Facing a Mid-Career Crisis? Now What?

In my last post, I shared the three signs we may be facing a mid-career crisis. If you resonated with those signs, this post shares a path forward that can lead you to a breakthrough.

The First Step Out of a Mid-Career Crisis

The first step in facing such a mid-career crisis is to admit the challenge. Many executives who hit a mid-career plateau have the hardest time with this first step. And this makes sense. After all, they are experts with in-depth content knowledge and experience. They also have been highly successful at resolving very complex problems within their business. The challenge they are facing is not something most successful executives want to admit openly. However, when one encounters a mid-career crisis, it can be confusing. This confusion comes because successful people are in the habit of collecting data from external sources to solve their problems. And a mid-career crisis requires a different kind of research.

A mid-career slump requires an individual to engage a deeper part of themselves. It asks the executive to find is a more profound, authentic meaning in their work. One can only discover the definition of this meaning within themselves. There are no external sources of information that can solve the issue. Thus, the first steps are to acknowledge the crisis and then turn inward to collect the necessary data that allows one to re-calibrate their career.

Exploring: Stage One of a Breakthrough from a Mid-Career Crisis

As indicated above, the first stage of moving from crisis to breakthrough takes into account this inward search.  It requires earnest reflection.  The fundamental questions of this inquiry are:

• Who am I?
• What is my true nature and how can I bring this forward to generate greater value?
• Why do I want to show up to work each day or what is my purpose at work?
• What is most essential for me to experience in my work?

By answering these questions, one understands more what drives and motivates them.

The Answers You Seek Lie in Wait Within You

So how do we answer these questions? First, by realizing the answers to these questions are within you. The answers are merely waiting for your inquiry. I have never had one of my clients fail to answer these questions when they follow my frameworks. And each time they did these reflections, they were energized by the answers. There are other means to collect this internal data. For example, if you have been fortunate enough to have gone through various assessments in your career, you might revisit those results as a means to answer some of the questions. There are also additional resources out there to help one gain greater clarity in our purpose as well as one’s critical motivators. However, in the end, answering the questions above is the most direct route. Once you have this clarity, you can move to the next stage.

Embodying: Stage Two of a Breakthrough from a Mid-Career Crisis

Now you have achieved clarity around your unique natures, purpose, and values.  Next, you must create a transmission point so that we can turn this clarity into a practical reality. This central transmission point is vision. Creating an image of the future you desire to generate is critical to moving into a breakthrough. By crafting an engaging vision, you are committing your attention to greater impact and meaning. From here, you can build intentions and set priorities that foster the fulfillment we seek. You can also confirm that your aspirations match your current role.  As you do that, you can determine how we can align your current position with your deeper desires.

To fully embody the vision, you must also engage in practices, just as a world-class athlete does when they are aiming to rise in their sport. The goal of such methods is to strengthen your focus so that the vision is paramount above all else in your attention. For example, once my clients are clear about their future image, I suggest they do two things:

• Review the vision daily and imagine what it will be like as it becomes reality
• Regularly set one daily or weekly intentions that take definite steps to turn the vision into reality.

Recent Neurosciences Research Confirms the Value of This Practice

Such methods leverage the power of our neurology. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have shown that what we most intensely place our attention on grows. As our focus sharpens on what we care about most, our subconscious automatically begins to look for creative ways to bring it into reality. As we set our intentions, we are telling our bigger selves that we mean business. We become more interested in being aware of habits that both support and distract us away from our aspirations. This approach allows us to navigate our work days so that we engage in ways that are most consistent with our deeper desires. As we build momentum in this way, personal fulfillment and confidence at work grow because we involve habits, more consciously, that most support us. As we do this, we naturally begin to engage our work colleagues in a new way – leading us to the third stage of a breakthrough.

Engaging – Stage Three of a Breakthrough from a Mid-Career Crisis

At this point, you have sharpened your clarity and focus around the kind of value you desire to generate moving forward in our career. From your reflections and through setting clear intentions, you now begin to experience higher energy and fulfillment at work.  Your reinvigorated passion will naturally lead to a different kind of engagement with your boss, team, peers and other stakeholders. Your goal now is to integrate our vision with our current role fully. The process towards such integration will require you to make new commitments with those that most support you in turning our vision into reality.

At this stage, you want to consider the missing conversations you must have to shore the vision and build stronger alignment. Engaging in some of these conversations may take some courage. However, if we are energized by your vision, mustering such courage will not be hard. The key is to engage in those conversations that will make the most difference in both your ability to create value and forward what you care about most. As you do this, you begin to see the fruits of our vision unfolding. In my former client’s experience, this leads to more rewarding and impactful relationships with their boss, teams, and key stakeholders.

The Value of These New Conversations

As you engage in these new conversations, a more productive level of engagement activates.  This is because as you engage others with more presence and passion, you open the door to more innovative ways of operating.  When this happens, you not only enhance your level of value creation and productivity, you become a model for others to do the same.  A new level of leadership starts to expand.  These realizations often lead to a feeling of sincere gratitude that you had a mid-career crisis.

Conclusion

In short, the way out of a mid-career crisis to breakthrough involves our willingness to turn our attention within and ask essential questions. The goal of this inward attention is to discover more deeply what we desire to generate through our work. Next, we must engage the power of our imagination to craft a vision that will direct our priorities and goals. From here, it becomes natural to involve others more authentically and courageously so that we can turn our vision into reality and continually innovate our approach and value creation as an executive leader.

If you are interested in further clarity around this process, follow this link to access a case study that shares how one executive achieved a breakthrough in his mid-career crisis. The case study also reveals in m0re detail the system I engage that generates breakthroughs for my clients.