156. If You’re Still Waiting for the Right Time, This Is Your Midlife Wake-Up Call

You think you're just waiting until life gets easier...until the kid graduates, until the project wraps, until the hot flashes stop. But here's the truth: waiting is costing you your one big, wild life. And midlife? That’s your wake-up call.

🎙️ Episode Summary:

In this fiery, heart-to-heart episode, Laurie calls out one of the most common habits among high-achieving midlife women: waiting.
Waiting until your job settles down.
Waiting until the kids are grown.
Waiting until your parents are taken care of.
Waiting until you feel better in your body.

But what if waiting is exactly what’s keeping you stuck?

Drawing from raw conversations with coaching clients, her own story of midlife reinvention, and the painful realities of caregiving and aging, Laurie makes the case that you can’t keep waiting to live your life—because eventually, you’ll run out of time.

She also ties in the School of Midlife’s upcoming free masterclass about why so many women still don’t feel like themselves even after addressing their physical symptoms—because until you figure out what you really want, fulfillment will always feel just out of reach.

In this episode:

• The invisible cost of “waiting for the right time”
• Why you don’t need to quit your job or blow up your life to make a change
• What’s really stopping you from putting yourself first
• A fresh reframe on success in midlife
• How to start now—before everything is perfect

🗓️ Upcoming Event:
→ Grab your spot for Laurie’s FREE 5-Day Masterclass this February:
"Why You Still Don’t Feel Like Yourself—Even After Fixing Your Midlife Body"

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Transcript

[00:00:00] 

What if the real reason you feel stuck in midlife isn't about time, circumstances, or responsibilities, but the belief that you have to wait to live the life you want? In this episode, I'm calling out the waiting mindset that's quietly robbing you of joy, purpose, and possibility, and offering up a powerful alternative for you to start acting on today.

Let's get into it.

Welcome to the School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson.

This is the podcast for the midlife woman who starting to ask herself big life questions. Like, what do I want? Is it too late for me? And what's my legacy beyond my family and my work. Each week we're answering these questions and more. At the School of Midlife, we're learning all of the life lessons they didn't teach us in school and we're figuring out finally what it is we want to be when we grow up. Let's make midlife your best [00:01:00] life. 

Well, hey friends. Welcome back to another episode of The School of Midlife podcast. I'm your host, Laurie Reynoldson. So good to see you back here again today.

Today we're gonna talk about waiting and the problem with waiting.

And this might be a problem that I brought on myself, and I fully own it. I fully own my responsibility.

Two weeks ago on the podcast, I was talking about why. The very beginning of January is an awful time to start new resolutions, to start new big goals because we had been on vacation, or we had been out of the office for a while. So trying to change everything all at once is a recipe for disaster.

What I suggested you do instead is kind of ease into the new [00:02:00] year. To kind of feel, get yourself back to zero before you start figuring out what it is you wanna do for the year.

And end. I think, I don't know if it was me like, I'm gonna own the part that was me. Let's just say a lot of you interpreted that as I was telling you to wait. To wait to do the big things that you want to do until some point in the future.

If I was unclear in my message, I apologize. Let me take a step back and say, I was not telling you to wait. I was telling you to get yourself back to zero. To get back to who you were at the end of 2025 [00:03:00] before you start making all these sweeping changes for 2026.

Because just like in the episode I talked about an acceleration lane on a freeway. You can't go from zero to 80 miles an hour. You need some runway there. You need that acceleration lane. And that's exactly what I was talking about in the episode two weeks ago.

Since that episode dropped, I have had probably six conversations with women who are interested in coaching for 2026, which is fantastic.

I love that. I love that women are trying to really think about what it is they want for the coming year, and they're understanding that if they had the tools to get them to where they wanted to go, they'd already be there. It's exactly the same reason why we hire a [00:04:00] personal trainer to help us with our fitness goals, or we hire a nutritionist to help us dial in our eating, or we hire an accountant to do our taxes because yeah, we could figure all that shit out on our own, but it takes a really long time.

