The Balanced Leader Podcast

Beyond the Midlife Crisis: How Leaders Evolve as they Age with Aneace Haddad

• Rob Hills • Season 2 • Episode 38

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What if I told you that the changes you're experiencing as a leader in your 40s and 50s aren't signs of decline, but the emergence of extraordinary leadership superpowers? In this eye-opening conversation with executive coach Aneace Haddad, I explore the fascinating science behind midlife leadership transformation. Aneace, who exclusively coaches leaders over 40, reveals how our brains literally rewire during this period—creating new capabilities for wisdom, emotional empathy, and presence.

We dive into the three "winds of change" that reshape midlife leaders, discuss why the traditional leadership development approach fails senior executives, and explore how the shift from seeking purpose to embracing presence can revolutionise your leadership effectiveness. Whether you're currently navigating this transition or approaching it, this episode will completely change how you view the second half of your leadership journey. 

Connect with Aneace: https://aramyss.com/

For the full show notes and transcript, click here.

Find out more about Rob Hills: www.robhills.com.au
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Rob Hills LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-hills/



Welcome to the Balanced Leader Podcast, where we tackle the ultimate challenge for leaders, achieving peak performance without sacrificing your wellbeing. If you're ready to lead with clarity, energy and impact without burning out, then you're in the right place. I'm Rob Hills, your leadership and well-being coach, and in each episode, I'll give you the insights, tools, and strategies that will enable you to thrive. Today, I'm diving deep into a topic that hits close to home for many of us. The profound transformation that happens to leaders during midlife. My guest is Anise Huddud, an executive coach who specialises exclusively in working with leaders over 40. Anise believes that the physiological changes that occur to us in our 40s and our 50s aren't limitations. They're actually the emergence of powerful leadership superpowers. We explore the three winds of change that reshape how we lead, why the shift from purpose to presence is so critical, and how embracing this transformation can make you a more effective leader than you've ever been. So sit back and relax as we dive into today's episode. Welcome, Anise, to the Balanced Leader Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Rob. Wonderful being here. Mate, before we jump in, can you tell the listeners a little bit about your background and how you came to do what it is that you do now? So a little bit about my background. Geographically, I'm in Singapore. I've been here 18 years. I was in France for 20 years before that, Italy for a while. Originally from the U.S., but I left 40-something years ago. I started as a techie. I was a programmer in my early days, my early career, became a tech entrepreneur, built a payment software company in the south of France, grew it to 30 countries, sold it in 2007 when I turned 47, and promptly embarked into a midlife crisis as one would around that time of that age, and discovered that I liked people more than computers. So I found that what I was most proud of in my company was the people that worked for me that went off and became CEOs, CTOs, CFOs of other companies. And I felt that that had a much, much stronger hold on me than all the technology we had developed, the patents I had filed, all of that stuff. So that pushed me into doing what I do today. So that's been 15 years now. I've moved into executive coaching, C-suite coaching. Most of my work is with C-suite teams. So how can the team function better as a team? How can they be more effective? All that kind of stuff. So it was quite a big transformation late in life. Yeah, it's really interesting there. You mentioned the midlife crisis. And maybe that hit harder for you because you just come out of a massive deal where you sold your company and get to a point where you go, what's next? Has that shaped where you are now and what you're doing? Yeah, it's the awareness of what we go through during that period. And it's not always, it doesn't always appear like a midlife crisis. It often appears as some kind of deeper reflection that's happening. And it can be anywhere from the mid-40s to the mid-50s. These kinds of changes are happening. And then around three years ago, so I'm 65 now, and I discovered, over the years, I discovered that there was something with coaching younger people under 40 versus people over 40, that I was noticing some qualitative differences in how they think, how they respond to the things, how they emotionally engage with the world. I found, for example, under 40, they would often say, well, what would you do if you were in my position? What would you do? You've been here before. You've done this kind of thing. You've had a board. Now, what would you do? Over 40, I would never get that kind of a question. It's far more reflective. So at one point, I just drew a line in the sand around three years ago, and I said, I'm just going to specialize in over 40. So I decided to no longer coach anyone under 40. And I'll occasionally make exceptions for that. But that allowed me to go a lot deeper and really do a lot of the research. I discovered, this is my second book that