Overcoming Self-doubt and an Insecure Mindset the Jill Phillips Way

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Greetings to everyone joining us today for our podcast. You're listening to the Living to 100 Club, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. You can find this conversation and all past conversations on our website, Limit2OneHundred.club. In addition to my podcasting, I'm a public speaker, and I present to community organizations and senior groups on topics related to aging well and managing setbacks. And on my website, you'll see options to sign up for one-on-one resilience coaching for anyone wanting more personal time to talk. I also provide consulting and training on clinical topics like depression and dementia. Now to our podcast, where we discuss successful aging, staying positive, and making more informed decisions. Today we have an exciting and inspiring conversation with someone who has worked in her post-50 years to cultivate confidence and break through long-held barriers and limitations. Our guest, Jill Phillips, shares with our audience how she decided to pursue her life goals after retirement: pursue a graduate degree, write a book about growing up in London in the early 1960s, and running a 5K marathon. First, a little background on Jill. Jill Phillips is an author and retired occupational therapist motivated by the retelling of family stories She wrote "Lam Lash Street," which is about navigating family life in London after World War II. She's a storyteller with a passion to inspire families to connect through the telling of their past. She spent 30 years working as an occupational therapist and hospital manager before retiring. Rather than slowing down the pace of life as she neared retirement, Jill refocused her efforts enjoying each day with a zest for life. She is currently splitting her time between the UK and Canada, maintaining close contacts with family and at the same time discovering more fascinating family stories. Learn more at www.jmphilipsauthor.com. Jill, welcome to our program today.

Oh, it's lovely to be here. Thank you.

Great, great. Glad to have you with us. I always like to begin by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about the journey that brought you to where you are today. I covered a lot of it in the intro, but tell us some of the highlights for our audience.

Okay, so I started out life, as you may have gathered, in London, and from the accent as well. And then we lived there until I was about 12 years old. And the Laminash Street, which is my family story, is about my early life up to age 12. And then we moved to Bexley Heath, which is only 10 miles outside London, but it's a very different culture and a huge culture shock. And it's a very— it's in Kent and it's a very middle-class area compared to working-class London, which is where I came from. Then I lived here, studied and so on, and then I did my occupational therapy training, went to Exeter for 3 years to do my training down there. And then just after I finished training, I met and married a Canadian, and so I emigrated at the age of 31 to Canada. And I lived there for 30 years, as you indicated, um, in working in healthcare. And then I got to be in my late 50s, and, um, I was just needed to express myself. I think I'd gone through the time of raising family and making sure family had a good start in life, and somehow it was time for me. And then so I did one course at master's level just to see if I could handle academics. I hadn't done any academics in like 30-odd years. And then I did quite well and I got my graduate degree age 58. And then a few years later I retired and then I thought I might have a stab at writing a book. I'd written a thesis, I knew I could write that many words. I wasn't sure if anybody would read it But I thought I'd give it a try. And so I ended up writing a book. It took me 3 years. And during that time, the marriage broke up. But I think it's because I was changing, to be honest. I think when you start to be more of yourself, your relationships change. And so that was a result of, I guess, me coming more out of my shell, if you like, and doing more what I really wanted to in life.

Sure.

And As you indicated earlier, I run a 5K and I've done all sorts of things I never ever thought I would do. But my life now is completely different from how it was when I was in my early 50s. It's— I do so much more now than I've ever done before.

Yeah. I think it's all about kind of redefining ourselves or reinventing ourselves as the popular term is. And we're always kind of growing and you know, opening new doors. That's, that's the beauty of this. So tell us about growing up in Southeast London in the 1960s. What life lessons did you learn from the working-class Cockneys on Flamelash Street?

It was a completely different era, a different way of life, very male-dominated. So my mother was quite an independent lady who really went against the grain of everybody else in the family. My mother was the organizer and the planner. My dad, fortunately, was a really quiet man, so it sort of works well for their relationship. She had plans for our future which was going to be much better than hers, but she— I guess the best way to phrase it would be this, that her father was a regimental sergeant major, and so he was very determined and focused, and that's what I got from my mother, how focused she was, how she would do what she really wanted to. She had 12 brothers and sisters. The men in those days were always the one who told you what to do, very male-dominated, very stereotypical post-war. The war heroes had come home and they were the, the men were the ones who held the purse strings, who told you what to do. But all except in my family, whereas in my family, Mum did all those things. So Mum being that type of personality really made me more of an independent person. She went against the grain all the time. She had— she was the youngest of the 12, but she stood up to all her brothers as well. So she was very focused on being— doing what she really wanted to do in life. And not listening to what the men would tell her she had to do, which for the day was extremely rare, very, very rare.

