August Is An Important Month On Your Life Calendar

August in Colorado.  Hot, dry, rather boring except for Palisade peaches and Olathe sweet corn.  Asking ourselves: “How did another summer slip through our fingers?” Browning lawns, back to the dreaded school zone speed limits and regretting the time wasted watching pre-season NFL games.

I  signed up to speak at my Toastmaster club last week.   The theme for the meeting was “August”, so I pulled together this eleven-minute presentation.  It was good enough to win the best speech for the evening, a nod that my sympathetic Toastmaster friends have given me several dozen times over the past six years of membership.

As I scrambled to prepare (I never start soon enough) it came to me that just like our 12-month Gregorian calendar has a beginning in January and an ending in December, so do our lives have a January and a December.

And we all have had, or will have, an August.

All of us started on January 1 of the calendar of life and each of us is at a particular month based on how long we’ve been on this planet relative to how long we will live.

It becomes a bit subjective when we do that because (1) people’s life spans can vary a lot and (2) we have no idea how long each of us may live.

We can look at a thirty-something millennial and say perhaps that she is in April on her life span calendar.

We could take someone mid-forties and say he is somewhere around June or July.

Or we could look at me at seventy-seven.  Based on today’s average life span of seventy-eight for men – egad, I’m at New Year’s Eve!

And the ball should be about to drop, statistically!

Don’t fret – I intend to stick around for at least another 100 articles. (BTW, this is #97)

August is the two-third point of the annual calendar.  In terms of age against our average life span in this country, that would be equivalent to 51 years for men 55 for women.

In my career and retirement coaching business, I’m dealing mostly with folks who are in the August/September period of their lives based on the current average life span.  My focus is helping people at that point make a career transition or move into the post-career phase of their lives – the final three to four months of their life calendar.

I refer to it as the third age – that period between the end of parenting or end of career and true old age.

I use my personal journey in my coaching. I’m admittedly a bit strange in how I view my life calendar.  Some time ago, in my 50s, I began to feel the calendar squeezing in – that realization that there may be more days behind than ahead.  I was feeling like I was in August, maybe even September.

I didn’t like that feeling.  I had too much that I hadn’t done.  The thought of being in August/September compelled me to think differently.  Hey, there’s only one-third left – and I’m not happy with what I have to show for it.

So my choice was to really kick it up and start doing more of what I wanted to do for this final stage of my life calendar – or find a way to extend my calendar.

I decided to try to do both.

Doing more – that I have control over.

Extend my calendar – not as much control.

But I decided I have nothing to lose by at least resetting my calendar because if I didn’t set that as a goal and change some things, chances are that I would likely live out just an average life span.

So about 10 years ago, I began to confess to myself and others that I was going to ignore average life span and live to 100.  I backed up that proclamation with a lot of research that said there isn’t any reason, biologically, for that not to happen.

People thought I was nuts then – and still do.  Even more so now, because at age 75 I changed my target to 112 ½.  I wanted to have a third of my life left because I had so much I wanted to accomplish.

I learned that, regardless of age, all of us can play a proactive role in extending our life span through our attitude, habits, and lifestyle.  I undertook a significant change in lifestyle and adopted more life-extending habits.

Let’s take a look at what that does to my calendar – at least psychologically.   At 77, instead of being at New Year’s Eve,  I’m back into August with 32% of my life left.

Think about where you would fall on your calendar if you adopted the same approach.  Now I’m sure few of you here spend much time thinking about how long you will live – or have projected a date for your demise.

But if you were, say,  forty-six and in the July of your life, but decided to live to 100, psychologically you’ve now moved that back to late May or June.

More time to get things done; more time to reach your life goals; more time with those you love.

The list of possibilities is endless.

Here are three things to think about in all this:

  1. We are learning that we can, in all likelihood, extend our life calendar by understanding how our bodies and minds work and treating them properly. We have more control over our life span than we realize because of how much more we know about how this two-legged transport vehicle works. I encourage you to learn more about your biology, exercise more self-care and to work against the healthcare illiteracy that pervades our society.
  2. Each decision you make today has consequences in later months on your calendar, especially in the fall and winter months of your calendar. Think today about what you are doing to protect your mind and body for the long haul.  We still live too short and die too long in this country because of the habits we developed earlier in our lives.
  3. Getting old and aging are not the same thing. We all are going to get old.  All of us has a midnight December 31st in our future.  But how we get there is called aging.  Despite all the forces against it such as ageism, youth-oriented society, myths about aging, we are beginning to discover that this third age – or fall/winter months of our calendars – can truly be the happiest, most fulfilling and productive months on our life calendar.

August on our life calendar – however long our calendar may be – is an important transitional time.  Rather than hot, dry, and boring and sliding us into a time of despair, deterioration, and depression as our culture would lead us to believe it’s going to, it can be a launch point to a new takeoff rather than a landing.  A time in which we all can bring forward our accumulated experiences, talents and passions and pay them forward to help those that follow us.

Maybe you have some thoughts about all this.  If so, share them below with a comment.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at  www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

One Woman’s Quest to Restore Good Nutrition

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, said:

“Man.
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.”

That quote was shared with me by Susan Buckley, Registered Dietitian and the Nutrition Manager at South Denver Cardiology, one of Denver’s premier cardiac medical practices.  I interviewed Susan for this article after attending several of her free nutrition presentations at SDC. I was impressed with the depth and breadth of her nutrition knowledge – and her commitment to revealing the truth about the sad state of nutrition in our society.

Susan has a pretty amazing personal story.  A southern California native, she grew up in a household where her mother didn’t cook much so there was lots of fast food.  She struggled for years with her weight, going from 118 pounds to 180 during her high school years.

Like many facing this condition, she tried lots of diets with the typical see-saw results.  The tipping point for her was when she reached 200 pounds following the birth of her second daughter.

She didn’t want her daughters to grow up with a “disordered relationship with food and their bodies” so she committed to the Weight Watcher program and decided to go back to school to become a dietitian, earning a degree in dietetics and doing an internship at the St. Louis VA Medical Center.

And she dropped 70 pounds – and kept it off!

Susan is a long-standing member of the National Weight Control Registry which is a  research study that includes people 18 years or older who have lost at least 30 lbs of weight and kept it off for at least one year. There are currently over 10,000 members enrolled in the study, making it perhaps the largest study of weight loss ever conducted.

She shared with me that the commonality they have discovered through the Registry is that it is a cohort of breakfast eaters and exercisers.   Those are two consistents in her life also.  And her exercise includes strength training multiple times a week.

As Nutrition Manager at South Denver Cardiology, she does a lot of one-on-one consulting as well as teaching classes on a variety of topics such as diabetes, cholesterol,  high blood pressure, and different diet plans.  She also teaches some cooking classes.  All this typically consumes one day of her week.

The rest of her week is spent in her private practice where she consults with people who have severe, life-altering food sensitivities such as migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, reflux, and autoimmune disorders.  She tells of clients who suffer from devastating migraines who can’t leave their homes for days and have exhausted their options with their doctors.  She works with these types of clients to do food sensitivity blood tests to determine what foods are causing severe inflammation in the body and then does a food elimination diet to reduce or eliminate the inflammation.

The results have been remarkable.

Susan exudes passion and confidence.  Tall, slender and fit, she portrays what she preaches.

I asked Susan if she is optimistic or pessimistic about the future when it comes to nutrition in our culture.  She admits to going back and forth on this.  My sense is that she tilts a bit to the pessimistic side as one who is immersed in understanding the tremendous forces working against us in trying to achieve widespread healthful nutrition.

She told me: “it’s almost impossible to sustain a healthy lifestyle in the environment we’ve created.  Our society is set up for convenience and high calories – and we combine it with all kinds of labor-saving devices.”

She bristles a bit as she explains how effective food companies are at designing foods to hit the “bliss point” where one bite, or one chip, or one sip builds a craving for another.  Bliss points aren’t aimed at what’s good for the body.   Remember the “betcha can’t eat just one” ads for potato chips.  That’s a core food design principle.  And it’s where a lot of our “pretend” food or “toxic food-like substances” come from.

In her world, she observes how entrenched bad eating habits are in our society and how incredibly difficult it is to change nutrition habits.  Our taste buds have been held captive since childhood.  Despite that, she has seen people make healthy long-term changes in their lives through her coaching.

She places her hope for the future with children, on reaching them while they are still malleable with a message of how important good nutrition is.  To tackle the childhood obesity epidemic, she feels we are going to have to work through the schools and the food companies.  She laments the horrific food offerings in our school systems and blames food companies for turning a blind eye to the health impact that their products are having on our children.

