Our memory seems like a mystery. Why can I rattle off the stating lineup of the 1967 Red Sox but can’t remember what  had for lunch yesterday? Charan Ranganath can explain. He joins us to discuss his new book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Mattersand what we can do to strengthen our cognitive fitness.

Charan Ranganath joins us from California.

_________________________

Bio

Charan Ranganath, Ph.D, is the author of the new book Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters. He is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Ranganath has studied the mechanisms in the brain that allow us to remember past events, using brain imaging techniques, computational modeling and studies of patients with memory disorders. He has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. He lives in Davis, California.

__________________________

For More on Charan Ranganath, Ph.D

Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters

Website

__________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

The Self-Healing Mind – Gregory Scott Brown, M.D.

The Power of Saying No – Vanessa Patrick, PhD

Successful Aging – Daniel Levitin

___________________________

Wise Quotes

On Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone

“…I really recommend for people to do new things and get out of their comfort zone. Novelty can be hugely important. It can be anxiety provoking for some people and you’ve got to be careful about that. But one of the things that we know is curiosity and novelty are associated with activity in these areas of brain that release and process dopamine. Dopamine is a modulator that, as I mentioned, promotes plasticity. Some work even suggests that if you, let’s say, put an animal in a box and you let it explore this box that it’s never been in before, its brain gets flooded with dopamine. Then if you give it some task, now it will be better at remembering the things that it was doing for this task. So in other words, that dopamine can have this spreading effect. So I think that is something that will improve people’s memory, potentially. And also I think that kind of engagement is just good for people in general. There’s also just a lot of value in seeing and feeling that you’re learning. It can get very easy to get into a rut and then feel like everything is the same. Sometimes you lose that curiosity as you get older. I know because I see this in my colleagues sometimes and I’ll say, Hey, what are the findings in your lab that you’re most excited about? And they’ll say, Nothing’s new, it’s all the same, we’re all just rehashing the same stuff. And I find that so depressing because it is like my whole business is curiosity and I am a big believer in the power of curiosity.”

On The Mind-Body Connection

“If you want to improve your cognitive functioning, or you want to retain your cognitive functioning over time and you want protect your brain health, consider that your brain is the seed of the mind and it is a part of your body. I think a lot of people have this idea of somehow I am my mind, and then my brain is separate. And it’s not. It is all connected. What this means is that if you’re not taking care of your mental health, your emotional health your physical health, it’s going to affect your cognition and possibly increase your risk for dementia…. If you want to get in to the positives, sleep and exercise are very important.”

On Prioritizing & Memory

“So at a minimum you want to prioritize, right? So I don’t hear people telling me, Boy, I remember this temporary password that I had from 10 years ago. That’s really great. I’m so happy about this. Even if you remembered everything else, you wouldn’t tell me this, right? And you certainly wouldn’t tell me I remembered that you’re happier about remembering the temporary passwords than you are about remember that you have a doctor appointment. So, I think that there’s this intuition that we have that we should be able to remember everything, that any inability to remember is a weakness. I think that intuition is wrong. But, of course, I lose my phone. I lose my keys. So I experience the everyday moments of frustration and of forgetting. And so I can empathize with that feeling. But on average, I think you would not want it in the opposite direction.”

On Habits & Memory

“Having good habits can help you at a day-to-day level, like just minimizing the number of distractions that you have in front of you, which I kind call memory hygiene, turning off alerts on various devices and things like that, not trying to do ten things at the same time….You say that I want be able to do a better job of remembering where I put my keys. And part of it could be put a sign, put sign saying, Hey, put keys here and just develop a habit. You don even need to remember, right? ”

____________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a lot we can learn – and relearn – from the younger people in our midst. They do many things in a  way that’s highly beneficial for older adults. Dr. Hasan Merali is the author of the new book, Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas, which shows us how toddlers bring out the best in humanity and how we can, too. It’s a whole new way of looking at and learning from toddlers.

He joins us from Ontario.

__________________________

Bio

Hasan Merali, MD, MPH, is an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics, McMaster University and a pediatric emergency medicine physician at McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario.

He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and Master of Public Health degree from Johns Hopkins University.

His research focuses on child injury prevention in low- and middle-income countries.

He has published more than twenty-five peer-reviewed journal articles, and his writing has been featured in Science, The Boston Globe, NBC, CBC, and Popular Science. Dr. Merali lives in Oakville, Ontario, with his wife and their toddler daughter.

____________________________

For More on Hasan Merali 

Sleep Well, Take Risks, Squish the Peas

Website

____________________________

Mentioned in This Podcast Episode

Chatter & Your Inner Voice – Ethan Kross

Auburn Sage

Who Has the Secret to Well-Being? The Answer May Surprise You.

Old People’s Homes for 4 Year Olds

___________________________

Podcast Episodes  You May Like

The Power of Fun – Catherine Price

Emeralds of Oz – Peter Guzzardi

___________________________

Wise Quotes

On Sleeping Like a Toddler

“I think sleep is one of the most important ones, and for anyone interested in wellness or improving their life, I would argue that sleep is the most important one to start with. I think it’s a foundation for everything else to build on. And I like the toddler routine because it is so simple and it works. And so the Toddler bedtime routine is a very easy thing to do. And if we all did it, we would all sleep better like they do, and so what you do is you set a bed time, you kind of stick to it. You got to be regular about that time. Start an hour before. None of this involves any screens, so those screens are completely off. One hour before, you’re either taking a hot bath or shower and what that does actually is cool down your body and your body needs to be cooler when we sleep and so that kind of gets your body into that mode. The next thing you do what toddlers do is they have lotion put on them and certainly that’s something we could all do. It feels good, massage is good but really any hygiene related activity is fine. And then finally I think we’re going to talk about this later too is reading and that is the best way to end your night. It’s no screens. If it’s an e-reader, it is fine, but there’s no other distractions. And it s a way to consolidate all that knowledge we’re getting because if you read and then sleep, you’re going to retain a lot more of it too.”

