As we hit middle age, we get into this grey area – we are the ones with ever increasing seniority in the room, we may be coming up on work anniversaries with two digits and may have mastered many of the tricks of our trade, many of us while raising families, but we are still not quite near the age where we can start daydreaming of spending winters in Miami and summers in Cape Cod.
It is precisely at this time that midlife angst may tap us on the shoulder. Perhaps we have grown bored with the industry that we have been in for so long, or we feel that we ourselves have become stale or that other unearthed passions exist and have begun pecking at the eggshell trying to hatch.
This was the situation I found myself in a few years ago. I was in my early 40s and had been at the same job for 15 years. I was surrounded with caring people who really watched me grow up, some attended my wedding and one coworker was the first visitor to hold my hours old baby girl. I raised my family and life went along, until I starting feeling restless. I could not describe it or even justify it – it was just that I was…bored. The tasks of the day to day operations became somewhat tedious, even the celebrations became repeats of years past. I made a very difficult decision to leave and venture out on my own.
What I have learned is that a little goal setting goes a long way in midlife.
Plan Ahead.
Before making a move from where you are, think about when you plan on or want to retire. What does your ideal future look like? What is your retirement strategy? If you don’t have one, this is the time to start ironing one out, even if it is not perfect – time is still on your side. If you need assistance with this, get it. A good CPA is really worth their weight in gold.
My husband knew how miserable I was and so we sat down and looked at what we could do. What we decided was that if I quit, we could afford a gap year – one where I tried starting my own business – we could swing it for one year and then if nothing took off, I could find a job. This was a perfect time for me to do it because we could make up the year later on if we needed to and I could finally lean in to a dream of mine.
This did take planning though: insurance, spending money, vacations, etc. all needed to be discussed upfront and agreed upon so neither felt blindsided later down the road. When things didn’t go so well, I did get another job but one that was in a different arena that challenged me, kept me fresh and allowed me to keep things going on the side, steadily building my passions so I didn’t feel so cut off from myself.
Find Your Passion.
Listen to your heart and make it a priority to find your passion. You may have already found it in your current job, if so, fantastic. You may find that it is time to step out of what you have been doing and either return to school or change paths. You also may find that a shift of thinking from your day to day work being your secondary gig and what you do on the side becomes what you light up for. It is the difference between being in “real life” versus being “really alive”. Sometimes we don’t need to quit our day jobs to move on the things that make our soul sing.
Midlife provides a very specific space for us to question who we our, what our purpose and passion is and what we want to do with the rest of our working career, and with the rest of our magnificently little time on this planet. It is in this sacred time that we can find a 2.0 version of ourselves just waiting to be unveiled.
Think about what you loved to do as a child, is there anything that you can return to and pick up that sense of passion and excitement you had then? I wrote when I was a child and it brought me great joy, but one harsh critique from a teacher in the 7th grade stopped me writing dead in my tracks until now. Can I make a living from it? Not now, but I can start there and see where it takes me. I can reawaken that part of me that had no limitations or belief that I would fail and rekindle that flame. Who knows where this will go, but I tell you I feel a heck of a lot better mentally and emotionally. And a hell more alive.
When setting your midlife goals, make sure your passion is front and center. We can create goals that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic -or Relevant- and Timely) to work towards what we want, but without passion they are just maps to a place that we might not want to visit. Start with creating goals from your passion place and work outwards from there, otherwise you are setting yourself up for failure or an indifference to the results. Who cares if you sell 20 widgets if your soul screams to write poetry. Start with setting a goal of writing every day and your widget selling will naturally become better. Why? Because YOU become better.
Push Yourself Past the Fear.
When we mine our souls and find that precious gem of passion, our first instinct might be to hide it away and only show it to those we deem deserving. Never to anyone who might want to take it away or show us a prettier gem that makes ours not as special as we thought it to be. But this is the time we need to push past that instinct. So many of us are waiting until we perfect that story or quit our job or until we are confident. Reality check: those things might never happen. We all have to start before we think we are ready. We have to look at what we are hiding from, behind and for and ask ourselves why are we waiting? Midlife can give us the courage to push past the fear of failure and of being judged and lean in to our own magic.
I started my FB page on midlife with guns blazin’ – I was willing to put myself out there and thought I was doing great until I got a negative review and someone called the page “boring”. I was so hurt by that – didn’t they see my courageousness, my vulnerability, my honesty as something to be admired? No, they saw it as a boring FB page. When I sat with it I realized that I didn’t die, no one was rushed to the emergency room and the sun rose the next day. My first reaction was to stop being so honest and vulnerable, but for what? One person’s opinion? I decided that it was my fear that was the drug of paralysis, not one negative comment that from another’s perspective may have been total truth. I realized that I wasn’t putting myself out there for others, it was for me – for that voice in me that calls to me from deep inside to write and tell what I know in my own voice. If others didn’t get that then, oh well.
Today, what can you do to push past the fear and take a step towards what you want? Sit down and start to Plan – think about what is calling you and how you can create the time and space to at least give it expression. It may not mean quitting tomorrow, but maybe it means going to an open mic, a poetry slam, getting up early to write, registering for that class (and showing up!), taking steps to self-publish, finally sitting down to create. Honor that in yourself. Start with your passion and work outwards and push past the fear that will be the worst troll that you could have following you. Let the angst of midlife be your muse and your hourglass. Embrace who you are and the contribution that only you can give the world. We are all waiting.