EP147: Am I Too Old For This at 47? Let's Do the Maths

A gorgeous human put her hand up at an event a couple of weekends ago, and asked if she was too old to change her career, start a business, and go after what she actually wanted.

She was 47 years old.

Forty-f*cking-seven.

And I watched her ask it with genuine uncertainty on her face, the years of conditioning sitting right there in the room with her, whispering in her ear that she'd already missed her window.

She hadn't by the way. 

And if you've been secretly asking yourself the same question, neither have you.

This episode is for her. And honestly, it's for every woman who has ever talked herself out of something brilliant just because she thought the timing had passed.

In this episode I get into:

• The maths that completely reframes where you actually are in your adult life (this genuinely shifted something in my brain when I worked it out)
• Why "am I too old" is never really an age question, it's an identity question
• The Survival Self vs the Sovereign Self, and why the gap between them is exactly where the real work lives
• What my own reinvention has looked like this year, the surgery, the recovery, the Crohn's, the financial terror of leaving a senior salary behind, and the moments of what the fuck have I done
• What actually changes when you do this identity work, and what life looks and feels like on the other side

You're not in the second act of a life that's winding down. You're at the interval. The second half gets to be amazing if you design it that way.

If this episode lands for you, send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear it today. The one who's been talking herself out of something. Be the person who finds her in the break and tells her she's not too bloody old.

And if you're ready to stop waiting and start designing the identity that actually fits who you are now, find out more about The Queen Edit here.

Loads of love, 

Sarah x 

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Transcript

Sarah Elizabeth  00:00

Hola, and welcome back to the Reinvention Era podcast. I'm Sarah Elizabeth, Queen of Reinvention, and this is a podcast for women who absolutely know there is more for them, those who can feel it, who dream about it, who lie awake at 2o'clock in the morning, fuming they haven't done it yet. That's for them. So today's episode started with a moment, a mo-ment at an event a couple of weekends back that I've been able to stop thinking about, so pull up a pew, love, grab your cuppa, or wine, whatever floats your boat, because we get into it. We're going all in. Okay, so I spent a couple of Saturdays ago at an event, an incredible event hosted by the brilliant Noor Hibbert, I bloody love Noor. I love everything she stands for, and she just fucking keeps shit real, you know. It was a gorgeous, full-on day talking about identity, mindset, business, the whole shebang. And if you know me, you'll know that spending a day in a room full of powerhouse women talking about who the fuck they are and who they're becoming is basically my idea of a perfect day, genuinely. And my table of gorgeous humans, we've made a pact to meet up at Christmas. Let's be honest, it'll be before then, and we're gonna do a bit of shopping in Selfridges, and then have tea at the Savoy, darling. Our WhatsApp group has been popping with so much gold. So glad I met them. It's a brilliant brilliant event, but also at the event there was this moment during the day that just.. I don't know, stopped me in my tracks a little bit. I've got to be honest, a woman put her hand up during one of the sessions, and asked the question along the lines of, Am I too old for this to change my career, to start a business, to actually go after what I want? Am I too old? She was 47 years old, 40 fucking seven, and I watched this beautiful human ask that question, and I could see it on her face, the genuine uncertainty, the fear, it was like the years of conditioning sitting right there in the room with her weighing on top of her in her ear, oh, going, "Nah, you've missed it, you've missed that boat, it's too late for you. What do you think you are? You could positively hear the voice in her fucking heads, because we've all heard that voice, right? And you know didn't know I couldn't let it go, I could not let it go as a 53 year old identity designer reinventing lives all over here, uh, huh, not letting that go. So in the break I went and found her and I said, you're not too fucking old, love, not even close, and you're absolutely stunning, and you have so much ahead of you. She's now a friend on Facebook, she's a gorgeous, vibrant, fucking capable woman with so much, so much to give, and the fact that she was sitting there genuinely wondering, worrying whether she'd already missed her window in life broke my heart a little bit. I'm not gonna lie, and I just thought I need to do a whole episode on this, because I bet she's not the only one I know. In fact, she's not the only one, and the whole thing about the am I too old question, it sounds like a practical question, right? Like you're asking about, I don't know, like a closing date on a job application, or whether the offer is still valid, you know, and there are some am I too old questions that sound practical, but this is not fucking practical at all. In the context of this, it's not practical, it's an identity question, that's what it was. What she was really asking is, does a woman like me at this point in my life, like this, get to want things. Does she really get permission to start? Does the world still have space for her ambition? I. And the answer, in case nobody has said this to you clearly enough recently, is yes, yes, an absolutely resounding no asterisk needed, fuck yes, but let's talk about why we think the answer might be no, because I think it's worth looking at, so we all know, right?

