What up my homies, Lisa Bilyu here with another incredible episode of Women of Impact. And today's episode is for all my single ladies out there. All my single ladies, all my single ladies. If you're feeling rushed out of glory, single them and thinking of settling that part in that video, God keeps warning you about you have to listen to this episode. Cindy Trimm is actually a former senator, a visionary and now a soul-healing inspirational being, is showing and sharing how she turned her unstoppable ambition into her main character energy. But it means she never settled until she decided to marry at the age of 60 years young. Guys, this two-pot conversation with Cindy is packed with the lessons that you guys are going to wish you heard 10 or 20 years ago. It's 2024 guys, so we're over settling for less than we deserve. We're over taking second place. This is your year to get your power and never freaking settle. This is Women of Impact and I'm Lisa Biddy. Let's go. Often when we're single we have a voice in our head that make us feel like maybe you're never going to find anybody better than the person that you're with or the person that you last dated and settle for somebody that isn't right for us. So what I want to know is how did you not settle and at the age of 60 decide to find the person of your dreams without giving up who you were and who you are. You have to act yourself this question. Am I worthy of happiness? Am I worthy to attract the right person to me? Because you don't really attract who you want. You attract who you are. And the greatest work that you do is on the inside of yourself. So I set with myself, I call it me moments, I set with myself and I wrote a 20 year vision plan for my life. What I wanted to do, what I wanted to accomplish and who I wanted to attract. And everything came to pass in that 20 years, except my spouse. And I rolled it over to the next 20 years because I realized that happiness that I wanted and the success and the prosperity that I wanted wasn't going to come from another person. It wasn't going to come from me. And I wanted someone to be a traveling companion, someone that had the capacity for me, and not just for who I was, but who I would be. And a lot of people have in their lives, people that have capacity for their now, but not for their next. And so I decided I have to have someone that can accommodate me. I consider myself a polymath, which simply means that I multi-talented, multi-gifted. At any given moment, I could change. So someone that could accommodate an evolutionary process. And who I am today, I'm not going to be that person tomorrow. And would I have a person in my life that can accommodate those kinds of expressions? So I ask myself hard questions. Do you want the white picket fans to children or do you want and a husband or do you want adventure? adventure I chose adventure because I felt like adventure was gonna help me to continue to connect with the next best version of myself on a continuous basis. And so I made the decision that I was not going to settle at all, not for a spouse, not for anybody. I was going to explore the full range of everything that I was to myself and for the world. And when I was ready, I felt like, okay, the right man was going to show up. And it's not like they were showing up every year. They did and it's not like I did in date. I did. But I wasn't looking for a feeling. I was looking for a person that loved themselves, just like I love myself, and wasn't intimidated by who he perceived me to be. And so that was the journey. And I didn't mind waiting because I was happy with myself. A lot of people think that their success and prosperity and happiness is going to come from outside of themselves. So they look for people and they look for things. And that's why a lot of people become addicted because they continue to believe that how I feel is going to be based on what I do. And we do more because we want to be more. But what if we can reverse that? What if we could take ourselves serious, serious like we take everyone else? What if we could value ourselves like we valued everybody else? What if we could believe in our dreams? And this is all a part of self-mastery. And I was a part of this self-mastery process, knowing that every season of my life, I was going to be introduced to someone really, really incredible. And that wasn't going to be a person outside of myself. It was going to be me. And secondly, I understood that I could only attract who I was, not who I wanted. So if I was going to attract this amazing human being to me, then I had to be just as amazing. So I worked on me. Oh my God, I lost that so much. If you don't mind, take me a little deeper. I believe in your 20s, you were with somebody and they said that either you had to choose the marriage or career. Yeah. In those moments, Cindy, there's so many people. Myself included, when I was 20, I married a man and then became a stay at home wife eight years when I didn't want to now It's not his fault. That was me choosing that but those are moments of weakness moments of not having utter clarity Momas of trying to have everything like I want the perfect person and I want this So how did you navigate that if you don't mind taking me into that moment because this is the moments indeed that people make a decision that can then take them off the path to self-mastery, to self-care, to actually looking inwards. When we meet with ourselves and those are quiet moments, what do we really feel about ourselves and do we really approve of our own happiness? This is a huge question. Do you approve of yourself? Do you approve of your greatness? Do you approve of your dreams? Do you approve? Do you approve? Because as women, we are trained to place supporting actress in the unfolding of everyone else's life narrative. And we forget that we've been cast to play leading actress on our own. And oftentimes we're giving a script. And these scripts are invisible. We can't really see it. And people don't even care enough about us for us to read over these grips so that we can agree or disagree. So as women culture has this expectation and men have an expectation that women are there to play supporting actress in the unfolding of their lives, living on the circumference of their lives rather than at the center. So when I realized, Lisa, that I was cast to play supporting actress in the unfolding of my life, Narita, which I write, I'm the one that writes the script. Nobody else writes it. And where I ended up at 21, 22, 23, 24, I would make an appointment to be there. And I came to that realization when I sat one day. And my father, I grew up in Ab abject heart poverty. I didn't really know my father,

but at 17 I wanted to go to university. And my father, I called my father and he said, come and see me at my job at three o'clock. And I showed up at three and I told him who my My father was, could you tell him I'm here?

