On How To Become an “Audacious Ager”

I have a new favorite term for what I’m striving to be – an “audacious ager”.

Aging is a pretty hot topic because so many of us are experiencing the unstoppable nature of it.  It seems we’re on a constant search for things to describe our denial of the eventuality.  Things like “purposeful aging”, “successful aging”, “graceful aging”. Creativity abounds amongst us later-lifers in our attempt to put monikers on what we are experiencing.

Margaret Manning at Sixtyandme.com polled 43,000 women and asked them to give her one adverb that described how they were aging. You can see 40 of them in this article.

No grace in aging

Pretty creative and surprising list.  Note that no one chose “graceful.” No surprise.  There’s not much that’s graceful about it.

Number 40 – “outrageously” – came closest to my new favorite.

My new favorite came from a rather unusual source – the National Business Group on Health’s (NBGH) Business Health Agenda (BHA) conference.  NBGHBHA for short – really?  This conference apparently focused on employer-sponsored health care plans and the challenges and changes companies are facing in terms of plan design, health data, demographics and much more.

One of the topics presented had to do with the boomer’s role in the future.  It emphasized that employers are facing a major paradigm shift for which they are unprepared. An employer poll revealed that, of five predictions for the future, “audacious aging” was the paradigm shift that employers were least prepared to deal with.

Here’s a graph showing the results.

 

It’s a revealing reflection of the fact that retirement, as we’ve known it, is going away.

It takes guts to age naturally

There are two reasons that “audacious aging” resonated with me.  First, I’m a contrarian by nature and being audacious in a number of areas of my life is becoming more common and more comfortable as I’ve outgrown my need to compare and seek the approval of others. It just takes too much frigging mental energy to do either. NOTE:  You’ll get there if you aren’t already.

Secondly, I’m learning that to age normally and naturally, we have to be audaciously aggressive against a lot of forces that are pulling us up short of our full life potential.

So maybe you’d like to join me and the growing ranks of audacious agers.  If interested, here are some fundamental steps to becoming one:

  1. You shun traditional retirement. You give the finger to a culture that insinuates that you have a “use by” stamp on the back of your neck.  You tell anybody who will listen that you “ain’t done yet” and to “stop asking me when I’m going to retire.”  Remind them that you know the universe will take your parts back someday but that, right now, they are still working just fine, thank you, especially your ability to think and create and contribute.
  2. You adopt an attitude with gratitude and altitude. You’ve sworn to not become a geezer/hag, that grumpy, immobile, smelly old fart/bag that you swore you would never become. You refuse to relinquish your still-supple mental bandwidth to the things that aren’t right in the world and in our lives.  You turn off Constant Negative News network (CNN), cancel the local paper and forget the local news.  You journal five things every day that you are grateful for.  You acknowledge that “better has no finish line” and you get better at something every day.  You block your brain’s innate tendency to time travel to your past (regrets) and to the future (fear) and commit to making your future bigger than your past.  You deeply reflect, rediscover, resurrect, and redeploy your essential self in a way that moves humanity forward positively. You put together a 25-year plan regardless of your age.  And you find the time – now – to write your 100th-birthday speech.
  3. Be one of the 3% in your age group that is at 24-hour Fitness (or equivalent) 6 days a week. And, no, none of this one-mph on a treadmill with zero incline for 15 minutes. Nope, you throw around some free weights at least three days a week with the tattooed, tank-topped and tiny-testicled 30-somethings as they tune up their mirror muscles (sorry ladies, couldn’t resist that statement).  And you add 45 minutes of serious interval cardio work six days a week. You accept that those 30-something mirror muscles (male or female) aren’t in your future and that isn’t what it’s all about.  It’s about being able to walk, talk, think, and be a hero and a source of cognitive and meaningful wisdom for your great-grandkids.
  4. Help eradicate fast-food.  OK, that’s not going to happen but you can do your part to help slow the damage it does.  Do the math on this: (1) 2015 was the first year that Americans spent more eating-out than they did cooking at home.(2) CDC has estimated that 40% of the U.S. population is overweight.  Hmmmm!  Any correlation?  Calorie-levels of restaurant food is 20-30% higher than food prepared at home – and portions are ridiculous.  Bring it home and be a “flexitarian” – plant-and fruit-heavy diet with occasional “meat as a treat.”
  5. Piss off your Primary Care Physician. Well, not really.  You need him/her along the way.  But you realize she/he is encumbered by a mindset focused on cure, not prevention, and under a corporate or government-driven mandate to spend less time with you than ever. You go into your annual or semi-annual visit (hopefully, no more than that) with the knowledge that 95% of physicians have had zero training in geriatrics and that they are anything but nutritionists. You reach an agreement on the front-end that you will rescind your co-pay if he/she once says “what do you expect at your age?”  You go into your meeting equipped with questions that will put them on notice that this is not your average bear when it comes to understanding how the body works.   Questions like: “why didn’t my blood test include a BUN (blood urea nitrogen), creatinine and homocysteine test?”  (See P.12 of my free e-book for more on knowing your biomarkers).  Trust me there’s a good chance that your doc is not going to be fully accepting of you taking full charge of your health and won’t appreciate being challenged (check out this article).  But it’s not too late for them to adapt. Look, healthcare is going the wrong direction for us audacious agers and the docs know it.  Self-efficacy/self-care is one of our new mantras and we are committed to enlisting our docs as partners in that mantra rather than abdicating our health to them.
  6. Change your circle and hang with the youngers. Jim Rohn, renowned American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker is often credited with saying that we rise to the level of the five people we spend the most time with.   When you take a look at the roles that mentors have played in the lives of highly successful people, it’s a hard point to argue.  As an audacious ager, you make sure the five closest to you are moving on and taking it to their lives rather than life taking it to them.  No downers, doubters, or whiners. You’re on the lookout for someone who will push you, challenge you, encourage you and accept that you are committed to coloring outside the lines.  You work to develop a “tribe” that includes people 20, 30, 40 years younger than you and draw on their energy and creativity and listen to their ideas and reciprocate by helping them with your wisdom.

