How I Stay Young at 76! Learn to Age Well by Setting Bold Goals.

Society would like to have us believe that our dreams and our passions have an expiration date, that once we get over 60, we aren't supposed to feel passion anymore, and our potential for human growth, creativity, and productivity is behind it. But I refuse to accept that. That would mean that all of the years that we have earned our wisdom and our life experience that have proudly accumulated over time have no value anymore, and that your potential as a human being to continue evolving, learning, creating, and prospering is over. Well, I can tell you that I personally have never felt greater passion or excitement about the future and had more clarity than I have today. I have decided to start a new technology business at 76, and I hope to prove that my dreams don't have to retire. And if you're feeling the pull towards something new, a business idea, a creative project, learning a musical instrument, writing music, writing poetry, or your life story, taking up dance or Pilates, joining a gym, but you feel that you are past your prime and won't succeed or you will be ridiculed by others, then this video is for you. You're going to learn that you are not fighting your age, you're fighting a survival mechanism in your brain that's trying to keep you small, and it's time to understand it and stop letting it hold you back from your dreams. Hi, I'm Linda. Welcome to my channel, New Age Beauty, which is all about aging beautifully, mind, body, and spirit. At 76, I explore what's possible, what's worth doing, and how we can all exceed our own expectations for aging by shifting our mindset from growing old to growing bold and setting bold goals for ourselves. So starting anything new can be daunting at any age. We've been taught to view fear and discomfort as a sign to stop, especially as we age, but that friction is actually a catalyst we can use to rewire our brains for success. I'm choosing to lean into the discomfort because I understand how our brains' neuroplasticity can convert that fear into fuel. And now we're going to explore how to rewire our brains for creativity and why your passion doesn't have an expiration date unless you choose to set one. So today, I'm pulling back the curtain on my new business venture at 76 and the fascinating neuroscience showing how the discomfort we often run from is actually the precise catalyst that we need for a second act. So how do you know what you are truly passionate about? Well, whatever makes your heart race. Those activities where you just disappear into what you are doing and you can't believe how much time has flown by. That is passion. It's a lot like when you fall in love. You can't get enough of the other person. You count the moments until you see them again. It can feel like that. When you're doing something you desperately love, it is often called being in the zone or in the flow. It's that optimal psychological state where your skills meet the right challenge allowing you to operate in the zone with effortless focus. But when your passion, that which you love doing, perfectly aligns with your purpose, your deeper why, your action becomes completely natural. I have been in the flow several times in my life and there is nothing like it. You get excited to wake up in the morning to get started. You feel like there's not enough hours in the day. Well, this time my passion is being made possible through the magic of AI. There are two types of people right now. There are those who fear AI and avoid it and there are those who are excited by its possibility and embrace it. So I have fallen in love with what is called vibe coding. It's an AI that allows you to create your own apps and it does all the coding for you so you don't have to work with developers. A few months ago I vibe coded my first app, the New Age Beauty goal tracker that now has almost 2,000 users. I had created and developed several apps over the years for companies working with teams of developers and I loved doing that but it was very time consuming and very very costly. But now I can do it all by myself and it's just amazing. This new app is much more complex than my goal tracker and it's designed to help YouTube content creators build and grow successful channels. It will be launching in a few weeks and I just can't wait. But this video is not about my story. It's about dismantling the invisible mental barrier that tells millions of us women over 55, 60, 70, 75 that our time for big dreams is over. Well, in the next few minutes I'm going to share with you how your brain is designed to change and build new ambitions even now. I'll also walk you through three specific mindset shifts I made that took me from feeling like I was falling behind the times to launching this channel at 75 and then building two different software applications today. So please stick with me because my goal is that by the end of our time together you will feel equipped and more importantly entitled to write a new chapter for yourself no matter what your calendar says. The one guaranteed failure in life is to let your dreams expire just like society says you should do at