On Turning 40 and My 10 Year Reflection
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Episode Summary
As I'm recording this episode on September 10th, yesterday was my birthday and I turned 40, which feels momentous. So for this episode, I was thinking, because it was on my brain a lot yesterday and today even, that I might share a little bit about where I was 10 years ago in case that helps you and also just to give you a little bit more of an idea of my story and where I've come from and what's happened in my life and what I've kind of created over that time period. I’m blown away when I look at where I was a decade ago and compare that to what my life looks like today. At the core of a lot of the changes I’ve made in my own life, is the understanding that happiness comes within, which we touched on last week, so listen to that episode! But I hope that today’s episode will help demonstrate the significance of making changes and letting go of things that don't align with who we are, the concept of living our own lives instead of living someone else's, and the importance of measuring our progress and growth.
Topics:
What Cecelia’s life looked like 10 years ago as a geologist in Doha, Qatar and how journaling for the first time on her 30th birthday changed everything for her
How Cecelia felt so empty even though her life looked good on paper, even though she had checked off all the boxes she was supposed to
Realizing that you have to let go of things, you have to make changes, to create something new in your life
Cecelia having the courage to resign from her job, get a divorce, and in turn having the most transformational year of her life
Measuring yourself by how far you’ve come rather than how far you have to go
Episode Resources:
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Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.442)
Hey and welcome to Calmer Conversations, episode 14. I'm Cecilia, your host. Let's get started. Yesterday, as I'm recording this, yesterday, September 10th, was my birthday. And it was my 40th birthday, which feels a little momentous. And so I was thinking, because it was on my brain a lot yesterday and today even, that I might share a little bit about where I was 10 years ago.
And in case that helps you and also just to give you a little bit more of an idea of my story and where I've come from and what's happened in my life and what I've kind of created over that time period. I think in this era of social media and even just when we can see snippets of people's lives, it's really easy to see where they are now.
and to not understand where they started. Sometimes because people don't share those stories or because we just see people as we see them when we meet them, it's a very natural thing. I have this really interesting story about living in Denmark and when I moved there, I couldn't speak Danish. And so everyone I met, Danes and non -Danes alike, knew that I couldn't speak Danish. But over the course of living there, because I lived there for six and a half years,
I learned how to speak Danish, and so by the time I left, I could speak Danish. But the people, not all of them, but many of the people that I met when I first moved there, when I couldn't speak Danish, they thought, even when I could speak Danish, that I couldn't speak it. And that's because we kind of form opinions about people based on where they are right now, and sometimes it's hard to see a bigger picture of them. I want to be fully transparent in my own journey and where I've come from.
because I don't have a perfect upbringing and I haven't lived a totally charmed life and I haven't always been who I am today or been in the life that I have today and I think it's really important to share that aspect of it too. So yesterday at the end of my birthday I was watching my kids run up and down the driveway and the moon was out and the sun was starting to go down and I really felt this sense of gratitude and happiness that I don't think of. I mean.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:09.854)
Maybe I felt it before in life, really in an overwhelming way, just could see my life and see what I had created. And it occurred to me where I was a decade ago, which in some ways a decade is a long time and a short time all at once. I was just kind of blown away by where I was today and what my life looks like today and really how lucky and blessed I feel on a day -to -day basis.
So I wanted to give you a sense of where I was 10 years ago. So 10 years ago, specifically on my birthday, I remember this because it was my 30th birthday, I was sitting in Doha in Qatar and I was, I took myself out to dinner at the Four Seasons and I was there alone because I was there for some core work and things didn't work out with some other people that I was trying to meet up with. And this was when I was a geologist, just for reference.
and I actually took a notebook with me. This was like a field notebook that I'd use. So if you are familiar with geology or doing field work, it was one of those write in the rain books, because it was just what I had with me. And I was not an avid journaler at the time. But it occurred to me when I went to dinner that I had just, I don't know, it felt like a lot was happening in my life and I wanted to record it. And so as I sat there having dinner, which was a very lovely dinner in a very lovely location,
I journaled for the first time. And I say that specifically because I think sometimes when we're in the personal development world or in the coaching world, people can look to maybe somebody like me and they can think like, they like maybe have just had this all together for a long time. Like they've had all these habits throughout their life. And certainly some people start journaling when they're much younger. But I will say for me personally, up until that point, I really had a fear of doing journaling wrong. We've had a lot of fear of doing many things wrong.
