What It Takes to Feel Hotter Than Ever

Erin: Welcome to Hotter Than Ever, where we uncover the unconscious rules we've been following. We break those rules and we find a new path to being freer, happier, sexier, and more satisfied in the second half of our lives. I'm your host, Erin Keating.

Welcome to the 135th episode of Hotter Than Ever, which marks not only the end of 2025, but but also the end of this chapter of this show. As you know, I'm going to be taking a break from making this show, this labor of love, this passion project, and I'm not sure yet for how long, but I promise I will let you know once that becomes clear.

I'm taking a break from Hotter Than Ever to focus on building my new business, Broad Collective, which I shared with you in detail in the last episode. And if you missed it, you'll know where to find it. I interviewed my business partner, Sarah Gallagher Trombley, in that episode, and I am so excited to be taking all the things that I have learned from the process of making Hotter Than Ever, both from a substantive perspective, what I learned about us women in midlife and what we're thinking about and what we care about as we enter into and embrace and own this next amazing, liberating chapter of our lives, and from a logistical perspective, what I learned about making a podcast and growing a brand and being a creator.

After a lifetime of being an executive, empowering creators to make incredible work, I'm so excited about putting everything I've learned across the past almost three years of making this show into practice in service of other women who are taking the leap and growing their own businesses in midlife. And I hope that if Broad Collective is something that resonates with you, something that you need or even suspect you need, that you will join us on that journey and let the other women in the collective teach and guide and lift you up as you reinvent or scale up your professional lives. For this next chapter, you can find out everything you need to know about membership@broadcollective.com and I can't wait to see a lot of you there.

But this episode is not an ad for Broad Collective. Arguably, the last episode was, but this one is not. This episode is an opportunity for me to reflect on the wild ride that Hotter Than Ever has been for me and for so many of you who have been here from the beginning or came into our little corner of the universe somewhere along the way. First, I want to take stock.

What the hell have we been talking about on this show? Sex, obviously. We have talked a lot about sex, and I will get into that a little bit later. But we've also been talking about our personal identities and how they shift over 40 and the opportunity that this next chapter gives us for reinvention if we choose to grab it and use it in that way. We've talked about how this chapter of our lives gives us the chance to redefine who we are over 40, beyond conventional roles and expectations and old external definitions of success. We have talked a lot about relationships and love and intimacy and all the things I'm saying still every day trying to figure out how we connect, how we communicate, how we can build meaningful relationships of all kinds. In midlife, we dove deep into sexuality and pleasure and desire, libido, embodiment, pleasure as an essential life force. We debunked a lot of myths about women our age and what we want and deserve in our intimate lives.

By the way, we deserve everything we can possibly imagine. We talked about dating and divorce and relationships and transitions. We talked about breakups, big and small, non traditional relationship structures and how we get a do over for all this stuff in this chapter of our lives. We talked a lot about body image and aging and beauty and our relationships to our bodies in the next phase. And hold this thought because I have a lot more to say on this one. This one has been epic for me personally over the past few years. We talked about emotional labor boundaries, domestic labor, self worth. We talked about unlearning people, pleasing and over functioning and reclaiming our personal agency or claiming it for the very first, first time.

We got deep into career and purpose and reinvention at work, reimagining ambition, taking career breaks, designing work that fits who we want to be and how we want to work at this time in our lives. Of course we want to work. Now we get to say how we do it. We got into parenting and family and how our roles are changing all the time when we're parenting. In the first year, I didn't want to touch parenting. And the deeper in that we got, the more integrated my life got, the less compartmentalized I was, the more I wanted to talk about my kids and your kids and how we're doing it, how we're co parenting after divorce, what it's like to have teenagers empty, nesting, evolving family dynamics.

We got into perimenopause and menopause naturally, given the fact that hot flashes are built into the title of the show on purpose. We had some amazing conversations about mental health, healing, resilience, grief, trauma, our nervous systems, self trust and how to finally care for ourselves in a deep way after a lifetime of maybe for some of us, putting everyone else's needs in front of our own.

Mainly we talked about breaking rules and designing a life on our own terms. We challenged some pretty deeply embedded societal scripts around aging and sexuality, marriage, motherhood, success, and that goddamn good girl behavior that got us so far and holds us back so much. And now that we know what those scripts are, we are free to rewrite them.

God, that's a lot. That's a lot. That's so much of life. That is the juicy, hard, deep, meaningful stuff of life. I want to share a little bit about what has happened for me personally as a result of of creating this show. What I hope I have given you through the course of creating this show is a sense of what is possible for you in midlife if you open yourself up to change. That is what I have experienced is a new sense of possibility as a result of all of these conversations, conversations I've been having with myself and having you witness.

Thank you for your witnessing conversations I've been having with extraordinary thinkers, women who have done the deep dive into their areas of expertise. Getting cool with change. That has been a huge theme for me, learning how to embrace change. And that seems to be the key to unlocking all of our freedom and happiness in this next chapter. Anytime I did an episode that talked about change, that's what you wanted to hear. How do I handle it? How do I roll with it? How do I get good at change? That has really been what this last couple of years has been for me, a sort of reset, a reinvention, a realignment of my inner self with the person I really want to be, as opposed to the person on the outside who really looks like they have it together.

