Why Aging Doesn’t Have to Mean Decline: Rethinking Midlife, Purpose, and Your “Trophy Years”

speaker-0 (00:09.998)
Welcome everybody. Today we have Barbara Waxman. Barbara is the head up of the Odyssey group. Barbara, it’s always sounds better to hear from the person I’m talking to exactly who they are, how they came to where they are, and what they’re doing now. So tell us a bit about yourself.

speaker-1 (00:28.152)
Sure. And thanks for having me. I’ve been looking forward to the conversation.

speaker-0 (00:33.208)
There you go.

speaker-1 (00:34.434)
My story began in a nursing home in Brooklyn, New York, in fact. So I’ve been in what we now call the field of longevity, but for ages we called aging. when I was a child, before I knew I was getting into a field or that it would be a lifelong passion, a lifelong vocation for myself. So my dad would volunteer, he was a physician.

And he would go to the Menorah Homan Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, see patients. And I would be maybe I was seven years old, something like that. And I would roam the halls. And to this day, I remember the linoleum floors, the bluish lights that were on, and I’d peek around doors, and people would say, What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? And so from a young age, I got all this positive reinforcement.

And I innately felt that these people were special in some way. I wasn’t afraid. I wanted to hear their stories. And over the years, I kept going back and through college, in fact, in my summer jobs, would be a recreational therapist at the Menorah Home and Hospital. And I thought I was going to be a nursing home administrator. So undergrad in college, I studied perceptions of the elderly before the field.

of aging really was recognized at all. And I got my master’s in gerontology, adult development and aging. I’m not a geriatrician, I’m a gerontologist. So someone with an expertise because we continued to develop as adults. I got that degree when I was in my 20s. And then for years I was working with people, architects, when assisted living sort of was born in the 1980s.

in Oregon, they would bring me up to talk about how do you create these environments for older adults and on and on. And over time, probably around 25 years ago, clients who were either CEOs if they were for profits or executive directors of nonprofits would start to ask me if I would coach them. And honestly, Neil, at the time I didn’t know what coaching was. And I’m

speaker-1 (02:57.858)
I’ve lived in California now for over 20 years. but the truth is the New Yorker part of my brain thought, coaching, what is this? It sounds really soft. I don’t get it. Why would these people need a coach? And the more I looked into it, I realized that at that time, to my knowledge, there were zero master’s level gerontologists and internationally certified coaches. So I went back to school in my 40s.

And got my coaching credential. And that is when the Odyssey group was born. And I started leadership coaching, executive coaching, and life coaching for what I call adults, midlife, and better. And then I’ll go more quickly. after doing that for about 15 years, I decided it combined with the time when I became an empty nester. And my husband and I decided to do something a little bit countercultural. We took a gap here.

Usually we think it’s for kids in college to take a gap year. We thought if we can manage to do it, we were working, but about this much. I wanted to write a book. So we moved to Italy to get perspective on ourselves, on what we wanted to do when we grow up, and to write this book. And what I recognized in my time away professionally is that the quantitative information, the data as a gerontologist.

Showed that we have added three decades to life expectancy, right? In 1940, 1900, it was 47 years. Today it’s around 80 years old. And if you’re college educated, you don’t smoke, and you are active in some capacity, it’s going to be longer. I recogni that recognize that quantitatively and qualitatively from my conversations for 15 years with clients, I saw.

That we go through something akin to adolescence twice. In midlife, men and women, hormones change, bodies morph, relationships shift, whether it’s becoming an empty nester or finding love for the first time or maybe the second time, or dissolving a relationship, caregiving. There are more relationship shifts in midlife than any other time. And another commonality with adolescence.

speaker-1 (05:20.856)
We have a sense of I’m not young, but I’m certainly not old. Right. So I wrote a book called The Middles Manifesto. You say adolescence, middle essence. That’s the second reckoning that we go through in life. And for the last 10 years, that’s what I’ve been working on and popularizing. And now

Around three years ago, I felt drawn to look at, okay, if we’ve added 30 years to life expectancy, and if about 20 of them are in the middle, what happened to the other 10 or 15? And what I found, again, from the quantitative and qualitative data, is that the last 12 years for women and 10 years for men are typically spent in.

