#288: How to Transform Your Midlife Crisis into a Joyful Journey: Stephanie's Inspiring 40 Drinks with 40 Friends Birthday Celebration

Because we're joined today by Stephanie McLaughlin, a woman who was getting ready to turn 40 years old, and she decided to set off on something that has turned out to be absolutely incredible.

It was an idea to have 40 drinks with 40 different people from her past.

She thought it was just going to be something fun, something lighthearted.

But as I said, it turned out to be something absolutely incredible.

As you listen to her story, I hope that you'll think about your own situation, about your own next upcoming big birthday, and how you might celebrate it in a little bit different way.

Maybe a way just like Stephanie is talking about today.

This is episode 288. This is the story of Stephanie McLaughlin, 40 drinks with 40 different people to celebrate turning 40 years old.

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I'm 39 and never married, single, never engaged, any of those things, and had been dumped by yet another terrible boyfriend.

By text message at some point earlier in the year.

Also, I'm a Leo, I'm an extrovert. I'm like all the things that loves a spotlight, right?

But those two things that year was like, I just wasn't into the big party, the big four.

Oh, you know, I'm the kind of girl who loves a good party.

But that year in those circumstances, it just felt really kind of icky and gross to me because it felt like, you know, here I am turning 40 and this is what, like the wedding that I never had, you know, like you get to, you get to chat with people for, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes at a party.

And, and, and it just, it just felt off for me.

So I was trying to figure out something else to do for my birthday. And I did two things.

The first thing I did was I went to Paris with some friends and my parents.

And that was just as glamorous and spectacular as you would think it would be.

It was fabulous. Trip of a lifetime.

And then as my birthday came closer that year, I was trying to figure out what I was going going to do to celebrate.

And the idea landed in my brain almost fully formed.

And I decided that I would have 40 drinks with 40 people in 40 different locations.

And then each drink that I had with somebody would have some sort of thematic connection to that person or our relationship that might relate to how we knew each other or when we were close or things like that.

And I loved the idea mostly because it was ridiculous.

Honestly, it was just the silliest thing.

And listen, my birthday is August 1st. So for decades, I have been celebrating a birthday month.

And frankly, I just think it gives me a great opportunity to say to friends, you know, who I don't see all the time, hey, let's have drinks.

Let's, you know, let's have dinner.

Like it gives me a great excuse to reach out to people. and so this was kind of that but on steroids and so my birth I could extend my birthday for as long as it would take me to have these 40 drinks.

Yes. Incredible. So, so when did you actually start? Like when was drink one?

Was it before your birthday or after? So drink one was about a month before my 40th birthday.

I was out for dinner with my very best friend.

We were going to a Red Sox game. I was in Boston and I hadn't seen him in a few months.

So I was telling him about Paris and about, you know, the trip and that was was great.

And then sort of turned the topic of conversation to this crazy idea I had.

And my best friend Adrian is just always loves my crazy ideas and is always egging me on.

So he heard the idea and he was like, I love it. You got to do it.

And then a couple of beats went by, I don't know. And he, he just said, Steph, look at this.

And he slid the cocktail menu over to me and he pointed needed something on the menu.

And I had such like this like moment of like separation from everything.

All I could think was, I wasn't really feeling like drinking rum tonight.

And he was like, no, look at the name. And my friend Adrian is a journalist down in Boston, and the drink was called the Periodista.

And that is a Spanish word for journalist list that sort of came to, I think in like the 1960s in Miami and Adrian is a native of Miami.

So like all of a sudden it was like, it was like Tetris things just sort of like falling into place, click, click, click, click.

And I was like, Oh, um, I think we're starting. I think we're doing this.

Wow. Yeah. So it was kind of kismet though.

That first one was just, um, you know, it was just kind of on a lark and it just off we went.

Yeah. So was it after that? I'm kind of curious, like, Did you be like, okay, I'm going to get serious with this and try to write out your list of 39 more people?

No. So, and that's the thing. Again, because this was sort of ridiculous, this was also a bunch of years ago now.

So I like to say back when Facebook was fun.

