Must couples in trouble necessarily fail? No, not necessarily: no healthy couple is doomed to failure. In fact, the only ‘doomed’ relationships are those where one or both partners are unapologetically physically or emotionally abusive . Without a doubt, the only realistic option for someone who finds her- or himself in a fundamentally abusive or exploitative relationship is to exit immediately. Apart from that, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem. Let me explain.

It would seem that the  person who hears another’s voice, but is no longer committed to listening to what the other has to say has given up on her or his partner, as well as their relationship together. If you look more closely, however, it soon becomes clear that the person has actually given up on him- or herself. Empathetic listening and appreciative inquiry represent a three-fold choice: 1) to accept the other, 2) to trust the other, and 3) to engage with the other. Closing off the lines of communication also represents a choice: to cease accepting, trusting and engaging with one’s partner. Before I relate this to fundamental spiritual principles, let’s look briefly at each choice.

The choice to accept another human being is foundational. True acceptance represents a fundamental option to see in the other person another self, with exactly the same sorts of strengths and weaknesses that we ourselves possess. This choice to acknowledge the other person as another self  has two destructive opposites. The first perversion of acceptance we call ‘exploitation‘. Philosopher Martin Buber contrasts these approaches with the terms I-Thou (for true acceptance of the other), and I-It (for exploitation). To see your partner merely in terms of his or her usefulness (like a tool or a piece of furniture) or her or his capacity to satisfy you represents a fundamental denial of humanity on your part. The second perversion of the choice to accept your partner shows itself as conditional acceptance. In brief, “I’ll accept you if you do such-and-such or so-and-so.” Conditional acceptance of another puts you in the position of being their judge, jury and executioner. In fact, it represents nothing less than your attempt to usurp the position in your partner’s life properly held by God alone.

Next, let’s look at the choice not to trust your partner. Why don’t you trust her or him? Because you’ve been hurt before? The refusal to trust your partner goes way beyond self-preservation. Once again, it is passing a judgment of condemnation on another person — another self — who exhibits the same sorts of faults and failings that you yourself exhibit. In fact, if the truth were known, the faults and failings that you find most easy to condemn and most difficult to forgive in others are the very ones that you exhibit most strongly yourself. In fact, the two keys that are absolutely essential to unlocking both acceptance and trust are these: first, to acknowledge an identical humanity in both yourself and the other, and, second, to commit yourself to the path of unconditional forgiveness. Who cannot look at the plight of even the most desperate of people around us and not be able truthfully to say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I?” The greatest message of Christianity — and also, I’m afraid,  its most forgotten and neglected — is simply this: unconditional, unlimited forgiveness. If you cannot forgive unconditionally, you cannot trust for very long.

The final choice is the choice to engage with your partner. If you refuse to engage with her or him, you thereby give credence to the (Jungian) ego’s false belief that you are vulnerable and need protection. It’s the same force that drives people’s frantic searching for that illusive (and illusory) ‘security’ that they believe will fix everything and protect them from danger. Once again, it would be foolish to put ourselves in harm’s way by engaging with an abusive partner. We owe it to ourselves and to them to take the necessary precautions so as not to allow ourselves to become victims of deliberate abuse. However, if you imagine that refusing to engage with your well-intentioned partner will grant you some sort of immunity from harm and from hurt, you are mistaken. Do you believe that spiritually you are invulnerable and that nothing outside of yourself — not even death — can destroy the essence of you? “Greater love has no one,” we have heard, “than to lay down his life for another.” Oddly, dieing for someone can actually be a whole lot easier than living for them.

Finally, what does the choice not to listen say about that person’s spiritual condition? The testimony it gives is nothing short of damning. Personally, I would liken it to what Christians refer to as the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘unforgivable sin.’ Here’s what I mean. Whenever I write, I use the terms ‘acceptance,’  ‘trust’ and ‘engagement’ as  synonyms for what are called the ‘theological virtues’, namely: faith, hope , and love. The ‘sin’ against faith is the decision not to accept the will of God exactly as we encounter it in our world. The ‘sin’ against hope is the choice not to trust that our only Source of genuine security is divine providence. The ‘sin’ against love is the refusal to become meaningfully engaged with those we were sent to serve: our fellow creatures who, along with us, share the “image and likeness of God.” If the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’ is a refusal to believe that the love of God is powerful enough to forgive us (and so we refuse to ask for forgiveness, and therefore refuse to accept it), then turning a deaf ear to someone we once claimed to love is a ‘sin against love’, for, as we know, the opposite of love is not hate, but deliberate indifference.

