20’s has always been a decade of uncertainty. Most people in this age range face tons of doubts and are often unsure what they should do with their lives. In this new podcast, Dr. Tim Jordan interviews author and mental health advocate Kate Berski about her new book, 30-Phobia: Why Your 20’s Suck and How to Get Unstuck. She breaks down practical tips on preparing girls throughout their childhoods to be able to deal with the uncertainties of their 20’s. Kate also discusses how young people should deal with the constant change in life, the right way to handle emotions, and how to build self-confidence and a resilient mindset.
Resources:
For more info on Kate Berski and her new book, check out her website at https://kateberski.com
Dr. Jordan’s previous podcast where he interviews 4 high school seniors who discuss why teen girls don’t want to grow up
Dr. Jordan’s new book is available! Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying By the Seat of Your Pants, revised and updated edition with an invaluable chapter and technologies and social media and readiness signs for both https://drtimjordan.com.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
How To Help Girls Deal With The Uncertainties Of Their Teen Years And Their 20’s With Kate Berski
I appreciate you coming by this show talking about girls of all ages, talking about the issues that they’re facing these days, giving you, I hope, some tips and some tools to support them more effectively. I thought I’d talk about older kids in this episode because for a couple reasons. Number one, all three of my kids are over the age of 30. Actually, one of them is 40 and wow. I watched them approach that 30-year milestone and their friends. I’m also counseling more and more young women in my counseling practice who were in their early mid-twenties. I’m hearing a lot of angst and uncertainty and just a lot of stress about growing up.
I did an episode where I interviewed some high school seniors who were flipped out about not wanting to grow up. I thought we’d talk about some young adults who are a little bit older than that because a lot of your kids, even if they’re not that age, they’re going to get there. Things have changed even in the last 10, 20 years about the kinds of pressures that young people are facing. What I thought I would do is have an expert come on to help us with that.
I asked Kate Berski to come on the show. She’s a mental health advocate who has survived her 20s and her 30s, and so she has experience going through that. She wrote a book called 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How to Get Unstuck which is a great title. First of all, thanks so much, Kate, for coming on the show.
Thanks for having me. I listened to the episode you did with the high school seniors, and it just confirmed to me that 30 phobia is not always a 20-something problem. Sometimes it’s a teen problem as well. It starts really early. I’m glad we’re having this chat.
Author And Mental Health Advocate Kate Berski
In some of my retreats and camps, I’ll have girls as young as grade school these days talking about how stressed they are about their futures. Fifth graders stressed out about college, their futures. It’s like it just keeps going younger and younger. Your book is about young adults who are facing their 30s. I work with girls in my camps, my retreats, my counseling practice. I wonder if some of that stress, uncertainty and anxiety about approaching milestones, like turning 30 is part of that.
Nowadays, they have more choices than they used to. Back in the day, 30, 40, 50, 60, whatever years ago, they could be a teacher or a nurse maybe a secretary or a mom. Now, young women are told, “You can be whatever you want to be.” I’m wondering if that’s a great thing, but I wonder if that’s one of the things that’s causing some of the angst about that being in your twenties and approaching 30.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. There’s quite an old book now that you’ve probably read called The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. In it, he says that as humans, we imagine that choice is going to be a really brilliant thing, but in reality, more choices means more stress. I think the twenties has always been a decade of uncertainty. Just about everything in your life, all the biggest life choices are up in the air at that point.
You don’t know when you’re 22 who you’re going to end up with, if you’re going to have a family, how much money you’ll be earning, what your career path’s going to be, where you’re going to live, if you’ll buy a house. Everything is so up in the air. The reality is that uncertainty breeds anxiety. As humans in general, we are hardwired to hate and avoid anxiety, because if you feel anxious in the wild, it probably means something’s coming to attack you.
The outside forces that are attacking us now might not be quite so physical, but definitely piling on a huge amount of pressure on young people. I think we started off before the call talking about social media and the pervasive impact. I’m talking about a generation that grew up on the internet, Gen Z, twenty-somethings now. They’ve been exposed to so many options, so many choices, and so many lifestyles, many of them incredibly overblown and unrealistic online. That just serves to widen what I call the expectation gap, which is their expectations out of life. Every element of it are getting higher. The reality is they’re living in a world that’s making it much more difficult to progress and make these choices.
