“I’m eighty years old,” she said, “and my family don’t understand why I keep working. They think I should be slowing down and it’s frustrating! I have a purpose — a mission — to help parents raise responsible children, so something good gets passed down the generations.”
We were in a breakout room on an online course, near the end of the session, and it came up almost in passing. I’d have placed her at sixty. So when she said eighty, I was stopped in my tracks.
She lit up — radiated — as she spoke. She’d built an online course. Written a book.
The world had handed her the usual script — you’re eighty, slow down, you’ve done enough — and she’d quietly declined it. Not out of stubbornness. Out of alignment. She knew there was still something that was hers to do.
We’re halfway through the year. Most people decide it’s too late to start. It isn’t. Behavioural scientists call it the fresh start effect — we move toward what we want most easily right after a landmark in time. The longest day just passed. July is days away. Now is a doorway, with six clear months on the other side.
“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.” — Goethe
You can run everything beautifully and still wake at 3am wondering: is this it? It isn’t too late to answer that. Not at forty, not at fifty, not at sixty — and, as my friend reminds us, not at eighty either.
So, something simple. A way to see where you are, without shame — Caitlin Walker’s Clean Feedback, which I use with clients all the time. Three questions:
- What’s worked well this year? What are you actually seeing or hearing that tells you so? What are you inferring/making up from that evidence?
- What hasn’t worked? Again — not the story. What are you seeing or hearing? And what are you inferring/making up from that?
- And the one that changes everything: what would you like to have happen in the next six months?
Then one small step toward it.
Here’s mine.
What’s worked: I finished a three-month facilitation course and I’m using it — my website’s built, my second one-day retreat is days away, and my seven-day retreat is taking shape. Alongside some things that have been personally hard. What hasn’t moved: the paperwork I keep meaning to declutter. It shifts, then stalls, then shifts again. So my one small step is a single pile at a time — not the whole lot.
And if you hit a wall — old beliefs, quiet fear, the negative self-talk that’s run so long it sounds like truth. You can’t see your own blind spots clearly. Nobody can. A skilled question, asked at the right moment, can dissolve in minutes what’s blocked you for years. That’s the work I do.
If you’re tired of circling the same wall and want to take honest stock — and decide what the next six months are for — I keep a few quiet coaching spaces for this. Discreet. Unhurried.
Whatever you choose to do, don’t just let six more months drift by, waiting for a better moment. Like my friend at eighty — you get to decide it’s not time to slow down.
It’s time to begin.