On Laughing Like a Toddler

“If you look at a graph of age across the spectrum and how much we do an activity, there is the first cliff that we go off is really humor and laughter. And there are a whole bunch of other ones. Reading is another one. Play is a another. And some of them do come back when you’re retired, which is wonderful. You know, for reading, it comes back for example when your 65. But laughter is definitely one of them that we can never reach the same level that we did have when we were toddlers. So toddlers left to themselves and they’re miked up. They’re laughing almost one time a minute. So nearly 60 times an hour. And adults, at most, will get to half of that level. And so this amount of laughter is good for them and us for a lot of different reasons. It’s everyone knows this it’s a stress reliever. It makes us feel good. And one of the things that I mentioned that toddlers are always trying to do is build relationships. And so, you know, one other things we know but we could probably do a lot more of is do some laughter in groups to build those relationships, we get less stress hormones.”

On Engaging with Books

“We kind of want to read all the time when we’re younger, and this kind falls off in later childhood and doesn’t come back until we were in our 60s. And I think this idea of placing that much importance on books is really critical for our well -being. I mean, it’s hard to be around a toddler or preschooler without being asked to read them something almost constantly. And there’s a couple of lessons there. One is that reading is very important for our own learning, but also for cognitive function. You know, looking at the data again, just in adults, if we look at people who read more, they’re the people who have lower rates of mild cognitive impairment and dementia as they get older. I think that’s really the biggest benefit of reading daily and if even get 20 -30 minutes as part of the bedtime routine ideal but any other time is really helpful. And the other big piece is something called deep reading. This has been promoted by a professor at UCLA named Maryann Wolf and she talks about how we are in this culture where we’re doing a lot of skim reading because we read on screens, there’s a lots of online articles, we just looking at the titles and we going through things very fast. But if they really want to absorb a book, we nearly need to get into deep reading. And I think toddlers are the ideal people to emulate with this. You know, I have a three -year -old, so I sit down with her with a book and we get through a couple of pages. There’s a lot of questions about the picture, about the text. We flip back. We have to go through other things, connected the dots. We get to the very end of this book much later than it would take me. And the question invariably is, again, and this way of engaging with the book, really focusing on the Book is really something we need to be doing. And so I would hope that your listeners, when they’re reading, not set chapter goals or amount of reading goals. Really, you want to set time goals and really engage with a book. And that can be in a lot of different ways. It can take notes, highlighting, book club. That’s the kind of deep reading that we’re missing out on and what toddlers and preschoolers do all the time.”

____________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

 

 

We’re surrounded by uncertainty and we don’t like the feeling of not knowing. But there’s often hidden strength in some things that make us uncomfortable. Maggie Jackson’s new book explores the research that shows that uncertainty is not a weakness, but instead can be a powerful tool for navigating complexity with creativity and adaptability.

Maggie Jackson joins us from Rhode Island to discuss her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure and why we should embrace uncertainty as a catalyst for curiosity – and more.

________________________

Bio

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her prescient writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure has been lauded as “remarkable and persuasive” (Library Journal); “trending” (Book Pal); “incisive and timely-triumphant” (Dan Pink); and “both surprising and practical” (Gretchen Rubin). Nominated for a National Book Award, Uncertain was named a Top 10 Social Sciences book of 2023 by Library Journal and a Top 50 Psychology book of the year by the Next Big Idea Club. The book inspired Jackson’s recent lead opinion piece in the New York Times on uncertainty and resilience.

Her acclaimed book Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of our tech-centric, attention-deficient modern lives. With a foreword by Bill McKibben, the book reveals the scientific discoveries that can help rekindle our powers of focus in a world of overload and fragmentation. Hailed as “influential” by the New Yorker and compared by Fast Company.com to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Distracted offers a “richly detailed and passionately argued … account of the travails facing an ADD society” (Publishers Weekly) and “concentrates the mind on a real problem of modern life” (The Wall Street Journal). The book is “now more essential than ever,” says Pulitzer finalist Nicholas Carr.

Maggie Jackson’s essays, commentary, and books have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Philosopher, on National Public Radio, and in media worldwide. She wrote the foreword to Living with Robots: Emerging Issues on the Psychological and Social Implications of Robotics (Academic Press, 2019) and has contributed essays to numerous other anthologies, including State of the American Mind: Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide: Arguments For and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Penguin, 2011). Her book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, was the first to explore the fate of home in the digital age, a time when private life is permeable and portable.

Jackson is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including a 2016 Bard Graduate Center Visiting Fellowship; Media Awards from the Work-Life Council of the Conference Board, the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and the Women’s Press Club of New York. For a National Public Radio segment on the lack of labor protections offered to child newspaper carriers, she was a finalist for a Hillman Prize, one of journalism’s highest honors for social justice reporting. Jackson has served as an affiliate of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto; a Journalism Fellow in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland; and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. Her website has been named a Forbes Top 100 Site for Women three times.

Jackson is a sought-after speaker, appearing at Harvard Business School, the New York Public Library, the annual invitation-only Forbes CMO summit, the Simmons and other top women’s leadership conferences, and other corporations, libraries, hospitals, schools, religious organizations, and bookstores. A graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics with highest honors, Jackson lives with her family in New York and Rhode Island.

___________________________

For More on Maggie Jackson

Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure

Website

__________________________

Podcast Episodes  You May Like

Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

Strategic Quitting – Julia Keller

The Emotionally Intelligent Retirement – Kate Schroeder & Nick Wignall

The Mindful Body – Ellen Langer

_________________________

Wise Quotes

On Tolerance of Uncertainty

“So, tolerance of uncertainty is a personality trait. It’s basically, in a nutshell, if you’re intolerant of it, you are fearful of the unknown, you see uncertainty as a threat. If you’re more tolerant and open to uncertainty, then you actually see uncertainty as challenging. So we’re not talking about Easy Street, but challenge versus threat makes all the difference. In fact, scientists and clinical psychologists now see an intolerance of uncertainty as being a root vulnerability factor, a risk factor basically for most mental disorders. So basically when you’re fearful of the unknown, you shut down, your thinking becomes rigid, the opposite to that kind of arousal and wakefulness and good thinking that I’ve been talking about.”

