Midlife Mastery Journal » plan

Who Am I?

Les Brown — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:26:13 +0000

As I've often written, midlife has little or nothing to do with age. It happens when it happens. It's a psycho-spiritual event, a transformation from adult to maturity, from self-confidence to serenity. The demarcation area (midlife) can be identified by one overwhelming feeling: fear. Even more specifically, it's a fear of 'losing it' (whatever 'it' may be). You don't even have to be able to identify what 'it' is: all you need to recognize the midlife transition is to experience the fear of losing it. Dealing effectively with that fear takes you to maturity; failing to address it leads you to midlife crisis. So, how can you deal effectively with what is very often a nameless fear? All you need to acquire (and, incidentally, this constitutes the essence of the spiritual transition) is a deeper self-knowledge. You don't really 'need' anything . . . you have everything you require.

Want some help? Here's a little exercise that I've put together for you to help you to work through this transition. The instructions are simple: a) Write down your answers; b) Do not read beyond this paragraph until you're finished with the exercise;. c) Work through each of the three phases of the exercise in order. That's it! It should take you approximately a half-hour to complete the exercise. Ready to begin?

Complete this sentence "I am a _____________" as many times as you can, each time filling in the blank with a different word or phrase (a minimum of 20 times).
For each of the statements you wrote down in phase 1, re-write each statement with at least 5 different descriptors (for example: "I am a married [descriptor] man [word or phrase from phase 1]."
For each descriptor-word (or phrase) set, circle the ones that are virtually impossible to change (for example: your height, your IQ, your sexual identity). Make sure that you only circle the impossible characteristics, not the merely difficult.

When you've completed your list and circled the appropriate characteristics, only then read on.

Were you surprised at how many different roles you play as an adult? The more examples you were able to identify, the more fully this exercise will assist you. For the time being, let's focus on all the statements you didn't circle. Now think of yourself as an actor playing each of these roles. You've already admitted (by not circling these statements) that the choice to play any (or all) of them is entirely your own. If there are any of these roles you're currently playing that you hate but feel compelled to continue playing, realize that all you've done is choose one value over another. Nobody is holding a (literal) gun to your head to keep doing what you're doing. You aren't always given the opportunity to do what you want to do, but you're always given the chance to stop doing what you don't want to do. You can always say 'No' so long as you're prepared to accept the consequences of your decision.

One of the fears of midlife derives from the feeling of being stuck in a rut and unable to get out of it. That fear is pure illusion. What very often happens to adults is that, for whatever reason, they lock themselves into a pattern of behavior that feels like 'them'. They become character actors in the play of life and, as a result, others (your producers and directors) type cast you in the roles you've always felt 'comfortable' playing. History seems to be repeating itself but, in fact, what you've done is set yourself up to be viewed as a particular type of character. Look at your list! You're NOT that type of character! There's SO MUCH that you can change — but only if you want to, if you're willing pay the price, and if you have the courage to change the rules of the game that you're playing.

Look at your list. Highlight the characteristics that you don't like about yourself . . . that aren't the 'real you'. These are your target roles. Right now, give up pointing your finger at your boss, your partner, your family, the government, organized religion, God, whomever it is you're blaming for what's going on in your life. You can't change them and, even if you were able to dump them and start all over again, remember that you're type-cast! In other words, you'll just attract the same sorts of people back into your life. You can't change them, so you have to change yourself. And right now, you have a list of things that you're not happy with about yourself that you can work on. What do you do next?

It's a simple two-step process: 1) get yourself a coach or a mentor whom you'll share with, seek advice from, and report back to; 2) with your mentor, make a plan consisting of SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based). That's it. That's all there is to it. You don't like who you are and what you're getting in life? Then get a confidant and make a plan. Perhaps the biggest lesson that anyone can learn at the midlife transition is this: you're given the raw materials, but it's entirely up to you what you're going to make out of what you're given. What that is will change on a daily basis. You can never predict where it's going to end up.

Who are you? You're 'homo fiens' — '[hu]man becoming.' So long as you live, you will never be 'this person' or 'that person', you'll always be in process. Are you going to 'lose it'? Of course you are. That's the only way that you can gain anything: by becoming someone new. The moment you accept and become resigned to that fact, that's when you'll achieve maturity. When will we know who you are? Never. We'll only know who you were. Who you'll be tomorrow is anybody's guess, but it's your choice!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Exit Plan or Shot In The Dark?

