Plan For Success
By Jane Glenn Haas
Reinventing yourself at midlife is a popular concept for women, well articulated by my colleague Suzanne Braun Levine, author of “Inventing the Rest of Our Lives.”
She talks about reawakening or discovering passions to sustain what she terms “second adulthood.”
But there are different levels of “reawakening.”
My friend, Lois, spends her free time stimulating the minds of youngsters who might otherwise never see a museum, go to a play, even visit the zoo. It’s important for her to spend time with these children for many reasons – probably the most obvious the fact that her only grandchild lives many miles away.
All it costs Lois to “reinvent” herself was time.
Others feel compelled to take a deeper plunge. And, let’s face it, successful professionals can dive deepest. Like Sue Parks, who launched her own company in 2003 to support her passion which is walking.
As a high-level corporate executive with Kinko’s, Parks was often traveling. Between airplanes and hotels and those endless meetings, she walked. She walked, she says, to keep fit and to keep sane. And while she walked about 5 miles a day, she wished she had more age-appropriate workout clothes and a special pedometer, maybe even a walking buddy.
The result was WalkStyles, an online firm (www.walkstyles.com) that recently started up a free, online service to form walking clubs to network some of the 72 million Americans who say walking is their favorite activity.
A recent Time article and an Orange County Register article both featured Parks as a successful professional who chose to leave the corporate world to follow a dream.
It’s a walk-away not everyone can manage, Parks, 50, admits. Only the young, or the successful middle-aged, can manage it.
“I think it’s easier to follow your dream when you are without many financial obligations – so early in the career before the mortgage, the kids, the lifestyle is set,” she told me. “Or after you are financially secure that you know you can last some specified period of time. An important point is that people don’t want to go backwards in lifestyle!”
If you decide on a midlife walk-away, Parks cautions not to burn any bridges. “You must feel confident in yourself that if you needed to go back to the corporate world, you could,” she says.
When do you walk? Maybe when there’s a natural transition in your company, like a reorganization or a new business strategy. The truth is, millions of boomers want to make a difference, says Mary Furlong, author of “Turning Silver Into Gold.”
“We want to still be a player and we have to teach ourselves to play again,” she says.
But she warns that finding and following a passion isn’t for everyone.
First, there are some people who are perfectly happy with their lives and their work. They regard all this chatter about “reinvention” as so much nonsense.
Then there are those who can’t afford to think outside the box they are in because of the life constraints that hem them in, financial or emotional..
Ah, but nearly half the nation’s self-employed workers – 7.4 million – are boomers, according the U.S. Department of Labor. And that figure is expected to climb as people retire from one career to another, lose their jobs or simply want the independence and flexibility of working for themselves, AARP reports.
Sure, it’s risky to start a business at any age. Statistics say only 44 percent of new businesses last four years.
Furlong cautions passionate boomers to do their homework, assess the marketplace and their own financial capabilities before launching a new venture.
Boomers know they have thirty “bonus” years, Furlong says. Years of extended good health and energy thanks to modern medicine.
If they have the passion, and the funds, who not try a start-up venture?
When they left college, boomers vowed to change the world. Somewhere along the way, they got distracted by jobs, families, responsibilities.
For millions of us, reinventing ourselves at midlife could be the most exciting career of all.