Uncovering Skills for the 3rd Age
herding cats, starting socialist movements, connecting community
This morning, my coach asked me to imagine out five years. My brain froze. She had posed a great question: Consider a future in five years, when what you are working on is in place and functioning well.
But I’m in a moment where five years out is a vague space on the other side of a lot of variables. Having struck half a century, I’m on the hazy edge of the third age1. In five years, maybe I’m semi-retired or no longer relying on tied to in a single full time job. Maybe I’ve found a new, wholly engaging role. Maybe I’ve moved to a nearby city, or a far away one! Maybe my kid has moved out. I don’t know where, what or with how many people I’ll be doing anything. I have some great ideas that are ready to be dropped into place, but it is a wide and long list of options. And all of these options are waiting for a very undefined something to happen first.
I’m holding my future hostage for an unknown mystical - theoretical - catalyst that will consolidate my passions and skills alchemically into a meaningful third age.
How did I even get here?
I started my career path so many years ago with a specific set of technical and scientific skills. I fairly quickly meandered through fields of softer skills that I collected to have at the ready, like any parent’s carry bag.
Scientific methodology? Ohhh, that’s sitting in the bottom, but it’s in there.
Excel and SQL are tucked into the notebook mixed in with music and language lessons and an old elementary school office phone number.
Event planning? Let’s whip that out of this side pocket.
Training manuals and videos got tucked in the main compartment next to document control systems and photo editing.
Project management and change management? Those are safe in these dedicated inner zips.
Coaching and facilitation? Hold on a sec, right here next to the snacks.
Management systems and continuous improvement methodologies you say? Well, that’s the whole bag itself, now isn’t it.
Some skills are backed up with certificates, some we can prove with evidence, and other skills will simply remain tools we can access and expand upon when called into use. Whether formally educated, learned on-the-job or hones as passion projects, after 30 years in the second age2 of life and career, what does the sum of your talents mean in five years?
For me, a few separate conversations over the past few months may help clarify. According to colleagues, my current soft skills can be boiled down:
Some skills are hard earned and hard won expertise accumulated by living through the application of our technical competency, the changes and implementations resulting from our efforts, and the impacts on the lives we connect throughout.
This accumulation and the passage of time doesn’t just happen. Mid-life didn’t sneak up on me. I’ve whined about the peri/menopausal symptoms. I celebrated the major birthdays and family milestones. I know that I’ve spent the last decades gathering skills - sometimes even consciously - to prepare for future flexibility. But it was not until my coach’s question at 5:15am that she knocked this pivotal opportunity into focus.
So what, now what?
While some skills come to all of us as we age, your honed set of talents are going to be your own unique blend of magic. Regardless of what you have become amazing at and known for, it’s time to ask ourselves a few questions. Now is our time to quantify these talents.
Who have we become over the years? How does this reflect our deepest values?
What do we want to do even more of on a daily basis?
Who can benefit from the talents and skills we have developed?
How do we create the balanced space for our best selves going forward?
Taking these questions in the context of a mid-life remapping means viewing them from this new moment in our lives.
We may no longer have the same expectations, obligations or boundaries on ourselves and others.
We can redefine what the second half of life could look like.
We might validate our current course, name necessities and options, or find a radically different looking path.
And then, knowing where we’re going, we can pack our bag to start the journey.
If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else.
- Yogi Berra
You’re invited
Join me in the mid-life re-creation of us. I’ll be opening up the Substack Chat to create space for mid-life pioneers and adventurers on a journey to understand, design and travel to whatever you want your 3rd age looks like. We’re not the first ones to go through this, but we are the first ones to do this a quarter of the way through the 21st century, with all the context, technology and challenges of this age.
We’re each finding our own path as part of a better whole. And we can do that together.
A quick definition search of 3rd age names “ over mid-sixties” but I am using the term to support anyone who is in a space for anyone life and career arc has reached a nebulous blah. Are we probably at least middle-aged when we reach the third age? Yes, but that’s not a requirement. We’re ready to contribute differently, meaningfully and in a way that fulfills ourselves as much as the world around us.
Of interest, the 3rd age also references the start of the downfall of Sauron.
The 2nd age can be identified as our career and, if you chose, family) years, generally mid twenties to middle-aged. We’re locked in and often empire building - home, net worth, memories.
According to bosses past and current, and acquaintances and colleagues alike
I have a certificate that says as much, granted alongside the more formal certification
Always a core value, and so not surprisingly one I engage in regularly