Be prepared for the ridicule

Let’s face it, the reality is that most people won’t buy into this concept and you are setting yourself up for some not-so-subtle jabs, especially from your inner circle (ref #5 above). They are likely locked into belief systems that say that sedentary retirement is an entitled gift, senescence is automatic, and that aging is more about fate and genetics than choices. But as an audacious ager, you know it’s bull****.  You become the model of what is possible and, as Gandhi taught, “be the change you want to see in other people.”  Some will want what you’ve got.  That’s the biggest payoff of being an audacious ager – effecting change through example.

Maybe you are already an audacious ager.  I’d love to hear your story.  Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com and set up a time to talk.  I’m on the lookout for audacious agers with big stories to feature on my podcast platform which I will be introducing in early 2018.

While you are at it, click on this link, scroll down and take advantage of my new free ebook, “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential:  Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose”.

Wishing you the best

No blog this week.  Just my best wishes to you for the holiday season and for 2018 to be the most exciting year of your life! 

Thanks for being a subscriber!

www.makeagingwork.com

Work Yourself to Death? Not a Bad Idea!

 

George Burns was guilty of some really fabulous quotes, most of them quite funny, some deadly serious.  Many had to do with his advancing age (he died in 1996 at age 100).  Here are a few:

  • Retire? I’m going to stay in show business until I’m the only one left.
  • People are always asking me when I’m going to retire. Why should I?  I’ve got it two ways – I’m still making movies, and I’m a senior citizen, so I can see myself at half price.
  • How can I die? I’m booked.
  • As long as you’re working, you stay young.

Michelangelo died at 89 – at a time when the average lifespan was less than half that – still working as the architect for the replacement of a 4th-century Constantinian basilica that became St. Peter’s Basilica, called by some as the “greatest creation of the Renaissance.”  He also worked on a sculpture (the Rondani Peita) up until six days before his death.

Steve Jobs was widely reported to have died yelling about something not being exactly perfectly correct – and is reported to have been working until the last day.

 

Einstein never stopped.

 

Revisiting vocāre

Today we treat folks who choose to “work themselves until death” as some sort of wunderkinds or anomalies when a mere 150 years ago that was the norm.  That was before the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of work and injected the concept of the artificial finish line called retirement.

In the process, it seems we’ve redefined, convoluted and distorted an important word.  That word is vocation.

Vocation is rooted in the Latin vocāre, meaning to call, which suggests listening for something that calls out to you, a voice telling me what I am.

Today, we relate vocation to specialized training into a “career track” or a “job” via a vocational or trade school versus a “profession” calling for a bachelor degree or higher.  Not likely a pursuit of a “higher calling” but more a decision based on need and what may be trending in the “job” market.

Grammarist.com defines a vocation as “a calling, an occupation, or a large undertaking for which one is especially suited. It can be roughly synonymous with career or profession, though vocation connotes a seriousness or a commitment that these words don’t always bear.” 

Today, we tend to mix vocation in with two other words – career and job – when their distinctions are quite different.

Career

A quick look at the definition of “career” shows a big difference. Career has its origin in the Latin word “carrus” or “wheeled vehicle” denoting a “cart” and then later from the French word “carrier” denoting a road or racecourse. The dictionary defines career, as a verb, to mean “move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.”

