Reinventing Yourself in Different Phases of Life

Have you ever stood at the crossroads of change, feeling both exhilarated and daunted by the unknown? My own journey through heartache and healing taught me that life's evolutions are not to be feared but embraced as the very essence of growth. As I share my personal narrative of overcoming a divorce and an abusive relationship in my twenties, this episode illuminates why welcoming change is not just necessary, but transformative. We delve into the power of reinvention at every stage of life, whether you're stepping into a fresh decade or facing the uncharted terrains of adulthood.

 I am so excited to share this podcast episode with you. It's not just a story, but a call to action for anyone who wants to make a change in their life. It reminds us that while the journey can be tough, it's also full of incredible opportunities for personal growth. Embracing change isn't just something we have to do, it's the way we become the architects of our own destiny, one choice at a time.

Let me tell you about my own journey, which has been one of resilience and reinvention. As a single mother, I faced a lot of challenges, but I never let them stop me. Instead, I worked hard and pursued my education and career. Along the way, I rediscovered my passion for journalism and even found love when many people thought it was too late. Now, as I approach my 50s, I've learned the importance of being present and taking care of myself. It's led me to a life that's incredibly fulfilling and intentional.
I hope that by sharing my experiences, I can inspire you to make choices that lead you towards your own personal milestones and a life of purpose. You've got this, amiga! Let's make some amazing changes together.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Mommy on a Mission podcast. The podcast empowers Latina women, and all women, to reach their goals, one dream at a time. I'm your host, mariana, and as we enter a new year, many of us have heard the popular phrase New Year, new Me. While this phrase may seem cliche, it highlights an important aspect of personal growth the ability to reinvent yourself in different phases of life. So in today's topic is about coping with change, reinventing yourself in different phases of life. Whether you're starting a new job, entering a new stage of motherhood or simply looking to make positive changes in your life, we'll be discussing tips and strategies for coping with change and embracing opportunities for personal growth. So sit back, relax and get ready to be inspired as we dive into compelling subjects that will uplift, motivate and ignite your passion. Get ready to be inspired, empowered and never give up on your dreams. This is the podcast where we turn dreams into unstoppable missions. Are you ready? Let's go. Hola, hola. Welcome to Mommy on a Mission podcast. This is your host, mariana, and I'm so excited to talk about this particular subject because I think many of us go in with that mentality of New Year, new Me, right Like it's a fresh opportunity for us to to embrace change. Like we're accepting of change more so at the beginning of the year as opposed to like, as we're going through a year, we feel like, okay, this year's already going like this, let's just go ahead and just continue to navigate the rivers, just as it is right. But why? Why do we do that? Why do we have to accept how things are going during the year and not change it? Like, why do we have to wait till the end of the year? Right, but for a lot of us like change, it's scary, right, some of us don't like change. Like, for instance, I know that when you're at a job and you know you're not happy there, right, you know you're not happy at your job. You know that you don't like how things are going. Perhaps your pay, you haven't had a raise in a while, or maybe you've been stuck in the same position for a long time and that things. You know you haven't been promoted or anything.

Speaker 1: 2:54

And then there's that chance of you looking for another job and for some it's like you start to think of all the negative things that go with it. Instead of the positive, we go to the negative. Why? Because we're scared, we're afraid, we don't like the change. We already know that with this job, if you show up, you're gonna make this amount of money, whatever, right. And then if, by starting a new job, you're having to start all over again in getting to meet people, learning a new job, being in a new space, and so you're out of your comfort zone, so to speak, and we accept things out of comfort, Even though it's not good for you, we still accept that comfort feeling because we're so accustomed to it that sometimes we'd rather just stick it out and not make any changes at all. And so I wanted you to take a look for a moment and realize that change doesn't have to be scary. It's actually an opportunity to further grow, to learn something new about yourself, to explore, to experience, to live, to be positive, something different, right. And so if we embrace the positive as opposed to the negative, we'll find that change is gonna be okay.

Speaker 1: 4:22

So, as women, we go through different phases of life, and each decade brings new challenges. So why am I talking about this? Well, in less than a month, your girl here is going to be 50 years old, and I am embracing that. I am embracing being at a new decade of life right and so many things. If I were to just sit here and pause for a moment which is what I'll do and I look back at the last 30 years of my life and I'm not talking about, like I'm not gonna go as far back you know my teenage years or my childhood years, because I don't you know, those are things that were gonna happen, you know and you're you know. Yes, we experienced changes during our adolescence and stuff, but I'm talking about adulthood change and I can remember, like, all those phases in my life I've said this before, though my 20s. It's kind of a blur, because I endured a lot of hardships during my 20s. That's the that's. Those are the times in my life where I was just going through it.

