Midrising Conversations · Episode 07
You can be highly capable, keep everything moving and still realise you’ve quietly become a passenger in your own life.
Autopilot doesn’t always look like something is wrong. Often, it looks like competence.
You’re working, parenting, planning, organising and doing what needs to be done. From the outside, your life may look perfectly functional. But somewhere underneath all that capability, you may start to wonder when you stopped actively choosing it.
In Episode 7 of Midrising Conversations, Gill Townsend and Barbara Scalzi talk about the moments that wake us up, the pressure to keep going when something feels off and how difficult it can be to live intentionally when real life refuses to pause while you work it all out.
About this episode
At some point, many women look around at the life they’ve built and realise they didn’t consciously choose every part of it. Some things were chosen for them. Others were inherited from expectations, circumstances or earlier versions of themselves.
That doesn’t mean the whole life is wrong. It may simply mean it’s time to become more awake inside it: to notice what still fits, what no longer does and where you’ve been waiting for something external to force a change you already know you need.
In this conversation
- How to recognise when you’re living on autopilot
- The moments that unexpectedly wake us up
- Why awareness and action aren’t always the same thing
- What it feels like when life is functioning but no longer feels aligned
- Losing your sparkle and beginning to find it again
- What intentional living can realistically look like in a busy life
- The deceptively simple question underneath it all: am I happy?
Episode chapters
00:00 — Introduction
02:10 — When you realise you’re on autopilot
05:00 — What actually wakes you up
08:30 — Losing your sparkle and getting it back
11:00 — Trying to live intentionally in real life
15:30 — The one question to come back to
This episode is for you if…
- Your life looks fine from the outside but doesn’t quite feel like yours
- You’ve become brilliant at managing a life you’re no longer sure you want
- You keep waiting for the right moment to make a change
- You feel as though some part of you has gone quiet
- You don’t want to burn everything down, but you do want to feel more awake
The Midrising takeaway
You don’t need to have everything figured out. You need to notice where you are.
Autopilot isn’t a personal failure. Sometimes it’s how we survive demanding seasons. The shift begins when you recognise that the settings running your life may no longer belong to the person you are now.
One question to take with you
Am I actively choosing this, or have I simply become very good at keeping it going?
About Midrising Conversations
Midrising Conversations is an honest podcast for women navigating the middle shift: the gradual changes in identity, ambition, relationships, bodies, priorities and what comes next.
Hosted by Gill Townsend in Australia and Barbara Scalzi in Thailand, these are direct conversations for grown-ups. No hype, no hustle and no pressure to become a brand-new person by next Tuesday.
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