Why Uncertainty Can be a Gift

“Quite simply, humans and many other organisms need and want answers. So therefore, we’re built to basically have a stress response when we are uncertain. So just to unpack that a little bit, when you meet up with something new or unexpected or ambiguous, your body and brain kind of spring into action. And contrary to uncertainty as a mindset being synonymous with inertia, for instance, actually uncertainty, in effect, wakes you up. Scientists call this arousal. So the stress response leads to your palms sweating, you’re in a traffic jam, you are not sure if you will get to the meeting with the boss, your cortisol levels rise, but at the same time, your brain becomes more receptive to new data. Your attention sharpens, and scientists call this curious eyes, which is a wonderful term, and working memory improves. So there are a raft of cascading effects on the brain, literally because you’re uncertain. That is, you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge, and you recognize that maybe it could be this or it couldn’t be that – that you don’t know. This is not ignorance, but it’s that uncertainty is really a kind of almost a stimulant. In fact, doctors in sticky situations show, or report, this heightened attention as well as they tend to look ahead to muster resources to contend with a problem or situation. And CEOs in crises who are ambivalent actually outperform their ultra-decisive peers. They’re more inclusive, they’re resourceful. So here’s a incredible positive aspect of human thinking that we denigrate and have long ignored. So it’s quite interesting. The unease of uncertainty is actually a gift.”

On the Value of Pausing

“Pausing is really important for memory making. So if you’re learning different things, and say you are doing two different lessons on a software to learn French because you going to Europe next summer, pause just for a few minutes between those two different lessons, and your memory for the vocabulary will be about 20 to 25 percent more. This is true even when people show some memory loss, which is pretty stunning. Pausing also allows the brain to catch up with experience in other ways, to not just encode memory, but to sort of sift memory. So you’re actually able to insert the memory and you relatively, simplistically speaking, you’re able to store memories in places where you emerge with insight….a night’s sleep will do it too. So this is really important for meaning -making. It’s not doing nothing. And that’s one way in which learning about this kind of uncertainty, the suspense of uncertainty the space of the uncertainty has changed. I used to race from thing to thing when I was working –  interview to interview and reading scientific papers and juggling….Everybody knows that feeling. Now I pause in between things just for a couple minutes, and I find that that actually has an incredibly potent impact.”

________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

 

 

Are you ready for the second half of life? Allen Hunt believes we should be more precise and instead concentrate on preparing for the fourth quarter of our lives once we hit our sixties. It helps us focus with a heightened sense of urgency and it can inspire us to be more intentional about the things that matter most.

Allen Hunt joins us from Atlanta.

__________________________

Bio

Allen Hunt is The Fourth Quarter Guy. He helps people discover how to become the best-version-of themselves in the Fourth Quarter of life.

A four-time #1 Amazon best-selling author, Allen collaborated with Matthew Kelly to write No Regrets: A Fable about Living Your Fourth Quarter Intentionally. In that fable, they share the ground-breaking secrets of the Fourth Quarter: the 5 Keys to Living and Dying with No Regrets.

Those 5 keys then led them to create The Fourth Quarter of Your Life: Embracing What Matters Most, a workbook to help people do just that: Discover and plan how to intentionally live their fourth quarters with confidence, boldness and passion.

Allen earned a Ph.D from Yale University. He enjoys hiking, literature, spirituality, history and good food. he and his wife, Anita, live in Georgia. They have two daughters, two sons-in-law, and seven grandchildren.

____________________________

Website – The Fourth Quarter Guy – Allen Hunt

You Tube Channel

No Regrets: A Fable about Living Your Fourth Quarter Intentionally

The Fourth Quarter of Your Life: Embracing What Matters Most

_____________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

Live Life in Crescendo – Cynthia Covey Haller

Independence Day – Steve Lopez

Taking Stock – Dr. Jordan Grumet

_____________________________

Wise Quotes

On the Fourth Quarter of Life

“And so when you turn 60, you really are three-fourths of the way through, and you’re in that fourth quarter. And as I’ve kind of accompanied folks on that journey, I’ve realized your perspective really changes at that point in different kinds of ways. Your values may not, but your perspective and your point of view does. And certain things become more important. Other things begin to kind of recede into the background. And like my co-author, Matthew Kelly, and I say, death is the one unavoidable truth. And in the fourth quarter, you begin to realize that at some level. And then once you actually really realize that and accept it, then you can truly begin to live. It’s almost liberating once you realize, and this thing is going to, there is a termination date. ”

On Regrets

“How do you redeem those regrets and turn them into dreams? You know as we talked with hospice nurses and as we worked with people who were preparing to die and listen to some of their regrets one of the greatest regrets people expresses I really wish I had expressed my feelings more. And so if that’s a regret that you anticipate that you might have or that you have up to this point so okay how can I how can I turn that into a fourth quarter dream instead of letting that regret kind of hang on me like a wet sweater. And one way to do that is to think about three simple statements I love you, I forgive you, or please forgive me. And who do you need to say those things to? And begin to think about who do you need to thank? Who do you need to express love to? who do you need to forgive and who do you actually need to forgive you? Who do you need to say I’m sorry to and begin actually acting on that. And you’ll you’ll not only begin to avoid regrets, but you also begin to experience a freedom from the past and a lightness and a liberty in the in the fourth quarter.”

On Being Intentional in Your Fourth Quarter

“…intentionality matters in every aspect of your life, whether it’s your physical health, your mental health, your spiritual life. And so just to put together a simple one step, this is the next step I’m gonna take, and then see what God begins to do in your life as you do that, whether you go on that pilgrimage or you develop a daily habit of prayer, or just sitting in silence and being in the presence of God. Take one step, be intentional, and it will be a powerful, powerful force in your fourth quarter, it really will.”

