Join me as I talk with Toni Reece, President of PEOPLE Academy, Inc., and host of the Get Inspired!2 Project – daily interviews creating a legacy of inspiration:

 

“We often think of the word ‘legacy’ as being that thing that we give at the end of our life; but really, the legacy is living with significance and living full out and passionately until you’re no longer here.” ~ from my Get Inspired!2 Project interview

If you’d prefer to listen to the interview:

Get Inspired!2 Project

Toni Reece:   What does inspiration mean to you?

Evelyn:  I thought about that when I first signed on for this interview.  I was reminded of a little poem by Rumi – “Every tree and plant in the meadow seemed to be dancing, those which average eyes would see as fixed and still.”

For me, when I think about inspiration, it’s really about being open and aware, and just being grateful and finding gratitude in everything that I possibly can throughout the day.  Really, I find my inspiration by listening to the stories that are everyone’s lives.  In the work I do, I’m so open to hearing the stories of the different women who come into my life or who I work with – colleagues, friends – that’s where I draw a lot of my inspiration from.

To me, inspiration is your ultimate calling.  It’s the thing you were put here on earth to do, and it’s what gives your life direction, purpose, and motivation.  I think we can all be inspired at the same time we’re unsure perhaps of what kind of work we want to pursue or activities we want to do, but inspiration is that calling to proceed, even when we’re unsure of our goals and our achievements.

Toni Reece: How do you put that inspiration into practice?

Evelyn:  Really, I try to be a living, breathing example of inspiration every day.  Not from a place of ego, and not to pretend that I never have a bad day or a problem, but by making a conscious choice to see the trees and the plants dancing in the meadow, just like the poem talks about.

To find gratitude and inspiration, even in the most difficult challenges – for me, that’s something I’ve really had to put into conscious practice the last few years because of a chronic health problem I’ve developed. The primary symptom is intractable pain.

I feel like I have two choices – I can try to find the positive and the inspiration and the message behind why this particular thing has happened to me and what it is I’m meant to learn and help others learn through it, or I can sit and wallow in it, which is not going to change the reality.  For me, it’s making that choice every day, and sometimes every moment if it’s a particularly bad day.

Toni Reece: Evelyn, how do you do that?

Evelyn: I think you have to have faith in whatever it is.  I’m not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person.  It’s just finding a faith that nothing that comes in our lives is more than we can handle, and that I try honestly to believe that everything in life that happens to me is a lesson.  It’s something that perhaps I need to learn or something that I need to help someone else learn.

It’s a choice. That’s all I can tell you is that it’s a choice; it’s a choice for me in every moment.  I don’t always succeed, but then what I’ll do is I’ll look around me or I’ll surround myself with people who are living, breathing examples of that inspiration, and that will be enough to pull me out of that place of self-pity.  Sometimes I’ll set a clock.  I’ll set a literal timer, and I’ll allow myself 15 minutes to have a little pity party, and then when the timer’s done, I pick myself up and move on, because there’s a lot more to be grateful for than to complain about.

Toni Reece: So really, what inspiration means to you with the being open and aware and grateful, you practice this, but you also gain from it by being around it.

Evelyn: I thrive on that, honestly.  I think that’s a conscious choice we make as well, because the world we live in today, it’s so easy to get caught up in all the negativity.  There’s so much information out there, and unfortunately so much of what we’re seeing and hearing can be very negative and depressing.

It doesn’t mean walking through life being a Pollyanna and not seeing the problems, but it does mean making sure that’s not all you see, and that you become effective; you’re either part of the solution, or you’re part of the problem, so you fix and you help where you can, and you trust that that’s enough – in that moment, that’s enough.

Toni Reece: What is your greatest life lesson?

Evelyn:  For me, it is through becoming ill.  It has transformed me into someone who understands what my life purpose is perhaps faster and sooner than I would have discovered if I had just been living my life the way I was up until five years ago.  To me, I see that as a gift, even as it’s been the most difficult thing I’ve had to deal with, because I had to leave my job, and in leaving my job, I had to make a decision about the rest of my life.  At the time, I wasn’t even 50 years old – what was I going to do?  I’m not one to just sit on the sidelines and not do anything.