Yes. We all remember when that was, right? I also, side note, my day job is I own a marketing agency.

And so I kind of had a little, a couple of resources. So I was like, Hey, listen, let's, let's build this little website and let me write blog posts about each visit and each drink.

And let me, you know, then share each of these blog posts on Facebook.

And again, when Facebook was fun, people would comment on it and, you know, so it turned into kind of a thing pretty quickly.

But what happened was I had two friends, friends of my brother from high school, like I've known them since I was a little kid.

They were home. They lived away and they were home like two weekends later.

So it was like, well, I only see you guys a couple of times a year. Let's have a drink.

And then the next week, same thing. Somebody else was home who I hadn't seen in a while.

So I had a drink with them. And then next thing you know, it was like, oh, wait, I've had seven or eight drinks.

I went out one night with friends of mine. It was three guys.

And we went down to Boston for a big night out. And I ended up having a drink with each of them. We went to three different places, three different drinks.

I had drinks with each of them.

And so like very quickly, it's like, oh, wait, I'm like eight or nine drinks.

And I know I want to have, you know, one with my mom and one with my dad and each of my brothers and like, okay.

So all of a sudden it was like, you get to like 12, 13, 14. And you're like, wait a minute, this is not an unlimited runway.

All of a sudden you have to, you do actually have to start thinking about what you, how you want to spend the rest of these slots.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know what? And when you put it that way, I guess it makes the whole idea of 40 people seem a little bit easier because at first in my head, I'm thinking, I don't know that there's 40 people from my past that I care to have a drink with.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting because, you know, first it's just who's nearby.

And of course, there are people who raise their hand as soon as you say you're doing this ridiculous thing. And they're like, I want to be one of your drinks.

So, you know, there's a handful of those.

And then all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, these are all people that I, you know, see regularly. Or like I said, those few folks who were home.

But what do I really want to do with this now that I'm starting to gain some momentum?

I don't want it just to be like all the same people that I see, you know, within the course of a year.

So I started digging through my brain and my history and my background, and I found people from grammar school, from high school, from college, an old boyfriend, people I worked at different jobs with.

And so then I started really doing some outreach and kind of trying to like, you know, reconnect with some people I hadn't connected with in in sometimes 10 or 15 years.

Yeah. And what a cool excuse to reconnect with somebody.

Exactly. Well, and that's the thing. So for me, this air of ridiculousness was kind of one of the things that gave me cover.

It gave me a reason to reach out to people that I hadn't talked to in 5, 10, 15 years.

And I'll be honest, Kevin, I reached out to a couple of girlfriends friends who I had lost connection with, you know, over the, over time.

And I really thought, you know, oh, I would love to reconnect with these, these women.

I just, I adored them and, you know, friendships, you know, ebb and flow, as you know, and two separate women said, no.

Hmm. They, they said, Nope, I don't think that's for me. I don't want to be a part of that.

So it, you know, there, there was, you know, there were the, the wins and there were, there were a couple of losses.

Wow. You know what? And you answered one of my questions I was going to ask is, is did you ever have anybody turn you down? And you did.

Yeah. A couple of girlfriends.

One of them said to me at the time, I just don't think I'm in the right place to to reconnect and to be a part of this.

And, you know, you have to respect that. What can you say?

And the other one simply just kind of said no.

But strangely, she and I, not strangely, you know, in a lovely turn of events, she and I reconnected a couple of years later.

And so, you know, life goes the way it goes. It's always, you know, wandering and meandering, and some people cross your paths, and then you separate, maybe you never see again.

And then other people, you just sort of come back into their orbit again. Yeah, absolutely.

I love it. So talk to me about when you look back on these 40 different people that you got to meet with, was there any that stand out that maybe, I don't know, for some reason, when you look back, that memory stands out more than any of the others?

Yeah, there are a couple of drinks that... that I mean, I could tell you a story about every single one of them, but we probably don't have that kind of time because they were just, let me put it this way.

Some people hear about this idea and they kind of recoil at the thought of like drinks and drinking and like, and it really turned out not to be about that.

