The party

My birthday came and went in a flash.  So much anticipation and preparation and then my big day was over.  I had a really marvellous time from the moment I woke up until the moment I went back to bed again at the end of the day.  I was the lucky recipient of some great presents, lots of phone calls, tons of good wishes via Facebook plus my birthday party in the garden.  And the sun shone brightly all-day.  What more could I ask for?  I promised I would post the pictures but I can do better than that; here is a compilation video of my party.  (It's a compilation because as you will see, none of us are Steven Spielberg or Spike Lee so we are all really rubbish and videoing.  These are the best bits!  Yes I know ... they are pretty ropey too!)

In case you're wondering what happened to the spider challenge, well I did manage to capture a spider that was trying to set up home between the wing mirror and the passenger window of my car.  I caught it in a sherbet tube, however, the only person around to capture the event on film was my daughter and you know how close she is prepared to get to a spider- in this case it was no closer than the other side of the glass a.k.a. the inside of my car, so sorry no pictures but I did do it I swear.

Today's the day

So the big day has finally arrived.  3 September 2011, my 50th birthday!  And more importantly (well not quite but almost) I've completed my 50 day blog challenge!  Every day for the last 50 days I have posted a blog without fail.  Wow I'm so proud of myself.

Thank you to all those who have taken the trouble to read it and a bigger thank you to the few who have commented here and via Facebook.

Today is party day, and I have  brilliant weather for my barbecue.  Thank you universe!  September is so reliable, the best month and the best people (but I would say that, I’m bias).  If you are coming, I'm looking forward to seeing you later.  If not, I'll make sure I have a drink for you too. By the way here's the cake I made.

So what next? I think I will keep blogging regularly, I'll see how long I can keep up the daily posts; but at the very least, I will do my usual weekly one.  

To conclude, I've done one of those lists (sorry if you find them a bit twee, apparently they are the “in thing” in social media): 50 reasons is to love being 50 – enjoy.

1.      You’re alive yippee! You have passed the life expectancy of at least 13 countries 

2.      50 is the new 30 – not really but until Paul McCartney, Mike Jagger and Cliff Richard's retire (now in their late 60s) you can lay claim to this.

3.      Wisdom comes with age and you can definitely claim age, so wisdom can't be too far behind

4.      You have finished being 49 and dreading getting to 50. You have arrived. Settle in. You are now in your 50's. (In another 9 years you can have a fretful year on the run up to 60.)

5.      You can be a tiny bit more confident in your belief that you think you know it all 

6.      You can now focus on YOU without feeling selfish

7.      You can stop caring what people think – if you ever did before; now you can claim your place amongst the ranks of the old and cranky (only if you want it)

8.      You’ve still got 20 years before you have to retake your driving test

9.      You can sing along to modern songs to the amazement of today's generation, and then smugly tell them that you remember the song the first time round by someone else. 

10.  You now get mail from aging celebrities – albeit promos urging you to take out "no medical questions asked" insurance policies, but hey at least they write to you now. 

11.  If there is a man in your life, he has lived through his mid-life crisis. (Unless you have a toy boy, in which case it’s win-win)

12.  You have natural highlights (what's grey hair?)

13.  Hopefully your kids have all reached the age of self-sufficiency – if not, never mind they won’t expect much from you because you’re “old”

14.  If you look younger than the stereotypical 50-year-old you can brag about your age

15.  You might not be entitled to free travel yet, but as a senior member of the community, you can legitimately sit in the priority seats if you're feeling tired

16.  You don't have to feel guilty about wanting to be in bed at 10pm (because you're tired, not to do the energetic stuff)

17.  You can enjoy a quiet night in and really enjoy the “quiet” bit.

18.  If you don't want to read the small print you can claim you’ve forgotten your reading glasses

19.  You can remember the hit parade of 30 years ago today

20.  Since time is no longer on your side, it’s okay to go all the way on the first date (some of us still suffer from the guilt inflicted on us as teenagers)

21.  Nothing about sex surprises or embarrasses you anymore

22.  You always have the latest fashion – you just have to dig it out of the mothballs

23.  It’s much easier to become a supermodel in the over 50s age category

24.  You’ve only got 50 years to wait for your telegram from the monarch

25.  Despite what your children think, 50 isn’t that old in the scheme of things - you weren't around when the dinosaurs lived and no, you don't remember the war

26.  You finally realise that happiness is a choice not a set of circumstances and so you get to choose to be happy for the rest of your life

27.  Been there... done that... is a great conversation stopper if you get cornered at a social event

28.  If you decide to write an autobiography you've got a lot of material to put in it

29.  Open University programs have started to sound interesting

30.  You now qualify for the offers in SAGA

31.  You’re part of the generation in charge 

32.  When you were at school they were still teaching proper maths and so you can add up in your head

33. You can communicate well because you went to school when they taught children how to    write a complete sentence. You know…with nouns and verbs and capital letters and all that stuff. Remember those things? They're rare today.

