What I’m finding as I pursue my studies on midlife issues (particularly for men) comes down to the same sort of attitude: “The midlife crisis only happens to other people.” People seem to think that just because they don’t sense trouble in their relationships and their family, and just because they feel relatively secure in their careers and financial situation, and just because they haven’t experienced any serious problems with their health or sense of well-being that things are going to continue along without much change or difficulty indefinitely. The bad news is, they won’t! That’s guaranteed. The midlife transition will occur, regardless of how happy or content you feel, regardless of how smoothly your life seems to be progressing, and regardless of how unprepared for it you may be. Like Hurricane Katrina, midlife is no respecter of persons. Whether or not you weather the situation depends entirely on how proactive you choose to be.

I’m discovering that people would generally prefer to take their chances living their lives with blinders on (oblivious to signs of trouble on the distant horizon) than to spend time and energy doing the challenging work involved in taking a close look at themselves, their situations, their goals and purpose and, particularly, feelings of uncertainty or discomfort that they may be experiencing. It’s way too easy for people to dismiss these danger signals — whether it be in their relationships, in their careers, or in their personal sense of well-being — as being just normal signs of anxiety or stress. The worst choice that you can make when faced with these symptoms of free-floating anxiety or dissatisfaction would be to dismiss them because you’re too busy with other things to pay attention. Think how absurd it would be to ignore an order to evacuate your waterfront property in advance of a hurricane’s landfall because you had an appointment to have your new big screen TV installed. Yet, people make these sorts of absurd decisions every day.

There’s nothing quite like a small-scale crisis to divert attention from bigger (and potentially more devastating) issues. In the 21st Century, with the information explosion and business traveling at the speed of the internet, there’s no shortage of minor crises to divert our attention. The higher the levels of socio-economic concerns we have to face on a daily basis, the more urgent these pseudo-important issues become. To return to Covey’s insightful work, we spend more and more time in Quadrant 3: not important but urgent. The more claim that the unimportant imposes on our time, attention, and energy, the more that really important issues get thrown into Quadrant 1: important and urgent.

One of my clients works for a government agency. She’s nearly burned out because every day, when she comes into work, there’s at least one new crisis facing the office. Even if she’s not directly involved in the solution of any given crisis, she’s being exhausted by the emotional energy pouring out from her fellow-workings and inundating the entire office with stress. They lack planning; they lack systems in place to handle new issues; they’re understaffed and overworked. As a result, there’s no way that they can distinguish between what’s critically important and what’s just apparently important. It’s a house of cards that needs only a really important issue to bring the whole thing down.

Pretending that things are fine will not get you though the midlife transition unscathed. You can count on three things: 1) your relationship will transition from being externally-focused (on building the family and creating a stable life together) to becoming inner-focused (on communication and issues of emotional connection and depth of understanding), 2) your career will transition from being focused on doing a good job to being focused on doing something that makes sense in the context of the rest of your life, and 3) your sense of health and well-being will be shaken by the wear and tear of life and those secret inner doubts that you try so valiantly to ignore.

So, once again, the choice is entirely yours: you can face these challenges of midlife up front and early before they become critical issues (Quadrant 2: important but not urgent), or you can deal with the (possibly) catastrophic results of ignoring them and hoping for the best. It takes a combination of courage, insight, sensitivity and humility to take a proactive stand: take the little bumps in your relationship seriously and deal with them openly; address your career, make sure it fulfills both your values and your emotional needs, build a sturdy financial reserve in advance of some probable career changes to come; and take care of yourself, not putting yourself and your own well-being last. What this all entails is creating a truly spiritual environment for yourself so that you become sensitive to those issues that really matter, while allowing you not to sweat the small stuff. You’re not a victim of circumstance: you can face these coming challenges head on and with confidence so long as you’re prepared for them. What changes are you going to make today so that this can happen?

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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Pain functions as a warning signal for the organism. In itself, there’s nothing ‘bad’ about pain (except, of course, that it hurts). In fact, if you weren’t able to experience pain, you’d be in deep trouble. For example, one of the signs of a sociopathic personality is the incapacity to feel [the pain of] guilt. Their behavior can be entirely random, self-serving and anti-social at least in part because they experience no emotional consequences. So therefore, pain remains a very necessary (and good) experience. Unless you’re more of a masochist than I’d like to address here, chances are very good that, at the moment you’re about to give the bed leg a good kick with your bare foot, you’re not conscious of what’s coming. On the contrary, as you’re entering (or about to enter) midlife, you can pick up some very good indications regarding what you’re about to encounter. Not all pain is necessary: wouldn’t you like to spare yourself some of it?

Our course of action in emotional pain management involves only two very, very simple elements: awareness and planning. You can think of it this way: if you permit yourself to be aware of where the leg of the bed is, you can plan to have your bare foot be somewhere else when you approach it. You’d think that this simple fact of life would be so obvious as to be a constant. Yet, if that were really so, you’d never stub your toe. In addition, if it were as obvious as you’d think, then the experience of emotional pain would never be optional. Sadly, much of the time, it’s only optional, and not necessary. People transitioning through midlife are particularly vulnerable to experiencing a great deal of optional pain. I think you’ll have to agree that the very best way to manage pain would be — wherever possible — to avoid it entirely.

