Sue Cleaver “struggled” with confidence until she reached her mid-forties.
The 61-year-old actress – who has played matriarch Eileen Grimshaw on ITV1 soap opera ‘Coronation Street’ for almost 25 years – didn’t feel as if she “belonged” and admitted that it took until middle age before she felt able to “transform” how she thought about herself.
Speaking on ITV’s ‘Good Morning Britain’, to promote her new book ‘A Work In Progress’, she said: “The first half is stories from my life and thoughts and beliefs about myself and not feeling like I belonged. And struggles.
“I struggled, I would say, to turn my life around and from the age of 45 or 46, I transformed my life and the second half is about how I changed my life and how I hope I can help other people.”
The ‘Loose Women’ panelist – who is married to Brian Owen but has son Elliot, 26, with her ex-husband James Quinn – explained that people tend to suffer from “empty nest syndrome” once their children have left home, but insisted that it can still be a “really exciting time” despite what society may think.
She said: “I think we get to a certain age, we get to 50-plus, maybe our roles as parents have come to the end and we’ve got empty nest syndrome. I think society would like us to sort of shuffle off quietly, and I’m saying that we do not need to buy into society’s bias. This can be a really exciting time.
“We all have that similar thing inside of us, impostor syndrome, which comes from comparison. We have this inner voice, and we say these things about ourselves but they’re just thoughts and thoughts are not facts. They pop in, and they pop out, and we choose ones we hang onto. Unfortunately, humans tend to hang on to the most negative thoughts.”