Speaker 1: I'm going to live as many adult years ahead of
Speaker 1: me at fifty four as I have behind me, and
Speaker 1: I remembered what it was like to be eighteen, and
Speaker 1: that was a long time ago. So I better start
Speaker 1: to be more conscious and intentional about how I want
Speaker 1: to live today.
Speaker 2: I chat with Modern Elder, Academy founder and New York
Speaker 2: Times bestselling author Chip Conley on the podcast. Chip is
Speaker 2: on a mission to help you live the best decades
Speaker 2: of your life, midlife and beyond.
Speaker 3: Chip is one of the world's leading experts at.
Speaker 2: The intersection of business, innovation, psychology, and spirituality. As one
Speaker 2: of the creators of the boutique hotel movement and the
Speaker 2: modern Elder to the young Airbnb founders, Chip's been a
Speaker 2: disruptor and expert on entrepreneurship and business leadership. In this discussion,
Speaker 2: we chat about Chip's new book, Learning to Love Midlife
Speaker 2: Twelve Reasons why life gets better with age. There's a
Speaker 2: great relief in chatting with Chip, you know, I mean,
Speaker 2: it was person meaningful to me considering I'm in mid life,
Speaker 2: and what he teaches us is that in midlife we
Speaker 2: can take great relief that our buy doesn't define us anymore.
Speaker 2: That we can redefine what success looks like. He talks
Speaker 2: about the great midlife edit, where we can let all
Speaker 2: of our emotional baggage, mindsets and obligations.
Speaker 3: That no longer serve us out the door. Just see
Speaker 3: it out the door, Bye bye bye.
Speaker 2: And he also talks about, of course something I love,
Speaker 2: growing whole, where we can finally begin to feel part
Speaker 2: of something bigger than ourselves. If you haven't felt these
Speaker 2: things yet and you're approaching midlife, where you're well into midlife,
Speaker 2: this episode just might inspire you to get going and transform.
Speaker 2: If you're going through it already and you're transforming, and
Speaker 2: you're growing whole, and you're letting go of all the
Speaker 2: crap from your past you want to let go. Good
Speaker 2: for you, this episode should encourage you to keep going. So,
Speaker 2: without further ado, let's get into it already. I bring
Speaker 2: you my friend, Chip Conley, Chip, welcome back to the
Speaker 2: Psychology Podcast SPK.
Speaker 1: I'm here with you. Yeah. Last time we did this
Speaker 1: squared Yes, he squared he squared SBK. Yes. Last time
Speaker 1: we talked a lot about Maslow and we both have
Speaker 1: a love and fascination with Maslow, and I have written
Speaker 1: books about him. But this time we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about maybe other things.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where we are, we're gonna have done about the
Speaker 2: tom your book, of your new book. I love to
Speaker 2: see the publicity. It's getting the press, the rave reviews. Man,
Speaker 2: out of all your books, it's uh, well, actually I
Speaker 2: don't know about that.
Speaker 3: All your books are personal with me. I was gonna say,
Speaker 3: out of all your books, this one's the most personal.
Speaker 2: I was like, wait, that's I feel like a lot
Speaker 2: of books are I resonate with uh equally, but thank
Speaker 2: you one man.
Speaker 3: I'm like, I'm forty four years old. It was written
Speaker 3: for you.
Speaker 1: It was written for you. Well, let's so. The book
Speaker 1: is called Learning to Love Midlife and Twelve Reasons Why
Speaker 1: Life gets Better with Age.
Speaker 3: So it was written for you, well, and it was
Speaker 3: before me.
Speaker 2: But I I gotta say I really resonated with it.
Speaker 2: And I loved this quote. Midlife is the Rodney danger
Speaker 2: Field of life stages.
Speaker 3: It doesn't get no respect.
Speaker 1: Now, don't get no respect. Yeah that's how.
Speaker 3: Don't Yeah not no double negative, it don't get well,
Speaker 3: it still doesn't. But anyway, it don't get no respect.
Speaker 2: I actually, in my my my students are so young.
Speaker 3: They don't. They don't know that reference.
Speaker 2: But I fly in class, you know, because I'm like
Speaker 2: jokes in class and it's silence and I'm like and
Speaker 2: I go, oh, I get no respect, you know, And
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, even that one, no one gets Okay.
Speaker 1: Well, but isn't this true, though, Scott? I mean, midlife
Speaker 1: as a life stage has a terrible brand. The number
Speaker 1: one word attached to a just crisis, and it's for
Speaker 1: some people it's the doorway to death. I mean it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: on the other side of midlife, I have these disease, decrepetude,
Speaker 1: and death. And so it's like this life stage that
Speaker 1: people disavow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, they do.
Speaker 2: And as you note in your book, there's all sorts
Speaker 2: of negative connotations where usually the word the term middle
Speaker 2: life is followed by crisis. Right, So now are you
Speaker 2: trying to reframe it in this book from crisis to
Speaker 2: what to chrysalis?
Speaker 1: I do love the language if you think about first
Speaker 1: of all, when it comes to social science research with
Speaker 1: m geek just like you other I don't have a
Speaker 1: PhD at touched me, although I don't have an honorary
Speaker 1: PhD from Saybrook, But that's like you know in psychology.
Speaker 1: But I only took one psychology class in college, and
Speaker 1: that was with Phil Lombardo, who is the classic weirdo
Speaker 1: professor I loved. So long story short is I am
Speaker 1: fascinated by the fact that there's not a ton of
Speaker 1: evidence that people have a crisis in midlife. There is
Speaker 1: some evidence that I think is pretty pretty strong, although
Speaker 1: some people don't like it, about the U Curve of happiness,
Speaker 1: which shows that our life satisfaction declines on a low, long,
Speaker 1: slow decline from our early twenties to the bottoming out
Speaker 1: around forty five to fifty. I hate to tell you
Speaker 1: that at age forty four your mileage may vary. And
Speaker 1: there's a lot of reasons why there is this slow
Speaker 1: decline and there's a low point of life satisfaction. Is
Speaker 1: the crisis? No, I wouldn't say that. Is it a chrysalis?
Speaker 1: So maybe it is and chrystal. Let's look with the
Speaker 1: word crysalis, So a chrysalis, The word is a We
Speaker 1: got familiar with it as a kid when we studied
Speaker 1: the butterfly, because midlife for the butterfly was the chrysalis.
