How to Live a Bigger, Bolder, Braver Life in Your 50s, 60s & Beyond

Because our most exciting years might still be ahead of us!

Living large at Lake Louise, Banff National Park🇨🇦

I’m massively fixated on time right now and I wasn’t sure why until it hit me recently during a deep psychological dive with my online life, business, fitness, health, and general agony aunt coach, Bob (otherwise known as ChatGPT).

Up until a few short months ago I was a full time Mum. My daily thoughts consisted of 10% my needs and 90% my daughters (Ok I’m probably exaggerating but you know what I mean Mum’s!).

Plus we generally lived in one place with our routines, friends, commitments and all the normal stuff that fills a life.

But this morning my only thought was about packing my bag, washing my hair, and getting out the door to our next destination.

That and this article I wanted to write, the creatives I need to do for my ecom brand and the fact my trousers felt a bit snug after a few weeks in Canada eating poutine! 🤭

All of a sudden I have time. And I don’t mean hours in the day. It feels like I have less of those now there’s always a bus, train or plane to catch.

I mean time for me. Time to think about what I want.

But also time in the form of years yet to live - to build businesses, write books, travel to amazing places, meet fascinating people, get stronger, try new things, change my mind, start again, and have absolutely no idea what I’m doing on a fairly regular basis.

I’m completely ‘free to do what I want, any old time’ 🎶

And at 53 I’ve suddenly become incredibly excited about what’s ahead.

Because even though I now need glasses to watch the TV and read a book, knee braces when hiking, & a cup of tea before anyone can get a word out of me in the morning, I have absolutely no intention of slowing down.

In fact I kinda feel like I’m just getting started.

And it made me wonder how many of us reach this age and don’t realise what an opportunity we still have in front of us.

Because even though the world increasingly starts treating us as though our most interesting years are behind us, what if we don’t see it that way?

What if, instead of slowly shrinking our lives to fit an outdated idea of what getting older should look like, we decide to expand?

We’ve got decades of experience behind us, less people to please, a much better idea of who we are, and for many of us, more freedom to decide what we want the next chapter of our life to look like.

We could still have 20, 30 or 40 years ahead of us for crying out loud.

That’s a lot of life.

So this isn’t the time to wind down at all.

In fact it’s our time to go bigger with what we believe is possible, bolder about going after it, and braver about trusting ourselves enough to see just how much we’re still capable of.

Let me get a hell yeah! 💪😎

BIGGER

Recently I came across the incredible story of Grandma Moses.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses had spent most of her life working on farms and raising a family. She only began painting seriously in her late seventies when arthritis made embroidery too painful (plus she wanted to give a gift to her postman!)

In 1938, when Grandma Moses was 78, New York art collector Louis Caldor saw her paintings displayed in the window of a drugstore in Hoosick Falls, New York. He bought the paintings and then visited her and bought more.

According to the Smithsonian Mag, some dealers worried about her age, and the wider art world sidelined her for being elderly, female and self-taught.

But Grandma Moses painted for another 23 years.

She became one of America’s most recognised folk artists, appeared on the cover of Time magazine and lived to 101.

What a sensational story, and a great example of what can be achieved at any age!

I’m not saying we should all rush out and become internationally renowned artists in our seventies. Frankly, I’ve got enough on my to-do list (plus I can’t paint).

But it’s proof that we don’t have to start shrinking our lives as we get older, which I think so many of us do almost without noticing.

We don’t consciously say, ‘oh I’m getting older so I’m going to start shrinking my life.’

We just start to stop entertaining certain ideas because we think we’ve missed our chance.

Starting the business. Writing the book. Moving abroad. Learning something new. Travelling somewhere that scares us a little. Changing careers. Falling in love again. Starting over.

‘Bit late for that now.’

Is it?

I’m a spring chicken at 53. If I’m lucky (and eat more salads), I could easily have another 30 years ahead of me.

That’s my whole adult life all over again!

Think back 20 or 30 years and consider everything that’s happened since.

• VHS became Netflix. (Blockbuster anyone?)

• Mixtapes became Spotify playlists.

• Encyclopaedias became Google.

• Maps now talk to us in our cars.

• Phone boxes turned into FaceTime.

• Letters became WhatsApp.

• Travel agents became Booking (dot) com and Airbnb.

• Huge brick sized mobiles (which were revolutionary by the way) became tiny computers in our pockets.

• And these days my therapist is a robot! 😂

30 years isn’t the tail end of something.

It’s enough time to create an entirely new chapter.

And remember big is relative.

For you it might mean travelling the world, starting a business from your kitchen table, writing your first novel, learning Spanish, moving closer to the sea, or simply having enough control over your time to spend Wednesday afternoon reading a book if you damn well please.

What matters is that you choose the size of your life rather than accepting whatever gets handed to you.