came out last year, Soaring Beyond Midlife. I discovered that there are neurological changes that are happening in the brain at that time. For example, our prefrontal cortex slows down. It starts to slow down. So we forget where we put our car keys. We forget our child's name or whatever it is. And that starts to get kind of scary. But at the same time, the two hemispheres are talking more to each other. So there is an ability to notice patterns that we might not have noticed as easily a few years ago, a few years younger. So, and those are the kinds of patterns that we're starting to see at that age. And we're going, well, hold on, do I really want to be where I'm at today? Is this what it was all about, getting here? What's next? Those kinds of things. So it's a very natural period. I just love that transformation. It's like a second adolescence without all the acne. Oh, I love that analogy. That's great. And I think for myself, I've probably been through that as well, asking myself, you know, am I doing what I want to be doing? Am I heading in the right direction? In fact, I just had an episode recently about, have you put your ladder up against the right wall, which is a reference in Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And I think people do get to this point and start looking around and going, is this right? Do you think we have maybe more agency at midlife to be able to say, no, I'm not in the right place. Maybe I do want to make a change. And that's why this construct around the midlife crisis happens. Yeah. So I've identified what I call three winds of change in midlife. This is what I write about in my book. Now, I'm not looking at this from the general lens of the general public. I'm looking at it from senior executive leadership. So the three winds of change that I'm looking at is wins that really impact leaders. There are other things happening in midlife that I haven't really looked into in detail, but it's more universal. So one of them is physically we're changing. Obviously, our bodies are changing. We're noticing that we put on weight faster than we used to, and it doesn't come off as quickly. Our stamina is lower. We can't go out drinking one night and then have a board meeting the next day if we want to be effective. We discover these things that used to work just a few years ago, they're not really working anymore. At the same time, we start to become aware that there's a high likelihood we're going to want to be active and busy and physically active much, much longer than our parents and grandparents did. So there's a, at the same time, there's this realization that I'm mortal and my body is aging, but I may have a runway that's far beyond 65 years old in terms of being active. So that's the, I call that the physiological wind of change. The next one is the neurological wind of change. It's just the one I described very briefly a little bit ago. There's all kinds of other stuff. Another area that's fascinating in the neurological change is our cognitive empathy starts to go down. So we have trouble understanding rationally and logically somebody else. But our emotional empathy goes up. So we find ourselves in these weird situations where we look at someone and we say, I don't have the faintest clue why you're doing what you're doing, but I get you. Emotionally, I get you. So it's a funny thing. And if we ignore that and we go, I excelled, I got here at this CEO, C-suite level, because I was brilliant logically and rationally. And if we start to get brittle about that, then we can get kind of hard, hardened. If we can let go of it and say, okay, that's just my brain changing, let me see how I can bring that kind of emotional empathy into the room and trust my people to have all the logical stuff that I might not understand as well as I used to. So it's a very different space. The third one that I really love is that, and this is a generalization, but with many, in our day and age, many of the people in their late 50s or so, their kids are growing up and leaving home. And it's a generalization because I know people who don't have kids or whose kids are much younger. But it's quite a large number of people that are going through that. And they're going through something very similar because they're going, what's my value as a parent now? They don't want to listen to me anymore. And that was my value the last 20 years. I would tell them what to do. Now I can't. They don't want to hear it. What's my value? And it's a very similar thing to what they're struggling with in leadership, especially with things changing so fast as we have today. So yeah, I love that. I love that period of life. And if people can lean into it and surf it rather than succumb to it, there's some beautiful transformation that happens. Yeah, it's interesting because I've heard you talk about the parallels between parenting and leadership before. And it's something that really hit me. And my son is 18 and a half. And I've noticed that change of my ability to parent him has changed. And I struggle with that. Particularly because he doesn't respond the same way that he used to. So it's a great analogy for leadership, though. As we move into the second half of life and we start changing, we become less of the technical expert and more of the coach mentor. I think this is a really interesting transition period for leaders. And I think people, if they are parents, should perhaps look at this and go, oh, I can see why maybe that's happening at home. And this might prepare me for what's happening in the workplace as well. Yep. There's so much intertwining with what's happening at home and what's happening at work. Sometimes what's happening at home is lagging behind what's happening at work. So then people can learn. They can say, well, okay, I see how I've shifted at work. Let me bring that shift to how I'm dealing with my teenager. More often than not, I see the shifting happen the other way, where people learn faster at home because it's such an important role and it's such a, it's something that people really hold valuable. And then at work, they're still treating their people like they were young teenagers. And then it's just an aha moment that they go, oh, I see what I'm doing. Okay, I'll stop that. I know what it is. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's interesting. So you must have coached hundreds, if not thousands of people now. Can you talk to us a little bit about what happens during that transition from the earlier parts of leadership, which I imagine most people go from technical expert to leader, and that's a whole nother transition. But then when they go from leader to a younger leader, and I say younger with inverted commas here, I don't want to upset anyone, to potentially an older leader, there's a bit of a shift. What happens in that shift? And how do people respond the best way? So there's some generalities that I see, especially in the C-suite. When someone arrives at the C-level of an organization and they've come up through the ranks, they've come up through their technical leadership expertise, it's very hard to shift out of that mindset and take on a mindset of my voice counts across the whole enterprise. And I have something valuable to contribute across the enterprise, not just my function and not just the way my function impacts the enterprise. So somebody comes up through marketing or somebody comes up through a technical area, they will speak up at a C-suite meeting when it's their area. And they'll feel a bit inhibited to speak up in other areas. Or they'll speak up if their area has an impact on those. But really, when they get to the C-suite, it's not so much, it's no longer for their technical expertise. It's their ability to really understand the whole enterprise completely in different ways. And so having that shift happen is quite transformative for a lot of people. I call it radical ownership, is that you've extended your sense of ownership beyond your function to encompass the enterprise. What I love about the overlap with midlife is that we tend to become, our sense of ownership of our communities grows. So whereas earlier on our sense of ownership really was our family, our role, what we do in the world, at some point it starts to shift and we start to feel empathy and ownership toward a larger group. And that can appear in different ways from different people. Some people go to church more. Other people get involved in community things. Other people contribute back or whatever. People find ways that they connect with something bigger than they did in the past. So it's exactly the same kind of thing that can be tapped into. And it's extremely valuable for an enterprise because it's much easier to address complex issues when the top team is really sharing deeply. There's so much wisdom at the top team. It's not just in their individual functions in terms of knowledge. It's that wisdom of things that come out. So that's a powerful one. That's a difficult shift for a lot of people. There's another shift in terms of purpose, where the whole question of what's my purpose, Simon Sinek, what's my why? I've discovered that all of that thing is kind of a younger leader's search. It's in our 30s and 40s. We're wondering, what's my purpose in life? Where am I going? What am I doing? What do I want to do next? All that kind of thing. What's my why? And these are very, very wonderful questions to explore younger, but that starts to dissipate in our 40s and 50s. And the best thing that I've seen that purpose question converted to or translated to or traded in for is presence, is finding that my, actually, if I'm just present with my people, present with the organization, present with my clients, present with myself, there's a lot that happens that gets unlocked because there's so much other wealth in the organization, so many other assets and capabilities in the organization. So it's kind of a trading in of purpose for presence that's happening in that timeframe. That's interesting. Do you think there's a correlation between the happiness U-curve and this moving from moving from purpose, I've got to, you know, I'm really struggling, I'm trying to find something, to then perhaps just going, I accept this and I'm going to sit with it. And maybe now that's going to allow me to have less angst and perhaps be a little happier. Yep. I love that you brought that up because if you look at the U-curve, the bottom of it is like 47. Exactly, which is my age right now. That was my age when I sold my company. Big changes are coming for me then, maybe. Yeah, no, I've shared that U-curve with people quite often, and most people aren't aware of it because it's such a specialized area. But it's fascinating that that study has been done around the world by all kinds of different researchers. They try to disprove it to find there's other stuff going on, but it keeps showing up over and over again. It comes down and then it goes