315, 330, 345, 4K'clock, 415, 430, 445, 5 o'clock. He never showed up. The same gentleman walks out and said, oh, I forgot to tell you, your father is not here. I had enough money to catch a bus to his workplace, not enough money to catch the bus back. Home for me was five miles away.

So I went to the bus stop and I sat down and the tears were just streaming down my eyes. Something told me to look up and with blurred eyes, I saw my father drive by. And he did not see me, but I saw myself. And that day, the poor little Cindy Trim that was waiting for someone to make life happen. I left her at the bus stop. And the person that stood up was the person you see today, the best selling author, and I can keep going on,

Guinness Book of Records. And that let me know the power of adversity. Victor Frankl said something, he said, adversity introduces a man to himself. So when I started reframing how I saw my life unfolding, how I experienced my life unfolding, changed. You have to see yourself. You cannot live a life as a victim. And so that day I was 17. He didn't see me. I saw myself. I got up and I bowed that I would never, ever play supporting actress in anyone's life. I can only play lead in mine. So I had to learn. It's like self-awareness. That was a self-awareness experience. And self-awareness is knowing where you and someone else begins. So I learned not to take one step. And so when my boyfriend at that time or fiance at that time, say, look, you don't ever have to work another day in your life. And he was Italian. And I'm going to take care of you. So after you finish this degree, you're gonna stay home. We're gonna have children I'm gonna go out to work and I wrote a Dear John meta This is not gonna work for me. It'll work for you But it's not gonna work for me And it was having the courage to defy cultural expectations. And we were talking earlier. Culture is either a predator or a prisoner. And a lot of things that we do as women, we've been culturally programmed to do. So I had to learn how to live counter-culture. It wasn't easy because I had my family's expectations. I had people's expectations, organizational expectations, and I had to ask, what expectations do you have of yourself? So the initial stages of me saying, I'm going to exert my personal power, and this is what you call self-afficacy. And I'm going to exert my personal power. And people say, what if you fail? I always say, what if I succeed? So I prepare myself for success, not failure. And I think the scariest journey that you will take is not a journey outside of yourself, is a journey on the inside of ourselves because we have been trained to ignore ourselves. And that's what culture does. You are here to make everything and everybody else's life work. And if you have energy at the end of your day, that's what you use to take a shower. And that's a miserable life. And I said to my husband, when we were dating, a better me is a better we. A better eye is a better us. So let me work on myself so that I can bring to the table the best of who I am. And I decided that I'm playing this leading actress in the unfold in my life. And everyone else has to respond accordingly. Oh, God. There's so much there, Cindy. And how do you make sure in those moments where you realize I have to set my own expectations, block out everybody else, that you don't start to compromise.

Because I think that that's also, there's A, the succumbing to the pressures. And then B, there's the, well, I'm not going to succumb to the pressure, but maybe I'll compromise. And let's say your fiance, when he proposed, and said, I'm going to take care of you. There can be that voice that's like, this is what everyone dreams about. You can't turn this one away, or if you never find love again, all these fears that

may become from past experiences can start to override the momentary feeling of or the momentary idea that you want to stand in your truth or stand in your power. How did you make sure that you didn't override this of what you're talking about, like laying out your expectations. We're created for relationships. I mean, everything in the universe is interrelated and relates to something else. So naturally, we're created for community. We're created not only to reflect one another, but to affirm one another. And I think that we're afraid of being alone. And aloneness is different from loneliness. Loneliness is the absence of people. Aloneness is the absence of purpose. And we're afraid, we're afraid of being alone. Because that's what you, where you really discover who you are and your purpose. And we're afraid of that because we're

