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The Midlife Mentors: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Midlife Mentors podcast with me, James, and today I am flying solo. So, Claire and I had a little chat, and we thought it might be good for me to talk through something that I've just started delivering once a month, which is called

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The Midlife Mentors: the second half session. So, I've been living this out. I did the first one at the end of July. It's basically a free online

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The Midlife Mentors: workshop coaching session, where I take… I take people through a kind of 10-minute

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The Midlife Mentors: framework around psychology, about why midlife can feel challenging, and then we throw it open to questions and discussion. Like I say, the first one happened in July, and there were some really incredible conversations in there. I thought the thing I talked about, because it does resonate, it's something we see time and time again with clients, is understanding

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The Midlife Mentors: Why and how we've drifted onto autopilot.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, this might be, does it sound familiar, that your life's starting to feel, like, there's nothing majorly wrong.

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The Midlife Mentors: But everything feels fine, or a bit meh. So, you're just feeling like there should be something more to it. You don't feel that fulfilled.

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The Midlife Mentors: Another way to look at this is to ask yourself the question. If nothing in your life changed in the next 5 years, if you just kept living in the same way, everything stayed the same, how would you honestly feel?

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The Midlife Mentors: Because that one's…

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The Midlife Mentors: sometimes a bit of a kicker for people, because we're very caught up in the moment, and living how we live now, and we're like, tomorrow I'll make the change, tomorrow I'll make the change, but if we actually allow ourselves to look forward and meet 5 years' time, my life looks exactly the same as it is now, are we truly happy? Now, if we are, great, fantastic. You probably don't need to listen on, but if you're like, you know what? There are things that are bothering me, there are changes I need to make.

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The Midlife Mentors: I wonder how I've ended up here. Then…

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The Midlife Mentors: this is an episode for you. And I just want to preface this by saying it doesn't have to be that life is not terrible, life's fine, life's even good, right? We've got good things going on.

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The Midlife Mentors: But, we just feel like something's missing, that there should be more. So it's, you know, not that our life is in crisis, we're talking, you know, everything's ticking along.

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The Midlife Mentors: We've got, you know, careers, partners, children, houses, holidays, but something feels missing.

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The Midlife Mentors: That feeling of, like, is this it?

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The Midlife Mentors: What else is there?

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The Midlife Mentors: And I think that's quite a natural way to feel at midlife, and I'm going to quote a bit of Jungian psychology in here later on as well, because I do love a bit of Jung. But how do we end up there? Well, like John Lennon said, life is what happens, and we're busy making other plans. And that is really well put.

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The Midlife Mentors: we have all these good intentions, we have the goals we're gonna achieve, but we get caught up in the mundane, the humdrum of life. We don't think, oh, I'm gonna stop living intentionally today.

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The Midlife Mentors: It just happens gradually. You know, we're focused on our career, the mortgage, raising the kids, bills, responsibilities, routine, making sure our partners are happy, and the years go.

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The Midlife Mentors: tick by.

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The Midlife Mentors: And even this year, how many of you have thought, oh, you know, I'm gonna… I'm gonna do that thing, I'll get that done by the midpoint of the year, and suddenly you're like, wow, it's August, how's that… how's that happened, and I still haven't done that thing I was gonna do?

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The Midlife Mentors: It's just the way life can be.

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The Midlife Mentors: And again, we need to have some compassion around that. We're actually programmed to run on autopilot. Our software, so our brain and our mind, I use those two terms interchangeably, is designed to make us run on habits, on scripts that we've inherited over time.

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The Midlife Mentors: So let's break this down. The first thing is, you know, what is the success script that you're operating from?

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The Midlife Mentors: And many of us don't even stop to think and ask ourselves that question, but often that script, we inherit it in childhood. It comes from our parents, from society, from culture, and it's very defined. School, university, career, promotion, marriage, house, children, retirement.

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The Midlife Mentors: And we're told this is what the picture of success looks like. And maybe that was even partially or wholly true for our parents' generation, the boomers, where they typically would leave education, go to a job, and then they would work their way up, stay there for life, and retire with a really lovely pension package.

