Waking Up Not Breaking

Jody Brooks 0:00

You're not falling apart, you're waking up. If you're somewhere between 35 and 65, life feels like it's cracking open. Well, the invitation in this season is to notice that that crack is not damaged. It is a small, honest opening between the story you've been telling and the story that's actually going on inside you. Nobody's being asked to demolish anything here, nobody's being asked to confess anything. All we're doing is learning how to tell a belief from a fact gently and without turning it into a case against ourselves. And I want you to hold on to one word before we start. The word is wool, because most of us are living up against one, and it often feels like we're facing a firing squad, and I'm going to take that wool and the firing squad off you before we finish here

Waiting Room Setup

Jody Brooks 0:51

today. Let's take a seat in the waiting room. It's not the doctors this time, it's the one where at the far end of the corridor is the courtroom of self-belief. This is Messy Midlife, it's not a crisis, it's a calling to connect. I'm your host Jodie Brooks. Welcome to season 4 Honesty. And thank you for connecting with me here in this waiting room today. You've not been called in yet, you're on a wooden bench, sat outside waiting, the light is a bit too flat and somebody has left a cardigan on the seat opposite, and there is a low murmur you cannot quite make out coming through a door. This is the waiting room where you get ready to take the oath. To tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But we're not taking the oath in there just yet. First we need to take the oath here, quietly to ourselves. Now there is a discomfort and a nervousness on that bench, but it belongs to the room. It does not belong

Protector Voice St Just

Jody Brooks 1:51

to you. Sitting on the bench beside you is a very quiet, very reasonable sounding voice. The voice of your protector, the self saboteur. I've been calling mine Saint Just all season. Saint Just sits on the bench beside you and says calmly and convincingly, in the tone that you would use to reassure a friend, you know what? You don't really need to go in there. You're not the kind of person who needs to take an oath. You're fine as you are. Look at everyone else in this corridor. They are the ones who need it, not you. And then they reach into their coat and they take out a folded piece of paper, soft at the creases from being opened so many times, and they smooth it flat on their knee and hand it to you. A small, comfortable list of things you already know about yourself. Long hand, biggest at the top, because they always lead with the biggest one. I'm not good with money, I've always been the one who holds it all together. I'm not the kind of person who starts again at this age, and you'll notice when you look at it properly that it is not written in their handwriting. It's written in yours. So here is the question I want to put to you, and it's the one to carry away from this episode. What am I protecting by not telling myself the truth? Last time we were in a different waiting room, the doctors and we sat with the smallest true sentence any of us can finish. The thing I already know and keep not looking at is now, I know some of you finished that sentence in the car park waiting to go in. Some of you finished it in bed at two AM staring at the ceiling, and a few of you did not finish it at all. You just noticed the shape of it and put it down, and I want to say clearly that that counts. Noticing was the whole ask there. There was no requirement to answer the question. You've asked the question, the answer will follow, it always does, but only when you're ready to

