Late Bloomer Living Podcast

At 51, Debi Robinson had a total hip replacement and she understands what it feels like to be what she describes as “handicapped, broken and sad”.  She had been a very active person before an injury to her hip that left her in chronic pain for years before her surgery.  This experience inspired her in 2014 to get certified to teach Yoga for Osteoporosis.  She has since helped many people strengthen their bones, bodies and minds through yoga therapy.

Yael Gilboa has been on a life journey that I would call an unveiling of her truest self.  She’s someone who follows her instincts, but she didn’t necessarily start out that way.  She’s an artist, a dancer, a filmmaker, a speaker and a wellness mentor.  At 35, she went back to school to study filmmaking leaving behind a secure career that was leaving her unfulfilled.  That was her first step into the unknown.  When she was 37 a friend invited her to a belly dancing class.  She loved it so much, she stayed with it and eventually began performing and teaching belly dancing in her forties.  At 50 she started a video business.  And now in her 60s she’s started a mission based online business to teach women how to do mandalas.  Her mission is to bring joy into women’s lives, and empower them to unleash their creativity using Mandala art and dance so they can connect to their inner spirituality and lead inspired lives.

Sherry Huss is all about creating experiences, connecting community, building tribes and having a bit of fun while she's at it!  She’s the co-founder of Maker Faire which she helped grow into a global brand in her forties.  Having grown up in Northern Ohio all she ever wanted was to leave home, but home tends to stay with us, doesn’t it?  It turns out that her childhood experience of the local county fair was elemental to the design of the Maker Faire and a constant influence now that she’s moved on from Maker Faire and is building a worldwide community of artists through her work with the Imaginary Places design studio and Freeman Events.  She doesn’t allow age to stop her as she keeps exploring with purpose and surrounded by community.

Mike Folie is an award winning playwright, actor, and monologist who spent 25 years working as both a playwright and a freelance speech and business writer for senior executives at Fortune 500 companies while happily married and raising 2 children.  In his late fifties, he was faced with an abrupt and awful change when his wife, Frances, died suddenly.  After her death he stopped all artistic activities for two years to focus on his children and his own grief.  When he began writing again he found himself writing autobiographical one-person plays.  He has since written and performed two, award winning solo plays titled 3 Men and My Dead Wife.  Mike is 69 and going strong, happily remarried and is now working on a memoir that he describes as being autobiographical-ish.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-two, Dara Kurtz left her twenty-year career as a personal banker and financial advisor to focus on writing, speaking, and podcasting.  She found herself transformed by the experience and found a new purpose in helping people strengthen their relationships and create more happiness and joy in their everyday lives. Today her personal blog, Crazy Perfect Life, reaches over 190,000 followers. Dara is the author of three books, Crush Cancer: Personal Enlightenment from a Cancer Survivor, Crush Cancer Workbook, and the most recent, I am My Mother’s Daughter.

Kenneth Ruthardt was 46 and minding his own business when the acting bug bit him. He did not know anything about the craft but jumped in and started figuring it out. That was seven years ago and since then he has performed in 15 plays, nine TV shows, four movies, and even flew First Class once. At 6’4” he is the World’s Tallest Apache and is developing an acting workshop to help other Natives across Indian Country develop their talent.

Rachel Strabley, a lifelong learner, wife and mother of 3 originally from the UK was feeling isolated and depressed after moving to a new town in her late 40s. Her husband was suddenly absent as he traveled for work, leaving her to shuttle 3 kids with busy schedules and no support system since she was in a new town.  She had shuttered her previous business and was feeling stuck.  She started exploring hypnosis as a means to get to sleep at night and started to see a radical change in how she felt and her overall outlook started to brighten.  She became fascinated by hypnosis and its impact on people’s lives.  She realized, with a nudge from her husband, that she needed something in her life beyond her duties as a wife and mother… so she decided to explore her newfound fascination with hypnosis.  She enrolled in training to become a hypnotist and opened her own practice.  She is now a consulting hypnotist, and always practicing the art of looking on the bright side of life.

Kamilah Reid-Burrell is a 44 year old woman working on getting unstuck.  On the advice of her coach she decided to start a personal project interviewing women in their 40s, 50s, and beyond about five key themes - career, parenting, aging elders, relationships, and showing up. Through the project she’s learning to embrace risk, rediscovering the value she has to offer, and helping other women in their 40s and 50s reconnect with their value.  

In the 1980’s, Mariann Aalda was a television trailblazer as one of the first African-American daytime soap opera heroines.  She played criminal attorney, DiDi Bannister, on ABC’s EDGE OF NIGHT along with many other television appearances on shows like Designing Women.  When Mariann turned 50 her thriving career came to a halt… as it tends to go for older women in Hollywood.  But, She didn’t just roll over and give up… She found a new path. Today, she’s blazing new trails...prosecuting ageism with her solo show, her TEDx Talk, and as an official AARP Age Disruptor.  She is 72 years old and is nowhere near slowing down.  Her courage and drive is totally inspiring to me.  I hope you will  walk away from today’s show feeling a little bit of borrowed courage for your next chapter just like I did after talking to her.

At the age of 53, Barbara Bradley Hagerty was experiencing chronic vocal cord pain along with losing her voice.  It was hindering her work as an on-air reporter at NPR.  Other life experiences also had her thinking she might be headed for a midlife crisis.  As any good reporter would do, she decided to follow the story and spent the next couple of years examining that stage of life called “midlife” and how we might thrive.  Hundreds of interviews with brain scientists, researchers and psychologists came together in a book titled Life Reimagined where she also examined her own midlife journey. What she found is that we’ve bought into a myth that midlife brings with it the inevitable midlife crisis. Instead, she found that midlife can be a time to “refocus our energies, and transform the ways we think about the world and ourselves.”