SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Midlife Women Entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Lynette Turner. And today we're going to talk about having dreams and not having big dreams. So if you've ever hit a birthday with a zero on it and thought, wait, hold on a second, is this really it? This episode is for you. Because sometimes the problem isn't that you abandon a dream, it's that you never had a big dream in the first place. You've just been taking care of everyone else, and somewhere along the way, you lost track of what you want. Today, my guest, Debbie Weiss, is here to talk about what happens when your creative side feels dormant, how tiny sprinkles can help you rebuild momentum, and why small commitments can change everything, even in the middle of grief and responsibility. Debbie, welcome to the show. I'm going to hand the floor over to you, give yourself a bit of an introduction, and then we'll take it from there.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Thank you so much for having me, Lynette. So, my name is Debbie Weiss, and as you alluded to, I have been spending most of my life taking care of everyone else. I have been a family caregiver to my father since I was 17. And then my oldest son, who was diagnosed on the autism spectrum, and then added another, a lot of other diagnoses after that. And then most recently, my husband, who suffered from a variety of both physical and mental illnesses, but eventually was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And I took care of him intensely for the last six months of his life. And I found myself at 50, feeling burnt out, overwhelmed, exhausted, and just thinking to myself, well, I guess this is it. This is my life, and there's not much I can do about it. And I had basically given up until I decided that I did not want to be that person who got to the end of their lives looking back with regret over what they hadn't done or tried. The only issue was I had no idea what I wanted to do or what I wanted to try.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Okay. And so what you just said there makes me think about how many other women out there have either A, gone through what you're going through or went through, and B, even if they didn't go through that, still have that feeling of, so this is it. Wow, this is it. I've literally gone through my entire life looking after everybody else, going to work, doing everything that I need to do. And then one day I wake up and everything has changed. And there's this feeling of loneliness, what's next? That just sort of floods in your body. So when that moment kind of hit you, what what was your what like what was your body and what were your thoughts? Like what were what scared you the most?

SPEAKER_01 2:51

It really did scare me the most. The time was flying by. And even though I would never have changed the fact that I spent so much of my life taking care of other people, I did that while not taking care of myself. And that was the mistake. I had lost myself. I did not prioritize, forget prioritize. I was not, my own self-care was not even on my list. And I just felt like I had to try something. You know, from the outside looking in, I would say that people might have thought, oh, she has it all. You know, I I have a small insurance agency, I live in a nice neighborhood, nice house, you know, the husband, the two kids, the dog, you know, the whole so-called American dream. But you can have that on the outside, but we all know that on the inside, everything can feel very different. And I just thought, I've got to try. I looked around and I thought, other people are doing it. Other people are living their quote unquote best lives. Well, if they can do it, why not me? Why not? What makes them different? So I've got to give it a try. I just don't didn't know where to even start.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Okay, and that is so true because we often do look at others, especially with social media. I mean, other people's lives are so accessible to us now, whereas even 20 years ago they weren't. And so maybe that's why we did stay stuck a little bit back then, because we didn't have any kind of muse or anything to look at. We only had like our books or our movies, you know, and everything seemed sort of fictional to me anyway. And so when you said that all of that happened and, you know, you've lost your husband, you've got all of this stuff going on, and then you said to yourself, well, I'm gonna make it happen. What was that first step that you took to say, okay, well, I am gonna figure this out? Because I don't, I think that's where people get stuck the most is how do I even try to even think about what do I want when for my entire life I've never had that big dream kind of thing?

