304. Rebuilding Your Future Self: A 5-Step Framework for Midlife Transformation with Holly Bertone

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This is happiness solved with America's happiness coach, Sandee Sgarlata.

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Hello, and thank you for joining us today. I'm so happy you're here. Happiness solved is the place where we explore everything you need to become the best possible version of you. This is Sandee Sgarlata, and today I've got some exciting news for our dedicated listeners. We've just launched our exclusive members only portal.

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Holly, such a great pleasure to see you today. I love your background. You can do it. I believe in you. That was the first thing I saw when you popped.

00:01:21
When you popped up on my. On my monitor. How's everything going? So great to see you today. Yeah.

00:01:27
Oh, my goodness. Sandy, thank you so much for having me on the. On the show. I'm excited to be here and share all good things. Yes, yes.

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So, for the audience, Holly Bertone is a midlife comeback coach, which I love that because so many people get to their midlife and we end up starting over. I know I did. But what I was really interested in is that you spent 20 years in consulting and federal government service, primarily at the FBI, where you were chief of staff, but you also struggle with breast cancer, all sorts of things. I'll let you talk about your story. Really incredible.

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So let's dive in. How did you get to where you are today? What is that story that made you want to be this midlife comeback coach? Yeah. Oh, my goodness.

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And I always like starting the story before everything happened, because I think so many people can relate. I was the quintessential overachiever, and, you know, just really striving to have that career success and thinking that being successful in a career being. I know you're a competitive athlete, and, you know, as a competitive athlete, I was a mountain bike racer. And, you know, thinking that standing on a podium, getting a medal around my neck, being super successful in my career, and I thought that that was what life was supposed to be. And what happened was, on my 39th birthday, I got rock bottom, number one, and I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

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And what happened was I went through the traditional surgery, chemo, radiation, and I never got better. I just kept getting sicker and sicker, and then I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, which then turned into debilitating chronic fatigue. So it was rock bottom number one, rock bottom number two, and then rock bottom number three. And I was like, that's what us overachievers do. We don't hit rock bottom once.

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It's got to be multiple times. Got to do it, like, to the nth degree. Right, right. So what happened was that the fatigue was so bad, I was actually forced to resign. And I was working for the FBI.

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It was my dream job since high school. And all of a sudden, I find myself not being able to get out of bed, not being able to function. And it wasn't just that my health had hit rock bottom, but my value was so wrapped up in being successful. And, you know, and I think the stories that were told, I think, especially as women, the stories that were told when were growing up is that were typically either the pretty one, the smart one, or unfortunately, sometimes the good for nothing one. And a lot of times, we carry these stories and we carry this value with us.

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And all of that was gone. And so not only did I try to figure out how to heal myself from this autoimmune disease and debilitating chronic fatigue, but it was also trying to figure out, what does this new life look like? It's like, I can't work. And then when I got my health back, I'm like, well, I don't really want to go back there. So what does this look like?

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So that's when I took everything that I learned from holistic health and became a coach and really focusing on the issues that women in midlife face, not just from the health perspective, but really looking at, you know, we're in a place where we're burned out. We're stressed out. We've got the career, typically. We've got a spouse and older kids and maybe grandkids and then aging parents and community stuff and volunteer stuff, and we do all the things for everyone. We try to get healthier.

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It doesn't work. We're successful in everything else in our life, so there's really a disconnect there. So I really help women to really go through that gap, find out what is holding them back from getting healthy and how we can revisit this time in our life from a holistic perspective. We think getting healthy is just like eating rabbit food. It's not.

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It's this holistic perspective. And I like to say, and what I learned personally, going through my own journey, is, you know, so often we look at health from a perspective of, I need to lose weight. You know, there's this extra 1020, 30, 40 pounds, but it's not the weight that's around our midsection. It's the weight of the world on our shoulders. And that's the sweet spot.

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That's where I focus on. I love that because. And I knew you were exactly going to say that. And I like how you framed that because many times, and I know from personal experience, I was holding on to weight because of what was going on in my mind. Yeah.

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Because women do that. It's a protection. It is. And I know I've talked to multiple people about this one person in my life especially, and I'm like, you have to deal with the emotional triggers that are causing you to overeat or why you're holding onto that. And I recently just interviewed just for the listeners, I have another separate interview that'll probably be released before this one.

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And we talk about emotional eating in it. And it was a wide opening experience for me because it's not something that's really talked about, but I find at times, I'm like, now I'm, like, paying attention. I'm like, I never eat chocolate. I'm eating a piece of chocolate. Like, what's going on in my mind?

