Asking for a Friend - Health, Fitness & Personal Growth Tips for Women in Midlife

Ep.157 Stop Shrinking, Start Leading: The Midlife Wellness Wake-Up Call

• Michele Henning Folan • Episode 157

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Feeling like you’re doing everything right—but still not feeling like yourself?

This episode of Asking for a Friend is sponsored by Better Help - https://betterhelp.com/askingforafriend

In this powerful episode of Asking for a Friend, I’m joined by Courtney Townley—health coach, creator of the Grace & Grit podcast, and a fierce advocate for midlife women ready to ditch diet culture and reclaim their power.

Courtney breaks down why the outdated “eat less, move more” advice is failing women over 40—and what to do instead. With a background as a professional dancer turned wellness expert, she shares how true health in midlife has less to do with restriction and more to do with self-leadership, resilience, and rewriting the rules that were never made with us in mind.

We dive into:
 💥 Why your hormones and stress response are shifting (and how to adapt)
 💥 What self-leadership really means—and how it changes everything
 💥 How to stop outsourcing your health and start leading from within

This isn’t another plan to follow. It’s a mindset shift—and it’s exactly what you’ve been craving.

🎧 Hit play to hear the conversation that just might change how you think about health—for good.

You can find Courtney Townley at https://graceandgrit.com/

Look for her book launching in November 2025! The Consistency Code: A Midlife Woman's Guide to Deep Health and Happiness

This episode of Asking for a Friend is sponsored by Better Help. Get 10% off your first month of therapy at https://betterhelp.com/askingforafriend

_________________________________________
Are you ready to reclaim your midlife body and health? I went through my own personal journey through menopause, the struggle with midsection weight gain, and feeling run-down. Faster Way, a transformative six-week group program, set me on the path to sustainable change. I'd love to work with you! Let me help you reach your health and fitness goals.
https://www.fasterwaycoach.com/?aid=MicheleFolan

Have questions about Faster Way? Please email me at:
mfolanfasterway@gmail.com

After trying countless products that overpromised and underdelivered, RIMAN skincare finally gave me real, visible results—restoring my glow, firmness, and confidence in my skin at 61. RIMAN Korea's #1 Skincare Line - https://michelefolan.riman.com

*Transcripts are done with AI and may not be perfectly accurate.

**This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services, including the giving of medical advice. The content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions.

Michele Folan:

This episode of Asking for a Friend is sponsored by BetterHelp. Let's be honest midlife is a season of transition, whether it's changes in your body, your relationships, your career or just the weight of trying to hold it all together. Sometimes you need more than a good walk or event session with a friend. You need a safe space and a trained professional to help you process it all, and that's where therapy can be a game changer. Betterhelp makes getting started simple. Just fill out a brief questionnaire and get matched with a therapist in as little as 48 hours. You can message your therapist anytime and schedule sessions that fit your lifestyle no commuting, no awkward waiting rooms and if you don't click with your first match, you can switch therapists to find the right fit. With a 4.5 star rating on Trustpilot and thousands of positive reviews, betterhelp is a convenient, trusted option for those ready to take a step toward better mental health. Visit betterhelp. com forward slash askingforafriend for a 10% discount off your first month and take the first step today. Therapy isn't just for crisis moments. It's for anyone who wants to feel better, think clearer and navigate life with more confidence Health, wellness, fitness and everything in between. We're removing the taboo from what really matters in midlife.

Michele Folan:

I'm your host, Michelle Folan, and this is Asking for a Friend. Welcome to the show. One thing that I see that holds women back in their fitness journeys are the damaging remnants of diet culture, and I want to address the most common mistakes midlife women are making when it comes to their health and how we can shift from chasing quick fixes to cultivating sustainable, soul aligned well-being. Today's guest is someone I've admired for a long time Courtney Townley. She's a health and self-leadership coach, the voice behind the Grace and Grit podcast and a true powerhouse when it comes to helping women reclaim their vitality and rewrite the narrative of what it means to be healthy in this chapter of life. Courtney brings over two decades of experience in the wellness space, but what sets her apart is how she blends physical health with emotional resilience and mindset work. In this episode, we talk about her own career evolution, her health journey and the bold mission she's on to help women rise in their second act, not shrink. Courtney Townley, welcome to Asking for a Friend.

Courtney Townley:

Michelle, I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Michele Folan:

Well, I want to start first with you kind of laying the groundwork of who you are, where you're from all that good stuff.

Courtney Townley:

Okay, yeah, so I come from a small town. I actually people will hear this and think, oh, that's you know, I know that place. That's not that small. I grew up in Jackson Hole, wyoming. But the thing I want to preface is that it was Jackson Hole before. It was Jackson Hole right, it was really small town, wyoming. It wasn't the really ritzy, glorious, fancy place it is today. It's still glorious. But yeah, I grew up.

