Joy? Never.
Career change or career development is difficult and stressful. …And that’s on top of my heavy workload in my current role.

I hear you. You don’t like your job, some days you’d like to pack it in. But you can’t allow yourself to think that… There’s the mortgage to pay, perhaps you’re supporting children at school or university. You tell yourself to ‘knuckle down’ and just get on with it.
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​You feel that your job sounds good (on paper). You’ve got a great job title… Some people would kill for such a job… And yet this job is killing you; slowly, relentlessly, devouring your soul…

I hear you. I hear how you’re feeling conflicted. I hear how you’re exhausted by the demands of your job. The commutes feel harder than they did 20 years ago. Some days you’re not even sure if your organisation values your years of experience. All those bright young things seem to bounce round the office – fingers flying as they text, working at a frenzied pace.
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It’s a tantalising idea to change or develop your career at midlife. But surely, you feel, working on changing your career will just further overload you and your ‘to do’ list?
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Psst! I’ll let you into a secret. Midlife career change CAN be joyful. That was the exact word that Sarah* used to describe her midlife career change journey. Sarah had become increasingly unfulfilled with her senior role in business development. She’d led a team for the last few years and they’d delivered their targets. Now things were getting tougher. Their targets had been increased in a declining market, and though she’d fought hard, she’d not been given a penny of additional promotional spend. Sarah kept up her good work… developing new strategies and tactics… She continued to give her all. She was no shirker. 

But then Sarah took her summer holiday. She reclined on the golden sands of an Italian beach, and marveled at the azure sea. She felt herself exhale, ahhhh, relax, and let go of all thoughts of work. She laughed with her husband and had play fights with him in the sea. And she realised she’d forgotten how to play in the last few years.

When she returned home, we met and she told me she was up for ‘playing’ with the idea of changing her career. She was up for dreaming of new possibilities of how she could work and live. I helped her to look at the world of work with ‘fresh eyes’, and notice just how much it has changed in the last fifteen years… And how there are now many new ways to work, earn a living and contribute. During our time together Sarah got excited and inspired… And now she’s arrived at a place where she’s talking to a charity about using her skills part time to support them in fundraising. She’s also planning to set up an interior design business with a friend. But most importantly, she tells me she’s rejuvenated and excited about the next 20 years of her working life.
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And now I see YOU. I see all you’ve achieved in the last 15 or 20 years; the way you’ve shown up consistently in your role; despite crises at home, bad weather and ‘off days’. I acknowledge how you’ve contributed hugely to leading and developing your team, how you’ve kept your skills up to date, and dealt with the office politics and conflict along the way.

And in this summer holiday season, I wonder, could you make the space, to exhale - ahhhh, and relax, and in your own time to get playful again… About life and your career? 

* Name and some details have been changed to protect confidentiality
© 2018 Trudy Lloyd & Associates. All Rights Reserved.

“I have to change my career,” Rachel insists, her eyes burning. “I know I’ll regret it if I don’t at least try and do something where I can be more active; like becoming a personal trainer.

If this was the first time I’d coached Rachel it might make sense for us to start to explore exactly what type of ‘more active’ role might suit her. But it wasn’t the first time we’d talked, and in truth Rachel was already pretty clear that for her new career, she wanted to help people improve their health and fitness at midlife so they can have a long and happy retirement and old age.
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Indeed Rachel had already developed an excellent action plan for her new career. Unfortunately, she was making little progress implementing it. I asked Rachel a few more questions and things became clearer. 

It seemed that Rachel was ‘identified’ so strongly with being an HR Director, and also with working in a large corporation, which was what she’d been doing for the last 18 years, that deep within her it felt impossible that she could be anything else. She’d had an ‘idea’ and made a plan to become a personal trainer. However, it was as if her internal ‘space’ was under monoculture to ‘HR Director vegetation’, and there was no ‘open ground’ within her, where she could plant and nurture the seedling for her new career.