Although for many years was a person who was, you know, quite the party girl and, you know, always out at the bars and all of that stuff.

But it, the, the project turned out to be not about that.

It really turned out to be 40 visits with people.

And if you go back to the concept of the big party, um.

And only getting, you know, oh, I invited my girlfriends from grammar school, right?

But I got to see them for five minutes or seven minutes or 10 minutes before I was pulled away or had to go visit with somebody else.

Instead, I had, you know, a visit with them, just the two of them and me.

So it was like, you know, I took this party and I spread it out among, you know, individual visits instead.

So, so there were a number of, of stories that, that were just wonderful.

One of them I'm going to tell just because I, I adore this. So the drink that I had with my dad, we had a drink called the creamsicle and we had this because when I was, I think I was 13 years old.

My dad was a travel and salesman kind of guy, engineer, sales engineer kind of guy. So he was away, you know, several days a week.

And And so it was some, I don't know, Tuesday or Wednesday night, he gets home, it's, it's eight o'clock, you know, my brother's, everybody's already had dinner.

And so he says, he grabs me and says, Hey, let's go, let's go down downtown and just go out and get some appetizers.

And so we, we go downtown, we go to this bar and I, sorry, not a bar. It was a restaurant.

And I had been there with my mom previously for lunch.

And I'd had this thing called a creamsicle. It's essentially like, you know, a, a, an ice cream shake kind of thing.

So we order you know some potato skins and a i don't know mozzarella sticks and he gets a beer and i order a creamsicle and when the waitress brings the creamsicle i took a sip of it i said dad this tastes really funny and he took a sip of it and he called the waitress back over and he said um excuse me this has alcohol in it and she goes yeah and he goes she's 13.

So, you know, I always looked a little old for my age and, you know, my dad looked a little young for his.

So I don't know if it looked like we were out on a date or something. It was kind of crazy.

So, you know, there were things like that. Like when I knew I was going to have a drink with my dad, I was like, it's gotta be a creamsicle.

There's literally nothing else it can be.

So that's just an example of kind of that thematic connection.

But one of the really interesting stories about these drinks was the two girls I went to grammar school with.

Karen and Ginny. And when I was young, we lived in this rural town outside the city where we live now.

And I moved into town in second grade and I met Karen at school.

And then in fourth grade, the summer before fourth grade, Ginny moved into town.

And she lived up the road from me. Now, I don't know how a nine-year-old like hears town gossip or something, but somehow I found out that there was a family with three little girls that had moved in up the road.

Well, down where I lived, I have two younger brothers and in the neighborhood, it was all little boys.

So, you know, lots and lots of boy energy, football, riding bikes, snowmobiles, all that kind of stuff. So one day I created this ruse where I put our dog on a leash and I said, I'm taking the dog for a walk.

And I walked up to this house where this family had moved in and essentially like loitered in the street until an adult saw me and sent the children out to meet me.

So we're at this visit and Ginny says, do you remember how we met?

And I said, no, I have no, I said, I was fourth grade, right? Did we meet at school?

And she said, no, it was before school started. And so she tells me this story and I'm just, you know, we're all laughing. Oh my goodness. Ha ha ha.

And on my drive home that night, I, I, I was, you know, relishing my visit with these these wonderful women.

And then thinking, wait a minute, Ginny's house was, where was it?

So I go home and I Google map it only to find out that Ginny's house was a mile away from mine. I was nine.

I was nine. And I like created this ruse, put the dog on the leash and walked a mile up the street to make a friend.

So I said to my mom, you know, told her, I saw her at some point after this visit and I, I said, ha ha, can you, can you believe this story?

And she said, of course I can believe it. Why do you think we kept you on such a short leash?

And it was like, oh, you know, a bunch of things started clicking into place for me again, more Tetris click, click, click.

I knew as a as a as an adult, as a young adult in my 20s, in my 30s, I knew I was sort of a bold person, an adventurous person, kind of, you know, up for anything kind of thing.

But I didn't know about myself that it was that innate, that it was really, you know, built in.

