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You Are Your Own Authority With Stephanie McLaughlin

How Forty Drinks Can Change Your Midlife

40 Drinks

In this conversation, I talked to Stephanie McLaughlin. Stephanie owns a marketing firm. The story that we’ll talk about is a story that she created when she turned 40. Before she turned 40, she had a number of unfortunate things happen. She tells us all about that in this episode, but she created a project for herself that was centered around what she calls her own ridiculousness, and what she created for herself was a real transformation. She walks us through what it took to get there, and we unpack some of the key ingredients that it took for her to create this for herself. I had a great time talking to Stephanie. I know that you’re going to enjoy this episode. I’ll see you on the other side.

Welcome to The Art of Transformation. I’m your host, Marc Scheff, and I’m here with Stephanie McLaughlin. Stephanie, welcome.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for being here. It’s funny that you’re here because, if I recall correctly, you’re here because I wanted to be on your podcast.

That’s right, and you will be. We have already got it scheduled.

Getting into some of that, what you’re doing is now different than what you were doing before. I love hearing stories of how we got to where we are. Can you give us a little background on what you’re doing and where that started? It’s such a great story.

The boring piece is, in my day job, I own a marketing agency, and I’ve done that for almost twenty years. The fun part of the story comes when I turned 40, which was a couple of handfuls of years ago. Forty is one of those times when we often hear of the big birthday parties, the surprise parties, the big celebrations. I was single yet again. I had been dumped by yet another terrible boyfriend who I had thrown a surprise 40th birthday party a year before. He broke up with me by text.

I was aiming a few months out at my 40th birthday and felt like the party was not the right thing. I’ve never been engaged. I’ve never been married. Putting all those people in a room together felt like a wedding that I never had. It was icky for me at that point in time. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do. An idea came to me almost fully formed. I wanted to have 40 drinks with 40 people in 40 different places. I wanted each drink to have some thematic connection between my friend and/or our relationship. The idea was so ridiculous, and that’s what attracted me to it.

I’ve always been ridiculous. I’ve always been a little outlandish. I thought, “Let’s do it.” At first, it was like, “Am I going to do it in a month? How am I going to do it?” I decided that there was no timetable for how long it was going to take me to have 40 drinks. It ended up taking a little over a year, about thirteen months. The thing that was surprising about all of it was at the end of the year that it took me to have 40 drinks, I was a completely different person than I had been at the beginning of the year. I was transformed.

Part of it was these drinks that I was having with people, which were visits with friends and family and some people I hadn’t seen in 10 or 15 years. Some part of it, I learned later, was this transformation that many of us go through sometime around our 40th birthday. It’s usually plus or minus five. My 40 Drinks Project turned into the Forty Drinks Podcast many years later, where I interviewed people about their transformation around age 40.

I was reading about brain development. I’m going to blank on the book, but if I find it, I’ll put it in the notes. There’s a book about that. Maybe you recommended this to me. Did you recommend this to me maybe? It’s a book about how there’s another stage of brain development. I was reading up about this. It’s so interesting that we understand your brain develops from ages 0 to 1 and 1 to 4, and all these things. I’m watching it happen with my 9-year-old and my 14-year-old. When you’re 20, it’s like, yay, then the gray matter starts to go away.

The big takeaway that I took from all of this was that the white matter starts to collect and hits a new phase or midlife. I didn’t read what she was writing. I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know if it’s in there, but it lines up with what I understand about right-brain connections, the part of the brain that connects seemingly unrelated ideas. That is essentially the core of creativity.

What I’m hearing in your story is you hit this stage of brain development and connected a few ideas about the themed drinks and seeing friends. You created this project for yourself without necessarily having an outcome. I want to be a different person. This was something that felt like it was going to take care of some emotional wellness or whatever, but you did it.

It was interesting because if I had set out to change my life or if I had set out to do something big and meaningful, I probably would have been so overwhelmed that I wouldn’t have kept with it. The fact that it came wrapped in this package of silliness, play, and ridiculousness was like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down thing. I didn’t even realize that I was learning new things about myself through the reflections of my friends and the people I was having drinks with. They were telling me stories about me that were changing the way I saw myself. Once I started changing the way I saw myself, things started shifting for me.

