Somewhere in the first minute of an eleven-minute video published in January 2024, a midlife woman is asked whether she feels disconnected despite a life that looks complete from the outside. The speaker, Jen, founder and owner of Laughing Lotus Wellness, is a transformational coach who spent more than twenty years as a clinician in social work and psychology before moving into coaching. Her video, titled "BOLD: How to BE BOLD in MIdlife," is built around a single word she chose as her word of the year, and it lays out five steps for acting on it: get clear about what you want, ask for it without apology, be honest and authentic, listen to what your body is telling you, and pay attention to the people around you. She frames all of this not as a productivity plan but as recalibration, a deliberate turn away from old patterns that no longer fit. What follows explains those steps and the reasoning underneath them, so the ideas hold up for readers who have not watched.
The video opens by naming a feeling many women in their forties and fifties will recognize. "Are you a midlife woman and you're wondering if there isn't more to life than the one that you're living right now," Jen asks at the start (0:01). "You are super successful, you've done all the things," she continues, and yet "you somehow feel disconnected, like there's something that might be missing or you're being called to do something different."
Her own story is the evidence she offers. Around age forty, she says, she had a private practice, a family, a job, and "all the things." It was not that she was living large, she clarifies, but she had a good life and was "absolutely miserable" (1:07). She describes feeling broken, thinking her purpose was to help people while feeling stuck inside the work that was supposed to express it. What she found was that she had not really known her purpose. She had believed she did, but it lacked "depth to it that anchored me in."
That distinction, between a full calendar and a purpose with real anchoring, is the core of her argument. Her coaching, she explains, is aimed at helping women reconfigure, recalibrate, and then revolutionize the experience they are having of midlife. She contrasts that with the familiar script of the "midlife crisis," saying a midlife season can feel "more celebratory than like a crisis" (0:44). The reframe matters because it changes what a woman does next: instead of enduring a breakdown, she treats the moment as a chance to adjust course on purpose.
Jen says the word took "quite some time to land" for her (2:17). She is candid that it is not a permanent identity: "this is my word of the year which will not always be my word of the year." For this year, though, it stands for something concrete. "What I really wanted to do was live audaciously this year," she says. In practice that meant to "stop asking permission, stop apologizing, stop doubting yourself, stop those old behaviors," and to ask herself why she was repeating patterns that no longer worked.
There is a practical test underneath this. Jen argues that alignment is recognizable by how it feels: "it'll feel juicy, it'll feel beautiful, it'll feel easier, it'll feel like a flow." Discomfort becomes information. If something feels heavy and forced, that is a signal about the direction you are going, not proof that you lack discipline. Boldness, in this framing, is less about volume or aggression than about being willing to act on what you already know.
The first step is to be clear about what you want. "If you aren't clear you can't ask clearly for what you want," Jen says at the top of the list (3:10). She describes the alternative with some humor: a vague request is "like screaming to the universe with a big old me megaphone saying I'll take whatever you want to give me," and she is blunt that this is "probably not super successful."
The logic is that a precise desire gives you a direction to move in. Once you know what you want, you can move "more boldly" toward it, because you are no longer spending energy on a fog of possibilities. Clarity is not a one-time decision, either. It is the foundation for every step that follows, since each of them depends on being able to name the thing you are reaching for.
The second step is to be brave enough to ask. Jen gives examples in the first person: "hey, can I join that," "hey, can I start that," "I want to begin this next journey of my life." She is specific about the midlife dimension of this. She describes a journey she had carried in her heart "for years and years" but did not have time for while raising children, and she notes that now that she is an empty nester, she has more room to pursue it. Asking, in other words, is partly about recognizing that your circumstances have changed.
