starting over

Tools To Thrive Today | anxiety | Community | Confidence Building | Emotional Resilience | fear | Life Transitions | navigating Transitions | Personal Growth | Personal Growth & Challenges | self doubt

Choosing What Fills the Space. How to Reconnect With Friends
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

The text was only a few lines long and it had an exclamation point in it, which in hindsight was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I sent it on a Friday to the women I used to have dinner with once a month, asking if we could finally get together again, and the moment…

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Tools To Thrive Today | Beginnings | career & reinvention | Confidence Building | Emotional Resilience | fear | Personal Growth | Personal Growth & Challenges | self doubt

Making Friends After 50 When Life Stopped Handing Them to You
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

About twenty years ago, around the time I went back to school, a woman I had just met invited me to a local museum park. She had free tickets, which she mentioned almost apologetically, as though the invitation needed an excuse, and we spent a long afternoon wandering the grounds and talking the way you…

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Tools To Thrive Today | Beginnings | Community | Emotional Resilience

Who Gets a Seat at Your Table Now? Living With a Smaller Social Circle
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

My mother had a way of handing you a seat before you even realized you were looking for one, and I’ve been thinking about that gift a great deal lately, because so many of us are living with a smaller social circle than we ever pictured and nobody told us how we’re supposed to feel…

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Emotional Resilience | holidays & hard times | Life Transitions | navigating Transitions | Personal Growth

The Overstuffed Life: Why You Can Feel Full and Empty at the Same Time.
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

A full house has a sound all its own, and so does the echo that settles in right after everyone leaves. You can feel full and empty at the same time, hollow in the very spot that was buzzing a day ago, and if that’s where you are right now, you’re not ungrateful and you…

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Tools To Thrive Today | career & reinvention | financial bravery

It’s Not Too Late to Build Something for Yourself
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

Guest post by Pam Allen A few weeks ago I put a question out to the Hive: who’s got a story about starting a business after 50? Pam Allen raised her hand before I finished typing. Pam spent years waitressing and managing restaurants before she ever touched Canva. She’s since become a virtual assistant, a…

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Tools To Thrive Today | Life Transitions | Personal Growth | Personal Growth & Challenges

What Summer Looks Like When You’re Starting Over
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

This weekend my phone filled up with fireworks, lake houses, and matching family t-shirts. And I know that somewhere out there, another woman scrolled through all of it and thought, that used to be my life. Nobody warns you about summer when you’re starting over. Winter is easy to hide in. Everybody’s inside anyway. But…

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Personal Growth & Challenges | A Better Me | Beginnings | Confidence Building | Emotional Resilience | Life Transitions | navigating Transitions | Personal Growth | self-Development | Tools To Thrive Today | transformation

Your Permission Slip Is Right Here — And It’s Free
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

The moment you finally decide you’re allowed to want something — you’d think that would feel amazing. It doesn’t. Not at first. If you’ve ever grabbed a permission slip — yours, someone else’s, a printable from the internet — and then done absolutely nothing with it, you are in excellent company. And you’re in exactly…

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Tools To Thrive Today

Permission to Start Over: 3 Truths Nobody Writes Until It’s Too Late
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

She is standing in front of her closet. Not because she has nothing to wear. The closet is full. It has been full for years, a whole life’s worth of choices hanging there in whatever system she set up in a different decade. She is standing there because nothing in it feels quite like her….

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Tools To Thrive Today | Emotional Resilience | Life Transitions

When You’re Wondering If You Should Keep Going
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

There was a moment not long ago when I sat down to work on this and just stopped, wondering if I should keep going. Closed the laptop. Sat there. And genuinely asked myself: does anyone even care about this? And maybe more honestly — do I have anything left to give it? If you have…

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Tools To Thrive Today | anxiety | Confidence Building | Emotional Resilience | Life Transitions | Personal Growth | Personal Growth & Challenges | self-Development | transformation

Why Saying “I Don’t Know” Is a Sign of Strength
ByMary Ellen Kundrat

I had no idea that saying I don’t know is a sign of strength. There was a woman I used to know who always had an answer. Every question that floated across a table, she caught it before it landed. Smooth. Certain. Never a flicker of hesitation. I used to watch her and think: that…

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