Speaker 1: So a caterpillary plumps up and consumes and produces and
Speaker 1: eats a lot until it actually spins its chrysalis, and
Speaker 1: then it goes into this crystalis and it's dark and
Speaker 1: solitary and guy, but it's where the transformation happens and
Speaker 1: they come out on the other side about it. Now,
Speaker 1: it had the butterfly had this the same DNA. The
Speaker 1: catapultar had the DNA of the butterfly in it. They're
Speaker 1: called imaginal discs. And long story short is. As I
Speaker 1: started to think about this, I started thinking, well, the
Speaker 1: U curve happiness shows that actually people get happier in
Speaker 1: their fifties and their sixties and their seventies, and women
Speaker 1: in their eighties even, And so what if, in fact,
Speaker 1: midlife is a life stage where you're going through a lot.
Speaker 1: You're supposed to shed a lot. Yes, it's it's a
Speaker 1: transformative period and some of it's going to be scary,
Speaker 1: but on the other side of it, you have the
Speaker 1: best years of your life. Maybe life begins at fifty
Speaker 1: and so that's that's a little bit of my perspective.
Speaker 1: And based upon you know, we've had over four thousand
Speaker 1: people come to our NEA or Modern Aldy Academy campus
Speaker 1: in Baja average age fifty four. And we sort of
Speaker 1: have seen, you know, like what it means for people
Speaker 1: to be going through a crystalis as opposed to a crisis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you use all sorts of terms to describe
Speaker 2: this period. You're also talking about as an unraveling, but
Speaker 2: you've refer to that as a good thing.
Speaker 4: Can you explain a little bit how in the raveling
Speaker 4: can be a good thing. Well, let's let's give credit
Speaker 4: where it's due. Brennane Brown said this to me a
Speaker 4: few years ago. She said, Chip, you know, I like
Speaker 4: what you're doing. She would give me, give me a
Speaker 4: cover quote from my book Wisdom at Work, The Making
Speaker 4: of a Modern Elder. And I told her I was
Speaker 4: creating this modern elder academy thingma And she said, well,
Speaker 4: you're going to find a lot of people having a
Speaker 4: midlife unraveling.
Speaker 1: And I said, oh, that sounds terrible. It's like unraveling
Speaker 1: says like someone losing their mind. And she said, have
Speaker 1: you ever looked at the dictionary at the word ravel?
Speaker 1: To ravel means something so tightly wound you can't get
Speaker 1: it undone. And for a lot of people in midlife,
Speaker 1: they're so tightly wound in their expectations of themselves, in
Speaker 1: how many obligations they have said yes to, and just
Speaker 1: how they have cured their life that it feels like
Speaker 1: a mess. And so to the midlife unraveling is learning
Speaker 1: how to disconnect from many of the obligations and mindsets
Speaker 1: and identities that we've inhabited so that we can do
Speaker 1: what I like to call the great midlife edit, because
Speaker 1: the first half of our life is about accumulating, and
Speaker 1: the second half of our life, if we're getting it right,
Speaker 1: is about editing. And so the unravel is the thing
Speaker 1: that happens before you actually have the chance to edit
Speaker 1: your life. Then we do a whole ritual around that,
Speaker 1: at mea to help people throw into the fire what
Speaker 1: they're letting go of, partly because we don't have rights
Speaker 1: of passenger rituals or schools or tools for people in
Speaker 1: midlife also known as mid lessens. In adolescence, we have it,
Speaker 1: You have all this adolescent support and love and care
Speaker 1: to help you through the emotional, physical, hormonal, and identity
Speaker 1: transitions of adolescence. But what about the hormonal, emotional, physical,
Speaker 1: and identity transitions of middle essence? Who is providing that support,
Speaker 1: and who's your peer group and your cohort that you're
Speaker 1: going through this with. For men, they don't even talk
Speaker 1: about this stuff.
Speaker 3: Such a good point, such a good point. Wow, wow
Speaker 3: wow wow. Chip Conleys, PK, you're right, yeah, you're.
Speaker 2: What What is the midlife atrium that you can create
Speaker 2: for yourself?
Speaker 1: Yeah, A term from Mary Katherine bateson so.
Speaker 3: I love you. How you give credit to people?
Speaker 1: I do? Yeah, because they deserve it. And so what
Speaker 1: she said was this the following she said that we
Speaker 1: have a tendency to think that with additional longevity compared
Speaker 1: to fifty years ago, then it just means we're old longer.
Speaker 1: And she said, that's not true. You're in mid life longer.
Speaker 1: So you know, you're get to be old for the
Speaker 1: last part of your life, but you're going to be
Speaker 1: in life longer. And what you really need in midlife
Speaker 1: is an atrium, a place to reflect upon how you
Speaker 1: want to consciously curate the second half of your life. So,
Speaker 1: if the average age of the person who comes to
Speaker 1: MAA is fifty four and their average age they think
Speaker 1: you're going to live till is ninety, you have thirty
Speaker 1: six years ahead of you. And if you think about
Speaker 1: fifty four is thirty six years into your adulthood, because
Speaker 1: fifty four minus eighteen when you turned it an adult,
Speaker 1: it was thirty six. So fifty four is halfway through
Speaker 1: eighteen to ninety. And most of us at fifty four
Speaker 1: don't say like, oh wow, how do I want to
Speaker 1: consciously curate the rest of our life? No, we don't
Speaker 1: give ourselves the space the midlife atrium to sort of
Speaker 1: ask that we don't ask. We don't have someone curating
Speaker 1: our life for us, asking questions like you know, ten years,
Speaker 1: you know what we regret if you don't learn it
Speaker 1: or do it now. What we need in midlife is
Speaker 1: a midwife, someone who can midwife us through this road
Speaker 1: map of midlife so that we can look at our
Speaker 1: life and say, wow, I have longevity literacy. Now I'm
Speaker 1: going to live as many adult years ahead of me
Speaker 1: at fifty four as I have behind me, and I
Speaker 1: remember what it was like to be eighteen, and that
Speaker 1: was a long time ago. So I better start to
Speaker 1: be more conscious and intentional about how I want to
Speaker 1: live my next few decades. And that's I think part
Speaker 1: of what the book tries to do. Learning to Love
Speaker 1: Midlife It also tries to help people to see, like, man,
Speaker 1: have we swallowed the anti aging message out there, the
Speaker 1: message that the anti aging industrial complex wants us to swallow,
Speaker 1: which is, you don't look young anymore. You got to
Speaker 1: do things to make yourself be and look young. And
Speaker 1: what I wanted to do with the book was to
Speaker 1: help people see that there's a pro aging message out
Speaker 1: there too. There's a lot of things that get better
Speaker 1: with age, and so I tried to actually point out
Speaker 1: twelve of that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so let's get into some of those things.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, which one should we start with first, don't?
Speaker 2: I don't think we need to go in order here.