This was not something I had picked up along the way.

This was, you know, a real core level kind of thing for me. And so that was actually Karen told us a story, a very similar story at that same visit.

She said one day she had come over after school for a play date and she and I went out into the woods behind my house and just went like adventuring out into the woods on our own, you know, sort of path.

And you know then when we finally showed up back at my house you know our moms were standing in the backyard you know red faces arms crossed they'd been yelling for us this is like I had no idea that I was just this adventurous bold do my own thing kind of person as a child but yeah I was so that was one of the first ones that kind of opened my eyes to like, Oh, wait a minute. People are telling me stories or they're reflecting back to me things that they know about me.

And some of this stuff is stuff that I don't know about myself, or maybe I had.

Overlooked or in, in another case had sort of like papered over, like wallpapered over, like, I don't know. I don't like that thing about myself.

So I'm going to like, you know, cover it up kind of thing so the the drinks started to reveal things about me that i didn't know and it was a completely unexpected element of the project isn't that just the coolest thing ever that here this crazy idea that's super fun it's quirky it's this neat way of celebrating 40, Who knew that you would then discover things about your own self, not just your past, but about who you are? Yeah. That's amazing.

Yeah. And I'll jump to the punchline. And that is that at the end of, so it ended up taking me a year to have all 40 drinks.

And at the end of the year, I was a completely different person than I was at the beginning of the year.

The project changed me.

Wow. Wow. Wow. while. What was the farthest you had to travel to have one of these drinks?

Great question. So I live in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is about an hour north of Boston.

And as you might expect, most of the drinks were in New Hampshire.

There were a handful down in Boston, one down in Connecticut, and the furthest drink was Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Oh, my God. Now, who was that person?

That was a friend from college. I happened to be in the area for a client visit.

And I because it was because I was doing this 40 drinks project, I had a reason to reach out to this old friend who was a dear, dear friend through college and a bunch of years after and I hadn't seen him in probably 15 years.

So I reached out to him and we were able to connect.

And that was another one of the crazy, crazy stories from from the drinks.

So do you want to hear that one?

I do, of course. Yeah, you can't bring it to the edge.

So in college, I was friends with a group of guys, a group of really cool dudes.

A couple of them had joined a fraternity. So they, they sort of grabbed, you know, a handful of other guys.

So there was like this core group of like five or six guys that I was friends with in college. And we did everything together.

We, you know, we were always, you know, out and about on the town.

We were, we were wild children for sure.

Big partiers. But the thing was over the years and through the years that there would be nights when it was no girls allowed, but I wasn't, I was invited.

There would be, there would be nights where it was no girlfriends allowed.

But I was invited. There would be nights where it was, you know, kind of like no outsiders invited, but I was invited.

So I created this story in my head that I was just one of the guys.

And that's why they always included me in these, I don't know, in these adventures and these outings, everything.

And that was something I interpreted myself, internalized myself, myself and really took that through, I don't know, maybe the next...

You know, 15 years of my life, because after that group kind of faded away and everybody went different directions, I found myself part of another group that was a group of guys and, you know, men and women are, you know, eventually, but the core of it was, was a bunch of guys. So I just thought of myself as one of the guys.

So I go down and I have this drink with, with my friend.

And this was actually the one drink of the 40 that turned into a real real corker.

We, uh, we, we went out and we did it up towards the middle or towards the end of the evening.

He and I were sitting at a, at a bar in Fort Lauderdale, again, trying to figure out what our quote unquote drink would be.

And I said to him, you know, we were talking about the old days and talking about college and the guys in the group.

And I said, well, you know, some toss off comment about, well, that's what happens when you're just one of the guys.

And it was like a a needle scratched on the record. It was like, what?

And he looked at me and he said, what did you just say? And I said, well, you know, cause I was one of the guys.

And he looked at me and he said, Steph, you were never one of the guys.

And I was like, wait a minute. I don't get it.

And I sort of, you know, went back to him and said, you know, I was always invited, but how could that be?

And he said, well, we just thought you were such a cool chick that we always liked having you around.

