“We should get together sometime” may be one of the kindest things women say to each other and one of the least likely plans to ever happen. We say it at the end of lunch, after running into an old friend at the grocery store, or while standing beside a woman we enjoyed talking to at an event. We usually mean it. In that moment, we genuinely want to see her again, but then we hug, walk away, return to our full lives, and somehow “sometime” never finds its way onto the calendar.

A few weeks later, we may think about her and feel a little guilty. We wonder whether too much time has passed, whether she was only being polite, or whether reaching out now would feel awkward. Meanwhile, she may be sitting at home wondering exactly the same thing about us. This is one of the strange things about adult friendship. Two women can like each other, want to spend time together, and still never make a plan.

After years of bringing women together and watching thousands of friendships begin, I have learned that most women are not lacking warmth or good intentions. What they are often missing is a clear next step.

When we were younger, friendship had structure built into it. We saw the same people at school, in the dorm, at practice, at work, or while our children played together. We did not need to formally arrange every interaction because life kept putting us in the same room. I wrote more about why meaningful friendships become harder as we get older in The Friendship We All Need, another paid article you can read as part of your subscription.

Adult life is different. Our schedules are fuller, our responsibilities are heavier, and the women we enjoy may live across town or move through completely different routines. If we want a friendship to grow, someone has to turn a warm idea into an actual invitation, and that is where many of us get stuck. We worry about appearing needy or imposing on someone who seems busy. We wonder whether she already has enough friends, and we tell ourselves that if she really wanted to get together, she would invite us. The funny and frustrating part is that she may be telling herself the same thing. If you recognize how often you wait for someone else to make the first move, my paid audio episode Stop Waiting for Permission may be helpful too.

Why vague invitations quietly disappear

When someone says, “We should get together,” the other person has to figure out what happens next. Does she suggest a day? Ask what you would like to do? Wait for you to contact her because you brought it up first? Neither woman wants to seem pushy, so both leave the conversation with a pleasant feeling and no plan.

Vague invitations also create too many decisions. We have to choose the activity, the date, the time, the place, and who is responsible for following up. Every unanswered question adds a little friction. When life becomes busy, even small amounts of friction are enough to make a good intention disappear.

There is also nowhere to put “sometime” on a calendar. Tuesday at ten can be protected, and Saturday morning can be planned around, but sometime will always lose to the appointment, deadline, family obligation, or pile of laundry already attached to a real day. This does not necessarily mean the other woman is uninterested. It may simply mean the invitation never became easy enough to accept.

I think this is important because women often turn an unfinished plan into a painful story about themselves. We assume we were forgotten, unwanted, or not interesting enough when the truth may be far less personal. No one took ownership of the next step. Friendship needs a woman willing to say, “I enjoyed talking with you. Are you free for coffee next Thursday morning?” That kind of invitation is not needy. It is clear, warm, and generous. You are not asking someone to commit to being your best friend. You are simply giving the connection somewhere to go.

Knowing this is helpful, but the harder questions usually come next. What exactly should you say? How do you invite a friend you already know without making the message feel too formal? What if you want to start a small group? How do you walk into pickleball, a cooking class, or a book club where everyone seems to know one another? When should you follow up, and when should you stop trying?

The rest of this article is a practical guide for those moments. I am sharing my simple formula for making a real invitation, ten messages you can copy and send, three different paths depending on whether you want to deepen a friendship, start something yourself, or join an existing activity, and a graceful way to handle silence or repeated declines. Paid subscribers will also receive my Friendship Invitation Kit, a printable companion with additional invitation ideas, a simple group starter checklist, an activity connection plan, and a thirty day challenge to help you move from hoping for friendship to creating it.

When you upgrade, you can continue reading, download the kit, and choose one message to send today. The friendship you have been waiting for may be one specific invitation away.

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You may have blamed a lack of motivation, confidence, or discipline. But what if the real problem is that somewhere along the way, you stopped trusting yourself?

In this episode, Julie explores why capable women can feel frozen at the edge of something new. Through the story of a woman sitting in her car outside a gathering she wants to attend, Julie explains how our brains can interpret uncertainty as danger, even when the unfamiliar thing in front of us could lead to friendship, joy, purpose, or an entirely new chapter.

You will learn why confidence usually comes after action, how small promises rebuild self-trust, and why courage is so much easier when another woman is willing to walk through the door with you.

In This Episode

• Why feeling stuck is not necessarily a motivation problem

• How years of caring for everyone else can weaken trust in your own voice

• Why the familiar can feel safe even when it no longer fits your life

• The difference between your brain protecting you and predicting your future

• Why confident women are rarely as fearless as they appear

• A simple three-step practice for taking action before you feel completely ready

• How connection helps women become braver together

Try This This Week

Ask yourself:

What door am I sitting outside of—and what would it look like to open it for just ten minutes?

Choose one small action you can take within the next twenty-four hours. Send the message. Make the appointment. Attend the event. Spend fifteen minutes exploring the idea.

Then tell one supportive woman what you plan to do—or invite her to walk through the door with you.

Go Deeper with Julie

If you are ready to stop overthinking, rebuild trust in yourself, and create real momentum, become a paid subscriber to Julie Marvel on Substack.

Paid subscribers receive access to:

• The complete 90-Day Success Workshop

• Julie’s six-part audio coaching series

• Practical guidance and encouragement to help you move forward with greater clarity, courage, and consistency

Upgrade here: Julie Marvel on Substack

Share This Episode

If this episode made you think of a woman who may be sitting in her own emotional parking lot, send it to her with a simple note:

“I’ll walk in with you.”

Sometimes a new life begins with one woman making room and another woman choosing to sit down.

Episode Quote

“You do not need the whole map—only one honest desire, one small step, and perhaps one woman who will remind you that you do not have to take it alone.”