Speaker 3: Let's just going to one of the ones that I
Speaker 3: found most interesting.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that's the fact that that a person's hero's
Speaker 2: journey can really shadow side.
Speaker 3: Now that really resonated with me.
Speaker 2: Well, and tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that that that. So the book is organized
Speaker 1: with an introduction and afterward, and then there's twelve chapters
Speaker 1: of the twelve reasons why life gets better with agent.
Speaker 1: That chapter speaks to the idea of I understand my
Speaker 1: story in essence, my narrative better because I had the
Speaker 1: pattern recognition of more life. You know, when you're a
Speaker 1: quarter of the way through a novel, you don't know
Speaker 1: where it's going or who the characters are. But halfway
Speaker 1: through you understand everything prepare you think you do. And
Speaker 1: that's sort of like life. You know, by the time
Speaker 1: you get the middle life, you can see your patterns
Speaker 1: and some of your shadow side. You can see what's
Speaker 1: consistent and thematic in the through line of your life.
Speaker 1: And once you know that you can, you know you
Speaker 1: will make Carl Young happy because you'll take the unconscious
Speaker 1: and make it conscious, and then your life becomes better, hopefully.
Speaker 1: So that chapter really speaks to the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: you could look at your life as a hero's journey.
Speaker 1: You could design even that chapter helps people design a
Speaker 1: hero's journey or heroines journey for themselves to understand what
Speaker 1: are the patterns that are typical and why is that important? Man,
Speaker 1: It's so important because wisdom is about actually learning how
Speaker 1: to learn from your mistakes. Your past life lessons are
Speaker 1: the raw material for your future wisdom. And if you
Speaker 1: haven't haven't learned something from the patterns that you've lived
Speaker 1: out in your life, then you haven't actually built some wisdom.
Speaker 1: And as Adam Grant said to me when I was
Speaker 1: writing one of my past books, he said, like, Chip,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of evidence that that wisdom is
Speaker 1: correlated with age. And I was like, really, that sounds crazy,
Speaker 1: and he said, well, you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: seventy year olds who have not metabolized their experiences. They
Speaker 1: don't have made sense, and there's a lot of thirty
Speaker 1: year olds who have. And it's like, okay, So what
Speaker 1: I really wanted to help with people with the book
Speaker 1: was to help people it's like, how do you make
Speaker 1: sense of your life lessons in a way that makes
Speaker 1: you wiser?
Speaker 2: Relating to that, you know, what can be learned from
Speaker 2: The Velveteen Rabbit.
Speaker 1: So the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit speaks to this
Speaker 1: idea that your favorite toy, your favorite little doll, maybe
Speaker 1: something that actually has been loved to death. It only
Speaker 1: has one eye and all of the fur it used
Speaker 1: to have has been rubbed off. And what the author
Speaker 1: of the book says is, you know, as we get older,
Speaker 1: we get more real, and to be real as a
Speaker 1: doll is something means that you don't necessarily look good
Speaker 1: on the exterior. But you have this, this love love
Speaker 1: affair with this doll, this velveteen rabbit, in such a
Speaker 1: way that it has a lot of sentimental value to you.
Speaker 1: And I think there's truth to that for us in
Speaker 1: our lives, is that, yes, as we get older, we
Speaker 1: don't look as good as we did twenty years ago,
Speaker 1: thirty years ago. Yes, if you want to put the
Speaker 1: time and energy into having the body you had thirty
Speaker 1: years ago, I love that you're doing that. But just
Speaker 1: know that a six pack becomes more expensive as you
Speaker 1: get older. And what I mean by that, I'm not
Speaker 1: talking about Budweiser or Heineken. I'm talking about the fact
Speaker 1: that a six pack apps take more time and more
Speaker 1: energy to actually maintain at sixty than at thirty. So
Speaker 1: there's an opportunity cost of trying to do that. So
Speaker 1: let's get comfortable that we were issued a rental vehicle
Speaker 1: at birth and it's called our body, and over time
Speaker 1: it gets dings and the paint job isn't quite as good.
Speaker 1: But what's more important than the outside and what it
Speaker 1: looks like is what it feels like on the inside.
Speaker 1: And that's when it gets real. That leather, you know,
Speaker 1: the leather, you know, bank at seat that just smells
Speaker 1: right because you sort of lived in it for a
Speaker 1: long time, so you know, it's comfortable. Learning how to
Speaker 1: get real issues. That's like of what it means to
Speaker 1: get to birth.
Speaker 3: And it's well, your book was real. I mean you
Speaker 3: said a lot of shit in there that I was like, oh.
Speaker 1: He went there. My mom, Yeah, my mom. My mom's
Speaker 1: not a fan of that. I mean, you know, I
Speaker 1: have eighty six year old parents. I'm sixty three and
Speaker 1: eighty six year old parents and they think, t M,
Speaker 1: I chip too much information. But you know what, as
Speaker 1: you know, Scott, I mean, I grew up in a family.
Speaker 1: I love my parents, love my sisters, and I grew
Speaker 1: up in a family where I could not talk about
Speaker 1: what was real. So I now in you know, in
Speaker 1: my role as an author and a speaker and then
Speaker 1: as the founder and CEO of the Modern Elder Academy MAA,
Speaker 1: leading workshops all year round, I get real and I
Speaker 1: can't not.
Speaker 3: Do it because who you are. Yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying someone else has to be like that. Well,
Speaker 1: I know, it's my charm, it's just my it's my realness.
Speaker 1: It's like who I am and I don't have you know,
Speaker 1: I have prostate cancer. I had radiation, I had like
Speaker 1: testosterone suppression therapy, and I basically lost my libido the
Speaker 1: last few years. Not fun to talk about. That, not
Speaker 1: fun to talk about, you know what it's like going
Speaker 1: through radiation. But I wanted to be real about it.
Speaker 1: And that's why I have a daily blog called Wisdom
Speaker 1: whilet You know, that helps people to understand like a
Speaker 1: little microdos or wisdom and realness every day.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, the upside of everything has an upside.
Speaker 2: The upside of not having such a libido as you
Speaker 2: don't worry about your abs as much.
Speaker 3: That is true.
Speaker 1: That is true. How are your abs? Dude?
Speaker 3: Well, look at these guns show.
Speaker 1: For those of you're just listening to it, you've got
Speaker 1: he's showing his biceps, which Scott, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: let's talk about that. Let's tell you, you know what, how's
Speaker 1: your dating life? Are we going there? No, we're not
Speaker 1: going to go there.
Speaker 3: We're going.