Courtney Townley:

My stepfather was a veterinarian, my mom was a nurse and I wanted to do nothing with my time but dance. I literally came out of the womb. Dancing, that's all I had a heart for and I took it really far. I went to college on a dance scholarship. I was in a dance company while I was in college and the beautiful thing about that was number one. I was doing what I loved. But I also got to be exposed. I was exposed to so much conditioning and what I mean like physical conditioning, like how do we actually optimize the performance of the human body? And as graduation was approaching from college, I was starting to really understand that probably my career with the company I was with was not going to put food on the table. I wasn't making a lot of money. Right, it wasn't a lucrative profession, probably more so now.

Courtney Townley:

I think dancers are being treated better today than they were 30 years ago. But I did realize that something had to give and I probably needed to go find other work. So I kept dancing but I ultimately decided. Somebody actually threw this idea out to me. I was doing Pilates classes as a part of my dance training and one of my friends said hey, you know, there's a school up in Toronto, toronto Canada I was living in Michigan at the time and you can get certified in a year and I think you'd be great at it. And I had been teaching fitness classes all through college. So I was like, oh, that makes sense and I could make money teaching fitness, like make a career out of it.

Michele Folan:

I have to ask you this is something that I mean. Of course, I've heard of Pilates, but 30 years ago.

Courtney Townley:

Oh yes. So, Michele, I have this amazing knack for falling into things and talking about things long before they're mainstream. I don't know why. It's like been my whole life, but yes, I was introduced to Pilates long before it was like the buzzword that it is today. But what was cool about that is I ended up going to get certified in this year-long program and I think it was like four months into my training.

Courtney Townley:

The owner of the company, which was Moira Stott is one of the biggest companies out there. She came up to me after class and she said hey, Courtney, we want you to come work for us. Like we'd love you to start certifying trainers for us. And I was like, hang on a second, I'm not even certified yet. Like I have, you know, eight months left in my training. She said I understand that, but let's just like continue your training with the idea that you'll stay here in Canada and you will work for us at least for a few years after your program's done.

Courtney Townley:

So, considering everything that went into that, I was going to have to get a work visa, all the things. They took care of all that for me. And the cool thing is they started sending me all over North America to certify trainers and I had to go to all kinds of conferences where I got exposed to all these different methodologies and supplements and things that people were teaching to help optimize human performance. And I just lit up because I'm like, oh my gosh, pilates is like a little pebble in an ocean, right, there's just so much. And so I ended up the dollar at the time, the Canadian dollar was not such a strong thing and I finally realized, you know, I'm probably going to make a better living if I go back to the States. And anyway, in a roundabout way, I ended up deciding to finally go get some education around nutrition, because I was realizing that so many of my students they weren't really coming to learn Pilates, they were learning. They were coming because they wanted to feel better, yeah Right, and I wasn't equipped with all the things they needed to be doing outside of the gym, in the studio, right. So I wanted to get more information.

Courtney Townley:

So I got my personal training certificate. I started doing a lot more strength training with clients. I went through nutrition programs and started to realize that it was really a whole enchilada. Wellness was a whole enchilada. It was the sleep and it was the stress management and it was the hydration and all the things, and that was well and good.

Courtney Townley:

And I then fell into this world of fat loss. Because fat loss is such a common topic among women, like it's the, it's the thing that they seem to want to talk about the most. It was really lucrative. I made a great living. I helped a lot of people lose an awful lot of weight and then I realized this is awesome until it's not like people will lose a lot of weight and then they're regaining it. What the heck Right? So that kind of had, you know.

Courtney Townley:

Know, I always say that my wellness journey has, in the professional and personal sense, has been like the proverbial onion. I just kept peeling back layers and I still am to this very day. But that was a layer for me of realizing. Hang on a second. I know the mechanics. I can give people this understanding of nutrition and exercise to strip fat off the human body. But what am I missing here? Because people can't seem to maintain it as an ongoing thing, and so that really got me curious about the psychology of wellness, and that opened up a whole can of worms, because psychology is hugely connected to emotions and health just became this more and more expansive thing.

Michele Folan:

So let me ask you a question how old were you at this point? Because it sounds like you've been doing this for years, right, yeah, so where were you in your age at this point?