Sarah Elizabeth  05:23

I think we've been raised in a culture that has a very, very specific idea of when women are supposed to do things, right. We're supposed to get educated by this age and have children by this age and have your career sorted by this age, and all that shit, and if you haven't hit the markers that society dictates, if you haven't done all that shit on time, just shut up and accept that you've missed the bus and make your peace and get on with it. That's the crap that we've been fed. It's completely utter bullshit, by the way, in case you hadn't realised, but it gets inside of you. It gets in your head. I know it does, especially if you're a woman in your 40s or 50s who have spent the last few decades being everything to everyone else, running on empty, doing the thing, doing the responsible thing, and now you're standing at the edge of actually wanting something for yourself, and that little voice pipes up, goes. It's a bit late for this, innit? It's a bit late, love, aint you a bit old now? Well, it's not too late, I promise you, it's not too late. And I'm going to prove it to you with a bit of maths. Yes, we're doing maths, not complicated maths. Stick with me here, because this reframe, when I really thought about this, genuinely changed something in my brain when I worked it out. Right, let's say for argument's sake that we live until we're 90, which isn't actually that wild anymore. This generation is living way longer than any before, so 90 is a reasonable working estimate right now our adult life properly starts at around 20, maybe 18, if you're being technical, but let's say 20 makes the maths easier, that gives us 70 years of adult life, 70 years. Now, what is halfway through 70 years 35 You're not even halfway through your adult life until you are 55 years old. Let that land. If you're 47 like the gorgeous woman at Noor's event, you're not even at the halfway point yet. You're statistically in the first half of your adult life. You have potentially 30,40, even 50 more years ahead of you, and we're sitting around wondering if we've missed our fucking window. I don't know. It's a bit like getting to the interval of the theatre show, or you know, you're going to get your glass of wine, and then you think, oh, I better go home, because it's nearly over, babe. It's the fucking interval. Second half hasn't even started. Now I know what some of you are thinking, but Sare, I'm not 25 with the energy and no responsibilities, I got a mortgage and kids, and the body that makes its very strong opinions known. The morning after a long day, I hear you, and that's fair, right? All of it's fair, but the thing is, you've got something that a 25 year old doesn't have. You've got 30 years of knowing who you are not. You've got hard-earned wisdom about what matters. You have the life experiences that make you credible, specific, compelling, real, authentic in whatever you want to choose to do next. You're not starting from zero, you're starting from a foundation that took decades to fucking build, that's not a disadvantage, that's the whole bloody point. Let me give you some names, because sometimes I think you need proof that it isn't just me on my soapbox on a podcast telling you it's all good. There's soapbox out again, Viva Wang didn't design her first wedding dress until she was 40 years old. 40, she's now one of the most iconic names in the fashion world. Julia Child didn't publish her first cookbook until she was 51 She didn't even learn to cook properly until she was in her fucking 30s. Penelope Fitzgerald, one of the most celebrated British novelists of the 20th century, published her first book at 60. Fauja Singh, that's how you say his first name, apologise if they. It's wrong. Run his first marathon at 89 years old. I just wanted to include him. 80 fucking nine. Yes, I'll say it again.

Sarah Elizabeth  06:22

89 I don't know if those are the famous ones, and I'm on my soapbox, that you know they're the headline-grabbing ones, but for every Vera Wang, there were 1000s of women who started over it in their 40s, 50s, without being out there and completely redesigned their lives without anyone writing an article about them. Women who've left careers that had eaten them alive and built something that finally felt like theirs. Hello, women who walked away from identities that no longer worked for them, even when everyone around them thought they were mad. Hello, ticking all me own boxes. Women who decided that the second half of their adult life was going to look radically different from the first half. Hey, fucking low, and that's not because me or them were brave in some kind of Hollywood sense of the fucking word, it's because we were done, done performing a version of ourselves that was built for everyone else's fucking comfort, done surviving when we could be designing, because you know what I think is really going on, when a woman asks, "Am I too old for this? It's not actually about age, it is purely about her identity, specifically it's about the gap between the identity she's been living in, call it the survival self, the woman who built her whole fucking operating system around being needed, being reliable, being the one who holds it together, and the identity she can feel pulling at her over here, the one that wants more, the one that's always been there, the sovereign self beneath all that conditioning, right, that's the woman who has always existed underneath all the roles and responsibilities, and the rules that she absorbs without choosing them, but you've just forgotten she's there, right? And the reason the am I too old question comes up is not because the dream is too big, it's because the current identity doesn't have a reference point for it, the survival self doesn't have a file for a woman who starts a business at 47 of a woman who completely reinvents her career at 52 of a woman who decides finally to put herself first. It's outside of the operating system, that doesn't mean it's wrong, it's just a sign that it's new and new things feel terrifying right up until the moment that they feel like home, that they feel like comfort. I need to tell you something about my own week that followed Noor's event, because that's also relevant, right? I spent a day last week at a VIP strategy day with the incredible Elizabeth McQuillan, going through everything I'm building for the next chapter of The Queen of Reinvention, and sitting in that beautiful luxury spa hotel, working through offers and events and strategy, I just had this moment of realising just how fucking different I feel to the woman I was, even 12 months ago. A year ago, I was still in employee identity, and you know what? Actually, even after I'd left my job earlier this year, even when I was technically running my own business, part of my brain was still operating as if I needed permission, still thinking in the structures and limitations and identity of being someone's employee for 20 odd years, right? That identity doesn't shift overnight, and I'll be really honest with you about that, it doesn't. Right, reinvention is not a one-off moment, it's a process, and it's not always a freaking comfortable one, right? I've had surgery this year, a post surgical infection, then wiped me out for fucking weeks when I thought I was gonna get better. I've had an extended time away from Instagram that I didn't plan because of it. Crohn's has been doing its level best to derail my calendar on a fairly regular basis for fucking years, I've had the financial reality of leaving a very high in salary and a higher status role to build something completely from scratch, which is terrifying in a very specific kind of way that I don't think anyone talks about quite enough, actually fucking terrifying. I've been writing my first book. There have been moments this last few months where I've genuinely thought, what the fuck have I done? It feels a bit like I've jumped off a cliff without a bloody parachute, which sounds absolutely insane when I say that, because it is. But what I've learned through it is that the parachute.

