While the proverbial midlife crisis is typically seen as a fearsome enemy, cresting the hill of middle age can launch a quest for true meaning in one’s life. Authors Richard Leider and David Shapiro have crafted a number of books guiding inner growth and empowerment, including Whistle While You Work, Claiming Your Place at the Fire, and the international bestseller Repacking Your Bags. In their latest book, Something to Live For: Finding Your Way in the Second Half of Life, Leider and Shapiro offer specific steps to a meaningful elderhood, interspersed with illustrative stories from their real-life explorations—both geographical and psychological—among indigenous tribes in Africa.
On the weekend of August 14–16, Leider will be giving a workshop, “Something to Live For: Repacking Your Bags for the Second Half of Life,” at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. Leider is a senior fellow in the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing; has penned additional books (The Power of Purpose and Life Skills); is a founding partner of the Inventure Group, a coaching and consulting firm; and was praised by Forbes magazine as being among the nation’s top five coaches. Leider recently spoke with us by telephone to share some of his insights and give us a peak into the workshop’s intention.
In your book Something to Live For, you talk about the three concepts of money, medicine, and meaning. Can you summarize what you mean by this?
Today, people are living longer than ever before. In 1900 the life expectancy was only age 47, and now we’re living into our eighties. What do we do with those extra years? We need to look at money, medicine, and meaning. Do we have enough money to do what we want? And by medicine we mean, Do we have the energy and health? And if we have enough money and health, what’s the third leg of the stool? It’s meaning.
Meaning is a fundamental human need. And it’s a megatrend of the 21st century. We’ve had the positive psychology movement—it’s a very big trend, with thousands of books in the self-help section—but what I’m talking about is the positive aging movement. MetLife, the largest insurer in the country, has a research group, the Mature Market Institute, which did a study based on my work in which they interviewed thousands of people from ages 47 to 74 about this very question of money, medicine, and meaning. They found that meaning trumps money: It’s more important to people.
How do you define a meaningful life?
There are four parts. The first is community. Throughout history, we’ve not lived in isolation, in retirement homes where we’re disconnected from the world, like so many older people do today. People want to be connected. It might be through faith-based organizations, or volunteer organizations—there are a thousand things. Second, people want to be connected with friends and family—a more intimate community. The third part of meaning is creative work. People really want to use their abilities to accomplish things. It’s not just about money. They actually want to feel connected to their work.
And the fourth is helping to make things better—to somehow be part of “saving” something. That can come in a lot of forms, like volunteering. And when we find ourselves disconnected from that, it’s a problem. A core question behind all this is pretty clear: What gets you up in the morning? You can talk about purpose and meaning in lofty terms, but when you don’t have a purpose to get up in the morning, you don’t live as happily or fulfilled—or as long. Research supports this.
You have talked with lots of older people around the world, and you have some insight into “what the elders say,” to use your phrase.
I’ve been interviewing people for 30-some years, and I’ve found three themes that come up over and over when I ask, “If you could live over again, what would you do differently?” First, they say I would be more reflective, meaning they would stop and look at the big picture, instead of being busy, busy, busy, and all of a sudden we’re older, wondering, Where did that life go? Secondly, they say they would be more courageous in two areas: work and love. In work, where you spend 60 percent of your life, they say, “I wish I would have made a better choice.” Courage is the courage to say no to some things and yes to others—to look for that which is a better fit. A lot of folks got into their work just by accident, and took an easier route. The same is true with relationships.
Thirdly, the elders say they would understand their own personal bottom line, and do what matters most to them.
You describe “savoring” and “saving” as both being important to a meaningful life, with the “saving” part becoming a more powerful need in the second half of life.
There’s a quote from E. B. White that really grabs everybody: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.”
Somehow, in our DNA as human beings, we want our lives to matter. And people know intuitively that helping others in some way is good medicine. We have found there is science behind this. People do better medically, and live longer, than if they have nothing else but themselves to live for. Even people with dementia may have a pet to care for, or a plant to water—something beyond themselves.
What if you have to work in your later years, for money? What if you feel stuck, and can’t really pursue your meaning?
A myth that we’ve uncovered in our work is that a good life means the absence of misfortune. But we’ll all have misfortune, including jobs we dislike, illness, death of loved ones, economic meltdown, and so on. But in spite of that, people can make something good of it. Part of that is your attitude, your choices. Just today, 21,000 people lost their jobs at GM. They are going to have to reinvent themselves even if they didn’t want to. They have to step back and take a deep dive—they don’t have a choice in the matter.
As a career counselor, I often work with people who are in jobs they dislike. Finding the will to change is not easy. But the starting point is this formula: gifts plus passion plus value equals calling. Calling is the inner urge to give your gifts away. One of the things I do is make sure a person understands their gifts or talents. Then I would look at their passions—what are they really interested in? Does their current job fit their passions? It comes to really saying, What do you bring to the party here? And then, What are your values? What is the best environment for those?
Those are the core pieces of a good work decision. It’s actually the core of the program I do at Omega. Gifts plus passions plus values. One of my mentors, Richard Bolles, who is the author of What Color Is Your Parachute?, is similarly aligned with this formula.
What if your spouse or partner doesn’t agree on how to spend the later years?
I hear it all the time in my coaching practice. Nothing short of a courageous conversation will get the job done. Couples oftentimes haven’t had to have this conversation because they have been planted where they are. And now they have choices. For example, in my work I do a “place” inventory with people. It’s shocking, how many couples get to the second half of life and they don’t agree on where they want to live. We have to sit down and look at the criteria, and maybe do a trial—try to live somewhere for a month. Or when I lead walking safaris in Africa, both parties may not want to go. Does it mean one can’t go because the other doesn’t want to? So they have a process to go through to see what they each want. It’s not easy, but there are all kinds of tools. Repacking Your Bags and our website have them, like a values inventory, and a good-life inventory.
As you point out, many people reaching midlife may never have had the chance or awareness to ask what would make their life most meaningful. How do you start doing that, or even know what to ask?
People are really looking for guidance. You can actually get a free self-help guidebook and DVD that I wrote about how to go about this process of reinventing yourself. It’s on the website that explains the MetLife study. It’s a guidance system—everything we’ve talked about, and practical tools. The good-life inventory asks essential questions to guide you in discovering and planning the good life for yourself. The four components of a good life are living in the place you belong, with the people you love, while doing the right work, on purpose. Part of the workshop at Omega is about how to have that conversation with yourself—to ask, What do I want? What’s next for me? And how do I have that conversation with somebody else?
RESOURCES:
Omega Institute
www.eomega.org/omega/about/workshops
Inventure Group
www.inventuregroup.com
MetLife’s Mature Market Institute
www.maturemarketinstitute.com