Page 165 - Talane Miedaner - Coach Yourself to a New Career_ 7 Steps to Reinventing Your Professional Life (2010)

STEP 6: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER 153

money has become an end in itself. While I like to have money just
as much as the next person (if not more!), there is no amount of
money that is worth sacrificing your life
for. As our lives change, our require-
ments and values can change as well. You have to be very
It isn’t always easy to predict just how careful if you don’t
things will turn out. I’ve coached super know where you are
ambitious executive women who were going because you
certain that they’d be right back to work might not get there.
after having children and then, much
to their own surprise, had a complete —YOGI BERRA
change of values and decided to become
stay-at-home mothers and loved it. I
personally thought I’d be a full-time, stay-at-home mother, but
after breast-feeding for nine months, I was eager to get back into
coaching—I was hungry for mental challenges and stimulation.
I particularly like the example (in Step 4) of my client who
was a professional musician and had his own band, but got tired
of being on the road after doing it for twenty-plus years and
decided to become a nurse instead. He enrolled in nursing school
in his forties. Even the die-hard rock
stars can get tired of doing the same
thing all the time. Every now and then
The hardest years in
it makes sense to sit back and exam-
life are those between
ine the big picture of your life—take
ten and seventy.
stock of where you’ve been and where
you’d like to go. If you don’t make a —HELEN HAYES AT AGE
few plans, it is easy to drift through EIGHTY-THREE
life or get really busy, and before you
know it, you’ll have missed the oppor-
tunity to do what you really wanted to do and your life will be
over and there is no getting it back. Once again, take a few min-
utes here to jot down and compile your answers from the prior
chapters so you can see how it all starts to come together, and
then consider where you are right now in the grand scheme of
things.