Although many people worry that their middle years will result in a decline in their various skills and attributes, there are a surprising number of things that people get far better at once they reach midlife. Here are 12 things you’ll likely excel at more and more as you get older.
1. Advocating for yourself.
When you were younger, you may have refrained from standing up for yourself when teachers or employers treated you badly out of fear of getting in trouble, potentially losing your job, and so on. These fears dissipate once you hit midlife, and you realize just how important it is to advocate for yourself.
This could range from negotiating for better pay at work to standing up to social injustice or refusing to tolerate unacceptable behavior towards you. You are your own champion and you’ll fight for the respect you deserve.
2. Understanding your own body’s needs.
This also relates to the previous point, especially when it comes to advocating for yourself with medical staff. You’ve been inhabiting your body for several decades now, so you know it better than the doctor who’s seen you for ten minutes ever will.
The American Council on Science and Health offers great guidelines on how to advocate for yourself as a patient. Furthermore, don’t be afraid to speak up if a professional suggests an approach that you know won’t work for you. They have as much to learn from you as you do from them.
3. Relating to people.
You’ve likely learned a variety of approaches in your chosen field because you’ve had a ton of experience. Similarly, you’ve also learned how to relate to people from all different walks of life, whether those people are colleagues, superiors, children, or those with additional needs.
Through midlife and the years that preceded it, you’ve learned invaluable interpersonal skills such as diplomacy and de-escalation, and you know how important it is to meet people where they’re at to avoid coming across as arrogant or condescending.
4. Prioritizing what’s important and what isn’t.
As you get older, you get faster and more efficient at assessing what it is you want to focus on, and what you would prefer to avoid. You don’t waste time prioritizing things that steal your happiness. You’ll likely prioritize things like family, health, study, and other personal pursuits over paying attention to gossip or the current spectacle.
By midlife, you have a solid understanding of what’s important to you, and what isn’t. As such, you prioritize the important things and don’t waste time on things that don’t really matter.
5. Seeing through deception and manipulation.
This is very much a “fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me” situation. Upon reaching midlife, you have enough experience with various types of people under your belt that you’ve learned how to see through superficial behavior to the motivations beneath.
As a result, it’s difficult to trick you because you can spot the clues that indicate someone is trying to manipulate or deceive you, a mile away. Furthermore, above and beyond recognizing these actions, you’ve also learned how to evade them effectively, so they don’t affect you.
6. Seeing other people’s perspectives.
Younger people often have an egocentric bias when it comes to how they view and experience the world. They assume that their experiences are universal and that other people will think and feel exactly the same way they do about everything.
As people go through the midlife stage of their life, they learn that everyone’s life experience is unique and that it’s important to seek to understand others’ perspectives. When you pay attention to how differently others experience the world, you gain immense empathy and comprehension for others’ struggles.
7. Knowing yourself, and all the advantages that brings.
In the same way that we get to know our friends better over time, so too do we have the opportunity to glean a stronger awareness of ourselves. This allows us to work with our strengths while simultaneously bolstering our weaknesses. This self-awareness is key to living a successful life.
As such, a fiery person can learn to control their temper over time, and a highly sensitive person can learn how to defend their boundaries effectively. By getting to know yourself over the course of several decades, you can temper and bring balance to your unique nature.
8. Enforcing your boundaries by saying “no.”
Younger people often throw themselves to the wolves in order to make those around them happy — both their elders and their peers. They compromise on boundaries that should be non-negotiable. This is often hugely detrimental, as it leaves them depleted, and by doing what others want of them (or think is best for them), they aren’t living their own lives.
By midlife, you’ll get much better at saying “no” to things that don’t serve you as you get older. Furthermore, you won’t allow others to guilt trip or manipulate you into changing your mind for their own benefit.
9. Forgiving your younger self.
We learn through our mistakes, and most of us will make major missteps that we feel awful about years after the fact. The key is to remember that we’re all in the process of evolving. Your younger self was still a mostly blank slate that had to learn lessons for the sake of perspective.
As such, by transcending your mistakes and understanding your own foibles, you can learn how to forgive the younger, more naive version of yourself who still had a lot to learn.
10. Your chosen hobbies and pursuits.
“Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect” – Vince Lombardi.
Skills that you consider to be easy and enjoyable — which you might do to wind down after a stressful day — might be horribly intimidating to newbies who are just starting those hobbies or pursuits. This is simply because you’ve spent so many years doing these things that they’re second nature to you.
The more time you spend doing these things, the better you’ll get at them until you’re a veritable master of your craft.
11. Being patient with others.
When you’re dealing with other people, you aren’t just aware of their current selves, but the children within them who are still figuring out their place in the world. After all, there is no “magical birthday” that signals absolute maturity, and we keep learning and evolving until our last breath.
As a result, you’re getting significantly more patient with people as you age and traverse midlife and beyond. Although you may find some antics irritating, you recognize the motivations behind them. You utilize a variety of strategies to be more patient in your relationships, which usually starts with treating everyone with empathy and understanding.
12. Allowing yourself time to learn new things.
When we’re young, we often get frustrated when we aren’t amazing at something on our first try. By the time midlife comes around, however, we understand that learning takes consistent effort, and therefore we allow ourselves time to learn the things we’d like to do.
There is no rush. We don’t need to be master craftsmen or fluent language speakers within a month or two: we can spend the rest of our lives improving our skills, and the learning process is a joyful experience in itself.
