COMPLETED COURSE: Second Wind: new maps for the magnificent mutiny of midlife

Befriend your resistance and build a vision for your second half of life in this immersive 6-month live online course with author and leadership coach NICK THORPE and a community of fellow voyagers

PLEASE NOTE: THIS COURSE IS COMPLETE FOR 2024/5. NEW DATES FOR 2025/6 WILL BE RELEASED TO SUBSCRIBERS IN JULY 2025. THANKS.

• Six months to map a midlife vision for your “one wild and precious life”

• Six live 2.5hr online sessions each focusing on a different energy for navigating change

• Blend of teaching, small group work, sharing stories, guided exercises

• Membership of online community for resources and support between live sessions

• Accountability and support in living out renewed purpose and personal mission

• 1:1 coaching available with Nick for deepest impact (payable separately)

• Detailed course descriptions below…

“Calm, kind, fun, honest and just an absolutely brilliant facilitator.” KW

“I absolutely loved this new approach to resistance and how it plays out with other energies.” LH

Let’s be honest: there are times when navigating midlife feels far from magnificent.

As we encounter converging storms of family conflict, career change, health challenges, caring responsibilities or relationship breakdown, it can seem more like drifting, sinking - even drowning.

Even if we’ve so far dodged the worst of the weather, the middle passage can leave us stuck in the doldrums, as existential questions bob to the surface around us: Where exactly am I going? Why do I feel so alone? What’s happened to my energy and motivation? Dare I pursue the life I really want?

The good news, I've discovered in my own rather choppy midlife journey and the courageous struggles of my clients, is that what many of us experience as a crisis can ultimately be a portal into much truer versions of ourselves.

According to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the arduous passage to the second half of life is both necessary and life-giving, as we shift from fulfilling the expectations of others to confronting death, finding new meaning in living and living our unique purpose in the world.

The bad news is that it often takes a mutiny to break us out of old patterns that no longer serve, confronting uncomfortable truths about ourselves. But we don’t need to do it alone. And as Jung put it: “I would rather be whole than good”.

Why not join me on a shared 6-month journey of discovery, to see if we can support one another to make the necessary shifts for the magnificent mutiny of midlife. I believe the more courage and vulnerability we bring to our exploration, the more joy we’ll experience when that second wind fills our sails.

NEW MAPS FOR MIDLIFE

As a philosophically-curious travel author turned life and leadership coach, I’ve beach-combed all the most transformative things I’ve learned in decades of journalism, group work, personal development training and rites of passage work and built them into the vessel of this course.

After nearly 1500 hours of coaching clients through everything from procrastination to burnout, relationship breakdown to business start-ups, stagnation to identity crisis, I've spent the last few years scanning for some kind of shared navigation system.

And what I've noticed are four archetypal energies that show up again and again - each bringing both shadows and superpowers, and a capacity to either help or hinder us:

The Mutineer – this is the resistant energy that frequently forces us to seek help in the first place, the critical friend turned saboteur, great at saying “no” but often stuck inside armour that's starting to pinch. Superpowers: boundary-keeping and self-protection; Shadow: self-sabotage and avoidance.

The Drifter – master of the fertile unknown, able to surrender to the lost art of letting go, this wildcard character can change everything. Usually marginalised but as essential as sleep to the functioning of a healthy crew. Superpowers: rest and spirituality; shadow: lostness and lack of energy.

The Wayfinder - a big-picture dreamer, scanning the horizon to envision possibility and connection, but sometimes struggling to land things practically in the real world. Superpowers: vision, creativity, imagination. Shadow: Scatteredness, failure to take action, ungroundedness.

The Commander - a powerhouse of action and leadership, but battling burnout and a sneaking suspicion we might be swimming up the wrong river. Superpowers: willpower and action; Shadow: Unsustainability and narrow focus.

Do any of these sound familiar? Most of us have elements of all these navigation styles, but with definite favourites and aversions. Ideally they work in balance together as a kind of inner crew: each complements and needs the others to form a system I’ve called the Navigate Drift Matrix.

Each has a certain energy we can recognise in our body, bringing specific strengths for particular moments in any project or life-journey. In becoming conscious of where each is showing up – and cultivating our neglected energies – we can create a 360-degree navigation system for making sometimes difficult life choices.

I’m excited to discover what it might mean practically for your individual situation, as we journey through each of the navigational energies in turn over the six months and support each other to discover our purpose and particular calling in our second half of life.

VOYAGE ITINERARY

Departing in late October 2024 and finishing our metaphorical voyage in March 2025, we’ll meet up online for a two-and-a-half-hour workshop each month – either Wed evenings or Friday mornings – with a digital community space (Substack and/or WhatsApp group), exercises and reading (all optional) to keep us on course in between.