What can you do if you find yourself failing to listen? Remember the futility of protecting yourself. What can you protect yourself from? Even more importantly, what are you protecting yourself for? After all, your mission here in this world is not to try (futilely) to keep yourself safe. It’s to share with your fellows (and especially those in relationship with you) the same kind of acceptance, trust, and engagement that your God has shown to you. God hears his people’s cry . . . can you do any less?

And what about you who find yourself ‘learning to love one another’ and your words keep falling on deaf ears? You, too, have the opportunity to pass on the love of God. Your acceptance of the other can be renewed continually. Your trust of the other need never fail or fade. You may stand ever at the ready to engage. However, engagement (love) requires reciprocity. God does not condemn, so how could you? God does not constrain, either (because love can never be forced), but rather waits for all eternity for the other to emerge from his or her isolation and re-engage. You can have the willingness to re-engage, whether or not the other ever seeks it. You may never re-engage as you once did: time and the world goes on while the other chooses to isolate, stagnate, or (what’s worse) repeat the same self-defeating choices and behaviors with other partners. You, on the other hand, have the opportunity to accept and trust and engage with people at every stage and every condition of your life: people who, like you, have chosen to listen not only with their ears, but with their hearts.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Love is a drug

In 1980, singer Grace Jones recorded the hit song, Love Is a Drug. That reference to love as a narcotic can be remarkably accurate, particularly at midlife. I see huge differences in the forces that drive people to ‘hook up’ during adolescence and young adulthood as compared with what happens at midlife. Obviously, youth is made for experimentation, getting involved in new situations, or trying on a variety of relationships to see which ones might be a good ‘fit’ for creating a family of one’s own. By midlife, all this should have become ‘old hat.’  All, that is, but the desire for companionship, and the thrill of the hunt and the excitement of conquest.  There’s enough of the narcotic in relationship-hunting at both stages of life, but at midlife, there’s a lot less of the ‘family-building’ motive going on. For most people, by midlife, that’s a “been there; done that” experience.

Certainly, illicit relationships (going out on your partner) can happen at any time of life.  When they do, I believe that they’re always narcotic relationships. I mean that seeking or permitting a new relationship while you’re already committed to another partner always represents your attempt to medicate something going on inside you that you don’t want to deal with. For someone who’s already in a relationship to allow her- or himself to get involved with someone else, means that you’re letting yourself get ‘hooked’ on love as a drug so you won’t have to feel (or deal with) what’s going on inside and around you. Narcotics always offer the promise of pain relief. But at what ultimate cost? Nobody who’s ‘hooked’ really looks at the facts (they’ve become too numb) and recognizes that, when the drug wears off, the pain will still be there waiting for you. Even worse, when the drug wears off, you’ll have the additional pain of having to deal with the guilt and shame you’ll eventually have to face for having compromised your values. Oh . . . and I almost forgot: narcotics wind up being very, very, expensive.

I have been in a committed relationship now for over fourteen years (it took me a long time to find someone worth committing to). Like all relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs, our laughing and crying, and our shouting matches. As someone who used to have chronic relationship issues, I find myself often amazed that, although I find other people attractive, and thoughts of what ‘hooking up’ would be like sometimes show up, they’re no more attractive to me than a huge serving of [fill in your favorite grossly fattening desert here]. In both cases, I can genuinely say, “Yum!” without actually wanting to indulge. That’s what people do when they’re committed to living life on life’s terms, rather than looking for the next ‘narcotic’ escape.

Virtual Addiction

“But,” you say, “all I ever do is flirt. I’d never actually do anything about it.” I have to tell you: that doesn’t matter. You don’t actually have to consummate a narcotic relationship to have it give you the escapist ‘high’ you’re looking for. If you’re at all wise, you know that going out on your partner can be very dangerous. A messy divorce or breakup with everybody knowing all about your private business can really mess up a good fantasy.  No matter how you look at it, ‘hooking up’ is really risky business. How can you get the thrill of the hunt and the ecstasy of conquest while minimizing the risk? Behold the internet! It’s private: just the two of you can know. There’s no possibility of being observed by a casual onlooker. There’s no risk of disease. Nobody (so you lead yourself to believe) will be the wiser, and nobody will get hurt. You imagine that you can medicate your problems away through this other person (or people) and thus you can have the best of all worlds.

