CHRIS PERKINS - MIDLIFE TRANSFORMATION COACH
I spent my 45th birthday eating pizza alone in a hotel room...
…straight out of the box, hunched over my laptop, doing pitch prep. I have never felt “Is this all there is?” more than that night. On paper, nothing was wrong – I'd ticked off the whole list. This is the story of what happened next, and why I do this work now.
MY STORY
Ihad the career, the title, the salary, the family, the house. I'd pretty much ticked everything off the list: degree, good job, mortgage, long-standing marriage, two kids, climbing the ladder, getting on with things. By my mid-forties I thought I’d be able to say “I've made it!”
Instead, I was eating a bad dinner alone, late, and getting up to do it all again the next week. And somewhere along the way I'd lost the ability to say, "Hang on a minute - this is crazy!"
That feeling creeps up on you. Work had become all-consuming without me noticing. Most weeks I was commuting Scotland to London, Tuesday to Thursday, and I kept that up for eight years. Much later, I calculated that I'd been away for roughly 40% of my kids' childhoods in those years. At the time, it just felt like what I was supposed to do to provide for my family.
Then I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
In 2018 I got a new boss who wanted to bring in their own team. I had a growing sense that my card was marked. The two years that followed were the worst of my career - managing redundancies in my own team while also fighting for my own job, in a place where nothing I did ever felt good enough.
On the 6th March 2020, I left. I had an idea, but nothing lined up. Two weeks later we were in lockdown.
That was possibly the worst time in history to be starting your own recruitment-related business. What came next was the hardest stretch of my life. My dad died that April, after four years in a nursing home with dementia. In October, my father-in-law died suddenly. The house we'd just bought sat half-renovated, with no one allowed in to work on it. Money was getting tight, and I had a lot of time to sit and think.
I'm not going to dress that up as a tidy turning point. It was grim. But it was also the first time in years I'd actually stopped.
It turned out I wasn't the only person in their late forties with a life that looked successful and felt hollow.
What I found when I stopped.
A friend tipped me off about a job that November - a role at a career-coaching company - and that was something of a salvation. With a bit of stability back, I finally made time for something I never had before: working out what had actually happened to me.
I read everything I could get my hands on. And the thing that hit me hardest was how normal all of it was.
There's a U-shaped happiness curve - over 600 studies back it up - and in the west it bottoms out at around 47-48. I was bang on schedule. So it wasn’t just me. I wasn't broken or failing at life. My brain was, in a real physical sense, rewiring itself for the next phase, much the way it did in adolescence. Nobody had ever told me that. I'd just assumed the flatness was a personal defect I had to power through.
Early in my coach training in 2024, a line I read stuck with me: ‘A lot of coaches coach who they used to be’. When I asked myself when I'd most have needed a good coach, the answer was obvious - right there, at the bottom of my own curve. So that's who I decided to help.
I'm writing this from the other side of it, not from inside the fog.
I no longer feel like I’m being dragged through my own week. It took reading, getting coached myself, testing things out, and getting plenty wrong along the way – but I found my way through, and I’m not going to pretend it was a straight line or a quick fix.
The whole point of my midlife coaching now is to help you find your own way through with a lot less flailing than I had – using what I’ve learned, and what I keep learning, from doing this work with other people.
WHERE I'VE GOT TO
30+
years in corporate life, lived and learned from
175+
hours of professional ICF coach training
200+
hours coaching people through midlife’s challenges
The people who tend to find me
Senior professionals, usually between their mid-forties and early sixties. Successful on the outside, silently restless underneath – you may well have not told anyone how you’re feeling.
You’re not in crisis – and that’s the dilemma. You know you don’t want to continue feeling like this, but nothing is dramatically wrong, which is exactly why it's so hard to explain or justify. You feel a bit guilty for wanting more from a life that looks so successful from the outside. You catch yourself imagining stepping away from something, but you don't actually want to blow your life up. You’ve built something real, and people depend on it.
You just want it to feel like yours again.
What this work actually is
Not a midlife crisis – a design problem, and design problems can be solved. My background is in design thinking, and that's at the heart of how I coach. We take stock properly, run small, low-risk experiments, and redesign the next decade a couple of degrees at a time – without detonating the parts that are working. I've identified the five big challenges of midlife and we’ll look at them all together: happiness, relationships, meaning, health and career.
This isn't picking off one – like career – and calling it the whole picture, because your busy life is more interwoven than that.
One honest caveat: coaching isn't therapy. If what you're carrying is clinical depression rather than the low-grade flatness I've been describing, I need to be clear on something – as a trained Mental Health First Aider, I'd rather point you to the right help than pretend I'm it. But for most people I work with, the issue isn't mental illness. It's that the life they built for the first half no longer fits the person they’re becoming in the second half.
For the record: I'm an ICF ACC-accredited coach, based in Stirling and working with people online across the UK and beyond. I'm trained in design thinking, with thirty-odd years of corporate life behind me – two redundancies, that long commute, raising teenagers into adults, a 28-year marriage, losing a close friend at 45, and my own midlife slump, all included.
HOW I WORK
We’re walking a path together, side by side.
The picture I've always had of coaching is this: we're walking a path together, side by side – not me out in front leading, and not you trailing behind. It's dusk, and I'm carrying a bright light. My job is to light up the bits you can't see clearly yet.
Whenever we reach a fork, I shine the light down each route so you can see what might lie ahead – you always choose which way to go.
A lot of the work is about paths in a more literal sense too. They’re the neural pathways in your brain. The habits that keep you stuck are like trails worn deep through a wood, easy to follow precisely because you've walked them so many times. Doing something different means cutting a new path through the undergrowth. It's hard at first, but gets easier every time. I'll walk alongside you while we do it – and at some point you'll say "I've got it from here," and I'll hand you the light to carry on yourself.
That, at its simplest, is what coaching does: it shines a light on your own thinking.
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A coaching business called "Chris Perkins Coaching" felt a bit flat – and as a brand strategist by background, I couldn't quite help myself.
"Brightpath" is the light on the path: my job is to help you see the routes ahead more clearly, so you can choose your own way to a brighter future. "Partners" is the relationship. I don't lead and you don't follow – we walk it together, for as long as you need me alongside. And if it turns out you need expertise I don't have, I can usually point you towards someone who does.
That's my whole philosophy captured in the name, really: I'll help light the way, but the path is yours.
A small first step.
If any of this sounds like you, don’t make a big decision today. Make a small one. The Midlife Fulfilment Snapshot is 15 questions and takes about two minutes. Free, no catch.
Get Your SnapshotOr, if you’d rather just talk it through, I’m always happy to have a chat – no commitment – and we’ll start there.
Book a Free CallWhere this is heading.
I didn't set out to build a business so much as to make sense of something — and then realised how many other people were stuck in the same place, with no one talking about it openly.
So that's become the mission: to get midlife’s challenges out in the open. To help as many senior professionals as I can skip the years I wasted flailing, and get to the good stuff on the other side faster than I did. That's what the coaching is for, and it's why I keep making the videos, writing the guides, running the workshops and recording the podcast with my daughter — different ways in, for people at different stages of working it out.
I'm in my mid-fifties and I’ve genuinely found the most meaningful work of my life. If any of the above sounded like you, I'd love to help you find your new path.
If any of this sounds like you
Here’s what Simon, a recent client said:
“I’d say reach out and agree a time for a discovery session - worst case scenario you’ve met someone new and talked about your life and goals, which can be cathartic and useful. Best case: you may end up on a path to help you build the life you want.”