А стіп деклайн і димінішмент.

So in those years, we are older and diminished for longer than we ever have been before. So my research has been in the area of how do we change that? I’m an advisor at Stanford University to their lifestyle medicine program and to their Center on Longevity. And I’ve recognized that we’re looking at longevity in an incomplete way. We look at

life span, how long we’ll live, health span, how functional we can stay, but we’re losing this sense that helps us stay undiminished. And that’s the science of human flourishing. And I call it the third span. So that’s what I do. I give workshops. I’m a writer. I I’m a coach and I work in this longevity area.

speaker-0 (07:10.646)
So you said that that last ten or twelve years, depending on the sex, is diminishment. What’s causing that? Is that just getting thinner for lack of a better term? Like you’re you’re getting older, you’re like, when’s it gonna end type thing?

speaker-1 (07:29.454)
There are a few factors. One is internalized ageism from midlife onward, because your listeners, I know you you started this around thinking about retirement. So when people are thinking about retirement, it should everyone says it should start earlier or in midlife. It’s the time to think about what I call those trophy years rather than diminished. How do I work now and figure it out?

So I get a trophy. I live the life that is undiminished and that I design. So why is it that way? Internalized ageism. People expect, well, I’m going to be able to do less and less. And they follow that thinking. Becca Levy out of Yale, just this year, 2026, did a study and she said, What if I look not at

Do people decline and how little can we create a decline? But what if I look at do people improve with age? Which is a whole different hypothesis. It’s an anti-ageist hypothesis. And what she found was that people with a positive mindset about aging, when they’re it amplifies all their efforts, their physiological health improves.

So why do people get diminished in the end of life, 10 or 12 years? Internalized ageism. Another thing I’ll say, Neil, is that the wear and tear theory is real. With time on this planet, our bodies break down. And if we know how to use lifestyle as medicine preemptively, we can stay undiminished.

So we all know those, maybe we think they’re rare birds who are in their eighties, late eighties, nineties, who are traveling, rolling their suitcases, living independently. They don’t have to be the rare birds. If we put lifestyle in place from midlife on, and that’s actually never too late to to start, then those are the years that we really get our trophy and can stay undiminished. It is possible.

speaker-0 (09:53.464)
I interviewed Dr. Michael Royzen from the Cleveland Clinic a few weeks back. he had some really interesting information about how your mind actually can change how your genes are acting. And as a result, by changing those thought patterns, you actually can turn turn the clock back from ninety to forty for your body and that sort of thing.

speaker-1 (10:18.09)
It’s incredible. So was he talking about epigenetics?

speaker-0 (10:22.166)
Yeah. there’s a number of things there.

speaker-1 (10:25.748)
just for your listeners, epigenetics. We people think, well, in my family, people died at 85, or this is the way it was. Epigenetics are the environmental factors, including again, your internalized ageist thinking or just your mindset in general. And all of those things impact when you think that our genes have on off switches. We can modulate.

How they’re turned on and off, are they on dimmer or are they getting turned on bright red, you know, pain sensors? So we can modulate those. So he’s absolutely right. And that’s called epigenetics. It’s what we surround ourselves with that will impact our genetic propensity, I’ll call it.

speaker-0 (11:14.638)
So you s started off coaching executives. That seems like a a strange place to start the coaching career as opposed to people that are already in into that post-career. Just as an aside, I’m getting to the opinion that retirement is a wrong word. We really should be rethinking that entire concept. But why start at the executives as opposed to where your area of specialty was?

speaker-1 (11:42.83)
That’s a great question. Somehow my work starting in nursing homes has gotten younger and younger. part of it was the fact that people came to me when I was doing consulting for CEOs, leading companies in the aging space, and they would ask me to coach them. I went and got more leadership training and the coaching training. And so that’s where opportunity was. And I found that I could as a

an individual have a real ripple of impact by coaching them and then they’re sending it out into the world. So that’s how I started there. And then I want to just click on this idea of retirement and your thinking, which is spot on, that it may be really time to retire, which means to withdraw the word from our vernacular, because

Retirement is really a signal. I want to redesign my life. I don’t want it so centered around work. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to live. So why are we calling it withdrawing with retirement? I want to redesign what I’m doing. I think preferment is terminology that more accurate accurately reflects what people want. I want to do the things I prefer to do.

