Latest / Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden / Your True Colors: Trusting Your Gut in Midlife

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Your True Colors: Trusting Your Gut in Midlife · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

• 0:10
  Tami Jorden (00:02.22)
• 0:13
  Welcome to my realm. I'm Tami Jorden, 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.
• 0:17
  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!
• 0:24
  Tami Jorden (00:56.436)
• 0:27
  Welcome to my realm. This is Tami Jorden, and you're listening to Butterfly Days. So there was a moment, and you'll probably have your own version of it, when you knew something was wrong before you could explain it. You walked into a room and you felt the temperature change before a single word was said. You looked at a face across the table and you thought, something is wrong here. And later, you found out you were right.
• 0:31
  You had a feeling about a person, a deal, maybe a diagnosis. And it turned out your feeling had better aim than anyone else's reason. And when you said it out loud, somebody asked you to prove it. Show your work. And because you couldn't hand them a footnote, they smiled a little and then they just moved on. And there was maybe there was this quiet part of you that filed it away as, well, I guess I'm just too emotional.
• 0:38
  But I want to sit with that moment today because I don't think you were emotional or irrational. I think you were doing something called reading the room. And somewhere along the way you were taught that reading the room was just being emotional, that thinking your way to an answer made you smart, and sensing your way there was a problem.
• 0:45
  So here's what I've come to believe, and I took a long time to see it, but I think you're gonna appreciate it. Modernity didn't discover that one kind of thinking is superior. No, it decided that. And then it stopped calling it a decision. There are roughly two ways a human being comes to know something. There's a linear way, step by step, with like evidence, argument, the kind of knowing you can write down.
• 0:52
  and hand to someone else. But there is another way as well. The embodied way. The read. The gut. The pattern you catch before you can name it. You know what I mean? And I want to be clear about this because it's the whole point. Neither one is the smart one. This isn't a switch that we flip where now the feelings win. That's just the same ranking upside down. I despise that and I'm not about it.
• 0:59
  Tami Jorden (03:15.714)
• 1:02
  What I'm saying is there was never supposed to be a ranking at all. There was supposed to be a repertoire, a selection of choices, to instrument, and you pick the one that the moment calls for. The linear mind is the right tool for an audit, let's say, the dosage, a bridge that has to hold, and thank God for that. But the read, the embodied knowing is.
• 1:06
  That just sense it in your heart or in your gut is the right tool for a room that's about to turn. The I'm fine that isn't, the deal that smells wrong, before you can say why. Different tool, different job. Neither one is the full measure of your mind. The disenfranchisement, and I'm using that word on purpose, was being told that only one of those counted as intelligence.
• 1:13
  That the other one was softness, and that softness was, more often than not, a you problem, a woman problem. And that's not an accident, and it's not new, it's ancient. The word hysteria comes from the Greek word for womb. For centuries, literally centuries, women's nonlinear knowing was diagnosed as a defect of the female body.
• 1:20
  Reason got coded as male and authoritative. Emotion got coded as female and unreliable. So when someone says to you, maybe your dad, a male doctor, a man at a dinner party, you're being emotional. And something in you flinches, that flinch isn't about you. You're not fragile. You're standing inside a 4,000-year-old reflex that's still running in the background.
• 1:27
  And I find that strangely freeing to understand that it's not personal, it's inherited. And our generation kind of got a modern spin on it. Do you remember the books? I bet you do. Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. And what about You Just Don't Understand? We passed them around, they were on every nightstand, and they were sold to us as help. Here's how to finally translate the great divide.
• 1:34
  Tami Jorden (05:37.986)
• 1:37
  Bedroom to boardroom. And some of that was genuinely useful. I mean, Deborah Tannen, who wrote, You Just Don't Understand, she's a serious linguist, and her whole point was that men and women often use two different styles to communicate. And this part we forgot, both styles are valid. She wasn't ranking them, she was naming them. But that wasn't the version that got the most airplay. The version that stuck was
• 1:41
  Men think this way, women think this way, and that's all there is. And once you believe that a thing is nature, you stop questioning it. You build your whole life on top of it. So a bridge that was supposed to help us cross the communication divide could become a cage that kept us on our side of it. We were handed the ranking like one more time, and this time it came dressed up as science, self help, love advice.
• 1:48
  And it had seeds of truth, which is exactly why nobody thought to argue with it. But here's the part, just this knowledge that gives me chills when I say it out loud. Y'all, we were the first generation of women told that we could be anything. And we were told also in the same breath that our way of knowing was too emotional to trust. Both messages at once. And nobody noticed that they cancel.
• 1:55
  You can't hand a woman the whole world and tell her that she can't be trusted to understand it. But that's what happened to us. Go be anything, and also don't be so sensitive. Don't be so much. Calm down. You're overreacting. We spent decades trying to obey both at the same time, and you cannot. It's not possible. One of them had to give. And I'll tell you which one gave. It wasn't the ambition, it was trust in ourselves. So
• 2:02
  Let me give you back the thing they took and let me do it with data because I don't want anyone to call this soft. There's a researcher named Gary Klein who spent his career studying firefighters or fire commanders, ER nurses, military leaders, police officers, etc. People who just knew in the moment what to do or what would work. The fire commander who suddenly pulls his crew out of a building seconds before the floor collapses and
• 2:09
  Tami Jorden (08:01.944)
• 2:12
  Can't tell you how he knew. The nurse who says this baby is crashing before a single monitor agrees with her, and she's right. Klein studied these examples for decades, actually. And here's what he found. It wasn't magic, it wasn't a sixth sense. It was thousands of hours of pattern recognition and mental simulation running so fast it never reached words. Which means
• 2:16
  The gut reads you keep getting dismissed for is not the opposite of expertise. It is expertise. It's expertise moving too fast to narrate. Yeah, it's expertise, literally a kind of intelligence. The kind the great quarterback uses when he sees exactly where to throw the ball that makes the most amazing catch. It's earned expertise.
