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for December, 2009.
By Gwen
The concept of letting go is far easier to talk about than to execute. Many [current] six-figure women admitted remaining in unfavorable situations, some holding tighter or dangling longer than others. And when they eventually did let go, it wasn’t without second thoughts or stabs of doubt.
It took management consultant Carol Anderson two years to dissolve a business relationship even though it was not healthy. “Those were the worst years I ever had financially. I didn’t have a single client in sight, only four thousand dollars in the bank, and no idea what I’d do next,” she said.
Finally, when she screwed up the courage to leave the situation, she got a call “out of the blue” from a colleague, which resulted in a slew of business. She marks her financial success from the moment she stopped doing something that wasn’t good for her and trusted her resourcefulness to figure out what to do next. “I believe that life works when you’re true to yourself and it doesn’t when you’re not. But I have to keep reminding myself of that all the time.”
Amazing coincidences so often occur as soon as people let go. There’s a perfectly valid explanation. While “intention” is a magnet that attracts what we want, “letting go” provides the space for our desire to manifest.
Barbara Stanny
Secrets of 6 Figure Women
Email me at
discoveryourdharma@gmail.com
for your
FREE 30 minute consultation
By Gwen
If I miss one day’s practice, I notice it.
If I miss two day’s, the critics notice it.
If I miss three days, the audience notices it.
— Ignacy Paderewski,
Concert Pianist
Practice Makes Perfect!
It takes practice to follow your passions. We often get so caught up in getting the next thing done that we don’t stop and ask ourselves if what we’re doing is in line with our passions. Yes, you may have to miss a day’s practice but do you then remember to get back on track! Do you continue to ask yourself “is what I’m doing going to take me closer to, or further away from, my passions … those things that I say are truly important to me?”
Missing a day, or even two, of practice is not about beating yourself up and feeling guilty. It’s just information. It’s a message that you’ve taken a fork in the road you didn’t intend to. We all get lost from time to time. Don’t waste your energy on feeling guilty … use that energy to pick up where you left off and take the next step towards finding meaning and fulfillment.
–Evelin Saxinger, ND
By Gwen
After 25 years of climbing her first ladder at Hewlett-Packard, Gina Cassinelli knew it was time for a change. “All of a sudden, you wake up and you say…I can’t believe I’ve been here 20 or 25 years,” she recalls. “I loved what I did, but I don’t want to do it for 20 more.”
Cassinelli took early retirement, then tried to open a new career door with few guides and little help. “You get to a point in your life where you have to feel like what you’re doing matters,” Cassinelli says. “But how to do it? That’s hard.”
The road used to be much easier. For 50 years, the average fiftysomething American was headed inexorably toward a clear-cut career and life transition: the transition to a leisure-based retirement.
The path was well-marked, with familiar rites like the retirement party and the gold watch. Employers offered enticements for early retirement, starting with pensions and health care. Policies like Social Security and Medicare were true safety nets.
Then the mad men of marketing went to work. On TV and in magazines, insurance firms trumpeted a shimmering vision of the good life. Whole communities with names like Leisure World were set up to cater to a full-throttled golden years’ lifestyle, filled with golf and shuffleboard.
Too Often a Do-It-Yourself Project
Today an unprecedented number of Americans are coursing through their 50s, bound for a dramatically different destination. They’re headed not to the golf course but to a new stage of life that, for most, includes work. Like Cassinelli, a great many want jobs that supply money and meaning, especially if they’re going to have to do them for another decade or two.
But the paths to find this kind of encore career range from dimly lit to nonexistent, and the search is all too often a do-it-yourself project made all the worse by tough financial times.
There’s no getting around reflection and initiative. And there are an increasing number of consultants—life coaches, financial planners, and headhunters—who are willing to help for a fee. But when millions of people are confronting the same transition, their struggles are no longer personal. They constitute a social imperative.
Think back. When millions of soldiers were crossing over from World War II to civilian life, we invented the GI Bill to help them move into a new chapter. Now, with 10,000 boomers crossing over the half-century mark every day, it’s time to tackle their transition not just one at a time, but as a society. At stake is the continued productivity of the largest, healthiest, longest-living, and best-educated generation in American history.