So she had a strong influence on you, it sounds like, from her own background being very intentioned, purposeful in all of her activities and her goals, and really it fostered a lot of that same strong-minded determination. With you. Yeah, so I'm curious about the 1960s in London. We've heard a lot of stories. I grew up in New York City in the 1960s, very exciting time. How did, how did that color your worldview?

Um, it made me understand the importance of education because my mother always encouraged us to do really well at school, whereas the rest of the family said, as soon as your kids get to be 15 years of age, you could leave school then. Then what you do is you just send them out to work so they can provide income. For you. But my mother always saw a plan for the future, so she always encouraged us to put education first. So in a sense, my family was atypical, really. But the, the thing I miss even now about Lamlash, which in that day and age was amazing, was I had family all around me. There must be 200 family members within a 5-mile radius. And if we went to weddings, you knew everybody there, you knew you were connected to everybody. And that is the one thing I treasure from that era, the fact that we were so close-knit. Yes, we may be complaining about them, but my mother always said, we can complain about family, but no outsiders can. So they were always complaining about one another, but it was— we felt secure as children, we felt so secure that if mum and dad were going a little bit strange or complaining about stuff or saying we hadn't done something, we could go to an aunt or uncle. And if the aunt and uncle weren't really that good that day, then we would go to talk to a cousin. So we always had huge amounts of support, and it felt very secure growing up in that environment. We didn't have any money, um, we rented a house. Nobody bought their own property in those days, um, you just paid your rent, then the landlord took care of the rest. We were quite lucky at Christmas time because we always had lots of gifts, but sometimes the gifts came from places where you didn't really want to ask people too closely as to why they were so cheap. So, you know, in that day and age, just to survive, you really had to be on the borders of illegal, if you like, in terms of— I would say there's a phrase here, I don't know if it's in the US, but it's something that fell off the back of a lorry, off the back of a truck basically.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Yeah, so what that is, it's like, well, somebody probably stole it somewhere along the road and we don't really ask any questions because we can't afford full price, but this is going to be half price, so at least we can have this in our life now because it may be vaguely illegal, but if we don't ask any questions they would tell you no lies. That was another phrase.

Sure, sure.

Mum always used to say that one, say, ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. In other words, don't want to know. So that was the environment we grew up in. Very poor but rich in terms of family.

Yeah, 200 relatives within a— did you say 5 miles or 5 kilometers?

Yeah, we could walk to all their houses. Yeah, we were going to see— because, you know, as I said, Mum had 12 brothers and sisters and there were 2 families. There was the Phillips family and the Clark family, and Basically, there were 12 on both sides, and they intermarried basically. So these two families, a lot of aunts and uncles were— it was really bizarre family tree. But, uh, yeah, if we were going to visit auntie or an uncle or a cousin, it was literally a 10-minute walk away all the time. Yeah.

So a strong emphasis on education, being in school. Were you tempted to enjoy the music scene at all in London in those years?

Well, I wasn't allowed to. My mother being so strong-minded, I didn't have a lot of options. And the other thing that was different in those days is there was a well-known phrase that children should be seen and not heard.

Oh boy.

So you were— if there was a family gathering, you sat there and you, you could not be part of the conversation. You could sit and listen unless you were told to leave the room because it wasn't appropriate for you, but you just sat and listened. You were taught from a very early age that you did not contribute to the conversation because adults adults had these rights, but children had no rights whatsoever.

Pretty strict, sure. Yeah, well, you probably, uh, caught up with the music a little later on. There wasn't that much going on, right?

Um, well, yeah, no, I mean, you know, you have to remember I was 11, 12 years old, so it was around me. I mean, obviously I knew about the Beatles, they were in the newspapers every day. And I can remember my mum saying to me one day, she said— she was looking at the newspaper, said, look, There's nothing in this newspaper, she said. They're just talking about these long-haired singers. What's wrong with the world, sort of thing. And it was the Beatles, right?