afraid of being alone because that's what you, where you really discover who you are and your purpose. And we're afraid of that because we're afraid of ourselves. When I look in social media and I look at all the beautiful pictures of women and usually we display ourselves in the best light, right? So we got our makeup, a lipstick, earrings on, and then when you meet the person, and you're wondering, okay, the person that I saw on social media doesn't exactly look like this. Cause we've used filters, we've photoshopped ourselves, we've done everything to show ourselves in the best of light. At first I had a problem with that, now I don't and I tell you why. Because the person that we display on social media is who we want everyone to see. But what if we took the same energy to be that? To be that beautiful person that is influential and admired and gorgeous, right? So what if we did the inner work to be beautiful, to be powerful, to be admired? And the makeup is only the icing on the cake. It is not the cake. So in order to not compromise, we have to be comfortable with being with ourselves. And the biggest question is, do you like yourself? Not your body, because your body is not who you are. Your body just gives you permission to live life in time. It's just a vehicle that carries you. The real you is the spiritual you, the person that we can see. What if you did the work with that person that we cannot see? And did that work first and then let the makeup and the clothing just be the icing on the cake? And this is what I'm saying to women, I don't have problems with the makeup, but what if you can be that? And I always say, we do more because we want to be more. The biggest question in life, could things be the way they are because you are the way you are? And what one thing can you change that can change everything? You can change the way you think about yourself. You could change the way you feel about yourself. You could change the way you carry yourself. Those are the things that you can control and you don't have to compromise that. And if you don't compromise that, your dominant thoughts will attract you in physical manifestation, the relationships, the opportunities, the people that reflect that, that is the physical manifestation of these spiritual thoughts that you have about yourself and what you think you're worth. So the greater work is here and not compromising is saying, no to what everyone else wants for you and determining what you want for yourself. And given people the permission to be disappointed with that, because if you temporarily, disappoint and you temporarily inconvenience a person while you're doing the inner work, you will permanently bless them. But if you do it, they opposite. You would live a miserable life. I'll do you then actually do that because there is wonderful joy that you can get out of making someone happy. Start where you are. I'll give you an example. I grew up in abject poverty. I made years old. I wanted to ballet. I wanted to piano. No money in the house. You can only start with where you are. But you have to determine where you want to be. The simple thing was I said to my mother, I wanted to be at I wanted to be at light. My mother said, okay, okay means there's no money in the house. Figure it out. So I started my first business at eight years old so that I could funnel a dream. So going back to what is it that you can do? Not what you cannot do. What I could do was to start this little business to pay for my own ballet. Number two, never feel like you're a victim. Life is not happening to you. It's happening for you. So once I discovered that, and at eight years old, I had the power to change my destiny, I've been changing my destiny ever since. 12 years old, I was financially responsible for myself. And life teaches you how to put yourself down when you compare yourself with someone else. So, the second thing that you could do, first thing is decide what you want, decide where you want to go. The second thing is never compare your life with anyone else. No one's living a better life than you. They would have to be you. Thirdly, recognize that you've got something to give and start giving. Give whatever you can. It could be a smile like you give a lot of hugs. No, there we go. So you come in and you give it hugs, you know. But it doesn't have to be something tangible. And there is a spiritual algorithm that happens that whatever seed you sow, you'll get a harvest of that in your future. So start sowing what you need. So if you want smiles, you get smiles. If you want opportunities, you should get opportunities. Start giving of yourself. There's Ling at all possible. Do the inner work to make sure that you're pitching at the level of your work? How do you do that if you don't actually know what your worth is? You start thinking, what do I want? So if a person says, I don't want to be unhappy, that's good. I don't want to be unhappy. So think about the opposite of that. So the opposite of unhappiness is happiness. And then every single day, do one thing towards bringing that to pass. And I can tell you exactly how you do it, because this is what I's do it. I woke up and I'm rewiring my brain, right? So I woke up and I used my left hand because I'm right-handed. So this is how you change your neurological pathways to rewire from habit. So instead of using my right hand, I use my left hand. So I use my left hand to brush my hair. I use my left hand to brush my teeth. And it's arduous, but I know what's happening. After I did that, I used my left hand to take off my pajamas. My left hand to go shower, you know, and bathe myself. Then once I did that, I looked in the mirror and I said, I love you. And I said that 12 times. And then I said, you're great. And I said it 12 times. Everybody that sees you loves you. I said that 12 times. Something happened. I started smiling. It raised my energy. It made me happy. And I talked to that person that was in the mirror. These are practical things that you can do. And then you could say that one thing you're going to accomplish today. You are going to do X, Y, and Z. I set that to myself. You are not going to eat another hamburger. You are not going to eat another chocolate bar. This is what you're going to eat healthy. And I'm talking to myself. I finished that. I did a couple of stretches and then I started getting ready for my day. It's practical but it will happen because you're rewiring your brain as a man thinking in his heart. So is he. You're emitting a frequency and you're influencing the entire universe with your thoughts. Unless you make the unconscious conscious, the unconscious will continue to direct your life and you will call it fate. Why? How do you get to the unconscious mind if you're unconscious of it? Well, the conscious mind is responsible for 5% of your behavior. The unconscious mind is responsible for 95%, but you're not conscious of it. But here's the caveat. You don't have to spend your whole life in therapy. You don't. I'm a psychotherapist, right? Train. You don't have to spend your life in therapy. What can you do? Since the 5% is also responsible for creating the 95% go back up to the 5% and that's how you reprogram your unconscious mind and that's what I did this morning. I love you. Everyone that sees you loves you. You are successful. You are productive. This is the most productive day you are going to have. What was I doing? I was... This is a life hack. I was putting myself on auto pilot for success, progress, and prosperity. Could things be the way they are? Because you are the way you are. And what one thing can you change that can change everything? You can change your thoughts. And your thoughts are nothing but words contained in this little container. So, life act, I change my thoughts and I change the subconscious behavior. I love how practical that is that everyone literally can go home and do it immediately. My question is, that was this morning. After the day you've been here, you've inspired so many people at home, you let's say go out, you've got a couple of business meetings, you hang out with your friends, whatever your plans are.

