Over-50

Aging & Working: It (also) takes a village to help us navigate that

Betty White has become known for her line, "Aging isn't for sissies." She said that in one of her books even though aging has provided her with a whole new branding.  She was referring to aging in general.  

When it comes down to us mature professionals who intend to continue to keep working it's an understatement that such a goal isn't for sissies.  Since I turned 58, when my industry blew up, I have been hitting bottoms as well as magnificent highs in operating my own business.  In May I will be 69.  I have no intention of ever retiring. 

But I would have thrown in the towel had I not been living in a "village" where emotional support, wise motherly advice and one of those eye-rolls now and then have kept me focused on my goal.  Yes, a village is not only needed to guide children, as Hillary Clinton noted.  A village is mandated for the challenge of overcoming those with garlic in their soul who would like us over-50 to become invisible.  And free up work slots for them.

I got lucky.  The villagers came to me.  The first to arrive was former college classmate and newspaper editor at Seton Hill Lee Harrison.  Her photo is to the left.  I was at one of several bottoms. She was both the good mother and the annoyed eye-roller about stupid moves I was making.

Then, Lee brought in her posse.  Mostly they have been other college buddies like Kathleen Huebner, Irene Nunn, Charlotte Toal and Karen Codaro.  Finally, a best friend from the good old days Anne Desmond also approached.  

Why the villager factor is so powerful is because they are my age (Lee being the exception who is one year younger).  They know exactly what buttons to press to encourage me in a fresh direction. Likewise they spot immediately my bad habit of chasing assignments I see as cool and which, as my magical thinking goes, will make me seem youthful.  Either I don't get the assignments. Or I do and screw up.  After all, I am a 68 year old writer.  Not one of the cool kids on Gawker.

Lately, villagers and I have been knocking around the idea of my relocating to Arizona (where Kathleen pitched her tent several years ago).  They sense and I sense it's time to try out the southern market for my services.  And leave the New York Metro glamour market to the young.  Because I am on the East Coast, the south hasn't taken me seriously.  Also, the cost of living is lower.  I could afford to choose my assignments.  

How can you establish your village?  Break open to possibility.  If you are, they will come.  We aging are eager to help each other - and generous in doing that.  We know no one is going to go to bat for us.  

One tactic is to form a Working Anonymous 12-step program in the village.  The first step is, "I am powerless over aging and the bias of the work world has made my professional life unmanageable." To conduct the meetings order "The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions" of AA on Amazon.com.

The village has a new resident, a four-footer.  The posse talked me into adopting him after my 18-year-old feline companion died.  I named him Lee K., after Lee and Kathleen.  Because I have Lee K. I can consider relocating for a shot at new kinds of business opportunities for my executive and marketing communications boutique.  I won't be doing it alone.  Lee K. et al. will be there.

Baby Boomer Moment of Clarity: We are no longer in the spotlight

That moment of clarity.  It's when we see and embrace a painful reality.  The classic one is the the unhealthy looking man in the bar, staring into the mirror, recognizing himself as the drunk he is and deciding to take the first step into recovery.  

For many of us Baby Boomers that moment of clarity is that the spotlight is no longer shining on us. Yes, we may be still able to bring in income, maybe a lot of it.  Last year the revenues from my executive and marketing communications boutique was higher than it had been in several years. I have been able to pay off all but a $7,000 balance on credit cards.  My portfolio is excellent.  My references speak well of me.

But, I am no longer a star.  No longer does my brandname pop into prospects' minds and they consider me their first choice.  I have become a vendor who has to pitch aggressively for accounts.  The good news is that I do nail down enough to be financially secure, for now. The bad news is that it feels like a punch in the stomach to recognize that I no longer set off wattage.

Sure, there are those in their 60s, 70s and even 80s whose light didn't dim.  They range from Warren Buffett to Roger Ailes.  They remain celebrities. 

But the more likely scenario, even if we are late bloomers, is that we have to embrace being just another vendor among vendors, worker among workers and part-timer among part-timers.  The gain from this is that all our energy can go into our lives. None of it gets consumed in watching others watch us. 

Baby Boomers: Back to the past, to improve current professional performance

Listen to spiritual advisors, psychotherapists, psychics, 12-step sponsors and close friends and they often hammer one thing to us Baby Boomers who are professionally stuck: Drop the baggage from the past.  Sometimes the best way to get our arms around that task is to return to the past.

Before technology gave us social networking sites like Facebook we had to depend on class reunions to do that.  Now and then we might attempt to get back in touch with our buddies who had drifted away.  That usually was awkward and left us feeling like we had made a stupid mistake.

Thanks to Facebook, over a two-year period I got to re-visit the past, on my terms.  I could comment and "like" as often as I found it useful.  I could stand back for weeks if I decided I needed to absorb the insight I was receiving about who I was, who they were and who we all are now.