Even if I need to make money, even if I need to have a paycheck, I’m not going to do something that is meaningless to me. For years, I’ve had clients who for years did things that other people may have loved doing, physicians, lawyers. And they said, you know, it was a slog. For the last decade, I did not want to be doing that. But I had bills to pay. There were reasons I I did it. Now

I want to make, you know, a portion of the income because I still need income, but I want to do something that I care about. So I I think you’re spun on with this idea of retiring, the term retirement, because it’s really an open field for life design at that stage.

speaker-0 (14:00.322)
Yeah. Yeah. I think I think we’re we’re stuck on that concept of retirement simply because we think of older people off to the side and we’re not used to thinking about because our ages have exploded in length, probably since the eighties, maybe a little bit earlier.

We never really thought what it was like to be older. I please notice I’m not saying the word old because my dad’s ninety-four and the man is still going type thing. So I I’m just thinking that we need to think in terms of I interviewed Dr. Catherine Rickwood. She’s down in down in Australia. and

Her entire concept has changed the lifestyle, period, from end end to beginning. You just mentioned you took a gap here.

But it’s it’s at the end when you became an empty nester as opposed to as a kid. There’s no reason for anything to be tied to a specific age.

speaker-1 (15:09.686)
That’s right. I think we need to learn to be more age agnostic and look at the stage of life that we’re in. So I’m so glad we took the gap year when we did, when we became empty nesters at the time. My husband’s parents, my mother, my father had already passed away. She they were all well enough. We’ve had 10 years, we’ve had a decade where I’ve been traveling for work around the world and

I’m still traveling a lot, but now we’re in a new phase. So it’s not about my age. At 63 and a half, I feel like I’m just getting going in so many ways. But my in-laws are not thriving at 90 and 87. And I have four grandchildren. And I don’t want to be away for a year. So it’s not, and you’d think, well, 63, maybe I would slow down. It’s not that.

It’s what stage I’m a caregiver to multiple generations, not the typical sandwich generation. It’s to my grandchildren and my parents, my in-laws. So I think we’re living in a whole new demographic environment where it is more important than ever that people understand how to be what I call a study of one. That works what works for you, Neil, maybe something that I support.

I admire, but it wouldn’t work from my circumstances, my habits, my preferences, my economic status. You know, I need to create what works for me in the milieu, in the environment that I live, and you do as well. Each one of us, we tend to be thinking about older people as though, everyone’s interesting and they’re growing up and they’re doing their own thing and they can make change. And then once

someone’s quote old, they’re all the same. I was on I was on a call yesterday with a client, which is a a company that oversees over 1100 senior living communities. And they’ve asked me to come in and help them reimagine what does longevity mean. So it’s right up my alley I’m very excited about the work and they’re very open to it. And

speaker-1 (17:30.444)
I kept reminding them in our conversation. And these are people who are think trying to think outside the box. They’re saying, well, they have their calendars of events and they’re I’m saying, look at the individual. We can’t think about in these communities, here’s what people want. How about asking people what they want? Whether they’re 70 or 95. We’ve got to know because each one of us, my my grandmother.

I’ll never forget when I was a child, I’d sit with her at her little makeup table. And sh I’ll never forget. I think she must have said to me more than once. She said, Barbara, sometimes I look in the mirror and I think, who is that old woman looking out at me? Because our spirits don’t age. Right. So we have to remember that and how we plan for our future as a study of one.

And how we hold others with respect and recognizing their own needs to design their own lives.

speaker-0 (18:39.982)
I think our current generation gets in into habits that were societal ruts that created for us. And we have to try and figure out how to get out of them. Like you look at the longevity aspects for men versus women. Men’s sus men’s relationships were primarily driven out of the work.