Their lived experience is probably lowing reducing. There’s this huge gap, this expectation gap between expectations and reality. It’s making young people feel really under pressure, really stressed out, anxious, disappointed, disillusioned and the close that they get to 30 more panicked that the women I speak to, they’ll commonly say, “I feel like I’m running out of time. I can’t waste time.”
They’re really feeling a huge amount of pressure. My mission is to take away that false deadline, push back on those societal pressures, and just give them permission to breathe a little bit, reassure them that what they’re going through is absolutely normal, that they’re not alone. It’s a huge reason why I use lots of data in my work, just to say, it might look like everybody else has everything figured out, but the reality is nobody does. Everybody is still figuring it out in their twenties. You do have time and you are doing fine. That is my message.
What’s your background? How’d you get to this passion? I’m curious.
I am an Exit Entrepreneur, turned Writer and Content Creator. My background is basically creative agencies working in advertising marketing, and then cofounded a beauty brand with my husband back in 2018, which we sold in 2022. I suddenly found myself with time and financial freedom for the first time in my life in my late 30s. That enabled me to pursue my lifelong passion of becoming a writer.
I wanted to write about a pivotal time in my life that had really changed the trajectory of my life. It was time in my late twenties where I basically suffered a full-blown call to life crisis. I’d always been quite an overachiever. I thought I was tracking along quite well. Suddenly, in my mid to late twenties, I started looking around at what my peers were doing, where they were at in their lives, and comparing my situation with theirs.
I also started looking online and seeing all these very successful, very rich and beautiful people doing all these incredible things, and started feeling like I was running out of time to tick all the boxes that society expected of me. By 29, I realized I wasn’t going to tick a single box by 30. My life wasn’t at all where I expected it would be at that age.
By doing the inner work, you can start to challenge societal expectations and challenges. Share on XI’d always just internalize that traditional order of things. I expected to meet my person and buy the house and get the career. The boxes weren’t really getting ticked. Things weren’t falling into place. I had a panic, and it all culminated in a very uncool girl moment where I issued my then boyfriend with a marriage ultimatum and said, “If you don’t commit, I’m quitting.”
He said no, politely. That hard stop was actually the most helpful thing that could have happened to me, because at 29, nearly 30, it was the first time in my life that I stopped to question where all those expectations I had of life had come from anyway. Were they even my own expectations? Were they even in line with the way I wanted to live my life?
It was only by doing all the inner work and really starting to challenge those societal expectations and challenge that timeline that I’d internalized to the point of panic that I realized those goals were not mine anyway. They were things that other people did. They were things that other people expected, the traditional order of things. What I realized at that point at 30 was actually the life I wanted didn’t include getting married and having kids and buying a house right now.
It included traveling the world, living in different countries, meeting lots of different people, starting a company, making myself deliberately financially insecure, which is the opposite of settling down. That’s what I did. I threw out the rule book and wrote a new set of rules and took all the pressure off myself. The irony of taking the pressure off and pushing back on all those deadlines and those expectations was that I achieved more than I ever could have imagined.
By 40, my life looked incredibly different to the life I expected to live, but it was so much better. I want to just reassure anyone who’s in their twenties right now and panicking, a decade makes all the difference. Everything is temporary, especially your feelings. The situation you are in right now is not the situation you will stay in. You’re probably in the decade of uncertainty, and that’s okay. That’s normal.
The Danger Of Seeking External Validation
I think we’ve done our young people a disservice. It may have been your generation as well, but I know for sure in the last twenty years, the disservices, we’ve conditioned them, taught them in this culture to look outside of themselves for their direction. It’s not just about social media, even though we blame social media and everything, and it has its part.
Our kids had not learned how to get quiet, turn inward listen to themselves, listen to their gut, listen to their intuition. There’s much more. You mentioned before that you, in your early to mid-twenties, you started comparing yourself to other people. This generation has, I think, more so than in the past, is much more outward directed than they need to be.