34.  You can get cheaper car insurance

35.  Your little monthly visitor, if not already deceased is definitely terminal 

36.  Contraception is (or will soon be) a thing of the past

37.  Anti-ageing products have come a long way since cold cream

38.  You have survived three and a half recessions (the current one isn’t quite over), so you know how to stretch your resources.

39.  "Good judgment comes from experience and a lot of that comes from bad judgment" (Will Rogers). You've already been there and done that, so you have a head start on the younger generation 

40.  You have expertises that have taken a lifetime to develop. There are no shortcuts.

41.  You can think on your feet. How do you think you got to be this age anyway?

42.  Your body has calmed down from the crazy mid 40s years’ when it was doing its own thing and now you've got back control 

43.  You get a real boost from overzealous shop assistants who want to check your ID before selling you alcohol – really you think I’m under 21 – that's okay you keep the booze – YES!

44.  You don't have to attend or host anymore under 5’s birthday parties or under 6’s or under 7’s or under 8’s etc (now that’s got to be worth millions!)

45.  You can use your mobile phone with impunity because any damage it’s going to do in the next 20 years will be overtaken by the effects of ageing on your memory

46.  You keep finding uses for all that "irrelevant" information they made you learn in school – it's like you've started to live your education

47.  It’s easier to forget bad experiences because it's just easier to forget, period!

48.  You are now the youngest in your age cohort (i.e. 50 plus) as opposed to the oldest (i.e. under 50)

49.  You are young enough to understand how to use technology and old enough to deploy it effectively 

and most importantly ...

50.  You finally get that age is a mindset so the best thing about being 50 is that it makes no difference at all.

My 50th year in seven days: part 7

The final thing to fall into place was a realisation that the wealth I was talking about wasn't material wealth.  It didn't start out that way.  Initially I thought the solution was to mentor women into business.  Whilst this is an important part of it, I realise that this is not where my passion lay and besides there are hundreds of excellent business mentors out there.   

The wealth that fired my heart and ignited my passion is an internal wealth.  Something that once you tap into can never be taken away. It is this wealth that has the potential to unlock the door that currently imprisons your inner goddess.

One thing I've learned from all the spiritual traditions I've studied is that the starting point to discovering your true internal wealth and living a truly inspired life is a journey inwards towards your own heart, your own passion.  The Buddhist prayer of loving kindness starts with offering loving kindness to yourself.   

Once you can look at yourself, your true self and completely love what you see– what's not to love – you will recognise the value of the wealth that is in abundance within you:  your spiritual wealth, emotional wealth, intellectual wealth, physical well (your body). Wealth on the inside overflows and pours into your daily life the way an underground spring bursts through the Earth and flows down the hill sides creating a stream.

So to continue the analogy: each wealth stream bursting from empowered, inspired, enlightened woman is able to join with the wealth streams of other women, forming a powerful river able to remove obstacles and carved channels in the landscape, changing it forever.  The river eventually flows into the ocean where the wealth streams of the entire planet of enlightened, empowered, inspired women joined together.  Now with the might of the ocean women of the world can change the world.

I would coach and mentor women to become Tycoons, however, the business they would be managing would be the business of their life, i.e.  They would become the CEOs of their own lives: YOU plc (Personal Life Company). What better business to be a Tycoon of than your own life.  If your life is your business then your assets are your emotional, physical, spiritual and intellectual wealth.  Learning to take charge and manage YOU plc was how I had managed to reinvented and rebuilt the different elements of my own life: my relationship, my body, my mindset and now my career. 

I suddenly felt as if the pieces of an enormous puzzle had miraculously  fallen into place and now revealed the picture that had until now been indecipherable.  I could use my NLP, project management, coaching and spiritual counselling expertise to provide the midlife woman with a smart restart solution, giving her the confidence to pursue the career of her dreams; the courage to embrace her passions and the know how to manage all aspects of her life with the prowess of a world-class CEO in charge of a FTSE 100 company.

