I’ve talked before about presence, what it is and why it’s important to develop, (see “Unwrapping Your Presence”). The first steps in developing this presence are asking the right questions, then opening yourself up to listening to the answers from the visionary voice inside you. These answers (or more and better questions) might come from within, but they can also come from messengers and symbols in your outer world that resonate with that voice. The important thing is that you open up as many conduits for that voice, for these messengers and symbols, as you possibly can, preferably with guidance from other visionaries. (Read more about this in “Stop, Look, and Listen.”)

This process is holistic, bringing together your body, soul, and mind in synchronicity. Presence is itself visceral. It isn’t a head trip but a physical embodiment of your Soul Speak. Even the visionary within resides in your body, connecting soul with its vessel. When you start hearing that voice and seeing messengers and symbols all around you, don’t be surprised if you feel the truth of what you’re receiving deep in your belly. There’s a reason for the saying “I feel it in my gut.”

That’s the inner feminine rising within you, the intuitive wisdom that your visionary voice embodies. Women and men have this aspect, but in women, it’s closer to the surface and often easier to access. But the inner masculine plays a role in this process as well, supporting the inner feminine, again for both women and men. (For more information about these aspects and archetypes, see Carl Jung.) As you work on asking the right questions and opening your soul and body to the answers, to that visionary voice, you can take the next step and start opening up your mind, gathering the knowledge that will feed the insight you gain.

Begin doing your homework, the research in the outer world that your inner world needs to process for you to ultimately make your vision reality. If you are focusing on your career or business, research the market, emerging trends, new business models and practices, technology, visionary leaders and companies, and gaps in what the world needs that business has yet to fulfill, or fulfill adequately.

If you are focusing on reinventing retirement, research what others are doing and where, flexible arrangements with companies or nonprofits that enable you to focus your energy and time the way you want, or entrepreneurial opportunities that would enable you to fulfill your soul’s purpose and make a difference, while still making a profit.

If you are seeking to make changes in your personal life—a move, a renewed focus on relationships, more travel, or more time and energy devoted to new or neglected meaningful pursuits—research places, social opportunities, logistics, and personal growth resources (such as this blog!). For all of the above and more, consider what skills you will need to learn and develop to make the most of whatever opportunities you will eventually pursue.

Now is not the time to draw definite conclusions or make decisions. Not just yet. The purpose of this information gathering is to give your visionary something to work with and to fine-tune the messengers and symbols you receive. Continue the inner work of asking questions and developing conduits for your visionary voice. By consciously getting your inner feminine and inner masculine to work together, you are on the path to creating a future that works—for yourself, your community, your world.

What knowledge do you need to gather to feed your visionary voice?

In 2017 surveys showed a large majority of Boomers planning to continue working past retirement age, some by necessity and some by design. But now we can see signs of economic recovery with over 50 percent of Boomers born in 1946 saying they are now fully retired.

Does this mean that Boomers are headed for “Retirement as usual”? I highly doubt it. All this means is that necessity is becoming less of a driving force, enabling more and more of us to design the Third and Fourth Age of our lives.

As more and more employers recognize the need to capitalize on their experienced workforce before losing them, we should see an increasing emphasis on flexible work arrangements—part-time work, consulting, and job sharing, just to name a few. This in turn will provide more visible options for Boomers to consider beyond the false dichotomy of retiring or not retiring.

Forward-thinking companies have already begun this shift, but far too many are not looking past their own noses and preparing now for the coming wave of Boomers making pivotal choices about how to design their lives. For many businesses, the planning for a changing workforce won’t happen until the sheer numbers of Boomers on the precipice of leaving reach a critical mass.

This is a huge mistake for these businesses, of course, but this lack of foresight does not have to extend to the rest of us.

We all have the opportunity, no matter our age or stage, to design our futures starting today. You don’t have to wait for your company to provide options for you. Now is the time to develop your own game plan, to think BIG about the next stage of your life, and to then create your own options to make that big vision happen.

This may mean going to your employer and laying out your plans and what you need from them to make those plans happen in ways that are advantageous for both of you. Or this may mean laying out a succession and exit strategy that takes you into your own business, your chance to combine profit and purpose, to make a living and a difference while enjoying more flexibility to work where and when you want.

I suspect that future surveys of Boomers will demonstrate far more variety in working arrangements as well as many more Boomerpreneurs on the horizon. This will be not only a result of economic recovery but also a stimulus toward economic growth and sustainable success for individuals, our nation, and the planet.

Have you figured out What’s Next for you as you head into your Third or Fourth Age?

Futurists, coaches, sustainability advocates, gerontologists, and many others have a vested interest in understanding and shaping change in ways that impact the future for the better. Yet there is a trend in these fields and many others that seems decidedly stuck in the past: an antiquated notion of professionalization.

Experts and experts-in-training understandably want to ensure that their field has credibility and the potential to make a living. I agree that both are important. In my new book Gray is the New Green, I am wholeheartedly in support of making money from doing what we love and getting beyond the shame so many of us hold about valuing profit. Without profit, we cannot make a difference in the world. It’s that simple.