Susan mentioned the work that Dr. Mark Hyman is doing to work with food companies to try to convince them to produce “real food” rather than “chemical food” which we know can affect the brain.

Susan has co-authored two books:  “The Kardea Gourmet: Smart and Delicious Eating for a Healthy Heart” and “Cooking With Heart”.  Both were co-written with Dr. Richard Collins, a retired cardiologist from South Denver Cardiology and a former partner in presenting many cooking and food selection classes at SDC.

I love the quote she shared with me that she borrowed from Dr. Collins. It clearly speaks to where we are today:

“It takes 2 calories to roll down a car window to get a 700 calorie breakfast”

It makes you appreciate what she is up against.  And what she’s been through.  And the worthiness of where she is going.

You can find out more about Susan and her practice at www.susanbuckleynutritionsolutions.com

 

Ten habits That Will Improve Your Life the Most After 55

In case you haven’t noticed, if you are over 55 today, you are the center of a lot of attention.  As a “boomer”, you’re a hot topic because you are part of the hysteria about the aging of our society.

You see, in the eyes of the government, media, academia, most corporations, and many of the Gen Xers and millennials, you threaten the stability of our country because, well, you’re getting older. And that means you are less capable, less productive, less motivated, less energetic, less whatever.

In spite of what we’ve learned about our mind and body and its resilience and potential, culturally we persist in believing that there is a major downturn in capability when we approach the end of our sixth decade or move into our seventh.

Pardon my bluntness, but that prevailing attitude has a lot bull**** mixed into it!

I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I believe in following the money.  And when you F-T-M on a lot of the attitudes about aging, you get the sense that there just might be some ulterior motives in trying to keep us in the dark about our potential to age more successfully, gracefully, optimally or whatever “-lly” you prefer.

 

Let me take a shot at a couple of “suspects”:

  • Our healthcare (er, disease care) system: Consider what would happen to our $3.5 trillion healthcare system if that system decided to revert to proactive healthcare instead of reactive healthcare.  What if, instead of drug it or cut it out, our healthcare practitioners practiced the Greek concept of “Hygeia” which means “soundness” or “wholeness” of the body and keeping it fit.  Instead of “Panacea” or “remedy for all diseases” and chasing the horse with pills or scalpels after its left the barn, what if “Hygeia” took over and fewer people showed up for their $35 co-pay, “fix-me, Doc” experience – because they didn’t need to.  Just think of the horrific impact it would have on general cash flow within this out-of-control system.  Empty hospitals.  Docs with openings on their schedule and more than 15 minutes to meet with you. Rusty radiology machines. Empty waiting rooms. Fewer drug addictions. Kind of a refreshing thought, isn’t it?
  • The pharmaceutical industry. Can you imagine if we learned how to get well and stay well what the drug companies would do? Extend that to TV advertising.  I’m sure you’ve noticed that drug advertising dominates TV advertising these days.  Neither of those industries wants us to take charge of our own health and do the things that allow us to avoid taking their drugs or ignoring their commercials.  Our healthcare naivete/illiteracy keeps them in business and profitable.
  • The food industry. OMG, don’t even get me started. Consider that we exist in a profit-oriented society where our healthcare system doesn’t care about what we eat and a food industry that doesn’t care about our health.  Sixty-five percent of us are overweight, twenty percent of us are obese. Heart disease remains the biggest killer.  Diabetes has reached epidemic levels.  On average, as a population, we’ve gained fifteen pounds over the last couple of decades but haven’t gotten any taller.  We succumb to the convenience of processed and manufactured/pretend food for a lifetime and then wonder why we get sick for a long time before we cash out.  Does the food industry care?  If you’ve ever been in middle aisles of an American grocery store, I think you know the answer to that.

Is there an answer for healthy survival in the midst of all this.  Yep – and it really isn’t complicated.  I didn’t say easy – I said it’s not complicated.

It’s called self-efficacy.  It’s getting educated and taking full responsibility for your health.

It’s never too late to start; it’s always too early to quit.

Here are ten simple things to do to improve your health and enhance your chances of living longer and healthier. Most of these you know. But, are you doing them?  As the proverb says:  ‘Knowing and not doing is not knowing.”

  1. Don’t retire. How’s that for a controversial starting point? Retirement, as we’ve known it for several decades, is dying, none too soon.  And for good reason.  Joint research by the Social Security Administration and the National Institute on Aging indicates that full-time retirement is associated with a 23-29 percent increase in mobility and daily activity difficulties, an 8 percent increase in illness, and 11 percent decline in mental health.
  2. Upgrade your diet away from animal-based and processed foods. The verdict is in, and has been for a while: a largely plant-based diet is by far the healthiest.  The only argument the food industry can take against that – in particular the beef, pork, and poultry industries – is that a plant-based diet doesn’t provide enough protein.  Wrong!   Most nutrition experts claim we are over-proteined in our culture and feel a plant-based diet offers adequate protein.   F-T-M and don’t buy the meat and poultry industry argument.
  3. Up your exercise and include strength training. Less than a quarter of Americans 18 or older met physical activity guidelines for cardiovascular and muscle-strengthening activity in 2017 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On page 56 (adult) and page 68 (older adult) of the downloadable .pdf of the government Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans,  minimum recommended exercise calls for 2 ½ – 5 hours a week of moderate-intensity or 1 1/4 – 2 ½ hours of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise per week.  Muscle-strengthening activities involving all major muscle groups should be added on two or more days a week. Get your heart rate into the optimal exercise range for your age (220 minus your age times .65 and .85) and sustain it.

The weight training is vital. You are experiencing sarcopenia and probably aren’t aware of it.  We all fall victim to it.  It’s loss of muscle mass and it started for us all in our 30s.  The only antidote is strength training.  Remember this simple mantra:  Aerobic exercise will give you life, strength training will make it worth living.

  1. Get more sleep. No magic here.  You need a minimum of seven hours a night at this age.  Naps count.  Research shows that a chronic lack of sleep, or getting poor quality sleep, increases the risk of disorders including high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and obesity.
  2. Challenge your brain. Don’t believe the myth that brain senescence is automatic.  It isn’t.  Oh, it can happen if you let it.  But we’ve known for years that our brain, regardless of age, can produce new synaptic connections.  It’s called neurogenesis.  Think of your brain as a muscle.  It, too, can atrophy.  Use it or lose it.
  3. Maintain a high level of social activity. AARP says that social isolation is as damaging as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  Too often, reduced social engagement is a consequence of the retirement phase of life. We now know that being socially active plays a key role in longevity and good health.   TV and Lazyboy are deadly combinations.
  4. Assess your relationships and do some housecleaning. Do you have toxic relationships in your life? We benefit by getting rid of negative, draining relationships. Motivational speaker, Jim Rohn, famously said: “You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”  We are greatly influenced by those closest to us, in the way we think, our self-esteem, our decision making.  Severing a relationship can be tough, but vital to avoid the energy drain and excess cortisol production that a bad relationship can cause.  Do yourself and your toxic friend(s) a favor – cut the cord.
  5. Increase your interaction with younger people. We seem to be quick to throw rocks at Millenials when we should make an effort to interact more with them.  It will be a mutually-beneficial relationship.  You feed off their energy, enthusiasm, ideas, and tech-savviness.  They gain from your wisdom, steadiness, and common sense.   It’s encouraging to see more and more companies discovering this and striving toward multi-generational workforces.
  6. Learn something new every day. Henry Ford said: “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”  We lament our muscle atrophy as we age but ignore our brain atrophy.  One of the greatest old dead white men, Leonardo de Vinci, nailed it:  “Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”
  7. Get savvy on basic technology. Technology development will continue to accelerate. If you are still pondering the purchase of a smartphone, well, you may have some serious catching up to do.  Yes, there are downsides to all the tech that surrounds us.  But the upsides are much greater.

There may be an organization in your area that specializes in teaching technology to seniors.  One good resource is a site called Senior Planet  which “celebrates aging by sharing information and resources that support aging with attitude, and helps people who were born long before the digital revolution to stay engaged and active by bringing a digital-technology focus to a range of topics – among them news, health, sex and dating, art and design, senior style, travel, and entertainment.”  They have physical locations in New York City. Plattsburgh, NY, San Antonio, TX, Palo Alto, CA and just opened in Denver, CO.

  1. Find someone to help/mentor. There is often a serendipitous effect of mentoring someone that goes beyond helping.  Mentors typically improve their own skills by being inspired by new ideas, expanding their network and learning new strategies, technologies, and methods.

OK, I don’t count well.  The last one is a bonus.

