There’s a lot of chatter about our authentic selves, but I haven’t seen a definition of it that I connect with.

So I went into my creative sandbox, and created my own definition of authentic self:

Our authentic selves are the unlived lives within us that we sacrificed on the altar of other people’s approval and acceptance.

Midlife reinvention isn’t about creating an entirely new version of yourself.

It’s about connecting and breathing life into the version of yourself you abandoned decades ago to be who you thought you needed to be.

We dedicated the first half of our lives to following the hand-me-down blueprint of success and chasing externals to be who we believed we needed to be.

It’s why when we reach midlife, with the shadow of death lurking in the distance, we conduct an informal inventory of our lives, look at all our external markers of success, and still say to ourselves,

“Is this all there is?”

I propose an alternative model for the second half of our lives if we want to create a life of purpose, meaning, and fulfillment.

We must stop chasing the hand-me-down blueprint of success, and instead write a connected version of success that aligns with our inner selves and answers the question,

“Is this all there is?”

I worked in the corporate world for over a decade, climbed the ladder and chased all the externals to be happy, approved and accepted.

By most conventional definitions of success, I had it all.

And yet I was woefully unfulfilled.

No matter how much money and stuff I acquired, my life was empty, I had a success-sized hole in the middle of my chest.

I asked the question,

“Is this all there is?”

I wanted to write, create, and invent, I wanted to do all the things I wanted to do since I was a kid, but that I abandoned in the name of the hand-me-down blueprint of success.

All of our lives will come with a wake-up call, it’s an invetibale component of our shared human experience.

My wake-up call was one of my own design, I self-sabotaged when I defrauded a Fortune 500 company and was arrested by the FBI, and was sentenced to 24 months in federal prison.

My wake-up call taught me many valuable lessons, but perhaps the one that has defined my life the most after prison comes in four simple words:

Stop Chasing. Start Creating

Stop chasing success that isn’t even yours.

Start creating success that feels like home

On the heels of that lesson, is another lesson:

Don’t wait for the wake-up call to change.

If you wait for something outside yourself to happen so you can change, you’re outsourcing the quality of your life to something out of your control.

I can’t think of a more empty way to live and the antithesis of agency.

Because when the first half of our lives is dedicated to chasing the hand-me-down blueprint, we have little agency over our lives.

We may think we’re in control, but if you’re consistently asking, “Is this all there is?”, are you?

The next time you feel empty and ask, “Is this all there is?” don’t stop there; mine that question for the gold it contains.

Ask yourself another question:

“What’s missing? What would fill the emptiness?”

The answer to that question is the first step on your journey of reinvention.

The moment you choose to change your life is the moment your life changes.