• 2:23
  It's seeing structures and patterns without realizing that you do it. That's why it feels natural. So sit with that. The knowing you were taught to apologize for is earned. It's a library, a highly developed library inside you. And you built it one experience at a time. And it got so deep and so fast that it stopped announcing itself. You just know.
• 2:30
  That's not you being irrational. That's you being good at something. So good you can't see the process anymore. Now, here's where this gets personal, and I hope it gets hopeful. When I was a girl, I went to camp and they'd hand you a compass and drop you off in the woods and tell you to find your way out. And I learned something out there in the woods that I've never forgotten. If you're just a few degrees off with your compass at the start.
• 2:37
  You don't come out a few feet from where you're meant to. You come out like a mile off, sometimes more. Every step compounds the initial error. One small wrong heading at the beginning, and you end up somewhere you never chose. And that's exactly how life works, y'all. If somebody handed you a wrong heading early on, your kind of knowing is the lesser kind, for instance, and you believe them, and you walk.
• 2:44
  Tami Jorden (10:23.768)
• 2:47
  Then you didn't drift a little, you drifted for decades. You made a thousand choices off a compass that was two degrees wrong. And this this is what I call the holy power of a life review at midlife. Not to punish yourself, but to recheck the heading, to think about what you were handed, to go back to the things you were told for sure, and hold them up with the wisdom you have now and ask yourself Do I still think this is true?
• 2:51
  Did I just accept it? Because it was handed to me. Because here's the turn, and it's the best news I have for you. Embodied knowing the read, the deep fast library does not decline at midlife. It peaks. Why? Because you've been stocking that library for decades. You've now lived enough, lost enough, loved enough, paid attention enough right at the moment you're
• 2:58
  The culture starts writing you off as past your prime. You are, in the one way that matters most, more powerful than you have ever been. You're not over, you're not too much, and you're not past it. You're fully equipped. And there are so many versions of you across a life. And this one, this one's got the whole library inside her. When I think about this, I think I love Martha Stewart's old line: learn something new every day.
• 3:05
  And I take that seriously because every new thing you learn is one more entry in that library, one more vitamin toward living your best life all the way to the end. You're still building. And I want to be clear, it never has to stop. So let me give you something usable, something to actually say the next time that happens, because it is going to happen. Someone will call your knowing emotional and wait for you to fold. And the trap?
• 3:12
  It's arguing. The second you start defending the read. No, listen, I really am right about this. I know I can't explain it, but I just know you've lost, even if you win, because you're still asking them for a vote. You're still standing for election on whether your mind counts. A real boundary doesn't argue. It reclassifies and it walks. So here's a ladder. Meet yourself wherever you are today.
• 3:19
  Tami Jorden (12:50.422)
• 3:22
  Are you ready? First rung, cleanest one. That's not me being emotional. That's me noticing something. Different question, different tool. What a great answer, huh? And then move on. You don't have to wait to be believed. If you need to make your move a little more visible, you could say something like, When you call it emotional, what's happening is you're deciding not to look at the thing I just flagged. Name it gently.
• 3:26
  Out loud. And if you're in the hard room, the boss, your brother, the person that won't let it go, here's the one that holds ground without a fight. I love this. I've decided to trust this. Not I can prove it. Not I won't back down. Just I've decided. Decision already made. There's nothing left to argue. And that's the whole thing. A boundary isn't about volume. It's refusing to relitigate.
• 3:33
  Your own knowing. You stopped asking for the vote because the vote was never really theirs to give. And I'll leave you with this. Think about the rooms where the term paper mind must go completely silent, where nobody wants a source citation, thank you. Where the only thing that works is the truest read of the moment, like the delivery room.
• 3:40
  The moment your friend says I'm fine and you know you know sit down and stay. The negotiation where you felt the lie before you could source it. The bedside of someone you love, the very end, where every reason in the world falls away and all that's left is presence and attention and knowing. Those are the rooms that matter most. And in every
• 3:47
  single one of them. The mode they trained you to be ashamed of is the only mode that saves anyone. So I'll ask you the only question that counts. The way of knowing that gets you dismissed in the meeting is the exact way of knowing that holds a hand in the last room of life. Was that ranking ever really real? You are never too much. You are never too emotional. You are reading the room. And the room it turns out
• 3:54
  Tami Jorden (15:16.088)
• 3:57
  was always the point. So go recheck your heading. You've got the wisdom now, and there's still plenty of sand left in your hourglass to use it. I want to help you build capacity to live your best life all the way to your end. So this is my benediction for you. May you know the deep peace that your intelligence is every bit as valuable.
• 4:01
  May you know that you never have to prove it to anyone anywhere. Given that perfection is not found on this earth, know that we all try our best in our own ways. May your respect for both ways of being intelligent bring you and all who meet you a deeper sense of what is true and what is possible. Go forth in joy today and always and remember, I'm rootin' for you.
• 4:08
  If you'd like to have me speak at your event or your meeting, or even on a Zoom call, just reach out and let me know at my website Tami Jorden dot com. Take care and I'll talk to you again next week with a great interview.
• 4:15
  I'm so grateful you listened to this episode. 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.
• 4:22
  You may be losing hormones, but your life has given you powerful perspective. 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.