Choosing Yourself in Midlife: What Deserves Your Yes?
Choosing yourself in midlife can change more than the boundaries you set. It can change the opportunities you see, the decisions you make and what you believe is possible for your life.
For me, choosing myself meant learning my limits, making space for what I love and recognizing that my wants, needs and opinions mattered too. But something else happened along the way. The more I learned to choose myself, the more open I became to saying yes.
Yes to opportunities. Yes to learning. Yes to stretching myself. Yes to things that scared me because I knew they could help me grow.
I didn’t need to become better at saying no to life.
I needed to become more conscious of where my yes was coming from.
Why Choosing Yourself in Midlife Can Feel So Difficult
Many of us reach midlife after years of taking care of other people and responding to what life asks of us.
There can be partners, children, aging parents, careers, friendships and responsibilities competing for our time and attention. Somewhere among all of that, it can become easy to lose sight of ourselves.
Putting everyone else first can become such a familiar way of living that we don’t even realize we’re doing it anymore.
We say yes because someone needs us. We take something on because we know we can handle it. Sometimes we keep going simply because that’s what we’ve always done.
Eventually, though, we can reach a point where we need to consider what we want.
For me, that became an important part of my menopause journey.
Choosing myself wasn’t about deciding that other people no longer mattered. It was recognizing that I mattered too.
Learning to Set Boundaries During Menopause
There was a point in my menopause journey when I realized something had to change.
I was allowing my husband’s health condition, his needs and everything surrounding them to affect my emotional and mental well-being. I had become so focused on what he needed and wanted that I wasn’t giving the same consideration to myself.
I had to learn to set boundaries.
At first, there was some guilt. I had to work through the belief that putting myself first meant I was somehow caring less about someone I loved.
It didn’t.
I could care deeply about someone else and still protect my own well-being. I could love someone and still say, “This is what I need.” My wants counted. My opinions counted.
I also had to learn to hold those boundaries instead of allowing myself to be persuaded into choices that didn’t feel right for me.
As I began making those changes, I felt the difference in myself. The people around me could see it too.
Choosing yourself in midlife doesn’t mean deciding that other people no longer matter. For me, it meant finally recognizing that I mattered too.
Menopause Made Me Pay Attention to My Limits
Menopause can bring a lot into our lives at once.
For me, symptoms affected my energy, mood, motivation, sleep, weight and mental well-being. At the same time, life around me didn’t stop because I was struggling.
That combination taught me how important it was to recognize my own limits.
Setting boundaries became part of supporting myself. Sometimes I needed space. Sometimes I needed rest. Other times I needed to do something I loved because it helped me feel more like myself.
That doesn’t mean menopause should become the reason we stop challenging ourselves or trying new things.
I believe the opposite can be true.
When we understand our limits, we can make more conscious choices about when to protect them and when we’re ready to stretch beyond what feels familiar.
That distinction has become important to me because choosing myself hasn’t made my life smaller.
It has helped me make it bigger.
My Perspective Had to Change
A major part of my transformational journey in 2024 was learning to shift my perspective.
I had been living in a very negative place for years. I needed to change how I was thinking about my relationships, my choices, my life and, in particular, menopause.
Instead of focusing only on everything I hated about menopause, I began focusing on the health of my body.
That included my physical, mental and emotional health because they are all connected.
Choosing yourself in midlife can also mean paying attention to the thoughts and patterns that are no longer supporting the life you want to live.
For me, living from such a negative place profusely affected my menopause symptoms. I was depressed, fatigued, withdrawn and gaining weight. My motivation was disappearing, and I felt overwhelmed by everything I was dealing with.
Eventually, I had to dig deep enough to tell myself that it didn’t have to stay that way.
I had choices.
And I could begin making different ones.
When the Fog Started to Lift
Once I started making choices for myself, something began to change.
The fog I felt I had been living under started to lift. The skies became clearer. It felt as though the sun was finally coming out again.
My circumstances hadn’t magically disappeared. Menopause hadn’t disappeared either.
I had changed the place I was living from.
I began paying more attention to what was good in my life instead of focusing entirely on what wasn’t. I started thinking differently about what might be possible for me.
That change in perspective opened me to opportunities I might not have considered before.
Instead of automatically allowing fear to stop me, I became more willing to consider what could happen if I said yes.
It wasn’t about pretending everything was wonderful or ignoring the difficult things happening in my life.
It was about recognizing that I still had a choice in how I responded to them.
Saying Yes to Sharing My Story
One of the biggest yeses I gave myself was writing my first book, The Menopause Mindshift.
