Hello, my beautiful and powerful, yes you listening today right here right now. You are a beautiful and powerful CEO of the world. Welcome to the Startup Stories podcast where new female business owners are heard, held, and served treated like queens with five star, ten star gold star service. I'm bringing you relatable stories to keep you sane, grounded, and growing as you deliver your purpose and grow your business in the world. Today I am joined by Wendy Legat.
I should have checked her name first. Wendy did I pronounce that properly? Fantastic. Oh good. I was trying to do that but I'm so fired up today. Like exploding. Just energy is wild. So anyway, Wendy is a retirement life coach. Guys, we spend so much time living in now but there's always more now. And if we're employees and we've been working for 10 or 12 years or even as entrepreneurs, it's almost more addicting.
Wouldn't you say Wendy to get caught up in this busyness of the work because it's so joyful? But switching into kind of what I consider our earned run-threats and goal of having passive income so that we can enjoy life without work constrictions is such like an underlooked and under talked about part of our entire life. We usually try to create something or get through something.
But when we get to retirement, and I've seen a lot of people obviously working public sector who have flopped and fallen or not really retired immediately returned to consult or take another job or do all kinds of things. So Wendy is going to share with us how she came to grow her company and what transitions she went through. She's not retired now in her own words but definitely living in a more comfortable balance of life.
She's committed and accredited herself by becoming a professional certified coach and the founder and owner of Conflux Retirement Coaching to specialize in non-financial retirement life planning. So you're here to help our heart and help our body acclimatize to that. She comes from 25 years of corporate sales leadership and experience and now using everything that she's seen in those incredible valuable years of service to guide clients into a retirement transition.
So I'll let you carry it forward from there Wendy and I'm just so excited to hear from you and share your wisdom and your career to entrepreneurial journey with our listeners. Yeah, thank you so much and it's really great and so energizing to be here. So I appreciate the opportunity and I think you captured so much of the essence of the work that I do. So far as this feeling of purpose and this feeling of this runway into elderhood and you know what we can do to make the very most of it.
I loved when you were saying that you know we're in the work now that we love and we feel passionate about and that's the key is continuing on that trajectory and if you get to that point where you say you know what I want more or want different that's when we can start to say well then what does retirement mean to me and how might I define it because I have so many people that come to me that say oh I'm of a certain age so I should retire
or I have to retire or they have so much pressure around them about retiring and so I always want us to first start and say well what is it about retirement how do you define retirement because yes I'm a retirement life coach but I don't advocate that everyone should be retiring.
I just want those that choose to to go into it with awareness and intentionality and really make sure that it's a fulfilling chapter for them so so I wanted to kind of mention that but I'll go back then to your question about how did I get here. Okay. Thanks so much to Unpack already. Did I stop?
Well we'll just roll with it I love it I'll write something down and you can start with your origin story and then we'll dive into that because you guys did you hear what she said and I love it and it just kind of shook this concept loose from me too as to what is retirement for you it's sort of like you know what are your own personal preferences how do you like to season your food right how do you want to season your retirement right.