If we’ve been in a role for 10, 15 or more years it’s easy to become ‘identified’ with that role. When this happens, our role is not just what we ‘do’, but it can seem that we ARE that role… and it can hard to be anything else. Our tendency to identify with our professional role may be exacerbated if we have worked long hours at it, and also perhaps if we enjoy the professional status that role gives us.
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It’s easy to identify with any role. A ‘mother’ or ‘father’ who takes a career break can become identified with their caregiving role, and then find it hard to make the transition back to their career. Being identified with a role can also make us feel alive and focused, and that we have somewhere to channel our energy.
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However, identifying with a role, any of our roles, ultimately limits us. Because when we are identified with a role we are not in control; instead we are being driven by unconscious urges. This means we will likely overlook and be unable to tap into our other talents, interests and traits.  This could mean that we miss out on career and life opportunities, miss out on what might make us happy at midlife. When we are heavily identified with a role and try to make career choices, there is a risk that we will make a sub-optimal choice.

Even if you don’t want to make a career change at midlife, you could benefit from ending a strong ‘identification’ with, or dis-identifying from your work role. Dis-identifying from your work role will give you a new perspective from which to make decisions. It can also release more energy as you reclaim parts of you that you might have pushed aside. Another risk of being overly identified with a job role is that, should you lose that role, perhaps through redundancy, retirement or ill health, then you could feel ‘quite lost’. It might even bring you to a crisis.
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“We are dominated by everything with which our 'self' is identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we dis-identify ourselves" Assagioli.

Even if you’re working 60 hours a week at your job – you are much more than your role identity. Your role might require you to be  for example organised and pro-active and ‘results driven’ among other things. But what about those other great talents you have; perhaps your creativity, your playful side, your athletic side. Is there space in your life for these aspects of you to 'show up'? By identifying so strongly as an HR Director, Rachel’s view of all the other parts of herself was blocked. 

​Ending your identification with a career role is a journey. It’s a journey where you discover your ’self’. The ‘self’ is a still, but dynamic place inside you, from which you can observe and direct the various aspects of your personality.

Only when Rachel can stand back from her identity as an HR Director or dis-identify from it, will she feel less attached to the idea of herself in that role, and realise she has more ways of ‘being’ in the world.
  
To begin this process I asked Rachel to practise a couple of exercises. You can download the full instructions here.
Here's a quick summary of the role dis-identification exercises.

• A meditation where she repeatedly asked herself ‘Who am I?’
• An exercise to dis-identify from her role. ‘I am an HR Director, but I am more than an HR Director.

It’s not just our work roles with which we can become overly identified. We can also become identified with our minds, our feelings and our bodies. By identifying with any of these aspects of ourselves we limit the choices we have in life.

The process of dis-identifying from our roles, minds, feelings and bodies, is something that we can work on regularly. This will not only enable us to change our career when we feel the need to, but it can enable us to open up more options for our whole lives and for us to use more of our talents.
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Ultimately when we are in touch with our ‘self’, we are best placed to plan our career change or career development and most likely to  succeed with it. 
​© 2018 Trudy Lloyd & Associates All rights reserved.

You work on your skill set, right? 

Of course. It’s a must for you as a 21st century professional; to keep up with your field, with work technologies and relevant legislation. …So when did you last upgrade your skills in handling the pressure at work?
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Professionals often tell me that earlier in their career they might have experienced short bursts of high-intensity working, but then things always quietened down again. However, now they feel the pressure at work is relentless.
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Such pressure left unchecked can lead to workplace stress and wreak havoc on health; weakening the immune system, upsetting the digestion, disturbing sleep and more.  Stress can damage relationships inside and outside of work, making people feel miserable and no longer able to enjoy life.

Clients struggling to cope with workplace stress, often ask me if they should leave their role or change career. I tell them : “You have three choices – and leaving to find pastures new is only one of them”.

Here are the other two options.

1. Change the SITUATION that’s stressing you.
2. Change YOURSELF.

Whether you can influence change in your working environment will depend on the culture, how well you relate to your colleagues and what resources are available.

