Podcast Episode 35: Women - Cycles, Chapters and Seasons, Part 1

Welcome to Episode 35 of Be the Real You podcast. I’m Sharri Harmel, life and career coach as well as editor of Be The Real You magazine.

This was planned to be just one podcast, but once I got started on writing about the chapters of our lives, I couldn’t stop.

So, ladies, welcome to Part One of Cycles, Chapters and Seasons.

Today I was at my new apartment – or my almost new apartment – with an interesting decorator whose work I love. My little apartment is new and modern but I’m a gal who loves antiques along with the new. Gerald Pomeroy, the decorator I invited in, is known for taking historical Boston brownstones and houses and making them bright and beautiful. I’m asking him to do the absolute opposite of what he normally does. I need him to bring character into an apartment with no character, no history and lots and lots of light.

When we were finished, he looked at me and said, “What a lovely way to start your next chapter.” His comment sort of shocked me. First, I took in a deep breath, and thought, yes, yet another chapter. How many chapters are actually going to be in the book of my life? But as I walked down the street following the meeting, I embraced that yes, this IS another chapter and honestly, I can’t wait!

As women, we especially seem to have many, many next chapters in our lives.

I wonder, do we as women have more chapters than men because we biologically have specific cycles. Pre-menstruation, the monthlies with a cycle that goes on for decades. Followed by pre-menopause and finally post-menopause. Yet, no two women experience any of these cycles in exactly the same way or even at the same ages. Women’s bodies have to deal with new cycles throughout our lifetimes so maybe our cycles are like big themes in our lives.

But let me ask you, as women, do our biological cycles naturally give us the motivation to think and plan for the upcoming next chapters in our lives? I’m not sure. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I remember being a young girl on the verge of getting my period and for some reason, I decided that once I got my period, I’d be a different person. I couldn’t be specific about what it was that would change about me, but I was sure I’d be more interesting, look more grown up, and suddenly my next chapter was going to be a whole lot more exciting than being a “little girl.” Having an older sister, I even “practiced” having my period to get a sense of how my life might change once the real event happened. (Note … practicing for an upcoming chapter we want to write is actually good!) Like we all know, the reality of monthly cycles was nothing like I had imagined.

But back to today…. Cycles and seasons in our lives are usually connected to something biologically or even historically and typically, these big cycles and seasons are out of our control.

But the chapters of our lives, are to a great extent, in our control. We are the authors of our chapters.

Some chapters are long, and others are short. Some are happy and some are sad. Starting a next chapter is almost always an option at any age.

Raising children or looking for your special someone, are very different chapters. Pregnancy is its very own chapter as is menopause. Children going to kindergarten, or leaving the nest are new chapters. Divorce or death are usually shocking next chapters.

Many of our chapters are about creating a new version of what family and even what home actually means to us.

What’s important for us to embrace – is that we are in control of what we want to write in each chapter of our lives. We alone decide what we want to create in our next chapter.

As many of you know, Minnesota was a difficult chapter for me. My daughter and son both found great partners and therefore my true purpose in returning to Minnesota no longer existed about a year after I arrived. I had bought this lovely large home that I completely renovated but because life had changed, most of the rooms were rarely used. I also had a nasty neighbor on one side of me who sued me for something as ridiculous as not adding a window to my new garage wall that faced his yard.

Frankly, it was a very sad place for me and if it hadn’t been for my wonderful college friends who I reconnected with under the guise of a book club, I would have sunk into a deep depression.

But one night, while sitting alone in my office with a glass of wine and staring out at the snowy front yard, I decided that I was either going to have to accept that I’d be sad and lonely for the rest of my life as the price to be geographically closer to my children, or I was going to have to take action, get out my figurative pen and paper, and embrace yet another next chapter.

So, the decorator was right. My move back to Boston IS a new chapter and it is completely up to me what I create in my next chapter.

No matter what, I always feel that the excitement of our lives, is that we have the gift of choice as we prepare for our next chapter.

Many of you have shared that you’re coping with the loss of your partner due to a death or a divorce. I ask you, what could be a next chapter that would make you smile again?

Is there an adventure you still crave? I love adventures … even the word makes me smile.

After my own divorce, I began a new life chapter that included a love affair with Europe and specifically France. I began that chapter by joining tour groups but very quickly that chapter evolved into solo traveling because it felt right.

After decades of asking my family and especially my husband where he wanted to go, what he wanted to see and then spending weeks creating and arranging a travel agenda that was family happiness focused, I could now go and do exactly what I wanted to do. So, I traveled alone.

I knew I wanted to try out Paris for longer times, so, I made my plan to start with a month in Paris. It happened during a January-February stint when Paris got more rain that it had for years. But I was there. I walked and walked. I bought more umbrellas than chocolate. I took cooking classes, learned how to shop with my little pull cart, wrote in my journal while sitting in cafes. I ordered champagne or wine with dinner depending upon how I felt. I had my places. Le Fumoir became my hangout, Saint Sulpice my church. The man who sold me bottled water always waved when I passed his shop. I learned that the word family can mean lots of different things.

Once home, another trip was planned. I went to Amsterdam to find bicycles, Dutch architecture and Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. I yearned to live in one of the homes on a canal until I discovered the stairs between floors more closely resembled ladders than stairs. I navigated getting on the train from Amsterdam to Paris with very little French and no Dutch.

