too old to start? it's but more of maybe What if I don't? I don't think we're supposed to spend the second half of our lives proving that we figured out the first half. I personally feel like I'm still allowed to be curious. I'm definitely allowed to change my mind. I'm allowed to walk into rooms where nobody knows me. I think I'm still allowed to discover things I may be terrible at or things that I may be freaking awesome at that I didn't even know. I think we're also, which I love, allowed to become people that my younger self couldn't have predicted. There are versions of you and I that can only exist on the other side of something that we have not tried. I think our life isn't asking us. to step back. I think it's asking us if we're still willing to begin. Like, let's do a first. It doesn't even have to be a huge one, right? And when you're standing there feeling awkward, ridiculous, excited, terrified, or all of those, remember you're not behind, you're a beginner. You know, like I love this. I love thinking about this, about what our next season holds if we choose to expand, if we choose to continue to be curious. If we choose to try things that maybe we're gonna look stupid at, that's okay. I think that's a much younger version of us that's concerned with what people think. I think a younger version of me would have like, my gosh, what if they think I'm stupid? my gosh, what if this? And and she shows up occasionally still, you know? But I mean, at the end of the day, who cares? Like, let's try the things. Let's look into new. Thing. Let's step into territory that feels uncomfortable. Life may not be asking you to step into a new chapter right now. Maybe you're in a sweet spot, but it doesn't mean that you can't try things that scare you. And if life is got you in a different chapter, in a scary spot you haven't been through before, just know you can do that. Know you can walk into it. And instead of letting fear hold you, be curious. Be curious about what brings you joy. Be curious about what things you've never thought about trying, but maybe you'd like to. Put yourself out there and see what you can learn. See what can embarrass you still. Why not? So this week. I hope you guys found a little light. And I hope as you move forward you think about some things that maybe you might want to try or do different. We're not too old to learn. This could be in a really exciting time to try something, do things that are out of your comfort zone and see which ones bring you joy. I'm Kelly, and this is all the light she found.