Aging With Purpose and Passion is the podcast for women over 50 who know they're not finished yet. They're navigating reinvention, career change, retirement, relationships, caregiving, and the deeper question of what they want now.
Hosted by Beverley Glazer, MA, CCC, a work and life transition coach for women over 50 and midlife reinvention strategist, Aging With Purpose and Passion features stories from women over 50 who have faced change, challenged expectations, rebuilt confidence, and refused to let age — or anything else — define what is still possible.
Each week, Beverley and her guests explore reinvention after 50, career change, retirement transitions, menopause, empty nest, caregiving for aging parents, divorce, grief, health challenges, business transitions, entrepreneurship, relationships, ageism, leadership shifts, ambition, resilience, mindset, purpose, and self-trust.
These are not polished success stories or generic conversations about starting over. They are real, practical, emotionally intelligent conversations about what happens when the life you built no longer aligns with who you are today.
Aging With Purpose and Passion is not about chasing youth, forcing positivity, or pretending change is easy. It is about women over 50 and far beyond, telling the truth about what they feel, what they've been through, and what becomes possible when they stop talking themselves out of settling.
You may come for someone else’s story. You may leave hearing your own.
New conversations released weekly.
Learn more at ReinventImpossible.com/podcast.
🔗 Resources
Beverley Glazer, MA, CCC Midlife Transition Expert, Reinvention Strategist, and Host of Aging With Purpose and Passion
Reinvention After 50: When You Can’t Keep Pushing | Dana Hilmer
•Beverley Glazer, MA, CCC, ICF | Work and Life Transition Coach for Women Over 50•Episode 197
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Rethinking success, retirement, identity, and what happens when life forces you to change the pace.
You can be very good at the life you’ve built and still know you don’t want to keep living it the same way.
For many high-achieving women over 50, the hardest transition isn’t leaving a career or approaching retirement. It’s realizing that the drive, productivity, and determination that got you this far may not be what you need now.
In this episode of Aging With Purpose and Passion, Beverley Glazer talks with Dana Hilmer, happiness and midlife transitions expert, unretirement coach, and founder of Wiser and Free, about what happens when your old definition of success no longer works.
Dana spent years believing that if she worked hard enough, achieved enough, and kept pushing, she would eventually arrive at the life she was supposed to want. But reaching that version of success brought an unexpected realization: it wasn’t enough to look successful from the outside. Her life had to feel right to her.
We talk about perfectionism, people pleasing, the persistent feeling of “not good enough,” and why accomplished women can become so identified with what they do that it becomes difficult to ask a much simpler question: How do I actually want to live?
Dana shares her “compass point” approach—using how you want to feel about your life as a filter for decisions about work, relationships, purpose, and pace.
We also explore unretirement and why leaving a full-time career doesn’t have to mean leaving meaningful work behind. For some women, what comes next may include part-time work, entrepreneurship, creative projects, volunteering, or simply more freedom to decide where their energy goes.
Then Dana’s own life forced these ideas off the page.
While caring for her father as his Alzheimer’s progressed, a frightening incident was followed by serious physical symptoms and a diagnosis of functional neurological disorder (FND).
Dana had always been someone who pushed through. Now she was learning that sometimes the work isn’t to push through at all. It’s to be with what is—and decide from there.
This is a conversation about ambition, identity, retirement, caregiving, health, and redefining success when life doesn’t go according to plan.
Because the question after 50 isn’t simply, “What am I going to do next?”
It’s “How do I want to experience the life I have now?”
Stay until the end, when Beverley shares key takeaways and practical actions you can begin using immediately.
IN THIS EPISODE
Why high-achieving women can struggle with identity after 50
When pushing through stops working
How perfectionism and people pleasing shape our definition of success
What to do when achievement no longer feels fulfilling
🎁 The Gift of a Safe Space: A private, non-judgmental zone away from work and family to focus entirely on your needs, your journey and what's next for you. If you are feeling stuck in your transition, this is your space to exhale.
Have feedback or a powerful story that's worth telling? Contact us at info@Reinventimpossible.com
Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host, psychotherapist, coach, and empowerment expert, Beverly Glazer.