back up. And we become more present. We become more, even without training, without going to classes on how to be more present, how to be more happy in your later years, even without all that, it's just kind of happening naturally. We've been through so much by that time that we start going, okay, this too, this will pass. I have a saying I like to use that at that age, a leader, something goes wrong, big fiasco, a big failure happens, and the younger people are all freaking out and the leader says, nobody died. Let's get pizza. There's a real shift in attitude that allows that to emerge at that time. Yeah. Yeah. And is that perhaps, again, as you mentioned, that leaders have been through quite a few things? I know when I first started with the AFP, Australian Federal Police, I noticed that there was a lot of change happening. I'd come from a very stable environment in defense where it was all very planned out, you know, multiple years in advance, whereas the AFP was very reactive. But I noticed whenever a new change happened, I was very alive to it. I was like, oh, this is happening. I felt like Henny Penny, you know, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Whereas as I became, as I got older, I suppose I became, I'd seen all of that happen time and time again. And you kind of like, well, here we go again. This is just another thing. Is that, is that what's happening there? Yeah, I think so. I think so. And then we start to compare it to other stuff and we go, okay, well, in the larger scheme of things, this really isn't as big as when my child, this happened to them, or my wife, this happened to her. And you start putting things in perspective more and you go, okay, nobody died. Let's get pizza. Yeah, I love that. And I suppose there's a sense of wisdom here. And I know Chip Conley talks about this, the modern elder. There's this sense of wisdom as we get older, that we've been through more things, that we've experienced more things. We kind of have a little bit more perspective. Not to say that young people don't, but over time, you have more experiences where you've got more things to draw from. So I think that wisdom starts shining through for people. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I love Chip Conley's work. There's a lot of stuff that he's doing. My area is the same area, but very specialized in leadership and very senior executive leadership. Yeah, no, wisdom is definitely involved there. One of my favorite books is The Wisdom Paradox by L. Conan. He's a neuroscientist. He wrote this almost 20 years ago, I think. And that was when I first was introduced to these neurological changes that happen at midlife. He was searching for what is it that can we see wisdom neurologically? Can we see those changes? What's changing in the brain that allows this concept of wisdom to emerge throughout time all over the world? So that was a formative book for me. That's where I learned about the prefrontal cortex slowing down, the two hemispheres talking more with each other. Since then, we've discovered more things like the cognitive empathy going down while the emotional empathy increases. So they're a lot more studied. We're learning things now that we didn't know five, 10 years ago. Yeah. And it's funny. And I often say this to people, as I get older, I realize I know less. I'm not necessarily, I'm learning more, absolutely, but the context is widening. And I'm seeing there's so much more information and things are changing. And I'm like, wow, like you've got to be open to what's happening because there's so many changes. Are there actual physical changes in the brain in midlife that actually cause some of these things to change? The empathy you talked about before, the wisdom. Are there actual physical changes in the brain parts growing or decreasing? Yeah, that's the prefrontal cortex slowing down. That's the logic part of our brain. And the memory, the short-term memory. So there are things that we forget more easily. It's the typical stuff that we hear about, that we see, that scares the hell out of us. That's prefrontal cortex. And again, the opposite side of that or the positive side, possibly as an evolutionary response, but this I don't know if there's proof on this, but it's possible that the two hemispheres are talking more with each other to kind of compensate for the prefrontal cortex slowing down. And that additional, that greater communication between the hemispheres, again, means that we can connect the dots, we can process emotions easier because we can connect, we can see patterns easier than we could have when we were younger. So all these things are coming up. It brings me back to actually when you look at the leadership frameworks, some of the big leadership frameworks, Jim Collins in Good to Great, he wrote about five levels of leadership and the very top level is something he called humility and iron will. Humility and fierce resolve are merged together. And he described that as being almost unattainable. He even wrote that maybe 1% of adults or 10% of people, a very small number of people could reach that level of leadership. And he didn't think it could be learned. He felt maybe it was innate. And then Keegan, Robert Keegan, who on adult learning, he wrote about the self-transforming mind. He also had five levels, and the self-transforming mind was the highest level. And he wrote that only 1% of adults ever reached that level. But it's very similar to what we're talking about. And then what I discovered was that both of them were in their late 30s and early 40s when they did their research. They hadn't gone through this process yet. Yeah, that's right. And then the more research I did, there's so much literature out there, leadership literature, all written by people in their late 30s, early 40s. They're missing this. They're not seeing this. So they're describing something that's extremely rare in our younger age, but which I believe is far more common as we age. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting and a fascinating thing to learn more about. And I'm sure it will sit with me for days and days to come. I also wanted to ask you about your book. So you're the author of the book, Soaring Beyond Midlife, The Surprising Natural Emergence of Leadership Superpowers in Life's Second Half. Can you tell us a little bit about the book, why you wrote it, and why a parable? That's a really interesting choice. So actually, there are two books. The one before that, The Eagle that Drank Hummingbird Nectar, that one was published in 2022. And the second one, Soaring Beyond Midlife, was published last year. Both of them are on midlife transformation with senior executives. The first one, The Eagle that Drank Hummingbird Nectar, is absolutely a parable. It's a fictional novel. It's based on my own transformation at 50. So there's a main character who's similar to me. But because I made it fiction, it meant that I was able to explore what I was going through in a more storytelling manner, and I didn't have to stick to the facts. But there's a good chunk of it that were things that actually happened to me. It was also a process that allowed me to kind of explore more universally what we go through during that period. But it's a first-person narrative. The second book, Soaring Beyond Midlife, is also with fables and parables and stuff, but it's structured more like a traditional, a little more traditional business book. It's in my voice as a third person telling the stories. And that one really was to go deeper into what is it. So that's where I explored the three winds of change. I identified what I call six midlife leadership superpowers that emerge that are fostered by these three winds of change. And that if we lean into them and we allow them to happen, then these six leadership superpowers really flourish. If we kind of resist the winds of change and we try to fight back against them and pretend they're not happening, these things get stunted and they don't necessarily come out. So that's, yeah, that's that book. It's all a sense of emergence. It's not here are 10 things to do. It's how do you let go of stuff from the past? We already know how to do that. We learn how to do that over time. But how do we become aware that there might be something in my leadership style that I want to let go of? Anyway, I'm not sure if I answered your question. I went off on a little bit of a tangent. No, not at all. That's great. Well, it's interesting. And I suppose I learn a lot sometimes by listening to people and making connections and then wanting to dive more into that. And as I was reading your book, and I'm not all the way through it yet, it piqued interest in different parts and it made me think, oh, okay, I see the correlation there for me. So I suppose that's where I'm interested. Is that why you chose that storytelling option to give people the storytelling so that they can then explore their own journey that way? Yes, absolutely. And interestingly, going back to the neurological stuff, our brains become more wired for storytelling and understanding complexity ourselves rather than someone telling us, here it is, this is the complexity. So as human beings, we're already wired for stories, but that even becomes stronger as we age. There's something about poetry that emerges as well. If you would notice that there was a whole chapter in the book on poetry, our brains become more comfortable with ambiguity and paradox as we age. We're able to hold the end of an equation easier, whereas younger, we want to resolve it. It's either this or that. Either I have a work life or I have life-life. Balance means I turn one up and the other down. It's 20% work, 80% life, or the other way around. It becomes very binary. And then as we age, we start seeing, actually, there's an and in there. Maybe I've got two knobs. I can dial up work and dial up life, and I can play with it a bit more. Our brains become more comfortable with ambiguity. And surprisingly, what I find really interesting is that poetry is all about paradox. So poetry processes, poetry exists with paradox. It's all ambiguity and paradox. And we love that when we're reading something in a poem and a word shifts and changes or the choice of a word gives new meaning to the whole thing. And our brain lights up and really enjoys that. So it's also a brain thing. If I was writing this book for, I don't think younger people might enjoy it as much. It's not telling them, here are the 10 things to do. Yeah. Yeah. Did you always like poetry or is that something that's evolved as you've aged? That's evolved. It's grown as I've aged. I'm not a huge poetry fan even now, but I'm finding that when I write things, I'm searching more for that kind of a poetic feel to it. The phrase that just lands differently because you've chosen a different word that's out of context, but that gives a lot of context. So I'm finding that that's more interesting to me. And the