______________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

A lot of our day-to-day behavior comes from habits. They create useful short cuts. But while they’re efficient, many lack something important – meaning. That’s where rituals come in. From the civic and religious rituals that commemorate key milestones and special events to our morning routines, they add a valuable emotional dimension to our lives. Michael Norton, author the new book The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, has studied rituals and joins us to share what’s he’s learned about how we can be intentional about rituals, both ones we’ve inherited and new ones we create.

He joins us from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

____________________

Curious?

Take the Habit or Ritual Quiz

_____________________

Bio

Michael Norton is the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He has studied human behavior as it relates to love and inequality, time and money, and happiness and grief. He is the author of The Ritual Effect and the coauthor—with Elizabeth Dunn—of Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending. In 2012, he was selected by Wired magazine as one of “50 People Who Will Change the World.” His TEDx talk, How to Buy Happiness, has been viewed nearly 4.5 million times. He is a frequent contributor to such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Scientific American, and has made numerous television, radio, and podcast appearances.

__________________________

For More on Michael Norton

The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions 

Website

_________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

Tiny Habits Can Lead to Big Changes – BJ Fogg

How to Live a Values Based Life – Harry Kraemer

The Portfolio Life – Christina Wallace

The Second Curve of Life – Arthur C. Brooks

_________________________

Wise Quotes

On Rituals & Emotions  

“I think one thing that I like about rituals is that they’re a bit domain general, in the sense that we don’t just use them in one domain. So imagine the only thing we use rituals for was to tie our shoes before a big race or to try to calm down before a big event. We for sure use them there. But then we use them in all these other domains of life as well. We use them in our marriages, we use them with our kids and families. We use them at work. So we really think about this idea of rituals allow us across many domains of life to change our experience in one way or another. We’re often looking for an emotion when we engage in rituals. Like if I’m doing something with my wife that we do on date night, we’re doing the ritual in order to feel closer. If I’m tying my shoes, I’m doing it in order to feel calmer. So we have these ways of using rituals to try to get us to an emotion that we think at least would be helpful in that moment.”

On Rituals and Retirement

“And I think that can help us then have a better demarcation between what we were and what we’re going to be. I was a full-time employee. I was a parent, now I’m retired, or now I’m an empty nester. How are we helping people transition from one to the other? Because it’s a huge transition. When we go through any of these transitions in life, we have, when we look at rituals, there’s many different types.”

 

On Inherited Rituals

“We have just two broad categories are rituals that we receive or inherit. They could be family rituals, they could be cultural rituals, they could be religious rituals that we get from our parents, from our grandparents, from our faith. And those rituals play an enormously important role in our lives. And we know what they are, and we know how meaningful they are when we do them. Weddings and funerals exist for a reason.”

 

On Taking an Inventory

“I think the last thing that anybody wants to hear is add 10 more things to your life. That’s not a good selling point. If I said it’s very helpful to meditate for five hours every day, well that’s great, but  who has time to meditate for five hours every day? So I often think about it less as about adding a whole bunch of rituals all over the place, and instead starting to just actually looking at your current behavior, kind of taking an inventory of what you currently do. Do you have something that you do in the morning? Is it always coffee and then newspaper and then chat with and then dog? Or are you all over the place? And those are places where you can start to see that sometimes you’re doing things already that have some of these propensities. And by the way, if you don’t think you have any rituals, ask your spouse, ask your children, ask your coworkers. They’ll be very happy to tell you all the quirky things that you do. And I like that idea of starting there, of just already recognizing this role that they play in our lives.”

__________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

 

Doesn’t everyone deserve a dignified retirement? Rather than fixing our retirement system, working longer is often seen as the solution to finance retirement. But for people with physically demanding jobs or people grappling with health issues or disabilities, working longer is not an option. Teresa Ghilarducci joins us to discuss her new book  Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy  and her proposal for a Gray New Deal to fix the retirement system in the US.

Teresa Ghilarducci joins us from New York.

_________________________

Bio

Teresa Ghilarducci is the author of the new book Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy.

A labor economist and nationally-recognized expert in retirement security, she is the Bernard L. and Irene Schwartz professor of economics at The New School for Social Research and the Director of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and The New School’s Retirement Equity Lab.

As a labor economist, she has spent her career working to ensure retirement security for all American workers. She joined The New School for Social Research as a professor of economics in 2008 after teaching at Notre Dame for 25 years. She frequently testifies before the U.S. Congress and serves as a media source to popular and online news outlets about pensions, labor economics, and older workers.

She also frequently publishes in economics journals and edited volumes and has authored several books, including How to Retire with Enough Money: And How to Know What Enough Is and Rescuing Retirement, co-authored with “Tony” James, who was Executive Vice Chairman of The Blackstone Group at the time and co-authored  In an unusual partnership, they outlined their bold policy vision to create Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs) for all American workers.

____________________________

For More on Teresa Ghilarducci

Work, Retire, Repeat: The Uncertainty of Retirement in the New Economy

How to Retire with Enough Money: And How to Know What Enough Is

Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans

____________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

Are You Ready for The New Long Life? – Andrew Scott

When Will You Flip the Switch? – Dr. Barbara O’Neill

Why Retirement is About Much More Than Money – Ted Kaufman & Bruce Hiland

____________________________

Wise Quotes

On the Pyramid of Retirement Security

“Well, me and everyone else in this field knows that the building box of a good retirement looks like not pillars, but is a pyramid. There’s a base and then there’s a middle part, and then there’s a tippy top part. I think of it as the food pyramid with the base as your fruits, your vegetables and your grains. That’s a foundation and that’s Social Security and that it doesn’t provide all of your retirement income needs, for sure. But it’s certainly a foundation. It’s a foundation of security because retirement is for the lucky ones. A lot of people have missteps along the way that they have to take care of somebody and drop out of the labor force. So your family needs to be secured for that. So a spousal benefit is there, or you may be disabled, of course. And in fact, a huge percentage of people can’t do their jobs mentally and physically starting around 50. And so official disability may not be in the offering, but kind of a partial disability is something that we all are at risk of having to manage. And so Social Security has to take into account the insurance system, a couple of missed quarters. We need social insurance against wild recessions where you might miss hours and work. And so you need that foundation.”