Have you ever sat in a room full of women and wondered why you still felt so alone?

I have.

When my children were small, I spent a lot of time surrounded by other moms. I remember sitting in PTA meetings where the room was filled with women who were living through the same season of life I was. We talked about teachers, school events, fundraisers, classroom parties, volunteer schedules, and all the things that needed to get done before Friday. I knew their names, recognized their cars in the pickup line, and saw many of them several times a week.

From the outside, it probably looked as though I had a wonderful community of women around me. In many ways, I did. I was included, involved, and connected to what was happening. Still, I did not feel as if I had real intimacy with any of them.

I had women to talk to, but I did not necessarily have someone I could tell the whole truth to. I did not know whom I could call and say, “I am overwhelmed. I feel like I am losing myself, and I could really use a friend right now.”

That kind of loneliness can be difficult to admit because it does not always make sense. How can you feel lonely when you are sitting in a room full of people? How can you feel disconnected when your calendar is full and your phone is filled with names?

I think many women have experienced this without knowing how to explain it. We can be surrounded by people, included in activities, needed by our families, and known in our communities, yet still feel as if no one really knows us.

Years later, when I was working as a family photographer, I experienced a different version of the same thing. I attended professional networking groups where women introduced themselves, handed out business cards, and asked to schedule meetings. Some were selling makeup or jewelry. Others were offering professional services or building businesses of their own.

There was nothing wrong with that. I love professional networking, and I believe deeply in women supporting other women in business. I have led my own professional networking groups, so I understand how powerful those relationships and referrals can be.

What I began to notice, though, was that we often knew what everyone sold before we knew who they were. We knew their business goals, their ideal clients, and the polished introduction they had practiced before the meeting. We knew how we could help their businesses, but we did not always know what was happening in their hearts.

We were exchanging business cards, but we were not necessarily sharing our real lives. We might leave with a new contact, a coffee meeting on the calendar, and someone to refer when a friend needed a photographer or a new lipstick. That did not always mean we were building the kind of lasting, intimate friendships I was craving.

There is an important difference between being connected to people and feeling connected with people.

A woman can have hundreds of contacts in her phone and still have no idea whom to call when her life begins to fall apart. She can be involved at church, active in her community, busy at work, and included in several group texts, yet still long for a woman who will sit beside her and listen without trying to fix everything.

She may have old friends she loves dearly, but those friendships may have been built around a life she no longer lives. Children grow up. Careers change. Marriages change or end. We move, retire, care for aging parents, or begin trying to figure out who we are after spending years taking care of everyone else. Our lives change, but our relationships do not always change with us.

Sometimes we also become so good at appearing capable that the women around us do not realize how much we need them. We show up, help everyone else, remember the birthdays, organize the plans, and say that everything is fine. Eventually, people begin to believe us.

They may know our schedules, our children, our work, and the version of us that gets things done. They may not know the woman underneath all of that. Sometimes that is because they have never taken the time to ask, but sometimes it is because we have never allowed ourselves to be seen.

I believe this is one of the reasons so many women feel lonely even though they technically have friends. The problem is not always that we need to meet more people. Sometimes we need more honesty, intention, and intimacy within the relationships we already have.

We need to move beyond saying, “We should get together sometime,” and invite someone to coffee next Thursday. We need to stop answering every question with, “I am fine,” when what we really want to say is, “I am going through a strange season, and I would love to have someone to talk to.”

This can feel vulnerable, especially if you have been disappointed before. It is easier to wait for someone else to reach out. It is safer to assume that everyone is busy or that they already have enough friends. It protects us from rejection, but it also keeps us from creating the connection we want.

Meaningful adult friendship rarely happens by accident. It grows when we spend time together consistently, share more of ourselves, pay attention to one another, and become brave enough to make the first move.

That does not mean you need fifty new friends. You may simply need to deepen one friendship that already matters to you. You may need to reconnect with someone you miss, create space for a promising new friendship, or accept that one of your relationships can no longer give you the closeness you need.

Before we start adding more names to our phones and more activities to our calendars, we need to understand what is actually missing. Are we craving companionship, emotional support, fun, encouragement, honesty, or simply someone who will show up consistently? Until we can name the kind of connection we need, we may keep surrounding ourselves with people while wondering why we still feel lonely.

That is why I created the “Am I Connected or Just Surrounded?” friendship assessment. It will help you look honestly at the relationships in your life, recognize the kind of connection you are missing, and decide where your energy belongs next.

After the assessment, I will walk you through a simple Friendship Reset. Together, we will explore which relationship you may want to deepen, which one might be worth reviving, where you may need to step back, and whether there is a woman in your life you would like to know better. I will also give you words you can use to reach out, because sometimes the hardest part is knowing what to say.

You do not need to become more popular or pretend that you are not lonely. You only need an honest place to begin and enough courage to take one small step toward the kind of friendship you truly want.

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The Courage to Leave What No Longer Fits

Sher Canada may be tiny, but there is absolutely nothing small about her.

She arrived at the studio with the kind of energy that seems to enter a room a few seconds before the person does. Sher is bright, quick, funny, glamorous, and completely alive. She speaks with confidence, but there is also an ease about her that makes you feel as though you have been invited into the adventure with her. Sitting across from her during our interview, I could understand why women have followed her throughout her career, why customers trust her with something as personal as how they see themselves, and why retirement never stood a chance against her.

What stayed with me most was not simply everything Sher has accomplished, although her career is remarkable. It was the way she spoke about beginning again. At 65, she does not talk about her age as something she has to overcome or politely accept. She talks about it as another beginning. She hears women say that they are too old, that their chance has passed, or that a particular ship has already sailed, and she refuses to accept that story for them.

