I'm coming back to full steam now. So I'm ready to jump into the new year and I wanted to start off with a big announcement. I am rebranding the Forty Drinks Podcast. I maintain the same mission and focus, but I'm choosing to move forward under a new name with the hopes that it helps me reach a wider audience with this message of transition at midlife.

I am so grateful for those of you who have been with me for the past 115 episodes. It is my hope and wish and intention that rebranding the podcast will bring more listeners into the fold over time.

The podcast itself is about transitions. The ones that we go through sometime around age 40, those internal shifts that we make, where we start to see and interact with the world differently. And this move that I'm making with the podcast is a transition as well. So I thought it would be a great idea to share a little bit of the background and the thought process behind making this change.

When I turned 40, You may have heard this story before. I celebrated my 40th birthday by having 40 drinks with 40 people in 40 different places, and each one of those drinks had some thematic connection to my friend or our relationship.

At the time, I thought it was a simply ridiculous way to celebrate my birthday. I thought it would help me extend my birthday for as long as it would take to have 40 drinks, which turned out to be about a year. And I thought it was something silly to do, that I could connect with people that I didn't have the time or opportunity to see on a day to day basis.

What I didn't know at the time was that this silly, ridiculous endeavor was going to change my life.

You see, when you throw the big party, you get what, maybe a couple of minutes to talk to each person at the party. You really don't get to interact much or or go deep. But by having drinks with all of the people that I would have invited to the party individually, I had the time to visit with each one of them and during those visits I had conversations and we reflected on the time that we were close in each other's lives and we talked about the memories we had.

And I did that with people from grammar school and high school and college and different jobs I had worked in and old boyfriends and all different kinds of people that I had known through my life. And a key handful of those people reflected back to me in our conversations, things that either, I didn't know or didn't remember about myself.

Things that changed the way that I saw myself and then started to change the way I showed up in the world and interacted with the world. And at the end of the year that it took me to have my 40 drinks, my life was really quite different than it was at the beginning of the year. It changed me.

So that was really a fun and silly and ridiculous project and a great way to celebrate a milestone birthday, and that could have been the end of it. I became intrigued by what happened to me, by the transition that I went through, and there were some things that were really remarkable, that I knew that my life had changed. The 1 that's really obvious that I always mentioned is that as somebody who had had terrible experience with romantic relationships and boyfriends through many, many years at the end of the year of my Forty Drinks Project, I had met the man who would become my husband. And from the very, very beginning, it was clear that he was absolutely different.

And the fact that he was different. meant that I was different.

So I became really interested in the ways that this transition shows up for other people because after I went through it, I realized, I found out, I was reading, I did research, this transition is almost universal. And, you know, a lot of us think that the stereotypical midlife crisis is something that, you know, one, doesn't happen to us, and two, is a throwback to a different age.

We think of, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, when maybe a couple would get a divorce and the man would start dating his much younger secretary and buy a sports car. And you could always look at those actions and roll your eyes and, and sort of paint it with the broad brush of the midlife crisis.

But this transition that most of us go through at midlife, it isn't always a crisis. Sure, there are times and there are people and there are situations that become like a crisis and we have to work our way through, but a lot of times, it's a shift. It's an internal shift in how we look at the world and how we interact with the world and, it requires us and calls us to make changes in our life to fit with that shift.

Ultimately, I spent many years rolling around with the Forty Drinks Project, as I called it, and working on a book project and trying to get a book sold, which it's still my hope and dream to do someday. But a couple of years ago, I took a workshop that introduced me to some marketing concepts that I don't normally work with in my day to day work with my marketing clients, one of which was a podcast.

And I thought, aha, 40 drinks, what a fun thing to turn into a podcast. And originally I thought if I talked about my Forty Drinks Project, well, then the podcast would be over in 40 episodes. But then I realized that I could take the spotlight off myself and turn it outward and start really digging into the transitions that other people are going through and showcasing all the different versions of what it can look like and the different ways to make your way through this transition.

And so that idea really inspired me and caught my attention and my excitement. So when I launched the podcast, 40 drinks seemed like the right name, since the genesis was the original Forty Drinks Project. I figured I would take the energy that I had invested into 40 drinks over many years and roll that right into the podcast.

Now, all the podcast consultants out there would I immediately recommend that I change the name of the podcast to be explicitly what the podcast is. And I have always resisted that for a bunch of reasons. As far as I'm concerned, the name 40 Drinks has some pizzazz. It's got style. It's got its own origin story.

And there was a magic to that original project that I wanted to draw into the podcast. The name is captivating and most times it really captures people's imagination when they hear about it and hear about the origin story. But that has always been one of the drawbacks as well. The name needed explanation.

There are plenty of brands out there that have built a name for themselves, despite their actual name being something interesting or unique or funky and not explicitly what they are or do. And to be honest, I get great feedback on the name 40 Drinks on really quite a regular basis. So I set out as the Forty Drinks Podcast. And the original podcast art played into the drinks part of the theme. But even at the beginning I would get prospective guests who would tell me I don't think I'm a good fit I don't really drink. Not often enough. And I would always explain that Well, I don't really drink anymore either and that the name was part of the origin story. But there I go explaining myself again

I should also mention that a great friend and colleague launched a podcast with his partner on the same day I launched mine. And I've always said, only half jokingly, that we're raising them as twins. And it's been wonderful to have someone to lean on, and learn with, and explore with. And I'm not sure I would have made it quite this far had I been doing it all on my own. And then a funny thing happened. My friend's podcast seems to have caught lightning in a bottle. His podcast started to grow very quickly, while mine wasn't growing quite as much as I would like it to be.