On Defined Contribution Plans vs. Pensions

 

“And I think an unintended consequence of our do it yourself experiment we’ve had for 40 years in our country, there’s no such thing as elders. You’re supposed to stay young forever. That is just not the reality or the culture or the legitimacy of elders in other countries and other countries. They tend to recognize people grow old and that people want to have a time in their life that they can control the pace of their time and the content of their time. And that somehow having that time at the end of your working life means that you’re still a full human being and that you are actually deserving of that time. In the United States, it’s not clear that if you’re working, you can actually speak up for yourself as a human being. It’s not clear that you can have an identity outside of a work life or be able to protect your time outside of your work or protect or find meaning or flow or identity or have the emotional content that you get from other people outside of the workplace. And so there’s this idea, and it’s embodied in the journalism that tells us a story. This is in my book too. I start with of the heroic barista, McDonald’s worker at 95, Amy Prince, I remember her name. And this journalist said, God, this isn’t this wonderful that she’s wiping tables at 90. And she’s asked, do you like your job? She says, Yes, I like my job. Well, I know as a labor economist people say one thing, but if you give them any out at all, they’ll leave that wonderful job in a New York minute.”

 

On a Gray New Deal

“So work is good. We all have to work. And maybe 35 years is what most of us are going to be productive at. Some of us might be productive for 40 to 42 years. Not as many people as you would think can contribute. We’re all productive in our own ways, but for that market demand productivity 40 years is kind of stretching it. Retiring is really good. The repeating part I had to research, who’s repeating, who’s going back to work? And it’s usually desperate people. It’s not bored people who find the golf course and being with their friends and family tedious. That’s actually a tiny amount, even though they get a disproportionate amount of attention. So my book is about how we could have a really good dignified off-ramp from work, which is good to a time of life where you can control the pace and content of your time, which I think is a definition of what a human experience should be developmentally. Erik Erickson says that we go through these stages. I had that little book on human development on my desk throughout the whole time I wrote the book. Is that this what ‘The Good Life’ is? Even Karl Marx says, we have to sort of fish in the morning and do the critical literary studies in the afternoon that we need to create our own life. And so retirement is that time and we need to have a way to finance it. And so I call for a Gray New Deal because I want to lift up the legitimacy and the dignity of having gray hair because everyone will have it. And I want to lift up the fact that we need something bold like a new deal. And it has to be one that respects work if people want it.”

______________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

Schedule a call today to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

 

 

 

 

 

Are you ready to make giving back your second act? That’s the question posed by AmeriCorps Seniors. While volunteering can make a huge difference in the lives of others, it offers many benefits for you too. Atalaya Sergi joins us to discuss how AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers are making a difference by redeploying their skills and experience, including through intergenerational volunteer programs.

Atalaya Sergi joins us from Charlottesville, Virginia.

__________________________

Bio

Atalaya Sergi leads AmeriCorps Seniors, the federal grant making office of AmeriCorps that is focused on promoting and engaging people aged 55 and over in outcomes-oriented service. She has more than 20 years of experience in service, community engagement, and education, working in the public and nonprofit sector to bring private and public organizations together to ensure people of all ages, as well as those living in underserved communities, thrive.

Prior to AmeriCorps, she served as vice president, strategic partnerships & programming at Jumpstart for Young Children, Inc., managing AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps Seniors programs as a federal grantee. She launched Jumpstart’s only AmeriCorps Seniors Foster Grandparent Program.

Sergi co-founded Los Angeles Generation to Generation, focusing on engaging older adults in volunteerism to support young children across LA County. She currently represents AmeriCorps on the federal government’s Elder Justice Coordinating Council and Scams Against Older Adults Advisory Group. She has been recognized as a PBS Next Avenue Influencer in Aging, an Encore Network Champion, and was selected as a Co-Generate Encore Public Voice Fellow, using her time to write about the positive impact older adults can have in educational settings. Sergi earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in social work from Virginia Commonwealth University.

_____________________________

For More on Atalaya Sergi

AmeriCorps Seniors

Atalaya Sergi on Next Avenue

_____________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

Changing the World One Small Act at a Time – Brad Aronson

The Best Day of My Life So Far – Benita Cooper

Why Retirement is About Much More Than Money – Ted Kaufman & Bruce Hiland

_____________________________

Related Blog Post

Find the Volunteer Opportunity That’s Right for You

_____________________________

 

Retiring? Check out our Best Books for Retirement

 

_______________________________

Wise Quotes 

On the Benefits of Volunteering

“One of the things that we have done some research on and learned about is the benefits to your health, and I’m not sure that everyone thinks about that. We did a research study where we looked over a three year period of volunteering, starting with volunteers who had never volunteered before and then following them over time. And we saw that of those that had volunteered for just one or two years, 84% of those volunteers reported improved or stable health. 88% reported decreased feelings of isolation. And we know how important that is given all of the work that our Surgeon General is doing. And 78% reported that they also felt less depressed after volunteering. And I think that getting out, getting moving, staying connected to your community and to others in your community really has a positive impact just on your health.”

On Volunteering & Lifelong Learning 

“I think another thing that volunteers may sometimes not expect is that they learn new skills. So we’re talking about adults that are volunteering, that have lots of lived experience, lots of career experience, but we always hear from volunteers that they learn new skills when they’re out volunteering from the training they receive. If they’re doing something that’s different from what they did in their career, they learn new skill sets.”

On Foster Grandparenting

“We have a foster grandparent volunteer in Mount Pleasant Michigan, and they call him Grandpa Rick. He shares his time and passion for reading with the kids, and he started a Book Club where he meets with third and fourth grade students from his assigned classrooms twice a week during recess. So the students get together, they read together, they talk about the story together, and their classroom teacher says that Grandpa Rick’s Book Club has got her students more excited about reading and that they are always looking forward to it. They want to know what the next book is. They want to know how they’re going to get to connect with Grandpa Rick. And when I heard this story, I was like, Grandpa Rick is awesome!”

