Navigating Career Transitions at Midlife

By Lucas Marang’a

Almost a decade ago, someone referred me to a book that changed how I think about life, leadership, and career transitions. It’s called Halftime by Bob Buford, and it uses a simple but powerful metaphor: our lives are like a soccer match. The first 45 minutes represent your first 45 years (or your 40s at least). Then comes halftime—that moment when you retreat to the locker room to catch your breath, assess how the game is going, and strategize for the second half.

When the whistle blows at halftime, what will you do? How will you approach the next 45 years of your life?

I came across this book during my own midlife career transition, when I was turning 40 and wrestling with big questions: What will I do with the rest of my life? What will give me meaning? These aren’t just philosophical questions—they’re practical ones that every leader faces at some point in their career. And in this VUCA world we live in—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous—these questions are coming earlier and more frequently for leaders across Africa.

Whether you’re an organizational leader hitting a barrier in your current organization, a mid-level manager looking for your next move, or a professional navigating redundancy, the ability to transition effectively is essential to your career and overall life success.

The Reality of Career Transitions in Today’s World

Organizational hierarchies are always narrow at the top. It is common for leaders to hit a ceiling, a point in their careers where vertical movement is limited. There’s simply no further room to climb in their current station of work.

I’ve coached numerous clients who found themselves in exactly this position. They were talented, experienced, and ready for more, but the structure of their organization, coupled with external market factors, couldn’t accommodate their growth. And in recent times, the situation has become even more complex. Organizations I’m working with are being forced to lay off people due to policy changes driven by global shifts. People are receiving severance checks and asking, “What do I do now?”

A significant change doesn’t mean the end of your career. It means you need to start thinking about pivoting. We need to introduce a different conversation: Where else can you go? What else can you find? How much can you change for something brand new?

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The agile world demands agile leaders

The world is changing so quickly that the skills that got you here might not be the ones that take you there. Whether you’re facing outplacement or looking for in-house advancement, the challenge is the same: How do we develop the ability to adapt rapidly with minimal information while still having the courage to take the leap?

In my work with Cedar Africa Group, we’re helping leaders across Africa build “adaptability muscle.” It’s the capacity to move forward with a career transition even when the path isn’t entirely clear. This matters because waiting for perfect clarity today means you’ll always be too late.

Some of our clients are navigating outplacement, transitioning out of organizations and into new opportunities. Others are working to climb higher within their current structures. The fascinating thing? Both groups need the same foundational work. Both require introspection, clarity, and strategic thinking about how to deploy their assets in new ways.

Build a foundation by taking stock

Before you start scanning job boards or networking for your next opportunity, there’s essential work to be done within yourself.

I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that successful transitions begin with this inward journey. You can’t know where to go until you know what you have or even where you are. You can’t deploy your assets strategically until you’ve taken stock of them.

The 3 Cs framework

One of the tools we use in coaching is the 3 Cs exercise (adapted from Halftime). It’s a career and life-coaching framework for assessing your abilities, skills, knowledge, and experience—everything that makes you who you are professionally.

Here’s an overview of the 3 Cs:

• Context – is about the role you want to play. It could be in your current organization or another that better aligns with your current stage of life and career. Sometimes your unique set of skills might require you to start your own organization to unleash your magic.
• Core – is who you are. What are your passions and strengths, and how can you align them with your career or job? One can achieve this by doing the StrengthsFinder (or similar) exercise.
• Capacity – is what you have. Specifically, what do you have in terms of time, treasure (financial state), and unused talents that are available and can help you get to your ideal occupation? One key aspect of capacity is answering the question: how much is enough? Our pursuit for more money can keep us from exploring new opportunities, hence remaining stuck in current roles even when the threat of exit is looming.

To have a meaningful career and life, we must audit where we are and what we have, and have an inclination of where we want to go or be. The aim is to know your sweet spot where the 3Cs overlap.

The beautiful thing about this process is what it reveals. I’ve had clients say, “I never realized I was actually good at accounting,” or “I didn’t know my networking skills were this strong.” When you’re more aware of what you have, and the assets you possess at a point in time, you suddenly know where to deploy them.

This is the walk within. The journey of introspection. And it’s not optional if you want your career transition to be successful.

Simple methods for getting clear

Beyond the 3 Cs, I use several simple methods to help clients get clear before they move forward. These aren’t complex frameworks that require expensive software or advanced degrees. They’re accessible tools that help you think more clearly about who you are and what you bring to the table.