Off and though, when you get towards the end of the day, you're tired, you're exhausted, you don't have that same energy, and then you end up maybe having that hamburger. And now you almost have lost the trust in yourself. How do you make sure A, that you don't get to that point where you then betray your promise that you've made to yourself in the morning? And then be, if you do end up slipping whatever word you want to use, how do you make sure

that isn't so detrimental to yourself as steam, that then you just spiral downwards? Love it, love it, love it. So, I think of a car to answer this question. You've got the rear mirror, and then you've got your front screen, your windshield. You can either spend the rest of your life using the rare view mirror, which is smaller than the windshield in front of you. Every day you could choose the thickness of your future or the smallness of your past, every single day. And your past has nothing new to stay to you. So stop listening and your future is calling. And life happens to you in such a beautiful way that tomorrow cannot be messed up in advance. It's a clean slate. It's clean. So I don't regret. I did it. And I'm not even going to try to justify it. I'm not going to beat myself down. I always ask myself, what are you going to do in the next minute, the next hour, the next day? All of that is clean. So every day you can rewrite the narrative of your life every single day. So when you wake up in the morning, it's either going to be Rare View Mirror, which is so small, so restricted. You put lids and limits on yourself with the Rare View Mirror. But then if you look at the front, you see this road that lies ahead of you and you just have to program your GPS where you are and knowing where you are cannot get you anywhere. But knowing where you want to be, that's what makes that GPS so amazing. You can punch it in. You can punch it in. That day when my father abandoned me and left me, or I was left at the bus stop. That's a drive by, isn't it? We all have our drive by stories. Every last one of us have been a victim of drive by. It's not what you do when they dry by is what you do after. And that's what you can control. That's when I tell women, listen, that's what your husband did. Your father did. Your best friend, your friend of me. They did that. Are you going to continue to play supporting actress? Are you going to take your life in your hand and play lead? And at 20, going back to 20, I decided I'm going to play lead actress. Once you've made that decision, then what do you change in your actions? Because there's those moments, I'm obsessed with this. And where does it probably fed up with me talking about it, but there's the moment it doesn't feel

if you ever saw the movie sliding doors.

So it's, I think it's Gwyneth Paltrow. She one scene, she runs and she makes the train and the doors close behind her. The next scene, she runs and she misses the train and the doors close in front of her. And then you see the different lives of how they go on different trajectories.

In that moment, there's a person like you

that's like, okay, I will no longer be the victim.

How do I change? What do I do? How do I, you know, make sure that I'm the one that holds my power? But then there's the other path where people then go down the victim route where they say this did happen to me. This was out of my control. I did have a, you know, a very hard up bringing. And then that takes you down to almost being inactive versus you that took action. What's that difference and then what actions did you take? No difference. It's no different because we're making decisions. I mean, I grew up in abject poverty. I made a decision. This is up to me eight years old, start my first business. Then I made a decision.

Oh, I want to be a best-selling author. I never wrote a book before a day in my life. Then I made a decision. Look at the decisions. I want to travel the world. I made a decision. I'm going to go to all seven continents. I made a decision. Oh, I'm going to study at Oxford. Oh, it's all decision.

So back to the car, a metaphor.

