Welcome to the Mastering Midlife Podcast where we talk about all the crazy fun things that happen when you are a midlife mama. I'm your host, Heather London, let's dig in. I remember one of my best friends telling me this story. She was talking about joining us for it she had never done before and here was her philosophy. Now her and I grew up together
we've known each other our whole entire lives and we've always played sports. So we're both athletic kind of girls and as we got older it could be hard to play the sports that you grew up with because sometimes your body just says not ah not happening and so her philosophy was if you want
to play sports as you get older you want to start a new sport. Play something you've never played before because you're going to suck at it when you first start but inevitably if you stick with it you will get better at it because it's something new that you're learning and on the other hand if you do a sport that you've played your whole entire life and you used to be really good at you're never going to be as good as you were in your prime and that's I guess that meaning like
you're going to be a husband. So you'll never be as good as you were when you were 20 years old which makes sense and you're always going to compare yourself playing that sport today as playing when you were in your prime like so good and so it stands to reason that
she was right if we want to take up a if we want to play sports as we get older we want to take up a new sport and try something completely new that we've never done so that we can see improvement and then we're going to feel really good about ourselves because we're better than we
were and that's what makes it fun to try a new sport and in this spirit as I was getting older and my body was unable to do the things that I loved doing before I took up a new sport and if you've been following it you know this sport is tennis and now I am obsessed with tennis but
I remember when I first started I joined the tennis club now what I didn't know was that usually people are at a certain level like 2.5 minimum I didn't even know there was levels in tennis but I was just new I've never taken a lesson I didn't really know the rules and I do remember that
the poco tennis club they are so such nice people so they were very welcoming even though I was not very good but I was eager and athletic and excited to learn and willing to take tips from everybody and all the things and when I first started I remember having this thought that I can't
serve I can't serve the ball over the net and so I would serve it underhand and for many years I was like I just can't serve overhead okay maybe not many years but I just had to go when in with the thought that it was too hard for me to serve overhand and I always served underhand and then
one day I thought like everybody serving overhand why can't I serve overhand so I had this limiting belief to start with was that it was really hard to serve overhead and I certainly couldn't do it and when I stopped and looked back at the big picture I'm like everybody else is serving overhead
I kept you that hard if everybody's doing it I'm gonna give it a try and low in behold when I served it overhand it wasn't a hard serve it wasn't like a rocket by any means but I could get it into the box when I served it overhand nice and easy much to my surprise and the only thing that
kept me from serving it overhand was a thought I had it was a belief I had and it wasn't even true I just put that in my head because maybe one time I couldn't serve it and get it over the net so I'm like oh I don't want to fail I'll just hit it like this so I succeed every single time because I
didn't want to fail I didn't even try and then I just served it underhand so needless to say I learned how to serve overhead and then my thought was oh just get it into the box when you serve it overhead just get it into the box and then the longer I played I thought damn like some people
have really good serves and it can be really a huge advantage to have a good serve and so last year I went out and every sunny day I practiced my serve I took my bucket of balls my basket of balls and I think there was 50 balls in there and I would serve from each service point from the ad side
and then from the other side and then on the other side of the court so it would serve in each quarter 50 balls and then I would go home and that would take me maybe a total of 20 minutes and my serve got better and then I started to love serving because I could see it from the
strategic point of view that this is like a free hit for me and I got super excited so instead of not wanting to serve or not caring about serving I'm like oh my god I get to serve this is so exciting and then where do I want to hit it and what kind of serve do I want to do and where's
the other person standing and it just became like a game of chess in my brain and I was like this is so exciting and now I love serving I love serving and I've created two different serves and they're very unorthodox and I don't care because I don't think that there's a one size fits up
and a lot of the people don't like one of my serves because it's really hard to return but it's not a hard fast serve and it always makes me laugh when people complain about my serve because there's no rule that says what a serve has to look like if a serve is hard to hit and you get a
point off of it that's the whole point of it so I love love love my serve now and it was because I practiced every day that I went from pretty much just throwing my serve away like not thinking of it as a point to being like oh I get a free hit this is so exciting to loving my serve and putting
more thought into the technical aspect of it and where I want to hit it and who I'm playing against and how the other players are playing who we're playing against so it is so much fun and it's the same in Spanish for me Spanish is hard so I have this thought in my brain that hey
I'm getting older and it's harder for me to learn new things I have this thought and when I'm trying to learn Spanish my thought is like I can't remember this it just goes in one side and out the other in one ear and out the other and I feel like that's a fixed mindset meaning I should hear
it once like when I have a thought like that I notice it and basically what it's saying is you should hear it once and just remember it forever and that's really not very practical is it not very valid and it's not serving me instead a thought of the more I say it the more I hear it the easier it
is for me to remember and I've noticed like there's a point when you're learning a new language where it's really hard and you feel like you don't know anything and then all of a sudden there's a turning point where you're like damn I can understand all of these words I can understand this
conversation and when it comes to reading and writing it gets easier and easier the challenges when you're talking to other people first of all because they speak really quickly it's just one huge word and then also when you're speaking you're searching for those words but I know a ton of
words because I've been practicing every single day and it will just come to the point when I can say them in a smooth sentence without having to stop and think about a word where I'm like there I go I can speak in Spanish and I'm super close so I know that if I stop I will never be fluent that was
like when I saw that video on Facebook a memory seven years ago about me learning Spanish and how excited I was and all the things I was doing and then seven years later I had stopped doing those things and I was not fluent so I know one thing for sure and that is if I stop practicing I will
never be fluent but if I'm willing to suck at it and be bad at it every single day I will get better it's a universal truth that whatever you do if you keep doing it every single day you can only get better and you will get better so if my thoughts create my results and I have a thought of
