Who knew? My crazy professional path was HEALTHY!

It turns out that all the different career changes that life foist upon me were GREAT for my mental, emotional & even physical health.  Who knew?!

Three cheers for Barbara Bradley Hagerty, whose interviews & articles have been playing touch tag with me for almost a week, who wrote Life Reimagined ~ the science, art & opportunity of middle age and the dandy article "Why a midcareer change might help you live longer."

 

It's the article, tucked into the Dallas News, that is getting my attention, caught by her wondering, "Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones. Perhaps you have reached your 40s, 50s, or 60s blissfully happy in your job. You are engaged, fulfilled, and challenged. Your work draws on your natural talents and passions. If so, feel free to skip this article."

Praise be, I have been!  Whether it was teaching, working with physicians & their staff & top execs at US Healthcare, working in-house with Prudential Healthcare marketing offices throughout the Middle Atlantic/Midwest, helping HR heads & employee benefits brokers handle the ins & outs & 'round abouts of financial service programs at BISYS, I was blessed to have jobs that made a difference to others, that drew on such different, often untapped skills & interests, took me into wildly uncharted territories.

 
Mind you, I had change thrust upon me, but the changes all contributed to the current work before me that will require I take everything from the past & integrate in my now into something splendiferous in the future.

Alas, it seems that my experience is not the norm. Polls indicate that a scant 1/3 of all Baby Boomers & Gen Xers are actually engaged by their work.  1/3!  That is shocking.  And the same studies suggest that about half of the same workers don't feel engaged.  Yikes!

A lot of them had an unforeseen opportunity to rethink their life work. After the financial melt-down of 2008, people who never saw it coming were suddenly out of a job in a workplace that offered few openings, with glaring age discrimination making finding a new position almost impossible if you were 30+. 

Folks like yours truly were thrust without warning into a new world.

 
These included LOTS of people who would never have left their jobs, even though many - maybe most - didn't feel all that satisfied by what they'd done.  In a lot of cases, people who'd tolerated a ho-hum job ~ yes, even those high up the success ladder were often bored - for the sake of benefits or a pension realized that they'd spent a shockingly large part of their lives doing something that did nothing for their personal development, their inner growth. 

People who had been making a decent weekly income found themselves looking for something that provided a greater sense of purpose, which might bring in less moola but yielded massively greater returns in once undervalued or even dismissed intangibles like increased health, greater satisfaction, even an enlarged social circle.  Many of those folks ultimately found work that paid less but gave greater satisfaction.  Quite a few took the same route I did, realized that the greatest security is found within ourselves,  created a position that uses our strengths, taps into our interests.  

Barbara mentions that having a sense of purpose in our work can even help hold off Alzheimer's.  Astonishing!  She notes: Researchers at Rush University Medical Center have found that a third of people whose brains, upon autopsy, display the plaques and tangles of Alzheimer’s never exhibited memory loss or intellectual impairment. The best predictor of whether someone would escape these symptoms was whether they felt strongly that they had a purpose in life. Those who did were two and a half times as likely to be unafflicted as those who didn’t.

Yes, it helps to be creative, to not be intimidated by change, even when it feels catastrophic.  Life can be set on its ear in an instant & the people who rise to its challenge might not be the ones you'd expect, predict.  Still, ability is meaningless without drive, creativity empty energy without follow through.  

Learning new things, navigating unknown terrains can be intimidating, even downright scary, but it turns out our brain LOVES it when we master new skills.  Am thinking about taking up knitting, something I've never done yet has long called to me.  And John & I are taking up mastering vegetarian cooking as a team!  I am going to make walking not just a slap-dash sometime thing, but something I make into a daily routine;  it will be good for John, too, as it will shake up his routine.

Reading Barbara's article is a good swift kick in my pants.  For YEARS, I've talked about making my contribution to changing how our culture approaches eldering.  Lots of talk, backed up by only a modicum of action. It's easy to wax rhapsodic about eldercare anarchy, daunting to put in the WORK needed to see results. 

As noted in the article, doing anything new & complicated takes time, creates discomfort & ushers in periods of frustration & disappointment.  But it turns out that mastering previously unknown tasks, perhaps especially outside our comfort zone, preserves new brain cells in the hippocampus, which makes & retrains our memories!  Big IF - the challenge needs to be not only novel & complex, it also needs to have a significant degree of difficulty.  The point is to get out of procedural memory, where everything comes easily because, no matter how hard it first was, it's become routine.

Honestly, it gives me goose bumps, reading Barbara's article & thinking about my personal & professional motto ~ engage, energize, empower. 

Friends, pleasant acquaintances, total strangers look at what I'm doing & say, "Well, you're lucky to have such a defined interest & related skills."  Jaws drop when I track my work history. 

Yes, I am at an exciting place - finally!  Took me decades - decadeS - to get to here.  There were jobs that tapped into skills but not my heart or touched my heart but offered little to no salary.  While folks are wrong that I stumbled out of a job & straight into my current true north purpose of helping people of all ages live as expansive, friggin fabulous a life possible, they were right that I always had a major advantage over (sadly) the majority of people in a similar  boat - I have always been open to seeing life reimagined, my faith in a better tomorrow always stronger than fear of any intimidating present moment.

It is pretty darn astonishing, looking back over the past 35+ years, realizing all the different skill sets that needed mastering, from being a home room teacher to baking bagels, to taking orders for balloons & fairy figurines to writing scripts & press releases, to supporting employer's 401k plans & teaching high school science. 

Thank you, Barbara Bradley Hagerty, for showing me how all those unexpected detours & switchbacks were not only good for my life's work, they were good for my health.

Who knew?!