Courtney Townley:

When I started moving into the mindset piece. Yeah, I would say it wasn't really until I was in my late 30s so I'm almost 50. And it was probably when I was around, I'm guessing, around 37, 38 years old, where I was really starting to get that. I had had my son at 35. And I will tell you that was an eye-opening moment because I had a really traumatic birth and motherhood slapped me upside the head, like had a really traumatic birth, and motherhood slapped me upside the head Like I did not waltz into motherhood, I face planted into motherhood. And all of my loved ones and my family and friends and my clients they came to see me like literally right after giving birth and all anybody wanted to talk about was how good my body looked Like. Oh, my God, you lost your baby weight so fast. And in my head I don't know if I can cuss on this show but I was like what the fuck? I am struggling on every level mentally, emotionally, physically and all you want to talk about is how I look. Something is really messed up and I had always been working with midlife women because midlife women had a little bit more time and interest.

Courtney Townley:

They were struggling more physically than a lot of my younger counterparts. A lot of them had a little bit more income to invest in their wellness. So the midlife population was always my center. So working with that population and also having my own epiphany that, oh my God, we have this so wrong. This isn't about fixing our body, it's about fixing our lives. Yeah, right, and so that was really the impetus that pushed me into getting more education and understanding around the mindset piece and our self-image and just approaching health so incredibly differently.

Michele Folan:

And what I'm hearing you say is that this mindset shift is really about redefining what health is. Absolutely For women in this stage of life.

Courtney Townley:

Absolutely Right. It's one of the first questions I ask my clients. I say to them what does health mean to you? And most women have never been asked that question, right? They think, and they'll say to me something like well, it means weight loss, right, or it means that I'm going to have better cardiovascular health. I'm like okay, but let's go deeper. What is health really to you, right?

Michele Folan:

And so I poke on that question a lot and there's this whole philosophy of reclaiming our power in midlife, yeah Right, do you find that that is really the baseline, like we need to first reclaim our power in order for us to start to do the other healing and to get where we want to?

Courtney Townley:

be yes, and I think both of those questions. What is health and understanding your power at midlife? They go hand in hand and I'll say this. So to me, health at this stage of my career and my personal life is really that return to wholeness. It's reclaiming your whole self, not just your physiology, but who you want to be in the world day to day. And power is the thing that will make that possible.

Courtney Townley:

And power is an interesting word because a lot of women hear that word and they're like, because they think of, like power over. They think of someone dominating, they think of you know false power, manipulation, coercion, those kinds of things. True power at its core is your ability to influence your thoughts, your mind, your behavior in order to get to where you want to go. That's what power is. Power is also I love this way of thinking about it it's a vitality barometer. It's the impetus for life. How much life do you feel there is in your life right now? And if you don't feel like there's much, we need to have the power conversation. It's like a battery. I always think of the image of the battery on your phone, like dropping down into the red zone. We need to get it into the green zone and optimize that.

Michele Folan:

Courtney, do you find that there are women that you work with and I'm saying this because I see this very often is some of the first conversations I need to have is to almost give women permission that it's okay to prioritize yourself, it's okay to go on this health journey, because they are so used to being so beholden to everyone else they forgot about themselves. Absolutely.

Courtney Townley:

Absolutely. The attention has been so outward facing that it feels uncomfortable and even wrong. Like women feel guilty about it to turn in, and it's so important, and the thing that I always stress and I'm sure you do too right is that you think you're showing up in these spaces and places in a powerful way, but if you're neglecting yourself in the process of doing that, you're leaving. You're not showing up in the most powerful way, and so it really is not a should like I. It's because women use that language a lot. Right, I should take better care of myself.

Courtney Townley:

No, you must take better care of yourself, and it's not a have to, it's an absolute get to, because it's so much more than a bikini ready body or whatever the image is that we have of health. It really is infusing your being with your most full expression. That's what health allows you to do. It allows you to be most fully expressed in the world, and your expression is never going to exist again. It's here, it's a one-time deal and if you do not use it in this lifetime, it'll never exist again. Like what a bummer to not optimize that I love this.

Michele Folan:

I love it too, I love it so much.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, I love this. Courtney, we're going to take a quick break and we come back. I want to talk about diet culture. Hey friend, may I ask you something? How much longer are you going to put this off If you're over 50 and waking up tired, frustrated with your body and wondering why nothing you've tried is working anymore? You are so not alone. But it doesn't have to be this way. The old rules of more cardio, fewer calories are broken. They don't work in midlife. The Faster Way to Fat Loss does. As your coach, I'll help you build strength, fuel your body with real food and finally feel in control of your health again. No extremes, no guesswork, just a strategy that works for women like us. So really, how long are you going to wait to feel like yourself again? Hit the link in the show notes and let's do this together. Hit the link in the show notes and let's do this together. We are back. You have been a vocal critic of the pitfalls of diet culture, and why do you think it's been particularly harmful to midlife women?

Courtney Townley:

Oh, so many reasons. I mean, let me start here. I think that one of the biggest issues with diet culture is that we are allowing someone else to set the standard for our life. That's always problematic because it's not something I decide. I didn't decide, maybe consciously and for great reason, that I wanted to be smaller, but because it's the pervading message of what I should be out there, that that's what I'm just following. So I think that that's a problem. I'm sort of outsourcing the goals for my life rather than insourcing them. That's always a problem.