These women understand that they want something different in their life. They're not sure what it is. They, they feel like something's missing. They don't know what it is. They feel like there's something more out there for them. They wanna figure out what that is.

Several of them are getting to the end of working. That's kind of a weird way to put that, but they know that they. They want to not be working in the job that they're working in now. But they, they're also not ready to retire. Like the idea of playing pickleball and mahjong all day drives them crazy. And no slight, for those of you who are enjoying playing pickleball and [00:05:00] Mahjong all day, good for you.

But some of the women that I work with, they are ready to be done with the job, the career that they have worked their entire life up until now. They wanna be done with that, but they're not done working.

So I've been having these conversations with women who are interested in, in working with a coach. And I love that they are thinking of me. These are women who see that I was wildly successful in a male dominated, high stress career. And I pivoted. I made a decision to go in a different direction.

That didn't mean that I was starting from zero. I was starting from experience. I was starting from decades of lived opportunity and experience and lessons. I'm just doing something different with my time during the day now than I was doing before.

Instead of going to an office and billing hours and [00:06:00] hours and six minute increments, which is a tough existence. Looking at how you spend every six minutes of your day and then billing that out accordingly, It's, it's not great, but it is what it is.

Anyway, I stopped doing that and now I do coaching. I do one-on-one coaching. I do group coaching. I host luxury retreats. All of them centered on this idea that midlife women have so much opportunity ahead of them... if they will grab onto that, if they will look at midlife as not a crisis, not the end of the road, but this beautiful opportunity to figure out. Who they are becoming. Because so many of us got to midlife because we're wildly conditioned. We're doing exactly what we were, we thought we were supposed to do when we were little.

And we, we get to [00:07:00] midlife with, we've got more time on our hands, most of us have more resources. Is we can actually do something that lights us up instead of is something that's expected of us. Anyway, so I have been having these conversations with women who are interested in coaching.

And almost across the board, not everyone, because I have onboarded, uh, several, one-on-one coaching clients for 2026. We've already started. It's been fantastic. I love the progress that we're making there.

But then there's this other group, Which is so interesting to me, and they are all in the wait and see camp. What I mean by that, and I wrote 'em down.

One of them is waiting until this next big work project is done. She leads a team. They've got a big [00:08:00] project that's coming up. It probably will be rolled out in September of 2026, but it could also get pushed. She was talking about how this has been in the works for a while, and the rollout continues to be delayed. She doesn't feel like she can figure out what is next for her until this work project that keeps getting delayed, but until the work project is done.

Another woman, she is, she's where I was a couple of years ago, which is trying to figure out what to do with her aging parents. She can't quite figure out if they need assisted living care. Do they need memory care? That that is a whole different ball of wax. I know several of you have been in that position yourself, where it's a different kind of exhaustion, isn't it? Where you're trying to spend the time [00:09:00] to do right by your parents, to get them in in a spot where they're safe and they're comfortable. And they don't wanna be there. They wanna stay in their home for the rest of their lives, but they, they can't.

Side note there, if you're somebody who is going through that, I created a masterclass called How to Parent Your Parents.

It is, I think there's seven, seven videos. Maybe. There's a really big workbook. I created it because when I was going through it... i've, I've actually been through it twice. Once when my dad died, unexpectedly at 66 from a heart attack. He died without a will.

And then again, when we were going through it with Mike's parents, who were both in their late eighties, early nineties dementia issues. And because we had a little bit more of a runway with them, we were able to put some things in place. But since I've experienced both of them, I've created [00:10:00] this masterclass for you that if you don't need it now, guaranteed at some point you're gonna need it. It's a great resource. There's a clickable link in the show notes. Pick it up, have it with you. Look through it. You can start that process now because. Guaranteed. You will get to a point where you're gonna need that information and hopefully it's not too late.

But so back to this woman. She's trying to figure out what's she gonna do with her parents. She's gotta get 'em settled. Are they going to assisted living? Are they going to memory care? And she just feels like she can't do anything for herself until that is taken care of.