Beliefs Disguised Facts

Jody Brooks 3:53

hear it. I said something else last time that I want to pick up, because everything here rests on it. The cupboard holds the truth. It is the label on the front that lies, and you are the one who chooses the wording on the label. Busy, fine, later I am, and of course I am not. Now I want to show you the label nobody ever questions. It's the one that says fact busy can be argued with, later can be caught out eventually, because later never arrives, and somewhere in you the receipts are piling up. But nobody argues with fact. Fact is the one label that closes the conversation before it opens. You do not question a fact, you work around it and you build a life that accommodates it. You remodel the kitchen around it, not just move a few things so you cannot open the cupboard, and you tell other people about it in a flat voice and they nod because that is what a fact sounds like. They are reassuringly definite, even if we wished they were not. Because most of the sentences we hold about ourselves are not what we think they are. They walk around dressed as facts and they behave like facts and from the inside they feel like facts. But if you press them gently, a lot of them turn out to actually be beliefs. And a belief, unlike a fact, is something you can change and you can update. Now, the cleverest thing these beliefs disguised as facts do, is come dressed as your personality. I am just a warrior, I've always been the strong one in this family, I am not academic, I am a perfectionist, I am not good at math, I am insecure, I am not good under pressure, I'm not good with money, I have a slow metabolism or a quick one, I'm just big boned and I'm the one who holds it all together, and numerous others. Notice that none of those sound like rules, but that is in fact what they are beliefs dressed up as rules and disguised as facts. They sound like a description of a person which is precisely why nobody ever asks them for evidence, and they usually do have accompanying evidence because you've been living in a way that keeps producing it. If you spent thirty years being the one who holds it all together, you will have three decades of proof, and every bit of it will be true, and none of it will tell you whether the rule was ever accurate in the first place. It only tells you that you kept a belief that became a rule, and now it is disguised as a fact. That is what the blocks actually are. The block is not usually a wall, the block is usually a belief that has become a rule and is carrying a fact's identification. In season two I talked with Catherine Castani. We discussed how these blocks often double their disguise by being things we see as attributes the strong one, the resilient one, the sticker for detail, the driven one, and so many more. It's a great episode and well worth a

Hope Candle Corridor

Jody Brooks 7:17

listen. Now, once you can genuinely tell a belief from a fact, the whole thing shifts. Not because the belief has changed, it has not. Nothing has changed, but you have moved, you've stepped one inch back from something you were pressed right up against. Yes, that wall, and the firing squad have lowered their weapons. That inch is hope. And I'm going to say that word carefully because hope has been dressed up and marketed at us until it means almost nothing, slapped on a mug, a t-shirt, and a pack of affirmation cards. Here is the line, I quote it exactly, never paraphrase. Faith is the possibility of something better. Hope is the belief in faith being possible. The faith we started with was that the truth in the cupboard would not destroy you. Hope is the belief that that possibility is actually available to you. Hope is not a bright light, hope is a candle in a corridor, and that is enough. That is more than enough. A candle in a corridor is not much, but it is the difference between standing still in the dark and being able to take one step. Because you only ever need to see the next bit of floor. That is all hope has ever had to do. It does not have to show you the room at the end and it does not have to promise you what is in there. It only has to show you that the corridor continues and that you are not going to walk into a wall if you

Tool Origin Explained

Jody Brooks 8:52

move. Before I put a name to this season's tool, I want to tell you where it came from, because I'm not going to pass it off as something I invented on a walk. There is a book I read this year called Beyond Belief by Nia Ayao, and right at the start of it he lays out a distinction I'd been circling around for years without ever quite getting it into words or down on paper. The distinction is between faith, belief and fact. Three positions on a line, and the middle one is where all the useful work is. I read that opening and I sat there and I thought, oh, there it is. That is the piece I've been missing. So the framing comes from him and the credit goes there and it is a fantastic book and I recommend it. Particularly good alongside this season. Now The Olive, The Temple, The Man on the Scooter,

Faith Belief Fact Arc

Jody Brooks 9:46

Saint Justin, the whole small justice league, that is my own application. But the three positions on the line are his and I'm naming him plainly because that is the kind of season this is. Right, the tool, faith, belief, fact. Faith at one end and fact on the other, and belief in the messy middle sitting between them. And the reason it's in that order, and the reason I have taught it in that order since the start of this season, is because the middle one is the only one that moves. But there is a second reason for the order, and it's the one I like best because this tool is not a filing system, it's a journey, and it runs from left to right. It starts with faith. Faith is the possibility of something better, held without a shred of evidence. Because you've not got any yet. Then if you hold on to it and something happens, it becomes a belief. A belief has some evidence now, but the evidence is because of what has happened to me. And then if you keep going and the evidence keeps arriving, a belief can become a fact, something anybody could measure, with a ruler, a calendar, or a test. Faith that it is possible, belief that it is happening, fact that it happened. That is the whole arc of any change a person ever makes, in three words, and it only ever runs in that direction. That is why we do not start at the fact end and work backwards, which is what most of us try to do. We want the proof before we'll risk the possibility. Does not work that way round. Nobody has ever been handed the fact first. I sat in a corridor holding a belief dressed up as a fact, and the doctor took it off me. What I walked out with instead was a small, unreasonable faith that twelve weeks might do something to change the fact with no evidence at all. Where that went is a story for later in the season, but it went in that order and it could not have gone in any other. So let me take the three of them one at a time, and I'm going to do it in the order that makes them easiest to hold. The two ends first because the ends are simple and the middle because the middle is messy, and it's where you and I actually live.