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Like, what's going on? Cause that's not something I normally do, and it's just the awareness of it. But I really love how you frame that because success is 80% mindset. It is. I'm going to be saying that that'll probably be the last breath I take.

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It's mindset. And I love how you've taken your experience and you're using it to inspire others. Because at the end of the day, in order to work through all of these things, you have to recognize that things happen for you, not to you. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, and I think, and I think so often we get.

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And you said the magic word, mindset. And I think so often we think that we have to do one or the other. Like, we have to go, we have to do. We do the thing, or we think it's all about the mindset and it's about both together. You know, it's.

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You need to have the mindset piece to. Of help you frame so that you can do the things. Because when you do the things without the mindset piece, you're coming right back around to where you are. I know for sure, and I know for me, I'm all about. I'm taking this course right now, which has turned out to be just absolutely incredible.

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It's like the goddess in you or something like that. And it's taught by margin. And her last name is escaping me at the moment. She, she worked for T Harve Eckerd for decades and she was actually the very first woman that was one of his trainers. And I really didn't know what the program was about, but there's a retreat in Mexico at the end and I was like, oh, I'm going to do it.

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Even if it's just for the retreat. This has turned out to be such a life, life changing course. And what I'm learning is that, you know, that radical self care is more about, or it's not just about like, because I get a good night's sleep, I eat well, you know, and it's, it's encompassing everything because what happens for me, and I'm saying this as a reminder to myself and to the audience that, you know, I get so caught up in everything that I'm doing because I get to do this for a living and I get to do so many incredible things. And I'm like, oh, I'll go to the gym tomorrow. And then next thing you know, it's been four days and I haven't taken care of that very important piece.

00:10:25
As an athlete, that's the most important thing we can do for ourselves, is to get your body moving. Right. Right. And it's a challenge, but it's a practice. My message here is it's a practice, right.

00:10:39
Can we talk about that cycle? Because I think it's, I'd love to. The statistics that go, 92% of New Year's resolutions fail, but it doesn't have be a new year's resolution. It can be just like you said, like I want to, you know, go out and do the thing. And I like to call it base camp, the base camp cycle.

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Because it's almost like we're at the, at the base of the mountain and we want to climb the mountain, whatever that is in our, in our health, whether it's eating healthy or moving or, you know, whatever that is. And we get so excited. And, you know, my whole thing is, is, you know, is all about the comeback story. And, you know, we think of it like this eighties movie montage and we're all like, I have the tiger and I'm going to do it. And we get so excited and the excitement lasts for a couple weeks, and then what happens is that it gets hard.

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It's not easy every day. And then we get discouraged and then not only that, something happens. Life, right? Life happens to us every single day. It could be a rainy day or extra meetings at work or, you know, an argument with our spouse or a change in the schedule.

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I mean, it doesn't have to be anything big or catastrophic. It can just be everyday life. And it throws us off. And we're like, yeah, I'm not going to do the thing today. And then it's, I'll do it Monday.

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And it's this whole perpetual cycle that again brings us, and then we're right back down to base camp again, and we're like, this never works. And then we beat ourselves up. We feel guilty. We're like, something's wrong. Something's wrong with me.

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Everyone else is doing the thing. Why can't I figure it out? Yeah, absolutely. And for me, I've gotten, not that I've gotten past it, but I've come to a place in my life where I'm pretty good about not beating myself up because I understand that everything I do is a choice. And so when I start to go down that rabbit hole and say, you didn't work out again today, I'm like, stop, stop.

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You made that choice. It's okay. Tomorrow's another day, you know, period. Like, what am I going to do? I'm not going to allow myself to beat myself up because I made that choice.

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And you have to live with those choices that we make. Everything in life is a choice. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I also found I played tennis on Sunday a couple days ago for 2 hours, and I hadn't played in 2 hours for 2 hours in a while, so I could barely walk the next day.

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Cause, like, I'm an athlete, so I, even though I'm 58 years young, I mean, I go out there and you'd never know my age because I'm racing around the tennis court. I don't walk to the baseline, I run to the baseline, I turn around, I'm running backwards, and, you know, like, I'm full in. And what happens is the next day I'm like, my body's screaming, like, ah, you know, so that was my air quote. Excuse was that, you know, and I did stretch. It's just, I still will find excuses not to do it.

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Oh, I'm into, I need to give my body a day's rest. And there is some truth to that, right? Because my body is, you know, pushing 60, right. So, you know, and it's just interesting. And I love being a student of the mind and figuring it out and analyzing it, you know, all of that.

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But, yeah. So tell me about what was it like being in the. Can you just give us a quick, like, inside FBI? Because I know that's just, like, it probably was no different than going to any other office. Right.

