Investing in Your soul's Call at Midlife and Beyond

A Woman Who Answered Her Soul's Call

Recently I debated the issue of reinvention vs. reintegration at midlife and beyond on the Harvard Business Review site and in the process I asked readers to join me in forming an organization focused on the idea of reinventing this time of life.  One of the people who responded to me suggested we form a group focused on investing in stocks and bonds as a way of reinventing our lives but to me that is investing in other people's calls and not our own.

A Soul Call is a Call to Invest in Yourself

I read a book years ago called Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow - well a soul call is a call to do what you love.  Now some people love the stock market, Warren Buffet comes to mind, but unless this is truly your call, then getting together and reading the financial pages and or watching the Dow Jones reports is not going to be a satisfying time for you.  A better use of your time and your money is to invest in what your soul is calling you to do at this time of life.  If this idea seems vague and you're not sure what that call is then investing your time and energy in finding out would be a better use of this time than starting an investing group.  Here is why:

Money Provides a Comfort Zone, Not Authentic Happiness

Here is what Martin Seligman wrote about money in his book, Authentic Happiness, he says that making more money has little effect on your authentic happiness once you have enough money to buy his book and that materialistic people are less happy in general.  In other words, if you are living a more or less middle class life and not on the edge financially, then more money will not have much effect on your true happiness. What I also know is that even if at this moment in time, money is an urgent issue for you, once you have stabilized yourself financially you will go back to money not bringing you authentic happiness.

So What Does Bring Authentic Happiness?

Authentic happiness comes from doing what you love to do in terms of work and contribution, what I am calling a soul call and using that call to make a contribution to the greater good rather than simply doing something that makes you money.  Again, Seligman has a lot to say about this and describes the three kinds of lives available to us in terms of happiness; the Pleasant Life, which is filled with pleasure and ways to bring more pleasure into your life - he calls this the Hollywood Life, I call it the Hedonistic Life. The second one he calls the Good Life, this one is where you use your strengths and virtues and do all the right things and go by the rules - I call this the Good Citizen Life and finally the Meaningful Life where you use your strengths and virtues for the greater good - I call this the Soulful Life.  In my work with people and in my own personal life I see most people - about 80% - fitting into the first two categories - they are either looking at life as a pleasure trip and spend all their time on doing things for the pleasure it brings or they are good citizens and try to do the right thing and go by the rules but are not in touch with their souls and get all uncomfortable when someone mentions the idea of a soul call.   The rest, about 20% of the people, are interested in what their soul's are calling them to do but may not yet have a clear understanding of what that is - these are my people - my tribe, my potential clients and friends.

Are You Part of the Soul Call Tribe or Would You Like to Join?

I started this blog post with the idea that we need to invest in ourselves at midlife and beyond rather than creating an investing club and investing in money making ventures.  Here is what I know, if you invest in your own soul's call it will bring you life satisfaction and authentic happiness and the money you need to provide yourself with life's necessities will follow.  This could be a huge amount of money or only enough to sustain you.  I believe that Oprah heard her call early and now she is one of the richest women on earth.  Mother Theresa had little money but lived her calling until the end and was provided the necessities of life as she went along.  Between these two extremes is where you and I live. Yes, we need a certain amount of money to live and I believe we need to use our  gifts and talents to make a living for ourselves but I also believe that when we do use these gifts and talents in a way that feels like a soul call and we contributes to the greater good, the universe will provide opportunities for us to prosper.  I believe this to be particularly true in terms of midlife and beyond, this is our opportunity to reinvent this time of life and the best way to reinvent it is to listen for the call of your soul and invest in that call.  So would you like to join me in this?  If so then send me an email at lorrainebanfield@msn.com and let's get started.

Blessings, Lorraine 















 

Encore.org Gives Me Pause

I have been following Encore.org for some time now, an organization which I had thought went along with my views and my mission about people in their second acts.  This group sponsors The Purpose Prize for people over 60 doing work for the greater good.  I discovered them about two years ago when I saw a program on PPS featuring their work and some of the people who had won the Purpose Prize. The show was about reinventing your life.  Since that was a concept I was working on with my book, I was impressed and began to support and follow them.

An Extended Stay in the Work Force - Not a Reinvention 

But recently I  received a post on my Facebook page written by the CEO of this organization that made me reevaluate my continued full fledged support of them.  The CEO, Marc Freedman, wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review entitled The Dangerous Myth of Reinvention.   He says the idea of reinvention is dangerous and not even a doable thing for most people.  This gave me great pause and I wrote several responses which you can read on the Harvard Business Review blog - see link at the end of this post.

