QUIET FIRE & GETTING GUTSY IN MIDLIFE

Finding Life PurposeRyan Haddon
Written By Sarah Milken

Show Notes

Are you curious about what it would feel like to get out of your comfort zone? After all the fear subsides and you put yourself out there, do you ever consider the joy you might feel? Are you ready to say yes to the midlife remix and put yourself first? Want to learn some tools to utilize to get out of your comfort area and “exercise bravery” to find new confidence and power in midlife? Then this episode is for you!


Join me, Dr. Sarah Milken in an inspiring and open conversation called “Quiet Fire & Getting Gutsy In Midlife”. My guest Dr. Leah Katz is a well-recognized clinical psychologist, author, and mother of two. She specializes in mental health issues among teenage girls and women. She wrote the book Gutsy Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Bravery (one of my personal favorites), and we are getting into all the details of her approach to depression and anxiety and what it takes to live a life that is fulfilling and deeply connected. I know what you’re thinking… sign me up!

Some Highlights:

  • Quiet fires and wanting to feel seen 

  • The power of letting go of “all-or-nothing” thinking 

  • What is mindfulness and how can it help you to get “unstuck”

  • Creating small shifts in your daily life 

  • It’s never too late to make a change in your life

  • You can grow your self-awareness and self-compassion (listen to find out how) 

  • Growing and maturing with your partner in a marriage 

  • There can be beauty in failure 

  • Anxiety and perfectionism are about a craving for certainty

  • Respond to things and then make more intentional decisions based on that

  • The importance of being a person outside of your relationship

Connect with Dr. Leah:

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Full chat (transcript)

I have a guest who will make you want to get unstuck in midlife and be what she calls gutsy. She's a mom of two. She's a well-recognized Clinical Psychologist in Portland, Oregon, who came from New York City. She specializes in working with teenage girls and women across many mental health issues, particularly anxiety, and depression, and helping women and girls live their most fulfilling and deeply connected lives.

She uses CBT, ACT, and mindfulness. She has a huge Instagram following and presence. She's adored and respected by so many. Viral Instagram posts one after the next, she calls her Instagram her mental health blog. This guest is also a frequent writer for Psychology Today. She's the author of one of my new favorite books, Gutsy: Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Bravery. We're going to get into this book. Her name is Dr. Leah Katz.

That was beautiful. Thank you for that intro.

You're welcome. Don't you love hearing when someone else says it? It's like, “I did all that. What?”

It's always an interesting experience to hear it, stay present with it, and not get in my head about all the things that we think about ourselves. Thanks for having me on.

I'm so happy you're here. I love watching you on Instagram. I like to say that this is like meeting in real life on Zoom and talking to you. It's not real life. It's good enough for now.

It's a few steps ahead of Instagram. It's cool.

We're friends now. We're in it. Here we go. The intention of this episode is to dive deep with Dr. Leah and find out how and why we feel so stuck in our comfort zones and tools to exercise our bravery and be gutsy in choosing ourselves in midlife. She says we only have one midlife to live so let's start taking the steps to choosing you in midlife. Are you ready, Leah?

I am so ready.

I'm going to call it Gutsy for short for this episode and it's an honest look at what might be holding us back from living our most and best meaningful lives through specific steps and mindfulness practices. Leah, you opened the book with this concept of quiet fire. You say that you went to a woman's retreat and everyone had to write this little saying or mantra on their name tag that personified them. Tell us about that.

It's funny how we all have so many stories that we don't even realize are stories until we sit and write or talk about them. We're like, “That's a funny story.” That does capture a lot of what gutsy to me means. It was this retreat that I went on several years ago and it was one of these find yourself and get out of your own way retreats, a women's retreat. We had to choose. They had a list of names that we had to choose for ourselves for the weekend. That was the one that my eyes gravitated towards, the quiet fire. I didn't think too much about it, put it on the tag. As I was writing Gutsy, as I was going over many edits to the book, that story came back.

It wasn't one that I was necessarily holding onto, but I'm like, “Yes, quiet fire.” That does sum up this idea of what gutsy and being brave can mean for all of us. People can reflect on this on their own. We all have this fire inside of us and sometimes we tend to it and we feel great and we're in touch with our meaning and we're living our best lives.

Sometimes we've got this fire in the background that we're ignoring because life is busy, maybe we're raising kids, we're working, and we have a relationship that we're in. It's there and it's burning, but we're not paying enough attention to it. This idea of the quiet fire is learning to turn inward, pay attention to what's burning inside, what's important to you, and letting it come out, unleashing it. In this way, that doesn't have to be dramatic or grand. That's the quiet counterpart. It can be on your own terms in a way that feels good for you.

I feel like there are probably so many readers, including myself, going, “That's me.” The beautiful part about this show is I feel when I bring people on and they're saying things that are resonating, everyone feels seen. In this time when we do have these quiet fires burning, we all want to feel seen.

I want to read this quote from your book that captures the gutsy thing and the quiet fire thing, as I call them these terms, so beautifully. It says, “Quiet fire embodies what gutsiness even means. It is a quality of how we approach life that is not big, splashy, ego-based, or in your face. No, it's stronger than that and subtler. Gutsiness and bravery are solid and growing forces, but they're often quiet and gentle, so much so that they’re easily missed by much of the time. They're kind and full of compassion for the self and others and driven by self-awareness and authenticity, discipline, and courage. They’re deeply personal and empowering.” I love the way that quote wraps around it all. It's all this paradoxical imagery. It's like it's quiet, it's fire, it's strong, but it's gentle.

That is a lot of what this is about. We can get into this more as we talk, but so much of the time we tend to become black-and-white and compartmentalize things. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it all the way and throw myself into it or I'm not going to do it at all. If I'm going to pay attention to my dreams and yearnings, I’m going to have to make this complete shift and change in my life. When we get into that black-and-white thinking, most of the time, that's the barrier. We think it's this all-or-nothing deal when we don't have the time or the energy or even the bravery necessarily to make it all or nothing.

If we let ourselves step out of the all-or-nothing, it has to be big and splashy and a huge change or nothing at all. We let ourselves enter into the gray area where it's something smaller and sometimes even hard to put our finger on it, but a little tiny baby step. That can lead the way to profound huge change. Even paying attention to ourselves is a huge shift in and of itself. It's like the fire part, but it doesn't have to be loud and splashy. That can get in our way of doing it.

“If we let ourselves step out of the “all or nothing,” or the “it has to be a big and splashy and a huge change or nothing at all,” and let ourselves enter into the gray area where it’s something smaller and these little tiny baby steps, that can lead the way to a profound change.”

I feel like that's one of the main messages I got from the book. All of us have this quiet fire. We may not necessarily know what it is or we may not be quiet enough to even hear it. I think that that's what we're going to get into. It’s this mindfulness thing and slowing down and pausing because you say in your book, “If we all pause and get quiet with ourselves, we can all identify the quiet fire that burns within us, even those who don’t know what that is there or deny it or think it’s silly or are frightened by it. The quiet fire is what keeps us from complacency and keeps us instead wanting more for ourselves and our children. The quiet fire keeps us craving more.”

In midlife sometimes, we've gotten to this point where we've put ourselves on the back burner for so many decades that we almost don't even hear the quiet fire. We're living on this hamster wheel of sameness the same day over and over again. Not to say that that's bad in any way, but then when the house starts getting quieter and the kids start fleeing and leaving, creating this empty nest situation, or if you don't have kids, you're spending more time with your spouse or whatever it is, the noise around you gets lower and then you're left with yourself.

It's interesting how many of us are afraid of that. A lot of my book is about mindfulness and how we can use mindfulness to help ourselves get stuck. There are such interesting studies that link the practice of mindfulness with bravery because it takes a lot of bravery and guts to let ourselves intentionally get quiet with ourselves and with what's unfolding within us. Sometimes busyness is a product of life. We're busy and there's a lot going on and sometimes it's a coping mechanism. I'm going to busy myself out of the stuff that I'm not attending to because it feels big and scary to do that.

