A New Model for Aging: Subtract 20 Years From Your Chronological Age.

I pulled another book at random off my “A” shelf this week as I wait for Amazon to deliver my latest new book purchase. It turns out the book’s kind of an oldie, published in 1999. As I began my reread, I quickly realized why it was on the “A” shelf even with that publication date. It sat ignored since my first reading in 2013.

It’s worth a second read for me, chock full of timeless wisdom and still-current advice on making something of the second-half of life.

It’s entitled “Don’t Stop the Career Clock: Rejecting the Myths of Aging for a New Way to Work in the 21st Century” and the author is Helen Harkness, founder and CEO of an executive coaching company in Dallas called Career Design Associates.

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I recall placing a call to Helen after reading her three books because I was so impressed with the process she had developed to help executives successfully find their “capstone career” in their second half.

I believe Helen was 81 or 82 when I spoke with her in 2013.

She’s still at it.

Do the math.

Shouldn’t she be doing something other than – gasp! – working?

Ms. Harkness, as you might expect, has some strong feelings about attitudes toward aging. In the late-1990’s, she was at the front of the parade calling for us to “break the mindset that chronological age, the age on your birth certificate, is your real age.”

Twenty-plus years ago, she took to task our bent toward using the calendar to determine our age, saying:

“In contemporary urban society, we have the notion that a precise chronological age marks the transition from one stage of life to another, which is highly questionable. Today, the chronological ages of twenty-one and sixty-five define the lower and the upper boundaries of participation in the adult world, as well as the cultural definition of full humanity. Unfortunately, as it is today, those over sixty-five have no defined active roles in our society. So what are we to do with our highly extended long life.”

“This is an outdated but strongly established system that maintains tight control over our destiny. Yet there is absolutely no expert on aging today who holds that chronological age is a preferred or valid way to determe our actual age.”

Ahead of her time, Harkness was suggesting then that, with our advances in nutrition, fitness, medical services, and scientific breakthroughs, we should expect mid-life to start at sixty, not forty.

We’re still stuck – –

-with a chronological mindset. We’re trending away from it but at a snail’s pace.

Because of our “- social and cultural expectations, we program ourselves to begin to fall apart at a certain designated age, and we oblige.”

We are still dogged by this irrational concept of full-stop retirement as something obligatory and entitled, refusing to acknowledge that the chronological component of age 65 spawned 85 years ago wasn’t relevant then and is totally irrelevant today. And, history is showing us that this outdated concept can put us at the top of a downward slope and accelerate the slide.

Yet, it persists.

Can we perhaps admit that with our average lifespan now beginning to recede and the average American living with over 10 years of multiple, debilitating chronic illnesses that it’s well past time to consider a new “aging model?”

What if – –

-you subtracted 20 years from your current chronological age? Knowing what you know about yourself and the world around you, what would you do? Harkness suggests that if you know what you would do, then go do it now, adding: “Move on with your life. Take action. Forget who or what you are supposed to be because you are a certain chronological age.”

I believe it was Satchel Paige, Major and Negro League Baseball pitcher, who asked: “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

Many of us remain frozen in our thinking about what we want this extended period of lifespan to look like without realizing that our chronological age is unconsciously and automatically blocking our thinking about our future.

Harkness goes further to say (bolding is mine):

“We grow old, not by living a certain number of chronological years, but by becoming idle in mind, body, and purpose. We decline and decay by abandoning our flexibility, our ideals, our talents, our life’s mission, and our involvement in our community. We grow old and retire by buying into society’s story that we can be surplussed, junked, and discarded. The most deadly assumptions related to aging are that retirement and old age are directly connected to the chronological age of sixty-five, that mental decline begins at age twenty-one, and that senility is inevitable if we live a long time.”

What do we have left if we abandon our chronological age?

Functional age, which Harkness describes as combining and integrating biological, social, and psychological measures into one active package and the answer to shaking ourselves loose from our fear of aging.

