Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
Ever wonder why I call it Heyday Coaching. It comes from a quote from one of my heroes, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said, “Fifty, not fifteen, is the heyday of woman’s life, then the forces hitherto finding an outlet in flirtations, courtship, conjugal and maternal love, are garnered in the brain to find expression in intellectual achievements, in spiritual friendships and beautiful thoughts, in music, poetry, and art. It never is too late to try what we may do.”
Bridges explores the typical transitions that we all make throughout our lives including career changes, retirements, job loss, marriage, having a child, losing a loved one, getting divorced. These transitions may be forced upon us by circumstances outside our control, or they may be things we initiate, but he points out that all transitions are stressful.
Ida Fisher Davidoff wrote, “There are two kinds of people and let’s say they’re driving along and they suddenly come to a boulder. One kind of person says, ‘just my luck! I’m in a hurry and now there’s this big rock in my way.’ The other kind of person says, ‘Oh, there’s a big rock here. Now, how shall I handle this? Is there room to get round it? Will I have to do something to move it, and if so have I got anything with me? Or shall I change my route instead?’ The second person puts their energy into solving the reality of what confronts them. The first person becomes overwhelmed, sees themselves as a victim, an object, and lapses into inertia and dependency.”
All the ink spilled on mid-life reinvention among the Baby Boomer generation could lead a body to believe that Baby Boomer women created mid-life reinvention. But that’s not true: my research showed me that mothers of boomer women were pioneering midlife reinvention well before the advent of the women’s liberation movement, those heady years when boomer women came of age.
