profile

Rachel Baum

Certified Life Coach and host of the Making Midlife Magic podcast

I'm a life coach, college professor, and former president of the Overthinkers Club. Also, I host the Making Midlife Magic podcast. I love helping middle aged people dream again and create lives they love. Sign up to get inspiring mind shifts sent right to your email box. I don't over-send, and you can unsubscribe any time. This March & April I'm celebrating my podcast-versary with some delightful giveaways, so now is a great time to sign up!

Featured Post

A love note to getting through hard times and the power of "not just that" thinking

Outdoor lunch on Mom's birthday, 2018 How do the painful things that happen in our life become part of us? And how can we shape their influence on us, so we emerge stronger, more soulful, deeper? This is really it, isn’t it? Sometimes we wish painful experiences wouldn’t affect us, that we could just continue on, being our beautiful selves, untouched. But we also know that the hard things we’ve made it through are part of our history, part of who we are. We put our experiences in their places...

about 2 months ago • 4 min read

Peets tastes best in SF with my sister Greetings from San Francisco! I'm here for a conference and to see my sister and her wife --- the best! My sister Carrie and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I had the opportunity to see the Ragnar Kjartansson installation, The Visitors. It's an experience that will stay with me. The installation is a dark room with screens projecting images around the room. In each screen is a musician in a different room of the house, playing an...

3 months ago • 3 min read

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash It’s New Year’s Eve! I’m not much for parties, but I enjoy the reflection of this time of year, looking back and looking ahead. Here are two powerful questions I’ve been sitting with: What am I saying YES to, in my life, right now? And in the coming year, What do I want to say YES to? Sometimes we say yes to things we don’t want. We say yes to make other people happy or to get along. We say yes because it feels easier or because we think we don’t have a...

3 months ago • 3 min read

Merry Christmas Eve! As a kid, I celebrated Christmas, even though both my parents were Jewish. My mother's father wasn't Jewish and he passed away when she was still a teenager. I imagine celebrating Christmas made my mom feel connected to her dad. My husband's family opened gifts on Christmas eve, but my family was all about Christmas morning. I remember that feeling of being so excited that I could hardly sleep, and the wonder of waking up to a cozy house, filled with lights and presents....

3 months ago • 2 min read

Hanukkah starts in two days. For my family, I mean. For most of the world, Hanukkah ended on Dec 15, but since my daughter was away at school, we moved Hanukkah. We'll celebrate with eight nights of special foods and presents. Earlier this month, my son said something about "real Hanukkah" and I didn't know which he meant -- when the rest of the world was celebrating or when our family was celebrating. He meant when we were celebrating. Of course he did. Real Hanukkah is when we celebrate....

3 months ago • 3 min read

Happy birthday to me! Saturday was my 55th birthday -- woohoo! People have different attitudes about their birthday. Here's mine: YES PLEASE THANK YOU. I used to sometimes be disappointed in my birthday. I LOVE my birthday and there have been years when people didn't show up in the ways I wanted them to. So I fixed it. I started showing up for myself. I thought about what I wanted and gave it to myself. When friends ask what I want, I actually tell them (imagine!). I do what I want on my...

5 months ago • 3 min read

Happy Halloween! When my kids were young, I bought a blond wig to wear on Halloween. I wanted to be a fun mom who dressed up for the holiday. The kids hated it. They cried, “Take it off, take it off!”. It was scary that I could be someone else, even for a few minutes. They wanted to look over and see their Mom. Of course they did. By adulthood, most of us aren’t alarmed by a wig, but it can be scary to be someone else – scary for us and scary for others. If you’ve always told your kids, “I’ll...

5 months ago • 3 min read

JOY (Inside Out, Pixar) We’re driving my daughter back to college today. She was home for six days, for Fall Break. It wasn’t an ideal visit. She had a lot of work, as did I. We both would have preferred wide open days, a true break. And also, it was a joy to have her home. Realizing this – the joy of it – was powerful magic. It allowed me to stop focusing on how things could be better and to embrace what is. How often do you feel joy? I’m an optimistic person. I regularly have feelings of...

5 months ago • 4 min read

My husband and I went to see singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams perform on Thursday. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I was raw and exhausted from the week. But I told myself that a few hours away from my computer would be good for me. They were, but the concert was more than that; it was a gift. You see, Lucinda Williams had a stroke three years ago. Having seen her several times before, the change was apparent. In the past, her onstage persona was defiant. Life had tossed Lucinda around, but...

5 months ago • 4 min read

I found this mushroom on a walk this week, a heart on a dying log. Nature doesn’t make us work hard for metaphors, does it? I don’t like to think about getting nutrients from decay, as mushrooms do - but of course I do. We all do. Our marriage ends and we pursue the political activism our ex had no interest in Our kids move out and with our newly free time we discover that we love tango. We lose our job and admit to ourselves that we haven't liked our job in years. I’ve experienced this...

6 months ago • 3 min read
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