Yeah yeah but you could go into a restaurant and you can say season it for me and it may not be what's of interest to you and that's the key is that I really speak to a retirement by design not default and that we're at choice and I think that for all of your listeners at every life phase you know let's seize that let's let's be accountable you are saying you know the CEO of the world we're the CEO of ourselves especially as we move into retirement
because it's it's it's for us and so if we don't take that leadership role and we don't take on that ownership of both the decisions and that accountability and then we do we do fall in fun bowl as you mentioned because we're not really owning it so so season it in the way that tastes good to you so yes okay okay well let's do your origin story and let's unpack more of that because there's these distinctions around even you know my
perception of retirement which would be not going to the office every day but still doing things in a different time flow I guess okay yeah yeah yeah no and again it's you know it's for us to each define so for me as you shared my background is in sales leadership and so from from early on even before college I was in sales and then was kind of you get promoted pretty quickly when you're in like a small fashion boutique and things and so
then from there into college I just continued on that trajectory and was doing really well but then got to this point where I thought you know I want something that to me feels more professional so I had seen peers of mine that were in outside sales so I made that big shift and ended up working for a fortune 50 company and again up that career ladder and I think I think I want to just mention right now that for me a lot of those decisions I
did abdicate I did see oh this opportunity is being given to me now so I have to seize it because I have that competitive driven nature and so I just kind of kept climbing in that regard I stepped out of things for a bit as I raised my three children and then came back into the workforce and so then flash forward having worked for a lot of different companies loving the connection with the team members who reported to me loving the connection
with clients and really being able to feel like I was bringing value to all and then also this idea of wanting to achieve you know and meet and exceed those numbers the sales and service numbers the last position that I was in before making this big career change was as a director of several franchises and love the people that I was working with we were so aligned with our philosophy and we were doing great things and that's probably
was the kiss of death because we did so well that I think the owner saw this is a great opportunity to sell and so they did and the new owner that came in had such a totally different philosophy than I did his way of facing to the clients and to our team members was just very opposed to mine and so our values were not aligned and you know a lot of us are fixers and problem solvers so I tried every which way to make it work but ultimately
it was so soul sucking that I just really had to you know I think sometimes when we're at that lowest point is when we look really closely and we listen and that's what happened for me and it was like you know I can't I can't make this better it's too much at my sacrifice and so I went back to really deciding okay what now do I want to go into a you know another sales leadership position and I thought it just didn't feel right any longer what
felt more right to me was really bringing more of myself forward and so I started researching things and I came upon coaching which was new to me you know I'd work with coaches I guess but I thought of them as more consultants more in you know the work environment and so and I thought wow I can go back to school and I can become a professional certified coach and so I went back to school which was in and of itself such an adventure and so
challenging but so fulfilling and determined okay I'll go back into coaching around business but very quickly it started to feel more trans you know transactional than transformational it wasn't filling my soul and so as much as they sometimes say do what you know it was like no what I know is that I see people like me I you know peers at their clients that are struggling as they're moving into retirement and I thought wow this is not this doesn't
feel good to me this isn't how I want anybody to be moving through their life not if there's something that I can do about it and so then I discovered retirement life coaching and thought so I got several additional certifications because I didn't do anything like that existed and then all the books that are out there and I started to see that and learn that there's a struggle for a number of people the studies tell us one in three struggle in retirement and so I'll kind of stop
there except to say that that's my passion is really helping people normalize that if they're struggling that's totally normal a lot of other people are going through that struggle and then what we can do about it and how we can be about it to move into that next chapter.
So you immediately you had been you said you had been advocating your power throughout your career but then when your career started shifting the work environment changed you and like you know it's it's bittersweet but beautiful how you were at this really incredible climax of everything being synchronized and healthy and slow and fulfilling and then a big change came in and rocked it right but in that time instead of continuing to give in and try and make do what you did because you
have a pure heart and you know you had people you genuinely cared about particularly having had such a good run with them leading up yes but then you took your power back you know yeah probably even before that but really took that personal responsibility then and made a very conscious and thought out decision it sounds like it happened over a bit of time you said you were trying to make do and you look after your staff and everything for a while right yes yeah and then
