Perspective
The Beyond Midlife Perspective is a different way of thinking about your life.
It’s about integrating Continuity & Change.
It is a belief system that life-well-lived is worth having.
Are you leading your life or trailing life?
When you were growing your career it was often challenging to strike a satisfying balance between your work and your life.
Now it is all about your life.
Everything you choose to be and do now expresses you and who you really are and is guided by your closely held values. You can have the freedom to choose your own experience and let more living into your life and life to your years.
Meaningful living brings sense of fulfillment that comes with acting on your values and the responsibility for your choices so you create the future you’re wishing for, even when you feel uncertain and less in control.
Living a life-well-lived requires you to take both big picture strategic view and also tend to the small details and gradual steps, while you continually course-correct along the way.
What’s your way of life-well-lived?
Shifting into post-career life is like learning a new skill. It takes time, practice, and being kind to yourself while you gain new skills and experience.
The Beyond Midlife Perspective is a non-linear process that takes shape over time.
You can start by becoming a great investor – in learning, exercising, spending time with people you care for. The return on your investment will be in creating new pathways to getting more into life.
And how would you decide where to invest your time and energy so you get the greatest joy from all your choices?
Every day you’re busy with many things. Some of your activities need to be routines that are consistent and repeatable (such as exercising, sleeping, or healthy eating), so you can focus on everything else that’s more strategic, explorative, and adaptive to change and ambiguity (such as deciding where you want to live, opting for medical procedure, or updating your advance directives).
Over time learning how to invest will pay off. You’ll be shifting with dynamic ease between these two interdependent parts:
Routine (providing consistency, speed, efficiency, repeatable results).
Everything else (bringing aliveness, explorations, interest, spontaneity).
Inside each of these 7 dimensions of well-being there is an element of continuity and an element of change; and they need each other over time to support your well-being.
Put together, they shape a big picture view that helps you focus, design, act, test, and update your choices for your future, so you can maintain your emotional awareness, physical fitness, and cognitive engagement.
Beyond Midlife Perspective has your well-being at its heart.
And what about your life perspective?
Throughout your life you have been developing your own principles, beliefs, and ideas about what life is about.
Now that you have arrived at this life juncture it is once again time to pause, look back, look around, look inside, and look forward.
Now could well be the most emotionally rewarding part of your life. And you’d still want to keep the continuity of your social relationships, healthy lifestyle, learning and growing, and giving to your community.
Some aspects of life are not optional and longer life has its own challenges. Are you holding on to ideas and values that are no longer supporting your highest priorities? Would you consider adding new perspectives?
What’s next for you could emerge not only from what you see in your own rich life perspective but from The Beyond Midlife Perspective as well.
Is anything you’ve read here raises either unrest or curiosity in you?
If so, do have this conversation with me. Together we can work on leveraging the duality of continuity & change in your life so you can assert what truly matters to you, and align your values and actions with the life you wish to live.
