1 Reimagine Your Life before Others Do It for You
A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the turn.
âHelen Keller
Face it, at some point you may no longer have your current job. You might be pushed out. Downsized. Aged out. Displaced. Replaced. Itâs increasingly likely that something is going to happen to radically change your work life, so why wait until that âsomethingâ happens to you? More than 40 million Americans experienced this as their lives were turned upside down during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some were hired back by their employers, but many found themselves laid off permanently, trying to figure out what to do next.
Itâs increasingly likely that something is going to happen to radically change your work life, so why wait until that âsomethingâ happens to you?
The same thing can happen in your personal life. What if you have been struggling in a relationship that once seemed rock-solid? You might be subconsciously ignoring the signals that your differences have become irreconcilable, and you are shocked when your partner informs you that they want to leave. Youâre being pushed out in a personal way, perhaps being replaced by someone new. In the panic of the moment, you wonder what will happen to you. On the other hand, if the relationship was never on sound footing, you must have thought about what you would do if things fell apart. Or maybe not; denial is a potent emotion!
Other things can happen to you, too. An illness. A natural disaster. Have you thought about what your plan would be if you became seriously ill? Or if you were forced to leave your home or town, as thousands of people did when Katrina hit New Orleans? When COVID-19 swept across the world, it forced countless people to rethink not only how they would live but also where they would live and what they wanted in their lives moving forward. The prospect of being a victim was a wake-up call for millions of people, who realized that a virus could take them down at any time.
Major life change is not easy. Most of us put it off because it is hard work. We donât want to think about the possibility of losing a job or a spouse or a way of life, yet we know when the signals are there. Why not be proactive in moving forward with your life before itâs too late?
If you are in mid-career, now is the time to ask yourself if you are doing what you want to do and if you will be happy doing it for the next twenty years. If you are leaving a career or retiring from your current job, have you thought through a plan for the next twenty years or more? In both cases, saying that you will figure it out when you get there just isnât going to work. In this book, youâll hear many stories of people who have successfully pivoted to a new place. Some have done it once, and others are serial reimagineers!
Now is the time to ask yourself if you are doing what you want to do and if you will be happy doing it for the next twenty years.
I spoke with a longtime teacher1 who regretted that she didnât know what to do with herself once she decided to retire.
âIâm driving my husband crazy,â she said, laughing. âI need to figure something out.â Too many people find themselves in that place.
Many people in my industry were displaced before they wanted to leave. The magazine industry, like newspapers and now television, has undergone tremendous transformation in the past twenty years. Numerous editors and publishers were pushed out in their forties and fifties, never to find jobs in their industry again. Many have floundered, some while trying their luck at selling real estate or attempting to create consulting gigs in the industry.
Some have proactively reimagined their lives, like my friend Polly,2 who was a journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper in the Southwest. At fifty-two and as a divorced mother of one daughter, she dreamed about a different future. She tried to ignore the thoughts, but as she moved farther into her fifties, she thought about her cousin who had reimagined herself.
âIf I donât do it at fifty-five, I wonât do it at sixty-five,â her cousin had told Polly, announcing that she was going to sell her commercial silk screen business and her home in the Northwest and move to Santa Barbara, where she had grown up, to become a full-time painter. Pollyâs cousin said she figured that if she didnât sell anything in the first year, she could always get a job at a gallery. Within the first three months, she sold three paintings and her new career was launched.
Polly wasnât exactly sure what she wanted to do, but she decided to take it step by step. For starters, she knew she needed to save money. She sold her house and about half of her belongings and moved in with a roommate. She asked herself some tough questions about what she found meaningful and motivating. She had always had an interest in depth psychology (the science of the unconscious), so when she heard about a masterâs degree program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Californiaâto which one could commute once a month for three-day intensivesâshe was intrigued. At fifty-five, after twenty years of working for a newspaper (that was then going through layoffs), she decided it was time to quit her job and move forward in her life.
She learned that if she were to pursue the graduate degree, she would need to use the profits from selling her house. Her financial planner said to her at the time, âDonât do it; you really canât afford it. But,â he continued, âas your friend, I would tell you that you have to do it.â And so, Polly made the leap, commuting and studying to become a licensed therapist. Today, she works in public health, within the opioid crisis, and feels fulfilled in her new career. She met a man and is remarried, thriving in her mid-sixties, loving her new life.
âMy financial planner was right. I couldnât really afford this path, but the good thing is that therapists can work into their eighties and nineties, and if you love the work, then it doesnât seem like work. The way I look at it now is that I couldnât afford not to take this path,â she said.
Dawn Steele Halbert3 was another casualty of the disrupted publishing industry, when she was laid off at fifty-nine from the magazine company she had worked at for twelve years. After a thirty-year career with stints at Essence, Ebony, and other magazines, she was forced to pivot. Tapping into her network, she first started working with a partner who created the I Am That Woman Retreat, which focuses on Black professional women in the later stages of their careers, about to be empty nesters, or looking for their next opportunity. Dawn, too, made an entrepreneurial discovery, when she joined a life insurance company called Symmetry Financial Group.
The company allows her to have real and meaningful conversations with people about their circumstances. Bringing solutions to their lives is now the course that she is on. At sixty-three, in her native Chicago, she is focusing on financial literacy education and protection for the African American community. A successful pivot from a corporate job to an entrepreneurial business has given her purpose for the future.