Les Brown — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:55:05 +0000

About fifteen years ago, I was unemployed for about six months. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly my finest hour. I had plenty of speaking and counseling experience (from my time in the ministry), but I had no ‘official’ training nor a license to practice. I had experience in tech writing and software design and programming, but then not enough background and training to land the kind of job I needed — or, really, any job at all. As my modest bank account steadily evaporated and, despite all my efforts, no leads materialized, I was grasping at straws. I scrutinized my training and experience looking for something, anything, I was qualified to do. I was over-educated, under-experienced, and both under- and over-qualified for work. I didn’t just fall through the crack, I dropped like a rock.

My odd set of job skills and experience, together with my inexperience with the whole job search process, left me in an odd, but not altogether unusual, position. I had no idea of what I wanted to be doing. By the time that number of months had passed, I was ready to take just about anything that came along. As fate (or humiliation) would have it, I was hired back at my old job before I actually had to start flipping burgers. Two things became abundantly clear to me from that experience: 1) while you’re employed, develop and actively pursue an exit strategy; and, 2) take the time and energy to figure out your passion. You’ll never accomplish anything at a job that doesn’t suit you.

What happens when you take a ‘shot in the dark’ and go for the first opportunity that comes along? First, let me say that I acknowledge that sometimes that’s a practical necessity. I also acknowledge that sometimes you can fall into a job that you later discover, to your amazement, you actually love. That does happen. Yet, if I were you, I wouldn’t count on it. Far more frequently, people wind up in jobs that pay the bills but that, at the same time, eat them alive inside, leaving them dreading each day, feeling angry, depressed, frustrated, or any combination of the three. I was shocked when I learned, during my coach training program, that the first move you should make upon landing a new job should be to develop your exit strategy.

Regardless of how well you love what you do, so long as you survive, you’re assuredly not going to stay in that job forever. Life is risk; but the more you’re able to address and lower that risk, the more successful you’ll become. The current world economic situation didn’t look at all probable a year or two ago. Stuff happens and, as Murphy’s Law predicts, it most often happens at the worst possible time. Having a viable exit strategy before you need it prevents you from going the self-destructive route of panic. Career change isn’t just a vague possibility; after all, it’s an almost absolute certainty. If you’re not willing to gamble with your happiness, you’ll have a plan in place now so you’ll know what you want to do then. One thing’s for certain: then will become now sooner than you think.

Your sense of self-worth and life satisfaction will be directly proportional to how closely aligned your future work will be to your personal passion, your life vision, and your understanding of your destiny and purpose. Regardless of what kind of work it may be (for hire or volunteer), it has to resonate with both the person you are and the person you most ardently desire to become, otherwise it’ll be a waste of your time and energy. Just because some job pays the bills doesn’t mean that’s where you need to be working. Here’s what I’m talking about.

Irish Playwright George Bernard Shaw once was at a cocktail party, where a very loud and pretentious lady (probably after a few drinks) was becoming obnoxious and dominating the conversation. Shaw asked said to her, "Let me ask you a question. If I were to give you a million pounds, would you sleep with me?" The woman stopped and thought for a moment, then said, "Well, I suppose I might." Shaw continued, "Would you sleep with me for a half a million pounds?" She laughed and said, "Oh, Mr. Shaw, you are naughty! For a half a million pounds, I suppose so." "Well," Shaw retorted, "How about for fifty pounds?" "Mr. Shaw!" said the lady, suddenly taken aback, "What do you think I am?" "Madam," said Shaw, "we’ve already established that. Now, we’re just haggling over the price."

When you’re considering your exit strategy, what’s your price? Don’t think that being tempted to sell your soul to the devil implies a contract with fiery shape-shifting letters and a signature in blood. To sell your soul, all you need to do is to abandon your dreams and to sell yourself short. That fairly accurately describes accepting a job you hate because it pays well. Again, at some time, most people need to do something that doesn’t suit them because of necessity. At the same time, that should be just a stop-gap measure, not a career choice.

Here are some questions for you. Regardless of whether you’re in a job you love, a job you hate, or a job that’s just ‘OK’, what’s your exit strategy? What do you plan on doing next? What are you going to need to get there (education, training, experience, contacts . . . or what)? What are you doing right now to move yourself toward that goal. What’s your time line? And, what’s your contingency plan, should things not go the way you think they will (because they won’t)? Your life — your career — is worth much more than just a shot in the dark taken out of necessity. You’ll get exactly what you pay for and what you plan for. If that’s a scary prospect, now’s the time to do something about it. The longer you wait, the longer you put it off, the sooner the unexpected will overtake you. So, don’t wait. Don’t put it off, for your happiness’ sake.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

What Will Your Transition Cost?

