How about giving yourself some more fundamental plans. Plans that really help you change your life for good. Its all very well dreaming about the ‘you’ in the future when everything is sorted and you have the life you have always wanted, but what will you need to do to get there? and how long does it take to put all these things in place? some things do really just take a long time to develop. Lots of nurturing and sustaining to make them become real and part of your life.

Why not start next year by laying out a plan of your wildest dreams. The dream alone may be something that keeps you going when things seem like life is too hard. Create a dream of a life that is realistic and achievable, but is creative enough to realise all your needs. So what are your needs? define them, list them. Leave them and come back to check and add to them when you think more about them all.

Then look at them all and find a plan for each that may take a year or maybe five years to achieve. Make that first step for each of them part of your new year’s resolution.

Good luck!!

©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

For instance, take me. I have to keep my perspective right now. I have a cash burn rate that is higher than my income. And it is going to be very much depending on my burn rate as to whether my business succeeds or not.

I have to step back and see that right now, I am in mid life, and that typically, like many mid lifers do, they step out of the office and try to make it independently, setting up their own business and make their own life and be their own boss.

That’s right where I am. That part of that type of cycle of life. That’s me all right.

But I am also aware that so many people fail to succeed with this because running your own business means you have to been sound with all the facets of business.

Your burn rate is very much about how good you are at cost control within your financial department.

Back in the dot com days there was much talk about new businesses setting up offices with old doors on legs for take tops and desks. They key here was to keep the costs low whilst you build the business. My costs are low, but, they could be lower, maybe.

Others see their independence as a sign that they can live a life of the projected riches to come.

There was (at least) one dot com company that employed many, paid them well and let them travel first class until the company came to a halt with investors.

Now as I wrote that I had another company in mind, but I then recalled being in upper first class for a one day trip / meeting across the Atlantic myself, so put me in that example too!!

So I, as others have learnt the hard way, that if you lower your burn rate, you can last longer. The longer you can last, the longer you will out-survive your competitors, and have some cash for really important things.

That pattern of life, that cycle that I am in has warned me to keep things tight so that I can survive just a bit longer before my income exceeds my outgoings.

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©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

I am really busy right now, hence the reduction in my postings. However the main thing I keep on thinking about is around creating a simple outlook on life. I feel very strongly that getting one’s self in a state of simple living enables one to be completely at one with yourself & be completely aware of who you are. This then gives you the greatest opportunity to have an open mind to think creatively about yourself and how you live and create things around you. Be that creative output an art, relationships or your job, you are the best placed to make this a success.

I need to think more about this but am very busy right now. If anyone wants to chip in, please feel free.

©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

This is not to say that anyone else, or any of my other daughters are my inspiration however my youngest (”oh of course, a ‘youngest child’ syndrome”) is particularly inspiring.

Years ago I remember picking her up at the local nusery and whilst walking back to the car I turned to her as she lagged behind and told her to hurry up.

She had stopped and was looking at a flower.

It was then that I realised I was the one that should have been told to slow down. There was no rush, Life itself shouldn’t be done at a rush. We should be absorbing all around us and being inspired by what we see, particularly nature.

Again and again, (at the times when she is not being stroppy or otherwise) she inspires me because she reminds me of the beauty of simplicity.

Those who have read some of my posts before might remember my thoughts on simplicity and a simple life.

I see this in some of the musicians I meet and review their work. Those that make their life less complicated enable inspiration and creativity flow. You don’t have to be an artist or creative to find benefit in making your life simple.

Remove the physical and emotional clutter from your life and make more space for yourself.

I am at a position where I can make choices and decisions about the complexity of my life. My life is complicated and I wish to be at a more simple place where I can focus more on being creative. It sometimes feels like I am trying to get back to being a five year old again and I wonder how much of this has to do with an ongoing midlife crisis, or midlife shift…

My business ventures make life more complicated because of the need to make money like everyone else. To make money from things I love means that life is somewhat more satisfying. A lot more satisfying. But still life can become more complicated in any way you point your life and career.

For example, I am starting to work with a business who wants a lot of me. I have to make the conscious choice to be committed to them and make the business work for both of us. the returns are expected to be very good but I know it will suck me in and I have spent time thinking about the implications of that.

Am I going to accept this level of complexity in my life? will in in fact make my life simpler because of the focus it will give? in some ways yes, I will have some simplicity in that it focuses me on a particular business and the model that this gives allows me to pursue more businesses like this one to create my future.

The money will give me choices but there again the risk starts to enter where with money I will make my life more complicated.

A few years ago my wife and I had a classic VW camper, a car each and a 6 berth motorhome. The motor home would regularly want an injection of cash a and we had issues with it such as the gearbox that was never right from when we purchased it.

it made life far more complex. There was too much to think about.