We call this delusional thinking ‘virtual addiction.’ By ‘hooking up’ over the internet, you get your narcotic at a fraction of the price. If this describes you, you’re missing the hidden costs. While you’re busy numbing your pain (and getting high) with your virtual relationship(s), the pain that’s coming from your primary relationship is growing . . . but you’re unaware of it. In a word, a healthy, fulfilling relationship doesn’t need a narcotic to mask what’s really going on. As you experience the midlife transition, it’s normal for you to experience huge changes in yourself: how you look at your life, how you look at all your relationships, how you look at your career, how you look at your future. All these things shift — often dramatically — during the midlife transition. Regardless of the changes that are going on around you (in your spouse, your family, your job, etc.), the biggest changes are happening in you.

All those things that narcotic relationships may be telling you may be correct. Maybe your spouse no longer loves you. Maybe you made a mistake in your choice relationship. Maybe your future will be entirely different from the one you had imaged for yourself. Any or all of these things may be true. It doesn’t matter! Getting yourself involved in a narcotic relationship (physically or virtually) isn’t going to solve anything. You can look at whatever seriously good feelings you may be generating for yourself from stepping out on your relationship as just a down payment on the pain that you’re storing up for yourself. While you’re off chasing feeling good, the problems you’re escaping are busy festering and getting worse. Sooner or later, your house of cards is going to come crashing down and, strangely enough, you already know that’s true. Guilty people subconsciously want to get caught.

Midlife Mastery

If you’re involved in a narcotic relationship, what do you need to do to get ‘clean and sober’? First and foremost: tell yourself the truth. Perhaps the biggest betrayal that you’re experiencing here is your betrayal of yourself. Put aside for a time your fears of not getting your relationship ‘fix.’ Recognize that your perspective has become warped. Get a confidant in whom you can have total trust (for example, hire a therapist). Start talking out loud about what’s going on with you. You’ll be amazed how ridiculous your addictive thoughts sound when you’re speaking them aloud to someone else. Explore with your confidant all those things about your life that you’re trying to avoid dealing with. Be courageous now (in facing your fears), or go down to flaming defeat later (when your relationships blow up in your face). The choice is yours.

I’ve often said that midlife presents each of us with the opportunity to come to terms physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually with the person who we really are. It’s perhaps the greatest challenge to our courage and integrity that we’ll ever face. There are so many and varied ways that we humans can avoid having to deal with these issues; but the only way to resolve them is head-on. Every minute that you continue to use things like narcotic relationships to maintain your avoidance, you also continue to accrue emotional and spiritual interest in terms of the suffering you’re going to have to face eventually. As they tell us in the ad: “Eventually . . . . why not now?”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Robert Kiyosaki in his book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, makes the point that houses aren't really assets, they're liabilities. Anyone whose mortgage has been caught in the current economic mess has first-hand experience of what he means. Anyone who owns property knows that just paying the mortgage isn't nearly enough. There's also the extensive cost of maintenance to be considered as well. Property depreciates, and that means that, without you doing anything at all, everything you own decays at a given rate. For buildings, the average rate of decay comes down to from new to worthless ruins in about thirty years. Although it may not be directly measurable, depreciation is a real, calculable cost of doing nothing. Think about it: for a nice $300,000 home ($150,000 home + $150,000 property), your cost of doing nothing comes down to as much as $5,000 a year!

Obviously, a house (or a car or a boat or any other big-ticket item) has a calculable monetary value. Now, how about those incalculable 'assets' that go to make up your life? There are a few universal and inviolable laws in this world, and one of them is the law of entropy: the tendency for all things to move toward maximum randomness (otherwise known as 'decay'). It's not really the chaos theory that we have to worry about (the theory that the behavior of large, complex systems [like the weather] is fundamentally unpredictable): that just tells us that we can't tell when or where disaster may strike. It's entropy that assures us that, without taking preventive action, disaster is inevitable. The true cost of doing nothing — whether the cost is calculable or not — is eventual disaster. Assuming that the midlife transition is upon you, what exactly does that mean?