You go through your workday, you pick up kids, you make dinner, whatever. it's like, “I'm going to go and sit with my quiet fire right now.” No, you're going to turn on Netflix and then the next day comes.

There's something powerful and brave about creating small little shifts and starting to pay attention to ourselves more. I work with a lot of women in my clinical practice and we'll talk about going for walks outside and spending time on yours by yourself. Oftentimes, I’ll hear from people, “When I go for walks, I put my podcast in or I make the phone call.” That's the same thing. We're multitasking and doing so much. We're trying to see how much we can fit into the space of time. We're not letting ourselves get quiet. Go for the walk, check in with yourself, and see how you're doing. That becomes the fodder, the platform to do something with it. We need that. We need the quietness.

“There’s something really powerful and brave about creating small shifts and starting to pay attention to ourselves more.”

I'm not brave enough to go on a walk without my phone yet. I'll be honest about that. What I have done is when I'm driving somewhere or if I'm driving to pick up my daughter from school, I won't listen to anything. I feel like that's my time. I'm driving, I'm in my zone, and it's totally quiet. I look forward to that time. I’m not having epiphanies or anything. It's my way of zoning out. Maybe I'm trying to escape having to meditate because that feels hard for me.

That totally resonates for me. I had this epiphany too where I would notice that I'd always put something on in the car, whether it was music or a podcast. This was going back a while ago. I would put music on. I didn't even like the music I was listening to. It would be a habit and I didn't even it. Now I also do the same intentional practice when I do have a drive to myself, which doesn't happen that often, unfortunately.

Both my kids have driver's licenses, but my daughter doesn't get to drive to school that much because the parking is slim pickings. I'm still an Uber driver on occasion.

I get that. That's where I am. I don't have those alone car rides too often. Now it's this intentional. I ask myself, “What am I in the mood for? Do I want to make it have a quiet ride?” It’s like what you're saying, no epiphanies. It's enjoying the quiet of this ride or do I want to put on a podcast because I feel like learning something or do I want to put on music that I like?

It's funny because we don't always take the time to examine those intentional choices. I know that when I'm at my parents' house, they have the TV running. I swear it feels like 24 hours a day. Some people love the background noise and chatter and I am the complete opposite. Put me in a silent padded room and I'm good.

I'm the same way. I like the quiet too. There's something very releasing about it. Going for walks sometimes too. Even if I know that I'm not going to take my phone out unless I need it when I'm on a walk, I feel it in my pocket. When I don't have it in my pocket, I leave it behind me at home, it changes it. It's this nice, light walk. Those are some of my favorite walks. It’s just me and my dog, not my phone.

Except I don't like picking up dog shit. That's not fun. My husband's like, “Why is it such a big deal?” I'm like, “It's not a big deal. It's just I hate having to carry it along the way until I find a trashcan.

I can relate to that completely too. There's a shift that happens when you drop the poopy bag in the garbage. Now I can enjoy this walk.

“Now I don’t have to carry the swinging poop in the bag.” I love it. When I was reading about the quiet fire and craving more, I said to myself, “This is exactly what I'm talking about with my midlife remix and the midlife itchies.” Instead of having a midlife crisis where that's happening to you, a midlife remix is like, “I have agency in this journey. I may not be able to control it but I can make little shifts and changes to endure the parts that feel tough, the hormone stuff, and all of that, and also enjoy it.” I also feel this term of the midlife itchies. You want to do something new in your second half of life. You want to rebrand.

You don't know exactly what it is. I feel like this term that you're talking about, this quiet fire, is tuning in to those quiet spaces and being like, “Was there something from my childhood I love doing?” I was not a cheerleader because I'm not coordinated enough for that. It’s like, “Did I love to dance?” I don't know, anything. Many times, we get all caught up in what the perfect quiet fire is. I'd like for you to comment on that since you work with a lot of perfectionists.

It's getting out of that mindset that just because it's been a certain way, it needs to continue being that way. It sounds so intuitive, but oftentimes we do that like, “I have never done this thing so I guess I never will. This is the way my days are or this is the age that I'm at and it's too late for me.” We take these thoughts for granted and those thoughts become the leash. It’s like we're the dog on the leash that is guiding us around and dictating what we do and what we don't do. If we remind ourselves things don't have to be because it was that way yesterday and the day before and the month before doesn't mean that we can't make big changes or small changes or anything different in our life now, that's hugely empowering.

Reminding ourselves that we always have agency in our life. Of course, there's a lot that we don't have control over so much but we always have that agency and the sense of control over how we meet that. Knowing that things will change and there's stuff that I don't have control over. I can change and I can work on my relationship and how I meet that and I can also focus on the things that I do have control over.

I was doing a podcast and the last question that I was asked was, “What does hope mean to you?” or something like that. This is how I ended it. it's coming back to me now too. Hope means we have agency and we lose sight of that. We think it's been this way. It's always been this way. It's not. You can change things for yourself, whatever that means for you in your particular circumstances.

I feel like I have so much to say and I'm like, “Where do I start?” I got to slow my brain down for a second. In terms of getting into that pause moment, I know you talk about meditation. Meditation sounds so big. It sounds so scary for so many of us. I can't close my eyes for twenty minutes. I can't talk to myself for twenty minutes. I can't listen to my thoughts for twenty minutes. What are you saying? I know you have a big practice and you have a lot of people coming to you with a lot of the same issues. What things have you given them that have opened the doors that seem so hard but are probably not?

I'm so glad that you brought this question up because sometimes, for myself, when I'm in the world of meditating and having practice mindfulness for many years, I lose a little bit of track of how common that misnomer is. It’s like, “Meditation is not for me. It's so hard. I don't have the time for it.” When we talk about it this, it's a reminder of how many people feel that way and how it's not the truth of what mindfulness and meditation mean. Oftentimes, we feel like, “I need to sit. I need to be quiet. It needs to be twenty minutes,” or how it needs to be a long period of time. All of that couldn't be further from the truth. Mindfulness is cultivating the awareness of what's unfolding for you in this very moment, whether it's in your thoughts, your emotions, or your body in a very compassionate way.

“Mindfulness is cultivating awareness of what’s unfolding for you in this very moment, whether it’s in your thoughts, emotions, or body, in a very compassionate way.”

It's like the pairing of those two things. Self-awareness, what's happening for me right now, and meeting what I find with compassion. It's building a muscle. Oftentimes, so many of us, especially perfectionists, are trained to meet what we find when we do find it with a lot of harshness and the opposite of self-compassion is self-loathing. it's a muscle and that's okay if it takes time to build it, but it doesn't have to be this big long practice.

The concept of it is building self-awareness moment to moment as much or as little as we can. It doesn't matter. People have this idea of like, “Now I'm going to have to be mindful and aware of myself all the time.” No, it's taking little moments at a time, bringing your awareness in, checking in with yourself, and seeing if you can let go of the voice of harshness if that comes up for you and replace it with one of self-compassion.

Let's take me for example. Let’s say I'm turning 48 and I'm like, “I know what the research says about meditation. I know what Dr. Leah says about meditation, bravery, and the connection between the two.” I come to you and I'm like, “Leah, I want to do something in the second half of life and I'm scared and I don't want to start small.” What specific thing can I do that's easy and palatable when I get home from your office?

The big thing that I hope to leave people with from the very beginning of starting therapy together is building this connection between their thoughts, their emotions, and their bodies. Even that question, “What can I do when I have these big dreams?” That's what we were talking about before, getting black and white and that's the barrier. When I jump too ahead of myself and I think that I need to do these big grand things all at once, most likely, I'm not going to do anything. If I can take a step back and say, “Let me build a small practice of self-awareness and self-compassion.” Hopefully, the more that we do that, it becomes a building block to then be able to make the bigger change.

I suggest this to people all the time. What I would say is come home and pause with yourself. Maybe it's some practice you do in the morning before you get out of bed or in the middle of the day or at nighttime or all three. Check in with yourself and ask yourself, “What thoughts am I having right now? What's going through my mind? What emotions am I having and how does my body feel?”