You were getting up. You’re sitting and visiting with people. You’re having drinks, going over old times, and they’re saying, “I always thought you were like this.” You’re getting that from this older lens.

People were telling me stories about myself that blew my mind.

Can you think of one?

I had drinks with two girls I went to grammar school with. Their two names were all through grammar school, junior high, and high school. It was like a single word, Karen and Ginny. I had drinks with them. I knew Karen. We met when I moved into town in second grade. Ginny moved into town in fourth grade. Ginny said to me, “Do you remember how we met at school on the first day of fourth grade?” She said, “No, the summer before fourth grade.” Remember, in fourth grade, I was nine.

Imagine this for your daughter. I have two younger brothers, and the area where I lived was very rural. It was all boys around me, lots of boy energy. Somewhere through the grapevine, I heard that a family with three girls moved in up the street. One day, I created this ruse. I put my dog on a leash. You didn’t need a leash because it was so rural, but I put my dog on a leash. I was going to take the dog for a walk. I walked up to this family’s house and loitered around at the end of the driveway until an adult saw me and sent the girls out to say hello.

Ginny was telling me this story and I went, “How amusing,” but on the drive home, I was thinking about it, and thinking about where my house was and where Ginny’s house was. I Googled it when I got home, and the house was over a mile away from mine. I created a ruse, put my dog on a leash, and walked a mile up the road to make a friend when I was nine years old. In my 20s and 30s, I was adventurous. I was bold. I was outlandish, but I had no idea that it was that fundamental to my character and that it went back that far.

I told my mom about the drink shortly thereafter within a couple of days. I was like, “Can you believe this?” She said, “Of course, I can. Why do you think we kept you on such a short leash?” There was the V8 moment of like, “Ahhh.” I didn’t have a lot of running room when I was a teenager or even into my 20s. My parents tried to keep me on the straight and narrow. They worked very hard at that.

That’s amazing. It makes sense. I’m thinking how would I ever go on 40 trips in a year or even have 40 dinners in a year with friends because that’s not part of my DNA necessarily. I do like this idea and how you call it ridiculousness and playfulness. I want to say authenticity, but that word is meaningless these days. There’s an honoring of the playfulness that we all want to get back to in a way. I think we start yearning for it a little bit in midlife.

It’s interesting because when I started the project, I started by accident. I was having dinner with my best friend, and I told him about the idea, and he thought it was fabulous. It so happened there was a drink on the menu at that restaurant that was relevant to our relationship. We started, and then it was during the summer. Some friends were home for a weekend, and I had a drink with them.

The first handful of drinks was easy. It was people who were nearby and people who were already in my orbit. Once I got 10 or 12 drinks in, I was like, “40 is not such a big number, and there aren’t that many left. How do I want to spend them?” I got thoughtful about it, and I started digging people up. Grammar school, high school, college, old jobs, an old boyfriend. I cultivated and curated like this is your life kind of thing.

Not a boyfriend at 39.

No. I dated in my 20s.

I’m hearing a few things, and I’m always trying to pull nuggets for people to take with them. I’m hearing that you didn’t go and say, “I’m going to be this completely new person. I’m going to travel all over the place.” There was a thing that you were already always doing, which was walking a mile to create a friendship, saying, “This would feel good. It’s not going to hurt my life to do it. I’m going to go do it.” You discovered something about yourself through that process.

It also was not as heavy lifting as you would think. I traveled for 2 or 3 of the drinks. Most of them were within an hour of my house. I live about an hour outside of Boston. I went to college and spent a dozen years living in Boston. I had lots of friends down there, and friends at home. People would come home for a weekend. I would grab them during that year. I didn’t make it too difficult that I couldn’t accomplish it. I was traveling for a client for one month. I was headed down to Florida, and there was an old friend that I went to college with who lived in Florida. I didn’t overthink it too much, and I didn’t make it too hard.

I’m writing a chapter for a book. I was looking back through James Clear’s book Atomic Habits and some of his online writing. I don’t remember his exact words, but he talks about when you’re creating a new habit or taking small steps on a project, you were doing this small, consistent thing, getting together for a drink over the course of time. If I had said to you, “You have to have 40 drinks in 40 days,” that’s a different thing.