then left and then weren't lost per se but you know used it as an opportunity to seek more and fell into coaching found that and I just want to point that out because I'm a big proponent of external circumstances don't dictate internal well-being right 100% but they they will create an environment in which we have to go inward and see what we're going to do and so I just think that's really beautiful and then it sounds like from there you kind of became your own avatar or niche in
you know we were going to end up serving but you didn't know yet so you were open and curious found something went for it tried it out a little and then kept digging in that coaching industry until you came upon retirement coaching and so I didn't realize that there was a deeper level of it available out there and I'm not surprised but I think that's great because then it helped you probably even normalize moving into that specific area and you had just kind of come out of a
comparable transition so yes start to serve people based on your personal experience right and you as a leader in that because you had a bit of a better sense or you know mind for strategy coming from sales perhaps you know as to how to lead yourself forward and so other people it's not because work you go and it's there for you right like you don't have to create it or anything it's it's like having a parent look after you even though it's a job there's that built-in structure
expectations and famous and so yeah so you're very insightful that I am my client in so many ways because just like I say you know let's experiment let's put a toe in see what feels right we don't need to jump into things because so often people are kind of one day they're in career the next day they're in retirement it's so black or white and and then they contend to start right away to do the to-do list in the bucket list in the travel in the leisure and all of that is great until that
honeymoon phase wears off which it generally does for most six months two years in and then people start to say wow what's why am I here like what feels right you know what matters at this point what's getting me up in the morning how can I contribute and for those that don't ask those questions then they can maybe get on that hamster wheel again a busyness you know and filling up their dance card to feel like they're relevant or falling out on the couch research tells us that
the average retiree watch is 47 hours of tv a week a week that's more than time than you spend at work if you have like a 45 hour yeah replaced replaced work with or anything in between and so that's that's really my focus is let's go in with realistic optimism let's not be on that idealistic idealistic edge which is leisure travel in less weekends or the other one foot in the grave and about loss and aging and things let's bring it to the middle and the way that we do that is to
heighten our awareness about this could be a struggle and then become intentional you know how am I feeling about this and what what is going to feel better to me or what needs more attention and then get into action so I do want to highlight that in the demographic that generally is retiring you know positive psychology was not on the scene when we were being raised and so this idea of feeling or giving any attention to our emotions is really foreign for a lot of people and and
that's why I feel like I can really help give some pathways to that because rather than suppressing or pushing aside those emotions their signals to us they're telling us something is amiss and so by acknowledging them and understanding and navigating and then we can move into this place that does resonate more with with our desires or resonate more with who we are just like I was able
to find that when I left that last position. So I want to hear from you based on clients that you've served different visions of retirement so we can start to plant that in because you know with my audience being newer female entrepreneurs and starting a business is like it's so delicious and so stimulating and I've said it a hundred times I guess I need to get because I've gone to Disneyland in a few weeks but it's like being a kid at Disneyland with a pocket full of candy and a
pocket full of cash and no supervision right and you're just like ready to go running until you fall down and throw up so um but I really want to you know encourage women that even though we're having that gorgeous stimulation at the beginning it's a long game and eventually or throughout we want to allow more room for life like that's my big um motivation for supplementing income through an online business is to have more time freedom my job has reigned over how much money
I earn how much time off I get how much sick time I have when I can go on vacation what my working hours are right all of these structures around it and having an online business is to create some freedom in that and then spread it out over like 30 years of life right or not to do not to replace my job with another job where I'm making my own money right but to create something above that that's purpose that's spaciousness that's meaningful and yeah of course that brings in money when we
retire we get a passive income hopefully in some cases right it's a little different Canada versus the States I guess um but then what I think opens up is all this space and time to exist and all of these distractions aren't there anymore to kind of fill the silence right of of who we are and like you were saying what now and what's next and when you described the first six to 24 months of retirement I was like oh that sounds like spring break right like grandma and grandpa are
going on spring break for a couple years yeah yeah but it's like you're right it's not a sustainable so how do you spread that out and and be more than just those things right yeah I mean what's really coming up for me as you're sharing that Nia and the entrepreneur's journey is it's there's some parallels between that and the retirees journey because this idea that if we do look at this time abundance or we look at you know really making them having so much in front of us we can fritter