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The Midlife Mentors: The world has changed. For many of us, life isn't like that. We've had multiple roles, we're probably still juggling roles, changing roles now. Pensions are probably something we're panicking about, if we think about it too much. The world has changed around us. But also, you know, nobody's ever stopped to ask.

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The Midlife Mentors: What does success actually mean to you?

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The Midlife Mentors: is that your definition of success? Or is it something different? And then overlaying that, of course, we've got

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The Midlife Mentors: status, comparison, external validation, keeping up with the Joneses, achievement, and that's always been there, it's part of human nature, and I guess it's what makes us very driven, so it can be a positive, but I'd argue that in the age of social media and false gurus, you know, we've got these…

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The Midlife Mentors: really, unrealistic expectations put at us. We're constantly told that what we have isn't enough, that we should have more.

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The Midlife Mentors: The… we need to be pushing towards this thing or that thing. When we get there, then we'll finally be happy. So, the first thing I want you to do is think about

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The Midlife Mentors: What success script did you inherit?

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The Midlife Mentors: And does that work for you? Because here's the thing, we don't have to operate from that script, we have the right to challenge it, and to rewrite our own script. So it may be, like, that worked for me.

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The Midlife Mentors: on the call… on the call I did, the session I did, we had some great conversations, you know, there were some guys that had gone, right, yeah, I'm gonna… I'm gonna go really hard at the start of my career, make as much as I can, sacrifice that time with family so that I can then move to something that's more fulfilling, more aligned with my values, later in life. Other guys are still, like, I'm still trying to juggle it, you know, do… do I…

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The Midlife Mentors: Invest in the repairs to the house.

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The Midlife Mentors: Do I go on a holiday? Do I do something else? What about my job security?

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The Midlife Mentors: So we're constantly walking this tightrope, and we have to find the balance that is right for us. And that will shift and change over time as well, with our environment, and what's happening in the world, and, you know, our immediate environment, and with our own sense of identity and our values.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, I'd encourage you to look at that. What would success look like to you? Is it that you've got that house, that car, that job title, or…

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The Midlife Mentors: Is it that I would spend loads of time with my family, I go on loads of holidays every year, and these things aren't mutually exclusive, by the way, it's not an either-or. You know, you can find ways to have all of those things.

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The Midlife Mentors: But often in life, we're making trade-offs. What I encourage you to start thinking about is, are you making the trade-offs according to your script success, rather than someone else's?

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, something else that's going on with our psychology is that success stops working, right? We get the achievement, we get the thing, we go, that promotion, I got it, and it feels really good… for a while.

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The Midlife Mentors: And then, suddenly, it's just normal.

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The Midlife Mentors: Same with salary, we're like, oh, boy, I got a raise, oh, amazing.

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The Midlife Mentors: then that level becomes normal. And this is something I hear all the time, by the way, you know, we often have, like, a figure in our head, when we get there, when I'm earning this much, I'm going to save this much, but then we get there.

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The Midlife Mentors: And it's like, I can't afford to save because now I'm spending more, and it carries on and carries on and carries on. Basically, every achievement becomes normal. This is something called hedonic adaptation, and it means that, you know, we go for the goal, but when we get there, we get that momentary satisfaction from it.

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The Midlife Mentors: But then it becomes normalized, and then we start looking for the next goal. So, I think a really good example for this is, you know, whenever we… that experience of getting a new car. And then you get a new car, and you're like, wow, this is… you sit in it, you're really aware it's a new car, this is really exciting, I've got to get used to the controls, how it handles.

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The Midlife Mentors: A few months down the line, you just don't even think about it. You get in that car, it's no longer special to you.

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The Midlife Mentors: So that is hedonic adaptation. That's a really good metaphor for it. So that's one thing. The other thing that happens is we have what we call the arrival fallacy. This belief that I'll be happy when.

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The Midlife Mentors: That happiness exists somewhere in the future.

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The Midlife Mentors: And we're all prone to this, again, human nature. We put things off, you know, oh, I'm gonna invest in spending time in the gym and getting in shape when I've got more time in my life.