Sarah Elizabeth  14:59

It does exist. It just doesn't appear until you've actually jumped. It doesn't materialise when you're standing at the top deciding whether to go, whether to jump. It shows up when you're close enough to the ground to be properly fun and terrified, and something in you shifts or shits yourself, and you realise it's working, it's actually working, but let's be honest, the comfort zone at the top wasn't actually that comfortable anymore. That's the whole story. I couldn't stay where I was, not because staying was terrible, but because I had outgrown the identity it needed me to be, and you can't squeeze yourself back into an identity you've already got rid of, trust me, it's like trying to get back into your jeans from 2015 technically they're your jeans, but that's not your bloody body anymore, you know, and that's exactly the work I do in the Queen Edit, it's not the jumping off the cliff bit that might come, but the identity piece, it's uncovering that buried sovereign self and using her to intentionally, intentionally consciously design your next level self. Your alter queen is where we decode the identity you've been living in, the one that was built around for survival and approval and other people's needs, and we design the next one, the one that's actually yours, the alter queen, the designed self, the woman who is already inside of you, who's always been inside of you, who just needs the conditioning all stripped back and the new identity installed. That's where she is. And do you know what that actually looks like on the other side? When you've done this work, you stop second guessing yourself in rooms where you used to shrink. You make decisions faster, because you know who the hell you are. You stop trying to get confidence and start actually feeling it. You wake up, and you're not already exhausted by the wont of being everything to everyone, because you've redesigned now how you operate from the identity level up, and the relationships that were draining the fuck out of you, they start to shift as well, because you've shifted the opportunities that felt so far out of reach, they just start to feel well, obvious, actually, you know, yeah, of course, of course, of course, it's happening because the woman who lives as her designed self, she doesn't wait to feel ready, she just moves, she stops apologising for taking up space, that's what happens when you've done this work, when you've done the queen edit kind of work, you stop shrinking your ambition to fit other people's fucking comfort, you stop waiting for the right moment or the right circumstances or the right version of yourself to arrive, whoever's right for what. I don't know, and you're not too old, you're not too damn old, because she's already in you, she's been in you the whole time, you're not trying to create someone new, you're just remembering the version of you that's in there and that's got lost. That's the queen edit, that's the transformation, the transformation who you become, that woman on the other side, and if that's who you're ready to be, if you're listening and thinking, yeah, that's me. I've been asking myself the same question. If I'm too old, then the link to find out more is in the show notes, and I'd love, love, love to work with you. And I promise I won't give you too many loving bitch slaps about saying you're too old. I get it. All right, back to that gorgeous woman at Noor's event that asked if she was too old when she was 40 fucking seven, she's not too old, she was never too bloody old, and neither were you. Whatever it is that you've been secretly carrying around, the dream that you've been talking yourself out of, or the version of yourself that you keep catching small little glimpses of, and then talking yourself back from. It's not too late. You are not in the second act of a life that's winding down. You're in the interval, the second half be fucking amazing if you let it be that way, if you design it that way, the only question worth asking isn't, "Am I too old? It's, "What am I waiting for? Because if you're waiting for permission, you've just had it. I've given it to you. There you go. Permission granted.

Sarah Elizabeth  19:57

So, if this episode hits something for you, if you've been sitting there nodding along, going, "She's talking about me, please share it, send it to the woman in your life who needs to hear this today, the one who's been talking herself out of something bloody brilliant, the one who asked the question at the event and didn't get an answer loud enough, be the person who finds her in the break and says you're not too fucking old, love, not even close. Share the episode, leave a review if you're feeling generous. Come and find me on Instagram at Queen of Reinvention. I'd love to know what landed for you today, because you are not too old, you were never too old. So, get that freaking crown on love. And then I will be back in your beauts, badass earbuds again next week. I am sending you so much love. Thank you for being here. Bye.