The Importance of Work in Retirement – A Video

Reid Stone is a friend and fellow retirement coach.  He extended me the honor of inviting me to be the first guest on his newly launched podcast at his home base website www.mylifesencore.com.

Click here to go to the page on his site to view the 23-minute video interview. 

We chose to talk about the importance of work in retirement.

In addition to the video, Reid has also provided a transcript of our conversation.

Hope you enjoy and benefit.  Leave me your comments below

Does Your Life-planning Go Beyond the Actuarial Tables?  It should.

In my multiple roles as recruiter, retirement coach, and career transition specialist, I have the good fortune to talk with some amazing, talented and successful people who have entered into their “third age” of life.  That’s the new extended and unchartered territory between the end of mid-career jobs and parenting duties and the beginning of dependent old age.

I often ask the question: “How long do you expect to live?”

Typical answers are – –

  1. I haven’t thought about it.
  2. I don’t want to think about it
  3. Oh, probably the average life span.
  4. I guess my genetics will determine that.

A few – very few – will volunteer an actual number.

One exception surfaced recently when I spoke with a 53-year-old business exec who is unwavering in predicting her ultimate demise (as in, dead) at or around 75 because of a collection of infirmities that have beset her immediate family, past and present – cancer, dementia to name the most common.  She has set a firm “full retirement” age of 65 so she can prepare for the 10-year downward slide that she feels is inevitable.

As usual, being the hammer that I am and with her innocently becoming an unsuspecting nail, I opposed her position by burying her in stats, facts, positive self-help clichés and – well, were you to hear a recording of the one-way exchange, you would appreciate why it’s unlikely she and I will have a further conversation.  She was gracious enough to sign off the conversation with a pleasant “so nice to meet you, Gary.  Hope you have a good weekend.”

This was on a Tuesday.

It’s a stylistic blind-spot that I’ve been unable to shake, to which my grown children will gladly attest.  In their 40’s, they still can sense when another “dad lecture” is about to emerge and they remain skilled in evasion tactics. 

They’ve turned out pretty darn good without having to experience the pile of pontifications poised for presentation in that crowded section of my mental hard-drive.

But, I remain undeterred in my belief that the self-fulfilling prophecy still has substance.  We can think our way into almost anything, including an early demise.

Or not.

The field of biocognition,  i.e. the mind and body communicating with each other, is teaching us that when we believe something our biology will comply.

So I guess if I choose to buy into the myth that my DNA is my destiny or if I accept that 80 is about the average age that I should expect to live to, well I subconsciously and subtly start paving the road to that end.

My daily life could get pretty miserable if I bought into only living to the average male life-span in the U.S. which is – yikes –  going backward and now is 78.69 years.

Since I just hit double-seven last month, I’m in fret-and-worry, end-of-life-planning territory if I let the averages guide my thinking.   I should be buying a cemetery plot since that’s sort of expected of my demographic.  But I’m not buying because several grand for a box and the culturally-infused ritual and “celebration” that I can’t attend just doesn’t compute for me.

My progeny have done well enough to pay to convert me to an urn of ashes.  And I’m sure they’ll agree to spread the results, without fanfare, in the Colorado River in the riffled-run 50 feet below the bridge over the at Ouray Ranch in Grand County, CO. That stretch has gifted me with a number of 20” rainbow trout over the years.

So, unlike the aforementioned exec, I choose to be an outlier.  I stay camped on my goal to make 112.5 as the number for the end of my dependent old age.  And, my dependent-old-age period – the morbidity stage – is to be two weeks or less.  Or, ideally, non-existent as in face-down in the previously referenced stretch of the Colorado River having fooled another of those 20” rainbows.

Oh, I get it – there may be a truck out there on the interstate with my number on it that could make this my last blog.   Or some critical organ cells could decide to go rogue.  But what good is there in that visualization?

I believe my biology is following my beliefs.

If I don’t look my age, which I don’t, it’s not my genetics.  If I don’t act my age, which I don’t, it’s about my beliefs.  If I don’t feel 77 – well I can’t say what that’s about because I’ve never been 77 before.   I just know I’m more energized, motivated and purposeful than at any other point in my life and I’m convinced my biology is listening and tagging along.

So, with total deference to all the actuaries in the world (aren’t you glad somebody likes and wants that job?), I’m ignoring their rear-view mirror research and going the outlier route.   I’m out to bend that average life span back up but I need companions to make that happen.  See my earlier appeal here.

Maybe you are up for it – maybe not.  Maybe it’s easier to accept actuarial fate and have your mind help your body check out earlier than necessary.  But maybe you accept the validity of a biocognitive relationship that is the on-ramp to becoming a longevity outlier and feeling good enough to enjoy it.

It’s a choice.  There are very few things in life that we have full control over.  Our thinking is one of those. Any of us can be rebels with a worthy cause that question and challenge the culturally-imposed portals that determine the way to transition through life.

We have the option to step out of that collective reality and make the actuaries look silly.  I suspect they wouldn’t mind.

 

Keep Working? Or Retire? Consider the Middle Road.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

Where in the handbook of life (you have one, don’t you?)  does it say that career and work have to end by a certain age?

If you do find your handbook, dust it off and look at the publish date.  If your copy is an heirloom from pre-FDR (and the old, non-green New Deal), there isn’t likely to be much said about not working.  The authors from that time pretty much worked until they couldn’t.

In fact, 150 years ago retirement was virtually non-existent.

Maybe we were smarter then and recognized that retirement is an unnatural act and doesn’t happen in nature.  We’re the only species smart enough (???) to come up with the concept of intentionally going backward (look up the definition of retire) and planning it into our lives.

I grew up in rural, agricultural Wyoming where, for most, retirement started a couple of days before the embalming.  My uncles died farming until they couldn’t, physically.  My dad worked until he couldn’t, physically.  That was a big part of the life handbook in my early world.

If you just dusted off a 2.0 version of the life handbook, you’ll find a hard 90-degree turn happened along the way between versions.  You’re not supposed to work after –  well, it’s a moving target.  Thanks to FDR and his corporate and union cronies, age 65 remains the number embedded in most heads.  But it shifts around.  Some like 59, some like 62.  There’s even a F-I-R-E (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, popular among millennials, that has participants staking claims for retirement before 40.

