My name is Peter Soer. I have written this book because I believe that with a few actionable coaching tools to use, men can lead more of the life they want. Yet currently, there is nothing actionable, enjoyable, or effective written for them. We have a brief time on this planet, so let’s live it to the full. Why should you believe what I have to say? Three aspects of my life make me uniquely qualified.

1) Nature + Nurture: The power of determination and love.

Both of my parents faced significant life adversity. This forged in them a great determination and with my mother, a great capacity to love. Through their genes and their raising me, I learnt the power of determination and love.

My mother, Anita, was born in Germany before World War II. She watched her family shop being destroyed by the Nazis and her father being beaten. She left Germany in 1939 at age ten and came to the UK. My mother and her siblings arrived without their parents. They never saw them again. Later they were to find out they perished in a concentration camp.

My father, Frank, was one of four children, born into a hard- working East London family. Many children were evacu- ated from London to escape the war bombing. In 1940, at the age of fourteen, Frank was evacuated to South Africa, a completely foreign land for him. While there, he had to deal with the destabilisation of moving a number of times between families who gave him a place to stay, and he was badly bullied at school.

Frank and Anita met in Sheffield, UK and married in 1953. They faced many ups and downs in life but stayed together. They are both dead now. They lost their first child to pneumonia at the age of three weeks and went on to have two more children. My sister Daphne and me.

They created a safe, stable home for us. My mother brought love and kindness. My father brought analytical curiosity and planning. They both embodied duty, determination, and a belief that life could be better.

I have a pronounced spinal curve—scoliosis. You might have seen older people standing bent over, almost looking at the floor—that can be the result of scoliosis.

I suffer daily pain, and my scoliosis torso contributes to my lack of physical confidence. However, through daily focused exercise and determination, I have limited the spinal curvature, and I manage the pain. I know that many people have much worse physical challenges than this, but this is the one I have to deal with, and I do.

2) A 35+ year career in Marketing and Coaching. Curiosity in people and skills in behaviour change.

I worked for almost thirty years in marketing-led businesses, ultimately leading teams diverse in gender, nationality, culture, religion and age. These roles nurtured in me a deep curiosity about people, and how and why they behave. It taught me how to communicate, to simplify, to illuminate.

I am British. I had the good fortune to live and work both in the UK and outside of my home culture—in China, the Netherlands and Ireland. During these years, I was able to experience and understand what it is like to be in the minority. This gives me extra perspective and empathy.

Since 2016, I have been a coach, working with people to bring out their capability within themselves, articulate and achieve their goals, and live more of the life they want. I learn with every client and every new approach and work with several peer groups of nurturing wonderful coaches. Almost 2000 hours of coaching so far, and still going strong. The core of coaching is enabling people to achieve their goals through changes in their mindset and behaviours.

3) I am a ‘Life’s second half man’, living the journey, facing the challenges— myself, my friends, many of my clients.

The world is flooded with ‘self-help’, ‘health & wellness’, ‘live a better life’ books, and yet none of them that I have seen are written from the perspective of a mature man, for mature men. I believe that my living this journey enables me to write a guide that is actually designed for ‘life’s second half men’.

In my mid-40s, moving into a big promotion triggered impos- ter feelings—‘I am not enough for this role. I am going to be found out’.

My initial solution was to work ever harder and longer, which, of course, led to my performance getting worse rather than better and had a negative impact on my colleagues. I was very fortunate to receive professional coaching, which helped me to understand my imposter voices, make them quieter, and harness my strengths instead. As a result, I succeeded in my promoted role and led business growth of +50% over 5 years.

My cousin Bernie and close friend Roger each took their lives. Such a terrible waste. Wonderful human beings with so much still to live, love, give and receive. This left me feel- ing (a) how important it is for people to be able to talk about life’s challenges rather than keeping stuff bottled up inside and (b) how precious is our short time alive, so make the best of it we possibly can.

I have made many mistakes, missed opportunities, and been selfish and clumsy.

I have loved, tried to turn up when I am needed, and tried to bring positive energy.

I am a pragmatic optimist. I believe that life can be better. This stuff doesn’t have to be complex. Equally, it isn’t easy. But with motivation and some practical tools, you can make the shifts you want to make.

I am husband to Shirley, father to Will and Hugo. I have learnt from each of them from the day we met, and con- tinue to do so. Most powerfully, how to love and be loved. Being a father to Will and Hugo is the greatest joy and priv- ilege of my life.

I believe that life is not a test. It is a non-stop opportunity to learn. When we live with this mindset, we try out new things, we grow in confidence, and we shine positive energy for ourselves and those around us.

So, now you know a little more about me, let’s get back to this guide. I simply want you to get the best you can from your remaining years on this planet—for you, yourself and for the positive ripple effect you will have on everyone you know. I believe for most of us, this journey does not require therapy or a retreat with a life transformation guru. It takes an open mind to try out new ways of thinking and behaviours, determination and some courage. We are all different, so there is no magic formula, but you can choose the tools in this guide that feel best for you, and they will work.

