Living a Regret Free Life

This post was originally published on Booming Encore and republished with permission.

By Susan Williams

Over the last year or so I have talked with many people who shared with me that how they currently were living was not what they really wanted to do.

Whether it was pursuing a different profession that would allow them to be more creative or wanting to help other people more or even a desire to feel that they were making a bigger difference in the world – they all had one thing in common.

They were talking about doing something different but we’re not actually taking steps towards doing anything about it.

It made me wonder – what stops us from pursuing what we say we really want to do? 

Here are just a few things that I think can get in the way;

Fear

Fear of failure, fear of what other people would think, fear of changing relationships, fear of not having enough time are just some examples of the fear that can stop someone from making a significant change.

Financial

In some cases – especially changing careers – I think that facing a potential financial impact may sometimes be even a bigger challenge than facing fear.

As we get older to think about changing from a comfortable lifestyle to possibly something less secure can be a real challenge.  It may not only affect you – in many cases, it can affect an entire family.

Easier Just to Talk About It

Let’s be honest.  It’s easier to just talk about what we would like to do in our lives rather than actually doing anything about it.

If we think about all the people who talk about losing weight, getting more exercise, seeing friends more often – but don’t – this is the same type of thing.  It takes time, work, dedication and commitment to actually pursue something new.

Support

To make a significant change can often require support – family, friends, colleagues – especially if your decision could impact others.

So why bother?  If we have to get over some of these hurdles is any significant change really worth it?

As I thought about this question, I was reminded of a TED video I watched a while back presented by Kathleen Taylor, a mental health counselor who worked with people in their final days of life.

In her presentation, Kathleen shared what was discovered as the number one regret at the end of a person’s life.  She shared the following thought that was voiced by many in their final days;

“I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself and not the life that others expected of me.”

Based on this, I think the answer to make a change or not make a change is truly a very personal decision.

The “follow your passion” or “pursue your dreams” advice looks great on Facebook and Twitter images but any significant change is a very personal decision with many different facets to consider.

I think the big question is to ask ourselves how we think we will feel at the end of our lives.

Will the choices and decisions that we have made allowed us the opportunity to live the life we really wanted to live?

I think if we can answer this question honestly and have made decisions based on this question then the choices as to whether we decide to undertake a significant change becomes easier.

Our lives will then be something to look back on with both joy and satisfaction – and without any regrets.

Here is the TED Talk given by Kathleen Turner – Rethinking the Bucket List;

Susan Williams is the Founder of Booming Encore – a digital media hub dedicated to providing information and inspiration to help Baby Boomers create and live their very best encore. Being a Boomer herself, Susan loves to discover ways to live life to the fullest. She shares her experiences, observations and opinions on living life after 50 and personally tries to embrace Booming Encore’s philosophy of making sure every day matters. For daily updates to help you live your best encore, be sure to follow Booming Encore on Twitter and join them on Facebook. (Link for website: www.boomingencore.com / Link for Twitter: www.twitter.com/boomingencore and Link for Facebook: www.facebook.com/boomingencore.

On Becoming a “Sage” – A Podcast

I had the good fortune recently to be asked to do a guest interview with Jann Freed, PhD, on her “Becoming a Sage” podcast.  Jann is a well-known business consultant specializing in strategic planning, leadership development, and life planning.

You can learn about her and her services at www.leadingwithwisdom.net.

Jann liked my guest post on Next Avenue entitled “Your Second Half Should Be Filled With These Four-letter Words” and asked me if I would be interested in an interview for her monthly podcast.

It was an easy decision to make.

It was particularly flattering to be included amongst the collection of Jann’s podcasts that included such notable names in the field of successful aging and life planning as Marci Alboher, VP, Strategic Communications at Encore.org; Ashton Applewhite, author of the best-seller “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism“; Chip Conley, AirBnB executive and author of an exciting new book “Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder“; George Schofield, designated a Top 50 Influencer in Aging by Next Avenue and author of “How Do I Get There from Here?: Planning for Retirement When the Old Rules No Longer Apply“, and others.

Jann and I covered a lot of ground.  Click on the podcast title below, listen and let me know what you think.

 

Becoming a Sage: Gary Foster

 

Thanks for listening.

 

 

 

Older for Longer? Or Younger for Longer? The Choice is Ours.

