2021 October 12 Life reimagined for Baby Boomers and everyone.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7everyminute and 7everyminute.com, a podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. As I described last week, I'm changing this Live away from a weekly news show, a news summary, and more into how Baby Boomers and basically anybody can learn how to re-envision, to re-energize their lives.

Pretty much at any age, the techniques are similar, and we're going to start going through those. We're going to be moving back to that, and I'll explain why. The news will be coming back in some format. I like doing it. I pretty much read the Wall Street Journal completely now every day.

I realized that there's just a trove of information, particularly in editorials, a lot of good insight. But for the moment, it's taking time away from what I really want to be doing, which is going into ways to really reimagine, re-energize our lives and live our lives to the fullest as we age.

The news will be coming back in some format, though. Right now there's just a ton of information on COVID treatment options and COVID prevention advances. So there's a lot of reasons to be going through the news, but I have to figure out a different way to do it. Whether I just do news snippets and put them together and broadcast them a couple of times a week or something like that, we'll find out how it's going on, because there's just a lot of things going on. Not only in medicine, but in world events in general. But we'll talk about that on another show and figure out how we're going to do it. I'll get some feedback from people on how they really want to listen to things. 

So what are we talking about tonight? Tonight I want to give a brief overview as to why I even started the podcast and website, the whole show.  It's been going for a little over two years now. At the time when I started it, it was unique, which was fun. People hadn't really thought about addressing Baby Boomers. The number one question I got always was how are you going to reach them? They don't use computers.

Obviously, a lot of that has changed, particularly with COVID. There's just a lot more resources, and we're going to look at some resources here on that whole topic. Now there's a number of people in that same space, but still it's fundamentally different. Many of the people are in a space targeting Baby Boomers who are very wealthy, and that's been around for years.

That's just not a segment that I'm interested in dealing with at all. That’s kind of wealth management and that's a whole different ball of wax. What I'm really more interested in, far more interested in, is helping people realize that they still have a ton of potential and things to offer in life.

That's independent of money, and that really has to do with self attitude. That's what we're going to be talking about tonight. Then I'm going to cover some of the personal reasons I started the show and the short version of that is - back when I was first starting, I was trying to go through and think of the best place to start.

Basically, I was working as a contract engineer, which is what I still do. So right away, I don't fit the standard mold of things, and I'm an exception, a lot of people think. We'll talk more about that in a bit. 

So I worked as an independent contractor and that meant a lot of common knowledge about things like Medicare just didn't apply. For one thing, I was 65 and still working full-time. Although a number of people are doing that - by a lot of really good luck, more than anything, although there's a lot of effort put in too - I was still getting paid, and still am getting paid, at a reasonable rate. So it's not that I'm suddenly 65, retired, with no money at all. I'm 65, still working, still pulling down a reasonable salary, which I'm extremely thankful for.

Everyone said, oh, you’ll love Medicare. It's free. No, that's not true, actually. As I started to look into it, what I really started to find out is that Medicare really - besides having its own lingo - it was a system that was purposely contrived and tremendously opaque. As opaque as it could possibly be actually.

With all these arbitrary constraints and time limits, if you didn't make the filing, suddenly you had lifelong cost increases on things. Getting people to tell you exactly what those were was extremely painful. So I thought, okay, fine. I'm going to start a podcast talking about Medicare. I went to FinCon in 2019, went to Podcast Movement in 2019 and decided, yes, definitely going to start a podcast, met a ton of good people, and then went to FinCon in 2019, talked to a bunch of people about Medicare and insurance and aging and financial products for the elderly and all that stuff. 

I was going to do this whole site around Medicare, and I thought that'd be really interesting. It brings value to people's lives, which I like to do, and there'd be a lot of good things about it. I started interviewing people who I thought might be interested in the show by age demographic.

It turned out that a lot of people were less interested in Medicare and more concerned about how they're going to actually live in retirement. A number of people aren't as prepared for retirement as they might want to be, and I put myself in that bucket. And so, what do you do about that?

How can you prepare for retirement when it's retirement age? So suddenly I did pretty close to a complete reversal and started focusing on finances. That's where the name 7EveryMinute came from, by the way, seven every minute, that's an actual statistic.

There's somebody, a Baby Boomer who is retiring about every nine seconds. So roughly every nine seconds, another Baby Boomer retires. That ends up being about seven every minutes. So the show became all about how to live more frugally, how to get the best bargains.

I was actually working with people, looking up low cost alternatives for things like off-season travel and cruises, and how to really stretch your dollar. I spoke to people in that space and met some of them at Podcast Movement, and some other places, people in travel who wanted to address that market and I was going to have them on the podcast.So we're all set to go on that. 

But then a really funny thing happened to me, and I realized I was having trouble defining what I wanted for my own future, and certainly for the podcast’s future, since I'd already pivoted at least two times. But just even for me, it's okay, so I'm 65 now. Now what? 