The list could be much longer.  I hope there is a pearl in this list you hadn’t heard or thought about.  I don’t expect you to agree with all of them.   I’d love to hear your disagreement/counter-argument.  Scroll down and leave a comment.

 

 

 

Are You “Winging It” Into Your Retirement?

“You’d Be Better Off Just Blowing Your Money: Why Retirement Planning Is Doomed.”

This intriguing statement headlined an article that came through on my LinkedIn feed this week.

I was shocked when I saw the source – Forbes.com!

Surely, with that headline, this is coming from some rogue, off-the-edge, iconoclastic, contrarian writer looking to gain a foothold in the American mind.

Kinda like what I keep bashing my head against the wall trying to do.

But to get an article with such a contrarian view published in Forbes there needs to be some street cred cooking here.  Something my head-bashing is yet to produce.

Turns out there is some of all this at play here.  The author is Garrett Gunderson, Chief Wealth Architect at Wealth Factory, keynote speaker, and author of the NY Times bestseller “Killing Sacred Cows.”

Wealth Factory helps entrepreneurs develop personal finance strategies that leverage their strengths as an entrepreneur.

I’m not promoting or endorsing Gunderson or his business. Well, I guess I just did a little by mentioning it.  I’ve never met or talked to the man.  But I think the raw truth of his article is worth mentioning.

I went to his Wealth Factor website.  It’s interesting that the word “retirement” appears ONLY TWICE in the lengthy home page.  In both cases, it referred to the hopeless nature of putting your money in a “retirement plan and hoping it works out.”

I really liked the article because it peels a few of the covers back on the retirement planning industry.  This statement lays it out pretty straight:

“The concept of retirement has robbed the public of the responsibility and accountability required with personal finance. It has become too easy to hand money over to so-called experts due to the busyness of business, kids, hobbies, and other obligations competing for our time.”

Gunderson refers to the prevalent narrative, “work hard, save money in a retirement plan, wait and it will all work out in the long run” and calls it destructive.

It takes some real cajones to make that kind of statement considering the grip that retirement has on our collective psyche in this country.  And to do it in one of the premier business mags!

It appears that Gunderson’s mission is to encourage investors – particularly entrepreneurs – to avoid the passive approach to accumulating wealth and to be more engaged and take more responsibility for the growth of their individual wealth.

What does your non-financial retirement plan look like?

As I thought about his stance against the passive retirement savings approach so prevalent in our society, it reminded me how passive we also are about planning for the non-financial side of retirement. 

Much like we put money into a retirement plan and hope it works out, so many of us move into retirement without a plan, assuming the non-financial side of retirement will work out also.

Passivity is not a good thing to have working for us for what could possibly be nearly a third of our lives.

Consider this:  if you live to be 65 without any major health challenges, you have a reasonably good chance of living to 95 or beyond.   That’s a long time to drift and just “let things happen.”

But that’s what most people do.

That can be risky.

The Hartford Funds recently explored the transition into retirement and the honeymoon phase and found that 69% of new retirees have challenges adapting to retirement, 37% miss the day-to-day social interaction with co-workers, and 63% of people feel stressed about their retirement decision.

Husbands and wives often discover they aren’t on the same page about retirement, contributing to the phenomenon called “Gray divorce”.  The rate of those over 50 who are divorcing has doubled in less than 30 years. Most of those divorces are initiated by the woman.

Deep depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates amongst the retired are alarmingly high.  One of the highest suicide rates in our country today is amongst men over 65.

Those aren’t great stats for something that consumes so much of our attention and energy through the mid- to later-phases of our lives.

So what if you applied Gunderson’s advice on both sides of your retirement planning – financial and non-financial?   No more passivity but rather an aggressive, take-charge position on how to build your wealth AND how you want to use it.

I spoke recently with a hospital CEO in the Chicago area that is approaching retirement.  He has already let his board know that he has no more than a two-year window before stepping down.  Once a major renovation of his hospital is complete, he is out of there.

I asked him about what he sees his retirement looking like.  It was fuzzy at best – not uncommon even from hard-charging executive types.  “Maybe a retirement community of similarly aged retirees somewhere in the southeast”, he replied.

I held my tongue since that is, in my opinion, a guaranteed fast-track to boredom and a roadblock to a purposeful third age – sort of “upscale warehousing”, if you will.

On the financial side of his retirement, however, he was anything but passive, managing his own portfolio which included investing in downtown residential real estate in Chicago.  Without specifics, he made it clear that there are no financial woes in his future.

It’s a pretty typical contrast amongst execs approaching retirement:  in good shape financially, limited attention to what they want their retired life to look like.

Risky and wasteful

I wish I could say that just letting your retired life happen will turn into the nirvana that the financial planning industry would have us believe it will become.  There’s a chance that a happy, fulfilling, purposeful retired life will happen by chance, but it’s not likely.

The research in support of the positive impact of a purposeful retirement on longevity is extensive. Entering retirement with a plan helps avoid the loss of the early years of retirement to purposeless drifting and boredom, a common result of “winging it” into retirement.

We’re built to think, create, produce, strive, grow, learn, teach.   Those are not age-specific traits.  Our culture would have us believe otherwise.  But we don’t have to buy it.

So Gunderson’s contrarian position applies for this third age.  Take charge, be proactive, have a plan – don’t pass it off to fate or someone else’s ulterior motives.

You, those around you, and the world will be better off for it.

What your thoughts are on this?  We’d love to hear from you on this topic.  Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at  www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

Seven Reasons We Should Be Amazed About Getting Older

“Getting old is for the birds!”

That’s one of the dozens of ageist statements tossed out casually when a group of seventh-, eighth-, or ninth-decaders assembles.  Each is usually followed by a litany of the issues that can make it seem so.

Nary a conversation goes by without multiple mentions of knee/hip/shoulder replacements, this or that type of surgery, arthritis, back pain, bunions, hearing aids, loneliness, ad infinitum.

What if one flipped the conversation and started brainstorming what is amazing about getting older?  While I suspect the audience would thin pretty quickly (physically or mentally) and the instigator tagged as beyond strange, isn’t the idea worthy of consideration?

After all, what is there to lose?  What’s the worst thing that could happen?  The worst thing would be that some would simply continue in their funk, incapable of a change in mindset.  And you or I, as the instigator, will have weakened a relationship that wasn’t helping us move forward anyway.

Call me pollyannish, but I think it’s worth a try the next time you find yourself with a group of naysayers.

Some people just won’t want to hear that there is a positive channel of thought about growing older. Should you choose to accept this assignment, be prepared for pushback.

Here are seven amazing things about aging that you can toss into a sagging, ageist conversation to turn it into one more uplifting and worthy of your time.

  1. Freedom of thought. Haven’t we reached the point, in our late-50’s and beyond, where our thoughts are fully ours and we no longer need to bend to other people’s opinions, to comparisons, corporate guidelines, policies, procedures, plans not of our making?

We bring forward credibility based on life experiences unique to us. We’ve paid significant prices and learned some deep lessons.  We’ve sorted out and rejected a lot of the dumbness of our culture.   We’ve made more than our share of silly mistakes but now realize that life is a series of experiments and there is no failure in life, only research and development.  It’s brought us to this unique and powerful place with the power to have our thoughts translate to gain for others.

We’re free to express ourselves knowing that we bring value based on our learning and our experiences but that we have no control over whether anyone else aligns with us.

We’re free to accept who we are which is little more than the thoughts we allow to take hold every day.  “As a man thinketh, so is he”.  We are free to either let our thoughts bring us down or build us up.   At this point, we have much more positive to build on than we may realize or acknowledge.

 

  1. Time freedom. At last, we are mostly in control of our time.  We can take Socrates’ advice and “avoid the barrenness of a busy life.” No alarm clock, no commute, no deadlines, no meaningless meetings.

We are more sage in our appreciation of time, having wasted so much of it in earlier decades.  We have better filters of what counts and what doesn’t.  We are less apt to worry about what others think when we say “no” – and we say no more often.

We say “yes” now to more things that are important and fewer things that are urgent.

And if an afternoon nap feels right, we can do it because, well, we’ve got the time and it matters not if someone says there are better things to do with our time.

 

  1. An opportunity to be generative. We can pay it forward and help the generations behind us.  We can do our part to extend the evolution of what’s right in life. We’re done with the selfishness of accumulation and comparison and can turn to the selflessness of sharing our wisdom and material wealth by helping those that follow.

We can turn this period of our lives from aging to sageing.  Thus, a backward glance is a good one, not one filled with regrets.   Someone – maybe even many – will say “s/he was a light on my path at a time that I needed it.”