Speaker 1: Well, you know it's you know, it is in our
Speaker 1: mid forties often that we thirst for connection and a
Speaker 1: depth of relationship if we don't have it in our
Speaker 1: life at that particular time. In fact, if we do
Speaker 1: have it and it's not going so well, that's one
Speaker 1: of the disappointment. E goes expectations of minus reality. That's
Speaker 1: sort of my my equation, my emotional equation for midlife.
Speaker 1: Sometimes you feel like, oh my god, I'm in a marriage,
Speaker 1: there's nothing or something in a marriage, and feeling lonely.
Speaker 1: But you know you're gonna I'm excited for You're You're You're.
Speaker 1: The reason that at forty four that you are going
Speaker 1: to sail through midlife is because quite frankly, you're precocious
Speaker 1: and you've already had some of the experiences that a
Speaker 1: lot of people sort of like all of a sudden
Speaker 1: get hit with at forty five. You've already had them.
Speaker 1: Being tough on yourself in terms of success. Yeah, have
Speaker 1: they're done that? Yeah No. Sometimes so a lot of
Speaker 1: people sometimes like it hits them on the head at
Speaker 1: forty five or forty six. But you you know, you've
Speaker 1: beaten yourself up on that. You have high expectations of yourself.
Speaker 1: You've hopefully gotten to a place where you are getting
Speaker 1: clear about your own definition of success and more comfortable
Speaker 1: with it. Unless worried about measuring it up to somebody
Speaker 1: else's definition. That's that's a process. That's a process. I
Speaker 1: think the fact that you have a level of introspection
Speaker 1: and depth to you is good because it's not it's
Speaker 1: not scary territory because that actually is often what starts
Speaker 1: happening for people in their forties and fifties is that
Speaker 1: they get introduced to a neighborhood they're not used to,
Speaker 1: and that is the neighborhood of the interiority of their life.
Speaker 1: And then and then they like use alcohol or drugs
Speaker 1: or you know, sex or whatever, you know overworking as
Speaker 1: their way to not use one of those three multiple
Speaker 1: choice questions. We're not going to go there. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so I think that millennials and gen z are going
Speaker 1: to help to flatten the the U cur of happiness
Speaker 1: little bit.
Speaker 2: It's no speak to my Twitter followers that I like edibles.
Speaker 2: By the way, Chip, I love I love what you're saying,
Speaker 2: and I love you know. There's this is the experience
Speaker 2: I had reading the book. I would I would read, uh,
Speaker 2: I just keep reading about what is common among people
Speaker 2: at this age, and I'd be.
Speaker 3: Like, wait, that's me that's going through.
Speaker 2: And so then there was this profound realization after finishing
Speaker 2: your book that like I'm really not that special.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well no, no, that's a good thing. That's a
Speaker 3: good thing.
Speaker 2: Another way of framing that in a in sort of
Speaker 2: a more self compassion Chris, and that sort of way
Speaker 2: is that there's a yeah, there's a great common humanity
Speaker 2: here and and there is a there is like a
Speaker 2: there there really are like there is a rhythm to life,
Speaker 2: and well there's a normality.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's a normality to many of the things
Speaker 1: we go through. You know, I lost five male friends
Speaker 1: to suicide during the Great Recession ages forty two to
Speaker 1: fifty two. I had some suicide ideation myself during that time.
Speaker 1: And what I think is true for so many people
Speaker 1: in midlife, especially men, is they don't realize that some
Speaker 1: of what they're going through is normal. And because we
Speaker 1: don't talk about it, and because we want to be
Speaker 1: the rugged individualist, we feel like we're suffering alone. And
Speaker 1: that sort of let the life of quiet desperation that
Speaker 1: I think it was thorough might have said. And so
Speaker 1: I think, you know, gosh, the more we can help
Speaker 1: people to see that we're not the only one going
Speaker 1: through what we're going through and that there may be
Speaker 1: some tools, like, you know, we have something called the
Speaker 1: anatomy the transition that help people to understand, like what
Speaker 1: you're going through a transition, here's these three stages of
Speaker 1: a transition, and to help yourself, like I understand what
Speaker 1: are the coping mechanisms and tools for each of the stages.
Speaker 1: And I, you know, I just wish we had more
Speaker 1: resources available to people in midlife so that they understood that, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're an adult and you may feel like an idiot
Speaker 1: because you're you're having emotions and feeling like you're really
Speaker 1: bad at this thing or that thing. But if you
Speaker 1: have a growth mindset on it, you're not going to
Speaker 1: focus on trying to prove yourself and win. You're going
Speaker 1: to focus on trying to improve yourself and word and
Speaker 1: if you like, if you see life at that learning journey,
Speaker 1: and you can laugh at yourself a little bit more
Speaker 1: easily as well.
Speaker 2: Definitely, And and part of that journey is letting go
Speaker 2: of identities that maybe you've you've held onto your whole
Speaker 2: life and even create a new one. You say, quote
Speaker 2: the trip becomes the journey once you've left your baggage.
Speaker 1: Or you've lost your baggage. Yeah, that just left it
Speaker 1: even lost.
Speaker 5: Its Yeah, we all have baggage, I mean, and yeah,
Speaker 5: trying to sort through our baggage and understand what's there
Speaker 5: and then maybe, you know, go ahead and put the
Speaker 5: valise that the suitcase up on the shelf and say like.
Speaker 1: Okay, I know it's up there. Now I'm not carrying
Speaker 1: it with me. Part of the challenge of midlife is
Speaker 1: it's a marathon. And if you're carrying a lot of
Speaker 1: emotional baggage through a marathon, man, are you going to
Speaker 1: be tired? Are you going to be very worn out?
Speaker 1: So being able to open up the suitcase and see
Speaker 1: what's in there, what kind of baggage is in there,
Speaker 1: and then maybe repack it and then store it is
Speaker 1: part of, you know, metaphorically, what we're trying to help
Speaker 1: people do in midlife. But for a lot of people
Speaker 1: who have baggage, they don't even realize that they're they're
Speaker 1: they're carrying all this along with them. You just see
Speaker 1: it in their eyes, and you see them worn out
Speaker 1: and burned out all chip.
Speaker 2: I mean, you see a lot of people, You see
Speaker 2: a lot of people you know, come and go in baha.
Speaker 1: Yes, we have a campus opening here in Santa Fe
Speaker 1: where I am right now.
Speaker 3: Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 2: What are some of the most profound things for you
Speaker 2: personally that you get a chance to do with people
Speaker 2: who come and take your courses.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think you know, people show up often feeling stuck.
