Easing the Mid-Life Change of Career

In 1978, Chuck Bond was living in West Los Angeles and earning $73,000 a year as national director of college recruiting and relations for one of the so-called Big-8 national CPA firms.

Bond had always enjoyed his job. He was, as he says, “emotionally hooked into it.” But at age 46--after 14 years with the firm--something was wrong.

“The first time I noticed anything was wrong,” said Bond, now a Balboa Island resident, “was when I started feeling some cynicism about my work. I’m normally a very positive person. It’s not like me to be cynical or depressed about my job. So I started talking with my wife, and I said, ‘Are you happy?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I’m happy.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m feeling a lot of pain; how can I be happy like you?’ ”

Bond sought professional counseling and then, he said, the process began: “I started taking long walks on the beach, trying to think things out.”

Still Thinking

Six months later, Bond was still thinking things out.

While attending a meeting of the board of governors of the College Placement Council in Houston, he recalled, “the legal counsel was going to make a sensitive presentation, so the rest of us who were not board members were asked to leave the room and return in an hour.

“Instead of returning in an hour, I went out and walked the streets of Houston for four hours, and I kind of reviewed my whole life. And I remember at the end of that walk, I said, ‘I don’t care if it takes every effort I’ve got, I don’t care if it takes every ounce of energy I’ve got, I’m not going to keep living this way. I’m just not going to do it. I went back to the hotel and called my wife. I talked to her and she said, ‘You’re crazy. ‘ “

The next day, however, Bond flew to New York and resigned. “

Bond is now field services coordinator for the College Placement Council, a nonprofit national association for career planning, placement and recruitment. He earns substantially less than he did with his old job, but, he said, he has substantially more job satisfaction.

Bond, 52, was one of four panelists who shared their experiences in making successful career changes during a daylong workshop, “Mid-Life Career Change,” sponsored by Coastline Community College in Newport Beach last Saturday.

Three women who conducted the workshop: Ann Coil, Jane Ballback and Jan Slater--partners in CB&S; Associates, a career consulting firm in Orange. The 110 men and women who attended--most of them in their 40s and 50s--paid $35 each to find out, as the workshop brochure put it: how to take your job skills, experience and talent and transfer them to more rewarding careers.

And, as Jane Ballback pointed out in her introductory talk on how to make the most of mid-life years, feeling restless, bored or stuck in a job--signs of the so-called mid-life crisis--can happen at any time in life.

And, Ballback emphasized, a life transition “is not always a crisis in the negative sense of the word.”

“You can turn it around and make it one of the most positive, exciting events in your entire life if you simply know how to do that,” She said.

For years, Ballback said, most people knew nothing about adult life changes and transitions because most studies focused on childhood and adolescenceor on the field of gerontology, which studies the aging process.

“What has not been around except for the last 20 or so years is studying that whole middle group,” she said.

Years ago, Ballback said, people lived out their lives in a relatively straight line, sticking with the marriage, career and life-style decisions they chose in their late teens and early 20s. But that has changed markedly in the last 20 years.

Easier Without Choices

“What’s interesting about living on a straight line,” she observed, “is it was a whole bunch easier not to have all those choices and not to be faced with all of that change.”

Citing research conducted by Daniel Levinson, author of “The Seasons of a Man’s Life,” Ballback said that between the ages of 38 and 42, people typically undergo a highly defined transition. They’ve been educated, they’ve established their families and careers and, she said, they begin to become very interested in “enriching” their lives and making “qualitative changes.”

Ballback noted that the late 30s to early 40s is a period in which some people make dramatic changes in their lives--a process that has been popularized in songs, books and movies. In the movie “Middle Age Crazy,” for example, Bruce Dern reacts to hitting his 40th birthday by walking away from his business, donning a flashy pair of cowboy boots, buying a new Porsche and finding a girlfriend.

But people who go “crazy” in middle age are, according to Ballback, the exceptions.

“Most of our mid-life crises are very quiet,” she said. “We just spend endless hours talking to ourselves:’Why am I feeling so restless?Why is it that what was exciting before doesn’t excite me anymore?How can I be done with this (job)--I thought this was my heart’s desire?’ Or we say things like Peggy Lee said, ‘Is that all there is?’ ”

Most people’s mid-life transitions, she said, “are not cowboy boots and Porsches and girlfriends for the most part because a lot of people really make good life decisions their entire lives. People like Bruce Dern in the movie, when they get to 40 and feel they have to change everything, have made all their decisions externally all their lives. They’ve never asked themselves what they’ve wanted, so of course when they reach age 40 they’ve got to change everything.”

For those who have made fairly good decisions in their 20s and 30s, Ballback said, “what we need to do in our 40s is redefine those decisions or adjust those decisions and make the kind of transitions that we want to.

Careers Sometimes ‘Over’

“One of the things people don’t tell us in life, though, is that people get ‘done’ with careers: You can’t change it, rearrange it, shift it--it’s over. And no one ever says that to anyone, particularly if you spent a long time getting ready for a career or you’ve been at it a very long time.”

Ballback said people have two choices when they start feeling restless and begin examining their lives: Do you change it completely or do you change it just enough to suit yourself?

“And,” she said, “there’s no clear-cut answer to that, particularly when it comes to career development.”

In “The Seasons of a Man’s Life,” Ballback said, Daniel Levinson talks about what he calls “the dream.”

“Starting early in childhood,” she said, “we have a concept of what we are going to become, and it’s Levinson’s theory that the closer we are to our dream in mid-life--the more we have played out that dream in our career--the happier we are in our career.”

What people in mid-life need to do, she said, is recall that dream and that image and think how about how close they are to it.