Making the most of this opportunity will require four changes.
We need a collective attitude adjustment. We must recognize that this isn’t merely a vocational shift—it’s not just a transaction (to a new job) but a transition (to a new stage of life stretching between the middle years and true old age). It’s not just about what you’ll do, but who you’ll be, for a period that could last a quarter-century or longer.
We’ll need to invent and adapt a whole range of social institutions, beginning with the two routes we offer young people preparing to start careers—internships and education.
Gina Cassinelli was lucky enough to take advantage of an Encore Fellowship, essentially an internship for grown-ups, being piloted in Silicon Valley. (For more information about Encore Fellowships and other emerging opportunities, see Encore.org.)
She spent the past year working for Citizen Schools, an entrepreneurial nonprofit that provides apprenticeships for young people led by volunteer “citizen teachers.” The experience not only provided a foot in the door but left her brimming with ideas for how to transform education and eager to plunge into a new nonprofit career.
In Portland, Mark Noonan faced a different kind of transition, one born in tragedy. At 52, after his wife died in an accident, Noonan decided to leave an unsatisfying management job and look for something more fulfilling.
He headed back to school at Portland Community College in Oregon. Through a one-year program, he earned an associate’s degree in gerontology and launched a second career with Elders in Action, helping Portland tackle both the challenges and opportunities presented by an aging society.
Cassinelli’s and Noonan’s paths approximate a kind of “gap year” for adults—the chance to catch their breath, test the waters, and fashion a new chapter of life and work.
We’ll have to invent new ways to finance this transition. Even with more ways to try on and train for new roles, underwriting this shift is a formidable barrier. One solution: Instead of telling boomers to save for an unsustainable 30-year retirement, the financial-services industry would do well to develop and market new products aimed at the midlife transition.
How about IPAs—Individual Purpose Accounts—to go along with the retirement-focused IRAs? IPAs could be set up to provide tax breaks for savings focused on education, training, or fellowships after the age of 50. Vehicles of this sort could help individuals invest in their own future by covering the costs of midlife transitions.
Finally, innovations in public policy will be essential, not only in creating tax incentives for savings mechanisms like IPAs, but for fashioning a midlife transition superhighway to replace the rickety routes that currently exist.
Here we won’t have to start from scratch. The new Serve America Act establishes the prospect of federally funded encore fellowships in all 50 states. That’s a start. But given the size of the boomer generation, we require nothing less than a national human resources strategy and policy agenda for the second half of life, one that includes health coverage for the midlife shift.
If we replace the DIY transition with a sturdy passage that helps boomers find new meaning, continued income, and the chance to use all they have invested in their human capital, we can make a virtue out of longer working lives over the next 50 years just as we made a virtue out of shorter ones in the past 50.
In the process, we can turn the demographic wave already washing over us into a new tide of individual and social renewal.
Posted 11/16/2009 – by Marc Freedman www.encore.org
NOTE: This column appeared in BusinessWeek’s special report, “The Case Against Retirement.”
By Gwen
Eight Principles of Goal Orientation
- Prepare your mind before taking action.
- Change your internal image of reality.
- Avoid flattening out by setting goals through, not up to.
- Make the extraordinary ordinary.
- Take the chance, and don’t leave yourself an out.
- Choose what’s good enough for you.
- Grow into the goal.
- Don’t worry about the resources.
Millions of dollars are spent on TV commercials to produce imagery to get you do discontent with the old you that you buy the new. In a car commercial, for example, the camera slides you behind the wheel so you can imagine vividly what it would feel like if you were driving an elegant new car. If you repeat the image often, your subconscious won’t know the difference between pretending that you’re driving the car, and actually driving it. You’ll drive that care 100 more times in your mind. Soon, you’ll have a new image of reality — a new picture of the car that’s “good enough for me.”
