Ageing and changing - how not to stagnate

I remember when I was a young man how I simply assumed that my elders (and I when I got to a certain age) would be 'sorted'. They'd be emotionally calm and confident, with strong answers to the difficult questions of life. And keen to innovate.

Well, I was wrong. Age often brings stagnation.

If anything, maturity brings more complexity, and experience makes it harder to instigate and adapt to change. Here are some impediments and a stab at some answers. Check them against your experience and assumptions. 

Some of the experiences that lead to resistance to change in late career professionals:

• Loss of clear sense of identity as the professional persona drops away
• Accumulated unresolved griefs from being brave or 'pushing through'
• Consequences of hidden trauma in early life that created life rules that don't work
• Believing you already know more than you really do
• Shame following failures, wearing responsibility and fearing a repeat
• Death anxiety, making everything difficult to finish

By our 50s and 60s some of these nasties become real, simply because we've been living life and bumping into the world. We've been through intense events, suffered setbacks and weathered challenges because of the goals we've strived to achieve. And if we've been as busy as our professions expect, there hasn't been enough time to resolve the big issues. They may not even be named or known until we take enough reflective space to let them emerge - or receive uncomfortable feedback. 

These impediments can make late-stage careers (and life) a misery by shaping how we interpret the world and address new ideas. You can't shrug off the long-term deep-seated issues of life. They gnaw at us and without a good strategy, we find our youthful coping mechanisms don't work. 

So what's the remedy? 

1. Take time to redefine purpose

I've been saying this to my leadership clients for decades. Reflective space, an empty time with no required tasks, enables insight. It reveals links between past events and current feelings. They can then be addressed with a caring, better informed and rational mindset. This leaves us free to reshape our sense of purpose.  

2. Express the toughest emotions with self-compassion

The wisest people I know say the only way out of tough feelings is through them. Expressing the feelings as you give them freedom to emerge is intense - the intensity is, after all, what is frightening. But once expressed, often that is enough. Expression is resolution; that's why the arts exist. Do this work in private, to explore its depths. Do it with self-compassion, though that may feel alien to a committed self-sacrificing professional. Eventually you'll find a way to talk about the feelings without being captive to them. 

3. Face your mortality

Irvin Yalom, in his book on Existential Psychotherapy, and indeed in other important books such as Staring at the Sun, deals up front and centre with death anxiety. In his decades as a therapist and teacher, he found death anxiety was at the core of our distress. Facing mortality means grieving, but it leads to profound feelings of gratitude, awe and love. These are worth the effort. 

4. Let go of false identity

Professional life pushes us to put up appearances of invulnerability, expertise, emotional control and competence. The net effect can leave you in your 50s and 60s with no other handle on your identity. When your professional role falls away, who are you? The biggest trick, especially for men, is to drop the need for significance (and the toys that prove it) and relish being fully present to what's in front of you. Children help, as that's their starting point. Humility, imperfection and uncertainty bring the gifts of new growth, deeper connection and new pathways. 

There is no full list of the issues and causes we face in the late stage of our career. There is no perfect list of remedies. So why am I even writing about this? 

Working with senior professionals, sometimes looking over the parapet at the ending of a major role or even a career, all of these issues surface in some form. Growth is still wonderfully possible - Erik Erikson discovered that for himself after his seminal research on life stages. Life after 50, which for most of us is more than half-way, is confronting but also full of possibility. After all, a high proportion of new entrepreneurial ventures in Australia are started by people over 60. (According to the ABS: Nearly half (47%) of small business owners are aged 50 and over. This proportion has increased each Census year since 1996. 22% are aged 60 and over.)

Of course, I'm also interested in this stage of life because I've had to work through my own thicket of issues. I have a process that helps - the kind of thing I wish I'd been able to devise earlier and apply to myself. To work intensely with me individually or in a small peer group whose wisdom matches yours, apply to join the Continuation Protocol programs for late-stage professionals [HERE]. Or simply contact me directly for a zoom or in-person meeting. 

The Continuation Protocol is a structured strengths-based process to design the endeavour and the life at a major threshold, where you're expected to 'retire' or withdraw without making too much fuss. Continuation is an antidote to retiring into stagnation. 

Working through inner impediments to your life goals is hard work, that calls for intellectual as well as emotional courage. But the rewards, concrete and qualitative, are immense.