For the next 7 days I’ll be sharing one story a day about a woman who reached her turning point. I don’t believe there is a single “way” to transformation. There is only our own unique way, and only we can do the work necessary to achieve our own sacred success…

We all have them: Those defining moments when the forces of head and heart come together with crystal clarity and we know that what we’ve been doing, or haven’t been doing, is no longer enough. For some of us it’s like standing at the edge of a precipice looking out at the vast open space beyond; for others it’s like standing at a fork in the road, looking left then right, but not moving because we can’t decide which road to take. Still others of us feel that nagging vibration in the pit of our soul that refuses to be silenced.

These moments are defining ones because it’s then that we realize we must make a decision: to jump; to turn in one direction or the other; to listen to the voice reverberating from some still small place within us. It’s then that we reach our turning point. That moment when we acknowledge the need to do something differently; to let go of something that’s holding us back and away; to step into the extraordinary life we glimpse on the other side. 

Marilyn’s Story

All I can ever remember wanting to be was an attorney. Then I spent a year as an exchange student in London and met my husband. We married, returned to California and instead of attending law school I opted to work so we could afford a house and then have a family.

I became a stay at home mom and really enjoyed it, but also rose to the top in several volunteer positions and found that I really liked being a leader and also having a cause to pursue. I think wanting to be an attorney was all about being a warrior. In any event, when my kids grew up and moved away, I thought about law school again, but decided I wasn’t willing to do the work and make the sacrifices it would involve.

Instead, I started my own Professional Organizing business. It was supposed to be a fun, part time hobby (we didn’t need the money). Well it became so successful that it took over my life and became a full time, very successful business. I didn’t even KNOW I liked business, but found out that I loved marketing and sales.

As time went by and I became more successful I had to decide if I wanted to continue growing or just keep to being small. I didn’t want to live with the “what ifs” and “if only’s” so I continued to grow the business. I became a business development coach and speaker.

The trouble was, I often missed my husband and never had time for myself either. I had a stack of “just for fun” books, but no time to read them.

Not too long ago we bought a holiday house on a lake in order to be near our kids and grandkids. The first time I stepped out on the dock and looked out over the serene water, I knew I was ready to slow down and read those books. I WANTED to slow down. I had never considered it before.

So my new goal this year is to develop a business model where I don’t have to travel but can still speak, teach and coach – just as long as I don’t miss my hubby and I have time for myself and the lake.

Turning points come at unexpected times and you must be ready to recognize that turning point when it arrives. I might have ignored the lake calling to me a year ago.

I’d love to know what those of you reading this blog post feel about you own turning point. Have you reached it? What was it like for you? Are you beginning to feel that rumble, that nagging restlessness that’s telling you a change is coming? Please share your thoughts and comments here as we explore then next 7 days of turning points.

_________________________________________________________________

Are you a woman executive whose career is beginning to wear like a tight-fitting pair of heels? If so, this call is for you! There is still time to register for my free one-hour teleclass: “Your Turning Point: The First Step Toward Your Extraordinary Life Waiting for You” scheduled for January 12, 2010 at 12:00 p.m. ET/9:00 a.m. PT. The only thing you need to commit to is 60 minutes of your time, and I’d love to have you be a part of the conversation and the journey.  You can learn more by following this link: http://www.evelynkalinosky.com/yourturningpoint.

For the next 7 days I’ll be sharing one story a day about a woman who reached her turning point. I don’t believe there is a single “way” to transformation. There is only our own unique way, and only we can do the work necessary to achieve our own sacred success…

We all have them: Those defining moments when the forces of head and heart come together with crystal clarity and we know that what we’ve been doing, or haven’t been doing, is no longer enough. For some of us it’s like standing at the edge of a precipice looking out at the vast open space beyond; for others it’s like standing at a fork in the road, looking left then right, but not moving because we can’t decide which road to take. Still others of us feel that nagging vibration in the pit of our soul that refuses to be silenced.

These moments are defining ones because it’s then that we realize we must make a decision: to jump; to turn in one direction or the other; to listen to the voice reverberating from some still small place within us. It’s then that we reach our turning point. That moment when we acknowledge the need to do something differently; to let go of something that’s holding us back and away; to step into the extraordinary life we glimpse on the other side.