And they didn’t have many external. When they retire, all of a sudden their relationships are gone by and large. You know, they still have the family. For me, my wife is my primary relationship. I don’t really have much outside the house, except for what she brings in. So her friends become my friends, that sort of thing. But that probably because I was driven at an early age, you work.

And you you do those things as opposed to have a different mindset. And I think it’ll take a bit to change society’s way of thinking. It’ll probably take a couple of generations.

speaker-1 (19:48.204)
I completely agree with what you’re saying. We have a cultural script.

When we’re young, we learn and we’re supposed to learn mostly everything that’s gonna last. In the middle, we find the perfect person. We have the perfect family. That’s not happening. That didn’t happen then, and it’s not happening now. And then we have our job. Well, the average person is changing jobs eight to 12 times in the course of their career and changing careers. And then we’re supposed to quote retire.

Problem is no one’s living like that anymore. Yep. And yet the script remains. So people feel very un uneasy, and there’s a low level kind of stress out there because people are looking around for the signals from society about what I’m supposed to do. I am happy to say it’s changing. And I know this because I’m deeply in this field, and I see the changes.

For example, in education. Small colleges around the country, you may have read, are closing. Why? People don’t believe that a college education is worth what the cost is more and more. Yeah. The demographics are changing. There aren’t as many young people. And at the same time, the costs are going up, right, for these colleges. So they’re going out of business. But the ones that are thriving.

Are saying to themselves, wait a minute, what if I take ageism out of it? What if I look at who is interested in learning? It’s middlescence, people who are in midlife who are and older, who are looking at how do I get away from trying to prove myself in the world? I’ve done that. How do I really start to improve?

speaker-1 (21:54.734)
And do things for the love of it. And they are going back to school in droves to study the things that never, you know, made sense on paper, to take up new hobbies, to socialize. So all of these scripts are being rewritten and it is starting to happen. And I’m so grateful for people like you who are changing the space and the conversation by

interviewing people in the space and then sharing it so other people can listen and say, my gosh, I’m not the only one. Yeah. And something’s happening out there.

speaker-0 (22:34.318)
Yeah, no, I had interviewed Kate Schaeffers from the University of Minnesota about higher learning for older adults.

speaker-1 (22:44.59)
They have a program, don’t they?

speaker-0 (22:46.494)
Exactly. It started in I think if I remember correctly, twenty twenty. Stanford had started Stanford or was it Harvard? Harvard had started

speaker-1 (22:55.822)
Harvard and Stanford both the Harvard has the Advanced Leadership Institute and Stanford has the Distinguished Careers Institute.

speaker-0 (23:03.148)
Right. And they had started only twelve years ago. Mina University of Minnesota only started in twenty twenty. And their the the concept of

Continuous learning throughout your life is well, hell, I’m coming out of the technology space. And I never stopped learning because technology was changing all the time. And there was no way I could stop. Anyone that was expecting to be taught how to do something in a classroom, you had to teach yourself because anything being taught was already like three, four years behind.

Mm-hmm. So you always had to keep teaching yourself and keep learning, that sort of thing. That’s one thing I miss about technology. And I will say this, technology has kind of slowed down compared to where where I started to now. Interesting. It has definitely slowed down.

speaker-1 (23:59.724)
So even with AI?

speaker-0 (24:01.974)
Even with the AI. So you gotta rem if you think about, okay, I started in technology in eighty-eight, before there was a network, before there was Windows, that that kind of gooey interface. That was back with Microsoft DOS. Right. So it was line based prompts.

Over time, you continuously had changes to the operating system, to the computer power networks. All of a sudden the internet came about because it was just a bigger network. Then you hell, I was a security guy before there was a firewall. That sort of thing. So there was always these new technologies. But then around 2008, things started to consolidate. So when everybody has

their own data centers and then you man, did we go off topic here. But anyway, let me

speaker-1 (24:56.814)
my fault.

speaker-0 (25:01.494)
If everybody had their own their own data centers, all of a sudden it got consolidated. And that’s where the concept of the cloud came. So no, you didn’t have to have all that. So now there is just three or four big data centers. yeah, there’s smaller, unique cloud providers. And then software became consolidated into SaaS. And now AI is doing the development. So the need of the person disappears.