 

  1. Live stress-free. Now we can relax into our worthiness.  We’re done striving to compete; other’s opinions of us no longer release unnecessary cortisol; we’ve learned that worry is useless and that few things that we worry about ever happen.   If they do, they are rarely as troublesome as we expected.

So we can settle into an experience-based mindset that responds only to those things over which we have control and don’t waste energy on the things we can’t.

We accept the inevitability of dying and that it is part of life. We no longer fear it.  We know it’s coming but that we don’t need to rush its arrival by stressing over it.

 

  1. We can help change the world. We’re sage now – we know the planet and the human experience are in trouble. And we know why.  With calmness and confidence and lack of concern about condemnation, we can take the right message about change to the world, one person, one encounter at a time.

We have an acquired appreciation for the state of our planet and have observed the damage that humans can cause.  We’re done accumulating, done with impression-motivated consumption.  Through our lifestyles, we can demonstrate that the planet doesn’t have to suffer for us to enjoy and appreciate life.

We can retest Gandhi’s guiding principle: “Be the change we want to see in the world”.  We’ve learned that we can’t change others and that motivation is an “inside job.”  But, by our example, we can be an inspiration to others to be what we are, want what we have and to kickstart that motivation.

 

  1. We can restore respect for the elderly. We’ve grown up in and endured the derision that our culture places on older people.  We’ve been on the receiving end of an evolution away from respect for the elderly that existed a mere 150 years ago.  We’ve witnessed the magnitude and folly of overemphasis on youth.

By our example of good health, vitality, shared wisdom, and our open stand against ageism, we can be a new light of reason and logic in an often dark, unreasonable, and illogical society.

 

  1. We can become “truth agents”. We’re good at filtering out the truth in situations.  We’ve got nothing to lose by exposing it and telling it like it is.  We can effect change by taking a stand on what we know is reality, the real truth.  In our wisdom, we know that “methods and techniques may change, but principles never do” and that a life worth living is guided by these ancient and immutable principles.  We are not afraid to stand behind them, live them and teach them. And watch truth change the world we live in.

Our experiences enable us to be “positively skeptical”.  We are good now at filtering the “wheat from the chaff” when it comes to truth.  We are skeptical about much of what evolves around us and push new developments through our well-developed filters.

We aren’t easily swayed from our position now when we know what is true.  We aren’t afraid to take a stand, realizing that it’s better to stand on the truth than to give in to public opinion half-truths.

Getting old is not the same as aging.

Growing old gracefully requires resilience. It requires an “attitude with altitude” that is grateful on a daily basis. It requires knowing that growing old is inevitable but that how we grow old is optional.

And, ultimately, it requires being in service to others, paying forward what we’ve learned, passing on our wisdom.

Therein may lie the true joy of growing older.

Consider a “Quest”, Not a “Rest” in Your Retirement

“The good things in life are not things.”

So said a bumper-sticker on a Subaru I was behind as I was leaving Home Depot for the umpteenth time this week (it’s springtime spruce-up and planting time as I write).

I think the sticker is a mantra that’s resonating for a growing number of us boomers and pre-boomers.

At a time when my wife and I are “purging” in preparation for an eventual home downsize, this sticker hits home.

I sense there is a lot of major purging going on in boomer households these days. Purging comes up in a lot of conversations with fellow boomers and pre-boomers.  Not as much as colonoscopies and knee, shoulder, and hip surgeries, but still at a pretty good clip.

We got another clue this week when we tried to drop off a pickup load of unneeded furniture at one of the local Goodwill facilities and they turned us away.  They already have too much of that stuff, they said.

Egad!  Nobody wants our stuff!

Doesn’t bode well for landfills, I’m afraid.

Not two hours after my Home Depot run, an article published by MarketWatch hit my news feed about a Google poll that revealed that the #1 question asked about retirement is “How Much Do I Need to Retire?”

Not surprising.  But, money is “things” isn’t it?

In our Western culture, we’re pretty wrapped around the axle about having enough money to enter into the mystical, uncharted territory called retirement.  Because we’re living 20, 30 years longer than our grandparents/parents, we don’t much know what this territory is supposed to look like.

Up to this point, our lives had lots of societal/cultural checkpoints defining what to expect and what our lives should look like at each point.  Then we hit this end-of-career wall and suddenly the guardrails and checkpoints disappear.

A metaphor by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, co-author of “From AGE-ING to SAGE-ING”, A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older” says it beautifully:

“From childhood to late adulthood, we’re like railroad trains that follow highly regular stretches of track to predictable destinations.  Then, as elderhood approaches, we reach the end of the line, only to discover that management hasn’t had the foresight to lay any more track.  We must get off the train and walk – but to where?  What is our next destination?”

It seems because we haven’t been here before, we generally don’t plan for it except for guessing at having enough money to enter into it comfortably.  And, logically, we don’t get much help in facing this new life void from the financial planner(s) who took us down the “paint-by-numbers” path to financial security.  Their work is done and they can pridefully say “you did it – congratulations – now go forth and – do ???????”

The “do what” is the rub.

Financial planners usually stop there.  Mental, physical, social, spiritual post-career elements are not “paint-by-numbers” issues and financial planners aren’t equipped to go there – or interested, thankfully. These soft-side components of planning your future apparently don’t pay very well – or at all.

There is one “what” we all know we don’t want.  We don’t want our grandparents or perhaps even our parent’s retirement – isolated; park bench; bingo, bridge, and bocce ball; extended morbidity; urine-scented nursing home; walkers, wheelchairs and oxygen bottles.

But rather than plan on how to avoid that type of end-stage (Free hint: exercise, diet, social engagement, continuous learning, continuing to work, giving back/paying forward), we focus on a paint-by-the-numbers, magic figure designed to buy our way out of all that.

Then, a few years in, we find it ain’t quite like advertised.  We begin to realize:

“Things” don’t buy legacies.  “Things” buy disposal problems.

 “Things” have never bought happiness.  “Things” diffuse our energy.

“Things” don’t extend evolution.  “Things” deplete our planet.

“Things” don’t build friendships.  “Things” create comparisons and jealousies.

 “Things” cause us to buy things we don’t really need, with money we don’t want to spend to impress people we don’t even like.

What’s real here?

Continuing through the entire MarketWatch article gets a little freaky and may cause mild-to-severe depression or the application of a corkscrew to a second bottle of wine.

For instance, the author states further in response to the #1 question: “ – most people won’t be able to retire the way they want with just $1 million.”

Just a million? Oh, really?  Tell me it isn’t so!!

Finance guru Suze Orman says the magic retirement number is $5 million!

According to a recent survey from Charles Schwab, which looked at 1,000 401(k) plan participants nationwide, Americans believe they need $1.7 million to retire.

Enough already – can we bring this back down to earthly reality?

If my readership were representative of the general population, 60% of us would have zero, zilch, zip retirement assets.  And only 11% of us would have $500,000 in retirement savings.

The median account balance for those with retirement savings accounts is estimated at $40,000.

Isn’t this latter figure close to “beans and weanies” and “under-a-bridge domicile” territory?

I know, as one of my readers, you do better than that – or aren’t hung up about it.

But just for grins: if you’ve got the $1.7 million in the bank, raise your hand.

OK – thanks and congratulations to all three of you!

Are we asking the right question?

If we were to flip the poll and ask “What is the least asked question about retirement?” what would you guess it would be.

I’m putting my money on: “Why do I have to retire?”

So maybe rather than succumb to the cultural pressure to enter into this unnatural act with its politically-inspired, artificial-finish-line, we should be asking: “Where does it say I have to do this retirement thing?”

I know.  It’s a real ego bruise and not easy to tolerate the fact that you may be tagged as a loser because you’ve chosen not to retire – early or late.  We’ve got a ways to go before un-retirement or semi-retirement will become the new prestige, replacing the current prestige tagged to early retirement.

But I sense we are getting there at a pretty good pace.  I’m trying to accelerate that pace. That’s a big part of my quest.

How about a “quest” instead of “rest”?

Speaking of a quest, do you happen to have one for this period between middle age and true old age?

When we succumb to the intrigue and hype of a traditional vocation-to-vacation retirement, we set ourselves up to slide insidiously to an early demise at a time when we can be kicking some serious tail with our accumulated skills, talents, wisdom and maturity.

