Even if you aren’t interested in the religious implications, learning how to forgive is worth doing.

We all get the advice: “Forgive and forget… Turn the other cheek.”  But when your blood is boiling over what happened and the injustice is over the top, it’s the last thing you’re going to think to do.  You want, with every fiber of your being, for that other s-o-b to realize how wrong he or she was.

Cut!

That’s the time when  you need to know how to forgive the most.  Why?  Because that furious attitude is a source of massive stress.   The major religions of the world advocate forgiveness as a key to leading a holy life.  That’s not where I’m coming from on this.  Nope, I’m suggesting something far more mundane and selfish than that:

Forgivenss  is a key piece of keeping the stress out of your life.

Whether you adhere to a particular religion or not, forgiving is something you need to do.  Not because of your great love for all mankind (which is great if you can pull it off).  For your own sanity.  Forgiving means you let go and move on.  Failing to forgive means you carry all that toxic emotion around with your for days….weeks….months.

This need to come from forgiveness is key for me in my primary relationship.   My very best friend is my man friend, but sometimes we get decidely crosswise with each other.  If I were in my A Game all the time, I’d be able to let go of whatever he was doing that I didn’t like instantly.  I’m not that proficient yet.  But once I recognize that “it’s the forgiveness thing again” I can drop the “slight” or “inconsideration” or whatever I’ve been labeling it in a heartbeat.  I am so grateful to know that (and finally realized I did yesterday, which is why I’m passing this along).

The flip side is equally important though.  He “should” forgive, too, right?  I should be off the hook with whatever he’s found unacceptable the same way, right?

Nope.  Forgiveness is about accepting what is and just letting it be what it is.  If it takes him longer to thaw, I still need to stay with forgiveness.  Not because of my feelings for him–those just make it even more important.  No, I need to stick with forgiveness because that’s where my own peace resides.

Forgiveness is not about “being right” or letting the other person “be right.”  Forgiveness is letting go of what happened for the sake of what you want to happen.

I want my life to be happy and calm.  I value contentment.  The most effective way to get back to that is to forgive whoever or whatever got me upset.

It doesn’t have to be about God.  It doesn’t have to be about being a good Catholic…Mormon…Presbyterian…Buddhist…or Muslim.  All it has to be is the acceptance of the uselessness of carrying a grudge. 

Forgive.  Life is so much better for YOU when you do.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

“What boomer women need to know and do right now to stay smokin’ hot for another 25 years…”

Some books just demand to be read and that’s the case with Barbara Morris’s most recent offering I DON’T Wanna Be My Mother.  Her focus is on women in their 40’s and 50’s but the advice is good regardless of your gender and age. 

If you want to make the most of all the life you’re going to end up living, pay attention to what Barbara has to say.  In her words, “While you can’t stop the passage of time, you can manage what goes on when time passes.”

Barbara knows what she’s talking about–as a pharmacist who’s watched hundreds of “older than they have to be” customers picking up yet another prescription, as a voracious gatherer of useful information about how to avoid many of the “age traps, and as a person who’s lived long enough to prove her recommendations work.  (She’s in her 80’s but I’m not supposed to tell you that.)  

The book is an easy read, set up in short chapters with a summary chapter that reviews her “rules.”  They are:

• Take care of your health.
• Discipline yourself.
• Have an open mind.
• Visualize your future.
• Balance what’s important now with what you need to do to prepare for what’s next.
• Don’t talk about your age.  (I told she said not to do it….)
• Don’t focus on your chronologic age.  (It’s just a number.)
• Distance yourself from anyone who invites decline and find positive role models for how you want to age.
• Engage in rigorous mental management.  None of this “I’m too old to…” and “senior moment” baloney.
• Monitor how you are changing and work at keeping what you don’t want to change.
• Do not move into an age-segregated community.
• Keep your world expanding.
• Have a “life plan” as well as a “financial plan” when you retire.
• Try to work on a flexible basis at what you were doing before you retired.

Bottom line:  “Do not give in to stultifying retirement.”

The entire book is full of good advice and sass.  If you aren’t a boomer gal with these worries, I bet you know some who is.  She needs to read it.

