Deborah Heiser (00:00):

And it’s like the jar opens up, the lid comes off, and you say, “Okay, now I want to know who I am in the world. Did I matter? Me coming into this world, did it even matter? Did I do anything important that meant anything?”

Deborah Heiser (00:14):

It’s kind of like the movie It’s a Wonderful Life — we don’t know what impact we have, and then in that movie, he gets to figure it out, well, we’re looking for that. Now, this is when we start to get that fulfillment because we’re saying, “Oh, I want to give back in some way.”

[Music Playing]

Stephanie McCullough (00:36):

Hey, dear listeners, we need to let you know that Kevin and Stephanie offer investment advice through Private Advisor Group, which is a federally registered investment advisor. The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations to any individual. To determine which strategies or investments may be suitable for you. Consult the appropriate qualified professional prior to making a decision. Now, let’s get on with the show.

Stephanie McCullough (01:11):

This is Take Back Retirement, the show that’s redefining retirement for women. Retirement is an old-fashioned cultural concept. We want to reclaim the word so you can make it your own. I’m Stephanie McCullough, financial planner and founder of Sofia Financial, where our mission is to reduce women’s money stress and empower them to make wise holistic decisions so they can get back to living their best lives.

Kevin Gaines is my longtime colleague with deep knowledge in the technical stuff: investments, taxes, retirement plan rules. He’s a little bit geeky and quantitative; I’m a little bit touchy-feely and qualitative. Together, through conversations and interviews, we aim to give you the information and motivation you need to move forward with confidence. We’re so glad you’re here.

 

 

 

Stephanie McCullough (01:59):

Coming to you semi-live from the beautiful Westlakes office park in suburban Philadelphia, this is Stephanie McCullough and Kevin Gaines of Sofia Financial and American Financial Management Group. Say hello, Kevin.

Kevin Gaines (02:11):

Hello Kevin.

Stephanie McCullough (02:12):

Today, we get to talk to Dr. Deborah Heiser. Debbie is an applied developmental psychologist, the CEO and founder of the Mentor Project, an author of a great book called The Mentorship Edge. She’s a TEDx speaker, a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, Thinkers50 Radar List, and an expert contributor to Psychology Today.

Stephanie McCullough (02:35):

She’s also an adjunct professor, and we’ll get to hear a lot about her research around the positive aspects of aging as well as the role that mentorship can play. Let’s dive into our conversation with Dr. Heiser.

Stephanie McCullough (02:54):

Debbie Heiser, welcome to Take Back Retirement.

Deborah Heiser (02:57):

Thanks for having me on here, I’m delighted to be here.

Stephanie McCullough (02:59):

I’m so excited because I just love the focus of your work and your research. Tell us, how did you come to do the work that you do?

Deborah Heiser (03:09):

So, it wasn’t a straight direct route. I first started out studying everything no one wants to have or get, things like depression and Alzheimer’s disease, and palliative care and frailty. And when I was doing that, I was really excited about all of my work because it was back when aging research wasn’t really popular. And so, I felt like I was really doing some cutting edge stuff, and I was.

Deborah Heiser (03:39):

But it wasn’t until I went to a conference and a dinner party and somebody … I was so excited to tell this group of people all about my work and I didn’t know them, but I thought I was going to come in there like some hot shot coming in like oh, here’s all my good stuff. And it didn’t land.

Deborah Heiser (03:59):

So, the person across from me said, “What do we have to look forward to as we age? You are studying everything that scares us, and I want to know what I have to look forward to.” And I didn’t have an answer for him.

Deborah Heiser (04:16):

So, I realized I also wanted to know what I had to look forward to. And it wasn’t those things that I was studying, which are not what we should expect as we grow older. They’re the outliers, they’re the things that you know can happen, but you shouldn’t expect.