Do a quick scan of your body so you're connecting all those components. That does build the cornerstone of self-awareness. Once we start to do that and we find how we're feeling and the more we do this, we notice patterns like, “I tend to have self-judging thoughts a lot.” That's when I do this practice of pausing and checking in. I notice that my thoughts are oftentimes harsh or I think about that job or that degree that I want to pursue. That's coming up for me a lot. Once we have self-awareness and we need it compassionately, we can ask ourselves like, “Now what? What's my next step? What am I going to do to make this actionable?” We do want to, if we can, and it's something that's meaningful for us, realize our dreams. That was a big answer.

It was good. If I'm asking myself those questions, am I writing down the answers? I know I'm being very literal here, but I want to make sure it's actionable. Am I writing down those answers and seeing what the patterns are and what am I saying to myself? I know, I can tell you, I'm not meeting myself with compassion. I don't think most of us are. What are we saying to ourselves when we answer that question and we know that we're not treating ourselves the same way we would treat our kids if they failed to test?

You can write it down if that's your thing. I always try not to make it too strict because then we're not going to do it again. If I need to check in with three parts of myself and write it down, forget it. If you want to, great. Writing is awesome. If you want to write it, great, but if not, that's okay too. I think of it as a triangle, like the triangle of awareness. Where are my thoughts at this moment? I’m learning to observe them. It’s almost like you're sitting in a movie theater and you're watching the thought like the thoughts are the movie. At this moment, what thoughts am I having? I can be an observer of them. Name your feelings and scan your body. What's here for me in my body? You can write it. You don't have to write it.

What do I say to myself when I know that I'm being critical and I'm not giving myself the same compassion that I would give my kid for failing a test? Why do we not treat ourselves the same way we treat a friend or our kid?

That is a whole thing in and of itself, so when we notice the patterns, understanding and we can do this in therapy. We can do this through journaling. Where do these patterns develop once we find what the pattern is? I’m getting curious about it because understanding where it comes from again creates this ability to observe it as opposed to feeling fused with it.

Just because I think it means it's true and this must be true about me versus this is a belief system that was developed when I was little and that's why I tend to think this way about myself. Creating that separation with yourself or with someone else who you can trust and talk through about this can be super helpful. That answers the question too. That's what makes it hard to do this to ourselves because we have so much history with ourselves. The way that we learn to talk to ourselves oftentimes comes from when we're young and children. Those of us who are lucky enough, if we had messages that we received when we were younger that didn't work for us, we got some therapy or some help along the way and learned to reframe them.

However, lots and lots of people hear what they heard when they were younger about themselves and like what we were saying before, take it for granted. “This is the way that I am. This is the way that the world views me. This is what I'm capable of.” They build their life off of those scripts. It makes it hard because it's our blueprint.

I love in your book how you talk about how you had the same English teacher for most of high school. She wouldn't give you the fucking A and you were like, “What's happening? I'm working so hard.” You carried around the script of, “I'm a B writer. I'm not a good writer.” You get to college and you're forced to take some writing class and you're like, “I am a good writer.” I feel like we do this to ourselves too. I do this all the time. I'm like, “I'm not good at technology. I'm bad at sports. I'm not a good game player.” The scripts go on and on.

Knowing that and then bringing awareness to what might your script be like, “Where does it come out for you? How is it limiting your life? Where does it come from and how can you start to rewrite it,” is so tremendously empowering.

I love that English teacher example. One of my favorite parts of your book is how you weave in your own personal story. You talk about wanting to create trust with your readers and your patients. A lot of times, people think that psychologists live these perfect lives with no anxiety and they can solve all their problems because they're so well trained. You take us on this beautiful journey of self-worthiness or lack thereof from your childhood into your twenties.

In your late twenties, you start to change things up a little bit. I want you to give the readers a glimpse into your Orthodox Jewish childhood. I know, as you say in the book several times and beautifully, that this is not about your dislikes or of the religion. It's about how you felt about yourself in the environment. Will you tell us about your self-worth and identity and how those created the framework, how you viewed yourself, and why you wrote the book?

FNP Leah Katz | Quiet Fire

Gutsy: Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Bravery

Sure. I had this story inside of me and the desire to write a book about my differentiating from the strict religious environment that I was brought up with for a long time. I put it in the book too. Something happened for me in my mid-30s. It’s like, “I want to write this book. What am I waiting for?” I sat down and I wrote it.

To share a little bit about that story, I was raised in New York, the youngest of five kids, and I was brought up in a very religious home, an Orthodox Jewish religious home with a lot of expectations and ideas about what it meant to be a part of that community and what our life would be like being a part of that community. That was the way that it was going to be. There wasn't a choice. You can choose us, but you can also choose something different.

I say in the book too, it was important to me to not have this story come across as badmouthing or putting down a sect of religion or that culture because that's not at all what I think or feel. It's this idea of you have agency. For me, recognizing that there were certain things in certain ways that I was living my life that didn't feel like I was in full agency and I was making important decisions about how I was to dress. I put in my book a little bit about the hair covering. That's one of the rules when you get married.

It's a wig.

I wore a wig but you can also wear a scarf. You can't show any of your hair. I did have a few wigs, scarves, and all that. They were things that didn't sit well with me and I didn't feel they were a product of my own choice and how I wanted to be living my life. I put in the book too that for me. That's why I'm such a believer and a passionate advocate of mindfulness. I started to make changes once I started meditating and practicing more mindfulness. I went on the seven-day mindfulness retreat. It was a crazy experience. I had no idea what I was signing up for, but I went for it and I did it. I had seven days of mindfulness like I never meditated before.

The result of that was transformative and amazing. I came home from that retreat with clarity. It's this idea of the quiet fire, paying attention to ways that I was unhappy in my life and how I was living my life, and how I was not affording myself the ability or even opportunity to explore what was making me unhappy because I didn't think there was anything I could do about it.

On this mindfulness retreat, I was able to spend a lot of quiet time with myself. Some parts of it were silent. Notice how I was thinking, notice the areas of unhappiness, and then come back from that retreat wanting to pay attention to those things and not live my life any longer in a way that didn't feel authentic to me. That was a long journey. It wasn't like I came back and I made this complete shift in my life. It took years and years for me to figure things out. I'm still on this religious spiritual journey, which is cool for me. I love it. That's a little bit about me.

As a reader, you get that message of not judging but also at the same time, talking about this quiet fire of wanting agency and wanting to choose you for yourself and not having other people or another outside source choosing the life for you to live. That came out very loud and clear. You said something like when you came home from the retreat, you thought to yourself, “I have one life to live. I want to claim it as mine. I want to live an authentic life.” You describe it as taking the mask off. It's a mask given to you by an outside source.

Some of it was. For me, some of it was the religious piece and redefining how I wanted that to play into my life and what felt right to me and spirituality too. Some of it was very internal. The masks that I had picked up along the way of perfectionism, which is a mask for people pleasing, not wanting to rock the boat, and performativeness. That's something that I had to work on a lot in my adult years, needing to seem a certain way to other people. It was okay to be me as I was.

Those scripts and masks were developed probably from some of the religious stuff that I was differentiating from, but also from my own wiring and my family upbringing. It was the pairing of the external with the internal like, “How do I want to live my life? What practices feel right to me? What do I want to keep here? What don't I want to keep? Who am I and how am I showing up in the world that doesn't feel authentic?

Were you married at this point when you started?

Yeah.

How did that go with your husband?

We got married pretty young because of the community that we were in. I started dating for marriage at 19 and it took me a while to find my husband and we got married at 23. I was 23 and he was 24 when we got married. We were both in that very religious culture where I was wearing the covering for my hair, not wearing pants, and covering myself up, along with a lot of other things.

We're still married and I'm very grateful for that because we've become partners with each other in a lot of ways that we were not in the beginning. When this first started happening, it was probably a few years into our marriage, it was hard. We had a lot of hard and painful conversations about the expectation of religion in our home and what we wanted our family to look like. Even family size, how many kids do we want? In the community that I was from, most people, if they can, have pretty large families.