And so I can do it. So I would buy journals and kind of this intention to start journaling or think that maybe it's something I should do, but I hadn't done it until that night. And at that point, because I was not, I didn't live in Doha at the time, I had this right in the Reino book. And that's what I took with me. And that's what I started writing in. So maybe if I'm doing some takeaways from this episode, one of the takeaways is you can start exactly where you are with exactly what you have.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:31.074)
You don't need specific things. You don't need a beautiful notebook. You don't need a fantastic pen to start journaling. And there is no right way to journal. And my journaling, I looked back on that one semi recently and recognize it was really almost more of like a pleading or a prayer to the universe, to God, to whoever, that I wanted something different from life. And at this point in my life where I was, I was 30, just turned 30, I worked for an oil company.
I was an expat in Copenhagen. was married, I was in a relationship. Things, for the most part, looked really good on paper. I was living this life, I made good money, I had good vacation. I had a beautiful apartment that was paid for because I was an expat. I was with this person who was a lovely human being. We had kind of fun hobbies.
So on paper everything was going pretty well and I will say working as a geologist was really interesting. I think the company that I worked for did a really great job hiring and every team that I worked on had such amazing people and we worked on really interesting projects. So again on paper my life looked great. I checked so many boxes.
And I was somebody who learned pretty early in the schooling process how to work the system and how to check the right boxes and how to behave in a certain way so that I would get accolades. And so how I could kind of quote unquote win in that regard. And I carried that way of being from school into life and really believed that that's where happiness came from. Like if I had checked enough of these boxes then I would be happy and satisfied in life.
And I just kind of arrive at this point of being an adult where things were quote unquote good, right? So it was like, by this point I expected to be there because I'd kind of done the things I was supposed to do. And again, on paper, I had done the things I was supposed to do, right? I got a degree from an Ivy league university. I worked for this great company. I had this amazing assignment. I was living in Denmark. I got to travel the world both for my own interest, but also because of work.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:46.154)
I got to work on really interesting projects, I worked with really amazing people, I had this relationship that was a pretty good relationship. So I had all these things and I felt so empty. I felt so... I mean maybe even empty isn't the right word. I felt like I was living somebody else's life. I felt like this wasn't my life, this wasn't something I am...
I was supposed to be doing. And I know that that's, that's, mean, we can take that down whatever path you want to do, you want to go down and are there something we're supposed to be doing, et cetera, et But by this point, I had kind of realized that I wasn't, that this wasn't my life, that this wasn't what I wanted to be doing. And a couple of years earlier, I had started practicing yoga regularly. I'd kind of dabbled in yoga since the time I graduated from college and then had started practicing more regularly.
Maybe when I was about 27. Yeah, sometime around then. Yeah, 26, 27. And so I was aware that there maybe was something else or maybe there was this other path to happiness. But until that night and until that time period, wasn't quite ready to... I wasn't quite ready to give up what I had.
And it was again, because I had this story of that whatever I had was the thing that was gonna make me happy. And I've done so much work to get these things to get to this place in life that I really didn't wanna make changes. And so maybe that's a next takeaway in that sometimes we have to let go of things to get something else. And that might sound like a nice platitude. All these kind of will probably. But you...
me as a person, we as people oftentimes have to let go of something before we get something else. And we have to be to the point of willing to let go of something for change to actually start happening. So I had been going kind of through the motions of starting to make changes or think about changes, but really until that point, I hadn't decided that I was going to make changes. And I distinctly remember at this dinner as I was journaling or kind of praying or pleading with the universe that
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:07.106)
that I wanted a different life. Like I needed something different. I wanted to be led somewhere else. I needed to have the courage. I think I asked to have the courage to do something different, to change, to make major changes in my life, to walk away from things that didn't feel like mine. And so that's, kind of in that moment decided that I wanted to make a change. And so I guess related to that takeaway and maybe this.
wait this is like a sub take away from that one, deciding you want to make a change and really saying I'm done with where I am, I think from what I've seen with myself and with a lot of clients is actually crucial for making a change. Right, oftentimes that's when people come to me, they've gotten to a place in their life and they say like, can't, I don't want to keep living this way. I don't want to keep feeling this way. I think that something else is possible for me and I'm no longer okay with this way of being.
