I watched a YouTube short where they asked an 82-year-old woman, for her advice to her younger self. Her advice was to always have someone you admire. This got me to remembering my own enamoration of powerful, intelligent, and stylish women growing up. The past few years I’ve been focused on finding and following older women who embody the kind of woman I want to be in perimenopause and beyond.

It’s such simple advice that it’s easy to miss how radical it actually is. Always have someone you admire. Not to copy. Not to compete with. To admire, the way you look up at a mountain in the distance, and you feel that there is more height available to you in this life. A higher perspective.

What happens to most of us in midlife, quietly and without our noticing? We run out of people ahead of us that we’re actually looking at. As girls, we were full of women we wanted to become. Somewhere in the busy middle years, we stopped looking up and started just looking down at the endless to-do list, and without models ahead of us, the future stopped looking like a place we were becoming someone and started looking like a place we were simply getting older.

How do we change that? By finding women to admire again. It gives you back a future with a shape. And it does three specific things, each of which matters more than it sounds.

It Reconnects You to the Girl You Were

Think back to who you admired at ten, at fourteen, at nineteen. The women you taped to your wall or studied on a screen or watched across a room, wishing you could be like them.

That admiration was not shallow. It was one of the purest things you ever felt. Before you learned to be cool, before you learned to protect yourself with irony, before anyone taught you that wanting to be like someone was uncool or naive, you simply loved certain women out loud, and let yourself want to become them. That open, unguarded wanting is one of the truest parts of a girl, and most of us quietly lost it.

When you let yourself admire again, really admire, without cynicism, you reach back and take that girl’s hand. You reconnect to the part of you that still believes she can become something, that still gets excited about who she might grow into. That part of you did not die. She just went quiet when you stopped giving her anyone to look at.

Admiration is how you wake her back up. And she has been waiting.

It Becomes a Beacon for Your Future Self

In a culture that hides its older women. If you cannot see it, you cannot imagine it. And if you cannot imagine it, you fear it.

Most of us walk toward our own aging in the dark, because the culture keeps its vibrant older women mostly out of view, so all we can picture ahead of us is decline, invisibility, a slow fade. Of course we’re afraid. We’re walking toward a future we’ve never been shown.

A role model who is aging with fire and style and presence is a light switched on in that dark. She stands ten or twenty or thirty years ahead of you and shows you, simply by existing, that the road keeps going somewhere good. That there is life, and boldness, and beauty, and relevance out there past the point where you were told the story ends. She is proof, walking around in the world, that your fear is based on a lie.

You need that beacon. Not to reach a particular destination, but to know there is one. A woman ahead of you, lit up and unafraid, quietly rewrites what your own future is allowed to look like.

It Gives You a Framework for Your Own Becoming

And then there’s the most practical gift of all, which is that role models hand you a set of possibilities you can actually choose from.

You are not becoming a fixed thing in midlife. You are, whether you feel it or not, in the middle of becoming someone, and the women you admire show you the range of who that someone could be. One shows you fearlessness. One shows you reinvention. One shows you how to age without apology, another how to stay curious, another how to build something that lasts, another how to be soft and formidable at once.

You get to gather these. To notice what specifically you admire in each woman, and understand that what you admire is information about who you are trying to become. Your admiration is a map of your own values, drawn in other women. You’re not copying any single one of them. You’re assembling, from all of them, a picture of the woman you’re growing into, and then walking toward her on purpose.

That’s the difference between aging by default and becoming by design. A framework of women you admire turns the second half of your life from something that happens to you into something you are actively authoring.

What This Means This Week

None of this requires anything but attention. Here’s where to start.

Reclaim the women you loved as a girl. Go back and remember who lit you up before you learned to be cool about it. There’s information in there about who you’ve always wanted to be. Let yourself love them out loud again.

Go looking for women ahead of you, on purpose. Seek out older women living boldly, in the culture and in the world, and pay attention to the ones who make you think yes, like that. Follow them. Read them. Watch them. Let them light the road.

Notice what specifically you admire. Not just who, but what. The fearlessness, the reinvention, the intellect, the way she carries her age like a crown. What you admire is a clue to what you value, and what you’re becoming.

And look closest to home. This is the most important one, and I’ll say more about it in a moment. The most powerful role models are often not famous at all.

My List, and the Women Who Matter More

I’ll admit my own list, because I think we should say these things out loud.

I look at Tina Turner, who walked away from everything and rebuilt herself into a force, still shaking the rafters in her seventies. Helen Mirren, who made being a woman of a certain age look like the most powerful thing you could possibly be. Grace Jones, who never once asked permission to take up exactly as much space as she pleased. Cher, gloriously, defiantly, immortally herself. Madonna, who refused to disappear on the schedule she was handed, paid for it, and did it anyway. Celine Dion, who is preparing her comeback as we speak. Gloria Steinem, still sharp, still fighting, proof that a mind only deepens. These are my aging baddies, and I keep them where I can see them, because each one shows me a different way the road can keep going.

But here is what I most want to leave you with.

The women who will shape you most are rarely the famous ones. They’re the ones close enough to touch. The aunt who reinvented herself at sixty. The neighbor whose marriage you quietly admire. The older friend whose intellect still sharpens every room she enters. The woman at your church or your gym or your work who has built a family, a life, a self, that makes you think I want whatever she has. The mentor who ages with such grace and mischief that you find yourself watching how she does it.

These women are your truest role models, because they are real, and reachable, and proof that this becoming is not reserved for icons with stylists and stages. It’s available to ordinary, magnificent women. Women like the ones around you. Women, if you let yourself become one, like you.

So gather them. The famous and the near. The ones on the screen and the one across the street. Let them show you the girl you were, the future you’re walking toward, and the woman you’re quietly, deliberately becoming.

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Watch for yourself our aforementioned 82-year-old Queen below.

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