Next time someone asks you your age, ask them “Do you want my functional or chronological?”  I assure you, it gets some interesting responses.

The “live long, die fast” model for aging:

You may know by now that I’m an advocate for all of us  “dying young, as late as possible.” Harkness calls it “living long and dying fast” and she created her own aging model.

I’m adopting it.

Here it is:

  • Young adulthood: 20-40
  • First midlife: 40-60
  • Second midlife: 60-80
  • Young old: 80-90
  • Elderly: 90 and above
  • Old-old: 2-3 years to live

At 78, I like the sound and feel of still being in my second mid-life. It feels right since I’m finding a surprising reserve in the old gas tank.

I also like the brevity of the “old-old and 2-3 years to live”  except that I favor 2-3 minutes instead of years.

I still envision going face down in a trout stream having just fooled a 20″ rainbow. At somewhere around 110.

I may have to rent a walker one of these days and see how it would work in a river.

Does this aging model resonate? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below or email me at www.makeagingwork.com.

Stay safe. We’re getting our vaccinations tonite at 7:30! Yay – maybe a taste of normalcy around the bend.

What is the biggest failure in modern health? Maybe not what you think?

I recently was monitoring an online forum on the topic “Why is our healthcare system failing us?”

It generated some interesting responses, some of them a bit out in “woo-woo” land.

Here’s a sampling:

  • Mega health mergers
  • Big data
  • Obamacare 2.0
  • Private practice doctors trapped in a completely perverted “fee for service” mode.
  • Drug corporations feigning concern with health when even they admit health is bad for business.
  • Corporate medicine creating disease deliberately with vaccinations and maintaining disease by suppressing true health knowledge and cures that would put them out of business. (There have been reports that this guy was seen on the capital steps last week!).
  • The almost religious reliance on antibiotics that replaced ‘barrier’ methods of keeping infections at bay in the last fifty years.

Some legit, some naive, some nuts.

It struck me that it was all about “them, them, them.”

It’s easy to point fingers and say it’s “them” that are failing in our “modern health system” when in fact it may just be US that are keeping it broken – our failure to take charge and accept responsibility for our own health.

When we point, we need to remember we have three fingers pointed back at ourselves.

We can say it’s a busted health care system (which it is) or greedy, profit-driven pharma companies (which they are), or a food industry that doesn’t care about our health (which they don’t). Or we can say I have the option to do a work-around of all that and be responsible for the actions I take that will allow me to avoid being enmeshed in all of that.

Maybe someday we will be honest and admit that it isn’t the failure of a health care system that causes me to take 1/3 of my meals through the side window of my car or cause 25% of the male population in the U.S. to be obese.

Or that pharma has driven me to become one with my voice-activated remote, La-Z-Boy, and Netflix an average of 40+ hours/week.

Or that the health care system has caused me to treat my health care as a reactive $35 co-pay experience when it goes off the rails.

Maybe someday we will just have to admit that we have a magnificent health care system that is supreme at “fixing” and “chasing the horse after it’s left the barn.” That’s the way it grew up over the last 120 years, stamping out diseases, fixing things, drugging and cutting things out.

We really can’t blame it for not being able to spell “prevention”, let alone teach, preach, or practice it.

Consider what would happen to that broken health care system if it taught you and me to be healthy? The entire infrastructure would crumble in a New York minute.

So, let’s stop throwing rocks at our modern health system and hiding behind our own crappy lifestyles. Let’s accept it’s brokenness and work around it.

Wanna change the healthcare system? Get healthy. Think “prevention” not “cure.” If you don’t need fixing, they are out of work, the big expensive machines will rust, scalpel manufacturers will be forced to Plan B, and TV ads will be something other than the latest pill for self-inflicted maladies.

 

Just saying:

THIS is NOT the fault of a broken healthcare system.

What was a choice you made that completely changed your life? Here’s mine. What’s yours?