Another woman I talked to, her son is in high school. He is halfway through his junior year. He's going to graduate in, let me do the math on that, it would be 2027, May of 2027. So a year and a half. At this point, he's gonna graduate. He's her [00:11:00] last child at home. Everyone else has grown and flown, and she just doesn't feel like she can devote time to herself until he is out of the house.

These are just a couple of examples of the women I've talked to. All of them want to wait and it is all I can do to keep my mouth shut. I know that they really feel like they need to wait to, to be able to focus on themselves. Like the time isn't right. I get that.

But how long are we going to wait? Because none of us have an infinite amount of time for most of us, we have spent most of our lives up until now doing for others. Making sure everyone else in the family was okay. Making sure that our [00:12:00] coworkers were taken care of. We have been doing for others, most of us our entire lives.

I understand the concern that putting ourselves first is going to be potentially viewed as being selfish. That's so much conditioning. That's how we were raised. That is the message that we received from society, which is women should be selfless. Women should not put themselves first. Women should not be self-absorbed.

They should give and give and give. And we have, yes.

But it is all I can do to not put my hands on your figurative shoulders, because most of the time I'm having these conversations virtually. I'm not sitting across from the table for them. But it's, it's all I do to stop from putting my hands on your figurative shoulders [00:13:00] and like shaking you and saying, you can't keep waiting to live the life you want. You can't keep waiting to figure out what does success mean to you in this season of life? Because you have been successful. You've got the paycheck, you've got the job title, you have earned your way in life. You've done the things that have been expected of you.

And you still feel like something's missing and you still feel like there's something more out there for you, which tells me that this whole idea of how much money do you make and what is your job title, the traditional way that we have described defined success, that's not working for you. And that's okay.

There's nothing wrong with you, but how much longer are you gonna wait? How much longer are you gonna keep putting all of [00:14:00] these hours in ad nauseum before you figure out what does success mean to you? What is it that you want in life? What is it that your best life looks like? How long are you gonna wait?

Because if we keep waiting, we're gonna run out of time. The average life expectancy for women in the United States is 78.8 years, and that is going down. Uh, unfortunately, despite the advances in medicine and the fact that we're healthier than our mothers and grandmothers were, our life expectancy is still going down.

So how much longer are we gonna wait? Are we going to wait until we retire at 62 or 63 or 68, and then hope we have this [00:15:00] long, healthy retirement. I ho I hope we all do. I absolutely hope we all do that, but there's no guarantee that we get that; right? So this whole idea that, you know, we should keep waiting to, to do what we want to do. I, I think it's bad advice.

I mean, here's the truth, absolutely. You can keep waiting. A lot of women do. There's no one who's gonna stop you from doing that. In fact, there are more people who are benefiting from you, putting off what it is that you actually wanna do. That talks about boundaries that we're not gonna get into today.

But yeah, absolutely, you can completely keep putting off the life that you wanna live. But waiting costs you time. Time is one of the one things that you cannot have delivered from Amazon. You don't get more time. Waiting [00:16:00] also can keep you stuck in that same story, which is if you keep waiting to figure out what it is that you actually want, that also means that you're gonna keep waiting to build a life maybe around what you don't, because the fact that you feel like you want something different right now necessarily means that you aren't living exactly the way that you want right now.

If I was unclear a couple of weeks ago and I led you to believe that you should wait until the time is right or someday or when you have your parents settled or when your son graduates from high school or until that big work project is done. If I gave you the impression that you should wait until everything is at a good point, [00:17:00] everything is settled, I need to walk that back.

That's not at all what I was intending to leave you with what I was trying to say two weeks ago is I didn't want you to start too fast without understanding where you wanted to go. Because I, I feel like so many of us have done that, which is it's a new year and we think we have to change everything, and we get started too fast without actually knowing where we're going, and then we find ourselves a couple of weeks into it and we're burned out. We're stressed out because we tried to change too much, too fast. That's what I was trying to avoid.

What I don't want you to do is wait until you feel a hundred percent to make changes. You, you're gonna feel a hundred percent ready because if there's one thing I know for sure [00:18:00] that is never gonna fucking happen. You will never feel a hundred percent ready to do the next thing that it is that you wanna do.

