School of Midlife

Why so many high-achieving women feel lonely in full lives…and what it takes to actually let people in. Laurie is in France, doing something she's wanted to do for years. A language immersion school, then a retreat in Paris. It's her best life, no question. And last week, she sent a text to a couple of friends back home: When I'm back, I want to go to dinner. Because I really miss m...

Why collecting information feels like progress (and isn't), and what France is teaching Laurie about the only way to really know. Laurie Reynoldson brought three books with her to France. She's barely opened them. And that small, slightly guilty stack beside her bed got her thinking about the much bigger stack back home: a whole shelf of personal development books in her Boise office, co...

That's great for you...but I could never. What's really underneath that line, and why the answer is almost always permission. Laurie is recording from Bordeaux this week, a couple weeks into a two-month stretch in France that a lot of people have had a lot of feelings about. After the now-infamous Must Be Nice episode, she kept noticing a quieter cousin of that reaction. Not the backhand...

Rigidity or serendipity. Guardedness or openness. What Human Design taught Laurie about the week when things didn't go quite as planned. Your mother-in-law dies on Monday. You're supposed to get on a plane to France for nearly two months on Wednesday. A younger Laurie would have read that as a sign. Selfish to go. Time's not right. Clearly the universe is telling you to stay where y...

Why "must be nice" says more about the person saying it than it does about you — and what it actually takes to build the life other people call lucky. Someone found out Laurie is going to France and said, "Must be nice." A week later, a different woman heard the exact same news and said, "Oh my God, that sounds amazing." Same information. Two totally different respons...

One-to-one coaching, BEST LIFE Retreats, and the BEST LIFE Mastermind — what each one actually is, who it's for, and the honest story of why one of them just got rescheduled. It's episode five in the Back to School of Midlife series, and Laurie is calling this one registration day. You've sat through a month of lectures — the coaching philosophy, the BEST LIFE framework, Learn/Earn/...

Curiosity, Clarity, Courage, Confidence — the four phases every high-achieving woman moves through on her way back to herself, and why they only work in that order. This is episode four in the Back to School of Midlife series, and it's one that Laurie purposely saved. Not because it's the least important — because it's one of the most important, and if she'd led with it, you wo...

25 years to learn. 40 years to earn. And if you're lucky — 13 years to yearn. Once you see that math, you can't unsee it. Session three of the Back to School (of Midlife) series. This week, Laurie lays out the three seasons of life — Learn, Earn, Yearn — on a simple timeline from zero to 80, using the average U.S. female life expectancy of 78.8 years as the anchor. The math is blunt: 25...

Most of us would fire our contractor building our dream home if she tried to make the plans conform to "specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound." So why do we do that to our own lives? Session two of the Back to School (of Midlife) series. If last week was orientation, this is the core curriculum — the actual framework behind everything Laurie coaches: BEST LIFE™. She...

The problem with high-performance coaching for high-achieving women? They're already high performers. That's exactly the problem. This episode kicks off something new: a multi-week series Laurie's calling Back to School (of Midlife) — not the pencils-and-Trapper-Keeper kind of back to school, the adult kind. Every week for the next several weeks, she's walking through the frame...

Why retirement, whether it's the literal kind or one you haven't named yet, doesn't automatically hand you the fulfillment you've been waiting for. There's something in the water lately. Laurie keeps having the same conversation, over and over, with women in their mid-to-late 50s who are planning to retire in 2027. And she loves it for them, genuinely. But there's a q...

T he "anti-influencer" who's been sharing midlife hacks in a weekly newsletter called Babble. Brooke Amidei didn't set out to build a business. She was on a hike with her dog, post-COVID, trying to figure out what to do with the next chapter of her life, when a podcast question stopped her mid-step: "What would you do if you were Oprah?" Her answer was simple...she wa...

