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.

If you feel this article has helped you, please donate something to help me keep this site alive for others. Thank you.

[donation]

©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.

If you feel this article has helped you, please donate something to help me keep this site alive for others. Thank you.

[donation]

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

Like this feels like my first ever real success,
Like its the only thing I have possibly ever done all by my self,
Like I’ve been an entrepreneur for so many years yet never had a break like this,
Using the words “I feel confident” hasn’t been that regular in my vocabulary for too long.

Almost five years ago I left corporate life. Since then I’ve trashed through a few small business ideas that were playing rather than real businesses whilst I worked out what I really wanted to do with my life.

I got divorced. I got qualified as a counsellor too.

But underlying this all, I realised that I did not believe in myself. I would put up new business web sites but not want to promote them because I didn’t want the exposure.. how self destructive is that!!

I had formed a learned behaviour that everything I did was a failure.

I would also find it hard to complete any project, I would get bored as I got nearer the end, looking for the next new thing, convincing myself (very well I might add!) that the next idea was going to be at least twice as definite to make me an income as the last.

This all starts a long time ago I am sure but there were signs of this learned behaviour in some troubled waters I thrashed through starting in the late 90’s.

I escaped from a distructive boss in a large corporate. He was arrogant and ignorant. I couldnt trust him any further than I could keep an eye on which cubical he was currently slivering into (note: my opinion of most of my bosses doesnt get much better from nowon). So ‘escaping’ is not a good way to describe a career development.

However I got into product management which was what I had wanted to do for a long time. Still with business Internet services so I was happy and excited.

Except I got into a team managing a some high profile services just at the time when they were going to drop through the floor.

All my ambitions to turn them around went up in dust and I ended up with nothing. However, since I wasn’t tarred with the same brush as the rest of the team, I survived as the blue eyed ’survivor’ .

I spent a number of years (and a couple of other bosses who weren’t half bad actually) trying to create some services based on the fact that my corporate had contracted with another corporate to purchase a lot of their software and so was committed to doing something with all that software instead of just dumping it in the stationary cupboard.

So my services were less about market needs and more about my corporate accountant’s needs. I sold nothing but was very busy still.
I got little achievement and fulfilment out of any of this. It was a bizarre time because the team I was part of felt quite desperate and felt that doom was only around the corner for us all at any time.

This part of my life I can not remember much about my children growing up. My mind was somewhere else. I was thinking about survival all the time. “What would happen if” scenarios were consuming me.

It’s a pity that no one told me, or if they did, I didn’t listen to the guy who told me that it all just doesn’t matter and that if you really believe in yourself, you know that you can walk out of this mess and find something far more useful to do.

The trouble was, I didn’t believe in myself. I was never that confident. I had done well to hide it by being brash whenever I needed to look confident.

I got a call from a head hunter and was offered more money to do what I wanted in a smaller company that was going places. Sounded like a good break. I could leave all this poo behind and go do what I really wanted to do somewhere else.

I was off. New boss, nice chap, knew what he was doing so I could learn from him. 3 months later he resigned and I had an idiot for a boss again. A right wally.

During this time I got a new partnership service to launch but on the day we launched it my company split itself into two meaning that I went one way and my lovely shiny new partnership service went the other and so was doomed. I had spent so much time on that and put my whole reputation into it.

I was back again fixing other people’s muck ups. The marketing guys had signed a deal for a lot of software that they weren’t authorised to do. they got sacked and it was my job to make a service out of it (I swear I didn’t put that on my cv).

I also had to work on creating a service from a deal the sales guy had put together telling the customer that we would make a service from it.

The sales guy didn’t get the sack however. I also was the one later on to sit in a room with two dodgy looking guys trying to tell them the deal was now off and that the head of marketing was way way too busy to meet to discuss it any further with them.

I left the company before it left me (which unfortunately was what happened to a few who didn’t leave in time) and jumped into safe shoes at a larger telco corporate again.

These guys actually had money coming in so I felt very happy… for six months. That was the time it took for me and my great little team to loose our really nice boss who I thought I could learn a lot from (yes, you’ve heard it all before two paragraphs up).

I ended up with a “cowboy” (to quote a great person I had the pleasure of being the manager in the previous job) of a manager who just wanted to do deals with the prettiest faces and leave us all in the office struggling to understand what our jobs were.

I never really understood my job after that. He gave me team members who openly confessed to their inability to do the job yet my cowboy boss was too busy managing his next promotion to take any notice of the issues he was ignoring.

A few years on this guy had been given the shove out the door himself and now promotes himself as a consultant.. as most who get the shove seem to do.

But enough about him, what about me? failure after failure. Im sure that if it wasn’t 5 minutes to 1am I might be able to paint a completely different picture of these last corporate years.

I met some great people. I had a lot of fun. Things were exciting sometimes. But I do regret missing my kids growing up in that time. I look a pictures and don’t remember anything about those times.

This is why, by this time, I was ripe for giving it all up and taking a chance on having a complete life change. All that I knew was grinding to a halt.

I didn’t feel I had the qualifications, the age or the understanding with what was being thrown at me to make a success of anything. And, oh yea, another sales guy sold something on the promise that we would make a product out of it. He didn’t get sacked, and I got the job of trying to make a service out of it again.

So failure sort of feels like it follows me around. Or rather, there is no success for me.

This is why, when I begun to take the time to really understand myself, I realised that I did have a habit, or rather a ‘learned behaviour’ of expecting failure and not expecting any success.

So back to the present. In the past few weeks I have been in discussions with a business about doing business with them. The initial excitement was incredible.

I had no idea my little business could achieve such an opportunity. Then over a few conversations it seem to become more and more real.

I got to a point where I had to accept that I had achieved this all by my self.

I had created this business. I had worked hard to design and develop the business and promote it and present it in a way that would make it attractive and functional for clients.

It was all my doing. It took a long time and I had to believe in what I was doing was going to make a difference to me some day if I kept at it. I kept saying to myself, never give up. Keep going, keep improving it. Stay passionate, and when you aren’t passionate, find the passion in it somewhere.

But most of all, believe in yourself. Believe that you are owed a break. Believe that you deserve to have success.

Believe that success will come your way one day.

This will change thing for me a lot. It will prove I can believe in myself. It will prove the success is a real possibility and that I can plan to succeed and not plan to fail all the time.

Do you plan to fail or succeed?

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

We may bottle it up for a while but eventually, at work or at home you will pop.

Take this guy below as an example:

Office Worker Meltdown Second Angle – Watch more free videos

©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.