287. The Art of Reinvention: Crafting Your Best Life After 40 with Kris Kendall

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

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Today is another amazing conversation, so let's get started.

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Kris Kendall, such a pleasure to see you today. Thank you so much. I love your name, my dear niece. Her name is Kendall, and it's one of my favorite names. How are you today?

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I'm great. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's funny because my married last name is actually Addison, and I love the last names that can be first names. Fun. Kind of fun.

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All right, so for the audience, Kris is a coach, and she has a business and a podcast called fulfilled after 40. And she helps women over 40 connect with the dreams, their dreams, and help them create a plan to fulfill those dreams in the next season of their lives. And it's such great work because it's such a needed thing. So before we dive into that, because there's so much that we can talk about, what is your backstory and how did you get to where you are today? Yeah, so I have been born and raised in the Silicon Valley, California, and really grew up around a lot of tech.

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And immediately after high school and college, I went into the tech industry and started out as a technical writer and then into marketing. And I've just kind of built my career in this high tech, high impact environment of just like, go, go. And I have two boys that are now adults. They're 19 and 22. And so as I've gotten to this next stage in my life where it's not revolving around family, my career is now not at the point of trying to climb up, up.

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It's more like slow down and figure out what I really enjoy doing and what I want to spend my time doing. I realized a few years ago that this is the right time to make that change. Women have more money, more time, more, fewer responsibilities in their family in many cases. And so it's kind of the perfect storm of good things happening that we can focus on what we really are excited about and want to do. Oh, I love it.

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Yeah. I have one child who's 23, so I know exactly what you're going through. And I remember sending him off to college, and it was August of 2019, and being only, you know, only having one child, it's a whole different set of issues than having multiple kids. And unless you have one or the other, you don't know what you don't know. Right.

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I have no idea what it's like to have two or three. Right. And I remember when I said goodbye to him, leaving him in his dorm room, I was crying hysterically, like it was uncontrollable. Yeah. And then Covid hit.

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He came home for spring break. We had three days to drive back 9 hours to his college, empty his dorm room, and he was home for eight months. And when I took him back to college, it was like, see ya. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. Right.

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And that whole dichotomy of not having him around and then having around full time. Right. Yeah. Excuse me. And I'm getting over a cold, but it's like, you realize, as women and caretakers, while you miss your children, that sense of relief and not having to be there and be on all the time.

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What has your experience been like? Yeah, similar, except my oldest one graduated in Covid. He was that class of 2020 who had no graduation, no proms, no trips, none of the fun stuff. And he was not a distance learning kid. Like, there was no way he was going to be successful leaving for college.

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So at that point, he decided to just go to work, and that worked out really well. He went into the trades. He's a welder, and he's had a pretty good career just in the past four years. And he's bought a house and all that stuff, so he's doing great. But it definitely took some time for me to get to that point of wanting to check every single minute of where he's at and what he's doing and trying to control from afar, but keeping an eye on every single thing to, like, now, like you said, he spends most of the time at his girlfriend's house.

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And I'm like, okay, I'm happy to see him when he's here, but I'm also okay to see him tomorrow when he's gone. And two years ago, I probably would have said that it's never going to happen. I'm never going to stop worrying. I'm never going to stop thinking constantly where he's at, what he's doing. Is he okay?

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But I'm here. I'm, at that point, still always worrying. But definitely it took some time, but I have been able to separate that he'll be okay. He's making his own decisions, and I'm doing my stuff now. It's my time to focus on my stuff and not worry about every single thing they're doing.

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Yeah, I love that, and I feel like that, too. That is definitely my time. Although, as a parent, I think your kids are always there in the back of your mind, you never completely forget. Although I'm surprised that there's days when I do forget things. I'm like, oh, my gosh, how could I forget that?

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Because we do get caught up in our thing.

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Fulfilled after 40. What does that mean to you when you say fulfilled after 40? Yeah. So I have been lucky in that I've always had lots of projects and side businesses, and I'm a writer, so I've always had books and all this kind of stuff, so I've never been bored, and I've always had stuff to do. But I realized at this stage where the kids and my friend group, they all had kids graduating and leaving for college, and at that same stage, they started to be completely unsettled in what they were doing next.