this is hard and I don't know what I'm doing how am I going to feel I'm going to feel defeated and I'm not going to want to carry on but if I have a thought that I'm learning every day if I just repeat it then it's going to stick in my brain every day I practice I get better and better
I'm just one word away from being fluent like those are thoughts that really really excite me and light me up and so if I'm willing to suck at it that means that I go to Spanish class and I talk out loud not from a written piece of paper that I wrote out before class but from my brain
and I'm willing to be like speaking in a broken Spanish so that I just keep speaking and trying different things so that I feel comfortable just trying these words and throwing them together and learning as I go because I know when I'm having a conversation with somebody who is Spanish
that they appreciate the fact that I'm making the effort and they can decipher what I'm saying because I have had international students forever and I never once had a thought that I couldn't understand them or I didn't want to try or didn't want to listen I would just slow down my speaking
and I would be happy to help them with their English I was actually impressed that they're in a foreign country these teenagers they're in a foreign country going to a high school where they don't know anybody and that English is their second language so they're learning the subjects and
trying to make friends in a foreign language that inspires me too I'm like if these teenagers can do it then I can do it too so I'm taking some inspiration from a lot of my international students that I've had over the years how do we go about getting this how do we apply this philosophy
to something that we want in our life so if if there's a goal that you're trying to achieve or a person you're trying to become the self-actualized version of you then there's three things that you can do three little things there's lots of things but here are my top three tips
for making this happen when you're trying to become somebody new learn a new skill reach a goal whatever it is you want to find the one little thing that will get you closer to what you want closer to reaching that goal just the one little thing what's the next little step I can take
and then write that down and then related to this one little thing what can you do on your worst day when it comes to this right that one little thing so here's my goal and I know if I just do this one thing I'll reach that goal what's the smallest thing so it doesn't feel overwhelming
and now you want to be like if I'm having a bad day I'm sick or it's rainy it's been raining for 40 days what could I do on that day the minimal amount and then that's going to be your go to every single day no matter what and then on the days when you're having a good day guess what you
can do more is not a problem but every day you're committed to doing this on your even on your worst day this is what you could do so that's the one little step that will get you closer to what you want to achieve because remember if you have a goal it's not one big grand thing that gets you
there it's being consistent every single day when we talk about the people that are super successful or the professional athletes it's they show up every single day they put the work in every single day what makes a difference between the average person and the wildly successful person is even on
the days when they don't want to they show up and do it anyway and that's the practicing part that's getting better at your tennis serve that's being becoming fluent in Spanish I'm willing to stand up in class and not make any sense because I know that one day I will make sense and it's just
we're all there to learn Spanish that's a Spanish class that's where you should go speak Spanish and make mistakes because it's the teacher's job to teach you so anything that stops you from doing that is just a thought in your head it's your brain trying to keep you safe because your brain
is like that's scary you could die we know that we're not going to die from standing up and sounding funny in front of the rest of the group because they're all feeling the same way so it's our brain trying to keep us safe that's what it is and then the last thing the tip number
three is know that failing is learning and growing and moving forward so you can never fail a lot of the times we don't do something because we're afraid we're gonna fail and that's the fail I'll also the fixed mindset but know that the only way you can get good at something is by failing so
failing forward is what I like to call it you want to be like what did I learn from that what can I take from that well I won't do that again next time because it didn't work what will I do so you're learning and growing so instead of thinking as a thinking of it as a failure
I want to invite you to think of it as feedback and then you can be like use it to take your next step forward so those are the three steps what's the one little thing that will get you closer to reaching that big goal if I do it every single day and what can you do on your worst day in
regards to that so on the days when you don't want to show up and then on the days when you're feeling good you can go above and beyond and then know that when you fail it means you're learning and growing so there's no such thing as failing if you just keep going and the only way you actually
fail is if you give up that's the only way you could fail is if you give up on yourself and your dreams that's the only way you could fail and the only reason we don't do this like do these three little steps and try new things and chase our dreams is because of fear fear of failure
but if you only fail by giving up on yourself then just have this thought I'm never giving up on myself I'm just going to go until I succeed and then you can't fail so you can put that one to the side that's not even an issue for you so good and this came to me I had this thought
when I was quantum jumping today quantum jumping I know it's a thing and it's freaking amazing and I'll be teaching it in my new group that I'm starting by the way keep your ears peeled I have this exciting new opportunity this new program that I'm launching
and it's going to be coming out in the next couple of weeks it's going to be coming out end of July so listen stay tuned hang out with me and I will announce what I'm doing the big launch but this morning every every day before I do my podcast I do a meditation or I do quantum jumping
and so when I was quantum jumping today before recording this this came to me quite often we're like thinking that there needs like we're aiming towards there's this goal or this there's an end something we have to achieve but there is no end game life keeps going on and then after life
your spirit lives on like everything just keeps existing because energy we're just energy energy never dies it doesn't disappear it just transforms so there is no end game you won't be like hey I completed this look I won no there's no final destination so I want to invite you to just be curious
and playful and explore all possibilities like in this moment when I had this epiphany it was like I'm always thinking that I need to be doing something to reach something but what if the whole purpose of this existence is to just explore and be curious and playful and see what happens and enjoy the ride along the way come on this is magic stuff that I'm saying where you're like this is mind blowing you're gonna show up to your life with a totally different
energy if you have this thought take the pressure off of yourself and just be curious like what if what if so I invite you to greet every single day and live every single day with playful curiosity and just watch everything change believe me when I say anything and everything is possible now go make it happen thank you for listening always always always love yourself first and have an amazing day