Midlife Reactions and Repeat Habits, a Morning Awareness Practice| Messy Midlife S2 EP7

Jody Brooks 0:01

You're not falling apart, you're waking up. If you're somewhere between 35 and 65, life feels like it's cracking open, the identity you built no longer fits, and the future feels terrifying, nobody around you seems to get it. Welcome, I'm Jodie Brooks, and this is Messy Midlife. Because this isn't a crisis, it's a calling to connect. Welcome back to Messy Midlife. It's Monday, it's the start of a brand new week, and if you've been with me through this season so far, then something rather lovely is happening. You are getting good at this. No, you really are. Let me tell you where we've been, because it matters for where we're going today. This whole season is about understanding, the second of my nine principles of authentic living. And understanding has one job. It asks why. In season one, we learn to notice. We built the awareness muscle and we created a little bit of space between the thing that happens and the way we react to it, the stimulus and the response. We met the iceberg again, that old friend, the idea that the tip we can see, the conscious mind, is only about 10% of us, and the 90% below the waterline is running the show. And I gave you the picture that has become the signature of this whole season, the satnav with an outdated map. Your true values are the destination, but the directions being shouted at you are coming from a map that expired years ago. In week two of this season, we went looking for where those old directions came from. We talked about the blocks, the protections we built so long ago we forgot we built them. I gave you the leak and the mop, the idea that mopping the floor forever never fixes the leak. And on Friday, with the help of my Wednesday guest Catherine, we became archaeologists. We learned to carbon date a feeling, to dig gently and ask, how old is this really? When was this actually installed? Because when you carbon date one of your reactions, honestly, you almost never find that it belongs to now. You find it's

Why as the New Tool

Jody Brooks 2:22

ancient. So here we are, week three. And this week has a name that makes me happy every time I say it. This week is called The Tools. Awareness is where it all begins, like I said, back in season one. Because awareness and noticing are beautiful. But noticing on its own can become its own little trap. You end up as a very well-informed passenger, but still on the runaway bus. You can see exactly where it's heading, you can narrate the whole crash, but you still don't know how to slow it down. This week I'm going to hand you the tool, the actual practical in your hands tool that does the digging, and it's the simplest, gentlest, most powerful thing I know. It is the question why. Now before you roll your eyes at me and say, Jody, I know how to ask why. I promise you you almost certainly never asked it like this, because there is a world of difference between asking why as an accusation and asking why as an invitation. And the difference is the whole of today's episode. So the focus question for this week, the one I want you to carry around in your back pocket, is this. What sits at the bottom of my iceberg? Not the tip, not the reaction everyone can see, what's down there in the 90% quietly steering the whole thing? Let's go find

Rescuing the Word Why

Jody Brooks 3:57

out. I want to start by rescuing the word why, because I think most of us have a slightly bruised relationship with it. Think about how the word gets used. When did someone last ask you why? I'd put money on it that it was actually an interrogation. Why did you do that? Why didn't you finish it? Why are you like this? Why can't you just be happy? Why oh why oh why? The word why in most of our lives comes with a pointed finger and a slight level of accusation and often a raised voice. It's the word a cross parent uses, it's a word a disappointed boss uses, it's the word we use on ourselves at two in the morning when we're replaying something we said at a party in 1988. That kind of why is not at all. That kind of why is in fact a weapon, and here's the problem with it. It doesn't want an answer, it wants a confession. When someone snaps why did you do that? They're not curious. They've already decided you were wrong, and the why is just the trapdoor they want you to fall through. So of course we flinch from it. Of course, when I sit with the client and say gently, so why do you think that is? I sometimes watch them brace as if I'm about to tell them off. Because their whole life, why has meant trouble. I've watched grown adults, capable, successful, brilliant people physically pull back in their chair when I ask a soft why. Because somewhere in them a much younger version is bracing for the telling off that used to follow. That's how deep the bruise goes. We've been trained most of us to hear why as the opening note of criticism. And you can't dig for treasure with a tool you're frightened of. Now here's the sad little knock-on effect of that, because why feels dangerous. We stop asking it ourselves entirely. We settle for that's just how I am. We reach for the label, slap it on, and call it personality. Oh, I'm just an anxious person, I'm just a control freak, I'm just not a mourning person, not a confident person, not the sort who speaks up. And a label is such a comfortable place to stop, isn't it? Because a label ends the conversation. If it's just who I am, then there's nothing to understand, nothing to look at, and crucially nothing that could ever change. The label protects us from the why, and the why is the only thing that will ever set anyone