Sharing my story publicly wasn’t something I had always imagined myself doing. But I reached a point where I felt I needed to tell other women what I had discovered through my own journey.
I wanted women to know how much our perspective can influence the way we move through difficult times.
For years, I had felt as though my menopause symptoms were overtaking my life. Once I began changing the way I was thinking, setting boundaries and making different choices for myself, I started seeing my life differently.
Writing that first book required me to say yes to being vulnerable.
It meant sharing parts of my story that were personal. It also meant putting my thoughts and beliefs into the world for other people to read and judge.
The old Lisa might have allowed that fear to make the decision.
Instead, I chose to see what could happen if I said yes.
That one yes led to so much more.
Does This Deserve My Yes?
I recently spoke with author Paula Mathias on The Menopause Mindshift Self-Love Podcast. During our conversation, Paula shared a question that has stayed with me:
Does this deserve my yes?
Her approach grew, in part, from recognizing how easily we can give our time and energy to other people’s priorities and needs.
Paula uses three questions to help decide what deserves a yes:
Is it yours? Is it essential? Is it sustainable?
I love the practicality of those questions.
Our conversation also made me think more deeply about something else.
Before we decide whether something deserves our yes, I believe we need to consider the place we are saying yes from.
A yes can come from obligation, fear or wanting to please someone else. It can also come from curiosity, self-love and a genuine desire to discover where an opportunity might lead.
Those are very different yeses.
Saying Yes From a Different Place
My approach today isn’t about trying to say no more.
Actually, I try to be more open to yes.
I want to remain open to opportunities and possibilities. Sometimes that requires stepping outside my comfort zone or doing something that scares me because I know I could learn from it.
Discomfort doesn’t automatically make something a no.
When something comes my way, I consider what it could add to my life. I think about whether I could grow from it, learn something or discover an opportunity I might otherwise miss because I was afraid.
At the same time, my boundaries still matter.
Sometimes I need more information before I answer. I want to understand what I’m committing to and whether it fits with the life I’m creating.
Being open to yes doesn’t mean giving my yes away.
It means being conscious about where I give it.
Stretching Yourself Is Not Overextending Yourself
There is an important difference between stretching yourself and overextending yourself.
I can say yes to something that makes me nervous because it’s new. That nervousness doesn’t necessarily mean the opportunity is wrong for me.
Sometimes it means I’m growing.
Overextending myself feels different. It means ignoring my limits or sacrificing my well-being because I feel obligated to keep giving.
Learning to recognize that difference has helped me protect my boundaries without using those boundaries to hide from growth.
That matters because boundaries shouldn’t necessarily become walls.
We can protect ourselves while remaining open to life.
For me, the difference comes down to whether an opportunity is asking me to stretch myself or whether saying yes would mean abandoning myself.
Knowing that difference requires us to know ourselves first.
The Inner Work Comes Before the Yes
If you’ve spent years putting everyone else first, you might not even know what you want to say yes to anymore.
That’s why I believe the inner work has to come first.
Each woman has to decide what choosing herself means for her.
Choosing yourself in midlife will look different for every woman. Each of us has to decide what that means in our own life.
For me, it began with boundaries. Then came the shift in perspective and the conscious decision to start living from a place of self-love rather than negativity.
Your inner work might look completely different.
The important part is discovering what you want from your life, what matters to you now and how you want to live during this phase of it.
Once you begin understanding those things, you have something to build from.
You’re no longer making every decision according to what everyone else needs from you. Your own wants, needs and dreams become part of the conversation too.
From there, you can begin making choices based on the life you want to create.
What Happens When You Start Choosing Yourself in Midlife?
When you get yourself into a better place within, that change doesn’t remain isolated to one part of your life.
It can influence your relationships, change how you approach your work and affect the opportunities you’re willing to consider.
That’s what happened to me.
The more I began choosing myself, the more willing I became to stretch myself. I became open to learning, creating and discovering what could happen next.
Not every opportunity deserves a yes.
But I don’t want fear to automatically turn an opportunity into a no either.
I want my choices to come from the woman I am today and from the life I want to continue creating.
That’s what choosing yourself in midlife has come to mean to me.
Choosing yourself doesn’t always mean saying no to someone else.
Sometimes it means finally saying yes to yourself.
Disclaimer
The views and perspectives shared in this blog are the personal views of the author and are based on her own menopause journey. This content is provided for informational purposes and is not intended as medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. If you are experiencing severe, persistent or concerning menopause symptoms, speak with your healthcare provider about your individual health needs.