Courtney Townley:

The other thing is, if you think about the chemistry of midlife, oh, this is such a like this is a whole podcast in and of itself. Oh, I know, this is meaty, I love it though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basic understanding of midlife chemistry and again, this is really boiling it down to the bare bones is that we are losing the very hormones that help us to manage stress. Okay, so our stress tolerance is declining at a time where we have more stress than we've ever experienced in our life because we're in the throes of our career, we have kids maybe leaving the house, we're having relationship challenges, we have aging parents, we're worried about retirement. I mean, dear Lord, right, the responsibilities that we have are really piled on at midlife, and then estrogen and progesterone are leaving the party, yeah and it's like no. I need you now more than ever, and so I always call midlife the renovation years, because if you are unwilling to renovate how you are living, you will implode, and menopause is very clear about this. We see some women get bulldozed through it very clear about this. We see some women get bulldozed through it and we see some women traveling through it, I don't want to say with no issues, but certainly with less suffering. And a big part of that is going to be how you conduct your life and the decisions you make.

Courtney Townley:

So back to the diet piece, because I want to make this clear this old school model eat less, exercise more in a life that is already contending with lots of stress and losing the very hormones that help us to manage stress. Guess what? Lower calories and more exercises it's even more stress In a body that can handle it. Sometimes it's a good thing. In a body that's already broken down, on the edge of burnout, it's a recipe for disaster.

Courtney Townley:

And you watch women do this. They keep banging their head against the brick wall of diet culture and they're like why isn't anything working? Nothing's working right and it's like yeah, because the whole system is broken. It's not you, it's the ideology behind diet culture that's a problem. And let me just say this before we go on that I really move from the premise that deep health because deep health is really what I am encouraging my clients to find it's not just physical health, it's the mental health, emotional health, the relationship health, it's the whole thing. And in order to pursue that, we really have to get radically honest with ourselves about our total stress load and the strategies that we are using to manage that stress load, because I think a lot of women aren't being realistic with themselves on those two fronts and they're getting themselves into deeper trouble.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, you will spin your wheels. You will continue to spin your wheels if you don't address some of the underlying stuff first. Right, yeah, and you know, I've watched some influencers out there and they talk about things like HRT as being, you know, the panacea. Right, and I'm on HRT and you know I always tell everybody.

Courtney Townley:

It has a place.

Michele Folan:

Sure, yeah, not everybody can use HRT, right, not everybody's a candidate, but we have to learn to manage some of this stuff externally without the use of HRT. So can you talk about that a?

Courtney Townley:

little bit. Yeah, it's interesting. I love that you're bringing this up, because I think that we love this idea that there's one solution Like if I just do this one thing, it's going to solve all these problems, and it's like well, HRT is a support mechanism. It is not the mechanism. The mechanism for deep health is actually taking ownership of your choices and making sure that you're making more decisions that nourish you than deplete you, and if you're not doing that foundational work, HRT is going to have a very difficult time helping to do its job right. It's helping to bolster you, not to say it might not help you slightly, but it's not the only thing that is going to help you in midlife and, like you said, a lot of women aren't candidates. So, while not everyone is a candidate for HRT, everyone is a candidate for taking ownership of their life and ownership of what's working and what isn't, and nobody gets to escape that level of work without severe consequences. Like HRT can't save you from not doing that work. Right.

Courtney Townley:

You all are getting some tough love today, so I just want you I know and I say I really do want to express, because I do tend to be so passionate about it it's all coming from a place of love. I just wish women could all see that there's so much BS that we're being sold and I don't want to say I mean, we are partly to blame because we buy in, and I get why we buy in. We buy in because we're so desperate to feel better that we'll almost try anything to feel better. But anything that's telling you that it's a one thing like you just need this one thing, that's a red flag to me, right?

Courtney Townley:

And anyone who is selling you something that doesn't actually include you learning how to lead your own life in a more power-filled way is also probably selling you snake oil. Because here's the thing we can work with helpers of the world. We can work with therapists and doctors and trainers and nutritionists and all the amazing people, but we're not going to be with those people the rest of our life. So I always say to my clients at some point you have to stop being the follower and become the leader. We have to be leading ourselves outside of those relationships to figure out what works for us and how can I sustain this in the long term, because this person's not always going to be walking next to me, right?

Michele Folan:

You do talk about self-leadership a lot, a lot. That's your thing. So how do you think that approach differs from some traditional health coaching methods?