But sometimes we just aren’t ready for the next chapter. The very first time I returned to London after my divorce, a city my husband and I loved together, I cried. I even bitterly sent him an envelope with the chocolate left on my hotel pillow inside with a sad little note – look what you missed. (I’m not sure he never received it.) I didn’t go back to London for several years because that chapter hadn’t yet ended. Once I was healed enough to start my new adventure chapter, I got on the Eurostar from Paris, checked into Number Sixteen Hotel, and had a wonderful time. But the only way I knew if I was ready was to take action.

So what adventures are you putting off? What do you want to put into your next adventure chapter?

Remember, there are all kinds of adventures. Some of the hardest adventures are the ones you take when you stand in place – no car or plane ride needed – the adventure is where you are standing right now.

It might be that you want to see if writing a book is REALLY what you want to do. It is at the top of many people’s list. If this is you, sign up for that writing class? Register for a writing conference to immerse yourself in the world of writers. Put something you wrote in front of an editor to get some feedback. Show your writing to a good friend and ask for feedback. You have to PRETEND you are a writer to learn if you really want to BE a writer.

If you want to see how far your corporate or professional career might take you, dive into that adventure. Begin that next chapter knowing that the process and certainly the ending of that chapter has yet to be revealed.

That’s actually true for all adventures. But when you pretend, which is called prototyping in the world of engineering, you will quickly get a sense of whether you are in the right place, and if not, what’s next. Do you need to learn something, master something? What is your daily life like when you pretend you have gotten to that place you want to be and are you completely jazzed with your contributions? Now we never really know … just like me pretending I got my period to see how grown up I would feel when my cycle started, we really don’t know how our adventures will play out, but we have to take action.

But what’s important is by pretending, you are actually starting to prepare for that next new chapter. You are building emotional muscle for your next chapter when you pretend you are already there.

If the kids are out the door and onto their own lives, maybe your next chapter is to embrace a hobby you’ve always wanted to pursue. Think about how you can clear out the stuff, redecorate and repurpose the rooms those kids will no longer use. Hobbies/dreams/activities need space so begin your next chapter on reimagining how you will use and live in your home.

The artist Laurel Pulvers, who attended a workshop with me in Paris, went home and turned her daughter’s old bedroom into her art studio!

When I was young my sister and I were often left to babysit our siblings when my parents went to church. Scary, but I have no memory of the kids, but what I do remember is that my sister and I reimaged how we could arrange the furniture on the main floor of our house. It was crazy fun. We reached a tipping point when we decided a large dining room was much more needed than a large living room, so we tried to swap the rooms. Our parents thankfully thought it was funny. But what this crazy activity taught me at a young age, that we can reimagine how we use space. So, the rooms in your next chapter home might look really different and why not?

When something shakes up your life, a new next chapter enters our mind. Good things like getting married, a new baby can do it as well as harder emotional hurdles like relationship troubles, a divorce or even a new empty nest. Covid was a huge an event and gave all of us the time to pause and ask what this is?

Even before Covid, many of my clients over the past few years were and are in that space of questioning, and I always make them start with self-discovery. Try it. Who is the REAL you? What are you all about?

Here’s a great question to ask yourself. A couple of years ago when I was thinking of purchasing a purse that was insanely expensive for me, I asked myself … “If no one sees this, will you still want it?” Whew … THAT really made me think.

But what if the world was a place where no one ever shared what they did for a living? What would you choose to do?

Asking yourself that question gets all the opinions of others out of the picture and pretty quickly, you’ll start to learn what makes YOU, the REAL you, happy. Self-Discovery has amazing benefits. I promise you; you’ll make much better choices in your life when you really and truly know yourself – those values you hold dear, your strengths and talents, what and who matters to you, what gives you energy, how you want to spend your time.

To learn more about yourself, start with this journal question every single morning …. “What do I really want…?” And every day, finish the sentence. By using the same question every single day, after a few weeks, you will have distilled down all the superfluous bits and gotten to the core of what it is you really, really want and in the process, you’ll figure out who you are.

That’s exactly why my podcast, magazine, and coaching is titled Be the Real you. We have to embrace our real and true selves to be happy, feel engaged, and be ready for whatever cycles or seasons are tossed in our direction.

For myself, when I began answering this question, I want to share that I’m tentatively embracing that I really, really want to be healthier, get back in shape, and learn to shift how I view food in my life. That’s huge ladies and I’ll talk about it in my next podcast.

What about you?

Go ahead and share on our FB page. Let’s each of us, get started writing a new chapter in our own books of life.

Now, I want to thank you for spending your precious time joining me today. There are hundreds of podcasts out there and I am grateful that you chose to be here with me today.

I have an exciting announcement. Sometime in June, I’m bringing my Paris soiree experience to you, by offering you my very first Champagne Soiree! If you didn’t already hear, I regularly attend a soirée hosted by Nancy Perdot who owns Salon Septiéme in Paris. I got this crazy idea that because I love her Paris Soirées, and I thought why not create my own, just online. I’m planning one per month, when we’ll have the opportunity to discuss a specific topic and connect with each other. I’m going to limit the numbers so connecting is possible. Right now, I’m lining up our summer guests with our first Champagne Soiree the end of June. There will be no cost to attend, all I ask is that you invite one other woman to join us. Spread the word!

My goal in offering the Champagne Soirees, the magazine, my coaching programs, and even social media posts is that we continue to build Be the Real You community. It truly is a women’s authenticity movement and today, knowing and showing up as the Real You is so important. This movement might just shift the world and in a good way!

Take care everyone and see you soon!

A bientôt.