In the past year that I’ve spent interviewing women for my forthcoming book on navigating midlife, something rather interesting has come up. In almost equal numbers, midlife women are lining up either for or against the notion that they feel “invisible” as a result of being 40 and older.

Evelyn Kalinosky

I wasn’t really expecting any one answer when I asked the question about whether or not they felt the media was ignoring them, but I guess I was assuming the responses would be less divided between two opposing camps of thought.

After talking with more than 150 women from all across the country, about 50% expressed concern that they were becoming marginalized because of their advancing years. The other 50% had no such concerns. In fact, I had to define more clearly and concisely what I meant by “invisible” for them to answer the question. It just wasn’t on their radar.

It got me thinking about what could account for such a stark difference in perspective. Did it have anything to do with how each person felt they had been noticed in their younger years? Would someone who was attractive and used to having attention paid to her because of her looks begin to feel the world is seeing past her as she ages? Does it have anything to do with attractiveness, or is it something else entirely?

I do know that regardless of which camp a woman lands in, neither side had any intention of actually being invisible. Whether or not they felt that the media has failed to keep pace with the midlife woman, they weren’t buying into the outdated belief that any woman past the age of 35 should be fitted for support hose and a rocking chair.

The women I’ve talked with are keenly aware of the various challenges that come with aging, and especially as a woman in our culture. There are few, if any, role models to show them the way, so once again they are the trailblazers for the generations of women coming up behind them -– just as they were in previous decades. It’s a responsibility they don’t take lightly.

I’ve interviewed women who are changing their careers at midlife and beyond, women who are going back to college to get their advanced degrees (one shared with me her decision to get her PhD so that she can work with teenagers— she’ll be 82 when she’s done with school), and women who are becoming artists, writers, vagabond travelers, social activists. The list goes on and on.

What truly makes the difference between aging positively, and the kind of aging that smacks of loss and decline, is attitude. What women should be focusing on -– and many, many already are -– is acting their stage, not acting their chronological age, since improved health, wealth, and resources have given most of us the opportunity to live another 25 years or more once we pass the 50 mile marker. That’s a tremendous stretch of time to spend sitting idly by, watching the world move on without us. Trust me, that is not a role I expect these boomer women to accept.

As a woman who sits squarely in the 50+ demographic, I have never felt more alive, more certain of who and what I am, and more passionate about what I want to share with the world. I do find it rather ironic that just as I feel like I’ve got it all together and am ready to explode out into the world, I’m sensing the cloak of invisibility nipping at my heels. But no worries -– I can and definitely will outrun it, and I expect to have a lot of company along the way.

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Evelyn Kalinosky

Someone asked me the other day why I refuse to refer to the transition that occurs for most women in midlife as a “crisis.” While it’s true that the word “crisis” means a crucial or decisive point, a turning point, it also has about it an air of instability and upheaval. There’s a negative connotation to the word, which perpetuates the stereotype of women being emotional and irrational. While both men and women experience the inevitability of midlife, it’s largely women who are branded with the super-charged “C” word.

I’m more comfortable with “midlife transition” or “midlife awakening” or any phrase that allows women to embrace in a more positive way what it means to age. Midlife transforms you from the person you were to the person you were meant to be. It’s a new birth, a new beginning, an opportunity to pursue dreams and goals that were neatly tucked away in the “someday” file we kept in the back of our minds while we raised our children or launched our careers, or both.

It’s like an automatic “do-over” when you hit midlife (not that we’d necessarily want to redo our lives up to this point). It’s a take-stock, take-no-prisoners exhumation of the soul, which if done with courage and exacting honesty, enables us to pull out that “someday” file and sift through the dreams, aspirations, and goals that are ripe for implementation now.

I can think of so many women I’ve known who have rummaged through their own private “someday” file and are leading more authentic lives because of it: a former colleague who turned down a promotion to have more time with her family; a friend who forfeited a steady income to launch a new business; another who started a family at 45; still another who went back to school to earn her PhD at 65.

It’s a heady time for midlife women. In our 40s we can be grandmothers or first-time moms. We can be launching new businesses or reaching the pinnacle of our career trajectory. We have so many opportunities that our mothers never had, largely because of the struggle we engaged in to redefine women’s roles, and the way in which we kicked to the curb the rules about what women should and shouldn’t do.

When I think of my own experience navigating the transition from my late 30s through my 40s, “crisis” is not the word that comes to mind (although I’m guessing that family and friends don’t necessarily agree). The journey was a bit rocky, but largely because I wouldn’t get out of my own way and let go of all the outdated beliefs I had about myself. Once I turned off those old, worn-out tapes, I was able to access my “someday” file and create this new, increasingly more authentic chapter of my life.

