What is My Point B?

Were I to explain what I do as a life coach (a term I’ve never really loved), I’d say this:

If you want to get good at tennis, you hire a tennis coach. If you want to get good at life (or better at it anyway) you hire a life coach. A good coach can help you get from Point A to Point B in lots of different areas - relationships, finances, health, career, whatever you want.

In the past few years though, I’ve discovered many people have no idea what their Point B is or how to figure it out. They’re spending a ton of money and time on things that seem promising at first, but then kind of fall flat - especially at midlife.

And that makes sense: Especially if you just got divorced, your kids went off to college, you burned out on your job 5 years ago, you got sober or you’re struggling with perimenopause. You’re basically perched on the cliff edge of an era that’s ending, with no idea what comes next.

It can be terrifying.

Previous generations didn’t really have the luxury of a thousand different options like we do now, a first world problem I’ve named “blank canvas syndrome.”

If you’ve got it, you’re often swamped by choices, an inexplicable boredom and a persistent sense of guilt for not being happier or more grateful. It can leave you sitting alone in your car screaming at the dashboard, “what am I doing with my life?”

I wish I could tell people what their Point B is.

It would be so much faster, because most of my clients are super high achieving and could use all those hard-charging, perfectionist tendencies to just go out and crush it, if they only knew what IT was.

Except the second half of life - or at least a well-lived one - has nothing to do with achieving, competing, crushing or performing. It’s about something else entirely

The purpose of the second half of life is…

…less about doing and more about being;

…less about competing and more about communing;

…less about about me and more about us.

It has nothing to do with productivity or cleverness, but rather learning to be still and listen to God, to surrender to a wild, unpredictable holiness; to dive deep into the living water and drift along, trusting it to take us where we need to go.

So that’s what I’ve been teaching lately.

Perhaps that sounds like an insanely impractical approach for people who pay me thousands of dollars.

Is it?

Twenty percent of the US population has been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Thirty two percent of US adults reported experiencing anxiety in 2023. Women are twice as likely as men to experience anxiety disorders and it is the most common mental illness in the world, according to Forbes.

Clearly we’re doing something wrong.

And I wonder if the reason we feel so sick and anxious is because we are trying to live contrary to our design.

Consider the speed of consumerism, our poor overwhelmed planet, the competition for resources, the tragedy, the relentless political farce. Our culture loves it, but our nervous systems don’t. It’s like we are trying to fit our square-peg humanness into a round hole culture; one we know is careening out of control, yet somehow we’re supposed to hang on and strive to win whatever first place is.

What if the trick is not to learn to play the game better than everybody else, but not to play it at all?

That’s the doorway to Point B.

I believe your highest self - the love of God within you - knows exactly what to do with your square peg self, but you have to muster the courage to actually do it.

The second half of life - where we might just live into our 80’s with good health and vigor - is blessing we didn’t used to have. With time, people see how ill-fitting the round holes are. They’re not bad exactly, just not relevant or satisfying anymore. We want to belong in a new place as the squares or octagons we are.

We come in a billion different shapes of course, but a few themes are common to people feeling their way into a purposeful second half.

• I want to be in community.

• I want to help others.

• I want to be useful.

• I want to share my talents to make someone else’s life better - not just make more money for millionaire shareholders.

And that’s right. That’s very second-half thinking.

But what is MY Point B?

Well, that’s where stillness is everything.

Most people I meet, deep in the throes of a midlife transition, have a strong sense that their first half, as wonderful as it was, is over, and the second is frustratingly opaque.

But the God who created you and me and the aurora borealis and everything else deals in uncertainty. It’s the soil where faith grows.

In my experience, leaps into faith, like this one in Central Africa, or this one in LA, or this one in Madagascar, made my life so much richer and more interesting. I had to depend on God, because the plans I made were impossible without Him. When I step outside of a life I can easily handle, I am astonished by what only He can do - just little daily miracles, like these.

Living this way is so much fun, but round-hole culture doesn’t get it, because it’s not cost-effective and my cute little boot straps count for nothing.

People in the midlife dip have often mastered the first half of their lives: Same job, same routine, same weekends, same relationships, and maybe it’s all fine. Even if life is stressful it’s possible to be overstimulated and underwhelmed, bored and plagued by the question “Isn’t there more?”

There is.

That’s why people call midlife a crisis, but it’s not. It’s a summons to Point B. 

• Your Point B might require skills or character you don’t currently have, things you have to cultivate and grow into. Good news: Growth is exciting and a sure antidote to midlife malaise.

• Your Point B might require you to get honest about the state of your relationships and to take action to improve or end them.

• Your Point B might invite you to recognize that the way you’re living now, will leave you quite sick by age 70.

• Your Point B might be to recognize that you won’t live forever, and there may well be someone on the other side of this veil who is eager to see you face to face.

In my opinion, life coaching is about preparing for that meeting, and choosing what we will contribute to this world in advance of it.

So that’s where we’re going at Girl Catch Fire because, after all, our Point B is helping you get into yours.

ps. Want to hear more about our approach to midlife and purpose building? Pop over here for our latest mini-training.