Beverley Glazer
What if the life you planned turns out to be very different than what you've expected? Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverly Glazer, a work and life transition coach and reinvention strategist for women over 50, helping you bridge the gap between the life you've built and what you're ready for today. And you can find me and this podcast at reinventimpossible.com. These conversations share powerful stories from accomplished women who face life's challenges and use their wisdom, resilience, and experience to create meaningful new chapters. We don't sugarcoat our struggles here. We learn from them, grow through them, and discover what's possible on the other side. Today, I'm joined by Dana Hilmer. She's a happiness and midlife transition expert, an unretirement transition coach and founder of Wiser and Free, who has spent more than 10 decades helping women rethink what they want. Yes, that's true, in the second half of their lives. Dana's story is compelling, not only for the wonderful work that she does, but how she was forced to rethink her own story about ambition, identity, health, and purpose, and what it means to live well when life changes the rules. If you've wondered how to create a life with more possibility, this conversation is for you. And stay with us till the end when I'll share cure takeaways and simple actions that you can put into practice right away. And while you're listening, if you're thinking, hey, that's me too, well, then let's have a conversation about what's next for you. And you'll find that link in the show notes too. And so welcome, Dana. You're always so happy and laughing, and life is always so good, or so it seems, but sometimes not so
That's a good question to start with. Um it's interesting. I think my perception as a child was that I had a very happy childhood. Um, I actually moved a lot, you know. So I've lived in eight states, five of which were at, you know, before my high school years. Um, so there was a lot of change, a lot of a lot of movement. Um, I did come to the realization um in probably ninth grade or high school that my mom was not a healthy person. So um, you know, you kind of look back and you realize how that shaped some of my choices and some of my patterns, you know, that I got into. Um because I I think, you know, without you know, psychoanalyzing her or anything, I I think she was profoundly unhappy. And there was an image, I think, of what was expected of my sister and I to fulfill her dreams. And it took some undoing to learn how to listen to my voice, to learn how to own my value, to learn that I'm different than she is, and I have different um definition of success. I have a different definition of what's meaningful to me. And I think all that, you know, was probably over the course of my early adulthood where I had some unraveling to do, like to really kind of create some separation because you know what I'm not sharing is with her unhealthiness, there there was a very intense controlling nature and an intense um, you know, the voice in my head was so strong and so loud. And so so it took some undoing um to to really actually realize for myself for the first time that I I get to define success. I get to define what that means to me. And that was that was a real turning point.
Beverley Glazer
Yeah, yes, because you're always judged, you know, you're always not good enough. So were you always though a high achiever having to prove I'm good enough? Did you have to do that? Did you feel that?
SPEAKER_02
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, it's like it's it's interesting. Yes, I was a high achiever. Yes, I, you know, I think that uh kind of pattern of people pleasing and perfectionism and you know, like trying to prove myself. And you know what's interesting is is I was achieving, and I I I think I did present myself confidently, and I would have even said, I think for a very long time that I'm very confident, but this underneath the radar stuff is really tricky, right? This, like, what's humming underneath the hood? And I and I I I realized now that I think what was driving a lot of that was that sense of not being good enough, of having this need to prove. And in my case, um I think it started by needing to prove that I was worthy of love. You know, those words I never heard from my mom. And I think I was always driving to hear those words. And so even though I think I've achieved and, you know, kind of outwardly facing, have been, you know, shown up in a way that I'm proud, yeah, there was definitely this, you're not good enough. You got to prove yourself. It's like whole anxious energy, I think, that was kind of running the show underneath underneath the scene.
Sure. So success for you. What was that growing up? What do you see for yourself?
SPEAKER_02
When I was growing up, uh, when I was growing up, I think the the notion of success was a very linear path, right? You know, so for example, I originally was a physical therapy student. I wanted to go to medical school. Parents couldn't afford medical school, do something practical. I did business. So now I'm a marketing major. The expectation was that I would become a marketing director. You know, so there was a linear path, right? So I started off as the marketing assistant, then the marketing coordinator, then the marketing manager. I was a magazine publishing, then the marketing director. And I was in the corner office, had the big budget, had the staff, had what looked like success, but I in no way owned it. I in no way found it fulfilling because there was nothing about it that was aligned with what actually mattered to me. You know, so so I was pursuing this. And then when you're on that path, it gets harder to get off, doesn't it? Because you're like you've got so much skin in the game of this thing that you think that you're pursuing for the reasons you think are, you know, looking right and the resume looks great on paper. But oh my gosh, was I unhappy. And that would, that was a starting over. I mean, that was a this is not working with me. This is in no way aligned with what matters to me. Um that is when I realized, wait a minute, I get to define what success is for myself. Um you know, you go a little bit backwards before you go forwards, right? And uh that was that was a tough time because I had the job that I look so successful and so deserving on paper. And it was so not who I am, and it was so not fulfilling, you know. So it was such a a strange place to hold, you know.
