Kissing Frogs, Mid-Life

In the mid-90s, I worked for a big securities firm, as head of marketing. I was proud of the fact that under my leadership we developed one of the first on-line interactive retirement planning tools. My big contribution was that I made sure the plan could assume different retirement ages for the husband and wife. Up until that point, there was just one retirement age…his.

I played with the system a lot, and kept trying to make the numbers work with the wife retiring at an age like…oh, say, 47. It never did work, and it was the first time I realized that all the talk then about early retirement might just be a lot of talk.

Flash forward to now. After leaving the company and starting my own practice, which was a variable blend of writing, talking and coaching, I kind of figured that mix was going to be my working life until I headed off to the Hebrew Home for the Aged. Then life surprised me, and I accidentally started a new business six months ago.

The business is a high tech firm that specializes in helping people get the most out of their careers, businesses, and life.

What I have learned is that I’m not alone in having a less than tidy career. Very few people have perfect career plans, and no one has simple career trajectories. What many of us have learned is that not only is no one retiring at 47, very few of us would be smart to retire at 57, or even 67. As I write this, the economy looks at best, unpredictable, and anyway, tomatoes are meant for more than three decades of trying to find ways to fill the day.

What that means for tomatoes is that we have to once again how to figure out what we are going to be when we grow up.

There are a lot of great tools and advice books and coaches to help you figure out how to do this, but they all start at the same place…frog kissing.

Frog kissing means the messy process of talking to a bunch of other people about what they do, to see if any of it sounds like something you want to do, and then taking a stab at doing that, and seeing if it works.

The bad news is that this can be really frustrating and you can sound like an idiot while you’re in the midst of it. The good new is that it works. And that you can meet a lot of great people along the way, and find a new set of relationships and activities that keep tomatoes saucy instead of soggy.

In my case, I now realize I have been thinking about doing something else for a while. I had this impulse to do something with women and video, but long after YouTube owned that space. Then I wanted to do something with wellness, until a friend who had almost gone bankrupt in a health care business asked me a lot of questions about the idea that I couldn’t answer. Then I thought I would get a PR firm to take me on as a senior advisor in some capacity until I actually met with a few and found out they didn’t think it was as good an idea as I did.

Every one of these frog kisses took me to my new shining prince of a business. Not by the fastest route, but by the one that came from a deeper place in me, which feels like the freedom we grown up women get in return for decades of pleasing others first.

Which brings me to the realization that I have two pieces of advice, not one. When getting ready for a career transition, you need to both kiss frogs…and tell. Telling other people what you need and want is how we get ready to star in our next act.