When she was 33 years old, Anna Navarro was the director of corporate social responsibility at St. Louis-based Monsanto Company. As the top-ranking female executive in the company, she had a high-profile, high-paying job that would have made many ambitious people drool.
But in some fundamental way, it wasn't fulfilling. "I was at the top," says Navarro, "but I was spending my time writing reports and crunching numbers, which I hate, and doing the bureaucratic maneuvering that's essential for a rising executive. I wasn't having very much fun. What I really wanted was to wear casual clothes and make a real difference in the quality of people's lives."
One day during lunch, a male colleague who was about 45 years old started complaining to Navarro about how much he hated his job. He calculated that he had 10 more years to go be-fore he could take early retirement.
That conversation really bothered Navarro. Driving home that night, she told herself that if there was a different way to live, she didn't want to wait until she was 55 to discover it. Realizing that, she did something quite miraculous. Without knowing what she wanted to do next, she resigned so that she could figure it out.
It wasn't a flip decision. She agonized long and hard before making the move. Her friends thought she was crazy. Her husband tried to talk her out of it. So did the people she worked with, as well as the CEO who had recruited and mentored her.
"You can do anything you want here," he told her.
But there was nothing there she wanted to do.
Not that she had some perfect vision of what she really wanted. She just needed the time and space to figure it out.
A few years of introspection, brainstorming and research brought her to an awareness that resulted in the founding of Work Transitions, a service based in St. Louis that helps others navigate out of career ruts like the one she was experiencing.
Navarro apparently hit her midlife career crisis early. For most people, it strikes around age 50. While there's nothing magical about that age, the five-decade mark seems to send out warning signals that it's time to cross some new developmental threshold. At 50, you can no longer pretend that you're young, but if you're healthy, you probably aren't feeling old either.
This is what it means to be middle-aged. Your youth is definitely behind you, but your most productive years may still be ahead. If you're like most of the 50-year-olds I know, you're probably asking yourself: "How do I really want to spend my time?"
The answer to that question is a highly individual one. But the prevalence of midlife career changes makes it unlikely that you'll be alone if you decide that you want to spend the next stage of your life doing something different than you did before.
To make the right decisions during this phase of life, you need to understand the new philosophical view of work that Navarro teaches. The days when a person could join an organization and receive automatic job security, benefits, pay raises and promotions are gone forever, she says. Work is structured differently now. The key today is to know how to survive and grow in the midst of change. To do that, you must take responsibility for managing your own career.
This can be a hard message to learn late in the work game, especially if you've been entrusting your career to your employer all these years. You may discover (if you haven't already done so) that the job market isn't cooperating with your desires anymore. Outplacement counselors know this mentality all too well. In every workshop we teach, there is inevitably someone whose only career ambition was to get a full pension and retire.
If you've spent your career stockpiling money and years of service rather than marketable skills, losing your job can be a downright catastrophe. It's daunting to face a discriminatory job market when you're in the twilight of your career and lack both self-confidence and a set of abilities employers value. It makes for a lot of bitterness, insecurity and cynicism.
There are lucky professionals who manage to make it safely to retirement without any hitches. But even these folks have been learning some rude life lessons. Many are finding retirement to be unaffordable financially or emotionally-or both. As one 55-year-old former sales manager commented after only three months of retirement, "It's OK for a summer vacation. But I can't spend the rest of my life chasing a ball around the golf course. I have to do something more productive."
Ditto for a 60-year-old data-processing specialist who returned to work part time after less than a year out.
"I could only pot so many plants," she says. "Once the garden was finished, I needed a little more mental stimulation."
The idea that every person's life should begin with education and end with leisure (with an extended period of work in the middle) is too narrowly proscribed to meet the complexity of modern adult lives and desires. For starters, it ignores the possibility that some people might actually enjoy their work and want to go on doing it for as long as they're physically and mentally able. And that even those who don't like their jobs may prefer to tackle a new challenge than spend the rest of their years rocking on the front porch.