Society tells me I'm all washed up. Thank goodness I worked for a company who did not listen to society, and was not asking me to retire and was happy to take my contributions. So I was very fortunate in that regard. Not everybody is, but I realized that suddenly the issue was less money and it was less retirement, and suddenly it was more about basically, as we often say jokingly, what do I want to be when I grow up? So here I am growing up at 65 and thinking, so what comes next? A good piece of society, and certainly much of the more malignant social media, is telling me I'm all washed up. I have nothing to contribute, and I should just go away quietly in a corner.  No, that doesn't sit right with me, and it's not true or accurate. 

At that point I started working with Pat Flynn on podcast development, and Pat Flynn, he’s the one. It's Smart Passive Income (www.smartpassiveincome.com). He was my first and is one of my three major mentors. Pat has made tremendous positive changes in my life. Thank you, Pat. I've told you many times, I'll thank you again. He basically got me thinking very much outside the box. He introduced me to a lot of other people and a lot of other concepts of how to really re envision your life and how to really structure something that could bring value to a lot of people and improve their lives at the same time. It was a real eye opening thing. Pat actually came from a technical background. That's why I was drawn to him. As I said, I work as an engineer. Pat was an architect, and he was very open on all his financial numbers at the time.

We struck it off, and I enjoy his company. His staff is amazing. So I went to the Flynn Con 1, Pat's first in-person conference, met a bunch of awesome people, and there I got an introduction to Dr. Shannon Irvine. Dr. Shannon Irvine runs the Epic Success Academy. She's also developed a quite comprehensive, cohesive course around neuro coaching.

It's a program for self fulfillment, goal setting and life envisionment. Full disclosure: I want to make this clear that I am an affiliate of Dr. Shannon Irvine and her programs. But the reason for that is because I immediately signed up for the coaching program to become a coach with her.

Her training has had an amazingly huge, positive impact on my life. Pat gave me the confidence to go out and do things. Dr. Shannon gave me the knowledge of how to set goals and re envision my life and work towards those goals, and really bring meaning where society was telling me there was no meaning. I am totally indebted forever to both of them. They are awesome. Look her up. Dr. Shannon Irvine, and Pat Flynn.

Working with Dr. Shannon really changed my whole view towards things, and I realized that the problem wasn't that people weren't prepared for retirement financially, per se. Certainly there are a lot of people in that boat. The big reason that it's such an issue is that they have decided that since they aren't prepared right now, they never can be, that how they live now is how they will live forever. That this is the way they've always been. There's nothing they can do to change.

I hear that an awful lot from an awful lot of people. Not just people of our generation, but even younger people. I've been that way since I'm a child, there's nothing I can do. That really isn't accurate at all. Armed now with this new knowledge from Dr.Shannon Irvine, I started following that along. Then through Dr. Shannon, she introduced me to James Wedmore. He is my third primary mentor. James is just incredible. You really have to watch him and pay attention to him and really listen to what he says. James is one of those people - he'll say a lot of things that are very obvious, but you go back and listen to them again. You realize the obvious message, yes, is there, but there are a lot of really subtle, really important messages underneath. He has a coaching program. Again, I am affiliated with his product, full disclosure (and also for Pat Flynn, I don't think I mentioned that) but James Wedmore has a coaching program.

This isn't just a recommendation for who to sign up for. These are all people that have had tremendously positive influences in my life. James has a coaching program and he has all these coaches that work with him. The coaches that work with him are amazing. They vary from amazing to incredible. These are people who have been in the trenches and have had tremendous life changes. 

There's a lot of good coaches. These are three that I happened to really click with, and they've made a huge, positive impact in my life. One of the things that happened out of this is I realized that James is just incredible in his focus, in his certainty of reaching his goals.

He envisions something and just his whole life becomes reaching that goal. Not that he's focused to exclusion on other things, but he regularly - and Dr. Shannon teaches us as well  - envisions that goal and makes it part of his life. So because of that, his life then tends to happen in a way that brings him towards reaching goals.

So you're seeing where I'm going with this. This is really very important as we age. The one more thing to talk about James is that as he'll tell you often when he reaches his goal, as he realized it wasn't at all the path that he expected. But the really important part is because his vision remained constant, his progress was constant.

Now we get to the Baby Boomer generations, and then all the joining and following generations. And what do we hear? We hear that Oh, you've reached the end here for your life. Now you're just a burden to society. You have nothing more to contribute. Okay. Boomer, blah, blah, blah.

There is a lot of negativity, and it's up to us helping each other, and from our own insides,  basically look past that negativity to look at all the positive things that we have in our lives, all the same powers that we had before, all the same drive that we had before. That's still there. 

It's still there.  All we have to do is learn how to bring that out. We used to do it, and somehow we learned how not to do it. So we just have to forget how we learned to stop it, and learn how to start doing things again. It's entirely doable. 

If you've been paying attention at all during this little diatribe, it sounds like I've had these huge major pivots, and I went from helping people find and fill out Medicare forms to get Medicare in a timely fashion, to how your life should be re envisioned. Re envision the entire purpose of life. So it sounds like it’s been a tremendous change, it really isn't a change of direction at all.