Beverley Glazer
Right. And very, very hard to get off of that. You have the golden handcuffs that come along with that. You should say you're doing well.
SPEAKER_02
Well, especially a magazine publishing my first jobs. I was waitressing on the side for three years for the right to work at Vanity Fair, right? You know, like like you know, you you're scrapping it out for a long time. Yeah. You're finally making decent money. You know, you know, it's interesting.
Now, you know, with the women I work with, one of the things we talk about is a compass point. And and it's really looking through the lens of how do I want to feel about myself and about my life, and to use that as a filter for the choices that you make. So if I had clarity on that then, if I had that as my filter, my compass point is I want to feel at peace, knowing I'm living fully and loving with all my heart, right? So if I applied that filter to that job, the job offer would have been a hell no. There was nothing about that job that was having me feel at peace. I certainly was not living fully. I was canceling every plan under the sun. I didn't have time to spend time with my fiance. I certainly, you know, so there was nothing about that was that was moving me in the direction of how I want to feel about myself and my life. And interestingly, my body knew that. My body revolted when I said yes. I mean, sparing the details, but you know, stomach spoke, right? Yes, and yes, and I chose to ignore that. I like shoved that baby down, like this is like in my head. I was like, this is the right choice. My my body was screaming at me. And, you know, not only have I learned the wisdom of the body, but also looking through that lens of how do you want to be feeling? Because that's how you want to experience your life, right? Yeah, yeah. How did you leave that though? How did I leave that? I ended up um going to a job, cutting my salary in half, and going to a job at an organization called AmeriCares. And that was a beautiful shift. And I think it was kind of just a reset. You know, it was a reset of I've got to get off this corporate path and do work that's meaningful. At that time, I was training as a coach. I was doing, you know, doing some training at that time, and it was in the very early days of coaching. Um, so for me, that was, you know, it was a place where you're doing meaningful work. It's a medical nonprofit relief organization. Ultimately, I got pregnant, and that wasn't a job that you know made sense to stick with monetarily or otherwise when you had a young baby. But it served a beautiful purpose, you know, and it and it gave me, I think, the space to think about, you know, what what is important and to kind of get myself off that hamster wheel, honestly.
When did you start to realize that women and retirement have really changed? And women were asking questions about retirement. When did you start to see that?
SPEAKER_02
You know, it's interesting. I think a lot of the women that are retiring now are the same women that kind of broke the glass ceiling in corporate, right? So they're used to being trailblazers and they're also used to not having a path, right? That's right. They're creating, they're creating the path. And so I would say women in this age group, whether it's heading towards retirement or whether it's just trying to figure out like what do I want my next chapter to be? I know I want to feel connected. I know I want to feel like I'm contributing. I know I want to feel like I matter. I know I want to feel, you know, a sense of meaning, meaningfulness or purposefulness, right? It may be retirement, it may not be. An awful lot of the women that I work with are either choosing to start their own business or or do a part-time job or to kind of hodgepodge like project, right? Like different kinds of projects. Because I think what women are realizing is I'm just so not done, right? This old paradigm of retirement was created for men back in the 1950s or 60s. We have, you know, arguably another 30 years left to live after retirement age. We have a whole nother adult life ahead of us. So this notion of retirement, meaning you put your feet up and you got two years to relax until you die, like I mean, that just so doesn't work. And our society hasn't caught up with that. But I do think that a lot of women hitting this age are are realizing that I have so much to contribute. And quite frankly, it's interesting. I'm 61 and I feel like I'm on the upswing of what I want to contribute because my kids are now getting out of college, right? My youngest is going into his last semester of college. Like, like there's a whole new chapter that I'm creating and excited about. And I think a lot of women are hitting that stage, right? Where some of the demands that have been on them aren't on them in the same kind of way. And it's like, hmm, this is where I get to show up. This is where I get to, you know, think about what do I want to do that's fulfilling. Um, so yeah, there's a natural shift, I think, that happens at this age.
