Latest / Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden / The Long Run, Who's Gonna Make It?

Transcript

The Long Run, Who's Gonna Make It? · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

• 0:10
  speaker-0 (00:02.22)
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  Welcome to my realm. I'm Tammy Jordan, and this is Butterfly Days, the podcast that proves you're not past your prime. You're living in it right now because women don't have expiration dates. Butterfly Days is a celebration of the extraordinary potential of Gen X and Boomer women. Throughout history, women have shared wisdom to uplift and empower one another. And you're about to learn hard-earned wisdom and best-kept secrets.
• 0:15
  From interesting, inspiring women. So if you're ready to embrace your butterfly season with confidence, find joy in the present, and create a legacy that matters, you're in the right place. No more holding back. Let's spread our wings now. Here we go!
• 0:20
  speaker-0 (00:55.116)
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  Welcome to my realm. This is Tammy Jordan and you're listening to Butterfly Days. I've been thinking about something, and I think you're gonna be glad that I did. Because I think at the end of this episode, you're gonna like the freedom and the peace that the questions I'm about to ask you are gonna bring to you. You know
• 0:25
  I've invested hours in rooms with people who are dying. And you know what I've never once heard or had any other Dilla tell me that they heard anyone say? We never heard anyone say I wish I'd pleased more people or if I'd done everything correctly, I would have been happier. Not the executives, not the women who raised four children and ran the PTO.
• 0:30
  Or the ones who work grueling shifts in the ER, not the ones with the impressive obituary already half written in someone's head, not once. But I have heard this in one form or another, and so have my colleagues repeatedly. I wish I would have realized what actually mattered. So sit with that difference for a second. That's someone discovering at the very end when there's nothing else to be done.
• 0:35
  That they were measuring the wrong thing the whole time. It's a miscalculation found too late. And it comes from people who have no reason left to lie, no performance left, nothing to protect and no one to impress. So here's the question this episode is actually about, because asking it now can transform your life and the truth of your butterfly day's heart.
• 0:40
  Beats right here. What were we measuring and whose ruler did we use? You were handed a scorecard early in life. So early you probably don't remember receiving it. And it started simply gold stars, great, be good, do well, be praised. And let me be clear, that's not an evil or a bad system inherently. Humans need rewards early to help them find appropriate lanes. We all know that.
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  speaker-0 (03:20.824)
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  But as a child, thinking simply, you may have come to believe the reward itself was the point instead of the good that it was meant to inspire. And then it grew with you, you know, the degree, the title, the promotion you got while pregnant because you weren't gonna let anyone say it slowed you down. But if you think this is a conversation about careers or against hard work, girl, stay with me.
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  Because for most of us, work was never where the scorecard lived the heaviest, you know? It lived in the marriage that looked so perfect from the outside, in the children who reflected well on you, or that they adored you back, in being the daughter who never asked anybody for anything, in being the woman who never said no, the friend who always showed up without asking it back, the good girl.
• 0:55
  The one who held it all together so visibly that people said, I don't know how she does it. And likely you took that as the highest possible grade. Here's what all of that had in common. Every one of those achievements was achievement that was pursued for its own sake, a template that you were handed, not in service of anything that you had chosen, and not necessarily aimed at a good that you defined.
• 1:00
  Just accumulation, just proof. And underneath it was a promise. Probably nobody said it out loud, which is exactly why it worked. Promise was do enough, be enough, and you'll feel whole.
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  I want to be careful here, because this is the turn. That promise didn't fail because you fell short of it. That promise fails either way. The woman whose marriage lasted and the one whose went bust. Or the woman who made partner and the woman who got passed over three times were handed identical equation. One of them scored high and one of them didn't.
• 1:10
  speaker-0 (05:32.374)
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  And neither one of them arrived at feeling whole because the equation was wrong. So let me say the truest version of this that I know. You are not wrong to want to matter. Actually, that is the highest expression of being human to want to matter. You just had the wrong instrument for measuring it. And here's the root of why it never landed and it never dawned on you.
• 1:15
  Every one of those measures pointed outward. They asked someone else to issue the verdict on your worth. But the validation you were actually starving for is never really theirs to give. It only ever comes from one place, respecting and honoring, and yes, even loving the woman, doing the measuring. You cannot be praised into that. It runs the other way.
• 1:20
  Which raises a fair question. It wasn't working, it was never going to work. So why did we do it for like over thirty years? And I want to answer that honestly, because a cheap answer is insulting at our age, you know? You count on me to pull the curtain back and allow you to see what matters. I think we stayed because the payoffs were real. That's the really uncomfortable part.
• 1:25
  A scorecard that never rewarded anybody would have been chucked in a year, but this one paid. The raise came, the thank you came. Your mother finally at forty three said the thing you'd waited your whole life to hear, and you can still tell me which earrings she was wearing and what hairdo she had. Those weren't imaginary, and you weren't chasing a mirage. They came unpredictably.