Michele’s Story

From as far back as I can remember I wanted to be a performer. When I turned 18 I went to New York City to study dance and theater. I was blessed to have received a dance scholarship and my goal was to pursue acting full time when I graduated, but after a few years of barely scraping by a voice in my head told me: “You’ve got to stop thinking like a child and get a real job.”

Truthfully, a lot of this internal voice came from my parents, who even though supportive of my talents and abilities, always wanted me to be realistic about my career. They liked to remind me of the dismal percentage of actors who ever became stars.  How was I going to support myself?

So I listened. I began pursuing the corporate route in publishing, but I just couldn’t give up acting completely. I did off-Broadway plays for little to no money, doing shows and rehearsing in the evenings after working full time during the day. I’d do a couple of productions a year, and because I also loved to write, I wrote monologues and short stories, too.

As the years went by, more and more time was taken away from the creative work I loved in place of my corporate responsibilities. I wasn’t unhappy at work. I got involved in the different projects they’d assign me to and my co-workers were nice. It was all okay, and yet I’d find that by mid afternoon I’d be exhausted and want to go to bed, but I’d push through it until the evening when I’d get to rehearsal and I’d be full of energy again.

My corporate life was very structured and my work wasn’t that challenging. It was stable, though, and the pay was really good so I’d tell myself to be grateful I didn’t have to worry about money. Maybe if I’d been more miserable I would have done something sooner instead of remaining stuck in an unfulfilling life. I had the routine Sunday evening dread, the feeling like my life wasn’t really my own, and yet I didn’t take any action to make a real change. I just kept rationalizing; telling myself I was being selfish and childish to keep thinking about performing as a career. I had responsibilities to my husband, who seemed quite content with the way things were.

Then, at the age of 35 I got an out-of-the-blue call from a man I’d worked with many years earlier who was producing a play in California and he wanted me to choreograph it for him. When I first received the call I told myself: “This is crazy. You can’t do this. You can’t quit your job, leave your husband and go out to California for 4 months.” At the same time, I heard this little voice inside me telling me I needed to pay attention to this opportunity. This time, the inner voice won out.

I had the most amazing time in L.A. Being back in that environment full time made me come alive. I was working harder and working longer hours than ever before, but I didn’t care because I felt so engaged; so happy to be part of it all. I didn’t want it to end. But it did. I remember sitting in the airport waiting for my flight back to New York and thinking: “Now I have to go back to my real life,” and there was no joy in that thought.

Back in New York I was miserable. Where before I had managed to trudge along, not really happy or sad, after getting a taste of the life I truly wanted it was impossible for me to reconcile the joy I felt in L.A. with what I now felt. I was torn between my need to be responsible and my desire to live life on my own terms. So, I vacillated. I bounced back and forth between being pragmatic and being a dreamer, never quite able to let go of the memories of those four months in California.

When I finally drummed up the courage to talk to my husband, I was sure he’d be anything but supportive. I was wrong. He’d seen the woman who came home from L.A. all fired up and alive and he liked her. He’d watched as that fire slowly banked until there were only a few remaining embers. More important to him than the security of two steady incomes was having a wife who wasn’t disconnected from him, from their life together, from everything.

I took it one step at a time, going from full time to part time, to working as an independent consultant. I used the extra free time to pursue my new life. I joined a theater company, and I’m writing all the time, doing plays and assisting with choreography. The work is far less fragmented than I thought it would be, and now that I place a firm value on what I have to offer, I’m being paid better, too.

I had been so depressed in the past, and yet I wasn’t able to take that first step toward the life I knew I wanted. I had to learn to trust myself, and to trust the little voice inside of me. I had to learn to close the gap between responsibility and passion, and discovered that it doesn’t have to be either/or. I can choose the life I’m meant to live and still be responsible. I can show up every day; give it 100% of my effort and be paid for my talents and abilities. I learned I want more than to just make a living. I want to make a life.