Deborah Heiser (04:30):

So, when I did that pivot, I started to look at midlife and the theories that are out there, and everything is so positive. The media just wasn’t talking about it, nobody was picking up on it. So, I pivoted and started to look at midlife and we have a stage called generativity and it’s an emotional developmental milestone.

Deborah Heiser (04:51):

So, I had before been looking at all the physical milestones that we could reach, and we know that we get frailer and slower as we get older, but nobody realizes that we get emotionally happier and more fulfilled as we get older. And that’s really what we’re looking forward to.

Deborah Heiser (05:12):

When we have children, we don’t say, “Oh, I hope brand new baby will run fast.” You say, “I hope the baby will be happy when they grow older.” And that’s actually what we have to look forward to. And I was thrilled with this and then I said, “I’ve got to learn more.” And that was the starting point for the work that I do now.

Stephanie McCullough (05:31):

So, you’re saying there is research that we get happier and more fulfilled, but it’s kind of just not the kind of common awareness of aging?

Deborah Heiser (05:40):

Yes. And so, it wasn’t an awareness when I started out. I was looking at aging in the 90s and early 2000s especially, and people were literally afraid they were going to get Alzheimer’s disease and people were getting blood tests to see if they had the APOE gene. It was kind of like when we had HIV and AIDS before that, and prior to that cancer.

Deborah Heiser (06:03):

There were always these sort of decades where we have something that we’re afraid of, and that was what we were afraid of. And that was tied to age, so people were really afraid of their later years. So, there was not a lot happening in the media at that time that was looking at everything that we have to look forward to. People tend to respond more also to things that scare us.

Deborah Heiser (06:28):

So, you know people weren’t getting so excited about hearing, “Oh, you’re going to be happier,” this kind of vague statement, “You’ll be fulfilled.” People were instead saying, “Well, what if, what if I have this negative thing?” So, that has been something that I’ve been on a sort of a quest to say, “No, no, no, change your focus and look at what you have to look forward to because then you are going to get more of that than if you are looking for something negative.”

Deborah Heiser (06:59):

And when you feel fulfilled or excited or full of passion or feel like you make a mark in the world, you live your life in a whole different way. And that’s what’s exciting to me, is we have an opportunity now instead of looking at our life as we get older as a series of challenges, and look at it as opportunities, it shifts our entire way of thinking to positivity.

Kevin Gaines (07:24):

So, the obvious question to me is why? I mean, why do we become happier? Is it just that the way our brains work? Or are there like particular things that happen that put us in a better place?

Deborah Heiser (07:37):

Yeah, that’s a great question. And here’s how it works. Developmentally, you know how we learn how to walk and talk, and we’re built to do that, and nobody says, “I wonder what’s going to happen, are they going to do it or not?” We expect that to happen. It doesn’t matter if it’s six months or 16 months, we expect a kid to do this right. Well, we have an emotional developmental trajectory too, where we should hit milestones.

Deborah Heiser (08:01):

So, when we’re younger, our focus isn’t on getting happier, our focus is I need to learn how to trust people. I need to learn how to — like you know a baby has to trust the people that are around them and grow that circle. Then we have to figure out who we are. And that’s the stage that’s like teen years all the way up until like 30. For some people, it’s one that has movement like learning how to walk.

Deborah Heiser (08:27):

But when we’re doing that, that’s the time period where we’re like, “What job am I going to do?” And maybe I’m going to switch my job because I decided I don’t like that. Who are my people? And once we get through that — so when we’re young, we figure out what we’re going to do and who our people are. And part of that process is sloughing off all of those people.

Deborah Heiser (08:47):

Like when we’re young and we’re going out and seeing a ton of people, not all of them end up being our people. You get a smaller and smaller grouping of people that you hang out with who are more meaningful.

Deborah Heiser (08:59):

So, you start to develop a more intimate relationship with people. And then you hit a stage where you say, “You know what, I’m ready to give back. I have acquired all of this information.” You’ve been taking things in all of these years, so you’re not focused on happiness as much as you are, “Let me figure out who I am, and get to where I am, and who are my people, and where am I.”