_________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how the Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

_______________________

 

 

 

 

What will you be retiring to?

Don’t just wing it. Design it.

Join our next Design Your New Life in Retirement small group program starting on April 26th. There’s one spot left…

_________________________

What lessons learned can you glean from a top financial advisor who’s helped many people successfully retire?

Scott Hanson, of Allworth Financial, joins us to share his insights and discuss the Four Pillars you’ll want to put in place to build the satisfying retirement you’ve earned.

Scott Hanson joins us from California.

_________________________

Bio

Scott Hanson is a founding principal and Vice Chair at Allworth Financial.

A nationally recognized financial expert, he’s been named to Barron’s list of the Top 100 Independent Wealth Advisors  in America numerous times and has been listed as one of the 25 most influential people in the financial services industry nationwide.

For over 28 years, Scott has co-hosted Allworth Financial’s Money Matters, a call-in, financial topic radio program and podcast, making it one of the longest-running shows of its kind in America.

A frequent guest columnist for several national financial publications, Scott is the author of Personal Decision Points: 7 Steps to Your Ideal Retirement Transition and Money Matters: Essential Tips & Tools for Building Financial Peace of Mind.

In 2010, Scott was recognized as the Outstanding Philanthropist by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, California Capital Chapter, and has received the Distinguished Alumni Award from his alma mater, California State University, Chico. It 2021, he was recognized by Investment News as one of the 10 “Icons and Innovators” of the financial services industry nationwide.

In 2019, Scott was the inspiration behind the founding of Allworth Kids, which has provided laptops, overnight kits, and financial assistance to over 200,000 foster kids to date.

Scott and his wife Valerie reside in El Dorado Hills, CA and have four children.

____________________________

For More on Scott Hanson

Allworth Financial

Allworth Financial’s  Money Matters

_____________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

Life in Retirement: Expectations & Realities – Catherine Collinson

Live Life in Crescendo – Cynthia Covey Haller

Independence Day – Steve Lopez

______________________________

Wise Quotes

On Work as an Option

“So I think it’s really important that people get to a point where retirement’s an option and where work is an option, not an obligation. When people get to that point where they have the financial independence, I think it changes their mindset and they can look at work a lot differently. They have other options available to them. And so for us, for financial advisors, it’s really about getting to that point where you’ve got that independence where you can choose your own future.”

On Planning for Life After You Retire

“A lot of people think ‘Well, as soon as I retire, I’m going to get rid of all my responsibilities and just going to have all kinds of blank space and a blank canvas to build from.’ That’s not always a very healthy way to approach retirement. I’ll never forget, years ago, I had a client, she was an executive, a CEO of a mid-size company with a couple of hundred employees, and she had done a nice job saving. She’d come in and we’d talk about her retirement preparedness. So we’re having the same conversation again – our annual review. And I said to her ‘Stacy, let’s assume you’re retired today. Tell me what your next few weeks look like. How are you spending your time?’ She says ‘What do you mean? ‘I said ‘Well, your entire career, you’ve been coaching people, mentoring people, you’ve been involved in strategic plans, you’ve been working as teams. What are you going to do in retirement to still have some of those activities? ‘And she sent me an email two weeks after our conversation and she said: Your questions haunted me. I realize I have a lot of work to do between now and retirement.“

 

On The Four Pillars of a Successful Retirement

“These are the four pillars, briefly: Health and Wellness, and that’s people feeling fairly confident about their health. Second is Prosperity – it’s not about being rich, but it means being confident that you can maintain your current lifestyle going forward. The third is People. That’s having Meaningful Relationships in our life – maybe not tons of people. If you’re an introvert, maybe just one or two close friends who are really important to you. But with those people, interactions are important. And then the fourth thing is Purpose, having something in your life that is of value to you and of value to others. What are you here for? And the people that have been able to focus on those four and to spend some time in planning all each of those areas, they’re the ones that we find have the most successful retirements.”

______________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how the Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

_______________________

The views and opinions expressed by guests on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast are solely those of the guests and do not reflect the opinion of the host or Retirement Wisdom, LLC. The Retirement Wisdom Podcast primarily covers the non-financial aspects of retirement. From time to time we may invite guests who discuss other aspects of retirement planning, solely for educational purposes. Listeners are advised to consult qualified financial and/or medical professionals on those matters.

What are you retiring to? Don’t drift into it.

Design it.

Join us in the next Design Your New Life in Retirement group program starting April 26th.

__________________________

I’ve just completed my second year as a grandfather. Like anyone finishing their sophomore year, I know twice as much as I did a year ago, but still have a lot to learn. In my quest to learn more, I came across this article in the New York Times – How to be a Better Grandfather – and discovered Ted Page. When he became a grandfather at 55, he looked online for guidance and discovered – well, not much. So he created the website and blog Good Grandpa. Ted’s writing a book that’s coming out next year sharing stories and wisdom from grandfathers on the #1 thing they’ve learned that will help nurture the next generation.

Ted Page joins us from Massachusettts.

________________________

Bio

Ted Page is the creator and editor of Good Grandpa.

Ted Page is a storyteller, performer and marketing executive. His non-fiction stories have appeared in Boston Magazine and the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, and his book of true family stories, The Willoughby Chronicles, was published by 3 Swallys Press in 2017. Ted is a Co-Founder of Captains of Industry, a leading boutique marketing consultancy based in Boston. Ted won a Telly award for The Institute for Back-up Trauma, starring John Cleese—who looks stunning in a red dress. Ted and his colleagues at Captains of Industry created The Climate Declaration for CERES, which was signed by over 1,700 corporations globally including Apple, Nike, Starbucks, GM and Levis. Ted lives outside Boston with his wife, Nancy, who continues to put up with him after 35 years. They have two children and four grandchildren.