It sounds like you didn’t put a lot of pressure on yourself. You made it fun, having drinks with old friends and having them tell stories about you. You made it pretty easy. A lot of them were close by. A lot of them were somebody coming home, and you took advantage of that opportunity. You also saw that opportunity because you had created this container around your socializing that year. I want to get into some other things, but I’m curious. You had this idea come to you, and you started doing it. Was there ever any time maybe at the beginning or even in the middle when you were doing it and you were like, “Maybe twenty is fine”? Did you ever have any doubts about the project?

No, I didn’t. The silliness and the ridiculousness kept me going. They motivated me. Those are attributes that I’m very attracted to, engaged by, and driven by. I was wrapping it in something relevant to me and motivating for me. This was years ago. You will remember this. This was back in the days when Facebook was fun. Do you remember those years?

I’ll have to dig, but yeah. I think there’s a whiff of a glimpse somewhere in there.

I own a marketing agency. We put up a little website, and I’m a writer by birth. I was writing blog posts about each of the drinks in each of these relationships and each of these visits. I would have a drink, I would write a blog post, I would post it to Facebook, and all my friends would see it. People would comment on it, and people would say, “I want to be one of your drinks.” There was this self-propelling energy around the project.

It never became a slog, but if I had decided to do something different, if I had decided to do 40 workouts or 40 hikes or 40 something else that wasn’t relevant to me or wasn’t natural for me, I can see where your question would be more relevant. Was it hard to complete? Sometimes when we undertake these big projects, they are hard to complete, but this one was so much fun for me that it was an easy slide to the end.

I can imagine that quite the opposite may have happened. I’m guessing that there were times when you almost forgot about the goal because it sounds like the process was fun. You were doing the writing around it, which is a form of creativity that you love. You were sharing it with friends when you could still do that. You were getting fun conversations and fun feedback. If anybody is listening to my podcast, they’re going to know what I’m going to mention, but I love my jiu-jitsu practice.

A lot of times, when you start maybe a year in, you start to think, “I’m going to get my next stripe, and I’m going to get my belt. My goal is to get to this black belt or beyond, or whatever you think you can get.” I feel like, “Let me test this out, then you’re like, “Here’s the goal. I’m going to set myself a goal.” As you get into the practice, it gets fun, it’s easy, and you can stay consistent, then you almost forget about the goal. I would love to get my black belt someday if anybody asks, but also I love going every day. I love the practice of doing it. As you did with these drinks, it sounds like they were fun.

They were. For me, there wasn’t a major goal to achieve other than doing the 40 drinks. That bar is pretty low, especially since I didn’t put a time limit on it. I could still be working on it. The transition or the transformation that came about was something that I was surprised by, and something that I learned about later because I went looking into what happened to me and what was going on.

Transformation

What did you notice? When you started to notice this, tell us a little bit, what did you start to notice if there even was one, and how did you determine what it was?

I started this story by telling you that I had been dumped by yet another terrible boyfriend six months before my 40th birthday. The project started a month before my 40th birthday and my entire 40th year. In April of that year, I met a guy the old-fashioned way. We met at a bar.

It sounds like you’re going to bars a lot.

I was. I pretty quickly realized that he was something special, and we started dating. By the end of the project, when I turned 41, I knew that he was the one. He was it. I also knew that I had become the person that he would be attracted to. If he had met me 2, 3, or 4 years earlier, I’m sure we would have dated for 3 or 6 months or something, and he would have been like, “Enough, You’re a little crazy.” Over the course of that year, I was settling into myself.

I wasn’t so motivated and driven even to be out in the world doing things all the time, all the work events, all the social events, all the friend events. It was almost a compulsion to be driven by all of these external stimulus. By the end of that year, I had become much more grounded in myself. That is one of the things that I learned. A major characteristic of this transformation that most people go through is that we go from looking at and looking to external markers to become focused on our own internal experience, our own authority, our own thoughts and feelings versus doing the things where we should or are supposed to, or things that are bound and determined to lead us to the life we want. All those external things start to fall away a little bit during this transition.

You said something before about this is the world that I inhabit, this world of personal growth, of transitions and transformation. There are tons you can do with deep focus and intention. I’m about to actually leave for about a week to eight days and completely go off-grid to do this workshop called the Hoffman process, which some people may have heard of. I’m going in and we’re going to be immersed in this stuff. Also, these transformations can happen in our regular lives if we’re paying attention.