We don’t have to look too far or too deep to see evidence that underscores the downsides of removing ourselves from the mainstream of life through retirement:

  1. We still “live too short and die too long” in this culture. Extended morbidity rates and early-on-set frailty are still too prevalent, costing us multiple-billions in late-life health care costs.  The sedentary lifestyle of traditional retirement, the accompanying withdrawal from social engagement and learning, and lack of purpose combine to rob us of our full-life potential.
  2. Depression, divorce and suicide rates among the retired have reached alarming rates.
  3. Research done by the Blue Zones organization has shown that retirement doesn’t exist in the societies with the longest-living citizens where most citizens typically “live long and die short.”

We can turn to some notables for practical (and perhaps uncomfortable) perspectives on the concept of retirement:

  1. Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan,74, refers to retirement as the “ultimate casualty” and advocates for “making your future bigger than your past” regardless of age.
  2. Walter Bortz, 89, semi-retired Stanford geriatric physician and author of seven books dealing with healthy aging refers to retirement in his book “Dare to Be 100” as “statutory senility.”
  3. Warren Buffett, still going strong at 87, says to avoid retirement. His rationale for avoiding retirement is straightforward and simple:
    • You’re healthy
    • You won’t have a fixed income
    • You stay engaged and productive
    • You’ll continue to mentor
    • You can leverage your knowledge
  1. William Shatner , 88, refuses to retire and continues to work like his hair is on fire.
  2. Ken Langone (co-founder of Home Depot), 82, says: “ I’m not going to stop.  I still go to work every day.  If I didn’t have to sleep, I’d work 24 hours a day!
  3. Boone Pickens, 90, still keeps an office that he goes to every day saying, “Retirement isn’t an option for me. When you retire you have time to do what you love, and I love to work.“
  4. Fred Bartlit, 87, is a West Point grad, former Army Ranger, new author, strength-training fitness expert, back-bowl skier and a golfer who shoots his age. He still is a practicing attorney in the hugely successful law firm he founded.

These are all folks who seem to have a “quest” of some sort in their lives – and aren’t so much into “rest” as a lifestyle.

Somewhere along the road over the last 80 years or so, we’ve developed this attitude that we’re supposed to “rest” when we get older.  For decades now, we’ve tagged 65 as the magic date at which this “rest period” should begin.

There is a multitude of problems with that.

Let’s start with the fact that our bodies and minds are not designed to “rest”.  There’s nothing about aging that says we are supposed to stop challenging our bodies and minds. When we make “rest” our lifestyle, the insidiously destructive nature of inactivity begins to take over.

If we don’t use it, we lose it – body power or brain power.

Just look at the extended morbidity that still pervades our culture.  We start “resting” and the decline gradually sets in.

We’ve been sold on the idea that we need to “slow down, enjoy life, take it easy, kick back, smell the roses, etc., etc.”  Then, before you know it, we are in such decrepit shape that we can’t stoop over to smell the rose.  Or our brain is gone and we wouldn’t know a rose scent from a bad case of flatulence.

No friends. No money. No purpose.

Those are the reasons that people die early, according to Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach.  All three seem to reflect “rest” instead of “quest”.

A “quest” is a sense of purpose with action behind it.  It will almost automatically mean an increase in social engagement and more friends because any quest is going to involve touching lives in some way.

A quest can serve and still generate income.  Author Mitch Anthony refers to it as a “playcheck” i.e. doing what you really want to do, are good at, that serves others and generates an income.

Start a quest

In mythology and fiction, a quest is a difficult journey toward a goal. It often involves a changed character of the hero.

You are the hero of your life.  A quest in the third age brings to bear the components that help ensure a longer life with greater vitality by engaging mind and body, avoiding the deteriorating nature of the comfort zone, and deepening the social engagement so vital to good mental and physical health.

Evidence in support of the physical and mental advantages of a late-life sense of purpose/quest is overwhelming as is the evidence of the downside of not having one.

Let us know what your thoughts are on this, especially if you have a quest in your life.  We’d love to know what your quest is and how you came to find it.  Leave a comment below or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

The One Word That Is The Most Dangerous To Our Health

 

If you are 55 years old living in California and you just found out that 24-hour home care would cost you $18,000 per month should you need it, would you do something different today to avoid having to go there?

That number came from a veteran senior care professional in California I had a conversation with this week.

Maybe $216,000/year just to have someone around 24×7 to feed you, clean you up and keep you on the planet is no big deal for you.  But that would put you in a miniscule swath of the California population – or any state’s population, for that matter.

Considering that most U.S. folks have accumulated, on average, about $100K by the time “retirement age” rolls around – well, do the math.

This gets more than a little freaky for all of us “peasants” out here.

Why do you need to know this?

Granted, California represents the extreme here, as they do in most everything.  But even if the cost is half that much in your state, well the math still doesn’t eliminate the freaky.

My point in tossing out this unabashed scare tactic is to suggest that “it’s never too late to start and always too early to quit” when it comes to protecting yourself from the conditions that lead to this abhorrent situation.

My thesis is simple (and not original):  reaching the point of needing someone 24×7 to prepare your gruel, wipe your fanny and tuck you in is, with some exceptions, a result of the insidious effects of harmful lifestyle habits.

Help your body help you

It’s a wonderful, amazing thing that our body’s 35 trillion cells somehow work in sync to sustain us despite our naivete about how they work and what they need.  We have a 24x7x365 immune system working hard for us, despite our propensity to make that job difficult.

I’ll confess to that naivete.  I flat out took all of that coordinated cell work for granted for the better part of six decades.   Life was all about following the linear-life model and the cultural rules de jour through childhood and adulthood:  striving, accumulating, comparing, competing, spending, playing.

That naivete included eighteen years of smoking and no attention to food types.

It wasn’t until my 73rd year that the insidious nature of lifestyle habits was really driven home.  It was then, following a routine heart scan (my first ever) that I found out that I had an artery calcification score that, at least in numbers, put me in the high-risk category for cardiovascular disease. (You can read more detail of that part of my story here.)

Fortunately, echo and nuclear stress tests revealed that artery occlusion was minimal and blood flow was normal.  But it was a wake-up call.  I realized that my inattention to diet to that point had contributed insidiously to the plaque buildup in my arteries despite years of exercise.

For 35 years at that point, I had been an avid exerciser.  I hadn’t put any tobacco to my lips in 40 years.  But I put my taste buds in charge and paid little attention to the foods I ate.

Insidious is a word that we should understand – and fear

The dictionary definition of insidious is “proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.”  Synonyms include stealthy, surreptitious, deceitful, deceptive, underhand, backhanded.

Reflecting on my situation, I wish someone would have insisted that I understand the stealthy nature of many of my lifestyle habits.

My formative years were in the 1950s living in a rural area of Wyoming.  Health habits were secondary to survival – we essentially “ate what we killed and grew”.  And in Wyoming, there isn’t a whole lot you can grow.

Eggs, meat, and potatoes were the staples.

It was a time when smoking was promoted as healthy by doctors, dentists, actors, athletes and was even marketed featuring babies (gee Dad – you always get the best of everything – even Marlboro!).  The warnings of the insidious nature of these habits were decades away.

Would I have adopted better habits had I been warned back then?  Perhaps – but not likely.  Like most, I suspect I would have stayed with the majority and forged on in the face of new advice to the contrary.

But insidious caught up with me.  Just as it did – more severely – for an uncle and my dad.  I watched both succumb to suffocation from emphysema as a result of 40+ years of smoking.

Reversing the effects of insidious habits

Just as we learned about the destructive nature of many of our habits, we have also learned that, in many cases, the destruction can be reversed.

For instance, I’ve been advised by my physician that after fifteen years of not smoking my lungs had recovered to that of a healthy non-smoker.   I suspect, immodestly, that my lung power is well above average for a septuagenarian because of my aggressive aerobic exercise routine.

Another example is that of offsetting the insidious effects of sarcopenia, or loss of muscle mass.  As I wrote about in my three-part series entitled “Aging Without Frailty”, loss of muscle mass is a condition that EVERYBODY begins to experience starting in their thirties with a dramatic acceleration commencing when we move into the fifties.   It can be halted, and even reversed, through a disciplined exercise plan of resistance training/weight lifting.

Of particular interest to me following my heart scan revelation, was whether or not cardiovascular disease (CVD) can be reversed.  Surprisingly, the response I got from my doctors was “no”.  They agreed that the advance of the condition could be stopped but not reversed.

Further research revealed the contrary.  Even cardiovascular disease has been shown to be reversible, although most doctors don’t take that position.  Most notable of the doctors advocating for – and proving – CVD reversal are Dr. Dean Ornish and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn.  Both Ornish and Esselstyn have proven that a change to a plant-based diet joined with an aggressive exercise program can reverse CVD.

