Loving that Midlife

Why does Thanksgiving sometimes feel more like work than a holiday? Between preparing the meal, managing family expectations, and trying to make everyone happy, it’s easy to end up exhausted before the celebration even begins.

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores why we take on so much responsibility for the holidays and how resentment can signal that something needs to change. You’ll learn how to question old traditions, set boundaries, and decide what actually matters to you this Thanksgiving.

You don’t have to do everything yourself or create a perfect holiday for everyone else to enjoy it. Discover a few practical ways to simplify Thanksgiving, share the workload, and make room for your own enjoyment, too.

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Have you ever walked away from a conversation only to replay it in your head 47 more times? Maybe you're wondering what someone meant, wishing you'd responded differently, or worrying that you said something awkward. If you find yourself overthinking conversations and second-guessing yourself, you're not alone.

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck, Master Certified Christian Life Coach, explores why we get stuck replaying conversations and how to stop mentally putting ourselves on trial. With a memorable story about a pair of Gap overalls, Lori shares how to separate facts from assumptions and consider what else might be true.

You'll learn a simple three-step tool to help you decide whether a conversation needs a response or whether it's time to let it go. Learn to take responsibility without beating yourself up, stop overanalyzing what others think, and move forward with greater self-awareness and emotional maturity.

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You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

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Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

Why are we so uncomfortable with our own emotions? Whether it's anger, fear, sadness, or even joy, many of us have learned to push our feelings aside, judge ourselves for having them, or try to make them go away as quickly as possible. In this episode of Loving That Midlife, master-certified Christian Life Coach, Lori Buck, explores why feeling your feelings is an important part of emotional health and emotional maturity.

Drawing on The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership book and her training, Lori explains why emotions aren't problems to fix or commands we have to obey. Anger can help us recognize when something needs to change, fear can help us recognize danger, sadness helps us grieve and let go, joy allows us to appreciate what's good, and creative energy helps us bring new ideas and possibilities to life.

Lori also explains the difference between repressing emotions and recycling them. Pushing feelings away doesn't necessarily make them disappear, while repeatedly replaying upsetting situations can keep us emotionally stuck. Learning to feel an emotion means allowing the experience rather than continually feeding it with the story surrounding it.

You'll also be guided through a simple practice for feeling an emotion in your body: locating the sensation, breathing, allowing it to be present, and exploring how it might move or make a sound. This practical exercise can help you become more comfortable experiencing your feelings without immediately trying to change them.

If you've spent years taking care of everyone else, criticizing yourself for being emotional, or trying to think your way out of uncomfortable feelings, this episode will help you approach your emotions with more curiosity and compassion. You don't have to stop feeling your feelings to become emotionally mature. You can learn to feel them and still choose how you respond.

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And if you loved this episode, please rate the show and leave a review so others can find it, too.  

You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

What if the goal of life isn’t to avoid every difficult experience, but to become the kind of person who can navigate difficult experiences well? In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores what it means to see life itself as a curriculum—and why some of the hardest things we experience may teach us lessons we couldn’t learn any other way.

This can be especially difficult when it comes to adult children. As mothers, we often want to rescue the people we love from disappointment, bad decisions, failure, and consequences. But sometimes our job is not to fix the problem. It’s to support them while allowing them to learn their own lessons. You can give advice, encouragement, wisdom, and support—but you can’t take the class for them.

Lori also turns the idea back toward ourselves. What if the changing body, empty nest, changing relationships, disappointment, uncertainty, or unexpected seasons of midlife are opportunities to become more capable, resilient, and emotionally grounded? That doesn’t mean every hard thing happens for a reason or that we have to pretend difficult experiences are good. It means we can stay curious about what an experience might have to teach us.

In this episode, Lori offers three questions for navigating the hard things we can’t immediately fix: How do I sit in the discomfort? How do I stay curious and open? And what does this curriculum have for me to learn? Because sometimes the lesson isn’t about getting out of the difficult season—it’s about learning how to live well while you’re in it.

If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend!

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You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

How often do you find yourself digging in because you know you’re right? Maybe it’s an argument with your husband, a disagreement with an adult child, or simply frustration when someone doesn’t do something the way you think it should be done. But what if being right isn’t always the most important thing?

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores the question, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Drawing from the second commitment in The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Lori looks at what it means to learn through curiosity instead of becoming defensive and committed to our own perspective.

This doesn’t mean giving up your convictions or pretending every opinion is equally valid. Sometimes truth matters, and sometimes we need to stand our ground. But we can also major on the minors, defend opinions as though they are facts, and damage relationships over things that may not matter nearly as much as we think they do. Lori explores the role of ego and our brain’s desire for safety, along with the powerful question, “What else could be true?”

The goal isn’t to become a person who never wants to be right. It’s to become more aware of when being right has become more important than what actually matters. Lori offers several questions to help you pause, get curious, and decide whether this is really a hill worth dying on.

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You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

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Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

What if the way you’re experiencing your life has less to do with what’s happening around you and more to do with the way you’re relating to what happens? In midlife, it’s easy to find ourselves thinking, “This is just how things are,” or “There’s nothing I can do about it.” But what if there’s another way to approach the life we’re living?