That's not any news. That's not relevant. Sure, sure.

Well, they weren't musicians, Mum, because we did— Mum never bought one Beatles song at all, one Beatles record or single, because she said they weren't real musicians anyway.

Yeah, yeah. Well, different. So you chronicled your, your growing up in your book, "Lamelas Street: A Portrait of the 1960s Postwar London." So you alluded to it earlier, but what drew you to becoming an author after age 50?

I don't think age was a factor for me, to be honest. I've always been somebody who felt that if I had the ability to do something, I would do it. Age was never a factor. But what drew me to writing a book. It wasn't actually writing a book as such initially, it was just writing the stories down. Because the stories about the aunts and uncles and cousins and the way we lived, they were retold over and over again. Every time you went to a family event, there was my mum, my Aunt Ellen, and my Aunt Mary, or three sisters, and they would sit and talk about the past, or they would sit and complain about everybody. But by those sorts of family stories, I wanted to get them down on paper, so I literally started by just saying, what can I remember from those days? And I wrote it down as much as I could, and then I would talk to other people and say, oh, do you remember when I went to Manor Place swimming baths and I got my school certificate in swimming? And they said, oh yes, I remember that, and do you remember this? And that's how it started. It wasn't any— I wasn't planning to be Shakespeare or anybody, I just wanted to write the stories down before they were lost.

Yeah, yeah, so a lot of conversations reconnecting with family members, maybe, you know, reminiscing and bringing in those stories of what you learned and what the family's experiences were. Yeah, and you, you put that together in the book and then you're a successful author. Yeah, congratulations.

Sure, thank you.

And you pursued other life goals after retirement. You also, when we talked earlier on the phone, you talked a lot about the kind of sabotaging behavior, self-sabotaging behaviors, and some of those challenges with confidence. And how did you overcome these negative thoughts, these self-sabotaging behaviors?

I had a lot of them. I'm not somebody who's always had masses of confidence. And even now, I struggle sometimes. And I spent a lot of my life not wanting to express myself. I didn't want to rock the boat. I didn't want to upset people. I was fearful of, you know, if I was outspoken, I might be sort of shut down again. And I think for me, what happened is when I started to work on my graduate degree, I realized that, because I was getting A grades basically on my assignments, which really shocked me, I realized that I could do something and do it really well. And so I thought, and then I completed my degree and I did the thesis because it was a thesis option or coursework option. I did the thesis option because I hadn't done one before, and I knew I'd have the support to get me through the thesis through my professor. And so that's what I did.

I—

so with that behind me, by the time I was in my late 50s, I then picked away at something else. I was thinking about the book or writing the stories down. And then later on when the chance came up and somebody said to me, 'Oh, have you ever thought of running a 5K?' Because Parkrun does 5K free parkruns. And I said, no, I haven't heard of that. And I thought, well, maybe I'll try. And I was with a personal trainer at the time, and because she was helping me to get fit— I'd had a nasty fall a couple of years earlier, and I was really overweight. But then I worked with my trainer, and I managed to lose 40 pounds, and I was pretty fit at that point, and still am. And so, um, when I heard about Parkrun, it's like, you know what, so far I've written a thesis, I'm working my way through this book, nearly finished the book. Why don't I try this? Why don't I try this 5K? So it builds over the years, and it comes from trying different things and getting other people to give you input as to whether you're good at something or not. So for example, when I was doing my university work, my professor was giving me feedback and said, oh, you know, you're quite good at this and you're quite good at that. So then I gradually Year by year, I got to the point where I was going to try— well, now I'll try anything. It may take me longer to do it, and I may not be the fastest or the first, but I do keep trying now.

Yeah, so you, you had some early influences that were not really conducive to being a writer and, you know, pursuing a lot of lofty goals. You really didn't want to, as you say, express yourself. You didn't want to rock the boat. But yet over time, you, as you embarked on any of these behaviors, you, you found some successes. You wrote some chapters, you took a course, and you found those little bit of rewards, what I call, you know, kind of that reinforcing behavior. And each time you did that, you built up some confidence, you built up that momentum, and people invited you to try something, and you said Why not consider running a marathon? Why not? So losing weight, why not? I mean, that's, that's curious because we have these negative thoughts, and the negative thoughts can be very limiting and very handicapping. So for you, it was that struggle, as you said, a lifelong struggle facing those thoughts and, you know, fighting them off.