I often dream about a small cabin situated by a lake hidden away from the rest of the world where I can focus on creating really endearing and rewarding art. The simplicity will allow me to be fully creative. Its a nirivana that I may never find, but by keeping it in my mind I know the direction I want to go in rather than slip into filling my life up again with complicated possessions and complicated relationships.

Ruben

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©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

Rather than being supportive it seems to bring out the worst in some people. It challenges their beliefs, e.g. that women shouldn’t be the main breadwinner or that you run a risk of becoming more successful than them.

After so many years where you have been there to demonstrate how successful they are, there is a serious risk that they will begin to feel inferior to you. Naomi’s article is here.

Why Do People Have To Knock Others Down?

Of course, our friends and family who have these issues should be taking a long deep think about the way they feel to try to understand why they choose to knock you down.

It’s much like if you break up form a relationship of marriage that many people around are affected by. People begin to choose sides, or are not interested in you as a single person.

As hard as it sounds, its time to realise that these friends weren’t real deep friends but were with you more for their own needs than from a mutually supporting and nurturing relationship.

They were with you because it gave them a good feeling that supported their vulnerable egos. Now you have broken the mould you can not give them that feel good factor anymore.

What Can You Do With Friends Who Can’t Deal With Your Life-Change?

Time to get REAL friends my brothers and sisters. Reject those who sap your energy feeding their own vulnerabilities, let them take it to therapy. Reject those who sponge off of you continuously. Walk away from those who never call you and expect you to do all the contacting and keeping in touch.

You’ve broken the mould they have encapsulated you in.

As hard as it is to find your friends are now turning on you, accept that they are not real genuine friends.

Don’t waste a minute more of your life with people who cannot genuinely, unconditionally care for you & accept you. Keep an eye out for those who are genuine and are interested in you because of who you really are and will be inspired by your original and alternative thinking.

©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

I looked at it again other day and found a mind-map I did whilst on holiday (which happens to be about 20 minutes from where I now live).

Titled “Out Of Control” It shows that I was pretty fed up with how things were going for me and most of all, had a lot of things that were bothering me that I seemed not to find the time to resolve.

One comment says, “Work is stifling me”. Another says, “New Adventure – travel”

What do I take from this? well it seems to me you can keep on being disillusioned about your life and wanting to get on and do something else for a long time, but it wont go away until you do something about it.

Take control of your life and make plans for change today. Don’t leave your life in the hands of others to make those choices for you.

You risk loosing the opportunity of your life to make something of it and find out what will make you fulfilled as a person.

Don’t leave it too late. My first frustrations were written down over eleven years ago now. Today I am working hard to make that dream become a reality.

One day I hope it will but it will take time, so my recommendation to you is to start today. Do something today that will make your dream a little nearer. Keep it up. Every day do something. Keep a notebook and write your ideas out and give yourself some actions to do.

If you don’t you risk ending up making your life change turn into a midlife crisis.

Here’s a pic of my notebook. There are four other smaller mind maps that took these ideas further as well.
It just goes to show you how complicated our lives can become. We eventually have to fight to find some time to work out what we really want to do with ourselves.

Take a look below.

©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

This weekend I found time to sit for a coffee with my partner to discuss her next step in life. She feels pretty burnt out with her career in mental health.
She has been involved in mental health for over 20 years and has pretty much seen everything more than once in that time.

She is frustrated with the organisation that she works in. She tells me stories that leave my jaw on the ground and repeating that behaviour like that would never have been allowed in corporate business.

Yet she has to face it every day; the negligence, the poor people skills of managers, & incompetent human resources.

If it was just a case of feeling fed up with doing the same thing for so long then she might feel like carrying on whilst she worked through what she wanted to do instead.

However she just feels like walking out most days of the week and struggles to get up in the morning even though she knows there are bills to pay.

She’s made a decision to get out of her career within a year. But she doesn’t know what to do. She enjoys working with people and developing them, although any sign of mental illness will keep her well away from customers.

So we began to talk this through and work out a list of things to consider for planning and preparing for a new career and most likely, self employment.

We began to discuss life coaching which both of us are pretty well qualified to do and would certainly enable her to get out and meet interesting people, and get paid for it too.

But as we started to talk about this I reflected on my own travels and how easy it is to find something safe that is close to what you have done before. For me, the Internet as been a part of my daily life for around fourteen years now.

I have lived and breathed it. So doing something on the Internet was safe for me. What I was going to do with it was another matter.

I thought about my partner. Working in mental health, managing teams of people helping others in the community with mental health.
Well, Life coaching isn’t anything like mental health, although it does have some similarities.

