Episode 152 transcript: How to Feel Better in Midlife Without Starting Over with Courtney Townley
[00:00:00] Courtney: We hyperfocus on health in two conversations. Diet and exercise like that are largely the conversation around health. And diet and exercise are important.
[00:00:10] No one's arguing that, but there are only two of many ways that stress comes into our lives. So, if everyone right now just visualizes a bucket, like a great big bucket, that is your stress bucket. And stress is filled into your bucket through so many different gateways, through how you think about yourself, how you think about your work, what you do for work, how much you move or don't move, where you spend time, who you spend time with. All of this is contributing to the stress bucket. And what I think happens for many of us at midlife is our bucket starts to overflow. Because not only do we have so much stress coming in, but we're also doing a lot of unnecessary labor. We're trying to control other people's happiness, and we're trying not to make other people uncomfortable with our choices, right?
[00:01:00] So that's just getting the bucket fuller and fuller. And
[00:01:02] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breath depth and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma, and join me weekly as I interview guests who have made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
[00:01:37] Welcome back to Live the Width of Your Life. My guest this week is Courtney Townley, and she's been helping women around the world take better care of themselves with more consistency and ease for the past 20 years. She helps women mend their relationships with themselves so they can achieve deep health and deliver their best to the things that matter most to them.
[00:01:56] Deep health, in her opinion, isn't just about finding someone else's set of rules and regulations for their life, but it's about getting to know yourself better so you can lead yourself better. She's a host of the highly rated podcast, Grace and Grit, where she encourages women to expand the definition of health, far beyond the rules of diet and exercise, and she's a level two certified nutrition coach.
[00:02:17] Through Precision Nutrition, a Certified Strength coach via the National Strength and Conditioning Association, and a certified life coach via the Life Coach School. We had such a great conversation talking about all things associated with women in midlife and different seasons of life, what it means to be healthy, and why some of the wellness advice that we're currently getting could be hurting us.
[00:02:41] She has so much information and depth, and a wealth of understanding from working with so many women over many years. Loved our conversation, and I think you will as well take a listen.
[00:02:52] Courtney, welcome to Live the Width of Your Life podcast. I'm so excited you're here with me.
[00:02:57] Courtney: I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:00] Aneta: Of course. I spent so much time checking out all of your channels and looking at your Instagram and your YouTube, and your website, and I thought, I have so many questions for you because.
[00:03:12] Courtney: Yay.
[00:03:14] Aneta: I feel like I probably could be one of your clients. And for those that maybe aren't as familiar with you and grace and grit, tell me a little bit about your mission and your passion. What are you so passionate about?
[00:03:27] Courtney: Yes, I'm very passionate about helping women, especially midlife women, to reconsider how they look at health and how they go about improving their health because I think we have been sold some interesting bills of goods in terms of how we do that. And I think it's creating so much unnecessary stress.
[00:03:46] I think it's creating a lot of disconnection with women, with themselves, and that's hugely problematic. So I am very passionate about helping women to take better care of themselves with a whole lot more consistency and ease. Doesn't that sound good?
[00:04:01] Aneta: It sounds so good because one of the things I remember reading in Instagram, I think it was a post, and you just said that women were so inundated with so much information and it can lead to this feeling that we have to fix ourselves, that our body is working against us, that we are an issue that we need to fix.
[00:04:22] And especially during midlife, when maybe we start noticing that our body is changing, that we're not feeling like we used to feel, the things we used to do are no longer serving us in the same way. And it can get confusing. And I feel like everybody is trying to sell me something there's like ads and somebody's trying to tell you, try this new diet or try this pill, or try this exercise or eliminate this or do this, and it's so overwhelming and it just, for me personally, I could say it just made me feel really bad about myself.
[00:04:56] And so I love that your messages are saying like, no, there's nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with your body. So tell me a little bit more, maybe about where this mission and this passion came from.