Well, I had a  conversation this week with a  gentleman who had just experienced an unplanned career inflection point that is happening to a lot of folks these days.

A 68 ½-year-old senior exec in supply chain management, he was unceremoniously terminated via telephone with two hours notice – totally blindsided following fourteen years of exemplary performance as a Senior VP with nary a nick on his performance reviews.

You’ve heard the drill:  your “position has been eliminated” as part of a restructuring.

He didn’t buy it and later confirmed his suspicion that his job was still there but now filled with a younger, less expensive understudy.

Well, Frank (not his real name) is in the second of the four stages any of us would go through dealing with this sort of ego-altering groin kick:

  • Panic
  • Anger
  • Acceptance
  • Seizing Opportunity.

Frank skipped panic, which is understandable in his case.  He proudly informed me that he had exceeded his goal of seven figures in retirement funds several years prior.  Plus, he and his wife are debt free, no mortgage, kids launched.  His wife (we’ll call her Sara) still works 50+ hours a week in a management role in (I’m not kidding) supply-chain/materials management. (Can you imagine the mealtime conversations?  Do you see possibilities for “seizing opportunity” here?)

But Frank has a decades-long fixation on working until he is seventy.  He admits to being a bit anal about it and it still angers him up – how dare his employer ignore this and kick him out 18 months short of his goal?

It didn’t help that, just prior to this happening, he had two experiences that had him questioning the wisdom of not working.

One was his fiftieth high-school reunion where he observed once-vibrant classmates expressing boredom in retirement and sporting 50” waistlines.

The other, his neighbor, who retired at 59 and is relentless in reminding Frank that he is beyond retirement age and should be taking it easy while admitting that his days are pretty much made up of caring for his lawn – and who-knows-what in the winter.

Frank’s self-inflicted dilemma is simple.  He wants to re-enter the job market so he can hit his work-until-retirement goal of 70.

LOL!

Before I stick too hard to my guns, let me do a quick poll – is there an executive out there that could use a $200,000/year, 69-year old materials management exec full-time for 18 months?

I thought so – crickets!!

So, it’s fork-in-the-road-decision-time for Frank:  work – no work.

But wait.  Is there a middle-road?

Another senior exec was just referred to me who I noticed had just changed his LinkedIn profile title to “semi-retired”.

I’m anxious for that conversation because that is a middle-road concept that makes sense.

How about that idea, Frank?

I suggested to Frank that maybe he should give some thought to a “lifetime, lifestyle business” where he could take his exceptional experience and skill set and put it to work doing:

What he wants to do

When he wants to do it

Where he wants to do it

I took it a step further and told him I could envision “Frank and Sara Supply Chain Management Consulting, LLC”. Charge a boatload for it, do it when you feel like it for clients that you like, and pick clients at sites that you’d like to visit (i.e. work/vacation combo).

There was extended silence on the other end.

I have a hunch that our next conversation, if we have one, may have a different tone to it.

I’ll stick my neck out and say that, especially amongst the Boomers, that semi-retirement or unretirement will soon become the new prestige.

It’s an unfortunate reality that re-entering the job market post-60 in a self-directed job search is very difficult.  There’s a general guideline that career coaches and experienced recruiters will invoke when counseling a job seeker in that age range:  plan on one month for every $10k in salary to secure your next position if conducting your own, self-directed search.

That’s a pretty freaky thought for a $300,000/year exec. It’s even freakier for a stay-at-home spouse/partner who would have to tolerate guaranteed mood swings and confidence lapses.

Working with a qualified career transition coaching organization can significantly reduce that span and smooth out the emotional swings.

Ageism, as blatantly demonstrated in Frank’s case, is rampant.

If there is a positive impact of ageism, it would be that it shakes loose the rigid thinking that says end-of-work is expected and entitled and that one is a defective anomaly if they don’t stop working by a certain age.

I’ll wrap by borrowing from my 12/18/17 post “Work Yourself to Death? Not a bad idea!”

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

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

Warning!

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

Second warning!

You may:

I’m betting on Frank to take the second – or middle – road.

 

Retirement Planning Done Well.

Dola Handley and Cary Smith in Munich, Germany

Imagine with me that you are working 60 hour weeks, making life-and-death decisions virtually every day, herding cats that are your staff, fighting with superiors for adequate resources, putting up with arrogant personalities, being on call-standby many weekends and operating on less than adequate sleep.

Now imagine that you’ve been doing most or all of the above for 20+ years.

Imagine further that you finally decided you’ve had enough and jumped off the cliff into retirement.

If I then asked you the questions: “How do you come down from that type of intense existence?” “How does it feel?” – what do you think your response might be?

I posed those very questions to a recently retired nurse executive that I had connected with on LinkedIn.

Her name is Dola Handley.

I pushed for a phone conversation with her because I was curious, as part of my overall research into the retirement mindset, why she retired, what the experience has been like for her and what she sees ahead for her and her husband.

In my 17 years as a healthcare recruiter, a high percentage of the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with candidates have been with middle- and executive-level nurses like Dola.  Bachelor- or master-degreed RN’s, some even with doctorates.

Dola fits the mold of this very special breed of professionals.  Selfless; humbling in the depth of their commitments to care; overworked, underpaid and (colossally) under-appreciated in their work environment.

Dola has “completed” her 22- year nursing career which included 20 years of active military duty with over half of that in a tactical signal officer role then as a nurse and a number of Director-level management positions in large hospitals overseeing women’s services/mother-baby/OB units.

I found her answers to those questions to be insightful:

  • “How do you come down from that type of intense existence?” Answer: I’m experiencing “active stillness”.
  • “How does it feel?” Answer: I’m “wonderfully bored”.

I probed both responses.

“Active stillness” for Dola is a throwback to her Appalachian farm upbringing where there was a lot of downtime and one learned to “relax into non-stressful activity but staying active”  For her, that currently includes satisfying her love of the outdoors by doing volunteer outdoor work with the state parks department here in Colorado.  She also walks 3-4 miles a day with a friend. She likes to mentor and finds that people she worked with are calling her for advice which she unselfishly provides.  She also meets monthly with a group of five nurses on a social basis where, not surprisingly, she has become the de-facto leader.

