About

I’m just your average woman, born with standard-issue equipment brain and body, who finally had a chance to look up and around and realized she was suddenly 50 years old, an empty-nester, with a life, finances, and several keystone relationships that had all been sequentially upended after having “done everything right” for decades.

There was a biting awareness that a larger number of years were behind me, rather than in front of me, and that so many of the significant pieces of my life weren’t fitting quite the way I’d anticipated.  I felt like a failure, small and dis-empowered, washed up, unneeded, unwanted, unnecessary, worthless, invisible, irrelevant.  Midlife is often experienced as a crisis for a lot of reasons!!

I really wanted to completely revamp my life, to have it built around what I wanted, and what deeply mattered to me with the time that I had left.  I wanted to push myself outside of my comfort zone and to play… hard!  I ached to live the kind of life I had dreamed about ever since I had had a taste of it when we lived in Oregon over 20 years ago, the life that was set on the back-burner while I played responsible grown-up.

I wanted to recreate my life, so I could LIVE, really live passionately, sucking every last drop of juice out of this precious life, while there was still time.  I wanted to live according to my lights and passions, to be the fullest version of myself, without limits on who I could now become, how far I could go.

I REALLY wanted to be able to swing off of trees, bomb down slopes, jump off of things – really live, deeply, richly, with confidence in my own capabilities as I moved through the world.

I felt I needed to figure this out so I wouldn’t have to experience the massive regret for having wasted the remainder of this precious life by sleepwalking through my “second act.”

But I was struggling with implementation – I knew how hard it was and how long it takes to get good at new things, new ways of being.  I knew from past experience that, while there is a ton of information out there, there were also very few really practical approaches to integrating that information into a new way of showing up in the world.  On top of that, the fears kept piling up in the wake of my previous life – afraid of feeling stupid (“what’s with the old lady trying to snowboard??”), afraid of more failure and disappointment, fear for my physical well-being (I wasn’t 35, or bulletproof, anymore!!).

But, luckily for me, that’s when I had one of those knock-you-on-your-ass type epiphanies…

I heard myself saying to my favorite, but as-of-yet directionless, nephew that I’d give anything to be an 18 year old, single guy, if I were him – I remember quoting my favorite Bob Segar song line to him, “I could go east, I could go west, it was all up me to decide.” I envisioned what it would be like to be in his position – to seemingly have any and all paths open to me in the same way I felt he had…

Something kept eating at me for days after that conversation. Then…  ”

WTF Renee?!??!?”

What in the sweet name of blipity-blip does some random chronological number and/or a Y-chromosome have to do WITH ANYTHING????”

“I can embrace my inner-dudeness, or anything else I want, whenever I choose to – I don’t have to sit around dreaming, or living my life vicariously through someone else’s life just because I’ve limited my ideas for what is possible!!”

This prompted me to start looking for solutions to my fears.

What I discovered was I didn’t have to have any special aptitudes to start reshaping my life into one of my own design. What I most needed was a methodical approach to build out my capacity, an approach that had comfortable progression and safety baked right into its special recipe.

I realized, (here comes the major epiphany), that CONFIDENCE COMES FROM COMPETENCE, and that COMPETENCE CAN BE BUILT METHODICALLY, EFFICIENTLY, SAFELY!!

So, my goal for me, and for you, is to give you the tools to do just that, to live your one and only life full-on!!