“The ship hasn’t sailed, lady,” she said. “The ship is just waiting for you to get on it.”

That sentence feels like Sher herself: spirited, direct, loving, and delivered with just enough force to make you sit up a little straighter.

I meet so many women who quietly wonder whether it is too late to change something about their lives. Sometimes it is a career. Sometimes it is a marriage, a friendship, a dream, or the way they feel when they look in the mirror. They may not say it out loud, but you can hear the question underneath everything else: Have I missed my chance?

Working with women has taught me that we do not stop wanting meaningful lives because we reach a certain age. We do not stop needing friendship, purpose, beauty, laughter, or the feeling that something new might still be waiting for us. What often changes is that we become more practiced at talking ourselves out of what we want. We accumulate responsibilities, disappointments, and evidence for why something might not work. We learn to call fear practicality.

Sher’s life is a rather fabulous interruption to that way of thinking.

She grew up in a Nebraska town with a population of 1,275 and one stoplight. She attended a country school where there were two students in her class until sixth grade, and the desks still had holes for ink bottles. She had her first Shetland pony when she was three, learned to ride bareback, and grew up around the hard, unglamorous work of farm life. While her girlfriends earned money at Dairy Queen, Sher worked alongside her father, who was employed by a veterinarian, cutting cattle and doing jobs that would surprise anyone meeting the beautifully dressed woman she is today.

Sher jokes that she was practically Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the picture is almost too good: the future fashion executive riding horses across Nebraska in clothes her mother had sewn for her, complete with matching dresses, scarves, and rickrack.

Underneath the humor, there is something important about where Sher began. That simple life grounded her. Nebraska still brings her back to family and to what matters, even after a career that would eventually take her across the country and place her in charge of thousands of stores. Before the titles, the airplanes, the revenue, the beautiful clothes, and the cream BMW with the brown top, there was a small town, a strong work ethic, and a girl paying close attention to a much larger world.

Fashion found her through magazines. She studied the photographs in Vogue and watched what women wore on television. Clothing fascinated her, but even then, I do not think it was only the clothing that interested her. Sher loved the possibility of transformation. She loved what happened when a woman put something on and felt beautiful.

That distinction matters. Clothes can appear superficial when we talk about them only as trends, labels, or things to buy. But anyone who has spent time listening to women knows that the mirror is rarely just a mirror. It can hold years of comparison, criticism, aging, changing bodies, and the feeling that we no longer recognize ourselves. It can also become a place where a woman sees something she has forgotten: her own beauty, personality, strength, and right to take up space.

Sher seemed to understand that instinctively, long before she built a career around it.

She initially enrolled at the University of Nebraska and thought she might become a psychiatrist. Halfway through her first year, she realized she was bored and that the life she wanted was somewhere else. Then, while reading Vogue, she saw an advertisement for a private fashion merchandising school in Miami.

That was enough for Sher.

She went home and told her parents that she did not belong where she was. When they explained that they could not afford to send her to the private school, she did not abandon the idea. She told them to contribute what they had been paying for the University of Nebraska and promised to work as many jobs as necessary to cover the rest.

Then she climbed into her 1967 Chevy and drove from Nebraska to Miami.

I loved listening to Sher tell this part of her story because she did not describe weeks of agonizing, polling everyone she knew, or waiting for certainty to arrive. She saw something that awakened her, recognized herself in it, and moved toward it. She admitted that she probably should have been afraid, especially arriving in Miami around 1979, but she was not. Everything was moving too quickly, and she was too excited by the life opening in front of her.

Miami was another world. Many of the young women at her school came from wealthy families in New York and were studying modeling. On Sher’s first night, she took a roommate to the hospital after an overdose. Another roommate smoked marijuana, something the Nebraska farm girl joked she had only encountered in a horse pasture. She shared her new life with six roommates, lived on Brickell Avenue, worked three jobs, pumped gas, sang in a band, and worked in retail.

She also had one particularly valuable social asset: a car. That made her popular. Dating a lifeguard whose friends would visit the condos did not exactly damage her standing either.

Sher laughed as she remembered it, and I could see that young woman so clearly—the farm girl from a town with one stoplight suddenly living on Brickell Avenue, driving everyone around, meeting lifeguards, working constantly, and discovering that she was capable of finding her place in a world completely different from the one she had known.

Once she began studying something she genuinely loved, she made the dean’s list. Her mother had spent years telling her that she was not applying herself, and Sher had insisted that she was. In Miami, she realized her mother had been right. The problem was not that Sher lacked intelligence, ability, or discipline. She had not yet found the thing that called all of those qualities forward.

I think many women carry old judgments about themselves that were formed in environments where they were never going to thrive. They believe they are unfocused, unmotivated, too much, too quiet, too restless, or somehow lacking. Then they enter the right room, meet the right people, discover meaningful work, or finally give themselves permission to follow an interest, and parts of them that appeared dormant begin to wake up.

Sometimes a woman does not need to become someone new. She needs the opportunity to meet the woman she has been all along.

Sher found that woman in Miami. She found her through fashion, hard work, freedom, and the decision to trust the pull toward a life she could not yet fully explain. She did not have a detailed map of where it would lead. She only knew that Nebraska was no longer the whole story.

It turned out to be the beginning of an extraordinary one.

When Success Is No Longer the Whole Story

Sher’s career did not rise because someone discovered her, handed her an impressive title, and invited her to take a seat at the table. She built it one relationship, one customer, one store, and one brave decision at a time. She understood the business of fashion, but even more importantly, she understood women. She knew that people do not want to be managed as numbers on a spreadsheet. They want to be seen. They want to know that their work matters, that someone believes they are capable of more, and that the person leading them is willing to tell them the truth.