Also, in typical nurse fashion, she couldn’t turn aside a request to do some voluntary consulting work for a local hospital that was setting up a new mother/baby unit.  She got that out of her system – it was a good reminder of why she had retired.

Being “wonderfully bored” means she no longer needs to dread the ringing phone, the pressure of someone in a health crisis, the weekend on-call inconvenience and, most of all, the 12-hour days.

Her work “filled her up” for years and she is proud that she impacted a lot of people.

She doesn’t miss it.

She is a doer, a server who is now freer and hasn’t lost anything. She revels in being able to now set her own schedule.   She knows what is right for her and that includes peace every day, comfortable in being financially secure and not worrying about where she is mentally, emotionally, physically.

Dola is less than a year into her retirement so the bloom is still on the rose, so to speak.  How will she feel, how will all of this play out say 1,2,3 years from now?  That’s part of the adventure.

Something tells me that Dola will somehow just go deeper and wider in her active stillness and stay wonderfully bored but busier in her service to others.  I’m suggesting that because, if I may paraphrase, you can take the nurse out of nursing but you can’t take the nurse out of a nurse.

Oh, did you catch the financially secure part?

I wonder how many couples start serious retirement planning discussions ten years before their targeted retirement date.

I believe one would need to sort through a trainload of couples to find one or two.

Dola and her husband, Cary Smith, are married with a blended family of four grown daughters and would be one of those rare finds.

This couple doesn’t fit the mold in this area.  They have their proverbial you-know-what together in this department.

Dola shared with me that she and Cary began retirement discussion together over 10 years ago.  They are both planners.  Cary, also a military retiree (they met in the military) is a skilled program manager still gainfully employed, by choice.

They both have military pensions and the accompanying health care coverage.  She didn’t reveal what they have stashed away beyond that but what I did find unusual, impressive and prescient is what they have done with real estate as they have gone through a number of job changes and relocations.

Within the last decade, they have lived in four homes.  Three of those (two in N. Carolina, one in Colorado) they have kept and are renting out, thus adding a nice equity component to the portfolio.  The fourth is their current residence in Colorado Springs.

Cary is keying his retirement date to the day they write the last mortgage payment check for the house they are in – which is two years out.

The retirement discussions that began 10 years ago focused on:

  1. What they want to do.
  2. Where they want to do it.
  3. What they want this third stage to look like.

Listening to Dola, you’ll get the impression that the what, where and how are pretty well set.  And the when is on the radar.

The initial “what” sounds exciting. They both have spent extended periods of time working abroad. They are doing a “pre-retirement” trip to Scotland next year and have agreed that, upon retirement, they will pick and move to a location (TBD), most likely in Europe, and go, “not as tourists”, for an extended stay.

And then determine the next step.

Dola and Cary present a stark contrast to the route most couples take to retirement, particularly on the non-financial side.   Research has shown that 2 of 3 couples go into retirement without a semblance of a non-financial plan.  As a Retirement Coach, I’m discovering that a surprising number of couples wait until the retirement of one or the other of the partnership to get on the same page, adjusting to the changed environment and sorting out what they want retirement life to look like.

It results in the loss of precious retirement years where resources and physical vitality are higher

It may help explain why the divorce rate of couples over 50 has been skyrocketing while overall divorce rates have leveled off.

The takeaway from Dora’s and Cary’s retirement story is clear:  start early, agree on what you want it to look like, put a plan together but be flexible and willing to compromise and respect the interests and desire of the other.

Theirs may seem like a retirement heavily tilted to a “life of leisure”.  I ‘spect not.  I doubt this nurse and these two military veterans will ever give up an opportunity to continue to serve in some way.

Retired? You May Be About to Waste the Most Productive, Fulfilling Time of Your Life?

Photo by Cristofer Jeschke on Unsplash

Your financial planner just called you to a special meeting in his office to deliver some news.  It’s all good. You’ve hit your investment goals and are financially prepared to retire!

You started  a diligent, leveraged savings plan at 28 and now, 35 years later and with his help along the way, you’ve ridden out a half-dozen market corrections, survived a couple of job changes and plenty of “normal” life challenges but never wavered from your savings plan and have become one of the estimated 11 million millionaires in the U.S.

Congratulations!!  Retirement day.  Retirement nirvana at last!!

You are about to step into one the most potentially dangerous times of your life.

Your financial planner’s good news is called the “Liberation Stage”, number three of the five stages of retirement defined by Dr. Ken Dychtwald of AgeWave.  The coveted retirement day!

His organization defined these five stages after interviewing 55,000 baby-boomers who were in retirement.

You can revisit these five stages in my January 6, 2018 article.

AgeWave identified the two stages preceding retirement as the “Imagination Stage” (5-15 years before expected retirement) and the “Anticipation Stage” (5 years before retirement).

Their research showed that 85-90% of pre-retirees in both these preliminary stages expected to be happy and 75-80% expected to achieve their dreams in retirement.

The average duration of Stage Three –  the “Liberation Stage”?   One year!

On average, it appears that it takes about a year for the reality of retirement to take hold.

Stage four and five – “Reorientation Stage” and “Reconciliation Stage” – revealed a different story than that expected in pre-retirement with only 40% of retirees achieving their happiness and retirement dreams.

A “gap analysis” needed.

A test score of 40% reminds me of what I achieved on most of my civil engineering courses in my first year of college before I was politely and appropriately asked to exit the institution for a while and come back for another probationary try at something else, like, well anything but engineering.

If retirement doesn’t seem to get even a fist pump for over half of those stepping into it, what’s missing?  After all, it is that “nirvana” phase that consumed 35-40 years of our lives to get to and that promised us – at least in the financial services ads – a life of freedom, comfort, and fun.

Why are we coming up a bit short on that promise for the majority of retirees?

It’s a fertile area for pontification, philosophical waxing, and slicing-and-dicing.  I’ll abandon my tendency to excel in all three of those boring, alienating methods and submit a single theory behind the gap.

It’s a simple triumvirate:

No plan

No people

No purpose

No plan

We know that 2 of 3 retirees enter retirement with little or no non-financial plan.  They expect their retirement to “evolve” and take care of itself.    They expect the transition to freedom and leisure to be fulfilling.  They enter retirement unaware that retirement is like an iceberg – 80% of the realities of retirement are hidden from view and not discussed or planned for.

