My friend and former co-trainer Margaret Nash has written a very practical and easy-to-read guide to finding your life’s new direction. As the subtitle implies, it’s written for ‘baby boomers’ (for readers outside the US who aren’t familiar with this term, it refers to people born in the years 1946-1964, in the baby boom after World War 2). But the book also has many useful lessons for people younger or older than that. It arrived on my 57th birthday, so I’m right in the middle of its target audience.
One of the things I liked about this book is that Margaret reminds us how cool our generation – she calls it the ‘Woodstock generation’ – actually was. With our reverence for the ‘greatest generation’, our parents who lived through World War 2, and the media’s marketing-led focus on younger generations, it’s easy to forget how the Boomers – us – questioned received wisdom, fought for women’s rights and civil rights, were responsible for an explosion of creativity in music, art and literature, and were determined to find our own paths beyond those that our parents laid out for us. It’s affirming to be reminded of that.
The book is very easy to read, with no use of jargon, and Margaret is not afraid to share examples of frailty, and of things that have worked, from her own life. She’s not the kind of personal development ‘guru’ who is concerned to come across as perfect.
Another useful thing about the book, both for the general reader and for coaches and therapists, is that it contains short, useable summaries of techniques like EFT and the Sedona Method, as well as some fairly standard procedures from NLP for goal-setting that will very possibly change your life if you’ve not come across them before.
There’s also a helpful distinction between ‘goal-setting’ and ‘manifesting’, which made me think again about concepts like the ‘Law of Attraction’ which for a long time I hadn’t given any attention to because of the number of what appear to be sharks and con artists who market themselves in those terms.
For me, though, the sections of the book which are going to be the most valuable are those on finding your life’s purpose and working with Archetypes. Margaret reminds us that our life’s purpose may change a number of times as our life goes through different stages, and not to get stuck in trying to live a purpose that is no longer relevant. And although I had heard of the idea of Archetypes, I wasn’t very familiar with the details, so there is plenty to explore in the practical exercises that Margaret gives us.
It’s a cliché, but this book really could change your life if you are ready for it. As with any self-help book, the value you get from it will be related to the effort you put into actually doing the exercises, of which there are many; for letting go of emotional baggage, finding your true self and the archetypes that resonate with you, finding (or rediscovering) your life’s purpose, setting goals and (it can’t hurt and it could work) manifesting what you really want in your life. All the exercises are doable (some of them not necessarily easy, depending on what you’re dealing with) and worthwhile.
The author’s voice in the book is the Margaret I remember from when I used to co-train NLP courses with her: funny, wise, compassionate and intelligent. Highly recommended!
Buy Age With Passion! A Boomer’s Guide To Fearless Aging by Margaret Nash