Deborah Heiser (09:23):

Then you hit midlife, and it’s like the jar opens up, the lid comes off, and you say, “Okay, now I want to know who I am in the world. Did I matter? Me coming into this world, did it even matter? Did I do anything important that meant anything?” It’s kind of like the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. We don’t know what impact we have. And then in that movie, he gets to figure it out. Well, we’re looking for that.

Deborah Heiser (09:48):

Now this is when we start to get that fulfillment because we’re saying, “Oh, I want to give back in some way.” And this is when people say, “I want to be a podcaster.” It doesn’t mean you run around, and you chase people saying, let me do good. It’s that you say, I want to put myself out into the world, maybe I’ll become a podcaster. And it’s an itch that people have that they want to start to scratch.

Deborah Heiser (10:09):

And it could be a blogger, it could be that a person volunteers that they get involved with philanthropy, that they mentor. We automatically start to do this, and this makes us feel like we’re more meaningful, and a part of the world, that’s part of the happiness.

Deborah Heiser (10:24):

So, when we say happiness, it’s not like every day, we feel like we open up a present. We’re like yay, again. It isn’t like that. It’s more like wow, who and what do I want to impact today? As you guys as podcasters, you are kind of doing that every time you do a podcast, and that is your digital footprint that you’re putting out in the world that shows that you are making impact.

 

Deborah Heiser (10:48):

So, does that translate necessarily to happiness, like you open a gift? It might lead to feeling fulfilled, or it might lead to feeling like a sort of completeness or something like that that is under that happiness umbrella. So, we continue that though all the way until our final breath.

Stephanie McCullough (11:08):

So interesting. And is that the meaning of this term generativity?

Deborah Heiser (11:12):

Yes. Generativity, think of it as generating something from yourself and putting it into the world. So, people will think it means you’re being generous, but it’s not, or reciprocal. So, generous is, if I go to an ice cream shop and I order an ice cream cone and the person gives me an extra scoop. As soon as I eat it, it’s gone. But here you are doing something generative, which is this podcast. You finish it, you upload it, it lives out there. It’s not gone. You’ve generated a piece of you that goes out into the world.

Deborah Heiser (11:46):

So, now, if people think of reciprocity, they think, well, if I’m scratching your back, you’ll scratch mine. That’s not generativity, it’s a transaction. Generativity has to be that you’re saying, I want a piece of me to go into the world intrinsically, that you’re putting it out there because you want to, not because somebody’s making you or you’re beholden to someone.

Stephanie McCullough (12:07):

And so, it feels like a creative act. You’re creating something that didn’t exist before. Is that a piece of it?

Deborah Heiser (12:13):

Yes, it can be, but it can also be imagine … people will say, “Oh, I don’t really see how this translates into feeling good.” I always ask my students, “How many of you would like to go donate your time at a soup kitchen, giving out food and beverages to hungry, thirsty people?” And they almost all say, “I would like to do that.” And I’m like, “But you’re not getting paid, why would you want to do that?” And they say, “I feel so good, I can do this. This is something that I have the capacity to do and the bandwidth and I’m able to do it.”

Deborah Heiser (12:45):

Well, now, if I were to say to that student just before they get there to the soup kitchen, turn left and go to Starbucks and donate your time there, how many of you would like to do that? No one raises their hand. Same act, you’re giving out food and beverage to hungry, thirsty people, but the act is coming from you wanting to make an impact in the world, versus you going and putting in time that you would normally get paid for.

Deborah Heiser (13:11):

So, that’s really an intrinsic feeling that we have within ourselves that makes us want to do this. So, all the people that blog, all the people that go out and they podcast, 90% of them are not making money from that. And they don’t say, “You know what? I didn’t get paid, I’m not going to do it.” They say, “Oh my gosh, I’m learning along the way. I’m meeting people, I’m making an impact by getting this information that matters to me out there.”