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But, like, so many people are like, oh, FBI. Like, what was that like, how was that experience for you? And what did you learn that you can bring into what you do today from it? Yeah. Oh, my goodness.

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It's. It was the best experience of my life. It really was, you know, working there and, you know, being able to serve my country. And it looks, or at least the offices that I was in looks nothing like tv, so sorry to disappoint. There's probably offices somewhere maybe that look like that.

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But I was. I was the one that they. So my background was in project management, so I was the one that they called in, especially after the 911 commission report and the WMD commission report, to help build new offices. So basically taking disparate offices and programs and then putting them together under one roof. So I want to say it was like five or six different offices.

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And then I ended up leading the last one that I. That I put together as. As chief of staff. And my forte was in, you know, in project management and putting these disparate pieces together, but then also looking at data analytics. So that's a big piece of what I take to what I do today is, is looking at those disparate pieces, because, you know, I think too often we focus on the one thing and we forget to just, you know, take.

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Take a few steps up and look at it from a bigger picture and say, okay, how do these pieces fit together and why? And one of my. When I was, I don't even know, ten years old, when I was a little girl, one of my favorite things to do was I would take three different puzzles, like 500,000 piece puzzles with this huge dining room table, and I dump them out, mix them up, and put them back together. So it's just how my crazy brain works. But that's why I love working with my clients, because it's digging into all these different disparate pieces of their lives and their belief systems and, you know, the.

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The. All the things that are sabotaging their success. And I like, okay, we need to remove this. We need to add this. And just looking at all the disparate pieces and then putting them back together, it is so much fun.

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So I do get to take what I did for the FBI. And, you know, even though it sounds completely different, you know, chief of staff and FBI and holistic health coach and comeback coach. And it's, you know, it sounds totally different, but it's really the same skill set. Oh, absolutely. And that's why I wanted you to talk about that because, you know, no matter, you know, no matter what you do, was it Steve Jobs said that, you know, you can.

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I always forget this quote. I need to, like, put it up in front of me because I say it all the time, but it's something to the effect of, you know, you can look back on your life and you connect the dots, and that's how you got to where you are today. So no matter what you have done in your past experiences, you know, there's always something that you can pull to it. And I love the analytical side of that because that's really important piece that a lot of. A lot of coaches may not have.

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Let's. Let's just say, yeah, yeah, that's really awesome. So, if there's somebody listening today saying, oh, my gosh, I so relate to Holly. What are some things that they can do to start working on their comeback story? Is there, like, is there steps that you can give, like, on a high level, like, basic things that they can kind of look at?

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Yeah, absolutely. And I have this. I'm all about the eighties montage movie, and Rocky was my favorite, even though it was in the seventies. So, you know, favorite best comeback story ever. Prove me wrong.

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So, I'll take you through a quick, the rocky rocky super quick five step process, and obviously, by, you know, with my clients, we go much, much deeper and, you know, much more in depth. But the r is the rear view mirror, and that's what I say. It's. It's, it's. We can't jump in the DeLorean and change what happened, but we can make peace with our past, and we can look at that from a place of forgiveness and forgiveness with others and forgiveness with ourselves and really make peace with our past.

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And that's where I like to start, and that's actually the hardest. But once the hardest is out of the way, the rest get a lot easier, and then the o is own your ship. That's with a p, like a boat, keeping it g rated. This one is. Yeah.

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This one is personal responsibility, and this one actually can potentially be just as hard. And I really like to look at it from that place of radical responsibility and not from a place of blame or shame. But, you know, I am responsible for my health, and I am responsible for the decisions that I make. And, you know, and that's we can even look at this, you know, as a. As an external, internal, you know, kind of validation.

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Like, like, I. I don't need to be validated externally. I don't need others to tell me my value. Like, I look within. And that is found through that level of personal responsibility.

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And then the c. And we, and we talked about a few minutes ago the kind of that, that doing this is when the doing comes in. So the first two steps, we go inward. First, we don't even think about the doing. We just go inward.

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So the third step is that doing is creating your future self. And that's the fun stuff. That's when we start to the manifesting and the visualization and the goal setting and the habit stacking and all of the fun stuff to really make this come alive and make it happen. And then the k is keep the vision, not the view. And again, we talked about life is always going to happen.

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There's always going to be setbacks along the journey. So that is really to not focus on those day to day setbacks, but to look at the big picture and to keep your focus on that end goal. And then the why is what I say is going back home to you. And all of these movies, you know, the characters, they're on their journey, but what they found is that it wasn't necessarily about the outcome. I mean, in the very first rocky movie, he actually lost the fight, but he won the journey.