Following the deep dive of the archetypal Hero's Journey, we’ll be journeying down and inwards through the autumn and winter, towards our resistance and our deep need for rest and nurture, before surfacing in the new year to face back out into the world with a clearer sense of our inner guidance system and individual mission.

Here’s how the modules pan out in a bit more detail – though as on any maiden voyage, you can expect some improvisation and swelling of the timbers as we chart our progress together. Each will combine teaching, inspiring stories and real-life examples, group discussion, small-group and 1:1 exercises and guided visualisation.

OCTOBER

MODULE 1: Shadows and Superpowers

Getting to know our fellow voyagers, we’ll set basic ground rules (such as choosing to speak for ourselves, withholding unsolicited advice, promising the confidentiality that will allow to be courageous in how we show up). We'll meet and discuss the archetypal energies - envision, strive, resist, surrender - and their interrelatedness with the cycle of our first and second parts of life. And we'll dig into the idea of the shadow - that part of us we hide repress or deny - and how to mine it for transformative gold using projection as a diagnostic tool.

NOVEMBER

MODULE 2: Befriend Your Resistance

Midlife is often beset with unfinished projects, frustrated dreams and general procrastination around what we can’t quite bring ourselves to do, or stop doing. So as autumn deepens we’ll offer deep curiosity to those parts of our lives we most resist, daring to embrace the stuck places and seeing what they might be trying to tell us. Our companion here is the mutineer, represented by the crab, the part of us who procrastinates, rebels, subverts, sabotages - but also might have something important to teach us about boundaries…

DECEMBER

MODULE 3: The Lost Art of Letting Go

Approaching the winter solstice in December (though slightly earlier in the month to avoid the festive crush), we'll be dropping into the generative space of the drifter. Floating like the jellyfish, we'll drop below the surface to harness the power of the subconscious, taking a look at our dreams, our needs for nurture in this traditional time of hibernation. We'll consider the possibility that something bigger than ourselves is holding us, whether that's a spiritual system or the simple interconnectedness of life. A module inviting us to deep and generative rest – and sustainable work-life patterns for the coming year.

JANUARY

MODULE 4: Intentional Drift

January is the month we change perspective from inward to outward and take flight with the Wayfinder, getting an albatross-eye view of our lives to envision where we want to go. Like the seafaring monks who set off without clear destination in search of “the place of their resurrection”, we'll be considering the virtues of intentional drift, scanning the horizon for possible paths at the start of the year. We'll be looking to calibrate our internal compass, trust our instinct and flow with the Tao along the path of least resistance.

FEBRUARY

MODULE 5: Striving to Thrive

By the time we get to February, it's time to bring the power of the Commander into play. Like the salmon, capable of astonishing waterfall-leaping feats in pursuit of the spawning grounds of its destination, we may be clearer on our mission in the second half of life, and willing to hold ourselves accountable to get there. With the balance of the other archetypes, we'll also learn how to harness our willpower without risking burnout – the shadow tendency of the commander – and keep our perspective wide enough to ensure we’re swimming up the right river.

MARCH

MODULE 6: Integrate your Ending

As spring arrives in the northern hemisphere we'll be in sight of the course's final harbour - and somewhere beyond that, our own inescapable deaths! Harnessing some existential memento mori, it will be time to seize the day, integrate and balance the archetypal energies we've encountered, using guided visualisations, writing exercises and group work to build sustainable support into our ongoing lives. We'll be celebrating the changes we've seen in each other over the voyage and building a way to stay in touch for those who wish it.

My experience over many years of facilitating 6-month coach trainings teaches me that strong bonds and life-long friendships can form when we choose to trust our fellow-travellers with our deepest hopes – and I hope that will be true of this course.

COURSE DATES

WEDNESDAY EVENING COURSE

1: Shadows and Superpowers: 23 Oct - 6-8.30pm

2: Befriend your Resistance: 27 Nov - 6-8.30pm

3: The Lost Art of Letting Go: 11 Dec - 6-8.30pm

4: Intentional Drift: 22 Jan - 6-8.30pm

5: Striving to Thrive: 19 Feb - 6-8.30pm

6: Integrate your Ending: 26 Mar - 6-8.30pm

FRIDAY MORNING COURSE

1: Shadows and Superpowers: 25 Oct – 10-12.30pm

2: Befriend your Resistance: 29 Nov – 10-12.30pm

3: The Lost Art of Letting Go: 13 Dec - 10-12.30pm

4: Intentional Drift: 24 Jan - 10-12.30pm

5: Striving to Thrive: 21 Feb - 10-12.30pm

6: Integrate your Ending: 28 Mar - 10-12.30pm

WHAT’S INCLUDED

Signing up for the course will get you:

• Six live 2.5-hour modules (recordings available for those who miss one)

• Digital community/WhatsApp to stay in touch with other participants between modules

• Resources, articles and reading list for further study, accessed through Substack

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

Here are some of the possible applications of the things we’ll experience in our six-month journey together:

• Befriend the resistant patterns and parts that you've previously critiqued as self-sabotaging – and find new ways to work with and transform them.