No people

Those work cohorts who promised to “stay in touch” as they wolfed down a slice of your retirement cake aren’t calling – or returning your calls to schedule a “lunch to reminisce”.  It seems they have their own set of challenges and you aren’t coming to mind a whole lot – not since about 30 seconds after you left the building.

So your “friends list” begins to narrow significantly unless you proactively rebuild it.  Certainly deeper and broader engagement with family is vital and an opportunity to make up for lost time.  But that’s not likely an arena in which to find new and different levels of mental stimulation and social engagement.

That sitcom and lazyboy are tempting substitutes for proactively building a new social network.

We now have research that tells us that a lack of social engagement is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.  It’s the newest entrant into the list of things that kill us early.

No purpose

Egad, not this purpose thing again!!

Yep.  Face it – you had a purpose before retirement, even if it was no more than showing up and building someone else’s dream for the money to get you to retirement nirvana.  Now even that shallow purpose is gone and the potential for serious drifting sets in after you’ve completed the third cleaning and rearranging of the garage and basement storage space.

Five rounds of golf a week isn’t changing your handicap much but the obligatory 19th hole with fellow drifters is adding inches to the waistline.

If you are fortunate, at some point early in your post-career life, your soul delivers a groin kick and says that it’s tired of being only a consumer and not a producer and that if this continues, the reward may be serious health, wellness, and sanity issues.

It’s just suggesting that the soul exists to serve, not take.  It’s kind of a divine thing that’s built into us that gets barnacled over in our pursuit of comfort and convenience and adherence to convention, conformity, and comparison.

Give it some space.

Take a year – do the fun stuff.  Visit Machu Pichu and the Buddhist ruins and float the Rhine.  Bore your family and declining circle of friends with your endless photos of places they have no interest in visiting – or have already visited.  Do the country club thing for a year and get it out of your system.

But while you are at it, do some serious reflecting on this simple string of questions:

Why am I here”

Am I meant to be “leisurely” for the next 20,30,40 years?

Isn’t there somebody/some entity I can help with the 55+ years of accumulated experience and the innate talents that I have?

If I stumbled into my funeral just in time to hear my eulogy, what would I want the eulogist to be saying?

The dangers of an unplanned post-career life are physical, mental and emotional deterioration and an accelerated dash to a shortened finish line.

You don’t deserve that; you weren’t designed for that.

Our post-career choices are to be selfish (consumer) or selfless (producer).

Our society sure could use us for the latter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retirement and the “No-Work” Danger Zone

Photo by Raúl Nájera on Unsplash

Here’s a theory to ponder:  retirement can cause brain-rot!

Brain rot?  Never heard of it?  Well, I hadn’t either – I kinda just made it up.

I just wanted to get your attention.

But the thought came to me after I stumbled across a YouTube featuring spiritual elder Rabbi Zalman Schachter  talking about “harvesting a lifetime.”  The Rabbi’s point is that as we move into our autumn years we bring forward an “essential insight” unique to each of us.

He insightfully refers to it as the “ripening” of the advanced portions of our brain (neo-cortex) as we have moved through life’s events, experiences, failures, victories.

As a spiritual mentor, Rabbi Schachter helps people bring forward this essential insight, emphasizing that our purpose is to “harvest” that insight and pass it on.

Unharvested crops rot

I grew up in the world of farming.  My grandparents were homesteading farmers in Wyoming; my uncles lived and died as farmers.

Every year for a farmer is a scramble to “pass on” their crop, be it potatoes, beans, beets or wheat, before it rotted in the field.

There’s not much that’s more unpleasant than the smell of a field of uncollected and rotting potatoes.

Is it too extreme to suggest that a failure to “harvest” this “essential insight” crop that we are carrying may lead to a sort of brain rot?  Perhaps not smelly, but certainly observable – as in drifting listlessness or dying early, its most severe form.

We know that, historically, the lifespan of humans who move into a retirement that binges on leisure is significantly shorter than those who remain active and engaged in some form of meaningful work.  In fact, the RP2000 Mortality Study of men 50-70 released by the Society of Actuaries showed that the death rates of those still working were roughly half the death rates of men the same age who were fully retired.

What if the “work” we entered into in our third stage of life was a harvesting of this “essential insight” and sharing it forward to preserve it and give it an opportunity to grow even more in the hands and minds of its recipients?

Rabbi Schachter uses a softer word to describe the fact that we tend to let our brains – and our bodies – rot as we enter the later phases of our lives.   He uses the word “diminishes.”

He maintains that we diminish because we don’t see the possibilities.

Why do we miss the possibilities?

I submit that our ability to see the possibilities of harvesting and passing on this essential insight is stolen away from many of us by the insidious penetration of our psyche by the concept of an off-the-cliff, labor-to-leisure retirement.

Many of us can hardly wait to shut down our creative nature (even more than what a mind-numbing 40-year job has done) and “retire” (derived from the French verb “retirer” which means to “retreat, go backward”) and further continue the assassination of our essential insight.

We not only fail to see the possibilities, but we tag work in the post-career as something to avoid.  We seem to believe that creativity dies at 65 and that post-career work will tag us as a “loser” or an “unfortunate”.

Creativity is work.  Work is creativity.

I like where the Rabbi took me with this.  His message reminds us that this third-age, post-career period of our lives is a time when we can, perhaps for the first time, fully engage in “soul work” i.e. work that emanates from the heart and incorporates the creativity of deep interests and passions that have been crusted over by a multi-decade quest for money, status, and security.

His message is that we can shake off the crust and shed the barnacles from what is for many the empty years of marginally-inspiring, money-chasing employment and bring forward what we learned and use it to advance our world.

I’m reminded that my story to this point is unspectacular against the worldly standard of wealth, status, title – in fact, it’s kinda messy.  But, my mess is my message – and that’s true for you too.  Our messes are a big part of the essential insight that we can bring forward.

It’s helpful to understand and accept that there are no failures – only experiments and research and development.  Even when that awareness doesn’t show up until the seventh decade.