Defining Facts Restful

Jody Brooks 12:16

Start with fact because fact is the shortest conversation in this episode. A fact is provable. It does not depend on who is looking at it. Water boils at a hundred degrees, the kettle does not care whether you believe it will. It boils anyway. I'm fifty three, nothing I feel about the number changes the number. You have type two diabetes. That is a fact I walked of the room with. And declining the insulin and asking for twelve weeks did not change the diagnosis by one decimal place. Facts are in a strange way the most restful of the three. There is nothing to negotiate with a fact. You do not have to convince it of anything, and it does not need you to believe in it, and that is one of the ways you know you are looking at one. You may not like it, it is still a fact. And here is the part nobody tells you. A real fact is the one thing on your list you're allowed to put down. You're not required to argue with it or improve it or feel anything in particular about it. You can simply sit it on the bench and stop carrying it in your

Understanding Faith Layers

Jody Brooks 13:27

hands. Now, the other end, faith. Faith is unprovable, and that is really the magic of it, because when there are no facts, no beliefs, we can always rely on faith. I'm not talking only about religious faith, although religious faith is the clearest example of it. Faith is something you hold without evidence, because holding it does something for you. It steadies you, it gives you somewhere to stand when the ground moves. It can be trusting a god or in a person or in a rule you were taught, or in a promise somebody made you a long time ago. It's often inherited and it's often held out of love. Faith is what carries you across the places facts and belief cannot reach. So I do not want anybody thinking honesty has turned up here to strip out your faiths. Faith is not a weakness in the system. Faith is doing its job. Which is why I have to say this next bit plainly, because it is the mistake people make with this tool more than any other. They run it on a faith, decide it fails the test, and start pulling. We do not talk about money in this family. You do not let people see you struggle. You always put the family first. Those are not beliefs you built. Those were given to you, and they are usually given out of love, and they are held so firmly that whole rules have grown on top of them. If you sit there with a crowbar trying to prove one of them is wrong, all you'll do is hurt yourself and pick a fight with somebody who's probably not even in the room anymore. A faith does not need to be demolished, a faith needs to be known about. Because once you can see that you're standing on one, you get to decide how much of your weight to put on it, and that is a completely different job from knocking it down. And here's the layering to watch because this is what makes them so hard to spot. Those three sentences did not arrive as facts, they arrived as faiths. Somebody handed you an unprovable thing, and you took it whole because you were small and they loved you. Then because a faith is unprovable and some part of you needed it settled, you started building, you built beliefs on top of it out of your own experience, and every one of them appeared to confirm it. Then the beliefs hardened into rules because a rule is easier to live by than a question, and by the time you meet them at fifty, they're not presenting as a faith or a belief or a rule. They're presenting as a fact, as how things are, as how you are. That is the reverse architecture. It runs backwards up the line, faith to belief to rule, and out the other end wearing a fax cloth, and it's doing it to make the unprovable thing feel provable. So when you say we don't talk about money in this family, it does not feel like something you were told, it feels like a law of physics. And I'm not asking you to touch the faith at the bottom of it. Leave that where it is, but every floor built above it is a belief, and every one of those is yours and every one of those can be looked at. And this is the good news, hiding in that. You can leave the faith exactly where it is, standing undisturbed and still change the rules you built on top of it. Nobody has to be betrayed for you to move. So fact at one end, provable and restful, faith at the other end, unprovable and low bearing. And now the messy middle belief.