away what's what presently is is provided to us and so I think that that's an important thing at any age or life stage is being present and really saying making those decisions taking that charge and so as an entrepreneur and thinking wow you know kid in a candy store there's that abundance so let's just give ourselves some space and grace let's slow down so that we can speed up and really savor those decisions and make mindful decisions very similar as we move
into retirement and so what I'd like to offer up is no matter what age your listeners are at or what they're looking at for their future is to use this as that runway because if we put some of these practices and beliefs and habits in place now they'll serve us well into elderhood and I think that's what I the disconnect that I see so often is that people have been on that autopilot or on that hamster wheel or just so so busy and so then I have clients that say wow now that works behind me
you know I don't really have those social connections because I wasn't nurturing those relationships and what I always invite is well if you got a call from someone from your past and they said wow you know it's been a long time but I'd love to reconnect would you hang up on them no you would more than likely I don't know the circumstances but mostly you would welcome it right and so so it's a matter of putting that toe in it's a matter of maybe being a little vulnerable it's
a matter of experimenting and so so I think that that's so vitally important you asked some of the things that people come to me with and I mentioned early on this idea of struggle and a lot of the clients that come to me are in that place of struggle and they feel I think a sense of shame almost or a sense that they can own it up you own up to it to anybody else because if you think about it if you say to somebody house retirement what are they going to say it's great yeah I'm
at Disneyland all the time yeah um and so if they say well I'm struggling with more than likely say what are you what are you talking about you're not working you know you leave your travel all that and so so there's a sense of wow there's something wrong with me then I must have missed the invitation to that party um but the reality is so many people do struggle so the people that come to me oftentimes are saying things like I feel lost in the desert I feel a huge loss um especially people
in the helping industry such as teaching and and nursing and things like that you know they are so connected on a deeper level not to say that all of us aren't but but especially there that a real loss um or gosh I feel like I'm going to fail in retirement so coming with all of these preconceived notions or expectations around us or or I've had people come that are so busy and then when we start to deconstruct it's like they're feeling like they have to continue to earn the badge of relevance
or feel like they they again matter but based on things that don't matter so much to them so those are some of the things um I is that kind of addressing the thought that had come to your mind in it's such an important conversation because it it shows how we can build our life in like individual chapters or blocks right okay right now I'm raising kids okay right now I'm working okay right now I'm retired but what you're talking about and and it's it's gonna heal and already is
so many people especially because I still work in government local government and we're not prepared for retirement work doesn't you know give you a six month transition or emotional support or counseling and programs like what you're doing I think really belong in corporate for that that last year so that you're ahead of it and you're supporting your employer employee in leaving but listening to you is very reminding of we want to blend our life together to kind of
have these smooth um evolutions right not these jarring like um hot cold contrasts right yeah I'm 42 I know I'm gonna retire one day right like it's inevitable the majority will do yes right we know that's coming it's always sort of then and then oh we think we're looking forward to it and I have observed people in the last year or so of retirement um being very excited and starting to really let go and kind of not care sort of that I won the lottery you know go-pound sand attitude then at
work a woman just retired and um I had to kind I lovingly and jokingly was like it is four o'clock beat it and now it's 427 we finish up 430 I'm like would you get out already right you know it's not gonna matter and but her heart's just so in it she wanted to to be a part of that but thinking about these things and the the jarring shift when you haven't been getting set up for it is a huge missing link huge right and then like people will become codependent on something
like a grandchild or or the the adult child and their family and that is now the entire focus and just completely lose sense of self because like you say the structure is gone the social network is very different or maybe you're kind of done with your work people as lovely as they were um and I just love the idea of normalizing that that stage of life and again as you connected the dots with the early stages of building something basically our whole lives were pursuing meaning
and pursuing greater self-awareness right and fulfillment so um layering that in throughout our journeys can ease those changes and I'd love to hear like what was it like for you from what I heard in your origin story work changed I finally decided to quit I jumped or I found life coaching and went back to school and so how did you feel really leaving corporate after 25 years and doing a total shift and what did you learn about yourself now in your own personal story that helps you
relate to the clients that you're working with yeah it's such a such a great question thank you I want to circle back to a couple things you mentioned um I want to touch upon really quickly this concept of off-boarding because I you're absolutely right you know there's so much that's done around on-boarding and yet corporations would do well and serve their communities and themselves and their employees well to assist them into this next chapter and I think that there's more and more