It means, primarily, that allowing yourself to become comfortable with the status quo (or, even worse, striving to maintain the status quo) is a sure recipe for disaster in the three critical areas that matter to you the most: your career, your relationships, and your personal health and well-being. If you're like most people, you're extremely generous when it comes to your toys and your fun (your possessions and your recreational activities), but you're proportionally cheap when it comes to taking care of yourself. Most of us don't mind going into debt (bank loans and credit cards) to purchase something we want, but, when self-care is involved, everything seems too 'expensive,' whether it's in time or money. For every time we've denied ourselves some luxury by telling ourselves, "I can't afford that," I'll bet there are many more occasions when we've encountered something that could genuinely improve our quality of life, but we've passed it up because of the cost. Let's look at some pertinent examples.

Here's the most obvious (and the one that almost everyone readily admits): "I should take better care of myself." Your health and well-being are dependent on three essential elements: nutrition, exercise, and rest (along with quality health care, when necessary). Is there anyone reading this to whom this is news??? It's been well-proven that stress is a killer and that a combination of excellent nutrition, exercise and rest can go a long way toward reducing the ill effects that stress brings on. In the book, Change or Die, Alan Deutschman reveals the stark facts: 90% of all people who are told that they must change their behavior or die, sooner or later go back to their old habits. What excuses are you using to hasten your demise? Healthy food is too expensive? Doesn't taste as good as all those round, fatty molecules? Takes too long to prepare? And why aren't you exercising regularly (and how many unused health club memberships, exercise devices and weight loss supplements have you collected)? What happened to last night's eight hours of sleep? What excuse did you use for cheating yourself of stress-reducing rest?

Now, about that person you're married to (and to whom you professed your love). How's your communication? How about the amount of quality time you're spending together? When was the last time that you took time to work on your relationship? How much has each of you changed over the years? How much do you (personally) still need to change in order to keep your relationship not only strong but growing? When was the last time that the two of you took your issues to an impartial third party (or do you imagine that the two of you are somehow unique and don't need outside help or advice)? You say that you don't have issues?? Then things are worse than I had imagined! People change — particularly during midlife — and, if you're not working at growing together, then you're growing apart. 'Disaster,' in this case, comes in the guise of waking up one day and wondering, "Who is this person, and what did they do with my husband/wife? I want them back!" Have you read Dr. Jed Diamond's book, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and, if not, why not?

Finally, let's look at your career. Regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur or you work for someone else, your career (and your health and your relationship) depend on what you're willing to invest in it. I'm not talking about how long you spend at the office or the volume of the output of your work day. That won't get you anywhere beyond where you already are and, in fact, it's a sure route to obsolescence. They say, 'If you want to keep getting what you're getting, keep doing what you're doing,' but, in fact, when you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting less of what you're getting. If you're not going forward, you're going backward. And remember, you're a boomer! You're not working toward 'retirement;' you need to be planning for your next career! What are you doing to prepare? The number one factor that every expert quotes as being an indispensable element in their (and anyone else's) success is: having a coach or mentor. So, who's yours? How much time, energy and expense are you willing to dedicate toward the end of advancing your career prospects? What's your exit strategy?

Consider at the name of my business, ProActivation. It's quite obviously made up of two terms: proactive and activation. Whether or not you take these two terms to heart may very well spell the difference between thriving in your health, relationships, and career . . . or not. Nobody can make proactive investments in your life for you: it's entirely up to you. As I've mentioned often before: at midlife, the training wheels come off. The expectations and constraints that ushered you through childhood, adolescence and adulthood have served (or outlasted) their usefulness. In maturity, nobody's going to be able to tell you what you must or can't do. Here's a radical statement: laws are made for children and adolescents. If you're still operating on the level of what somebody else is telling you that you can or can't do, you're ethically still a child (and have no business reading this yet). In maturity, making the right choices has to do with alignment with the principles and values seared into your heart and soul. If your proactivation isn't coming from what's in your heart, it'll never have any lasting effect.

Every morning when you wake up, you have a choice to make: whether today you're going to invest in your own personal future or not. Every morning you have the opportunity to just let it ride for one more day: to do nothing. That's your prerogative. I just hope that, after reading these few words, you'll no longer be able to do that with a clear conscience, however, imagining that doing nothing costs you nothing. Indeed, the cost of doing nothing is very, very high: sooner or later, it could cost you your health, your relationship, your career, your future, even your life. That kind of puts the cost of hiring a trainer, a marriage counselor or a life or business coach into perspective, doesn't it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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Perhaps it is. However, I’m discovering that, although the conditions of my migration away from my latest entrepreneurial venture may not be entirely voluntary, the movement toward personal reinvention is becoming increasingly more so. Whatever lapses in judgment led me to market midlife insights to people who largely preferred (or, for some psychological and emotional needs, needed) to stay fixed in denial, it was ultimately a good thing to recognize that paying my bills trumped providing quality intellectual products without remuneration — particularly under current market conditions. So, although closing down my internet marketing business was not wholly voluntary, nonetheless it wasn’t involuntary, either. The ability to read the handwriting on the wall is, after all, one of the hallmarks of the spiritual life strategy I call ‘discernment’.