Yeah, I know. And, and even now I notice that, I mean, the older you get, once you hit 60, something about society, they feel that they have to keep telling you how you're too old for this or you're— what are you doing that for? I mean, when I said to my family, oh yes, I'm running a 5K, and they looked at me as if I completely lost my mind. It's like, you're doing what? I said, yeah, I'm running a 5K. But then once you've done it, so it becomes just— they eventually do accept it. So the first week it's like, do you know what Jill's up to? I have no idea. No, I don't know either. I mean, I could hear it, all the telephone conversations, right? By the time I've done it for two, the third week— and every week you get your time and it comes through— and there's, oh yes, I 'This many minutes this week,' and, 'Oh yes, I'm so many seconds faster than the time before.' Eventually people 3 or 4 weeks down the road said, 'Oh, are you running this weekend?' So people do adjust. Yeah, they do adjust.

You step out of that, what I call that comfort zone. You know, people— excuse me— see us in a predictable way. It's comfortable, it's familiar. But then you start to take some risks and people say, 'Hey, what's going on?' You know what Why the change? Why are you changing your clothing style? Why do you change your hairstyle? Why are you taking up running? Why are you taking up whatever? So, it's stepping out of that comfort zone and feeling a little bit of that uncertainty, a little bit of that anxiety, but at the same time, it becomes exciting for you, right? I mean, you start to feel that new behavior and that whatever's going on in you, there's a little bit of excitement for you.

Oh, I agree, because my family attitude, and friends to a large extent as well, although they're a little bit more reserved in mentioning how they feel about things, was, "Why are you bothering at your age, at your time of life? Why are you bothering?" But you're right, it's incredibly exciting because not only is it satisfying that, say, you run your 5K or you have a published book, inside you're thinking, "Wow, I didn't know I could do this. What else can I do?" And it's such a personally exciting thing to happen. And then eventually, because your reputation grows, people are saying to you, 'So what are you going to do next then?' It's like, 'I've got to do something even more exciting now, I wonder what that will be?' So it grows, it fosters, it's an amazing experience. And like I said, I was a very quiet, reserved— very professional at work, but very quiet, reserved. And I've gone from that to hopefully people at least start to think about maybe making some changes to their life that they would like to, to make.

Sure.

Because that is so satisfying if you come across somebody who says to you, oh yes, you, you mentioned this, or I heard you say that, and because of that I've now done something I really wanted to do. That is so rewarding.

Yeah, yeah, I know that feeling when you offer a story or a solution or even a recommendation, it's nice to hear when people take you up on it. So it reminds me of this book by Dr. Joe Dispenza. The title is Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, and this is exactly what he talks about. Because we're— today we're not defined by who we were yesterday or who we were 10 years ago. We have the opportunity to break out of those molds and to explore new opportunities. And the more we explore those opportunities, the more rewarding it becomes, and the more exciting it becomes, and the more doors that get opened after that. So we break the habit of being ourself and let go of some of those old definitions, and you're really being open to some new definitions of ourselves.

Yes, and as I said earlier, the hardest thing is— yes, so you have self-doubts, but the hardest thing is when everybody around you also says, "Why are you even bothering?" And I think that for me was the hardest thing to do. When I— while I was writing the book, I decided when it was— when I got to the point where I realized that my stories could be turned into a book, and yes, it looks as if I was going to actually be able to do this, I think for me what I decided then was not to look for approval from everyone in my family. I think the old version of me would have said, 'Oh, I'm writing a book, um, what do you think? Do you think that's a good idea?' Whereas now it's more that I keep it to myself, so I'm very focused on what I'm doing, and I tell people after I've done it, not before I'm thinking of doing it.

I think that's a great concept. That's, that's so important. We can't wait for the approval or acceptance of others before we continue, because that's a trap. We may not get it. People may not want us to change. People may feel envious or whatever is going on, but let's not wait for others to promote us forward because it's really got to come internally. It's really got to come from our own initiative. I can see that. Yeah, yeah. So where do you think that— where does that confidence come from? Where— how do we find it? I mean, we're all looking for ways to change or do something different, something new, and That confidence, where do you think it comes from in your experience?