Courtney Townley:

Well, I think so many health coaching methods are follow my wisdom right, follow these steps, follow this meal plan, follow this supplement protocol. It's follow, follow, follow right and pay me for my wisdom. I always tell my clients look, I will be your coach only until you are ready to take the ball and run with it on your own right. But my whole goal is to get fired, like I hate to. I mean that sounds terrible. But I want a client to be in a space and place where they feel so confident with how they're showing up in their own life that they can say to me hey, courtney, I think we're done here. Like that gives me goosebumps.

Michele Folan:

Yeah.

Courtney Townley:

Yeah, and so that's where self-leadership comes in. No one is going to make that decision unless they feel that they have not the meal plans and the exercise programs. That's not what self-leadership is. Self-leadership is things like self-compassion, self-trust, self-discipline, self-inquiry. Those are the skills that really help us to rise anytime in our life, especially in the second half of our life.

Michele Folan:

You know I had some clients ask me the other day on a group call. They said when did you finally feel like you were successful in your health journey? Yeah, and I said, oh, I'm not. That's the thing. I continue to work on this every single day because this is not my end. There's no end game here. I am looking at 75, 85, hopefully 95. That's my goal. That's why I never stop. So you know, that's what I try to tell my clients is there's no end game here. There's not a number on the scale that is going to tell you whether you're successful or not.

Courtney Townley:

Yeah, it's that health is more of a direction you will travel in as long as there's breath in your lungs, versus a destination. And, man, have we been sold that it's a destination, right, that it's just this place we arrive at and forevermore we just are there and it's like, yeah, that's not true. And the work is always changing because your life is always changing. Self-care doesn't always look the same. What kept me healthy in my 30s is radically different than what's keeping me healthy approaching 50. And if I don't honor that truth and I get really rigid about what self-care is supposed to look like it's supposed to look the same throughout my entire life that becomes a cage, that becomes a huge problem, and I have seen so many women self-combust because of that, thinking that they're supposed to be taking care of themselves in the same way that they did in their 20s. Well, let's be honest. None of us were taking care of ourselves in the 20s. Even if you were doing extreme exercise or whatever you thought was working for you, we weren't taking care of ourselves. But if you continue to chase that past version, you will not only rob yourself of your health at this age, but you also rob yourself of the possibility for what you could be stepping into. So health is? It's multidimensional and it's dynamic, and if we do not honor those two truths, we only focus on the physical and we have rigid protocols that we're always following, it's never going to create a state of deep health, no way.

Courtney Townley:

Yeah, and I'll share this with you too I was a dancer for crying out loud Talk about body image issues. I always never really liked my body. I was very muscular, which meant I didn't get a lot of roles that I thought I should have or that I thought I was just as good as the other girls to get. I had a lot of power. There were a lot of benefits from that muscle, but I fought my muscle my whole life and at my leanest weight and I worked really hard to get there. Honestly, I was probably like 14% 12% body fat. I was very low.

Michele Folan:

Oh.

Courtney Townley:

Lord, and this is embarrassing to say, but it's probably why a lot of clients hired me early in my career. They hired me because of how I looked. Yeah, I was the unhealthiest I'd probably ever been right. And now here I am right. I definitely have higher body fat. I don't even know what my body fat is currently I'm about to get it retested but I know I'm heavier, but I'm also healthier than I've ever been and it's that expansion right. I've expanded my worth, like my sense of worth in myself. I've expanded my self-leadership skills. I've expanded my abilities to manage stress rather than hyper focusing on always shrinking, which is what I was doing for the first half of my life. It was all an exercise in shrinking, getting smaller, and I don't look at it that way anymore. And man do I feel so much better.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, cause you're, you're managing everything from the inside out and it just yeah, you know. You talk a lot about stress and I'm really curious, like what your own stress management strategies are and what do you recommend for clients.

Courtney Townley:

Yeah Well, let me start by saying this, because this is probably one of my most passionate topics just the stress management conversation, because that's what health is. It's all about stress management and we have to approach it from two fronts. In order to find that state of deep health, we have to A remove unnecessary stressors from our life. So think for a minute what unnecessary stressors might be for you. Is it negative, self-narrative? Is it eating foods that stress your body out? Is it going to bed so late that you're only getting like four hours of sleep? Like those are unnecessary stressors. They don't need to be happening and they are costing you a lot.

Courtney Townley:

And that's the part that the fitness industry and the wellness industry tends to hyper-focus on. Is those unnecessary stressors? But there's also this whole side of purposeful stress. What is the stress that we need to lean into on purpose, in order to become more resilient? Have you been in a job that you hate for 30 years and it's robbing you of your health? And maybe the stress you need to lean into is getting back to your resume and starting to pass it out Right? Right Is maybe some purposeful stress that you've never had a healthy relationship with strength training and yet you also understand by everything you're hearing lately that it's probably important to your health moving forward, and so maybe the stress you need to lean into on purpose is actually hiring a trainer or going to a class to start learning more about that. It's removing unnecessary stress and it's leaning into purposeful stress.