You don't use birth control and all of these things.

There are so many nuances in different sex. Some do, some don't. anyways, yeah, there's a whole expectation there. We worked a lot on our marriage. We had marriage therapy, we had lots of painful conversations, and we also grew as people. We've been married for many years, so we got married young and now we've matured together. For us, because we've been working on our marriage the whole time and had therapy along the way, maturity has helped us to be able to get each other more and have conversations and figure out what we want our family to look like. it's definitely been a big walk.

It's interesting because even if you're looking at getting unstuck, making life changes, and choosing you in midlife, not everyone's in a relationship or a partnership but many times you are and you feel like, “I'm going this way and I'm growing in these ways.” The other person is not on the same page and that could be hard.

I had a woman message me and she goes, “I thought my life was totally fine, and then my husband told me that even though we've been married for many years, he’s not sure he wants to be with me anymore because he is not sure he's been who he is this whole marriage.” I thought to myself how difficult that must feel. It's making me think about how in midlife, there are so many changes that are happening to us and that we want to create and become and how that affects the whole house and the ecosystem.

Something that's been powerful and profound in my relationship with my husband as we've navigated these pretty big differences at the beginning of our marriage is by keeping communication and learning the tools. We're in a very different place right now together because we had to learn this.

Neither one of us knew this going into our marriage the tools of being transparent with each other, so unmasking with each other and learning to communicate how we feel about things and make space to hear things that were uncomfortable for us to hear because transparency does require a lot of ego work. Learning to get out of your ego and defense and make space and listen together with practicing curiosity, so getting curious about each other and why things are important to him and to me.

It's the thing. It's not like you have three conversations and then you're done. I know this is cliché and you hear about this, but to have a healthy sustainable relationship, it does take that ongoing work. The ongoing conversations, curiosity, transparency, and repairing conflict that comes up because conflict comes up.

Relationships are co-creation projects that never end. You don't want them to stop evolving because that means that you both have stopped evolving if you're not both going at the same speed or wanting the same things. Sometimes changes like your kids moving out of the house or someone in the marriage saying, “I don't want to be here anymore,” or whatever. There are so many of us experiencing different versions of these huge changes.

Sometimes the changes are making space for there to be a difference and understanding the pain of that. It’s knowing that you can still be engaged and be in a healthy relationship and also know that there's something painful that you don't agree on or see eye to eye on. Going back to the religious conversation, at the beginning of our marriage, that was a piece of it. It's okay and some people choose for it not to be. Sometimes it's not okay that we feel we need to align in this way. Sometimes it's okay to say like, “It's okay that we see this differently,” and we can hear each other's pain around that.

“You can still be engaged or be in a healthy relationship and also know that there’s something painful that you just don’t agree on or see eye to eye on.”

It's like you and your spouse aren't on the same page about politics. You're like, “You do you and I'm going to do me,” or whatever. I wish most people live like that because we are all entitled to have different versions of what's okay for us. Who wants to live a life where, as you said, you're people-pleasing and kowtowing to other people’s scripts for you?

I feel like by the time you get to midlife, it's like, “Screw that. I want to choose me. I have the rest of my life to live. I'm not doing what someone else assigned me.” It's complicated. You do a beautiful job in the book of using the hair covering or the wig as a literal and metaphorical symbol for being gutsy, like your book title describes, taking those steps and getting uncomfortable in the uncomfortable to make changes that you see fit for you.

That was a big part of it for me and a reason why it took as long as it did for me to start making any changes is because by making those changes, I was taking a lot of risk. This is my own personal story, but we all have that story in a different context like wanting to make some change or movement in our lives, whatever that means for the person.

We don't know how other people are going to feel about it. We worry about their response and then we worry about how other people who might not necessarily voice it to us, but maybe they'll judge us for it. That fear of judgment plays into I think a lot of our stuckness. What are other people going to think and say? Even the people that I'm not close with and I'll never know. There is something brave and gutsy about letting that go.

I call it the peanut gallery. It's like you want to start something new in midlife and first, you have your inner mean girl going. It's like all your self-limiting beliefs and then you start creating all these tapes in your head of what she thinks, that mom thinks, carpool thinks, and this person thinks. It could stop you forever if you exactly attended to all of that and accepted those things. I love how you talk about how taking off the wig for you literally and metaphorically was what you call both scary and exhilarating.

I still remember those days, having my hair out for the first time and the feeling of like, “This feels scary. Who am I going to bump into?” Maybe bumping into people who had known me from before and dealing with the awkwardness that I felt around that or the judgment, real or perceived, that I felt about it. It’s the exhilaration of walking through the mountain. This idea is that we think we have this big hill in front of us to do whatever it is that we want to do. It feels like it's this insurmountable hard thing to do. Once we've done even a small thing to get us there, we realize, “It's not that big. I can do this.”

There's something so exhilarating about that. “I can do this. I can do this in small little ways that will take me further to that goal.” Your judgment comes also from the way that people knew us from before. We get stuck in our heads like, “What's this person going to think because they saw me?” For me, it was the religious thing, but if it's someone wanting to pursue a new career or do something different, people have this expectation of me, and letting that go is so freeing.

Obviously, you had a whole toolbox of tools, but did you have a little mantra or something you would repeat to yourself? As you walk the streets in a town where you knew you could bump into people who knew you from before and you wearing the wig, was there something that you repeated to yourself like, “I can do this. Leah, I got you. You're going to be okay. You're safe?” What was your little thing?

I don't think I had a mantra, but because it was coming off of my mindfulness retreat, and then I've been on many more retreats since then, what I use is a lot of grounding techniques. It’s noticing my thoughts, wanting to whisk me away and like, “What are they thinking? This is so embarrassing. Who are they telling? I can’t believe this is happening.”

I have it in the book. I remember I would go out in pants or jeans for the first time. I'd have all of that stuff come up for me. It’s learning to notice it and then grounding, feeling my feet on the floor, getting in my body, and being okay with that. That's tremendously empowering. We don't need to make any of that go away. I can do, you can do, and we all can do the scary things with that scary narrative going on in our minds. Knowing that it's a narrative, it's the words on the movie screen that we're watching, and getting in our bodies helps us feel more certain about the choices that we're making and why we're making them.

When you're talking to women in your practice or even with your book and you are trying to explain to them like, “You have this inner fire. You have this gutsiness. You have this bravery,” How do you get people to flip that switch of, “I'm stuck,” to “I'm going to take a step outside with my jeans on?” What is that thing?

I don't know if it's one thing, but the first thing that comes from me when I hear the question is we're never stuck. You are never stuck unless you're stuck in jail, which isn't the case for most people. Stuck is the perception. How am I getting in my own way? This was a big work for me, noticing that the thoughts that I was having and the stories I was telling myself are why I couldn't do things or what other people think. That was me keeping myself stuck and getting in my own way.

Once we recognize, “I am responsible for the stuckness and the thoughts that I'm having,” in a very compassionate way, not blaming anyone, how can I again detach from the thoughts and take that very next step towards change? One little thing at a time. That's a piece of it too. Don't overwhelm yourself. It's the next little thing. I had a session with someone who wanted to do something that was scary for them. We talked about the next thing being a Google search. Google the programs that you want to go to that and then feel so proud of yourself for doing that like, “Go me.”

Going back to your concept of celebrating the small wins, which is a huge part of any change or transformative process, we get so stuck in the, “I'm going to run a marathon. It's so hard. I can't do it.” You're like, “Let's break this down into steps here.”

The word that I like is savoring. Savor the way that it feels after you've done that small thing. It's not even necessarily a win. It's more like showing up for yourself. The small ways you show up for yourself, do it. Do the Google search and then we can do this together right now. Recall the last time that you did something that was hard for you to do. It could have been so tiny. You feel it in your body. You can feel a lightness in your chest and it’s like, “Look at me showing up.”