Speaker 1: I'll just tell you a quick story. There's a female,
Speaker 1: a woman who came. She was sixty years old. She'd
Speaker 1: been a litigator for thirty five years. She was a
Speaker 1: damn good litigator and she's made a good amount of
Speaker 1: money doing it. But she was wearing armor, and that
Speaker 1: first twenty four hours of a week long program she
Speaker 1: was you could feel the armor around her, not just
Speaker 1: in how she wasn't opening up, but also in just
Speaker 1: how it was weighing her down. And so we went
Speaker 1: through an exercise maybe on the second day, which was
Speaker 1: trying to understand your purpose and like, you know what,
Speaker 1: you know, what are the breadcrumbs that take you to purpose?
Speaker 1: And often it's the things that excite you or agitate you,
Speaker 1: or the things you're curious about, or maybe something from
Speaker 1: childhood that actually feels fresh and new again that you
Speaker 1: want to actually re explore. And she man she started
Speaker 1: crying because she had these memories of being in about
Speaker 1: a fourteen year old twelve year old at her grandmother's
Speaker 1: home in Kansas, cooking pies. And she said, ever since then,
Speaker 1: I mean, she never you know, she never focused on
Speaker 1: cooking a whole lot, but whenever she loves having friends over.
Speaker 1: Even though she's a litigator and she sort of likes
Speaker 1: to argue a lot, that's sort of what she's become.
Speaker 1: She hates that her profession has made her the end
Speaker 1: to that, but she loves having people over because she
Speaker 1: loves cooking dessert. And so by the end of the week,
Speaker 1: she realized, I don't have to be a litigation attorney anymore.
Speaker 1: She knew that she didn't want to do it, but
Speaker 1: she had no idea what was next, and she was
Speaker 1: looking for something adjacent, like I'll be a consultant to
Speaker 1: litigators or something like that. And she realized that the
Speaker 1: thing she really wanted to do was to go become
Speaker 1: a pastry chef and then if she liked it, and
Speaker 1: she would take a small step by going to a
Speaker 1: pastry chef school, and if she liked it, she would
Speaker 1: create a bakery in her neighborhood because the bakery that
Speaker 1: used to be in her neighborhood closed down during COVID,
Speaker 1: and that's what she's doing now. So what I love,
Speaker 1: whether it's someone who's coming, you know, limping in based
Speaker 1: upon a divorce that happened that came as a surprise,
Speaker 1: or it's someone who has just sold their company and
Speaker 1: feels lost. There another story I'll tell There was a
Speaker 1: forty five year old investment banker who has retired, six
Speaker 1: foot four, white from New York and he had a
Speaker 1: lot of money and not a lot of purpose. And
Speaker 1: then there was this four foot eleven African American, joyous
Speaker 1: woman from Atlanta, Africa who was a social worker, and
Speaker 1: she had a lot of purpose but not a lot
Speaker 1: of money. And over the course of the week, the
Speaker 1: two of them became close, even though they're from completely
Speaker 1: different worlds, and they'd go for a walk in the
Speaker 1: beach because they were in Baja as opposed to Santa Fe.
Speaker 1: And by the end of the week they had become
Speaker 1: quite close, and she taught him about purpose and he
Speaker 1: taught her about money, and they're still close a few
Speaker 1: years later, So that that's beautiful. You know. Dak Or Keltner,
Speaker 1: who is at UC Berkeley, professor started the Greater Good
Speaker 1: Science Center. He's on our faculty at MAA. Teaches every year.
Speaker 1: Actually now he's teaching twice a year, once a year
Speaker 1: in Santa Fe, once a year in Baja. In his
Speaker 1: book Awe, which came out last year, which is a
Speaker 1: great book, he focused on the eight common pathways to
Speaker 1: awe globally and the number three on the list was nature.
Speaker 1: And I would you would have thought, like, okay, nature
Speaker 1: is the number one way to awe. That feels the
Speaker 1: sort of like normal thinking, right, But it was not
Speaker 1: number one on the list. It was actually number three,
Speaker 1: and number one and number two on the list were
Speaker 1: pro social things he would witness or experience. Number two
Speaker 1: on the list was the list was collective effervescence that
Speaker 1: Emil Durkheim term studied, the French sociologist who studied religious
Speaker 1: pokrimages one hundred and fifteen years ago, and he said,
Speaker 1: when people actually are in certain environments, their sense of
Speaker 1: ego separation dissolves and their sense of communal joy emerges.
Speaker 1: And so Daker said to me when the book, his
Speaker 1: book came out, and I had talked with him a
Speaker 1: lot about collective effervescements. I've always I am a founding
Speaker 1: board member of the Burning Man nonprofit, and you know,
Speaker 1: I'm very close with the founders, and so I have
Speaker 1: I like collective effervescence. It gives it brings me a
Speaker 1: lot of joy. So he said, you know what mea
Speaker 1: when someone goes through a week long workshop, they feel
Speaker 1: collective effervescence. That's part of what you're creating awe. You're
Speaker 1: creating awe in with other humans in a cohort where
Speaker 1: they actually feel a sense of that communal joy. But
Speaker 1: number one on those lists is something came out of
Speaker 1: left field, and it's called moral beauty. And he says,
Speaker 1: he said that moral beauty is the number one pathway
Speaker 1: for people to feel awe in the world, and at
Speaker 1: a time like we are right right now where it's
Speaker 1: so partisan and so difficult, and it's like, really that's common.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, tell me more about it. And he said,
Speaker 1: it's when in a workshop chip where you see people
Speaker 1: and you may have been judgmental about them in the
Speaker 1: first I don't know, first day, but then you see
Speaker 1: their courage or their resilience, or their compassion, or their
Speaker 1: equanimity or their kindness and you witness your the enlightened
Speaker 1: witness for the best humanity has to offer. That is
Speaker 1: the number one halfway to awe. So I bring all
Speaker 1: of this up in the context of saying, what I
Speaker 1: have been lucky enough to do for you know, six
Speaker 1: years now with over four thousand people, is to experience
Speaker 1: moral beauty and collective effervescence and awe and to feel
Speaker 1: that with you know, twenty four people in the workshop
Speaker 1: at the second, you know, for a whole week. Is
Speaker 1: I feel so lucky. I'm not a livigator, so a
Speaker 1: lit gator you know, gets the armor on. I'm quite
Speaker 1: the opposite that. It's like it's opened me up in
Speaker 1: ways that are just making me a better person. So
Speaker 1: I feel very lucky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you are.
Speaker 2: There's a great integration here between your all of your work,
Speaker 2: you know, integrating the work you've done with peak, right,
Speaker 2: Like I mean, when you're talking about peak experiences, that is.
Speaker 3: True with middle.
Speaker 2: Age, and you know, how can we basically ask you know,
Speaker 2: you're asking the question, now, can we cultivate more peak
Speaker 2: experiences in middle age? And what a what a what
Speaker 2: a profound question? And but I think that we go
Speaker 2: going even further. Your book suggests there's even greater potential
Speaker 2: in Middle Ages than maybe we've ever had before or
Speaker 2: that we'll have after.