Courtney Townley:

So in my own life stress so in my own life, unnecessary stress how I cope with that is I am really good at checking in with myself daily to almost assess where the unnecessary stress was. I'll tell you, this morning I was having anxiety. I think I told you that I have a book coming out this fall and I was having anxiety about some things, and when I checked in with how I was feeling, I was like, okay, this is so unnecessary. The only reason I'm experiencing anxiety right now is because I'm thinking about this in a way that's producing anxiety. I'm the one who's creating it. Right? I will also say I'm pretty close, I think, to having my period, so I think there's an element of that too.

Michele Folan:

Oh, you're still getting those?

Courtney Townley:

Well, yes, I am. I think I'm very close to being done, but I am still getting them. So that helps me. The play. I have a 15-year-old son and he definitely, when I'm throwing the ball with him in the yard or I'm just goofing around with him in the living room, that's a stress management tool for me. I still dance, so I go to dance classes because that's nutrition for me, good for you, yeah. So those are my forms of helping me, certainly not exclusively, but those are a few of them. But then the purposeful stress I need to lean into. I would much rather hide from, I would much rather not do these things. But I also know that when I don't do these things, I don't feel good.

Courtney Townley:

I have what I always call integrity pain. Integrity pain is really that internal friction that we get when we're not showing up in the way that we want to. And I'll use the book as an example. I wanted to write a book and I had 10,000 reasons why I shouldn't. I didn't know anything about book writing. Somebody could write a book better than me. Just go on and on, oh yeah. But when I really got honest with myself, it's something I wanted to do. So that's purposeful stress. And now that I'm nearly at the end of it it's like, oh man, I can look back and I'm so proud of myself. I don't even care what happens with the book. Of course, I care. But even if the book isn't a raging success, I'm so proud of myself for doing it and the skills I had to learn and what I had to practice to get there, like nothing can replace that.

Michele Folan:

It will serve me the rest of my life, whether the book again is successful or not, and that's what I love about doing this podcast is because I get to speak to women like you who are writing books, you know, at 50, or starting new businesses or you know, just stepping out and really doing some cool stuff for others. But you know what I love that and I say this all the time Don't hate me, it's never too late. Never, it's never too late to step into that discomfort. Right, you know, no one said it has to be easy. Right, it's going to be a little uncomfortable to try new things, but do it.

Courtney Townley:

Do it. And, Michele, it's a scientific fact that it's never too late. Because when we look at our cells' ability to regenerate, that happens as long as we're alive, right? So what are we inputting to those cells? And if we change the inputs, our cells behave differently. And if you look at neuroplasticity, right, we know that neuroplasticity happens as long as we have a brain in our skull. So if you want to learn new skills, if you want to lean into new things, you have the capacity to do it. But it takes practice and it takes self-coaching. It takes talking to yourself in a way that actually inspires you to move into the work rather than hide from the work. We're so good at hiding from the work. That's self-leadership. That's self-leadership.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, let's talk about I want to talk about grace and grit. So Courtney has a very successful podcast, grace and grit. So Courtney has a very successful podcast, but I have to say, okay, it's called grace and grit. She's an OG, ladies, she. She came out with this podcast 10 years ago. I'm I'm at three years this week. Yeah, congratulations.

Courtney Townley:

That's no small feat.

Michele Folan:

Thank you, but I'm just cracking up. I was like 10 years You've been doing this. 10 years, 10 years yeah, what made you start a podcast?

Courtney Townley:

I think it was really understanding there was a need to educate my clients, my audience, my consumer. Writing was something that I always enjoyed doing, but I tended to take a really long time to do it because I'd go back and rehash and rehash and putting out blog posts. It just wasn't working for me, and I'm a lifelong teacher. I've been teaching since I was 18 years old, and so a few friends said to me hey, courtney, have you ever thought of starting a podcast? Cause part podcasting was just kind of coming on the scene as a, as a more popular thing, and I didn't know anything about it Nothing. It's kind of like the woman who knows nothing about strength training or nothing about nutrition. But I was interested enough in it that I just took the next step. And the next step was I called someone who did have a podcast and she put me in touch with an audio engineer and other people who could kind of help me get my first episode launched. And then, of course, it just snowballed into its own thing, and what I love about it is it's such a great example of how change happens.