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Mary Lloyd is CEO of Mining Silver.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

Just because you had it all set up doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.  Maddening, isn’t it?  You’d think by the time we’ve marched past 50 that we’d be used to this fact of life, but sometimes it seems that the older we get, the more stubborn we are that what we thought should happen is the only alternative allowable.

Life doesn’t work that way. 

Sometimes, it’s as everyday as having new neighbors move in who have a different idea on how a cul de sac is to be used.   You see a round street; they see this fine place for their kids to play…and pretty soon all the kids within six blocks are treating “your” cul de sac as if it’s their personal turf.  We actually lose sleep over these kinds of situations.  Who gains when we do that?

Not one soul.  The kids don’t care what you think one way or the other.  The parents are blissfully telling all their friends from the old neighborhood what a great place the kids have to play.  And you seethe…or maybe snarl…or honk the horn when you are trying to get out of your driveway.

You don’t like being the mean old neighbor.  You don’t like being expected to navigate your way to the nearest main street through kids on bikes and skateboards and scooters.  It’s hard to let go of that one “allowable” alternative–the way it was before the new neighbors moved in.

Let it go.  It is what it is and fuming about it only makes your feelings about it worse.  Find something else to focus on and let it go.

Sometimes, the change is to you.  Right now, my left pinkie does not want to carry it’s share of the load when I’m at the keyboard.  It’s kind hard to blog without a’s.  My first reaction was to just muster on, making the errant finger get on with what I needed from it.  But that finger isn’t buying my bluster.  When I try to hit the a normally, nothing happens.  Now what?

Let it go.  Find a workable alternative.  For me, that means this will be a short post.

When life goes a different place than what you had planned for yourself, see what’s there.  Sometimes, where you end up because “plans changed” is a whole lot more exhilarating than what you had mapped out.

And sometimes, it means you can’t type a’s.  Either way, you learn more than you would have had things gone “right.”

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker, consultant, and job search skills coach for 50+ job seekers.  She is the author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com

One of the nicest aspects of retirement is that your work no longer decides where you have to live.  But does that mean moving to a retirement community in a warm, sunny climate is in your future?  That decision involves a lot more than getting away from your local version of lousy weather.

Where you choose to live needs to be a well-thought balance between what you’ve already built and what you yearn for.  I’m not talking about square footage here.  Where you live now has a lot of pluses (unless you just moved there). 

You already have your network of resources in place—your primary care physician and specialists if you need them, your dentist, your hairdresser, your car mechanic, your plumber.  The list goes on, but you get the point:  When you move, you need to find new back up for what you can’t do yourself on, well, pretty much everything.

And, of course, there’s the daunting task of moving itself.  (Just moving everything to the garage when I got new carpeting last fall was enough to make me promise I’m going to live here forever.)   Moving does help you get rid of stuff you no longer need, but with a bit of discipline, you can do that without putting what’s left in a moving van.

Usually, the big loss of leaving where you are now for “somewhere better” is the network of relationships you leave behind–neighbors, friends who like to do the things you like to do, family, and business associates (who just might be people you want to know three years from now when you get tired of “being retired.”)

Those three are just the tip of the iceberg, too.  You can thrive with a retirement move, but it needs more thoroughly researched than watching the Weather Channel for your dream location a few times a month.  Before you put a For Sale sign on where you are, there are a lot of things to ask yourself:

• What do I not like about where I live now?  Sometimes, just retiring might solve the problem.  Traffic for regular commuters can be horrendous.  Once you make your own schedule you may be able to avoid it most of the time.  Or maybe it’s a case of not having friends where you are now.  Are the time demands of your job what’s keeping you from making them?

• What problems am I expecting this move to solve?  Changing geography doesn’t change who you are.  A new location quickly becomes a disappointment if you think it’s going to get rid of woes that move right along with you.  What are the real issues and what other solutions are there for solving those problems?  Look at all the options rather than just assuming a move will solve everything.

• Who am I going to miss?  Make a list of all the people you love who are going to stay where you are now.  Is the move you’re planning worth having them somewhere you’re not?  It’s easy to lose track of your valued everyday relationships when the romance of living year-round in a resort climate blooms.