Yes, and if we allow them.

Mindset For Self-Reflection And Growth

That’s a great insight. I could go have 40 drinks with friends and get something completely different or nothing at all. For those tuning in, what is the mindset that you would encourage people to approach? Maybe it’s a practice they already have. How would you suggest they look at things to mine that gold of what we call self-reflection or growth?

One of the things that happens to us in this period of time is that we start to hear our internal voice a little bit more. For so long, we are on the path of should. We’ve been dating for two years. We should get engaged. We’ve been engaged a year and a half, we should get married. We’re going to have a baby, we should buy a house. We have a baby, we have an extra bedroom, let’s have another baby, and then you’re 35 on the side of some soccer field.

Having an extra bedroom is the worst reason to have another kid. Keep going.

I don’t have any of my own, so I’m making stuff up. The point is you should yourself into a life without listening to what it is you want, or actively closing down what you want because you think that the should path is going to lead you to the place of happiness, health, security, safety, and fulfillment. What most people wake up to, at some point in their late 30s or early 40s is that they’re not fulfilled. They’re not happy. They want something different.

Tuning into that inner voice, to that intuition, to the gut instinct, and following its guidance, that’s the thing that can help you start to make a change in your life. It’s going to tell you scary things, leave your safe job, leave your eight-year marriage. It could tell you scary things. Sometimes we should ourselves into lives that don’t fit us.

Sometimes we ‘should’ ourselves into lives that don’t fit us.

My coach likes to say, “Don’t should all over yourself.”

Stop should-ing yourself.

I wonder if, on a tactical level too, because there are lots of ways of approaching whether you want to call it designing your life or personal transformation. There are lots of creative approaches, and I do a lot of work around creative practices for that. Simple conversation is a creative practice. I wonder if the process of also writing about it, you were getting these reflections, and then you were reflecting on the reflections, and you were doing so publicly, it sounds like as well.

I wonder if that process also helped you start to see a pattern. I have a pretty good memory. There are folks in my family who do not. I wonder if that process of almost documenting, almost like journaling is what you were doing in a way. Journaling through the process allowed you to see some of the patterns that became so self-evident later.

It’s interesting that you point that out. That was not what did it for me. It’s so funny. I came out of the womb as a writer. I remember in fourth grade, somebody handed an essay back to me and said, “Good essay. Who taught you how to use a comma?” I looked at her and said, “What’s a comma?” I had used it right. Writing comes naturally to me. I see words and I see letters in my head. When I was writing about these visits, I was writing about here’s who this person is, here’s who they were to me, here’s when I knew them, here’s where we decided to go, here’s maybe what we talked about. For me, the writing piece was very surface.

Also, one of the things that was a huge challenge for me, and continues to be, is that I was not naturally introspective. I didn’t go digging around in my own guts looking for things, which is why having these conversations with people and having them be right in front of me, saying things to me that I had to hear. For me, it was a slow burn to take that piece of information and let it marinate, and come to terms with it over time. For me, it was everything together creating the process and then learning that it was more universal than I thought.

At 36, I had a job that was perfect and fabulous. I thought I was going to be there for twenty years. Within a year and a half, they were marching me to the front door because things had gone south and sideways. The job was falling apart. I was having weird stuff with friends. I was starting my own business, which was a weird, funky, and bumpy thing. Finishing all my bad luck with men and making changes in how I wanted to approach things. It was a culmination of a lot of things coming together into the stew that helped me make that transformation in my life.

I think the key ingredient that I’m pulling out of this is that time that you had. I don’t know where this came from. There’s a popular saying that my coach loves to say, “Slow is the fastest way.” A lot of people in my world, and probably in your world too, want the thing now. I told you before, I’m waiting for a package from Amazon. I can have it now. I can have it tomorrow. I can have it in an hour.

I also have kids who want everything now. My daughter last night going to bed was like, “My bed is so uncomfortable. Can we get a new bed?” I was like, “We can probably get a new bed.” She’s like, “Where is it?” I’m like, “It’s 9:00. First of all, even if any of the bed stores are open, we’re not going now.” Lots of us aren’t as dramatic as a nine-year-old, but we also live with that expectation without even necessarily knowing it.