After a lifetime of being all things to all people, I felt the call of something deeper and connected with my purpose and deep intention for my life. Because we don’t live in a vacuum, I felt the external twists, turns, and shifts in perspective that come with any major life transition, but for the most part, the transition was an internal one. It was a long last look at the life I had led. It was a journey of gratitude and appreciation for where I had been, and it became an invitation to where I had yet to go.

At the end of all the reflection, I made an offering to myself to open up to another way, another life that rings more true to the woman I am in this moment. My next transition involves a search for significance, an expedition to uncover the wealth of the self, a rite of passage to my highest purpose and to a life that is as unique as my fingerprint.

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Evelyn Kalinosky

Ready for a “ReCareer?” Maybe you first need to know what it is. Evelyn Kalinosky has written “Finding Personal Meaning Is An Inside Job.”

For women, the second half of life brings many career choices and questions. For some women, continuing in a current career doesn’t fulfill personal, spiritual, or financial needs as it once did. For others, re-entering the workforce has become a necessity due to the changes in the economy. In either case, a ReCareer may be the answer. What is a ReCareer? According to Dr. Richard P. Johnson, nationally renowned expert on maturing adult development and founder of ReCareer, Inc. it is: “Personally authentic work that feeds your mind, your heart, and your spirit.”

Women at midlife who are “seekers” want something deeper out of life. They want more personal purpose, more meaning, and they want their efforts to align more closely with their core beliefs. They seek a more authentic way of living. To these women, who may be 45, 55, 65 or older, age holds no meaning. What does hold meaning comes from work and interactions that renew their life purpose, revitalize their passion, reignite their soul, and reinvigorate their inner desires.

One of my closest friends is a seeker. She was courageous enough to listen to that persistent voice inside her that said she needed to take a new career path. For the past several years she has commuted back and forth between the home she shares with her husband in Pennsylvania and her apartment in New York City where she runs her own executive coaching business. She was in her mid-50s when she made this change.

Largely because of seekers like her, there has been a fundamental shift in how we perceive getting older. Previous assumptions about life’s second half are becoming passé as a new set of beliefs is giving birth to what it means to live optimally. Aging is no longer viewed as a forced march down a path of decline and constriction, a path that narrows the older we get. The path we’re on now is one of expansion, with an accent on gaining new wisdom, and discovering a new authenticity and significance greater than anything previously experienced.

Certainly the goals of working over our lifespan have changed. Our former jobs provided a financial foundation. They paid the mortgage, put the kids through school, and got us through the daily expenses of living. All of this was necessary, but for many reasons women are now searching for something more, something that gives rise to that small voice within that longs for achievement of a different type— something that feeds their very being.

But there are relatively few, if any, clear-cut directions for women in midlife who are seeking that blending of career and life passion. So how do they begin this ReCareer journey? The first thing is to commit to a personal assessment, a personal excavation of sorts. A ReCareer represents much more than a set of skills and functions; it’s a woman’s personal response to her inner call, her investment in the mission of her life. A ReCareer determines much of a woman’s total environment: physical, social, mental, psychological, even spiritual arenas of living.

There are five essential competencies that women need to tackle before they can successfully launch themselves into a ReCareer. This journey of discovery will bring them personal fulfillment as well as meet their individual needs, and put them solidly on the path to ReCareer success:

1. ReCareer Identity. This is defined as the degree to which women derive a personal sense of identity and definition from their work. How much of their personal identity, their unique definition of self, comes from their career? In addition, it’s important to look at attitudes, beliefs, and feelings women hold about themselves and determine if they are still true or if they are self-limiting. It’s also important to construct a personal definition of their potential ReCareer (new career), and to assess each of their formerly held positions in terms of skills and functions performed, and any personal feelings generated by these positions.
2. ReCareer Self-Assessment. It helps women identify their ReCareer values, interests, and skills. Do they know their inner values, motivated skills, and most cherished interests well enough to accurately translate what’s truly best for them in their ReCareer process?
3. Transition Hardiness. The definition of “hardiness” is the ability to be adaptable and flexible, two qualities that are critical to successfully engaging in Recareer life change. Women need to determine if they have developed the necessary inner qualities of hardiness: commitment, control, challenge, and connectedness which will enable them to better achieve their ReCareer goals. By looking at past career and personal life experiences, women can assess these qualities and work on those areas that may need shoring up.
4. ReCareer Success Perception. This looks at women’s personal and career worlds and how well they can perceive the events in their careers and personal lives as self-enhancing and self-affirming. That’s done by uncovering and analyzing the successes women have achieved to date. Success perception is the foundation of positive self-esteem. Without that, women are denying their innate power— the energy that calls them to their ReCareer Success. It’s important for women to define what “success” means to them, and to ask themselves if they have successfully clarified their unique formula for ReCareer success.
5. Setting ReCareer Goals and Making ReCareer Decisions. The purpose is to help women establish ReCareer and life-goals that can assist them in pursuing a clear ReCareer direction. To do this, it’s important to look at all the life arenas: work, family, relationships, self, leisure, and spiritual. Then they can assess how well they exercise solid decision-making skills and what areas they need to address to formulate the most compelling ReCareer goals and bring them to reality.