She also takes on fear of refusal directly. "Even if you feel a little afraid to ask, know that no isn't going to hurt you. You're going to be okay." Her point is that most of us have heard "no" many times and survived it, and that persistence depends on being willing to keep the momentum moving after a refusal. She adds a line that reframes the outcome entirely:
"Sometimes a no is a blessing in disguise, let's be honest." (Jen, in her video published January 2024, around 4:04)
The third step is to be honest and authentic, which Jen calls "a huge, huge move" for being bold. Her confession here is one of the more interesting moments in the video. She had become "so in a habit of checking boxes" that she "stopped feeling authentic when I showed up." She was not saying things she disagreed with, she clarifies, but she was not in the energy of "seeing it the way that I wanted to." That realization led her to step back from parts of her business for a time to recalibrate how she wanted to show up.
Her standard is simple: "I don't want to just talk to talk." She is wary of "getting stuff out there to get stuff out there," and she extends the same standard to listeners, inviting them to be honest "with your own voice about where you are, what you need, how you want to do that." Notably, she says authenticity earns her respect even when she disagrees with someone:
"I don't even have to agree with somebody. I always appreciate authenticity, even when I don't agree. I can respect it, it might not be my jam." (Jen, in her video published January 2024, around 6:00)
For a midlife audience, the implication is that the years of performing competence can make it harder to speak plainly. Boldness in this step means letting your actual voice be the one people hear.
The fourth step, which Jen calls embodying your experience, asks you to listen to your body. Her list of signals is specific: a tight, constricted feeling; breath that becomes shallow or gets held; tightness or stuck feeling in the throat; tension in the belly or the gut space; shoulders and neck that go tense. "Our bodies are always talking to us," she says, and in a busy culture "we sometimes don't listen. We forget."
Her practical tool is a question she calls the "hell yes" test: "Is my body like a hell yes? If it's not a hell yes, then it's a no." She treats this as a working rule rather than a slogan. The practice she describes is to pause, take a breath, and ask "what am I noticing?" The answer might be, in her words, "my body says that feels pretty freaking good," or "my body says no thanks." Either response is useful data. The goal is not to override the body with a rational argument but to let it inform the decision.
It is worth being precise about the scope of this claim. Jen is not offering a medical framework; she is describing a habit of attention that many people, especially those who have spent decades in demanding roles, have lost. Within that frame, the body becomes an early warning system for choices that look right on paper but feel wrong in practice.
The fifth step, which appears in the last third of the video, turns outward to the people in your life. Jen says that "network is so vital" and that the people who meet you where you are matter. She talks about finding people who share a "matching vibration," and about valuing people who offer a different tact, approach, or perspective, which she says is "always going to help us grow." The transcript for this section is partly fragmentary, so it is best to read her emphasis as a general invitation to be deliberate about your circle rather than as a detailed method.
Her closing segments return to the same theme, asking viewers to think about who is around them and whether those people support their growth. Read together with the earlier steps, this one completes a loop. Clarity tells you what you want, courage lets you ask for it, honesty lets you show up as yourself, the body tells you whether a choice is right, and the people around you determine whether you keep moving.
What makes Jen's approach distinctive is that it refuses to separate the inner and outer work. A midlife woman who is clear about her goals but silent about her needs will stall. One who speaks boldly but ignores her body's signals will burn out. And one who has courage but no network may find herself alone when a "no" arrives. The video's five steps are best understood as a single practice seen from five angles.
Jen closes by inviting viewers into further conversation, pointing to her email list and free resources. The most useful takeaway from the video, though, does not depend on any of that. It is a set of questions a reader can ask herself: What do I actually want, stated clearly? What am I afraid to ask for? Where am I performing rather than speaking? What does my body say when I imagine the next step? And who is in my corner?
If this framework resonates, start small. Watch the original video on the Laughing Lotus Wellness channel to hear Jen's full delivery and tone, since much of her meaning lives in her warmth and examples. Then try two exercises over the next week. First, write one sentence describing exactly what you want in the coming year, without qualifiers. Second, run the "hell yes" test on a single decision and notice what your body says before your mind has finished arguing. Boldness, as Jen frames it, is not a dramatic leap. It is a series of honest, specific choices, made one at a time, by a woman who has decided that midlife is a season to recalibrate on purpose.