Explore with your boss or colleagues options to reduce pressure and combat stress; these might include deferring deadlines, getting access to extra resource from inside or outside the organisation, doing some work from home and cutting back on the scope of a project. Brainstorm as many ideas as you can and try to make a case.
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And yes, I’m aware that speaking out at work about how you’re experiencing pressure and even stress may carry risks as to how you’re perceived, and may even affect your career progression. However, if your current job with less pressure would still suit you, then maybe it’s worth a try?

Ultimately though, option two may be more fruitful: Change yourself. This means growing your capability to handle the pressure at work.

I imagine you’re already familiar with what I call ‘Level One’ stress management techniques. They include ‘self-care basics’. However, it’s easy to break these positive habits when we’re under pressure.

• Eat a nutritious diet and avoid junk food.
• Exercise and stretch regularly.
• Get enough sleep.

Follow these and you’ll have more strength and vitality to cope.  Level One techniques also include personal rituals:-

• Morning meditation, visualisation and 'setting your intention' for the day.

These tools won’t stop people interrupting your work and diverting your attention from your personal priorities, but they may help you get back on track more easily.

• Remember your boundaries.

Push back on tasks that aren’t in your remit. Be wary of colleagues sweet talking you into accepting work they should be handling. Push back on requests for you to deliver tight turnarounds, particularly when it’s to make up for delays further up the pipeline.

• Remember your emergency stress responses

Learn and practise your breathing techniques, affirmations and calming visualisations for when times get tough.

OK, but what if you’re still feeling the pressure? That’s where what I call ‘Level Two’ techniques come in.

‘Level Two’ techniques can bring about a step change in how you manage pressure and stress at work. E.g. They’ll enable you to ‘get away’ from work when you’re not there, so that you’re not recreating your 'stress response', and the attendant risks to your health, by thinking about work at home. You may need to work at mastering these techniques, but if you’ll do, you’ll reap huge quality of life rewards.

Here's a brief introduction. If you’d like to learn more, we've got an online workshop where we’ll be getting into more detail. bit.ly/2DtUHAw

Are You Too Attached to 'The Outcome'?

• How do you think about your work? If you have fixed ideas about outcomes and what is best for your career; ‘I must win this client’, I must get that promotion, then you’re likely setting yourself up for failure repeatedly, and by doing so adding to your work stress. 

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t be productive and ambitious in your work role. What’s critical to avoid stress is to be able to ‘just do your best’ and then ‘let go’ of outcomes over which you’ve got no control.

Are You 'Too Identified' With Your Role?

• You may feel you just want to be ‘a good accountant’ or a ‘good salesperson’. But be aware that your job can become a place to ‘prove your worth’.
• If much or ALL of your self-esteem comes from your professional role, work will take on disproportionate importance in your life. You'll risk ‘performance anxiety’. ‘Failures’ will hit harder, and stress will increase.

You can start to explore how attached or identified you are with your role through mindfulness meditation. In addition, there are specific techniques and meditations that can help you reduce your attachment and identification with work. We’ll cover these in the workshop.

Handling pressure and avoiding stress is a key life skill in the 21st century. Perhaps it’s the MOST important professional skill - because it’s fundamental to your ability to keep on working and to enjoy your work!

If you'd like to learn more about advanced techniques for handling pressure and stress at work why not join us for this online workshop ​​bit.ly/2DtUHAw

How have you learned to handle pressure? Share what's worked for you in the comments below!

"​Karen, an account manager in a software company complained to me that she’d grown tired of her role and found it unfulfilling. She wanted work that was more ‘meaningful’.“Trouble is,” she went on, “doing something more ‘meaningful’ isn’t going to pay the mortgage or enable me to support the kids through university, is it?"
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​I've found it’s common for professionals in well-paid but unfulfilling roles to believe that a career switch to work that’s more ‘meaningful’ will cost them dear. However, I also know it doesn’t have to be so.

