2022 April 19 Plan for Happiness

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thank you for joining us tonight. 

We’re going back to our roots a little bit to talk a bit more about how to prepare for retirement, but this is kind of a funny episode. I've been writing it over a couple days and so once you start thinking about something, more thoughts pop in. So I rewrote part of it just before the show. But it's kind of neat, because it occurred to me as I was going through and writing everything that this is really a nice way to tie up all the topics we’ve been going over for the past couple of months. So, we’ll talk about that in a second. 

First, a reminder. I’m not a medical professional, and I’ll be talking about things that I personally find useful and helpful in my own life. If you find yourself feeling truly hopeless or depressed, please seek out professional medical help, or just dial 911. You can call (800) 273-8255, or simply dial (988), that’s the three-digit dialing code that should immediately connect you to a helpline for immediate assistance. Something to keep in mind. Good for yourself, good for a friend, and the regular public service announcement. 

So, way back when, if you started following me about three years ago - thanks to all the people who’ve been here - you may remember one of the first focus topics was preparing for retirement, specifically Medicare, and that’s still the topic we’re going to come back around to. It’s an important topic, and it’s even more so these days. It’s made just purposely to be opaque, but that was where we started out all so long ago. Then, for a number of reasons, (primarily the day job) and because retirement preparation is heavily based upon mindset. We became more focused on goal setting and life envisionment and the aspects of this truly a wonderful time in our lives. I really mean that. I think this is an awesome time both in the age of humanity and in our own ages to be alive. 

So goal setting and envisioning things is what a comfortable life means to you. That’s extremely important. It’s kind of the foundation of a happy retirement, foundation of a happy life. Certainly, in our retirement years a lot of people will try and convince you that you are less important. That you’re just more of a burden, that you now no longer have anything to contribute- all sorts of negative things that you read in all the various social media and quips and quirks. We’ve talked about that before.

When you’re younger, you can look ahead and you have your whole life ahead of you. Oh sure. That doesn’t work? I’m 30 years old and will change my career. I’m 40 years old and will change my career again. I think goal setting and envisioning what you really want for happiness is even more important now. In Monday’s Wall Street Journal they had a special report called Encore. It was Monday, April 18th. It’s actually a pretty fascinating section, and the whole report was about how different people handled retirement and the challenges and changes that came along with it. 

The Wall Street Journal. We did talk to them, and they don’t directly offer programs for getting any sort of discounts to people. They do so directly. The paper has kind of turned into something more like a grownup New York Times; a conservative moderate New York Times. There’s a lot of good stories. They have things like this where it’s not about all the coolest new things to get. They have articles on technology, too, but they realize that a lot of their audience is a bit older, so they have a much nicer breadth of articles than a lot of the more popular and what people think of as the general reading newspapers. It’s really not all about finances anymore. 

But back on topic. In the Encore report section, there were a number of very interesting topics about how to prepare for retirement. Some were financial, of course - it is the Wall Street Journal, but probably more than half of it was about mindset. That’s right, mindset, and mindset’s really nothing more than goal setting and envisioning the future. While the stories are pretty varied, and they covered a wide variety of topics, anywhere from, you know, all of a sudden, people who hadn’t really lived together for 20-30 years because one of them was National Sales Manager or or ran a hospital chain and they traveled all the time, so they spent a lot less time together. Well, now they’re retired and good golly they’re spending all their time together, and for a lot of people, that’s a big change. It’s not that they didn’t want to see each other, but you get used to living in a certain way, a certain space. 

One of them was a person, a woman who had worked for almost 40 years in psychology as a psychologist. She got rid of her whole practice and got rid of all the furniture and everything. Her whole life was in one little room. Her husband came and had the carpet cleaned, and took everything out of the room. It really upset her. It was her whole profession, her career, everything that she defined herself by was gone, and so she had this one little enclave left that kind of defined her as a psychologist, and he went and took everything out and had the carpets cleaned. It was a pretty interesting story. It’s kind of interesting. They’re kind of fun to see how something that should have been really neat - Hey, thanks for cleaning my room! suddenly turned into a threat because the rest of the world around her had years and now she was an ex-professional. They go through about what she did about it. It was very interesting,because what she did was she took up and developed other skills. 

That’s kind of the whole point of it, that you really work hard to make a successful transition. It works best if you have some sort of plan as to what you want to do and how you’re going to handle things - finances, being together, travel, illness, all those things. At least some kind of general plan, and you also have to be open to change and accepting life on its terms, because as we age, you never know. Things happen - not necessarily horrible things, but just things change. Have some flexibility in your life, which a lot of people say as you get older, that you get less flexible.

