Is the Story You’re Telling Yourself a Lie?

There's a story running through your mind right now. It's been playing on repeat for years, maybe decades. It sounds something like this:

• "I should have done more.”

• “I missed my chance.”

• “I'm not where I thought I'd be.”

• “Look at everything I got wrong."

Here's the truth that's going to set you free: That story is a lie!

Not because the events didn't happen. Not because you haven't faced challenges or made choices you wish you could revisit. But because the way you're framing those experiences—the lens through which you're viewing your entire life—is fundamentally skewed toward deficit rather than expansion.

Most women sit in the wreckage of their perceived failures, tallying up everything they think they did wrong, cataloging their shortcomings, measuring themselves against some impossible standard that keeps moving further away. We've become experts at self-devaluation, masters at dismissing our own worth, skilled at erasing our accomplishments from the record while highlighting every misstep in bold, flashing neon.

This isn't wisdom. This is a learned pattern of self-betrayal.

The Problem With Your Current Frame

Think about a photograph. The image captured is fixed—it happened, it's done. But the frame you choose to put around that photograph? That changes everything. A cheap plastic frame from a discount store tells one story. An elegant, carefully chosen frame that complements and elevates the image tells an entirely different story about the same photograph.

Your life is that photograph. The experiences you've had are fixed in time. But the frame, the narrative structure you've built around those experiences is entirely within your control. And most of us have been using the cheapest, most unflattering frame possible.

We frame our lives in terms of failure. What we didn't do. Where we didn't arrive. Who we didn't become. The relationship that ended. The career that stalled. The dream that didn't manifest exactly as we imagined it would.

But here's what that frame is hiding: Every single experience you've had has made you exponentially more valuable, not less.

The Reframe: From Deficit to Expansion

Reframing isn't about positive thinking or slapping a happy face sticker on genuine pain. It's about accuracy. It's about telling the truth about who you've become through everything you've experienced.

When you reframe your life from failure to expansion, you're not denying that things were hard. You're recognizing that hard things made you harder to break. You're not pretending mistakes didn't happen. You're acknowledging that mistakes are the tuition you paid for the wisdom you now carry.

Expansion is the natural state of consciousness. We are designed to grow, evolve, and become more of who we truly are. But we can't expand while we're contracted in shame over our past. We can't evolve while we're frozen in regret. We can't step into our power while we're busy cataloging every way we think we failed.

The reframe asks you one simple but revolutionary question: What if none of it was wasted?

• What if the marriage that ended taught you exactly what you will and won't tolerate in relationship?

• What if the career that stalled gave you the space to discover what you actually want to create?

• What if the financial struggle developed your resourcefulness and resilience?

• What if every single thing you've been calling a failure was actually an expansion in disguise?

The Knowledge You're Dismissing

Here's what happens when women over 50 devalue themselves: they dismiss the most valuable asset they possess, their accumulated wisdom, experience, and knowledge.

You know things now that you couldn't have known at 25, at 35, even at 45. You understand human nature because you've witnessed it in a thousand different contexts. You recognize patterns because you've lived through enough cycles to see them clearly. You can spot dysfunction, manipulation, and inauthenticity from a mile away because you've encountered all three more times than you can count.

This isn't just knowledge. This is hard-won intelligence that only comes from living, from trying, from falling, from getting back up, from trying again differently.

But when you frame yourself as broken or behind, you render all of that wisdom invisible. You act as though your value expired the moment you made your first mistake or encountered your first major setback. You treat yourself like damaged goods instead of a woman who has been refined by fire into something far more valuable than the untested version of yourself that existed before life taught you its lessons.

Giving Yourself Credit

One of the most revolutionary acts a woman over 50 can engage in is the simple practice of giving herself credit for what she's already done.

Not in some future moment when you've "fixed" yourself or "caught up" or "finally got it right." Right now. Today. Credit for showing up. Credit for surviving. Credit for learning. Credit for trying again. Credit for the wisdom you gained from the things that didn't work. Credit for the strength you developed from carrying heavy loads. Credit for the compassion you cultivated from your own pain. Credit for still being here, still growing, still willing to expand.

This isn't ego. This is accuracy. This is recognizing that you have been doing hard things for a long time, and that matters. Your resilience matters. Your persistence matters. Your willingness to keep evolving matters.

The Lens of Expansion

When you view your life through the lens of expansion instead of failure, everything shifts. That job you lost becomes the catalyst that forced you to discover capabilities you didn't know you had. That relationship that ended becomes the teacher that showed you exactly what authentic love should feel like, and what it definitely isn't. That financial crisis becomes the experience that taught you resilience and resourcefulness.

Expansion doesn't mean everything was easy or pleasant. It means everything was purposeful. It means you extracted value from every experience instead of allowing experiences to extract value from you. It means you stopped being a victim of your circumstances and started being the woman who alchemizes her experiences into wisdom.

This is the reframe. This is how you step out of the cheap plastic frame of failure and into the elegant truth of expansion. This is how you recognize that you haven't been falling behind, you've been gathering what you need to surge forward.

The Narrative in Your Head

The most important conversation you have every day is the one you have with yourself. And for most women, that conversation is brutally unkind. We speak to ourselves in ways we would never speak to someone we love. We hold ourselves to standards we would never impose on anyone else. We frame our experiences through a lens so harsh that it would make us weep if we heard someone else talking to a friend that way.

It's time to rewrite that narrative. Not with platitudes or false positivity, but with the truth of who you've actually become through everything you've experienced.

You are not broken. You are broken open, which means you can hold more wisdom, more compassion, more power than you could when you were still tightly sealed against life's lessons.

You are not behind. You are exactly where someone with your specific set of experiences, insights, and growth would be.

You are not less valuable because of your age. You are exponentially more valuable because you've had the time to accumulate what cannot be rushed: wisdom that only comes from living.

Moving in Powerful Ways

When you reframe your life from failure to expansion, when you give yourself credit for the wisdom you've accumulated, when you recognize your value instead of your deficits, you unlock the ability to move in powerful ways.

You make decisions from wisdom instead of fear. You create from abundance instead of lack. You show up from worthiness instead of proving. You lead from experience instead of following scripts that were never written for you.

This is what becomes possible when you change the frame. Not the photograph, the experiences are what they are. But the story you tell about those experiences. The meaning you assign to them. The value you extract from them.

You get to choose the frame. You always have. And the frame you choose determines whether you spend the rest of your life contracted in regret or expanded in recognition of the woman you evolved into.

Choose expansion. Choose the reframe. Choose to see yourself as the woman who has been gathering wisdom, strength, and value with every single experience, not despite them, but because of them.

That's not a lie. That's the truth you've been too afraid to tell yourself.

It's time to tell the truth: You are not broken. You are expanded! And that expansion is your power.

I post a 2 to 3 minute video short on YouTube every Friday. Here’s today’s topic on the Fierce Feminine Friday YouTube Channel.

About the Author

Dr. Diva Verdun, the Fierce Factor Expert and Architect of Ageless Power™, is the founder of FENOM University and the Age with Power™ movement, where she empowers ambitious women to crush it after 50 and rewrite the rules of aging. Through her signature Core 4 Principles of F.I.R.E.™ — Purpose, Passion, Prosperity, and Power — she guides women to ignite their inner brilliance, embody their authentic power, and expand into a life of bold, liberated expression. On the campus of FENOM University, Dr. Diva leads transformational experiences, legacy brand training, and deep mindset shifts designed to help women rise into their next chapter with unstoppable fire.

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