What felt super uncomfortable also ended up being a very natural and interesting conversation. The whole point of Quality Coffee Podcast is to start taboo conversations so our community can feel more comfortable existing as we do in unison with the world around us as it exists. We love life, we love each other and we love you. It's why we are here and with a full, open and vulnerable heart we invite you to join the conversation. So! Grab your coffee and let's chat.

One of the most important themes in this episode was so many of us Elder Millennials gave up our authenticity for approval and acceptance.
Think about the first time you were conditioned to have this belief? When you learned to walk and we cheered for you and you learned that was how you can seek and earn approval.
In this episode Vanessa talks about how she was always taught to live for approval from a very young age and we deep dive into my midlife women are being more transparent, loving and communicative in our relationships .

Ready to join the conversation?

Grab you coffee and let's chat!

We women have a tendency to make to do lists and forget to add ourselves to it. Have you ever noticed your to-do list consists of work and kids and errands ... but none of it includes read one chapter of your book or call your sister to tell her your funny story from this morning.

In our midlife we are working on slowing down if our autoimmune diseases haven't beaten us to the punch. We need self-compassion more than almost anything in this time of our lives. Elder Millennials are seeking self discovery, self compassion. We are reconnecting to our own sense of humanness, to our intuition and that's building up super powers we didn't know we possessed. Self love.

In a world where we are viewed as "old women" struggling with just about anything and everything you can think of, we are the generation turning that narrative on its head. Nothing is wrong with us. If fact, we are steadily continuing our climb to the peak of our mountain and on our way up to these crazy new heights we've had to learn the toughest lessons of our lives.

Now we are standing below the summit making our plan to attempt to make it to the very top and when we look side to side we see our core women friends. In your forties you realize the true purpose of these relationships. They're to see you through everything. Nothing is off the table. Including this summit and every step of the descent back down the other side of the mountain.

They're with you to remind you to add self compassion to your daily to do list. They're there to help you prioritize it even above prioritizing them. That's why your village of women friends are so unique in our midlife experience. They're the only people in your lives who love you endlessly and will push you AWAY to tend to your own needs because they know you. They see you. They hear you. And they will sacrifice time and space with you so you can tend to your own needs first.

Self compassion is a commitment to yourself with yourself and with your women friends.

Three cheers for that.

Get your coffee, and let's chat.

Having a podcast is a little bit like having a public online journal available to anyone to read through. Of course we knew that getting started but what we didn't realize was we'd have a way to witnessing scale our growth as humans week by week. Sometimes we edit episodes and are already different people than the two elder millennials who recorded it.

Like anything, starting a new project requires new skills and our included developing the right tone and the right temperature for us to feel like these unscripted conversations were authentic and raw, as intended. Episodes were deleted, some were heavily edited... and then after a while they weren't anymore almost at all. We found our groove and realized a few things about Quality Coffee Podcast.

For Tonia and Vanessa, recording the episodes is therapy.

For our audience, it's a chance to weigh in about taboo topics and join the conversation. Once we publish an episode out into the world of midlife women seeking midlife clarity these episodes are no longer about or for us. They're for us all.

So grab your coffee and let's chat!

Us Elder Millennials are lucky to have the awareness we do to see bullshit for what it is but even we get trapped in the wild when we are preyed on for our insecurities. Girl, we are not broken. Perimenopause is not a disease, it is a transition. Our bodies are not failing us, they are doing everything in their power to protect and nurture us.

It's time to put work and effort into our mindsets.

It's time to get vulnerable and raw with our core girlfriends.

It's time to reconnect to our own intuition.

It's time to value our bodies exactly as they are. Right. Now.

You are amazing and worthy of every single cell in your body. The only noise you should be validating is 90's R&B, hip hop, the occasional boy band and maybe some Third Eye Blind.

And Quality Coffee Podcast, of course! Follow along, grab your quality coffee and join Tonia and Vanessa in the conversation!

It is true that making friends becomes a more difficult task as you get older. Is it as simple as commenting on someone else's shoes? The ice-breakers are great but then the small talk that happens after is what we all are dreading. Grab your quality coffee and join us for an honest talk about what social settings look and feel like in our current stage of mid-life. Tonia and Vanessa dive into what makes making friends uncomfortable and how they're coming up with ideas of ways to make a bigger impact with short-form conversations that don't feel so soul sucking. Is it possible?

Find out on today's episode of Quality Coffee Podcast.

Get your coffee and ket's chat.

We sure do love a good interview episode where we take turns asking some burning questions we've been wanting to know about each other. It's a great way to get to know your favourite elder millennial podcast hosts and we cover all the bases on today's show. Serious, silly and everything in between. If you're a 40-something woman entering your midlife we will break your heart and crack you up all in the same day. Ready? Buckle up and grab your coffee. It's time to join the conversation.

This episode is for the 40-something women who are entering their midlife era and are awake to the bullshit noise that is the shaming, dismissive media burying the wise women we worked for the first half of our lives to become.
We are not over the hill.
Our mid-sections do not need fixing.
We are not wearing the wrong clothes for our age. 

Our bodies are not supposed to look TWENTY!
WE ARE WILD AND FREE.
This era is about seeing through the cracks and looking past the societal pressures women have tried to smash through… well listen ladies, Elder Millennials are not going to lay down while we continue to spew hate and shame towards the women that, for the last two decades, were cat-called, desired (often to a fault), 

The only thing we are no longer capable of us bearing children.
It’s our time now to return to ourselves. We are going inward and walking down quiet, dusty and dark hallways we haven’t seen since our childhoods but this time we know the way and we’re back for good. We’re dusting, we’re decorating and we’re going to take over the world building empires right in plain sight.
We’re doing for our daughters. Our nieces. Our inner children. We are doing it for one another.
This isn’t a crisis. This is clarity. And if you forget, we’ll be right here to remind you.
It’s time you joined the conversation.

Grab your coffee and let’s chat. 

What could we possibly have to say about love languages?

Tonia and Vanessa have put a lot of work into understanding their own love languages and talk a lot in this episode about meeting others' love language needs also.

Which love language speaks to you?

Do you know the love languages of your spouse?

Do you know the love languages of your kids?

Do you know the love languages of your friends?

Having vulnerable conversations with the people in your life sure helps form better quality relationships filled with secure attachment (see Ep.5 of QCP: Attachment Styles) and trust. Your relationships will be much more fulfilling and a nurtured friend, spouse or child always reciprocates in kind.

Explore these love languages with us:

- Quality Time

- Physical Touch

- Acts of Service

- Words of Affirmation

- Receiving Gifts

Some of these we resonate with and others either don't impact us much or can even have negative responses. Deep dive with us into this conversation. Grab your coffee and let's chat!

Tonia and Vanessa discuss ways we can support up-and-coming generations, setting them up in ways where healing is basic decency. Instilling a standard level of being treated and accepting the treatment of other people means teaching our kids to say, "that’s not ok that you said that to me" or "that's strange that you said that out loud".

Dehumanizing conversations, as the great Brené Brown discusses, includes cruelty such as name calling, discriminating, or treating others immorally and is not to be tolerated. Full stop.

Tonia and Vanessa are passionate about teaching the next generation, so this unscripted and vulnerable conversation is about leading by example. We look forward in a way that is hopeful so we can change how we speak to other people and also is one more way we can break generational trauma cycles in our family systems.

This is the start of many subsequent conversations to come.

It's time for all elder millennials to join the conversation. Grab your coffee and let's chat.