Everyone wants long term success. But it is elusive for most.

Long term success is dependent on knowing where you are now and where you are headed. Then closing the gap. Frequently. Continuously.  Whether it’s your business, your career or your life at home., it’s easy to get off track, lose touch or get buried under. Without a true sense of where you are in the moment, it is impossible to realize your dreams or be a leader in your field.

Re-calibrate your profound knowledge

The only way we can take 100% responsibility for sustaining our success is to keep re-calibrating-in every aspect of our lives and organizations.

Key to successful recalibration is to acquire what my dear departed mentor, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, coined as Profound Knowledge. This umbrella phrase emphasizes understanding change and how to measure it, being aware of emerging trends and shifts, and learning how to apply this knowledge to leading and sustaining long term success.

Bottom line: If we don’t acquire Profound Knowledge we cannot know how to prepare for and leverage coming change, thus how to sustain our success long term.

Understanding change means understanding shifts in our personal world as well as tracking trends that capsize us, overtake us, or cause us to flounder.

Learning the Hard Way

Unfortunately one of my Gen X male clients learned this the hard way. A rising star in his field and recently married, he was planning far a great future for his kids, tons of time for fun and all the trappings of success. As if out of the blue, the rug got pulled out from under him. His “Happy Homemaker” wife fled, saying I’m out of here!

Somewhere along the way there was a breakdown or perhaps many small fissures below the surface. Had they been recalibrating an checking in with each other, communicating the truth of what was so for each of them…perhaps they could have saved their marriage…or at least ended it with love, grace, and forgiveness.

Even in the most secure relationships, unexpected change happens to ruffle our plans. A recently returned to work mother of teenage kids reported that her new career is now going gangbusters and she no longer worries about the empty-nest . But, the new ripple in her life is that her once very successful husband, in his late 40’s, now faces an unknown future. Surprised by the shifts in his industry, “suddenly” he and his business partner are facing the probability of closing their doors. What once appeared to be the sure path to their dreams, is no crumbling beneath them.

Change is inevitable. If you can learn what Profound Knowledge is and apply it you can avoid these same pitfalls and NOT LEARN THE HARD WAY!

What steps are you going to take to future cast your long term success?

If there is one aspect of being post-50 that we all share in one way or another, it is the concern about care—caring for our parents, our spouses, our grandchildren, our children. Many of you can probably check off several of the above as immediate areas of concern, especially if you are a member of the sandwich generation, those caring for aging parents while still helping your children get on their feet in a slowly recovering economy.

Women especially find themselves in caretaking roles, even as more and more of us are also working full time. The physical, emotional, and financial strain inevitably takes its toll. Yet the one person who seems to be left off the list for care is the one person who is most crucial to everyone’s needs being met—you.

This is not news to you, I’m sure. Yes, yes, you know you must replenish yourself so that you have something left to give, but who has time? And on the one hand, you can know that you have to make time, even a little, or you will simply wipe yourself out and not be there for anyone, yet even knowing this, you push forward. That superwoman ethos we first imposed on ourselves as working mothers, able to do it all, has not gone away.

Our nest may be empty, but we still feel responsible for everyone’s well-being. We are “younger” and healthier than people our age were a generation ago. We’re thinking about starting a business more often than we’re thinking of retiring from one. Yet we know that we won’t live forever, and we can’t deny that our energy is not the same as it once was. It’s shifting, yet our lifestyles are not necessarily shifting with it.

I’m not talking about recognizing that we really do need to retire. Just the opposite, actually. Too often we get stuck in either/or thinking, that we either keep going at the same pace and in the same way as we have always done or we throw in the towel and retire to some cookie cutter senior complex in the desert. But those aren’t the only choices. Those really aren’t choices at all, frankly.

