The Modern Midlife Crisis Goes Online: Building a Business Online

Linzibee’s Story of Blogging, Business and Lifestyle Design

I am excited to share this guest post from the UK’s Lindsey Briscoe, author and creator of Debt Help Tools. She has been running her own management and consultancy business since 2013 and has worked in multiple industries for various-sized companies. Her website includes a lot of free financial tools for you to check out. This article she created for Free At 50 shares advice and tactics for growing online, attaining professional freedom, and designing a lifestyle!

Disclosure: As a blogger, I use affiliate links sometimes! I may receive commission from purchases I share, but it does not change your price.

Meet Linzibee.

So we have arrived somewhere towards the middle of our lives, (yay!) it must be time for a crisis.

I don’t think I’m in the mood for a crisis, but I have been wondering how I got here and whether it was really where I intended to be when I started out.

I’ve noticed that I am missing the loving (and incredibly hot) husband and bulging bank account, so that didn’t go quite to plan for a start.

Maybe that’s because there really wasn’t too much of a plan to speak of.

More just a series of reactions. I wonder what would happen if we just stopped reacting?

If you think about it, we form a large part of who we are by reacting to what life throws at us. We react to our parents, our schooling, our friends, our family, our work environments, our partners and of course – how could we forget – our kids!

But what happens when we stop reacting, then I suppose we have to create something……

Sounds simple doesn’t it?

We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate.” — Bruce Lee

If you have found yourself here, in this place of wanting to create a “life by design”, probably a tad later than you intended, then maybe you can relate to this.

What seems to be all of a sudden there are no kids screaming for their dinner, no deadlines to be met, no parties to be attended and no urgent emails to be dealt with. The relentless decision fatigue has – in what seems like a heartbeat – become a decision vacuum.

Maybe you are here through choice and you’re just taking a minute to appreciate the blissful (or uncomfortable) silence or perhaps you feel like – in the immortal words of pink Floyd – “No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun” and you were so busy doing what needed to be done that you didn’t realise that the race you were running in finished sometime last week.

Photo credit: Groove free stock photos

So what do you do?

Do you react instinctively and go in search of things that need you to fill the space?
Maybe, if you have the financial side of this crisis sorted already, you could volunteer or get a dog?

Or do you take a moment to start on a completely new build, foundations up, built for purpose design for your life from this point forward?

I wonder then if the measure of a person is less about how they react to life’s challenges and more about how they design a life when there is nothing to push against, or perhaps more succinctly put; when they decide to observe over engage.
Imagine designing a life without boundaries, without necessities, without being pushed or pulled or shoved or tightly bound by our duties to others whether they are real, perceived or socially (or corporately) conditioned.

How much harder is it to design a life from scratch?

Imagine having no stories or excuses to tell yourself about why you must, can’t or shouldn’t do something. No templates to follow or management to please. Would you – given this choice – create the world around you that you have right now?
I’m not sure I would.

I can (like many people I assume), give a pretty convincing synopsis of my life to date that sounds like it was planned to the last intricate detail (well almost!).

I can spin all my challenges and heart wrenching experiences into the most amazing opportunities for growth that have catapulted my life to the next level. To be honest, on a good day, or after a few too many glasses of red wine, I believe this version of it too, but I don’t think that the truth is quite so clean cut for me or for any of us if we are truly honest with ourselves.

As I sit here now at the grand young age of 49 and wonder how I’m going to design the second half of my life (or at least the next few decades), whilst finding a way to make a “non-corporate” living, (the design without necessity part of the plan didn’t work out just yet either), I am truly amazed at how I managed to arrive here.

My initial thoughts are that it has had way more to do with luck than any real judgement on my part and a hell of a lot to do with my reactions to the environments, social expectations, mainstream education, people and situations I have “found” myself in.

Though on reflection this might be better termed “lost” myself in.

My reactions to life experiences thus far have made me into an excellent problem solver; give me a practical problem, anything from a broken business to broken house, and a great many things in-between and I’m quite definitely in my comfort zone.

Photo credit: Groove free stock photos

I just love taking broken things apart and putting them back together working.

A great skill indeed, and one quite revered in today’s western society (though admittedly not overly successful when applied to relationships but that is a story for another time).

The problem I have now though is a polar opposite one in many respects; it is one of design without parameters, which unfortunately for me, is a completely different skill set.

In this dilemma there are no instructions, I don’t know what’s it’s supposed to look like or “do” when it’s finished (other than make me rich and happy of course), there is no one telling me what I should or shouldn’t do (or no one that I’m listening to at least), there is no manual, no boss or business objectives to meet, no team to run or managers to please.

It’s everything I ever wanted and it’s giving me a panic attack.

Photo credit: Groove free stock photos

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