Same Recipe, Different Results: Why Midlife Career Change Goes Wrong

I’m a fan of The Great British Bake Off. And last week, I watched every contestant make a total mess of the 'flatbread and grapes' technical challenge.

Since I’ve made flatbread a handful of times, I thought this one looked far too easy. Yet Paul Hollywood called the results “probably the worst technical challenge in 17 years” of judging.

Same recipe. Same ingredients. Same tent. Wildly different results.

That’s exactly what worries me about what I’m about to share with you.

It’s a simple formula for something enormously complex: a lifetime of satisfying work.

I’ll also show you why it’s harder to follow than it looks. And introduce you to four people who each wrestled with a different part of it.

Because simple isn’t the same as easy. And if you’re over 40 and wondering whether your work could feel better that it does currently, you deserve to know both.

No one taught us how to choose happy work

No one ever gave us a recipe, a formula or a method for designing work that feels good. There were no school lessons called “How to do work that excites the hell out of you.”

All we could do was learn from the people around us, who were mostly working in a very different world of work.

So many of us took the first job that was offered, in the first industry that seemed ‘okay’. Or we followed our parents into something that felt like a sensible starting ground. Or we took a J.O.B. to earn money, and twenty years later woke up from a career coma. (I talk about this in my TEDx talk.

The good news is that work you love doesn’t have to be left to chance. It can be designed. It just needs a framework.

So many of us want to do work differently. The catch-all term for that is “career change”.

Some people think you can simply think your way through a career change. You can’t.

Others believe you just need to be brave and take a leap of faith. You don’t. (In fact, that’s crazy talk unless you have a generational trust fund!)

I’ve read thousands of psychology studies and run my own work happiness research for almost a decade. [ADD: one striking finding from your research]. And, for simplicity, I’ve condensed it all down to one little diagram.

I offer it only as a big picture starting point, a way marker if you like. Not the entire map.

The Forever Formula: A recipe for career change that works

The Forever Formula for a life filled with satisfying work.

3 elements to combine and one to extract.

A lifetime of satisfying work comes from three ingredients working together while at the same time minimising a fourth.

1. Your Superpowers, used daily. These are the things you do uniquely well, in the way only you do them. I’ve only met a handful of midlifers who could describe their Superpowers in detail. And I’ve met plenty who are using skills they’re good at but that drain the life out of them.

2. A Superproblem that matters to you. This is a problem for other people that you genuinely care about solving. Many of the midlife professionals I work with are paid well to solve problems that no longer matter to them.

3. Enough £. Satisfying work has to pay enough to be sustainable. Passion without income is a short-lived experiment (think of the starving artist).

Here’s the catch.

Ace one of them, and you’ll feel satisfied for a while.

Crack two, and it’s still short-lived.

It’s marrying up all three where the magic lies.

You need all three for sustainable, long-term work satisfaction.

The soggy bottom: your personal Kryptonite

And there’s a fourth transformational ingredient that is often overlooked. Every baker knows a soggy bottom can ruin an otherwise beautiful bake.

4. The fourth ingredient in the forever formula for satisfying work is your personal Kryptonite: the people, places or processes that drain your energy (or your soul) dry. Without it your work-life ends up damp, soggy and doughy.

Our kryptonite is different for each of us. Some of us can thrive in situations where others struggle to survive.

If we stand for a while in your personalised Kryptonite - it's a short road to burn-out or a rickety path to being bored to death.

So the full forever formula is: use your Superpowers daily, point them at a Superproblem that matters to you, earn enough, while avoiding your Kryptonite as much as possible.

Why this simple recipe still goes wrong

In the same way every baker in the Bake-off tent can have the same recipe and still produce very different results, many other factors come into play when we're designing work we could love for forever.

Here’s a starter list of what gets in the way:

Inner stories: limiting beliefs, fear of failure, fear of success, shame, anxiety, under-confidence, imposter stories and a very human comfort found in our familiar situation.
Life circumstances: grief, divorce, elderly parents, young children, redundancy, illness in the family, personal health worries, money concerns, lack of support at home and societal pressure.
Everyday friction: busyness, distractions, boredom, lack of time, lack of sleep, lack of energy, unclear values, unclear focus, unmet emotional needs.

None of these means you can’t do it. But it’s why so few people manage it alone, and why a formula on its own is never enough.

If you’d like to find out where you are right now, you can complete the Joy at Work quiz before you read on.

4 clients demonstrate the four parts of the Forever Formula

Here’s what the formula looks like in real life. Each of these people was stuck in a different part of it.

Superpowers: Keira, early 40s

Many clients arrive knowing their current work is wrong, but with no idea what they need or want next. Keira had an unspoken itch, a fearful sense that the only way out might be to escape to the circus (or some other radical career change). But as happens so often, when she discovered her Superpowers and started bringing them to her current work, new doors began to open.

What did Keira do instead? Read Keira’s story

Superproblems: Iona, mid-40s

Some clients arrive feeling stuck because they have too many ideas and can’t narrow them down. It’s just as painful as having none. They carry the burden of confidence in their potential to make a difference, if only they could narrow the field of potential problems to maximise their impact.

“I felt like I could absolutely do anything. But I could never make a decision on the right thing to focus on, and that lack of direction and focus had begun to weigh very heavily on me.”

How did Iona find her focus? Read Iona’s story

Finances: Cillian, early 50s

As the bread-winner with three young children, a frustrating senior leadership role and only fleeting moments to think about his future, Cillian couldn’t access a clear vision of a role that might suit him better without bringing financial failure.

He needed a methodology to work through to reduced his fear that he would end up stuck in the exactly same position in five years!

“I need to keep the financial show on the road, but I’ve realised it’s also important to work on my future personal satisfaction. One keeps the other alive.”

What did Cillian decide? Read Cillian's story

The soggy bottom: Kara's Kryptonite

Kara had thrived, and felt passionate, in her industry for twenty years. Then a toxic new boss became the catalyst for a work-life make-over, and it rocked her world.

“I’m not sure whether I want to stay and fight, accept my fate, or get the heck out of here!”

What did Kara decide? Read Kara’s story

Where to start

You don’t need to fix everything at once. Here’s an idea. Start by rating yourself from 1 to 10 on each part of the formula:

How much of my week uses my Superpowers?
How much does the problem I’m solving matter to me?
Does my work pay enough to feel sustainable?
How free am I of the Kryptonite that drains me?

The lowest score is usually where to begin.

Then, don’t bake alone.

Design the remainder of your work life with someone who’s been stuck, learned all the slow and painful lessons and researched the globe to create a proven method to design your work to suit you, for as long as you choose to work.

Step 1: Complete the Joy at Work quiz: Check out your joy readiness score across the major influencers of joy at work.

Step 2: Book a call: 30 mins, I review your quiz results, we talk through what's keeping you stuck and I recommend your next step.

Back in the tent

The Bake Off contestants didn’t flop because the recipe was bad. It was a simple recipe. It just wasn’t an easy one.

A lifetime of satisfying work is the same:

The forever formula is simple: your Superpowers, a Superproblem that matters, enough earnings to live the life you choose and no soggy bottom caused by Kryptonite.

Making it work in your own kitchen, with your own history and your own circumstances is the hard part.

But it can be done, at 45, at 55 and at 65. And you really don’t have to do it alone.

The Forever Formula - for a life-time of satisfying work.