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah. Well, first let me go back and say that it this is my fault in my time frame. My husband was still alive when I turned 50. He passed away when I was 59, which was three years ago. So, although he was, like I said earlier, he did have health issues, just I didn't know that he had cancer at that point. And I don't think that I realized that he was also really suffering from anxiety and depression. Maybe it wasn't as evident at all when I turned 50. But anyhow, so I turned 50, my friends took me away for the weekend to celebrate. And on that trip, we had an evening where we were sitting around, and one of my friends said, okay, let's go around the table and share our hopes and dreams. And when it got to me, I was like stuck. Hopes and dreams. I had hopes and dreams for my kids, but not for myself. And that really stuck with me. So when I got back, I thought, okay, I gotta do something. What's it gonna be? And you know how you break down your life into different pie pieces, like your career, finances, relationships, those kinds of things. In my case, I didn't really need to look far. I knew out of all those segments, the thing that I had to work on first was my health. Because I have struggled with my weight since the moment that I was born. And at 50, I found myself at one of the highest weights that I had ever been, and I needed to lose over a hundred pounds. And when we're younger, it's all about vanity, right? The clothes, the way we look. Not that that ever goes away because I still feel that way today. But when you're younger, you don't think about the health implic implications. And, you know, at 50, you gotta start thinking about that and my kids and hopefully my future grandchildren I want to be around for. So I decided this is the first area of my life that I have to tackle. I have lost and gained weight a million times prior, but I gotta do something differently. So I decided to go back to Weight Watchers because for me that was what had worked most often. But I said to myself, I can't do what I used to do, which is go to Weight Watchers and say, okay, I've got to lose 25 pounds in three months or by the summer or by my birthday. And if I only lost, only, quote unquote, 18 pounds in three months, I was a failure because I didn't reach my goal. And then I would say, see, you just showed your, you know, you just proved it, you can't do it. You're weak, you're, you know, saying all these terrible things to myself. So I said, this time, forget all that, forget the numbers. All I want is to show up every week to attend a meeting. That's it. I don't care what I eat, I don't care if I exercise, drink water, all the other things. This is my one and only goal. And that's what I did. And every week I'd be really proud of myself because I achieved my goal. Probably three months later, I had gained five pounds, but I had gone to the meetings every week and I felt really good about it. And then I added, you know, another little piece. I'll pay attention to what I eat 50% of the time. And I just kept building. Three and a half years later, I had dropped about 90 pounds, and that was almost 10 years ago now. I still have not yet reached my original goal of 100 pounds. But the bigger point is that this is the first time in my entire life that I've maintained a weight loss. Yeah, exactly. And what happened on that journey is that I realized Weight Watchers really hadn't changed. You know, they make little tweaks and stuff. What changed was the way I approached it and my mindset. And once I realized that, then I started applying those principles to other areas of my life.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

So And that's such a good way of putting it where you kind of looked at your life wheel, if you will, you know, your health, your finances, your friendships, like what actually, maybe that is the question. How did you break it up in a way that you started to look at your life and then decided that weight was going to be the first thing for you?

SPEAKER_01 9:24

I can only speak for myself. I don't know if everyone else has this. For me, the it was so glaringly obvious. You know, there was a couple of areas in my life that I knew needed the most attention. So for me, I didn't really have to search very far or very hard. But, you know, a lot of what is recommended, and I've done this myself since then, is taking a look at all of those areas, and you can just Google and see what they are and make your own up, you know, nothing's written in stone, and rate it one to 10 and see either one to ten how much work you need or one to ten how happy you are in that particular area of your life. And then it becomes apparent.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Yeah. And I think too, like for me, when you start making a change, how you made the change, like through, you know, just showing up, just not trying to put too much pressure on a goal or an outcome. It was just, you know what, I'm gonna do this for me. And I don't think that a lot of midlife women, I don't even think a lot of women think that way, where I'm gonna just do it for me. And then I think that takes the pressure off. And I think that's what what happened to you. And therefore, you're like, oh, hey, I have I have shown up to all these meetings. And then, oh, hey, I have started to drop a few pounds. And holy cow, I've actually maintained this weight loss. And so what does that do for you? Like, what do you think that did for you from a confidence and a mindset perspective?

SPEAKER_01 10:53

Oh my goodness. I mean, it gave me so much confidence, especially because this is the one area of my life where I felt like I had never had success. Never. Again, I'd lost the weight, but then it came right back. So to me, that's not a success. And it proved to me that I was looking in the wrong places and I was approaching it incorrectly. I was approaching it all with discipline and denial, you know, certain foods and those kinds of things. And I felt that the answer was in the suffering.