• Experience a range of tools for self-discovery, from cognitive enquiry and journaling to guided visualisation and somatic exercises.

• Understand the Jungian concept of the shadow and awareness of inner gold in what we habitually repress, hide or deny.

• Understand projection and how to diagnose our own issues and needs from what we habitually attribute to others.

• Use the archetypes of the Navigate Drift Matrix to diagnose when we’re out of balance and bring less familiar energies into play in our daily life.

• Use the Navigate Drift Matrix to track phases in work projects, relationships and the cycle of life – and know when to anticipate or initiate change.

• Birth a vision or mission for the second part of your life, with resources to help you stay on track.

• Make new friends to accompany you on this transformative journey and keep you accountable to changes you want to make.

NICK’S PROFESSIONAL QUALIFICATIONS

Nick Thorpe is an award-winning journalist, author, PCC-credentialed coach, supervisor and trainer for Animas Centre for Coaching. In his private coaching practice in Edinburgh, he leans towards person-centred, integrative coaching, with a particular passion for midlife/career transition, male rites of passage, shadow work, spiritual & creative process and intentional drift.

He also coaches on executive leadership programmes with senior academics and head teachers seeking fresh thinking. In his 25-year career as a journalist he produced three acclaimed travel memoirs, worked across most UK broadsheets and BBC radio, and voyaged 2500 miles to Easter Island in a home-made reed boat.

He was educated at Oxford University (BA English Lit), City University (Dipl Newspaper Journalism) and Animas Centre for Coaching (Dipl Transformative Coaching and Supervision).

WHAT OTHERS SAY ABOUT NICK

Feedback on Nick as Animas trainer/facilitator:

Calm, kind, fun, honest and just an absolutely brilliant facilitator. KW

Nick was warm, professional, compassionate, and also shared personal, vulnerable things about himself that made it okay for the rest of us to be vulnerable and admit to mistakes and fears, etc.. He explained concepts and instructions in a comprehensive way, and always made sure everyone understood. ST

Great facilitation, inclusive, warm & mindful of everyone’s needs. Always felt that all group members were equally heard and respected and it was a safe space to share. RJ

Feedback from a taster Animas lecture about resistance and the life navigation styles

I absolutely loved this new approach to resistance and how it plays out with other energies. LH

Nick has a real talent in bringing his lectures to life through story telling and presents information in a very clear thought provoking way. His energy and passion shine through. EP

I enjoyed learning about the four archetypes and their superpowers and shadows. It all made so much sense - how we might navigate through those in different stages of life! AP

Clarity of presentation, real person, calm (apparently) no BS or marketing bollocks. Excellent analogies. Visuals wonderful to look at and good for visual learners. JT

WHAT NICK SAYS

I’ve spent most of my life scanning the horizon in one way or another - whether literally crossing oceans as a travel writer, learning to sink or swim as an adoptive dad, or navigating existential cross-currents with the many courageous people who come to me for coaching. My books are all experiments in drift of one kind of another. Eight Men and a Duck was a hare-brained 2500-mile voyage to Easter Island on a slowly-sinking boat made of reeds, while Adrift in Caledonia tested the serendipitous art of boat-hitching around the country I’m proud to call home. Most recently, in Urban Worrier, I burned out and decided to traverse the world in search of experts in the lost art of letting go.

Having spent half my working life in journalism, I’m committed to evidence-based learning and enquiry, but also relaxed in the realms of the woo, having trained in somatic and integrative modalities ranging from process-oriented psychology to shamanic practice. A committed Christian in my early life, my awe has remained even as the more rigid doctrines dropped away, leaving me with a lingering sense of the sacred interconnectedness of all things, without a need to pin that to a particular religious system. I’m passionate about the power of deep listening, which is the basis of coaching, and believe (on a good day) we’re all basically doing our best with what we were given in life. I aspire to be good at meditation one day, but mostly love to sit and gaze out of the window at the sea, or kayak on it. Conveniently, I live by a harbour in Edinburgh, UK.