What do you think that midlife feels like? I suspect that most people going through this experience would say, "Confusing." Yet, any first-year psych major would be able to tell you that ‘confusion’ isn’t a feeling. Feelings, when boiled down to their basic essences, come in only about four flavors: ‘mad,’ ‘sad,’ ‘glad,’ and ‘scared.’ The confusion comes from an inability (or unwillingness) to get down and dirty and really identify the feelings that are churning around down there. It’s often the case that, on one hand, you do recognize how you feel, but, on the other hand, your intellect tells you, "That can’t be true! I can’t be feeling that way!" As a result, your mind and your emotions end up at war with each other. It’s not pretty.

Let’s take a look at the kinds of feelings that you can expect to experience during the midlife transition.

1. First of all, the majority of what you’re going to be feeling during this period of your life isn’t all that comfortable. Probably the least common experience will be to be feeling ‘glad,’ so I suspect that this one is the most superficial of your feelings. When does a guy in midlife feel glad? Most often, when things are going well for him and he’s getting his own way. Often, there’s an ‘I’ll show them’ attitude attached to it, or a rebellious sense of thumbing your nose at customary propriety.

2. But, what happens when you’re not getting your own way? Evidently, you’ll probably be feeling ‘sad.’ For whatever reason, your career, your relationship, or your health may have hit a wall. Or, even more likely, they’re not at an impasse, they just aren’t getting any better. You’re tired. You’re emotionally spent. You’re sad. You may feel so sad that you just want to give up, or, alternatively, just chuck it all away for good. At least on the surface, that may seem like the only way to get out of the dumps and to start feeling ‘glad’ again (see #1).

3. When you’re finally tired of the ‘sad’-'glad’ merry-go-round, it’ll be time for you to dig deeper inside, because neither feeling ‘glad’ nor feeling ‘sad’ are telling you anything like the whole, true story. "Depression," they say, "is anger turned inward." Underneath the furious rebellion that makes you feel ‘glad’ and the self-punishing depression that makes you feel ‘sad’ lies a complex of emotions that you’ll eventually be able to recognize as ‘mad.’ You’re angry! You’re pissed off! You’ve been following your convictions about what was the right things to do all the way along (and working rather hard at it, I’m sure), and now it all feels worthless. So, you’ve become furious. You’re furious at your career; you’re furious at your family; you’re even furious at yourself. And, when you’re tired of being furiously sad, you break out and become furiously glad. When you look at it all like that, it doesn’t look too pretty: in effect, you’re having a tantrum.

4. Yet, getting yourself in a rage over your situation is really a powerful — but only a thinly-veiled — attempt at hiding the truth from yourself and everyone else. Underneath the manic gladness and the depressive sadness, underneath the rageful anger, there lies the most unacceptable emotion of them all. Deep down, you’re scared. For a man, almost all emotions are unacceptable (except anger, occasionally). And, the most unacceptable emotion of them all is to be ‘scared’. Still, that’s the operative emotion at the core of the midlife transition. You’ve lost your way; you don’t know which way to go; and there’s nobody there you can trust to help you, In fact, merely acknowledging that you might need help may well be the most unthinkable thought of all.

Glad -> Sad -> Mad -> Scared: every step down the emotional ladder takes you closer to a core reality that you really don’t want to have to look at (or even let into your conscious awareness). Midlife works on your core of self-esteem rather like having your own personal Three Mile Island: you’ve uncovered your nuclear core and you’re in meltdown. If you’d only allow the transition to do its work properly, you’d gradually become aware that your whole life is just a facade built upon other people’s expectations (and your own assumptions) and that you haven’t any clear idea who you really are, what you really want, or where you’re really going. If you have enough courage to push away the denial and smokescreens to look coldly at the facts, you’d see how true that is.

You’d also see the utter simplicity of the solution. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to change anything about your life. The only thing you have to change is your mind. The Greek philosopher, Epictetus, learned this lesson dramatically. As a young man, he was captured by the Romans and sold into slavery and bought to tutor the children of a wealthy Roman family. His midlife transition came when his rebellion, sadness, and anger had played themselves out in pure frustration over his condition. He looked through all that was left (his fear) and saw his condition as it really was — not like he wished it would be. That day, he said to his master, "Master, from this day forward, I am no longer your slave; because, starting today, I choose to serve you freely." For the structure of his life, nothing had changed. From the core of his life, nothing was the same.