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It was who he became. And it's realizing that we have it inside of ourselves the entire time we have this superpower. And you were talking about your inner God. It's like this amazing inside of us, and we're like, just finding it and bringing it out and finding that sparkle and finding that confidence and finding that value again. And that is really what the comeback story is, is coming back home to yourself.

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So that's the five step process that I like to take my clients through. I love every single bit of that. That was incredible. And I wrote down one word, two words that, that resonates so deeply with me. And that is your future self.

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Yes. Because the older we get, you start, you know, you don't want to dwell on it. But there's days when I think, okay, you know, I'll be 59 this year, and then next year I'm going to be 60. And, you know, you just don't know. Right.

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We don't know how long we have. And again, you know, you don't want to focus on that what I tend to focus on is that that future self, like everything I do, is because of my future self. Yes. However much longer I have here in this, in this body, you know, I want to be there for my future self because I don't want to get to the end of my life and, and not have, accomplish what I set out to accomplish. One of my biggest fears is untapped potential.

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Right. And that drives me every single day because we all have untapped potential, you know? So I love that. That's, that sounds incredible. Program.

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Oh, thank you. And Sandy, I think there's two pieces to that, too. Is number one, exactly what you said about that potential is am I, am I living out my purpose? Is it going to be 1020, 30, 40 years from now? And I'm looking back and saying, oh, I wish I could have, shoulda, woulda, right.

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And the other piece of that is just, are we physically able to do the things? My father's in a retirement home and he's super active and doing his thing. And I go there and some of the women, I mean, their bodies are literally broken, you know, and some of the women, they're running circles around me and I'm like, I want to be like that, you know? You know, I want to be, you know, in my eighties and nineties and running circles around people half my age and saying, oh, yeah, this is fun. Right.

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And to be able to age in that way that you have that purpose and you also have the physical ability to, to do those things as well. Oh, sure. But you're right. It starts with today. It starts with the decisions that we make today.

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20, 30, 40 years from now, it's going to be too late. It's the decisions that we make today that's going to create that future for us. Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And I take care of my mom, who's 83, and she doesn't move around very well because she's so sedentary.

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And I, you know, and you can't force it. You know, I'm at this point where I've become the mom, right? And she's, you know, she jokes and was like, thanks, mom.

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But I look at her and I'm like, that's not going to be me. You know, I'm going to be playing tennis when I'm 83 years old. You know, I'm going to be out there running around as best as I can because it's all about just keeping that body moving. And you're right, you know, today's the day, right? 100% yeah.

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So you've got so many amazing things going on. What's next for you? Oh, my goodness. What is next for me this year? My goal is a TED talk.

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So that's exciting. And either a book this year or next year. So fantastic. I should say another book. Yeah, another book.

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Right. Because you already have, you already are an Amazon number one Amazon bestselling author, and you're the host of the, your comeback story podcast, which is, sounds incredible. Incredible. What is the name of your book? So it's actually, it's called thriving in the workplace with autoimmune disease, which the pandemic kind of made irrelevant at this point because it was written quite a few years ago.

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So that's my goal this year, is to write something that's more along the lines of everything that I, that I teach and talk about. Well, I'm sure it's still relevant to many people. So that's great. So, Holly, is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience before we finish up? I know you said that you've got a free gift for everyone.

00:26:17
Yes. Oh, my goodness. This has been so great. And, you know, I love to connect with, with your audience. And, you know, if you've been listening to this, if you do feel like that you're, you know, you're burned out or you do have the weight of the world on your shoulders, and it's like you're thinking about health and diet, and you're like, oh, I can't do this.

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Then I really want to offer a different solution, and one that really, I think, connects with, especially with midlife women, because like I said, it isn't about the weight. It's about the weight of the world on your shoulders. And I've put together a three episode. It's a private podcast. It's three episodes to really help you to feel healthier and at home in your body, to have your comeback story so that you can wake up and have more energy and really perform at your highest level.

00:27:08
And so you can go to podcast Holly.com. It's super easy URL to remember, and you can sign up for free. And if you forget, you're like, what was that podcast Holly was talking about? And that's exactly it. It's podcastHolly.com.

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I love it. I will make sure that is in the show notes. So for those listening, just go to the show notes, click on the link, and you will have access to that private three episode podcast. Oh, I love it. Holly, thank you so much for coming.

00:27:42
On today. I love everything you're doing and thank you for being such a bright light in the world to help so many people write their podcast, their podcast story, their comeback story. Thanks. You can write a podcast story too. Yeah.

00:28:00
All right. Thank you everyone.

00:28:14
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