Most of us live through the mind and live for the mind; we do what the mind wants and we don’t do what it does not want: we seem to have lost touch with our intuition.
This problem is accentuated as we approach mid-life; once upon a time mid-life was 35 years of age, now that stage is somewhat blurred. Whichever way you look at this transition point and whatever age midlife is for you, it can be a time of great opportunity. In Chinese culture they have the same pictorial image for opportunity as they have for crisis.
As Merilyn Hill says, “ midlife is a transition period, a time to reassess and refocus career and life for the 20-plus years of the second half of life, starting in the mid-40’s to late retirement in the mid-70’s.” As we get older our priorities change and what we thought was a great idea career wise earlier on in our life suddenly looks tired, boring although secure.
Merilyn Hill says that as we approach midlife, (whatever that age is for you) there are three hurdles to overcome.
The first is Strengths Identification, which implies that if you have been in a career or job for a long time it is more difficult to transfer the skills elsewhere as you try to carve out new interests or a new vocation; “the strengths are blurred and the job search skills are rusty.”
The second is the field of Shattered Dreams where you realise that you may have to work a lot longer than you ever thought possible. In fact you never thought about it. Now, you see that all those things you could have done far cheaper when you were younger you can’t afford to do at all.
The third is the Negative Climate, with high unemployment, age discrimination even over 40 years of age, possible pension changes and redundancy if you did not choose to leave yourself.
Wherever you are in the life cycle, whether at the retirement end of the spectrum or at another age, and you are vitally interested in carving out new possibilities for yourself, upskilling yourself is without question one of the most important things you can do for yourself.
Apart from the obvious external steps to take when making a change and the main point of this blog, the real questions at play at this stage in your life ( apart from sheer survival ) are whether you have clarity about the next steps to take or whether you are just plain confused about what to do.
We often wonder why our timing is so way off the mark, when we need it to be otherwise; one of the reasons is that we are out of touch with our centre and are too obsessed with planning. We do not realise that life has its own way of functioning and that if we could keep our minds out of the way we would be more in tune with what needs to be done and perhaps even with what needs to be planned.
In life, we are occupied day and night with planning, so we plan life, death and everything in between and wonder why joy and aliveness are not pumping through our veins. The truth is that through planning any spontaneity is destroyed, and not only that but the beauty is destroyed and the whole wonder of existence annihilated through our constant planning.
If, once in a while we could let life “plan” for us, we could be more in the moment, more spontaneous, joyous and happy and when the time does come to plan we could then really do it with totality, creativity and originality. Then we can sit down and begin the process of developing new skills, creating new networks, putting procedures in place and casting our net, as we begin a new adventure where all the players we want in our team come to us as needed.
Cheers
Chris Borrett
If by chance, you have not encountered my previous posts outside this blog, one of my favourites is about “A Woman’s Labour of Love”. You have the luxury of reading it by clicking here.
Image Credit: FreeImages.com/Martin BOULANGER