Belief Messy Middle

Jody Brooks 17:25

Belief is the flexible one. Belief feels like fact from the inside and behaves like face the moment you question it. And that combination exactly why it goes unnoticed for thirty years. Beliefs are the rules we've built for ourselves out of experience and comparison and story. A thing happened, you drew a conclusion, and the conclusion quietly stopped being about the thing and started being about you. And belief is the only one of the three you can genuinely check and update. You cannot change a fact, you should not try to demolish a faith, but a belief you can sit down with and thank and ask a few gentle questions of exactly the way we learn to sit down with a protector. Now, I want you to notice what that means, because this is the whole reason I've been going on about the middle. If the only movable one is the middle, then every single thing in your life that is actually going to change is sitting in the middle. Not at the fact end where there is nothing to do, not at the faith end where there is nothing that should be done, in the messy middle, which is and I promise I did not design my own show around this precisely what a messy midlife is. It is not the part of your life where everything has gone wrong, it is the part where you finally get near the only material you were ever able to actually work with. So the job is not to become more truthful, the job is much smaller than that. The job is sorting out. Working out which of those sentences you're carrying are facts you can put down, which are faiths you can stand on, and which are beliefs you get to update. And you sort them with three questions. That is all this is. If the evidence for it is because I was told so, it's a faith. Leave it standing and look at the rules you built on it. If somebody else could measure it with a ruler, a calendar or a test, it's a fact. Put it down. If the evidence for it is because of what happened to me, it's a belief. And a belief is the messy middle, and the messy middle is the only place any of this can do anything at all. Which really is the joy of a messy midlife, because it's where every bit of the opportunity we've been so frightened of has been sitting the whole time. Those three questions will get you most of the way

Olives Rule Example

Jody Brooks 20:12

there. Let me give you the example I use with everybody because it is the smallest possible version of the thing. Well into my mid-twenties, I would have told you without hesitating in the flat certainty of somebody stating the weather and a fact that I did not like olives. They taste disgusting. If you'd put a bowl in front of me at dinner I would have moved them politely to the edge of my plate with a grimace on my face. If somebody had said try one, I would have said no, thank you. I do not like olives, they taste disgusting whilst impersonating someone sucking a lemon. In the tone of a man reporting a fact. And nobody argued with me. Disagreed maybe, but not argued because that is what facts sound like. I held that fact for over twenty years. Now, run the three tests on it. Could you measure my not liking olives with a ruler? No. With a test? No. Was the evidence something I'd been told? Not really. The evidence was what had happened to me. Specifically, one olive at some point in my childhood at somebody's house that I did not like. One olive, one data point, on that data point I'd built and maintained a lifelong rule about myself. That was functionally a piece of legislation. Do not like olives. Not I did not like that olive. Not olives have not been my thing so far. A full stop framed as biology. Olives are disgusting. And when I finally questioned it, in the least dramatic way possible, one evening at dinner in Greece, I put an olive in my mouth like an adult rather than a child who had first met one. I discovered something. I want to say carefully, so it does not sound like a cheap punchline. I liked it a lot. Now, not life changing, not earth moving, liked it a lot. But a like that dismantled a rule I'd held as a fact for two decades. And when the rule fell over, I did not feel exposed and I did not feel foolish. I felt about a millimeter freer. That is what updating a belief feels like from the inside. It's not a firework display, it is a millimeter of freedom. And what I want you to hear, sitting there in your kitchen or your car, walking or on your own bench, is that a great many of the things you are holding as facts about yourself are olives. Not all of them, some are factual facts, but a great many are olives that got upgraded to legislation on one bad afternoon a long time ago, and you've been eating your dinners around them