Childlike Curiosity Why

Jody Brooks 6:44

free. Now let me give you the other why. The one we're going to use this week. This why is a child's why. Picture a three or four year old. Why is the sky blue? Why do dogs bark? Why do I have to go to bed? Why why? And it drives us round the bend. But notice something about it. It's completely without judgment. The child isn't accusing the sky of anything. The child just genuinely, openly, endlessly, wants to understand. There's no shame in it, no blame, no gotcha, just a wide, open, curious little face saying, but why? And yes, I know eventually every parent in history reaches the end of the road and says because I said so. We talked about that back at the start of the season. Because I said so is where curiosity goes to die. It's the moment the questioning stops and the instruction gets installed. And a lot of what sits at the bottom of the iceberg got put there by a because I said so from someone who was tired or stressed or doing their best or not, as the case may be. But this week you get to be the child again, not the tired parent. The child wide open, no judgment, just but why. And then but why and then but why again. I want you to really feel the difference between those two whys because it is the whole game. The interrogation why is asked with your arms folded, it's asked leaning forward, jaw tight, already knowing the answer, just waiting for the other person or yourself to admit the fault. The gentle why is asked leaning back softly with genuine, open-handed I honestly don't know, and I'd love to find out curiosity. Same three letters, completely different tool. One is a scalpel someone's using to hurt you, the other is a torch you're using to find your way around that dark room you've been stumbling through for years. That's the tool. That's the whole tool. Now it sounds almost too simple

Why Works in the Brain

Jody Brooks 9:06

to matter. Stay with me because I'm about to show you what happens when you actually use it on something real from my own life, and I warn you now, it goes somewhere I didn't expect the first time I did it. Before I take you into my own story, let me tell you why this gentle Y actually works, because I don't want you to think this is just a nice idea. There's something real going on underneath it. Do you remember what I told you in week two from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett? The idea that the brain is essentially one normous prediction machine. It doesn't experience the world fresh each morning, it predicts the world from memory, and then it acts on the prediction before you're even consciously aware of it. There's a study I keep coming back to from the Max Planck Institute that suggests the brain can settle on a decision up to seven seconds before you consciously know you've decided anything. Seven seconds. That's the head start your autopilot has on you. By the time you feel yourself reacting, the prediction has already fired. Now here is why that matters for the why. When you ask why gently with curiosity, you're not trying to win the seven seconds back. You can't, you're not fast enough. Nobody is. What you're doing is something clever. You're going back afterwards in the calm and asking the prediction machine to show you its workings. You're saying, Alright, you fired, I saw you fire, now gently. What memory were you predicting from? What did you think was about to happen? What were you trying to protect me from? And the machine, if you ask it kindly, will actually tell you. That's the astonishing thing. It will hand over the old file, but and this is the whole reason we use the gentle why and not the interrogation why, it will only hand it over if it feels safe. Ask why like a prosecutor, and the system slams shut, gets defensive, gives you a story that protects your ego. Ask why like a curious child, and it relaxes and it shows you what's really down there. So the gentleness isn't me being soft for the sake of it. The gentleness is the technique, it's what unlocks the drawer. Which funny enough brings me to the picture I want to give you