I’d love to know what those of you reading this blog post feel about you own turning point. Have you reached it? What was it like for you? Are you beginning to feel that rumble, that nagging restlessness that’s telling you a change is coming? Please share your thoughts and comments here as we explore then next 7 days of turning points.

___________________________________________________________________

Are you a woman executive whose career is beginning to wear like a tight-fitting pair of heels? If so, this call is for you! There is still time to register for my free one-hour teleclass: “Your Turning Point: The First Step Toward Your Extraordinary Life Waiting for You” scheduled for January 12, 2010 at 12:00 p.m. ET/9:00 a.m. PT. The only thing you need to commit to is 60 minutes of your time, and I’d love to have you be a part of the conversation and the journey.  You can learn more by following this link: http://www.evelynkalinosky.com/yourturningpoint.

A recent survey of midlife women conducted by More magazine revealed some interesting (and not surprising) results. When asked to define the most important aspects of a great job, in addition to a good salary and benefits, midlife women told More they need:

• Meaning – to feel that they’re contributing positively     98%
• A job in a growing field with a bright future                          89%
• A high level of freedom or control                                            87%
• A job that’s appropriate for a woman over 40                     79%
• A chance to work a flexible schedule                                      73%

I know these elements are certainly essential to me. One of the main reasons I took the leap to become an entrepreneur in midlife was to fulfill many of these same outcomes, although my career path is a bit different than the norm, since most of it has been based on doing work that enabled me to feel I was contributing positively, and that generally took priority over salary and benefits. As I’ve gotten older I’ve decided that I need more of a merging between money and meaning, and have learned that it’s possible, even necessary, to have them both as front line goals.

When I say the results of the survey aren’t surprising, it’s because this is what I consistently here from my clients and other midlife women I talk with when it comes to what they want in a career at this stage of their lives. In our younger years it’s understandable that the focus might be more on the financial aspects of getting ahead. Climbing the corporate ladder or navigating any organization requires focus and tenacity in order to reach the pinnacle of success. There’s no shame in that. These are honorable goals. I think what happens, though, is as we age into our 40s and 50s our goals shift. They become more expansive. They become about more than just ourselves; they become more about how we relate to the world around us, and how we can take what we’ve learned, what we’ve built over the years, and create a lasting legacy. It’s that “search for significance” I tend to write so much about.

Many women reach a crossroads in their 40s and early 50s where career alone is not enough to sustain them. They’re professional life is starting to feel like a tight pair of shoes. It’s no longer fitting them and the life they want to lead. They are searching for something more. For some that means travelling a totally new path; for others it means finding a way to reconnect with their career in a way that is more meaningful and more heart-centered.  The reasons may vary, but the need is often the same: to merge money and meaning in a way that enables women to achieve a more sacred kind of success.

It can be a painful place to be, and there are often painful questions that need to be asked such as: When did I let my life become not my own? When did I lose touch with myself? How can I be so financially successful and feel so personally bankrupt? While it might feel like that old song “Is This All There Is?” I know – having been there – that it isn’t. There is so much more. There’s a life that has you bounding out of bed with enthusiasm; a life where you control what you do and how you do it; a life of balance, power, passion, and purpose. 

There’s an authentic you showing up for that life; a you who uses your one-of-a-kind voice, abilities, and talents; a you who hasn’t checked one single part of yourself at the door; a you who has explored your core and has tapped into your unlimited wealth. And there’s your own personal vision for your sacred success: the kind of success that makes a difference in the lives of others; the kind of success that merges money and meaning; the kind of success that creates purposeful work and a lasting legacy. 

One of my favorite quotes is by George Eliot who wrote: “It’s never too late to be who you might have been.” Ladies, who do you want to be on this next journey? 

***Because this is such a driving force in the lives of so many midlife business women, I’ve put together a free one-hour teleclass:“Your Turning Point: The First Step Toward Your Extraordinary Life Waiting for You” that’s scheduled for January 12, 2010 at 12:00 p.m. ET/9:00 a.m. PT. The only thing you need to commit to is 60 minutes of your time, and I’d love to have you be a part of the conversation and the journey. If this feels like something you’d like to explore, you can learn more by following this link: http://www.evelynkalinosky.com/programs-and-services/1238.

