"​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?"
​
​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.
​
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.
​
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?
​
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.
​
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’.
​
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?
​
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.
​
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’.
​
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.
​
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.
​
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.
​
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!
​
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.
​
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.