Chances are pretty good that you may live 20 or more years longer than your parents. If you hit 65 without major illness, you have a better than even chance you will live to 90 or beyond.

So the prospect of 25-30 more years beyond the average retirement age in the U.S. puts us in a territory we haven’t been in before.  And we find ourselves with no roadmaps.  Where mom and dad, or granny and grandpa had a few years of bingo, bridge, and bocce ball, we now face the prospect of multiple decades of – what?

Just being older longer?  Who wants that?  But that’s what happens when there is no plan for this extended longevity.

Without a plan, that’s what it often turns into for those who refuse to give up the traditional learn-earn-retire model that we’ve bought into for the last several decades.  You know the one I mean – that old, aging elephant in the room, the one that has those golden years of “every day is Saturday” at the end.

Well, we’re getting smarter now and discovering that “every day is Saturday” or “I have plenty to keep me busy” is not a healthy plan for this extended longevity period.  There is this thing called “boredom” or “stifling sameness” that sets in when every day becomes the same people, place, time, combining to yield the same result.

Mitch Anthony, author of “The New Retirementality”,  puts it this way:

“‘Every day is Saturday’ quickly becomes a life of those Mondays you used to dread.”

He goes on to say:

“You need to have realistic expectations regarding retirement. Thinking that going from working full-time to a life that involves focusing on only leisure activities gets old quickly—and makes us older in the process. Most of us will be disappointed once we find out that our vision of retirement is not the nirvana we thought it would be.”

It’s rare that I hear a recent retiree use the word “bored” in describing the current status of their retirement.  I get it – who’s going to admit that their retirement isn’t sailing along as presented and expected?

The “no structure” trap

I’ve had lots of conversations over the last year with newly-retired hospital and large medical practice executives.  These are highly-educated, highly-compensated folks stepping away from very time- and stress-intensive positions.  They created and thrived in a very structured environment – a necessity in an industry which, at its core, is often akin to herding cats and just simply keeping the wheels on because of the ever-changing world of government intervention.

One common theme I see emerging from these conversations is the visceral “I have plenty to keep me busy”.  Catching up on delayed home projects, more family involvement, resurrecting moth-balled hobbies, trying new activities (pickle-ball comes up more often than I expected!).

Being busy soon after retirement never seems to be an issue.

But, I’m also hearing that the move from structure to non-structure is wearing thin.  Several have expressed a sort of “drifting” or “ping-ponging” nature to their retirement and feeling that “there is more that I can do that has more meaning.”

Steve is a former hospital CEO that is three years into his retirement.  He recently shared this with me: “I enjoy being by myself and with my family. But I need intellectual stimulation, a new challenge, something that uses my expertise, experience and leadership abilities.”

He laments that he didn’t give thought to, or have someone to help him with, things to consider post-career – a method for “finding himself” or a path to more purposeful use of his time at this stage.

His financial goals were achieved early.  But nowhere in conversations with financial advisors was there any conversation about “what’s next” from a mental, physical, social or spiritual perspective.   Nor did anything along the path to retirement “hook” him and steer him toward something that would ignite dormant passions or a greater sense of purpose in how he was living.

Like so many, this very talented, experienced executive walked from a structured environment into an unstructured environment with the assumption that retirement would “take care of itself”.

This new terrain can be a bit like trying to negotiate the city of Chicago using a map of Des Moines.

Steve, at 66, understands he probably has a longer roadway ahead than previous generations. That’s part of his angst, I believe. Perhaps fear of a meaningless, dependent post-career existence.  In other words, just being “older longer.”

We’ve agreed to work together and experiment with some techniques to help him get on this “purpose-path” that seems to be simmering in his psyche.  It’s interesting to note that, even with his successful career experience and education, he is most interested in starting that process by going all the way back to doing some basic strengths and talent assessments and tests.

With this reminder of how he is “wired up” and some guidance on the development of a flexible, written plan for his post-career life, I believe we will carve out that roadmap that he feels is missing for the remainder of his days.

I am confident that we will see a Steve that is “younger longer” with no fear of being “older longer.” More importantly, I believe, will be a focused transfer of skills and experience back into the marketplace in a way that will allow him to leave a more meaningful footprint.

It’s a discovery path that is an option for all of us if we are willing to stare down that “aging elephant in the room.”

