Distracted by Life

Wow! It's been a long time (almost a week) since I've been able to write about all things midlife! Sometimes, events conspire to take your attention off the duties of the day-to-day world and force you to focus on what's more pressing and immediate. That's one of the great stressors of life: midlife or adult life, and even child life.

I've been distracted by a return to another parallel program I'm involved in, called The Frazzled Entrepreneur and, ironically, it's nudged me over the line into what I call 'frazzled focus' where important issues have become urgent. There are serious consequences for non-performance, and those consequences are imminent. Also, as often happens in these sorts of situations, once you're thrown into frazzled focus, the precipitating causes suddenly seem to evaporate, leaving you up in the air, half-finished, with an urgency that's passed. Is it best to leave things half-finished to go back to your routine, or does it serve you better to complete the project at hand, only to put it up on the shelf? For people like me (high Myers-Briggs 'P'), it's very dangerous to leave things half-done: I never seem to make the time to get back to them.

What does getting distracted from my daily routine have to do with the challenges of the midlife transition? Isn't it just a fact of life even during your (more-or-less) 'stable' periods? Yes; only at midlife the possibility of falling into frazzled focus becomes, not only a more likely occurrence, but one with more consequences as well.

As you progress into the midlife transition, and your life as you experience it becomes increasingly less satisfying (for all the dozens of reasons I've been talking about in many of my articles), you experience the need to make changes — sometimes major changes — that can thrust you quickly and easily into frazzled focus, because these changes recommend themselves as an answer to the pain of the present moment.

Pursue a promising extra-marital relationship. Consider telling your boss where to put your job. Give your pastimes an importance and urgency above and beyond everything else. Presto! You're in frazzled focus.

You've seen it before (and maybe you've even thought about it): you look at what you're doing — and all the unnecessary frustrations that go along with it — you see all the ridiculous and unreasonable hindrances that you face, you know that your a better craftsman than those around you, but you're being held back. Your restlessness, irritability and dissatisfaction are getting the best of you and, what's more, it's beginning to affect other areas of your life: your relationship, your family life, and even your health. The answer seems obvious: the importance and urgency of making a career change grows almost daily.

Becoming an entrepreneur seems like the most obvious answer to your problems. At the same time, your doubts about being able to manage that undertaking — and about making a living doing it — slowly fade into the background as the pain of enduring the no-win situation you face at work grows steadily.

Here's where, especially at midlife, men (and women) make their most serious mistake: their discomfort with the present state of their affairs causes them to see an urgency to their decision-making that may not really be there at all. And this deceived sense of urgency is your ticket to making poor (unfortunate) decisions.

Let's imagine that you were dissatisfied with your kitchen. Let's imagine that some of the features of your kitchen were no longer working up to par: perhaps your refrigerator was too small for your growing family, your water pressure might be low, your dish washer not doing a very good job, besides the place looked dingy, beat up and shabby. It's time, you think, to make a change. Do you draw up some sketches on a paper napkin, and start tearing out the counters and cabinets, plumbing and appliances because you once made a book shelf in wood shop back in school?

No matter how dysfunctional your current kitchen may be, you don't want to start making drastic changes until you've thoroughly researched your project plan!

That includes, by the way, consulting with experts, coaches, and mentors, or hiring others either to do the job or to help you take care of things where you lack the experience and skill to do the job yourself. And yet, many people at midlife are willing to throw away a perfectly good job because they have a napkin-sketch of what they think life will be like when they're a self-employed entrepreneur. It's not enough to have a vision of your new kitchen, and it's not enough to have a vision of your new career: you've got to have a plan, and you've got to have help. You need others' input to help you decide what's a key issue, and what's a distraction.

Especially at midlife, as you reevaluate the meaning of your career, your relationship and your personal well-being, all under the destabilizing influence of hormonal changes, it seems much easier to allow peripheral distractions to take center stage rather than do the mundane, tedious, boring work of handling the day-to-day issues that make up the bulk of a mature life. Like your shabby kitchen, a boring life begs for some excitement to spice it up.

Sadly, the spice that people too often put into their lives at midlife is called a 'crisis': falling headlong into frazzled focus. "I've fallen, and I can't get up!"

Would you like a nice rule of thumb to help you decide whether your desire to become an entrepreneur is an honest calling from your own personal destiny, or merely a distraction that's arising out of the restlessness, irritability and discontent (to say nothing of the boredom) of the midlife transition? Here's an important clue: if your desire to go out and work on your own is authentic, you're going to want to learn as much as possible about what you're about to do; you're going to want to find — and hire — the best and the brightest to advise you; you're going to want to take your time.

Even if you've been laid off and are without a job, you owe it to yourself, your family and your future to resist the temptation to jump into anything. Face the facts: it will probably take months to find new employment (especially in today's job market). If your gut impulse tells you to take your time and not rush into anything, you're on the right track. If, on the other hand, you're feeling a compulsion to push forward regardless of the consequences ("damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead"), beware!

The path of the frazzled entrepreneur leads directly toward those torpedoes: your own personal, private, perhaps devastating midlife crisis.