What kind of baggage have I been able to dump?

At the top of the list is the self-hate for the person I used to be.  The amazing realization is that few remember that person as I did.  More importantly no one cares.  Everyone is preoccupied with the challenges of the present.

Secondly, genuine caring exists.  After being battered by the economy and disappointing relationships, we can become cynical about just about everything.  Such a mindset doesn't represent the world as it is.  For example, when I had two biopsies for breast cancer, my former college buddies cared.  They include Lee Harrison, Dr. Kathleen Huebner, Irene Nunn and Charlotte Toal.  They truly shared the good news when the test results were negative.  

Third, people can teach us more than the experts.  I had read a zillion books about aging.  But it was in the back and forth with folks on Facebook that I could come to terms with aging. They gave me the gift of their personal experience.

For now, I plan to invest less energy in Facebook.  It seems my college friends are at the same point on their social network sharing.  This might be a time to integrate what we have learned. Or it may represent a fork in the road when we go the last parts of our life's journey without each other in our present.  However, those people will now always remain in my memory bank.  I can dip into it when I become stuck.

Baby Boomers: We're letting it be, finally

The Counterculture was supposed to be about letting it be.  

We drove across the nation in our VW bugs singing Beatles songs about that.  But, come on, few of us Baby Boomers really got the hang of that -until now.  And that's why some of us have turned out to be late bloomers. 

For example, I can now do my writing, both in client work and for my own self expression, without going through such self doubt and angst.  A college classmate won first prize in an art contest.  Another made peace with herself that she will never be "famous." A friend who had been canary yellow from alcohol abuse never thinks about a drink.  

How did all that happen?  The Counterculture, built on a Disney vision of peace and love, never told us life would be full of pain.  It was.  That has been a shock.  But we got on the other side of that.  And that was what did the trick.  In a sense we don't care, at least not as much as we used to. And we stopped trying so hard. We just let it be.

Baby Boomers: New Great Divide Is Those Who Know How to Find Work, Those Who Don't

It's palpable.  Status, influence and having a sense of self - all that has shifted to the Baby Boomers among us who manage to find work.  That's the new great divide.  It's the acid test for if we are able to navigate reality in the 21st century.  Our past doesn't matter.  How much we make doesn't matter.  How we make a living doesn't matter. What matters is if we need/want to work and have managed to score on that count. 

"She will never find a job."  That's how folks in the senior citizen complex where I live have written off one of our younger residents.  She's only in her late 50s.  And, it's become obvious that she is doing it all wrong in looking for a job.  This has been going on long enough that she has taken on the "smell" of being unemployable.  Increasingly she's being isolated.  It scares others that she is so unable to figure out new realities.

Another woman, at least the last I had heard, had been out of work for 20 months.  Her attitude has hardened in brittle defensiveness.  We all have a hunch the negatively seeps through in interviews.  Yes, she does interviews.  But never closes on a job. Of course, she "smells."

So, how can you make the leap from being unemployable to landing work, any kind?  It's an inside job.  You have to admit that everything has changed.  Most of us represent glut.  We are older and less attractive to employers and clients/customers.  Wages and fees have undergone some deflation.  Once we accept that then we can allow that internal paradigm shift or 180 which opens us to looking for work in fresh ways.  The past is not prologue. 

2013: A Facebook Christmas with Former College Classmates

Last Christmas season, former college classmate Lee Harrison was pulling up stakes in a small town in Ohio and relocating to a small town in North Carolina.  The reason was her husband Ed's business.  

My blogging on that wrenching transition made it to Facebook.  Lee, who I had just caught up in life about a year before, has a network of seeming thousands.  The blogging content went viral.  

No slouch when it comes to effective ways to get traffic for my three syndicated blogs (here and here are the other two), I began hanging out on Facebook.  Very soon, I re-acquainted myself with other members of the Seton Hill University Class of '67.

They now include Irene Nunn, Kathleen Huebner, Charlotte Toal and Karen Cordaro, with outlier (not yet with us on Facebook) Anne Desmond.  Together we sorted out aging, grief, estrangement from siblings (big!), the value still in reading books, medical crises in the family and pets as therapists. 

This holiday season, the first time since my neurons switched on "depressive" when I was 11, has been, well, pleasant.  No, I am not running down the hills of Connecticut belting out joyful lyrics.  But I discovered the strength and cleverness how to make the season work for me.  

For instance, I brought in new business by opening myself to prospects who wanted to meet on Skype about urgent projects.  Previously I couldn't have been up for that because, you got it, too depressed. 

Time traveling through the past, present and future through Facebook has been a breakthrough experience.  It's the college buddies, not family members, neighbors or those we networked with on the job, who we are able to let into our minds and hearts.  Maybe that's because they never really left. 