Let me wrap with a quote from a new reading “project” that I started this week:  Laurence G. Boldt’s “Zen and the art of Making a Living: A Practical Guide to Creative Career Design” 

“Most of our lives, we are chasing food, sex, attention, knowledge, security, and – most of all – money.  Without the real engagement of our souls, all this can seem quite empty as the years go by.  For the soul too has its demands.  It has a way of letting us know when we neglect or abandon its imperatives  – authenticity and responsibility, joy and compassion.  At some point, many come to realize that listening to their hearts and souls isn’t a luxury but an essential part of their psychological and spiritual health.”

Are “soul”, “authenticity”, “joy”, “passion”, “purpose”, “essential insights” part of your internal dialog as you move into or toward this third age of your life?  Or is it still just “money”, “security”, “escape”?

Tough – but essential – questions.

Your thoughts and comments are welcomed and appreciated.

 

 

How To Make Aging Work

I added to my hero list this week.

During another boring 24-Hour Fitness workout this week, my aging I-pod Classic served up a James Altucher podcast interview with William Shatner of Startrek, Boston Legal, and Priceline fame.

Now 87, Shatner looks 20-years younger and is living like his hair is on fire (yes, he still has plenty)  – writing books; doing a country-western album, a blues album, and a Christmas album; touring internationally; producing, directing and performing on NYC Broadway stage; speaking.

It’s obvious Shatner doesn’t spend much time thinking about his endpoint. He’s too busy.

He subscribes to George Burn’s viewpoint on dying:

“How can I die?  I’m booked”

And

“As long as you’re working, you stay young.”

One of Shatner’s opening comments was that “all the 87 year-olds I know are dead. They didn’t follow my advice – I told them ‘don’t die’, but they died.  Why did they die?  Because they changed their mind about living”.

No mystery to him about it.  “They decided they were through.”

He’s far from through.

Try the schedule described above and see if you could make it happen, at any age, let alone 87.

It strikes me that Shatner epitomizes the merits of refusing to retire and of continuing to work. He validates what we need more of to sustain – in fact, build – our vigor and vitality as we enter and move through the third stage of life.

For example:

  1. Doing something we’ve never done before. Just a few Shatner examples: c&w, blues and Christmas album; interview and dinner with Stephen Hawkings shortly before Hawking’s death; writing a book.
  2. Staying physically active e.g. touring globally. I’m sure he does more physically – he appears to be in better shape than the loose-cannon, Denny Crane, in Boston Legal.
  3. Challenging ourselves mentally. Shatner is no slouch here.  Honestly, I bailed on the podcast when Altucher added world-renowned theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku, to the conversation and the three of them went off into “woo-woo” land talking about quantum physics, string field theory, hyperspace and the “physics of the impossible.”  Shatner’s mental acuity and ability to not only engage in this type of dialog but to lead it, was amazing.  What happened to the myth about declining brain-power as we age? (BTW, Kaku is no spring chicken – he’s 71).
  4. Always having something that isn’t complete. It’s apparent from Shatner’s conversation that he doesn’t hesitate to start something new while he has other things going.  He’s not concerned about each activity being perfect – in fact, admits to a number of stinkers in his prolific list of projects.  For him, it’s just constant forward movement. No living from the rear-view mirror for him.

On this last point, I’m reminded of one of the principles espoused by world-renowned entrepreneurial/business coach Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach.  Sullivan opposes completing one’s life.  He argues persuasively that our culturally-infused notion that it’s important to “wrap up one’s life” and “leave a legacy” is like planning for a funeral and is counter-productive and life-shortening.

This leave-a-legacy mindset is a product of what Sullivan calls one of the many “general narratives” that our culture instills in us that rob us of the potential we can bring forward into this third stage of life.  It’s a general narrative that says “I’ve only got 70 or 80 years on this mudball so I should start winding down as I approach that period of my life.”

That’s giving up on one’s uniqueness and on one’s self as a creator.  It’s apparent that Shatner and Sullivan don’t buy into that general narrative.

At 74, Sullivan’s whole idea for his future– and for the professional and personal lives of his coaching students – is an “ever-expanding incompleteness” as opposed to bringing life to some sort of legacy.  He teaches “always expanding one’s present into a bigger future” with “each tomorrow starting at a higher level.”  Any legacy – if it were important – will take care of itself.

We waste energy worrying about when the end is coming. It’s not for us to determine – nature owns that and has her own unpredictable timetable.

Sullivan intends to leave a total mess of in-process creative projects for his team to straighten out or complete when he checks out – a rather refreshing new spin on the concept of a legacy.  I suspect this is a concept that resonates with Shatner as well.

Shatner, Sullivan and probably hundreds or thousands of other third-act participants are busting several myths (or “general narratives”) that need busting.   To name a few:

  1. That creativity dies as we age.
  2. That brainpower deteriorates as we age and senescence is automatic.
  3. That “labor-to-leisure” retirement is good for the body and the soul.
  4. That unhappiness accompanies growing old. (NOTE: the nadir of unhappiness is age 47 – see this article.)

Fascination and motivation lie available for the taking for all of us by creating every day; by striving to make our future bigger than our past regardless of age.  It starts with rediscovering what we are uniquely gifted to be able to do and linking that with a vision and sense of purpose for this third act.

I’ll wrap by adding to the overuse of an overused but important cliché:

It’s never too late to start, but always too early to quit.

Do you have a unique giftedness deep inside that cultural expectations/general narratives have stolen or covered over – one that you can resurrect and apply against a vision for your future that is bigger than your past?  Does the concept of an “incomplete life” versus a “legacy” resonate with you?   Your thoughts on either or both are welcome – scroll down and give us your thoughts.

The Thief Called “65”

I had phone conversations this past week with two middle-aged (50-ish) divorced professional women that had eerily similar undertones having to do with a critical life inflection point.

These were two talented women who were facing similar challenges in re-entering the job market after an unexpected change in their professional employment status.

It wasn’t surprising to hear their rants about the rampant ageism, the age-biased corporate job application process, the HR-black hole that applicants in this age-range disappear into.

What did surprise me was a very powerful underlying fear both expressed as we went deeper into our conversation.

Both were terrified of the number “65”

Adding to their anxiety of trying to re-enter the job market was a deep-seated concern that they were seriously behind on being able to retire at the expected retirement age.