[00:05:10] Courtney: Yeah. It's such a big part of my story because I came in through the door as a performing artist. I was a dancer, where there's a lot of body dysmorphia and body challenges in that realm, which I certainly grew up with. But as a natural, by way of trying to make a living, because at the time that I was a professional dancer, it wasn't super lucrative.
[00:05:30] And I needed to make money, so I fell into fitness. I fell into fitness. Someone just said to me, Hey, you should go teach this fitness class. I had no qualifications or anything, but I did. And thank God I did because I realized how much I enjoyed teaching movement. And I'm so embarrassed to admit this, but the first class that I ever taught was called Butts and Guts.
[00:05:50] I did not call it that. That was the name of the class that I was given. That would never fly these days and age, but I learned that I did love teaching. I had a heart for helping people feel better in their bodies, and then I ended up getting certified in Pilates through a school in Canada. It was a year-long program.
[00:06:11] They decided to bring me on as an instructor trainer at the end of that program to help certify other trainers. And through that work, I got introduced to so many different modalities in wellness, and I started going to all these conferences. I started to go into all these wellness facilities, and it just expanded like my excitement and my possibilities for the industry.
[00:06:34] And I also started to realize how little I knew. I knew the movement well. By this point, I was well trained in teaching others how to move better and how to be more conditioned. But I also realized that a lot of people were coming in wanting to feel better, and movement was not the only thing that was gonna create that.
[00:06:53] I didn't know anything about nutrition. I didn't understand anything about how sleep helped the human body to recover and become more resilient. So I went on to get even more education, specifically on behavior change science and nutrition science, and that led me into the world of fat loss. Man, we all land there at some point, because this is what you were alluding to earlier. There's so much fear-mongering, especially among midlife women around menopause, perimenopause, and hormones. But there's also this very rampant messaging at every age for a woman that your body is the problem. And if you morph it, and you tweak it, and restructure it and rebuild it, you will somehow be a happier and healthier human.
[00:07:37] And I bought into that hook, line, and sinker, and I knew enough to understand how to help someone shed fat. So I helped a lot of people lose a lot of weight. And what's interesting is I did that for almost a decade, and I kept seeing the same curious pattern show up time and time again, which was that people could accomplish the outcome. They could follow the rules and regulations, check the boxes, and create the fat loss results. Very few sustained them, and that fascinated me. Why would people work so hard to achieve an outcome that they then can't sustain? That led me to more education of realizing that it's not really about the food and the exercise.
[00:08:20] It's about the self-image. It's about the belief systems. It's about how we've structured our lives and the real weight of our life that's influencing our food choices and our ability to move our bodies more or not. So I stepped away from fat loss, and that was a very hard thing for me to do because I was good at it and I was successful with it, but my soul was depleted by it because I just felt like I was selling something that I don't believe in anymore.
[00:08:47] And so it took me five years longer than I'm happy to admit because I rumbled with that for a long time. I finally broke into having more of the conversations and doing more of the coaching work that I believed would help women become healthier, and that's where I've been for the last 15 years.
[00:09:04] Aneta: It's so interesting because we all have our journey, and it sounds like we all go through a similar one, especially because we're marketed to that way, and it works. It does work. And I guess my question for you, too, is, did you have to do your internal work to then say, I can't do this for other women? I can't keep telling them the things that I no longer believe.
[00:09:27] Courtney: A thousand percent. It's kind of like if, when you open the box and you see the truth, you can't close it. You just can't put it back in the box. And that's what it was for me. And there was a real pivotal moment. I shared this all the time when I was around 35 years old. I'm almost 50, so I was 35 years old.
[00:09:43] I had just given birth to my son, and I always say that there are a lot of women in the world who waltz into motherhood, but I kind of face-plant. It was not; I was not a natural at motherhood, and I just felt like my whole world imploded overnight. My identity as I knew it had changed. I now had this little gelatinous blob to take care of, and I didn't know what to do with that.