• 1:30
  And that's critical to see at our age. You know why? Because anyone who works in human behavior will tell you this. Unpredictable reward is the most durable conditioning there is, stronger than reliable reward. Because if the praise arrived every single time, you know, gotten bored with it by thirty, it came sometimes, just often enough. Never when you could predict it.
• 1:35
  speaker-0 (07:59.512)
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  Thirty years of not knowing which effort was gonna land is precisely the recipe for a woman who cannot stop trying to nail it right. You aren't stupid. You are getting real reinforcement on a schedule. And you know what else? There's a trap folded inside it that I want to name out loud because it catches the strongest women the hardest. Every payout confirmed.
• 1:40
  the instrument you were using. Success never reveals the miscalculation. No, success validates it, which means the women who achieve the most are carrying the most evidence that the scorecard is air quotes correct, and they're very often the last ones to question it. Now, one more thing and this matters a lot to me. I despise
• 1:45
  Blaming structures for synthetic moral high ground. I just think it's cheap. And I want to be clear here, nobody played you in this. There's no villain in this story. The people who handed you that scorecard were keeping it themselves. Your mother was scored on it, your boss was scored on it, your family, your community, your church, your neighborhood, your friends. All of them living by the same measure and all of us believing it.
• 1:50
  We all drank the Kool-Aid. I'd love to give you someone to be angry at. But you know what? A villain would just let us stop right here. That's the problem. We'd be satisfied, maybe a little sanctimonious, and change nothing. What's left when you take the villain out though, is the mechanism. And y'all, the mechanism is the thing you can actually do something about.
• 1:55
  So I love being able to be clear about that. You know, as a reform good girl who always tried to get good grades, please everyone, and who thought if I obeyed all the rules, I could be happy. It was such a shock to hit the moment when I realized even when I did those things, I was not happy. And the feeling of fulfillment was fleeting if it ever landed. And I kept wondering when I would feel like I had arrived.
• 2:00
  speaker-0 (10:25.176)
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  That I became a success, that my heart would feel full, that I was deeply proud of myself. But it kept seeming to be just beyond my grasp. There was always this niggling hole that was kind of unfilled. It made me want to understand why I did the things and didn't get the results that mattered. Why was I feeling a little hollow, even though my life seemed pretty good on the surface?
• 2:05
  And I think you get me on this. We are not alone in this revelation, y'all. That's why we're having this conversation right now. Because you know you did all the things, and then something happened around fifty. The payout slowed, then stopped. The kids left, the career plateaued, or maybe it ended. Your parents got sick and then maybe they died.
• 2:10
  Your body aged and the world responded to that change by looking straight through you or straight past you. The room stopped turning when you walked into it. Nothing pays the way it used to, and that's the truth. And we have a name for that. We call it a midlife crisis, but it isn't a crisis. It's the reinforcement schedule breaking down. And I want you to hear what that means.
• 2:15
  Because it's the opposite of what it feels like. You didn't suddenly get wiser. You got quiet enough to notice for the first time in maybe three decades, there was enough silence in your life to ask whether the game was worth playing. And that silence felt like loss maybe. But the brilliant thing is this is the exact condition that makes everything I'm about to say happy.
• 2:20
  possible. Before I tell you what replaced the scorecard, I have to draw one line. If I skip it, the rest of this sounds like some sort of weird contradiction. So let's talk about contribution, about service, about offering your true gifts to the world and how good that feels. And you have every right to stop me and say, you just spent 20 minutes telling me I've been living for other people and now you're telling me to
• 2:25
  speaker-0 (12:50.582)
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  Live for other people? No, sister no. The difference is authorship. Assigned means someone else decided what you owed and you paid it to keep your standing. Chosen means you decided out of your own values what you wanted to spend yourself, your precious time on. And notice what authorship requires.
• 2:30
  You cannot choose your own measure until you respect yourself enough to trust it over anyone else's tally. That's the hinge the whole pivot turns on. We stop doing things because we were told they'd finally make us enough, and we start doing what's meaningful to us because we decided we are worth answering to. The activities
• 2:35
  That you do can still look identical from the outside. Same grilled fish with a side salad, same board meetings, same Tuesday afternoon, same watch the grandkids, but one of them empties you out and one of them fills you up. And you already know the difference in your body. You've always known. You just didn't allow yourself to use that information. So here's the correct instrument.
• 2:40
  The old one asked, how do I get ahead? How do I check the boxes? But the new instrument asks, how do I become someone whose gifts improve my world in some way? Because that fills me up. Notice what that is not. It's not lowering the bar. It doesn't ask you to be less excellent, less ambitious, less good at what you're good at. No, it gives your excellence a direction to
• 2:45
  Mastery still matters. Build the skill. Build the platform. Get sharper at fifty eight than you were at thirty eight. Not to outshine anybody though. But because the sharper you are, the more you can actually do for the people and the causes that matter to you. Excellence stops being a destination this way and it becomes the vehicle. Do you see what I'm saying here?