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The Midlife Mentors: When I earn more, I'll be able to take more time off and be happy. When I lose weight, I'll buy those outfits and things. When I retire, I'll be… the thing is.

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The Midlife Mentors: What we're doing there is kicking

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The Midlife Mentors: our sense of fulfillment and satisfaction down the road. I'll be happy when this thing, when I get to this thing. Now, of course, what that is teaching us to do is not be happy in the present with what we have.

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The Midlife Mentors: So when we get there, when we lose that weight, when we earn that amount, when it's alright, again, hedonic adaptation, we get momentarily happy, then we're like, actually, I'm not happy. What's the next thing? What's the next thing? Because we're focused on the goal, rather than the journey and what we're learning along the way.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, also playing into this, you say all these interweave with each other, is our sense of identity. Who are we?

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The Midlife Mentors: For many of us, we'll take a role that's aligned with our career, our job, that'll be our identity, it might be caring for our family.

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The Midlife Mentors: But…

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The Midlife Mentors: At midlife, you know, those things change. Is our job as important? Have our kids grown up and left home? So what does that mean for our identity? Who are we now?

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The Midlife Mentors: And is who we are aligning with the values that we have now?

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The Midlife Mentors: And this is a really big part. Looking at values, I'm going to come back to that in a minute. I said I'd mention Jungian psychology, and here it is.

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The Midlife Mentors: Carl Jung believed the first half of life is about building our place in the world, but the second half…

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The Midlife Mentors: He's actually asking a different question.

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The Midlife Mentors: Who are you becoming? And he said, the afternoon of life must have its own program. And I love that.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, that might mean we start shifting from achievement to meaning, accumulation to contribution, proving ourselves to actually living our lives. And again, you know, we can see that goes hand in hand with our development.

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The Midlife Mentors: When we're younger, when we're teenagers into our 20s, we're researching for that identity, we're trying to prove ourselves all the time. But somewhere in midlife, we really know who we are. We've got that experience, that wisdom, we're comfortable with ourselves. That's of real value. What do you want to do with that?

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The Midlife Mentors: So… We've looked at the psychological pressures that have led you to this place where you are now.

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The Midlife Mentors: Again, I just want to emphasize that…

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The Midlife Mentors: what happens is we run on autopilot. It's the way we get it. Our brains are exposed to so much stimuli every second of every day, it can't process at all, so it makes inferences about things and runs patterns for us. The example I always use is brushing your teeth, you know? You get up in the morning, you go in the bathroom, you brush, you don't think about it at all.

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The Midlife Mentors: It's habitualized.

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The Midlife Mentors: But that happens every day at a micro level. Every interaction you have, I react like this, I react like this, I react like this. It's very efficient.

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The Midlife Mentors: And our system is designed to make us efficient, but efficient doesn't necessarily…

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The Midlife Mentors: equate to happiness, contentment, and where we want to go. So what we need to do is bring awareness to it and start being more intentional.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, the first thing is that, exactly that. Be aware, curious.

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The Midlife Mentors: Is this what I want?

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The Midlife Mentors: Where am I going? How do I want to show up in the world?

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The Midlife Mentors: And start directing your actions on that. Just be curious. Ask yourself the questions all the time. Values.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, when we're young, we're often quite sure of what our values are, and they inform our decisions, you know? Our choice of partner, our education, our career. But values shift over time, and it's okay for them to shift. So what matters to you now? When's the last time you actually did a values audit, and looked at your values? And sometimes when we feel unfulfilled in our life, despite having everything we thought that we wanted.

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The Midlife Mentors: It's because our values have shifted, but our life hasn't shifted with them, so we need to realign our life with our new set of values.

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The Midlife Mentors: Intention.

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The Midlife Mentors: And this is about, actually, you know, we've looked at awareness, so, like, what's going on in the situation? What are my values? Then intention is, like, how am I gonna respond here? How am I consciously gonna make a decision? How am I gonna act rather than react? Small changes.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now, this might look like taking action, right?

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The Midlife Mentors: Calling an old friend.