[00:10:03] I was struggling on every level. My marriage was struggling, and when all of my friends and family, and clients came over to see my baby, who, of course, I wanted to celebrate and all the things, the main comment was, Wow, Courtney, you lost your baby weight so fast. That's what people were focused on.
[00:10:23] Aneta: Isn't that horrible?
[00:10:25] Courtney: So I felt like I was doing everything I could just to keep my head above water, and all anybody wanted to focus on was my physiology, like how I looked. At that same time, I think I was also, this is when I was rumbling with the fat loss industry, so it was all coming to a head at the same time.
[00:10:45] But it was through that experience that I just really felt like we have this so wrong. We are talking about health. And conditioning women to think about health in a way that is so destructive and ultimately not helpful. Because you're right, a lot of these methodologies work until they don't. And that's what I experienced personally, and it's what I saw in my professional life too.
[00:11:08] And so I just couldn't keep going down that path.
[00:11:11] Aneta: Yeah. I love that, and I applaud you for saying, okay, there has to be a different answer. So what did you find out when you started having the conversations with women? What were they seeking?
[00:11:23] Courtney: I think the seeking was always the same, like what they were seeking was always feeling better, feeling more confident, feeling more fulfilled. That kind of remains true throughout my career. But I think where the disconnect was, again, they were making their body the problem.
[00:11:39] And what the real problems were, things like their inability to honor their actual resource availability. So they were overspending time, energy, and mental bandwidth, and wondering why they were so uncontrolled around food. They did not set boundaries in their life. They weren't going after the things that lit them up.
[00:11:58] They had a horrific self-narrative. So all of those things, what do they do? They make us feel terrible. What happens when we feel terrible? We reach for things to self-soothe that don't make us healthier because we need to feel better fast. So the sugar, the alcohol, Netflix, and shopping. Things that don't nourish us in meaningful ways become our main source of nutrition, and that's problematic.
[00:12:26] Aneta: Yeah, and it's a way to distract. It's a way to numb. It's a way to forget. And I always say the alcohol, too, is just a way to go from a hundred miles an hour to 35, right? As fast as possible. It's okay, here comes the wine, because I've been running at this level all day long and now I'm exhausted, but I need to be able to bring myself down.
[00:12:47] And so we find these unhealthy, self-soothing techniques, and over time, that's where it just contributes and leads to more. And I remember this, I remember when I was in corporate, like it would be no problem for me to come home and just know I'm gonna have two tall glasses of wine. And now that would put me under a table. I would feel awful. I don't know how I was getting up and then going to work the next day, but it's like maybe a walk would've been a better choice, a bath, or something else to self-soothe. But it's interesting why we make these poor choices, the bad choices.
[00:13:21] Courtney: And the brain truly loves the path of least resistance.
[00:13:25] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:13:26] Courtney: While we could say, I should probably go for a walk, that would be more nourishing than a glass of wine. That's true. Like, logically, we can understand that. But the brain is like, but the wine's right there and I don't have to walk around the block.
[00:13:39] So that's where kind of the, my company is grace and grit, and that's where the grit comes in, where we have to purposefully choose discomfort to some degree. We have to lean into the hard, but we also have a lot of agency over how hard.
[00:13:53] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:13:53] Courtney: Like a walk compared to a glass of wine is not epically harder. It's just a little bit harder.
[00:14:00] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:14:00] Courtney: And so when we can coach ourselves in that moment and remind ourselves that this isn't calculus, it's not bringing a new child into the world, it's a walk around the block.
[00:14:10] Aneta: And you can see the benefits of that. That's the thing where you start to feel the mental benefits. You feel you can sleep better, you're able to rest better, you feel better, like physically, you might start to see things shift. Or you could go with your partner or a friend and do it enjoyably, and you don't see it as work.
[00:14:29] Courtney: So true, and that's the key because we know sustainable behavior change is only possible when people enjoy the process. So if you aren't, if you're miserable the whole way, you're not going to keep doing those things. Can I ask you a question about corporate, like when you were drinking the wine at night, right?