a certain age. I have reinvented myself so many times as you probably have. After surviving a terminal illness in my 20s, to coping with the loss of my life and business partner in my 30s, to losing a business I had poured my heart soul and money into in my 40s, and starting a real estate career in my 50s. And then developing a complete transformation of my body mind and spirit in my 60s. Then in my 70s I became a caregiver to my very ill husband who has now had a transplant and doing great. And during that time while I was home with him I launched this YouTube channel and now I'm launching this new business. So I am not an exception to the rule. I am proof that the rule itself is just wrong. And the key to breaking it is not in your circumstances, it's in your brain. So we spend a lot of time on this channel talking about our bodies, how to build muscle, how to get more protein and avoid sarcopenia, how to have beautiful skin, on and on. But today we're going to perform a targeted intervention on the most important real estate we own. And that's the three pounds between our ears. So when you first start out on a new path towards a new dream, the reward center of your brain lights up and you feel lit up. Your brain gets flooded with dopamine and that is your motivator. It gives you intense euphoria, focus, and that incredible drive you just want to work on your new project all day and night. And then at the exact same time your prefrontal cortex, which handles rational judgment and critical thinking, actually decreases in activity. So your brain is deliberately giving you a honeymoon phase so that you aren't paralyzed by the risks involved. It encourages you to feel courageous. So this dopamine-driven focus is vital for neuroplasticity, which is your brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections. By engaging in novel complex tasks, you stimulate the creation of new neurons and you are fundamentally acting out of what is called the vitality loop. Setting new goals leads to dopamine release, which enhances your cognitive function, which ultimately promotes long-term brain health and longevity. It acts as a literal fountain of youth for your mind. But we all know what happens next. The honeymoon phase ends when the novelty wears off and suddenly the dopamine drops. Well, this is what neuroscientists call the dip. The excitement diminishes or even vanishes. The business plan you loved last week or the daily language lesson that you started suddenly feels difficult, boring, and even overwhelming. So many women have written to me saying that they start and stop their diet, fitness, and beauty routines because they procrastinate and are simply too lazy to finish what they start. Well, I want you to stop saying that. Stop thinking that. Remove the word lazy from your vocabulary. It is a useless judgment for a neurochemical state. You weren't lazy when you spent three nights in a row researching your new passion or buying all the supplies for your new project. That same person who did all of that is the same person struggling today. Your brain is just trying to avoid the negative emotion or discomfort. And whenever we feel dread, our lower brain, specifically the amygdala, takes over. And the amygdala's only job is to keep you safe and comfortable. So it scans for threats. It despises discomfort and it certainly does not care about your bold goals. Well, when you sit down to work or start doing your exercise for the day and you feel frustrated, the amygdala screams at you to grab your phone, scroll through the internet, go tidy up the kitchen, or just watch television instead. It vetoes your higher rational brain in exchange for immediate gratification. What you are viewing as laziness or procrastination is not a time management problem. It is an emotional regulation problem. So we have to learn to override that lower part of the brain if we ever want to reclaim our independence and our confidence. First, you need to expect the dip and then tell yourself it is going to fade. And when it does, it's just proof that things are getting serious. It's not a signal that you should quit. Secondly, you should shrink your commitment during that phase. If you can't face working on your passion for two hours, tell your brain you only have to do it for 30 minutes. The terrible 30-minute session that you actually complete is infinitely better than a perfect two-hour session that you skipped entirely. So go in and introduce just a little bit of novelty to trick your dopamine system back into gear. And finally, when you feel that sense of dread, just tell yourself the truth that you feel the resistance and acknowledge the uncomfortable vibration in your body that you are going to take the action anyway. And once your brain sees you doing a hard thing and surviving it, you're beginning to rewire your identity. You're starting to prove to yourself that you are the kind of woman who honors her commitments and accomplishes her goals. So you may have noticed that the voice of doubt, the one that whispers in your ear that you're too old, you'll look foolish, it's too late, it's too hard, is the loudest when you are idle, when you're