My 50th year in seven days: part 5

The funny thing was that although the message to move on was loud and clear and I was hearing it at last, it didn't say what to move on to!  How was I supposed to restart my life at almost 50?  I was a highly skilled senior project manager and programme director with many years of experience working in the public sector designing, developing and coordinating the delivery of multi £million complex projects.  How did I translate this into what I needed to do next? 

 After a bit of soul-searching I decided that I wanted to be my own boss.  I'd had enough of the politicians and the re organisations.  If I was my own boss, I could choose when, where and how I wish to work.  Great!  What was I going to boss myself about with?

I decided to go and find out about business models and business strategies and how to develop the thing I knew I love doing – helping others.  The thing I had loved most about my job was the deep connection, the one on one communication you could establish with another person through mentoring and coaching. 

As a senior manager my work was getting others to operate at their best so that the projects we worked on would achieve their targets.  This meant I was constantly coaching, mentoring and supporting others and I loved it. I discovered halfway through my career that the key to getting things done was to treat people like they matter.  Really matter - in other words treat the like you believe the best of them and trust that given the right information, skills and tools, they would be more than happy to do their best. 

In addition to my management experience, I was already an NLP Practitioner, an interfaith minister and spiritual counsellor, so I also decided to further augment my people skills by retraining as a personal development coach.

Now I had two pieces of the puzzle:  A desire to be independent and a desire to help other people achieve their best.  But how was this going to make a difference? In addition the other question that needed answering and that was becoming more important was: how was it going to make me any money at all, let alone replace my previous salary?

To be continued...

Read the penultimate part of my journey here tomorrow.