[00:14:45] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:14:45] Courtney: I'm imagining, because I think this is true for a lot of us, where we justify the wine because we had a hard day, but we also normalize the wine by saying things like, but I feel fine.
[00:14:57] Aneta: Yeah.
[00:14:57] Courtney: We haven't tasted the other side. We haven't been without the self-soothing thing for so long that we delude ourselves into believing that we're truly fine.
[00:15:06] Aneta: Absolutely. And it was because the work didn't stop when I got home. I still had to do things with the kids and log back on and do additional work. And so it was actually like, this is the fastest way to help me relax, so I can continue and do the rest of the things that still need to get done. Yeah, and it was a justification like, okay, this is fine. I felt relaxed. I wasn't getting drunk on two glasses of wine at the time.
[00:15:32] Courtney: Yeah. And the thing is, we also start to build our tolerance right. To whatever the thing is that's spiking dopamine. And yeah, it is. It's fascinating how that works, but we all have it.
[00:15:42] Aneta: And it was normalized. I will say. I know we're talking about alcohol here. It was normalized, like everyone talked about it, and happy hours and everything else, and I think now it's so interesting just to see that many people are sober or very sober, curious or just choosing to abstain, and just very intentionally only having a drink maybe for a special occasion or something. And it's wonderful to see the shift, and I think it's happening. I'm seeing it in the younger generations. I'm seeing it in people in my decade. And it's great to see that when you go out, you don't have to feel like you're the only person who's not drinking or choosing to make healthier choices, even with food.
[00:16:23] Courtney: Absolutely. And you said, I think something so interesting about midlife, where, not only was it normalized to drink the two glasses of wine every night, but you also could tolerate it better because you had a more resilient physiology. Because what happens as we cross the threshold to midlife is that we start to lose some of that resilience naturally when we lose progesterone and estrogen, as life gets fuller with more responsibility.
[00:16:46] Our cortisol goes up, and our ability to manage that cortisol starts to decline. And so we now have two glasses of wine, and like you said, we feel like we're going to be on the floor, and it's just not as enjoyable because our body is sending a very clear message that, hey, this isn't working for me.
[00:17:05] This is hurting me. It's not helping me. And I do want to circle back to this, because I think this is important to what you said earlier about some of the myths and the lies that were sold as women. And one of the phrases that I hear so often that drives me crazy is that when you have two glasses of wine, even though you wanna take better care of yourself, you're somehow self-sabotaging.
[00:17:26] And I don't believe that's true. You're self-soothing. That's what you're doing. Self-sabotage is intentionally harming yourself.
[00:17:34] That's not what women are doing. What we're doing is we are so beyond our capacity for what we can tolerate in a day that our nervous system is desperate to regulate. And so we reach for the quick fixes, the fleeting pleasures, the chocolate, the pizza, whatever it is.
[00:17:52] And I think that is such a grace-filled thing to remember. You're not intentionally hurting yourself; you're just past capacity, and you need some regulation. That's what it is.
[00:18:05] Aneta: And it's so interesting because when I left and I started my business that first year, I lost over 25 pounds.
[00:18:12] Courtney: Of course, yes.
[00:18:13] Aneta: And then, of course, menopause happened, and I gained it all back. And so when you talked about the cortisol and our bodies just not being able to tolerate what we did before, I think that there is a huge shift.
[00:18:25] And I know I was at a wedding shower this weekend, and I was talking to women the same age as me, a couple of years younger, who are just starting perimenopause. I'm 53, so women like my age and women who are in their forties. And it's that we all go through and have the same experiences and are looking for the answer to figure out, like, how can I start sleeping again?
[00:18:48] How could I feel like I recognize my body again? How can I feel relief from the hot flashes and whatever else is going on? And I'm grateful that we are having open conversations. My mom, I never heard her talking with her friends about these things. Like, I think they just suffered in silence. Or I see women at work that I knew were old, and you just could tell when they were having a hot flash in a meeting and trying to pretend like it's not happening.
