The Next Chapter is Yours to Write: A conversation with Colleen Dupont
Colleen Dupont, of Les Frenchies fame, wants midlife women to rediscover who you are *now* and design your next chapter with purpose, joy, and ease. We go deep in this video.
Let’s face it. If you’re a midlife woman, you’ve spent a lot of your life giving, doing, and caring for others, and trying to meet their expectations. By the time we hit our 50s, many of us start to wonder What do I want now? Trust me, that question feels especially potent after 60, when familiar roles shift and something inside starts whispering there’s gotta be more. A recent conversation with Colleen Dupont shed new light on this. Midlife, Colleen says, isn’t an ending. It’s an invitation to step into your own story again.
Colleen is no stranger to reinvention. In her late 50s, after juggling a career and raising a family in South Florida, she and her husband Antoine relocated to Paris. It was Colleen’s lifelong dream to live there (and Antoine’s hometown). They’d been many times. She even spoke some French. So it didn’t seem like it would be that hard. But learning how to navigate a new culture proved a much bigger challenge to Colleen’s identity, as she shared in this profile I wrote of her. Lucky for us, it worked out, and what she learned has gone into the Les Frenchies Travel YouTube channel, launching Colleen and Antoine as a global phenomenon.
Now Colleen is on a mission to help other women live lives they adore, just as she has done. And her method is to use self-inquiry to help women gain real clarity on who they are now.
What moved me most in our conversation was how Colleen insists that clarity isn’t something you just stumble upon — it’s something you intentionally create. That’s why she has developed the Clarity Course. I had the opportunity to serve as a beta tester of the online version (there is also an option to go to Clarity Camp in France!). I can vouch for the power of the process, and the rigor. This is not a quick fix. It’s a deep dive into what makes you, well, you, and all the ways we’ve learned to conceal ourselves. Through guided reflection, videos, structured activities, and the company of women walking similar paths, the course offers a way to peel back the shoulds and expectations to uncover what truly matters to you now.
Clarity is not about erasing your past, but about remembering yourself — your values, your voice, your joy — and channeling them to build what’s next.
Perhaps the most beautiful part is that you don’t have to do it alone. The women in the Clarity Course join a sisterhood that listens, witnesses, and holds space for questions that might not have neat answers yet. Because at this stage of life, real transformation isn’t about doing more — it’s about coming home to who you are and daring to live from that place.
Jean & Colleen on getting Clarity in midlife and beyond.
Jean Shields Fleming is the founder & editor-in-chief of Certain Age, a Substack top 100 publication in Culture. Her novel Air Burial was published by Carrol & Graf, and you can read an excerpt from her latest novel, All The Reasons Why.
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