You don't need, need a new job or a smaller waist or more time or permission from anyone. What you need to do is to be willing to try something different, to go in a different direction, to act on your curiosity. You, you already have this curiosity, this idea that there's something more out there for you. You already have the courage to want more than what you have right now.

I would like you to couple that with this belief that you can actually start living your best life right now. Even if it doesn't mean that you are going to change everything, even if it doesn't mean that your best life is just gonna automatically show up. [00:19:00] There are probably some things that, that you can actually start doing right now that aren't going to take away from your responsibilities to your son who's graduated from high school or from your coworkers that you're leading on the big project, or take away from your parents. You can still be there to support all of those people. And you can also start building your best life right now, even if it's a little messy, even if it's not exactly where you think you wanna get to.

You can start. Tom Petty said, waiting is the hardest part. I think that's wrong. I think starting is the hardest part. Starting. It doesn't have to be a full start like burn it down. Start over from scratch. That's not what I'm saying. You can get started moving in the direction that you want to without changing everything in your life.

That's what I didn't want you to [00:20:00] do two weeks ago, but I still want you to, to get into motion to figure out what does your best life look like to figure out what do you want, what do you want in this season of life?

If you're ready to figure out what's next for you, even though you have some additional obligations, because we all do. We will always have responsibility and obligations to others. That's not gonna go away. But I'm hosting a masterclass in two weeks. We're gonna go live for an hour each day for five days, and we're gonna talk about why you don't feel like yourself in midlife.

Like you've done all of the things you're supposed to do. You've dialed in your hormones, you're sleeping well, you're eating well, you're wearing your weighted vest. Probably we're not gonna talk about all of the physical pieces that so many midlife women.... like, like they get to the [00:21:00] beginning of the year and they feel like they have to change the way they're eating and they have to get a new exercise routine, and they have to add a ridiculous amount of protein to every single one of their meals.

We're not gonna talk about that at all. We're gonna leave the physical stuff to the physical gurus. I wanna talk more about the inside job. I wanna talk about why you don't feel like yourself in midlife, and why we can't keep waiting to get back to ourselves. We can't keep waiting to feel like we're ready. There's a clickable link in the show notes. It's absolutely free to join. You do have to get signed up though. If you can't make it live, no problem. There will be a video replay. There is a private podcast replay. You can listen on the go.

This is information that you absolutely must hear. It is so much of the thought [00:22:00] leadership that I have been working on. It is a really big part of the book that I am writing. It is, it's important for you to hear it. And it goes so well with what we're talking about today, which is we, we can't keep waiting.

We have to decide it is time for us to finally become the woman who we were always meant to be. And that doesn't mean waiting until the time is perfect, waiting until the time is right, waiting until our parents are situated and our children are out of the house. And our work is all tied up with a pretty bow.

Because if we keep waiting for those things to happen, you're gonna find something else that's going to trip you up and that's gonna make you wait on that as well.

There will always be another reason to put off what you want to do with [00:23:00] your life, and I'm begging of you. Please stop waiting. What would change for you in your life if you just decided to go for it?

What would change? That's what I want for you. Thank you so much for being here today. I'll see you right back here next week when the School of Midlife is back in session and until then, go out and do something. Stop waiting. Stop waiting. I'll see you back here next week. Take good care.

 Thank you so much for listening to the School of Midlife podcast. It means so much to have you here each week. If you enjoyed this episode, could you do me the biggest favor and help us spread the word to other midlife women? There are a couple of easy ways for you to do that first. And most importantly, if you're not already following the show, would you please subscribe? That helps you because you'll never miss an episode. And it helps us [00:24:00] because you'll never miss an episode. Second, if you'd be so kind to leave us a five-star rating, that would be absolutely incredible. And finally, I personally read each and every one of your reviews. 

So if you take a minute and say some nice things about the podcast, well, that's just good karma. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you right back here. Next week when the School of Midlife is back in session until then take good care.