But the trend I’m seeing seems to neglect the most important part: futures that matter. Professionalization just for the sake of earning a credential and making money goes hand in hand with the outmoded view of education as a means to an end, rather than a means in and of itself. Futurists, for example, are talking about bringing more of academia into the field, building programs that more clearly (and more narrowly) define what a futurist is for the sake of earning credentials and therefore a living. But credentials do not equal profit. There’s an enormous gap in that equation—the people we serve.

In a world increasingly recognizing the value, even the necessity, of holistic thinking, I think it’s a mistake to focus on narrowing our field rather than broadening it and seeing where it intersects with our other skills, gifts, and experience. Further, focusing on professionalization is a focus on ourselves when the problem with our field lies with a lack of focus on the needs of the people we serve.

Credentials are a valuable way for people to distinguish among individuals in a field, and I absolutely support the idea in theory. But in practice, if those credentials are simply built upon another floor atop the ivory tower, they will distance us even further from the people who need us most.

When people tell me that they don’t really understand what a futurist is, answering with a list of futurist jargon does not really answer their question. What people really want to know when asking what “futurist” means is “What does a futurist mean to me and my organization or business? Why should I care or champion professional futurists?”

That is the question we should be answering as professionals, and it applies to every field. Simply replace “futuring” and “futurist” with the field relevant to you and see how well you and your colleagues are answering the right questions.

If we can’t teach others what futuring means and why it matters, we can have as many acronyms as we like at the ends of our names. They won’t matter, and neither will futurists.

Do you see similar trends in your field? What can you do to refocus the conversation?

Featured image by Dollar Photo Club

Jack Levine subtly set the tone for our time together in his opening invocation’s succinct prayer, likening the conception of our movement to bringing seeds to loaf. The seeds we were able to plant in this conference alone were too numerous to recount here, but I would like to share some that are continuing to grow in my own body and soul.

PAC 7 Seeds of Wisdom

The conference rocked from the engaging opening by Tom Esselman, followed by Katrina Rogers, President of Fielding Graduate University, the leading institute for adult learners in human and organizational development, our host from 2010 to 2013, and that year’s co-host.

Passing the PAC Master of Ceremonies baton to Tom Esselman, President and CEO of the Institute for the Ages, Katrina created a vessel for what was to come by sharing the “4 Principles of What It Means to Age Well”: positive aging rests upon creativity, community, life transitions, and wellness. Dipping deeper ever so briefly, but profoundly, Katrina deftly wove together the themes of this year’s conference, Positive Aging Transcends, when she anchored us by sharing that “one aspect of transformation is transcendence” and closed by cajoling us with a caution: “Aging is not all happy talk.”

I was, and am, deeply appreciative that Katrina held the dark side of aging up to the light of transcendence around the conversations we have about aging positively.

Katrina ushered us on to an always enlightening keynote speaker, Marc Freedman, who explored “The Generativity Revolution: A New Movement of Americans in the Second Half of Life.” Marc shared his apt observation that a new myth of America is emerging, one not based “on the notion of eternal youth,” but one that “appreciates the true value of experience.” Here, here, we clapped. But what remains in my recall still today is Marc’s pronouncement that “Stages of life are fiction, not a fixture!”

Throughout his keynote, Marc referenced many of the early voices of human and adult development and aging. He discussed how the visionary Mary Catherine Bateson’s “Active Wisdom” was a pathway to social innovation. Memories flooded back from when I had been a post-graduate student in gerontology and adult development.

I had been blessed to take probably the one and only Aging Literature course given anywhere. What a gift! I didn’t realize till hearing Marc mention Bateson’s writings what an imprint that literature course had left on me. I had been exposed to all the visionaries and pioneers in our fields from way back to modern times. Like Marc, I’ve seen the truth of their groundbreaking work and words as positive aging reaches its tipping point. Marc also had a few urgent recommendations for public policymakers: Create new public policy such as a gap year for adults and new educational opportunities.

Our second day together started over breakfast, with Victor Strecher sharing findings that “declaring one’s life purpose is a driver for changing behavior and giving life meaning.” To all of us in life planning and all genres of coaching, counseling, education, and positive psychology, this is not a surprise. Rather, it’s a welcome affirmation and confirmation of why we do what we do.

In between plenary sessions, many of the best of the field’s pioneers and newbie innovators conversed about new approaches to positive aging, life and retirement planning, reinvention, and eldering as well as elder care. We discussed the importance of declaring purpose to our wellness; spirituality and dementia; intentionality in older adults; second-half adulthood; the challenges of the coming Alzheimer epidemic; multigenerational dialogue versus discord; aging and technology; and so much more.

Harry (Rick) Moody spoke about “Voices of Older People.” Demonstrating the passing of the baton as part of our legacy-making years ahead, Rick introduced and later interviewed the newest generation of NPR journalists on aging, including the highly popular Ina Jaffe, who shared her recordings of wonderful vignettes of older adults’ life stories.