Esselstyn advocates a totally vegan diet with no oils, nuts or seeds.  Ornish is less restrictive.  Both have shown that the insidious build up of artery plaque can be reversed.

My calcification score motivated a diet change four years ago.  I have become what author, journalist and food activist Michael Pollan calls a “flexitarian”.  I found going totally vegan a bit much.  I have virtually eliminated meat (I succumb to an occasional brat or do a “meat treat” meal infrequently) and dairy (almond milk is a healthy, tasty change from milk) and drastically increased the plant-based nature of my food intake.

Have I reversed my CVD?  I don’t know – and am not really motivated to do another heart scan to find out.  I am confident that the progression has stopped and I have experienced a serendipitous effect on the rest of my body as I have switched diets and intensified my exercise.

What’s insidious that is going on in your body?

You’ve crossed the 50 threshold, most likely thinking there are fewer days ahead than behind.  Perhaps with visions of what you don’t want to end up like – warehoused, wheel-chaired, and withdrawn.

It’s a good time to do an inventory, a personal assessment with a view toward lifestyle changes that not only can extend your life but drastically reduce that period of extended morbidity that proceeds our inevitable decline into frailty and true old age. (See my April 15, 2019 article on this.) 

I predict, should you choose to accept the assignment, that your assessment will reveal a surprising number of marginal lifestyle habits that, if reversed, can play a huge role in you maintaining vitality and vigor right up to the end – to “live long and die short” versus the “live short and die long” scene that still dogs our society.

We both know what the low-hanging fruit will be:  diet and exercise.

We both know what will be the toughest: diet and exercise.

 

 

You’ve been hijacked

Admit it.  Your taste buds have been held captive by our blameworthy food industry for decades.  Breaking away from the fast and processed foods and their crafty combinations of sugar, salt, and fat produced by our huge and highly mechanized food industry is a big challenge.

Need a guide to start to turn the diet ship?  For starters, I recommend investing the equivalent of two Carl’s Junior Bacon Cheese Thickburgers in a wonderful book by Michael Pollan entitled “Food Rules” in which you will find 64 rules on eating that are designed to steer you away from the Standard American Diet (appropriately called SAD).  It’s a clever presentation of the steps we can take to eliminate processed “edible food-like substances”  and move toward a diet built around the mantra Pollan is noted for:

“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”.

Exercise – the life extender

The late Dr. Henry Lodge, co-author of the transformational book “Younger Next Year” issued a succinct and profound statement in the book that can serve as a motivational guide for an exercise plan.  He stated:

“Aerobic exercise will give you life.  Strength-training will make it worth living”.

That statement alone has inspired me to the regimen that is now my weekly exercise discipline:

  • Aerobic exercise for 45 minutes, 6 days a week with my heart rate at the top end of my exercise heart rate range of 93-121 beats/minute.
  • Aggressive strength training with free weights and machines three days a week.

Join me in declaring “insidious” your enemy and working to eliminate the habits in which it thrives.  The changes are pretty simple but not easy because the habit patterns are decades deep in their entrenchment.  And there are powerful “stealth” elements out there that aren’t on our side in making those habit changes.  Our food industry and healthcare system are at the top of that list.

We exist in a culture in which our food industry doesn’t care about our health and our health care system doesn’t care about what we eat.

We’re pretty much on our own with our choices.  Informed decisions result in better choices.   And better choices, even now at 55 or beyond, can make for a longer and better life.

What lifestyle changes have you made to extend your good health?  We’d love to hear your story.  Leave a comment below – or email me at gary@makeagingwork.com.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

 

Your Dentate Gyrus Needs a Pair of Sneakers!

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Did you know you have a dentate gyrus?

I just learned I’ve got one.

So do you.

I didn’t know it.

You probably didn’t know it either.

When I first saw the term, I thought, yuck, a Greek sandwich made with toothpaste?  But it turns out that it’s a pretty important part of your brain, specifically your hippocampus.

Yes, you have one of those too.  Your hippocampus is mega-important.  It’s that walnut-sized, seahorsey-shaped thing in the middle of your brain that regulates emotions and is associated mainly with memory.

So. If you remembered to shower this morning and didn’t kick the puppy because it piddled, yours appears to be working.

Now we learn that the hippo has a side-kick, an important appendage.

My biology class in high school in the 50’s didn’t mention my dentate– wait a minute – I don’t remember having a biology class in my rural Wyoming high school sixty years ago.

How was I to know?

But then, why do I need to know?  Is this in the too-much-information category?  Well, maybe – but I’m forging on to make an important point.

This brain is made for walkin’ (my apologies to Nancy Sinatra – see, my hippocampus is still mostly operational)

Not only do I have a dentate gyrus, but I’m learning it needs a pair of sneakers – or running shoes –  or cross trainers – any of those will do.

The idea was spawned by an article in Psychology Today by Nigel Barber, Ph.D.

He points out we’ve come a long way in understanding this 2 ½ lbs of fatty-acid between our temples.  This is yet another discovery – that the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus has something to do with increasing the proliferation of stem cells.  And that’s a good thing because it’s good cell growth and not the uncontrolled growth that becomes the “big C”.

Now, aren’t you glad to found out that you have one?

But sneakers?

Canadian neuroscientists apparently produced some “startling evidence” that exercise stimulates cell growth, especially in your dentate gyrus. 

This article reminds us that exercise affects both body and brain and that “the logic of a healthy mind in a healthy body becomes compelling.”

Barber says (bolding is mine): “Some confirming evidence was produced in a study showing that educated people live longer than those having less schooling. One plausible interpretation of this finding is that a well-exercised brain resists senile deterioration, possibly by having a more robust circulatory system due to increased cognitive demands placed on it.”

Now I agree there’s a touch of judgmental harshness in that paragraph with the inference (maybe a side-effect of Ph.D. achievement) that only the “educated live longer.”

I’m no Ph.D. or neurologist, but I think I can fill any “education” gap you may be feeling from this article.  Barber gives us what we need to know in the above paragraph:  well-exercised brain and a robust circulatory system.

Read the following and you can consider yourself educated.  All it will cost you is the price of a pair of sneakers and a commitment to a few habit changes.

It starts with O2

When I first read the book “Younger Next Year” in 2013, my biggest takeaway was the importance of providing health-sustaining levels of oxygen to my cells, which only happens when I get my heart rate up.  It’s how you build a more robust circulatory system.

So the new simple habit with our new sneakers is to feed the dentate gyrus, (along with the other 35 trillion or so cells in our bodies) by using them to get our heart rate to a meaningful aerobic exercise range.

It’s a simple formula: 

220 minus your age times .65 and .85. 

That’s the heart rate range you should get to and sustain for 20 minutes or more at least three times a week.

My range, at age 77, is 93 to 121 beats per minute.  Since my “Younger Next Year” revelation, I push the upper limit of the range six days a week for 36-45 minutes.

I think my dentate gyrus probably loves me.

Brain exercise?

OK, we’ve covered Barber’s “robust circulatory system” part.  That leaves the “well-exercised brain” part to address.

Your brain is like a muscle:  Use it or lose it!

Brain exercise should be as routine as your physical workouts.

How do you “exercise” your brain?  Here are ten tips for starters:

  1. Read – tabloids and newspaper don’t count. Dig into something that will move you out of your comfort zone, take you somewhere, and make you think. Consider a book club.
  2. Start journaling
  3. Put down the smartphone and lose the remote. I’ve shared with you the research that revealed watching a sitcom on TV and contemplating a brick wall generates the same amount of brain activity. Stephen King refers to TV as the “glass teat.”
  4. Get more sleep. Seven hours plus.  The brain flushes junk with spinal fluid while we sleep. More sleep, less junk.
  5. Eat brain supportive foods. Medical News Today says these are the best brain-boosting foods:
  6. Meditate/pray daily
  7. Play challenging board or card games with friends.
  8. Learn a second language or play a musical instrument.
  9. Dance (this is a double-dip – dancing makes you think and gets your heart rate up).
  10. Take a cooking class – and learn to incorporate the ingredients listed above.

Think of the serendipitous benefit of what you’ve learned with this article.  You now can impress your friends by dropping a dentate gyrus bomb into the conversation and turn the conversation from colonoscopies, achy joints, and hip and knee surgeries.

What a relief that would be.

Are You a Career Tenant – or a Career Landlord?

My wife and I made a highly disruptive decision recently.  We decided to sell our golf course home of 19 years and move into a rental.

It’s the first time we have rented in 46 years of our 49-year marriage.

Right or wrong, the decision was based on trying to catch the top of the wave of a hot Denver real estate market that is starting to soften.  We’ll rent for a while as the market corrects with an eye toward a downsize when we re-enter as owners.