So the need of the person to actually understand all this stuff has continuously been disappearing since 2008. So it’s it’s been that continuous learning over the decades has what’s been driving me. And that’s what drives me in this podcast is okay, what’s the next thing? What do I need to learn now? What’s what’s coming up? So I ask you that question.

What’s coming up? What are the things that I need to think about? I say, yeah.

speaker-1 (26:04.716)
Very good. Well, tying on to your your point, there are a lot of people who are middle essence, that you know I define as midlife and better, who feel like I can’t get a job. What’s happening now in the time of AI and it’s very tricky because for younger people coming out of college, for example, those entry-level jobs.

That was a lot of grunt work, but you’d get you’d learn from being in those surroundings, from meeting people, from just doing the lower level and then being recognized. Those opportunities are leaving. But there are a number of opportunities, and in fact, it’s growing if you speak to HR folks, where they’re saying we need human interface with wisdom leaders.

With people who have the experience and emotional intelligence to use our smaller workforce and amplify everyone’s efforts. So in some ways, this plays to an older demographic now where clients of mine get caught up and is challenging is many of the opportunity now, they’re not paying as much as as people are used to being paid.

speaker-0 (27:25.582)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (27:26.252)
And so it’s not that there are no jobs, they’re thinking there are no jobs, but there’s a reckoning in the workforce for many people. It’s those entry-level jobs are disappearing. Not necessarily that AI is taking them all over, but companies are anticipating AI might be able to and are trying to tighten their belts now. I think it’s inherent for people who are midlife and better.

To prepare themselves to be able to explain why their experience and that wisdom factor will benefit whoever’s interviewing them. Because of course, in an interview, you always want to feel out what’s that thing that would make this person’s life easier? Right. And what will help the bottom line of this company? so that’s just a little sidebar about.

some of the changes related to technology and bring it back to middle essence.

speaker-0 (28:28.94)
Hmm. Here’s what I think is going to happen. And this is why I think your the your entire concept of middle essence is valuable. I think any place there was a human machine interface that will be taken over by automation, whether it’s AI, whether that’s automation, robotics, you name it, that human to machine can be replicated.

It’s the human to human interactions that cannot be replicated. And that is going to start growing, I think. So the middle essence aspects.

that interaction with the younger people and passing along that wisdom or that knowledge or that guidance. I think that’s where that is going to start growing and blossoming.

speaker-1 (29:24.802)
Yes. Ag agreed. Agreed.

speaker-0 (29:28.334)
Yeah.

speaker-0 (29:33.324)
So you’re doing research right now on the the diminishment a areas. Is there a trigger that’s triggering that? So you’ve you’ve talked of I I’ve noticed that we tend to put limits on where things happen. Retirement, 65, finished university at 21, married by 35.

that sort of thing. So we have typically we have some sort of ha hard and fast rules type thing. The age of 50 is a major milestone. Why? I don’t know. I just blew by that, but that’s a different story.

Is there a trigger for that diminishment?

speaker-1 (30:23.734)
Well, the research, one is what the research shows. And the research shows that for most Americans, I’m not speaking internationally now, this research, the data is about the US, their last healthy birthday is at around 66 years old. So when you say trigger, some of it has to do with a lifestyle that’s led them to a place where they’re not taking them care of themselves.

using what I call the seven lifestyle levers to amplify their efforts so that they can remain healthy and undiminished. do you mean triggers in another way? Am I not understanding?

speaker-0 (31:06.19)
question. You had you had indicated that the last ten, twelve years there was a diminishment that was going on. So that would have had trigger started. Yeah, what triggers that diminish? Okay.

speaker-1 (31:19.544)
So that is we now know that we can use things at our disposal, our mindsets. I mentioned Becca Levy’s research and you talked about the epigenetics in your conversation with the physician. We can use exercise to keep our brains, what happens in that those last 10 to 12 years, people’s memory gets worse and worse. This wear and tear theory.