That understanding carried Sher from working in retail to becoming a regional sales manager responsible for half the country. Eventually, she would oversee 2,200 stores and $1.9 billion in revenue. She took over Soma and Boston Proper, with multiple companies, vice presidents, and thousands of employees falling under her leadership.

Those numbers are staggering, particularly when you remember where her story began: one stoplight, two students in her class, and a little girl riding bareback through Nebraska.

But Sher did not speak about her success as though she had conquered an empire alone. Again and again, she brought the story back to her team. She knew the results may have appeared beside her name, but they were created by thousands of women showing up in stores every day, standing on their feet, serving customers, solving problems, meeting goals, and trying to become a little better than they had been before.

“I just had to convince those girls to be a dollar better than they were a year ago,” she told me.

There is so much wisdom tucked inside that simple sentence.

Sher was not asking every woman to become someone entirely different by Monday morning. She was asking her to believe in growth. One dollar better. One customer served more thoughtfully. One conversation handled with greater confidence. One small improvement repeated across thousands of stores until it became something enormous.

That philosophy helped her teams achieve thirteen and a half years of double-digit comparable sales increases. In the retail world, that kind of sustained growth is remarkable. But what interested me most was not only that Sher knew how to get results. It was how she got them.

She believed in paying women well. She believed in recognizing their contributions. She believed that leaders should communicate clearly and treat people with respect. When I asked her about the most important lesson she had learned in leadership, her answer was immediate: “Clear communication.”

Not complicated communication. Not impressive communication. Clear communication.

Women are often expected to become mind readers in both their professional and personal lives. We are handed vague expectations and then judged for failing to meet them. We are told to speak up, but cautioned not to be difficult. We are encouraged to lead, provided we do not make anyone uncomfortable while doing it. We are asked to carry enormous responsibility while pretending it requires very little from us.

Clarity is a form of respect.

A clear leader does not make women guess where they stand. She explains what is expected, tells the truth when something needs to change, and acknowledges good work when it happens. She creates an environment where people can use their energy to grow rather than wasting it trying to decode the room.

Listening to Sher talk about leadership reminded me how hungry women are for that kind of environment. I see it in my own work all the time. Women flourish when they feel safe enough to participate fully, when they know they will be welcomed instead of evaluated, and when someone remembers their name, notices their absence, or tells them, “I think you can do this.”

Sometimes leadership looks like managing billions of dollars and thousands of stores. Sometimes it looks like noticing the woman standing alone at an event and walking over to include her. The scale may be different, but the heart of it is the same: helping another woman recognize that she matters here.

Sher’s gift was not simply seeing potential in women. It was expecting them to see it in themselves.

That does not mean she led without standards. Sher is warm, but she is also direct. She expected people to work, improve, and take responsibility. There is nothing particularly empowering about telling women they are wonderful while refusing to challenge them. Real encouragement is not empty praise. It is the willingness to say, “You are capable of more, and I am not going to let you hide from it.”

I believe women need both tenderness and truth. We need friends who will sit beside us when life breaks our hearts, and we need women who will lovingly call us out when we have begun making ourselves small. We need people who celebrate our victories without competition and remind us of our strength without pretending the hard parts are easy.

Sher offered that combination throughout her career. She brought energy, expectation, humor, and genuine care into the workplace. She understood that people work harder for leaders they trust, but trust cannot be demanded by a title. It is earned through consistency, by doing what you say you will do, communicating honestly, sharing credit, and remembering that every impressive result has a human being standing behind it.

For years, Sher’s life moved at an extraordinary pace. There were stores to lead, companies to grow, planes to catch, decisions to make, and people looking to her for direction. She knew who she was inside that life. She was needed. She was successful. She had built something exceptional.

Then she retired.

Retirement is usually described as a reward. After decades of work, you are finally free to slow down, enjoy yourself, and live without the relentless demands of a career. But we do not talk enough about what can happen when a woman steps away from a role that has shaped her identity for most of her adult life.

When the meetings stop and the phone becomes quieter, who are you then?

When no one is waiting for your decision, where does all that energy go?

When you have spent years being useful to thousands of people, can you still feel valuable when you are no longer needed in the same way?

Sher was honest about what happened to her after retirement. She started drinking too much.

At first, it was martinis at lunch. Later, there was wine. From the outside, it may have looked social, celebratory, and harmless, the sort of drinking that can blend easily into a life with fewer schedules and more freedom. But Sher knew her family history. Alcoholism and recovery were already part of the landscape around her. Somewhere inside herself, she understood that this was not simply a woman enjoying retirement.

She knew she was in trouble when she began to lie.

That detail stayed with me because the line between something we enjoy and something controlling us is not always marked by a dramatic collapse. Sometimes the warning is much quieter. It is the moment we start hiding. It is the story we alter, the amount we minimize, or the question we hope no one will ask. It is the distance that begins growing between the life we are presenting and the truth we are living.

For someone as accomplished and disciplined as Sher, admitting that truth must have required a very different kind of courage than the courage that took her to Miami or propelled her through corporate leadership. We often celebrate the bravery it takes to build a successful life. We do not always recognize the bravery it takes to interrupt one.

Women become incredibly skilled at keeping things looking fine. We can lead companies, care for families, organize events, answer emails, remember birthdays, and show up beautifully dressed while something inside us is quietly asking for help. Our competence can become camouflage. Because we are still functioning, we convince ourselves that we are not struggling. Because no one else has noticed, or because they have noticed and do not know what to say, we keep moving.

But pain does not become less real simply because a woman carries it gracefully.

Sher stopped drinking. At the time of our interview, it had been approximately six years and eight months since her last drink. She described her sobriety as “one of the biggest accomplishments of my life.”