[00:19:15] So I do think that we've made so much progress in terms of half the population is going through something very similar, so of course we should be able to talk about it. Of course, we should be able to trust our doctors, whom I have not had a great experience with Western medicine trying to deal with this, and we should be able to have some answers around what it is that we can do.
[00:19:37] So maybe you can share if someone's listening and they're feeling it right now. What are some of the things that we should be doing for ourselves that are self-soothing, in a healthy way, that are nourishing things that we can do for our bodies, but also just like mentally and emotionally, and spiritually? How better to take care of ourselves during midlife?
[00:19:58] Courtney: First of all, I think it's really important to recognize that though we are having more open conversations and we are normalizing kind of menopause and all the challenges that go along with it, we are also being sold the products, the pills, and the programs to revolutionize that. And I am from the mindset and of the mindset, and this is the hill I will die on no matter how much I learn in my lifetime.
[00:20:27] I'll always circle back to this, which is self-leadership. We're conditioned in today's culture to look for someone to follow, for someone to guide us out of that valley. And I strongly believe that we are the people for that job. We are the only people for that job because you can work with a lot of people who know a lot more than you do about hormones and nutrition and exercise programs, but at the end of the day, you are the only person on the planet who knows how that advice fits into the wholeness of your life, and you are the only person who knows how that advice affects your physiology.
[00:21:05] Nobody else knows that. And so I do think that, like kind of 1 0 1 is learning how to become more powerfully self-led. And that is spending more time with yourself to get to know yourself. And believe me, I realize that what I'm about to say is so inconvenient and unsexy because we just want the pill or we want the quick fix, but it is finding pockets of time.
[00:21:29] It could be five minutes, it could be a minute of you just putting your hand on your heart in your car before you go into the house for the night, to just check in with yourself and say, hey, Aneta, how are you doing today? Like, how are you doing? Not just a surface-level answer, but how are you doing, and how can I support you better?
[00:21:49] Listen to the answer because it's probably not, go to bootcamp class tomorrow at 5:00 AM, or go inside and count all the macros of the dinner that you're going to eat tonight. Please don't hear me saying that those things don't have a time and a place for the right person for the right reasons. But I feel like we're always gravitating to more disciplined behavior when so often what I see in the midlife population is they need to learn how to bend so they don't break.
[00:22:16] They need to learn how to pull back so they can go forward. And we are not so skilled at that part because we make it mean that we're lazy, that we're never going to be accomplished, that yeah, we make it mean terrible things. Okay.
[00:22:29] Aneta: If we believe that we should be kinder to ourselves, and we're loving and checking in and doing something that's the kindest thing to do in that moment. Who does that benefit except us?
[00:22:43] Courtney: Of course, it's a whole shift in that.
[00:22:46] Aneta: It's a whole shift. And also so many of us, I think, have spent so much of our lives in our masculine energy, just go, do. So we're used to saying, What's the problem? Here's the solution. Let me be disciplined and take action, and then I'll hit the goal. And what I found is that those things did not work for me, and oftentimes I was feeling worse about myself, and then also gaining weight. And then you go to the doctor, and the doctor's you should consider GLP one, and I'm like. I'm not even obese. Why is this the solution or the recommendation? Like, there's no other answer. And so I love this idea of saying, how do we rest a little bit more in our femininity? How do we allow ourselves to just check in and see what it is that we need? Because I've done the 5:00 AM bootcamps. That was me last summer, and it didn't work out so well, and I wasn't having that much fun either.
[00:23:42] Courtney: I want to share this visual with your listeners because I think it helped me so much over my career, and I think it's helped my clients a lot. We love to hyperfocus on health in two conversations. Diet and exercise like that are largely the conversation around health. And diet and exercise are important.