Once you compare your new image of “reality” — the elegant new car — with your old image of reality — last years model, you throw your system out of order and become discontent with the old. Anything less than the new car that you visualize will not satisfy you. Eventually, you will invent a way to get the new car. You’ll rationalize, “With the money I save from the new tires I’ll need to buy next year, and with the better gas mileage and the better resale value of the new car, it’ll pay for itself. In fact, I’d be stupid not to buy it!”
By setting goals, you mentally produce your own commercials. You deliberately throw your system out of order to stimulate the creative energy you need to resolve the conflict or achieve the goal. But you must imprint the image of the new into your subconscious so vividly that it is stronger than the way things presently are. The vision must be so strong that you can’t stand the old car anymore. If it isn’t strong, you’ll return to your currently dominant picture.
The aspiration creates the appetite for growth. No goal, no appetite. You first create the appetite, and then you grow.
You and I are always working for order in our minds. Your senses are always asking, “Where am I? How am I? How does this look, feel taste, smell, or sound to me? When your idea of how things are supposed to be doesn’t match your present situation, you experience a conflict. Whenever you sense incongruence, you seek to clean up the mess. Goals, if set properly, stimulate creativity. So, your job is to disrupt the status quo by setting goals and then to imprint the what and they why. You need to write out the what and the way several times a day to imprint the new vision with emotion. IT takes many repetitions to make that image so strong that it’s a done deal. It takes clarity, strong emotion, and repetition to change the image in your mind to a new sense of the way things are supposed to be.
Lou Tice
Smart Talk for Achieving Your Potential
NOTE: The remaining 6 principles will be in following WEDNESDAY blog posts.
By Gwen
Love what you do, and the world gains.
The greatest change happens because of people that are deeply passionate, and have a great love for the work they do.
If you want to make a difference in the world, the single most important thing you can do is consciously and deliberately choose to do work that you are passionate about.
No other choice can have a greater impact on the planet, or your life.
If you’re doing work that’s boring, you probably won’t make much of an impact. You might provide people with some amount of value. Enough to pay your rent, enough to get by. But you won’t be inciting change. And you certainly won’t be inspiring others. If you’re doing boring work, chances are you do just enough to not get fired.
But if you do work that excites you, keeps you up at night, and fulfills you… you’ll do more. You’ll give yourself to it completely. You’ll put in extra time, more energy, more passion. Because it’s worth it. It’s satisfying.
At the end of the day you’ll think: “My time was well spent today.”
So the real question isn’t whether or not to do boring or passionate work. The question is how to get started.
Five things you can do to move toward getting paid to do what you love:
- Find your passion. This is all about your great love, and what makes you come alive. To get started here, ask: “What am I insanely interested in?” “What could I talk about for hours?” and “What would I do for free?”
- Find your strengths. What we’re looking for are things you’re naturally good at, and the unique strengths you’ve had since birth. This is about contributing your gifts to the world. To get started, interview your friends, family, or peers and ask them what three things you’re naturally talented at.
- Find your value. Finding the intersection between what you’re good at and what people are willing to pay you for is what it all boils down to. If you can’t find a way to get paid to do what you love, the other stuff doesn’t really matter. So it’s worth spending some time figuring this out. To get started, think about the benefits you’ll give others by contributing your value. Think about whether or not there is a desperate pain or a deep passion involved in what you’re offering.
- Make the commitment. I think, more than any other reason, people fail to succeed is because they fail to commit. Thinking “I don’t know” or “maybe someday” will not get you to the point of doing what you’re passionate about for a living. It takes an uncompromising commitment to make this change for yourself. Instead of thinking “I don’t know,” think “I’ll figure it out.” Remember, paths are made by walking.
- Be willing to let go. As much as you might want to make this change for yourself, it can be hard to let go of the old patterns of thinking and behaving. A lot of us have ideas that “work shouldn’t be fun” or “you should just suck it up.” Breaking down those beliefs can be difficult, but moving toward a new direction is most definitely worth it.
- What will you give up? You might not think that you have time to take on a new endeavor, and you’re right. You won’t have time until you make the time. There are a lot of things we place in our schedules that we think we must do. But in reality, our world wouldn’t collapse if we chose something else. Make a list of all the activities and time sinks that you’ll give up in order to make time for your new journey.