This is a woman who oversaw 2,200 stores and $1.9 billion in revenue. She produced thirteen and a half years of double-digit growth. She built a career that would be the defining achievement of almost anyone’s life. Yet when she spoke about what mattered most, sobriety stood beside, and perhaps above, all of it.

I found that deeply moving.

The accomplishments the world applauds are often not the hardest ones. The hardest victories may happen privately, without a stage, a promotion, or an announcement. They happen in the decision made again each morning. They happen when a woman tells the truth, asks for help, changes a pattern, walks away from what is hurting her, or chooses herself even when no one is watching.

Sher’s sobriety did not make her smaller, quieter, or less fun. It allowed her to become more fully herself. The bright energy was still there. The humor was still there. The fashion, the confidence, and that unmistakable Sher sparkle were all still there. But now they were rooted in something deeper: the knowledge that she had faced herself honestly and chosen her life.

There is an important lesson in that for women. Reinvention is not always about adding something new. Sometimes it begins with putting something down.

We may need to release a habit, a role, a relationship, an old identity, or the belief that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We may have to grieve the woman we were before we can discover the woman waiting for us next. That process is rarely neat, and it is certainly not glamorous, but neither was driving cattle in Nebraska, and Sher has never required the road to be glamorous before she is willing to take it.

Retirement could have been the closing chapter of Sher’s story. She had already achieved enough for several lifetimes. She could have stepped quietly out of public life and allowed her career to become the final word on who she had been.

But Sher does not believe in final words simply because a woman has reached a certain age.

At 65, she was ready to begin again, not by trying to recreate the corporate life she had left, but by taking everything it had taught her about women, confidence, clothing, leadership, and transformation and turning it toward a new purpose.

The ship had not sailed.

Sher was getting ready to climb aboard again.

The Woman in the Mirror

After retiring from Chico’s following twenty-three years with the company, Sher continued doing work on Instagram for another five years. She still had the drive, creativity, and experience that had carried her through decades of leadership, but she was no longer willing to return to a life that demanded eighty hours of her every week. That decision is important because reinvention does not have to mean proving that we can still exhaust ourselves in all the ways we once did.

Sometimes wisdom is not losing our ambition. It is learning how we want to spend it.

Women are so often taught that our value is connected to how much we can carry. We become proud of being needed, dependable, and capable of doing more than should reasonably be expected of one person. Even when we finally earn the freedom to choose differently, it can feel uncomfortable to set limits. We worry that slowing down means becoming less relevant or that saying no to one version of success means we are no longer serious about our lives.

Sher did not stop being ambitious. She simply became more intentional about where that ambition belonged.

She opened She Can Love, beginning with a tennis pro shop at the Ritz-Carlton and eventually developing it into a boutique built around what Sher calls “luxury you live in.” The phrase suits her. Sher loves beautiful things, but she does not believe beauty should be reserved for a special occasion or some imaginary future version of our lives. She wants women to feel good in the bodies they have and in the lives they are living right now.

That might sound like a conversation about clothes, but with Sher, clothes are never only clothes.

For forty years, she watched women stand in front of mirrors and nearly cry. She saw women blame their bodies when an outfit did not work. She heard the criticism women directed toward themselves, the stomach they wanted to hide, the arms they no longer liked, the weight they had gained, the shape they wished they had, and all the ways they believed they had failed to remain the woman they used to be.

Sher knew something those women often did not: the problem was not necessarily the body in the mirror. Sometimes the clothes were wrong. Sometimes the proportions, color, pocket placement, sleeve length, or cut were working against the woman wearing them. Yet instead of questioning the garment, the woman questioned herself.

That realization became the foundation for Sher’s book, The Mirror’s Been Lying to You.

The title captures something many women understand immediately. A mirror may reflect our appearance, but it also reflects every message we have absorbed about what a woman should look like. We do not approach it alone. We bring fashion advertising, social media, old photographs, changing bodies, careless comments, and years of comparison with us. We bring the younger version of ourselves and quietly ask why we cannot still look exactly like her.

Then we call what we see the truth.

But the mirror cannot measure a woman’s warmth, courage, humor, intelligence, or ability to make another person feel welcome. It cannot show the life she has survived or the people she has loved. It cannot reflect the energy that fills a room when she walks into it. It can only show her surface, and even that surface is often interpreted through eyes trained to search for flaws.

Sher wants women to learn another way of looking.

Her book teaches women how to dress for their body type, choose flattering colors, understand proportion, pose for photographs, place pockets, cuff sleeves, and use what she calls “slim secrets.” But beneath all of that practical education is a much more meaningful message: your body is not the enemy.

“You just gotta learn what to wear, for you, and for your body,” Sher said.

Those last few words matter. For your body.

Not the body you had twenty years ago. Not the body an advertisement told you to want. Not your friend’s body, your sister’s body, or the body of the woman whose photograph you studied on Instagram. Yours.

Sher believes education gives women independence. When we understand what works for us, we do not have to enter a store already apologizing for our bodies or place our confidence entirely in the hands of a salesperson.

“Educate yourself, ladies,” she said. “Then you will be prepared, and you don’t have to count on other people.”

There is something deeply empowering about giving a woman useful knowledge instead of another reason to feel inadequate. Confidence is often presented to women as though it is a personality trait some lucky people were born with. We are told to love ourselves, own the room, and believe we are beautiful, but we are not always given the tools that help us get there.

Sher gives women tools.

She teaches them to understand what they are seeing, make choices that serve them, and stop treating every disappointing dressing-room experience as evidence that something is wrong with them. The clothes are supposed to fit the woman. The woman was never meant to shrink herself, physically or emotionally, to earn the right to wear them.

I think that lesson reaches far beyond fashion.

