You Have Boundless Potential: Embrace It!

Guest post by Mark Walton, author of Boundless Potential: Transform Your Brain, Unleash Your Talents, and Reinvent Your Work in Midlife and Beyond.

What is the lifelong potential of the human mind? Do we have talents or brainpower we’re unaware of? Can we make money and a difference doing something we love? Is there a science to it or just luck? Mark Walton can shed some light on these questions.

Millions of us in our forties, fifties, and sixties are facing career, financial, and personal challenges beyond anything we anticipated—and now we’re filled with fresh uncertainties. We’ve seen careers derailed and investments devastated by economic chaos. Some of us have grown restless or burned out in our businesses or professions. Others have unexpectedly “flunked retirement,” finding the so-called golden years mind-numbingly boring. However we’ve come to it, the challenge is the same: What Now?

Are you looking to change things up? Follow Mark’s “Design of Reinvention” for a healthier, happy career (and life!):

Step One: Examine your life and to ask yourself: given what I’ve seen, know about, and have experienced thus far, what is it that really fascinates me? What tugs at my mind and heartstrings? Maybe it’s business, for instance, or technology, or the creative arts, or coaching or leadership. What, even if I don’t fully understand why, truly lights me up? For successfully reinvented people, reflecting on and identifying this was the first step in the process.

Step Two: Explore ways in which your personal fascination could be translated into action (real-world work that you would deeply enjoy and that would empower you to succeed). What type of work would allow you to experience what psychologists call flow, that special happiness that comes from challenges that really matter?  That’s what you needto decide.

Step Three: Determine what type of structure you’ll need in order to materialize this new work in the world and marketplace. Perhaps you might go about this by starting new a business, or via creating new roles, careers, or nonprofits through which they could express your fascinations, reinvent your work and reach new levels of success in your life.

You can teach an old brain new tricks!