Speaker 1: 5:37

I was going through a lot, like I got married at the age of 17, got pregnant at 19, divorced by 22 from my first husband, got into another relationship shortly after that which was abusive, and I don't really talk about that relationship Like this was somebody that I had known since I was a kid, when I would go visit my family in Mexico, and you know, this was like a childhood boyfriend, so to speak, and so after my divorce, we kind of like, met up again when I had gone to go visit my family in Mexico and it was during that time that I got into this relationship with him. It was a friendship, but then it got to where, like, okay, you know, maybe we could have a relationship or whatever. And then he ended up crossing over and coming to the United States and when he did, he pretty much wanted to have this like relationship with me. And even though we did get into a relationship, it became very dominant because he did come from like a machista type mentality and I'm American, like I am Mexican descent, but I'm an American, I was born here, I am accustomed to a lot of the ways here, as well as having incorporated what I grew up as a Latina, learning right from my mom. But this person was very, became very abusive, was an alcoholic and it's like they say in Spanish what the mother, what the father? I think I said it right there what the mother, what the father, and what basically with that thing is.

Speaker 1: 7:22

I went from bad to worse, right Because, or yeah, because, in this person, you know, I ended up going out with him or whatever, and we almost got it. Well, we did get into a car wreck and we almost died and I knew then that I could not be with this person. Fortunately for me, this person lived in Mexico, so I we went to Mexico and I ended up letting the letting them know as we were crossing the border, that this person was not an American, and that was just my way of being able to handle that situation and knowing that I was going to be far away from him and that I wasn't going to have to see him again. However, during that change that's when I met my second husband and again I went from one bad relationship into another, and so my twenties was a lot of learning moments, teachable learning moments that I had to endure.

Speaker 1: 8:23

Like I had no confidence, I did not have the mindset. I guess at that time I was very naive, even though I thought I was very smart. But I was very naive and most of us in our twenties I could say that we're very green with life, like we feel we know we have a handle on it, but in reality, how much do we really know? Because most young people end up going to college and they go from being in their household, go to school and then graduating, go into college and then that's like their first experience of living as an adult, but not fully, because at some point they're still dependent on their parents for things, right, but with me I wasn't dependent so much on my parent, I was dependent on the man that I was with. And so there was like this learning curve, this transition in my life, like I didn't know if I was going to be in a career. I didn't have a career path In my mind. I was going to be a housewife, I was going to stay home with my kids and I was going to allow for the man to support us, which is, again, the mentality of most Hispanic women. And I speak again, I speak about Hispanic women because that's who I am right and that's how I grew up, to say that it's like that in every Hispanic household, but for the majority of what I've experienced, it has.

Speaker 1: 9:57

And so I didn't know how to phase out into a different life until I really started to hone in on my voice, like finding a voice to get out of this situation, and I started working. So, even though I have had other jobs in the past, I really didn't have a job that I would say was a career. I just had a job. That's how I saw it, because I didn't know the difference between a career and a job. All I knew is that I was going to go work, make money and pay the bills. That was how I grew up thinking too so. But then I discovered through the people that I was working with, through the executive director that I was working with. That is when career really started becoming a word that was going to become familiar to me, like not looking at a job as just something to receive an income, but something that was going to fulfill me, something that was going to help me grow as a person. And so that transition actually happened in my 30s. That is when I started to navigate and explore other avenues or other ways of living and thinking, and so that also came with its own set of challenges, because by this point now, I am twice divorced.

Speaker 1: 11:31

My life started over at 30. That's when I started to work in nonprofits. I went to college, but I was a single mom taking care of my children, and so, as a single mom I was, I had the challenge of balancing motherhood, work and everything else in between, paying the bills and all of that stuff, and that was hard. That in itself was hard to kind of like balance all of those things out and then put in the equation moving in with other family members. So that itself was scary. But then within my 30s, what I should have done in my 20s I started to do in my 30s, and that was go to college and start thinking about what kind of life I wanted to have. And so I remember that I started journaling a lot of what I wanted it to look like, what I wanted to have.

Speaker 1: 12:33

I started thinking about what you know old dreams of mine, like wanting to be a journalist and being in front of a camera. I started thinking about those things, but at some point in my mind I felt like those were unrealistic goals and so I had to like think and pause for a moment and be like okay, wait, I need to think realistically like am I going to be a news journalist or a reporter or whatever? You know, I'm a single mom, I've got these kids. I can't be traveling around the world trying to get you know news updates or whatever. I need to find something that I can do here, that I can have daycare for my babies and be able to go to work and support them Well along the way.