How many situations have women remained in because we assumed we were the problem? How many rooms, relationships, or friendships have made us feel uncomfortable, invisible, or not quite enough, and how quickly did we begin changing ourselves to fit? We become quieter. We ask for less. We edit our personalities, cover the parts that might attract criticism, and call it maturity.

Sometimes we are not too much, too sensitive, too loud, too ambitious, or too difficult. Sometimes it is simply the wrong fit.

The right environment does not require a woman to disappear inside it. The right friendship does not punish her for having needs. The right community does not make her earn her welcome by becoming more like everyone else. It gives her room to arrive as herself.

That belief is at the heart of my work with women. When I began bringing women together, I understood that loneliness was not always about being physically alone. A woman can be surrounded by people and still feel as though no one truly sees her. She can have a family, coworkers, social media followers, and a full calendar while quietly missing the experience of being known.

Connection begins when someone pays attention.

Sher understands that instinctively. In her store, every customer is greeted within five seconds. When a woman makes a purchase, Sher does not point toward the counter and slide the bag across it without looking up. She walks the bag around, makes eye contact, and says, “I know you have a million places to shop. Thank you for choosing She Can Love.”

It is a small gesture, but small gestures are where connection often begins.

A woman remembers how you made her feel when she entered the room. She remembers whether you looked up, learned her name, invited her into the conversation, or noticed when she was standing alone. She remembers the person who behaved as though her presence mattered.

We sometimes imagine that changing women’s lives requires an enormous platform, a perfect program, or a dramatic act. But a life can change because one woman decided to walk across the room and say hello. A friendship can begin because someone was brave enough to admit she did not know anyone either. A lonely season can start to loosen its grip because another woman reached out and said, “Come with me.”

This is what I have learned again and again: women bringing women together is not a small thing. It is how confidence grows. It is how courage becomes possible. It is how we begin taking chances we might never have taken alone.

Sher’s life has been shaped by that same human awareness. Whether she was leading thousands of employees, helping a customer understand her body, thanking a woman for entering her store, or speaking honestly about sobriety, she kept returning to the person in front of her. She paid attention. She communicated clearly. She helped women see possibility where they had begun to see limitation.

Her confidence is unmistakable, but Sher is also clear that her energy is not an accident.

“I don’t act it. I don’t feel it,” she said of her age.

Then she explained the choice beneath that feeling.

“It’s by design. I decide to wake up that way every day.”

I appreciated her honesty because it would be easy to assume Sher simply arrived in the world with an endless supply of enthusiasm. Some women seem naturally brighter, braver, or more comfortable taking up space, and we tell ourselves they possess something we do not.

But Sher’s joy is a practice.

She has experienced pressure, reinvention, retirement, addiction, and the disorienting question of who she would become after the career that had defined much of her adult life. Her positivity does not come from having avoided difficult things. It comes from deciding those things will not have the final word.

That does not mean every woman must wake up sparkling. There are seasons when getting through the day requires all the strength we have. There are mornings when confidence feels impossible and hope arrives very quietly. We do not need to perform happiness to prove we are healing.

What we can choose is not to abandon ourselves.

We can decide to speak to ourselves with greater kindness. We can wear the clothes that make us feel alive instead of waiting to deserve them. We can tell the truth when something is hurting us. We can enter a new room, make the phone call, extend the invitation, or begin the thing we have postponed because we were afraid of looking foolish.

Most importantly, we can stop assuming we have to do any of it alone.

When women are connected, courage becomes contagious. One woman says, “I’m going,” and another finds the nerve to join her. One shares her struggle, and someone else realizes she is not the only one. One begins again at 65, and a woman watching from a distance quietly wonders whether she might begin again too.

That is what stayed with me after my conversation with Sher.

Her story is impressive because of the career she built, the businesses she led, the sobriety she protected, and the new work she created. But it is inspiring because Sher refuses to let a woman’s age, body, mistakes, or changing circumstances become the end of her imagination.

She wants women to see themselves differently.

Perhaps that is what the best women do for one another. They become a kinder mirror. They reflect back the courage we have forgotten, the beauty we have dismissed, and the possibilities we can no longer see clearly on our own. They remind us that we are still here, still becoming, and still allowed to want more from our lives.

Sher Canada may be tiny, but she carries an enormous message: a woman is never finished simply because one chapter has ended. There are still rooms she has not entered, people she has not met, and parts of herself she has not yet had the chance to know.

The ship is still there.

And perhaps it has not been waiting for a younger, thinner, braver, or more confident version of us after all. Perhaps it has been waiting for the woman we are today, and for a few good women willing to climb aboard beside us.

Watch my full conversation with Sher Canada on YouTube

Find Sher Canada’s book, The Mirror’s Been Lying to You, on Amazon

There have been a few different times in my life when I have had to admit something that sounds simple when you say it out loud, but feels enormous when you are the one living inside of it: I don’t know what I want anymore. Not what I should want, not what would make the most sense, not what would make everyone around me comfortable, but what I actually want for myself.

Every time I share this part of my story, I see heads start to nod, because so many of us know this feeling, even if we have never quite known how to explain it. Women nod immediately, and honestly, even the men do it, because there is something deeply human about waking up in a life you have been faithfully tending and realizing that somewhere along the way, you lost track of your own voice.

After my divorce, I did not feel as though I were simply beginning a new chapter; I felt as though someone had handed me a completely blank book and forgotten to include the instructions. I did not know who I was anymore, I did not know what I wanted, and I was not even sure how adults were supposed to go out and find new friends.

So much of my identity had been connected to being married and to the life I had built within that marriage, and when it ended, I had to face questions I had not asked myself in years. What did I like? What sounded fun to me? If no one else had an opinion about how I spent my time, what would I choose? Those questions should have felt freeing, but at first they felt overwhelming, because freedom can be surprisingly intimidating when you have forgotten how to listen to yourself.

