Ep 183: Getting Unstuck at Mid-Career and Mid-Life (Mastering MidLife #4 of 4)

It's about having the clarity , self-confidence and unstoppable belief to go after and get everything you want . If you'll come with me , I'll show you how Well . Hello friends . I hope you had an amazing week . This week we're going to continue our series on mid-career and midlife and we're going to talk about changing perspective and midlife .

And to illustrate this , I want to talk about it in both ways . I want to talk about it through the lens of career , of course , because that's primarily what we talk about on this podcast , but we also talk about the whole person on this podcast . But we also talk about the whole person .

And so I think , because midlife is such a rich time when we've got so much time in the rearview mirror , we hit this place at midlife where we've been toting this baggage with us that's built up over the course of our life . By the time we get three , four , five decades in , it's pretty heavy baggage .

So I want to talk about this concept of perspective through the lens of something that they teach at the University of Pennsylvania . It's called learned helplessness , and I think it's really valuable .

This is something that Dr Seligman pioneered I think it was back in the 70s at the University of Pennsylvania , and he actually founded the Positive Psychology Center there at UPenn , and when I went through the certification , this really resonated with me .

I instantly saw through the lens of myself as a leader of teams and functions in my past career as well as in my own life . I thought , oh my goodness , I see how this is a factor , and so I want to talk about what is it , and I want to share his view of the things that make up learned helplessness .

And I want you to challenge yourself , as I'm talking about some of this , to look at your own life the way I did when I first heard it , because I think you'll see , I think we kind of all have it to some degree , but think about your way of being in your corporate life and think about your way of being in your personal life and look for how this

concept of learned helplessness , look for the ways that it might be showing up , either in you or in someone you love and care about , or maybe in your children or whatever . So it's super valuable . So let's talk first about what is it Learned . Helplessness is when a person is unable to find resolutions to difficult situations .

Even when a solution is there , even when it's accessible , they just don't see it , don't allow themselves to act on it , and they stay in this suboptimal situation that usually they don't want to be in . So we remain passive in negative situations , despite our ability to either change the situation for the better or remove ourselves from the situation .

Now , this is super important If you are an organizational leader , whether you lead a team or whether you are a functional lead or even a company lead .

This is incredibly important because , like if you look at my own career path , it's been somewhat non-traditional , mostly because , as I got into the specialty of brand brand especially in the 2000s to 2010s it was a very highly sought after skillset .

It still is , but I would say those time periods were the age of brand and they were always looking for talent to come in . And so I looked at my own career . I'd say this is the opposite of learned helplessness I looked at my own career as being up to me . This is a good way to look at the antidote to learned helplessness .

I looked at it as it's up to me to have the career that I want . No one's going to do that for me .

I'm not going to stay with a company for 30 years and try to sell them on what a great person I am If I'm not getting the opportunities that I want at the place that I am , if I can't fully optimize , if I can't fully bring my skill set to an organization . It's kind of the way I looked at it when a headhunter would call and they would talk to me .

A recruiter would talk to me about a potentially great situation where I could go in and lead a team and drive change and make a difference If it made sense and I would put it through the specific filter that I won't really talk about now . But if it made sense to me , I did it and I have a series of moves .

Sometimes I stayed three years , sometimes I stayed five , sometimes I stayed two . It just depended on who called next really and what I decided to go do next and because of that my point is I think that that is a very powerful way of looking at your own career , I think .

But because of that , I experienced many different situations where I was dropped in at a fairly senior level and was able to see the functioning of different organizations .

For me , because I do plan to run my own company , that is incredibly valuable experience now , and even I would say I'm still in my corporate thing , even in my existing corporate career , because organizations have learned helplessness and what I mean by that , and I'll describe it and then you'll probably be able to see examples of your own .

Sometimes it's just within a team , sometimes it's just within a function , sometimes it's just within a function and sometimes , in general , it's the entire organization .

But what I mean by that is that there are things that are broken either definition of roles within and across teams , ill-defined or broken processes between teams and between functions and broken relationships , usually at the top , across functions , but sometimes also even within teams or whatever , and those are ways of being that the organization has .