So commence mind blow emoji, right? So like, holy cow.

All right. So this, this character trait that I had internalized and then built stories around and built a decade of my life on turned out not to be true.

I was telling another friend, this was probably a couple of years later, I was telling another friend of the story and he kind of pushed back at me and he said, so what?

What does it matter if you weren't one of the guys?

And he really made me think more about it.

And I realized that the thing about that is why was that so pivotal for me to find out that I wasn't one of the guys?

It's because I never would have given myself the credit that I was cool enough to hang out with those guys and to always be invited and always be included if I hadn't sort of handicapped myself that way.

I had cut myself down to say that that was the reason that they included me all the time instead of building myself up and saying, well, geez, I must be the coolest chick around because these cool dudes are always, you know, want to include me in our adventures.

So that was another one that really kind of like, that one left a mark.

Yeah. Wow, wow, wow. Wow. And that was the one in Fort Lauderdale. Yeah.

Wow. I mean, again, this just profound way of turning something silly.

Into something truly just life-changing. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and for me, that was one of the takeaways is that if I had endeavored, if I had set out to do something life-changing, if I had set out to go about querying my friends and family about myself to learn about myself, I don't think I ever would have followed through.

I think because the project was wrapped in such a silly, you know, wrapping and it was very no stakes, there were no stakes when I set out to do this other than to be silly.

And I think that's what allowed it to turn into something profound.

Yes. Yes. I love it. But talking about profound, let's get to the to the drink that led to marriage, because that seems pretty darn profound.

Let's hear that story.

So this was the project started in July.

And by the following April, I had already had, you know, a bunch of the drinks.

And, you know, some of these changes were already underway.

A lot of these realizations and some of these big drinks had already happened.

And I was out one night with some friends, a girlfriend and I were out for dinner and a bunch of friends showed up, but the restaurant was too busy to sort of accommodate us all.

So we said, well, just go next door to the dirty dive karaoke bar.

And so we're hanging out there and I met this guy and I had this really cool, really cute, funny guy.

And I knew he was something special, but well, as we started out, we, we know my track record with men has not been been great.

I've had some pretty not great relationships. And so when I found out that, you know, when I realized that this guy was something special, I said to myself, you know what, I'm going to do things different this time.

So if I want to call him, I'm not going to call him.

If I want to text him, I'm not going to text him anything that I would normally do.

I'm going to do the opposite of and see what happens because I want a different outcome come with this guy.

And wouldn't you know it, I got a different outcome. And I think he was probably one of the most obvious markers that I had changed in the course of that year, because my husband is just such a sweet, such a sweet dude, such a great man.

And I know that had I been the same gal I had been the year before or a couple of years before, he might have been amused by me for a couple of months, but then I just would have been a little too outrageous, a little too much of a party girl still.

And I don't think it would have worked, but because I was going through some of these internal changes, I had sort of settled inside inside myself enough to not be so constantly, I don't know, trying to, you know, get what I needed sort of out in the world.

I think that that's a probably a reasonable explanation, right?

Like always trying to like be out and get and do and, you know, be a part of things. And, and, and instead I was starting to settle inside myself.

And so I didn't, I wasn't as compelled to be doing all of that craziness as much anymore.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. One thing that just came to mind as you're talking about this and I'm seeing that this whole thing is just taking on such a deeper meaning in your life.

Did you continue the original intent though to blog about each one of these?

I did, yeah. I wrote a story about every single one of my drinks.

Wow, wow, wow, wow. That is incredible. Yeah.

So the question is, is after the 40 drinks with 40 different people, what was the result?

How did your life exactly change compared to Stephanie before that happened?

Yeah, I think I was just sort of starting to touch on it, that settling inside myself and that being open to other people.

Versions, other impressions of myself that I hadn't been previously allowed me to really start, I think, calming down.

Is that the right? Settling, I think, is probably a good word for it.

Another big shift for me towards the end of that year, and it was happening just after I had met my husband, was that there had been a group of people that I had been friends with for, oh, I don't know, six or seven or eight years.

