Quality Coffee Podcast

We went looking for new topics and found out we've already been answering your questions all along. In Part 2, Tonia and Vanessa take on the second set of questions from real Canadian women aged 35 to 50, and this week gets personal. We talk about estrangement from a parent or an adult child (with a little wisdom from Gabor Maté), what a boundary really is and isn't, how to stop repeating...

Why does no one talk about perimenopause? That’s the #1 question Canadian women aged 35 to 55 are typing into Google, and we have a better question: why aren’t we talking to each other? This week, Tonia and Vanessa work through the first few questions midlife women are searching at midnight, and nothing is off limits. Perimenopause rage. Feeling “crazy” before your period in your 40s. Low libido,...

What if, as kids, asking for help was never really about the socks or the homework? What if we just wanted connection? This week on Quality Coffee Podcast, Tonia and Vanessa start with their inner children and end up somewhere much bigger. We talk about being grilled with “well, what have you done so far?”, growing up as the kid who had no one to lean on, and why so many midlife women default to “...

Sometimes a book enters your life and it just needs to be talked about for an hour with your sister! The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is one such book. The idea of living out different lives to discover what the outcomes would have been can be both triggering and thrilling... but there is a price to pay for these subsequent lives the main character must face in each scenario that costs something...

There are two kinds of people in the world. Action takers who get the job done and over think later, maybe. And over thinkers who take too long to make a decision and sometimes never pull the trigger. And they become best friends. Grab your coffee and let's chat!

Rest... how we love thee. Let us count the ways! All of those books we have collected over our lifetime and didn't find the time to read. All of the flowers and plants we've wanted to nurture in our garden but haven't. All of the wines we haven't sipped but have longed to try. All of the journaling we haven't done. All of the rest. What does that feel like in midlife compared t...

It becomes evident in Midlife how much of ourselves women have given away or put aside to accommodate so many others.. We long for a lot more balance, or perhaps even a pendulum swing in our Midlife Era, we long to be wanted. Appreciated. Cared for. Considered. Adored. We recognize around that 40-year mark that we have a yearning to return back to ourselves. We also begin to really allow space to...

There is never a dull moment on The Interview episodes of Quality Coffee Podcast with Tonia and Vanessa. The same midlife women talking about taboo topics with a twist every ten episodes when we ask each other questions even we don't know about each other. We had a lot of fun on this show. Count how many times Vanessa giggles! Grab your coffee and let's chat.

Rather than a discussion about how to be spiritual, we dive into a conversation about lived experiences and how they've shaped (mostly) Tonia's life. In the beginning Vanessa shares the difference between religion and spirituality where she says: " Religion is structured, shared, tradition based and spirituality is personal, open-ended, and experience based." Tonia shared anecdot...

Do you ever wonder if we are mistaken about eras of our lives because we simply have never taken the time to reclaim them? Midlife was packaged up with a pretty bow and handed to us filled with disclaimers and warning labels about the treacherous ways women left men enduring them. Motorcyles and long road trips on them was their prescribed antidote for when women went absolutely insane. Turns out,...

We are in an interesting time when our parents are aging which has some of us facing difficult questions and decisions. Tonia, having been very ill for a long time, offers a unique perspective on how a sick family member can impact a home long after the fact. This episode also exposes the hardships and differences between the Millennial and Boomer generations and how expectations and demands play...

Tonia and Vanessa deep dive into all of the ways we felt unprepared for the experiences young women go through that impact us still to this day. A lot of our parents were too uncomfortable to talk to us and also encouraged us to be too uncomfortable to talk to anyone else as well. How many of us were told these things are private or not to talk to anyone about our worries or problems. When it come...

Once we hit our 40-something era we knew we couldn't agree to sitting in comfort anymore but now in all areas of our lives. You know how you work so hard in all of these areas like career, parenting, your marriage... but maybe you let this or that slide? It's almost impossible to do once you hit midlife because it's right there. In your face. Staring at you. Like, are you gonna do some...

What Tonia and Vanessa have reeky discovered in Midlife so far is that there is plenty of un-learning to do on our journey for inner peace. Whose values are these anyway and how did they get here? Have you been asking yourself the same thing lately? Why were our family systems based on fear, "because I said so" and conditions? Do they have to actually run in this way or can we shift and...

Every episode takes an interesting turn as we dive into vulnerable taboo topics. Tonia & Vanessa discuss angles of guilt we have experienced from perspectives maybe we hadn't considered before. Having these conversations openly with our women friends has uncovered truths and perspectives that are unlocking epiphanies. What is guilt? Where does it start? How do we recognize it? Is it even o...

This episode of Quality Coffee Podcast with Tonia & Vanessa ebbs and flows between highly emotional grief, humour, sisterhood, and how we are actively working on a list of things that help us when we are in crisis or are feeling overwhelmed. Also, if you have not watched up to the end of season 2 of Paradise and want to then do not listen to this episode because there are spoilers. midlife cla...

A lot of the conversations Tonia & Vanessa have on the Quality Coffee Podcast unravel patterns built because of how we were raised. In Hot & Unbothered, we dive into protection and how our parent’s version was more of sheltering us than anything. We didn’t feel prepared and confident entering our adult lives and too much was left for us to discover without guidance or information. We had t...

To celebrate 50 episodes we listened back to some of our earliest episodes. It feels incredible to already be celebrating such milestones together. We are two midlife elder millennial sisters-in-law who are best friends and business partners navigating all of life together. Tonia is married to Vanessa's brother and the two spend all of their spare time talking about generational healing, plann...

When it comes to taking care of ourselves in our midlife era as Elder Millennials, reaching into the fridge for a balanced, healthy, already prepped meal is a kind of self-love that is next level. There’s only so long where we will ignore the symptoms we feel from eating the foods we know aren’t great for us. The unfortunate thing, which has been true for both Tonia & Vanessa, is that food int...

Tonia & Vanessa packed a lot of goodies into episode 48 of the Quality Coffee Podcast including gems like the spoon theory and how others offer us their spoons in compassionate ways when they have enough to share, helpful and insightful tools from the great Brené Brown amongst some anecdotal stories from our own lives.  We break down the realizations we come to in our midlife era as Elder Mill...

Following the theme of made up constructs, family systems come with all kinds of labels and expectations unique to you. Simply because you grew up in your family does not limit you to their previously held beliefs if they are incongruent with your life path. Your life is demanding you to live it completely so when one construct feels out of alignment, it’s up to you to be brave enough to take the...

What felt super uncomfortable also ended up being a very natural and interesting conversation. The whole point of Quality Coffee Podcast is to start taboo conversations so our community can feel more comfortable existing as we do in unison with the world around us as it exists. We love life, we love each other and we love you. It's why we are here and with a full, open and vulnerable heart we...

One of the most important themes in this episode was so many of us Elder Millennials gave up our authenticity for approval and acceptance. Think about the first time you were conditioned to have this belief? When you learned to walk and we cheered for you and you learned that was how you can seek and earn approval. In this episode Vanessa talks about how she was always taught to live for approval...

We women have a tendency to make to do lists and forget to add ourselves to it. Have you ever noticed your to-do list consists of work and kids and errands ... but none of it includes read one chapter of your book or call your sister to tell her your funny story from this morning. In our midlife we are working on slowing down if our autoimmune diseases haven't beaten us to the punch. We need s...

Having a podcast is a little bit like having a public online journal available to anyone to read through. Of course we knew that getting started but what we didn't realize was we'd have a way to witnessing scale our growth as humans week by week. Sometimes we edit episodes and are already different people than the two elder millennials who recorded it. Like anything, starting a new project...