I think the danger of seeking that external inspiration is that you see goals that might be unachievable. You don’t see what’s gone into the journey that that other person’s been on. Seeking external validation is beyond your control. You can’t control what other people are going to say and do, and how many likes you get on your post, whether other people like your haircut.
What you can control is how you feel about that, how the stories and the narrative you tell yourself. All of us really as humans, we have a hard time separating the neutral facts from the meanings and the fears that we attach to those facts. We’ll say, “I’m 29, I’m still single.” That is a fact. You are single, you are unpartnered. That’s the fact. The dangerous part is the stories that we then tell ourselves about why we’re single, the things that are wrong with us. That’s the part that we need to help young people to interrupt as well.
How Young Girls Can Look Inward More
We’re talking with Kate Berski. She’s the author of a new book called 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How To Get Unstuck. It’s a great book. I read it and I really liked it. There’s lots of great information in there. How do you coach, or how can we get our young people to learn how to turn inward more? It sounds so easy to stop looking out there and instead look inward, but I don’t know that it’s quite that easy of a switch.
Seeking external validation is beyond your control. You cannot control what other people are saying and doing. Share on XI completely understand. There’s definitely, tools and tricks that you can do. One simple thing I really like to do is ask people to pay attention to the language they’re using and the stories they’re telling. Whether you are journaling or whether you’re sitting down with a close friend or family member, just talk through, vocalize your fears.
Most of the time, young women will have one fear which rises to the top. “I’m never going to find my person, I’m never going to be financially secure. I have no idea where I’m going with my career.” Which one is coming to the top? Take that fear and really talk it through at length and pay attention to the language you are using about that fear and that anxiety. Oftentimes, I will hear the word should. We are shoulding all over ourselves.
The thing about the word should is it is an indicator of an external expectation, an external pressure, a societal pressure. If you can’t reframe that should as a genuine want or need, then maybe it’s not really a life goal that you need to be focusing on and prioritizing and panicking about right now. It happened to me. It wasn’t until my 30s that I figured this whole thing out that who cares if society said I should be a mother by now? Who cares if society said I should be married by this age? That’s not the life that I want to choose for myself. I think it’s about recognizing that language you’re using and really starting to identify if that is a priority for you, if it can be reframed as a want or a need.
If it can, great, that is a priority for you, then we can use some techniques to help you get unstuck in that area. There’s lots of things I talk about in the book about setting realistic goals. One thing I talk about is reframing your goals and moving away from that milestone mentality, so that focusing on the end goal, that panicking about the deadline that we all do, and instead become more process positive.
Let’s say your goal, your genuine goal that identified, “I want to find somebody. I want to find a romantic partner,” let’s say. You can’t control whether you’re going to meet that person by a certain age. You can’t literally snap your fingers and ensure that you’ll meet that person. I wouldn’t recommend that anyway. Deadline dating is not to be recommended because marry and haste, repent in leisure and all that. Definitely take your time.
Instead, if that is a genuine goal, what can you control? What behaviors can you commit to? What process goals can you set for yourself that are within your control, that are small, achievable, and little inch stones? Instead of saying, “I need to meet my person by 30,” and panicking, say, “I need to invite one new person to coffee every month,” and not have the agenda of, “I need to be married by 30,” but just have the agenda of being open, meeting people.
“I challenge myself every time I’m standing in line for coffee, I’m going to speak to one new person,” again, without agenda, without expectation, but just practicing that meeting, making connections, putting yourself in the path towards your goal, but not focusing on the summit of Everest and sitting at the bottom panicking, because the only way we get anywhere is one small step in front of the other.
Defining Success On Your Own Terms
You also talk in your book about how important it is for people to define success on their own terms, I guess is the best way of saying it because the culture has told them this is what it looks like. I was thinking of two things as you were talking. I was listening, but I was also thinking one of them was that as a woman, as a girl, I think that good girl conditioning is still out there, that you’re supposed to be a certain way.