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They didn't have their own hobies. They didn't have things that didn't revolve around kids. They didn't know what to do. They weren't happy with their career. I just started hearing from more and more of my friends and my peers that they were kind of stuck.

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Like, just all the things that they thought that they would do in their life, they haven't done yet. And now they don't really know where to start. They have ideas. Maybe they want to start a business. Maybe they want to pick up a hobby.

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Maybe they want to travel more, but they're just, like, afraid to do any of it. There's sort of this guilt of, like, but maybe I shouldn't. Should I save every penny just in case the kids need it for something else someday? So I realized that I want to help encourage women to put themselves first. That doesn't mean other people don't matter.

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It just means it's okay now for you to put your priorities out there to decide what you want to do and actually work toward meeting your own goals and your own dreams and the things that have always been in the back of your mind as a someday. Well, maybe today's the day. Yeah. I found that, too. And I still to this day.

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And now I'm in, let's see, fulfilled after 40. What do we call it after 50? I don't know. Fun after 50. I don't know.

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Fabulous after 50. Fabulous after 50. There you go. I like that. But I do find that a lot.

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And for me, I've always been the type of person where I've always had multiple jobs. I was told in my early 30s that I'd never have children. So I had resigned to the fact that I wasn't going to have children. So when, miraculously, I learned that I was pregnant with my son, and he was born one month before I turned 35. I still had a career.

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I actually owned a company. And even when I decided to stay home with him, that was when I became a certified life coach, because I've always been that type of person that needs to have multiple things, and yet I have so many friends who just delve completely, 100% into the children. And that's perfectly okay. Right. It just depends on, for me, I was never going to be that happy homemaker kind of thing where I was just content.

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And it's okay because we have to take care of ourselves. Right. And I've always been that way. Right. Take care of myself first.

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Many women and people in general think that that's selfish, but in fact, it's not. Because if you don't take care of yourself, how can you be there for everybody else? Right? So what are some things, it's a long segue into my question. What are some things?

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Because I'm kind of curious, too, because I've never faced this. What are some things that women, they have devoted 100% of their life to? Their children. Their children are now older teenagers, off to college, whatever the case may be. What can a woman do to figure out how to find fulfillment when they're completely like, what do I do now?

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Yeah. So one of the first things I always ask clients, or even just friends when we have these conversations is what did you used to like doing? Like before kids, before friends, before family? What were the things that you enjoyed? Did you like to paint?

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Did you like to read? Did you always imagine being a journalist? Did you imagine being on tv, an actress? What were the things that really excited you back when you were allowed to have your own dreams, when you were only thinking for yourself? And that usually is a good starting point to just sort of take stock of like, deep down, I love to paint.

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I always loved painting. I haven't done it in a long time. That is something that always brought me joy. Or I've always loved gardening and maybe I had a small garden with the kids or something, but that's something that's like a passion. So really just kind of thinking back on what are some of those things that really make you happy?

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And then how can you bring more of that into your life today? So is it something as simple as taking up that hobby again, starting a new hobby? Are there people that you haven't spent time with over the years, friends that you've sort of lost touch with? I mean, I think many of us have those friends that I still call them a best friend, even though I only see them once a year or maybe once every five years. Right.

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But they're still like the people that I would call to and want to spend time with if I had that time. Well, now you do have that time, right? Now is the time to call up and reconnect with the people that you love being with, that make you laugh, that you can just spend three days with and just never get tired of and just have so many stories and share things and reconnect and make an effort to start doing those things that bring you joy and happiness. I love that. I love that.

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So I wonder if there's anybody out there who's thinking, yeah, that sounds really great. I'm getting too old. It's too late to start something new. What do you say to those? Yeah, I do hear that a lot, unfortunately.

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And for most of us, we don't know how much time we're going to have. But unless you have some very serious reason to believe you're not going to have a lot of time, you probably do have a good, let's say even ten years ahead of you. Right? 1015, 2030, 40 years ahead of you. So in that time, what do you want to be doing?