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The Midlife Mentors: finally going to the gym, carving out that time in your schedule to go for a walk, you know, at lunchtime, rather than staying at your desk, booking the holiday you've been putting off, saying no to something, you know, establishing your boundaries, saying yes to something that you were perhaps fearful of, having that difficult conversation. The whole idea here

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The Midlife Mentors: It's to start getting you to live your life by design, and be intentional about it.

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The Midlife Mentors: So when we're on autopilot, we have things like, we're busy, we're reactive, external validation, achievement, it's a default setting. We're always, you know, tomorrow is the day that I'll feel better, because I've just got to get through today.

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The Midlife Mentors: When we become more intentional, We're aware. How am I showing up in the world?

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The Midlife Mentors: We're deliberate. We know what our values are and operate from them, which means we feel more fulfilled. We know we have choice points, and we make conscious choices, and then listen to the feedback from them to inform our next choices, and we're very focused on today.

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The Midlife Mentors: Now,

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The Midlife Mentors: there's something I work on with clients called the future self, and it's that thing about looking ahead, right? I said at the beginning, like, if nothing changes in your life 5 years from now, are you going to feel happy or not? Now, we can leverage that, right? So, neuroscience tells us that our mind can't distinguish between

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The Midlife Mentors: Reality and imagination, if we make that imagination realistic enough, and we practice it enough.

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The Midlife Mentors: So what we can do is think about… Yeah.

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The Midlife Mentors: who I am, and world I've got to.

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The Midlife Mentors: That's who I am now. Everything I've done in my life has brought me to this point, so that's my identity. If I want something different for myself, I need to step in a different… into a different identity.

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The Midlife Mentors: So imagine yourself, two years down the line, Right?

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The Midlife Mentors: You close your eyes, imagine yourself two years online, like, how are you showing up in the world? What values are you operating from? How do people respond to you? What does it feel like when you're going about your day? We want to spend time there imagining that.

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The Midlife Mentors: And then we want to rewind back to now, and then when we're facing those choice points, like, how am I going to react to this? First up, we choose not to react. We think.

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The Midlife Mentors: What would my future self do? What would the me of two years from now, how would they choose to respond to the situation? And we act intentionally, and this is how we change both our beliefs and our behavior at the same time, by literally stepping into that future version of ourselves.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, I'm gonna throw you a second half challenge based… based on this whole chat. Don't try and change anything, just notice.

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The Midlife Mentors: Notice habits. Where are you living on autopilot?

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The Midlife Mentors: You know, what have you become accustomed to in your day that you just go through it, and you don't even question?

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The Midlife Mentors: I want you to notice expectation.

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The Midlife Mentors: Are your expectations realistic? Have you inherited someone else's expectations? Are you living someone else's idea of who you should be?

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The Midlife Mentors: And then notice your values.

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The Midlife Mentors: Have you outgrown some of them? Are some of your values outdated? Is that why some elements of your life might not feel fulfilled? This is really important, right? We've got different dimensions and elements to our life. So values can be aligned in one area, but maybe not in another.

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The Midlife Mentors: But by sitting and thinking about it, and thinking about your values, you'll get really strong clues as to what areas of your life are out of alignment and need to be adjusted.

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The Midlife Mentors: I just, you know, think every day. Am I living it by default, or am I living it by design? Because this is about taking agency, about taking control of our life.

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The Midlife Mentors: So…

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The Midlife Mentors: Midlife isn't your life shrinking. It's your time to start asking better questions. And your goal is not to become someone completely different, it's to wake up to the person you've slowly stopped paying attention to. It's to reconnect with your values so that you're aligned going forward.

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The Midlife Mentors: So, I invite you to just notice this week your habits, your expectations, and your values, and then you can make a coarse adjustment based on those.

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The Midlife Mentors: I hope you found that useful. The next…

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The Midlife Mentors: second half session, or it'll be on the last Thursday in August. It's at 11am UK time, and I'll be talking about andropause, which is age-related testosterone decline, but also the psychological pressures that we can come under at midlife as men, and how we respond to those, and more importantly, what we can do to come through them positively.

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The Midlife Mentors: I hope you enjoyed that. I'm sure Claire and I will be back with normal service next week. Thank you.