SPEAKER_00 11:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

And it wasn't.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Yeah, no, so good, you know. I just feel like for me, like that, once you have that sort of self-trust in yourself, because I think that's probably what it was, is you unlocked this self-trust that, okay, actually, holy cow, I can do this. And therefore, now I'm feeling a little lighter on my feet, you know, and I'm feeling a little more inclined to like start to figure out other areas of my life. And it doesn't have to be a three-year thing. Like you could just decide, you know, over the three years is kind of when you you unlock that self-trust. But you also started to take some other actions throughout, to where you finally have landed, which I'm gonna cut to the punchline. You, you know, you've got books, you've got products and and and uh side gigs that are turning into real gigs, and you're you're you know, you've grown so much. And so take us back to the the next step that you did after the unlocking the self-trust, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

So the next glaringly obvious area of my life that needed help was money. And so, okay, you can either make more money or spend less money. Of course, I looked at both areas and I actually started trying to make money by selling little things on Facebook Marketplace. And like 10 years ago, it wasn't as popular as it is today. So it was kind of new to me, the whole idea. And I wasn't shipping anything, it was just like the local thing, leave it on your doorstep and someone leaves you some money. And I'm telling you, whether I sold something worth$40 or I sold something worth$4, it was a thrill. It turned into a game, like I'm running around my house, opening up all the cabinets, looking. What else can I sell? What else can I sell? I had stuff laid out on my dining room table. It was so exciting and empowering because I was taking control. Because up until that point, I was not taking control. I was sticking my head in the sand when it came to money and just hoping and praying, right? Like I'm gonna win the lottery. I wasn't even bothering a lottery ticket. So I was I was trying to ignore the problem because it was too overwhelming and too painful. And just by selling little trinkets in my house felt empowering because I was doing something about it. That eventually led to me saying, okay, what else can I do to make money? And at the time, I was taking some like health supplements that I really felt were helping me. So they were a network marketing company. Okay, I'll start to sell these supplements. And at the same time, I had been listening to this uh podcast on Mindset, and the woman was talking about a mastermind and her coach, and he was on the show, and he was launching this mastermind for people earning zero to$500,000. And I thought, okay, perfect. That's me. I'm at zero. I'll join this mastermind and they'll show me how to sell this product. Great. Except I had no idea what I was signing up for. I didn't know at that point what a mastermind was. I didn't know who was gonna be there. And I turned on my computer screen and there were 150 people, probably 147 of them were 20 years younger than I was. And I stepped into this online world that I never knew existed. Yeah. And as people introduced themselves and they were saying, I'm a divorce coach, I'm a money coach, I'm a confidence coach, I'm like, what? I never heard of this. What qualifies these people and what do they do? And how do they find their clients? It was all brand new to me. And I realized, well, you know what? Forget these supplements. They're doing something based on their lived experience, helping other people from their lived experience. That's what I want to do. And so we didn't talk about my backstory, but I've been a family caregiver to my father, my son, and my husband. So for over 40 years, this is where my life is experiences. This is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna become a coach for caregivers to help them learn to prioritize their self-care. And that's when I really started my entrepreneurial, down the rabbit hole journey that have had so many twists and turns over the last, I don't even know now, four or five years. I can't even believe it. And looking back, I I just can't believe where I am now and how far I've come and how much I've learned and um just kind of by being open to it.