Les Brown — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:13:46 +0000

On paper, it seems obvious that people should plan for a major shift in perspective that should occur just about the time they settle in to their relationships, their careers and their sense of personal achievement and well=being. That’s all very fine to speculate about before the fact. Yet, a huge problem arises around the question of midlife because a) you don’t know what you don’t know and b) the criteria that you use to evaluate your life before midlife are made obsolete by it. Midlife involves not only a paradigm shift, but a values shift, as well, and that’s what makes planning for it such a difficult assignment. Consider this: what good does it do you to calculate carefully the cost of driving your car (gas, maintenance, insurance, etc.) when you suddenly decide you want to sell it and ride a bicycle to work every day?

Right now, you’re planning and directing your future based on your specific life vision: in most cases, it’s something that’s been with you a very long time. That vision has been meticulously constructed over the course of your lifetime (up until now) and it provides you with an invaluable context in which you can live your life. From your vision, you derive a sense of purpose and direction, as well as your sense of what matters to you and what doesn’t. The ‘crisis’ of midlife comes upon you when, for a variety of reasons, that vision no longer speaks to you. You find yourself in the situation where all those things that used to matter most to you now don’t matter at all and things that you never even considered now appear as the most important things in your life.

When you, as an adult planning for the midlife transition, begin to take stock of what it’s going to take to get you through it successfully, you need to take into consideration the fact that your priorities will change — and change drastically. Under ordinary conditions, the next step after creating your basic plan of action would be to do a risk assessment (formal or informal). This involves, first of all, taking an inventory of things that could happen along the way that could deflect you from your goal. The assessment involves deciding just two things for each eventuality: 1) how likely each event might be, and 2) how seriously each event might negatively impact reaching your desired ends.

A problem of crisis proportions arises when your goals and values change. Suddenly, everything that was orchestrated to see those goals through to completion loses its meaning and purpose. Everything loses its importance, and everything (or almost everything) that had once seemed out of the question winds up back on the table again. Once your life has lost its core meaning and direction, what sense will anything else have? How do you perform a risk assessment to determine the importance of any aspect of the future direction of your life when your entire value system is in flux? Up until this point, you’ve assumed that you knew what was important to you and what not, but now all that is up for grabs. You can assume no longer.

Performing a valid risk assessment at middle age puts many men into a serious conundrum: many, for the first time in their lives, have to reevaluate the basic assumptions of life, from "What do I really want?" to "What is really right (or wrong) for me?" Whereas women had their cultural models handed to them in from the post World War II era popular culture (magazines, films, books, TV, etc.), and they’ve had over 60 years to critique and accept or reject them, men’s cultural models haven’t evolved nearly so drastically. Instead of the cultural revolution that women have fomented, men have been left to a more or less reactive role: trying to find how their cultural model ‘fits’ into a changing world. This has worked most often to their detriment.

Rather than critique their core views and values, men have too often either turned a blind eye to them, or put up some fairly severe emotional barriers to change. When masculinity is too rigidly defined as ‘Joe six pack’ or the ‘Blue Collar Comics’ ("Git ‘er done!"), then even exploring the deeper goals and values of life falls under a cultural taboo. And men pay a high price for this. When core values shift (as they must at midlife), and self-reevaluation is either culturally unsupported or even a taboo, the probability of suffering a true midlife crisis (and the disorientation that accompanies it) rises nearly to certainty. When your goals and values are gone, how do you plan? How do you calculate the risks of any potential course of action? Obviously, you can’t.

If you want to know in advance what your midlife transition is going to cost you, you’re going to have to be very clear about where you want to go and how you want to get there. It’s going to take focus, and it’s going to take embracing a bit of masculine counter-culture: being prepared to do some deep and hard self-examination. What are your core values? What are your motives? What’s really important to you? Until you’re ready to take the time and energy to engage yourself fully in this quest for personal meaning, the cost to you of an eventual midlife crisis may be too high to bear: it could cost you everything you hold near and dear and leave you with precious little apart from an empty or broken heart (yes, men have them, too). It’s a price you really don’t ever want to have to pay.