_________________________

For More on Ted Page

GoodGrandpa.com

What’s the #1 thing you’ve learned that can  help the next generation? Contact Ted Page: [email protected]

_________________________

Mentioned in This Episode

The Parrot Sketch

________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

The Long Distance Grandparent – Kerry Byrne PhD

The Mindful Grandparent – Dr. Shirley Showalter

_________________________

Wise Quotes

On the Next Generation

“The mission of the blog is to nurture the next great generation. So I’m a Boomer, sort of at the tail end of the Baby Boomers, born in 1959. And for us, we always just kind of looked up to our parents as what Tom Brokaw had dubbed the Greatest Generation. He wrote this terrific book, The Greatest Generation, and that’s very understandable. They won World War II, they survived The Great Depression. They were great. They were fantastic. And I revered my father and mother. I revered the one grandfather that I knew. But when I saw these little kids starting to appear on the scene, our grandkids, I thought: What if they’re going to be the greatest generation of all time? And what can we do to help them become the greatest generation, not just here in the United States, but around the world. We have tools that our parents didn’t have.”

On Continuous Learning

“But then of course, I said, Well, John, let me tell you what I’m up to. I’m writing a book and I’m gathering wisdom from elders and asking everyone what the number 1 piece of wisdom is – and he just jumped in and he said, ‘Well, that’s easy. I’ll tell you.’ And I’m like: Great! Mr. John Cleese, one of the greats, is going to share his number one thing. And he said: ‘It’s more important to find the truth that it is to know the truth.’ And when I asked him to unpack that a little bit, he said, well, Newtonian mathematics and physics was accepted without question for hundreds of years. And that along comes Einstein, and it’s all upended. And then just within Einstein’s life, there’s quantum physics. It’s the constant learning that matters. It’s the seeking the truth. And sometimes when you believe something’s the truth, it blocks you off from continuous learning and exploration. So that conversation with John was kind of back to back with interview with Tom Brokaw at the early stages of writing this book, which is not coming out until a little bit later in 2025. But my process changed for writing the book because it’s about seeking. It’s about the learning versus me saying, look, here’s the truth, because we can all find our own truth in this, the one that matters most to us.”

 

On Wisdom

“And we were down in the water by the beach, and I had just found out I was going to be a grandfather. So just in passing, talking to Aunt Lois who’s wearing these big pink sort of Jackie Onassis sunglasses, I said, Lois, how can I be a better grandfather? And she didn’t skip a beat. She just said: ‘Be there for them.’ And it’s interesting you used the word distilled wisdom earlier, because I was thinking, that’s just the first part of what she’s going to tell me, right? There’s going to be this whole speech after this. And I kept waiting and she said: ‘No, just be there.’ A lot of times the people who have the best wisdom say it in fewer words….I owe a gratitude to Aunt Lois, and to all the grandmothers out there, because it is one thing to hear something. It’s another thing to actually listen. And I hope that everyone has a chance to listen to Aunt Lois.”

____________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

 

 

Don’t drift into your retirement. Design it.

Join us in the next Design Your New Life in Retirement group program starting April 26.

__________________________

Today’s Building Block: Wellness

What will your life in retirement really be like? Will you flourish or languish? Our guest today is Corey Keyes, a renowned expert and author of the groundbreaking book Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down. Corey explains what languishing is and the five essential “vitamins” for flourishing, derived from extensive research, offering practical strategies to improve well-being.

Corey Keyes joins us from North Carolina.

_________________________

Bio

Corey Keyes is professor emeritus of Sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, GA where he held the Winship Distinguished Research Professorship. He was a member of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging. He has been called on to participate in several U.S. National Academies of Science initiatives – “The Future of Human Healthspan” and improving national statistics to measure recovery from mental illness. His research introduced the concepts of social well-being, flourishing, languishing, the two continua model of mental health and illness, and his work is being used to prevent mental illness via the promotion of positive (flourishing) mental health. He has been selected to give several honorary lectureships, including the Dorosin Memorial Lecture for the National College Health Association, The Chesley Lecture on Aging at Minnesota State University, and the Anita Spenser Lectureship in Clinical Behavioral Sciences at McMaster University.

_________________________

For More on Corey Keyes

Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down

_________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like The Mindful Body – Ellen Langer The Self-Healing Mind – Gregory Scott Brown, M.D. Chatter & Your Inner Voice – Ethan Kross The Power of Fun – Catherine Price

______________________

Wise Quotes

On Flourishing and Languishing

“….the good news is that flourishing is at its peak during what most of us would consider the first decade of retirement. So roughly between 60 to 74, it is at its peak and before you retire and throughout your adult working phase, it starts out pretty low in early to late twenties, but it’s steadily increases and increases so that as you get settled into your career and become senior and established, you tend to on average leave your career on a high note. You’re flourishing, but it gets better. And that’s the point I want to make, that it’s the first decade at least of retirement. People are doing really well on average. It’s the problems that come with if we live long enough. And by that I mean roughly past the age of 75 plus and more and more of us are. We see a downturn in flourishing and an increase in languishing towards the end of life.”

On Activities That Promote Flourishing

“… five of the activities stood out among people who were flourishing, who they did more of the following. They engaged in more forms of helping behavior. It might be volunteering, helping people, or even living your purpose. Go out there and help someone or help something in the world and make it better. The second vitamin, that flourishers did more of was that they connected, prioritizing warm, trusting relationships. Relationships where they had a sense of belonging, where they were part of a community and relationships where they mattered. And by that I meant they were needed. And in my measurement of flourishing, the sense of contributing worth and value to the world is baked into flourishing. So the second thing they did more of was connect around warmth, trust, belonging, and mattering. The third was they were very active in learning something new and prioritizing personal growth. And I tend to think of this passion for learning. And again, this was not something you learned because you had to or it was work related. It could be work related of course. But when people have to learn and do it, much like many of my former college students, you would think college students are the happiest. They’re always learning something new, but they have to, so they don’t get the joy out of that learning and growth. That’s sort of like our version of photosynthesis. What plants do with the sun, human beings come alive when they’re engaged in some form of learning and growth. So that was the third category. The fourth was what I call transcending. And by that I mean spirituality and religion. People were engaged. Now again, you don’t have to be religious or even spiritual to benefit from this lesson, but what people were doing was engaging in some form of ritual or practice on a regular basis that had what we would consider a spiritual component. And for me, that’s always been yoga. Now again, you can do yoga and just do the poses and not get involved in all the spirituality, but I’m here to tell you that research shows you’ll get a lot more bang for your buck if you don’t just go and do the poses.”