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The more stagnant we are, the more sedentary we are, the quicker our body deteriorates, our health deteriorates, our mind deteriorates. I mean, we need to be challenging and exercising all of the muscles in our body, all of our emotions, all of the things that make us who we are. And so it's important to really think about what you want your life to look like in one year, two years, five years, ten years, if you are still around. Do you want to be healthy and strong and active or not? The alternative is really not what any of us want.

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And in order to ensure nothing will ensure, I guess, to set ourselves up for the best health and happiness. I think long term is by encouraging our own spirit to continue to grow and blossom, our mind to continue to learn new things, our body to continue to grow and just be active and be strong. Those are things that we can't get back once we lose our health and our mental capacity. In many cases, it's gone. I mean, it's really hard to get it back as we age.

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And so just doing everything we can to hold on to our mental health, our happiness, our joy, those things will really make the rest of our years, the next 20 or 30 years, so much better than if we stop, if we go stagnant now and just let it go. I've seen people who really, truly regret not doing more in these years where we're really so vibrant and healthy still, like they say, 50 is the new 30. That's true. We are just getting started at this stage. We have money, we have time.

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We have some freedom. For many of us, we need to use it. We need to take advantage of this time and really have our second coming over here. Oh, my gosh. I love it.

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And you made me think of something that I talk about all the time, which is think about your future self. What would your future self say to you when you didn't go after your dreams and you get to the end of your life? Will your future self look at you and say, good job, you did everything you set out to do? Or, jeez, what did they say? They're not going to punish your tombstone.

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I'm so proud of the fact that I worked 80 hours a week and I spent no time with my family and all that stuff. Right? So what does your future self want for you? Yeah. When I was probably 20, I did a workshop with the seven habits of highly successful people.

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I don't know if you remember that. It was a long time ago. In the guess is when it was popular. One of the exercises we did was to write our own eulogy. And even back then, when I was 20 years old, I wrote down, I want to have a family who loves me and is healthy.

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I want kids who enjoy their time growing up with me. I want my sister to say I was a good sister. I want my friends to say I was a good friend. I want my mom to say I was a good daughter, like all those things that I wanted to be. And over the years, I can say I was at different stages of that success.

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I wasn't always a great friend, I'm sure not always a great mom or always a great sister. But now I'm at the point where I feel like that is what's most important. I can focus on being a good wife, being a good mother, being the person I want people to remember if I were to die tomorrow, I hope that everyone has really good things to say about me, and that's how I'm trying to live my life. Yeah. Yes, I hear you.

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So before we started recording, you mentioned book publishing, and I was like, yeah, let's talk about the fulfilled after 40. And now I'm thinking, let's talk about that for a minute from a different perspective, because I come across so many people who say, oh, I would love to write a book. There's a book inside of me. I mean, I think almost every single person you talk to has a book inside of them. So from that perspective, and you can talk about your book publishing by all means, from that perspective.

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For anybody out there who's over 40 and has always had that dream of writing a book, what are some of the steps that they can take to take action and get it done? Yeah. Yes, I will agree that almost every person I meet has a book inside of them. Or surprisingly, they have written a book. Like, you would not believe how many people have written a book and it's on their computer.

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They don't know what to do with it. Now, I wrote it, I typed the end, and I saved the file, and that's it. Now what do you do? Right. So there is a thing called self publishing, and if you write a book and you pay to have it edited, pay to have it edited.

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You design a nice cover, or you get a cover from a company for less than maybe a few hundred dollars, you could have your book selling on Amazon tomorrow in a few days. I mean, it really is easy to self publish a book now. There are steps that go along with it if you haven't written it. People, the way I coach when I'm talking to authors is to just start. So pick any scene that's in your head.

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You have an idea of what this story is going to be. Whether it's your life story, whether it's poetry, whether it's a memoir, whether it's fantasy, fiction, romance, whatever it is, just pick any scene and start writing it out. It doesn't have to be perfect. Don't worry about the grammar. If you don't know how punctuation doesn't matter at that point.

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Just start and get that scene written and then think about the next one or a different one and just get it on paper. You can use Google Docs, Microsoft Word. You don't need any fancy tools, any means of typing it up and getting it on there is your first step. And then as you continue to just fill it in, that's the most important thing is getting the words down when you get to the point where you feel like it's finished. I have lots of resources.

