Midlife Mastery Journal

The holidays can be particularly challenging for men and women at midlife. There are attitudes that you can adopt that transform your holiday season into something very special.

Remember back to when you were the only person in the entire world who ever felt this way: the time of favorite songs (that made your heart ache) and trying to do the ‘right’ things with the ‘right’ people at the ‘right’ time so that maybe eventually you’d belong? Remember how you felt when you were convinced that you didn’t belong? like you’d never belong? like nobody understood you? like you were alone?

Just the fact of knowing what your emotional reactions to encountering change will most likely be (grief and fear), will also allow you to begin opening yourself up to the possibility of achieving an appreciation for the change process in your own life, and the rich rewards that are yours, if only you can train yourself (and your pesky emotions) to look beyond the momentary present discomfort to the growth experience that awaits you.

I’ve been working on a program to help guide people who are recovering from a serious (perhaps painful) life experience and are having trouble getting back up on their feet. It gave me the opportunity once again to explore the grieving process. Keep in mind that almost all life transitions result in the grief process, [...]

Although both adolescence and midlife involve a transformation that requires us to leave something behind, the losses involved in adolescence is masked with the opportunities to come, while the losses that come with midlife are heightened by our perception of the perceived decline that we will have to face.