Why Physical Activity is Important as We Age.
Recognizing Midlife Challenges: Ladies, you’re not alone!
Midlife women have shared with us the many challenges they face. Weight changes, changes in their physical body shape, loss of strength and balance, or changes in their metabolism.
They’ve shared feeling achy, having pain, and experiencing a lack of stamina or fatigue which interefered with achieving their exercise and fitness goals. Eating healthfully and getting adequate sleep were also on the list.
They also shared difficulties staying connected and engaged with friends (or the loss of friends) and family due to life transitions. The lack of connection was often described as feelings of loneliness.
Women also felt torn between managing grown children, aging parents, and not having enough personal time to care for themselves.
The good news is you are not alone! Read more to find out what you can do to flourish after 50!
Fashion After 50, A Fashion Week MN Event. Photo credit: G. Marie Images
“Right after your breakdown is your breakthrough.” – Trent Shelton
Do any of the following midlife challenges sound familiar? Weight changes, including changes in your physical body shape, loss of strength and balance, or changes in your metabolism.
We’ve been surveying women since 2021; those were the most common challenges they shared experience in midlife.
Women also told us about feeling achy, having pain, and experiencing a lack of stamina or fatigue. All of which interfered with achieving their exercise and fitness goals. Eating healthfully and getting adequate sleep were also on the list.
They also shared difficulties staying connected and engaged with friends (or the loss of friends) and family due to life transitions. The lack of connection was often described as feelings of loneliness.
Women also felt torn between managing grown children, aging parents, and not having enough personal time to care for themselves.
Financial stress and feeling prepared for retirement were also reported as challenges.
The list challenge list continued, although not as many women reported the following:
Feeling stressed
Getting healthcare professionals to listen
Being self-compassionate
Enjoying life without guilt
Feeling invisible
Experiencing ageism at work
Having anxiety
Dressing for age
Increasing disease risks
Finding purpose
How do you feel when you hear the challenges and struggles of other midlife women? Do they resonate with you?
Sharing this list is not to overwhelm you with midlife challenges you may or may not be experiencing but to help you see YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Midlife is a time of transition, and with transition and changes come challenges. Our bodies are changing. Our kids are leaving home. Our parents are aging. Our friendship groups are changing and evolving. We may be reassessing what we want during this phase of our careers. Many women ask themselves, ”What is my purpose, and what should my life look like for the next decades?”
Experiencing these challenges that come with midlife are common than most women believe them to be. And the difficulties faced during this time are natural too. It’s time to normalize, talk, and share the realities of midlife and lean on each other as we learn to position ourselves to live vibrantly. We can and should flourish through our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond!
The good news is that we can overcome the new challenges of midlife! With the right tips, tools, and techniques, you can tackle these challenges and live your best life!
Here’s what you can do to overcome your midlife challenges:
Write down the challenges you face in midlife. Be very specific. It is not an exercise about wallowing in our challenges but recognizing them to address them.
Keep your list visible. Add to the list throughout the week.
Sign-up to receive our bi-weekly email newsletter. In each email, we provide tips, tools, and techniques for overcoming challenges and creating lasting change in your life.
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where we provide additional tips and talk about living vibrantly together.
Review your list frequently. Develop a plan to tackle one or two of the most pressing challenges you are experiencing.
Take small steps every day to address your challenges.
Most importantly, you’re not alone. We’re on this journey together, and at Rumblings, we believe women can and should flourish after 50!
5 Lessons from A Fashion After 50 Event to Inspire Midlife Women
Over 200 midlife women attended a Rumblings’ Fashion Week MN event. It was an enormous undertaking and a departure from our previous events and outside our ‘self-defined expertise.
Planning the event and meeting new amazing women was fun and exciting. The immediate excitement of the event has ebbed. What hasn’t faded is the energy and new way of thinking and self-discovery from doing something different, a bit scary, but a lot of fun!
Aside from the new friends we met and all we learned about fashion, business, and ourselves, several takeaways will inspire us as we plan future events. We hope it will inspire you to continue to learn, connect, and empower other women so that we can all flourish in midlife.
The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides...the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years.
~Audrey Hepburn
Over 200 midlife women attended a Rumblings’ Fashion Week MN event. It was an enormous undertaking and a departure from our previous events and outside our self-defined expertise.