If Pollyâs and Dawnâs industries hadnât been disrupted with heavy layoffs, these individuals might not have thought about their own future directions. Fortunately, they were proactive in regrouping.
There are countless stories of midlife individuals who have made huge moves. Colonel Sanders didnât franchise his secret recipe until he was sixty-two.4 Ray Kroc founded McDonaldâs when he was fifty-two,5 and Leo Goodwin was fifty when he and his wife Lillian launched Geico.6 But you donât have to be a household name to make your mark. According to an article in Entrepreneur, Jim Butenschoen left the IT business at sixty-five and created the Career Academy for Hair Design in Arkansas.7 Dave Bateman, a Washington State lawyer, and his wife Trudy, an emergency room nurse, fell in love with the idea of becoming coffee growers in Kona, Hawaii. When they were both in their late fifties, they launched Heavenly Hawaiian Farms, where they produce and distribute their own blend of coffee, a move that Bateman says is ânot retirement, but a change of focus. A change of life.â8 And Gerry Fioriglio started the Family Caregivers Network at fifty-seven in her native Pennsylvania.9
What drove all these midlifers to ROAR into their second half? A vision. A passion. A desire to create something that was fulfilling to them.
Change is everywhere you look. Countless brick-and-mortar retail businesses are shutting down because of the rapid rise of online shopping. The pandemic hastened the demise of many stores, from the closure of Pier One and Tuesday Morning to the bankruptcy of Neiman Marcus and JCPenney. Transportation has changed with the advent of ride services such as Uber and Lyft. The medical industry, too, is changing, with more people visiting urgent-care locations than general practice doctors, and fitness centers being replaced by online training.
If you are in an industry that is challenged, you donât necessarily have to leave it, but you do need to reimagine yourself and your skill set. In the disruption of the publishing business, I watched print-skilled individuals learn new skills for the digital age. Todd, for example, jumped in headfirst to learn the digital world and became a highly successful sales executive in that area, giving him a lot more latitude for future moves.
I turned to my friend Julianna Margulies,10 the award-winning actress you might know from ER and her seven-year run as Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife. As someone who is constantly reimagining a new character, she had some helpful insights. In order to understand how her lawyer character thinks and acts, she studied lawyersâ behavior.
âMy grandmother, Henrietta Greenspan, was one of the first women to graduate from New York University Law School, so I spent a lot of time researching her life along with the history of other women lawyers. I wanted to understand their journey and absorb it into my skin. Also, my husband is a lawyer by training, so he was able to help me have a deeper understanding of how a lawyer thinks,â she told me. One of the lessons she learned by acting the part of a lawyer was to stand back and watch both sides of an argument before making any type of judgment. While that isnât her natural behavior, doing so helped her see how effective a lawyer could be with that skill.
When Julianna was preparing for her role on ER, she went to a Cook County hospital in Chicago and was allowed to trail the nurses in the emergency room. She explained that until you walk in someoneâs shoes, you canât have a perspective. You need to be in the room with them.
In her book Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life, Julianna talks about taking on new roles and a lot moreâlessons for anyone who is thinking about exploring different roles in life.
Even if you are the star or your name is on the door, youâre not exempt. Designer Donna Karan stepped down from her eponymous company, but she didnât let that stop her from reimagining herself. After she sold her company to luxury-goods giant LVMH (MoĂ«t Hennessy Louis Vuitton) at fifty-nine, she started Urban Zen, a philosophy of living inspired by world cultures. Balancing philanthropy and commerce, she sells clothing, home accessories, and jewelry, but her latest business endeavor is a whole lot more. It promotes holistic wellness, childrenâs education, and integrative training. While she may have stepped into the reimagineering process, today, in her early seventies, Donna is thriving. She has far surpassed peers who were forced out of business and are not even close to living such a dynamic and fulfilled life.11
You might say that Donna had lots of resources to start her own business, but I assure you that anybody can find their own solution, given a strong drive to succeed. One of my favorite examples is my friend Maggie Lentz,12 whom I met at the Berlin Marathon. The moment we met, she had a sparkle, an aura around her that told me that she was very special. She is one of the lucky ones, having realized early (as she approached her fortieth birthday) that she needed to reimagine herself.
A married mother of three living in Houston, Maggie is an Ecuadorean native who came to the US for college, became an American citizen, and stayed. She was an award-winning teacher in her district, as well as bilingual teacher of the year, but she felt that something was missing.
âI kept saying to myself, There must be something more out there,â she said. âAlso, I wanted more freedom and the ability to make more money for my family. I started reading about other things that might appeal to me. One thing I knew is that I wanted to be of service to people.â When she was in her twenties, Maggie dealt with cervical cancer on her own in America, while her family was in Ecuador. That, coupled with her fatherâs death the same year, had a huge influence on her. She isnât wasting any more time.
Ultimately, Maggie recognized her true entrepreneurial spirit and started a company called Hello Freedom. She focused on health coaching and obtained a certificate to become a running coach. She manages a friendâs health and wellness company that leads a group of trainers who bring family and kidsâ workouts to your home. She also finds time to be an ambassador for a group that sponsors Go Run for Fun initiatives and races against violence, as well as other business activities.
âIâm in charge of my own destiny; itâs creative and fast-changing, and Iâm thriving,â explained Maggie, who also focuses on her own fitness, with fifteen marathons under her belt. She plans to spend the rest of her life focused on ways to bring health and fitness to people, as her lifestyle and her profession.