I started journaling because I needed somewhere to put all of those thoughts, fears, half-formed ideas, and tiny sparks of curiosity without requiring myself to have an immediate answer. I thought back to who I had been before I was married and tried to remember the things I had enjoyed, not because I wanted to become an earlier version of myself again, but because I needed clues.

I used Pinterest to create vision boards and let myself dream about places I might go, things I might try, and the kind of life that looked interesting to me, even if I had no idea yet whether any of it would fit. It was not one dramatic revelation in which the clouds parted and my new life appeared fully assembled before me; it was a gradual process of collecting little pieces of myself and allowing them to become possibilities.

Years later, that same feeling returned in a completely different season, when my kids became old enough to drive. Anyone who has spent years driving children from one activity to another knows how strange this transition can be, because one day your calendar, your car, and a large part of your identity are organized around their needs, and then suddenly they have places to go and no longer need you to take them there. They are doing exactly what you raised them to do, becoming capable and independent, which is wonderful, but it can also leave behind an emptiness nobody warns you about. You are proud of them, you are happy for them, and at the very same time, you are standing in a much quieter house wondering what you are supposed to do with yourself now.

When we spend so many years caring for other people, we become experts in what everyone else needs. We know who has to be where, who likes which dinner, who needs encouragement, who forgot an appointment, and who is quietly having a hard day, but we can become complete beginners when someone turns to us and asks, “What do you want?” Once my children did not need me in the same daily, hands-on way, I could feel my personality changing as I moved into a new phase of life. I had more space, but I did not yet know what belonged in it, and that space felt empty, anxious, and lonely, while also carrying this persistent sense that there was something more for me.

I hear versions of this story from women all the time. Sometimes it happens after their children grow up, sometimes after a move, a divorce, a retirement, the end of a friendship, or a career change, and sometimes it arrives without one obvious event they can point to. Their lives may look perfectly fine from the outside, which can make the feeling even more confusing, because they think they should be grateful instead of restless.

They wonder whether wanting something more means they do not appreciate what they already have, when often it simply means that they have grown and their life needs room to grow with them.

If you are in one of these seasons, I want you to know that not knowing what you want does not mean there is something wrong with you. It may mean that an identity you have carried for a long time no longer fits in exactly the same way, while the next version of you is still taking shape. The discomfort is real, and I would never tell you to slap a cheerful quote over it and call it personal growth, but the uncertainty can also be an invitation. You do not need to have one perfect, life-changing answer today; you need to become curious about yourself again and begin paying attention to the small things that make you feel more alive.

For me, that has always started with writing things down and putting something real on my calendar. Journaling helps me hear what I am thinking beneath all the noise, and my calendar helps me turn a thought into a commitment. If I decide that I want to play pickleball or have lunch with a friend, putting it on my calendar makes it more than a nice idea I can abandon the moment I feel tired, nervous, or tempted to talk myself out of it. It becomes a promise I have made to myself, and although I do not keep every promise perfectly, because I am a human woman and not a color-coded robot, I try to treat my own commitments as though they matter.

This is how we begin finding ourselves again, not by waiting until we feel completely certain, but by noticing a possibility, making room for it, and taking one small step toward it. We journal, we remember, we imagine, we try something, and we let ourselves learn from the experience. We put lunch on the calendar, show up to the class, text the woman we would like to know better, or try the thing we have been quietly thinking about for six months. Clarity does not always arrive before we move; very often, clarity finds us because we moved.

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Episode 6 of Create a Life You Love

If you’ve made it to this final episode, I hope you’ve started to see yourself a little differently.

Over the course of this series, we’ve talked about why we feel stuck, why we wait for permission, how our thoughts shape our identity, how to rediscover who we are, and what it looks like to…

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A few years ago, I started noticing something interesting.

No matter who was sitting across from me, a woman navigating divorce, an empty nester trying to figure out who she was again, someone grieving the loss of a spouse, retiring after decades of work, or wondering if she was too old to start over, the conversation almost always found its way to the same place.

Eventually she’d lean in and say something like, “I know I need something to change. I just don’t know where to start.”

I’ve heard those words so many times that I could almost finish the sentence for her. The details of our lives may be completely different, but that feeling of being stuck is something so many of us have experienced. The frustrating part is that it often happens at a time when we desperately want to move forward.

For a long time, I assumed the answer was more information. I thought maybe women needed another book to read, another podcast to listen to, another course, another strategy, or another plan. But after years of listening to women share their stories, I’ve changed my mind.

I don’t think most women are stuck because they don’t know enough.

I think they’re stuck because somewhere along the way, they stopped trusting themselves.

Life has a way of doing that. It rarely happens all at once. It’s usually the result of years of putting everyone else’s needs ahead of our own, a few disappointments we didn’t see coming, dreams that didn’t work out the way we hoped, relationships that changed us, or seasons where we became so busy surviving that we forgot to ask ourselves what we wanted.

Little by little, we become cautious. We second-guess our instincts. We analyze every possible outcome before making a decision, convinced that if we could just be certain enough, confident enough, or prepared enough, then we’d finally move forward.

The problem is that certainty almost never arrives first.

Our brains are designed to protect us, and anything unfamiliar feels risky. Starting a business, making new friends, changing careers, moving to a new city, ending a relationship, writing that first article, or simply walking into a room where you don’t know anyone can all trigger the same response. Your brain isn’t trying to keep you from becoming happier. It’s trying to keep you from uncertainty.

Once I understood that, I stopped being so hard on myself.

There have been several times in my life when I found myself standing at the beginning of something new. Looking back, it’s tempting to believe I had a clear vision of where I was headed, but that’s not how I remember it. What I remember is feeling uncertain. I remember wondering if I was making the right decision and wishing someone could tell me exactly how everything would turn out.