Speaker 1: 13:17

That's when I met my current husband my husband now, the man that I've been married to for the last 15, almost 16 years. And this is the person that I found in my 30s. So, even though I wasn't looking for anybody, he pops up in my life, right, and so together we're establishing and living the life that typically most people do in their mid 20s, when they've graduated college and they meet their college sweetheart and then stumble into a relationship and then start making decisions about family life. Well, I did that in my 30s. Now I had to take and learn the lessons from that moment in my life, right, finding out what was working for me, what wasn't working for me, diving deep into literature, enrolling in personal development courses and really honing in on making positive changes in my life. And then now we're going to go into my 40s. I'm a little bit more established now in my 40s. I turned 40 years old. New things are happening. Physical and emotional changes are happening.

Speaker 1: 14:39

When I thought at the age of 39 that I was already entering the phase of menopause, turns out that I was once again pregnant, again with my baby, and I had to reevaluate priorities now because I'm in a different look. I don't know but what it is. But as soon as you turn 40, you're going to be pregnant. Your hormones are just all over the place. You start to feel pain in places you never thought to feel pain in. You start to feel pain when it's cold outside. You know you're wanting to take more naps. You become a little bit more I don't know.

Speaker 1: 15:26

I would say you try to find more quietness and peace, like you don't want all that fuss, like there's nothing else you need to prove to anybody anymore. And so you're starting to really find your way. At least that's what the experience has been for me. It's like at the age of 40, I'm a lot more settled and my kids are growing up, even though I still have a baby. You know he's at that. You know now he's like I'm gonna be 50, right, so he's 10 now, but I have no little ones anymore. And so, like now, I'm just really enjoying my time seeing them grow up and just not having to worry about babysitters or anything like that.

Speaker 1: 16:14

And so my 40s has become a transition. Or became a transition of finding pause moments or breaks in life and just kind of really, you know, learning how to embrace life in the moment, in the now and now. At the age of 50, I'm like on a new path, like I don't want to stress about anything and I'm enjoying the things that I'm doing now, and I want to be a lot more present. I want to just be intentional about myself, taking care of myself, intentional about my family, intentional about who I spend time with as far as friends, keeping my circle small, but just really intentional about enjoying and living life, and so that is what I am looking forward to. Are those moments, those opportunities, right? And you know, for some of us maybe it's changing altogether. Like, maybe you've been a teacher, like I can't tell you how many women have come to me who are teachers and are transitioning into like completely different careers. Or, you know, I've had women who, for a long time, never thought about themselves and what their dreams or goals or anything was for them. It was all about their families, which is fine.

Speaker 1: 17:59

But we do have to focus on ourselves as well. We do need to find that balance of not just putting all of our energy into others, but also putting energy into ourselves, and that's something that many of us don't do, and even when we do talk to other people about making changes in our life. We often allow other people's, or allow them, to project their own insecurities right, or their fears into our decision-making, and so I've had to learn that I can't always tell people, because, again, they're gonna have their opinions and they're gonna and just like anyone else, they're gonna always wanna point out the cons as opposed to the pros. We always wanna look at the negative as opposed to the positives and, yes, keeping in mind that there are gonna be some monkey wrenches thrown into the equation, but does that mean that we stop pursuing what it is that we want to pursue? Does that mean that we don't strive for something new? And so I think that's why, when we hear that term new year, new me it's like we can accept that a lot easier, because I think that is a common theme for most women. That is the opportunity for them to say, okay, now is the time for me to reinvent myself, now is the time for me to make some decisions, and it's supported more at the beginning of the year as opposed to in the middle of the year or towards the end. I think we start thinking about it more so as we're approaching the new year.

Speaker 1: 19:51

Many people are on that bandwagon, and so I'm going to encourage you that don't wait until the new year to do that, okay? So, no matter what phase of life you're in, it's important to embrace the change and reinvent yourself. And then here's some things that you can do, so here's some strategies that I wanna share with you, or some tips. Brother. It says embrace your strengths and weaknesses. Take some time to reflect on what you're good at and what areas you need to improve on. This is called self-awareness, which will help you identify the skills and knowledge you need to acquire in order to achieve your goals or your change, or whatever it is that you want to accomplish, right. Also, set realistic goals. Break down your long-term goals into smaller, achievable steps. This will help you stay motivated and focused.

Speaker 1: 20:47

I think when we start thinking about the bigger picture, we forget to take baby steps into making some changes in our life or prepare for it, and we just wanna like throw ourselves in the deep end. Right? It's like when you at least it was for me I started learning how to swim. I didn't go to swimming classes, y'all. We learned the hard way, or we learned by life, and that was my dad just grabbed us and threw us in the water and we had to learn how to swim. I do not recommend that for anybody. My kids, I taught them by holding their hands and holding their little bodies and teaching them because that was scary. But that's what we do, right, and that makes it scary. That makes it scary when we're just trying to dive in and not knowing how to swim. We're just gonna sink on down right. But we want to be able to make those goals swan and learn and take those necessary steps.