• 2:50
  speaker-0 (15:13.714)
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  I want you to know this isn't something I made up on a walk. Aristotle, that smart man, said that the highest human good was a life of character lived toward the common good and not a pile of accumulated honors. And Victor Frankl, who survived a concentration camp and had every reason to understand this, said meaning comes from serving something beyond yourself, and that chasing success for its own sake is.
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  Is the surest way to lose it. And more recently, Michael Sandell has argued that a whole culture can get sick with this thinking, that when a society decides your worth equals your achievement, it manufactures arrogance at the top and humiliation everywhere else. And that last one matters. What happened to you was not a personal failure of discernment. It was the water.
• 3:00
  And everybody was swimming in it, but you don't have to. Which is why I keep coming back to a phrase. This was a shallow water error. Humans of any real depth have always found fulfillment the same way, through contribution, through kinship, through compassion, through a life that answers to their own values instead of someone else's tally. And that's not new wisdom.
• 3:05
  It's the oldest wisdom we have. We just got handed a shinier ruler and we stopped consulting it. Depth is the correction. Meaning is the goal. Here's where I want to leave you. We were taught to build a portfolio when we started working. Save early, compound it, protect your future. Listen, that is solid advice and I am not arguing with it. But
• 3:10
  Nobody told us about the second portfolio, the one that determines whether that future is worth arriving at. Our second portfolio, as I look at it, has two holdings. Contribution. Now that's what you actually have to deploy in yourself. Your talents, your gifts, your hardworn experience, including the parts you'd rather not have earned. And kinship. Who you're deploying it alongside.
• 3:15
  speaker-0 (17:41.346)
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  Chosen connection, the people that you want in the room when you're eighty, and that's it. That's the whole account. And most of us arrive at fifty five having never once taken inventory of either of those two things, contribution or kinship. I'm not suggesting that you blow up your whole life. Reinvention rarely requires demolition and
• 3:20
  Sometimes it just seems like anyone saying that is selling you something. So hear the scale of this, because I can feel some of you already picturing something enormous you need to change. I'm not asking you to become Mother Teresa or go broker piece in the Middle East. Although if you're able to, it would certainly be helpful. Listen, giving toward the common good can happen right inside the life you already have.
• 3:25
  Your current job, your ordinary Tuesday, your marriage, the people already in front of you, the kitchen table counts. I'm asking you to take inventory. That's the challenge. I'm saying this is how we humans actually find fulfillment. So here are three questions to sit with this week. What talents do I have that I'm not currently using?
• 3:30
  And get creative with what are your talents. Which of the things I do would I still do if no one ever knew I did them? Are you doing them for somebody else? And whose approval am I still working for? And is that person even still keeping score? Seriously, the voice in your head? So let me bring you back to that room where I started. The folks who reached the end without regret.
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  We're not the ones who achieved the most, who checked the most boxes. And I want to be really clear about that, because it would be easier if it were true, but it isn't. They were the ones who knew what counted and they spent themselves on it. Regret at the end, and this is such an important thing to hear. Regret at the end is just the gap between how you spent your life and
• 3:40
  speaker-0 (20:06.808)
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  And what you actually valued. Regret at the end is the gap between how you spent your life and what you actually valued. Someone else's measure guarantees that gap. Your own measure will close it. And you only have a measure of your own once you decide that the woman holding the ruler is worth honoring. That's the whole turn.
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  The respect comes first and the meaningful life follows from it, never the reverse. You are not out of time. Midlife is the exact right point where knowing this is still so useful, which is the entire advantage of hearing it now instead of at the end. You aren't wrong to want to matter. I want you to hear me on that. You know, you weren't wrong to want to matter.
• 3:50
  But put down the wrong instrument and go find out what you actually have in your tank. Assess your holdings in that second portfolio. And stay tuned because I'm trying to create a worksheet that could help you with that. But for now, here's my benediction for you. May you come to live knowing what's most important and what's best for you while still being respectful of others.
• 3:55
  May you be able to move towards those things with grace. And may you find the clarity to acknowledge the best in yourself and then leverage it to make the world better. And may you be fortunate enough to make tribe with others brave enough to be doing the same thing. And just remember, I'm rooting for you. This year has been crazy and it's filled up so fast.
• 4:00
  If you're interested in me speaking to your company or your group or your book club, please let me know soon and I'll see if I can make it happen. Currently, I'm sharing on midlife and end of life transitions because it's really beautiful to see how Gen X is changing midlife and beyond. This is our moment, Joel. Thanks for listening and have a great week. I'm so grateful you listened to this episode.
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  speaker-1 (22:28.537)
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  you
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  speaker-0 (22:32.704)
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  I hope it was a real value to you. If there's a sister in your life who needs this message, please share it, just like women have done to lift each other up over the centuries and across cultures. Women lifting each other is so important. It's why I do this work. And to avoid FOMO and keep up leveling your own life, make sure you don't miss the next episode. You may be losing hormones, but your life has given you powerful perspective.
• 4:15
  And I believe you have something to give that no one else does that the world needs. So remember, I'm rooting for you. Let's go.