Stephanie McCullough (13:39):

That’s really cool. One of the things I feel like I’ve seen as I and my friends have hit midlife is this kind of the, like you said, the kind of questioning like wait, kind of either, is this all there is? Or the things I have been doing up to now aren’t really filling my cup. Like what could I do differently? And I think you had mentioned before, like it’s a reevaluation of your identity?

Deborah Heiser (14:02):

Yeah. What happens is we identify with one identity that we have usually. So, that’s oftentimes work. And our business card is our identity card, and we forget that we have other aspects of ourselves. It’s not like we don’t have other identities, we forget about them. It’s like when you go into a closet in that back corner that has all these cute things we’ve forgotten about in it, well, that’s kind of like our identity.

Deborah Heiser (14:28):

So, this can happen in retirement, because this often happens in a midlife or a person will take a midlife pivot and say, I want to do something else. This is a time when somebody’s like I have not been engaging that a part of my identity. And it becomes a feeling like I must do this now. And part of that is because our bandwidth has changed. We have more time.

Deborah Heiser (14:51):

We’re good at the things that we do. So, what in our 20s or 30s took us all day to achieve, we can do in two hours because we’re so good at it. That leaves us time to say, “What else is out there?” And so, having that bandwidth gets us to question that.

Deborah Heiser (15:06):

But that’s where people will say, “I’m going to start a side hustle. I’m going to go engage in things I haven’t engaged in before. Or I’m going to leave the job that I’ve been doing and go start something new.” And that’s really pulling clothes from that back corner of your closet that you’ve neglected for a long time.

Stephanie McCullough (15:25):

I mean, that’s what we see with our clients in this phase of life, which is why we named the podcast Take Back Retirement. Let’s kind of redefine this. It’s not necessarily hanging it all up and sitting on a porch and knitting for the rest of your life. We want to do something and engage in the world, but maybe in a different way than they have.

Stephanie McCullough (15:43):

Even my friends who took time out of the paid workforce to raise a family or care for other people, when that kind of wraps up, then they’re having the opportunity to say, “Okay, what other parts of my identity can come out?”

Deborah Heiser (16:00):

Exactly. And it’s because … I feel for, I always tell the students that I teach, you can run faster than me, but I’m happier than you. And part of that is because they’re going through that stage — they’re getting jobs to make money. That is their first goal.

Deborah Heiser (16:18):

Now, they want to have jobs that they like, but the first real goal is a survival goal right. I have to set myself up so I can eat and have a roof and maybe a car, whatever it is that they need. That’s the primary goal.

Deborah Heiser (16:34):

And then they’re sort of stuck in that for a little while. And that is why the identity they’re not thinking of their identity first. It becomes their business or work because they can’t think of anything else. It’s kind of a survival mode for most of us because we know that if we stop working, we’ll have no months or one month or two month or whatever it is to survive. And that changes in midlife, because we’ve already established a lot of that stuff, and why we can..  it’s a luxury that we have the ability to do this now.

Stephanie McCullough (17:07):

Right, right. Of course, not everyone does.

Deborah Heiser (17:10):

That’s true. But even if you are not in a stage where you can say I can shift or pivot my job, a lot of people will say, “I’m going to shift or pivot how I think of myself outside of work.”

Kevin Gaines (17:21):

But as you’re doing these pivots, can you pivot within what you’re currently doing and just look at it differently? Meaning if you know you have a job and yes, you get a paycheck, but if you learn or say, “Hey, I get a lot out of this by giving out my knowledge, the fact that I get a paycheck is a nice bonus, but I’m actually getting something (I don’t know if I’m using the word correctly), altruistic from this.”

Deborah Heiser (17:50):

Yes. And that’s a great point that you’re making because a lot of people will say, “I’ve been at this job for a long time, and I want to see a piece of me in it.” And so, that’s when people … if you are in a company that has a good mentoring program, there are very many bad ones out there. But if you have a good one, and the good one means that people are asked if they want to mentor, it’s not part of the checkbox of the workplace.