• How long do l want to live there?   Maybe it’s not something you will want to do long term.  If you aren’t sure, you don’t have to buy real estate right away. Consider living in the new location on a rental basis for six months or a year rather than pulling up stakes and moving there forever immediately. 

• Is this something that I’ll enjoy everyday? What do you think of the “off season” where you’re planning to move?  A Seattleite who moved to Arizona on retirement admitted when she moved back that having to open the garage door with an oven mitt in the summer was just too much for her.   Some people are fine with taking a fifth wheel to a sunny clime for two months in the worst of winter.  Are you sure you’re not one of them? 

• What kind of lifestyle am I envisioning?  Barbara Morris refers to retirement communities as “senior ghettoes.”  Pay attention to that.  When you segregate yourself from the full breadth of society, your view of the world starts to shrink.  The best way to stay vibrant is to keep your world expanding.  If you do end up in a 55+ community, have ways to get beyond the walls and stay in touch with the full social range.  Relying on the compound fun exclusively will make you old long before you need to be.

• What else is going to change that I haven’t factored into this idea?  There’s a lot more to it than getting away from the snow…gray skies…humidity…whatever.

Moving may be the best answer.  But be sure you’re asking the right questions when you decide.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

When you let people know–what you need, what you have, what you would like to do–you increase your chances of getting it exponentially.

I’m writing this just after doing some volunteer work at the local library–where I didn’t work much because no one knew about what I was there to do.  Not promoting my availability to do one-on-one job search counseling was a conscious decision.  They were worried too many people would want help and that many wouldn’t get it because I was only there for two hours.  But not telling anyone before the period when I was actually there meant I had a lot of time to read magazines I don’t ordinarily get to see.

It also made me stop and think about how many ways there are to benefit from “letting people know.”

The obvious one is if you are job hunting.  Letting every person who knows your name know what you are looking for is essential.  There really are only a few steps between you and what you need–just as the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon party game suggests.  (Microsoft actually tested that premise and found it to be very close to that.)  So “let people know” if you are looking for work, projects, internship opportunities, whatever.

Last week, my brother called asking if I needed a new dishwasher.  He had just purchased one he could not return and it didn’t work in his kitchen.  I did (need a new dishwasher).  Desperately.  One friend described mine as sounding like I was washing bowling balls.  But I had just purchased one as part of a major kitchen remodel and was within days of getting it installed.  I did, however, know of someone else who needed a new dishwasher.  So I called him…and now his family has a nice new dishwasher.

I have a wonderful hiking group that I go out with on Wednesday mornings.  I would still be yearning for the chance to get up in the mountains if I hadn’t “let someone know” that I was looking for a way to hike.

Three very different examples of the same principle:  Good things happen when you “let people know.”  This isn’t a case of “expecting” people to give you what you need.  It’s more like getting your name on the list for the Universe to work with.

Let people know…if you’d like to meet some new members of the opposite sex…if you need a handyman….if you want to wallpaper your dining room with tinfoil and are wondering just how to do that.

The power of community is one of the sweetest things about being human.  You tap into it by “letting people know.”

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker, consultant and job search coach and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

As a kid, it was how many weeks of allowance would buy what you yearned for. But as you move through life, the complexities of financial planning increase. That’s not bad, just something to be aware of.

It’s hard to know how much is “enough” for what might come along after you stop working. And it’s hard not to get sucked into valuing yourself by the number of digits in your investment account–if you have one–once work no longer provides an identity.  But if you have determined what’s enough and are fortunate enough to have more than that, why are you sitting on the rest?  

Those of us over 50 hold over 75% of all the financial assets in the US. What are we doing with that?

I’m not stumping for the non-profits with that question. It’s a quality of life issue that each of us answers a different way.  Those answers depend on the money available, sure.  But the effectiveness of these decisions also depends how well we assess our priorities as we make money decisions.

Are you telling yourself you “don’t need” that new furniture  you really want when there’s money available for it? When you do that, you’re living from a scarcity mentality that impoverishes your whole life, not just your financial decisions.

The flip side of this issue deserves a good look, too. Do you need to get your teeth fixed but can’t because you “don’t have the money for it”–while you continue to smoke or head for the casino three nights a week?  It’s all too easy to make decisions based on childish emotions or miserly adult ways when neither serves you well.