And in my old 'keeping up with the Jones's life', where everything looked good on the outside, I was not consciously faking it. That is the most confusing part. I really thought that I wanted all the things that made up the fabric of my life. I did want to be married. I did want to have kids. I did want a big career. I just didn't want the way they felt to me in the specific formulation that I had created. I didn't want the way the marriage felt. I didn't want the way the last job felt to me like pressure, like relentless demand, like an unfillable need.

I mean, I look back at the pattern of my life and I think a lot of my unhappiness stemmed from trying to do everything for everyone for about a decade. The getting pregnant and having babies and the building the career, at the same time trying to keep a marriage together. That was probably fundamentally flawed from the beginning. The expectation of perfection and mastery in all areas of my life simultaneously. My expectation of those things, that I was going to be able to do it all swimmingly with no problems, smooth sailing.

Can you relate to this? Of course that is going to burn you the fuck out. It may still be burning you out. You may still be suffering from this myth that we can be everything to all people at all times, that women are built for multitasking and over functioning. But we are not. We are not. We're just human beings with big dreams doing the best we can in the circumstances the culture and our own high expectations puts on women. It is a lot. It is too much.

You know, the greatest thing about being a woman in midlife is when the space from that obligation opens up just like a crack just opens a crack. And you can start to put yourself at the center of your own story again. You can be the protagonist again in a way that is thoughtful and intentional and where you're not just running the circuit and repeating the cycle. You know, just because I'm taking a break from making this podcast for the foreseeable future and I am doing this episode and trying to draw some conclusions about what I've learned and hopefully some of what you've learned from the conversations we've been having here, that does not mean I have it all figured out. I really, really don't. I do feel realigned. I do feel reconnected to my own agency. I've gotten really clear on how this calling I have to empower women in this next chapter of life can be the thing that defines the next chapter of my career.

Certainly I feel in charge of my own decision making and my life. I trust myself as a good steward of that life and those decisions for both me and my kids. And that is all huge. And you know what? When I think about it, it's really hard to tease out how much of all of this is just the liberating energy that is released when a woman gets a divorce that she really needs. My divorce really helped me shed a lot of my childhood stuff. My people pleasing my feeling like I needed to sell myself out in order to survive, to be safe in the world. My practice of always throwing myself under the bus, negating myself, disregarding my needs, disregarding what my heart and my body were telling me over and over again. That learned skill of override. So many of us learned that as young girls and carried that into our lives as women.

I feel like what I've learned is that rather than being a sign of failure, giving up my unhappy marriage, stepping away from that dynamic was my way of declaring that I was worth better treatment and a better life. That is the opposite of self negation. My divorce has really helped me to solve my primal wound of my difficult relationship with my father, whose approval I always sought and I could never quite get in the way I needed as a young person. Today, that's a different relationship, but as a young person, it was the source of so much pain. And that's a pain that I hoped my marriage would solve. And now that the marriage is over, it's a pain I don't feel today. Divorce gave me that. What a gift.

In the past four years, since I got Covid and was in the hospital, you know the dramatic midlife reinvention origin story that that was, I have had a wholesale reset of my life. And you have been along for the ride, living your own midlife reinvention story right alongside me. And during this chapter, I have found so much willingness. Willingness, just the condition of being willing. I have been willing to try things, as you know. I have been willing to be uncomfortable. I have been willing to take risks. And I think that is the main difference between who I was and who I am now. I no longer seek safety as a default. I seek my own satisfaction.

I have also cultivated a deep connection to my own pleasure and a deep sort of impulse to seek out pleasure. And honestly, at times, I may have had a little bit of a junkie like addiction to chasing my own pleasure. I mean, I'm not ashamed of that. But I'm also not claiming to be the healthiest person in the world around this stuff. I wouldn't need to have a podcast and talk about it endlessly if I was, like, all healed, signed, sealed, delivered, tied up with a bow. I know how to do life. I know how to do sex and love and relationships. I fucking do not. I am a work in progress. But I've had the willingness to chase my own growth.

So here's a couple of threads I have been pulling together in my head. One is that all of this focus on sexuality and rediscovering my own pleasure has led me to healing my relationship with my body. And it's a work in progress. But I have never had the willingness to take care of myself in a beautiful and sort of consistent way that required some kind of rigor and practice. And I have that today. I have that today. I get an image in my mind of my soul being sucked back into my body After a lifetime of thinking my body was a problem and wanting to separate my body from this idea of who I really am, which was my mind. Because my body was such a source of deep shame, my body made me feel unlovable and unworthy of love and praise be to science. I have of course lost weight before and gotten fit before.

But this time feels different because it is different. GLP1 drugs have made an enormous difference in my life because they have taken away the layer of conversation around food and body and self worth that was wrapped up in every single thing I ate and every single thing I did. God, that's so profound. And this is coming from a person who spent seven years going to three meetings a week in Overeaters Anonymous. I have been doing this work my whole life. But these drugs have created a quiet that has really helped to make room for me to reshape my relationship with my body. And my relationship with my body has helped me to reshape the way I show up in the world. I went after my weight and body image and that sense that I've always had of not enough-ness that came along with all of that because it's the thing that I have always felt was plaguing me. It just radiated out into everything else.