What was a choice you made that completely changed your life?

This question was posted recently on Quora.com. I was intrigued by it and decided to pen out a response.

I had to think hard because, after chewing up nearly all of eight decades, there have been just a few choices along the way.

The first thought that came to my mind was my decision to leave Wyoming and head to the east coast for my first job. It’s when I first discovered there is this natural phenomenon called “trees.”

Certainly, choosing my roommate of 50 years was a life changer. Life got better 50+ years ago (we hit “The Golden” on 12/27/20) when our relationship started.  Not always easy, but always better.

I have to say that for two reasons:

  1. It’s the absolute truth.
  2. She is the final proofread on all of these articles.

Let’s see, what else completely changed my life?

It could be when I quit smoking 41 years ago on June 6, 1979.  That was a significant turning point.

Naaa. Lots of people do that.

Let me go with my decision to leave corporate cubicle-nation and start my own business at age 60 in 2002.

That still remains a popular option for many, so I’m gonna pass on that one.

OK. It’s a tie. My bride of 50 years and – – – – well, this is probably going to sound weird.

I’m including my decision to stop time traveling!

Whaa? Time travel?

Yep. When I decided – with considerable difficulty, mind you – to stop traveling into the past or the future and to kick worry to the curb, life got decidedly better.

You see, with a lot of reflection and study, I’ve learned that the main residents in both of those domains aren’t particularly good for our physical or mental health or success in life.

Regrets, guilt, remorse in the past. And shame – the worst and most powerful.

Fear and the ever-present worry dominate the future.

Not good thought-mates for moving forward in life.

Addicts discover this truth – or they remain addicts. I saw it first hand. Especially the overwhelming power of shame. “Day at a time” and the sense of a power greater than oneself is at the heart of recovery for the addicted. It also is a key to living a healthier, stress-free, successful life.

Dale Carnegie said it years ago:

“You and I are standing this very second at the meeting place of two eternities: the vast past that has endured forever, and the future that is plunging on to the last syllable of recorded time.  We can’t possibly live in either of these two eternities – no, not even for a split second.  But by trying to do so, we can wreck both our bodies and our minds.” 

One of my favorite authors, Steve Chandler, super-coach, prolific writer, and former addict brings credibility and experience to this present-moment idea. His book “Time Warrior: How to Defeat Procrastination, People-Pleasing, Self-Doubt, Over-Commitment, Broken Promises and Chaos” is a worthy read and introduces the idea of linear time, where most of us live, versus non-linear time (day-at-a-time) where we should be living.

From “Time Warrior” (bolding is mine):

“Stay out of the past unless you are dissolving past beliefs that are dragging you down.  And stay out of the future unless you are loving drawing a map of it for yourself to follow. But even that is a present moment activity.  Make today and only today your masterpiece.

Non-linear time management doesn’t allow that line that stretches into the future because the linear thought process always produces stress – unreasonable stress.  Create your perfect day.  Figure out what you have to do in one day (today) to automatically meet that deadline.

Non-linear time management doesn’t ever have a long timeline.  It has two choices: now or not now.”

The past is history; the future is a mystery. The power is in NOW – this very moment.

Learning to practice that and striving to live it continues to be pivotal in my intentional, endless transformation. Even with my awareness, too many days are lost to hopping on my time-travel machine between my temples and wasting the most valuable, unreplenishable resource I have. I’m getting better, but “the resistance” is relentless.

If you’ve got this mastered, I’m all ears on how to get all the way there: gary@makeagingwork.com or 720-344-7784.

Do you have a life-changer you’d like to share? Love to hear your story. Shoot over a comment below or drop me an email. What say we all use the goofiness of 2020 to move toward the acceptance that all we’ve really got is the day we are in?

Do You Have an Exit Strategy Built Into Your Retirement Plan?

Exit strategy from your retirement?

No, I’m not talking about prepaid funeral expenses/burial plots or DNR/power-of-attorney stuff.