Careers for many are just that – a mad rush for a long time that ends up going nowhere and with that realization coming late in life.  Or maybe it’s going somewhere in terms of provision and accumulation, but not in a way that fits the definition of a “calling”.

The checkered flag at the end of this racecourse is that coveted pot of gold toward the end of life’s rainbow called retirement, a finish line that may have blocked moving toward a true calling.

Job

A job is the most immediate and relatable term as it’s what we do every day to produce income, the fuel that keeps us on the aforementioned racecourse. The dictionary defines job as “a lump, chore or duty.”  For some, that lump is “coal”.  Consider that the average job is around 3.2 years and that during the average lifespan, most of us will have had a dozen or more “jobs”.

 

Does sound like a racetrack doesn’t it?  Perhaps that old word denoting a calling is what is missing.  As we zip past mid-life into our second half, it would be a good time to re-evaluate, resurrect and reapply vocation in its true, traditional meaning.

 

But I’m passing 50 –  too late to find my “calling”?

It’s a pretty common question amongst mid-lifer’s.  There’s that uneasy stirring going on deep in the gut. More days behind than ahead; lost enthusiasm for the chosen “racetrack”; a growing sense of aimlessness and emptiness; accumulation no longer important; the “who am I and why am I here”, “is it too late to make a difference?” questions that won’t go away.

It’s a critical fork-in-the-road time of life.  One road gives in to the “social self” that has indoctrinated us into an artificial age-related culture and encourages us to remain a part of the crowd and stay-the-course to a landing called retirement.

The other road acknowledges a long-suppressed “essential self” that is insensitive to age and puts us on a trail that can enable a new takeoff rather than a landing.  Only this time the takeoff is launched through a re-discovery and resurrection of our deepest dreams and desires but applied using our deepest talents and acquired skills.

Warning!

The second fork may mean you will, willingly, work yourself to (until) death.

Second warning!

You may:

Evidence has been in for a long time.  Work is necessary for longer, healthier living.

Polls of centenarians have revealed that an astonishingly high percentage of them continue to work and that they rank working alongside being able to walk as one of the keys to their longevity.

The universe doesn’t want your parts back yet

I’m a huge fan and follower of Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach, the most successful entrepreneurial coaching program on the planet.  In a recent podcast from a series entitled “Exponential Wisdom” that he does with Peter Diamandis, Dan stated that he feels he has “disenfranchised” most of the 18,000 entrepreneurs he has trained from the idea of retirement.  He and Diamandis have tagged retirement as the “ultimate casualty.”

Together, they emphatically emphasize that “stopping and retirement means you are ready to retire your bits back to the universe.”

Not sure about you, I’m in no hurry.

Newsflash!  Your Recruiter Practices Ageism!

 

By Oxford Dictionary definition, “ageist” as a noun is “a person with ageist views.”  And “ageism” as a noun is “prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a person’s age.”  The recruiter(s) you are working within your job search are practicing ageism.

There, I’ve said it.  I’ve been a recruiter for 16 ½ years and I’ve been practicing ageism the entire time.  Not because I’m prejudiced toward older people – good grief, I’m 75, a job- search and career-reinvention coach for over-50 folks and a passionate advocate for living a longer and healthier “second half” of life.

Ageism is built into the recruiting profession.

Just so you know, I’m not out to condemn this respectable profession.  I’m one of ’em.  I’ve befriended, partnered with, admired and enjoyed knowing many recruiters.  It’s a great, but tough, profession.  Recruiters are a special breed.  They have to be to survive.

Look, they are working with creation’s most imperfect and unpredictable product on both ends of the recruiting equation – people.  It takes grit, staying power, patience and extraordinary people, communications, and organization skills to succeed in this business.  For the most part, recruiters are fiercely independent and hear a different set of drums– one of the reasons I like being around them.

None that I know are prejudicial ageists.

But we all discriminate every day.  Someone gets picked, someone gets rejected.  It’s inherent in the hiring process.  But that discrimination may involve ageist-based decisions. It’s not a heart –based discriminatory decision.  It’s a business-based decision.

So, why do I need to know this?

I’m writing this for the over-50 job seeker or encore-career candidate.  That’s who needs to know and understand why the ageism element is embedded in the recruiting business.

First, please understand that, as a career coach, I advise against any job search strategy having more than 15-20% of the search effort dedicated to connecting with recruiters.  It’s no different for someone over 50.  Recruiters find people for jobs, they don’t find jobs for people.  Unless you are a superstar, don’t expect any recruiter to do back flips because you called or sent your resume.  The chances that he/she has a job order on her/his desk that you would fit into are as likely as you winning the Power Ball.