My passion: women, my mission: to empower enlighten and inspire the midlife women needing to start again, to support them to recognise their inner wealth and use the knowledge to restart smart.  My Tycoon women - Totally You Confident Outstanding Optimistic Now: the CEOs of their own lives with the power to use their inner wealth to create wealth for themselves and their community.

But the story is not complete, it is just beginning.  An exciting future lies before me as I enter my 51st year running a business I love, doing work that I'm passionate about and sharing my fabulous new life with amazing family and friends.  

The last post in my 50 day challenge is tomorrow, my birthday.

My 50th year in seven days: part 6

My research into different business models suggested that I needed to narrow down or niche my focus.  Helping people was too broad, helping who and with what?  I decided to ask the universe the question and wait for the answer.   

My spiritual connection is grounded in the concept of interfaith.  Interfaith is not a new religion, it's a way of being that holds, whilst our spiritual traditions are many and varied in what they tell their practitioners to do; in essence they  are all seeking the same thing: connection to each other and connection to our source.  Interfaith, accepts that our many different spiritual traditions are equally valid as long as their core message is one of love and respect for others.

Asking the universe meant praying and meditating on the question and waiting for the answer to show up, trusting that it would.  Sure enough it did.  It was just before International Women's month and this year (2011) was the hundredth anniversary of the International Women’s Movement.  I was doing some research for a workshop I intended to run and I came across these statistics, which in the context of 100 years of targeted activity focused on improving the lot of women shocked me.  

Actually it was more than a shock; it rocked me to my core.  Women do two thirds of the world's work for less than 10% of the wages and own less than 1% of all the wealth in the world including property.  So I found my niche, women, we definitely needed to help each other and my topic, wealth.  Women needed wealth and power or as history had shown, we’d never change things.

Although I wanted to work with all women, I remembered how difficult it was to focus on anything other than home making when I had a young family.  Not wanting to go down the route of piling more stuff on already over loaded young mums, I thought of my current circumstances.  There are many women like me, in mid-life, who if they do have children; their offspring are now at an age where they need coaching and mentoring rather than caring and nurturing. What if these women also had to restart their lives because something had happened to upset their equilibrium?  That is, they'd receive life's curve ball and their wild swing at the projectile had not only missed but caused them to unbalance and now they lay dazed on the floor.   

Many could be facing redundancy due to the large public sector cuts and wider economic decline.  Like me they would be highly skilled, and looking for a way to pick up the pieces and restart smart. 

Perhaps they would be looking for a way to start new careers doing something that they were passionate about. It was  also very likely that these women would be worried about their financial security – none of us are getting any younger and the prospect of being poor after retirement is a scary thought (even if the Government expects us to work until we drop!) 

Or maybe they might be looking to re sculpt their bodies and image like I had done when I hit my mid forties and suddenly found that I had put on 3 stone!  I had to discover a new way of getting back in shape and staying that way without the crazy diets or killer exercise routines.  

So many times in my life I have had to restart smart, fundamentally changing what I was about so that I could move forward effectively and be in charge of my life again.  When I reviewed my journey I realise just how much similarity there was between how I manage my life and the techniques I used to manage major world class projects.  I could streamline this so it was a more user-friendly solution and I could pass it on to empower women to create wealth, change themselves and change the world.

It's a known fact that where Development Agencies have educated and trained women, the women have taken the knowledge back into the community and the net result is the whole community has been uplifted and improved.  A nurturing nature means that we are more likely to give back.  Women are the way to change the world.  I therefore reasoned that empowered women could change the world; could redress the imbalance in wealth and power that resulted in those appalling statistics.  I was on a mission.

I needed a name, a way to capture the idea that could become shorthand.  Obviously it had to be the right name.  Words are so important; they convey ideas in an instant.  Often women are associated with softer, touchy-feely words which are lovely; however whatever words I used needed to say power conclusively, it needed to signify that women were 100% in charge of their lives. A word (or words) that even if you didn’t understand the deeper ideas behind the concept, was strong and powerful in its own right. I was mulling this over with a good friend when it came to me.  Tycoon: someone powerful, an amasser of great wealth and power.  Tycoon Women was born.

To be continued 

Read the exciting conclusion to the story of my 50th year here tomorrow.