Filing Cabinet Metaphor

Jody Brooks 11:39

today. Here's the new image for this week. I want you to imagine your subconscious, that 90% below the waterline as an enormous filing cabinet. An old one, the heavy metal kind, with dozens and dozens of drawers. And in those drawers are all your files, every belief you've ever formed about yourself, every rule you've learned about how to be safe, how to be loved, how to be enough. Some of them you filed carefully, most of them got shoved in by other people when you were far too young to object. And then the drawer got shut, and you forgot it was even there. And here's the thing about this cabinet, nobody ever taught us how to use it. Nobody sat us down at 7 or 12 or 17 or even 25 and said, right, some of these files are going to be wrong, and some of them were written by people who were frightened or careless or cruel, and one day you're going to need to come back and read them properly and decide which one still deserves to be in there. Nobody said that. So the files just sit there unread, quietly issuing instructions for 30, 40, 50 years or more. Now that's not a flaw in you, that's just how the cabinet works when nobody hands you the key. Well, consider this episode me handing you the key to your filing cabinet. Now, when one of your reactions fires, that runaway buss moment where you watch yourself behaving in a way you don't even like, what's happening is the machine has gone to the cabinet, pulled a file and acted on it. Instantly, without asking you, it found a file, marked this situation, and it did what the file said to do. The trouble is you can't read the file, it happens too fast. Seven seconds ahead, remember, and all you get is the feeling and the behaviour. And afterwards

Opening Drawers with Whys

Jody Brooks 13:39

the guilt. So what does the gentle Y do? Here's the lovely bit. Each Y opens a drawer. The first Y gets you to the right cabinet, the second Y gets you to the right drawer, and it's usually somewhere around the third, fourth, fifth Y, sometimes as far down as the seventh Y that your fingers finally land on the actual file. The original one, the one that's been running the whole show. And I want to be really honest with you about the first drawer you open, because it always lies. The first Y nearly always gives you a tidy, sensible, grown-up answer that makes you sound reasonable and lets you close the cabinet again. I did it because it needed doing. I did it because someone had to. I did it because that's just good practice, and I did it because that's just my personality. All perfectly true on the surface, and all completely useless, because none of them goes anywhere near the 90% below the waterline. The top drawer is the drawer your conscious mind keeps for visitors. It's tidy, it's presentable, and it's not where the treasure is. The treasure is always further down in a drawer that sticks a bit that you have to give a proper tug to open and only get it open by asking why one more time than feels comfortable. And I'll tell you what I've learned both in my own life and sitting with many people doing this work. When you finally pull that file out and read it, two things happen at once. The first is a kind of grief because you see how long you've been living by an instruction that was written by a frightened child, and the second, right behind it, is the most enormous relief. Because for the first time, you understand you're not broken, you're not mad, you are just following a very old file, very faithfully for a very long time. Let

Pub Story Setup

Jody Brooks 15:46

me show you, let me open my cabinet and let you listen as I pull the file, because I promised you right at the start of this season that I would do that. Now, some of you have been with me from the very first episode of this season, and you'll know the pub. For those who are new or who need a reminder, let me set the scene one more time, and then this week we're going to do something we haven't done yet. We're going to properly dig. I grew up for a part of my childhood in a public house in a small village in Oxfordshire. My mother and stepfather ran it, and one afternoon when I was about twelve, I walked into the bar, it was busy, there were customers I didn't recognise, and a few of the regulars, and my little brother, only five or six, playing with some tools on the floor. I'd come in to ask a question and I can't even remember that question now. Isn't that strange in itself? The question that brought me to the situation has gone completely, and yet everything that happened next is carved into me. I stood there, waiting for a gap, waiting for permission to speak, and then my stepfather turned, looked at me, and said to the whole room, This is the fat son. He can't tell a Phillips screwdriver from a flathead. Quite clever though. And they laughed. The whole bar laughed. I can still feel that heat come up my neck, the flush on my cheeks, the pain in my stomach, the moistening of my eyes. I can still smell it, the cigarettes and the beer and the open fire. And I stood there twelve years old, feeling humiliated and rejected and small and absolutely certain of one thing. I was never ever going to let that happen to me again. Now in week one of this season, I let myself just feel that story. I stopped narrating it like a fun anecdote, and I let it be what it was. A boy who got hurt. In week two, I carbon dated it and I told you something important. The pub wasn't where the belief was born, the pub was where an older, quieter belief got its official stamp in front of a jury. There was a chill already there long before that afternoon. A sense that I was loved when I was useful and no trouble, and might not be wanted otherwise. But I stopped there. I promised you a proper dig would come in week three. Well it's week three, so let me actually do it. Let me sit here in front of you, in front of the cabinet, be curious, like the child, and ask the gentle why out loud, so you can hear exactly how it goes. And I'll be honest with you, I don't do this to perform it, I do it because watching someone else do it is the fastest way to learn to do it yourself. So here