These aspects of financial planning are important to consider no matter how much or how little money you have to work with.  “How much” isn’t the operative phrase here.  “How well” works better.  As in “How well will doing this meet my needs?”

I grew up in a large family that didn’t have money to spare. ” We just did things a bit differently than some of the other families in the neighborhood. Mom made the soup we ate. (We naively assumed Campbell’s was a luxury.) We created many of our toys and came up with our own games complete with rules. The Mother Lode in all that is that every single one of us is creative as an adult–in how we decorate our homes, how we solve our problems, how we live our lives.   Our parents blessed with wisdom on how to use our money well rather than savvy on how to amass a lot of it.

Financial planning is not just a matter of “having enough money.” It’s about balancing what you have with what you believe in and want to do–whether it’s a world cruise, starting an heirloom vegetable seed business, funding a school in a Third World village, or treating yourself to a cookie. 

Give yourself the gift of good thought in all this. it’s not about how much money you have. It’s a about what you choose and how it enhances your life.
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Mary Lloyd is a speaker, consultant, and coach and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more see her website.    She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com.

We all agree stress is bad, but who should fix it? You or the “stressor?”

We answer that question differently, depending on how we view the world.  Some of us see ourselves as the primary source of change.  Some of us expect others to change to make our lives better.

Sounds like eye color or skin tone, right?–something you just are and accept for the rest of your life.  

Not so fast.  Those who assume others decide how their lives are going to go are asking for problems they don’t need to have.   When you expect someone else to make the decisions, take the lead, and “be the master” you increase your chances of a stroke, heart attack and dying sooner in general.  Do you really want to do that?

Yes, there are times when someone else gets to decide what you are going to do.  Work, marriage, and parenthood are all rife with these situations.  But it’s one thing to take work direction (even from a two-week old daughter) and another to assume subordinate status.  If life is stressing you big time, check out how you are seeing the world.  The big difference between humans and other organisms is that we have the power to choose.

When your start to feel stressed, look at how you are seeing the situation.  Do the work because you choose to do it, not because “you have to.”   Don’t give up your right to choose even when the other alternatives are so unacceptable you would never consider them.  And while you’re at it, hold on tight to your sense of why you are doing things.  That makes you the master of your own fate rather than a pawn in the game of Life.

Jonah Lehrer’s article in the August 2010 issue of Wired magazine does a nice job of highlighting the physical negatives of being subordinate.  In short, it’s a highly stressful role.  Much of that article explores the health effects of being a low ranking baboon (literally), but the implications go well beyond primate research.

The brain actually changes in a subordinate situation. Stress response mechanisms take priority and learning and memory activities decline.  We become less effective as problem solvers and even more vulnerable to stress when we accept subordinate status.   None of this is necessary, but it’s automatic if you aren’t paying attention.

Lehrer goes on to recommend seven steps you can take to reduce stress:

1.  Make friends

2.  Drink in moderation.  (Alcohol reduces anxiety.)

3.  Get enough sleep.

4.  Don’t fight.

5.  Confront your fears.

6.  Medidate.

7.  Don’t force yourself to exercise.

I would add one more to that list.

8.  Always remember you’re in charge of  your own life.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker, consultant, and coach and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Her website is http://www.mining-silver.com/

Deciding where to live in retirement is not as simple as we tend to want to make it.  I never thought I’d see my words on a real estate blog, but when Mary Sallman with the Las Brisas retirement community in the Texas Hill County suggested  a guest post about how to do a good job of making that decision, it made perfect sense. 

So…check out the Las Brisas blog –and my guest post of July 14.

Well-being is more dependent on the way you see things than most of us realize.  Being mindful instead of letting someone else’s labels define you, your health, your challenges, even your strengths can make a major difference in the quality of your life.

At the moment, I’m into Ellen Langer’s book Counterclockwise:  Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.  This isn’t a New Age exhortation to do affirmations and expect blessings.  Langer is a social psychologist who’s been researching the mind/body link scientifically for decades.  She and her students at Harvard have done study after study with amazing results about the power of little things that are conveyed in words. 

In the study for which the book was titled, they took groups of nursing home men on a weeklong retreat where they recreated the year 1959.  One group of men was treated as if it were that time.  The other was asked to reminisce about that year while the same music, movies, etc. played. 