I also think this is true in America. You’re from Europe, but I think it’s true there. I’ve spoken in different countries in Europe, I think there’s this prescribed path that we’re pushing all kids on getting good grades and going to a good college and getting a good job and making a lot of money. There’s this path that they’re supposed to be on. It you, you veered off. It takes a lot of courage to veer off and say, “That’s not my path, and that’s not my definition of success.” That means you need to take the time, I guess, to think about what is my definition? What does success look like for me?
I think the key is what you said, it’s that we don’t take pause. We just get on the treadmill, and we just work through the steps, and we go through the process and we do the same things that people around us are doing. We never stop to question if this is right for me. There’s nothing wrong with a traditional path, if that is something that makes you happy.
I think at some point, if you’re on the wrong path, you will find out. If it’s not a quarter life crisis, it’s a midlife crisis. Something will happen that will stop you in your tracks. You will be forced at some point to evaluate. For me, it happened earlier rather than later, potentially. I know also plenty of women who did tick all the boxes, really successful at work.
They did get married, they did have the children, and they woke up at 35, deeply unhappy with their life and trying to figure it all out at that point, trying to undo some really big life choices. Arguably of course, life crisis is much more easy to solve because you haven’t yet maybe committed to all those paths and those choices yet.
Yeah, of course, it can be a very difficult and brave thing to do, but I think tuning in again, to your feelings, your feelings and your intuition will always tell you. Let’s take dating, for example. I think so much of the time especially with you said about that good girl conditioning, we are conditioned as women to worry about what the other person thinks of us. Does he like me? Did he find me funny? Did he like the way I look? What does he think?
We don’t tune in as much to how that person made us feel. How did that person make me feel about myself? How did I come away feeling about myself after interacting with that person? Same goes for friendship. Same goes for jobs. I think if you are living an unaligned life, you’ll feel it, you’ll know it. There’ll be a deep sense of unhappiness, unrest anxiety potentially. Yeah, I think it’s just, again, trying to learn to take pause and tap into how you’re really feeling about situation and really trusting yourself a little bit more.
I tell young women all the time, they might want to switch out of wanting to be wanted into what do I want? I think social media and all that stuff has caused them to want to be attractive, but then that’s not necessarily what they want.
I think the society has done quite a bad disservice to women by valuing the external a lot. Particularly young women in their twenties plays a huge amount of emphasis on the external validation and the value of their external self, their appearance, basically. Really, they need to start to recognize that their true value is internal. I always counsel young women try to write down what are your best qualities? What are the things you want to be remembered for? What are the things your friends and family love about you? I can guarantee it’s not your hairstyle. Start to really validate yourself and start to focus on those positive inner virtues, because those are enduring and those are never going to leave you.
How Young Girls Can Get Out Of The Grind
I also wonder, in our culture, I think it’s probably true in your culture as well, kids are really busy and there’s this whole push for being on these, in our country, they call them a club sport teams, select teams. They’re playing year-round, they’re playing 4 or 5 days a week, they’re at tournaments. Everything is about not enjoying now, not enjoying what you’re doing.
It’s about someday you might get a college scholarship or it’s all about some future reward down the road, but, so you need to be on this path doing all these things. I think they’ve been conditioned not to just enjoy the moment. As you were talking before, these are my words, not yours. Instead of enjoying the process, they’re so focused on the destination that they miss out on today.
They’re learning deferred happiness. It’s really sad that I think a lot of young people now are living life in the waiting room. They talk like, “I’ll be happy when I’ve got this scholarship. I’ll be happy when I’ve got this money, when I’ve got this partner.” You have to learn to be happy now. That doesn’t mean that you need to achieve all the things now. I think we need to, as a society, get better at celebrating the small wins and celebrating the inch stones, however small they are. It sounds really cheesy, but really practicing the gratitude. It’s something that we’ve been doing around the dinner table for the last couple of years, and my five-year-old daughter has really caught onto it like, “What am I grateful for today?”
We want to train that muscle because it really is a muscle, your mental fitness, and part of that is being grateful and focusing on the small wins. What are my wins today? Sometimes, I’ll put a shout out on my Instagram. I’ll say, “Tell me your small wins,” and it’ll be everything from, “I became a pet parent,” to, “I did my first driving lesson, I finished writing the first chapter of my book. I finally started that course.”