Speaker 3: This might be the time.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it depends. And you know, Arthur Brooks wrote
Speaker 1: quite you know, eloquently in his books From Strength to Strength.
Speaker 1: You know about fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence, and flood
Speaker 1: intelligence is when we're fast and focused and we're good
Speaker 1: at solving problems quickly. And when I worked at Airbnb,
Speaker 1: I was surrounded by people with fluid intelligence and they
Speaker 1: were as smart as can be, didn't have a lot
Speaker 1: of peripheral vision, very focused on what was right in
Speaker 1: front of them, and brilliant in many ways. But as
Speaker 1: we get older, our food intelligence declines, but our crystallized
Speaker 1: intelligence grows. And what is crystallized intelligence. It's our ability
Speaker 1: to think holistically and systemically. It's what I what doctor
Speaker 1: Gene Cohen in his book The Aging Brain called four
Speaker 1: wheel drive of the brain being able to go from
Speaker 1: logical to lyrical because actually the brain shrinks a little
Speaker 1: bit as we age, and crystallized intelligence allows us to
Speaker 1: sort of be adept atchoing from the you know, from
Speaker 1: one side of the brain to the other and long
Speaker 1: straight short is, as we go into midlife and beyond,
Speaker 1: trying to find professions that allow us to tap into
Speaker 1: our crystallized intelligence. Are connecting of the dots is really valuable.
Speaker 1: I don't want a coach or a therapist who's twenty
Speaker 1: five years old. I want to coach or a therapist
Speaker 1: who's fifty five or sixty years old, because they have
Speaker 1: the life experience. And I'm not saying I wouldn't see
Speaker 1: a coach. This is let's be really clear, these are generalizations.
Speaker 1: I want to be Not all fifty five year old
Speaker 1: coaches are good coaches. But if wisdom is the metabolized
Speaker 1: experience that leads to a distilled compassion, that's really what
Speaker 1: wisdom is. Wisdom is a social good. Being savvy or
Speaker 1: smart is not a social good, But being wise is.
Speaker 1: It means you've metabolized something, You've had your life lessons,
Speaker 1: and you're offering them to someone else. I love this
Speaker 1: quote from David Viscott, which is the meaning of the
Speaker 1: purpose of life is to find your gift. The work
Speaker 1: of life is to develop it, and the meaning of
Speaker 1: life is to give it away. That's really what we
Speaker 1: help people with is to help people to understand their gift,
Speaker 1: their mastery, the wisdom. How do you continue to develop
Speaker 1: that and then how do you, as a social good
Speaker 1: give that away to people? And I think that that's
Speaker 1: part of our role, you know, Eric Erikson, I am
Speaker 1: what survives me. You know, this is the era of
Speaker 1: our life where we're supposed to be giving it away.
Speaker 2: Is this what you meant by life as a horizontal
Speaker 2: journey then a vertical one?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: What I mean by that is that was later in
Speaker 1: the book. So the book is organized with twelve different chapters,
Speaker 1: and there's five different sections. There's a section on the
Speaker 1: physical life up around Yeah, that's fine, and then the
Speaker 1: emotional life, and then the mental life and the vocational
Speaker 1: life and spiritual life and the spiritual life. You know,
Speaker 1: we are we walk the planet, we through our career.
Speaker 1: We're on a treadmill and we learn all these things.
Speaker 1: And so life is a horizontal journey as we are
Speaker 1: on that treadmill of life with everybody else. But there's
Speaker 1: a point in life where we start to actually look
Speaker 1: at our connection with something deeper and bigger than ourselves,
Speaker 1: and that's when it starts to go vertical. And when
Speaker 1: I say and I'm not saying I'm not speaking about
Speaker 1: a particular religious tradition here. I'm speaking about the idea
Speaker 1: that we feel connected with something bigger than ourselves, and
Speaker 1: that maybe through a religious tradition or a spiritual practice,
Speaker 1: and so that's when we move beyond, you know, the
Speaker 1: sort of horizontal plane of life. And I do, I
Speaker 1: do believe that is something that you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of social science research that shows that we get
Speaker 1: more spiritually curious in midlife and beyond. And there's you know,
Speaker 1: and Richard Wore and charl Young both said, you know,
Speaker 1: the primary operating system for the first half of our
Speaker 1: life is our ego, and for the second half of
Speaker 1: our life, it's our soul. But nobody gave us operating instructions.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, well, that's probably my favorite part of your book,
Speaker 2: is all to talk about the discovering your soul.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker 2: You know, well you say, reallying to what you just said,
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote you. All of this can be disorienting,
Speaker 2: but don't feat a new primary operating system is being
Speaker 2: installed in your life, upgrading you from the era of
Speaker 2: the ego to the stage of the soul. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's basically what you just said, but I thought it
Speaker 2: was worded better when you said it this other way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: It's still you though, it is it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but yeah, you know, I I know lots of
Speaker 1: people who in their fifties, I justn' getting fill Pizzo.
Speaker 1: Let me just use him as an example. He's a doctor.
Speaker 1: He's from Italian American family, Catholic, you know, first first
Speaker 1: generation to go to college, and his family ultimately became
Speaker 1: a doctor, became the dean of the Stanford Medical School,
Speaker 1: started the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. This man, in his
Speaker 1: later life was trying to integrate all of the different
Speaker 1: parts of himself and as a doctor and as a
Speaker 1: professor at Stanford, he felt like the spiritual part of
Speaker 1: his life was he was having a hard time. He
Speaker 1: was trying to show up every day as a spiritually
Speaker 1: minded person, but he couldn't. He couldn't figure it out.
Speaker 1: And at seventy seven, a good Catholic boy, he surprised
Speaker 1: all of his colleagues when he said, I'm going to
Speaker 1: rabbinical school. I want to become a rabbi. And so
Speaker 1: not only was he seventy seven. He's Catholic and he's
Speaker 1: an academic, and this is like not at all what
Speaker 1: he was studying. He realized that there was a spiritual
Speaker 1: curiosity that had been there for the last twenty years
Speaker 1: and he needed to scratch that itch and to and
Speaker 1: to dive headlong into the deep end of the core
Speaker 1: and he did.
