The Top 5 Regrets of Mid Career Professionals

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Brave up Tuesdays. Kathy Caprino here. Now. What's really strange is my. I'm seeing myself upside down, which is really kind of strange. So why don't we hang, hang on with me and see what we got going on? All right, that looks good. Now why. There we go. Take technology. Anybody feel challenged about it like I do? How's that? Does that work? All right, folks, there we go. Thank you for being here. I'm sorry I'm late. I decided to do it in a different location. This is my family room and that just took a little longer than we expected. So thank you for being here and thank you for your patience. So today want to chat about the top five regrets of mid career professionals. And I want to tell you how this all came to be. A while ago, someone turned me on to, I think you pronounce it Bronnie Ware. And she did a post a while ago that went wildly viral. The top regrets of the dying and making sure my volume is what it needs to be great. And I read it and it really hit home for me and I think millions of others about when we come to the end of our life, what are we really thinking about? What really matters? What is it we want to make sure that we have done? And you know, I lost my beloved dad three years ago and he was a brilliant guy and just to me, a real light in my life. And he had dementia and he had cancer. His prostate cancer had spread all over his body. And even in his demented dementia state, there were things he would keep repeating. How are you? How are the kids? How's work? Got enough money? And he would ask, why am I here in the hospice place? Oh, so hard. But when you have actually been with the dying, you. You see what really matters at the end of life. So this weekend I said, you know what I want to do? I want to do this for mid career professionals. So as you know, I think I've worked with over 11,000 people in 11 years. I've heard from thousands more than that because my posts have something like 25 million views now. And I do feel like I have a finger on the pulse of what mid career professionals want. Why? Because I am one and I had so many regrets. So many regrets. I was stuck as you can be stuck. So also, you know, in my courses and private coaching and group coaching, I hear every day the top regrets of mid career people. So let me talk two things. When I talk mid career, I'm talking about age 35 to 55, 55 because I'm 56 and I feel like, God willing, knock wood, I have 30 years left to work. So I view that as still mid career 35, because we're getting into the phase of not just striving and striving, but what is it that we really want? What is it that we're really creating? What do we want to stand for? How do we want to use our talents? So to me, that's the mid career conundrum. Second thing I want to talk about is regret. So let me tell you how I feel about this. I don't actually believe in regret because regrets are toxic. Regrets are. I hate myself, I'm stupid, I'm a loser. So I feel that regret can be useful information. But we don't want to live in a state of regret because regret makes us sick and sad. So when I talk about regret, why I'm talking about it is that I want to help people identify them and then move beyond them. That's what we want. Okay, so what are the top five regrets of mid career professionals? So here they are. And you can find this on my Forbes blog. It seems to be going a little viral. I posted it, it just came flowing out. It's funny how messages for me, I don't want to woo, woo anyone out, but sometimes they come from another place, like another dimension. Like it'll come pouring out and then I'll have to go back and read it and say, what, what am I saying here? Because it seems like it came from another dimension and. And those are the ones that go viral. I have to tell you, the when I really felt that happening was when I wrote six toxic behaviors that push people away. How to recognize them in ourselves and change them. That thing went viral, blew up 3 million views on LinkedIn. I swear I wrote that in 20 minutes and it just came flying out. So there's something there. I'm grateful that that happens. All right, so what are the top five regrets of mid career professionals? So they're all framed in I wish I hadn't. So number one is I wish I hadn't listened to other people about what I should pursue and study. So let me talk about that. I was thinking about this the other day. My son is 19, my daughter's 22. And I remember a few years ago my son said something like, yeah, he's 30, he's old. And I, you know, I was whatever, 50 then. And I'm like, oh gosh, if 30's old, what am I? And he goes, oh, you're not old mom. But the point is, a lot of people think when you're 30, 35 you're living your own life, you're on it, you're not a child anymore. But what I see in my courses and working with so many people, millions of people are not living their own life at 30 and 35. They're living the remnants of the choices that they made. And for so many, they made pivotal choices in their late teens and twenties that have wreaked havoc on their life. So what I'm talking about is what they chose to study in college, if they went to college, what they chose to pursue as a job and a career. And what they continue to focus on that now they realize they don't like and in fact many of them realize they never liked it. So why did they pursue it? Because their parents told them they should. So look, I'm a parent. I'm not, I'm not saying all parents are stupid. I'm not saying all parents are bad. I am saying there's a lot of bad parenting. And I want to talk about this for a minute because it's a bugaboo of mine. Parenting beliefs and behaviors are influenced by your culture. You know, I was raised by a Greek mom and an Italian dad. And in a certain generation, and you know, generational generations have themes. So my parents generation was, you know, dad went through World War II, the Depression. It wasn't about self actualizing, it was about put the food on the table and be secure. Secure is what they were going, oh, there we go. We just lost you. In that generation. Security was the thing that was so elusive. And in that generation you could get a job like my dad did at General Electric. 