Yeah. And as you start thinking of your own life moving forward, you also experienced your dad's issues. Yeah. That is never expected. So what happened with your dad? He had Alzheimer's.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, so I guess the conversation goes into two areas. One is one of caregiving, which I think a lot of women can relate to. Um, I was caregiving from a distance. You know, he was in Massachusetts and I was in Connecticut, and it became all-consuming, you know. So being in charge of every decision, every choice, managing everything long distance, going there every weekend, you know, so so there was an intensity, you know, at that stage of life. What happened in terms of an event is I made the judgment call to bring my dad from his nursing home in Massachusetts here to my home in Connecticut over Thanksgiving. And, you know, we knew it was his last holiday season. And I drove him back. And having advanced Alzheimer's, I now know what sundowning is. And I'll set the stage that my dad was like the sweetest puppy dog of a man. But with Alzheimer's, you're not necessarily yourself. And I've now learned it's also a disease of disorientation, not only memory. So essentially, there was a life-threatening incident where he threatened my life on the highway and was yanking my hair as I was driving and threatening me. And, you know, like, so it was a very um scary, very traumatic situation. Um, and at the time, I was very, very proud of how I handled it. You know, I I didn't want to take a chance that he could escalate, right? So I'm like, Dad, we're driving. Dad, we're gonna count, right? I was keeping myself focused, I was keeping him focused. Um, it was incredibly intense. Um, and what's interesting is I knew when it happened that it wasn't my dad threatening me, it wasn't my dad putting me um clearly in harm's way. Uh, it was the disease, right? So I I knew that cognitively, but my body has responded um to the incident. And so, so in in terms of a turning point of my life experience uh so far, is it triggered in me what is known as FND, which is functional neurological disorder. And so what I'm now challenged with is the first part of my day until two o'clock or three o'clock every day, I'm good. I can do what I want, I feel good. Nobody knows that anything is challenging. And the irony is I'm a happiness expert and I'm having to lean into my toolkit in such an intense way. Because starting around two o'clock or three o'clock every day, I start having uncontrolled movements. You can probably see a little bit of movement happening now. And then as the day progresses, it becomes extremely painful because I have neck spasms that get so painful, it's like somebody's yanking my head and I can't hold my head up. So I literally can't go for walks. I have to support my head on a table. Um, and it's and it's it's intensely challenging. Um and it's challenging me in a way that I've never been challenged because I've always taught the happiness tips and tricks and how to live a meaningful life and a purposeful life and being fulfilling. Like I've always taught that through the lens of being somebody who's happy. Now I'm teaching it through the lens of somebody who profoundly understands what pain is and profoundly understands what challenge is and understands grief, right? I don't know if I will be who I've always been, who understands fear and uncertainty. I may heal or I may not, right? I am certainly holding every vision in the world that I'm on the healing journey. Um and it and it's challenging, right? So this is making me bring out a toolkit, you know, my positive psychology toolkit, my coaching toolkit, my manifesting toolkit, you know, pain reprocessing therapy, like you name it, you know, somatic healing, mind, body, parts work. I mean, there's so many things that are coming into play that I am leaning so fully into and I'm learning more about, honestly, too. Um and I think it's enriched what I offer my clients. I think I'm serving at a at a higher level. I I think um, you know, it's interesting. I think when you go through a big challenge, you know, I I think there's much more understanding of meeting people, you know, I think where they're at. Um and and it's scary, right? So, so and my my days are kind of divided, you know. The first half of the day I'm myself, and the second half of the day I'm truly struggling, you know. So, so it's um it's a difficult disorder to explain. Um, essentially, functional neurological disorder means your hardware is fine, my spine is fine, my brain is fine. It's basically soft work glitches, which means that the messaging within the brain is going to skew. So there is a disconnect in the communication between my brain and my motor capabilities. So it's um, yeah, it's a wacky disorder. It's hard to wrap your head around and and it's having me lean in. Um, and you know, you know, it's interesting. I I one thing I've always subscribed to, and I think that this has become more so, is this notion that I think our goal in life isn't really to be happy. I think our goal in life is to be fully alive and to be fully engaged with our life. And you can be fully engaged and have a meaningful life. And that doesn't matter what your age is, that doesn't matter what your circumstance is, right? You still get to choose to lean in and you still get to choose to live as wholly and as fully as possible. And so, you know, you can talk about peace and joy and love and all these, but you know what? Even in really tough times, I can bring more peace into the pain. Even during really tough times, man, gratitude just lands in a way it never landed before, right? Um, so these uh notions, these feeling states are things that you can and will benefit from leaning more into, especially during the challenging times. And that is, I guess, the aspect of the practice that that I'm learning more and leaning more into, and I and I believe as a result helping my clients with more Dana.
say, and it's a wonderful saying, living never gets old.
unknown
Yeah.