More Than Muddling Through

Les Brown — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 01:14:54 +0000

Unpleasant surprises don’t necessarily have to be a necessary part of the process of midlife transition. ‘Shock and awe’ may have have some usefulness in military operations, but they clearly don’t belong in a well-managed life. Although it’s impossible to predict all the eventualities of midlife with 100% accuracy (as it’s similarly impossible to make those predictions for the other two stages of life: childhood or adulthood), many aspects of what may be confronting us are ‘out there’ for us to become aware of (and knowledgeable about). "It happens to everybody" doesn’t have to be a statement of capitulation; it can also serve a wellspring of wisdom for those who’re willing to consider the facts carefully.

Is there anyone who doesn’t know the legendary symptoms of a ‘midlife crisis’? There’s a stale primary relationship that’s often accompanied with a sense of alienation or disinterest with things at home. There’s ‘straying’ and ‘experimenting’ apart from a man’s life partner. There’s a striving to achieve a new ‘look’ — a new hairstyle (or color), new (and younger-looking) outfit, or the iconic red Corvette. At the same time, there are all they new ‘toys’ and interests, with or without the mushrooming credit card debt. Of course, there’s job burnout, impulsive job change, or ‘dropping out’ of a stable career in favor of something a lot riskier. In fact, taking risks (more of them, and more severe) can serve as an excellent symptom of the onset of the midlife crisis.

This may sound too obvious to mention, but if we can predict the onset of midlife, and if we can identify the symptoms of midlife, and if we already know that midlife crisis can (and almost always does) affect those who we’d guess were the most immune to it, then why does it seem so difficult for us to put forward a plan to deal with it? Why, indeed? We can ask the same things about a number of other common behaviors. Why, when we know that old age (ideally) happens to everyone, are so many people so ill-prepared for it? Why do people continue to drink and drive, even when they know that their chances of getting caught, hurt, or killed are excellent? Why do people build and rebuild houses next to the water and in flood plains and leave themselves without flood insurance? Why do people smoke? Why do people who know better take stupid or even insane chances, heedless of the consequences? (I could go on for pages with examples, but I’ll do us both a favor and I won’t.)

The answer seems to lie in an all-too-human attitude that says, ‘It’ll never happen; and, even if it does, it’ll never happen to me.’ So long as you can’t see an obvious target painted on your behind, why shouldn’t you think of yourself as the next Evel Knievel? Taking risks can be a huge adrenaline rush: they can make you feel really alive . . . especially when your insides are starting to feel really dead, right? Dead right!!

Thumbing you nose at risk — particularly serious risk — feels like you’re thumbing your nose at death itself; and the denial of the consequences of risk-taking feels like you’re denying death itself. Think of yourself at midlife. A big chunk of your life is gone forever. The time (and resources) available for you to enjoy all those things you’ve been telling yourself you’d do mañana shrinks day by day. So long as you can deny that life has any limits, you can also maintain the illusion that your present sense of exile and alienation is only a temporary condition. After all, someday, you’re going to . . . but, in the meantime, you’ve ‘gotta’ do what you’ve ‘gotta’ do. Denial of death gives you the illusion of immortality and the sense that you’ve got plenty of time and that right now is just a temporary condition. At the same time, this ‘temporary condition’ behaves exactly like a permanent situation.

What’s the alternative to muddling through life, pretending that your permanent condition is just a temporary one? As the signs of the shortening of the years become more obvious, how do keep yourself from taking more and more outlandish risks just to prove that you don’t see what you see, feel what you feel, and know what you know? You can start by admitting that you’re getting older, that your time here is limited, and that the time you have left (however long it may be) is steadily shrinking. Then, you can take a long, hard look at where you are, do some really intense personal work to get in touch with where you’d like to be (given your present conditions) and, finally, you can start making SMART plans: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. That’s right: you can plan your way through your midlife transition. You can figure out where you are, where you want to go, and how you want to get there. There’s nothing at all esoteric about that!

This, after all, is the message of midlife (a message that’s much more comfortable to ignore than to attend to): you have a choice. I know that, so long as the state and direction of your life remains other peoples’ faults, you can remain relatively content believing that you really can’t do anything. If you want to maintain that attitude, I suggest that you prepare yourself for a long and painful midlife crisis. However, if you want to admit that you are where you are by your own choice and that, right now, today, you can make a different choice, then you’ll be one of those blessed souls who can not only laugh at midlife, but even recognize it as the time when your real life actually began. And all you have to do is have a plan.