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Surrenderedpress.com is my publishing company. I have lots of resources there that will help people find copy editors, developmental editors, whatever level of editing they feel like they need. You can start with some of the AI tools. We'll do a lot of that early, almost like really advanced spell check. That kind of cleans up the document at a basic level.

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But yeah, there's so many tools out there that are free and make it really easy for anybody to publish a book, whether it's a children's book. You want to write your grandkids story and make a book about their lives and their names and their dog and their cute little stories, or it's a grand, epic american novel. I definitely encourage everybody to just start writing it. Just get it on paper. Yeah, exactly.

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So one of the things that I find when I'm writing, and it's hard for me to just get it all down because I try to make it too perfect.

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How do you separate that and just get it out there without worrying about all of that? Because for me, that kind of trips me up many times. Yes. That is one of the hardest things is to not constantly self edit and fix it and worry about every word. Is that the right word?

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Am I being boring? Did I punctuate it right? Do I need quotations? Is this a comma, not a like, don't worry about any of that. So one of the ways that I kind of ignore all that is I use dictation.

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I open up my word processor. I use Google Docs a lot. There's a button called know. There's basically that little microphone just like if you're talking into your phone to send a text or something like that, and I just start talking out the scene and I don't worry about any of the, there's a couple of things I use new line to break a line, I'll use period and maybe a comma sometimes, but a lot. Do you say those words?

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I say those words usually, but you don't have to. Don't worry about every quotation, start quotation, blah blah blah, end quotation, question mark, all the stuff. You don't have to do any of that. You can literally just talk out the scene and it'll type it all up for you. And then you go in there and you clean it up and you kind of go back and forth.

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But dictation is one way to just like, blah, get it all out of your head and get at least a chapter at a time. When I'm commuting to work, I can do a whole chapter on a commute, whether I'm just going to visit a friend, I'm going to meet somebody for lunch. As soon as I get in the car, I start talking my chapter as I'm driving, and then I arrive. And then when I get home later, I'll go in and clean it up. And of course, it's not going to be perfect.

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It's definitely not going to be perfect. And sometimes you have to read the word, the sentence out loud, like hamburger. What? None of that makes any sense. But when you say it out loud, or if you say to somebody else, they're like, that sounds like you just said blah, blah, blah.

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It's like, oh, okay, that's probably what I meant. But it's an easy process to get moving. Wow. Yeah, it sounds like it. And I love the whole dictation thing.

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And what I also heard was keep it simple and don't overcomplicate it. Because I think as humans, sometimes we tend to, oh, I'm going to write the great american novel now. And you get caught up in that whole thing. Just do a download, a brain dump. Just get it out on paper.

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I love it. That's awesome. So, Kris, is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience that we haven't touched on so far? Well, I mean, one of the things that I work with clients a lot is starting a business. And so for so many women over 40, 50, they feel like, like you said earlier, their time has passed.

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It's too late for them to do something brand new, start a business. They are old dogs and new tricks and all that kind of stuff. But I really encourage people, if they have in their heart something that they've always wanted to do, maybe they'd like to make just a little bit of extra money. Maybe they have a craft that they'd like to sell on etsy. Maybe they want to write a book and start a writing career, whatever their business is.

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I would love to offer a free coaching session. I have a podcast in which I do free coaching. The sessions are coaching sessions, so those are really fun. If any of your guests would like to just talk through some ideas they have and ways that they might be able to get started on a business. I would love to invite them to be a guest on fulfilled after 40 the podcast.

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Oh my gosh, I love it. That sounds like a great opportunity and I love that format that you do. That's really awesome because I would imagine that that would really be useful for so many people. It's really fun. Yeah, it's really fun.

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Love it, love it, love it. Well, Kris, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate this. I love the work you're doing because as you and I both know, having gone through it, there's definitely challenges that we all face as we hit those early years of wisdom. Yes, that's right.

00:25:19
Thank you so much, Sandy. It's been great to chat with you today. All right, thank you. Thank you everyone.

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