Step into living the life you want and your best future.

Gary Player once said that “You must work very hard to become a natural golfer.” 

By age 30, I had all but reached my salary targets, had passed 7 successful years or marriage, had 3 kids with another on the way.  Life was going well, so it was time to set my goals even higher.

Off we went to Australia.  The city lights were bigger and brighter, and the opportunities more plentiful.

Under the guidance of my boss and mentor, I learned how to succeed in the high-stakes world of trading energy futures contracts - yes the same products that destroyed US conglomerate Enron.

Our team delivered hundreds of millions in trading revenue, transformed the wholesale energy portfolio and I had a key role in billions of dollars in asset acquisitions, divestments and green field developments.

Life was good, but as time went on, I looked ahead and I didn’t like where my life was going.  I saw corporate life wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.  When I looked around me I saw boring meetings, politics and many divorced executives who didn’t know their kids.   I could see that work was a very poor substitute for the really important things in life.

I had to change the path I was on before it was too late...

I decide I had to leave, to start my own business, do what I loved and forge a lifestyle away from the corporate machine.

But why would I leave a high-paying career to start something that had a very high chance of failure?

Risk is an interesting thing.  One person’s security is risk to another.  Some see a corporate job as secure, but I looked down the road and decided I had to get off the hamster wheel before it was to late. 

Staying on seemed far to risky for me.

But how, when I had a large mortgage, 6 kids under 10 including one on the autism spectrum, no family in Australia.  I was risking their life and not just mine.

I had to break new ground on how to make business and family work or face a future train wreck.  

So we did it.  Some colleagues and I handed in our notices and started an energy trading fund – think hedge fund – investing on behalf of high net wealth investors into the Australian energy market.

It was succeed or bust.

But life was about to get a whole lot crazier, at home and at work.

We survived the loss of our best trader and bad swaption positions too big for our size to almost blow up within one year of starting.

But in 4 years we recovered to generate $50 million dollars in trading revenue, for a net return exceeding 25% p.a. on invested capital, and a share price jump of 20x its original value.

And during the heart of the GFC, we were a finalist for Asia-Pacific emerging manager of the year.

Business was booming, but home life was a battle managing a family of 7 kids, home-schooling, raising one child with autism and nearly 3 hours of daily commuting from my home on the outskirts of Melbourne.

It couldn't go on forever.  It didn't.

Our seed investors hadn't banked on the extreme volatile nature of our business model, so they plotted a way out and to grab as much value as they could on their way.

And it came in the form of a private company version of a coup d'etat involving my former friend and mentor.

And so that vision was over, and a successful business was brought down overnight. 

It was a bitter pill, and there's not much worse than betrayal of a friend. 

We made some money, yes, but on a personal level, I was done.  It took too much out of me.  There was no going back to trading or corporate life. 

I was in midlife now, and it was time for a big change.

Life transitions are a difficult beast to master.

It took a lot of time for me to recover from the personal betrayal and loss of my business. But part of me was relieved.  So was my wife.  Trading one of the most volatile commodities in the world (before Bitcoin) was not a family-friendly pursuit.  But another part of me missed the status trading brought and the thrill of making money from not much more than intellectual property.

Suddenly, I had time on my hands - time to spend first and foremost with my family, but also to rethink my life. 

Life transitions bring turmoil, doubt, fear, interspersed with courage, determination and clinging to a hope that new opportunities lay ahead.

I had to learn quickly who I really was and who I wanted to become.  

I chose to make this brutal setback a springboard to seek my creator afresh and a new purpose for my midlife and beyound.

Jumping forward to today, I have lived through and worked out a system for handling major mid life transitions.

As a certified Professional Life & Business Optimization Coach, I help clients adjust their path ahead to bring about a future that they (not others) truly want to live.

I help my clients to:

• Come to grips where where they are, who they really are with a healthy view of their past
• I help create new hope and optimisim for their future
• Re-discover the parts they have lost over the years, such as laughter, carefree fun, motivation, purpose and friendships
• Explore broadly the possibilities that are out there for living a full mid life and beyound
• Create a new vision for a second half of life with purpose, and with an intentionally designed legacy
• Formulate a plan to make it happen
• Be encouraged and equiped to overcome internal and external obstacles, and
• Be supported for as long as you need help through midlife change.

I’ve discovered that true coaching is an incredibly powerful 21^st century method to help high achievers get from ‘stuck’ to real life ‘success’ faster, and with less pain.

I'm not making the sort of money I made trading, but I have found something much more valuable than money, so I wake up Mondays glad I'm doing what I'm doing and who I am.

For me, life is a dynamic harmony of work, family, friends, personal life and wellbeing.  Never perfect, but going in the right direction.

How about you?

If you're in midlife and you are worried about the driection of your life right now, drop me a line and let's chat.  I promise to help you even in just one call.