[00:24:00] No one's arguing that, but there are only two of many ways that stress comes into our lives. So if everyone right now just visualizes a bucket, like a great big bucket, that is your stress bucket. And stress is filled into your bucket through so many different gateways, through how you think about yourself, how you think about your work, what you do for work, how much you move or don't move, where you spend time, who you spend time with. All of this is contributing to the stress bucket. And what I think happens for many of us at midlife is our bucket starts to overflow. Because not only do we have so much stress coming in, but we're also doing a lot of unnecessary labor. We're trying to control other people's happiness, and we're trying not to make other people uncomfortable with our choices, right?
[00:24:50] So that's just getting the bucket fuller and fuller. And what happens is, eventually, your bucket's gonna tip over and make a huge mess. But what's also happening is your bucket itself is starting to lose its integrity. Because with the absence of hormones like estrogen and progesterone, our bucket is not as resilient as it once was.
[00:25:10] So we have an overflowing bucket, we've got holes in our bucket, and the answer is not adding more stress, which a 5:00 AM bootcamp very well might be for you. If I have a lot of stress in my life, exercising more aggressively is probably not the answer; I have to create some bandwidth. I have to restore some energy before I can go there.
[00:25:33] Aneta: Absolutely. I love that. And I think that this goes back to the self-leadership and what you said is being so in tune with ourselves, checking in, making sure we're listening, making sure we're honoring, and allowing ourselves to be our advocate for what feels good and what doesn't feel good. Because there is no cookie-cutter approach. One size is not going to work for everybody. And I love that about your work.
[00:25:58] Courtney: It's so true, and I think it all circles back to self-trust and self-honesty because I will tell you that there are lots of women in the world, and I've been in this place in my own life where I have used the concept of grace as a way to hide from the work. We've all done that, and the only person who knows if you're doing that is you.
[00:26:24] I've also seen women use grit discipline to the point of self-destruction. And again, you are the only person who knows why you're going to your 5:00 AM bootcamp or why you're eating a salad for lunch every day, or why you're so obsessed about losing the last five pounds. If you, honestly, like your reasons, more power to you.
[00:26:45] But as a coach who has poked that question at a lot of women, 99% of the time, they don't like their reasons. They're doing it for external validation. They're doing it to prove their worth. They're doing it because they think they will be happier once they create the result. But the reality is they can be happier right now by the way they're thinking about themselves in their life.
[00:27:07] Aneta: I love that. And I wanted to read a post that you wrote because I think it resonated so much with me, and I wanted to just read it with the audience, too.
[00:27:16] So you asked, I think it was tied to like questions. That we should ask ourselves. And so the first one is my constant focus on weight loss, really about health, or about trying to control something bigger? Do I call it healthy when it's leaving me burned out and resentful? Am I moving my body in ways that feel good or just punishing it for not looking the way I want? Is the voice in my head mine or someone else's definition of discipline? And have I confused consistency with perfection?
[00:27:48] And I love these questions because they convinced me, really felt like a deep conviction. Not in a judgmental way, but just like a, yeah, I have done these things, and why do I do them? And so I know that you talk about awareness and self-awareness as one of the foundations of the practices in your business. Talk to me a little bit more about these four practices. Awareness organization, follow through, and realignment.
[00:28:17] Courtney: I love it. So let me start by clarifying what consistency is, because I think there are a lot of beliefs around consistency that are making everything harder for us. So consistency is not perfection, it's not rigidity. It is not doing the same thing over and over until the day you die. That is not how I think of consistency.
[00:28:41] I think of consistency as the consistency that I teach is self-honoring. Can I consistently honor what is true for me? And guess what? Sometimes, when you are consistently self-honoring, it's going to look like staying home rather than going to the gym. because you can feel that you're starting to get sick.
[00:29:00] Or it's going to look like putting yourself to bed earlier, even though, sure, who wouldn't want to stay up and watch the 10th episode of their favorite Netflix show. Consistent self-honoring requires deep self-examination and deep self-honesty. And you cannot have either one of those things if you don't have deep self-awareness.