I’m talking about a retirement strategy that includes a contingency plan should (when) the euphoria of a leap from labor-to-leisure fades and one finds themselves wading into the hidden perils of a self-indulgent, leisure-based retirement.

OK, I understand the raised eyebrows. I don’t imagine this was ever a part of the conversations that took place with your financial planner – that is if you were one of the 25% of retirees who have chosen to work with a planner.

Can you imagine the customer retention rate of a financial planner that says: “OK, now that we have your plan laid out, let’s talk about what you would like to do when you discover that this traditional off-the-cliff retirement thing is for the birds.”

Why would I need to have an exit plan from something that is supposedly the apex of a life-well-lived?

Relaxation. Fun. Sleep. Rinse. Repeat.

Feels so, so good – easy to get used to and to become habitual.

Hard to exit.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the dangers of “the dip”, that early phase of retirement, how easy it is to get stuck there, and how retirement can be like a cul-de-sac – circular, safe, comfortable, dead end.

An exit strategy is a good thing to have for “the dip.”

In 2018, I did an article about the stages of retirement (see it here) where I referenced the research done by Ken Dychtwald, the founder of AgeWave and the foremost thought leader on issues related to aging.  His organization has done extensive research on retirement, using a database of over 50,000 retirees.  They concluded that retirement has five stages:

  1. Imagination – 5-15 years before retirement

  2. Anticipation – 5 years before retirement

  3. Liberation – retirement day, anticipation realized. Average duration: one year

  4. Re-orientation – 1-15 years after retirement. Critical life questions surface; post-partem depression is common; growing concerns about health and finances; boredom; unstimulated

  5. Reconciliation – late 70-80s; trying to come to terms with who they really are; friends and family dying; money concerns intensify; concerns about legacy

Number 3 is the entrance to “the dip.” If you knew the downsides of staying in #3, wouldn’t an exit plan of some sort be sensible to avoid #4 and #5?

Mikey likes it!!

Mike Drak is a budding new author that exercised an exit strategy from a retirement gone sour. Mike got his walking papers unexpectedly after 36 years in the banking industry, with much of it in upper management roles. After working hard throughout his career, saving for and anticipating his retirement, his experience was nothing like he expected it to be when it came around.

In his words, “- I felt lost, aimless, well on the way to spiraling down into Retirement Hell.”

Mike’s exit strategy was to write and to help others avoid what he experienced. His first book, “Victory Lap Retirement: Work While You Play. Play While You Work” has been a big success.

Mike treated me to an advance copy of his second book entitled “Retirement Heaven or Hell: Which Will You Choose? 9 Principles for Designing Your Ideal Post-Career Lifestyle.”  It’s a solid guide for retirees who are experiencing the disenchantment of traditional retirement.  Better yet, it’s a guide for those anticipating retirement to avoid what can become “retirement hell.”

Mike’s story of entering “retirement hell” will resonate for some who have entered retirement without a carefully thought-out non-financial plan  – which is the case for 2 out of 3 retirees – with no plan for exiting “the dip.”

I’ll wrap with a paragraph from Mike’s book:

“This book contains everything I’ve learned about retirement and how we can live longer, healthier, happier lives. It’s a  book about possibility, finding purpose, and having fun in retirement. I felt the need to write it because the conventional retirement story they like to tell us no longer works today. It’s a big mistake to live a retirement devoid of accomplishment, success, and failures. We were not born to merely survive and then retire, full stop. Once we’ve left our primary career behind, we need to continue to matter, to make a difference, to contribute, to help the world be a better place. And believe me, the world needs a lot of help right now.” 

Did you have a retirement exit plan that you’d be willing to share? We’d love your thoughts or comments on this. Scroll down and leave us a note. Also, tell your friends about this weekly publication and suggest they join the growing tribe at www.makeagingwork.com.  There’s a free 25-page ebook on how to live longer and healthier in it for them.