Five Whys in Action

Jody Brooks 18:53

we go. I'm going to start not with the pub, but with the behaviour it left in me, the reaction I kept noticing at work all these years later. Because that's how you do it. You don't start in the past, you start with the thing you caught yourself doing this week. The thing I kept catching myself doing was this. In any meeting, any group, any situation with people, I would push myself to the front, I'd become the spokesperson even when nobody asked me to, and I'd take control of the room. So everyone else, I probably looked confident, headstrong, maybe a bit of a control freak. And I only know that because once I had a bit of space, I could finally see it too. So why one? Why do I always push to the front to lead? And the first answer is easy, almost too easy, because I could see I was doing it, because that's just what you do. I'm a leader, I'm the one who steps up. And do you notice the first answer explains nothing? It just describes the behaviour back to me and dresses it up as a personality trait. That's just who I am. That's the answer the ego gives you to make you stop asking. Do not accept it. Be childlike. Ask again. Why too? Why do I feel the need to lead? Not what do I do, why do I need to? And this answer surprised me. I did it because when I'm leading, I'm controlling, and when I'm controlling I feel safe. There it is. That's better. That's a real answer. Because it's got a feeling attached to it. Safety. And it points somewhere. But the sea mist hasn't cleared yet. So gently again. Why three? Why do you need to control the situation to feel safe? And this is the one where if you're doing it properly, you have to stop. You have to sit with it because your mind won't hand this one over very quickly. I sat with that question for a week. Why do you need to control to feel safe? And I didn't get a work memory back over the week. I got a flood of childhood ones. And one of them was the pub. The heat up the neck, the laughter, the cigarettes and beer, fear and humiliation and not fitting in. Now watch what's happened. I started with a work behaviour, a grown man in a meeting, and three Ys down, I'm twelve years old in a bar in Oxfordshire. That's the machine handing me the file. That's the drawer opening. I could not have got there by force. I got there by asking kindly and waiting. I want to pause on that word waiting. Cause it's the part everyone wants to skip. When you ask a why that really matters, the answer very rarely arrives on Q. There's a silence first, an uncomfortable one. You might Will rush to fill it with the tidy answer, the visitor's draw answer, anything to make the silence stop. And your whole job in that moment is to not let it, to sit in the not knowing a little longer than feels comfortable. That's where the real file lives, in the silence just past the point most people give up. I sat with why do I need to control to feel safe for what felt like an age before the pub floated up? If I'd filled the silence, I'd have got a lecture on good management because I waited. I got the truth. Why for? Why do you think leading stops rejection? Because when you lead you control what people think of you, and if you control what they think, you can make sure they never think you're fat and stupid and not worth listening to. You can make sure nobody ever laughs at you in a room again. If I'm the one running it, I'm safe. If I wait quietly for permission to speak, like I did that day, I hand them the power to humiliate me. So I'll never ever wait quietly again. Do you hear it? Do you hear the twelve year old writing the rule that the fifty year old is still obeying in a meeting decades later? That's the file. That's what was in the drawer, a frightened boy standing in a bar full of laughing strangers drafting a policy in permanent ink. Never wait for permission, never be caught not knowing, always run the room, so the room can never run you. And that boy filed it and shut the drawer and grew up, and forgot he'd ever written it, and the man just kept obeying it faithfully, in boardrooms and in meetings and dinner parties for the best part of forty years. Never once stopping to ask who wrote the rule or whether it was still true or whether it had ever been true at all. And the last one Why five? Why does this matter to you so much? And the answer when it came was so quiet and so simple it almost knocked me over. Because it's not the truth. Because I am not those things, because being pushed to the front out of fear of humiliation is not who I actually am or want to be. Somewhere down there underneath the frightened boy's rule was a value, a real one. My value of authenticity, quietly insisting that this performance, this controlling, this always being the spokesperson, was not me being me, it was me being safe. And those are not the same thing. That was the moment I found the right draw. Not just the painful memory, but the value hiding underneath it.