30 years, seven patents, you could get a secure job. Today, I believe as a career coach. Forget it. If you're looking for a job to be secure, you're going to be barking up the wrong tree. Nothing is secure. Look at what happened after 9 11. You know, I lost my job one month after 911 because the company I worked for had a big travel division and they, it was decimated. Nothing is secure outside yourself. Only you are secure. Only your talents, your gifts, your special amazing mix of who you are and how you see the world and your triumphs and tribulations and, and traumas, the pivotal moments in your life. All of that is what is secure because it's made you who you are, not a job. So parenting, I, I'm going to be really bold and a lot of people are going to say you're wrong. But bad parenting is teaching your child that they can't think for themselves and they have to follow what you say. Teaching your child that your values are what they should value, not their own. Teaching your child that they can't be independent in their thoughts, in their heart. Teaching your child not to believe in themselves is bad parenting. And I know parents don't mean to be bad parents. Look at my Forbes post. Seven million views. And that is seven crippling parenting behaviors that keep children from growing into leaders. I mean, look, I read those. I interviewed Dr. Tim Elmore, who's amazing at Growing Leaders, that's his company. I've done a lot of those terribly crippling habits and behaviors. So I'm not above it. We do it because we think we should do it the way we parent. We do it because we can't stop ourselves. I know a lot of very anxious parents that are hovering hover mothers and they can't stop themselves. They're upset, obsessed about performance or grades or premier soccer teams, you know who I'm talking about. And they're making the kid crazy. So bad parenting, what I would say is this. Teach your child and your teen and your young adult to think for themselves, to believe in themselves because you won't always be there to walk them down, you know, walk them to college hand in hand. They need to be able to think for themselves and they need to make decisions for themselves. Okay, that was a little parenting rant. So what I see in 30 and 35 year olds and even 40 year olds, I studied to be a doctor, I studied to be a lawyer, I studied to be an architect and did that. I became an engineer, I became an IT professional because my parents said that's the secure thing, that's what you should be doing. And now they're miserable. But the problem is mid career professionals have spent 10 to 15 years already in their career. So there's a lot to they think lose if they're going to shift. So I'm asking you to think about this in two ways. If you're a parent of little kids or teen kids, start teaching them to think for themselves. If they say, I had a client who all she wanted to be was a lawyer in the world and she knew it from age 12 and her parents said, no, you're not. Lawyers are sleazy scumbags, forget it. You don't want to be that. Why would you want to be that? So they put her down, made her feel terrible and told her that her decision, her ideas, her heartfelt thoughts Were wrong, bad. And it took her till she was, you know, in her 30s to finally shed that. And now she's. She actually is shifting and, and got into an amazing law school. One of the best. Oh, I'm so happy for. So if you're a parent of young people, please instill in them to choose for themselves and support them, even if you think it's a little nervous making. All right. And if you are a mid career professional and you know you're not in the right field, it's time to do something about it. And listen, you don't have to chuck everything. You don't have to chuck your engineering career and become a career coach. Although I can tell you, a lot of engineers have told me they want to do that. You can take baby steps, baby steps, baby steps. To figure out what you want and not chuck everything and have a great transition plan. Okay. All right. The second is I wish I hadn't worked so hard and missed out on so much. This one really resonates with me so deeply. When I was in the corporate world, in my most toxic jobs, my kids were little and I was not in. I say this, I use this term. I wasn't in the fabric of their lives. I missed it. I missed so much. And I remember saying, if there's one thing in this world that I don't want to blow, it's being a parent. Because when I get to age 56 or 66 or 86, I don't want to look back and say, I screwed it up. And screwed it up would be my definition, not yours, not his. But I did want to be in the fabric of their lives. I wanted to go to their soccer games. I wanted to go to my daughter's dance shows. I wanted to see their culminating 8th grade project where they were standing dressed, said Betsy Ross or, you know, Einstein. I didn't want to miss these things. Why did I have kids if I was going to miss all of it? Now, listen, Some. Some women, some men say, I hear what you're saying, but in order for me to have the impact in the business world, I have to miss things. I've heard from women who are in California and their kids are in New York and they're calling them up and reading them a bedtime story on the phone. I am not judging. I'm just saying for me, that wouldn't be the life I want. What people tell me is, I've missed so much. I've missed so much. I didn't see my kid graduating from kindergarten. I Didn't. And you know, for me, I would get home at seven at night, we would make dinner, and then I would collapse on the couch. I could barely make it till their bedtime. If this is you, things have to change. You've got to learn to prioritize what's important to you because you will get to the end of your life. You will get to 56 and say, wow, 30 years have gone by. Do I have regrets about that? All right. The third is I wish I hadn't let my fears stop me from making change. So what do we fear? There