For me, I think it came partly from frustration, um, from the fact I'd been unhappy for probably a good couple of decades with where I was in life, my relationships, and, um, the fact I hadn't really achieved that much. I, I felt tied down, hemmed in sort of thing, um, And then, as I said, I was desperately looking for a way out, so I did ask people about doing the graduate degree, and some said yes and some said no. But I think the fact I actually did that one thing I really wanted to do that I thought I could never do— me with a master's degree from— I came from the Elephant and Castle, working-class London, and I'd done really well to get my occupational therapy degree, but to do, you know, to have a master's of science and do the cap and gown thing and convocation and that, which by the way, I did attend the convocation at the university. I was absolutely determined. I thought, I've worked hard on this. This has taken out whole chunks of my life, but I've got there. And so when they said, will you be attending the ceremony? I thought, I don't care if I'm the oldest person there. I'm probably older than most of the staff there, the faculty, but I don't care. And I walked across the stage in my cap and gown I have the photographs, and my photographs framed on the wall, this sort of thing. So yeah, I think at that point I was going to go whole hog on this anyway. I was not going to hold myself back. And I think for me it came from the frustration over the years of I tried so hard to please everybody else, and I was so miserable. And I thought, I don't care, I'm not putting up with this any longer, and just went for it really. So for me, it came from that passion, really.

Yeah, I think that's great. And the frustration and really recognizing, I don't need to please other people anymore. I need to look inside and see what I want, see what I want to pursue, develop my own interests, my own passion, my own purpose. That, that's so important. And that's what I love, the way you put that, because that's where the confidence comes from when you say, I'm not doing it for anybody else. I mean, if other people benefit, great, but I'm not doing it just for them. It's coming from me. And that's— it's that internal drive that really makes such a difference. So I'm curious, what would you tell other people about getting started on, you know, kind of writing down their life stories and they're going through their own struggles? What would you— how does somebody get started doing this on their own?

With the book, literally what I did was, as I said, I I literally started by writing down what I could remember from those days. So I think, now, what did I do when I was 10, 11, 12 years old? Right, so I would have gone swimming. So I could write about swimming lessons, which, um, is very different from today. There were no flotation devices in those days. It was all we had. It was an old Victorian swimming bath with the steam rooms were downstairs, and the old bathrooms where people didn't have their own bathrooms were downstairs as well. Very old building. I think it's now historical building protected or something. But the way we were taught how to swim was the swimming instructor, who never ever got into the pool at all, walked around the side of the pool and she had a broom handle in her hands. And so after we'd managed to swim widthways, because we could still touch the bottom of the pool across the pool, that was 25 yards, and then we used to have to swim up the full length of the pool She would walk ahead. I was swimming by the edge of the pool, and no instructions on technique, nothing at all. And she had held this broom handle, and if she could see you was sinking down a little bit too far, she'd bring the broom handle really close to you so you could hold on to it so you wouldn't drown. And she thought you were doing okay, she'd move the broom handle further away. And that was the swimming technique that we, we learned how to swim by. She literally walked around the pool holding on this broom handle, and it was— that was the only thing between you and death, basically. Um, so it's, um, and half our class did manage to learn to swim, so there we go.

Yeah, so you're recalling these experiences and kind of recording them, and that's what composed the book eventually.