Here’s where I repeat one of my all-time favorite stories: how the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, came to his ‘enlightenment’. Epictetus, although highly educated, was captured and sold into slavery to the Romans where he was forced into service as tutor to a wealthy Roman’s children. The young man chafed in servitude until finally, one day, he went to his mater and said, “Master, from this day forward, I am no longer your slave.” The Roman was both surprised and aghast at the Greek’s declaration. “From now on,” Epictetus continued, “I choose to serve you freely.” In one act of will, Epictetus reinvented himself, throwing off the mantle of victimhood and taking full ownership of his condition. He transformed involuntary service into voluntary. Can’t we, in midlife transition, do the same?

Of course we can. Every event in life can be seen either as happening to us, or happening for us. How we look at it takes no more effort than Epictetus expended in coming to the realization that we are, after all, the Meaning Givers in the physical universe and that whatever meaning we choose to put on events will, ultimately, determine their outcome and their effects. Those in my potential ‘market’ who preferred to allow the midlife transition to take over their lives, blaming their ‘fate’ on others (the boss, the wife or husband, the kids, the neighbors, the government, the establishment, or whatever) chose to surrender their freedom of choice to others, and then to blame others for their predicament. No wonder life under those circumstances sucks!

So, how do you make closing a business or being laid off work for you, especially when your most significant goal for the future is to maintain (or attain) financial solvency? Choosing to accept the situation as you experience it as an opportunity (rather than as an obstacle) becomes the first step. My guest on this week’s Midlife Matters internet radio program, Rosanna Tufts, had a great slogan that works very well here: ‘creation’ and ‘reaction’ are made up of all the same letters, only rearranged. We always have the option of choosing the former over the latter. Once we’ve decided to interpret what’s happened as an opportunity, we then have the possibility of creating our future out of the raw materials of the past. Regardless of the circumstances, we’re never put in the situation of ‘starting over’ from scratch. We have a wealth of knowledge, skills and experience with which we can create a fully positive future.

Your world has only changed, not ended. You can, if you so choose, decide to mourn the possibilities that have passed. Or, you can more fully recognize that not all possibilities were yours from the very outset. Your nature (genetics) and your nurture (training and upbringing) set you out from day 1 with obvious limitations. There are things you could never do, places you could never go, plans you could never accomplish. In fact, your limitations define you: they’re truly what makes you you! From birth onward, every choice you make imposes further limits on your pool of possibility. Day by day, youj’re further defining who you are. Events, like job or career change, have only a limited impact on those determinations. These events are just one more brick added to the structure that is the person who you are becoming. How are you going to use that brick? You’re still the chief architect, you know. There are many things that you can do with the heand that you’re dealt. The real question now is, ‘How will you use your knowledge, skills, experience and imagination to create something new and wonderful for yourself today?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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There are two basic aphorisms that I believe everyone must learn by the time he or she finishes passing through the midlife transition: 1) the only constant is change, and 2) we see only what we want to see. Even after having hung around on this planet for a reasonably long period of time, I never cease to be amazed at the incredible capacity men and women have for self-delusion. Denial, particularly for men, and even more particularly at midlife, is less an aberration than it is a way of life. Yet, the powerful lessons of the first decade of the 21st Century are starting to wear away at our comfortable, if not very realistic, façade. I think the first such illusion to fade was the myth of ‘retirement.’ The career men and women of the present and future are going to have to embrace quite an attitude readjustment, compared with the attitudes of the quite recent past.

As I have often said (quoting a number of wise people who came before me), one of the principal (and most sacred) roles of government is the protection of the weakest members of our society from the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ If we honestly believe in the absolute sanctity of human life, that means that no one — not even one person — can be left to ‘fall through the cracks.’ None of us ever earns our basic human rights, nor can we ever forfeit them (since no society can give these rights, no society can honestly pretend to take them away or even ignore them). Of course, there are times when families and societies must exercise ‘tough love’ toward some of its wayward members, but that simply means that we, as a people, refuse to enable our fellow citizens to wreak havoc on themselves or on others. Yet, people don’t lose their inalienable right to membership in the human family on account of their behavior any more than Uncle Fred the drunk loses his membership in the family by what he says or does.