Rick carried this subtheme forward as he interviewed Connie Goldman, the first NPR reporter covering older people and aging back in the seventies, who is also a prolific writer on caregiving and caregivers. My personal take on Connie in the short moments I’ve shared with her this year and last is that she is one of the warmest, most engaging wise women I’ve met in a very long time. Connie is so present and authentic; she is a gift to know.

For the first time, I heard Nancy K. Schlossberg, EdD, Founder of IFA, Board Chair, Professor Emerita at University of Maryland, author of Revitalizing Retirement, speaking on “Mattering Matters,” and then responding to Rick’s questions. Nancy, who is deeply honest and provocative, queried back, “Do we have an adult development story? How do you want to do this adult development story?”

To my surprise, Nancy asked a similar rhetorical question to the one I had posed in my session on the first morning of the conference. I had challenged my fellow attendees to take with them the questions of What story am I in? and What positive aging story do I want for myself, my employer or organization, my work and career serving 50-plusers? as they moved through the conference, in both their storytelling and conversations with colleagues.

Most important, I challenged them to take the questions home afterward, when they returned to their communities and life routines. Instead of putting them aside on a bucket list, bring these questions back home and keep asking them so we continuously improve how we serve and are served.

The mission of the annual conference is to sound the clarion call for positive aging. It was spreading organically, certainly not intentionally structured. Or was it? We were spreading the seeds from the opening till closing, when they emerged as a rising loaf!

On the next to last morning, I was drawn to hear and meet Juanita Brown, PhD, and David Isaacs, Co-Founders of the World Café. They were co-leading a short-form breakout session. As an advocate for creating multigenerational solution-finding conversations to make Ageless Futures the norm, I was magnetized just by the title alone, “Wiser Together: Partnering Across Generations for the Common Good.” I was not disappointed. It made me feel like I was coming home to my kin, other professionals who share a similar mission, a mission expressed in simplest terms by Juanita “to enliven across generations and be a catalyst for collaborative action.” How cool is that?

Karen Sands, MCC, BCC

Phone: 203.266.1100
Email: karen@karensands.com
Website: www.karensands.com
Address: PO Box 43 Roxbury, CT 06783-0043

One conference theme, Positive Aging Transcends: The Voices of Innovation and Community, resonates with the now irreversible meme of positive aging as a collaborative creative effort across the lifespan. The meme isn’t new; it’s just moving fast, converting all those who resist its rapture! Now we can celebrate that positive aging is bicoastal in the U.S. and going global thanks to PAC 7 past conference attendees collectively sounding the clarion call to join the positive aging movement. The title of one breakout panel session in my second year of attendance captured this so eloquently: “Evangelizing Positive Aging: Growing the Seeds of the Movement.”

I rejoined my colleagues again another year at PAC, as both a roving journalist/blogger and an author and presenter, sharing “Visionaries Have Wrinkles: How to Serve the Generation Who Will Change the World . . . Again!” In the intervening years, both I and my Ageless Futures models, approach, and teaching have morphed yet again. Now I am refining and integrating my life’s work in a synchronized holographic wholeness. My destiny is calling. Reverberating for me all year was James Birren’s parting query as he closed that year’s conference. He asked us to consider, “What is your life’s metaphor?” In other words, What story are you in?

I had been churning with this question relative to my own work for a long time. In a practical, down-to-earth way, I had been using this as a pivotal catalyzing question for creating new narratives with my executive and professional coachees for decades. Now Birren pushed me into the middle of the muddle of my own story and that of the fields of positive aging, adult development, gerontology, and the future.

Donning my Everyday Futurist hat, I am always looking for assumptions to dismantle and new aspirational futures on the emerging horizon. As I prepared for my presentation, Birren’s words did what they were meant to—encourage the idea that I/we can rewrite the ending, or at least come up with alternative scenarios (even aspirational aging futures) and take actions informed by what is so, actions fueled by a new wisdom only to be gained as we mature and evolve our wisdom lived.

Karen Sands, MCC, BCC

Phone: 203.266.1100
Email: karen@karensands.com
Website: www.karensands.com
Address: PO Box 43 Roxbury, CT 06783-0043

As a professional futurist and transformational certified gerontologist, I’ve been tracking positive aging on the age beat for decades.

Birth of a Movement

We’ve come a long way, baby, since the early days of this movement, which appeared to emerge out of the shadows in ’92, when the upstate NY Omega Institute hosted the first two annual conscious aging conferences. I was there with a cast of the early neo-elderly “greats” coming together in one place, such as my favorite Jungian author Marion Woodman, Baba Ram Dass (last year’s PAC keynoter), Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Gray Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn, Robert Bly, Rick Moody, and a cadre of other pioneers.

Then back into the shadows we went. The next conference was to be held in San Diego, California, in 2001, but it was canceled for the horrific reason that we were to convene and present on 9/11! It took another seven years until PAC was rebirthed onto the aging stage, calling for the positive aging movement to come of age. And so it is. How grand that we are sharing this transformative time in the aging field together.

Karen Sands, MCC, BCC

Phone: 203.266.1100
Email: karen@karensands.com
Website: www.karensands.com
Address: PO Box 43 Roxbury, CT 06783-0043