It is. So I wrote down a whole bunch of stories like that. I also tried to inject some humour into it because some of these things are so archaic compared to what we do now. It's important to bring out the differences between then and now and then, so I wanted people to understand that you think things are really bad today, you know what, you go back to the 1960s, it was a struggle then as well. So I wanted people to understand that it's not that things— it might have been a simpler life, but there was a lot of things we didn't have as well. I mean, laundry took the whole day just to wash the clothes. And you had to wear clothes 2 or 3 times, 2 or 3 days running, because they couldn't deal with all that. You couldn't change your clothes every day because it was too much hard work for everybody to get the clothes clean again. So I started by thinking about these things. I wrote them down. I talked to my mum and said, "Oh, do you remember when we did laundry?" And, "Oh yes, the old Empress washing machine. Oh, wasn't that great?" So reminiscence. Thing, as you said earlier. And then I had a whole bunch of stories. I had about 25, 30 stories, and I put them, obviously, in the word processor, so I had these spread all over the floor, all these various stories on pieces of paper everywhere. And then I did get some help with the structure of the book, like how do I get this all to pull together as a storyline, which hopefully people will want to read and keep turning the pages. And so I came up, which I call it a washing line approach to the storyline. So you think of your main storyline, storyline. In my case, it was a romance storyline. So that's the thread that holds the whole story together. That is the washing line, if you like. And then you take your stories and you pin them on the washing line in an order that makes sense. So then you have your chapters and the stories flow from one to the other. It does take time. It can take months and months. It took me 3, 3 and a half years before the book was published. There were times when I did really well with the book and I could think of lots of things, and other times I left it for 2 months, could not write a thing. You do need to have time, you need to have time to yourself, you need to be— for me, I had to be in a quiet space. I surrounded myself with photographs from those times to help me remember, pictures on the internet. If it was, for example, talking about Manaply swimming baths, I'd do a little bit of research on the internet. So when was it built? So why was it built? How much was it to get a bath? It was a penny, I think Mum said, to have a bath. And if you wanted special fairy soap, it was an extra penny. Or if you want— I think that came with hot water as well. So I did a little bit of research around it, and the more I talked about it, the more I could remember more. Or people around me were saying, oh yes, I remember when. Because as soon as you sit down with family or friends at that time and talk about things such as swimming lessons, they all have their own little stories, and so you'll find it builds and builds and builds. So you don't sit there in isolation developing a storyline and characters, you're writing about people you know, so the characterisation's already done in a sense. And on top of that, as you tell the stories to your family and friends, they give you more information as well. It's research, is really what it is. So it's not It's like a marathon. It's— you just have to keep plodding one step to the next. Eventually you get there, but you— it's not a quick thing. For me, it wasn't a quick thing, and I think that's the hardest thing. It's not writing it down, it's not the fact you're publishing a book, it's really just keeping at it. That's the hardest thing.

Yeah, staying at it. It sounds like it was a long process, was it a couple of years, would you say?

Yeah, it was, it was 3 years and about 6 years for the publication piece.

Did you have trouble finding a publisher, or how did you go about locating?

Well, I self-published, and I went through a company that supports self-publishing, which has worked well for me. What happened at around the same time is my uncle, who had lived with us in Lambeth Street and whose stories are in the book, he passed away quite suddenly. He was older, but nonetheless, within like a week he was gone. And I came over to England for the funeral, and I looked through his flat, through his apartment, because my brother and I were going to sell it because we inherited it. And so I got some money from that, and I used some of that money, which I thought was appropriate, to help— I included some of Uncle's stories in the book— to pay for some help as I needed it. And I guess that's the other thing I'd suggest to people as well is don't think when you, you get to a roadblock that that's the end of it. If you really think that you're, you're stuck and you don't know where to go next, go and ask for help. Don't just say to yourself, don't let that little negative voice say, see, I told you, you couldn't do this, and so I don't know why you even thought about starting this. Ignore that piece. What you do is you say, okay, what sort of help do I need to get me through this roadblock? And then you look at what your resources are. If it costs money, do you have the money? Are there some friends or family? Is this a group on Facebook that you can join? Look to see what your resources are and then get help through your roadblocks. Don't put it all on yourself to do it all by yourself. I used to do that all the time. And like I say earlier on about the 5K, the only reason I could run a 5K is because my personal trainer had helped me through. I thought, because when I went to her, I said, I'm going to run a 5K. I thought she was going to laugh and say, what are you doing at your time of life? And she said, no, no, that's fine. Check it out with your doctor. If your doctor says it's fine, then come back and we'll just develop some exercises around what you need, you know, in terms of your knees and your legs and so on. And that's what she did. And because of that, I got to run the 5K, but I had to learn to ask ask for help. Don't look at the roadblock, look at how you can work your way around it and what help you need.

Yeah, I think that's a great description, Jill. You know, the notion of facing these roadblocks, we hit the wall and we say, I'm done. Or we can interpret it another way, it's like, I need some help, let me reach out and find who can guide me through this, or around this, or over this, or whatever it takes to get beyond it. So That's really an important message. It's so easy to misinterpret these blocks and say, oh, it's beyond me, I can't do it, you know, I'll never make it. So that's where the old negative thinking comes in. And let's, let's put that away and stay with finding solutions and continuing to— either it's finding help and finding new approaches, whatever it takes, but keep pushing forward. I, I really appreciate the way you described that for our listeners. I'm curious, what would you say to somebody— you know, I think it's important to not let age come into the picture because age is only a number, as I keep saying. What do you say to somebody who's 60 or 70 or 80 or 90 years old who is saying, I'm just too old for this? How do you convince them that age is only a number?