Prescient?  If we are, it will be the first time.  We may end up on the pile of bodies with others who have tried to time either the real estate or stock market.  Nonetheless, it’s full steam ahead,  tolerating the inconvenience of house showings and maintaining two households.  (Yes, we signed a rental agreement without the house being sold – craziness  prevails!)

After 46 years of home-ownership, this simply feels weird, moving into something that someone else built and put their own personal touch on and not being able – or wanting – to fully put our own personal touch on it.

Becoming a tenant is going to take some adjusting.  Which bring me to a curious question.

Are you a career tenant or a career landlord?

It occurred to me that there is a parallel here to career decisions.

I’ve been self-employed for the last 17 years, much of it as a career coach.  Renting feels like going back to work for somebody, building someone else’s dream.  I’m paying the mortgage for this landlord, helping him/her build a real estate portfolio.

I was a career tenant for most of my working life – for 33 years before deciding to be a career landlord.  For much of those three decades, I was never crazy about “renting space” on someone’s payroll to build something that I didn’t define or have much control over.

Like most, I did it for the money and the perks.  I drank the kool-aid that said it was the only real secure, stable place to be.  And when I jumped into it fifty years ago that held true.  But that changed radically over time to where working for a corporation today is one of the least secure places to be, career-wise.

As career tenants, we are subject to eviction at any time, at the drop of a hat and for any number of landlord-centric decisions. And those landlord-centric decisions have become more common and less compassionate.

My friend Rick, a polished laboratory sales professional for 25 years, found himself on the street unexpectedly, at 58, following a merger of two hospital systems.  The landlord changed, rendering all tenants subject to eviction without cause.  He was replaced by two junior, lower-cost tenants.

It’s a story repeating itself daily in today’s ruthless environment of mergers and acquisitions, private equity buyouts and companies adjusting to rapidly changing and disruptive technologies.

How to become a career landlord

How can you protect yourself against becoming a vulnerable career tenant?  I suspect you aren’t prepared or interested in going out on your own or starting a business.  I get it.  Most people aren’t.

But you can become a career landlord and still be on someone else’s payroll.

It’s really about mindset.

Become a “Business of One”

J.T. O’Donnell is an experienced career counselor, coach and founder and CEO of Work It Daily, a private online career coaching platform.  As a former HR professional and recruiter, she talks with authority about the importance of a career mindset.

One of J.T.’s compelling arguments is that our cultural programming conditions us with “career bias” wherein titles or “what we do” becomes a personal identity.  Job titles affect our perception of people and people’s perceptions of us. Thus, too often we build careers to earn approval from others, a track that can lead to career dissatisfaction.

By shedding the “golden handcuffs” of traditional employment with its overemphasis on the title and a spot on the org chart and by becoming a “business of one” we can become career landlords instead of career tenants.

As J.T. says: “Working ‘for’ companies implies they’re in charge and you are being held hostage by the pay and benefits. Instead, you must see yourself as a business-of-one who wants to partner ‘with’ employers to create a mutually beneficial and respectful relationship.”

By viewing yourself as a “business of one”, you become the employer and the company becomes the employee in which you “partner” with employers to bring them the skills and experience you have acquired that can create a powerful relationship.

It’s really a key to survival in today’s volatile business world if one chooses not to be self-employed.

Recasting yourself as “employed landlord”

With the new “business of one” mindset, you are positioned to essentially reverse the typical employer/employee relationship by taking ownership and becoming the landlord of your talents, skills, and experiences.  As the landlord, you take control of many of the employment variables that were conceded under the traditional employment model.

Rent and lease terms are now salary and benefits based on the quality of the property – you.

As an “employed landlord”, you avoid becoming a hostage to the pay and benefits that come with “working for” a company.  It’s now the company working for you and paying a rental for what you bring to the table.

Three key steps to becoming an “employed landlord”

Warning:  this isn’t easy or automatic.

Adopting a landlord mindset and making it happen isn’t a casual occurrence.  And it’s not just a “time in grade” thing.  Earning and maintaining career landlord and business-of-one status requires a commitment to becoming the best you can be in the field you choose.  Without the credentials to back up your position, you aren’t likely to achieve the rental payment you want.

Here are five steps that will help you avoid a career lifetime as a tenant, shed the “golden handcuffs” of traditional employment and put you in the driver’s seat as the landlord of your career.

  1. Know what you are good at and really want to do. Become a specialist. In other words, know your strengths and specialties.  Being a jack-of-all-trades may have worked in a previous era, but not today. Your prospective employer-partner already has lots of folks who are simply after a paycheck and lack a clear focus on what they do well.  Employers want highly skilled specialists where their return-on-investment is high.  That is your bargaining chip because it’s a select few that show up at an employer’s doorstep with highly developed skills and an attitude of “let’s partner up – I can help you.”
  2.  Stay ahead of emerging, disruptive technologies. Once you’re clear on your strengths and specialty, it is essential to be on top of changes taking place within your specialty.  One of the bargaining chips you have to extract higher rent for your services is to show your tenant company that you are ahead of the changes in the industry and are a special resource that can help protect them from technology disruptions that can undermine their core business.

That means ongoing investment in deepening your expertise through reading, study, additional education and/or certifications, taking leadership positions in associations or forums dedicated to your specialty.  Your rental price depends on your ability to be a key problem-solving resource by bringing leading-edge resources to the problem.

  1. Build a brand around your expertise. Your commitment to becoming a “business-of-one” requires that you develop a brand that focuses on the value you bring. That involves two key components for conveying a clear, consistent and compelling message that focuses on the value that you bring:
    1. A resume that is built on quantifiable achievements in our area of expertise.
    2. A LinkedIn profile that is consistent with the resume and makes it crystal clear what your specialty is and what you have been able to do with it.
  1. Invest in building your network.  J.T. O’Donnell is correct when she says that “your network is your net worth.” She is also spot on by reminding us that “every job today is temporary.”  Making a meaningful career transition without a robust network is difficult.  Consider, for example, that 80% of jobs are filled through referrals and networking and the other 20% through job boards and recruiters.

As a career coach, I’ve worked with very talented, experienced professionals that have neglected this area of their professional life.  There is a natural tendency to downplay the value of networking when they are ensconced in what feels like a safe, secure position that is very demanding of their time. When the fit hits the shan and they suddenly find themselves unemployed, that failure to nurture an active network hinders their ability to re-enter the job market on a timely basis.

Networking and building key professional relationships should never stop.  In fact, with the “career landlord” mindset, continually building a robust professional network should be a priority activity.  LinkedIn today provides an excellent platform for building a network.  But just getting your LinkedIn connection count up is not sufficient by itself.  The network needs to be “worked” and that means phone conversations and emails to maintain and cultivate the relationship.  It means sharing helpful information with network partners and being a resource for them.  What goes around comes around – the network will respond in kind.

  1. Own your professional identity. As a business-of-one and career landlord, you are integrating all of your acquired skills, experiences, education and network to bring unique value and problem-solving ability to an entity in need.  Learn how to effectively communicate your passions, your deep skill set and solutions as you work to continuously refine and expand your abilities within your specialty.

 It will be helpful to also adopt a new perspective on mobility.  With this new mindset, mobility within an organization is secondary to going wherever or to whatever is the right next step in your continuing professional development.  Titles are secondary to how the job fits your overall growth as a landlord.  You are taking ownership of your career destiny and building your own dreams, not someone else’s.

In 1964, Bob Dylan popularized his song “The Times They Are A Changing”.  It should be the theme song for a career landlord.  Changes that two decades ago took years to evolve are now happening in months, even weeks.  And it’s catching career tenants by surprise daily.  When that shoe falls for an over-50 career tenant where ageism gets stirred into the equation, job re-entry can be extremely difficult and grueling.

If you are in your mid-to-late forties or into your fifties and feeling super secure in your position, I suggest doing a deep dive into evaluating just how safe and secure you are, with questions like the following:

  • How aware are you of the top three key initiatives that are propelling your company forward and driving top management decisions? Can you articulate them right now?  If not, you are too far away from the core that protects and defines your career path.  You are entrenched as a career tenant.
  • Having defined the key initiatives, how entwined are you in their development? Are you a participant or a spectator? Are you involved day-to-day in pro-active contributions to these initiatives?  Or are you viewed as a bit-player, a “delegatee” and not a “delegator”?
  • How does your current skill set align with the company’s key initiatives? Are there identifiable gaps between what you can offer and what the initiatives call for?  If the gaps exist, it becomes pretty fundamental.  Is the company worth the time, money and effort to close the gap?  Or is your current skill set better deployed with a company where key initiatives align better with your current strengths?