[00:29:21] So I teach a framework called the consistency code. The first piece of the code is bringing everything that you would rather sweep under the carpet. All the dirt that you want to shove under the rug. We have to expose it, we've got to bring it to the light. We have to ask ourselves questions about everything in our lives.
[00:29:40] Is this nourishing me, or is this depleting me? From relationships to workouts, to food, to self-narrative, we ask that question of everything. And what happens when we start asking that question is we start seeing the dirt. It gets exposed, healing happens in the light, is what I often say, that freaks our brains out, which is why we don't do it.
[00:30:04] We would rather keep things like shoved under the bed and in the closets because it's just easier not to address. Because once you expose it, it's calling you to work. It's calling you into a curriculum. And again, that's effort. The brain doesn't love effort, so it's easier to hide. So we have a lot of hiding habits.
[00:30:25] We keep ourselves super busy. We never look at data; we don't make the appointments. We avoid all the things that will help us to do the work. So awareness starts with, again, I used that example earlier of the hand on the heart for just a minute, but it is just starting to name and notice everything.
[00:30:47] How am I feeling? What am I thinking? How did I show up today? Like, exposing that level of truth is the only way we can truly make a deep transformation in our lives, but it's not convenient. It takes time. It's not a quick turnaround. It's not sexy. There are a lot of reasons we don't do it, but everything has to start with awareness.
[00:31:10] Martha Beck, who's a well-known life coach, says that awareness is the way out, and I just love it because it just is. Once we're aware, we have to decide where we want to start cleaning up first. So I always use the analogy, like if my son threw a party. My son is 16, and as far as I know, he has never thrown a party in my house when I haven't been here.
[00:31:31] But let's just say that he did, and I came home and I flipped the light switch on and I just saw a mess everywhere. Like the whole house was destroyed. I would have to decide where to start cleaning up the mess or I'd have to make him decide where he wanted to start cleaning up the mess is the bigger truth.
[00:31:49] My point is that I can't clean up the entire mess at once. I have to pick something. And again, we are sold this notion that the only way to improve health and wellbeing is through the gateway of exercise or diet. And I want to offer your listeners that unpacking a little bit of stress is going to improve your health and happiness anywhere.
[00:32:13] So, where do you want to start? It doesn't matter, but let's start unpacking some of this unnecessary stress. Once we decide that, we have to organize ourselves to do that. Do you know a midlife woman who isn't busy or who doesn't have a thousand things to do?
[00:32:29] Aneta: Not.
[00:32:31] Courtney: I don't either. And we play this game with ourselves, where we have really good intentions, but we have no strategy. Strategy's everything, or I work with a lot of women who have so much strategy, such an ambitious strategy that they have a plan on day one. So we don't want to make too much commitment. We don't wanna do too little, but we do have to come up with a game plan for making progress.
[00:32:54] Once we have a game plan, most people just don't show up. This is where I do most of my coaching. We decided that we want to start going to bed 30 minutes earlier. We have a plan for how we're going to do that. We color code our journal, we do all the things to make it like it's going to happen.
[00:33:11] And then what happens at 8:30 when it's time to start unwinding to go to bed? We turn on another show, or we start doing laundry, or we go into the kitchen to find something to eat. So the practice of follow-through is everything. It's about keeping promises that you make to yourself, because think about it, the promises that we're talking about are helping you to get out of what I call integrity pain.
[00:33:36] Integrity pain is like this very real internal friction. That is caused by living our lives in a way that's misaligned with what we want. And we all have integrity pain, but when we talk ourselves out of the commitments we've made for ourselves, we're just creating more integrity pain. We're not solving it, we're just creating more of it.
[00:33:55] So, two big things will help us to follow through. Three things. Number one, you gotta regulate your nervous system. If your nervous system is jacked to the high hilt with stress all the time, you're never gonna follow through. You also need to learn how to parent your brain, manage your thoughts, and think in a way that's helpful rather than harmful.