You know, I get the most curious looks when I tell people that in order to avoid a great deal of the emotional pain in your life you don’t really have to do anything . . . you just have to change your mind. You might say that it’s that old ‘mind-over-matter’ routine on steriods. Oddly enough, just because it’s a cliche doesn’t mean it’s not true. All emotional pain management by avoidance rests on one simple principle: by the time you feel the pain, it’s already too late. Still, people (and guys in particular) tend to shy away from doing the intensive, time-consuming inner work that would make the necessary changes in attitude and behavior possible. That’s a very old story: it’s much easier and more comfortable to critique others than it is to critique yourself. Managing the pain is easy: just don’t kick the bed leg (and if you’re wondering where that leg is, it’s in our guest room, and I kick it all the time). Putting yourself in a state so that you remember not to kick the bed leg is not so easy. It takes awareness, it takes planning, and it takes work.

To become truly proactive about managing the pain of your midlife transition, where do you have to start? From what I’ve just said, you’ll know that you have to begin with your awareness. Let’s start with an awareness of this important fact: midlife transition doesn’t care about what you want to do or what you think you ‘ought’ to do. The core of your midlife transition lies in your capacity to get in touch with who you are: the real you. The real midlife work begins when you start to ask yourself, ‘What am I supposed to be doing with my life?’ So long as you run away from the question ‘Why am I here?‘, you’ll continue to dance barefoot about the bed, pretending that it has no legs. The avoidance of that question — the question of your personal destiny — keeps you in an indefinite period of denial and can also actually cause the trauma of midlife crisis to continue on well into old age. Sadly, some people’s refusal to get ‘down and dirty’ with themselves can actually prevent them from ever completing the midlife transition.

Obviously, what I’ve said here isn’t the complete answer to managing the emotional pain of the midlife transition. It’s only what we in philosophy used to call ‘necessary but not sufficient’. I believe that awareness (taking stock of yourself at a core level) remains the essential first step that makes all proactive planning possible. I’ll say it a thousand times before I die: as the Cheshire Cat told Alice, "If you don’t know where you’re going, any path will take you there." Want to avoid pain? Watch your step!

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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I’ve decided to call my midlife success formula ‘Proactive Transformative Integration‘, or PTI. It looks like a really complex idea, but it’s not that hard to understand, once you’ve broken it down into its components. As you might expect, there are only three elements:

• It requires awareness and the making of conscious decisions
• It requires active involvement in the process of change
• It requires a willing acceptance of both possibilities and limitations

Before I consider each of these points in their turn, I’d like to talk about the three attitudes that people have toward the aging process. Two of them are, quite literally, deadly, while the third offers abundant hope. The first and probably the most prevalent attitude is denial. That attitude causes people to fight the aging process with kicking and screaming, or by using various escape mechanisms (like external show) that will allow the person to pretend that it’s not really happening. That’s where we see the infamous ‘midlife crisis’ with all its self- and other-destructive tendencies. The second attitude that some people take is surrender. Anecdotal evidence suggests that one segment of the population just gives up and dies (or becomes essentially catatonic) shortly after their working career ends. The third attitude is one of positive acceptance: an approach that considers the midlife transition just another event along life’s pathway. Guess which attitude results in the most positive lifestyle!

Now, let’s look at the three elements of Proactive Transformative Integration (PTI). The first element consists in becoming proactive with regard to the evolution of your life, making informed and conscious decisions based on the facts as they present themselves to you. On the one hand, there can be no room for denial in proactive decision-making. Conscious awareness (that means taking time for inner, spiritual reflection) is not an option. The temptation to run and hide in external distractions needs to be fought continually and at every turn. Knowing intimately precisely where you are at every stage of the evolution of your life gives you the perspective that you’re going to need to make appropriate decisions. ‘Making appropriate decisions’ also means that you make the hard decisions, and you make them early. Waiting until difficult situations have engulfed you — making reactive choices — will never bring you positive results.

The second element demands that you view your life as dynamic rather than static. In blunt terms, it means giving up the quest for security as the pipe dream that it is. Afer all, ‘security’ suggests that you’re not vulnerable, and that never was, nor ever will be true. ‘Security’ imagines a stable world and a stable life where the forces of change can’t touch you. Of course, if you’re rational about it, no such state actually exists. There is change, and that means that new (and often unexpected) things are coming, and old (and often beloved) things are passing away. Every change (not just death) involves going through the five stages of grief (cf. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross). Making your life transformative requires that you grab life’s tiger by the tail and hang on tight, getting through the stages of grief as quickly as possible and embracing with a passion the new challenges that come at you continually.

The third and final element refers exactly to that process of embracing with a passion that I just spoke of. Right here we discover the stark difference between ‘surrender‘ and ‘acceptance‘. ‘Surrender’ suggests defeat and a passive submission to life’s (often unreasonable) demands. If you were to ‘surrender’ to retirement — in fact, when you surrender to anything — what you’d really be doing is just giving up on life: you’d be abandoning in cowardice your responsibility for living. In contrast, there’s nothing at all passive about ‘acceptance’. ‘Acceptance’ implies a ‘get-in-there-and-get-your-hands-dirty’ type of approach to life. Who are you to say that the life you’re being offered at midlife should be considered any less valuable (and worthwhile and productive and exciting) than the one you’re grieving now? ‘Acceptance’ (or integration) means that you’re going to continue letting go of the old in order to make room for the new that you’re being offered. You can’t cling to the old and embrace the new at the same time, so why try?

There it is, folks: the secret formula I call Proactive Transformative Integration (PTI). You don’t think you can handle it? Don’t be silly! You’ve been doing this (with greater or lesser degrees of success) your whole life. All you need to do now is make it a 24/7 conscious decision. Stubbornly insist that life — your life — deserves nothing less than your best effort. Then, as the song says, "Knuckle down, buckle down, do it, do it, do it!"

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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