You’ve built a life. Is it honestly the one you want?
By the time we reach our fifties and beyond, we’ve collected a lot. Experiences, successes, mistakes, expectations. Ways of doing things that made perfect sense once and somehow became permanent.
Then one day you look in the mirror and think,
How the fuck did I get to this age already?
This feeling can be truly visceral. Getting older isn’t the problem. It’s that later suddenly doesn’t feel like an unlimited resource.
That’s when the questions start. Is this it? Why do I keep talking myself out of things I know I want? And eventually, the most painful one of all.
Is there something wrong with me?
01
I’m Marianne.
And there is nothing wrong with you.
I help women over 50 get brutally and lovingly honest about why they’re not living the life they say they want to live, and do something about it.
Honest, because nothing changes until we tell ourselves the truth. Loving, because you were never the problem.
I’m 61, a coach, writer and entrepreneur. Before coaching, I ran restaurants and a delicatessen, worked as a professional photographer and renovated houses. I’ve had more careers than is entirely sensible and have always been better at ignoring the instruction manual than following it.
That applies to my personal life too. I’ve never been married and I don’t have children. I assumed I’d do both. I just didn’t. It’s the lens I write through, especially on the scripts women are handed about marriage and motherhood. You don’t need to share my story to work with me.
One of the biggest parts of my life was caring for my beloved Mum. Losing her changed me profoundly. Grief strips away the unimportant stuff and makes you look hard at how you’re spending the life you still have.
These days I live in Devon with my two dogs and an increasingly low tolerance for doing things because I think I should.
I’m not interested in pretending my life fits into a neat little box.
I am very interested in what happens when we stop arguing with the life we’ve actually lived, get honest about what we want now, and choose from here.
02
Stoicism with Sass
At the heart of my work is one deceptively simple idea. Accepting reality is how we move forward and stop wasting time on what we can’t control.
Not approve of it. Not like it. Just accept it, because it is your reality.
That’s the Stoicism. The Sass is there because I have no intention of discussing it in a toga.
My work comes back to three things.
Accept what is.
Thinking you should be further ahead by now, that something shouldn’t have happened, or that your life should have turned out differently, is arguing with reality.
And reality will win every bloody time.
Acceptance means starting from what is actually true, instead of exhausting yourself wishing it weren’t.
Own who you are.
Before deciding what needs to change, take a proper look at the woman who got you here. (That’s you, by the way!)
What have you built, survived, learned, created and loved? What do you know now that you couldn’t possibly have known at 30?
There is so much more to you than the things you haven’t done yet. Own all of her. Then decide what she wants now.
Live while you’re here.
There is one ultimate deadline. You’re going to die.
Cheery, I know! But it’s the only guaranteed thing in your life, and it’s the spine of an exercise I do with my clients called The Eulogy Effect.
Client love
Before I started my sessions with Marianne, I was feeling stuck and unable to move forward due to being faced with many uncontrollable events in quick succession. After the first session, Marianne helped me to realise that no matter what life throws at me, the one thing I can control is how I respond and react to them. I’m finally able to see things more clearly and let go of the things I’m unable to control and enjoy the present moment for what it is.”
Becky
03
The Eulogy Effect
We imagine your funeral. Yes, we do.
And we get to visualise everything you’d love people to say about you. No modesty required.
Your loved ones are there. Friends, colleagues, people whose lives you changed. Hell, if you want a world-famous editor talking about the book you finally wrote, she can be there too. And they’re all talking about what you created, how you loved and the chances you took.
It’s one of the most optimistic and badass conversations you can imagine, because in that space, you’ve already done it.
Then we work backwards. What needs to happen between here and there? What do you want to stop postponing? What matters enough to do something about now?
The Eulogy Effect turns the fact that life ends into the best reason I know to make the time you have left more precious, more intentional and much more your own.
So stop waiting.
Not quite ready to plan your funeral? Fair enough.
04
The work behind the work
I’ve been coaching women for more than 15 years. I’m certified by The Life Coach School and Heroic Coach, and somewhere along the way I also collected two honours degrees.
And I know what it’s like to be highly capable and still talk myself out of things. To know exactly what I should be doing and still not do it. To get spectacularly tangled in my own thinking and need someone else to help me see what I can’t.
So there’s a lot of training behind the way I coach, and a considerable amount of real life too. Some fairly terrible humour, a bit of swearing, and a huge amount of love and empathy for the woman sitting opposite me.
Sometimes we need challenging. Sometimes we need reminding how bloody brilliant we already are. Usually, it’s a bit of both.
Client love
Marianne has a very good way of explaining what she is teaching, always succinct, always kind and always encouraging. Consequently, I am much more self aware and much more present in my daily life, which profoundly affects how I deal with these challenges. Whilst I still stumble now and again, I am more able to pick myself up and take the next step forwards and I feel more at peace.”
M.B.
Start where you are
On paper, there might be nothing wrong. You have a good life. You’re grateful for it. You’d feel a bit daft complaining.
And still, you know you’re not living the life you keep saying you want.
It’s incredibly difficult to articulate exactly what’s wrong, especially when so much of your life is good.
But you’ve reached the point where you’re no longer willing to keep ignoring it.
You don’t need to know what you want yet. You don’t need a five-year plan or the nerve to blow the whole thing up. You just need to admit that voice is there.
That’s enough to begin.
OWN THIS is a free workbook to help you take an honest look at the life you have now, give yourself some proper credit for everything you’ve already built, and work out what you want from here.