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck introduces two ideas from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: “To Me” and “By Me.” “To Me” is the belief that life happens to us, while “By Me” recognizes that we have agency and can participate in creating the life we’re living—even when we can’t control our circumstances or other people.

Lori also introduces the book’s concept of living above or below the line and connects it to familiar ideas from coaching and brain science. Below the line—closed, defensive, and committed to being right—is often our default. The goal isn’t to shame ourselves for being there, but to notice it and become curious about what’s happening.

The question Lori wants you to take with you this week is simple: What is mine to do? You may not be able to change the circumstance, another person, or everything about your life. But you can begin to recognize where you have agency—and move from feeling like life is happening to you toward actively participating in what happens next.

If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend!

And if you loved this episode, please rate the show and leave a review so others can find it, too.  

You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

What if quitting isn’t failure? We’ve been told that quitters never win and that we should finish what we start—but sometimes continuing to do something that no longer works for us isn’t perseverance. Sometimes it’s simply staying stuck.

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores what it means to change your mind in midlife. Maybe you’ve outgrown a tradition, a family role, a responsibility, or even something you once genuinely loved. Lori shares personal stories about quitting piano as a child, hating track, stepping away from a decades-long tradition, and rethinking how she approaches everyday responsibilities.

She also talks about what happens when women wait until they’ve reached their breaking point and want to “burn it all down.” Sometimes the answer isn’t quitting altogether—it’s changing how we do something, sharing the responsibility, or becoming more selective about where we spend our energy.

Midlife gives us an opportunity to ask some important questions: Do I still want this? Would I choose it today? Am I doing it because I want to, or because I’ve always done it? And do I need to quit, change it, or simply stop carrying it alone? Changing your mind doesn’t mean you were wrong before. Sometimes it means you’ve grown.

If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend!

And if you loved this episode, please rate the show and leave a review so others can find it, too.  

You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

What are you waiting for?

In midlife, it's easy to put our lives on hold while we wait for something to change. We tell ourselves we'll be happier when the kids are more independent, when our marriage is better, when our bodies feel different, when we have more time, or when we finally figure out what we want.

But what if we're spending too much of our lives in what Dr. Seuss called the “Waiting Place”?

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores why we wait for circumstances to change—and the deeper truth that we're often waiting for those circumstances to make us feel a certain way. What if you could begin creating some of those feelings now, rather than making your happiness dependent on something happening in the future?

This isn't about pretending you don't want things to change. It's about learning how to stop putting your life on hold while you wait.

Lori shares practical coaching questions to help you identify what you're waiting for, uncover how you expect it to make you feel, and consider what you can begin creating right now.

And in this week's Midlife Moment, Lori discovers that her long-awaited trip to 30A taught her something surprising about what she actually wanted—and that maybe the fancy beach experience wasn't nearly as important as a soft-serve ice cream cone and a tacky beach souvenir.

If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend!

And if you loved this episode, please rate the show and leave a review so others can find it, too.  

You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

What if the thing making a hard situation even harder isn't the circumstance itself—but the fight you're having with the fact that it's happening?

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores what it means to stop fighting reality when you're facing something you can't change. Because some circumstances really are hard. Dementia, addiction, difficult relationships, health struggles, loss, and other painful realities don't become easy just because we think differently about them.

But while we can't always change our circumstances, we can notice when our thoughts, expectations, and attempts to control the uncontrollable are adding another layer of suffering.

Lori shares a powerful coaching question: “What if we take changing reality off the table?” And from there, she explores how we can stop asking, “How do I make this situation different?” and start asking, “Given that this is the situation, what do I want to do?”

This isn't about giving up or pretending hard things aren't hard. It's about recognizing where you have agency—and learning how to make your experience of a difficult circumstance easier.

Because sometimes you can't change reality.

But you don't have to keep fighting it, either.

And in this week's Midlife Moment, Lori discovers that preparing for a long-awaited beach vacation isn't quite as relaxing as the vacation itself—including a broken dryer, perimenopause, a sick daughter, and an indoor clothesline that has her family feeling like they're living on the prairie.

If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend!

And if you loved this episode, please rate the show and leave a review so others can find it, too.  

You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]

What happens when your body changes in midlife—and you don't know whether the change is temporary or your new normal? A sore joint, lingering injury, hormonal changes, or a new physical limitation can leave you wondering, “Can I fix this, or is this the body I have now?”

In this episode of Loving That Midlife, Lori Buck explores the emotional side of living in a changing midlife body, including the uncertainty, fear, frustration, and grief that can come when our bodies don't work the way they used to.

Lori talks about the difference between acceptance and giving up. You can pursue healing, care for your body, and hope for change while also learning to live well with what is true today. She also looks at the Christian perspective on suffering and why physical struggles aren't evidence that we've failed God.

And in this week's Midlife Moment, Lori discovers that her beloved hair routine may actually be destroying her hair. Because apparently, even our hair has decided midlife needs to be an adventure.

If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend!

And if you loved this episode, please rate the show and leave a review so others can find it, too.  

You can also follow me on my socials:

Instagram: @loribuckcoaching

Facebook: Lori Buck Coaching

Website: www.loribuckcoaching.com 

Email: [email protected]