When values shift for 50+ workers

Have you ever thought about how your career management might differ at middle age from your earlier years? For today’s conversation on career issues after 50, here are some examples of people I’ve worked with in the past year.

■ Having been the “good girl” who cared for her ailing parents nearly all her adult life – and having made career decisions to accommodate this reality – Carol is struggling with career planning in the wake of their recent deaths. As she says, it’s not the grief that’s holding her back, but the unaccustomed freedom.

■ When Jack was laid off by his employer of 30 years, he assumed he would jump into a job search almost immediately. Now, six months later, he’s surprised to discover that he doesn’t miss work at all, or at least, not for the reasons he thought he would.

■ Terry has been a truck driver all his life but only because it’s the best-paying work he could find when he started his career. He’s always been able to push aside his real interests but lately his desire to be an artist has been almost overwhelming.

■ Susan started a company in her early 30s to allow her to rise more quickly in her profession. Twenty years later, she’s moderately successful, but not to the point where she can cash out. Even so, she’s nearly desperate to find a way to work less or at least, with less responsibility for the enterprise.

These stories have something in common, besides the fact that the individuals are all 50 or older: Each story reflects a shift in the worker’s personal values from youth to middle age.

The truth is, we care about different things as we grow older. After all, why wouldn’t you approach the question of work differently after experiencing such things as raising children, surviving serious illness, going through a divorce, or losing your parents? Even reaching a professional goal or completing a successful career can contribute to a change in values.

Since so many of our career habits are established in our younger years, it can be difficult to recognize the default settings we’re using for decision-making decades later – such as choosing a job or company for the potential to move up when that’s no longer important. Or eschewing jobs with travel even though there are fewer demands on the home life now that the kids are grown.

In most cases, life lived on the same path as always won’t be disastrous. But the nagging sense of “what if ” might not go away without being addressed head on. One way to do that is to try out different scenarios. Here are two to get you started.

Scenario 1. Look back at a point when your life was changed – perhaps a marriage, or a decision to attend or leave college, or a health crisis in your family. Ask yourself: If this hadn’t happened, how would my life have been different? Then, crucially: Is the alternate life one that I regret not having? Is there something in that version that could still be captured or returned to?

The goal isn’t to merely identify points of dissatisfaction. Rather, you want to gain a better understanding of how responsibilities or thought patterns assumed early in life have become codified into personal rules of conduct, impinging on future plans. What once seemed like a necessary sacrifice may now be simply habit – is it still the best way to solve a problem or meet your responsibilities? Or are there other solutions to consider?

Scenario 2. Look to a future vision of how life might be if you made one particular change. For one client, it was selling her home, which simultaneously provided cash and freed her from being the de facto keeper of family holidays and traditions. When she downsized she was logistically freed to travel but she was also psychically freed from being the maternal symbol of home for her clan, perpetually hosting holidays and birthdays and long summer breaks for her grandchildren. By making the one change (selling her home), she was able to rewrite the pattern for her entire life.

At 50 or 60 or older, you have the life experience to use scenarios for good effect. You can look back with wisdom and ahead with relish. And, while you may not feel you have the resources – perhaps financial, or health, or even lifespan – to do everything you can envision, you have something at least as good: The life experience to help you make the best use of the resources you do have, including resiliency, ingenuity and inner strength. Let the dreaming begin!