When we approach our midlife, and this thing starts going on with our brain, where suddenly we start to see new connected ideas, things we want to do, we can see when we know what 30 years looks like. We’re like, “Let’s work on that.” I see a lot of people wanting to have it happen now. People I’ve seen anyway. I’m hearing this story, which is why I’m bringing it up. It’s the people who can slow down. “I’m not going to do fifteen worksheets this week, I’m going to do one. We’ll talk about it. We’ll simmer through it. We’ll see what else we can develop from it, and come back to it.”

I met Stephen King, who I grew up reading, in Harvard Square, speaking of Boston, maybe in his book On Writing. He talks about how he writes. He writes this garbage, vomits, trash draft, whatever, and he’s like, “I write everything in some insanely small amount of time, and then I put it away for 3 or 6 months, then I come back to it,”

You come back to these ideas and you give yourself that time. If he sat down and was like, “I need to finish this, I need to figure it out now,” it would probably be fine. He’s Stephen King. He’s like, “When I come back, it’s like I’m looking at this problem from an outside perspective.” You are getting all these outside perspectives. There’s so much here about how we get to the best draft of our own story.

It does. I love it.

Midlife Advice

We’re at 30 minutes, but I have one more question. I usually tell people it’s 25 minutes, but this has been so much fun. If somebody was tuning in who was approaching midlife, or approaching this question of midlife and getting the sense that they wanted to change, or they don’t necessarily know what it is, do you have a piece of advice or a word of encouragement? What would you suggest, maybe a mindset or something? What would you say to someone like that?

Midlife is an interesting time of life. Everybody qualifies for midlife differently. For me, I’m looking at this period of mid to late 30s or early to mid 40s. I think what has happened by the time we get to that period of life is that we have twenty years of experience being an adult, twenty years of experience working, living, thriving, falling down, or whatever. This ties into what I said before. The thing is starting to trust your own experience, starting to trust your own opinion and your own authority. You are now the authority of your life.

All the things that your dad, uncle, teachers, bosses, and mentors told you or all the shoulds, you can put those away now because you know what the outcome is of following the shoulds. That’s what got you here. If you’re looking to shift in your life, you have to tune into your own knowing, your own experience, your own voice, and that gut instinct. That’s one of the major keys. It’s to start trusting yourself.

Start trusting yourself.

I love that. Trust your intuition. What you said, “You are the authority of your life.” That’s landing for me as a fellow midlifer. I have also a couple of handfuls after 40. This has been so much fun. I’m looking forward to joining you again on your podcast. For those who are just tuning in and don’t read webpages, where can people find you, find out more about what you do, or your project, or this project?

You can find me everywhere at Forty Drinks. The website is FortyDrinks.com. I’m FortyDrinks on Instagram and Facebook, All those places, and the podcast is everywhere that you would listen to a podcast. It’s called Forty Drinks, The Podcast About Turning 40.

Go check it out. It’s a great podcast. If you liked this episode, please go over to her podcast and sign up, like, subscribe, or whatever people are doing now. Do all the things. Leave a comment. Thank you so much for coming. This was fun. I’m so glad to have you here. I’m looking forward to talking again.

Thanks, Marc. I am too.

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She stuck the landing there, didn’t she? “You are your own authority in your life.” That stood out to me, especially as someone who is midlife. It applies more broadly. When we remember that we are the authority in our lives, we can make our own decisions, we can ask for help, and we can get support in the ways that we need, our lives get better. I’ve seen it hundreds of times with lots of different kinds of people. I hope you got something out of this show too. If you did, please do all the things, like, share, subscribe, and tell your friends about this show. If you can think of one person who would get something out of a listen, please send it to them. We appreciate it. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links

• www.FortyDrinks.com
• www.Instagram.com/fortydrinks
• Atomic Habits
• On Writing
• Forty Drinks, The Podcast About Turning 40

About Stephanie Mclaughlin

Stephanie is a heart-centered marketing agency owner. She is also the founder of the Forty Drinks Podcast. On the podcast, Stephanie has conversations with guests about transformation and reinvention around the milestone birthday. Stephanie lives in Manchester, NH, with her husband Patrick and a rambunctious black cat named Quinn. Professionally, she’s confident and optimistic. Personally, she’s sassy and a little ridiculous.