of a spotlight around that but it's definitely not something that is is very commonly seen so that's one thing another I'd like to highlight is this concept of balance and I think the more throughout our lives that we can keep that balance like I was mentioning clients who say gosh I haven't been in touch with people for so long let's pepper in those little pieces throughout at every again age or life stage and let's make sure that if it's our faith or if it's our community or if it's
activities or if it's a significant other you know that we're that we're balancing that because I kind of always hold up a circle and say if our lives are 24 hours and that's the whole and if we're working eight or 10 or 12 or more hours and then oh yeah we're supposed to sleep it doesn't leave much time but yet if we just build in those little little steps just the smallest step you know making a plan to contact somebody once a week having dinner with somebody once a month um that's around
social connections getting to the gym you know so many people say when I retire I'll get healthy and yet we want to just continuously have these sampling blocks the last thing that I'd like to speak to and then I'd love to talk about my transition is transitions um and that was a concept that I was new to me when I started coaching and I that's what I did my research project on was transitions because I didn't realize that there's a big difference between the external change like
me for example with leaving corporate and going into coaching and the internal transition that
that really happens deep within us and and how things are impacting us. William Bridges did a lot of work around this prolific around transitions and I love his model which is that we start with the ending we start with that closure we start with okay what what do we want to bring with us and what do we want to leave behind and what do we need to put a period or an exclamation mark on and that's why sometimes rituals like a retirement party for example or for any of you leaving from
one career to another um is so important or sending kids off to college you know we're changing our roles but we're not changing who we are that our sense of identity that true essence of who we've always been and always will be is there but sometimes life just buries it or we allow it to be buried and so so I want to bring that up too because I think so often people jump right into the what right into the doing right into all the activities when they make a transition and that's
really that external change but it's not allowing for us to have closure and and really clarity about what's going to serve us best as we move forward and what we need to have an ending to so just to finish up on Bridges model so we start with the ending and then we go into what he calls the neutral zone and maybe productivity drops off if we give it the time in the space in the grace to reflect on what's most important to us and that can be that time when we're in conflict or we feel stuck
or we feel unsure or we feel denial about the changes we made or angry and we need to sit in that place and explore it and really determine you know what's coming up for me and what's what questions do I need to answer for myself before we then go into that third piece of the model which is that new beginning and that then can become the what but we start with that why and we start with what's meaningful to us and doing that um for me I think that if I'm going to be
totally honest when I made that change from corporate I don't know that I was in tune with with all of the things that I'm sharing with you as I am now um because again I was raised in that era where you know you push through emotions you're you know no pain no gain productivity hard driving get things done and if these things come up you push them down unless they just you know explode um so so I think this idea of really keeping that balance and mindfulness about
what's coming up for us is just vitally important I was very fortunate through my coaching to also have the opportunity to get involved in a program called positive intelligence and I don't know if some of your listeners have heard of it but is this idea of not just physical fitness but mental fitness and how we can take that survivor brain that we have that skews to the negative it just does and but through science we're learning now there is neuroplasticity the more that we infuse positivity
in our life not in a toxic way but more in a way of what's coming up for me that's a negative emotion how can I shift it um then we get on this trajectory of looking at life looking at the gifts looking at the possibilities um and so I was very fortunate to also become credentialed in that as well and that works very beautifully hand in hand with the work that I do so that was a lot to answer your question
but did it you know kind of yes no yeah it's so profound and you know you speak in a very calm and grounded place too and it's it's lovely to listen to you draw it out what I'm hearing is you know habits in shaping our day to day that are aligned with our values and that are true for us this is the stuff that like you said happens from inception to last breath it's our it's like our heart DNA essentially right if I have to put a label on it um and in in life we again go through
these different stages and as adults we just sort of make may end up cataloging these different stages right so when you're a kid it's fun la la la toys no responsibility school la la la fun maybe a bit more responsibility real world you kind of play for a bit and then into the career and there we we kind of become a bit generic potentially and I want to speak very generally because the underlying element pulling out from what you were sharing Wendy is there's the doing
and there's the being and the doing can tend to take over as we age because creativity curiosity you know like if you look at your standard average adult to a beautiful four to seven year old you're going to see some personality differences and that's what I want to really be clear that I'm talking about right yes is the being and the doing and retirement is a a jarring life of van tat times because we've been in the doing yes for so long yeah and we've got we have