And I believe personally , one of my big values in my corporate career is that when you're responsible for a team or a function , it is 100% your responsibility to stop the learned helplessness and to raise awareness of where things are broken and to be the one that's there .

First was starting to figure out how to get a new way of being established in the organization . Now , this is not easy to do . It's emotionally exhausting , having done it many times because you've got to do it at every level . You've got to first talk to your peers across other functions who interact with you .

You've got to get them aligned on a different way of being and they may not be open to that . So that's tough , right . And then even just as tough sometimes is convincing your team that it's possible for things to change and to have the courage to come with you as you're shaping the new way of being .

And it's just like anything in life as a leader , as you start to drive out that change just within the confines of your team and you're showing up differently and things are optimizing and work's getting done faster .

It sort of forces the entire organization to start doing their own optimization , to come up with their own way of being , because it shines a light on what's really broken . And until there's an organizational leader or leaders who are willing to do that , nothing changes and everything stays broken .

And before I pivot over into how this shows up in our personal life , I just want to say to organizational leaders and functional leaders and CEOs , c-suite , it is 100% your responsibility to make sure that the learned helplessness in your organizations stops permanently . There are too many forces in the outside world . It is not 1980 , 1990 .

It's not even 2000s anymore , or the 2010s . We are now in an era where change is quantum and there are too many things .

I mean , just look at , we've gone from talking about AI like artificial intelligence as an abstract thing that will happen in the future to now there's these high functioning chat bots and things chat , gbt , chat , gbt4 , like all kinds of things little apps now that are actually quite powerful and quite good .

They're already changing how students learn , how students research , how organizations , marketing departments are expanding their own ideation capabilities by leveraging some of these things . It is quickly going to change everything . That's just one little component of what's changing .

So we can't stay stuck in old ways of being , and I believe that organizations that don't find ways to break the learned helplessness within their own organizations or teams or whatever are going to be increasingly left behind at an increasingly

fast pace . I truly , 100% believe it and I believe that , while it can be difficult to be the one that raises your hand first , questions , established ways of being questions , the status quo , the power structures that exist , all of that .

It doesn't necessarily earn you friends , but I believe all that will fall to the side as you start to sell it in , as you approach it in a way that's not threatening , as you keep the olive branch extended to other organizations around you . I believe you can galvanize the change within an organization and completely reinvent . I've done it a lot of times .

I haven't always been in a role that allowed me to do it . I wasn't always high enough to do it , but in many organizations the teams that I worked for would tell you that how they function . When I came in and how they function and thought about their roles when I left were completely different . And that's just because we started to question everything .

We started to question the learned helplessness , the established ways of being that weren't working , and we found new ways of being that did work . And that's how you optimize and drive change in your leadership role .

So that's the antidote to the learned helplessness , the stuckness , the brokenness of an organization is for someone to come in and say I'm going to start questioning all of the ways of being . But I want to talk to you about how this shows up in our personal life , because it is very much something that isn't just showing up in our career .

You definitely can see it in organizations and with people in your career , but you can also see it in your personal life . Dr Seligman says that there are really three things that make up learned helplessness .

So if you want to double click into the concept , the three things are that we have a sense of permanence about the problem , that there's a sense of pervasiveness about the problem and that we make it personal .

So I want to talk about each of those in a minute , because that's really what is underneath feeling stuck , whether you're in an organization or whether you're talking about something in your personal life . So this feeling that we believe that it's permanent .

He said that when we look at our life or our career or whatever , through a lens where we believe things are permanent , it is the belief that this negative thing , whatever it is , and their causes of the negative thing are always going to be there . That's never not going to be the way things are .

So like , for example , I'm coaching someone right now and we're talking about her problems or her challenges .

She's in the tech sector and she kind of feels like she's like in her mid to late 30s and she's got this way of being in her career and she's starting to recognize that she needs to change some things about how she shows up , you know , and we're starting to work through that .

But what's interesting to me is in the last couple of sessions she started to connect the dots out on well , this is just the way I am and this is how I show up and , as a result , like this is this is how my career is going .

She's extrapolating that out now into oh and , by the way , this is why my relationships are always a hot mess , because I'm always the girl with the bad guy or the wrong guy , right . So she's got this narrative on who she is in relationships and how she chooses partners and how she shows up within those relationships .

