It’s now five weeks before my 65th birthday and I’ve found myself reflecting on what has been the most meaningful and unexpected transformation in my life. The changes in how I see myself and the world have resulted in significant changes to my financial, professional, and personal goals and desired outcomes.
For one, I finally went out on my own and now have a small business as a leadership and executive coach that pays the bills and gives me purpose and structure. My business doesn’t dictate my lifestyle choices as it once did. Instead, my chosen lifestyle dictates how I’m going to run my business – the hours I’m going to work, how much I need to charge, and the kind of clients I work with.
I was a strategy consultant for most of my 30s and early 40s and then ran a few businesses before becoming a coach. I learned how to appear confident in any situation and built a thick suit of armor around me that glistened and shone. I was happy with my adopted persona of a (would-be) Master of the Universe.
Then sometime between the age of 55 and now that persona stopped working for me. It wasn’t that I was actively looking for a change. I even grieved as my old persona gave way to a new state of being which was much more in tune with my years of experience and learning. Ultimately, I let go of a bunch of beliefs about the way I thought my life was supposed to go and allowed it to more or less happen.
I learned that being a Master of the Universe wasn’t very authentic or original and certainly not sustainable, at least not for me. I also learned that although mastery is the path to enlightenment and fulfillment, it isn’t about mastering the universe. It’s about mastering myself – understanding who I am and accepting with gratitude what the universe has to offer me.
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