that's on the back we're doing it right we get the sense of accomplishment we get you know we have connection we have relevance um yeah but there's parallels there also with you know your listeners who are entrepreneurs or listeners that are deep into their careers and not looking at retirement yet there can be that same that same busyness factor that same doing and I love that saying that we're human beings and that's just such an important reminder you know that that we know that when we
build off of the feelings that are deep within us we do have more clarity more commitment more conviction more confidence but if we don't allow for that then we can just be in this autopilot or we can start to abdicate some of those choices to others and that's not a place that I want any of us to be in and I know you don't as well and a harder um truth to face as we become more vulnerable in older age right you can tend to then just further and further constrict is like your last
few chapters on earth right so taking that um reverse engineer model right to your last breath what are you going to take with you in that moment and allowing that to play back all the way to right now you guys and think about the long long game not all at once but with an awareness and a connection to the being that you want to be as you be from here on forward no yeah I mean that's one of the exercises I do with clients is that wiser elder self that legacy of wisdom you know and
then but we're not going to be just looking at leaving things behind we want to live it now you know and so being mindful then and taking that time to reflect and taking that time to dig deep so it is work um and that's the thing that I think a lot of people don't want to open up that door but gosh once you open up that door then you're really entering into that room that's filled with the things that that you love you know the things that are meaningful to you and so um so I
really do I really want that for everyone but it's not for everyone I understand that you know digging deeper looking a little closer um but I'm going to think that your listeners are not of that elk and that they really are on this path of self-discovery and and honesty and authenticity in what's meaningful and then finding the pathways to it so share with us Wendy then some different visions that your clients have had over retirement and even some of the
transformations that you've seen from um their Pinterest board you know should retirement to their soulful spirit led fulfilled retirement yeah I mean that's such a that's such a deep and important question um and I think that what I want to first say is that you know these are works in progress we're all works in progress so it's not a matter that we finally achieved the goal it is I I I always like to think it's a different word than journey but that's what comes
to mind is you know that we're just we're allowing for that and we're we're entering it in with this idea of possibility and positivity and and pivoting where needed um you brought up before this idea that sometimes we can kind of our world can become much more narrow and we can start to constrict and so this is what I want for everyone is to stay really open and I think that's the beauty um that I've seen in all of my clients is this opportunity to you know yes they have this bucket
list or yes they have this to-do list and they start to look at it very differently and they can start to build it to don't list or they can get rid of the list or they prioritize you know they see what is most meaningful because like you said at the end of your day is looking back you know what will you have valued the most well if we're caught up with all of this checking things off which oftentimes is a mindset from work then we're not going to be fully stepping into you
know what's what's possible or what's more importantly what's meaningful to us so for one of my clients she loves music and so for her she had always thought about writing a song for her children and so that's something that she was really able to allow for that vulnerability and that creativity
to come to the surface that had been really kind of submerged in her corporate work. For another client who was in the teaching profession just really being able to see that no I'm not going to now go back to working in a different way I'm going to instead give a myself a mentor and help raise somebody's situation up and so she chose to go and become a volunteer in the prisons and that became very very heart-centered and important for her and so those are a couple examples I have so very many
but I think I think just opening the door I think people just feeling this weight that's lifted because yes it's so anticipatory but it's also like oh no you know what am I don't think so yes and so then it's known yeah yeah and even for one who came back and said you know I look at my vacation so differently now I really immerse myself in the experience I really step into it seeing the gift in it and seeing that this is such an opportunity as opposed to
you know checking okay so I went here and I went there so just being more present being more present and being in your life living that life treating everything as those precious moments so that's what I would say is that's the universal that I see in clients so the retirement is the external factor that's holding you to an internal expansion if you're willing to go there right yes and one that it's kind of funny because it's almost so
obvious right like you know it's coming you know it's going to be different but it's somehow still so unknown for you and you've painted just a beautiful picture of how people really made it for what was right for them yes you know and so if somebody's finding a part-time job that's right for them you get a social element you get a little bit of money you get to have fun get out maintain some semblance of structure like there's so many different ways of doing it but the the thread behind
it all is their sense of self and their sense of really allowing for something that they haven't made time or space for yet right particularly when you talked about the person going on vacation I was feeling like you know when you work nine five Monday and Friday 52 weeks a year going on vacation is like oh yeah you get to be a kid again but when you don't have to go back to work you're not escaping from anything you're really enjoying life for what it is and if we pull that