Inherited Money Belief

Jody Brooks 23:03

ever since. Now for the harder one, because the olive is a belief I built myself out of one small piece of my own experience. Some beliefs did not come from us, some were handed to us lovingly by people doing the best they could. And they arrived so early that they never had the chance to be checked. Those are the ones that run most of your life while looking the most like the shape of your character. The one I always come back to is money doesn't grow on trees. I got that from my mum. I heard it as a boy more times than I could count, in a voice with genuine worry in it, because she'd known times where money had felt very finite. I did not question it. Children do not question beliefs handed to them by the people they love. Children absorb them whole, and that one lived in me for a long time, and turned into a whole architecture around scarcity, around saving and around not asking for things, and around a very specific tightness in my chest whenever money was mentioned. Every time I spent money on something deemed unnecessary, expensive a luxury, I would hear it shouted at me from the past almost with an accompanying You know the rules. Run the tests. Can you measure money does not grow on trees with a ruler? No. A calendar? No. A test? No. Was the evidence because I was told so? Yes. And that first answer lands with a thud. Because the honest version of it is because I was told and they were right, and they loved me, and I do not want to skate past that thud. That is exactly the point where Scent just leans in and closes the door and says see, we cannot question this. Questioning this means questioning them, and they loved us. So here is the line I quote exactly every time this comes up because I do not trust myself to paraphrase it and get it right. Honesty about an inherited belief is not betrayal of the person who gave it to us. It's often the most loving thing we can do with what they handed us. We take the love forward, we leave the fear behind. My mum was not wrong. She was right. Money did feel finite for her. The rule she gave me was a kindness and she was trying to keep me safe, and the rule was also too small for the life I'm living now, and the tightness in my chest was not something I needed to keep. Two things can be partially right at the same time, and that is the one you can live inside for years. Her intention was safety, the rule was scarcity, both stand, and once I could separate the mother from the rule, I could keep the mother's love and update the rule. I could hold on to every ounce of the love in that inheritance and put the fear that came with it gently on the bench beside me and thank it and let go. Because you cannot walk a rule back to where it started until you have noticed it is

Why Midlife Cracks Open

Jody Brooks 26:28

a rule, and this is the bit I want to say about the age we are. Because it explains why all of this is surfacing now and not at thirty. You can hold a belief dressed as a fact for a long time, without any trouble at all, as long as nothing tests it. That is the arrangement. The label stays on, the cupboard door stays shut, and life goes along fine, because you've built a life that fits the label, and for most of us that arrangement holds beautifully for about twenty five years. Then somewhere between thirty five and sixty five, the evidence starts arriving whether or not you asked for it. That is the whole of it. Nobody sends for it, it just turns up. A body that used to absorb everything starts filling reports. A parent needs looking after or is not there to ask anymore. A job you organized your identity around gets reorganized without you. A child leaves and the room they were in turns out to have been holding up something structural. A friend your age gets ill, a number on a screen in a surgery. And none of that is a crisis. I know it feels like one. What is actually happening is that labels are being tested all at once by life. For the first time since you wrote them, and a label that has never been questioned in thirty years does not come off politely. It comes off in a corridor on a Tuesday in front of somebody with a folder. That is why midlife feels like everything is cracking open. It's not you cracking, it is the labels. They were written by somebody much younger than you, with much less information, doing their best, and they were never designed to be load bearing for this long. So you've got two options and only two. You can wait and let each label come off the way minded in a room on somebody else's timetable at whatever cost that room decides, or you can start taking them off yourself gently, in your own time, on a bench, starting with a small one about olives. That's the only choice this season is really offering. Not whether the labels come off, just who takes them off and how much it costs.