When I say that our energy is shifting, I mean just that. It is simply moving within us, changing form, no longer the energy of all-nighters to meet a deadline or the kind that fuels caring nonstop for small children. But it is still there, and it is even more powerful than ever before. Especially at menopause and beyond, the energy heats up in us creatively. We can easily miss this, however, if we are focused only on trying to make use of the physical energy we think we need to accomplish everything we want to and need to in our lives.

This is why it is crucial to find time to care for yourself. Not only do you need to restore yourself physically and emotionally, but you need to learn how to get in touch with this creativity so that you can use it to shift gears and rebalance, to determine what you need to do now to start that business, for example, so that it nurtures you and fits best with who you are and who you will be with each passing year. Especially if you are feeling stuck in a cycle of work and caregiving, these moments to pause and reflect, to express yourself and tap into your inner wisdom, are necessary if you are going to get unstuck and find solutions that go beyond quick fixes.

Believe it or not, taking time for yourself now will free your time in the future, making it possible for you to not only rise above the day-to-day but to give more to others and to the world in ways that don’t drain you but sustain you. Take the time—make the time—today.

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Sound financial planning is an obvious answer, but it’s also an ideal-world answer. In the real world, the effects of the recession, the costs of caring for parents and children, and the denial of the eventual effects of aging on our health are just a few factors that can make financial planning not enough to secure the future.

For many, the solution is to work past retirement age, some by necessity but many others out of desire to keep working. Individuals and companies are catching on to the idea of flexible working options, particularly those that allow telecommuting, job sharing, and shorter work weeks. These are benefits not just for Boomers but for the younger working generations as well.

Most age-friendly ideas for the workplace (and indeed for our homes and communities) are beneficial to all ages and stages. The sooner organizations and governments recognize this (and the more we emphasize it), the more prosperous and secure we will all be, in the workplace and as a nation.

In fact, longevity has been shown to have a positive effect on the economy. A 2005 study, “The Value of Health and Longevity,” by Robert Topel and Kevin Murphy, of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, demonstrates massive economic benefit to living longer and healthier than in the past:

Over the 20th century, cumulative gains in life expectancy were worth over $1.2 million per person for both men and women. Between 1970 and 2000 increased longevity added about $3.2 trillion per year to national wealth, an uncounted value equal to about half of average annual GDP over the period. Reduced mortality from heart disease alone has increased the value of life by about $1.5 trillion per year since 1970. The potential gains from future innovations in health care are also extremely large. Even a modest 1 percent reduction in cancer mortality would be worth nearly $500 billion

Therein lies the paradox: Longevity is undeniably good for the economy as a whole while presenting economic challenges for the individual. How do we bring the economic benefits to the individual?

This question is crucial not only for Boomers but also for future generations, especially the equally massive Millennial generation. We need more than short-term fixes. We need lasting changes in the workplace as well as changes in how we—at the individual, organizational, and governmental level—ensure a financial safety net that is adequate for the longer lives many of us will live.

What changes would you like to see in the workplace and in government policy to ensure longevity is a boon for all of us?

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With cancer care, this is a particularly serious issue. Findings by the Institute of Medicine show that far too many oncologists and other providers involved in treating cancer are not providing the best care, even when they are doing their best.

Part of the problem is actually a positive development: cancer research is moving forward rapidly, with new discoveries happening apace. Finding time to not only keep up with this research but translate it into practice is difficult for far too many doctors.

For example, the advances in genetics research show that the same type of cancer can be very different from person to person, including how a person will respond to particular treatments. Yet many people with cancer do not know this and are not tested to determine which treatment has the best chance of working.

This is, of course, on top of the ongoing problem of healthcare providers not giving patients all the information they need to make informed decisions.

The Institute of Medicine makes several recommendations for improvements from the healthcare side of things, but most of us can’t afford to wait on this notoriously slow system to change. We have to take our health into our own hands.

Cancer specialist Dr. Patricia Ganz recommends starting with these questions of your doctors if you are receiving care for cancer or are about to start:

—How long does the average person with this cancer live?

—What is my likelihood of a cure?

—If I can’t be cured, will I live longer with treatment? How much longer?

