I am beginning this blog and web site in a middle place. I have been coaching, teaching, and consulting for a long time, so I am in the middle of my coaching career. I am in the middle of my life. I am in the middle generation between my children and my dad.  I am in the middle of  transitioning from working for others to being self-employed. It is the middle of the day in the middle of summer.

I am fascinated with how challenging it is to be a beginner, to begin and carry through the beginning stages of any new learning or endeavor once we become adults. As children, we enter new beginnings as a course of childhood. In adolescence, we reach and stretch for each starting gate that represents adulthood. As young adults, we struggle to find our footing with so many beginnings on which so much seems to ride. And then, once we are beyond being a beginner at something, or everything, we tend to want to hold onto the comfort of the known, the expected, the places we feel confident and competent, or at least where we feel we have some degree of control.

When and where in your life are you experiencing new beginnings in the middle of other things? In what ways do you stretch yourself from the middle of things to the edge of things, out of comfort to being a beginner? How do you respond when new opportunities are either offered or forced upon you? What is that like? How do you work through the fear, the failure, and the fun?