That our bodies, the longer we’re on the planet, it’s the more the older we get, the more time we need to put into working out. It doesn’t mean going to the gym and killing it. It means going for a hike where your heart rate’s going to get up with with a friend. It means lifting heavy things, carrying a package home from the store if you don’t want to go to the gym, taking the stairs instead of the elevator when it’s reasonable. So the trigger.

Is that people are not utilizing what we have at our disposal. And so as they get older, it’s happening that they are more diminished, which is why I really want people to think about two things. One, middle essence, midlife, this time where we feel these reckonings is a normal developmental place in life where it’s a pivot point. It’s like a fulcrum.

Where we need to say, I’m using this time to ask myself some of the same questions that I asked when I was younger. Those social constructs. What do I want to be doing with my time? How do I want to show up in the world? And the like. That’s middle essence. That’s the first thing people need to understand. It’s not a crisis. There’s no real research around a midlife crisis. It can be a very hard time for some people and not so hard for others.

Some people might do stupid things, but in general, developmentally, there’s not a midlife crisis. That’s why people say, I’m having a quarter life price crisis or what have you. The other thing I want people to understand is this is the great place to say, I am partially feeling the time won’t go on forever. I’m somewhat feeling that life is precious because it’s limited. When something is scarce.

speaker-1 (33:43.564)
It’s more valuable to us. And this is the correct time to think about the other idea, your trophy years. Those years where people are diminished. How can I get there? So for me, when I’m 100 years old, because when I use longevity calculators and I have a lifestyle that is associated with longevity,

And my grandmother lived to 103. Interestingly, it showed a 103. So when I’m 100, what’s my perfect day? So for me, I love to garden. so I will go pick something in the garden. I happen to live about half a mile, relatively flat walk to grocery store. I want to be able to walk to the store and back and carry a bag of just a few things. I love to cook. Meal.

If you’re in town, come over for dinner. I love to read. I’ll go to bed, I’ll read, and I won’t wake up. That will be a perfect day at 100. For me to have that day, what do I need to do at 63? Well, I need to socially continue to meet people that I want to engage with and new people, not just the same people who are my network. I want to continue to have interesting conversations and to grow.

So I need to keep that going. I need to be able to garden, right? So it takes a lot of different things. You have to get up, get down, lift things. You have to read about what’s working, what’s not. So it’s intellectually, physically, and kind of spiritually. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out in a garden and really taken it in, but it’s new life and there’s something very spiritual about it. I need to be able to walk half a mile and then carry things back. So now I need to be able to walk way longer.

If I’m going to be able to walk a whole mile with 100, I need to be able to walk 10 miles now. And I need to be able to carry much heavier weights. So that’s what I’m talking about. The trigger point is kind of this when you know life won’t go on forever. And the vision is how do I get clear now and make design my life for my trophy years? And actually it’s a workshop I’m teaching with. Have you heard of MEA, the Modern Elder Academy?

speaker-0 (36:10.264)
Yes.

speaker-1 (36:11.764)
that I’m teaching with the CEO.

speaker-0 (36:13.986)
For other people, remember it’s not just you and I. There are people watching this. Yeah. So for

speaker-1 (36:20.33)
Anyone can sign. Well, we have an admissions staff, but yes, this is open people come from all over the world. And that’s the other thing. I’ve had people who’ve asked and I welcome any of the listeners to reach out to me individually and say, I’m not a real group person. Are we gonna have to expose our souls? Is it gonna be kumbaya? And I believe it or not, I lead workshops. I’m not a real joiner.

Myself. The beauty of these workshops is you come and get what you came for. And in the process, you’re not having anyone else answer because it’s way easier for me to tell you, Neil, what to do with your life than to figure out what to do with mine. Right. It’s easier to fix someone else. So people listen to the wisdom in the room and they get ideas.

And they get inspiration, and sometimes it’s that is not what I want. And it is remarkable. I have a group, it’s a different workshop I gave years ago called the Thrive. They called themselves the Thrivers. That’s what they name themselves. It was maybe five or seven years ago. They’re still getting together without me. so yes, this is for anybody. Yes, go to meawisdom.com and check out.