That was me before we got on when I told you I was having the printer problem. I wanted to call my husband and yell at him and be like, “I don't understand. Do this. the printer's not working.” I thought to myself, “How is that going to help me right now?” I need to do this myself and tell you that I'm running five minutes late because my printer decided to print double-sided. I'm going to breathe through this and not make it someone else's problem. I was weirdly proud of myself for that dumb little move right there. It's so easy. I could just yell at him.

I don't think it's small. That's a big deal. It's this idea of regulation. It's hard to regulate when you're frantic and you feel you're late. It's hard noticing that you did that and that you got out of the story of like, “I need to blame someone for this. I can breathe through this and figure this out and message me.” Great. That's a deal.

I know if you get into this thing where you're like, “She's going to think I'm unprofessional.” You start playing all these things and then I was like, “Sarah, stop. Get your ass in the printer. Make it work. DM her. Tell her you're running five minutes late and move on.” In the past, I may have not been able to do all of those things in 30 seconds.

That's why this is a work. It's like flexing the muscle. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more instantaneously it happens where you have it. That's a lot of mindfulness. It’s noticing the story that you're telling yourself about what's happening, getting out of the story because it's not helpful, and getting yourself back into the moment. What's the next thing I need to do? I'm okay. It's okay for me to feel frazzled. That's okay too. Sometimes people have this idea that mindfulness is this cure-all.

The yellow brick road to Zen.

It's not. Sometimes it's like, “This is what it feels like to feel frazzled in my body. I'm sweating.”

One of the beautiful things about anyone talking about or sharing their journeys is this creating this connection of vulnerability that makes a situation or energy where somebody else can feel seen. For me with my show and my Instagram, I get so many messages from women and they're like, “Thank you so much for sharing on X, Y, and Z. I at least know that I’m not the only person in the world who feels this way.” You talk a lot of that in your book about the power of sharing and sharing your stories.

It's so powerful. It's the best thing that we can do for ourselves, honestly. When we think about mental health and wellbeing, there's a lot that goes into keeping ourselves well. A big one is the power of social support, especially for women. More interesting studies that researchers have looked at not just human females, but females across mammals. Females tend to turn towards and seek out other females in times of stress and that helps. There's something very biological about having a group of people or a person to support you to talk about it, to keep it real.

I heard a podcast with one of these little phrases that I liked. The person was saying, “Don't worry alone.” Make that rule for yourself. If you're worried or something's going on, share it with someone else, not only because it helps you at the moment, but it's in our biology. We're meant to do that. In terms of talking about vulnerability and being authentic, there's tremendous power in that, not only to help us in times of stress but also to help us unlock the life that we want to live.

When we're not being authentic or we're keeping our cards close to us, there's going to be something that we're not addressing in our lives. It's another way of keeping ourselves stuck. Whether it's in the masks that we were talking about before or that performativeness, “I need to be a certain way. What are people going to think?”

When we get comfortable with ourselves and develop or access confidence and self-worth because we need self-worth. I'm okay and it doesn't matter. Not everybody has to like me. Not everybody has to like what I'm saying or what I'm writing. We can unlock a lot of things that maybe we are feeling stuck around.

“When we get comfortable with ourselves and develop or access our confidence and self-worth, we can unlock a lot of things that we feel stuck on.”

It's so funny because the research is obviously correct in that it's research and empirical evidence. I even know, in my own life, myself or my daughter, we're calling our friends and telling them this whole long story of what happened. My husband and my son don't have that. Not to say they don't seek assistance or want to talk about things but it's not as crucial to them to have that connection of sharing about something that happened.

Having a teenage daughter and myself together, it's feeling central. Sometimes she'll go, “I just can't talk about this anymore.” I'm like, “Yeah, but you're the one who walked into my room at 11:00 at night. Now you don't feel like talking about it? Excuse me, whatever.” My husband's asleep. He's already been sleeping for 40 minutes. Now in terms of your book, you use these three key buzzwords, gutsy, courage, and bravery. I know they all sound like synonyms, if you look something up on Google, but tell us what the subtle variations are amongst them for you or how you define them.

I got to think about that one for a little bit. How would I define them differently? To me, the two central words are bravery and gutsy, and then courage is maybe a sub-word. Talking about the two of those first, bravery, to me, feels a little bit more cerebral. There are things I want to do. I got to be brave. I got to get out of my own way and show up.

Gutsy is more soul. What's in my soul? What am I feeling? Here I have this Jewish word, kishkas. What's in my kishkas? What's in there that I'm not attending to and how could I unleash that and let myself be more authentic? To me, it's a little bit more soul-oriented. It's hard to explain it exactly. It's definitely not scientific, but I do hear them differently.

It seems to me from reading that bravery was about the big things. You say in the book tough parenting moments where you didn't think you were going to make it through that time. Gutsy was like, “I went to that exercise class and wore the sports bra without a t-shirt.” I don't know. Not that I would ever do that in any scenario, but it has a different quality to it like a ruffling of feathers, if you will.

I hear that too. Gutsy to me is like what I was saying before. It's this idea of how I can honor myself. The sports bra example does work because that's like, “I want to do this.”

I did that once many years ago. I dyed this little piece of my hair pink. That's not even something that I even did in high school. What the fuck? What are you doing? I wanted to show myself that I could and then I would show up at board meetings with these pink stripes. I don't even know what I was doing or thinking but it felt good.

I get you. I did that with my piercings. I finally got a couple more over here, which I never had growing up. I only did this a few years ago.

I got mine with my daughter. She has six or I don't even know. I was like, “I only have one hole on each side. I'm going to get 2 and 3. I'm going for it. I'm doing this.” Meanwhile, I regretted it because managing that whole infection drama for a year. I'm never doing this again.

I had the same experience, 2 and 3 and the same. I'm like, “This is uncomfortable and I won’t be able to sleep on my right side.”

You can’t sleep. It’s like twisting the earring and putting the alcohol and I'm like, “I can't do this.” In terms of bravery, getting unstuck, and being gutsy, fear of failure is a ginormous piece of all of this for all of us. Nobody wants to fail and nobody wants to feel like they failed or want other people to say like, “Her company failed. The book she wrote only sold three copies,” or whatever. How do we get out of our own way and reframe fear in this beautiful gutsy reclaiming your life way?

That's probably all the things we're talking about. That, to me, feels the most important because that is the one that holds so many of us back, especially people who are high achievers and perfectionists. It's like the fear of failure and fear of what other people are going to think if I fall flat on my face. That's such a big thing. Without sounding trite but it's going to sound trite to develop the ability to say, “Who cares?” Why am I putting so much stock and what other people think about me? Where does that come from in the first place? This is my one life. Why do I care so much about what other people think and how well I do and why do I feel like I'm only worthy if I do well?

There's so much there. There's such a blessing and beauty in failing. I still find it inspiring. People that I look up to, hearing their podcast, when they talk about, “I wrote this book and it didn't do very well. I went on and I wrote another book that did do pretty well.” Everybody has stories that are like we're “failures.” It didn't go as well as planned and those opportunities are inevitable and they teach us a lot about persistence and self-worth. I'm okay and I can still do this even if it doesn't do as well as I wanted it to. That's okay. I'm not writing this book so that everybody in the whole world loves it.

I'm writing this book because I feel like I have a story it moved me and I hope that it moves some people and some people, it won't jive with. I had this example. I was looking at reviews of my book on Amazon and my daughter was like, “Mommy, why are you doing that? People are going to say not nice. Don't check it.” It was such a nice learning opportunity for me to her because she also tends to be a little bit of a perfectionist.

I know that I'm not going to get all five-star reviews and that's okay. That's part of showing up. For me writing and knowing not everyone's going to love it, that's okay with Mommy. For her to hear that message, I hope it plants the seeds for her. She can keep on showing up. It's okay to fail. It's okay to have some people not like what you wrote or not like you.

It's beautiful. Having my own daughter, I try to do that as much as I can. If she's not invited to something and I'm like, “There was a birthday party that I saw all over Instagram and I wasn't invited to that.” It's not like, “Me too.” It's this idea that the problems or issues that come up in childhood or teenage years, they're not over forever. It's not like you become an adult and suddenly, you don't have FOMO or you don't care when somebody says something bad about you. It's that you have more experience in your response.