Either way, this process moves you to a career-landlord mindset.  Maybe you are where you should be even if it means a skill-upgrade. Consider that top management worth their salt will appreciate and support an attitude that portrays a commitment to get better and get more in line with key initiatives.  If they don’t, perhaps you have the clue that it’s time to look for another spot to lease your services to.

Be so good they can’t ignore you

Early in his career, comedian Steve Martin decided to “become so good they couldn’t ignore him.” Through years of experimenting with crazy, off-the-wall acts, he achieved his goal.

You, as a “business of one” have the same opportunity. And never has it been more critical to work toward a Steve Martin type goal.

As a moderately-skilled, out-of-date career tenant you are extremely vulnerable. Unlike Steve Martin, few are going to be willing to adopt a “business-of-one” mindset and become “so good they can’t be ignored” with their skill set and problem-solving ability.  Your willingness to do so is your edge.

It’s critical and important to start the evaluation process now and chart a path to becoming a career landlord that puts you in control of your career destiny.

Do you have a career story that illustrates either side of this argument i.e. have you experienced the effect of being either a career-tenant or a career-landlord? Tell us what you’ve experienced in this area, either via comments below or via email to gary@makeagingwork.com. We really appreciate your feedback.

You Are Too Old Not to Exercise!

 

Photo by Catherine Heath on Unsplash

Late afternoons on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday are three of my least favorite times of the week.  That’s when you will find me at my local 24-Hour Fitness.  I rarely break that routine.

It’s the most boring, painful time of my week.  I hate it, until I’m done and back home rewarding myself with a cold Wialua Wheat beer with Passion Fruit.  (I know what you beer snobs are saying – just get over it – I’m 77 and “entitled” to have weird beer tastes).

With mega-missing cartilage in both knees from 17 years of pickup basketball, I’m relegated to not having both feet off the ground at the same time.  So my aerobic is no running, no basketball, nothing that pounds the knees.  So I’m restricted to an elliptical, a treadmill or an upright bike.

BORRRING!!!!!!

I relate to what Jack LaLanne, the late fitness, exercise, and nutrition expert is reported to have said when asked why he enjoys exercise so much.  His response: “I don’t like exercise.  I just like the results.”

I get that.  The two other guys in my age range that I see repeatedly at 24 apparently get it also, I guess.  I’m sure they are hating it also.  Why else would they be there looking so out of place as we do?

The mirror-muscle crowd with their tattoos, tank tops, and tiny testicles don’t seem to be bored with it.  But then, I’m thinking they have a different motivation, as in attracting the Lululemon-clad “hard bodies” that seem to align their workout schedules with the mirror-muscle clan.

I also wonder if they have a life. And what’s really in those big water jugs they haul around?  I don’t inquire.  We don’t get in each other’s way since we are working opposite ends of the weight racks.

Six by forty-five

I’ve held to a six-day-a-week, forty-five-minutes-a-day aerobic exercise routine since 2013 when I first read “Younger Next Year”, one of the most transformational books ever (Bill Gates and thousands of others say so also!).  Following the book’s recommendations, I add 45-minutes of strength training to three of those days – the aforementioned least favorite.

Tuesday, Thursday, Friday are “off days.”  Still boring – just a shorter bore.

The physician co-author of the book, the late Dr. Henry Lodge,  made a statement that has stuck with me and motivates this exercise regimen.  He said:

“Aerobic exercise will give you life; strength-training will make it worth living.”

Let’s get “counter-cultural”

A few decades ago, exercise physiologists assumed that older people cannot build muscle mass or strength after age fifty-five.  That is cultural programming at its worst.  We now know it’s wrong.  But it still lingers as just one component of general negative programming that triggers physical changes in the body leading to reduced health and vigor.

We are subtly taught to expect to be socially useless after a certain age.  We buy in and ignore what we now know can retard, even reverse, the so-called inevitable declines of aging.  We’ve known for a long time that lack of physical activity, along with poor nutrition, smoking, and excess libation are responsible for much of the late-life suffering caused by chronic illness.

All are preventable choices.

Be like Fred

If you’ve hung with me for a while, you’ll recall my three-part series entitled “Aging Without Fraily – A Series”.  I talk a lot about a phenomenon in my Colorado backyard by the name of Fred Bartlit.  Fred is an 87-year old practicing attorney, West Point grad, former Army Ranger, back-bowl skier, a golfer who shoots his age and is a gonzo strength-trainer.

He co-authored a book “Choosing the Strong Path; Reversing the Downward Spiral of Aging” in which he is not shy about taking our healthcare industry to task for not raising the awareness about the ills of inactivity – especially strength-training – and its role in early and long-term frailty.

Fred pushes more weight around in a day than any five randomly-selected people in my neighborhood would push around in a week.  And he looks it (check him out at www.strongpath.com).

I had a brief phone conversation recently with Fred, trying to persuade him to volunteer to let me interview him for an article or podcast. No luck – but I did get an earful about how the day before he had made 23 runs at Vail, including five from top to bottom.  He not-so-subtly reminded me that “nobody does 23 runs in a day at Vail.”  He’s right  – I’d guess a good day at Vail for most would be 12-15 runs. (If you are sensing a bit of arrogance in Fred, you would be spot on – but I’m thinking maybe he’s earned the right.)

Fred, and the thin slice of our older population like him, demonstrate what we third-agers must come to understand. Exercise, especially strength-training, are not domains for just the young.  When we are younger, it’s an option.  When we cross the 50-year line, it is imperative.

At that point, you are too old not to exercise.

Not an exerciser?  Take these three simple steps to start.

 

 

 

  1. Get a wellness check/physical and get your doctor’s green light to start a program. Just be aware that your doc probably doesn’t exercise and isn’t likely to be an expert.  He/she is still too busy trying to figure out how the electronic medical record on the computer works. You’re not looking for personal trainer-type advice from him/her.  You just want to know that you don’t have something that will go haywire if you walk to the end of the block and back while arm-curling 2-lbs weights.
  2. Walk to the end of the block and back arm-curling 2-lb weights.   Start slow and commit to a routine.  Scrap that – make it a ritual.  Routines are OK but until you make it a ritual it won’t stick for the long term. (Reference my 6 x 45 above – that is a ritual for me – you don’t want to be in my vicinity if I break that ritual.)
  3. Start kedging and count telephone poles. Whaaa? Kedging is an old mariner technique whereby the captain of a sailing ship that was “in irons” (that’s no wind for you non-mariners) would keep his ship moving and his crew busy by having them row a small boat out a few hundred yards with a rope attached to the main ship, drop anchor and pull the ship to them.  When you start out with a walking/jogging exercise routine, walk/jog to a close-in telephone pole and back (or similarly repeating marker like the end of a block) the first day and then the next exercise day walk/jog to the next furthest telephone pole/block and back.  Keep extending it and before you know it you have exceeded your best expectations for this life-altering activity.  And you will:
    1. Lose weight
    2. Regain stamina
    3. Gain flexibility
    4. Have a better appetite (no sugar, salt, fat please)
    5. Sleep better
    6. Like yourself better
    7. Make your sedentary, grumpy neighbor jealous and perhaps motivate him/her to action.
    8. Help reduce our out-of-control healthcare expense.
    9. Wonder why you’ve been so naïve up to this point.
    10. Forget the number for your favorite TV channels.
    11. Open space in your home where the Lazyboy used to be.

This really is simple but vital stuff.  There is no better antidote to extended morbidity, frailty and a shortened life than exercise.  Yet our cultural programming has convinced us it’s the young person’s domain.

I’ll wrap with two specific points of knowledge that we, as third-agers,  should understand:

  1. Sarcopenia is a condition that we all experience starting in our thirties. It’s the loss of muscle mass and strength.  It starts subtly and really accelerates in our fifties.  There is no drug or surgery for it.  The only antidote is resistance training.
  2. There is a protein called brain-derived-neurotrophic-factor (BDNF) that is a key player in generating new neural connections in our brain. The only source of BDNF? You guessed it – exercise!

We can be pretty creative in coming up with reasons and excuses for not exercising.  I submit that few are legit.

It’s not an option – it’s imperative.  Because you are too old to not do it.

Do you have an exercise breakthrough story that you can share with us? Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com or leave it as a comment below.

Also, if you haven’t, subscribe to our weekly newsletter at www.makeagingwork.com and receive a copy of my free ebook entitled “Achieve Your Full-Life Potential: Five Easy Steps to Living Longer, Healthier, and With More Purpose.”

 

 

 

 

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