A Tweaking of the Status Quo But Not a Real Change

What I see after reading his article and reviewing his website and reading all his responses on the HBR site is that he is supporting and promoting the idea of extending one's work life beyond retirement and then reintegrating yourself back into it either in the same field of endeavor or to transition into a non profit with your skills, talents and gifts.  He likes the term reintegration rather than reinvention since he believes, or implies, that most people are happy with who they are, what kind of work they do or have done up until now, and are happy to continue on in it as long as they can remain employed and then to reintegrate themselves back into the workforce after conventional retirement via going to work for a non profit - as his website says, "Purpose with a paycheck".

I think this is an okay idea for the average person.  In fact I wish him luck with his work, but I realized after a week of back and forth posts on the HBR site, that this was not what I had in mind when I wrote my book. I I believe there are a great many people out there who not only want to reinvent their own lives but want to reinvent this time of life as well.  I find his ideas only a tweaking of what is already the mainstream way of doing things.  But we are being given by science, medicine, and just plain evolution up to thirty more years of life and to simply keep doing what we have been doing seems a waste of human potential given this gift?  Are there not things that need to be done that require a reinvention and not simply business as usual?

But Reinvention is What Needs to Happen 

He does not support the idea of any kind of reinvention or world view shifting except this extension of the time we now have to continue on with the same old same old.  But reinvention is what needs to happen. Even though on first glance this seems to be an organization focused on changing the world of work and the perception of people as they age, it seems to me to be an organization that supports the status quo by extending the working life of the average person.   The only change or reinvention I can see in this is that he is supporting the idea of a new phase of life between midlife and old age, but what he suggests we do with it is conventional and mainstream.   This then is the typical mindset of the average person, they just want an an extended time frame so they can keep working or if they have saved and invested their money then they will just retire and maybe do a little non profit work, if they feel like it. This is simply marketing the idea that people can work longer these days if they want to and then they can do some work for a non profit if they want to do that.  There is nothing new here.  This is the same mindset that has been around for years.  As far as I can see, he is simply encouraging people to stay in their jobs as long as they can and for them to do some good works for a non profit after they retire.  

Become a Pioneer Instead

But I say let's be pioneers instead and do what we have always longed to do and reinvent our lives to suit who we are in the depth of our souls and then to be the leaders and role models of a movement to reinvent this time of life..  There will always be people who huddle up under the middle of the bell curve and live their lives according to the values of the mainstream, but there have always been pioneers and out of the box thinkers as well, who have been the ones that have led in terms of human evolution.

Listen for the Call of Your Soul and Reinvent Your Life 

I'm suggesting that many people, but certainly not all, missed the opportunity to hear the call of their soul's in their first act and now at midlife and beyond they get a second chance to listen for it and act on its message. In most cases this will mean a reinvention of their lives, at least their work life, and not simply a reintegration back into the work world from which they came.  I am also suggesting that this call will impact the world or what I call in the book, the greater good, but it will not necessarily be philanthropic.  It could be opening a little Italian bistro, or starting a seminar business or becoming a sea captain or becoming a watch dog for abuses in your old profession.  It could be championing an environmental cause, running for office, you name it and if it's your soul's call then it is the right thing to do.  It could be owning and running a B&B as two of my friends are doing or going to Second City in Chicago and leaning to be a humor writer as one former college administrator is doing, or maybe like me, you want to write a book.  Whatever you do, if you do it with joy, gusto and passion, then this will have the effect of changing the way people see this time of life and this will indeed change the world.  

Be a Crazy One, a Maverick or a Change Agent

For people like myself and those I work with and hope to work with, we are the mavericks, the movers and shakers, the change agents, the odd balls that Steve Jobs and Microsoft were talking about several years ago in their Superbowl advertisement.

Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

So here is to all you crazy ones out there - join me - I'm pretty crazy myself.  I'm here to help you with this most compelling and vital time of life.  So let's get busy reinventing our own lives and reinventing the world too, one person at a time.  .  

Blessings, Lorraine 

Link to Harvard Business Review post:   http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/the-dangerous-myth-of-reinvention/#comment-1195262742 .

PS - You may now check out my book at the Anythink Library in Westminster, Colorado.  Here is the link:   http://catalog.anythinklibraries.org/Record/967821/Home

You may also purchase it at the Tattered Cover in Denver - all three locations and on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  Get it and start changing your life and the world today.