So, maybe nine months ago, I took half a step towards the podcast consultants and I tweaked the name and added a tagline that is more explicit. It became 40 Drinks, the podcast about turning 40, in hopes that adding that tagline would make it more obvious to people that this podcast was about turning 40.

And when we did that, we also moved away from drinks as a graphical element in the podcast art and went to something that was more, uh, the ebb and flow of life. And one of my millennial colleagues told me she responded more to that than she did to the drinks concept, so I thought we were on the right path. And yet, the podcast was still not growing as much as I would like.

Though I have been serving the small audience I have captured. My dreams are bigger than that.

My friend's podcast reached an amazing milestone in December. And while I know there's no one to one comparison, 40 Drinks has achieved only a very small percentage of that same reach in the same time. And yet I think there is this huge potential audience of millennials who will be turning 40 for the next 10 years and who will be facing these issues and who I want to help make their way through this transition.

So while I have resisted all suggestions to rebrand the podcast, I decided recently, I didn't want my ego to be the thing that's standing in the way of reaching and serving a wider audience

For so long I have been so attached to the name 40 drinks. And for really a couple of years, I've been stuck in my thinking that something with such a cool backstory and such magic around it should be able to make its way in the world on its own. Oh my god. There it is. The word. Should. Ah! Only in the rear view can I see how obvious it is that should was my downfall.

But a couple of weeks before Christmas, I was falling asleep one night and a very clear, and distinct thought bubbled up inside of me. I often get my, uh, messages from my gut from my internal wisdom at that point in the evening where I've shut off the lights and I'm getting quiet and I'm about to fall asleep. And I heard, I think it's time, I think you're ready, I think you're ready to let go of the name. And that was an absolute surprise to me.

And it's so interesting that it's also such a clear representation of what happens during this transition around turning 40.

For many people, it's a transition from looking to and relying on external authorities to tell us what we should be doing, to listening to and relying on our own experience and expertise to know what's right for us. It's at this time of life that we really need to start tuning into and listening to our own inner voice and our own inner wisdom.

And for so long, my inner voice and my inner wisdom had been so attached to this name and building a brand and building energy around the Forty Drinks Podcast. But then one night, all of a sudden, and very clearly, I think it's time.

And if I'm being honest, I think it's probably been my ego that's been so attached to the name and my gut instinct was finally able to make itself heard.

I don't want my ego to be the thing that's standing in the way of my podcast reaching the audience that I want it to reach. I have been serving a small and wonderful and dedicated and lovely audience for the last two and a half years. But my dreams are bigger than that. And since the podcast is mostly interviews with people sharing their stories of transition, it really is less about me and my story and less connected to that original project, though I do still talk about it in my conversations.

So in December, I shared this whole scenario with a group of my podcasting friends at the New England Podcasters Group. And I got some really amazing feedback. I was pressed to consider whether my mission was still valid. And after checking with my gut, I was able to say with confidence that it is. The content of this podcast will be almost exclusively the same. The topic isn't changing. I remain committed to helping to shine a light on all the ways we make our way through this transition at the door to midlife. This time that feels so unique and individual to us, but is actually really quite universal.

My friends also gave me some wonderful feedback about what podcast so far. So thank you to Corey, and Amy, and Andy, and Mary, and Andy, and Angel, and Jack, and especially to Peter, who I had never met before, and who showed up late to his first meetup. He showed up just in time to see my presentation and to make a statement that stopped me in my tracks.

You see, at this point, when I was telling the story to the group, I was still just in the consideration stage. I hadn't committed to rebranding. I was just weighing my options and getting feedback from my podcasting peers. But Peter said to me, if this new name. gives you the space that you need to grow, then I think it's probably a good thing for you. And honestly, I'm not sure Peter is a real person. I think he was an angel sent to that meeting to say that specific thing to me that day.

So with that, now I didn't include a drumroll here if I had the technical capabilities, I would like to welcome you to The Big Four Oh, The Podcast About Turning 40. It remains my goal to make it common cultural knowledge that there is a transition that most of us go through around age 40, and then showcase so many versions of that transition that anyone approaching or recently turned 40 with dread in their heart knows that they are not alone.

I will continue to bring you stories of transition, of transformation, of stepping into power and wisdom and purpose and fulfillment. I will continue to discern the commonalities among these individual transitions. I will continue to develop a framework for identifying when you've entered your transitional phase and how to make your way through it without making as much of a mess of it as I did. And I will work to uncover the keys to doing just that.

I hope that those of you who've been with me for a while will continue with me on this journey and that this new name does indeed give me the space that I need to grow so that I can help more people make it through this midlife transition a little bit easier than I made it through mine.

There's one other thing I wanted to mention about my experience that day at the New England podcasters meetup. For several years. I've been telling my close friends and my coach and my therapist about how disconnected i've been feeling. How isolated. And invisible. I've said over and over again that I feel like i'm a vampire and that the internet and social media are mirrors, and you know, you can't see a vampire in a mirror.

And I always saw the slow pace of growth of my podcast as a symbol of those feelings. And after that meeting, I felt the opposite of all of those things that I had been feeling for several years. I felt connected. And seen, and like I had friends and a community. I felt supported in a way that I haven't felt in a very long time. And when I was telling her the story, one of my close friends pointed out that I wasn't invisible anymore. And that's very exciting.

I am so optimistic and excited about the next phase for this podcast. I feel like I'm on the right track and I'm so happy you're here with me. This pneumonia has tried to derail me just a little. I had to cancel my trip to Podfest this week where I'd been hoping to make a big splash with this rebrand and relaunch, but it cannot derail my enthusiasm or my excitement for what's next.

So thanks for joining me on The Big Four Ohh, The Podcast About Turning 40. I look forward to seeing you next week with another story of midlife transition.