I would say a lot of people I know as they’ve aged have gotten considerably more flexible because they have a wisdom now as to what really matters versus what just seemed to matter at the time. It gives them a better perspective on what really mattered to them in life. So if it was that suddenly you can’t do something at a particular night because it conflicts with something else, before it became like Oh I can’t believe all the trouble. Oh I really wanted to do that! Now it’s Oh I guess I’ll find something else to do. So flexibility, if you put your mind to it, is an integral part of planning, especially as we get older.

It's nice to have validation of our ideas that planning is important, but really it's super important to remember that goal planning and acceptance and all those things as we age become more important. Also in the story, a lot of people face challenges that they hadn’t really planned on, but whether it’s health related - one of them was that her husband was going deaf and she realized how much I was annoying her. So he finally said, you know, why are you yelling at me all the time? Not as in just speaking loudly for him, but just being angry that he didn’t understand her. So, a lot of it had to do with how people perceive themselves and perceive their relationships, and how much they were willing to work on them, and accept other people’s changes, and then they realized they were changing too. 

One of the big things happening is that people learn to cherish the things that they did have rather than being bitter or upset or disappointed about the things they didn’t have. I think that’s a really important takeaway. Because all of us through our lives have gained things. We’ve lost things. We’ve gained skills. We’ve lost skills. As we change jobs, we forget things from the old job and learn new things. But we forget that happens on a personal basis and a health basis and just a life basis, too. You’re going along and suddenly you realize that you can't take out the garbage alone anymore. 

You just have to adapt to things. Again, it comes back to: flexibility is really important as you get older because things happen. If you take those as just a change in life, Now we’ll do something differently, that’s really great and you say, Wow, now, I just can’t take the garbage out alone, but I got this nifty, new, little wagon. I can take it out with that! You look at the things that are good or you can just be really annoyed about things that you can’t change, and that's a super important takeaway that you have to remember, like we talked about the other day. When you do something and you don’t totally succeed, most people tend to get really angry about the part where they didn’t succeed. The people who have a better attitude generally remember to celebrate the part where they did succeed. Maybe you’re going to walk two miles today and you walk a mile. You can either be annoyed about the mile you didn’t walk or you could be pleased with the mile that you did walk. So, a super important topic. 

One of the things I really noticed that makes people feel isolated as they get older is that a lot of their friends move away or their friends, for whatever reason, end up with another group. Maybe they move into a retirement community, so they’re not hanging out with their old friends quite as much anymore. Some of us have already gone through this, and it happens more and more as we age. Obviously, where many of our age peers pass away and then, you know, this is made even worse because a lot of people in our older ages just aren’t very comfortable with technology. Even within our own generation and in adjoining generations, there’s a big technology divide even within our own age groups. Some people are very technologically comfortable. I work with technology every day. It doesn’t bother me at all. I know a lot of my friends are very uncomfortable with technology to the point where a couple of people I know just literally do not have a cellphone. They don’t understand it. They don’t want to use it. If it’s important, then leave a message on an answering machine at the house 

Like so many things in life, this is partly a personal choice. It’s how you approach things and how you approach a situation. If you want to convince yourself to give up and say, I couldn’t possibly learn that because I’m old, then that’s probably what the outcome will be. But if you plan to learn a new skill on a regular basis, including even the evil regular smartphone, then I bet you will because now it’s become something that you envision that you can do. 

We talked about this last week. Remember that ~80% of your thoughts are often negative. If you made those positive thoughts like we talked about, just think how excited you’d be to try new things and have the opportunity to congratulate yourself at the end of the day for all the new skills that you learn. Go back and listen again to last week’s episode, because I think it was a reasonable summary of how to get rid of some of the negativity bias. It’s just built into many of us, to replace with a positive bias in all your thoughts and that that affects how, once you start envisioning that you can do things, now your plans will change because you’ll envision that this is possible and once that changes, you realize your goals are going to change and so it kind of builds on itself in a really positive and good way. 

We’ve come full circle from where we started a number of months ago. We have a number of new techniques to see good in ourselves and our life, to always build ourselves up instead of tearing ourselves down, and now we know how to set goals and envision the desired outcome. We’ve been to that a number of times and very importantly, we’ve gone over ways to recover our energy and our spirit when things don’t go quite the way we expected or the way we wanted. Even when we just have real bonafide setbacks to kind of get refocused again to start moving forward again. 

We’ve also started to talk about how to apply all these things together to the next phase of our lives, to see opportunities where before we really didn’t see anything. You look at a lot of people. They’re just pumped and full of energy. We’ve gone over a lot of those techniques. I hope you see how you can put those together and really make your life more interesting, a lot more fun, and a lot more energized, and to see your strengths. Before, I talked about how we tend to see our shortcomings. Oh, I didn’t do this as well as I wanted to. I thought I was going to do this week, this weekend, I didn’t get a ton done. Now we’ve learned how to see the progress that we’ve made. We can gradually celebrate the successes that we’ve had. 