People are more sophisticated usually in how it comes up. The same things come up for sure.

For a lot of midlife women, this whole fear-based thing of an inner mean girl, external peanut gallery, for me, a lot of it is living with uncertainty. That's so uncomfortable. What can we do as perfectionists and as performance-based people to sit back and get cozy in the uncomfortable?

As I work with a lot of perfectionists and women and teenage girls with anxiety, this is always a big component of that work because anxiety and perfectionism want us to seek certainty. It wants to know for sure this is going to be amazing and it's going to work out. With anxiety, I need to know for sure this isn't going to happen. That's not possible.

First of all, know that certainty is an illusion. We never get certainty. We're trying to pursue something that doesn't exist and then, we're on this rat race because it doesn't exist. We're pursuing a thing that we can't get. It's an illusion. Knowing that uncertainty is a part of life and using your words, I said this to a client, learning to cozy up to uncertainty.

How can I learn to make space for it in my life? Bringing us back to where we started, it’s this idea of finding it in your body. How does uncertainty live in my body? How do I feel it? Is it in my chest? Can I hold myself there? Can I offer myself self-compassion for this feeling of uncertainty? It is so hard we're not pretending that it's not hard.

Also, it's a part of life. I can meet it with compassion. I can let it in. Like what you were saying, it can have a seat at the table, it can make itself comfortable, and I'm not going to let it stop me. I'm at the head of this table. I'm driving my bus and it'll come and go. The self-compassion because it's uncomfortable. Uncertainty is a hard one. I get it.

I wish we could get to this feeling of being okay with it faster. You talk about this example in your book, how you failed the driver's test and you didn't go back for a year. I thought about that. Let's think about how many midlife women are like, “I want to do X, Y, or Z.” They send an email and somebody says no or whatever, and then they backburn it for a year. So many of us are guilty of that. What can we do about that?

A big key here is bringing more attention to what is happening for you, how you're responding to things, and then making more intentional decisions based off of that. Back burning or the story with the driving test, it's because I was so young then too. I didn't have all the skills that I picked up in my twenties and now I'm still working on it.

Your daughter's ass would be there the next day, Leah.

I wasn't talking to anybody. I was like, “Whatever.” I was probably making all kinds of excuses. I wasn't saying to myself or anyone else, “I'm not taking it again because I might fail.” I was probably saying, “I'm busy and I have a test. I don't need to drive that much anyways.” It’s paying attention to what's happening, pausing, and getting quiet with ourselves.

Let's say you pitch something and it gets turned down and then you feel like, “I'm going to put this away for a few months.” Don't do that. Pause. What's here for you now? What thoughts are you giving yourself? Is it fear or is it something that you want? Do you want to put this away for that much time? If it is fear, what can you do with it? Can you meet that with self-compassion and then keep on persisting?

That's resilience. We keep on going. Writing this book took a lot of persistence, keeping on going even when I got rejections and different things. We all need to normalize that. When we're doing anything hard and scary or out of our comfort zone, we're going to have to persist and it's not going to be easy most of the time.

FNP Leah Katz | Quiet Fire

Quiet Fire: We all need to normalize that when we're doing anything hard, scary, or out of our comfort zone, we're going to have to persist, even if it's not going to be easy most of the time.

I sent a scary email, not in terms of asking for something. I didn't hear back and I was like, “That's annoying. That bugs me.” I emailed her again maybe a week later and I was like, “Checking in. I know you’re super busy. I don’t know if you got my email.” Another week goes by and I'm like, “That's a closed door. I tried.” I got an email that's like, “Let's talk on Tuesday.” I thought, “Yes.” There are so many noes and there are so many maybes that turn to yeses or noes that turn to yeses or yeses that turn to noes and can we be okay with all of it?

Try to notice yourself telling a story about the no. “Why did I do that?”

I regretted sending that email.

Just get out the story. Is this something that you want to do? Keep on doing it. It is so hard. Maybe that's also part of the social support thing. If you have people who are also doing things that are hard and scary for them, then you can support each other in this because it is hard and it can feel very lonely.

A midlife woman comes to you and says, “You are a clinical psychologist. You have a huge practice. You wrote this book called Gutsy. I'm in midlife. My kids are out of the house. I'm married. I'm divorced. I'm widowed. I need a midlife remix as I call it. What's my next step, Dr. Leah?” Is it, “Let's sit down and figure out what your next step is?”

Not to sound too tongue in cheek, I get asked questions like that a lot in my practice. “What do you think I should do?”

I know. That's why I'm asking you.

Especially if I have a good long rapport and relationship with my clients, I'm like, “What do you think you should do? Why do you think I have the answers?” That means it's like self-trust. I talk about wisdom in my book too. We all know a whole lot more than we give ourselves credit for.

When someone's like, “I don't know. What should I do?” I'm like, “Hold on. Let's breathe together. What do you think you should do? I'm here. I'm listening. I'm here with you. Let's talk about it. I can support you. I can help build you up or offer skills to work with your anxiety, but you've got your own answers, girl. That's the way it is. I don't have your answers.”

I also think it goes into one of your steps of having someone like a therapist, a life coach, a friend, or an accountability person who's not necessarily telling you what to do. A lot of times, we want someone to tell us what to do because we feel like it's a lot easier and takes us out of conflict. I know that when I hired a life coach, I still talk with her to this day. I was like, “Tell me what I should do for the rest of my life. I am so bored and help me out.”

She's like, “Sarah.” We're all looking for these Amazon Prime answers that are not there. It's the process. It's the journey. I know it's so trite and everybody keeps saying the same shit over and over again but it's so true. It's like, “Stop. Listen to your quiet fire. Is there something that you've always wanted to do that you haven't done?”

I wasn't like, “I've always wanted to start a podcast.” No. You have this list. I'm trying to find it in my 40,000 pages of notes. Ask yourself the important questions. I can't remember what they are off the top of my head, but it's like, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where do you want to be in a year? Who do you want to become? How do you want to feel? All of these questions come together but not in one instance over time. It's the overtime that makes us crazy.

It's the overtime that is necessary. That's accepting that is such an important thing. I have a chapter on me doing improv. That was before I started writing my book. I had always wanted to do some acting but I never did. I had thought about doing improv. For me, signing up for that first improv class, create a movement and change, and this idea of, “I can step out of this narrative I have about myself and the things that I do.” I didn't do improv. Start to do other things from that. Now I wrote a book and that was also a big deal for me and something that I might not have thought that I would do years ago.

It seems to me like it's figuring out. It sounds so basic but my life coach says it to me too. I'm like, “Don't say that to me again.” My husband says the same thing too. “Sarah, calm down. What's your next step?” I'm like, “Shut up with the next step thing.” You talk about it too.

I think it's powerful.

Why is it so powerful?

When we're overwhelmed and we focus on the big picture, it's that black and white don't do anything. We're like, “Forget it, I'm going to watch the next thing on Netflix because this is too much, too big, and too scary.” I ask myself this question verbatim, “What's the next thing I need to do? What's the very next thing?” It's, “Okay, I can do that.” Sometimes, I need to get a drink of water because I'm thirsty. I'm going to do a little bit of writing because I've been wanting to work on my next book, or whatever it is. It's different things but it's always small and it's the next thing.

“When we’re overwhelmed and focus on the big picture, it’s like black and white, and we just don’t do anything and say, “Forget it.”

What I've gleaned in this two-and-a-half-year process of interviewing all these different types of people is that sometimes the first seventeen things you do may not have anything to do with where you end up. It's not you were trying to try out for Saturday Night Live so let me take an improv class. You get curious. Do a new thing. It doesn't even matter what the new thing is. That new thing creates this new energy within you. Maybe you talk to someone at the improv class and then she invites you to do a poem reading. It's the synchronicity of doors.