That may not be the best for her and she believes that it'll never not be that way . She looks at her friend's lives and they're starting to choose their long-term partner . They're starting to make decisions around children or houses or making their life more what they want it to be over the long-term .

And she still feels stuck in her college years and feels like she has not progressed , and it's because she has this view of herself and her relationship choices , whereas there's this sense of permanence around something that she knows like on one level , is not optimal , but she doesn't feel empowered to change it .

So that's what I mean by permanence is that you believe that there's these things in your career or your life that aren't the way you want , but you believe that , for whatever reason , you're powerless to change them . They're happening to you and your response to it is what it is and that dance is never going to change , right ? So that's permanence .

Second thing is pervasiveness . Now , this is where we can look at a problem in our career life . It's kind of what my client was doing , and you can look at it as the problem is everywhere . It's not just happening here , in this one part of my life , it's happening in my whole life . Everything is bad , everything is terrible .

I failed at this thing , so I'm always going to be a failure at things like that , so I'm not even going to try anymore .

Like it's a very limiting way of being , because it takes something that might've been true about one part of your life or one situation and it extrapolates it out into other things and you have this sense of looming , negativity or doom or whatever it's like .

There's this sense of , well , this didn't work in this area , it's not going to work in any area , right that kind of thing . So that's pervasiveness . And the third thing is making everything personal . So you know where , if something's happening that's negative or that you don't want , you're making that about you .

Now , it's important to take responsibility , of course , for our own mistakes , but people that have this sense of learned helplessness tend to blame themselves for everything . And the truth is , we're not responsible for everything that happens to us . We'd like to be , we'd like to be in control of all of that .

It would , in one way , make our life a little easier because we could just sort of , you know , avoid all the unpleasantness and all the things we don't want and just have life unfold in our grand vision .

But that's just not the way it works , and there's other people , there's other factors , there's circumstances that happen that we just don't want , and the truth is that when we face those circumstances , it's very important to do it with the clarity of am I responsible for this , or what part of this am I responsible for , and take accountability for that , so you

can learn right . That's important , but don't take accountability for the whole thing . Don't say to yourself , well , this would have never happened if I hadn't been involved or this would have never happened if it wasn't for me , because that's just usually not true .

There's other things going on besides you and so when you tell yourself things like that , the problem with it is that it can really do a number on your self-worth , your self-esteem and , I guess , the degree of optimism or the lens that you view your life through .

If you think everything bad that happens is your fault , you're not going to ever be able to shape , probably , the life that you want , and it's really important to avoid the omnipotence of like , self-blame , like it's really important to look at things with clarity and be clear about the things that you caused and the things that you're accountable for , that you

might want to do differently next time , and the things that are caused by someone else .

I really related to this one because in my past I've had a relationship or two where the person was suffering from , in one case , substance abuse , in another case it was more just like self-sabotaging behavior , and there were periods of time in those relationships where I thought it was my fault , and I know that sounds weird , but when you're in a relationship

with someone that you really care about and they're doing things like that , I think parents go through this a lot . You know it's like you think , well , it must have been my fault , like I must have raised the kid in a way that caused this , right , if they've got a addiction problem ?

Or I know I was coaching someone else whose grown children were on their second divorce and what came up in the course of the conversation was they've been married twice in 10 years and this must have to do with . This must be my fault . It was something with the way I raised them . It's that kind of thing . I think .

You know we have to give people responsibility for their own lives , and , yes , we can always do better responsibility for their own lives . And , yes , we can always do better . I think everybody can always do better at everything . So that's probably true . But at the end of the day , your children are going to make mistakes , right ?

Your partners are going to make mistakes , and those mistakes are theirs to make . Those are their choices to make .

You don't control everything that other people do , and so , while you want to be there to support people , there has to be a clear boundary around what you're willing to take accountability for , what you should take accountability for , and what is theirs to own , and that line is very clear and I think it's the same thing on how you look at .

That line is very clear and I think it's the same thing on how you look at other parts of your life , like making everything personal . You know this wouldn't be happening if it wasn't for me . This is happening because of me , like that kind of thing . It's not a great possibilities oriented way of looking at your life .