Temple Belief Revealed

Jody Brooks 29:01

And I have to tell you where I noticed mine because this is not something I read in a book and thought was clever. I lived inside it for the better part of forty years, and I only found out because a doctor said a sentence I could not put back in a box. I told you about that room, I walked out of it a type two diabetic, having declined the insulin and asked for twelve weeks. What I did not tell you is what Saint Just had been saying to me in the flat, closed voice for years, and saying it as fact. Your body is basically a temple. I ate well, genuinely well, no red meat, no processed food, under the units of alcohol, cigarette swap for a vape, which is a whole other conversation. I read the health advice on the wall at the surgery and I ticked almost every box before my name was called, and Saint Just sitting next to me said calmly Look, look at all those things you do not need to worry about. We are essentially a temple. We are here for a prescription to lift your mood, and then we are on our way. That is what they said in that flat, obvious weather reporting tone, and I believed it. Not as a hope, not as a faith, as a fact. Now, was it fact? Could you have measured it with a ruler? Yes, actually, and the ruler would have told you something my temple belief did not want to hear. With a calendar, yes, if you'd lined up the years and looked. With a test Yes. And one had been done, and the result was sitting in the folder on a desk about to be read out to me. All three of the fact tests were quietly failing in the background, and there I was in the corridor holding a belief that felt exactly unshakable, like the wall. The honest version is that the temple was the right shape and the wrong size. The diet was not the problem, the diet was extraordinary. I was simply eating enough food to feed the whole congregation of a very large actual temple. My body is basically a temple was a belief, and it had been walking around in a fax clothes for so long that I'd built an entire architecture of self image on top of it. That is what a belief does when it's allowed to. It hardens, it furnishes, it gets a nameplate and it starts running the room and diverting you away from the cupboard of truth. And here is what it cost me, which is the part I can only see from here. In all those years I never once asked the question the ruler was asking. I audited the food endlessly because the food gave me ticks. I never audited the amount, not once. And that was not stupidity, and it was not laziness, it was the belief protecting itself by choosing which evidence I was allowed to collect. That is the thing to watch for in your own sentence when you get to it. Not whether you have got evidence, you'll have plenty. Whether there is a question you have quietly never asked. We can so often be measuring the wrong result for the change we are truly seeking. And this is the part that took me a lot more than the twenty minutes in the waiting room to be able to say what Saint Just was protecting in the corridor on that day was not my body, it was my belief about my body. Because if the belief was true, I did not have to go into the room at all. That is the whole job. That is the only job they have ever had. They're not trying to keep you from the truth, they're trying to keep you out of the room in which your belief will not survive being looked at. And Saint Just was not being cruel. Saint Just was doing the job they were installed to do decades earlier by a boy who needed protecting. Saint Just is not the enemy. Nothing in this season is the enemy. We're not evicting anybody, we're taking one belief off the wall, one at a time and asking it gently to show us its receipt.

Try The Three Tests

Jody Brooks 33:35

Now let me sit down beside you properly because I've been talking for a while, and if I do not hand this over, it becomes a lecture, and this show is not a lecture. This show is a bench in a waiting room you've chosen to sit in. Take a breath, and if you're driving, please do not close your eyes. If you're walking the dog, keep looking where you're going. This is the smallest version of a thing. And nothing here costs you an action. That is worth saying plainly, because there is a part of you already braced for the bit where I ask you to change something, and I'm not going to. Nothing is being demolished, nothing is being confessed, nothing is being fixed. All of this is sorting three piles faith, belief, fact. You can do the whole thing in the car and nobody will ever know you did it. Think of one sentence you hold about yourself that sounds like a fact. Not the biggest one, not the most frightening one. Saint Just will try to hand you the biggest one because Saint Just knows the biggest one is the one that you cannot look at yet. So do not take it. Take a small one, a quiet one. Something on the level of I don't like olives. I'm not good at asking for help. I'm not really a creative person. I've always needed a lot of sleep. I'm not a morning person. I do not do well in groups. I'm not the kind of person who start things over at fifty three. Whatever the small quiet one is for you. And if what arrives is not a sentence but a feeling, that's fine too. Sit with the feeling until it gives you words, and if it does not give you any today, then it does not. And you have still done the work by asking. Hold it, and now run the three tests on it. Quietly. Nobody's watching, nobody's grading you, nobody's going to make you say the answer out loud. Because I was told so, and it's a faith. And faith is doing a job, and you do not have to demolish it. Ruler, calendar test, and it's a fact. Facts are restful and you can put it down. Because of what happened to me, and it's a belief. And a belief is the messy middle, and the messy middle is the only place any of this can do anything. And that really is the joy of messy midlife, because it's where the opportunity we fear has gone really exists. And notice while you're running them, whether you're trying to make the sentence come out as a fact when it is not one, that is saying just working. They want everything on your list to feel unarguable. What they are protecting you from right now is finding out that you've been sitting in the flexible middle and calling it the wall that feels like if you move the firing squad will press the trigger. If you want something to write on, I've built a small workbook exactly for this. It's called Faith Belief Fact and it walks you through the three tests on eight sentences of your own. It's in the Messy Midlife community at Messy Midlife Podcast.world forward slash join and it's free and so is everything else in there. Now you do not need it, you can do this in your head, but if you like a piece of paper, it's there, and I made it small enough to actually do. It's not a program, it's a one page kind of noticing.

