Every woman who reaches mid-life that halfway stop where dreams have been either realized or abandoned looks around and wonders, Whats next? The kids are grown, the career is schlepping along and you wake up each day feeling just a little bit lost. What happened to the life you imagined when you were twenty-one, with all those years ahead of you? The good news: theyre still ahead of you. Women have the capacity to live two, or more, different and equally exciting lifetimes. Dreams and visions tend to morph over time. Guided by family and career experiences, we gain wisdom and perspective that was not possible for us in those early years. Amazingly, the future we perceive now is much more attainable because of those experiences. Stoke the Fire Promise yourself that from this moment on you will:1. Live and work a passionate life. What excites you right now, today? If its travel, promise yourself youll travel at least once a year, if only on weekends or to nearby, unexplored towns. If you yearn to pursue a latent talent, such as writing or music, make that pursuit a priority. If you crave a new career, look for opportunities to fan that flame.
2.Go for it or reject it outright. Make a plan and execute it. Quickly decide to go full-speed in pursuing your vision or to reject it and come up with a new goal you can attain. 3.Take action every day. Jump in! Spend 15 minutes daily on your action plan. Write only one page a day and you can finish a book in a year, but sitting down to write an entire book can feel too daunting to even begin. Start small, start now.4.Be a success student for life. Immerse yourself in a vision of your future and seek out the knowledge that will bring you to the next level. A travel enthusiast could learn about the culture, take a cooking class or host an exchange student. To expand your career or business, find a mentor or request new challenges outside of your daily job description. 5.Believe you can do anything. Believing is 90% of the win. If you believe that your next 40 years can be whatever you want to make them, no matter the challenges or what anyone else tells you, you will succeed.
The magic of these Five Promises is that they are not complex, they can work for any goal and, most importantly, they will instill the confidence necessary to succeed. By reaffirming these Five Promises every day, any woman can stoke the midlife fire and reinvent her life.

A map is not functional until you know where you are on it. Consultants that objectively view their current reality always find a way to reduce confusion and misalignment. Agreement with yourself and your clients about what is true right now—in your company, in your project, in your life—is critical for making clear headway.

Get a Grip

There’s an old saying: “what you resist, you’re stuck with.” I’ve noticed this is particularly true with creative consultants and their work. If you’re not clear what your current job really is and you’ve skipped doing a complete and thorough inventory, you’re going to have a hard time making things happen for your client.

“Real generosity toward the future
consists in giving all
to what is presen”.
- Albert Camus

What is your job, right now! What is the main priority today? It is seldom as obvious as you might think. You can best answer that one question by answering these six:

1) What are your current tasks? These may be physical actions you need to take right now about your commitments and responsibilities: phone calls, e-mails, converstations, errands, brainstorming ideas, and so on. Typically a busy consultant can have as much as one or two hundred of these to do.

2) What are your current projects? These are the outcomes you have agreed with yourself to achieve, remeber you are an independent professional and must keep your word to yourself. There’s no one setting your agenda, in fact you are being paid to set it. Now, which of these outcomes requires more than one action to complete. Most consultants have between thirty and one hundred of these.

3) What, exactly, are your current areas of responsibility? Most consultants have ten or fifteen, like staff development, asset management, planning oversight, customer service, etc. But you’re NOT running, nor are you responsible for the WHOLE company. Leave that to the owner or CEO.

4) How are your consulting responsibilities and your personal affairs going to be changing over the next year? I’ve found that the truly effective, high pound consultants I’ve known and worked with, have taken the time to mesh their work with their lives. You are a one person conglomerate, but also, a living-breathing human being that has ‘outside’ considerations for a well-rounded life. If you don’t consider consulting an extentsion of a real life, a flesh and blood existence, but rather, something altogether seperate, placed in a box called: ‘consulting work’, then you’ll fail most of the time and be very unhappy nearly all of the time.

5) How is this life I lead going to change over the next five years. This is the big picture question, the vision of how things should be, not necessarily how they will be, into the near future. Why is this important? Because, in the quest for the answer to our question above, namely, what is your job right now, we can get a nearly crystal clear answer when we extend our vision into a larger field. By this I mean, you can see if your current job selection is aiding you in your long-term visionary goal.

“It takes about ten years
to get used
to how old you are”.
– Unknown

If you ocmplete a thorough inventory of the ocmmitments, issues, and projects that currently exist in your ocnsultancy and life on earth, espeically in these six areas, you will have a good definition of your work. This isn’t easy stuff, I know. I’ve spent over fifteen hours just identifying my work on two mundane levels: current actions and projects. But wihtout doing these things I don’t feel prepared, nor am I prepared to have conversation with my clients.

It’s all very useful work, however, should I need to re-calibrate my job description or deal with needed changes along the way. So many people have just a vague desription or ‘feeling’ about what they want to do or be in the future. But without a reality based reference point of where they are, right now, they are like the Flying Dutchman, doomed to drift.

So, know where you are on the map, so you can determine if you need to turn right or left.

“Discipline does not mean suppression
and control, nor is it adjustment
to a pattern or ideology. It
maeans the mind sees
“what is” and learns from
“what is”.
– J. Krishnamurti