And so , as I'm talking about this learned helplessness concept , you might be looking at and recognizing things that have happened in your career , things that have happened in your life in some respect , and you might be recognizing where you might have had a sense of belief that this was permanent , where you might have felt like that bad thing was everywhere you

know pervasiveness , have felt like that bad thing was everywhere you know pervasiveness , and you might have recognized in yourself your tendency to make things personal , to make them your fault or to assign full responsibility for everything bad that happens to yourself . Right , and you might be wondering if you recognize that . Well now what you might recognize .

Intellectually that's not the way you want to

be . But by the time we get to midlife we tend to look at our way of being in the world as permanent . We don't really think about ourselves going forward , as being fluid , not in the same way we did in our growth years , like from zero to 18 .

That's the time period where we're becoming and we're being shaped and I think 90% of us take that way of being whatever . That was that default way of being that we learned through our environment and the people around us and stuff like that . That's who we are in the world and that becomes who we are for the rest of our life .

But it doesn't have to be that way and why I wanted to talk about this today . Changing perspective in midlife it's like well , what's the fix for learned helplessness ? What's the fix for having a set stuck way of looking at the world ?

What Dr Seligman teaches and I truly believe myself is that it is possible to change your default style so that you replace any learned helplessness tendencies that you see with something called learned optimism .

So this is really important and it's derived from cognitive behavioral therapy and it's just important to have a sense of awareness of where this is showing up and examining , I think , narratives that have happened or built over your life , like my client who said well , I'm always the girl in the bad relationship . Well , that is an established narrative for her .

But is it true ? No , it's been true , maybe because of the choices that she's made . But does it always have to be true ? No , and how would she change that ?

Well , that's what we're working on , but she would change it by fundamentally , before she even gets into a relationship , really gets clear on her own worth and her own identity , such that she knows what she really wants , and starts to make choices about future relationships that are through that lens .

And as she does that , she finds herself probably down the road in a different relationship that serves her better , one that isn't consistent with her narrative of I'm the girl in the bad relationship . Right , and so that can be true for any part of your life . So , learn optimism . So I would say , like , apply it to what I was talking about in your career .

So broken ways of working in an organization . That's one of the reasons , I'm convinced , why people hate their job .

It's one of the reasons why people leave their job is because they're just tired of the inefficient , dysfunctional , negative , non-helpful ways of working that have grown up in the organization that they're in and they feel like it'll never change and they're tired of doing it and they want something better . I'm 100% convinced . People say they leave bad leaders .

I think they leave dysfunctional organizations . I really do . And so the way to fix it in your career if you're a leader , it's easier to do if you're a leader , but you can do it even if you're not .

You can take to your leader ideas of changing things that you see that are broken , not settling for the way things are working because you believe that that's the only way the organization's ever going to function , but instead to say how can I change this part of it ? Don't look at the whole thing , look at just your function , just your team .

How can you guys start functioning better ? What can you change about the roles ? What can you change about the processes ? What can you change about the parts where you touch other teams ? That is how change starts .

It starts from the inside out , like it starts in organizations , I believe , in a micro way , and then the ripple effects of that change affect the people around you .

Then they have to change and that's how the ripple effect of change can go through the organization without having to blow anything up , without having to fire half the workforce , without having to fire all your organizational leads . You can change it one tiny nucleus of a team at a time . That's how it changes .

The most broken things , I think , are fixed in that way . I've done it myself and it can be uncomfortable , I think , for the organizational leader , because as you start to change and those ripple effects change , it does upset . You've moved other people's cheese and they get upset about that .

But when they start living in a new , more highly functioning organization where things are actually getting done and all of the negative unpleasantness starts to diminish and die down , I think everybody enjoys it more . Right , everybody does better work , everybody gets praise , the company does better .

That's how it starts is by believing first that things can change and by focusing on the inside your team , your function and then let the ripple effects of those be felt across the organization and take a leadership role in helping to make that happen , extending the hand to other people that might be at your peer level or higher and helping them see how the

connectivity points between your two teams could change and become more high functioning . The same thing is true in your own life the learned optimism of believing that you might have these established ways of being that have always been there since you were young . But none of it has to be set . You are not set .

