Crisis avoided

Midlife is one of those times that seem to sneak up on me. When I was young it seemed a long way off, but all of a sudden it’s arrived. I didn’t plan it, it just happened. I arrived at midlife with a wife, kids, house and business and although I really enjoyed my business at one time and there was nothing wrong with it as such, in fact most people who saw it would have killed for it. I work at home, make good coin and I get to create interesting projects the way I want to with a lot of artistic license, I can even delegate off the things that I don’t want to do, what could be missing?

…but there was something missing.

I was finding that I was increasingly focusing on the negative, the stuff that I could not control, to the point that I was just putting out fires, things that would have once been a challenge or that I would have easily breezed through, suddenly became an issue, something to complain about. I really didn’t care anymore.  Consciously and unconsciously I started doing things that sabotaged my otherwise successful business until one day I went for a walk and came back to announce to my wife that I quit, I’m not doing this business any more, I need a change. As this was our source of income, not surprisingly my wife was a little concerned.

This was the beginning of my pity party and the beginning of my midlife quest. I spent a year or so trying to figure out what it was that I wanted to do with my life, this seemed like it would not be hard to do, there’s a whole world of things to do out there, right!!! But I kept finding dead ends and even more reasons to get stuck and to add to my gloom. At this point there’s nothing like boring my friends with my slump into the pit and expecting them to help fix it for me and give me the right answers. What I was really saying is that I didn’t want to take responsibility for my life anymore and someone or thing should fix it for me.

I started to ask around my friends and found that a lot of them were in a similar palace to a greater or lesser degree and this is where my Midlife Quest began. I concluded that there are a lot of other people in this world who have come to the same place and are looking for a place to move forward and so I thought that maybe a midlife quest might be in order to rekindle my passion for life again and hopefully to help others to come along with me.

All quests require a direction and after a year in the dumps I knew that was not the direction I wanted to go. It’s interesting how “We attract that which we do not want”, but not surprising as I kept focusing on all the things that where not working for me and kept getting more of the same. I needed a new direction so I made a choice to feel health, happy and whole again, to feel a rich passion for life and create a new reason for being on this planet. I realized quickly that this could be overwhelming and that I may get stuck before I even got started and so I implemented my first strategy.

Take small steps to achieve greatness – I decided that my first strategy was  to do little things, things that I could accomplish with ease. I had some bits and pieces that needed to be done, like phone calls, five minute fix-it jobs  etc.  By doing little things I started to achieve great results and have the feeling of success again.  I can aways do something small and feel great about it and get an immediate feeling of success to build on.  By taking the direction or destination that you want to go towards you can always break it into  little steps that do not take long to achieve and with that one degree of separation greatness can be achieved.