sitting quietly, driving, or trying to fall asleep. Well, there's a fascinating neurological reason for this. Your brain has two key networks that work in opposition to one another, kind of like a seesaw. One is called the default mode network or the DMN. So think of that as your brain's autopilot. It's active when you aren't focused on a specific external task. And while it's important for creativity, it is also the network that loves to ruminate, that replays old stories, and it worries about the future. The I'm too old to dream narrative lives right there in the DMN. But here's the beautiful part. The moment that you engage in a focused, goal-oriented activity, your brain flips a switch. It suppresses the autopilot DMN and it activates its opposite, the task positive network or the TPN. So that is your doing brain. It's what lights up whenever you are learning a new skill, concentrating on a project, or totally absorbed in your work. You know that it's at work when time just disappears. And here is the secret that changed everything for me. These two networks are inversely correlated. So when one is highly active, the other goes quiet. You cannot be fully engaged in learning how to use a new piece of software, for example, and simultaneously be ruminating on whether you're too old to do it. The very act of doing it is the neurological antidote to the self-doubt that festers in idleness. This is why my advice is not to tell you to think positive. That's not enough. My advice is to take action. The focused effort does not just move you forward. It neurologically silences the inner critic that tells you to stay small. So if the science tells us the doing is the cure for doubting, well, how do we put that into practice? This is where three practical shifts come into play. First, I shifted from asking what will they think to what will I think. The biggest barrier to starting something new later in life is the fear that we're going to look foolish. We're concerned that our family is going to worry about us or that our friends are going to laugh at us. But then I had a very honest conversation with myself. And that was, how will I feel about myself in five years if I just let my dream die? All because I was afraid of what other people might think. And the pain of that potential regret felt so much heavier than the fear of failure. Your judgment of yourself is really the only one that you're going to have to live with for the rest of your life every single day. So support yourself by being kind and encouraging. The second thing I did was I shifted from accumulating knowledge to applying it for myself. So I started this journey by developing my New Age Beauty Goal Tracker. And during that development, I learned how to vibe code. And learning how to do that created a new friction for me because my brain went through the process. And it seemed a little chaotic at first until I got into the flow of doing it. But that's true with anything new. And now I'm creating a much more complex program using AI to help YouTube content creators build a bigger, more successful channel. So the lesson here is twofold. Start with what you know. Pay attention to the problems on your journey. And inside them, you could find your next opportunities. The third thing is I embraced progressive overload for the mind. And yes, that's a term we normally use for building muscle. But it works perfectly for building dreams. You don't walk into a gym and try to lift 200 pounds on day one. You start with 10. My 10-pound weight was this channel. Then you go to 15 pounds. My 15-pound weight was creating the Goal Tracker app. And now my 20-pound weight is this new project. Just lift the first small weight just like you do when you're lifting weights. And then push past the current comfort level. Allow for recovery. And then level up to your cognitive capacity. Each step builds the mental muscle for the next heavy lift. So your dreams don't get smaller as you get older. They just get quieter. So give them a voice to start down the path. And you'll find joy just in the process of trying. So my question to you today is what is your next dream? Put it in the comments. I read everything and I respond to everything. I would love to see and I would love to support you on your journey. In fact, sharing can be the first step to that task positive network that we talked about. And if you need a nudge to stay accountable, make sure you download my free New Age Beauty Goal Tracker. Now it's designed to help you with your beauty routines, fitness, wellness, nutrition. But you can set it up for any kind of goal that you want. So you can customize it. Just go to or if you're on your TV, you can just go ahead and scan this QR code and it'll take you right to it. So if this resonated with you, I ask you to please give me a like, subscribe, maybe even a hype. It'll help my channel grow. And click on the notification bell so that you'll be alerted when I have new videos uploaded. I want to thank you for joining me today. Here's some other videos I have done that you may enjoy as well. I look forward to seeing you in my next video. And in the meanwhile, I wish you a beautiful day.