You may be asking what or when life’s second half is? I believe it is not a specific age. It begins with the moment in life when you ask the is this it? question of yourself. For many, it is somewhere between 30 and 60 years old.

Peter Soer 2023

CONTENTS

Step 1: Get started

(1.1) Why do you need this book?..................... 19

(1.2) What is this book and how to use it? .............. 21

(1.3) Whathappens if you read on? ................... 24

Step 2: Open your mind

(2.1) Is this it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

(2.2) What do you want? ........................... 31

(2.3) In this next phase of your life, what is important to you? . . 33

(2.4) “The story of the Mexican Fisherman” ............. 33

Step 3: See your possibility

(3.1) How is my life now? ........................... 41

(3.2) What do I want? ............................. 42

(3.3) Don’ t put up with should ...................... 43

(3.4) Wherever I go, there I am ...................... 45

(3.5) Own your own achievements and powers. .......... 46

(3.6) In this next phase of my life, what is important to me? . . 50

(3.7) The most important letter you can write now... to yourself .................... 57

(3.8) Use your possibility building blocks to build your plan . . 59

Step 4: Learn from how you got here

(4.1) Why is life like this? ........................... 67

(4.2) Being a boy ................................. 70

(4.3) It’s all just chemistry .......................... 73

(4.4) “The story of a normal guy” ..................... 74

Step 5: Make small changes and get big differences

(5.1) Clean up the basics............................ 83

(5.2) Breathe .................................... 85

(5.3) Visualising .................................. 87

(5.4) Be choiceful who you spend time with and what you

spend time doing ......................... 90

Step 6: Refresh your key relationships

(6.1) Love is a verb—do it more ...................... 95

(6.2) Have better conversations with the people who are

most important to you ........................ 98

Chapter 7: Some Final thoughts ....................111

appendix 1: Example Exercises ......................115

Acknowledgements ...............................135

STEP 1

GET STARTED

(1.1) Why do you need this book?

Because too many men enter life’s second half, wake up one day and ask this question...

“Is this it?!”

Or something similar, and have nowhere useful to go to work out the answer.

The cards are stacked against you because many of the unwrit- ten rules for men are obstacles preventing you from find- ing answers:

be strong

people don’t change

suck it up, stop whinging and get on with it

And weirdly, none of your friends seems to need to talk, so you are left thinking it must just be me overthinking stuff. So, instead of finding a way to think things through, you go for a pint or a run or walk the dog or do something useful instead.

The result is that for your remaining decades, you accept a life that is okay rather than the best it can be, wasting some of your life’s second-half opportunity.

Then one day, twenty or thirty years later, you awake to a new question.

‘Was that what I wanted?’

But by that point, it is too late to do much about it. The opportunity you had to have the best possible second half has gone.

It doesn’t have to be like that. With a few actionable tools, you can have more of the life you want.

That is where this book comes in. If you are curious whether the rest of your life can hold greater possibilities and more potential and how you can make it happen, then this is for you.

You don’t have to face a crisis for this guide to be for you. This guide is useful if you would simply like your years ahead to be the best they can be.

(1.2) What is this book and how to use it?

This book is a simple, actionable guide to help you do more than just get through life’s second half. To help you realise that, far from having to just keep going, you have great potential, combining experience of the past with energy for the future.

Only you own the pen that writes the story of your life.

The core tools I will use are questions and exercises which ask you to think, write, and reflect. The questions are spe- cifically designed to enable people to see with fresh eyes, to generate new understanding, and to unlock their potential as valuable human beings.

Get a pen and some paper, or a notebook, or your favou- rite device to type with. You will be thinking and writing/ typing your thoughts. The guide helps you to do the think- ing in bite-size steps, with each step building on the last, so that by the end, you will have new insight, clear choices and actionable plans to get what you want out of life’s second half.

Many books feel like they are three ideas stretched into three hundred pages. My aim with this guide is the opposite—it is short and power-packed. Don’t rush. Give yourself time between exercises to let your unconscious explore and build on the thoughts you had. You will likely want to come back to your work and add thoughts and ideas to it.

(1.3) What happens if you read on?

This guide is structured like a conversation. I hope you will find it easy and enjoyable to read.

You will find insights that you can action, torch lights that switch on and help you see a new way ahead, generating opti- mistic energy that you can harness. The guide provides lan- guage and questions you can use with your family and friends to open up new discussions that will help you and help them.

We are all different, and so you and the guy sitting next to you will each find the most value in different parts of this book. For sure, there is something in here that will work for you... a life 10% better, a relationship improved, an oppor- tunity uncovered. With each step forward, you gain momen- tum, and it becomes clear that you do not have to accept that this is it.

So, mindful of two of my favourite quotes:

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

HENRY FORD

“Unless you believe the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and

take responsibility for making it so.”

NOAM CHOMSKY

Come along, let’s have some fun.