- Will you say Yes to yourself? You may want to become a writer, dentist, life coach, painter, or public speaker. If you know that this is what you’re meant to do, then give yourself permission to call yourself that… even if you’re not established yet. And even if you don’t make a full time income from it. Own your passion, completely and unreservedly.
While there is more to your journey than just these seven things, this is a huge start. Clarity and commitment are the biggest steps, the rest is easy. One foot in front of the other.
You will get there. No one can stop you if you want it enough.
And remember, the world needs you to do what you love. Nothing else can create more change, or have a greater impact.
Give yourself permission. We need your gifts.
Zen Habits contributor, Jonathan Mead of Illuminated Mind
By Gwen
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
–Mark Twain
By Gwen
Why is it that the holidays are both the most joyful and most STRESSFUL time of the year? We should be thinking about peace on earth, goodwill toward all people, and the start of a new year. Unfortunately, many of us are caught up in unreasonable expectations for our holiday gatherings. We think that if we just do everything right, this holiday will be “PERFECT”. Well, wake up and smell the Yule log! There is no such thing as a perfect holiday — not in real life — and expecting one just sets you up for disappointment. So let’s talk this month about what is REQUIRED for you to experience a pleasant, fulfilling, and stress-free holiday.
Some Practical Organizing Tips…
Look at your true PRIORITIES this holiday season. Decide what this time of year means to you, what you want and don’t want to happen this year — and make those choices about how you will spend your time, money, and energy accordingly.
Create a NOT to do this season — things that you’ve felt pressured to take care of in the past, but you really don’t enjoy and aren’t critical to you enjoying the holiday. Then think about ways to make the chores that are left easier and more enjoyable.
Keep track of what works and what doesn’t this year. Then take steps to REPEAT your successes and correct any problems next year. Choose the kind of holiday you want — through the decisions you make and the way you spend your resources.
www.onlineorganizing.com
By Gwen
Employee turnover has decreased since Civitan Foundation began hiring older caregivers like Leo Levenson, 65, who helps client David Zowin, 43. The problems facing older workers are well documented in the media, so it was refreshing to attend the Encore Opportunity Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., in November 2009, where the buzz in the room was all about the value and values that experienced employees bring to a job. The event honored 10 nonprofits or government organizations that have demonstrated their commitment to encore talent.
“Seven out of 10 nonprofits have recently hired someone we’d think of as in an encore career,” said Civic Ventures Vice President Phyllis Segal, citing recent research done by Civic Ventures and MetLife Foundation. “And those who have done it are far more positive about recruiting the encore workforce than those who haven’t.” That led to what Segal jokingly called her very sophisticated theory on hiring encore talent: “Try it, you’ll like it.”
During a panel discussion and mingling over lunch, a few themes emerged. Social innovators like Elaine Santore (cofounder of Umbrella of the Capital District) stumbled into social entrepreneurship to solve a problem or fill a need. Santore created an organization that matches up individuals over 50 with handypeople to help with household chores. She got the idea when her own mother had to give up her home because she could no longer care for it. By starting Umbrella, Santore created jobs for retired plumbers, carpenters and others looking for part-time work. The business model made sense. “Who better to help a senior than another senior?” she explained.
Many of the people hiring and managing encore talent are in encore careers themselves. “I was CEO of a children’s service agency and took early retirement, the so-called dream. About two and a half years into it, I realized that it just wasn’t for me,” said Jim Fischer, CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Lake-Sumter Florida Inc. Dawn Trapp, executive director of Civitan Foundation, which runs programs for people with disabilities, moved into the nonprofit world after a long career in the travel industry. Captain Cecil Whiteaker, 62, came to the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Dept. after 20 years in the Marines.
The employers talked a lot about how experienced workers tend to have patience and life experience that helps them on the job. Whiteaker found Gwinnett County’s use of older people as jailers to be especially successful. “Sometimes they become mentors or informal counselors to the inmates,” he said. Trapp said she values experienced workers because they tend to make a commitment to the work. “We were predominantly hiring college students and turnover was very high,” she said.