That's not to say that people haven't tried things before they come to me or they haven't been working to change things. I I had been working to change things, but up until that point, it had been kind of one toe in, one toe out. You know, I wasn't kind of all the way in on making the changes. And so at that point, 10 years ago, I decided I am making changes. And I remember asking that my life look radically different in a year.
You know, I really wanted to make big changes over the next 12 months. And I think I was also under no illusion that I was going to be able to upend my life in the next week or so. So I had taken that pressure off of myself, and at least I kind of worked through that amount of perfectionism. But I did think, and I was open to making shifts and changes over the next year. And so what happened was, and kind of the path from there, was that I did start to make.
lots of changes. So the marriage and the relationship that I was in, we ended that. And not because this person was not a nice person or we didn't have actually a really interesting relationship, but that it didn't really feel like the relationship for me as I was growing and moving forward in life. And so that was the impetus for that change. I also ended up almost a year later actually resigning from my position.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:29.362)
By that point I planned to go to India and kind of set things up for that, planned some other travel. I didn't know what I was going to do. I didn't know what my life was going to look like after this trip to India, but I did know that I wasn't going to go back to what I had. So that I wasn't going to go back to being a geologist. I wasn't going to go back to that relationship. I wasn't going to go back down that path.
that things had fundamentally changed. And so it took that year, so we're gonna go through kind of a quick timeline here, but so that year was full of a of changes and also really like, now I would call it coaching myself through having the courage to make a big change, like resigning from a position. And again, resigning from a position that on paper looked really good and sounded really good.
didn't really totally align with my values, but at least with the education that I had, it was a good job. So that year, I did a lot more journaling, a lot more pleading, a lot more, please help me change, change me into somebody else, help me change my life. I did a lot of that.
And at the end of the day, what I got out of it was I got this year, the next year that ended up being really kind of radically transformative in many of the things that I did and the identities that I shed and who I became. And so I did some traveling for a year and was in India for eight months and then ended up back in Copenhagen, but teaching yoga.
And during that period, actually lived in a closet in a yoga studio for a number of months, which was very interesting and fun and really had this radically different experience in Copenhagen because suddenly I wasn't working for this big company that's very respected. I was working as a yoga teacher or yoga apprentice. I was living in this closet and I really had to grapple with all the identities that I had set up for myself.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:46.762)
and who I was and what I was doing. And so at this point, was... My life was definitely not as good on paper as it was the year before or two years before. But it felt so much more satisfying and I felt so much more like me. And I'm saying this because I think in at least a couple episodes, we've already talked about circumstances and outside circumstances not really determining who you are.
but also recognizing that sometimes we put ourselves in situations and end up living lives and end up making decisions that don't actually resonate with who we are. And it's important, I think, to courageously live your own life instead of somebody else's. I mean, this is in the Bhagavad Gita. This premise of living your own life imperfectly is a more worthy path than living somebody else's life perfectly.
And so many of us, think, because of society and maybe pressure from parents or whatever else around us, we end up living other people's lives and we live them maybe very perfectly. And we think that happiness is going to become because of living that perfectly. But really, that's not where happiness comes from. And so one could say I was happier because I different circumstances, but I would like to think and would maybe argue that I felt happier because I had actually.
worked through my own thoughts about who I was and where I thought happiness came from, which was before I thought happiness came from the job that I had, from the salary that I made, from the vacations that I took, and now a lot of that had been taken, had shifted or changed in pretty major ways. And happiness was this more internal game. It was coming from within me. And so I think those couple years right around my 30th birthday,
were lot of groundwork that I laid for creating the life that I have now. And it was a lot of this working with my brain, working with my nervous system, working with my identity that I had created for myself and my self -concept, starting to dismantle those in pretty major ways, and then asking very intentionally, who do I want to be moving forward and how do I want to be moving forward? And if I have a choice here, what does that look like? And...