​​Findings from studies defining ‘meaningful’ work, point to concepts such as ‘the amount of significance people perceive to exist in their work ¹.  There’s the idea of a ‘calling’ which has deep historical and religious roots and which might lead people to choosing a role within the church or a healthcare environment. Nowadays the phrase ‘calling’ is often more about an inner drive to do fulfilling or self-actualising work².

There’s also the related concept of ‘meaning in life’³. Which suggests that work is meaningful not only when it is judged to be significant, but also when it is viewed as having a distinct purpose or point.

Some argue that you don’t have to have ‘meaningful’ work, as long as you find meaning in other parts of your life e.g. through family and relationships, a hobby, using your creativity, or through your faith.

The late Susan Jeffers, renowned author and psychotherapist, encouraged us to set the bar high. If your work isn’t ‘joyful’ she encourages us to ditch it.
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Ultimately, ‘meaningful work’ is a ‘career value’ which any individual will rank somewhere on a continuum from high to low, according to their own make-up.

​Your interest in your career may wane gradually over several years. Or, having been made redundant, you may experience a sudden realisation: ‘I can’t go back to doing that! Either way it can feel frightening when the career that may have paid you handsomely and have reinforced a positive sense of self no longer ‘fits’.

Such experiences are consistent with what renowned psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung labelled as the ‘midlife crisis’. Jung believed such an event to be driven by a ‘search for meaning’, and attributed it to the need to ‘individuate’ at midlife, self-actualise and develop further our unique selves.
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If you made your career choice in your early twenties, perhaps twenty years ago. And since then you’ve changed and grown, and the world has also changed; is it really surprising that you, your career and the world of work no longer fit together like freshly sawn jigsaw pieces?

​There’s no quick fix. However, by starting with these three strategies you’ll be on your way to a better balance of money and meaning in your career at midlife.

​Uncover your current ‘career values’ by asking yourself the question. What is important to me in a (my) career now?

Take some quiet time to do this and write your answers down. Review them a week later and add new ones that occur to you, remove any that don’t really resonate. Finally, try and prioritise your top five.  Where is ‘meaning’ in this list? How does it relate to your other career values?
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Audit your current skills. People have told me that they find this hard. They take their skills for granted, they’re just ‘doing their job’. Get started by thinking through a major project you’ve completed, what skills did you use to deliver it? Don’t forget the soft or interpersonal skills.

​A business model can be defined as ‘how a business makes money’. Your business model is how YOU make money.  As a midlife professional you may see career opportunities in terms of employers and candidates, full-time and part-time. However, nowadays it’s more helpful to think in terms of a global market for skills.

Skills can be sold in any size ‘package’ from an hour’s work to a full time role and every increment in between. Skills can be sold to regular employers or directly to customers, to agencies or through an online platform, to name but a few.

How are you going to ‘package’ your skills? And what type of business model will suit you best e.g. time for money, project fee, retained fee, revenue share from a business, equity stake in a business? As in any market, rare skills or unusual combinations of skills can command premium prices.
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Considering these things will help you explore alternative business models and ultimately help you maximise your income and your return on activity (and investment) from the huge asset that is your skill set.  

​Think, like Karen, that you can’t have money and meaning - then you surely won’t. One of the most important reasons people don't get the remuneration they want is because they are not ambitious enough about money.

Get clear about how much money you want… and then set a goal of significantly more than that.

Madness? No. By setting a challenging goal we send a message to our subconscious that it needs to come up with a plan to deliver the results you desire.

Ultimately, achieving both money and meaning in your career is a creative process. It’s about breaking free from an outdated and constricted view of the ‘job market’ and being open to exploring new options for you in the global ‘skills market’.
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Want to learn more about reinventing your career to have both money and meaning? Download my Reinventu™ process guide here.
Sources
1. (Rosso, Dekas, & Wrzesniewski, 2010)
2 (Baumeister, 1991; Hall & Chandler, 2005)
3 (Steger & Dik, 2009)

So you’re thinking of changing your career at midlife? Reinventing it even. Simultaneously you feel exhilarated and petrified. Maybe those feelings surge in equal measures, or perhaps one far outweighs the other.

