Late Bloomer Living Podcast

At 51, Julie Carrick Dalton has finally found her stride.  Her debut novel Waiting for the Night just launched in January as a Most Anticipated 2021 Book from CNN, USA Today, Parade, Newsweek, and Buzzfeed, and was an Amazon Best Book of the Month. She’s also a brand new organic farmer.  She bought a tract of forest that was in danger of being timbered and developed and managed to preserve 92 acres of forest and built a small farm from scratch all while writing her book and raising four young kids.  She acknowledges it’s been a bumpy journey, but well worth facing the hard work, mistakes and rejections along the way. 

Broc Edwards has some questions about mastering midlife, starting with how do you do it?  At the age of 50 he started a new podcast called, “Midlife Mastery” to explore that question and look for answers.   In this conversation we talk about the quest and what it means to age with purpose and curiosity.

Stephanie Mojica wanted to travel for the longest time.  She had a career as an award winning reporter, but after some time in that career she realized she wanted more control over her life and her schedule.   She started several side hustles to explore what else she might do, eventually establishing an online business coaching people to write their own books as thought leaders.  Once she had a solid online business, she started getting curious about being a digital nomad.  Some major life events inspired her to finally take the leap.  We talk about how she gathered the courage to pursue her dream and how it’s working out so far.

It’s been a year!  This is episode 52.  That’s 52 weeks of midlife reinvention stories out in the world!  For this special episode, I’m talking to John Flaherty, my husband.  John is a classically trained actor who is slightly obsessed with Shakespeare, music, motorcycles and classic cars.  He teaches theatre and directs the classical productions at Sacred Heart University, and is also the Operations Manager for Hannes Precision Industries, a manufacturer of precision screw machine parts.  This year he worked on a project with our kids to renovate and revitalize a 1974 VW Bug Super Beetle that was about more than car restoration.  We had a little sit down to discuss our concurrent projects with all the challenges, pitfalls and wins involved.

Mike Morawski is a 30 plus year real estate investment veteran. He is an entrepreneur, author, real estate trainer, public speaker, and personal coach with strong personal resilience and a deep desire to help others live an extraordinary life. He has coached hundreds of real estate investors to fulfill their dreams while staying connected to their values.  Mike has always believed that transparency and honesty are central to any successful business and personal life.  The 2008 world economic crisis presented his business with major challenges.  The impact that had on his company and its real estate holdings left him scrambling to protect the company and its investors, but Mike let his guard down and let his transparency slip in the process.  In this episode, we talk about what he learned and how forgiveness is key to the healing process and finding resilience.

Vanessa Joy Walker is a Life [After Crisis] Strategist and coach who has shared her story of hope, perseverance, and joy with thousands of people worldwide as a featured speaker.   Her life experience is vast and includes; seasons of abandonment, betrayal, cancer, infertility, and grief.  As she says, “It’s the ragged edges that actually make a difference.”  We talk about how our crisis and pain is what uniquely qualifies us to make a difference for other people and she encourages us to get real about pain while cultivating joy in the middle of life's most complicated seasons.

Michelle Widmeier is a chiropractor and acupuncturist who has been studying and working in the field of holistic medicine for over 20 years.  The Covid shutdown was, of course, a massive roadblock for her private practice.  Her response to the shut down was ingenious.   She chose to entirely rethink her business and reinvented it with the new name, Ground Control Wellness.  She created a mobile chiropractic, acupuncture and wellness clinic designed to respond to the needs of her patients.  What does that mean?  It means she bought a van and outfitted it for the safe treatment of her patients.

Rich Companik had a long, successful and storied career as CFO and eventually CEO of a talent management agency in New York City, but in his fifties he decided to leave that behind him and follow a new path selling real estate.  He had a passion for it and he was curious to see if it would be a good fit.  He's someone who had an extremely successful career and was able to walk away from it when he realized it wasn’t a good fit for him anymore.  We talk about the courage it takes to change careers in midlife. We so often stay in situations beyond the time that’s healthy for us because we’ve invested our time and effort and money and might be considered crazy for walking away.

For Intermittent Fasting Coach and Author, Laurie Lewis, menopause dealt a crushing blow -- brain fog, lack of balance, memory loss, and the sudden gain of 50 pounds of stubborn hormonal fat. She tried everything she knew to feel better, and the methods that worked in the past made no difference. After four years of struggle, Laurie stumbled upon Intermittent Fasting and started fasting that very same day. The menopausal fog lifted in less than one week, she had more energy and felt more “like herself.” She lost 51 pounds in 15 months and has kept it off for years! Now, at 57-years old, Laurie has turned her personal success into the premier thriving Intermittent Fasting coaching business.  As a certified health coach she combines her knowledge of nutrition with deep research and practice of Time Restricted Eating. Laurie guides her clients with a dream come true -- eat the foods you love and enjoy the rest of your life feeling vibrantly well.

Jack Perez is a fixer.   A few years ago, Jack was hit hard by menopause and when she went looking for information realized that there wasn’t a place to find what she needed.  She saw a problem and decided to do something about it… for herself and for other women.  In 2017, Jack founded an online platform called Kuel Life where she champions change, redefining modern midlife for women through curated content and women-driven brands.  She is an example of how a person can find themselves needing something, figure out that other people need the same thing, make a decision to provide that to other people and end up enriching their own life.