Deborah Heiser (18:17):

If people are allowed to give back, they then can feel really much more invested in their job and have their identity put in there in a way because they are generating a piece of themselves in others, whether it’s laterally in other departments or it’s hierarchically. And that makes people happier about their workplace and want to stay there longer. And it makes them identify in that way.

Deborah Heiser (18:38):

That is a refocus. That’s like saying, “I’m having a new look at my workplace, and what I’m doing because I’ve taken a step back and now, I’m seeing it through the eyes of somebody else who I’m mentoring.

Deborah Heiser (18:52):

So, you can get that.. if you’re mentoring, you’re not being paid, so that’s why I said it’s voluntary. So, when companies do it right, they say, would anybody like to volunteer to mentor, sign up here. And then you get a list of people who want to mentor, and they match them up somehow, and see if that works.

Deborah Heiser (19:12):

If you are in one where people say, now you must mentor, that often is an opposite effect. And people feel like you are at Starbucks rather than soup kitchen. But that reframing is exactly what we want for mid-level and upper-level people in the workplace because otherwise, their work always feels like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the mountain as opposed to feeling like I am now changing the trajectory of somebody else’s life or viewpoint or whatever. I’m infusing a bit of me into it.

Deborah Heiser (19:46):

The other thing that happens when we don’t engage properly with that is that we’re burning down libraries. Our mid and senior-level employees are the ones that hold all of the information about the company. And as we saw senior executives getting cut from their jobs, not so long ago, we saw the newer hires who were paid less were floundering because they didn’t know how to move forward. It’s like starting from scratch.

Stephanie McCullough (20:15):

Yeah. The institutional knowledge out of the window.

Deborah Heiser (20:19):

The wheel stopped, and then they have to reinvent the wheel. And so, there are many benefits both to the company, but also to the younger people who might still be there. So, we have to be very mindful of the knowledge bank, and how this developmental theory works in the workplace for our benefits.

Stephanie McCullough (20:41):

And you’ve done a lot of work in this area.

Deborah Heiser (20:43):

Yeah. And it’s so exciting to see that people who are working or decide to pivot and do something different can find satisfaction either right where they were 10 minutes before, or that they get to have a new pivot, see themselves through their own eyes differently.

Stephanie McCullough (21:04):

Tell us about your book.

Deborah Heiser (21:06):

So, I wrote The Mentorship Edge because I had been working with so many people who were mentors, and I was so worried about how we throw around the word “mentorship.” And so, people will use it so loosely that I felt like if people were walking their dog, they felt like they were mentoring their dog because it’s just used so loosely.

Deborah Heiser (21:31):

And then it kind of got hijacked by corporate America where people were talking about the toxic mentor. And I was like what? If you’re toxic, you’re not a mentor, those two don’t go together. You should never feel … by being a mentor, or feel like, oh, I got paired up with some horrible person, now I’m stuck with them like in an arranged marriage for the rest of my life.

Deborah Heiser (21:53):

All of these things made me feel like we need to get the right definition out there and show how we’re built to do this, because if we miss that opportunity, we miss it in our own personal lives. Mentoring isn’t just work, it’s … all the different ways that we mentor and we don’t know about it. If you are somebody who doesn’t think that you’re making impact, you are probably one of those people who’s going to fall into the trajectory of what I studied earlier in my career.

Stephanie McCullough (22:24):

The bad things, the bad outcomes.

Deborah Heiser (22:26):

Yes. But here’s what we really know about mentorship, and that is that religion has been passed down for centuries. You just one day say, “Oh, I got a box, here’s religion, here we go.” You subscribe to whatever’s in your family or whoever you marry or what’s around you. And that is mentorship. Somebody’s passing that along. And that goes with the values that we have in our families where we pass on values and we say, “I loved what I grew up with, I’m going to take what I like, and I’m going to pass that down and not pass down the stuff I didn’t like.”

