Reached your midlife career tipping point yet? What is it and what to do if you see it coming?
Did I drive my career into a rut overnight? Hell no! It happened slowly over a couple of years of low-level dissatisfaction.
Like a slowly-dripping tap.
I don’t really remember when it started but I certainly remember the point at which I decided that enough was enough…the point at which I’d reached my midlife career tipping point.
Sometimes careers in our 40s and 50s slowly descend into something that we didn’t mean them to be. We can avoid thinking about it and avoid taking action, until we hit our midlife career tipping point
A personal story that fills me with shame
It was on a cold Tuesday evening in October, just after my 42nd birthday.
I’d done the commute to London on the early train leaving home the moment our lovely nanny arrived.
11 hours later on returning home, I ushered my young daughters upstairs to bed immediately, speed-read a story, speed-sung a lullaby and ended up ordering them to go to sleep because “Mummy has an important call to do now!”
They didn’t complain and did everything in their power to make me happy. My shoulders have slumped just remembering it.
What was that important phone call? I was interviewing a Finance Director for a UK -wide search which I was leading in my head-hunting role.
We all have crap days. I wish I could say that this experience was a rare occurrence but it happened on a regular basis.
I experienced working-mother guilt leaving the office earlier than others and needed to prove (to myself more than to anyone else) that I was still good enough at my job by working in the evenings.
As it turned out, that particular FD was perfect for the role. I, on the other hand, didn’t feel anywhere near perfect.
I had priorities questions in life.
I had inspiration questions at work.
I had work fulfilment questions.
And I had begun to have life fulfilment questions.
That Tuesday was the day I reached my own personal tipping point.
That experience and the emotion of shame formed my midlife career tipping point
A "Tipping point" and why it's relevant to mid-life careers
Malcolm Gladwell in his book called The Tipping Point describes the phenomenon as “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”.
He uses it to describe the point at which an idea, trend or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire.
I see the career change tipping point in a similar way.
The midlife career tipping point occurs when the wealth of evidence to make a change outweighs the mass of evidence to stay in the same role, career or profession full-time.
After interviewing over 100 successful career changers in their 40s and 50s, for my book, one of the first patterns I discovered was that they all reached a tipping point in their previous careers where making a decision on priorities was required.
A now or never moment.
There was almost always a tipping point at which their work became so unsatisfying and made them so unhappy that they felt compelled to do something about it.
Some of the quick thinkers who had begun their thinking process a little earlier described their tipping point as the point at which their new idea became so appealing that they simply felt compelled to change direction.
Either way, they all hit a midlife career tipping point.
How doing unfulfilling work impacts us
Unless something dramatic like a surprise redundancy or exits occurs, being in a career-rut in our 40s or 50s can feel like a slowly dripping tap of dissatisfaction.
When you feel stuck in a career that isn’t fulfilling, it ever-so-gently ebbs the joy out of your working existence like a slowly-dripping tap.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
We all react in different ways
Some can zone out from the low level annoyance of a career rut’s dripping tap and continue to do good work without thinking too far ahead and live for holidays and weekends. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Some find a way to quickly turn off the annoying tap and either change jobs within a company, move to a new company or re-train. (This occurs more often during the first ten years of their careers. Once your career is more fully established, your life has often been established at a similar rate. This makes midlife a harder time to turn off the annoying tap without material consequences.
For others, the annoying drip becomes ever so slowly louder and ever so slowly more powerful over years - while we put our career happiness on the back burner to prioritise paying mortgages, nursery/school fees and the family holidays (needed to recover and give us the energy to go back to face the nagging drip, drip, drip).
But dripping taps and career ruts don’t fix themselves magically…
Sometimes the “fixing” of career ruts and drips gets outsourced (re-structuring/re-structures/closure of divisions).
This can have profound impacts on the individual who has been hearing the midlife career drips for a while.
Sometimes, someone else is brought in to solve the dripping tap problem (company take-overs/acquisitions/mergers).
It appears that feeling stuck and doing work that is unfulfilling to us is very obvious to those around us, even if we don’t admit it to ourselves.
That said, I’ve known many successful professionals who were exited from their company under a range of circumstances who (after the luxury of time and an adjustment of mind frame!) were quoted as saying:
“It was actually the biggest opportunity of my entire career.”
But many of us keep ignoring the dripping tap until the message becomes deafening or until there is some sort of crisis in our personal lives which forces us to take action.
These crises, in my experience, often come in the form of redundancy, divorce, parental illness or personal health scares.
My granny was right – a stitch in time saves 9 - meaning that if we could catch our careers before the tipping point and grab them by their throats before we hit rock bottom/break/get so stuck that it makes us feel sad, things might be a great deal less stressful.
If we could lift our heads up and understand that we can design and test a back-up plan for when the inevitable happens, BEFORE it happens.
So, what can you do when you feel that your midlife career change is approaching tipping point?
If I had known my mid-career tipping point was coming, I’d have done so many things differently.
I see no other way than to think deeply first, then take one action which breeds many more. Here’s what I recommend:
Figure out what it is you want your work to do for you and why it isn’t doing it now
Figure out what it is specifically that you do better than anyone else (I call these your Superpowers - read more about them here)
Using the information from Step 1 and Step 2, design possible ideas that would allow you to get paid for using your unique assets.
Understand what’s stopping you & do one small experiment.
Analyse that experiment in detail.
Do another small experiment with tweaks from Step 5.
Continue forever.
There is simplicity in re-designing your career to suit you but there appears to be lots of ways to do it.
But this is the way that I have found to be most successful.
With more fun and more excitement.
Two ways to work together to bring more joy to your work.
My signature programme - and my best value programme (I love it so much I consider it to be my third child)
It’s called The Fierce Emporium
And it’s been designed exclusively for midlife professionals to design their way out of their career rut, before it reaches its tipping point.
It’s a DIY programme with group support.
Here’s an article to help you decide if it’s right for you…or not.
More individualised career design support
If you’d like a little more individual attention and/or to move super fast - The Personalised Redesign programme offers full access to The Fierce Emporium - but with one-to-one support from me.
You move as fast as you’re ready to move.
With me in your back pocket guiding you. An accountability partner. A partner-in-design. To keep you on track, to challenge you to go further and to cheer you on when the going gets tough.
Here’s some unedited reviews of this programme.
These programmes give you options to design your way out of a career rut and they’re all a heck of a less painful that the way I did it!
Grab a copy of my book on the secrets behind successful career change on Amazon.
If you’re interested in knowing the secrets behind successful (by “successful” I mean “happier”) career change - even at our age, grab a copy of X Change: How to torch your work treadmill.
It’s based on 100 interviews with midlife professionals who designed their work differently and discovered a freedom and fun in work that they didn’t believe possible.