While working on developing products and services for 2010, it occurred to me that I needed to ask a number of questions of the women I serve or hope to serve before I can create a telecourse, e-book, or any other product that is spot on. So I began to do just that, and have spent the past couple of months talking with women all across the corporate spectrum about their pain points, their challenges, their goals and passions. I wanted to get a better handle on what ignites a fire in the belly of a high-achieving, soul-driven midlife woman, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Everyone I talked with was wonderfully open, unreservedly frank, and touchingly vulnerable.  While these women may have taken any number of divergent paths as a result of choice or circumstance, there are a number of places where these various paths intersect, and when standing on that sacred ground, their voices sound particularly unified.

As a general rule, successful career women engage in an ongoing inventory of their lives, their values, and their priorities in order to make sure these areas are integrated and aligned, and to make the necessary adjustments when they are not, but midlife is a time when that level of evaluation and reflection becomes increasingly essential.

Many of the women I spoke with commented on this kind of self-reflection and on their desire to combine both money and meaning to live a life rich in significance.  For some women, that means reflecting on whether or not their current career can meet them where they now live in terms of their evolving values and desire to create an optimum life.

“Is this all there is? I ponder that question every day since I turned 52. One the one hand, I love what I do. On the other hand, I’ve had this nagging restlessness the past several years – this subtle itch that’s telling me there has to be something more.”

 “It’s not to say that what I’ve been doing these past 25 years didn’t have significance for me, but my needs have changed. The goals I had in my 20s and 30s are not the goals I have today. I’ve met those – achieved those – and what I value has evolved over the years. Now it’s time to align these values more closely with the kind of work I do. To do that means branching out in a totally new direction.”

 “I am a child of the 60s. We started out with a lot of idealism and a belief that we could make things better in the world. What I’m seeing now is a lot of younger people in their late twenties, early thirties, who are seeing that in themselves, too. There’s a spark there that I relate to and I feel it’s important to keep that spark ignited so I can continue to make a difference – something I’m not so sure I’m doing in my current career.”

 “If I am really honest with myself, I know I’m just not performing at my peak level any longer. To admit that is frightening to me, but at the same time it challenges me to step up my game or step off and into a new arena.”

 “I literally woke up one morning and realized I’d been doing this for 25 years. It’s not that I haven’t loved what I’ve done, but I just can’t imagine myself doing it for the next 25 years.”

Over the course of his research, psychologist Erik Erikson emphasized the importance of having a sense of authenticity and integrity in later midlife. He found that the growth of the personality in the 40s and 50s is built on a heightened concern with the meaning of life and the process of taking stock, resilience in the face of setbacks, and greater self-acceptance.

There is a deeper sense of the core self, with fewer illusions and a beginning appraisal of where career and life has taken a woman. This re-examination is as natural as it is inevitable, and it often begins by asking questions and seeking answers from her internal world as well as her external world.

The questions a woman may ask herself are some of the same questions I asked during my recent conversations with various career women. As a favor to me, but more importantly, as a favor to yourself, take a break; make yourself a piping hot cup of herbal tea; sit down somewhere quiet, somewhere private, and allow your mind to consider the following: 

• What are the top 3 goals you most want to achieve?
• What are the top 3 things you love about what you currently do?
• What are the top 3 things that aren’t working for you, or that you’re not actively addressing?
• As a high-achieving, soul-driven woman, what is it that ignites that fire in your belly?
• What is the 1 thing you feel is holding you back from living your most optimum life?

After you’ve spent some time thinking about these things, I’d love for you to share your answers here as part of this blog post. Let’s continue the conversation we’ve started and see where it leads us. We’re all on a journey of discovery, and all roads lead to a more sacred kind of success…

For women, the second half of life brings with it many career choices and questions. For some women, continuing in a current career doesn’t fulfill personal, spiritual or financial needs as it once did. For others, re-entering the workforce has become a necessity due to the changes in the economy. In either case, a ReCareer may be the answer. What is a ReCareer? According to Dr. Richard P. Johnson, nationally renowned expert on maturing adult development and founder of ReCareer, Inc. it is: “Personally authentic work that feeds your mind, your heart, and your spirit.”