On Purpose

“The reason I talked a lot about purpose in that chapter on helping is because that is the nature of a purpose. I have two very simple questions. I ask my readers, do you want to help someone or something and focus and make the world a better place through your activity? Yes or no? And if you say no to that, you don’t have the time or interest, don’t sweat this notion. Don’t even bother with the purpose. The purpose is built on trying to help someone or something in the world and improve it or leave it in better shape than what you found it. And then it’s not enough just to say, yes, I want to do that, but do you have the resources, the talent, the skill, the time, and can you get to the place where you need to do your purpose? Is transportation for instance, readily available? Can you drive or can you hitch a ride? There’s all kinds of practical things that you’ll need to think about, and that’s why I also recommend that when you think about helping, volunteering or living your purpose, think small. Small is big. And by that, I think we sometimes see so many of the tragic things on the news and we want to get right in there and solve the problem in the Middle East or refugees or there’s nothing wrong with that, but my chances are your purpose doesn’t have to be that enormous. It could be picking something very local and in your community so that you can actually do more of what and actually do some face-to-face work. And you said consistency earlier. It’s true. The research shows very clearly keeping up the habit of helping and then living your purpose is very important. And that’s why I say small is big, because if you keep local and focus on something that’s nearby something or someone that needs help, you’re much more likely to do it more consistently.”

______________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

_______________________

The views and opinions expressed by guests on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast are solely those of the guests and do not reflect the opinion of the host or Retirement Wisdom, LLC. The Retirement Wisdom Podcast primarily covers the non-financial aspects of retirement. From time to time we may invite guests who discuss other aspects of retirement planning, solely for educational purposes. Listeners are advised to consult qualified financial and/or medical professionals on those matters.

 

Don’t drift into your retirement. Design it. Join us in the next Design Your New Life in Retirement group program starting April 26.

_____________________

Who knows more about whether or not you’re ready to retire? Your financial advisor – or you? While you’re diligently planning for your retirement and dreaming to retire happy, the retirement landscape keeps evolving around you. Let’s take a look at what’s happening in the world of retirement with Nate Miles of Allspring Global Investments. He joins us to the discuss key trends highlighted in their latest study on retirement, including happiness in retirement, retirement readiness, what retirees regret – and more.

Nate Miles joins us from North Carolina.

___________________

Bio

Nathaniel (Nate) Miles is head of Global Client Strategy at Allspring Global Investments. As the leader of this business, Nate leads a team of investment specialists centered on client-type expertise, which enables Allspring to be more relevant and impactful with clients. Client-type areas of expertise include Defined Contribution, Pension/LDI, Insurance, Liquidity, Foundations and Endowments, and Wealth. Nate joined Allspring from its predecessor firm, Wells Fargo Asset Management (WFAM). He joined WFAM from WisdomTree Asset Management, where he served as U.S. head of retirement solutions. In this capacity, he oversaw the creation and execution of marketing strategies and distribution for retirement business across all platforms. Prior to this, Nate worked as a managing director at State Street Global Advisors and as head of U.S. investment strategy with its defined contribution team, where he began his investment industry career in 2005. Nate earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and financial management with honors from Wilfrid Laurier University. He has earned the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst® (CFA®) designation and is a member of CFA Society Boston.

_________________________

For More on Nate Miles 

The 21st annual Allspring Global Investments Retirement Survey: A Clear Vision of Retirement

Allspring Global Investments

_________________________

Podcast Episodes You May Like

Life in Retirement: Expectations & Realities – Catherine Collinson

Retire Happy – Dr. Catherine Sanderson

_________________________

Wise Quotes 

On Happiness in Retirement

“The one thing that we found out every year is our study says and relates how happy retirees are. So that wasn’t new, but we are trying to get to the why. And one of the things we found this year for the first time was that on average retirees could have their spending decline by 25% before it significantly impacted their happiness. So that was a bigger number than I expected, but was corroborated by the fact that when we asked them about their spending on things like their needs, wants and wishes, that only tallied up about 64% of total income. So those numbers actually jive together and I think are a nice story and a nice finding from this study.”

On Retirement Readiness

“Advisors ranked their clients as 40% of them being generally ready for retirement. Near retirees were down below 40%. So there was actually a positive spread. I would say advisors believed them to be a little more prepared, but retirees were up around 77%, so clearly much happier. So overall we had advisors at about 50% of their client base being ready for retirement versus a total population of 64%. But that’s really broken down between those two groups where the retirees were much more confident than near retirees.”

On Regrets

“It was a little bit harder to find regrets because our retirees tend to be generally pretty happy. They don’t tend to have much complaint about retirement. It is generally better than they expected.  One was the too early crowd. We saw some that retired before age 50, 38% suggested that it was too early. They wished they would’ve hung on and worked a little bit longer. So yes, they were able to retire, but I think they thought there’s probably more that they could have done in the workforce and it had that social component to it and could’ve stayed a little bit longer.” So that was one in terms of retiring too early and when they did state they retired too early, it was five years too early.”

___________________________

About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

_______________________

The views and opinions expressed by guests on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast are solely those of the guests and do not reflect the opinion of the host or Retirement Wisdom, LLC. The Retirement Wisdom Podcast primarily covers the non-financial aspects of retirement. From time to time we may invite guests who discuss other aspects of retirement planning, solely for educational purposes. Listeners are advised to consult qualified financial and/or medical professionals on those matters.