"Dallas Buyers Club" - Work heals, provides dignity

Lowlife rodeo hanger-on Ron Woodroof is diagnosed with HIV in 1985.  Through his search for effective treatment he becomes an entrepreneur, setting up the "Dallas Buyers Club."  In the process he adds seven years onto the amount given by the medical establishment, helps others, and develops a sense of self. 

Some claim this film is about resilience.  I don't agree. I see in this true story the old American theme of the redemptive power of hard work. Way back to Puritan times, when folks got themselves into a pickle, they were told to get busy and work hard.  

This lesson is very timely for us Baby Boomers who may be riding a roller coaster staying in the workforce.  When I was at bottoms in restoring my once-lucrative business, I would grab a job, any job.  That would get me busy, working.  Soon enough I put together the marketing plan which brought in new business for my communications boutique.

SuperAgers: WarrenBuffett, Rupert Murdoch, Betty White as role models

The SuperAgers don't try to come across as young.  In fact, one of them - Betty White - leverages aging as her personal branding.  Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch have taken on none of the protective coloring of youth.  Their positioning and packaging are all about getting results, having influence, and throwing thunder bolts of smart strategic and tactical moves.

Those roles are open to us.  To take them on we have to embrace that the past is over and the present is full of opportunity.  The trick is to identify those opportunities and figure out how to go after them. 

One tactic that's working for me is to present myself to prospects and clients as the voice of experience, mixed with comprehensive understanding of current trends in my field of communications.  That leads their attention away from "She's Old" to "Hey, she can get results for us."

Another tactic is to dump anything which is draining energy.  Executive coach Henry Cloud hammered the importance of that in his breakthrough book "Necessary Endings." That mandates we become brutal about cutting ties which are no longer emotionally nurturing or professionally useful.

A third one is to frame a bad day as just that.  Setbacks, disappointments, criticism don't mean that our best days in our field are behind us. Those kinds of whacks to the ego mean that we are still playing the game.  On the bench, no one gets hit. 

 

 

 

Success! Baby Boomer migrates from sweat-shop deli work to full-time job, with benefits at brandname supermarket

Eight months ago this Baby Boomer was a down-and-out unemployed male with child-support payments overdue.  He had to make money.  And that he did through just-in-time work for a local deli. The tasks were not only sweat-shop.  They were also back-breaking.  Those included unloading gigantic shipments and then stocking the shelves.  

His attitude was extraordinary.  Even the Machiavellian owner, who had gone through tons of employees, noticed. The man got a lot of hours but not enough to qualify him for benefits.  The hourly pay remained low.

Today I ran into him on the elevator at the complex where we both live. He was wearing a shirt and tie.  He looked taller.  I asked him where he had been.  He told me about his full-time job at a brandname supermarket.  Yes, he is a member of the union and receives benefits.  The powers that be are training him to head a whole department.  

I asked him if he felt that his work in the deli had given him the edge in nailing this opportunity.  He answered that he didn't want to look backward, only at the present.  He added that he was grateful for what was now in his now.

 

Revenge of the Late Bloomers: Perks of getting older

Who doesn't ask themselves the question: Why do some make it big, at least relatively speaking, and some just about make it?  And since we are living longer we have many more years to keep pondering that.

For me, that question shifted around 2006.  University of Chicago professor David W. Galenson published his research in the form of the book "Old Masters and Young Geniuses."  What he found was that there were two kinds of accomplishments.  

One is done early in life by the Mozarts.  They find their direction and talent and that's that.  The other is by those who keep experimenting.  It isn't until they are 50 or 60, like Frank Lloyd Wright, that they can put it together in a way that leads to success. 

More and more of us Baby Boomers are finding ourselves in the second category.  No, we weren't failures before.  It's that we are hitting our stride now.  A reason might be that society pays less attention to us.  The pressure is off.  We can finally try out things.  We can absorb and use our failures in private.  We have the strength to say "no" to this and that in order to focus on our work.

My work is being a ghostwriter/speechwriter.  It's like being an actor in that I take on other people identities.  There were times when I made a very good living.  However, my talent still hadn't really developed.  Now, at age 68, I have entered a fresh, no pun intended, phase of my career.  Clients are, well, wowed.  I feel like a "master," the term Galenson uses.  

Yesterday, I received the assignment to ghostwrite a second book in a short time.  I also have been accepted into the Motley Fool stable of business writers.  My client in Canada, who I am guiding in how to promote herself in the academic niche, said she "loved" the new strategy I proposed.  On Monday I start with the online tutorial for writers and data, funded by McGraw-Hill.  I was awarded a free spot in that program.  Like, everything is about data now. 

Where can this all lead?  The nice thing is that I can do it my way. No one is watching.  No one cares.