It is an understatement to say that we felt out of our comfort zones. Creating an event was familiar; however, the idea of creating a fashion event was very new. We’re not fashionistas and we have the same questions about style and dressing during midlife as many other women.
We, too, have fashion biases like believing we’re too old to wear something or our clothing choices must hide certain parts of our body we’re uncomfortable with. Yet, we believe how we dress embodies how we feel about ourselves, and living inside out is a part of living authentically.
Our mission at Rumblings is to create a community of women who come together to learn, connect, and inspire one another to flourish after 50. A Fashion After 50 event was a perfect way to create a new opportunity to personally step outside of our comfort zone and bring midlife women together.
Planning the event and meeting amazing new women was fun and exciting. The immediate excitement of the event has ebbed. What hasn’t faded is the energy and new way of thinking and self-discovery from doing something different, a bit scary, but a lot of fun!
Aside from the new friends we met and all we learned about fashion, business, and ourselves, several takeaways will inspire us as we plan future events. We hope it will inspire you to continue to learn, connect, and empower other women so that we can all flourish in midlife.
Women empower women when they come together and share their personal stories—especially midlife women. Over twenty-one, female entrepreneurs and small business owners came together to create this event. Most have reimagined their lives during midlife, taken a giant leap to jump into something new, and created the life they want.
By far, the most inspiring part of the evening was hearing stories of midlife women reinventing themselves, starting new businesses, and creating a life where they flourish. It's not too late to chase your passions. We LOVED hearing their stories and all of them inspired us.
What is your story that you can share with others? Who do you know who has reinvented themselves in midlife by changing careers, starting a business, or taking up a new hobby? Let’s start sharing our stories. Empowered women, empower women.
Community is important. Moving into midlife can create feelings of isolation and loneliness for many women. Coming together in a community with other midlife women can help by knowing other women experience similar challenges, stresses, and transitions.
Whether we’re rethinking our careers or our personal lives, midlife women especially need deeper connections with other women in the same life stage. Midlife transitions are messy. There is something deeply personal about acknowledging our collective experiences with one another.
That’s why we created Rumblings-a community of women who come together to learn, connect, and inspire one another. You can get involved by signing up for our email, attending events, or simply engaging on social media. Together we can support and encourage one another to thrive after 50.
Together we create energy. When midlife women come together, we can energize a room. The past two years have been difficult. We’ve been managing careers, midlife transitions, balancing caring for family, neighbors, and older parents while navigating a pandemic and constant uncertainty. At the event, we witnessed the collective energy of women coming together, and it was magical!
We can help one another think about how we want to shape the remainder of the second part of our lives. We are in unchartered territory in more significant numbers than women that came before us. Our mothers collectively may not have had the same options, life experiences, or financial independence as a norm that we have available to us. Sharing inspires. And, inspired women create energy. We must continually lift up one another to navigate midlife together, reimage what it means to thrive in our primetime, and have tons of fun while doing it!
Find your women. Share, support, and let go. Enjoy this fantastic time in your life.
Attendees engage with a few of the pop-up market vendors. All female-owned small businesses.
Support midlife women-owned businesses. There will be 1.1 billion postmenopausal women by 2025. Yet, few companies market or create things specifically for our demographic beyond societal norms created by others to pressure us to be ageless, beautiful, or thin. We’ve all felt at one time or another to be less relevant because of aging. After years of working, many of us are either financially independent or have significant buying power. There is no reason we have to accept marketing and advertising that caters to younger demographics or males while diminishing our value by either ignoring us entirely or trying to limit our worth based on our appearance or age. We deserve better, and together we can advocate for it.
There are amazing, diverse, and phenomenal midlife women running businesses. Seek them out. Support them by purchasing from them. Let’s create a social movement for change and show the world what it means to be a midlife woman.
Fashion is from the inside out. Fashion is a reflection of who we are from the inside out. It should make us feel good about ourselves, which means wearing what makes us happy and confident.
Download our phenomenal Fashion After 50 Tips curated by the expert panelists at our event. Learn how to edit your closet, build a capsule wardrobe, select swimwear, and more!
Missed the event? You can watch the entire evening, experience the energy and excitement, hear expert advice from our panelists, and see looks from local boutiques on real-life (non-professional models) midlife women here.
Sign-up today to get more information on how to Flourish After 50!
Together We Rumble!
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