Yes, for both, the number that underscored their fear was “65”.

For both, the prospect of only having 15 years or so to get “where they were supposed to be financially at 65”not only terrifies them but seems to be driving some employment decisions that were clearly outside of what, deep down inside themselves, they really wanted to be doing.

They are making employment decisions based on a “need” to be able to retire instead of an employment decision based on what they truly “want” to do.

The number 65 is robbing them of their “essential self.”

They both are the rule, not the exception.

It reminded me once again of the power of cultural expectations.  Both of these talented ladies were demonstrating a fear of the cultural-imposed stigma of not being able to “retire on time and in good shape” and were turning their back on their dreams.

It remains a “badge of honor” in our culture to retire on or before 65.  To not do so says “failure” or, at a minimum, to cast one as an “unfortunate.”  Take my word for it.  I know I’m viewed this way by those who inquire of my status and find that, at 76, I’m not retired.  I encounter few who subscribe to my outlier position of never intending to retire.

For both ladies, a key criterion for their next employment was a good 401K.  I didn’t have the heart to suggest that to try to recover and build enough retirement savings in fifteen years to support another 15-30 years of “retired life” is, well – impossible.

With both ladies, I posed the coaching question:  “If we were to take away time and money as a factor, what would you be doing?”

Both expressed something radically different from the employment they were pursuing.

One said she would be running a “doggie daycare”, a dream she has been carrying since childhood.  She is deeply passionate about animals and only partially satisfies that passion by having two dogs.

The other said she would like to coach people on finding their true potential but struggles with what it takes to start a coaching practice part-time that would eventually support her.

Both are tabling things that excite them to try to fit the cultural mold of retirement at 65.

Thinking about their thinking.

I asked both to think about what was so sacred about retirement at 65.  Neither had a really good answer other than one that dripped of unwritten cultural expectations.

I reminded them that 65 is an invalid, artificial finish line established 83 years ago for political reasons and at a time when the average lifespan was 63.  It was never meant to provide for a lengthy “life of leisure and bliss” as it’s marketed today.

When I injected the notion that retirement is an unnatural act and, for most, the beginning of phasing out and moving toward societal irrelevance, the tone of the conversation changed a bit.  That a productive life beyond 65 is not only possible but potentially the most productive and fulfilling time of life was a concept they instinctively found difficult to get their brains around.

For them to envision a re-launch or re-acceleration of life at 65 or thereabouts was laden with dissonance – as it is for most at this point in life.

Did our conversation “rock their world?”  Will there be a fruitful shift in attitude and perspective?  I can’t say.  I just know that, for the animal-lover, the idea of removing 65 as a cultural guidepost seemed to take pressure off.  The idea of not having to ever retire seemed to re-open some new possibility thinking – more of an open-mindedness to the remainder of her life as opposed to one restricted by cultural timelines and the expectations of others.

The childhood dream very suddenly re-emerged and she literally transformed on the phone – her voice changing from one coming from fear and concern to one of excitement and passion.  She reached back to childhood conversations she had with her father, who supported and encouraged her dreams but was sadly taken from her life early by a fatal heart attack.

Her story is like many – she suppressed the childhood dream to pursue a more “sensible” livelihood.  It served her well – until it didn’t.  Fifty, divorced, a single mom with a teen, sudden unemployment followed by severe under-employment, fear of not “measuring up” on several fronts.  All a toxic brew crawling with ANTs – Automatic Negative Thoughts.

Both/And, not Either/Or

I hope this talented lady will understand that, with the removal of a culturally dictated timeline, that she needn’t give up on her childhood dream which likely is an expression of an unacknowledged or suppressed “essential self” or “unique ability.”

The reality of her circumstances requires that she stay outside her essential self some of the time to meet her obligations as a provider.  To think of it as “either-or” will only increase frustration.  “Both-and” works for lots of people.  She needn’t give up on her dream but rather may find a way to cultivate it, perhaps as a side-hustle, while succeeding as a provider.

Regardless of the road traveled, I believe she can now move forward without the stigma of thinking she “has to” retire or that “65” holds any significant relevance.  I believe she is beginning to see how this thinking is robbing her of an opportunity to re-open her dreams, passions, and creativity.

I’d bet you know someone like this – or perhaps you look at one every morning in the mirror.  I can tell you, from my own personal journey, to crawl out of the thick shell of cultural expectations, to shed the barnacles of sailing in someone else’s seas is tough.

I’ve found Martha Beck, author of “Finding Your North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live” to be a great source of inspirational reminders when I beat myself up with the frustrations of pursuing my essential self.  Here’s one of those gems I hit this morning in my re-reading of the book:

“When you’re doing what you’re meant to do, you benefit the world in a unique and irreplaceable way.  This brings money, friendship, true love, inner peace, and everything else worth living; it sounds facile, but it’s really true.”

Do you have a story about finding your “essential self” or “unique ability?” Scroll down and tell us about it.

Is It Too Late to Be Amazing?

I recently read a veteran career coach’s advice for displaced or dissatisfied middle-agers wishing to re-enter the job market or make a late-life career change.

His advice:  In today’s changing workplace, you will have to come across as – AMAZING!

That’s worth pondering.

What makes up amazing?  The reality is, most of us don’t think of ourselves as amazing, although deep down we can be – or should be.

Honesty can hurt here – truth is most of us at this mid-life point are coming off of extended stretches at or near the top of the bell curve – neither slug nor superstar.  Comfortable, convenient, middle-of-the-road, don’t-rock-the-boat, needs-based existence.

So now I’m suddenly expected to move to the far right of the bell curve and be amazing?  Uh, I think I’m gonna need some major help here.

This coach’s message has to do with image, personal branding, positioning, preparedness, self-confidence, energy – the components necessary to conduct a successful job search at this stage of life where the challenges are magnitudes greater than what it took 20,10, even 5 years ago.

His point is that every component of the job search process needs to be, well – amazing.  The resume needs to be a Picasso in terms of content and structure; presence on LinkedIn and other social media must be top-notch; commitment to, and energy for, an effective networking strategy must be beyond the pale; elevator speech development, interviewing skills practice, attitude maintenance, self-management discipline – all need to be – amazing.