Courtney Townley:

Here we are 10 years later and 400 episodes deep, and if I knew what it took to get here, I never would have started to get here. I never would have started. So I think there is a genius to nature that prevents us from knowing what it's really going to take to lose 100 pounds or to start your own business, or to start a podcast or whatever it is that you want to do. So often I hear women say but I don't know how to do it, you don't need to know, you need to know the next step, and that's it. And it's like breadcrumbs, right. You take the next step and then the next one gets revealed, and the next one gets revealed, and years down the line you look back and you're like, ah, I see how I did that. Now I see it. And had I known I would have run for the high hills.

Michele Folan:

Well, speaking about running for the high hills, then you wrote a book.

Courtney Townley:

And then I wrote a book, because isn't that what? But that's what leaning into purposeful stress does it builds confidence. I never would have written a book had I not done this podcast. Because the podcast showed me number one. It helped me to really consider my own ideology around health, and I've had hundreds of conversations and it took 10 years for me to get to this place where I just feel so strongly that the message needs to be out there in a bigger way. And because I showed myself that I could start a podcast. Why couldn't I write a book? Right, I'm excited for you. Thank you. Yeah, I'm excited too. I'm excited and terrified.

Michele Folan:

I know, but you've done the really hard work of just getting pen to paper right and now it's. Then it becomes the book promotion and all that stuff. But so you said November is your launch date.

Courtney Townley:

It'll be out in November. Yes, Out in November. It's called the Consistency Code A Midlife Woman's Guide to Deep Health and Happiness. I love it. Yeah, yeah, that's wonderful.

Michele Folan:

I'm pretty excited about it. That's great. So what future aspirations do you have in terms of anything else, any other projects on your plate, you know?

Courtney Townley:

it's so funny. A lot of people probably would not assume this about me, but I'm not really that person who has like a five-year plan or a 10-year plan. My life has unfolded so beautifully because I have followed my impulses, because I have trusted my own heart, and it didn't always make sense, in fact I would say largely. It didn't make sense to the people around me, right, my parents were like what, you're going to go to college to dance and then you're going to go to Toronto to do this thing we've never heard of. It made no sense to them, but I trusted myself enough to just have my own back and you know what, if it doesn't work, I'll figure it out. And that trust has led me to the next decision and the next decision. And where that's going to go I have no idea, but I know it's someplace good, because it's never failed me. Yeah.

Michele Folan:

It's never failed me, yeah, yeah. It's like I think that faith that you have in yourself then leads out to those around you and they're like oh well, it looks like she's got this. You know, we're just let her run with it. She's, you know, I think, yeah, I think we do that.

Courtney Townley:

I feel that if it all imploded tomorrow, like if, for whatever reason, like the internet just went amiss, you know it was no longer in existence and my business completely imploded I know I would be okay Because I have a heart for life. It's not just well. Yes, wellness has been a conversation Like it's the only career I've ever known. I've been in it now almost 30 years and I love it. And I also know I would be okay contributing in a lot of other ways. And so I think just that, like not having, like I'm not clinging so tightly that I'm hurting myself.

Courtney Townley:

Sometimes we do that, we do that in relationships, we do it to just a lot of things in our life that we just we cling to it so tightly that it's almost damaging. And that's been a beautiful lesson in midlife that I don't need to cling so tight because I know it's the things that are meant for me will stay and I'm going to be okay because I have those skills. Now I'm not saying that I've mastered all of them, Like it's a work in progress for everybody, but I do trust that at least I have these tools in my tool bag that when things come that are hard or unexpected, I can pull out those tools. Now. Using them is the key right. I can have the tools and never use them, and that's not going to help me at all, but that is that level of self-trust that I wish I could just give every woman on the planet.

Michele Folan:

And you do, because you do coaching, which I think is wonderful, and could you talk a little bit more about your Rumble and Rise membership and actually how you work with clients?

Courtney Townley:

Yeah, so Rumble and Rise. I always laugh when I talk about this, because I did one-to-one coaching for literally almost two decades. That's how I worked with people. It was either one-on-one in a studio, it was one-on-one on a call, it was one-on-one on Zoom, and I was so attached to this belief that, even though I was maxed out, I couldn't take any more clients. There was no way that the work that I did one-to-one would ever translate into a group, into like a community, right. I mean, I was so fiercely attached to that and I finally got to a point I'd been working with a business coach for a long time and she was like Courtney I'm not going to change my tune Like we've been talking about this for years why don't you just run an experiment, right, and teach a group class? So I did. I ran this group program, which is now my book.

Michele Folan:

The Consistency.

Courtney Townley:

Code. It was the first group program I taught which has now become the basis of my book, and I taught it and what I saw right away was I had no idea how normalizing these topics in community with other women would impact them, because they were not just hearing their own stories, they were hearing other women's stories and it helped them to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm not the only one and they could talk and they could share and we could normalize and we could heal together as a group. And then eventually that got to a point where people would go through this four-week course and then what? Like? I just set them out, you know, and there was no additional help.