And we were tight. I literally called them my framily.

And that group of friends was starting to kind of fall apart.

And it was really upsetting for me because I'm a very social, very outgoing person.

And as a single person, you know, it's nice to kind of have that, that group, right?

Everybody, most people, you know, are sort of married and they've got their kids and they're off and they're doing their grownup lives.

And so this group of friends was incredibly important to me.

And I remember bringing my husband around to meet them and they were terrible to him.

They were terrible to him. They were not welcoming. They were not interested.

They were, and he really came away with this like kind of of weird taste in his mouth. Like those are your best friends.

And it, it really opened my eyes to like, Oh, who am I surrounding myself with here?

You know, I felt like other people had come into the group, you know, and I, you know, with, they'd start dating people and I would always be so welcoming, like, Oh my God, you know, come in, you know, making sure they felt welcome and not, you know, outside the group. And yet.

When I started dating somebody, it was the exact opposite.

So there were a lot of shifts in the people around me as that year came to a close and sort of beyond.

It was almost a replacement of quantity with quality.

Yeah. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. I keep coming back to it. And what I love about our conversation today is the fact that I got to understand such a deeper meaning.

I mean, I had no idea. I mean, I knew that I knew that one of the dates turned into a husband, but I had no idea about all these other just literally life changing moments that compounded with one another over the course of this year. It's fascinating.

It is. It really was fascinating. but let me take it one step further for you.

I was so fascinated by what happened to me and by what I experienced that I kind of started getting curious about it.

And it turns out that I'm not the only one that goes through some sort of major shift around age 40.

It turns out that That this is a period in time where many or most of us experience some sort of shift or transition in our lives.

It's actually a pretty predictable developmental stage for adults. Yeah. Interesting.

Very, very interesting. For the person like me who's thinking to myself, this would be incredible to do for any milestone birthday.

What kind of tips, pieces of advice would you offer for anybody thinking, oh my gosh, I want to do this too?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that for me, going out and being social and being out at the bars and having drinks was very much in my wheelhouse.

So it was an easy thing to commit to and to say, I can do that.

But I think you could do this same kind of project with almost anything.

Anything, you know, is it lunches? Is it coffees? Is it walks?

Is it hikes? Is it a bike ride?

Whatever it is that you're interested in, you're due.

Is it, you know, scrapbooking? Is it any kind of thing could be used as the basis of this same kind of project?

The idea would be to bring yourself or to expose yourself to people throughout your life, right? Do a, this is your life kind of thing.

That was the big part for me was exposing myself to people that I hadn't communicated with or really been in touch with much in a long time.

Those were where the big revelations came from.

People who were in my life on a day-to-day basis, they saw me as I was now, and they didn't have things to reflect back to me that were quite as profound because we were kind of aligned on who I was today.

So it really was the digging through my past to find some folks who maybe we used to be friends or we used to be close or we used to hang out.

And those were the folks for me that offered the most interesting insights on my life.

And not that I went asking for them or looking for them.

It merely was a part of the conversation because every drink kind of had the same format.

You know, you'd get to wherever it was you're going, you'd say hello, you'd, you know, get settled in.

And most of the time we'd grab a drink, any old drink, because you'd have to figure out what the quote unquote, our drink was going to be.

And that might require us looking back to what are the thematic connections?

So Karen and Ginny, we had, we ended up having a shot called the birthday cake because we always used to go to each other's birthday parties every year for like a decade as all growing up.

So that was our thematic connection.

So there were a lot of things that just organically the conversation kind of turned and included, hey, remember when we used to do this or remember when you did that or remember how we would this.

And that kind of thing happened in almost every drink.

Interesting. And you brought up a whole nother component that I didn't realize was this idea that each of these 40 drinks with 40 people that you guys decided on a drink that was your drink. for that moment. Yes. We decided together.

There were very few of them that I went in knowing exactly what I wanted to drink.

My dad was one of them, but yeah, there was another girl I met, but from high school when we were girls and we used to, you know, again, get into some trouble and we had something called a naughty school girl that had like little dum-dum lollipops in it for its garnish.