Values Hidden Under Blocks

Jody Brooks 25:03

And here's the twist that I still find remarkable. The thing I was reaching for, all that controlling, all that leading, was a distorted grab at authenticity. I wanted to be seen and accepted as myself so badly that I built a whole false self to protect the real one. The trigger was producing the exact same opposite of the thing that I valued most. Sit with that for a second, because it's one of the strangest and most beautiful things I've ever learned in all this work. The behaviours we like least in ourselves are often a clumsy, frightened attempt to protect the things that we value most. The person who can't stop controlling usually values safety or fairness more than most. The person who can't say no usually values connection so deeply they're terrified of losing it. And the one who's always performing usually longs more than anything to be genuinely seen. The block and the treasure are in the same drawer. That's why you can't just rip the block out, you tear the treasure with it. You have to open the drawer gently and lift them apart with your hands. That's what sits at the bottom of the iceberg, not a floor, a value in a cage guarded by a frightened child using an out-of-date

Use the Tool Gently

Jody Brooks 26:31

map. Now I need to say something carefully here because this is where people can take a good tool and hurt themselves with it. The gentle why is for understanding. It's not this season for fixing and it's definitely not for judging. Notice what I did not do just now. I did not at any point turn to that twelve year old and say, You idiot, why did you let that one comment define you? I did not say, well that's a stupid rule, delete it. I did not stand over my stepfather in my mind and demand he apologize, and I did not decide the whole belief was false and I should just get over it. All I did was understand where it came from. That's it. That's all understanding asks of you. We're noticing the beliefs, we're not yet questioning whether they are true or rewriting them. That work, the updating of the map, the changing of the software, that comes later in the seasons on trust and honesty. If you try to do it all today, you'll just start beating yourself up, and beating yourself up is the old why just in a new coat. One more thing, and it's the ethic that runs under this whole season. When I go back to the pub, I'm not attacking my stepfather. His memory of that day might be completely different. He might not even remember it at all, and that is genuinely fine, because I do not need him to agree. It's my memory, it's my reality, and whether or not he'd recognise the story, that memory is what's been steering my iceberg. My memory is my reality, and that is fact. Why? Well, you guessed it, because I said so. Sorry, I couldn't resist. But hold on to it, because it's true. You don't need anyone to validate your memory for it to be the thing shaping your life. You just need to understand

Your Invitation This Week

Jody Brooks 28:31

it. So here's your invitation for this week. And notice I say invitation, not homework, because the moment this becomes a chore, you've turned the child's why back into the parents why. Sometime this week, when it's quiet, I want you to take one reaction, just one, the one that's been most obvious to you, the thing you've caught yourself doing that you don't much like, and I want you to sit down, be the curious child, and ask why. And then why again and keep going gently, three, four, five, even seven Y's down, until you feel a drawer open. You'll know when it happens, there'll be a memory, usually older than you expected, and a little jolt of oh, that's it. That's the file. You don't have to fix anything, you don't have to solve it or resolve it or forgive anyone. You're just opening the drawer and reading the file kindly for the first time. That is the whole job. Let me tell you what to expect so it doesn't throw you. You might get all the way down on the first try, and that's completely fine. Some drawers open easily, others are rusted shut, and you'll get two or three Y's in and hit a wall, a blankness. And I don't know. When that happens, don't force it, don't grab a crowbar, just leave the question sitting there quietly, and go for a walk or wash up or sleep on it. More often than not, the answer arrives later when you're not looking straight at it, when the kettle's on or you're halfway down the road with the dog. The subconscious is shy, it hands things over sideways when it trusts you've stopped interrogating. So ask the why and then let it go and let the answer come to you in its own time. And if all you manage this week is one gentle why, one single draw, even just noticing that a reaction is older than the moment that triggered it, then you've done the work. Truly, this is not a race to the bottom of the iceberg. There's no medal for excavating your entire childhood by Sunday. One honest why. Ask kindly is worth more than a handful asked in a rush.

