MID-LIFE ALCHEMY

"Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall." Joseph Campbell

A personal story

I was 38, happy, professionally very successful, fit as a fiddle - life was good. I remember being at a weekend training in Transpersonal Psychology and overhearing people in their forties and fifties talking about the difficulties in their lives. In my innocence, I was appalled and decided that I would never let my life get like this. Duh! A few years later, my sporting life was over because of physical injury and I was in deep grief because several friends had died suddenly. In fact, I was in a mess, and remained so for a while. Outwardly, not much changed, but I was in a classic mid-life process which had thrown out all my assumptions and at the same time, had gifted me the opportunity to review everything about myself and about what I imagined was important in my life. The poet, Dante, described the experience of Mid-life like this:

'Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.'

Finding the path beyond the 'dark wood' is one of the most valuable journeys we will ever take. What I hope the reader gets from reading the article, are important insights into key features of the midlife journey, pointers regarding the sometimes paradoxical nature of the transition, the courage to go deeper with a client and the confidence to stay with the coaching process through the narrow gateways which are often part of midlife experience.

Coaching and Mid-life

This experience of not knowing, of having lost one's way, is typical at this time and coaches who work with clients in mid-life - say 35 -55 - need to know about this transition; it is like no other. As a Coach Supervisor, I work with Executive and Personal Coaches whose coaching becomes, richer, deeper and much more efficient when they begin to understand the full implications and promise of this pivotal time. Knowing the territory gives coaches both insight and courage and it ensures that they do not collude with clients who are still scrambling up the old ladder/old wall - hiring the coach to give them a shove towards a final promotion, a new relationship, a new challenge. The truth is that in mid-life, what worked before is unlikely to work now; life requires that we grow and change. Senior professionals, business men and women, parents, stressed CEO's, public servants, coaches - we all undergo the challenge to renew ourselves. Mid-life is sometimes referred to as the second adolescence - a time to complete our development, to re-connect with our dreams, a time for transformation. The coach needs to keep aware of this process and ensure that coaching is serving the client's becoming (the right wall), not his/her old self. And the coach needs to be able to support new insights, awakenings as they occur - even if they seem contrary to the client's original goals.

Typical features of mid-life include:

Experiencing healthy dissatisfaction.....yearning for more....is this it??
What worked before no longer rocks your boat
The changing body becomes your guide
You get used to uncertainty
You want to give back
You become much more than you thought you were
Your values change significantly
You are getting a hefty whiff of you own mortality
The emergence of wisdom

Mid-life challenges

And so, in the midst of the everyday stuff which clients bring to coaching, there will undoubtedly be challenges such as:

Learning from loss, change and death
Moving one's life onto a much broader, richer foundation
Making a radical shift toward much greater self-expression
Reconnecting with joy and pleasure
Moving from head to heart/soul living
Creating sustaining vision for the rest of your life
Allowing wisdom to guide you
Taking time to discern the 'right wall'.

What is Alchemy?

Classically, it describes the process of turning lead into gold; so coaching becomes the crucible or container for transforming our sometimes difficult experiences into 'gold' - finding the right wall, greater purpose, a much fuller sense of self. Joseph Campbell called it, 'following your bliss'. The unuseful behaviours, out-of-date aspirations, negative perceptions of self and life may be burnt up at this time. The alchemy at work here, offers us the possibility of becoming fully functioning people, perhaps for the first time. We may now begin to experience life from the heart and soul as well from as our heads - work/life balance finally makes sense! Jung called the process, Individuation. Through successfully negotiating the narrow mid-life gateways of loss, change and death, we have the chance to look up from our busy lives and begin a conversation with life which bestows meaning, connection and a surer sense of our presence here. A coach who is unafraid of the paradox that suffering can shift us to grace, choice and action, brings huge benefits to their client at this time. The coach who has the courage to challenge the executive who wants the old/wrong wall, because that's all she knows, and open the coaching conversation to include what might well be nudging a client's hinterland, is serving the client well. To miss the transformative potential of these difficult but defining moments can, at best, take our clients down an expensive cul-de-sac.

Supporting clients to learn form their 'dark wood' experiences is a huge gift to them. So too, is enabling them to find rites of passage which will ease them into the next phase of their lives. How do we/they co-operate with the process of aging so that we can welcome change and move into the fullness and wisdom which are the gifts of maturity? What is really trying to emerge in a clients' life as mid-life chaos shakes the old foundations? It's a great privilege to accompany clients whose individual journeys welcome this level of transformation. The whole process often follows the classic break-down-to-break-through pattern.

A healthy response to mid-life challenges leads to greater energy, clarity, 'bliss' - or as the poet Mary Oliver, joyfully expresses it:

'When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms….
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.'

Bliss indeed!

Edna Murdoch 2006 © www.coachingsupervisionacademy.com