SPEAKER_00 16:25

Exactly. But you you don't do that now though, right? The the caregiving and the coaching. So take us fast forward a little bit to the journey now that you're on. You wrote your first book, which is a memoir with no advice actually. And so let's talk a little bit about that and then how you've kind of gone into some other areas.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Sure. So I'll just won't go into it, but I realize that coaching probably was not for me for a variety of reasons, mostly where I was at that point in my own caregiving journey. And through kind of stepping through my comfort zone, I discovered from a volunteer opportunity, nothing with business, I liked speaking, public speaking, which was after, you know, spiders and snakes, my next biggest fear. And I was shocked when I learned this. So I thought, okay, I want to share my message, which is that regardless of how old you are, whatever your circumstances are, that you have the power to change your life. And I didn't discover it until after 50. So I figured there must be other women out there just like I was. But how was I going to get to these people? And so it kept coming back. You have to write a book, you have to write a book. I'm like, that's great, but I have no idea how to write a book. I'd have no interest in writing a book. I heard of a thing called a ghostwriter. How much does that cost? You know, anyhow, I wound up discovering this woman who helped first-time authors get their stories out there. She was launching a small group coaching program. I joined at the same time that my husband got diagnosed with cancer. And I'm it's another whole story unto itself that I'll skip. But I go through the process, I write the book. I am amazed that I actually did it because it was not easy. I have to say, I discovered something about myself that I actually like writing, and that writing is actually cathartic and therapeutic and all the things. And when I shared my story and people reacted and related and felt emotion from it, there was absolutely no bigger payoff. But as you said, I made the choice that there is no advice in that book. It's just my story. Take from it what you will. After that, people kept saying, Well, this is great. It's so inspirational, but what did you do? What did you do to start changing your life? I was like, oh, for goodness sake, I can't believe I'm gonna have to try this again and write another book when I didn't even think I could write one. And so my second book is called The Sprinkle Effect, which is comprised of 15 to 17, what I call sprinkles. And if you're not watching on YouTube, because it's right back there, it's your rainbow sprinkles, because rainbow sprinkles make me happy. In rainbow sprinkles, obviously, it's made up of all different colors. And so my sprinkles are all different colors, and they're sprinkles of things like belief, courage, discipline, resilience, joy, connection, those types of things. And so I write this book. It's still kind of part memoir because I share stories that relate to that sprinkle. But then at the end of each chapter, there are exercises for you to complete. So I also created a workbook that goes along with it to have one place to do all the exercises. Because what I've found through my own personal development journey is I read a book and I'm so inspired by it. It's so great. I'm gonna do all these things in the book. And then I put the book on the shelf and I never pick it up again because who's really reading a book a second time? You know, unless you forgot you read it the first time or years later. I realized that those exercises are there for a reason. And I was that person who would skip it. Like, I'll come back to it, but I never did. It's not until you do those exercises because each of us has our own story and our own journey. And all these books and everything, they're just ideas and guidelines. It's not until you really start looking at yourself, which is what the exercises allow you to do, that you really start to change.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:46

And so that's where that came from.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

That's great. And Debbie, so for the woman listening who feels a bit flack of, you know, thinking, oh wow, this star this woman's story is my story. What could she, like, what are sort of three starter sprinkles she can try this week that don't really require a full overhaul? Like what could she do?

SPEAKER_01 21:06

Well, maybe it does require an overhaul, but I'll tell you the one sprinkle that really changed me was a sprinkle of responsibility. Because I did not realize for my entire life I was blaming everyone and everything else for the outcome of my life. My father had a stroke. I was 17. My son is diagnosed on the spectrum, and then with mental illness, you know, I'm overweight. You know, I could go on. We all have stuff, right? So everyone has their own things that you they can list. But those things happened to me. And so I felt I had no choice. But what I learned is that that's not true. Now, look, I didn't make my father have a stroke or my son have issues. Of course I didn't. But how I respond to events in my life, people in my life, that's up to me. And I was giving that control away. And in my book, I talk about this formula that I learned from the success principles by Jack Canfield. E plus R equals O, which means E is an event, R is our response, and O is the outcome. So the event plus how you respond to it equals the outcome. I thought it was just E equals O. The event happens, it's the event is lousy, the outcome is lousy. But that's not necessarily the case. So if you don't like the outcome, if possible, you go back and you change your response. And if you can't change your response to that past event, you take that knowledge and you apply it moving forward. And so that doesn't mean that I still don't get caught up sometimes in that victim mindset. Why me? I can't believe how unlucky I am. Yep. But then I stop myself. And when you do that, at first it could feel disempowering because, oh my goodness, looking back, look how I reacted. And you know, you can get down in yourself. But really, that realization is empowering because now you know that no matter what happens, and stuff is gonna happen. It happens to all of us. That's life, right? There's bad things gonna happen, unfortunately. You always still have control of your life. Yeah and that's empowering.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Yeah, that's really good. Debbie, where are you going next? You know, often, you know, you talked a little bit about coaching previously. You, you know, you talk about the speaker circuit, you wrote the books. Where, like, what what does life look like for you down the road? Like taking what you have already and building it out?