It’s Time to “Take Back and Own” Your Elderhood

How did you react when you received your AARP card just before your fiftieth birthday?

Were you:

  • Surprised and shocked.
  • Flattered
  • Excited
  • Ambivalent
  • Pissed

Surprised?  We probably don’t want to know how much they know about us.

Flattered?  Just a thought – you might want to raise the bar.

Excited?  You love those weekly Bed Bath and Beyond 20% discount coupons also, don’t you?

Ambivalent?  Good choice.

Pissed?  Good –I’m not alone.

In one trip to the mailbox, I was slammed, culturally and without my permission, into an insulting, miscast category entitled  “elderly”.

I refuse to contribute to this insurance-company-in-disguise.

Yes, it defies all logic that I would pass up a 12% discount on ParkRideFly USA airport parking. Or a 15% discount on Philip Lifeline medical alert service or save on an eye exam at Lenscrafters.

But, I’m sorry.  I just haven’t gotten over the insult that arrived twenty-eight years ago with that AARP letter.

I guess that kinda makes me seem like one of those grumpy, crass, hard-headed ol’ farts I swore I’d never become.

I’m working on fixing that.


So it was that when I got a mere one chapter into Chip Conley’s new book “Wisdom at Work” (reference my 10/21/19 article) that I got affirmation that my resistance to that premature elderly tag will have served me well.

If you’ve been hanging around my weekly diatribes for a while, you’ve no doubt detected that I seem to have a new hero every week or so.  Well, this week – and I think for a good while longer – it’s Chip Conley.

I wrote two weeks ago about his Modern Elder Academy, a “boutique resort for midlife learning and reflection” and his coining of a new cultural portal he labeled “middlescence”.

My intrigue with his inventiveness motivated me to Amazon Prime his book and dig in.

So glad I did.

I didn’t need to go past Chapter 1 to know that Conley’s is a voice and message that needs to be heard – across generations.  He is saying so much more eloquently and authoritatively what I’ve been waltzing and bumbling around with for most of my two years with this blog.

At the heart is the message that it’s time to:

“liberate the ‘elder’ from the word ‘elderly’.  ‘Elderly’ refers solely to years lived on the planet.  ‘Elder’ refers to what one has done with those years.  Many people age without synthesizing wisdom from their experience.  But elders reflect on what they’ve learned and incorporate it into the legacy they offer younger generations.  The elderly are older and often dependent upon society and, yet, separated from the young.”

Conley reminds us that the average age of someone moving into a nursing home is eighty-one vs sixty-five in the 1950s and that this leaves a lot of people not yet elderly but as elders.

He encourages us to “take back the term elder” and own it as a modern definition of someone with great wisdom especially at a time we need it.

I loved this choice of words:

“Let’s make it a ‘hood’ that’s not scary.  Just as a child stares into adulthood with intrigue, wouldn’t it be miraculous if an adult peered into elderhood with excitement?”

Count for me how many, amongst your family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, that you think will “peer into elderhood with excitement”.  I’m guessing you didn’t need the fingers on both hands.

While you are at it, count up the number of millennials and GenX’ers you know (if you know any at all) that are excited about the same thing i.e. about us being anything more than irrelevant “elderlies.”  Even fewer fingers, right?

Conley brings a different but refreshing, evidence-based perspective on how and why this all can change; on how generativity can close the gap; on how we need those digi-head millenials as much as they need us wisdom keepers.

It’s time for you and me to become more intentional about our “wisdom worker status” and to redefine our third-age as one of “mature idealism.”

Consider Conley’s perspective on this:

“For many of us, the baseball game of our career will likely go into extra innings.  So maybe it’s time to get excited about the fact that most sporting matches get more interesting in the last half or quarter.  By the same token, theatergoers sit on the edge of their seat during the last act of a play when everything finally starts to makes sense. And marathon runners get an endorphin high as they reach the final miles of their event.  Could it be that life gets more interesting, not less, closer to the end?”

I’ll wrap with these two powerful quotes from the first chapter of Conley’s book.

“If you can cause maturity to become aspirational again, you’ve changed the world”.  Ken Dychtwald, Age Wave

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy, sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”  Edith Wharton

Anybody up for joining this “elder revolution” and become Modern Elders?  There’s a lot of room.