I’m very excited about this age of my life. I realized that I have knowledge and wisdom that - when I was little or younger, even if I was teenager, 20, 30 years old, it would be really hard for me to envision myself ever having that sort of insight and knowledge into things. I can remember when I was younger and asking the old guys, How do you do this? We’re trying to cook something. I asked my mom, How can you do this? It was just beyond me how people could remember all these different things. 

Well, now, where I work, there’s a number of younger people who I work with. They’re coming to me as the old guy, and they seek me out as a mentor and they look for answers from me for all those tough questions. They can’t figure it out, and it’s always fun to be appreciated, obviously, but what’s really fun to me is looking back in my own life and thinking when I used to do that and then seeing now that people are doing that to me, so I take that as a real responsibility. Here’s my opportunity. When people are looking for knowledge, here’s my opportunity to really get them excited about things and really show them  lots of good things.

I try to limit negative comments because life has good points and bad points. Try to limit the negative things and instead point out all the exciting things that are going on in life, and all the exciting things in their career, and all the exciting things and opportunities that are here - not just for me, but for everybody, and for them particularly. A lot of them are younger, have families. They’re going to have college ahead of them, and all those expenses and things like that, whatever they’re looking for the path that their kids are going to follow. So they have to figure out all these things that I’m passed now. I can look back and say, Here’s what I did, here are the good things, here are the bad things, some things to consider as make these decisions and they’re almost always appreciative - not of me telling them what to do, but of giving them options and explaining what happened and what I thought of the outcome and what other outcomes might have been. 

Working with younger people is just an awesome way to really make your life more fun and make it really exciting when you associate with younger people. I associate with older people, people my age, people much older than me as well. They all have different things to contribute, and I have different things to contribute to all of them. So, it's really good and it's another trick to make aging more fun, because it also reinforces in you all the good things that you have in yourself. But, that’s a big topic. We’ll talk about that another time.

In summary, tonight we realized that we have developed a lot of tools to make the most of the times of our lives, and we do that at every different phase. We have a lot of tools to share with other people. We have to remember to practice them, and then just our own tools that we developed just now over the past couple of months of goal and goal setting, envisioning, setting priorities, learning to find the good things in life. All those different things. We have to remember to practice those as well, and to use them every day. 

I hope that you’ll find that this current age that we’re in is a real blessing. It’s not a whole bunch of negative things, and a lot of people trying to convince you of that. I just don’t find that true at all. I think it says nothing but opportunity and good time. So, good luck on your journey to start rewriting your own future, to choose to succeed, and to see all the good and to never give up. 

7em.link/Congress

If you want to support a cause, the cause may be something like you feel that you were subject to ageism in one way or another, either intentionally or accidentally; whatever is an important topic to you. I would encourage you. Write your people in Congress. Write to your representative. 7em.link/Congress   If you put in your address, you’ll get direct links to how you can contact your two senators, and also who your representative actually is. There are advantages to both. Representatives tend to work at a little lower level, so smaller topics are often more pressing to them. The senators tend to work at a very high national level, and if you have really major topics - I write them about Ukraine, for example. Those are the people to address for that. Then even acting in a small way, especially if it's something that’s really important to you, it really helps you feel a little more involved and confident in your actions in life and can make a difference. You really can make a difference. 

The other other link is UKR7.com. That forwards you onto a page that has lots of links to places where you can donate. Share the link If someone says they want to do something to help the people in Ukraine, but don’t know how, give them that address UKR7.com. Please don’t forget the war in Ukraine. Everyday, you say how could it possibly get worse, and Putin doesn’t disappoint. He targets more civilians. He’s shooting civilians in cars. It’s just like I said the other day on Easter. He has no bottom limit. So keep those people in your prayers and your thoughts, and one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. Please go tell people who are looking how to donate. Pass the link along. If you can donate, thank you very much, and no matter what, keep them in your thoughts and prayers. It’s super, super important. 

And as always, be true to yourself, live the life that you’re aligned with. That’s the best way to really be excited about life. To think, act, and do in ways that you really fundamentally believe. If you do that, then life is going to be nicer for you in a lot of ways, because if you do that, things will natural tend to flow the way you expect, and if you expect people to be nice to you and you’re nice to them, they’re going to be more likely to be nice to you back. Then, you’ll say, Wow, life is actually nicer than I hear some people talk about, and I see that by example around me every day. 

They have their cranky pants on, and so they go around and they’re grumpy with everybody, and so people are grumpy to them. They go, Wow. See, I told you, life’s just full of grumpy people. It’s kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Happiness is also a self-fulfilling prophecy, happiness and kindness. If you tend to be happy and try and bring joy to other people, you’ll find that joy tends to come back to you. That’s not necessarily the only reason to do it, not because you want joy to come back to you, but you can create the environment around you, and that will tend to spread and it's a wonderful phenomena. 

So, that’s it for the week. Thank you very much for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. If not, please drop me a line. Let me know what topics you’d like to hear about. 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.