Both groups came out of the experience with their hearing and memory improved.  On many measurable dimensions, they “got younger.”  Astounding results, to be sure.  But even more amazing, those who actually re-lived the year improved more than the others–on intelligence tests, posture, gait, height and weight.   Photos of them taken at the end of the week were judged by people unaware of the study to be younger than the ones taken at the beginning of the week. 

In Langer’s words, “It is not primarily our physical selves that limit us, but rather our mindset about our physical limits.”  What are you doing about that?  What are you thinking?

Henry Ford’s famous quote, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.” is another way to consider this phenomenon.  We set ourselves up to succeed or stumble, sail through challenges or become chronically ill with what we tell ourselves.  That’s why some people can live through Dachau and some have a heart attack just dealing with traffic on Monday morning.

One of the places that has a lot of potential for a better life is how we perceive control.  Are you the only one who knows the right way to do things?  Does everyone else need your perspective to get things done?  That’s not reality, but some of us take on a lot of stress assuming that.

How about the opposite—where you assume you have no control?  If you tell yourself that someone else has to make you happy, improve your work situation, help you eat better, or make you lose weight, you’re eliminating the one person who can really make any of those things happen—YOU.

The truth is, you don’t have all the control and never will.  But you do have more than “none.”  All of us do.

Another perspective that works against our well-being is the idea that aging is linear and inevitable.  Once one piece of your body starts to have problems, the rest will follow.  The path is inalterable.  Studies support that people who see health problems as a temporary blip recover better than those who see their illness as the first step in the staircase down to total infirmity.

Even though social scientists confirm the importance of consciously choosing how we see the world and our place in it, it’s not that easy.  The vast majority of the images and ideas we hear, watch, and relate to are mind-numbing and contagious.  Each of us is different in many, many ways.  But it’s natural for a society to expect similarities.  You have to be your own watchdog on this.  Forgetting one person’s name doesn’t mean your memory is gone.  Many older people remember more than those two generations younger.  (My dad could still tell you the names of the guys he served with in WWII when he died in 2001.)

The mind-body link is a huge piece of good health.  Much of modern medicine ignores it. Society ignores it.  That doesn’t mean you have to.  Pay attention to what you are telling yourself all day every day.  Get rid of the junk that implies “less than,” “unable,” or “decline.”  It’s far worse for you than a greasy burger with fries and a giant milkshake. 

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more about her and her work, please visit her website http://www.mining-silver.com/.  She can be reached at mary@mining-silver.com. 

This article originally appeared in the July 2010 issue of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter, Put Old on Hold.

Our right to freedom in the US is broader than carrying guns and assemblying to protest or support something.    We also have freedom of information and freedom to pursue what we believe in.  What do we do with all that?

It’s too easy as Americans to equate our beautiful right to the freedoms we enjoy as citizens with a “don’t fence me in” attitude.  I can be what I want and do what I want (as long as I do no harm) and that’s it.   The “I can be me” of it is just the start though.  How good a “me” can you be?  In the US, we have a lot of protection for taking ourselves to the top.

But to the top of what?  Too often lately, it’s been to the top story of greed or petty bickering, to the top of who makes the most as a CEO or sports figure, to the top of what a nun I had in 7th grade aptly termed “a manure pile.”  None of that stuff is worth the effort to get it in the long run.

Here in the US, we can do more than that.  As a nation, we’re languishing because we’re not.  If we want to truly be Americans, then it’s time to accept that sometimes life is hard and that blaming someone else instead of dealing with it is cowardly.  We need to get off this bickering kick in the halls of decision-making and get serious about finding solutions.  “My” way only works when you’re the only one involved in the situation.  “Our” way is always the product of negotiation, good will, and respect–and a desire to get on with what needs to be done.

Nothing in our Constitution holds holy our right to be right.  That document–and everything this country is built on–comes instead from our right to do right.

The next time you decide someone else is wrong, remember this.  Find a solution not a fight over who’s gonna win the right to be right.

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Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  Her current focus is on helping 50+ workers develop effective job search skills and strategies.  Her website is http://www.mining-silver.com/ She can be contacted via her website.