Women at midlife who are “seekers” want something deeper out of life. They want more personal purpose, more meaning, and want their efforts to align more closely with their core beliefs. They seek a more authentic way of living. To these women seekers, who may be 45, 55, 65 or older, age holds no meaning. What does hold meaning for them comes from work and interactions that renew their life purpose, revitalize their passion, reignite their soul, and reinvigorate their inner desires.

One of my closest friends is a seeker. She was courageous enough to listen to that persistent voice inside her that said she needed to take a new career path. For the past several years she has commuted back and forth between the home she shares with her husband in Pennsylvania and her apartment in New York City where she runs her own executive coaching business. She was in her mid 50s when she made this change.

Largely because of seekers like my friend, there has been a fundamental shift in how we perceive getting older. Previous assumptions about life’s second half are becoming passé as a new set of beliefs are giving birth to what it means to live optimally. Aging is no longer viewed as a forced march down a path of decline and constriction, a path that narrows the older we get. The path we’re on now is one of expansion, with an accent on gaining new wisdom, and discovering a new authenticity and significance greater than anything previously experienced.

Certainly the goals of working over our lifespan have changed. Our former jobs provided a financial foundation. They paid the mortgage, put the kids through school, and got us through the daily expenses of living. All of this was necessary, but for many reasons women are now searching for something more; something that gives rise to that still small voice within longing for achievement of a different type – something that feeds their very being.

There are relatively few, if any, clear cut directions for women in midlife who are seeking that blending of career and life passion, so how do they begin this ReCareer journey? The first thing is to commit to a personal assessment, a personal excavation of sorts. A ReCareer represents much more than a set of skills and functions, it’s a woman’s personal response to her inner call; it’s her investment in the mission of her life. A ReCareer determines much of a woman’s total environment: physical, social, mental, psychological, and even spiritual arenas of living.

There are 5 essential competencies that women need to tackle before they can successfully launch themselves into a ReCareer. This journey of discovery will bring them personal fulfillment as well as meet their individual needs, and put them solidly on the path to ReCareer success:

ReCareer Identity: is defined as the degree to which women derive a personal sense of identity and definition from their work. How much of their personal identity, their unique definition of self, comes from their career? In addition, it’s important to look at attitudes, beliefs, and feelings women hold about themselves and determine if they are still true or if they are self-limiting. It’s also important to construct a personal definition of their potential ReCareer (new career), and to assess each of their formerly held positions in terms of skills and functions performed, and any personal feelings generated by these positions.

ReCareer Self-Assessment: helps women identify their ReCareer values, interests and skills. Do they know their inner values, motivated skills, and most cherished interests well enough to accurately translate what’s truly best for them in their ReCareer process?

Transition Hardiness: The definition of “hardiness” is the ability to be adaptable and flexible – two qualities that are critical to successfully engaging in Recareer life change. Women need to determine if they have developed the necessary inner qualities of hardiness: commitment, control, challenge, and connectedness which will enable them to better achieve their ReCareer goals. By looking at past career and personal life experiences women can assess these qualities and work on those areas that may need shoring up.

ReCareer Success Perception: looks at women’s personal and career worlds and how well they can perceive the events in their career and personal life as self-enhancing and self-affirming. That’s done by uncovering and analyzing the successes women have achieved in their personal and career life to date. Success perception is the foundation of a positive self-esteem. Without a positive self-esteem, women are denying their innate power – the energy that calls them to their ReCareer Success. It’s important for women to define what “success” means to them, and to ask themselves if they have successfully clarified their unique formula for ReCareer success.

Setting ReCareer Goals and Making ReCareer Decisions: The purpose of this focus is to help women establish ReCareer and life goals that can assist them in pursuing a clear ReCareer direction. To do this, it’s important to look at all of the life arenas: work, family, relationships, self, leisure, and spiritual to assess how well women exercise solid decision-making skills and what areas they need to address in order to formulate the most compelling ReCareer goals and bring these into reality.