Read more by Evelyn Kalinosky. Click here.

I turned 50 this past December, and guess what? My life isn’t over. I didn’t slide down that slippery slope of aging I kept hearing about. If anything, the most amazing thing happened. I woke up. I have morphed into my authentic self like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

I was as surprised as anyone to experience this awakening, since I believed much of the rhetoric that abounds about decline, depression, and despair being hallmarks of aging. I felt that angst in my 30s, but throughout my 40s and marching into a new decade I began to feel a different mantra struggling to the surface. This mantra said, “You are not who you were, only older.” It wasn’t until I turned the corner on 50, however, that I let that mantra break free with all the strength of a gale force wind.

I began to seek out other women in midlife to find out if I was the lone wolf experiencing aging as a rebirth. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I found in talking with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond is a collective commonality. I found that, like me, they are happy being where they are, and have no desire to go back to any of the earlier stages or decades of their lives.

Suzanne Braun Levine talks about this very thing in her book “Fifty is the New Fifty.” She writes: “The assumption is that youth – or at least younger – is the ideal state and that given a chance, no woman in her right mind would relinquish it. I have found the opposite to be true. Many of us are delighting in rejecting that backward-looking mindset and focusing on (to paraphrase the song from The King and I) ‘the beautiful and new things I am learning about me day by day.’ The range of things to learn about ourselves is now as wide as it hasn’t been since we were adolescents. So much about our bodies, our thinking, our relationships, and our approach to the world is under review – by us for a change.”

Evelyn Kalinosky

When you look at the reality, midlife and beyond is longer than any other stage of life. My mother is 92 and still kicking, despite two broken hips that have relegated her to a wheelchair. If I share my mother’s longevity genes, I have another 42+ years of life to live – way longer than childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood stages. That’s a tremendous amount of time to simply endure, to simply exist. Newsflash: I have no intention of simply existing, and neither do my midlife soul sisters, most of whom, like me, can expect to live another 25-30 years or more. Our mothers and grandmothers may have felt that “the change of life” meant their lives stopped changing, but for today’s midlife-and-beyond women, that meaning is no longer inevitable thanks to the women’s movement and our willingness to rewrite the book on aging.

The real challenge to this stage of life is to get to know ourselves in this new context. Who is this person who declares, “I no longer care what others think of me,” and means it? Who is questioning the meaning of her work, and the nature of her relationships to see if they support who she is now? Who is waking up to the wealth of possibilities, and is willing to tackle a new and totally out-of-character experience just for the fun of it? Who, despite understanding that life and death are not just words any longer, keeps moving forward?

The struggle is to learn which parts of ourselves are true and authentic, and which parts are conditioned responses based on “faulty” messages we may have received when we were younger. For me, these “faulty” messages said that what I had to offer was my physical appearance – not my intelligence, not my compassionate nature, not my curiosity, or quirky sense of humor – and even that offering wasn’t good enough. That baggage has dogged me year after year, and the more I challenge it, the more I realize that it has nothing to do with reality – it has nothing to do with who I really am or what I have to offer.

I wasn’t capable of knowing that, of owning it in my 20s or 30s, and just began to grasp it in my 40s. That’s why I can say with complete candor and honesty that given a pill that would transform me back to age 25, I would not take it. Yeah, right, you say. Skeptics abound, I’m sure. Who wouldn’t want to be younger given the chance, but for me, going back to who I was at 25 means living the life of a people-pleaser, a caretaker lacking enough self-worth to recognize my gifts and maintain boundaries. The truth is, there is no magic pill that will transform us back in time, and we don’t need one. What we need is to live the stage we’re in, and to be willing to keep growing. Nothing makes us older faster than standing still, stagnating.

That knowledge has empowered me enough to become an entrepreneur at age 50, and I work with other professional women 50 and over to create a midlife and beyond that’s as unique as our fingerprints. All the roads I’ve traveled have led me to where I am today. The lines on my face are reminders of these roads (though hopefully a little less weathered). I know that my path is not anyone else’s path, despite that collective commonality I mentioned earlier. Each of us cuts our own unique trail through life. I also know that who I am today is not who I will be in 10 years, let alone 20. I will not be “the same person, only older,” but will continue to embrace the evolutionary process that is a fundamental part of aging. And although the path I cut is uniquely my own, I’m sure my midlife soul sisters will keep me company along the way.

Follow Evelyn online at www.evelynkalinosky.com