Speaker 1: 21:42

We also need to be open to learning, right. We can be afraid of learning something new. We wanna be able to take new challenges and this is gonna help you grow, both professionally and personally. That's one of the things that I love to do is I like to read books, things in the area that I've been doing as career-wise. I'm always looking for new ways or new approaches or new methods to incorporate with the coaching that I do with my clients, but at the same time, I look at that information and apply it to myself. So I don't just provide information to my clients, but I also adopt it and I adapt it into my life as well, because if it's gonna work. I mean, I need to see what approach is gonna work, and I'm not saying that everything is gonna work for me or for anyone else, but I'm just saying that I can at least talk about my experience right. And so we want to be able to learn something new.

Speaker 1: 22:45

Take on some challenges. One of the scariest things that I ever did that I never thought that I was gonna do, was do a Tough Mudder event, like I always saw my husband doing. Tough Mudder events going through the mud, climbing over walls, going through an Arctic blast, like all of that was scary in itself and it was hard. I wanted to give up many, many times, and if you've never done a Tough Mudder challenge, I recommend that you look it up just so that you can see. And it can be a lot of fun, especially once you get through it right. But one of the things that I learned from Tough Mudder was that it does take a support system, like it's almost like no man alone right, like in the military, you know you never leave anybody behind mentality, and so that's the same thing.

Speaker 1: 23:36

As we are going through some changes in our life is that we have to have a strong support system, and so we need to build that up by the including the right people, key people in our lives in order to help us, like people who have already gone through the things that you're trying to go through, or embrace the changes that you've are that you're trying to embrace. You know we've got to get with those people that have the experience in those areas. I always say never ask someone advice who's never gone through it. Like, for instance, I would never want to ask a non parent for parental advice to raise children because they don't know. They really don't. Books can only teach you so much, but until you experience it for yourself, they won't know. That's just like you know in a different career path. You can't just go and ask somebody who you know just a question, because they're gonna come out with all kinds of opinions or what they think, or this and that. Right, that's the famous thing as well, I think. And then it turns out that it wasn't the correct thing, and so we have to be very picky and choosy on who we're going to for advice or for support. So remember change is an opportunity for growth. So by embracing change and reinventing yourself, you can achieve your goals and reach your full potential.

Speaker 1: 25:10

So I hope that the information that was provided was somewhat useful or helpful because, like I said, I was just sitting here thinking about that. You know, like wow, I'm about to be 50 years old and and I look back at all of the things that I've gone through and to know that a lot of it was scary, to know that a lot of it was hard, challenging, mind-blowing at times, but yet here I am. Here I am to talk about those experiences, to talk about the difficulties, but at the same time, also to share the beautiful things that came out of it, the lessons that I've learned and now I get to share with many, many women out there, and that there's nothing impossible. You know, it's just because it's hard doesn't mean it's impossible, right, and so we have to adopt that mentality and remember that we are strong Latino women and women. So I'm not gonna just exclude all the other women, because we're all strong, right, and we're here to empower each other and to remember that we can reach our goals one dream at a time. So, I mean, I hope that this message was helpful for you.

Speaker 1: 26:29

I pray that you will share this episode with your Amiga, your Mana, your Prima, I pray that you will subscribe to this podcast and that you give me your feedback. Let me know what your thoughts were. You can go on Spotify and share your thoughts. I would love to hear what you think about today's message and if you have anything that you want to add, you know, let me know. I'm also inviting guests to the podcast. So if you've got a story that you want to share and you want to get on a podcast, send me an email. All my information is going to be in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 27:07

So if you want to get on the podcast, if you, if there's something that you want to share, or if there's just something that you want to talk about, let's talk about it, because I think it's very important that we all contribute and share to one another, because that's how we fix each other's crowns right.

Speaker 1: 27:21

Alright, I mean as well. Thank you so much for you know, taking a little bit of your time this Saturday morning for listening to another episode of Mommy on a Mission podcast, and I will see you next weekend. If you are hearing this message, you've listened to the entire episode and for that I want to say me gracias from the bottom of my heart, if you would like to dive deeper into today's message and would like to connect with me, send the DM on Instagram at olamommyonamission, or Facebook at Mommy on a Mission. You can also find me at mommyonamissioncom. I hope you've enjoyed this new episode and if you did, it would mean the world to me. If you would subscribe, share this podcast and leave me a review on Spotify and Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast. Tune in next week for some more words of motivation, inspiration and encouragement on Mommy on a Mission podcast.