“What’s important about that when you’re at mid-life is that you do still have time to play out that dream,” she said. “It’s never too late to play out that dream because the world is full of transitions. The world is full of changes, and the world is very agreeable to that type of change if that’s what you want to do.”

For those contemplating a career change, she advises saying to yourself: “What do I have to lose?”

Initiating Change Quietly

“You can initiate a career change without making an announcement on the PA system that you’re about to change,” she said. “And when you get done, you can even make the decision that where you’re at right now is exactly where you need to be.”

Ballback said 12% of her firm’s clients, whose median age is 39, end up staying in the same career because “they have explored and now know there’s no other place they want to go. And when they stay in their career, they change what has bothered them about that career and commit to it with a brand new fervor.”

To give the workshop participants a feeling for what it’s like for those who do make major career changes, the four panelists answered questions posed by Ann Coil.

In addition to Chuck Bond, the panel included:

- Patricia Cain, 39, of Huntington Beach, a former sixth-grade teacher of gifted students and now a management systems analyst and video satellite-conferencing coordinator for Hughes Helicopter/McDonnell Douglas.

- Helen Wardner, 46, of Irvine, a former medical laboratory technician and now guild coordinator for Childrens Hospital of Orange County.

- And, to show that career transitions can happen before reaching “mid-life,” Dennis Gimian, 31, of Corona del Mar, a former sales and marketing manager for a manufacturing and construction company who is now a portfolio manager for a financial planning group.

Following are highlights of the question-and-answer session:

Question: Before you made a career transition, what were your concerns, and how long did you think about the change before making it?

Bond: The emotions I felt were uncertainty, fear, concern about finances. I was in a job that I can describe as having some very attractive “golden handcuffs” or, if you prefer the other term: (It was a) “fur-lined bear trap.” The employer gets you in a situation where they want to hold onto you, and they make it very tough to leave. . . . I just realized this was the time I had to face up to it, that I really wasn’t that happy and do something about it.

Wardner: I was actually thinking about a career change probably from the first moment I went to work as a medical technologist.

While she was in college, she said, she found herself always doing things that were people-related, such as helping produce special events. Once, she recalled, she skipped out on a chemistry lab to work on an upcoming fashion show.

But after she had completed college and was trained, she said, she felt she should stick with medical technology. “I mean how can I possibly give up all this education and go into something else?”--particularly something people might consider “frivolous” such as the fashion field.

“So I was always agonizing inside, whether I was working or home as a mother taking care of children. I was sort of agonizing inside between these two different areas. And when I finally got the courage up to go and make a decision and get some professional help on this, I began to see that what I had been agonizing about could actually be a reality: that I didn’t have to be a medical technologist all my life.”

Cain: I was at the opposite end. I assumed I would be a teacher forever. I did not go into college choosing to be a teacher; it evolved through time. And for eight years being in the classroom served me well.

In September of 1984, I was just on a roll; I had projects going all over the school; my classroom was performing better than it ever had before, and all of a sudden it was done. It gave me no more joy, and I never wanted to become someone who pulls out the Jan. 15 lesson plan and this is what we’ve done every year: Chapter 23, questions 1 through 15 . . . complete sentences please.

Gimian: Basically, I think the concerns are pretty universal from listening to the other panelists. You go through concerns about are you going to keep bread on the table? Are you going to be able to do what you want to do in the kind of environment you want to do it in?

My major concern was going through this transition, which started for me three years ago, and being able to attain some long-term goals and objectives. At the time I wasn’t sure what they were, but I had some idea of the direction ahead.

Question: What were the actual steps you went through in the process of making a career change?

With the exception of Bond, the panelists sought the help of a career consulting firm. They also made a point of making contacts in the career fields that interested them. They talked to as many people as they could. They attended professional organization meetings. They picked up business cards. And they researched extensively, reading career-related books and magazines.

Bond: The tough part was fending some (job offers) off early in the process, hoping for the right one but fearful that the right one would never come. And when it finally came, it turned out, eight months later, to be the wrong one.

But having the freedom of leaving, you see, now I had a different perspective, so I left and I got another (job) and that one lasted a year and I left and got another one. . . .

So, you see, I was like emancipated. I discovered I could do anything I want as long as I’m willing to take some risks and endure some pain. And I found that out of pain comes growth and out of growth comes change, and I could never make change unless I had pain to start the process.

Question: In what way has this career transition affected other parts of your life?

Gimian: Let’s see, not much really: All I have is a new business, two new partners, a new career and a new wife--no big deal. It’s sort of a leading question, but it changes not only your work environment but, more than anything, it changes your emotional, psychological and mental outlook on life. It really did for me because I was in a position where I wasn’t too crazy about what I was doing. I wasn’t making as much as I thought I was worth--(there were) just a lot of things that weren’t right about it.

Cain: All the changes have been positive. I do a lot of traveling through the company. I meet a tremendous amount of people--people who are experts in so many fields--and it’s broadened my knowledge of technology. It’s broadened my knowledge of how I interact with people. . . . It’s not that I didn’t love teaching, yet I never saw completion. Those kids left in June and I never knew how I’d done, where now I can see my results and it gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

Bond: The linchpin, or the trigger, on my mid-life career change was when I realized my own mortality. When it finally sunk in that it was not a question of if I was going to die, it was only a question of when, I realized I had to make a material change to live the rest of my life in a way that was more satisfying.

Out of this experience, I’d say the greatest change in my life has been a new sense of freedom and that freedom means a great deal to me. It means, for example, that I can be experimental, not only in the job but in many other parts of my life. It means to me that each day that I wake up is an adventure, and I can put into that day whatever I feel like putting into it. And that’s a much different feeling than I used to have.