People are winning all the time, every day in small ways. Those are things that are worth celebrating. As a society, we only seem to focus on those mega milestones, those marriages the huge exit from the company, the really big promotion those huge big wins. We’re perpetuating that milestone mentality, that living in the waiting room. It doesn’t cost anything to be grateful now to find things to be happy about. Now everybody can find something.
We are talking with Kate Berski. She’s the author of a brand-new book called 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How To Get Unstuck. It’s a really good book. I would recommend you all get it, buy it, read it. Not just if you have kids in their twenties, but also younger kids, no matter what age your kids are who are reading this, you’re preparing them all along the way to be able to approach their futures or twenties in a more healthy way than I think they are now.
One of the things that my old mentor a long time ago, Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, talked about something called Touchpoints. Touchpoints were times in our lives when we were about to go through a big change, like a big leap in development. Just prior to those leaps in development, kids tend to fall apart. You think about you’ve been through this 2 and 3-year-old terrible 2s thing. Sometimes around 5 or 6 years, there’s some fears that come up as they start to wrestle with growing up.
Middle school for girls is a huge touch point, going through all kinds of changes. High school seniors who are right now thinking about, “I’m going to be moving on.” College seniors. “I’m living college.” There’s midlife crisis for some people when their parents pass away, empty nest. There are predictable times in our lives when we’re about to go through a big change, so it’s normal to have all those feelings of anxiety and uncertainty, but I don’t think we’ve taught our kids that. I think they start to feel all those emotions and they get overwhelmed. They don’t know how to handle it, they judge it, and they sink.
I think you that’s exactly right. Transitional times bring with them all of these fears, these anxieties. A lot of the work that I do is about normalizing being normal. Like I think sometimes young people can be almost made to feel like they’re the only one that’s struggling, or they’re the only one that’s in a particular situation. That’s why I use a lot of data to reassure people.
You are broke at 30. Did you know that almost everyone your age is broke? You’re single. Did you know that half the people in your age group are also single? You’re living at home with your parents. I’m such a freak. No, a third of people in your age group are living at home with their parents as well. I like to use data to reassure that even if you are in a less than perfect situation, it’s absolutely normal and you are in the majority are all in it together.
It does not cost anything to be grateful nowadays. Find things to be happy about. Share on XSome of the things that really surprised me, so I surveyed 2,500 women in their twenties in the UK and the US as part of my research. All of them had fears about the future. There were some really stark things like 90% of them had fears about aging. At the age of twenty, you wouldn’t have thought. I wrote the book in public, so I started sharing my research, my thoughts, my content really early on.
I was shocked to find that I was getting messages from men and women as young as 18 and 19, feeling like they were terrified of aging and they were past their prime and they were already running out of time. It’s really terrifying to hear that because I expected this to be a 29-year-old problem, and it’s not. It’s starting so much earlier, those fears.
Part of it may also be, because we talked be before about being outward directed. As you said before, you look online, you see all these people with these fantastic jobs, and they look great, and they have this perfect life, and you’re like, “My life compared to that stinks.” They get discouraged and they start to get revved up and their fears come up because they’re looking outside like, “That should be my path.”
As we said earlier, social media has falsely elevated our expectations of where we should be at a certain point in life. The reality is most people your age are not in that position. You’re looking at the very successful, wealthy and beautiful 1%, and people who are lying about their lives. We need to add a filter on top of everything we are looking at.
I think it’s so important for young people to care about what they consume. You are what you eat. It goes much beyond food. It’s everything you listen to. It’s everything you look at online. It’s every TV show you watch. It’s every conversation you have with the people closest to you. You need to be aware of what you are consuming and try to make healthy choices from a young age.
I also encourage the young women I work with to interview every adult they bump into, their friends’ parents, their boss at work, whatever job they have and their aunts, uncles, just adults and/or watch biographies. Ask some questions like, “When you were my age, did you have it all figured out? When you were my age, did you know you’d be doing what you’re doing now at age 50 or whatever? I think they become really surprised that most adults did not go straight from A to Z. It wasn’t a straight line. It was a zigzag. It’s like you’re in the middle of some of your zigs and zags. That’s most people, but they don’t know that.