Certainly my workshop, they they give a lot of workshops.

speaker-0 (37:53.058)
everybody listening, I will put that website into the description of this video so that you can find it in access E A Wisdom. I got a question for you. So you start going down the road of spirituality.

speaker-0 (38:10.926)
The concept of religion has been steadily going down, both north and south of the border. North of the border much more than south of the border. I think i if you were to ask people who’s part of a actual religion or in Canada, it’s something like only thirteen percent. Whereas in the US it’s it’s much higher.

Is there an impact of the loss of religion in this entire space?

speaker-1 (38:42.442)
I I can answer that, but from the flip side, which is to say the research that’s been done is that people who are part of spiritual communities.

speaker-1 (38:55.746)
And I will try not to add any of my own judgment on it. But I think the research was more people saying spiritual community, not

The purpose of humankind, you know, some spiritual community, they live longer. Now, I don’t know if it’s religion or feeling a part of a community. There was a study out of Harvard, it’s still continuing, it’s longitudinal, it’s 87 or 89 years old, called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. And they have had, I think they’re on their fourth.

Study director, because the study outlives the careers, career span of the directors. And when pressed, they’ve looked at all this data over decades following individuals. When pressed for an answer, if you had to choose one thing that’s the most important thing for longevity, what would it be? They said the quality of your relationships in midlife are the best predictor of health in later life.

Stronger predictor than your cholesterol count or your blood pressure. It’s pretty powerful. So I think part of spiritual commit communities have to do with that, but I can’t speak to the religious part.

speaker-0 (40:20.344)
Yeah, no, and there is a definite departure from religion to spirituality, with regards to that. One of my early interviews was with Dr. Helen Lavretsky, who from UCLA Longevity Center, and her area of study it combines the mind, body, and soul. So things like normally with the Western medicine you just focus on the bar body, a cardiologist just focuses on the heart.

Whereas when we s when I talked with Dr. Royzen, he was saying how the mind can impact the body. So there’s that combination. You’re now bringing in the soul aspect of that spirituality helps with the longevity aspects. So when you have all those three.

speaker-1 (41:08.972)
Yes.

speaker-0 (41:11.468)
You’ve been traveling internationally.

How’s it different or how is it the same outside of North America? Have you been able to see any differences?

speaker-1 (41:24.718)
For sure. For sure. when I was living in Italy and I would meet with friends and they’d find out I’m a coach and they were very interested in coaching. We’ve heard of this. What is this? And I would talk to them about life coaching and and what I cover. And when I a said to them, we cover questions about purpose. They said, purpose. What would ever what would anyone ask about purpose? And I said,

There are lot of questions about purpose. What is my purpose? How do I find my purpose? And the Italians would look at me and say, the purpose of life is to live, which is a very Italian way of thinking, right? And so that is one clear distinction that we have from a number of other cultures that we get so consumed with this idea of doing it right, it right, doing life right.

I think statements like, and I think you’ve had Richard lighter on, and he may be someone who says this. he’s a colleague of mine. The purpose of life is a life of purpose. Well, that just puts pressure on people. Well, I don’t know. I’m not Mother Teresa. So I like to think of purpose as little pea purpose being the breadcrumbs that lead you to your bigger purpose. And what do I mean by that?

Our bigger purpose, first of all, we usually have more than one in our lives. When I was working younger, I had young children and I was working and I was always suffering, feeling like I’m not a good enough mom, I’m not spending enough time with work, you know, that well, when my daughter Jill was eight years old, she was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease. And you know what? That went away in a flash.

speaker-0 (42:56.974)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (43:19.758)
For any parents listening, if your child gets that sick, I had complete purpose. My only purpose was her health. Thank goodness she’s 34, she has through two children, and she’s completely healthy now. And I have to say, my dedicating two years of my life, stopping working at the time, had something to do with it because traditional medicine couldn’t resolve couldn’t what she had. So

That’s big P purpose. Now I could say part of my Big P purpose is what I’m doing here with you today, Neil, is trying to change the world one conversation at a time, nationally, internationally, but having people understand that we are in experiencing an inflection point in our culture and demographically to live better. So that’s big P purpose. It changes and

There are times in life where you may plateau and not feel it. But what is always there? That’s little P purpose. Little P purpose is a combination of what are the things that bring me joy? I had a client who had couldn’t was obsessing about purpose, and she just was unhappy. She didn’t know what she wanted to do for work. She didn’t want to know what she wanted to do in terms of her purpose. And so we broke it down. And she not only had her own pets.