When Brenda retired from her high-level corporate job at the age of 57, she didn’t know what to do with herself. She got up each morning at 6:00 a.m., as she had done for the past 26 years, put on a suit, ate a quick breakfast, and slipped out of the house as she’d always done. Only now she had nowhere to go. For the first few weeks she wandered around aimlessly, not able to talk to anyone. Starbucks became her home-away-from-home as she spent hours each day at a table in the corner by the window watching the world go by around her.

A member of the Baby Boomer generation (women born between 1946–1964) Brenda is part of a tribe of women who were the first to enter the professional world in large numbers, and are the first to encounter the hazards surrounding retirement. Defining themselves largely through their careers, they have challenged traditional models at every stage of their lives, and are now being challenged by their own negative stereotypes about retirement.

The decision to retire means the end of a significant chapter in the lives of professional women who often hold a strong attachment to the social status and identity they derived from their careers. A recent Ohio State University study reported that professional women may have a tougher time adjusting to retirement than do women who hold jobs customarily thought of as non-professional. According to the study, large numbers of women who worked in professional occupations reported feeling a sense of loss once they retired: a loss of their corporate identities, and a feeling of reduction in their social status, as well as a loss of the daily social interaction that work provided.  

In addition to the loss of their corporate identity, many women believed that over time they were forced to give up much of their self in order to be successful in the corporate or professional work environment. In some corporate cultures, pure unbridled creativity is considered a negative, and as a result women sometimes temper their creativity in order to not be seen as lacking business acuity. Spirituality and a desire to contribute often get suppressed as well. This creates an imbalance and a loss of confidence for many women as they come to the end of their career and aren’t sure who they really are anymore. They need to reclaim other dimensions of the self they lost in order to move forward. Left unchecked, these feelings can spiral into depression, disconnectedness, and a sense of isolation.

To deal with these feelings of loss, professional women can focus on these 5 key action strategies:

1.       Grieve: For women who identify themselves primarily through their corporate or professional identity, they experience a type of “death” when they retire. They need time to mourn the loss of their corporate identity, but also the losses within the self that have gone underground to survive or succeed in the corporate world. Women need to be able to experience this loss, and their family and friends need to support them as they go through the various stages of grieving.

2.      Excavate: Once women go through the grieving process they can then begin to excavate those parts of the self that were suppressed or diminished over the years due to the demands of their career environment. This unearthing of long dormant parts of themselves can then be reintegrated, creating an opportunity for more balance.

3.      Explore: In addition to uncovering long-dormant aspects of their personalities, women need to explore new self-images and new self-identities. They need to question key truths about themselves:  Is this who I really am? Is this really true for me? How can I redefine this next stage of my life? They need to question the very idea of how they develop a new identity without their job, their title, and business contacts. It’s not an either/or proposition, and women can choose to continue their professional work even into retirement or start out in a whole new direction.

4.       Network: Loss of social interactions can be devastating for women who have relied largely on their work environment for such daily connections. It’s critical to build new networks following retirement.  Women can develop these networks through volunteering, remaining connected to the professional organizations they belonged to prior to their retirement, and through creative outlets such as book clubs, writing groups, yoga or other areas of interest where women can build new relationships.

5.      Exit: The traditional retirement no longer applies in today’s world. There are numerous alternatives available for how and when women choose to retire and what that retirement looks like.  Women can:

• Create an exit strategy that allows for gradual lessening of professional responsibilities over several years leading to retirement.
• Take a sabbatical – women can step off the fast track to rethink life and the direction they want to take.
• Become a consultant or work part-time rather than leaving their current profession completely to allow for development of other facets of self.
• Balance work and creative play.
• Combine work and volunteer opportunities. 
• Engage in a “working retirement.” More and more women are seeing employment as a lifetime commitment. It’s likely that women do and will continue to identify themselves more closely with their work roles and will want to continue to work in some capacity. 