—Will this care directly treat the cancer, or improve my symptoms, or both?

—What are the side effects?

—Am I healthy enough to try this treatment, or will my other health conditions and medications interfere?

—How many times have you done this procedure?

—What does the care cost?

—Am I eligible for clinical trials?

If you don’t get clear answers, seek a second opinion . . . or third, or fourth, until you are satisfied. This is good practice with any healthcare issue, of course, but when we’re most vulnerable can be the most difficult time to be assertive. Bring your questions in writing or bring someone to advocate for you.

I’ve talked before about 50+ women and men having the most disposable income of any other demographic, making our age group the crucial consumer in the marketplace. The same is true with our health care. The more we speak up and change the way we expect to be treated, the more we can mobilize a change in how we are treated.

Karen Sands, MCC, BCC  Phone

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You will have the opportunity to examine the hottest topic on the minds of leading CSAs and newbies alike.

Join me to kick-start a unique conversation on how to turn what keeps CSAs like you up at night into assets for the Longevity Economy.

Insights gained will become the foundation for developing and implementing effective, innovative – yes, even visionary, new approaches.

Leading GeroFuturist best-selling author, firecracker speaker, game changer, and thought leader on the Longevity Economy, 40+ market, the business of aging, and ageless aging. A world-class trusted advisor, Master Certified Coach and expert authority, Karen boldly advocates for the new story of our age.  Karen guides go-getter entrepreneurs, trailblazers, and visionary leaders to their niche in the global business of aging while evolving their role in response to this new narrative. Karen is an in-demand speaker known for dynamic presentations and a remarkable gift for captivating any audience!

Contact Information: http://www.karensands.com/ | 203-266-1100 | Karen@KarenSands.com| https://www.linkedin.com/in/karensands/

Books:http://www.karensands.com/store/
The Ageless Way
The Ageless Way – A Companion Journal/Workbook
The Greatness Challenge
Gray is the New Green
Visionaries Have Wrinkles
Visionaries Have Wrinkles Reflections Journal
Visionaries Have Wrinkles Reflections Card Deck
Ageless Reinvention (Releasing 2018-2019)
Mastering Reinvention for Midlife & Beyond – (Re-releasing 2018-2019)

Let us try to see things from their better side: You complain about seeing thorny rose bushes;
Me, I rejoice and give thanks to the gods That thorns have roses.  

~ Alphonse Karr

Have you ever heard the phrase “Where attention goes, energy flows”? Where we choose to focus our thoughts can impact the quality of our lives. Though I think denying reality under the guise of “staying positive” can be damaging, and I do not believe positive thinking, on its own, will magically change everything, I do believe that our mindset and approach can offset negativity for ourselves and those around us, particularly when grounded in reality and tempered by intention.

A 2012 New York Times article, Older People Become What They Think, A Study Shows addressed this concept in regards to how we age. Among its assertions? “When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows. When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability. For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.”

So how do we shift ages-old culturally ingrained stereotypes about aging? How do we find resilience even when facing downsides to growing older like physical problems or disabilities, issues with illness, grief from increasing losses, and other tender life occurrences? My feeling is that Positive Aging must be rooted in authenticity, a genuine grasp of the up sides and down sides of aging and of yourself, as well as a conscious choice to discard what is not true for you and to embrace both what is true and what is possible. Often, it is precisely those of us over 40, who have garnered the kind of knowledge that can only come with time, who are best poised to face life’s challenges with a deeper, authentic sense of hope, optimism, and fortitude.

I never see what happens to me as tragic. And I’ve surely had my share of challenging times. I always find the silver lining and some positive rationale as to what my takeaway is going to be. So what kinds of benefits come to mind when I consider a more positive aging experience? For starters, as we age, many of us no longer are held back by the same all-consuming self-doubt of earlier years, so we are freer to be true to our inner nature (and in times when we do doubt, we are more aware of available resources for re-visioning our old self-stories).