Intergenerational issues do exist in these organizations, but they aren’t insurmountable. “We force good communication because we put people together and expect it,” said Habitat for Humanity’s Fischer. “We always try to mix our resources on a task, like sending a 21- and a 72-year-old out on a truck. We’re also seeing a lot of mentoring which goes both ways, especially around technology.”
Diane Piktalis, an expert on boomers and workplace issues who helped select the winners, closed with a gentle command to employers to go home and replicate their activities. At least one organization in attendance, Umbrella of the Capital District, is already doing that.
Marci Alboher’s blog
www.encore.org
Email me at
discoveryourdharma@gmail.com
for your
FREE 30 minute consultation
By Gwen
Eight Principles of Goal Orientation
- Prepare your mind before taking action.
- Change your internal image of reality.
- Avoid flattening out by setting goals through, not up to.
- Make the extraordinary ordinary.
- Take the chance, and don’t leave yourself an out.
- Choose what’s good enough for you.
- Grow into the goal.
- Don’t worry about the resources.
Preparing for personal change and growth is a process of familiarizing yourself beforehand with the new situation; familiarizing yourself beforehand with a new environment; familiarizing yourself beforehand with the new behavior. REMEMBER: All meaningful and lasting change starts on the inside first, and works it’s way out. Change starts in the imagination, and then manifests itself externally.
If you first don’t change your internal picture of who you are, you tend to revert to the familiar. For example, suppose that you consciously force yourself to lose weight without first changing your self-picture. If you still see yourself as 20 pounds overweight, your belief system will keep you there. You might temporarily lose weight, but when you let go of conscious control, you return automatically to your currently dominant picture, to the way things are supposed to be.
This is like cooking from a recipe. When you open a cookbook to a recipe, what do you see? The ingredients. But what do you see in your mind’s eye? The finished product — a baked cake.
The recipe for change is to deliberately throw your system out of order. Create dissonance inside yourself so you will have the energy and drive to change your picture. Take your ideal and visualize it and affirm it as if it’s already done in the first person, present tense.
If you use affirmation and visualization to upgrade “where you belong” before you go out of your comfort zone, you won’t feel the tension when you actually get there. For example, to prepare your kids for kindergarten, you talk with them about it months in advance, not the day before. You get the kids to visualize the kindergarten environment so vividly, the feel as thought they’ve already been there. Then you ca’t keep them home. If the child visualizes kindergarten in advance and affirms, “I’m going to have a great time,” that child will comfortable adapt.
That’s how you feel when you set goals properly: “I’ve been there. This goal is mine.”
NOTE: The remaining 7 principles will be in following WEDNESDAY blog posts.
Lou Tice
Smart Talk for Achieving Your Potential
Email me at
discoveryourdharma@gmail.com
for your
FREE 30 minute consultation
By Gwen
Just as I began writing this chapter, I got an excited call from my friend Kitty Reeve.
“I made six figures this year,” she announced with a mixture of pride and astonishment.
My jaw dropped at the news. I knew Kitty was an average earner, a freelance writer and photographer. But last year, at age 58, she turned a sideline interest into a thriving business, becoming an Internet consultant in on-line community, content, and strategy.
”How did you do it?” I asked, absolutely shocked.
Her answer was immediate. “I realized I had to put aside the myth that money was bad. I used to think there’s a limited supply and if you have more then someone else has less. If I do OK, some woman is homeless. I wouldn’t ever let myself make money until I changed my attitude. I was blocking myself.”
In every spiritual discipline, the master’s first task is to tear down the novice’s view of the world. In Zen, the metaphor most often used is the overflowing teacup. We must first empty the container before we can refill it. Similarly, if our minds are full of limiting thoughts, there’s no room for the expansive ones. Success can only come when there’s space for it to enter.
Barbara Stanny
Secrets of 6 Figure Women
Email me at
discoveryourdharma@gmail.com
for your
FREE 30 minute consultation
"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."