Minx Up Your Life!

By Carrie Brooks

What do you get when you combine the insights of a professional life coach with the very human experience of being single, female and over 45? You get Minx Up Your Life! An inspirational call to action for single women over 45 to start embracing love, life and living for the moment. Carrie deals with the challenges and issues that single, older women face in a positive and realistic way. She also offers insightful and tangible solutions, while championing an exciting and tantalising alternative to settling down to a life of bingo, arts & crafts and a houseful of cats!

The book openly discusses issues around sex, dating and relationships for women over 45. It also confronts our culture’s tired, old and stereotypical beliefs about ageing as a female in today’s society. Minx Up Your Life! introduces the idea of beliefs and core values and how they affect women’s everyday attitude and behaviour. To ‘Think Minx’ is to embrace a new mindset, which increases self-confidence and self-esteem. The Minx in this book, is unashamedly a playful and joyful single woman in mid-life, who is fulling her life’s full potential. Carrie’s rallying call is for her readers to “Come On, my fellow Minxes, let’s start living!” as she invites them to see mid-life as a potentially exciting and thrilling time, rich with possibilities and opportunities to stretch their wings and truly fly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789011647

Carrie Brooks

Carrie Brooks is a professional life coach with a thriving business. She is also known as an inspirational speaker, a regular blogger and has written articles for online publications. With a rich and varied life experience, combined with her extensive coaching experience, she is finely poised to become the voice for the women of her generation.

Book preview

Minx Up Your Life!

Carrie Brooks

Copyright © 2018 Carrie Brooks

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781789011647

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This book is dedicated with love

to my beautiful friend

Gaidik

as a constant reminder

to live life to the full, always.

Contents

Acknowledgments

One: Minxing Up Your Life

Two: The Era of the Minx

Three: The Single Minx

Four: The Minx Takes Charge

Five: Romancing the Minx

Six: Sex and the Single Minx

Seven: The Spirit of the Minx

Eight: Freeing the Inner Minx

Nine: Being a Minx in Mind and Body

Ten: Minx Culture v Youth Culture

Eleven: The MenoMinx

Twelve: Values Exercise

Thirteen: You know you are a Minx when..

Not an end but a new beginning...

Notes

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance and support with Minx Up Your Life!

Firstly my son Max whose patience and unshakeable belief has seen me through the challenging moments of the writing process. My editor Meredith Tennant whose professionalism made editing with her such a joy and to all my wonderful clients who have made me the coach I am today.

My heartfelt thanks to you all.

A Minx is a sexually attractive and playful woman who often causes trouble.

How delightful!

When I started to write this book, I wanted to find a word that encapsulated, reclaimed, and reinvented the experience of the older single woman.

I was looking for a word to capture the essence of a single woman in mid-life, a word that would sum up the playful and joyful nature of a woman fully embracing her life potential. Minx expresses it beautifully.

It is time for us to come out and play.

I love the idea of being sexually attractive and playful at all stages of life. I see the Era of the Minx as a dawning realisation that we have been suppressing our genuine selves to fit into societal constraints of what a woman past her childbearing years should look, behave, and feel like. I believe we need to decide for ourselves what this stage of our life is, not only for us to enjoy a full life expression but also for all the young women following in our footsteps. Can we honour ourselves and create a live that will fully express who we are?

I believe so. . . The choice is ours.

Sounds delightful!

My rebellious spirit also likes to challenge the idea of causing trouble. My question is, trouble for whom? Is it possible that we are beginning to question the traditional idea of fitting into the neatly designed ‘single women over a certain age’ box, encouraged to believe that the only thing we have to look forward to is a houseful of cats and weekly bingo?

So what inspired me to write a book for single

women over 45?

Firstly, this is me! I have been single off and on for 10 years now, so everything that I talk about in this book taps into my own personal life experience. I have felt as you have, lived through the ups and downs, challenges and disappointments and have come out the other side. This book was born through a deep desire to share what I know and what I’ve learnt. This very personal experience, combined with the professional knowledge and expertise of a life coach who has coached many women of our age group, conjures up a potent brew, a book bursting with straight-talking, no-nonsense heartfelt help unique to where we find ourselves right now.