Deborah Heiser (22:59):

But we’re still mentoring. That’s why if you look at culture and traditional meals and things like that, when you go to a holiday, you aren’t like, “What’s going to happen today?” You know, you open the door, and the smells are going to be what you expect — the sights, the views, the people.

Deborah Heiser (23:14):

So, every year for Thanksgiving, I make the entire meal that my grandmother made. It’s on little index cards in her handwriting. She’s no longer with us. And it’s the same meal every year. And we all take this for granted that this is just what we do.

Deborah Heiser (23:30):

One year my uncle came to visit us for Thanksgiving, and he was so emotional because I make the meal that he grew up with. He had been eating his wife’s meal. So, he was like, “I haven’t had this, 40 years.” And he was so emotional about it that the next year, I sent him the meal. Like put it in containers.

Deborah Heiser (23:56):

But we forget that the values, the culture that we have in our families is passed down — on my kids, this is their meal. So, that index card that probably came from her mother that was passed down is going to continue to get passed down. And that’s mentorship. We are not going to remember Bob and accounting in 300 years, but we will remember the meals and the holidays and the values and the religion and the culture that have been passed down.

Deborah Heiser (24:23):

So, in the book, I really try to make sure that everybody realizes that mentorship is around us, we’re engaged in it. And people who say to me all the time, “I don’t have a degree, I can’t be a mentor,” there’s more power in a grandma’s back pocket than there is in anybody else out there because they’re the ones that are often passing down the values of the family.

Stephanie McCullough (24:48):

And I would imagine sometimes the oral history or the stories and traditions, I love that.

Deborah Heiser (24:54):

Yeah. We all operate. Even the bad stuff that we don’t like about ourselves often comes from family dynamics and things that get passed down.

Stephanie McCullough (25:03):

Oh, sure.

Deborah Heiser (25:05):

So, when I was parenting my kids, I was like, “Oh, I see my parents right now.”

Stephanie McCullough (25:10):

Like I am being my mother, how did that happen?

Deborah Heiser (25:13):

Exactly, but if you look at all of that, it feels there is some comfort in knowing that we are doing things based on what we have seen before. And then it isn’t like we’re starting from scratch all the time, but the book is really there to let people know how they can engage in mentoring in their everyday lives, who is actually around them. Just look to your left and look to your right, and how it looks in a bazillion different ways.

Deborah Heiser (25:40):

So, I highlight it with different mentors and how this is a developmental milestone that we can all reach and should expect to.

Stephanie McCullough (25:48):

So, it’s not just that you have to work in a company that’s got a formal program. And I would imagine that even kind of reframing the things we’re already doing and realizing that it’s mentoring might make it feel more significant.

Deborah Heiser (26:01):

It does. So, when people are able to quantify how much mentoring they’ve done, they’re able to feel that footprint that they’re making and the impact that they’re making. It’s the same as when George Bailey found out that he made impact in his community. He was feeling so down and then he found out, “Oh my gosh, people really were affected by me.”

Deborah Heiser (26:21):

Now, we get that exact same feeling when we feel like we’ve been able to quantify our mentorship. And I was just talking to somebody the other day who said, “I taught somebody how to do something,” and it was a young person teaching another young person about some new aspect of social media. And that person acknowledged that he helped them, and this person was moved by that. He felt really good. And this is a young person in his twenties who’s saying this.

Deborah Heiser (26:51):

So, we are engaged in this all the time and we don’t have a word for it. We may say, “Oh, I was nice to somebody.” That’s not being nice, you’re mentoring somebody. And when that person acknowledged it, they got to put that in the bank, their impact bank.

Deborah Heiser (27:09):

So, if you are able to thank somebody and say, “Thank you for mentoring me through that,” it puts it in a different category than nice, nice. We throw away, we’re supposed to be nice. Nice is just a part of our character.