~ Those of us who have lived through a multitude of experiences often find we know how to be more optimistic.

~ We may have fewer regrets as we learn to be less judgmental and have a broader context within which to examine and assess all that happens in the world.

~ We may tell our truths more courageously given a more solid sense of self.

~ With something learned from every experience and a deeper sense of self-trust, we value that each of us has deep wisdom and are able to be more discerning in our choices, what we share, and with whom.

~ We often feel less self-conscious about exploring and expressing our playfulness and creativity and are more capable of showing up with full presence to ourselves and each other. (Quick Aside: I am excited to share more detailed descriptions of these and other beneficial aspects of aging with you when my new book, The Ageless Way, is published).

Rather than seeing growing older as a reason to be discounted, let’s acknowledge and honor the beneficial aspects of aging so we can move into the future with the sound knowledge of our place in attending to, thus ensuring, a thriving, more alive, realistic and inter-connected (hence healthier) self, community, and world.

What realities of aging are you currently contending with and what benefits of aging are allowing you to find the silver lining in, and work through, your experiences?

However, from the vibrating heart of our dissipating structures comes the promise of our true greatness: a greatness of awareness and action that will change the world. From the midst of the evolving Great Transition, we leave the Great Recession and the uplifting Obama era behind us as we enter an unknown, unchartered new cycle of populism and extreme radicalism ripping our valued democratic tenets to shreds and putting each of us on the line.  This Great Shift demands that we each unlock our potential for greatness which lives in each of us, and we are being called to make a difference. That is the premise of The Greatness Challenge, in which I offer a template for embracing and embodying our unique Signature Greatness DNA^SM to unleash our personal and collective greatness.

The Greatness Challenge is a manifesto for the growing wave of us who want to add value in all we do and who are being called to personal and collective evolution—from dentists to doctors, executives to engineers, artists to teachers and visionary leaders and futurists who are looking to redesign their lives so that every moment counts . . . for those of you who seek work that not only fills your bank accounts but your “values” bank as you yearn to do well doing good . . . for leaders who seek a pathway to visionary leadership, so the impact you have is of the greatest benefit for all.

To be one of the first to hear about The Greatness Challenge when it releases join us in the Secret Facebook Group here.

To Hire or Not to Hire: Family Caregiving and When It’s Time for a Helping Hand

By: Samantha Stein

A secure long term care coverage is difficult to find, especially when it concerns your parents. Who do you trust with their care? Would an insurance policy be enough? And which long term care insurance companies can you truly rely on?

One of the biggest components of a comprehensive long term care plan is identifying where your loved one wants to receive the care. Understandably, many individuals opt to receive care and age in their own homes for as long as their health permits it. The main reason for this is because they are most comfortable there; their houses are their safe zones. For many families, however, adult children are left to provide the care that their parents need despite the repercussions in their own lives.

This is the reality for many Millennials and Gen Xers. Thanks for the changing market that left plenty of the Baby Boomers underprepared for their own long term care needs, Millennials and Gen Xers called upon to provide the support that they need.

For many, the support that their parents need is in the form of caregiving.

Family caregiving is not an easy task. While it can be truly rewarding, the role can cause severe stress and anxiety on anyone. Many caregivers have had to drastically change their lifestyles to accommodate the new task. Some individuals have had to leave their chosen careers to care for a loved one while others have had to cut back on hours just to make room for the new demands. On top of that, family caregivers are also at risk emotionally, physically, mentally, and financially.

Fortunately, some individuals and agencies specialize in providing the care that many people need. Hiring caregivers is an ideal option because this setup provides a way for adult children to ensure that their parents get the best care without sacrificing aspects of their lives.

What to Look for in a Caregiver

Looking for a good caregiver is a challenging task, but preparing a list of qualifications and considerations can help immensely. Many people apply to senior caregiving jobs, but not all of them possess the necessary skills to provide the care needed.