Outside of the issue of tough love, we have an obligation to support our family — our human family — and we need to take this obligation more seriously in the years to come, because things are apt to get much worse before they get better. The time for laissez faire anything has come and gone. We are responsible not only for ourselves and the members of our immediate families, but for the members of our human family as well. We can’t leave our common obligation only to those who are generous enough with their time and resources to give to charity. Our obligations to one another go way beyond ‘charity’ — it’s now a matter of justice because each one of us possesses inalienable rights that everyone needs to respect. Making a good living for yourself and your family alone can no longer be anyone’s life purpose. To do so would be to court extinction, because the definition of ‘the fittest’ has changed. ‘The fittest’ no longer refers to the strongest and most aggressive; the fittest from now on will be the men and women who are the most empathetically connected to one another. It’s a new world.

One thing is certain: things will never again in our lifetimes be the way they were. The socio-economic changes that have finally come upon us will leave permanent marks on our human family. Like the passage from adulthood through midlife into maturity, our world is getting a dose of reality that (at least in the short term) may be rather difficult to swallow. When we’re ready to emerge from the other side of this, we’ll find that our socio-economic expectations as well as our understanding of our place in the world and in human history will be profoundly altered. Change, like ‘tomorrow’ from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “creeps on its petty pace from day to day;” while we’ve been obliviously trying to seize the day and hold it. Change doesn’t stop just because, for a time, we’ve stopped believing in it. Eventually, reality wins out, the denial has to break, and we find ourselves suddenly in Future Shock, trying to catch up.

One of the illusions that we’re watching going up in smoke is retirement. Pensions? No! 401K’s? Ugh! Social Security? Huh? That leaves us contemplating serial careers: once we’ve reached an age where it’s no longer appropriate to continue in our chosen career, we’re faced with a decision concerning our next, more age-appropriate career choice. With proper planning, we may be able to avoid ending our working lives where we began them: as supermarket baggers. However, the vast majority of us are going to have to end them someplace rather than on a beach in the Caribbean. We’re also having to rethink what we mean by a career. No one anymore can expect to spend their working life with the same organization, in the same job, or even in the same profession. Even the traditional life-long professions of doctor or lawyer no longer guarantee people a permanent place in the workforce. You don’t want to be overtaken by change and left out in the cold without a ‘Plan B’ just because somebody at some time sold you a bill of goods regarding job security!

We would do well to banish the term ‘job security’ from our vocabulary. The US department of labor estimates that today’s students will have between 10 and 14 jobs by the age of 38! Also 25% of today’s workforce has been with their current employer less than a year, and half the workforce has been at their current jobs less than five years. The majority of new jobs on the horizon will require extensive education. In general women will continue to be better educated (and therefore better suited for these jobs) than men. Add to this the fact that women’s temperament will increasingly be more appropriate for these jobs because they will require advanced social networking skills and the capability to share both information and responsibility openly and freely, and you’ll see clearly that men’s suitability for the most advanced positions of the future job market will become increasingly compromised. Men’s historic role in human society as the bread-winner, provider and protector has already become obsolete . . . we men just aren’t aware of it yet, or, if we are, we’re in denial.

In adolescence, our world was turned upside-down, and we had to reinterpret everything we thought we knew. If we were lucky, we had someone whom we could rely on to guide us by our side. Now that we’re approaching or involved in the midlife transition, we’re needing our world once again redefined and reinterpreted for us. If we’re wise, we’ll go looking for someone older to mentor us through this process as well. This is true particularly now, when our whole social structure is in flux, and with it our understanding of how we fit in and what our purpose here ought to be. These are no longer obvious facts, but conundrums that we’re needing to wrestle with (on top of all the rest of what we’re going through)!

On the down side, as we break out of our comfortable illusion of security, we’re increasingly going to be finding ourselves in a world that we can barely comprehend. Yet, at the same time, if we have the courage (particularly as men) to break out of our historic molds, face our unnamed or unmentionable fears about ‘manhood’ and imaginatively reinvent ourselves, we can look forward to what promises to be one of the most innovative and creative eras in all of human history. We’re at a watershed point right now. Why not grab the opportunity and run with it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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