Of course, no one could.

Instead, I made the best decision I could with the information I had, and then I made another one after that. Some worked beautifully. Others didn’t. But every experience taught me something, and each step made the next one a little easier to take. It wasn’t the perfect plan that changed my life. It was my willingness to keep moving before I had all the answers.

I’ve seen this same pattern repeated in the lives of countless women. We often admire someone who has reinvented herself and assume she possessed some special kind of confidence that we don’t have. Then you hear her story and realize she wasn’t fearless at all. She was nervous. She questioned herself. She worried about making the wrong decision. The difference was that she didn’t wait until every doubt disappeared before taking the first step.

That’s why I want to gently challenge something you may have been telling yourself.

If you’ve been thinking, “I’m just not motivated,” or “Maybe I’m not confident enough,” I’d love for you to consider another possibility. Maybe you’re not lacking motivation at all. Maybe you’re simply experiencing the very normal discomfort that comes whenever we step toward something unfamiliar.

There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re not behind. You’re not incapable of change. You’re simply standing where almost every woman stands before her life begins to shift.

The beautiful thing is that once you understand why you feel stuck, you can stop fighting yourself. Instead of waiting to feel different before you act, you can begin taking small steps that gradually change how you feel.

And that’s where everything starts to change.

If this resonated with you, I don’t want to leave you with understanding alone.

Behind the paywall, I’m going to walk you through the exact process I use whenever I feel stuck, along with a simple exercise, journal prompts, and this week’s action plan to help you stop overthinking and start moving forward.

Because insight is powerful, but action is what changes your life.

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I interview a lot of women, and every one of them has a story. Some conversations leave me smiling. Some stay with me because we laughed so much I couldn’t wait to tell someone about it. Every now and then, though, I finish an interview, close my laptop, and just sit there for a while because I can’t stop thinking about something that was said.

That happ…

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Have you ever looked around at your life and quietly wondered, “Who am I now?”

In this episode of Create a Life You Love, I share my own journey of rediscovering myself after years of putting everyone els…

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How often have you talked yourself out of something before you even began?

Maybe you’ve told yourself, “I’m too old.” “I’m not qualified.” “What if I fail?” or “Who am I to do this?”

The truth is, the conversations you have with yourself shape the life you create. Many of the thoughts holding you back aren’t facts at all. They’re old beliefs your brain ha…

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In this episode, I share why it’s completely normal to question your identity during times of transition, why I don’t believe you’ve lost yourself, and a few simple ways to begin reconnecting with the woman you’ve always been beneath all the responsibilities you’ve carried for everyone else.

If this conversation resonates with you, I’d love to invite you to become a paid subscriber and join me for my exclusive six-part audio coaching series, Create the Life You Love.

In this private series, we’ll dive even deeper into topics like:

• Why you feel stuck and how to move forward

• Stop Waiting for Permission

• Quiet the Voice That Holds You Back

• Rediscover Who You Are

• Build the Life You Actually Want

• Your Next Chapter Starts Today

Each episode is designed to help you build confidence, change the way you think about yourself, and take practical steps toward creating a life you truly love.

Become a paid subscriber here:
https://juliemarvel.substack.com/foundingmember

Thank you for listening. If this episode encouraged you, I’d love for you to share it with a friend who may need to hear it today.

How many times have you caught yourself saying, “Maybe someday”?

Maybe someday you’ll take the trip, start the business, make new friends, volunteer, write the book, or finally pursue the dream that’s been sitting quietly in your heart.

The truth is, most women aren’t waiting because they lack ability. They’re waiting because somewhere along the way, they…

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The other day I was having coffee with a friend, and somehow our conversation turned into one of those deep talks that seems to happen more often these days. We started reminiscing about our twenties and thirties and all the different seasons we’ve lived through. College. Starting careers. Getting married. Having children. Building businesses. Moving into bigger homes. Life felt like it was constantly expanding. Every chapter seemed to bring something new, and even when those seasons were hard, there was usually something exciting waiting on the other side.

Then we looked at each other and realized something had changed. This season feels very different.

For many women, our fifties aren’t marked by new beginnings as much as they are by endings. The kids leave home. A career comes to an end through retirement or a job change. Some marriages don’t survive. We lose parents, siblings, friends, or a spouse. Our social circles become smaller. The calendar that was once overflowing suddenly has more empty spaces than full ones.

None of those changes happen all at once. They arrive one by one, sometimes over several years. Each one asks us to let go of a role that has been part of our identity for a very long time. I don’t think we talk enough about the grief that comes with that.

Not the overwhelming grief that follows one tragic event, but the quiet grief that slowly settles into your life as things you once depended on begin to disappear. It’s easy to dismiss those feelings because no one else seems to notice them, but they’re real. You’re not only grieving people or places. You’re grieving the life you knew and the woman you used to be.

Maybe that’s why so many women eventually find themselves asking the same question.

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Maybe you’ve thought, “I’m too old.” “I’m not qualified.” “What if I fail?” or “Who am I to do this?”

The truth is, the conversations you have with yourself shape the life you create. Many of the thoughts holding you back aren’t facts at all. They’re old beliefs your brain has repe…

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Maybe someday you’ll take the trip, start the business, make new friends, volunteer, write the book, or finally pursue the dream that’s been sitting quietly in your heart.

The truth is, most women aren’t waiting because they lack ability. They’re waiting because somewhere along the way, they…

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Over the past few months, this community has grown in ways I never imagined. Every day I read your comments, messages, and emails, and one theme comes up again and again.

“I feel stuck.”

Some of you are navigating an empty nest. Others are rebuilding after divorce, retirement, loss, or a move to a new city. Some of you simply know there’s more waiting for…

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