Before interviewing someone for the caregiver position, you need to know the specific tasks necessary in providing the care for your parents. You may want your caregiver to help them out with personal care or meal preparation. You may also require a highly skilled person when it comes to monitoring of medications and housecleaning.

Caregiving Duties and Responsibilities

When sorting out applicants, you need to read their resumes carefully and determine the type of caregiving services they can offer. Standard duties and responsibilities of caregiving fall into three categories – companionship, home helper, and personal care.

• Companionship refers to activities that assists and encourages an individual. Providing stabilization and assistance with walking and preparing meals are examples of companionship.
• Home helper involves light housekeeping, doing errands, or incidental transporting of an older individual.
• Personal care includes assisting a person with bathing, grooming, and toileting.

Additional Qualifications

If you are short listing caregiver applicants, you might as well hire someone who possesses exceptional skills and qualifications. For example, hire someone who can drive your parents to the doctor’s clinic. Moreover, it will be helpful if you could find a caregiver who can lift, push, or pull a minimum of 25 lbs. If your family member needs assistance with transporting, the caregiver can help him or her move around the house without a problem. Essential qualifications that you need to look out for also include specialized training with CPR and life support or certification for medication monitoring.

Certainly, finding the right person to care for your parents is not easy. If you are looking for someone to tend to the needs of your loved one, consider the tips above.

Becoming More Involved

“Do you feel like 24 hours in a day is not enough?”—no one agrees more with this sentiment than the Millennials and Gen Xers.

Holding down a full-time job, raising their own children, acquiring advanced degrees—these are just some of the most important aspects that fill your lives as Millennials and Gen Xers. However, more and more individuals are being called upon to fill the role of family caregiver.

Though hiring an extra set of hands can help, you need to keep in mind that they cannot fully provide one important factor in their parents’ wellbeing: the comfort and companionship through family ties.

Understandably, accomplishing everything is easier said than done. There are already so many responsibilities on your plates that it is a struggle to incorporate caring for your parents into it. However, it can be managed.

Listed below are ways to help you succeed in providing care to your parents, on top of the demands of your everyday life.

• Share The Tasks

Other than the hired caregiver, spread the duties and visits between siblings. Create a schedule that is manageable for you and your siblings that also ensures your parents get regular visits.

• Explain Your Situation at Work

Employers are now more understanding of understanding of the demands of caregiving. They are now more accommodating, and some even offer family caregiver leaves. Others offer flexible working hours to their employees caring for their relatives.

• Support Others in the Same Situation

This might not help immediately, but appreciation and affirmation from others going through the same situation can boost a person’s outlook. Caregiving can be a big responsibility, but random acts of kindness from people in the same boat can lift anyone’s spirits.

• Sometimes, Spending Time Together is Enough

You do not have to do anything grand. Sometimes, having tea on their porch and just talking can go a long way. This type of downtime can help your parents feel valued. It can also give you time to step back from your hectic life and rest.

• Use Technology to Your Advantage

When your schedule gets too packed and physical visits become challenging, technology can bridge the gap. The misconception that most people have about Baby Boomers is that they are not good when it comes to technology. This is not entirely true.

Skype or FaceTime with them or simply call them on their mobile phones. That is what makes technology wonderful—it helps people connect even though their thousands of miles way. Taking a few minutes to call and say hi will not take too much from your day.

The reality is that caregiving can be a stressful and frustrating task. It is not easy, but it can be rewarding. These are our parents and our grandparents, and they have spent their lives providing for the family. Whether you choose to hire or step up and provide the care, are you doing everything to ensure that your parents are well protected and cared for now that the roles are reversed?

Over the past few months, I’ve traversed the country speaking and reporting, and everywhere I go, I keep hearing the recurring theme of “reimagining.” This paradigm-changing phrase is a favorite of mine, and now it is morphing into a meme . . . especially around retelling our generational story and our her-story.