For instance, working and developing people: as a manager in mental health this was what she was doing all the time. Leading them, sorting their panics out and getting them all back on the road when they (regularly) acted like bunnies in headlights.

I then had an image flash into my mind. I saw my partner dancing to salsa or cuban music. I know she loves this style of music and thought to myself, why not take a step back here.

She could do anything she wanted, she could teach people dancing sala, she could organise cuban bands to come and tour, she could join a band, she could manage a band, she could photograph bands… the world, literally is her oyster.

She has good communication skills, works well with people (although at the first sign of mental health she would run a mile, which might not be a bad habit to start).

This is an opportunity to really think about what she really wanted to do with her life. Make as dramatic change as possible to realise something that she could be really passionate about for the rest of her life.

Indeed something that would keep her alive rather than make her life go grey. Moving to life coaching would be too easy. Its almost a career shift or slide rather than a career change.

We thought about that for a moment. How do you break down these barriers of thought and thinking to really understand what you want to do in life when you have for so many years been institutionalised by yourself and by your own culture and society.

What do you need to do to break away from any preconceived thinking about what can possibly be achieved.

For many of us the problem begins to be irrelevant because we need to work out something we can get going on pretty quickly so that we don’t stop the money coming in.

Some of us may have been fortunate to have pre-planned our move and have had the ability to save money to bridge the gap of a period that will for most provide some fluctuations in income as well.

However, irrespective of this, our next thought provided us with the route forward. You see, at a time of needing a change like this we put all our thinking into what is it that we can do instead. The answer is not so obvious.

The answer is to begin a process towards being open enough to understand what it is that will motivate you for the rest of your life.

It is also to be able to walk a path following a passion that does not have such a name or a career role, but is part of a way of life that allows your passion or passions to come out of you along that path as nature, or fate or whatever allows.

So, by questioning your routine thinking and asking yourself why is it that you think that way you will be opening yourself up to break down the barriers of conventional roles and thinking about a career as a job, more a way of life.

My partner decided that the first step she needed to take was to hook up with a psychotherapist to then go through a process of understanding herself without the constraints of thinking that had ruled her life as a western professional career person.

By working with someone to understand yourself in a more pure place, like before the complications that life had thrown at her such as a pressured marriage and parents that tended to expect perfection and were not happy with anything less, she would be able to understand what her core motivations were.

What could she feel passionate about and then learn to take something new on without the issues of being knocked down for trying something new and not instantly being an expert at it.

Her mind would be open to take on anything without worry from external issues, she could get to a pure way of thinking where the only decision was, “am I passionate about this?”

Almost on queue a man walked past happily chatting to himself stopping at people and saying odd incomprehensible things to them, then walking, almost hopping off into the distance.

Maybe we both had more in common with this man who seemed to have some sort of mental problem than those around us at this moment because we three were thinking outside the box in our own ways.

©2010 Discover Aid: The Challenges Of Living In Your Midlife. All Rights Reserved.

Does Being Single At Midlife Make More Sense To You?

Surely for many at midlife we are now settled into a happy life & routine with a companion. We have become mature individuals and understood what really we want to do with our lives whilst watching our own children develop and grow around us.

For many, there is a hidden desire to break away from their long-trodden routine and a relationship that has long past its sell by date. They fantasize about being free to roam and do exactly what they want to do without hindrance and receiving guilt laden comments by their ‘other half’.

Many partners keep this quite for fear of being alone emotionally, practically or financially. They don’t share their real feelings for their own reasons. This is how things were with my relationship. My ex’ and I had been trying for our forth child and I had felt things had never been better. We had downsized and both worked from home so that we could both be equally part of our children’s developing lives and not spend so much time apart. Yet within a couple of months my wife had begun an affair that ultimately ended in her leaving the family home.

I had no idea she felt this way, she would tell me she loved me, yet when it came to her being honest to me when I discovered the infidelity she told me she had at many times been tempted to have an affair (but confessed to no more) and had not loved me for a long time. Useful things to know if you are planning to live a happy life. She had found someone that she felt secure enough to ‘jump’ to without fearing she would end up being alone.

Rather than delve into the why’s and wherefores of my wife’s integrity, her midlife crisis and my own I am more interested (today) to write about being mid in years and that perhaps for many it is a time that more naturally you should be single.

You see, and I am aware that this is a little controversial, but stay with me here.

As you come of age, i.e. midlife, you become finally and fully aware of who you really are and what is really important to you. Mixed with a slight increase in your narcissism you are now well prepared to be uncompromising with your views and motivations for your own life, and less likely to be willing to compromise for others.