Courtney Townley:

So I started this community called Rumble and Rise, which is really just skill sets of self-leadership that we practice every month and we do it in a lot of different ways. I teach a masterclass at the start of every month and then we have group coaching calls on these topics. This month is all about emotional wellness, last month was all about boundary setting. So it changes constantly what we're talking about and this is just a community of women who they want to approach health in a different way. They want to learn those self-leadership skills rather than consistently hyper-focusing on weight loss or diet or exercise. And I will say that we have a lot of those conversations because those things are valid. They just aren't the only conversation that needs to be had Correct.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, no, I like that because what you're doing is I think sometimes we put the cart before the horse. Oh yeah, and if we can work on some of that foundation, that the mental piece of this whole thing, and that wellness piece, that internal wellness, then the other stuff gets a little easier. It all starts to yeah, it does, it's so true.

Courtney Townley:

Yeah, I love that. I'll share the story with you of a client of mine that and I have her full permission because I put this in the book but she came to me because she was trying to fix her body and how often is that the case? We're trying to fix our body again, like I said earlier, rather than fixing our lives. And it was very clear that her marriage was not in a good place and she was rumbling in a lot of ways and her husband was really disrespecting her in so many ways. And, long story short, we worked together for a long time.

Courtney Townley:

She also was working with a therapist at the time I want to make that clear and ultimately did decide that respecting herself ultimately meant leaving her marriage because it was not healthy for her to be there. And what's so interesting about it is when she made that decision which was really kind of the root problem to begin with, even though she didn't see it for what it was at the beginning when she ultimately made that decision, her self-care got so much easier because it was really. It became about self-respect. It wasn't about fixing her body anymore. It was about what do I need? What do I really need to be happy and healthy and as she started throwing those nutrients in which it was way more than diet and exercise, everything started to get better and she started to get so much healthier and she was like I cannot believe how differently I approach my self-care now, because my whole approach, my whole belief system around it changed.

Michele Folan:

Yeah.

Courtney Townley:

I wasn't fixing my body to prove something to someone. I was now taking care of myself because I respect myself enough. It was almost in devotion to my self-worth rather than to prove my self-worth. There's a big difference. Proving your worth we do this a lot as women. We try to prove our worth to the outside world. We overwork, we overdeliver, we overhelp. We're just to the point of burnout, to the point of self-destruction, and self-care is really about devotion to self-worth. I am worthy, no matter what size, no matter what I do for a living. I am worthy and I am worthy of respect and my own attention and time. And when we can get to that place, you'll never stop caring for yourself, because once you open that box, you can't close it. Amen, Courtney

Michele Folan:

Townley. Amen, I love, and so I'm. You know, I'm sitting here nodding, nodding and I'm going, yeah, yeah, yeah, like I'm at you, yeah, yeah, like I'm at some religious revival. But I mean I'm soaking all this in because I deal with this every day too. I mean it's you know, but, and I still have work to do on myself too, right.

Courtney Townley:

We all do. We all do, and I'm the first to admit that to my whole community. I'm like even the reason I started Rumble and Rise, I always feel is for selfish reasons, because I was so tired of being in community of women that only wanted to talk about their clothing size and losing weight for an upcoming event and what new diet they were on and what new exercise program they were doing. I was like, dear God, are we not bigger than this? Is there not other things we can talk about? And so I wanted to start a community. I wanted to be in a community of women who were talking about health in a very different way, and because I couldn't find it, I just started it.

Michele Folan:

There she goes again.

Courtney Townley:

There she goes.

Michele Folan:

I know I love it. So, Courtney Townley, for listeners that are interested in your programs and your insights through your Grace and Grit podcast, how do they?

Courtney Townley:

find you. Yeah, probably the best place is graceandgritcom, is my website and all the things are there. We have a Start here button that if you click on it it'll take you to some freebies where you can get some information on. We have a I think it's called Midlife Magic Guide. That just gives you some really basic skill sets to get started in your own self-leadership process. The podcast, of course there's the gateway for that on the website, and then all my program information is on there as well.

Michele Folan:

Wonderful. I really appreciate you being here today.

Courtney Townley:

Oh, I so appreciate you having me, and I love that we do similar work in the world like we're helping women, because I don't think there can be enough of us, and so I applaud what you're doing and I'm cheering you on in the biggest way.

Michele Folan:

Oh well, thank you, and I wish you the best of luck with your book launch in November.

Courtney Townley:

Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much.

Michele Folan:

Thanks, courtney. Hey, thanks for tuning in. Please rate and review the show where you listen to the podcast, and did you know that Asking for a Friend is available now to listen on YouTube? You can subscribe to the podcast there as well. Your support is appreciated and it helps others find the show. Thank you.