are three critical things we fear. Loss, pain and failure. Loss, pain and failure. That's what we. That's what we fear. If I. Thanks, everybody. I love when you send your thumbs up because then I know I'm resonating with you. And you know what? Please type in your questions. I can't wait to answer them. I'm going to leave some time. So, you know, if you look at my life, I waited 18 years in a. In a career that wasn't right for me day one. But I didn't kind of understand that fully until I had so many crises. And then it was like the cosmic two by four. But why didn't I make change? I was afraid of loss. Losing money and losing self esteem. Losing the status of being a vice president. Who cares? At the end of our life. Am I really going to remember that I was a vice president? No. I'm going to remember the impact I had if I made a difference in anybody's life. You know, loss, pain. I was very scared of the pain of admitting that I was wrong in this career. The pain of starting over. Number three, I was scared to death of failure. What if I blow this at age 40? And then I got a master's in marriage and family therapy and became a therapist. And I think I've shared this story. It was in this room, actually where this happened many years ago, where I'd been a therapist for several years and I was putting my little kids down to dinner. Here, right here. I'll show it to you right there. And weird. That's crazy that it happened right there. And my phone rang and let me fix this. And my client said, I'm going to kill myself right now. I'm going to wrap my car around a tree right now. And she had a series of disorders that would have made her much more likely to actually do it. Some people say they're gonna do it, but they won't. She would have done it. And in one Milli, millisecond, my mind said, I don't want this in my life. I don't want this. I snapped out of that and we got her help and. And she's doing much, much better now. But there was pain there because I had made a known enormous reinvention. And then I had to realize this isn't right either. Pain, it's painful. It's painful. So what do you do if you don't want to have regret at the end of your life? You got to push through the fear. You cannot let fear of loss, pain and failure stop you. You know why? Because if it stops, stops you, you're going to have lost pain and failure, period. If you don't get in the cage with your fears and move through them and figure this out, you're going to have the very thing you've been running from. That's what I'm seeing with my clients. Number four. I wish I hadn't let toxic people and situations get the best of me. You know, I write a lot about toxicity and there's some authors and thought leaders I love who don't think of it the way I do. And I think that part of that is because I grew up with some narcissism in my life. And that is toxic. Even if you look at your friendships right now, a lot of people write me, wow, I don't have any solid, healthy relationships. It's all toxic. Well, when that's the case, it's not a random thing. It's that we are co creating and attracting challenging relationships and challenging experiences. It doesn't happen randomly. Anything that's a pattern is something that you are 50% of. That's really hard to hear. But you know, I started a Facebook group, Thriving after Narcissism for Children of Narcissists. And I just started it one day recently, a few months ago, because I couldn't stop myself. Because it's so clear that so many people who grew up with narcissists as parents or seems like the theme of today is parenting or had emotional manipulation in their upbringing do not have appropriate boundaries. So they don't know when to say no to something. They don't know how to stand up for themselves when it's unacceptable. And when you don't know how to do that, toxicity is everywhere. And you know, this was me. I didn't know how to speak up. I didn't know. And it's still hard for me. It's still hard for me to say the tough things that have to be Said to fire somebody, to tell. To tell a partner that it's not going the way I need it to go, right? To tell a staff member. I have to talk to you about this behavior. It's hard. It's hard, right? But if we don't know how to do it or we shy away from it, more toxicity will pour into our lives. And if you've had narcissism in your life, join my Thriving After Narcissism Facebook group. I have a six, six month, six part webinar series with the amazing therapist Jeanetta Bolander. And we're talking about how to divorce a narcissist. My mother is a narcissist. What happens if you're working for a narcissist? How to heal and how to recover. So join. Join us there. But letting toxic people and situations crush your life is something that requires you to shift. These people in these situations are not miraculously going to disappear. The shift has to happen with you. And that's hard. It's hard work. It's hard internal work and then it's hard external work, right? It's the brave up process. And that's not easy. But you can do it. You can do it. And finally, I wish I hadn't become so trapped around money. Let's talk about it. Somebody wrote me after reading this, do you have any books you can share? What do I do? I am trapped. I can tell you I would say that 95% of the people that I meet have some sort of issue with money. Even millionaires, even multi millionaires. Some are slaves to the money. They make some work night and day and feel like they can't stop because money is scarce. Some I know a millionaire who feels like it's never enough. I mean, that was a scarcity trauma he had growing up. I have people that no matter what they do, they can't make enough money. And this is your wealth programming. Part of it is your wealth programming. And you got that from childhood. You got that from the messages you heard around you, from your parents, your family, and from situations. I had a client once whose father was a gambler. So one Christmas, for instance, he'd be in the money and they would live like, you know, kings. The next Christmas, they were broke and had to go on food stamps. It was