SPEAKER_01 23:46

It's a good question. Think, like I've already discovered, I could have a wonderful idea, and then something throws a monkey wrench into it. So I've created other products around the Sprinkle Effect book. I have a card deck, I have a blank journal called the, you know, a sprinkle of thoughts, and I have a morning journal, which is actually my favorite thing, coming out any day. It's just getting printed. I'm also now writing a children's book based on the concepts in the sprinkle effect. Simultaneously, I am also, you know, the whole speaking business is another, you know, each each area new area of business that you go into, you discover it's a whole other world, right? It was like, oh, I wrote the book. Oh my goodness, everybody's just gonna come and buy the book. No, nope, they don't. You know, your sales are gonna be zero unless you do something about it. So there's that whole marketing piece. It's the same thing with the speaking, it's cold outreach. It's like it all, I think it looks easy when you see people who've already mastered all of these things. It can get to be a little bit overwhelming. Same thing in the product world. Well, who the heck knows that my journal or my card deck is somewhere? So it it gets a little, I found for myself I might be a little spread too thin because uh I can't think of the analogy, whatever the heck it is. You know, can't be uh whatever. Yeah, basically I'm the master of none, right? Because I'm doing too many things at once. Now I want to write a children's book. Now I want to sell my products and I want to sell my books and I want to book speaking gigs. It's like, whoa, what do I? And I have I still work full-time. So it's a it's a bit overwhelming, but I can't imagine it any other way. I'll tell you. Every time I look at it, I think to myself, how how did I even want to say live before? I wasn't living. This feels like living. This is exciting. Every day getting up and doing something different, not knowing who I'm gonna talk to, right? Being able to talk to you on the other side of North America. I mean, it just blows my mind. It blows my mind, and I can't believe how different my life looks than it did just really, just four years ago, even.

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Yeah, and you know that I think that that's a good way of sort of leaving this podcast because I think we often can lose hope and especially late stage lose hope, you know. And I think that's where you were at, late 50s. Um, like what I have no dreams, I have nothing. And you are a true testament is to when you don't have a dream, you can build one by sprinkling in these tiny acts of self-trust. That, you know, just writing a book can be something that opens up different opportunities for yourself, even if it never gets published, you know. I I think that I've had a few guests on lately on the podcast that have talked about that, of getting the book done. It's not gonna be your money maker, it's not, but it's going to be a way for you to look at your life and assess your life so that they can say those things that you're saying. It's sprinkling in these little things, taking little tiny steps, track it, and identify what really is gonna work for you. And I think you've been a great guest to prove that. And I'm looking forward to, you know, seeing what else comes out for you. So, Debbie, where do people find you? What do you what's what's the takeaway that you want people to have from today?

SPEAKER_01 27:34

So people can find me on my website, and from there you can find everything else about me. And that's Debbie RWis.com. And, you know, I think I'll leave with a quote that I think we all know, but I didn't truly understand until several years ago, which is from Glinda the Good Witch from The Wizard of Oz, who said, You've always had the power, my dear. You just had to learn it for yourself. And I took that at face value, like Dorothy, you just had to click your heels three times and say there's no place like home in the beginning of the movie, and you would have been there. But now I look at it so differently because I had no idea that I had the power to control or change my life. But we all have it, and all we have to do is realize it and use it.

SPEAKER_00 28:23

Yeah, no, that's that's great. Thank you, Debbie. And your last name is spelled W E I S S, correct?

SPEAKER_01 28:30

Yes. Yes. And thank you so much for having me, Lynette. This has been wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

My pleasure.