research I've done shows that with senior executives, that lands more deeply than a list of 10 things to do. Yeah, absolutely. What do you wish that all leaders who are approaching midlife or perhaps are already there understood more about what's happening to them so that they could become more effective leaders? I find myself in deep resistance to giving advice. And it feels like that's inviting advice. Okay. Is there another way that we could look at that then, perhaps, rather than giving advice? I trust that people are going to get there on their own just by living. So be more present, perhaps, and hold on. Yeah. And they're already doing that. They're already learning to do that. I have a term that I use I discovered, radically empowering presence. And I discovered it through coaching teams that there are times when if I question the team's ability to get through some mess that they're in, if I have any doubt as to their ability to get through it or their desire to get through it or their wisdom or anything like that, it'll screw things up. And if I have complete trust in them, my way of being in the room displays that without even saying anything, and they do get through it. So I guess the best advice, the only piece of advice would be to whatever you're doing that's creating more sense of presence. If you're struggling with your 18 and a half year old son and that's teaching you presence with him, fantastic. If it's going kayaking or swimming or meditating or mindfulness or whatever, fantastic. It's those things that help us really emerge more easily into our second half. Absolutely. I love that. And a big advocate of mindfulness, as people who listen to this podcast would know. So, and I do this every day, even though I've been practicing mindfulness for 25 years, 30 years. It's still something that I constantly try and just sit with and be present for. And it makes the world of difference. Yeah. Yeah. I did want to ask one related question. And because I have a background in learning and development and leadership development particularly, I'm interested in your thoughts, then, on whether we need to be doing something differently in the leadership development space for people in midlife and beyond. So it seems to be it's a one-size-fits-all approach at the moment, but could we change that maybe? And what would that look like? Yeah. Yeah, since I've come up through, this is 15 years now, I've been in the leadership development area and have done a lot of work earlier with up-and-coming leaders, high potentials, things like that. It's so different at the top echelons of the organization and so different in our mid-40s to 50s that I think there's a huge disservice that's happening by having this one-size-fits-all leadership approach. It's a top-down, let me teach you. There's very much a sense of teaching, imparting content, teaching things to people that worked great younger and doesn't really work anymore. There are things, there are topics that are skill-based that people need to learn throughout their life, but people in their 40s and 50s know how to go out and look for that. Yeah, and perhaps this is where executive coaching comes in, because it allows you the space to have deeper conversations and really focus on the areas of interest and perhaps not put those guardrails up you were talking about where it has to be clearly defined. Yep, yep. I'll see things like when I'm preparing a retreat for a C-suite, somebody, maybe the CHRO, maybe the CEO, they'll say, we need to mix things up and we need to define the small groups that the C-suite is going to be working in and make sure we mix people up that don't normally work together. And I'll point out how that type of approach and attitude is very counterproductive because it sends a message that I can't trust you to work together and figure out who you need to work with to develop a better relationship with. So I will do it for you and I'll create the small groups beforehand. And most people that I work with, they'll say, oh yeah, I get you. Okay, I'm infantilizing them right now by doing that. And then occasionally, there'll be a CHRO or CEO that really are adamant. And then I've managed to convince them to allow me to do it anyway. And the way that I do it, by giving agency to people to choose who they want to work with the most and choose someone that you don't work with a lot and you might have issues with, invariably they create the small groups that the CEO wanted to create. And then when they do that, I'll go off, I'll smile at the CEO and they'll nod because you give agency to people and they do what's best because they know how to do what's best. Yeah, absolutely. That's so interesting. Anise, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation, a really, really interesting topic. If people want to connect more with you and find out more about what it is that you do and how you're doing it, how can they do that? So the easiest place is my website, Aramis, A-R-A-M-Y-S-S dot com. So Aramis, kind of like one of the musketeers, but with YSS at the end, like an abyss. So there's a sense of adventure and charm of a musketeer, but the adventure of really going deep for the purpose of action and adventure and all that. So it's not just navel gazing. So Aramis, A-R-A-M-Y-S-S.com. Excellent. Amazing. I'll link that up in the show notes so people can find it easily. Thanks again, Anise. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Rob. Wonderful talking to you.