Gold Nugget Coaching

The burned-out feeling that many mid-career workers are experiencing has been given a name: “middlescence” (see March 2006 Harvard Business Review, “Managing Middlescence” by Robert Morison, Tamara Erickson, and Ken Dyctwald). If you’re in the throes of middlescence, it may feel like an overwhelming malaise or a deep downward spiral.

There are definitely things you can do to break the malaise or spiral but, admittedly, many of the remedies can take asome time and commitment. However, I propose that there is one amazingly simple—and incredibly healthy—thing you can start doing immediately to break out of the middlescence rut.

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Recently, almost simultaneously, two of my coaching clients had a similar kind of challenge arise. Both of them came up against middlesence career issues—where to go next in their well-established and successful careers. When you’re “stuck” in the middle of an issue like this, the way out often just looks like a nebulous blur. But with some work, the nebulous blur begins to take shape and a solution begins to form. Of course, in retrospect—after the problem is solved, we often realize that the answer was staring us in the face but we couldn’t see it. So how do you go from a “nebulous blur” to seeing a solid solution? One of the primary keys is by creating “distinctions.” Since distinctions are such a critical component to getting “unstuck,” I thought it would be valuable to spend some time here talking about them.

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Finally! A name for a largely unacknowledged, but very real, issue that many mid-career workers are currently in the throes of.

In fact, tens of millions of workers are “feeling burned-out, bottle-neck, and bored,” according to a breakthrough article in the March 2006 Harvard Business Review entitled “Managing Middlescence” by Robert Morison, Tamara Erickson, and Ken Dyctwald.  They coined the term middlescence (like “adolescence”) to characterize this newly recognized phenomenon. 

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