Power Tips for a Winning Midlife Career Transition

Attitudes become our realities. At midlife, if you believe your age is a reality, you’re probably right. If you believe it’s a disadvantage, you’re definitely right. Midlife is an incredible time to invest in the future. Rich with experience, at the height of your professional expertise, you’re positioned to put all your talents, interests and abilities together for the most productive and fulfilling years of your life. Take this advice and power on!

1. Create your brand: Differentiate yourself in the marketplace by creating a brand that is recognizable, repeatable and outcome based.
2. Expand your horizons: What have you learned today? Whom have you met? How often have you laughed? What risk did you take?
3. Get in fighting shape: Are you ready for the competition? Would you bet on this horse?
4. Define your market niche: So, ok, you can do most anything, but where do you excel? Where do your talents, interests and skills meet?
5. Invest in people: We are herd animals by nature, and we are inherently integral to each other’s lives. Nurture your relationships; create new connections.
6. Fish where the fish are: “Cruising the net” is probably the most popular, and least effective, way of finding a great new career opportunity. The courting ritual that goes on in front of monitors is like guppies in different tanks posturing in front of the glass. Interesting but probably not going to produce new guppies. Get out there and meet people face to face.
7. Get a Coach: Would you put a winning basketball team out on the floor without a Coach? Isn’t your life worth as much as a ball game?
8. Create a power resume: Forget the nonsense of a 1-2 page resume. If you’ve got it, flaunt it! It’s your sales brochure, the owner’s manual for a cutting edge product.
9. Bury the past: No one hires a wounded bear, so move on. Save the recriminations, pain and regrets for your journal and then burn it. There’s too much possibility in the future to waste emotion on the past.
10. Get with it! There is a time to cogitate, a time to ruminate, a time to meditate, but make it quick. Exploring new options is exactly what you should be doing at mid-life. This is a beginning, not an ending and you don’t want to miss the party.

“This time, like all times, is a very good one,
if we but know what to do with it.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leaders are Always Originals

Leaders are where you find them. The new leadership challenge is to make sense of the context. Deal with the hand you’re dealt. The key is to identify the people in your organization that others are following and bring them into the fold. Are they leading where you want them to go? Do they understand your goals, the reality of the marketplace you are facing? Can they see your vision? Are they on your team or creating an alternate world you may neither recognize nor approve?

Leadership comes in all sizes and shapes and it is no longer defined by title, expertise or experience. It can appear in the most unexpected places. Keeping the focus of everyone in your organization on a vision can require the flexibility of a chameleon, the charisma of a rock star and the wisdom of an ancient oracle. What are we poor mortals to do? Start with recognizing the multiple viewpoints and goals of the people you are leading and bring them with you in the journey.

Whether leaders are born, made or evolve on the spot when the situation demands it, there is no question command and control is out and persuasion is in. It’s all about identifying and developing talent and that requires subtlety. It is more about vision than task, collaboration and respect than hierarchy. The faceless leader who issues edicts from an ivory tower with a moat around the castle to keep naysayers out and who surrounds him/herself with sycophants will see the talent drain away and the company fade into oblivion.

10 Rules to Become a Career Superstar

The corporate ladder is gone, lifetime employment a quaint blurb in the history books. Scary as this may seem, it’s also enormously freeing to know who you are and what you do is your choice. A number of years ago, I gave a keynote address to the International Association of Career Management Professionals (now ACP) in Montreal, where I encouraged us all to partner with our clients to become Career Entrepreneurs, taking control and running our careers like a business. The rules I created then seem even more important now.

Rule 1: See yourself as a product or service worth buying

Rule 2: Identify your life’s work

Rule 3: Focus on outcomes; don’t limit your identity to a profession, title, or skill

Rule 4: Collaborate; develop strategic alliances

Rule 5: Brand yourself

Rule 6: Learn something new every day

Rule 7: Become a child again; laugh, play, skip and climb

Rule 8: Find the sunshine in your life and spread it around to others who could use a ray or two

Rule 9: Ask “Why not?” more often than “Why?”

Rule 10: Live your life in cycles rather than linear stages; keep learning, growing, playing and working at every age.