It was really finding my purpose and finding something that I could do.  I’m also a very proud person who doesn’t like to show when I’m not doing well or I’m having a messy day.  This has been a gift to me as well, because it’s enabled me to actually share with others, and in sharing with others and allowing them to see me struggle or me overcome something, it gives them permission to do that as well.  That, for me, has really been the biggest life lesson – that I can still have a life; that I’m a person with a disease, and not a diseased person.

Toni Reece: You know, Evelyn, life lessons tend to come through some heavy learning, and the fact that your life purpose is attached to a life lesson is pretty powerful.  If I could ask you to share with us how you came to the life purpose – how did you know that that was to be your purpose in the work that you’re doing?  There are so many Boomers that are in transition, and so many people – not just Boomers – that are in transition or trying to figure out what their purpose is.  How did you know?

Evelyn: I’d like to say it was just a light bulb moment and I just woke up to it one morning, and that was that.  Really, it wasn’t, and maybe for some people it is.  For me, it was more of a process, and that process started with what I like to refer to as little inner rumblings.  Little nagging thoughts that kept working their way up from way inside myself, and they would come out to the surface.

I didn’t welcome them.  I wasn’t open to them at the time, so I would push them down, because at the time it was too scary – and I think it’s something we often do when we’re getting close to giving birth to something or transitioning or transforming to another way of living. It’s scary.  Oftentimes, we try to stuff it and keep our life on course, even though we’re really not happy – even though we really know there’s a restlessness there that needs to be answered.

It took a couple years, and again, it literally took that crisis, about to fall off a cliff experience, for me to say, ‘Okay, if not now, when?’  I started thinking about the number of years I worked in the corporate and nonprofit world as an executive.  I started to think about the fact that there were so many challenges and things that I had to go through, so many parts of myself that I had to suppress or push aside because they didn’t fit into the life I was living and the work I was doing.  Then I started to realize that really it didn’t fit because that’s not what I’m meant to be doing.

I needed something that was going to enable me to be creative, to be slightly quirky, to kind of work on my own rhythms and my own hours.  What I found was that by the time I got through this transformation, how I wished that I had had somebody that could have helped guide me through that process when it all started, and for me that’s how I got that light bulb, that ‘ah-ha – that’s what I’m here for’.

If I could do anything in the world…that’s what I want to do.  I want to help these women who are approaching midlife to not look at life once you hit midlife as a lessening or a constriction, but more of an expansion.  I know so many women who are approaching their 40s, their 50s, and they feel like for the first time in their life they’re really coming into their own.  They’re really finding their own power at a time when our society might be saying to us, “You need to start stepping back because you’re getting old.”

I want to help show women that you don’t have to do that, and we can age gracefully.  We can age with a certain ferociousness, and that getting older may be a chronological fact, but we act our stage, not our age.  There’s still so much we can be doing.  It’s helping these women find out what that is, and doing it now and not waiting until the end of their days when they look back and they have regrets…

Toni Reece: Evelyn, there’s just so much value in what you’re speaking about here, and I absolutely love this Project and people that show up here.  It sounds all wrapped through your life lesson was right out of the gate with what inspiration means to you is being open and aware, and yet the life lesson and the purpose came from realizing you weren’t open and aware.  The inspiration really exploded for you, didn’t it, once it happened?

Evelyn:  It did; and constantly having to push just beyond my comfort zone.  When you’re standing on one mountain and there’s this huge crevasse and you’re looking across and there’s a mountain on the other side, and you know in your heart and soul that that’s where you want to be, but you’re over here.  Somehow you have to build a bridge and you have to take one step beyond where you’re comfortable each step of the way, until you get to that place.

You’re not going to do that all at once; I know that I’m not going to do it all at once.  I know I’m not done, but I really feel that I’m on my way.  I’m on my journey.  That’s an inspirational thing right there for me.  It helps me get up every day and have a purpose.

Toni Reece: What do you want your legacy to be?

Evelyn: I think that like so many of us, that I made a difference.  One of the things I work with women on is what I call “living your legacy.”  I think what I want my legacy to be is that I want women to understand that if you are open to it, and you’re willing to do the work, and you’re willing to let go of some things, that you can live your legacy in your forties, in your fifties, in your sixties, instead of waiting.

We often think of the word ‘legacy’ as being that thing that we give at the end of our life; but really, the legacy is living with significance and living full out and passionately until you’re no longer here…

*Oil on Canvas Painting by Ahmed Nussaif “Kliem of South”

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