You’ve reached the final straw. You missed out on a much hoped for promotion. …Or a wave of redundancies has been announced. Your relationship with your boss has hit rock bottom. …Or the death of a loved one brings home to you your own mortality. Worse, it’s your health and relationships that are suffering through your crazy hours and bonkers commute… Perhaps you long for ‘something else’, and now that ache you’ve been suppressing for some years, is pushing up again, refusing to be ignored any longer.

Suddenly you realise you’re being called to make changes – but where to begin?  How to ‘set off’ if you cannot see a path? Can you call this ‘a journey’ if you’re not clear about the destination?
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The emotions of the people I meet who are beginning to change career fall along a continuum from petrified to exhilarated. What’s more the emotions of career changers often lurch about; one day they feel excited and optimistic, the next they may feel scared and hopeless. Reinventing your career brings a rollercoaster of emotions.

The good news is there are steps you can take to prepare for your career change which will give you the best chance of success. Here’s three to get you started.

​We’re often taught to see ‘opportunities’ in life as related to acquiring things - possessions, wealth and status. We’re led to believe that if we go after these visible signs of ‘success’, we’ll increase our feelings of security.
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However, if we bring such an attitude to our career change or career reinvention process, we risk increasing our anxiety. We may start to feel overwhelmed mulling over ‘what’s at stake’, and specifically about what we might lose if we change career. This will likely make us feel insecure. Wanting to feel secure again, we may retreat from making changes.

There’s another way of looking at opportunities and success. Instead of thinking in terms of ‘having things’ we can think about how an opportunity can help us develop our capacity to ‘handle things’.
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Arming ourselves with such a mindset as we pursue life changes - like career reinvention - will set us up to learn from the new challenge. We’ll see how we can use the change process to build our capacity to handle things. This in turn will build self–esteem.
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Ultimately, it is our ability to ‘handle things’ in life that enables us to feel secure.

Similarly when we feel fear around career change, the fear is also telling us something important is at stake – our reputation, our earning power, our happiness. No wonder it feels scary.

But fear can be a poorly tuned ‘warning system’ and prone to overreacting. For some people lights flash and sirens wails even as they begin to contemplate career change.
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In order to make a career change, we need to acknowledge the fear, but not let it stop us from connecting with our desires, or researching new opportunities, making plans and taking the actions we need to take.

We need to push on through despite the fear; one small step at a time.

​We all w​ant to move away from painful things in our lives and move towards pleasure. Understand this and you’ll be tapping into the secret to motivating yourself to do anything. You’ll also be able to use this technique to help you change or reinvent your career.

It may be frustrating when your boss dumps more projects on you yet again, or tiring when you’re four hours late home again due to train delays, but if you’re serious about changing your career you can leverage these experiences to drive your change forward.

If you want to make changes, whenever you’ve had a rotten day, instead of drowning your frustration in a large glass of Merlot – take time to reflect. Get in touch with the ‘pain’ of your current situation. Dial it up. Think about all the days in the last six months when you felt unhappy about your work. Recall just how bad things have become. Connect with that pain, connect deeply and get really clear that things must change.

Similarly, you can leverage pleasure to help motivate you in your career change. When you’ve made some progress with your career plans – visualise your new future, imagine how great it will feel when you’re doing a role that is more authentically you. Connect with that pleasure deeply and connect with it every day.
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Using pleasure as a motivational tool keeps you on track and helps you bounce back from any setbacks in your career change process. 

Finally, when you make significant changes to your life there’s a risk that you may become isolated. If progress feels slow, some people withdraw from friends and sit alone, anxious and brooding about their future, and possibly regretful about the past.

Preparing to change your career means thinking about who to tell and how much to tell them. If your plans will affect the lives and financial security of other people then you need to discuss your plans with them and resolve any areas of conflict.