So wouldn’t it just be more natural for a whole lot of us to be honest with our partners and say, “hey its been nice but in the last few years you’ve got really boring and I want more form life.. so .. I’m off. Good Luck”

Harsh words but honest. Genuine. You can’t accuse a person who would stand up and say that to their partner as being a coward, hiding away their true feelings, just…

…. waiting for the day for a damsel to arrive over the horizon needing to be rescued, or a knight in shining armour to whisk them away.

I look around me sometimes and I see a whole community of people living alone, happily, independent and loving it that way because of the freedom it gives them to do what they want and live exactly the way they want to live. Perhaps in a way like they are reliving their college days perhaps. Free from complications. Earning a crust and paying the bills, or maybe even better. Maybe they have got to the top of their profession and are now enjoying the rewards of this. Convertible, summer house, holidays away with friends.

They can socialise, they can have relationships but they don’t let anyone pin them down into a mutually compromising co-habiting agreement (now there’s a phrase I might like to use again!)

It seems to me they are the most honest majority. I take my hat off to those couples who are genuinely in love and want to be with each other. They do exist! My parents recently had their 50th wedding anniversary. My mum gets a bit fed up with my dad because he is loosing his hearing but other than that, they work well as a team together on most things.

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Its a topic close to my heart and one that is part of many people’s midlife decisions. Many individuals at midlife decide that their inefficient and corrupt corporates are not great places to work, nor were they meant to give the best years of their lives to them just for a corporate salary package and a few transient perks.

So I have started a new category today from this posting that will build into a new area that I know is another part of the midlife challenge and crisis that many have. I have combined career change with lifestyle change because if you don’t change your lifestyle as part of your career change you have missed a great and important opportunity.

I have been in the Internet industry for fourteen years now. I remember when it was novel seeing an article in the newspaper about the Internet. Ironically, it is now novel again to see an article about the Internet because it is so ubiquitous to people’s lives. The importance of it, along with a few other tech things like mobile phones is that, given the right control and management these tools will enable you to create a new living and also a new way of living that will be far more natural than the corporate Victorian existence many of us are well used to.

So choosing a new career, and taking into consideration not only new technology but alternative ways of living that can come from new technology as well as simply thinking differently, is a great opportunity for you at midlife.

Choosing a new career or leaving your old job to start a new business is a big event which can be one of the biggest challenges of your life. Choosing the way you live is as important and can be integrated into the new career as a fundamental part of it. For example, I recall on a recent holiday to Cyprus seeing a man who would appear from one corner of the village I stayed at to sit by the local bar, open his laptop and connect to the wireless network of the bar. He would sit, type and sip for half an hour and then be off, laptop in rucksack.

It turned out the guy lived in a bus near the village a few hundred yards from the beach. I don’t know what he did for a living but I got the impression much was done via the laptop and then uploaded to the Internet on a frequent basis. He had created a lifestyle around his work-style, or was it the other way around? he had created a work-style around the lifestyle he wanted.

Contrast this to a dull day in the winter of a northern European or American day in a city. Millions of us travel for hours to work in crowded conditions to then work alongside others who are equally frustrated at having to travel and spend so much money doing so, only to get the salary to pay the bills we don’t feel any fulfilment in paying. Compare that to this guy; he has no need for heating bills, he sits under shade when it is hot, goes for a swim when he wants to. Lives off of fruit and vegetables that keep him healthy. He also doesn’t need to bust his butt working long hours to make enough money just to survive. I want to think about those last words for a moment. “Just to survive”. That’s what it feels like for many people. Paying bills for heating and electricity, tv, insurance & house loans or rent, just to survive.

Why not consider a skill you have that could give you a modest income and find somewhere you could live that required little monetary challenge?

I spent years trying to work out what I really wanted to do with my life. It came my permanent thought process for everything I looked at and interacted with. I read books and even read books of lists of careers to find something that met all my needs.

I was so frustrated with the corruption and negligence in the corporate I was working in (in the telco industry) that I wrote 90,000 words of a book I never completed to possibly get published. It was therapy in its own right.

Choosing what is right for you is not easy but starts by taking a review of who you really are, stripping away at the scales you have built up over you over the years to understand who you really are and what really excites you. What were you born to be?

At midlife, as part of a crisis and after a long term relationship separation and divorce, there is a time when you think to yourself, ‘what now?’

That is the time to think to yourself, ‘what was I born to be on this earth?’ its not meant to be a religious calling, it is meant to trigger within you a desire to understand what really excites you, and no, I don’t accept any corporate job as being the thing that really does that. A corporate job is just a mask that gives some reward and satisfaction and maybe hints at what you really have a passion for that makes your life unique and worth living.

I will begin to write more about this category over time but for now, back to Clay at the Growing Life.

Clay has written an article that proposes a new manifesto for living and working. Go check it out and please let me know what you think right here.

Soon I will tell you about the man from Thailand I met on the beach one day and how I think he has got it made.
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