Unexpected Benefits of Midlife Career Change Coaching

You tell me that recently your employer, along with your whole industry has struggled due to the pandemic. The leadership team, you and your senior colleagues dug in and battled to keep it afloat, but eventually the CEO admitted defeat. The balance sheet wasn’t strong enough for the business to survive. 

Nevertheless, I see how you come to the Reinventu™ career reinvention process weary but still expectant. You feel your career future is uncertain, but I sense your determination too; to reorientate if need be and open yourself up to change, and winning back some control.

Skills Audit, Dreams and Reflection in Midlife Career Reinvention

You engage with the process, you reflect on your career and enthuse about your passions. You tell me you gain awareness and insight about yourself, who you are and what you want. You explore the wonderings and dreams that you’ve pushed away for half a lifetime, and suggest that it was high time that you seized the opportunity to reflect on what makes you tick, what fires you up at midlife and what you long for in your future career.

You surprise yourself too : when you realise just how many hard and soft skills you’ve accumulated through your career: the amount of experience you have and the valuable qualities you’ve developed along the way. You’re blown away when you realise just how far you’ve come since you started out as a graduate trainee nearly twenty years ago.

You tell me that you feel that our regular career coaching sessions and the Reinventu™ process make you feel safe. You feel in this space that you can move beyond ‘shoulds’, ‘oughts’ and your established rules and beliefs about how things are in work and life.  “I’m surprising myself” you say, “there was me and the day job and a lot of practicalities up until now… ​and now I’m

in touch with something else, something greater than career progression and making money, it feels like it’s something about... ‘why I’m here’.
​
And I see how you’re growing and I suggest that you are so much more than that senior manager in your industry, and you tell me that you get that, you really feel that now.

Overcoming Barriers to Midlife Career Transitions

It’s not all plain sailing. Doubt creeps in at times about whether you can make the changes to your career and life that you really want to make. ​Could you disrupt your life in the way in which you now feel drawn to do? ​Could you transition from having one big corporate role dominating your thoughts all your waking hours; where there are many good projects but also other initiatives 

that make your heart sink and drain your energy? ​Could you live more flexibly with a portfolio of projects and roles, where each one sets your heart on fire and allows you to bring more of you into the world?

We work through the doubts which you say feels like deep work that brings to awareness your established patterns of how you respond to challenges and risk, and you realise now that there may be more resourceful ways to respond to life. You say you are feeling less torn. We work on how to finance your transition plan, we continue, you notice you feel by turns waves of exhilaration and terror.

The Spirit of Midlife Career Reinvention

​Gradually you find you can hold both those emotions for longer. It seems to me that you are becoming infused by a spirit of adventure. You say you feel hopeful and joyous and even though there’s some discomfort, your nascent adventure feels right.

 I see in you as I have seen in many who 

have walked this Reinventu™ path before, that you have become more fully alive. You have a burning sense of purpose and direction. You are realising that midlife career reinvention is not just about getting to a plan. It’s about the feeling, a feeling that says ‘yes’ to the universe… And you say it’s like nothing you’ve felt before. ​

© Trudy Lloyd & Associates 2020. All Rights Reserved.

If you'd like to have a chat about how the Reinventu™  process for midlife career reinvention please contact me