For the woman who did everything right

This isn’t a midlife crisis.
It’s an awakening.

A crisis is something to be handled. Fixed. That’s what they told us. But nothing here is broken. It’s you, finally seeing you.

You want your life to change. That doesn’t mean tearing it all down. That’s why and how FANC was created. I’m Lizzy Bellari, and this method finds the one thing that actually has to change. It’s almost always smaller than it feels right now.

Read: 10 Questions After 40 See how the method works

Is this you?

Does any of this
sound familiar?

Check the ones that are true for you. Most women who find their way here are somewhere in this list. Nobody is in all of it.

Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. It’s just for you.

0 checked

Why you’re stuck

Two things are true
at the same time.

“I can’t do another thirty years like this.”

“I’m not willing to lose what I built.”

Both of those are true. That’s the whole reason you haven’t moved. Not because you’re indecisive, and not because you don’t know what you want.

Everyone around you wants you to pick one. Leave him. Stay and be grateful. Quit the job. Don’t be crazy, you have a mortgage. Every piece of advice you get asks you to choose between two things you’re not willing to choose between.

So you don’t choose. You wait. And another year goes by.

You don’t have to pick. In almost every case, the thing that actually needs to change is one specific piece of your life - not the whole thing. The work is finding out which piece.

What you’ve already tried

Why the usual advice
hasn’t helped.

“Follow your passion.”

Great, if you know what it is. You have six things you half-want and no way to tell which one is real and which one is just a nice daydream about a different life.

“Just be grateful.”

You are grateful. That was never the problem. And nobody in history has ever stopped wanting something because they were told they shouldn’t want it.

“Blow it up and start over.”

Sounds incredible at eleven at night. In daylight it costs you a marriage, a house, and a relationship with your kids - usually to fix a problem that was much smaller than that.

“Make a budget. Make a plan.”

Numbers matter, and they show up in step three. But a spreadsheet has never once told a woman whether to leave her job, and it’s not going to start with you.

The method

Four steps,
in this order.

The order matters more than anything else here. Most people do this backwards - they start with a decision and work backwards to find a reason for it. That’s how you end up doing something dramatic you regret, or doing nothing at all for another year.

  1. FStep one

    Faith: you let yourself want it

    Before you plan anything, you have to be able to picture your life looking different without immediately listing every reason it’s impossible. Most women haven’t let themselves do that in years. It takes about twenty minutes, and it’s usually the part that surprises them.

  2. AStep two

    Awareness: you find out what’s actually wrong

    Not the loudest thing. The real one. A woman decides “I need to quit my job,” and what she actually can’t stand is one specific part of it, or the fact that nobody has asked her opinion in four years. So you go through your life piece by piece: marriage, work, money, friendships, health, what you do on a Saturday. Some of it still fits you. Some of it expired a long time ago. By the end you know exactly which is which.

  3. NStep three

    Numbers: you put real numbers on it

    This is the part almost nobody does, and it’s the part that makes the fear manageable. What is staying actually costing you - in hours, in money, in how you sleep? What would changing cost? How much would you need in the bank before you’d feel safe? What does that business have to bring in during year one for this to work? Fear stays enormous as long as it stays vague. Most of it gets a lot smaller the moment it becomes a number.

  4. CStep four

    Clarity: you decide, and you do one thing

    Not a five-year plan. One decision that you made yourself, and a first step small enough that you’ll actually take it this week. Then you build the next ninety days around it, so the decision turns into something that happened instead of something you thought about.

You come out the other side with a decision you can explain to your husband, your mother, and yourself.

Where to start

Ways into the work.

The method lives in a few different places. Two of them are ready now, and the rest are being built this year.

Available now

The articles

Free, and the best place to begin. Each one takes a single piece of this - a fear, a number, a conversation you’ve been avoiding - and walks it all the way through. No sign-up, no wall.

Start here

Read the articles

New ones go up as I write them. The list gets them first.

Available now

The playbook

The whole method on paper, worked through section by section, at your own pace. For the woman who wants to do this quietly first, before she says any of it out loud to anyone.

FANC Faith · Awareness · Numbers · Clarity

Is This All?

The 40s
Awakening

How to Start Over When You Did Everything Right, and It’s Still Not Enough

By Lizzy Bellari

Playbook No. 01

Twelve worked sections, moving through Faith, Awareness, Numbers and Clarity in order.

Digital Stan Store Coming Print & Kindle Amazon Coming
Get the playbook

In production

The course

The full method on video, self-paced, with the worksheets built in. Everything the playbook does, with me talking you through the parts that are hardest to do alone.

Get told when it opens

Coming

The podcast & the videos

The same conversations, out loud. Short ones on YouTube, longer ones as a podcast - for when reading isn’t what you have the energy for.

Hear about it first

About me

I’d learned
how to earn it.
Nobody taught me
how to keep it.

I’m Lizzy Bellari, and I got here the long way around.

At twenty-eight I left a marriage that wasn’t safe, and walked out of it holding debt I hadn’t created. At thirty-five I found out I was having twins, and raised them on my own while working three jobs - not because I planned it that way, but because that’s what it took.

By forty I was finally making decent money and I still didn’t feel safe. I’d learned how to earn it. Nobody had ever taught me how to keep any of it.

So I learned. Money, investing, the boring discipline underneath all of it. I trained properly before I taught a single person anything. At forty-four I opened my third business, a school that helps women go from working for someone else to working for themselves.

FANC is the method I built out of all of that. Faith, Awareness, Numbers, Clarity. It isn’t a theory I read somewhere. It’s the order I actually had to do it in, and it’s the way countless women have changed their lives, their perspective and their future.

- Lizzy

The list

Get the next one.

New articles as they go up, and first word when the course is ready. Short letters, worth opening, and you can leave whenever you like.