As I just mentioned, the midlife transition is actually perfectly simple. Yet, in its simplicity lies its power to terrify even the most courageous of men and women. God, they say, is utterly simple. Yet, in God’s perfect simplicity lies his ineffability. In Hebrew, אהיה אשר אהיה (ehyeh asher ehyeh): "I will be who I will be." At the core of your own being, laid bare by the transformation at midlife, is the simplicity of the personhood who you are. In your own being, in your own connection with Being, lies the meaning that’s waiting only for your permission to infuse your life. It’s in that act of acceptance of the person who you are and who you’re meant to become that you can find the courage to lay down (at long last) the need to prove anything to anyone. When you stand there within your personhood, without the layers and walls of pretense, go barefoot: the place where you stand is holy ground.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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How hard was that? How long did it take you? Did you have to stop and ask yourself, "What does he mean by ‘core values’?" Did you have to stop and think, confused by a long list of things that seem very important to you? Did you find it tough to choose the top three, or did you just write down the first three values that popped into your head? It doesn’t matter to me (at least not right now) what your top three core values were: I want you to have the experience of stopping whatever it was you were doing (obviously, reading this article) to think about it. The more difficult you found this exercise to be, the less thought you’ve given to your core values recently. What does that indicate?

There’s a good chance that, if you haven’t taken the time to explore your core values in a while, you may not be aware of the principles that are driving your decision-making. Would you trust your GPS to guide your driving if you haven’t updated its software in years? Yet, your core values determine many more important choices in your life than when to make a left or right turn in traffic. Let’s review (for the sake of argument, I’ll call it a ‘review’) how your core values function in your decision-making process.

Your core values are those principles that you use, often subconsciously, to evaluate your choices: that is, to determine the relative value of one choice over another. Is it better (that is: more valuable or more advantageous) to select this possibility over that possibility? Does this seem obvious? Now consider this: almost exclusively, people make their choices based on what feels right to them, rather than what makes better sense to them. The most confrontational question you can possibly ask another person is, "Why did you do that?" Asking them ‘why?’ immediately puts them in the position of justifying (rationally) a decision that was probably made emotionally. When it happens to you, you’d probably have to admit (at least to yourself) that you don’t really have any rational justification for your choice, it just ‘felt right.’

When you make a decision, you subconsciously engage your core values. That suggests that, if you want to determine what your core values really are, you should look at the decisions you’ve made over the past week or so and ask yourself what reasons you had for making each of them. If you can be honest about it, your collected reasoning will show you what’s really important to you (your values). In this context, the old saying makes sense: "Your actions are shouting so loudly that I can’t hear what you’re saying." Your choices, based on your core values, will cut through even the smokescreen of self-delusion and rationalization that you may use to cover up bad choices (and poor values) with good reasons.

I hope you’re able to see the importance of making your core values explicit. Knowing these values and keeping them in your conscious mind not only helps you to make your decision-making more rational, it also serves to keep yourself aligned with your chosen purpose and goals. Here’s something else to consider: people (wrongly) think that your core values determine what you do in the present. It seems as though your core values should guide your rational decision-making process, choice by choice. However, since most decision-making is not rational, but emotional, in fact, most of the time, when you make most of your decisions, you’re not engaging your reason at all. From this perspective, your core values determine, not your present choices, but your future choices. The more you align yourself with consciously-chosen core values, the more likely your emotion-driven future decisions will be informed by those values.

Are you finding it difficult to achieve the ends for which you think you want to strive? Perhaps its because your present choices are being driven by old values (those ‘old tapes’ that people often talk about). Those old and often-dysfunctional values will continue to infect your decision-making process until you’re able to replace them with strong, consciously-chosen core values of a different sort. Here’s where coaching can be a great help to you. When you engage the help of a coach to discover your core values, you have a better chance of getting out of the always-present trap of self-delusion. Then, once you’ve determined your core values, you need to review them ofen — even daily — to make sure that they’ve sunk in to the deeper levels of your awareness. Only then can they serve to take charge of your decision-making process and keep you aligned with the purpose and meaning behind the person you really want to become.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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