For post-50 women especially, this theme is empowering. On every level, from how we see and feel about our bodies to our potential to kickstart a new era of visionary entrepreneurship, we can surpass the limits of imagined stereotypes about aging and being women. We start by consciously reimagining alternative futures for ourselves—personally and professionally—and for our families and the world seven generations ahead.

Our future is ripe with possibility, yet something is bugging me. It’s like biting into a handful of juicy berries and discovering too late that a few had started to grow hair . . . and having nowhere to spit them out.

I keep feeling like the subtext, the underbelly, of our conversations is not front and center. Everywhere I go, I’m witnessing a new story called in, while an old one pulls in opposition, holding on for dear life in a death-defying tug of war for power over rather than with.

Many of us led the way in breaking through the glass ceiling. We’re all too familiar with those patriarchal old boys’ clubs, which held onto their silos of power for dear life, twisting our demands for equal opportunities and freedom of independent choice and success into a “them vs. us” conversation we never intended.

Now, as we strive to break through—or bypass—the silver ceiling, I can’t help feeling a disturbing sense of déjà vu. I keep putting on my foresight lens, but it’s the past that’s speaking to me. From deep within my belly, a question demands my attention: Haven’t we lived this story already?

I touched on this a bit when I wrote about the Boomer Business Summit, which itself was a top-notch conference. At one of the panels, about making money on the Boomer market, I sat taking notes in the last row, next to a lanky blond guy on his cell phone. Guess we both wanted a fast getaway if the material didn’t grab us. We exchanged cards, minimal chatter, and the session began.

As I glanced at his business card, I chuckled to myself. This was a guy who had already crossed my radar. I had wondered what he was up to with his website aimed at younger Boomer women. I just didn’t get him as someone passionate about women Boomers.

In fact, I couldn’t quite grok what he was doing in the aging field at all. It wasn’t until I explored his site that I learned he had formed a Boomer women platform simply because no one else was marketing to us.

He was in this business because post-50 women were a means, not because we are meaningful.

And that’s when the creepy sense of déjà vu wafted over me. Are we women being coopted again?

In the early ’70s, my cohorts were the Clio feminists who catalyzed and drove the second women’s movement. Part of this movement involved throwing off the medical nomenclature that had coopted us, robbing us of a place at the table even for control of our own bodies.

Women’s concerns were trivialized and our healthy emotions stigmatized with the label “hysterical.” We were treated accordingly to remove the dangerous craziness, emotionality, independence, and so forth that were apparently signs of that horrible disease of simply being female. (See Betty Friedan’s classic Feminine Mystique.)

Miriam Hawley and Judy Norsigian, among others, gave us permission to trust our own knowing and smarts, woman to woman, by creating a cooperative manual that was on every Boomer woman’s bookshelf, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Kind of our own Wikipedia of women’s health and wellness.

We began to see that the changes and differences in our bodies once classified in terms of disease and dysfunction were actually part of the natural cycle and beautiful variation in the female body.

Fast-forward 40 years, and here I am at another panel listening to another middle-aged man discuss research done for Big Pharma into sexual dysfunction in younger Boomer women.

He reported, “Most women are too embarrassed to talk about vaginal dryness.” They suffer in pain for years. It blew me away to find that women still don’t talk about these issues even with each other. I was less surprised to hear that they don’t speak with their physicians either, and that when some do, it’s around two years after the onset.

Worse: 93% of the women report a significant effect on their lives yet they continue to have painful sex . . . as often as once a week.

Hearing this man reveal such private details about the sacred space of women’s bodies brought another wave of déjà vu. I viscerally felt a trespass as yet another women’s health issue was trivialized as a dysfunction, as another path of women’s life cycles was coopted and made into a pathology. The natural changes of aging being discussed as though we were robotic Stepford Wives who had to get fixed, oiled up for our men. Just so Pharma can market and sell a product.

Which came first, the solution or the research?

And who says it’s a dysfunction anyway? Menopause occurs for a reason. Why is it so shameful, so scary, for us to talk about our changing bodies? Why aren’t women talking with each other? Why do we suffer in silence?