In my professional coaching over the years, I have observed a certain recurring, intransigent belief surfacing in many women over the age of 45. Essentially it is a belief that their best years are over and that they’ve missed the boat, both relationship- and career-wise, a general feeling that they are too old to embark on anything new, so it’s better to remain securely in their age-defined comfort zone, never to venture out again.

I found myself witnessing this mindset with alarming regularity, and it was fascinating to observe the reaction it provoked in me. This is my age group, my fellow women passengers on this road we call life, and I began to feel such a burning rebellion in my soul that I simply had to strike a blow for this age, this stage of life, so unappreciated and undervalued.

I came up with the idea of writing a book that challenges these limiting beliefs and is a positive force, encouraging a deeper understanding of what this stage of life has to offer to women. In effect, to counterbalance the negativity surrounding ageing in our culture, and with joyful abandon, flip it on its head. A new dawn where over 45 is a stage of life to be celebrated and delighted in. I called this book Minx Up your Life to encourage women to venture beyond old stereotypical and limiting ideas of women past childbearing age and have them embracing this time as a wondrous opportunity for self-discovery and personal fulfilment.

Are there quite enough books written for women of our age?

The simple answer is no, and definitely not for single women of our age.

In this book I talk about sex, health, and relationships, all things that are of interest to us, and I express my thoughts and feelings on the subjects in a frank and open way, opening up this important dialogue so we can address these issues in an informative and empowering way.

I want to encourage older women to reclaim their self-worth and become inspired, to relish the opportunity this era of their lives offers them and to go on to create a joyful expression of who they are.

I wish to examine and understand what has brought us to thinking that our best years are over and to question our beliefs around ageing.

What is the precise age that we are ‘too old’?

I believe that we need to redefine the concept of ageing. We are living ever longer, and while there are a few pioneering souls, the majority of us are still caught up in the old mindset of seeing numbers as a barrier, a way of pigeonholing and confining ourselves to a life of limited expectations.

It is a time for a change!

I would like to highlight and bring into the open all the wonderful positives of this unchartered time of life. We have arrived at these shores with a wealth of life experience and we know ourselves in a deeper, more satisfying way. We embark on new friendships and relationships with a better understanding of why we are drawn to people, and we choose more wisely whom to invite into our lives.

We have more personal power

We have also grown comfortable in our own skins—this comes hand in hand with a deeper sense of self-awareness, developed over the years. At this time of life we recognise what we like more quickly and easily, while also developing a strong idea of what is not right for us, identifying people or situations that simply don’t work for us. It’s a lifetime of experience that brings us to this point in time. What a wonderful cocktail, a rich life experience combined with the energy to enjoy it.

Over 45, for most women, marks an end to their childbearing years. For most women, their thirties and early forties are consumed with the ongoing dilemma of whether to have or not have children, and then there’s the challenge of finding a partner to father those children. If the decision is to go ahead and have children, there’s the preoccupation with fertility and the frightening possibly that it won’t happen naturally and that it’s all been left too late. This can overwhelm women’s lives, this race to beat the fertility clock. As we arrive at our mid-forties, generally the ticking has finally stopped, and a brand new time opens up before us, free from the pressures of reproduction.

The start of a new stage, a time for us

For many women with children, this time of life is when our children are steadily growing up, needing us less and less as they hurry impatiently toward their burgeoning independence. Now this has a very interesting knock-on effect, because as the children become more independent, they equally become less dependant on us.

Our role starts to naturally change, which triggers an opportunity to redefine what we want from life, an opportunity to start reclaiming our life again, picking up where we left off before we had children. For many, it’s a dawning realisation that our parental role is simply just one of the many stages in our life.

Are we ready and prepared to step into the new life that is waiting for us, or will we be ever-defined by the role of parent? The choice is ours. This is very much a choice for our generation. Our parents slipped from being parents to grandparents without much thought about what they wanted their life to be. We can make the choice. It’s not a question of no longer being parents but more about choosing to embrace all the possibilities our life has to offer, while doing the best job we can of bringing up our children as they move toward independence. We have this opportunity, so are we going to take it? And if we do, what excellent role