In this solo podcast episode, Natalie Fisher tackles the common anxiety that job seekers appear "too old" or "too young" and worry it will hinder their career prospects. She begins by framing these age‑related judgments as mere opinions, not facts, and shares a personal story about a judgmental ex‑partner who dismissed two respected life‑coaches—Brooke Castillo (perceived as "ancient") and Stacy Behman (perceived as a "12‑year‑old")—solely based on their appearance. Fisher uses the anecdote to illustrate that age bias is superficial and that the value of a person lies in the ideas, skills, and impact they bring. She argues that focusing on helping others, showcasing expertise, and connecting with "your people" renders age irrelevant. To operationalize this mindset shift, she proposes a 30‑day experiment: each day, identify and share aspects of yourself unrelated to age—skills, stories, passions, humor—and actively promote them. She acknowledges that judgmental individuals will still exist but advises listeners to accept their presence and concentrate on audiences who appreciate substance over looks. Fisher also points listeners to two related podcast episodes (the Self‑Confidence Challenge and Intentional Self‑Confidence) for deeper work and invites feedback via LinkedIn or comments, encouraging participants to report their 30‑day results.
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Hello, hello, and welcome to the Get a Six Figure Job You Love podcast, or welcome to my YouTube channel if you're watching on YouTube or listening on the podcast. Welcome, welcome, welcome. All right, so my name is Natalie Fisher. Today we're doing an episode on I look too old, I look too young, what can I do? All right, so here we go. I have a lot of clients who come across this as a problem in their search. They start believing that because of the way they look or because of their age, that this could be something that creates a problem for them and impedes them from landing job offers or from getting ahead, from doing the work they want to do. And I just want to share with you a story and a thing you can try. So listen until the end because I want to share with you an activity that you can do that will change you. If you go all in on this activity and you're having any of these thoughts, this will completely change your outlook on feeling like you are looking too old or looking too young. Now, first of all, these are opinions, right? I look too old, I look too young. They are not ultimate facts. There's no chalkboard in the sky that says you are too old to get this job, or you are too young to be taken seriously. If you follow my work at all, you know that those are just sentences that your brain is repeating and believing, and they're not going to be useful to you. They're not going to be helpful. Now, I know a lot of people will say, yeah, but they're true. It's true. So-and-so told me this. This is the feedback I've gotten. And I just want to say it's not useful. And yes, maybe it is true, but who cares? So I'm going to clarify all this with a story. I'm excited to tell you the story because I posted it on LinkedIn. It got a lot, a lot of views and engagement, and that's why I'm recording this podcast video episode for you now on it, because it really made a difference and I got a lot of feedback from it. So as a lot of you know, I was in a 10-year relationship with, with someone who was emotionally neglectful. It was very an unhealthy relationship. That was several, several years ago. I'm out of that relationship now. I'm with someone amazing, and Living my best life. But that was a part of my life that I was definitely not seeing clearly. And I use this example because my ex was definitely one of those people who was very judgmental. Now we know who I'm talking about, right? The people who are very judgmental in this world. Those are the people that we are kind of afraid to show ourselves to, the people that we're afraid to talk to, afraid to share things with because We're afraid they're gonna judge us, right? And sometimes there are judgmental people in the world, and my ex was a prime example of this. So I was watching a video. So when we lived together, we had a house, and I would often watch videos on my laptop screen, and he would walk by me in the living room and he would see what was on my screen. And one day I was watching a video with Brooke Castillo, and I don't know if you know her, but she's the founder of the Life Coach School. Her name is Brooke Castillo, and he walked past me And he saw her name on the screen and he said, she looks ancient. Why are you listening to that old grandma? And I think she's in her 50s now. I don't know. But anyways, this was his commentary, right? And my response was, first of all, I was like, who does he think he is? He doesn't know who Brooke Castillo is. Like what? Like I didn't put any weight on his comment, right? But He is an example of somebody who is judgmental and thought of her in that way. He saw her and he judged her by her looks, right? By her age, right? And then there was me. I had a different perspective and I thought to myself, well, I don't care how old she is. She's amazing and she's helping me. And like, I just initially wanted to jump to her defense and tell him how many things she'd done and how much she was helping me and how awesome she was. And what great ideas she had and all this stuff, right? But I didn't. I just said, I don't care how old she is, she's helping me, right? And so this story is to illustrate that there are going to be some people like my ex who are going to look at somebody who's older looking in age and, and they're going to think, oh, that person's old, I wouldn't want to hire that person. Maybe there are some people like that, okay? And let me just tell you that those people suck. They're very superficial. They're very, just very judgmental on the surface. They're not cool people to have in your life anyway. So that being said, there's also people like me who was so happy to find Brooke Castillo and ended up paying her a lot of money for her coaching certification and listen to her religiously every time she publishes something. Every time she does something, I'm in for it. I love her. And I don't care how old she is, and I'll be doing that until the day she dies because I love her. So that's one example. And then to use the flip side, this happened on a completely separate occasion where he saw me watching a video from somebody called Stacy Behman. And Stacy Behman is a life coach, and she actually looks very young. So when I— she was in her late 20s, but she does look very young for her age. And so he looked— same thing. I was watching a video from her on my computer and he passes by it and he says, instead he says, she looks 12. Why are you listening to a 12-year-old? Right? And same thing. I initially want to jump to her defense and say how great she is and how she's helping me and how successful she is and all this. And instead I just said, I don't care how old she is. She's helping me, right? She's great. I don't care how old she is, right? Because it was never about their ages, right? It was always about how they spoke, who they were, how they shared their experiences, how they introduced me to new ideas, how they motivated me to do things I'd never done before, how they had an impact on my soul, on my life, right? And they are two women who I have paid a lot of money to and been very loyal to for a long time. And they could be considered a granny or a 12-year-old by some people, right? But who cares about those people, right? So I tell this story and the extremes of the story to be able to say that they— neither of them