So. decision, oh, I'm going to study it, Oxford. Oh, it's all decision. So back to the car, a metaphor. Sometimes we just have to shift our lives out of gear. Because most people are driving with the foot on the paddle and the assing it, but we never shifted the gears. You shift the gears by taking back your personal power and start making conscious decisions. And this is the question every day, what do I want? What do I want this data look like? What do I want my marriage to look like? What do I want my happiness? What do I want my health to look like? What do I want my future to look like, what do I want? So you go back into that mirror and you ask that person that's looking back at you. What do you want? How do you want to feel today? What do you want to accomplish today? Who do you want to meet today? Where do you want to go today? It's decisions. I mean, it's as simple as that. It's as hard as that. So you have to keep telling yourself over and over and over that, hey, I made this decision. I like it. I'm going to make more like this. And sometimes, even for people without education, it's not about skill, it's about will. Will is always stronger in skill, always. I find that the will is the thing that people struggle with the most. How did you, in saying what that is, was it easy or difficult based on everything you just said to then turn to your fiance when you were in your 20s and say, no, I won't marry you. It's always difficult. But it was contrary. It was compromising what I wanted from my life. Going back, people have scripts. Everybody has a script for me. Every friend, my family,

my husband, they have a script of what they want from me, what they want me to be at any given moment. I will have to either agree with it or disagree with it and I have to be comfortable with disappointing people. It's not natural for me to hurt people. Very unnatural. Because I'm a giver. So I give, I naturally care for people, I nurture people, I nurture people's greatness, I sacrifice my own comfort. That's what I do naturally because that is where my purpose finds the greatest expression. But what I had to do is to stop making people a priority and myself an option. When I did that, something amazing happened. Amazing happened. People eventually were serviced. Because I was servicing myself. But I was literally killing myself. And a lot of times your body is talking to you. I recently was in Kenya and I fell down. First time ever. And the part of my body that was hurt was my shoulder. What is that? It could have been my hips, it could have been my ankle, it could have been my finger. What was it an indication of? I had started to carry the weight of the world. I was taking care of everyone. I had to retire my superhero cape because my body, I wasn't listening. So my body was saying to me, Hey girl, you're carrying too much. Take a deep breath, exhale and dump some of this burden. Put the burden on, give people back their burden. Just because you could do everything doesn't mean that you should do it. So I just took on this and I finally fell down. It wasn't a freak accident. It was my body saying, okay, this area you're compromising here. I guess the good side of that happening is that you have that realization, right? And so many of us, I think, fall into those traps of having to be everything to everyone at all times. And what is that thing that can help stop you in your tracks and pivot? But going back to the people pleasing thing that you were saying is really powerful. And I'd love to know, like, if you don't mind, I don't know how comfortable we are going a little deeper on that moment where you turn around to your fiance and say no in your 20s, we'll get to definitely your beautiful marriage now. Because if your people please are, in that moment, I assume you know you're gonna break his heart. And so how do you make sure that you still stay true to yourself? You still say the word and you're able to then not go down a path that wasn't right for you. I think when you are okay with people's response or reaction, because you know where you and, and they begin. So once you're comfortable with a person's right to feel what they want and to think what they want and not try to control that, you can only ensure that your motivations and intentions are honorable but you cannot control their response. That was the secret to living successful, to living fulfilled life and just having a sense of pure joy because you've already said to yourself, my intentions are honorable. And even if you get it wrong, and even if people reject you, and even if they never speak to you, you can go to sleep at night. Because your intentions are honorable by them. If I go this way, I'm going to be compromising myself. And if you compromise in all areas, one area, you compromise in all areas. And all you will have left in life is compromise. That's a miserable space to live in. And then number two, asking yourself this question, you know, when I'm on my dying bed, laying on my back,

what would I regret? And if I answer that, then I can live a life of integrity, a purity of transparency and invite others to do the same. If they're not, that's not in my business. My business is right here. And the more I do it, the more people around me will do it. The more I do it, the more I attract in like kind. So you can only attract who you are and not who you want. So you do the work. That's what I do. I do it in my marriage. I do the work. This is what I expect from myself. This is what I bring to the table. And that was the conversation that we had. What do you expect of me as a woman? What do you expect of me as a wife? Let me agree with that. Here's what I expect of you as a man and this is what I expect of you as a husband. Now you can either agree or disagree, but we've had that adult conversation. And I wish that every married woman before she got married, I wish I could talk to all of them. Don't lose yourself in a relationship. Cloture trains men how to think. They also train us how to think. And men are naturally takers. We are naturally giving. But if you keep giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, giving, and you don't have anything in return, eventually it turns to bitterness and resentfulness. But what if you can ask for what you want? What if you could put a stop to what you don't want? What if you could do that? And you can, just by speaking up, this is not going to work like this. Or give me more of that. And I like how that makes me feel. I don't like how that makes me feel. And if you could do that over and over

in your relationships, I mean, it's so,

that brings such dynamics to the table.

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