You are a person that is able to approach their life in a different way , and you can do that first . Just like I said , in an organization , you don't start it necessarily by blowing things up in your life . You don't have to sell your house and move . You don't have to leave your partner . You don't have to sell your house and move .

You don't have to leave your partner . You don't have to do any of those things first . What you need to do first is change yourself , and you change yourself in this instance by changing what you believe is possible for yourself and who you believe at the nucleus of yourself that you are , the nucleus of yourself that you are .

That's why , in my practice , I start with self-image and we're always working on that , because if you believe that you are the girl in the bad relationship , just keep going back to my client or whatever you believe .

You know you're the one who can't manage their money , or you're the one who can never lose weight , or whatever your issues are that you're really wanting to work on , you will never do it . You will always be that If you believe that's who you are .

But if you change that and you allow yourself to see the truth , which is this is maybe a trend in your life , maybe you're at a weight you don't want to be at , maybe you've had these patterns of behavior and ways of being in your life , in your relationships or with money or whatever , yes , but that can stop right now and it stops by you looking at

yourself in a different way , realizing that you're the one who can just decide to become the person who's great at managing money .

You're the one who becomes the person who's living at their ideal weight , and you're the one who becomes the person who's choosing the right relationships or showing up differently in your relationships , or you're the one who's the wonderful parent , not the bad parent , or whatever you're telling yourself .

And it's like when you start to look at yourself through that optimistic lens and you start to think about not who you are through the lens of your past , but who you are through the lens of who you decide you want to be in the future , of who you decide you want to be in the future .

That is a very powerful thing because you can sit in that moment of self-image creation and you can look to your future you that you want to be in five years , in 10 years and say , okay , like , how do I become that ?

And like , in my case , how do I move from something I've always identified with , like being the brand strategist for , you know , x corporation , into the CEO of my own business ? That shift has been shockingly hard for me . It's not that I think I can't do it , because I tend to look at my business capabilities , that I believe I can do anything .

But shifting who I am has been a journey for me , and so it takes time sometimes to change established ways of being . But it starts , the germ of the idea starts with what you know , what you believe is possible in your life , and when you believe that , yes , I might've always been this thing , but I choose to be something else in the future .

I'm going to start right now figuring out who I want that to be and then starting to align my way of being today with what that future thing is , not the thing in the past , right . So my client who says that she's the girl in the bad relationship . It's like okay , well , now we know you've got patterns of behavior there that you don't want the future .

Who do you want to be in three years and five years ? What do you want that to look like ?

And then come back to today and say how do I change how I'm showing up so that I am consistent , not with what I've done in the past , with what feels comfortable for me , but how do I break that old behavior and how do I start showing up as something completely new , something that serves you and heads you in the direction that you want to go ?

So that's what I mean by changing perspective at midlife the concept of learned helplessness and the opposite with learned optimism .

I think it's the perfect way of thinking about it and talking about it , because the thing that I want you most to take away from this episode is , even if you're 45 , 50 , 60 , 70 , it doesn't matter your age , 35 , if there are things about your life that you don't like , I want you to cultivate a way of looking at your life that is optimistic , that sees

the issues for what they are , but that then gives yourself permission to say that doesn't have to be permanent .

That might've been the way it has been , that might've been my old patterns of thought , but I can change it and I can do it by doing this , and I'm going to start looking to who I want to be in the future and letting how I show up today align with that . That is self-image work .

It goes a lot deeper than that , but that is why that's where my practice focuses , because I believe that when we are constantly working on our self-image , that's when we start optimizing everything about who we are , how we show up in our world and the results and things that are possible in our life .

So I hope you found this episode helpful and with that I will leave you till next time . Make it a great week . My friends , do you have a life coach ? If not , I'd be so honored to be your coach . I've created a virtual coaching program and monthly membership called Next Level . Inside .

We take the material you hear on this podcast , study it and then apply it . Join me at the purposefulcareercom backslash next level . Don't forget the purposefulcareercom backslash next level . Join me and together we'll make your career in life Everything you dream of . We'll see you there .