[00:34:13] And you need to learn how to befriend your emotional landscape, all of it. Not just the good stuff, not just the feel-good stuff, but the dark stuff, the hard stuff, the things that we avoid like the plague. We've got to learn how to bring those things to the table and listen to the messages they have, so we can decide what to do from then on out. Those skill sets help us to follow through. And then the last thing is just the practice of realignment, because man, life throws a lot of curveballs. Like it always, right? You think you're going to like start this new exercise program, and then you twist your ankle or you feel like you've been in a routine with getting good sleep for a while, and then you hit perimenopause, and all of a sudden, you're awake at 3:00 AM. Life throws curveballs.
[00:34:59] So, how do you handle pivoting back into alignment? It's so important because we can stay misaligned for months, years, or our entire lifetime. And that sucks. That is not how most people want to live. Like at the end of their life, they don't want to look back and say, I just never really got my act together.
[00:35:21] So there are a lot of skills baked into the practice of realignment, but it all goes back to where we started, which is the practice of awareness. It's a circle. It's not a straight line.
[00:35:31] Aneta: Yeah, it's so true. And what is this methodology again? What did you call it?
[00:35:35] Courtney: Called the Consistency Code. That's what we call it.
[00:35:38] Aneta: And is this your upcoming book as well?
[00:35:41] Courtney: Yes, it's the name of my book, the Consistency Code, A Midlife Woman's Guide to Deep Health and Happiness.
[00:35:46] Aneta: I love it so much. When is the book coming out?
[00:35:49] Courtney: A launch date is November 5th.
[00:35:52] Aneta: What are you doing to launch it? Can people get on an early list, like for reading, or what are you doing, just for folks that might want to get their hands on something, sooner?
[00:36:02] Courtney: Absolutely, people can go to theconsistencycode.com and get on our list. And we'll notify you, number one, when the book is for sale, but we'll have lots of things that make that more enticing, too, as we get closer to the launch date. I've been running a course called the Consistency code for over a decade, which is what kind of birthed this book.
[00:36:20] But there are so many opportunities to get a lot of free resources in the book itself. We just link it back to the website so people will get PDFs and support materials, and we're encouraging people to start their book clubs based on the book. Because my vision for the book is that I want women to normalize these conversations. It's like my attempt at trying to pivot the way that we're approaching health and wellbeing.
[00:36:46] Aneta: I love it. And the answer, instead of saying, I'm going through the same thing, try this keto diet, like the fast, quick responses we currently get. So, tell me how folks can find you if they want to work with you, they want to follow you. What is the easiest entry point?
[00:37:03] Courtney: The Easiest place is just to go to graceandgrit.com. That's my website, and all the branches where you can go from there are on that site. But that is the best place, graceandgrit.com.
[00:37:14] Aneta: I love it. I love what you're doing, and I love the name Grace and Grit. It's easy to understand and I love this idea of being kind and gentle with ourselves and knowing when we need to do some work and roll up our sleeves and be a bit more disciplined. So the final question I have is tied to the title of this podcast. And you alluded to it earlier, which is when you were talking about not wanting to wait till the end of life and looking back. And what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:37:42] Courtney: First of all, I love the question. I love the name of the show, but for me to live the width of your life means to become a fully expressed human, whatever that means for you, you cannot do that work if you're cellular and soul integrity are subpar. And so to me, health is becoming a fully expressed version of you.
[00:38:06] You are this one-time expression that will never exist in all of time again. And what a shame not to allow that expression to happen. I feel like that is our work here, to champion our expression. And if I can help a woman do that, bring it on, that's what I'm here to do.
[00:38:26] So that's what it means to me is to become a fully expressed version.
[00:38:31] Aneta: I love that answer. Thank you, Courtney, so much for doing all this amazing work in the world. I am just so excited to continue to learn more from you, and excited for this conversation to be listened to by many women who I know are going through the same things that you and I talked about today.
[00:38:46] much
[00:38:46] Courtney: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:38:49] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.
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