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (16:05.224)
if I stop becoming attached to the actual path and I am open to a path, what might that look like? And so to give you, again, we'll just do cliff notes and we can dive into any of these if people have questions or, you know, if they come up kind of later to talk about. But from that place, I taught yoga and started teaching breathing for a while. And then I almost became an accountant, which was kind of like a reversion.
I came back to the US and I spent a year kind of taking accounting classes, even though I had no background in accounting and kind of applying to accounting master's schools that I got into and decided, I think about two weeks or three weeks before the master's program started that I was, that was definitely the wrong path to go down. wasn't my path. I was going down this other path again.
and I came back and that's actually when I went into the counseling and coaching world and really started applying these skills that I had and this background that I had in a way that felt true to me in a way that allowed me to move forward. Also along that path, I studied Ayurveda. I did the breathing as I mentioned, lots of yoga, yoga therapy and got a master's degree in counseling. And so through this decade,
I went down a lot of paths and I made a lot of detours and I made a lot of U -turns and I kind of went up and down and really had committed through that time of making that decision back when I turned 30 that I was willing to stick with it until something made sense to me. And I really didn't think that it would take as long as it took, but it took a long time and it took a lot of different kind of explorations.
and I still use so many of the skills that I have, including the accounting ones, but that having the courage to stick with yourself and knowing that sometimes these changes happen really quickly and sometimes they're very not linear and sometimes they take a little bit longer, I think is really powerful. So if you ever look at my life and you think like, she's got it all together and she's been doing this for so long and it probably was like so smooth for her, please.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (18:27.51)
don't think that, or you can think that if you want to. But know that to get where I am now took an immense amount of working with myself, a lot of courage to do different things, and recognizing that I have an immense amount of privilege too, so I don't want that to go, I totally recognize that, everybody. So that I do have privilege, but that getting to where I am now was a process.
and that getting to where I am going is also a process and that having these times where we can actually pause and look at how far we have come and where we might be going, I think is just so, it's so important, so rarely, and this is a big concept of the ongoing course I'm doing, the WINS course right now, where instead of measuring yourself against where you are not in the future, you measure yourself against where you have come from.
in past. So right now, kind of what I was doing yesterday, inadvertently, because I've trained my brain so well in this, when I was thinking back, is I was thinking about how far I've come over the last decade. I was thinking about all the amazing things I've done, all the amazing people I've met, all the amazing experiences that I've had, all the times that I thought it definitely was not working out and it did work out. And feeling...
joy and gratitude and happiness because I was looking at what I had done, not at what I have yet to do or all the ways in which my current circumstances mean that I'm also a failure, right? Because you could look at my current life, some of my current life circumstances and say like, is she, she's a total mess.
But if you, maybe the last takeaway here is that if you want to start to see yourself in a kinder light and a gentler light and a more flattering light, start to measure and look at where you've come from. So you can pick a different time period. You can pick the last 90 days or the last year or the last five years or 10 years and really think about everything that you've accomplished or all the things that you've moved forward on because we are always moving forward and growing. And the more we start to recognize that and see that within ourselves, the more we will do it going forward.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (20:40.234)
And so I am starting this next decade of my life feeling so optimistic because I know that there are going to be ups and downs, right? I know that life is still going to be life. And I've recognized that as I move forward, will take, I will grow. I will experience things I can't even imagine right now. I will get to see things that I can't even imagine seeing.
And that's really exciting. And I don't know who I'm going to be in the next decade. And I don't know exactly what I'm going to do over the next decade. But I do know that if history is any indication, that it's going to be really amazing. And that as long as I can keep taking my brain to the winds, and I can keep having gratitude as a foundation for my existence, then I will keep moving forward in a way that is really powerful for me, for the people that I work with, for the people that I am in contact with, both in real life in my community and also more online.
And that is really honestly what this whole thing is about for me. And that's, there's so much happiness that comes from that and pleasure. And as I said, gratitude. I've never felt this grateful in my life. I've never felt this happy. And I have this belief that you can go ahead and borrow is that life just gets to get better and better. And so if you were, whether you're on a milestone birthday or not.
You might just take a minute and look back at where you have been and where you're going and congratulate yourself for everything you've done and for how you've been showing up because I bet you've done some amazing things. All right, I will see you next week. Bye.