This coach’s advice is spot on – for the mechanics of a job search.  Question is – is it realistic?  How many can get there?

Pretty tall order, especially if your ego just took a hit because of an unexpected termination.  It’s pretty hard to think amazing when you feel like a slug and that the whole world is “a tuxedo and you are a pair of brown shoes.” (my thanks to long deceased comedian George Gobel for that – doubt that he cares).

My experience in coaching folks in this position is that getting to amazing with all this requires more sustained effort and attitude adjustment than most are willing to undertake.

Why?

Because they don’t see themselves as amazing.

In their mind, all this effort may seem fraudulent, sort of like putting lipstick on a pig.  Twenty-plus years in the grinding corporate world tends to bury our most amazing qualities.

Be your true amazing self at work, and you will either (1) bump up against a manager who will be threatened by you and find a way to remove the threat or (2) be seen as an outsider that doesn’t fit or belong or (3) you will realize you need to take your amazing self outside of the confines of a job.

Needs vs wants

Re-entering the job market or making a corporate career change is typically a needs-based move.  It’s mortgage/groceries/college tuition/orthodontics/golf club membership/luxury car payment/retirement savings/home repair coverage.

Rarely is this type of move a “wants-based” move that acknowledges and satisfies a deep interest or passion and resurrects and ignites one’s uniqueness or essential self.

Certainly, there are exceptions, but working for someone, building someone else’s dream makes it difficult to get to the true amazing self.

By the time we have 15, 20, 25 years of this, it seems pretty late to try to be the true amazing self that one’s unique ability or essential self can produce.  It’s pretty well stamped down and covered over – maybe even forgotten.

So is it too late?

There is plenty of time to be amazing, regardless of age.

Let’s just do a “what if?”

Suppose you are 55 and in good physical shape.  You have a better than 50% chance that you will live to 90.  That means you’ve got 42% left.  With the right attitude and continued good health and wellness habits, you probably fit the “live long, die short” model – that is, your morbidity period should be short, at least shorter than for most. So, we’ll need to take a couple of percentage points off to account for your brief period of dementia, drool and Depends.

There it is.  Could you make “amazing” happen for yourself with 40% – 30+ years – left?

Well, yeah!!

This is the point where most personal development pundits inject the over-worked examples of Colonel Sanders, Grandma Moses, and Ray Kroc.  But I won’t do that to you.

OK bunko, tell me how to be amazing.

OK – here are five steps that will help – in order of priority:

  1. Protect your health. Amazing doesn’t happen if you feel like s__t!  Become health care literate. Know your body; learn your biology; understand your biomarkers; take control of your health and don’t turn it over to your doc – co-partner with him/her but stay in charge; get your heart rate up every day and stop eating crap!
  2. Adopt an attitude of gratitude and altitude. Much of success emanates from an attitude of gratitude.  You are gifted.  Start each day with a mental list of the good things in your life that you are grateful for.  And then think lofty thoughts, dust off the dreams and be grateful that you are now a masterpiece-in-the-making.
  3. Find your “essential self” or your “uniqueability”. Invest in and digest Martha Beck’s “Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live.”  From that, you will learn how to identify your essential self and how to:  “- stop conforming to the pre-designated patterns offered by your cultural environment.  Instead, you will turn your life into a work of art – an absolutely original expression of your unique skills and preferences.”

  Or understand the concept of “uniqueability”, the success principle taught by the planet’s most successful entrepreneur coach, Dan Sullivan of Strategic      Coach.  It’s that unique giftedness that all of us have that we’ve yet to manifest.  You can learn all about it and how it leads to “amazing” by listening       to podcasts #137-140 at 10xTalk.com.

  1. Dust off the dormant/suppressed dreams. What were you drawn to and got you most excited when you were 6, 8, 10?  There is likely a link between that and your essential self/uniqueability.   What passions or deep interests have you tabled in favor of dedicating yourself to a paycheck and mortgage coverage?  Think on these things, let them resurface – they are a path to realizing “amazing.”  My July 9, 2018  article featuring the story of a successful late-life entrepreneur is a good example.
  2. Find a mentor or coach. Being your amazing self will take time and commitment.  You can get the journey started and benefit from the low-cost/no-cost coaching available online and in books.  And these are essential tools but, by themselves, extend the journey.  Engaging an experienced life or career coach in addition to these tools will accelerate the process by helping remove the clutter, build your confidence and hold you accountable to the steps on the journey.

We’d all be amazing if it were easy.  But being amazing doesn’t so much fit the way our culture thinks and works.  We need a lot of non-amazing and conformity for our system to work – a lot of folks that are content at the top or to the left side of the bell curve.

But if you got this far in this article, that’s not you.  You’ve already said, “I’m amazing.” And now realize it’s “never too late to start but always too soon to quit.”

Or, to paraphrase the late, great Zig Ziglar:  “You don’t have to be great (amazing) to start, but you have to start to be great (amazing).”

Let me know if I can help you get your journey started.  Email me gary@makeagingwork.com or call my office at 720-344-7784 and let’s chat.

If you are on that journey now, tell us how it is going – leave us a comment below.

 

 

Time For a New Cultural Portal

 

“We either ease into age or we’re disrupted by age.  I don’t like the fact that I’m 82, but I can’t fight it – it’s better that I am 82 than I didn’t make it to 82.  I keep going.  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!”

********

“You can be old at 30 or young at 90 – it’s all up to you.  I’ve always been in a hurry. I know I’m racing against time, and now more than ever. But I have not lost my competitive spirit, and, in some ways, it’s personal. I still keep an active office and go there every day. Retirement isn’t an option for me. When you retire you have time to do what you love, and I love to work. “

The first quote is from Ken Langone, the billionaire businessman, investor, philanthropist and one of the founders of Home Depot during his appearance in a podcast with James Althucher.

The second is from a recent LinkedIn article posted by T. Boone Pickens, also a billionaire business magnate and financier, hedge fund chairman and former corporate raider, on the occasion of his 90th birthday.

Different capitalistic routes to fame and fortune – one central late-life message:

Don’t stop – retirement isn’t an option.

Well, if we are going to splash around in the billionaire pool, then shouldn’t we see where the daddy-of-the-elder-billionaires, Warren Buffett, stands on this retirement thing?  Now 87, he doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down.