After that, it’s time to surround yourself with a wider network of support. These are the people that will listen to your doubts but never doubt you, and believe in you throughout your career reinvention journey.

Next time you hear a 'call' to make changes to your career or your life, what are you going to do? Give in to your fears and ignore it… Or push through your fears to a new career adventure? …Do let me know in the comments below!
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If this post has resonated with you and you’d like to learn more about getting started with your career change or career reinvention you can download my free ebook "The Top 5 Challenges Facing Midlife Career Reinventors and How to Overcome Them".
©2017 Trudy Lloyd. All Rights Reserved.

Perhaps it’s just a niggle that you don’t enjoy your job anymore, but it’s a niggle that won’t go away. Or maybe you loathe your working life and get home each evening ready to hit the gin or scratch your eyeballs out.

Either way, this time it feels like you won’t be able to fix things by simply signing up with a recruiter and begging her to find you more of the same. This time it feels like you need a fundamental rethink of your career – a career reinvention even.

But hang on a minute... Haven’t you been here before - on the cusp of ‘finding your new path’? You slump a bit, hang your head, mull things over... At the end of the day your ‘package’ is pretty competitive – you don’t have to worry about paying the bills. You know your organisation, your team... Come on, you’ve been building your expertise in this field for over fifteen years...

​There are three things – or keys that will help you to not just reinvent your career at midlife, but excel at reinventing your career. Follow through on reinventing your career and you’ll enjoy huge benefits - whichever ones YOU want.
For some it’s about getting into a new field or starting the business that they’ve always hankered after. For others it’s about reinventing their career to work with different types of people, or to fundamentally change the nature of their working relationships; a guy who turned to teaching kids rather than selling computers to aggressive procurement managers springs to mind. For others it’s about reinventing to have more autonomy or more flexibility... The motivations are endless.

​Key 1 : Use A Proven Career Reinvention Process.
Unless you’re lucky enough to have a fully-formed ‘vision’ come to you while you’re asleep, reinventing your career won’t happen overnight. By turns you’ll need to analyse, think creatively, undertake research and more. You’ll gather data, and insights...  And some of these activities might be more challenging than others.
Having a proven process will work wonders for keeping your 'career reinvention show' on the road. The process will support you and keep you on track, freeing you up to open your mind, to explore your passions, and discover what your soul longs for. The clearly defined steps of a great career reinvention process will keep you moving forward and stop you getting bogged down.

Key 2 : Career Reinvention Tools and Techniques.
As with any ‘job’, it’s easier and often quicker if you use the right tools; and reinventing your career is no different. The tools for successful career reinvention include well-designed templates and materials and also having the right thinking skills; for self-analysis and reflection and to investigate and synthesise data. Having the right tools will set you up to get the most out of your career reinvention process.
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Key 3 : The Mindsets of a Career Reinventor.
Want to give yourself the best possible chance of taking your thinking about your career into new territories? Then you’ll need the mindset or outlook to support your journey.  Having the right mindset enables you to tap into your appropriate emotional resources when needed, which you can then draw on to support you through each step of the process. I’m talking about open-mindedness so you don’t reject new ideas prematurely, confidence to believe in what’s possible and resilience to keep going when the process demands more from you.

 ​Feeling stressed, miserable – desperate even – most days when you return from work shouldn’t be anyone’s normal, and it doesn’t have to be yours. People sometimes think that their options close down at midlife - I’m convinced that they open up. Everything you’ve done and achieved to date can be a springboard for a brand new professional role or career.
Reinventing your career will likely be a ‘project’, but with a proven process, effective tools and techniques and a winning mindset, you can keep yourself on track until you reach your new work Nirvana. A place that you leap out of bed for each morning, where your work feels purposeful and makes you heart sing.
 
​If you’d like to learn more about reinventing your career as a professional why not download my free short ebook here.
If you’d like to learn more about the Reinventu™ career reinvention process then please get in touch.
Source : Time
© 2017 Career Reinventors 40+. All Rights Reserved.