Pharma is always ready to fill the void with fear disguised as hope: Don’t lose your man to someone who doesn’t have this symptomology. You can eradicate this. You can stay young, ready, and able, desirable, rather than old and useless.

Something is terribly wrong here. Did we Clio feminists fail after all?

Haven’t I heard this story before?

An even older story comes to mind. Perhaps you’ve heard some version of it. In Greek mythology, the warrior-goddess Artemis is bathing in her sacred lake, hidden in privacy amid lush forest. Actaeon, in the forest on a hunt with his dogs, spies the goddess, vulnerable and unclothed. He is captivated by her beauty.

When Artemis catches him spying on her, she warns him never to speak again or he’ll be turned into a stag. Foolishly, he calls out to his hunting party and transforms immediately into a stag. His own hunting dogs tear him to shreds.

A woman’s feminine psyche, her sacred temples, are still fair game in a patriarchal culture. No, it’s not okay to spy, even under cover of the hunt for women’s health information. No, men shouldn’t speak for us about our most intimate concerns. But men are just as stuck in the patriarchy as we are, in the way things have always been done.

Many are just savvy businessmen in a culture still so infused with centuries of patriarchy that the sexism is almost on autopilot. After all, they can see the magazine headlines and book titles just as we can: how to keep your man, drive him crazy, keep him satisfied at all costs. Anti-aging is the name of the new money-making game, a game still rigged so that even if some women “win,” the men always do.

At least superficially. In truth, the only winners in this game are the businesses exploiting it.

Women today are stepping into their own power in many ways. On so many topics, we are using our own voices, speaking up. Yet we are still being coopted, and not just in the health arena. Have you noticed, for example, how many personal growth and transformative venues for and about women, online and off, are owned by men, even moderated and directed by men?

As women, we need to step up and own our conversations, our her-story telling. Women and men benefit from this, as we can see in many other arenas, such as business, where women are speaking up and leading, and the results benefit the companies, the shareholders, and the world.

What if we women reimagined a new ending that truly serves our womanhood vs. solely refilling big business’s deep pockets at our expense? What if we took control of the conversation about our bodies, ourselves? What if we could change that conversation, and the world, simply by taking one radical step—talking to each other?

Most of us struggle with the disconnect between the age we feel inside and the age we see and feel in our bodies. Our capacity for extraordinary visions and creative leaps is truly ageless, no matter the packaging, but that doesn’t make the aches and pains (corporeal and emotional) of an aging body any less real.

The aging process has long been something of a mystery. Even though many people tout products, diets, and other methods to slow or stop aging, these have been difficult to put to the test scientifically because we haven’t had a way to objectively measure the aging process.

Until now.

A new study in the journal Molecular Cell describes an exciting development in measuring biological aging, with implications in forensics, health treatments, and possibly ways to slow the aging process.

Researchers at the Institute for Genomic Medicine in San Diego studied 656 people ages 19 to 101, focusing specifically on DNA methylation, a genetic process that leaves markers in our blood. By mapping these markers along with changes to the genome, Dr. Kang Zhang and his colleagues discovered they could determine biological age from a blood sample and accurately predict the rate of aging in that person.

This is clearly an exciting new method with potential for health and wellness therapies and treatments of specific diseases. For the first time, we can tell whether a particular therapy or regimen slows or speeds up aging. The more we are able to measure these effects, the more knowledge we will have about what we can do, eat, drink, etc., that will slow the process of aging in our bodies.

But of course, the road from initial research to application is always much longer than people realize. No one should put their lives on hold, waiting for the fountain of youth to hit the shelves. In fact, discoveries like this should impel us to do just the opposite, to be more persistent in pursuing our BIG visions now, especially those that will make a difference in the world around us. The more visible we are post-50, leading, volunteering, and changing the face of business, the more we’ll create an ageless legacy that will live up to the promise in our cells.