Worksheet and Community

Jody Brooks 30:55

And because I don't want you doing this in your head on the runaway bus, I've made you something to hold in your hand while you do it. It's called the Gentle Why. It's a simple worksheet that walks you through the five whys with prompts and space to write and gentle reminders to keep it curious and never cruel. It's completely free and it's waiting for you inside the messy midlife community. That's where all my free tools live, and it's where I'd love you to do this work because inside the community you won't be doing it alone. Now, if you use it, be gentle with yourself because opening old drawers can stir things up, and this is completely normal. Go slowly, there's no prize for reaching the bottom of the iceberg by Friday.

Wrap Up and Next Guest

Jody Brooks 31:46

So let me draw this together before I let you go. This whole season understanding has one question at its heart, why? And this week, the tools, is where we finally pick up the tool that answers it. The gentle why, not the interrogation, not the pointed finger, not the two in the morning why that only wants a confession, the child's why. Open, curious, endlessly kind. We imagine the subconscious as a great filing cabinet, we learn that each gentle why opens another drawer until your fingers find the original file, the one written long ago, often by a frightened child that's been quietly running the show ever since. I opened my own cabinet in front of you, we walked the pub story and all the way down to five whys, from a grown-up man taking over a meeting to a twelve-year-old boy deciding he'd never be humiliated again, and underneath even that a value, authenticity, waiting in its cage, and we found the thing that I most want you to take away today. What sits at the bottom of the iceberg is almost never a flaw. It's a value you are protecting in the only way a child knew how. You're not falling apart, you're waking up. And this week you're waking up with a tool in your hand. So on Wednesday, I've got a guest I can't wait for you to meet. His name's Dave Albrecht, and he's spent a decade as a hard-charging employment litigator in the American courts, right inside the most adversarial system there is, before he walked away to ask a beautiful, slightly mad question: what if lawyers could become healers of human conflict? What I love about Dave's story is that his truth didn't arrive in some dramatic crisis, it arrived quietly and slowly over time. Once he was competent enough to notice the bits of his life he'd never questioned. It's a proper week three conversation, all about the tools, and I think you're going to love him. And remember, you don't just have to listen to these conversations, you can watch them too on Apple, on YouTube, on Spotify, or over on the Messy Midlife homepage. However you like to take them, they're all there for

Final Encouragement

Jody Brooks 34:13

you. Now, if today stirred something in you, if you felt a drawer start to open, please don't sit with it on your own. Come and join us in the Messy Midlife community. It's warm, it's free from judgment, and it's where all the free tools live, including the Gentle Y worksheet made for this exact week. It's the place we do this work together, gently and at your own pace. The link is in the show notes below. So, until next time, stay curious, stay kind, and keep coming home to who you really are. Thank you for spending this time with me on Messy Midlife. If this episode resonated, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might need to hear it today. You can find the show notes below and more resources at authenticcoaching.me. And just a little gentle reminder, Messi Midlife is here for information, reflection and personal growth. It isn't a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, therapy, or any other professional healthcare support. If you have concerns about your physical or mental health, please reach out to a qualified professional. Until next time, take good care of yourself. And remember, midlife might be messy, but it's not a crisis, it's a calling to connect.