Hellllo readers, hope you’re well! I’ve got a really exciting guest post for you today from the fantastic, Cheryl Garrison talking all about her fantastic book. Without further delay let’s get into it!
The Re-Invent Yourself book is a working guide for women over 50 who want to take their life from ordinary to extraordinary. Do you ever feel as if nothing is ever going to change for you, that this is it? Are you ready to change but don’t have a clue how to begin the process of making a change?
I wrote this book for you (and to be honest for me as well). One day I was a 20 Something, bold and confident career woman, wife, mother and entrepreneur and the next I was over 50 and struggling with my purpose in life. I had lost the passion. I had lost the hope. I had lost my vision. I was lost and I didn’t like that feeling. I had two choices. Keep dealing with this feeling of inadequacy and lack of desire or re-invent my life so that I could experience the success and vibrancy that comes with being passionate about living.
I wrote this book for every woman who wants to regain the passion and experience real change. I believe that the first steps in re-inventing yourself is to actually know who you are and what you want. I had forgotten my own identity, at least I thought I had. Who was I? I knew I was a wife of 30+ years, a mother of three adult children, and a grandmother of one incredible granddaughter. But was that enough. Unfortunately, not really. At one point in my life, I had aspirations to be tremendously successful in my own business. In fact, I had many years of successful entrepreneurship.
But in my early 50s I experienced a very painful business failure that left me in debt and jeopardized my family’s financial stability. This probably would not have been that big a deal if I had been younger and wasn’t heading toward those retirement years. But here I was, a husband approaching retirement age, having to liquidate years of savings and security to pay off the debt. All I can say is, on the other side of this experience was a 50Something-year-old woman who was almost too afraid to get out of bed let alone try something new again.
What I discovered was I wasn’t alone in this journey. I met many women who were experiencing some sort of life experience in their 50s and beyond and found themselves in the same place – afraid, depressed, and devoid of the passion that had carried them into their mid-life. Whether divorced, laid off, down-sized, empty nested, or obsolete in their career, the result was the same. Now what?
An off the cuff comment from my son led me to create the 50Something Lifestyle network and ultimately writing this book, Re-Invent Yourself! I began researching different techniques I could use to get out of the “funk” I was in. I started listening to motivational videos, reading and writing affirmations, studying techniques on how to rediscover my true identity and finally how to put together the steps needed to rewrite my story.
This book is a working guide for women who also want to rewrite their stories and begin dreaming again. After realizing that identity was the first thing lacking in women in this age category, I researched authorities in helping people find their true self and included exercises that will help women come away with the knowledge of who they are the personality traits they have that will support them as they create a re-invention plan for their life. After completing the exercises, I was able to resolve the conflict I had developed about who I was. I am now acutely aware of who Cheryl is and what Cheryl has to offer to the community at large.
The second obstacle that plagued me on this journey was What Do I Want? I had plenty of past experience both in my career and in my entrepreneurial endeavors to do almost anything I wanted. But for the first time in my life, I had no clue what to do. In talking to several women who took this journey with me, we came up with the phrase that we were stuck in “cement blocks”. I even wrote a blog about how it feels to be stuck and not know what you want to do or how to go about getting it done.
As I pondered this, I knew that the only way to renew the passion was to find something I wanted to do that excited me. I discovered the concept of “Life Possibilities” which is an exercise where you list all the areas in your life that you have a possibility to change (career, family, leisure, education, etc.) and then identify all the things that you would like to accomplish in those areas (time and money now being a factor). If taken seriously, this exercise can help women create the beginnings of what will eventually be their goals/lifestyle plan.
The book also helps women resolve the obstacles and beliefs that keep us from succeeding and gives full details on how to create goals. The exercises and worksheets included in the book will result in a re-invention plan that if followed can change the life of every woman who gets the book. By integrating personal experiences and exercises I wanted to give women over 50 the tools they need to create the life of passion and purpose that they are seeking.
If you are ready to reinvent yourself and begin designing your lifestyle plan you can get your digital download copy here http://www.50somethinglifestyle.com/books or follow Cheryl Garrison here!
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