It's not easy because if you're 90 and thinking that way, you probably thought that way for the other 90-odd years. Oh yeah, it can be a struggle, but it's also very rewarding as well. All I could say to them is the way I approached it was, I want to be in the best shape I can be for my years, so I eat healthy, I exercise. So I would certainly say to somebody who says, oh, I can't do this, are you looking after your body? Are you looking after your mind? If you've really looked after your body and your brain, then you can do anything you want to. And like I said earlier, don't ever ask the opinion of people around you because the nearest and dearest may not be the most helpful people in you starting anything. I know for years I listened to the negative voices, but what I've learned— I think maybe the best way I can say is this, because I know it's a very good question you've asked and it's not an easy one. There's no clear answer saying, oh, you can do this and that's the answer. No, that's not the way reality is. But I think what I have learned, and maybe this is the only way I can encourage people, is that the, the older you are, the more experience you have and the more knowledge you have about life and things in general from all those years that you've lived. So what you will find is, because you have a lot of that knowledge in your head, you're not like someone who's 20 years old who doesn't know what they don't even know in life. You have lived life. You have had kids, you've had children, grandchildren, you've been through all sorts of terrible things, you've been through some amazing things. So what you will find is when you want— find something you want to do, for example writing a book, you can get there much more quickly. The transition between starting the book and finishing the book is going to be much quicker for you than somebody who's 20 years old because number one, you have stories, you probably have contacts, you know how to find people who can help you, you may have more resources. What you will find is the older you get, the quicker you can make these transitions because you know so much more than somebody younger than yourself.

Yeah, that's so important because I want to emphasize that you are not the exception. I think you would agree with that too. Everybody has this potential, and there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people who are doing the same thing that you are, looking at your experiences and overcoming some of those negative thoughts and really pushing forward. And you know, opening up some new doors and really accomplishing some things that we didn't think we were capable of. So I really appreciate the way you shared that, that we have a lot of experiences and we can chronicle that in our own book, or we can, you know, find some other ways to utilize that experience. But that's, that's so important that we can rely on our own experiences and share that, and we get confidence and kind of more, more momentum when we can put this into, into practice for ourselves and for others. Yeah, so I think that's great. I think that's an important message for people to take away from, from our podcast. So thanks very much for sharing that. Yeah.

Oh, you're more than welcome.

Well, uh, Jill, looks like we're out of time for today. Before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners about a co-sponsor for our program, A Mighty Good Time. Are you looking for ways to engage and stay active? Check out almightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 50 and over. It's free to search and it's free to post. almightygoodtime.com. And be sure to visit the Living to 100 Club website to sign up for our weekly podcast announcements and monthly news newsletters. And while you're there, be sure to download a free copy of my 9 Tips for Living Longer. Lastly, pick up a copy of my book, Living Longer Is the New Normal, all about maintaining a positive mindset in all we do. It's on Amazon as an ebook or a hard copy. We've been talking today with Jill Phillips. Jill, for those who might want to contact you or pick up a copy of your book, how can they best do that?

Well, if they go to my website, um, W— as you said, it's www.jmphilipsauthor.com. You can reach me by email on that website. And the other thing is, if you wanted to pick up a copy of the book, if you just go on and Google Lamlash, L-A-M-L-A-S-H, sorry, L-A-M-L-A-S-H, Lamlash Street, it comes up. It's such an unusual name that you'll find it. Lamlash is also an island in Scotland, but other than that, you'll find the book will come up.

Well, thanks so much. This was thoroughly enjoyable. I really appreciated your sharing your story, your challenges, and your accomplishments. So congratulations on all that you've accomplished and pushed through over the years. That's great. Yeah. And thanks to our listeners for tuning in, and hope to see you next time.

Hi everyone, this is Meredith from the Senior Fitness with Meredith podcast where I discuss all things for seniors, from fitness, your health and wellness journeys, how to be all over strong and beyond. I also have my mini podcast called Motivation with Meredith. It's a great quick motivational pick-me-up for your days. Join me, listen now, search for Senior Fitness with Meredith on your favorite podcast platform.