But there is another reason that recruiters should be a small part of your job search effort when you are over 50.  It’s rare that they go on a dinosaur hunt!

OK, maybe a bit severe – I hear the “hrrumphs”.  No, you are far from being a dinosaur, in your mind and in reality.  But there’s a  chance your recruiter perceives you that way personally (not likely), or, that seed has been planted through an off-the-record, “you-didn’t-hear-me-say-this” conversation” with the recruiter’s client (more likely).

Recruiters like to get paid

Remember the business model:  he who writes the check dictates.  So if your recruiter, in this little off-the-record conversation with his late-30-something client, is asked to bring in someone south of 50, your recruiter probably slips on the ageist hat.  She/he is not going to put that check in jeopardy by getting on an anti-ageism soapbox even if they are a dedicated advocate.  Not if they want to survive.

So, regardless of personal bent, your perceived recruiter ally may weed you out for this project, along with your fellow over-50 job seekers, and you’ll never know it.  It all happens silently and secretly in the recruiting process.

Is your “dinosaur” showing?

Successful recruiters are very good sleuths.  They can pick a “dinosaur–in-training” with little effort, especially with the advent of social media, particularly LinkedIn.  Think of the ways that you can send off a dinosaur odor:

  1. LinkedIn photo – typically the biggest giveaway and the hardest to overcome. There is a limit to what photo-shop can do.  Answer:  do the best you can and have it professionally done and in current business attire.  Hint:  no photos with grandkids with grandma.
  2. Work history on the resume and LinkedIn profile – limit your history to 10 years back, maybe 15 if there are exceptional achievements back then that merit inclusion.
  3. Graduation dates: Put a 1980’s graduation date on anything, the cat’s out of the bag.  Just state the degree, forget the dates.
  4. Email address – AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Earthlink (really – they are still out there) all say “Methuselah”. Get Gmail.
  5. No training in more current or trending technologies – if the last professional development course you took was on Cobol, VOIP or Quickbooks 2.0, you are better off leaving that out than mentioning it.
  6. 14 connections on LinkedIn – it’s been around since 2003 and acknowledged as THE default network for job seekers and recruiters. If you don’t have a 500+ in the third line under your headline, you are telling me, as a recruiter, that you are out of touch.

Look, let’s not whip this horse any deader with more do’s and don’ts.  I’m just saying, be aware that the job market is rife with hidden, silent ageism and recruiters and their clients are both culpable – as a part of the business equation. That’s not likely to change.  As recruiters, we get away with it because it’s all hidden from you, or from anybody for that matter.  It’s business, man!

Here’s a couple of real-life examples: 

I have a healthcare client who won’t accept any candidates over 45 for a front desk receptionist position because they “just can’t keep up with our pace and our electronic records technology.”  I disagree with the premise but I bite my tongue and sidestep some obvious talent because my client has a bias based on one or two instances where someone didn’t perform.  It’s a business decision driven by little things like having married a lady 47 years ago who still likes to sleep inside and eat warm food.

In another instance, while with a successful biosciences recruiting firm, I teamed with my boss to take a job order for a data analyst from a very large east-coast client.  The hiring manager requested candidates “under 40, preferably with an undergrad degree from India, and 2 years of experience working with an American firm”  I did the LinkedIn search, came up with over 150 suspects.   In under an hour, my boss and I “discriminated” that list down to a manageable list of 25.    Physical appearance and age (photo and length of work history) were key parts of the screening out process.  Who knew but the two of us? Nobody.

This goes on every day inside of recruiting firms.

So, is there a solution coming with this problem?

First, don’t let your LinkedIn profile and resume scream “over-the-professional-hill”.  Second,  limit your reliance on recruiters and shift your search strategy to networking.  Less than 10% of open positions are filled by independent recruiters.  Over 80% of open positions are filled through referrals as a result of effective networking.

I had a coaching client, 58-years old, who networked herself successfully into three job interviews over the course of a month and then blew away a 30-something hiring manager at a large pharmaceutical firm by positioning herself as an experienced professional problem solver.  Age concerns never surfaced as she demonstrated her understanding of the manager’s challenges and how she could help solve them.  She’s in her dream job, making 25% more than her last job and has much more control over her time and life.

I encourage you to check out my five-part newsletter series entitled “Double-nickeled and Stuck! Getting re-employed at 55 or beyond.”   Click here for Part One and follow it through all five pieces.  I believe it will help you with tools to work around this, and other challenges, you may face in the job search process.