Most of us have a very squiggly success story. What’s been incredible about the journey I’ve been on in writing the book is I’ve been fortunate to meet so many amazing women, particularly and experts in mental health mindset, motivation. Most of them have found their purpose in their calling in their 30s, 40s, 50s. Even when it comes to career there’s no such thing as a career for life anymore. People are pivoting. There really are no deadlines on dreams anymore. I don’t think there ever were. Even more so these days, you really don’t have to have it all figured out by 30. How boring would it be if you did, if you just figured it all out and then you just did the same thing every day for the next 70 years?
I think it’s exciting. I think one of the big mindset shifts I’ve been through over the past years is instead of seeing uncertainty as a shortcut to anxiety, I see it as that uncertain feeling, as a shortcut to opportunity. That’s exciting to me, to not know what’s around the corner, who I’m going to be, what projects are going to come up, what opportunities are coming my way. What people say when you’re about to go on stage, “That’s not nerves, that’s excitement,” I wish you to tell myself that as well. It just, it really helps. I’m not anxious, I’m excited. I’m excited for life.
Everybody reding, write this out and make a little plaque for your daughter that says, “There are no deadlines on dreams. “That’s a great mantra for them to keep saying to themselves. Maybe part of this also is I’m a Boomer, so in my generation, by the time we were in our early twenties, the expectation was you’d be married, you’d have a job, you’re already into your career, and then you were going to be in that job/career, or whatever. Nowadays, it’s not that way. The average age, I think, for people to get married is in their late 20s, early 30s, to have their first kid mid-30s, late 30s. I think everything’s been pushed off. There’s a much longer period of “preparation” or whatever you want to call it. I think you call it, emerging adulthood.
Emerging adulthood now, yeah. It goes up until 29. We’ve all got time and that emerging adulthood phase is characterized by that uncertainty and that identity exploration and that anxiety, basically. You’re absolutely right. My parents are Boomers as well, and they got married when they were 21. For me, unconsciously, every day I went past the age of 21, I felt like I was falling behind. I hadn’t really t tweaked that until I wrote the book.
Of course I was panicking by 29. I was thinking my mom was married at 21. By this age, she had three kids already. She had bought a house. The world has changed. Also, I have huge sympathy for today’s twenty-somethings because even the economic environment in which they exist is very different to the environment in which my generation of geriatric Millennials, your generation of Boomers grew up in.
Only less than half of today’s 20’s will over-earn their parents. They are financially worse off than pensioners. Share on XThe cost of living is huge. Salaries have flatlined only less than half of twenty-somethings now will go on to out earn their parents. That shouldn’t be the case. It should have been that the next generation moves the family line on. Actually, we’re worse off. Twenty-somethings are financially worse off in real terms than pensioners. If you are a working twenty-something, you are poorer than a pensioner.
There’s not much said about how we’re going to financially support twenty-somethings. Rents have skyrocketed cost of housing. When my parents bought a house, the income to cost of housing ratio was 1 to 4. Now, in most US cities, it’s 1 to 8. The barriers are huge to making progress in life. I think we do need to acknowledge that it’s not because twenty-somethings are buying too many lattes that they’re in a difficult financial situation. It’s the financial reality.
They don’t have anxiety because they’re snowflakes and they’re weak. It’s because we experimented on them. They’ve been called the anxious generation. There was that incredible book by Jonathan Haidt, I’m sure you’ve read it, where it talked about how the brains of twenty-somethings were rewired by social media and it’s making it very difficult for them to progress. It’s really challenging their mental health. I’ve got huge sympathy for this generation. I don’t support those headlines, which just call them snowflakes and other mean words. It’s a tough time out there.
They are buying too many lattes at Starbucks.
Nobody ever saved a house deposit by swerving Starbucks.
