Resources
Everything worth your time on the question: What does this part of my life require now?
Seven things on this subject: six things to read and one free service or course. It opens with Midlife MOT by MoneyHelper. Free and government-backed.
This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.
What stage am I in?: talk it throughLEARN · FREE TOOL
MoneyHelper
Free and government-backed. A structured look at health, work and money, the areas that matter most for what comes next.
A free review of work, wellbeing and money for people in their forties, fifties and sixties.
READ · BOOK
William Bridges
Read this if something has already ended and you are embarrassed that you still have no idea what comes next.
Bridges separates change, which is the external event, from transition, which is the slower internal business of letting go of who you were while it happens. His most useful claim is that the empty middle stretch is not a failure to move on. It is the part of the process where the next thing actually gets worked out, and rushing it usually produces a decision you reverse later.
READ · BOOK
Herminia Ibarra
Read this if you have been reflecting on the same possible change for two years and have never once tried a small version of it.
Ibarra followed people through major career and identity change and found that almost none of them thought their way to an answer first. They acted first, in small reversible experiments, and their sense of who they were caught up afterwards. It is the strongest available argument against sitting still until you feel certain.
READ · BOOK
Bruce Feiler
Built on hundreds of life-story interviews, and useful mainly for one finding: disruption is far more frequent than the tidy three-act version of a life allows for, and the big ones do not arrive on schedule. It is a corrective to the idea that you are either on track or in crisis.
READ · BOOK
Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter
Forty years of research arguing that burnout is a mismatch between a person and the conditions they work in, not a deficiency in the person. Worth the time if you are about to redesign your entire life on the strength of feeling depleted. The two are easy to confuse. The remedies are not remotely the same.
READ · BOOK
Erik H. Erikson and Joan M. Erikson
Best for the tension between contributing and standing still in adult life.
Erikson set out adult life as a sequence of tensions rather than a plateau, with the pull between generativity and stagnation sitting through the middle decades. The stage model is tied to a mid twentieth century life course, so read it as a frame rather than a timetable, but it remains the clearest account of why what continues after us starts to matter long before the end of a life.
READ · RESEARCH
Laura Carstensen
Why the relationships and goals we prioritise change as our sense of time changes. The finding worth having is that this tracks how much time a person believes is left rather than how old they are, which is why a shortened horizon at thirty produces the same narrowing as one at seventy.
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
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