It's creating movement in your life. Movement is movement. It's the content process. The specifics of the movement that I'm creating could be completely unrelated like doing improv, writing a book, starting a private practice, or whatever else, versus the process of, “I can do hard things. I can do scary things and be brave.” I can sign up and do an improv class, which is so weird for me to do. Look at me, stepping out of my comfort zone and that energy, what you were saying, translates into the next thing that is in line with something that I want to keep on pursuing.

Many of us are like, “I'm going to sit home and spend six hours thinking about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life.” From what you're saying, those quiet moments are important. Maybe not six hours. It's not like you're going to sit down and all of these ideas are going to come to you and you're going to have a whole plan the next day. That's why sometimes people sign up for a class or go take a college Art History study class.

Even though you're not going to become some museum curator at some point, it gets you into someone else's structure and gets your brain and your juices flowing. I feel like a lot of women have sent me those messages like, “I signed up for that aerobics class. I finally went to that Pilates class even though it seemed hard.” I feel like a lot of times, people have luck with getting off their hamster wheels by doing those random new things.

I've seen it in my own life and I see it with people that I know personally and professionally for sure.

You say that tricky excuses hold us back. Tell us about that.

The tricky excuses, that's where I start off with and that's tying what we're saying together. It's the narrative in our mind and we come back to the same old things over and over again. Back to the license, I can't do it because I'm busy. How many of us say, “I can't do this because I'm too busy?” Raise your hand if you'd use that excuse. We all do it, especially when you're in midlife, you're busy, and you're doing 1 million different things. You are busy but you can take 1 minute or 2 or 5 or however long to focus to do the Google search or to do the very next thing you need to do. The tricky excuses are tricky because they're believable.

“The tricky excuses are tricky because they’re believable.”

You are busy. That does cost a lot of money. There's a piece of it that's believable and if you stay with it at the surface level, that can be the barrier and then you don't tap into the thing that you want to do. If you notice the pattern and the excuses coming up and you ask yourself, “Hold on a second. What's here for me?’ the tip of the iceberg is what we see. That's the excuse. If we dig a little deeper, what's this about? Am I afraid? Am I afraid of failure? Am I worried about taking away from this other thing? We then get at it.

Now I'm rethinking the part about your iceberg example in the book. Another example used in the book to talk about this tricky-excuses thing that we all are guilty of is this disillusion of the perfect moment or the perfect time. You say that when you wanted to write your book, you were like, “I need the perfect Zen meditation corner in my house that has the perfect meditation pillow and the West-facing window.” I almost died when I read that because I was like, “How many of us have those illusions of the perfect time or the perfect way to do something?”

The perfect amount of time. If I'm on another book right now, I need to have at least two hours because I need time to get into it. Come on. Sit down for fifteen minutes. Do what you can do. I think we all do it in different ways, for sure.

Did you ever get the perfect cushion?

No. I do have one that I like.

Yeah, but did that help you write the book?

No, but I did find one that I liked but I had nothing. It's not even in my office. It's in a completely different room in my house.

What cushion is it?

I got it a long time ago. I'll send it.

We have to have that. Did you get the West-facing window?

No, I never got my West-facing window. I don't even know how I did it.

Thinking of those examples are so funny because we all have a list of them. It's like, “I'm going to get that dress when I lose 20 pounds.”

I catch myself in this loop still. it comes up still in lots of different ways.

I want to scream and say to everyone because I'm part of it too. It's like “Okay, you guys. Let’s just get up and do it.” That's how I feel about working out with weights. Getting on the treadmill is mindless for me. It doesn't require mental gymnastics. I could get on and space out. Lifting weights is hard for me because I have to think about what the routine is. I can't space out. I come up with all these excuses of why I don't have to do the weights.

I do the same thing if I know that I can give myself a break. If I go on the treadmill and I've got to PR this time. It has to be as good as the last time I ran, then I might not do it. I might hate doing it. If I say, “I'm going to do what I can do. I'll walk if I need to some of it,” that helps.

Isn't the mind games that we play with ourselves funny? It weaves back into this idea of the fear of failure. I love how you have this little note in your book that says that you should write a letter to your fear of failure. I want to read it. It says, “Hello, fear of failure. You are here right now and that's okay. I'm not letting you control what I choose to do and not do. I will not make my life's decisions based on you. I am not going to try to make you go away. I am choosing to embrace the entirety of my life, honoring myself, my dreams, and my longings. If you'd like, you may come along for the ride.”

That's a huge part of it. We've got to let it all in and we can't wait for anything to go away or try to make it go away before we do the thing. That's the bottom line.

“We can’t wait for anything to go away or try to make it go away before we do something. That’s the bottom line.”

How does self-acceptance play into all of this? I know we've talked about it before and we've woven it through, but there's this part of your book where you say that you read this quote in a book that said, “Will you take me as I am? How has that impacted you?”

That's a big one for me. I remember so clearly where I was when I read that for the first time and it was years ago and I still tell myself, “Will you take me in as I am?” Me asking myself that question, all of us asking ourselves that question. “Can I be okay with myself at this moment? Can I be okay with however this turns out?” That is what helps us show up. As long as we're in our headspace of, “This has to be the most amazing session ever or even a good session. This has to be good. The thing that I write has to get these many likes.”

If we get in our heads about it, number one, it saps the joy out of it. It puts all this pressure on ourselves and it makes it less likely that we'll show up. If we bring ourselves back, it's that grounding and getting present. Can I be here with this, with the excitement that's here that I'm doing this thing, with the fear that's here for me, with the possibility of me failing and not working out? Can I be okay with that? I'm a human and that's part of being human.” Hopefully, if we get ourselves to a place where the answer is yes, so much more becomes possible.

Tell me again the name of the book that you read that in.

That's a good one. That's an ACT. Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life by Steven Hayes. It's a workbook. My therapist years ago, told me to read it and I read it and it was profound for me. It was my first intro to ACT.

Tell us what ACT is.

It stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It's a form of therapy that focuses on those two pieces. Acceptance, learning, and training ourselves to accept what's here for ourselves right now, whatever that is. Commitment, committing to values and things that give us meaning and purpose in life. It's the pairing of the two and it's beautiful. If any of this sparks anybody's interest, I recommend you check that book out.

I put it in my Amazon cart. I'm going to have to order.

I still have my old copy and it's all written up because I did the exercises in there at the time. It was a good book.

I always get confused or try to get my head around this idea of surrendering and letting go because when I hear those terms, giving up and not having agency, but that's not what it is.

It's the opposite.

Can you explain that? It doesn't make sense.

Steven Hayes talks about this in his book on ACTs. There's a difference between willfulness and acceptance. Willfulness is this idea of, “I don't want this here. I don't want this to be a part of my life.” You close yourself up to it. Sometimes people feel acceptance is this. I'm going to throw my hands up in the air and like, “Whatever. There's nothing I can do here.” Acceptance is the opposite of willfulness. Acceptance is this idea of instead of going like, “Go away. I don't want this.” You open up your arms and you say, “Whatever's here for me, whatever is showing up for me right now, I'm okay. I can let it in. Come on in.”

It doesn't mean you're not going to take steps, lay down, and roll over it.

This is the opposite. All these things get to be here because they are here, but I can learn to relate to them differently. These things don't get to drive my bus around and tell me what to do, but they get to hop on the bus and take a backseat. “Hello, fear of failure, and hello, anxiety, and hello all you guys. I can't make you go away because I can't.” We can't make our feelings go away. If we try to make them go away, they get bigger. I'm going to learn to coexist with them and lovingly accept them and that's okay. I can do this scared. I can go and do this spirit. I can do this with my anxiety. We have to adopt that.

Another piece of your book before we wrap up is you talk about being a person outside of your relationships. Tell me about that.

That was a big one for me too. I got married young and we were dealing with a lot of different dynamics in our relationship with the religious piece. It was easy for me and I didn't even realize this happened for a long. To get lost in like, “This is stressful. This is hard. I'm in this relationship, we've got to make this work and do this thing.” I lost track of who I was beyond that. A lot of us do that for our parenting or with having a long-term relationship. We can so easily get caught up in the details and the stresses and even the good stuff.