My divorce led to my freedom to pursue whatever sexual and romantic and intimate experiences I chose. And that led me back to my body through pleasure. And pleasure led me to want to take on my disconnection from my body from a new angle, from the sense that it could be a place of joy and well being and self esteem and therefore deserved my love and attention and care. So once there was room from the noise of the food, then I could say to myself, well, what do I want for my body? What would make me feel good in my body? I found my way to Pilates because I always wanted to have core strength. I heard that Pilates gives you core strength. Holy do I have core strength now? It's like all I can do to not show you my abs, which you might not be able to see, but I could see them. I found my way to Pilates, to exercise. And I have gone deeper and deeper and deeper into that practice for the past several years. And I am a person who has never been able to sustain a consistent exercise practice because it was always coming from a place of exercise as punishment, not exercise as self love. I wonder if any of you can relate to that.

All that to say is I am so grateful to be in the 54 year old body I'm in today and the midlife that I am in today in the middle of my life. What an evolution from being a person who felt like she was always hiding, like she was dissembling, like she was lying. That woman was just surviving. And for me, divorce and prioritizing my own pleasure was the hinge on which my reinvention, my course correction has pivoted. And the catalyzing thing of change is that one change begets another change begets another change.

So I want to ask you, where are you holding yourself back? What is that one sticky spot for you that you know in your heart of hearts that if you changed it would unlock the door to your best possible life in the second half? Is it your marriage that you know is broken and maybe it's over and you're just sort of treading water and making excuses because you're scared to change? Is it that you're in the wrong career, that you've always dreamed of doing something but you thought you should be doing something totally different because it's practical or something that you just were told you should do? Is it in your codependency, in your over dependence on the approval of others?

How can you figure out how to give yourself that approval? Is it in your sexuality, your dead bedroom, your lack of libido? Is it in your loneliness, your lack of involvement, your craving for community and connection? Are you longing for a spiritual life but judging yourself for wanting a real connection to a higher power? Is it in your body, your weight, your food, your appearance, your fitness, your willingness to put taking care of yourself just slightly ahead of taking care of everything and everyone else? Is it in your childhood trauma, your grief over unprocessed loss? Is it in your mental health that you're not really willing to look at head on? Our happiness is a direct result of our willingness to make earnest, authentic efforts to evolve to towards a version of ourselves that we think is hot. Your happiness is deeply tied to your willingness to grow, to change and to manifest something new. That's all I've been doing. I've been doing it intensely. I've been doing it alongside you. I've been sharing it with you. Again, your witnessing is everything to me.

Hotter Than Ever is the project of me and hopefully in some meaningful way, it is the project of you. Oh, the feelings. I'm not going to shut them down, I'm just going to let them happen. Because they're really real. I really, really love you. And I really, really love me. And I really love this journey we've been on together. Okay, I'm gonna get a tissue.

What I am aspiring to be is as conscious and self aware and gently observing of my own behavior and decisions as I possibly can be. And rather than living in my head and thinking, what if, what if, what if? I am choosing to live out in the world and do stuff, take action, start a new business, talk about tricky topics, explore my own interests and curiosity, erotic and otherwise, even when it's hard and weird. And I'm pretty sure people will judge me for it. But really, that's more about them than it is about me. I've learned that what I want so passionately for you is for you to discover the willingness to take on the sticky stuff, to run at those hard things, to chase your own curiosity, and to let your inner compass, your inner guidance system, be the thing that informs how you live your life in the second half. Maybe your compass is dusty, maybe you need to blow the dust off of it, but it is there and it is waiting for you to take its direction.

I am so grateful for you, for your love and your encouragement and your support and validation. I am so grateful for having been on this stretch of road with you. As we all have changed and grown and deeply inquired into what it takes to become truer and lighter, freer and deeper and happier versions of ourselves, I come back to what my friend Sherry Salata said to me at the very beginning of this journey, that thought, I've thought again and again and again. How much time do you think you have left? How much time do you think you have left? None of us knows. You get one fucking life. Live it your way. I love you.

Thanks for listening to Hotter Than Ever. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Is there someone in your life who needs to hear this or any of the other 134 conversations we've had so far on Hotter Than Ever? Share this show with them right now.

Hotter than Ever is produced by the incredible Erica Gerard and Podkit Productions. Our associate producer is the amazing Melody Carey. Music is by my talented brother, Chris Keating, with vocals by the beautiful Issa Fernandez. I could not be more grateful for my collaboration with Erica and Melody, who have been the glue of this show and such incredible teammates and friends and supporters of the vision of Hotter Than Ever. This show would not be possible without them.

It is not the end. It's not. It's just a long hiatus, a sabbatical if you will. Am I a professor? I've always kind of thought I should be one. I'm not disappearing. You know where to find me if you miss me. I am always on Instagram, like, literally always. DM me. Follow me. Follow. Broad Collective. I miss you already.