A little Google research reveals Warren’s “playbook” on the topic of retirement.

His clarifying position on reasons to avoid retirement is simple:

  1. You’re healthy
  2. You won’t have a fixed income
  3. You stay engaged and productive
  4. You’ll continue to mentor
  5. You can leverage your knowledge

We can all agree that not one of these three “elders” needs to work to subsist.  They all could have stopped at the traditional retirement age, but blew past it completely ignoring the signpost.

So what? They’re billionaires!

I personally don’t know any billionaires – never have, most likely won’t, ever.  Like you, it’s difficult for me to relate to what it must be like to be a billionaire.  Also, like you (I’m assuming), it’s not a pinnacle that I will experience.

But what I can relate to is a late-life stage of continued work,  productivity, and contribution and the effect that has on the individual and society.  I don’t see billionaires having a corner on that.

But it is this kind of story that just adds to my amazement at how pervasive and deeply rooted the concept of traditional retirement remains in our culture.  These billionaires represent but a tiny sampling of the vast evidence we have that work is a key factor in longevity and good health.  Given that, where is the sensibility in striving to hasten away from it at an age where natural talent, acquired skills and valuable experience can be mixed together and deployed for the greater good of society?

Time for a new portal?

In previous articles, I’ve referred to traditional retirement as adherence to an outdated, politically-inspired artificial finish line, the model for which has no relevance to our current world.

Permit me to coin another term for it: Wasted Cultural Portal.

Cultural portal?  Whaasat?

Neuropsychologist Dr. Mario Martinez defines cultural portals as:  “culturally defined segments of expected beliefs and conduct.” Martinez offers up a cultural portal list that includes: newborn, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adult, middle age, and old age.

Quite a contrast.  One-hundred-fifty years ago, we had two portals: childhood-adulthood.

Changing technology, longer lives, creative social scientists and enterprising capitalists have stretched the portal list, in Dr. Martinez’s eyes, to seven.

But something happened on the way to the 21st century.  Baby boomers and technology came along and started redefining the gap between portal six and seven, presenting a strong argument for the need for another portal between middle age and true old age along with a clearer definition of true old age.

This new portal is where we find Langone, Pickens, Buffett.

They aren’t wasting it.  Most of us, as we enter or move through this new portal, will.  It’s called traditional, vocation-to-vacation retirement.

They are outliers.

We are safely within the confines of our comfort zone of conventional wisdom, cultural expectations, and comparison.

They have chosen to push all those aside.

A simpler portal concept.

Perhaps rather than expand the portals to eight we should simplify the portal concept altogether.  That’s what Marc Freedman, founder of Encore.org and author of a seminal book on this topic, “The Big Shift, Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife”, advocates.  Drawing from his relationship with and studies of the 1990’s research done by Peter Laslett, eminent British demographic historian, Freedman has championed Laslett’s solution to “the oxymoronic years, the longevity paradox and to much of what ails us today.”

Laslett predicted, because of declining births and longer lives, an emerging life stage he called the “Third Age.”  With it comes a much simpler and appropriate four-portal alignment which Freedman advocates:

  1. First age – childhood/age of dependence.
  2. Second age – adulthood and mid-career jobs.
  3. Third age – new territory between the end of mid-career jobs and parenting duties and the beginning of dependent old age.
  4. Fourth age – age of dependency and ill health, the doorstep of demise.

It’s important to share Laslett’s prescient view on this.  Laslett foresaw a need to clean up some fundamental mistakes resulting from failure to recognize this third age. Mistakes that impact you and me.

“In his view, lumping everyone with grey hair under the same umbrella, and assuming this population in the future will look like and live like those of that age in the past, produced both a miscasting of reality and miscarriage of justice.  And it led to everything from damaged lives to bad policies.  Laslett saw the conventional wisdom – that this population would be a vast burden to society, a huge drain on the medical establishment, an unproductive class inevitably focused on their own narrow needs  – to be a result of ‘the persistence into our own time of  perception belonging to the past.’ In other words, it was scenario planning through the rearview mirror.” (extracted from Freedman’s book).

Voila!! Yet another definition of traditional retirement

There you have it.  Another appropriate definition for traditional retirement:  planning through a rear-view mirror, following an 80-year old script applied to a hugely changed longevity and promoted by an industry largely unchanged from a late-1970’s model of insurance and securities salespeople promoting a labor-to-leisure retirement model based purely on dollars and cents and insensitive to the wastefulness that model encourages.

Beware of being consigned to “mass indolence”

Laslett’s “third age” represents a liberation of those of us in our (in Freedman’s words) “ – sixties, seventies and beyond from the psychic strain and misclassification and from the very real  consequences of being assigned to ‘mass indolence.'”

Laslett writes: “The waste of talent and experience is incalculable.”

We need look no further than to our cratering healthcare system, the massive expansion of elder warehouses, the unchanged message of the financial planning industry, rampant ageism, and our youth-oriented media and culture to realize that Laslett was spot on.

What’s your third age going to look like?

At 76, I’m about five years into my true “third age”.  Yep, about a 20-year late start following 40+ years of thrashing around in mismatches in the corporate and self-employment world, operating according to cultural convention instead of my essential self.

Not recommended.

There are days when the regret over a late start and thoughts of what more I could have done will occupy more mental bandwidth than I should permit.  But with a strong belief that my fourth stage will be beyond 100 (see my earlier blog on this topic)  and each day functioning at a higher energy level and with more motivation than I recall from any other stage of my life, I feel my third age holds much promise as it slowly unfolds.

At this age and stage, you learn that today is what you’ve got, nothing else – and that success in life ultimately emanates from gratitude, a quality you will hear expressed frequently by the aforementioned billionaires.

That stirring you feel might just be your third age trying to move from cocoon to butterfly.  My encouragement to you is to listen, not hasten it, or cover it over with cultural constructs, comparison, and comfort-zone living and thus kill the butterfly.

We are anxious to hear what thoughts you have about a “third age” sequence in your life.  Email me at gary@makeagingwork.com or scroll down and leave a comment.

You can still access my free e-book “Achieving Your Full-Life Potential” by subscribing to my weekly newsletter articles at www.makeagingwork.com.