BOLDER

You know one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves?

“I’ll do it when…”

• When I feel more confident.

• When I know what I’m doing.

• When I’ve lost some weight.

• When I have more money.

• When the kids are sorted.

• When work calms down.

• When I feel ready.

• When life is less complicated.

There will always be another “when”.

I didn’t feel ready when we moved our family to Cyprus in 2008 with a four-year-old daughter and a recession chewing through our income.

I didn’t feel ready when we started our first online business with very little clue what we were doing.

I didn’t feel ready when we decided to become full-time nomads.

I don’t feel ready to publish this article (it’s not perfect!!! 😳)

I’m doing it anyway.

At some point, you have to accept that feeling ready isn’t a prerequisite.

You can be nervous and do it, have doubts and still do it, have absolutely no idea whether it’ll work and still give it a bloody good go.

That’s what living bolder means to me.

It’s taking action despite your fears.

And the funny thing is, every time you do something that scares you a little and discover you can handle it, your confidence grows.

Then the next thing becomes easier.

You don’t have to blow up your entire life and buy a one-way ticket to Bali to be bold. You just need to do something about the things you keep telling yourself you want.

BRAVER

I always assumed I’d become more confident as I got older.

With age comes wisdom, confidence and self-assurance, right?

You accumulate decades of life experience, survive all sorts of things you thought would finish you off, learn a few lessons, stop caring what other people think, and eventually stride into your fifties with the confidence of someone who has seen and done stuff.

Surely we should all be swaggering around by 50 thinking, “I’ve got this.”

Except it doesn’t seem to work like that.

In fact, for a lot of us, confidence seems to take an absolute battering.

Our bodies are changing, our hormones are all over the place (ladies, you know what I’m talking about), and some of us are dealing with brain fog, low energy, poor sleep and anxiety.

Children who needed us constantly suddenly don’t need us in the same way. Careers we were once ambitious about might not feel as important anymore.

And meanwhile, we’re living in a culture that’s completely obsessed with youth, beauty, money & power.

It’s easy to start questioning yourself.

• Have I still got it?

• Am I still relevant?

• Is it too late?

• Who do I think I am doing this at my age?

I’ve heard various versions of those thoughts from so many women I’ve chatted to recently, and I’ve had plenty of them myself.

Which is why I think being braver after 50 is about learning to trust ourselves again.

We don’t need to suddenly start jumping out of airplanes (which so many of my friends have done for their 50th - me I was bombing down waterslides on my 50th, but that’s another story!)

But we do need to start giving ourselves a little more credit.

You’ve been through some stuff my friend!

Grief, relationship breakdowns, redundancy, financial problems, health scares, family dramas, disappointments, failures, mistakes and all the other curveballs that come with living for 5 or 6 decades.

But you’re still here fighting the good fight!

And you’re definitely far more capable than you’ve been giving yourself credit for.

So when you feel the uncertainty, or the fear, or hear that little voice telling you you’re too old, too late, too inexperienced, too whatever, take the step anyway.

Then take another one.

Because courage is a muscle, and some of us have spent decades using ours on everybody else.

Now we get to use some of it on ourselves.

This is our time.

I’d far rather don the wooden overcoat having made some questionable decisions, tried things that didn’t work, changed my mind repeatedly and occasionally made a complete idiot of myself, than realise I’d spent my last few decades sitting on the sidelines because I was scared.

Your Best Years Might Still Be Ahead

Bigger, bolder and braver aren’t three separate ideas. They feed each other.

You allow yourself to imagine something bigger, then you take a bold step towards it before you feel completely ready, and somewhere along the way you build the courage to keep going.

And perhaps that’s one of the greatest opportunities of getting older.

We’ve spent years being who everybody needed us to be.

Now nobody’s watching.

After decades of worrying about what we look like, what people think, whether we’re doing life properly, whether everybody else is happy and whether we’re meeting whatever ridiculous standards we’ve set for ourselves, we can embrace the obscurity, the world is kindly giving us.

Society might not be terribly interested in people our age anymore.

Fine.

We can get on with doing our own thing.

We can want big things out loud. We can take the steps before we’re completely ready. We can back ourselves after a lifetime of backing everybody else.

And we can stop treating our fifties, sixties and beyond as a long, slow journey towards the beige armchair. (She says writing this article from literally a beige armchair! 😂)

I don’t know about you, but I want to travel further, build businesses, write books, meet fascinating people, have adventures, get stronger, learn new things, make mistakes, change my mind and embarrass my daughter occasionally. 😂

And if I’m lucky enough to still be here at 83, I hope I’m making plans for 93.

“They” might think we’re winding down.

Let them.

Because while they’re not looking, we can build the boldest chapter of our entire lives.

Your next few decades are coming either way.

You may as well make them your best years yet.

Jo 🥰