Speaker 2: I love that. I love that story. When you're diving
Speaker 2: deep end into the pool, though, it's just really helpful
Speaker 2: to have a support system around you. And I really
Speaker 2: like when you talk about who is there for you
Speaker 2: as you shift your operating system from your ego to
Speaker 2: your soul. How might you be a midwife for midlife
Speaker 2: for someone else? And I think that that does cause
Speaker 2: that that that's a moment of reflection, a reflection point
Speaker 2: where you think, you know, the people that I'm surrounding
Speaker 2: myself with the best midwives or mid what's the male
Speaker 2: version of that?
Speaker 1: You can be you can be a male goodwives yeah,
Speaker 1: mid husband.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, good point.
Speaker 1: Good point.
Speaker 3: In my attempt to be be PC, I was not.
Speaker 2: PC anyway, but yeah, how how you know it is
Speaker 2: a good moment of reflection to think about who you know,
Speaker 2: who do you really want to be the midwives? And
Speaker 2: who do you want to midway four? I mean there
Speaker 2: might be that that reflection might cause you to change
Speaker 2: some things in your life, right, some drastic changes.
Speaker 1: Well you know this, Get this opens the door to
Speaker 1: a phrase that I really love, which is social wellness.
Speaker 1: When we think of wellness, we tend to think of
Speaker 1: the personal side, like your sleep, your you know, nutrition,
Speaker 1: your exercise. But as Bob Waldingger at Harvard is shown
Speaker 1: with the eighty five year old eighty five year long
Speaker 1: longitudent Study of Adult adult Development, you know, the number
Speaker 1: one variable for people who are happy, healthy and living
Speaker 1: into their eighties and nineties is how invested were they
Speaker 1: in their social wellness in midlife and beyond. And so, yes,
Speaker 1: to answer your question, having a social safety net, having
Speaker 1: you know the people in your life that are there
Speaker 1: for you on a rainy day, that's really important. But
Speaker 1: we also need to think of friendship as a practice.
Speaker 1: You know, if you don't if you don't if you
Speaker 1: don't exercise, you know, you you atrophy. And so if
Speaker 1: you don't practice friendship, it'll atrophy. And for a lot
Speaker 1: of men in particular women too. But because we have
Speaker 1: the spinning plates of our twenties, thirties and forties. Everybody's
Speaker 1: really busy. It's really easy to lose track of friends
Speaker 1: and to lose track of what it means to be
Speaker 1: a friend and how to be become a great friend.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot written about that in the
Speaker 1: last year, pertly because we have a loneliness epidemic. But
Speaker 1: I really like using the term social wellness because I
Speaker 1: think that's really what we need to do to solve loneliness.
Speaker 1: We need to help people to realize that there's a
Speaker 1: huge value in having people in your life and and
Speaker 1: have them across energy generationally as well. You know, most
Speaker 1: of the people who are our peers and the people
Speaker 1: who know us intimately are around our same age. But
Speaker 1: my gosh, is it beautiful when you've got somebody who's
Speaker 1: become a bit of a mentor to you and they're
Speaker 1: twenty years younger and you're learning from them. Yes, I mean,
Speaker 1: I love that that might My experience at Airbnb is
Speaker 1: I was twice the age of the average employee there,
Speaker 1: but and I was mentoring all kinds of people, but
Speaker 1: I was learning as much from them as they were
Speaker 1: from me.
Speaker 3: My personal trainer right now, she's half my age. Now
Speaker 3: I realize that, Yeah, really helping them get into good cheap.
Speaker 1: Good for you.
Speaker 3: Shout out to my personal trainer.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, I also really loved the part on growing hole.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a phrase that combines two of my
Speaker 2: favorite words, so of course I'm going to like it
Speaker 2: or love it.
Speaker 3: Talk a little bit about what it means to grow whole.
Speaker 1: You know. We know society has a you know, a
Speaker 1: narrative about growing old. But I wanted to do is
Speaker 1: you know, I love language. Midlife Crystal is my left
Speaker 1: crystals crisis. Krystal is pro aging and to aging, and
Speaker 1: I wanted to say, like, Okay, growing old doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it I'll have to be a bad thing because you
Speaker 1: could be growing whole. And when you're growing whole, you
Speaker 1: are integrating all of who you've ever been into who
Speaker 1: you are now as well as who you are who
Speaker 1: you will be in the future. Eric Erickson, you know,
Speaker 1: as the eighth of the you know eight different Stages
Speaker 1: of adult development, talked about integrity versus despair as the
Speaker 1: eighth you know question that was going on in one's
Speaker 1: life late late in life, and so the word integrity
Speaker 1: is interesting because to be integrity he didn't necessarily mean
Speaker 1: a person who doesn't lie. He meant more that you've
Speaker 1: integrated all of the polarities of yourself to introvert and
Speaker 1: the extrovert, the wise and the curious, the gravitas and
Speaker 1: the levity, the yin the yang, the masculine, the feminine,
Speaker 1: and what you show up with is the alchemy of
Speaker 1: all of that. Whereas when we're young, we're compartmentalized and
Speaker 1: for a lot of reasons, and we don't necessarily feel integrated.
Speaker 1: So one of the processes of growing old is to
Speaker 1: grow whole in a way that people see you in
Speaker 1: your presence as being complete and that and you know,
Speaker 1: you know, the best thing you could ever do is
Speaker 1: complete your life before your life ends. And so helping
Speaker 1: people to learn how to integrate and alchemize these various
Speaker 1: polarities of themselves is very valuable. Frankly, we need it
Speaker 1: in society right now. But if you can actually do
Speaker 1: it as a human and show up with that, you
Speaker 1: know you're you're doing one thing to help have a
Speaker 1: less polarized world.
Speaker 2: Yeah as well, you just the phrase dichotomy transcendence is
Speaker 2: a big part of that sort of transcendent. Yeah, those
Speaker 2: who become trends senders. Yes, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: you are pointing people in the direction of becoming a transcender.
Speaker 2: What I love peak experience. He's a transcenders have a
Speaker 2: lot of peak experiences. They resolve these conflicts, you know, they.
Speaker 1: Have psycho hygiene. And he's one of my favorite. One
Speaker 1: of his hyphenated words.
Speaker 3: I loved that's clever. That's clever. Actually I heard that one,
Speaker 3: that's clever.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, psycho hygiene. So let's talk about that for
Speaker 1: a second. Because as a CEO of Boutigo to company
Speaker 1: called viv and then helping to run Airbnb and then
Speaker 1: at MA, this was one of the things I thought
Speaker 1: of as my job as a leader. My job was
Speaker 1: to create healthy psycho hygiene such that, you know what,
Speaker 1: a lot of companies are set up there, like you
Speaker 1: end up feeling like I have to take a shower
Speaker 1: when you go home because it's been like a sweat box,
Speaker 1: or you just feel dirty. And so to actually create
Speaker 1: a psycho hygiene in an organization such that people feel
Speaker 1: like a cleansed by coming to work and I feel
Speaker 1: psychologically lighter as a result of it is really raret
Speaker 1: by saying not easy to do and a great aspiration
Speaker 1: for a leader. And so I write about that a
Speaker 1: little bit in my book Peek How great Companies get
Speaker 1: their mojo from Maslow love that.