What else did I have? There was a friends of mine, a couple that the guy and I used to vacation together with a group of friends for, I don't know, three or four years.

And on one of those vacations, he met his wife. So So, She became, you know, great friends with us as well. So I'm out to drinks with these two and trying to figure out what it is that we're going to have for a drink.

And we all used to vacation on this island. It's called Block Island.

It's off of Rhode Island.

And so we ultimately ended up coming around with the Seabreeze.

Amazing. Oh, my gosh. This is incredible.

Thank you. This is so awesome. It was so much fun.

Yeah. Now, are these all the blog posts?

Are they available where we can still read any of those? They are. They are. Yeah.

So their website is 40drinks.com and spell out the word 40.

Okay. And when you get there, you'll see that a couple of years ago, I started a podcast, which I can talk about in a moment.

But so at the top on the navigation, it says the podcast and then the project.

And if you go to the page that says the project, when you scroll down, there's pictures of all the drinks.

And if you hover over a drink, you click that, it goes straight to the blog post.

So you'll be able to see what I was thinking about and talking about and how I was describing these people back when we did the project.

Oh my gosh. I will be sure that your website, the link is left in the show notes for anybody interested.

I mean, because that is just incredible. And then also for anybody who you are interested, you can also just head on over to graceinspiration.com slash 40drinks.

And that will also be in the show notes. So that way, if that's easier to get to, then trying to scroll down in your app and find show notes, just go to that website.

So with that said, though, I want to be sure people knew how to find it.

Talk to me about the podcast.

As you know, the idea is sort of, you know, crazy and very compelling and engaging.

So for several years, a friend and I, a friend who is a ghostwriter, and I tried to sell a book proposal.

We wrote a book proposal. We tried to get a book published.

And as it turns out, the publishing industry is highly risk averse.

And so if you don't, if you're not Anderson Cooper or Oprah, or, you know, somebody with a built-in audience already, they're very unlikely to take a flyer on you.

So, so that for years, I tried to do that. But then a couple of years ago, I became not aware of podcasts.

I knew of podcasts, but I went to a workshop that sort of showed me under the hood and kind of behind the scenes.

And I thought, well, what if I turned 40 drinks into a podcast?

And so my first thought was, well, I could talk about each of my 40 drinks, but then the podcast would be over.

But if I zoomed out a little bit and I used this theory, this whole thesis that many of us go through a transition around age 40, what if I talked to other people about their transitions?

So that's what I do. It is primarily an interview show. And I talk to people...

By and large so far, it's been people who are beyond their transition and who are reflecting back on the lessons they learned and how they made it through their transition.

But I also sometimes have people on who are in their thirties who are looking forward at age 40 and kind of trying to think, trying to reconcile, you know, their thought process around who they are now with what they think about turning 40 and what their plans for their 40th birthday are, those kinds of things.

So my goal with the show is really to one, make it common cultural knowledge that there is a transition around age 40, because I don't think there really is.

And then number two, to showcase so many versions of that transition that anyone out there who's either approaching or recently turned 40 with, you know, dread in their heart or quaking in their boots, you know, they'll know that they're not alone because they'll be able to really experience other people's transitions as well. I love it. Oh my goodness.

I love everything about you. I love everything about this whole kind of just theme that you've got going, this whole just purpose and mission.

The 40 drinks is incredible.

You are incredible. Oh, Kevin, thank you so much. Oh my gosh. Yeah.

Oh my gosh. I have enjoyed hearing your stories today so very much.

And like I said, I will be sure that links are all in the show notes for your website, for the articles, for the podcast, all the things.

Thank you so much, Stephanie, for being here. Thanks for having me, Kevin. It's been my pleasure.

Absolutely. For you, my friend, be sure to check out today's show notes.

Go to her website, 40drinks.com.

You heard it. Go check it out because I'm telling you, you got to get some more of this lady in your life. So, this is Kevin Lowe with Grace and Inspiration.

Get out there, and hey, today, why don't you consider going having a drink with somebody from your past?

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