Beverley Glazer
Tell us what you mean. Living never gets old.
SPEAKER_02
You know, Living Never Gets Old speaks to both age and also to circumstance. And what it means to me is that everybody can have a meaningful life, and it's up to you to choose how fully you're going to engage with it. So I don't care how old you are, clearly you can have health issues, be grieving, whatever it happens to be, you can still choose to be more connected. You can still choose to live more fully, you can still choose to contribute, you can still choose to grow and evolve, you can still choose to lean into more joy and more peace. So it's this notion that we're not limited by our age or circumstance, but rather it speaks to resilience and the beauty of life. And living wholeheartedly isn't about living always with a smiley face. Living wholeheartedly is about being able to embrace it all, right? And that's the challenge, right? We often want to run away from the things that are painful. God knows I want to run away from this pain when it happens. It can be, you know, it can be extraordinarily challenging. We want to numb ourselves, we want to not feel the things. But the more we can engage with all of our life and learn from our life, I think there's I think what I've come to realize maybe it's being this age, but I think there's a gift in really knowing ourselves and knowing our story. And to know ourselves and to know our story means we actually have to kind of look under the hood at maybe even some of the things that are unsavory to us, right? Like we need to be able to have the courage to own what our mistakes were and to learn from things that kind of didn't work out so well. And to too, right? And to and to be able to lean into this fullness of our experience, not just try to gloss it all over with a smiley face or right. And I think that's for the world of happiness and positive psychology. I think people have kind of misread that that it's about just like positive thoughts. Well, you know, yes, you can lean into those things and you need to experience the things that are really challenging. You need to be able to be with those things. And so living never gets old is really about honoring the wholeness of your life.
Leave us with one final word, Dana, what would you like to tell us?
SPEAKER_02
I would say that it is never too late. You know, and that feels tight because you hear that all the time. And it's true because it's never too late unless you say so. If you say it's too late it is. If you say it's too late you will find all sorts of evidence to prove that to be true. If you say it's not too late, if you say I am doing this, if you say I am going to experience this, you're now experiencing life and seeing life through a completely different lens. So it's never too late unless you say so.
Beverley Glazer
Thank you. Thank you Dana. Dana Hilmer is a happiness and midlife transition expert, unretirement coach, founder of Wiser and Free and Living Never Gets Old. For more than a decade she's helped women in midlife think beyond retirement and create lives with greater freedom, possibility and purpose. Here's some takeaways from this episode retirement can change more than your schedule. It can change the way you see yourself. You can slow your pace of living and still be ambitious. And what fulfilled you at 40 may not be the same at 70. Pay attention to that. If you've identified with the story here are some things to do right now. Cut out one thing from your schedule and do something just for the fun of it. Explore what you're curious about right now and don't wait for later. And separate your identity from your work what you value is where your happiness lies. For similar episodes on aging with purpose and passion check out You've built a life now what that's episode 190 and retirement after 50 your best work is not over that's episode number 185 of Aging with Purpose and Passion. And if you're looking for podcasts for older women Women Over 70 Aging Reimagined is an award-winning podcast and community that celebrates wisdom, resilience and vitality of women over 70 and far beyond. That link will be in the show notes.
Please share your links yeah thank you for asking so uh you can find me on LinkedIn under my name Dana Hilmer. You can also find me on my website which is wiserandfree.com and you mentioned my Substack and this is a substack that I've recently started and this is Living Never Gets Old. And I hope that you'll join me over there. I'll be obviously doing um a fair amount of writing but I want to have conversations with everybody. I want this to be a community and really more of a movement right of people embracing um living fully despite and with whatever their age or circumstance happens to be. So living every gas hold all hands upstack wonderful also Instagram too Instagram at email terrific.
Beverley Glazer
Davis links will be in the show notes and also on my site too that's reinventimpossible.com and so my friends what's next for you if you're wondering what's possible for yourself too let's map that out together and you'll find that link in the show notes that's on reinventimpossible.com as well and if this conversation spoke to you please add us to your playlist share it with a friend and remember you only have one life so live it with purpose and passion thank you for joining us you can connect with Bev on her website reInventimpossible.com and while you're there join our newsletter subscribe so you don't miss an episode until next time keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life
