This week on Life on the B Side, I’m taking a nostalgic trip back to the 80s and 90s — the mixtape years where we learned about patience and the lost art of just being bored.

Join me as I share three things I genuinely miss from those decades, and why they still echo in my life today.

Whether you grew up in that era or just love a bit of retro comfort, this episode is a warm, reflective journey to things being a lot bloody simpler!

Is it just me, or does life start to feel... compact as we get older? Not in a minimalist, Zen kind of way — more like, “When did my idea of a big night out become a garden centre café and a browse in B&M?”

As the world quietly shrinks — fewer last-minute adventures, more “meh, it’s too far” — I’m wondering: am I being charmed into becoming a local lifer? Or is there a chance that the next phase of life might actually expand my world again? Maybe I’m ready to rediscover the city (and myself) — with less FOMO and more comfy shoes.

It’s really easy to let encouraging and supporting your child to reach their potential turn into living through them and their achievements. In doing so you can end up claiming victory for yourself while your child is left pursuing a dream that is no longer theirs.

But don’t panic! It’s never too late to let that inner child out to play…

You don’t get to this age without the odd look around to see how successful you are in comparison to others.

But wait!

Should we really be measuring our life’s success in monetary value and volume of possessions?

Even if you think you should have been more ‘successful’ in life by now (whatever that means), there is still plenty of time for some personal bests…

PART ONE: Getting Your Timing Right

From talking to teenagers, sliding doors moments and bank robberies. Adulting is all about timing. And that’s not sexy. Or fun.

While this episode started off under the guise of being about GCSEs and real-life work experience, it ended up using the phrase ‘faecal chatter’ more than once.

We all chase a dream – the dream life, the dream bod, the dream relationship, the dream bank balance! And in pursuit of these goals, we invest HEAVILY. We invest our money, our energy and our time. But sometimes the goal shifts or it just gets trickier to attain, and the amount we have already invested becomes a dead weight, anchoring us to the spot, to the dream.

“If you stop now you’ll have lost all that time / money / energy…”

News flash! It’s already gone regardless of whether you hit your target. The two occasions I called time on my investment were ultimately the most liberating and saved me money and my sanity. You gotta know when enough is enough…

There’s a saying - "What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while". But sometimes, what you do once in a while can have a profound effect on what you do every day.

It can be hard to reset yourself but if you’re lucky enough, you might have a Factory Reset Friend who comes along and pushes the right buttons to get you back to what was normal before normal was this.

Make sense? It will. 

Moments of disconnect happen to everyone, right?

Join Maria as she takes on a little exercise to identify why she can’t create a vision for her life and what the biggest barrier to discovering her purpose is.

The 5 why’s exercise: https://www.oakland.edu/Assets/upload/docs/Pawley/Lean-Enrichment-Activities/LEA---5-Whys.pdf

Good ol’ Bob Proctor for a bit of woo woo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=3w4OIypyneo&t=0s

Once the journey into midlife gets underway, one town you might visit is Crisis-ville. It’s situated somewhere near Parent Village and Invisibility Central.

Navigating your way through Crisis-ville isn’t as tricky as you might think though.

Just remember, that YOU are your map. And if you change yourself entirely en route, you are 100% bound to get lost.