What I discovered is that most of our limitations, we create ourselves. They're not physical, they're not mental, like memory issues. It's that we've convinced ourselves that we're no longer capable of doing something, whether it's something physical - obviously we all have physical limitations and those limitations grow as we get older and that's part of aging - but we also have gained a lot in knowledge, as I talked about last week. 

We have a lot more background to do things on. So we've already learned a lot of the mistakes and can avoid them. We've learned how to do things so that we can still accomplish our goals in a timely and reasonable fashion. We've also learned a lot of self-limiting behaviors. The thing that makes that worse actually is not only do we, we'll go through this in far more detail over the next weeks, but you should listen to what you say to yourself or say to other people while you're driving.

It's really very telling. If you walk down the stairs, and you left your phone at the top of the stairs, and you go Oh, nice move stupid! Now you’ve got to go up to the stairs. You may say I don't really take that to heart, but actually your brain does take that to heart because how you talk to yourself is how your subconscious starts to believe in itself.

So one of the things (we're going to go over many techniques, and I'll give you a little win right for today): The next time you start to criticize yourself, just stop. Just take a deep breath and say, Okay, so what really happened?. I left my phone at the top of the stairs. Okay. So what can we learn from this? We can learn that I can walk the stairs twice. So I get a little exercise, a few more steps for the day. I go up, and I look around. Oh, that's right. I also meant to bring this thing over to my friend today and so you pick that up at the same time. 

Next time you walk out the stairs. You stop and you look around and you pick up the things you forgot at the top of the stairs. We can learn new habits. When you do that thing and you look around, you reward yourself, and you say Aren’t I clever? I've learned a new trick. So you continue to improve your life. That's something that we forget as we get older. When we were younger, we did this all the time.

We were always running in to show our parents something new and nifty that we did, whether it was something really good, like a drawing of a dog that actually moderately resembled a dog, or there was something that wasn't so good, like flushing all the dishwasher soap down the toilet because it made fun bubbles or something.

But nonetheless, we were always excited about what we did, and we wanted to share that with other people. As we get older, that's driven out of us. So we tend to think that well, of course I should've known, that I'm older now,I should know everything. Every time we make a mistake, we tend to berate ourselves.

There are techniques for getting past that. Two of the big ones right now that we can take away today, and you can start practicing right now, is when you start to say something negative about yourself, catch yourself. Don't say it. Finish what you're doing. Then think about the positive outcome and remind yourself of the positive outcome. Something that you can take away today and actually act upon. 

That's the short story of where we are right now. That’s the backstory of how I got to where I am. It was a little circuitous that's for sure. But like all good things, it was actually driven by input from the people I wanted to serve.

I really think we're on a better path than we were two years ago. Like the 60+ episodes I did on the news, that was a distraction during COVID and during some of the pauses in the production of the program. I'll talk about that, as to why they happen, but not tonight.

The really important takeaway, what I'm trying to get across tonight, is really the show was originally intended to, and is going back to, focusing on how we can take control back in our lives. To take the negativity from the world, that happens for reasons I'm really not sure. A lot of it, I think, is for control reasons from one group to another. One tribe, as it was called at one point in time. 

I think a lot of it is self-inflicted. As we get older, we get harsher on ourselves. This is just a reminder that it's okay to love yourself, to give yourself a little space, to be kind to yourself. That when you do something wrong, it isn't six expletives in a row telling yourself what a fool and an idiot you are.

But rather you just look at it, set those aside. Don't even say them, don't even think them. Then when you do something good, when you improve your behavior, remember to celebrate that and remind yourself for it. If you're trying to cut back on candy, then when you do something really clever, that's a good time to have a candy. It's kind of wow, I did something really smart, that yesterday I screwed up.  What a good day! and reward yourself. 

That's it for tonight. We're going to come back and talk about this more for the next couple of weeks. It's the core of some of the courses that I'm working on. I really want everyone to know that we have tremendous potential still. We have basically limitless opportunity, limitless potential. 

I'm going to go through some of the ways that you're told you don't, and why those ways are wrong, and remind you to have grace with yourself and to be kind to yourself, and look for ways that you do things that are clever and remember to congratulate yourself and celebrate all those little wins, because there's hundreds every day. We've learned to ignore those and just beat up on ourselves. So we're going to put all that aside. 

Then next week, we're going to go into some more of the techniques and start talking about where I really want to take the show and the courses and how we can put these little steps into play every single day to make every single day a little better than yesterday and get the wind back in our sails, and get going again as moving into our retirement years and really make the most of life. 

So I guess that's it for the week. Thank you very much for stopping by. I know it's completely different. If it's not the kind of show that you want, I apologize, but this is the direction we're heading because it serves a lot more people than just the news does. 

The news is going to be coming back in some form, but I don't know what the form is. It's probably going to be on vacation for at least a little while, because I have to concentrate on this at this point. 

So if you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. If you did not, or if you want some specific topics covered, please drop me a note. That's really important. I know things that are important to me. I don't know yet things that are important to you. So if there's some topic you want covered, some particular life situation, whatever. Drop me a note and let me know what it is. I look forward to hearing from you. 

Have a great week. Thanks for visiting. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everybody, and see you again at 7everyminute and 7everyminute.com.