Yes You Can (And Yes There Is) – Do It Now!

Recently, a significant portrait of mid-career angst was painted in The Atlantic Magazine. Having been there, and through the resulting work, lifestyle and wellness focused changes necessary to address it, the story made me remember what happened in my mid-forties. After my parents passed and I was “evaluating things,” I realized that the conflict nature of law practice just wasn’t what I wanted to be doing with my life energy anymore…

But I had so much invested in that picture.

And I remember wishing there was a place I could go for help figuring out what to do next, what direction to go, and how to make it happen. A headhunter and a revised resume wasn’t going to cut it. Building on the skills I learned through my first major career change would help…

Decline… or Development?

The magazine article entitled, “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think – Here’s how to make the most of it,” was written Arthur C. Brooks, contributing opinion writer for The Washington Post and president of the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy think tank. 

I was drawn to the “how to make the most of it” subtitle – and eager to hear how Brooks approached it. He described things this way:

“…I had started to wonder: Can I really keep this going? I work like a maniac.
But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point
my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then?
Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead?
Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself
a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—
when the music inevitably stops?”

(Why yes! There is.)

Brooks went on:

“Though these questions were personal, I decided to approach them as the social scientist I am,
treating them as a research project…
and for the past four years,
I have been on a quest to figure out how to turn my eventual professional decline
from a matter of dread into an opportunity for progress.”

It’s a good article, and it goes on to describe the dichotomies between success and happiness, the challenges of aging, the unsettled nature of our 40’s and 50’s, peaking in career, and the so-called decline.

But a 4 year quest…?

The Greatest Opportunity For Progress

I also remember I wasn’t interested in decline – that’s why I needed a change to begin with. I definitely wanted to embody true happiness while the music was still playing and I could still dance. AND not take any longer to accomplish getting there than absolutely necessary.

That is exactly why I shifted my own work focus toward helping people at mid-career create a fulfilling reinvention. Rather than years, I wanted them to be able to get going in as little as 90 days. I created a model – an intensive designed to create a viable plan. One that’s inspired and exciting! It results in a roadmap to guide “making the most of” what’s truly important for people ready to re-create, renew and revitalize their lives, and work.

Because THAT is what would provide the greatest opportunity for continued progress.

Professional career and productive work are definitely an important part of reinvention. But real fulfillment has to be based on more than that. Some fundamentals provide real guideposts.

Creating A Reinvention Plan

So unlike Brooks’ more academic approach, I created a practical process that covers everything important to consider when fashioning a plan to actually make the changes you truly want in career and life.

Here is the 5 step plan I came up with:

1.        Develop a big picture of your life – and where and how you see yourself in it.

That includes understanding the importance of the experiences that brought you to the pivot point of craving a change – and what you bring forward as a result of those experiences. What you don’t want is as revealing as what you do.

Also helpful is to identify the qualities you bring to the party, so you can truly appreciate them. This involves increasing self-knowledge about personal attributes you have developed, like how you respond to conflict, what motivates you, what causes you stress, and how you solve problems. Add to that an inventory of not only your expertise, personal qualities and talents, but especially your preferred skills and interests so you can acknowledge the ones that actually bring you joy and a sense of pride to contribute. There is power in that to make things happen.

But who has the time and just how do you figure all that out? I collected the best tools I’d used and could find to guide taking that inventory.

2.        Discover what you really want to include (and what you can release, let go of).

Armed with your self-assessment in this new unit of space and time, you can start to consider where you want to go next. It is important to consider what to keep in place, what to ‘retire,’ and what to take with you.

I like to start with departure considerations because they can take some time to put in place. What do you need to establish to leave where you are? Is there succession or exit planning work to do?

When I decided to sell my law firm, I wanted to preserve the systems I’d developed to work through cases with clients and trained staff. To accomplish that, I wanted to transition the firm to a colleague as partner, and then as new sole owner. That took a couple of years to properly accomplish, to maintain long term clients, install ways to attract new ones, and avoid losing key staff. While putting that in place, I also worked on putting together what I wanted life (and work) to look like after that.

