The Distracted Dreamer

Send Carlene a text or voicemail I almost pushed to hit 100 episodes just so the number would sound better. And then I remembered what I tell you all the time: you don't keep going on something that isn't serving you anymore. So here's episode 97, the last one.  Listen to hear the honest story of what this podcast actually taught me about my own dream. 3 Key Take Aways: 1️⃣ Sometime...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Have you ever left a conversation and felt like you just needed to go decompress? And then another time, you talk to someone for twenty minutes and walk away lit up, ready to take on your whole day? Same amount of time. Completely different experience. This week I'm digging into something I've started calling Relationship ROI — the return you actually get...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail If you grew up hearing "you'll figure it out," "life isn't fair," or "just do your best," this episode is for you, my friend. Those words made us strong — but a lot of us also learned to say "I'm fine" when we weren't, and just keep going anyway.  Today I'm sharing three lessons that could genuinely c...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail BECOME THE MOM THEY WANT TO CALL You love your adult kids. But somewhere along the way the conversations got harder. You second-guess everything before you say it. You replay it after. Some days you say too much and can feel them pull back. Other days you say nothing at all, because nothing feels safe enough. And the quiet between you keeps growing in a way that sc...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail We don't talk about this enough: the years after raising kids, after caregiving, after decades of showing up for everyone else — those years are not the winding down. They are not the epilogue. They are a new chapter opening, and it might just be the most powerful one of your life. You are not who you were in your thirties. You are wiser. You have less patienc...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail We're more than halfway through the year, and if I'm honest, I'm not as far along on my dreams as I thought I'd be by now. Maybe you're right there with me. So today, we're going back to the basics I talked about almost two years ago. What consistency really is. How getting impatient with results sets you back, and what to do instead....

Send Carlene a text or voicemail What if the biggest predictor of your health at 80 has nothing to do with cholesterol or exercise, and everything to do with how satisfied you are with your relationships at the age of 50? Real human connection, not chatting in the comments on social media, isn't just nice to have. It's tied to how long and how well we live and I’m sharing the research wi...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Have you been more focused on the effort of your dream lately than the fun of it? Are you constantly replaying that soundtrack of, "This is hard, like, so much harder than I thought," or, "This is taking so much longer than I thought it would"? If you find yourself wondering how you ever thought your dream was going to be fun, you are in the rig...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail You know that great year you had with your spouse? The one where things finally felt easy? Somewhere in there, date night disappeared, conversations turned into scheduling logistics, and that loving feeling faded. You got comfortable. Things were fine, even good. And somewhere along the way you stopped doing the things that created it. That's complacency. And...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Have you ever stayed in a dream, a job, a project, or even a relationship just because of how much you've already invested? In today's episode, we're talking about the sunk cost fallacy — the sneaky trap that convinces you that walking away means everything you already gave was wasted. It wasn't. And staying just to prove it wasn't wasted m...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Have you ever ended a week knowing your dream didn't move — and you're not even sure why? You weren't scrolling all day. You weren't being careless. You were handling real things for real people. And somehow the thing that matters most to you got buried under all of it. That's what Rory Vaden calls priority dilution, and it's the one t...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail I sat down to record this week thinking, honestly, that I had nothing left to say.   And instead of pretending otherwise, I decided to talk about that. About what it feels like when a dream goes quiet, and how you tell the difference between a hard week and a finished chapter.   We've all picked up the idea that if something is truly your dream, it should feel...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail I don't even know what I want anymore." If you've said that to yourself lately, it's likely your nervous system is maxed-out.  In this episode, I'm getting into what happens when your body has spent years managing everyone, holding the family together, running the mental and emotional load nobody sees. Because when that happens there's...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail One foot in a season that's closing. One foot in a future you don't quite recognize yet. Midlife has a way of reshuffling everything at once, which is why so many of us hit a wall. We're trying to move forward while standing in two seasons at once. The roles that used to tell us who we were have shifted. The life that used to fit doesn't quite f...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail American culture has taught us that being busy, slammed, having so much going on makes us important.  Like a packed calendar is proof that we matter. But what if everything we've been measuring our worth by is working against us? Against our health, our clarity, our joy, and yes, even our productivity? If you've been running on fumes and calling it produc...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail You've said it before. Maybe you're saying it right now. "I'm a perfectionist." But what if that's not the whole truth? In this episode, I'm coming back to perfectionism — because just when we think we've put that monster to sleep, it sneaks back in. It disguises itself as excellence and hard work and caring oh so much. And t...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Have you ever stood in the middle of the widest open season of your life — and somehow felt more lost than free? That's where so many of us are in midlife. The kids are grown. The schedule has space. And instead of feeling excited, we're staring at a 12-page menu of possibilities with no idea what to order. In this episode, I'm sharing the one questi...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail What if the reason you're stuck has nothing to do with motivation — and everything to do with how your brain is actually designed to create? In this episode, we're getting into the neuroscience of creativity — and why your best ideas almost never show up when you're trying to find them. I'm talking about the Default Mode Network, the incubation...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Nobody warned us that one of the hardest parts of motherhood would come after the kids leave home. We were handed books about teenagers. We had pediatrician conversations about every developmental stage imaginable. But parenting adult children? Crickets. So we carry it — quietly, alone, with nowhere to put any of it. In this episode, I'm going there. Because w...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail You're texting. You're in the group chat. You're sending the memes and the voice notes and the "thinking of you" messages. So why do you still feel so lonely? That's exactly what listener Theresa asked — and honestly, it stopped me cold. Because she's not wrong. We have more ways to reach people than ever before, and yet so many o...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Is it ADHD? Is it menopause? Is it just… you? If you're a woman in midlife who's suddenly drowning in ideas, can't finish the thing you just started, and keeps getting pulled down rabbit holes you didn't plan to go down — first of all, you are not alone. And second — there's actually a really good explanation for what's happening. This...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Someone out there is selling you a 10-step morning routine. Wake up at 5am. Meditate. Journal. Cold plunge. Green smoothie. Visualize your goals. Maybe you've tried it. Maybe it lasted four days. Here's the truth: you don't need a perfect morning. You need a morning that belongs to you. In this episode I'm calling out the 10-step morning routine...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Somewhere between the kids leaving, the career shifting, and the pandemic teaching us that staying home was actually fine — a lot of us stopped reaching out. One un-sent text at a time. Tomorrow we tell ourselves. Tomorrow, I'll reach out. Just like our dreams, we file it away under "someday" — and someday is not a day on the calendar. In this episod...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail Have you ever made a promise to yourself that you'd do something important… and then avoided it? The truth is, every time we say something matters and don't act on it, we erode our confidence. Do it long enough and you stop trusting yourself. What if the reason you can't seem to follow through has nothing to do with discipline, motivation, or willpow...

Send Carlene a text or voicemail We don't talk about this enough: the years after raising kids, after caregiving, after decades of showing up for everyone else — those years are not the winding down. They are not the epilogue. They are a new chapter opening, and it might just be the most powerful one of your life. You are not who you were in your thirties. You are wiser. You have less patienc...