elements into now it will change our life and we start to reverse engineer then from that transition of retirement to this present moment where we are building our business work in corporate whether you know just being on a self-development journey and really living from a deeper place and sense of self and making space for things you mentioned one person didn't have like creative bandwidth at their job and now can release that and so we don't have to wait for that to happen
either right yeah yeah no I think I think that's so true and I think this idea of reframing you know that looking at life from a spot of abundance rather than scarcity and looking at it from opportunity rather than obstacle and and the concept that were the motivation you know what's what's the motivation are we drawn to something or are we trying to move away from something and so we have all of these at our fingertips throughout our lives but if it's a muscle that we're not
used to or it's an opportunity that we haven't even we don't even know it's at our feet then we can step over it and so it's just so important that we are aware and that we are intentional and that then we get into action so that we don't just have these hopes wishes and dreams this fantastic retirement but we don't have a runway to it and more importantly when we plan for it or step into it that we do plan for it and we fully step into it yeah and I think just
you doing this work and showing up is going to help blend together these transitions right so we've already linked this sort of startup new entrepreneur to career retirement and we've we've shown the parallels between them and created a thread now for that continuity and as retirement coaching grows and gets into corporate and other places and provides that support for especially current generation where it just wasn't part of the culture part of the family conversation part of
any of that is very healing and meaningful and will create a legacy and of its own you know for future generations to to live um you know like a bit more holy all the way along or rather than waiting for different stages for that to come out yeah yeah and so that it's not like we're always looking for oh gosh I get to retire in 30 years I get to retire in 20 years you know when I retire I will yes yes because then we're just like counting away the same and stuff and and
instead of being in that present moment um and I love how you're mentioning this thread through our lives because it is this idea that yes it's a new chapter but it's not a whole new book you know sometimes people say oh I'm starting over and it's no you bring so many strengths capabilities passions with you into every chapter in your life at the same time let's be mindful of the things that don't serve us well and and I think that's where when I made my change I was able to start to
um recognize some of those patterns and habits that were working against me and let go of them and and yet again if we're not present and mindful about that we carry all that weight with us and it weighs us down it doesn't allow us to be our best selves. Wendy what would current you say to the five year ago you about this journey what would you go back and tell yourself?
Just to allow the difficult emotions you know just don't try to push them away but really really recognize that there are signals to something that there's something that needs more attention and that I don't to prove my worth I don't have to power through I don't have to be this hyper achiever I don't have to um you know drive past all these things if I sit in that place for a little bit and I allow myself to get more in tune to what's important to me and authentic
to me and true to me it's going to be the springboard into a much better place and so that's that's what I would say because that's what's happened for me so don't hurry through it sit and hold yourself comfort yourself yes yeah and if you know for some if you're so foreign and I get that um but then let's think of okay why is it foreign and I think oftentimes it's just because it's just not something that we're used to but we can wrap ourselves in a blanket of discomfort
and stay in that place and so instead let's shed it and get a little uncomfortable because we know that when we're uncomfortable generally we're growing and so yes if we start to sit with those emotions and they feel uncomfortable that that's a signal that okay there's growth that's happening here there's something good around the corner freedom freedom in there what do you think future you will say to current you present you now good on you yeah you know I mentioned earlier that work
in progress so yes I I continuously each day I want to bring my best self forward and each day you know did I fall short or whatever it's such great learning for me um and so I think that I'm just on this trajectory and I think my future self will feel like okay you've you've just continued to to hone hone Wendy along the way good job keep going good job how are you doing great right the cheerleader I'm waiting for you at the finish line yeah Oracle finish line yeah Wendy where can
we come find you where can we work with you where's the best place to hang out and continue to learn and grow with you oh yeah I appreciate that opportunity so as you mentioned the name of my company is Conflux Retirement Coaching and that's c-o-n-f-l-u-x so you can find me at my website confluxretirementcoaching.com or wendy at confluxretirementcoaching.com I'm also on LinkedIn Wendy Leggett and and just drop me a note I offer you know a session if that's helpful because I
like people to be able to really voice and normalize the obstacles or opportunities they're seeing
and so I would really welcome that opportunity to connect with anyone. Beautiful okay and we'll put all that in the show notes no worries and help get you around wonderful well thank you Wendy this was just a beautiful beautiful conversation I really enjoyed it oh and I did as well I mean your heart and your and your spirit and and just your knowledge of things is just so enriching so I appreciate it bye