But she had a few fural cats and who would visit and she would feed them every day. And I said, wait a minute, hold up. What if you took just a moment, you’re doing it anyway, every day, and had sort of the spiritual coming together and saying, I welcome this opportunity to feed these animals. And we started to notice.

Points in her day that brought her joy like this. Those are the breadcrumbs, the little things making her coffee became a ritual. It still took the four or five minutes that it took before, but she paid attention. So by the time she got to lunch, she felt like this day has had elements that are meaningful and purposeful. And it led her to be open to when a big big P purpose showed up.

speaker-1 (45:50.52)
She could see it because so often people aren’t really aware and awake enough to see it when it’s right in front of them.

speaker-0 (45:59.246)
Think a lot of people get too caught up in up here as opposed to it just being, if that makes sense. I I watched I came across a video last week talking about Dr. Winston Doctor, Sir Winston Churchill. He suffered from depression through his entire life. He called it the black dog. And one of the things he would do is

when he was starting to feel depressed, he’d go out and he’d start laying brick and building a brick wall. Because what happened was it got him out of his head and he started doing things. I remember my youngest son, when he first broke up with his first girlfriend, he was devastated and asked him, Where are you? I’m outside her dorm room. I said, Start walking. The moment he started walking, he started moving away from those type of issues. I think

Getting caught up in the head is detrimental to finding that purpose. I think you’ll find the purpose just by acting and taking a step.

speaker-1 (47:13.506)
That’s a great point. And where you started out asking me, what do I see cross-culturally? One is this idea of purpose, another is being present. I think here we think, I’ll relax, I’ll sort of feel be in my body. It’s like dessert, you know, when I deserve it, etc. Whereas other cultures understand that can wisdom is connecting your mind, your soul.

your guts, which is your second brain, your heart. And that breathing through and connecting enables us to be really present for others, but also for ourselves. And people don’t necessarily take that into account here. so I think that what you brought up is a really important point.

speaker-0 (48:08.782)
Well, I think we’re getting close to the end of the interview, Barb. Yes. If I was I always ask everybody this simple question at the end. If you were to give one piece of advice, what would it be? Doesn’t matter who the audience member is, if there was one piece of advice you’d give, what would it be?

speaker-1 (48:29.15)
I know it. it’s a bumper sticker that I saw years ago that I’ve always remembered. And it simply said, Don’t believe everything you think.

speaker-0 (48:34.062)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (48:43.992)
We are brought up to think a certain way. And our very conversation is about how we need to recognize when that old way of thinking no longer fits. So don’t believe everything you think.

speaker-0 (49:00.014)
Wise words.

speaker-1 (49:01.4)
Mm-hmm. Thank you.

speaker-0 (49:03.49)
Thank you very much for taking the time. And for everybody, I’ll put links to everything with regards to Barbara in the description of the video. so feel free to look into the various different webinar seminars. reach out to her if you want. Anyway, thank you very much.

speaker-1 (49:25.934)
Thanks for having me.

speaker-0 (49:36.802)
There we go. Okay. And that’s where you go.

speaker-1 (49:41.022)
MJ did MJ send you ahead of time? I know we’ve got a list of things for you to add that will be interesting to people, like my free assessment things. Did she send you anything?

speaker-0 (49:55.231)
I don’t recall seeing any links. So send me send me a list of all the links.

speaker-1 (50:02.062)
I’m gonna reach out to her and ask her to do that. Wonderful. And of course, let us know when you launch this and we’ll share it.

speaker-0 (50:09.356)
You got it. I much appreciate it.

speaker-1 (50:11.784)
Absolutely. All right. Take care.

speaker-0 (50:14.198)
Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.

speaker-1 (50:16.461)
Bye.