A few of my favorites:

• The StrengthsFinder exercise by Don Clifton is a timed, 30-40-minute assessment of your unique talents. The assessment identifies patterns in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and then categorizes them into themes that reveal your strengths.   
• Halftime Roadmap is a great yet simple tool for visualizing the journey from where you are now to where you want to be in a year or so. In between, there are milestones to achieve, as well as accelerators and obstacles that might get in the way of a successful career transition. This provides clarity about the journey ahead and how to move forward as you measure progress.
• A foundation assessment is another simple tool where you score yourself on 12 key elements of life. You then ask your spouse or partner and a close friend to rate you. The variations in the scores we give ourselves and those our significant others give us make for good reflections, conversations, and adjustments.

The goal of all these methods is clarity. Because once you have clarity about your assets, new possibilities start to open up. You begin to see opportunities you couldn’t see before. You realize that the skills you’ve been using in one context can be valuable in a completely different setting.

The pivoting conversation

This is where career coaching really becomes valuable. Once you have foundational clarity from self-assessment, you can start having the pivoting conversation and explore questions like:

• Where else can your skills be valuable?
• What opportunities align with your experience?
• How much are you willing to change?
• What would a brand-new role look like for you?

These are difficult but crucial questions. Having a thinking partner who can help you explore these questions without judgment makes all the difference.

When you take stock of yourself, you become deeply aware of your assets at that point in time, and you’ll know exactly where, when, and how to deploy them. That awareness changes everything.

A Midlife Career Transition Story

To illustrate the importance of planning for career transitions, I want to share my story about the danger of past success.

When I was 30, I was doing pretty well. Things were working. My career was on track, I was successful by most measures, and I felt confident about the future. And you know what I did for the next 10 years? I operated on autopilot.

I didn’t look around to ask, “What else is there?” I didn’t scan the horizon for what might be next. Everything was working, so why would I?

Then, at the age of 40, the ground under my feet opened up. I went through a turbulent season where I had to figure myself out all over again. It was disorienting, challenging, and honestly, painful at times.

Looking back now, I can see clearly what I couldn’t see then. When everything is working, we stop being vigilant. We stop scanning for the small signs that our current season is ending. This is why past success is the biggest threat to your future success.

I’m a picture-thinking kind of person, so let me paint this for you. Imagine you’re surfing. You’re on a wave, and it’s carrying you beautifully. But every wave eventually crashes. The skilled surfer isn’t the one who rides every wave until it hits the shore. The skilled surfer is the one who reads the wave, feels when it’s losing momentum, and smoothly transitions to the next wave while the current one still has energy.

Life always gives us signs—small indicators that you’re getting to the end of one wave, that the wave is about to crash, that it’s time to jump to the next one.

But many times, success blinds us to those signs. We don’t see them (or we see them but dismiss them) because things are still working well enough. And we only realize the season has ended when we’ve crashed, when it’s already too late for a smooth transition.

That’s what we need to learn about career transitions. That’s what I wish I had known at 30.

How Career Coaching Helps Leaders

Career transitions require both clarity and courage. You need clarity about who you are, what you offer, and where you might go. But you also need the courage to move forward with incomplete information, to take the leap even when you can’t see exactly where you’ll land.

A coach serves as your thinking partner during this uncertain time. A leadership coach is not someone who tells you what to do. They help you think more clearly. They ask questions that unlock new perspectives. They create space for you to figure out your own answers.

These are wonderfully energizing conversations. Whether I’m working with a leader who’s been laid off and needs to figure out what to do with their severance package, or someone who’s ready to pivot within their organization, or a professional who has hit the glass ceiling and needs to reimagine what’s possible—these are the conversations that help drive your success.

The Next Step in Your Leadership Development

Let me leave you with some questions for reflection:

• Where are you in your leadership journey right now?
• Are you seeing signs that your current season might be ending?
• Have you taken stock of your assets, your skills, your knowledge, your experience?
• What would clarity about your next move mean for you?
• What would clarity mean for your organization?
• What would clarity mean for your family?
• What would clarity mean for the impact you want to make in the world?

The second half of your career can be your most meaningful, but it starts with the willingness to pause, reflect, and strategize.

Remember the halftime metaphor? You’re in the locker room now. The first half is behind you. You’ve learned, you’ve grown, you’ve succeeded and sometimes struggled. But the second half is waiting and full of possibility.

How will you strategize for the rest of the match? What will you do differently? What wisdom will you carry forward? When the whistle blows, you can be ready for what’s next.

About the Author
Lucas Marang’a is an ICF-credentialed coach (ACC) specializing in leadership and career transitions for professionals across Africa. His insights and experiences enable leaders at all stages in their careers to plan proactively, navigate transitions, and meet professional goals. In addition to delivering executive coaching and leadership development consulting, Lucas is an accomplished writer and award-winning nature photographer. Follow him at lucasmaranga.com.