Create Safe Spaces For Young Girls
Yes. We’re talking to Kate Berski. She’s the author of a brand-new book, which you all should buy and read. It’s called 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How To Get Unstuck. Any last advice you have for, for parents who have kids who are in their teens maybe they’re young adults about how best to support them?
I’m not a parent of a teen. I’m a parent of a five-year-old, but the things I’m doing, just talking with them. I listened to a brilliant episode that you created and it was all about connection being the key. I think just being that safe place, being that safe connection to your children or anybody else in your network. Just being open to conversations, creating that space to talk to them about their day and how they’re feeling and the things they’re worried about.
It is tempting as parents to shut down their fears. “No, that’s ridiculous. You’ve got nothing to worry about. You don’t know you were born. Life’s easy for young people.” I think I’d rather say, “What is making you feel that way and how can I support you with that?” Being a little bit more open because we actually don’t know what they’re going through. The world has changed a lot, and they are facing some unique challenges. I hope that when I get there with my daughter, I’ll come there with openness and empathy and just be that safe space for her.
As you said before, parents can give information sometimes, and also remind them that you’re never behind on your path because it’s your path. If you compare yourself to other people, then you may act like, look like, feel like you’re behind, but you’re not ever behind on, on your path because it’s yours and you have your own timeline.
Yeah, exactly. There’s no such thing as ahead or behind. You’re just on your own path. I love that.
Get In Touch With Kate And Buy Her Book
How can people find you? How can they find your book?
You can find me on my website, KateBerski.com. There’s also a free resource on there called Mindhacker Cards, which you can download, you can print out, and you can just use for free just to help figure out some of your anxieties and your fears. It’s basically a little conversation starter game that you can play with a close friend. That’s there for you. You can find me on Instagram @Kate.Berski on TikTok @30_Phobia, and you can find my book 30-Phobia on Amazon right now.
Thank you so much for coming on the show. Also, thanks for the book. I think it’s something we don’t talk about enough and we don’t give enough support to people in their twenties. As you say, we judge them a lot. We don’t actually guide them as much as maybe and support them as we could.
Yeah, I agree. I think it’s a bit of an under supported generation at the moment, a bit of an underappreciated generation. I’m happy to be doing my bit and I’m happy to connect with others who are also supporting.
The book is 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How To Get Unstuck By Kate Berski. Thank you so much for coming on this show. I really appreciate you giving our parents who are reading and also their kids some great information.
Thank you so much, Tim. I’ve loved this chat.
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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
That was a great discussion. I really encourage you to read the book. Even if you have kids who were in middle school or whatever, I still think it’s good to know what’s coming up, know what some things you can do at this point in your daughter’s life to help prepare her to be more confident and to be able to handle her future in a different way, to handle her emotions. There’s uncertainty and anxiety about changes when you’re starting middle school, when you’re starting high school, when you’re leaving high school, when you’re starting college, when you’re leaving college.
Along the way, there’s a lot of good information in the book. Again, it’s called 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How To Get Unstuck by Kate Berski. Thank you so much for reading. I hope this was helpful. I hope it was interesting for you. I’ll be back again with our brand-new episode. Thank you so much for stopping by. A quick plug, my brand-new book came out. It’s called Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying by the Seat of Your Pants. You can find that on our website or you can also find it on Amazon or wherever else you buy your book. Check that out as well. See you back here next time.
Important Links
- Kate Berski
- 30-Phobia: Why Your 20s Suck & How to Get Unstuck
- Mindhacker Cards
- Kate Berski on Instagram
- Kate Berski on TikTok
- Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying by the Seat of Your Pants
About Kate Berski
Kate Berski is an exit entrepreneur turned writer and a self-proclaimed “recovered 30-phobic.” After navigating a turbulent quarter-life crisis, Kate transformed her life—going from broke, burned out, and feeling behind at 29, to a self-made millionaire, married mother, and published author by 39.
Today, she empowers 20-somethings to break free from societal timelines and rewrite their own success stories. With candor, humor, and hard-won wisdom, Kate shares the four mindset shifts that changed her life in her debut self-help book, 30-PHOBIA. Now living in sunny Spain and writing full-time, she’s on a mission to prove that your best decade might just start at 30.