From the trial and error of that experience – in all areas of my life – I narrowed down the most effective approaches. Research provided information about how to determine what a fulfilled and whole life actually includes. From that I could create a full life planning model to focus the process of drawing that new picture – one that was more like painting by the numbers, than trying to figure out how to fill in a blank canvas.

Painting that canvas starts with having a clear sense of purpose – who you are (now), what you want and where you’re headed. Reinforcing that purpose is served by being very clear on what you truly value – which may well not be obvious without some exploration. Identifying your top values provides a compass to the north star of your purpose.

3.        Design the next chapter – your way!

Research tells us that life satisfaction is comprised of addressing primarily 8 key areas – like health, finances, family, personal interests, friends and leisure, along with work and making a contribution.

Each of those areas encompasses a veritable ton of different choices, and no two people will make the very same ones. What’s important to one person, may not be to another. That’s why I created the Full Life MAP (mindful action plan) model. First, what good is knowing those ideas and choices without a plan to act on them? And second, if you are in a relationship with someone else, particularly if you love them, it’s important that you BOTH get to fulfill your own preferred choices.

Armed with that information supports being able to communicate what you identify on your MAP.  It further helps finding different advisors and guides you may need to get where you want to go for your WHOLE life, and streamlines explaining it to them.

4.        Deliver yourself, your gifts and your preferences to the world

With all that foundation laid, this is where the rubber meets the road on your journey to what’s next. I call it “activating your MAP.” Making it happen. And if what you want next is considerably different from what you’ve done before – and you truly DO want “it all,” everything important to you, to fully express your unique brilliance and experience your heart’s desires in all those areas of life satisfaction – then, it’s time to get on with making it happen!

You may need to enlist help to take those steps – and I recommend it. Now is the time to do that and gather the right resources. Developing your sense of creativity is key – and we are all creative beings, not in the artistic sense, but in the build-something-new sense. This is served by building a network of new people, a new community. That’s how you accelerate building on what you’ve developed, discovered and designed thus far.

5.        Dance into your exceptional life!

Ah! The fun part! Doing all this designing and planning to create that exceptional life should lead directly into a joyful dance as it unfolds.

Only that’s not how things work. As the old saying goes “we make plans and God laughs…”

Only I don’t think that’s accurate. What is true, is that when we start to make changes, other things show up. Action begets equal and opposite REaction, as per Newton’s Third Law.

Learning to dance on the road to what’s next is about mastering the invisibles.

What first tends to show up, with keen regularity are forms of resistance: like blocks, naysayers, and challenges. That often starts with us, through self-questioning like:

“What was I thinking to believe I could do THIS?”
“Why again did I think this was a good idea?”
“Who do I think I am to aspire to these things?
And similar sorts…

This is a “not if, but when” phenomenon – to learn why this happens, how it shows up for you, and what to do about it makes all the difference between moving forward and staying stuck. So having some tools to overcome your inherent negativity bias (something we all have) is key to help to move past this “noise” that can stop you in your tracks.

On the more positive side of this coin, learning to recognize the invisible powers behind progress helps, too. They are real and you can master them.

It’s like learning to read the wind in sailing. You can’t actually see the wind, but you can recognize it in the direction of fluttering flags or blowing tree limbs, or in the ripples on the water.

You have already mastered a lot in order to reach mid-career with the expertise and experience you’ve gathered – even if you don’t realize just how much. Add mastering the invisibles to the capacity to leap over obstacles, and you have a new level of peak performance to get where you want to go…

Both managing the negative and building on the positive are important to the choreography – to help you truly dance along the path of creating the exceptional life you can actually have.

Now you are truly on your way. (And yes, that’s me, charting a course in the Bahamas…)

“If decline not only is inevitable but also happens earlier than most of us expect,
what should we do when it comes for us?
Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful….
There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.” “
~ Arthur C. Brooks

I mean to change that. Not so much changing bookstores…

But what to do is get out ahead of it – preventing decline by promoting fulfillment. Doesn’t that sound better to you?

And again, it IS a process. Building anything new doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey. There is a way to create true fulfillment in work and life using activities and tools that will get you there faster. But just thinking (or reading) about it isn’t enough.

So, there you are: Yes You Can – and Yes There Is. And I’d be thrilled to help.