Speaker 2: Thank you for a double clicking on that idea. Let's
Speaker 2: maybe end this on the topic of play. Actually, no, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 2: what a really before we talk about play?
Speaker 3: You know, I'm upset.
Speaker 2: I'm really really interested in the idea of late bloomers.
Speaker 3: This is a topic that has been.
Speaker 2: Will Key obsessed with since my first up article is
Speaker 2: about late boomers for the popular audience and psycholo to
Speaker 2: today when I was like twenty eight years old. And
Speaker 2: I'm really interested in the extent to which we don't
Speaker 2: have to give up on our dreams. Yeah, maybe we
Speaker 2: had like dreams in childhood. That can we revisit some
Speaker 2: of our dreams in childhood that we gave up on
Speaker 2: in middle in midlife.
Speaker 1: Of course, I mean, I told you the story about
Speaker 1: the litigation attorney who went back to saying I want
Speaker 1: to be a pastry chef. That happens a lot. You
Speaker 1: can find love. I mean, the number of people I've
Speaker 1: met who actually after getting divorced, ended up connecting with
Speaker 1: and becoming getting married to a high school or college sweetheart.
Speaker 1: Is it's staggering, I can talk. I can tell you
Speaker 1: it's dozens of people at this point. So, yes, helping
Speaker 1: people to see that just because you hit forty or
Speaker 1: fifty or sixty doesn't mean you don't have the opportunity
Speaker 1: to experience being what it means to become a beginner again,
Speaker 1: or what it means to have a dream fall into
Speaker 1: your lap as a surprise. So, you know, I think
Speaker 1: one of the things that we do get better at
Speaker 1: as we get older is we are we have less
Speaker 1: expectation and entitlement on that. So, you know, when we're younger,
Speaker 1: we have an expectation, and that expectation leads to entitlement,
Speaker 1: and it leads to disappointment, And you know, there's a
Speaker 1: ratcheting of psychology that happens around that midlife unraveling when
Speaker 1: we actually lower our expectations a little bit and we
Speaker 1: maybe make them into hopes as opposed to expectations, and
Speaker 1: as in so doing, we have less less entitlement about
Speaker 1: how the world's supposed to work for us in the
Speaker 1: next ten years and more of a sense of maybe
Speaker 1: discovery and gifts that actually arrive for us out of
Speaker 1: left field. And I know, you know, to be able
Speaker 1: to be in that kind of childlike wonder to say, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the next ten years is going
Speaker 1: to be like, and I'm going to be really bad
Speaker 1: at predicting it. I just know that if I show
Speaker 1: up with a passionate engagement and a curiosity, people won't
Speaker 1: notice my wrinkles. They'll known as my energy and and
Speaker 1: I probably will show up in a way where things
Speaker 1: are gonna happen, and I'm gonna, you know, I'll be
Speaker 1: the beneficiary of them, even if some of them are hard,
Speaker 1: because even the thing that's a hard, painful lesson is
Speaker 1: that raw material for wisdom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ain't that the truth? Everything can be fodder for
Speaker 2: wisdom if you're wise.
Speaker 3: On everything.
Speaker 2: That sounds like a tetology, But okay, let's end just
Speaker 2: talking about this idea of pressing play on your life again,
Speaker 2: because it does segue what we just talked to segu
Speaker 2: Is Nice into that pressing play on your life again.
Speaker 2: You know, how to incorporate more play into our lives
Speaker 2: and and and have this fresh new you know, childlike
Speaker 2: wonder that.
Speaker 1: This Sometimes people like in the Korean and Japanese and
Speaker 1: Chinese cultures, they say, when you turn sixty, you have
Speaker 1: a second second adulthood or sec actually second childhood actually,
Speaker 1: and for some people they look at it, you know,
Speaker 1: fifty as your second adulthood, the idea that you are
Speaker 1: in your fifties and beyond maybe starting to create some time, affluence,
Speaker 1: some space in your life to try things. I mean,
Speaker 1: let's face it that when you're you know, you've got
Speaker 1: the spinning plates of a career and a family and
Speaker 1: kids and taking care of parents and sandwich generation and
Speaker 1: all of these obligations that you have, you know, taken
Speaker 1: on in your twenties, thirties and forties, there is not
Speaker 1: a lot of room for curiosity or for play. So
Speaker 1: the only way this works is if you actually start
Speaker 1: to look at doing that great midlife edit that I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, and you start to let go of the
Speaker 1: mindsets and obligations and you know, archetypes that have been
Speaker 1: defining you so that you can have some new space
Speaker 1: come in. When that new space comes in, it's really
Speaker 1: helpful to ask yourself, what would give me some joy?
Speaker 1: You know, my first but talk is called, you know,
Speaker 1: to have life, and it's not something we ask ourselves
Speaker 1: when you're younger, because we sort of are on a
Speaker 1: path to like try to live up to someone else's
Speaker 1: expectation of success. But pressing play on our life gives
Speaker 1: us the opportunity to get curious and to try some
Speaker 1: things that maybe we should tried twenty five years ago.
Speaker 1: But you know, now's a no bet. There's no better
Speaker 1: time than now. And Plato said long ago. Yeah, Plato said, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you can learn more about a person in
Speaker 1: an hour of play than a year of conversation. And
Speaker 1: that is not meant to mean like there shouldn't be therapists,
Speaker 1: because you're gonna have a the year of conversation with
Speaker 1: a therapist. But the truth is that play allows so
Speaker 1: many different qualities of a human to come to come
Speaker 1: to the surface. And so that's it's a very important
Speaker 1: part of our MEA program. We're not just in the
Speaker 1: classroom all the time. We're doing play, and we're doing
Speaker 1: play that is experiential as a way of us learning
Speaker 1: something along the way.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna end today's interview with another quote I loved,
Speaker 2: but I want so many quotes from your book. I
Speaker 2: was just pulling things out of Oh my god, you say, yes,
Speaker 2: we are aging and growing at the same time, and
Speaker 2: ironically it's our growing that helps us with our aging.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very clever, very clever tip.
Speaker 2: It was a real honor and privilege to have you
Speaker 2: back on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 3: I wish you all the best with this book.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Sbka. You know it's just an honor to
Speaker 1: be here with you. I love I love the podcast,
Speaker 1: I love what you're doing, and I appreciate being a friend.