I turned 50 this past December, and guess what? My life isn’t over. I didn’t slide down that slippery slope of aging I kept hearing about. If anything, the most amazing thing happened. I woke up. I have morphed into my authentic self  like a butterfly emerging from  its cocoon. I was as surprised as anyone to experience this awakening, since I believed much of the rhetoric that abounds about decline, depression, and despair being hallmarks of aging.  I felt that angst in my 30s, but throughout my 40s and marching into a new decade I began to feel a different mantra struggling to the surface. This mantra said “You are not who you were, only older.” It wasn’t until I turned the corner on 50, however, that I let that mantra break free with all the strength of a gale force wind.

I began to seek out other women in midlife to find out if I was the lone wolf experiencing aging as a rebirth. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I found in talking with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond is a collective commonality. I found that, like me, they are happy being where they are, and have no desire to go back to any of the earlier stages or decades of their lives.  Suzanne Braun Levine talks about this very thing in her book “Fifty is the New Fifty.”  She writes: “The assumption is that youth – or at least younger – is the ideal state and that given a chance, no woman in her right mind would relinquish it. I have found the opposite to be true. Many of us are delighting in rejecting that backward-looking mindset and focusing on (to paraphrase the song from The King and I) ‘the beautiful and new things I am learning about me day by day.’  The range of things to learn about ourselves is now as wide as it hasn’t been since we were adolescents. So much about our bodies, our thinking, our relationships, and our approach to the world is under review – by us for a change.”

When you look at the reality, midlife and beyond is longer than any other stage of life. My mother is 92 and still kicking, despite two broken hips that have relegated her to a wheelchair. If I share my mother’s longevity genes, I have another 42+ years of life to live – way longer than childhood, adolescence or early adulthood stages. That’s a tremendous amount of time to simply endure, to simply exist.  Newsflash: I have no intention of simply existing, and neither do my midlife soul sisters, most of whom, like me, can expect to live another 25-30 years or more.  Our mothers and grandmothers may have felt “the change of life” meant their lives stopped changing, but for today’s midlife and beyond women, that meaning is no longer a fate acompli thanks to the women’s movement and our willingness to rewrite the book on aging.

The real challenge to this stage of life, as I see it, is to get to know ourselves in this new context. Who is this person who declares, “I no longer care what others think of me,” and means it?  Who is questioning the meaning of her work, and the nature of her relationships to see if they support who she is now?  Who is waking up to the wealth of possibilities, and is willing to tackle a new and totally out-of-character experience just for the fun of it?  Who, despite understanding that life and death are not just words any longer, keeps moving forward? 

The struggle is to learn which parts of ourselves are true and authentic, and which parts are conditioned responses based on “faulty” messages we may have received when we were younger.  For me, these “faulty” messages said that what I had to offer was my physical appearance – not my intelligence, not my compassionate nature, not my curiosity, and quirky sense of humor – and even that offering wasn’t  “good enough.”  That baggage has dogged me year after year, but the more I challenge it, the more I realize that it has nothing to do with reality – it has nothing to do with who I really am or what I have to offer. I wasn’t capable of knowing that, of owning that in my 20s or 30s, and just began to grasp it in my 40s. That’s why I can say with complete candor and honesty that given a pill that would transform me back to age 25, I would not take it. Yeah, right, you say.  Skeptics abound, I’m sure. Who wouldn’t want to be younger given the chance, but for me, going back to who I was at 25 means living the life of a people-pleaser, a caretaker lacking enough self-worth to recognize my gifts and maintain boundaries. The truth is, there is no magic pill that will transform us back in time, and we don’t need one. What we need is to live the stage we’re in, and to be willing to keep growing. Nothing makes us older faster than standing still, than stagnating.

That knowledge has empowered me enough to become an entrepreneur at age 50, and I work with other professional women 50 and over to create a midlife and beyond that’s as unique as their fingerprint. All the roads I’ve traveled have led me to where I am today. The lines on my face are reminders of these roads (though hopefully a little less weathered).  I know that my path is not anyone else’s path, despite that collective commonality I mentioned earlier. Each of us cuts our own unique trail through life. I also know that who I am today is not who I will be in 10 years, in 20 years. I will not be the same person, only older, but will continue to embrace the evolutionary process that is a fundamental part of aging.  And although the path I cut is uniquely my own, I’m sure my midlife soul sisters will keep me company along the way.