The difference between real choice, and expectations, validation and approval masquerading as choice. This episode wasn't planned. Laurie Reynoldson was out on a hike when something clicked — an idea she'd never quite heard articulated before, about the nature of the choices we think we've been making. She scrapped the scheduled guest episode and recorded this one instead. And it mi...

What if everything you thought you knew about menopause was either wrong, incomplete, or decades behind the science? Tammy Hadfield has been a women's health nurse practitioner for over 35 years — 25 of those as a hormone specialist. She was in the field in 2001 when the Women's Health Initiative scared an entire generation of women away from hormone therapy. Instead of backing down, she...

What if the real midlife crisis isn't running out of time — it's living like you have more time than you actually do? In this episode, Laurie gets personal. She shares the story of her dad, who spent decades saying "someday when I retire" — only to die five months after his retirement at 66, having collected exactly five social security checks after a 46-year career. That story...

Hillary Dater came to a BEST LIFE Retreat a few years ago -- not because she was in crisis, but because her work brought her there. She had what looked like everything: a dream job in the nonprofit sector, family, community, a life that rang all the bells. And still, something wasn't quite right. She just hadn't stopped long enough to notice. What followed the retreat was a series of gen...

15 weekends of summer. How are you spending them? Laurie counted them. There are 15 summer weekends this year — and the moment she did that, something shifted. Not because it changed anything. Because finite time does something very particular to high-achieving women: it turns enjoyment into management. This episode started as a thought on a walk and became something much bigger: an honest look at...

Guest: Allison Dunn, Executive Business Coach, Founder of Deliberate Directions, Host of the Deliberate Leaders Podcast, Author of Think First: Stop Being the Bottleneck. Start Building Thinkers. Episode summary Allison Dunn has spent thirty years coaching entrepreneurs and executives — over a thousand of them — and has just written her first book. But this conversation is about so much more than...

Laurie opens this episode mid-story -- crossing a street, spotting someone she admires, and doing what she's done her whole life: looking away. What follows is one of the most personal episodes she's recorded. It's the story of her relationship with Ellen Yin — media company founder, host of the Cubicle to CEO podcast, keynote speaker, and one of the most gracious humans Laurie has...

What would you do differently if you actually trusted yourself? Laurie is recording from the mountains this week, which means no studio microphone, slightly different audio, and zero apology about it. Some things you just roll with. What she did bring: a piece of paper with four transformations that become possible when a woman finally stops deferring to everyone else and starts trusting herself....

Time to do something just for you. When is the last time you made a decision, chose a direction, or said "yes" to something that was entirely, completely just for you? Not for your family, not for your career advancement, and not because it fulfilled a decades-old obligation—but purely for yourself?  In this powerful episode, host Laurie Reynoldson challenges high-achieving women to step...

The guilt that so many midlife women feel during graduation season It is officially graduation season! Across the country, high-achieving women are hosting big open houses, packing up dorm rooms, and celebrating incredible milestones. But beneath the festive surface and the proud smiles, many mothers are quietly navigating a profound, silent struggle: the bittersweet realization that their kids ar...

Have you ever noticed how we almost work twice as hard to get ready to leave for vacation? We pack our schedules with an endless to-do list, run ourselves ragged, and then carry the office right along with us in our pockets. In this rejuvenating episode, Laurie Reynoldson shares her reflections after returning from a completely offline, computer-closed "ass-sitting vacation" on a tropica...

What happens when a successful business owner makes a bold decision to change, but the community she serves isn't ready to let go? In this raw and deeply cathartic conversation, Laurie Reynoldson welcomes back Annie Tevelin , founder of Skin Owl , Daybreak Colour , and Gem Jolie . Annie recently announced the closure of her brick-and-mortar Skin Owl store in Boise, Idaho—a decision made from...

The coaching industry has failed high-achieving women. It's time to change that. Have you ever felt like you’re living a double life? Like the "badass" CEO or high-performer at the office has to shape-shift into a completely different person the moment she pulls into her garage? In this breakthrough episode, Laurie Reynoldson reveals why the coaching industry has done high-achieving...