care that My ex was judging them by their age or how old they look. They definitely do not have a thought about that. They do not care. You know why? Because they're too busy. They're too busy doing important things, right? They're thinking about how to help more people. They're thinking about how to convey ideas in a better way. They're thinking about new ideas. They're thinking about how to help other people become more successful. They are helping, right? Their mindset is focused on something other than themselves or how they look, right? And that is what's going to make you successful too. So if right now you might be thinking, I look too old, I look too young, maybe people are not going to take me seriously— and it goes both ways, right? So I've had people say, people think I'm too old, they're not going to want to hire me, or people think I'm too young, they're not going to take me seriously, right? But if you are focusing on helping them, caring about them, working on solving problems for people, your age isn't going to matter. Okay? And I'm proof of that. I'm one of the people among millions of other people who are not going to care about your age. There will be some people that do, and they are not your people, right? They shouldn't be. Turns out they're nobody's people. They're not fun. Right? Like I said, I was actually thinking my ex was so judgmental that when I left him, several of my family members actually started confiding in me with secrets that they hadn't told me before. And when I asked them, oh, why didn't you ever tell me this before? They said, well, I didn't want you to tell your ex because I knew he was going to judge me and he would make fun of me and he would be an ass about it. And I was like, oh my goodness, yes, he would have. And of course we were together, and you know how oftentimes you tell your partner things. But anyways, I totally understood that, and I was like, yeah, of course I understand why you wouldn't have told me. I wouldn't have wanted to either, right? And so we have to understand that there's always going to be those 2 types of people: the people who are not our people and the people who are, okay? And our job is just to talk to the people who are our people. And if we give any energy, any thought, any entertainment to the people who are not our people in our brain, that will stop us from doing what we need to, to meet our people, to meet the people that we connect with on a soul-deep level. The people who hear you speak, hear what you have to say, hear about your experience, hear about your stories, and say, that's the person I want to hire. I don't care what she looks like. I loved what she said. I love how she made us all feel. I love the energy she brought into the room. I love the story she told. I don't care how old she is. Right? And if you're thinking, oh, well then maybe they're worried about me retiring, your people are going to be thinking, I'm happy to have her for as long as she wants to keep working. I would be lucky to. If you're thinking, oh, they're going to think I'm too young, say, yeah, it's not about Her age, she's just getting started, and we would be lucky to have her in the beginning of her career, right? This is what your people will be thinking. But first, you have to give them reason to think that. And you won't do that if you're worried or concerned about, I look too old, I look too young, and you're, you're already perceiving what they're going to think about you. First of all, when you do that, you prevent yourself from meeting the right people. You prevent yourself from really going for it and putting yourself out there to meet those people. And secondly, when you do, you're so concerned about them judging you and what they're thinking about you that you don't give them a reason to think those things that you want them to be thinking, right? So you don't show up as yourself because you're too worried about them judging you, too worried about them thinking that you might look too old or you might look too young, right? So here's what I propose, okay? If you for 30 days went all in on everything else about yourself that you have to offer that has nothing to do with your age, and this could be anything that makes you feel very good about yourself, anything that you think about and you feel confident about. This could be your knowledge on certain topics, your skills on certain things, your stories of your experiences. It could be your passion for particular problems you've solved. It could be your sense of humor. It could be Your passion for anything like design or cooking or anything that's awesome that might connect with somebody else. So we're just brainstorming here. Anything that makes you feel great that has nothing to do with your age, right? Moments that have shaped you, challenges you've overcome, anything that makes you feel strong and powerful that is a real part of you as a human being. And you go all in on that. And you ask yourself, how can I share this with more people? And you do that for 30 days and you just set the age thing aside, set the belief that you had, set it on the nightstand and say, I'm gonna go all in with everything I do have that is helpful, powerful, has helped me, has shaped me, has made me confident. Your whole consciousness is gonna change. Okay? Because now you can let go of that. You can let go of this belief that you're too old or you look too young or whatever, right? You can let go of that because it's not useful. And so as I shared above, there are still gonna be some people who might judge you like my ex, and they might judge you based on how you look, right? There might still be those people. I can't say that there won't be. Right? But if we tried to say, oh, like, don't think about those people, don't worry about them. Truth is, they are there, right? The world is mixed, is filled with all types of people. So I'm saying accept that those people exist. Be aware of it and just accept it, right? And don't let them be a problem for getting in front of the people that are not like that. The people who really wanna hear everything you have to say, the people who want to hear about your skills, the people who want to hear about how you can specifically help them. Okay? And remember those other people, they're just not your people. And if you do happen to come across one, it's okay, 'cause you know, right? And you can just run far away from them and that's fine, right? You don't have to make it mean anything about you. You actually get to decide what you wanna believe about yourself. You can believe Anything you want about yourself. So if you do that for 30 days, let me know how it goes. Let me know what you discovered about yourself. Let me know how you felt, what you did, what resulted from this experiment. And if you do that for 30 days, just keep going. There is actually no end date to it. The 30 days is just to get you going because 30 days can really do a lot to ingrain a new habit. Okay. And some other things you can check out are my Self-Confidence Challenge podcast. It's not a video because I wasn't doing video then, but it's a podcast episode. It's called the Self-Confidence Challenge and the Intentional Self-Confidence podcast episode. Those are 2 episodes that will help you and give you some questions to really help you focus in on all the things that have nothing to do with how you look or your age. Okay, so do that. That'll give you some homework and let me know how it goes. Okay, send me a message on LinkedIn, DM me if you can, or drop a comment on one of my posts, and I'd love to hear how the experiment went. Okay, thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you next week. Bye.