chaotic. It was scary. You know, when your parents deliver an experience that is chaotic, it's very scary for a child. So we internalize messages and our energy system stores trauma around money and around everything. But it's really important that you look at your money story. If you struggle at all with money, if you have an unhealthy, resistant, angry relationship or fear relationship with money, it's all about how you're viewing it, your money story, and what's been programmed inside of you in terms of how you're interacting with money. So a few amazing books that I recommend, run out and buy these books and devour them. The first and best to me is the Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth. Life changing book. She helps you look at how you take action, how you think. Your money story. She helps you unpack it and revise it. It's amazing. The second is the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. Amazing. He talks about how we all have an upper limit problem. The upper limit is from childhood and from other things that happen in our life. We have kind of a limit to how much success, joy, health, love, happiness, money we're comfortable with. And it's a. It's a tight limit. If you go over that limit, you sabotage because you're not comfortable, your system can't take it. And he talks about what has to happen to push that limit up. And there, there are so many examples in my own life on how unconsciously I had these upper limits. What's going on there? I got another Facebook message, sorry, unconscious limits. So it's an upper limit problem. You have to gain awareness of it in order to push it up, push it up, push it up. Otherwise you're subconsciously, unconsciously sabotaging yourself. Fantastic book. The third is Tapping Into Wealth. Margaret Lynch, Tapping Into Wealth. It talks about the tapping technique, which is a therapeutic technique that draws on or impacts the meridian points that acupuncture uses. And she has videos that you look at and go through from the book where you're actually tapping to release energetic trauma. I devoured this book in a weekend, and I cannot tell you the healing and the revelations I had around. She talks about goal trauma, debt trauma. It's powerful. So if you have intractable issues around money, read those three books and get some help. All right, how we doing? Anybody have a question? Questions, questions. I see some of you are live. I'd love to answer your questions, I really would. Do you have any of these regrets? You know, people have written me, as I said, it's going viral. Some people say, wow, one of them hit me, you know, between the eyes. And others said, I have all of these regrets and you. And you know what's crazy? When this stuff comes pouring out of me, you know, I don't stop myself and critique it. I let it, I write it and then I go away and then I come back and read it. I had every one of these regrets and they, they so grab, grab me by the heart. Because when we regret, it's really like we're experiencing loss, pain and failure times a thousand. We lost out on life. We failed to be the person we wanted to be that we so dreamed of being. And pain, it's very, very painful to get to middle age and say I've worked so darn hard and what I've created is, is making me sick, sad and angry. So I hope this is helpful. I hope this is giving you some strategies to let regret be Information today. Watch this. Take a white pad of paper. Go sit. You know, today I want to show you what it looks like here. It's so sunny and fall in Connecticut is so beautiful. Sit outside if you can. Take a pad of paper, write down what do I regret today? What do I regret? And what concrete action can I take today that will address this? I don't want to wait one more minute. Don't wait one more minute. You know, I mentioned last time my brother in law passed away suddenly in his sleep at 64. Life is fragile and life can be short. Make it, make it happen. Let your light shine. Please do. And speaking of that, I want to share with you. You know, I'm giving A TED Talk TEDx Talk TEDx Centennial Park Women in Atlanta, October 28th next week and I'm having a meetup with anyone who wants to come to the event and or lives in and around Atlanta. So if that sounds interesting to you, please write a comment on this page and we will get in touch with you about the the, the information. You can go to centennial tedxcentennialparkwomen.com for tickets and you can see all this on my page. And I'm talking about time to brave up because it is time. Let that light shine. And what else to learn more about yourself? You know, I have this pretty amazing quiz I have to say. It's called the Six Dominant Action Styles. Take it. It's Kathy Caprino.com actionstylequiz It will tell you what is your dominant action style or it'll tell you the style that you are using now that is not authentic to you. You're going to learn so much from this and I'm committed in 2017 to putting out a webinar training series on each style. It affects everything. Your style affects how you think, how you feel about yourself, what's important to you what you value, who you like and don't, who makes you crazy, how you communicate. So check out that dominant action style quiz you're going to learn so much about about yourself. All right, thanks for joining me and let me see what we got for questions. Hi, Havalah. Oh, I have to like, let me take it and do it this way. There we go. Ah, working on not being stuck. Two websites are born as we speak and I spent money to do them. Ooh, wow. Thank you, Havala. Thank you for sharing. I love it. Oh, I hope this was helpful, folks. I'm thinking of you, wanting you to brave up, shine your light. Let me know how I can help you. You know, I have courses and private coaching and you know, I do have a 12 month professional skills webinar training, 12 modules, which is incredibly affordable. So I'll post that here too. Let's get you the help you need so that regret is going to be something, a thing of the past. All right, my friends, thanks so much and I'll see you next, next week at noon or thereabouts. Bye. Thanks.