We immerse ourselves in it and we lose track. That's one facet of us. Remember Trivial Pursuit? It’s like this relationship gets a pie and this relationship gets a pie, but then there's this cool part of me that's not a part of that relationship. That gets a pie and my job gets a pie. It all fits into this thing. Keeping that in perspective is pretty cool because it helps broaden us and richen our lives and get some perspective too. If one of the pies isn't working out so well or we're having a hard time with it, we know it's not our only pie. We have these other things that we can find balance in.

Another piece of it that you talk about is we can't depend on other people to fill our holes. For example, the hobby thing. The hobby thing is hard for me because my husband has 40 million hobbies and I don't. I'm like, “We're going to age together and he's going to be in Hobby Land and I'm going to be doing nothing. I'm not a hobby person.” In this midlife zone, I'm trying to figure out, “I'm not naturally a hobby person, but what could I get curious about enough to maybe not make a hobby out of it, but at least try it?”

I'm thinking about this with you now, but maybe it's how you define a hobby. Oftentimes, we think a hobby is taking up like a thing, a sport, art, or something. I'm throwing this out there. Maybe your hobby is connecting with people. You love to connect. You have a show and you connect with a lot of different women and people and that's the hobby. Where do you find fulfillment and how can you bring that into your life?

It's interesting because again, we go into that judgment zone of like, “That’s not a hobby.” Talking to all these women, that's not a hobby. A hobby is you play golf, you know how to knit, or you play pickleball. It's having different definitions like you're saying of what's okay and what other people will think.

Ultimately, it’s what gives you purpose and meaning in your life. You might not be sporty, but as an example, you love connecting with people. It's doing the podcast and it's when you go to Starbucks. You talk to the barista. It's this thing.

Wearing cute golf outfits. No, I'm kidding. As we wrap up, I want to take a few questions from Leah's book and ask readers to ask themselves, “What are your dreams and goals? What yearning is there inside of you that you have silently been ignoring? What is your quiet fire asking for in choosing you in midlife?” Leah says we should write it all down, say it out loud, acknowledge it, and accept it because it makes it more real. We can start taking steps towards leaving our comfort zones and living more gutsy and brave lives that are meaningful and celebrating small wins along the way and learning that failure is part of personal growth. That's all we have to do?

We could unpack so much of what we talked about in this episode.

It could be a seventeen-part series. Leah, if readers want to find you, where can they find you?

I'm on Instagram at @Dr.LeahKatz. It's my only account. Sometimes, on Instagram, there are these imposter accounts. It’s so annoying. I don't understand it. That's the only one that I have.

I had one that was going on for months. It was messaging people asking them for stuff. I was like, “This has to end.”

You report it to Instagram and this is what happens to me. They're like, “We're sorry. This account doesn't violate community guidelines.”

Mine was saying, “Due to COVID, we are backed up right now.” I'm like, “Okay but 2,000 people have reported it. Can you get to it?” The major one finally came down. I was like, “Thank God.”

My website's DrLeahKatz.com.

I love your website. I was on that too, digging for stuff. I want everyone to think about what stuff they can start doing now. One small step towards choosing us in midlife with thinking about what it means to be gutsy and brave and to find our quiet fires. I want to thank Dr. Leah for highlighting the tools and strategies on how we can more deeply connect with ourselves, step out of our midlife comfort zones, take some risks, and live more meaningful lives. Thank you, Dr. Leah Katz, for saying yes and becoming a new friend to the show.

Thank you for having me. This was great.

---

I read this episode with the well-recognized clinical psychologist, best-selling author, and mother of two, Dr. Leah Katz, so I could summarize the golden nuggets for you to have actionable items to start using. I know that when I read a long episode, I'm like, “I love that,” but then I can't even fucking remember the specifics. This is why I come back and do a golden nugget summary.

In this episode, we dig deep with our golden shit shovels in a conversation that is intended to help you find out why you feel so stuck in your comfort zones and what tools we can use to exercise bravery and be fucking gutsy in choosing ourselves in midlife. Golden Nugget 1) What is quiet fire and why is it important to midlife? Quiet fire is a term that Leah uses often. It refers to a little fire that lives within all of us, regardless of whether we tend to it or not.

When we do tend to it, it can feel amazing. When we don't, which can happen for a variety of reasons, it can feel like a little fire just burning in the background. The idea of quiet fire is really to turn inward and pay attention to it. Be curious about it. Ask yourself what is important to you and let it come to fruition, and it's nothing to fear. It's not dramatic. That's why we call it quiet because it is something you conquer within yourself, terms and conditions that you create within yourself that makes you feel good.

Golden Nugget 2) We always have agency over our own lives. Leah advocates that it's never too late to make changes in our own lives. It's okay to let go of that black-and-white thinking that makes you assume that change is all or nothing. Change happens every day, and it often starts in small ways. Leah suggests making little shifts in your daily routine to make more time for yourself, even if that just means listening to an inspiring podcast while running errands. The way we think about change can dictate our habits, and those thoughts are like a leash. Let yourself off of that leash and remind yourself that just because you are one way now does not mean that you'll be that way forever.

Golden Nugget 3) The power of narratives and thoughts. When Leah meets with women who are feeling stuck, she first explores what their perception of being stuck really is. The answer will be different for everyone. This opens up so many more questions like, “Am I the one getting in my own way?” If you can take responsibility for your stuckness, then you aren't blaming anyone else and you have the power to change it.

This is where mindfulness comes in. We hear this word all the fucking time, but what really is it? Leah defines mindfulness as the act of cultivating an awareness of what is unfolding in this very moment. Doing this will help us detach from the narratives that keep us stuck or tell us we can't make a change. This is something that you will get better at over time. It's like flexing a muscle. The more you do it, the better you get at it, and the more instantaneously it happens.

Golden Nugget 4) Being a person outside of your relationship. Leah shared her experience growing and maturing in her marriage after getting married at a very young age. Being a person outside of your own relationship, your own person is something that she talks about a lot in her book. She admits that she lost herself in the stress that she was experiencing and began working on her relationship. She began to see her relationships and obligations as varying parts that added up to who she is.

She realized that there are other sections within her to focus on hobbies and work and that it's as important to feed those areas too. It's important to create a balance and not give all of your energy to one section of yourself. It can be intimidating to think, “What even are my hobbies? What are my passions? How can I find fulfillment in these other areas?” It can be helpful to redefine what a hobby is and to consider that it could be anything from pickleball to connecting with like-minded people.

The gold is dripping off these nuggets. Grab it. Use it. You know the drill. There are three things you can do. The first is to subscribe to the show. When you subscribe, it helps my show grow. Second, share it with some friends who like midlife shit. Third, write an Apple review. Writing reviews is so fucking annoying and it's an extra step, but it helps the show grow also. If you think your little review won't matter, it does. If you went to a show and everyone said, “My clap doesn't matter,” then there would be no clapping. You all matter. DM me. Follow my Instagram @TheFlexibleNeurotic. Love you. Talk soon.

Important Links

About DR. Leah Katz

FNP Leah Katz | Quiet Fire

Originally from New York, she completed her doctorate training at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology. While living in New York, Dr. Katz worked at a community clinic where she led several groups, treated individuals and couples in therapy, and taught Health Psychology at Stern College for Women.

She currently works in private practice where she specializes in working with teenagers and adults, with a focus on treating anxiety and depression. She primarily utilizes a hybrid of cognitive behavioral, ACT, and mindfulness techniques in her therapy work. She has an extensive mindfulness background and incorporates mindfulness concepts into the therapeutic work she does.

Dr. Katz is passionate about girls’ and women’s mental health, and helping women navigate challenges to live deeply connected and fulfilled lives. She recently published her first book, Gutsy: Mindfulness Practices for Everyday Bravery.

You can find her on Instagram, @dr.leahkatz, where she shares mental health thoughts daily.

This podcast, along with associated websites and social media materials, are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are that of Dr. Sarah Milken, and that of her guests, respectively. It is for informational purposes only. Please consult your healthcare professional for any further medical questions.

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