Door Not Wall Closing

Jody Brooks 37:16

So let me pull it back into one shape. The block is almost always a belief carrying facts identification, often presenting itself as an attribute. The tool is faith, belief, fact. Faith is unprovable, fact is provable, and belief is the flexible middle where all the work happens, which is why it sits between them. Because I was told so because of what has happened to me. Ruler, calendar, test. A belief dressed up as your personality will always have evidence and the evidence will always be true, and it will still only prove that you kept a rule. The olive was a rule I built out of one afternoon. Money does not grow on trees was a rule I was given out of love. The temple was in the right shape, but the wrong size. And what Saint Just was guarding every time was never the thing itself. It was the belief about the thing, it was the label on the cupboard. You're not falling apart, you're waking up. And this is the part I want you to hold on to. With honesty comes real change, and out of that change comes purpose and joy, not on the outside but where it really matters on the inside. So let me take that word off you as I promised I would. The wall you've been pressed up against, something you could not move for fear of the firing squad. You were right about how it felt and wrong about what it was. It was never a wall, it was a door with a label on it, and the label said fact, and you are the one who can take the label off, and you do not have to open it. Not here, nobody is asking you to walk through anything. All I'm asking is that you stop calling it a wall, because a wall is something you live against. See it as a door to a cupboard, and a door is something you get to choose about. And those are two entirely different lives. You can wait until a room takes the label off for you in front of somebody with a folder, or you can sit down on the bench beside it in your own waiting room in your own time and ask it gently to show you its receipts. It was never locked, it only ever needed the right question, asked in the right tone of voice, the tone of voice you would use with a nervous

Connect Next Episode

Jody Brooks 39:45

friend. Now, before I leave you here in the waiting room, you're not on your own with this, remember, you can tell me how this landed, share what came up or ask a question about your own messy midlife. Click connect with Jodie at the top of the show notes. It opens a message straight from wherever you're listening, and then you can send me a text or a voice note straight from there. I read them all and I reply personally. You can find out more about my guests in every single episode of this show, like this season's episode with Karana Siddin, or the episode with Catherine Castani from season two messymidlifepodcast. And if you want the workbook and a room to sit quietly in with whatever came up here, the messy midlife community is at messymidlifepodcast.world forward slash join. It's free to join, and so are all the tools. Now most people read a great deal more than they post, and that is entirely fine. It is a room where the light is a bit softer. Next time our guest is Eric Robinson and this is a conversation I've been looking forward to bringing to you. Eric spent twenty four years in the FBI and twelve years in Baptist ministry, and he is the author of a book called Irreverent. Eric held a belief for most of his life that he had been taught was an objective fact by an institution that reinforced it. And his own words when a belief is regularly reinforced and presented as objective truth, it's not questioned. That sentence is the whole of the episode said by somebody who is not me. He also does something no other guest has ever done with me. He walks a gentle why on himself in the middle of the interview, unprompted, and it's quietly extraordinary. There is a content note on the episode because Eric's life has held genuinely hard weather, and we name it clearly at the top so you can choose. And after that we go to the fear that sits on the other side of a belief, once you've caught it, because catching it is the mechanism, and the fear is what the mechanism was protecting you from feeling all the time. Now remember you can watch all the guest episodes on Apple, on YouTube, on Spotify, or over on Messymidlife Podcast.world. However, 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.

Final Disclaimer Outro

Jody Brooks 42:21

If this episode resonated, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who might need to hear it today. And just a little gentle reminder, Messy 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.