Deborah Heiser (27:22):

So, if we just say to somebody, you just were nice to me, that, they don’t get to put in their impact bank, they do get to put it in if it’s categorized as mentorship. And if we say to somebody, “Thank goodness you helped me and you showed me what you did, that was a real mentoring moment,” we’re helping that person to see, every time we do that, we do it more and more and more and more. And our impact bank gets full.

Stephanie McCullough (27:44):

I love that.

Kevin Gaines (27:46):

So, am I taking this too far? But if you view your job as helping people, obvious stuff, doctors, teachers, whatever. Is there a tendency to have greater job satisfaction because you actually think you’re doing something beyond just a paycheck? Or am I taking this way too far?

Deborah Heiser (28:10):

No, you’re not. And I love that you said that. No, some people get great satisfaction if they’re money oriented and they’re like I want to make money and I see money, they’re happy. A person who goes out and says, “Oh, I’m helping people,” they might be happy, that’s passion. But here’s what a lot of people do. They say, “I am a teacher, therefore, I’m also a mentor.” No, you’re not, doesn’t mean that.

Deborah Heiser (28:31):

So, when I’m helping a student and they’re like, “You are mentoring me,” and I’m like, “No, this is my job. I’m advising you right now. I’m doing my job and if I didn’t do this, I’d be a bad teacher. But I happen to do my job well right now, you are getting what you need, I’m giving you what you need.” It’s outside of that environment (and this happens all the time with teachers), that outside of the classroom you’re engaging with students and helping them, that’s mentoring.

Deborah Heiser (28:58):

So, I give an example in the book of both a college professor who advised his students and one of them said, “I want to do more.” Like you’re an author, you do all these things. So, he brought on his former advisee to co-author a book with him. So, he then mentored her through that and getting her to the next level. She was not his student anymore, or in that capacity.

Deborah Heiser (29:26):

In terms of an elementary school teacher, I talk about a woman who was teaching, and she lived in Iowa and was teaching in Iowa. And after school, the kids would come over and play out. She lived and worked very close that she would see the kids in the community, and they would come over and talk to her and see her. And she would mentor them outside of the classroom.

Deborah Heiser (29:49):

And it wasn’t until she retired that someone said, “You are the reason I graduated. I’m the first person to graduate high school. I went on to become a nurse. My daughter is now going to be in the Opera, and it was because of you and mentoring outside of the classroom because I had a terrible home to go to, and you showed me what it could look like to have a good life.”

Deborah Heiser (30:11):

So, mentors are everywhere, and they can be in jobs that are seen as sort of more altruistic jobs. But mentoring and advising or teaching or coaching are different things. If you’re coaching, the goal is to get you further along in the job or in the sport or in whatever it is that you’re doing. Its goal focused in that way. Mentoring is an emotional connection between two people. It’s a meaningful emotional connection, and that’s outside of the job. That’s where the difference is.

 

 

Stephanie McCullough (30:45):

So, what would you say to someone who finds themselves stuck in a more negative perspective on growing older? Whether just because that’s what they’ve picked up from the culture or maybe they are facing some specific challenges, or they’ve seen family members struggle with health stuff. I know people who really don’t have a positive outlook on getting older. Would you have any suggestions to help them reframe?

Deborah Heiser (31:10):

I think a lot of times people need to see someone. We have an emotional trajectory that goes in one way. Can we sometimes fall aside? Yes. But if our continuous thought is negative, you should talk to somebody.

Stephanie McCullough (31:25):

You mean like a professional?

Deborah Heiser (31:26):

Yeah. Go talk to a psychologist, a therapist, someone in your community because that reframe is necessary. Now, some of us, we can reframe on our own if we just hit a blip. And this happens like when people retire. This happens all the time, somebody’s like, “Oh my gosh, this wasn’t what I signed up for, or I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know what to do next.”

Deborah Heiser (32:04):

And this is like where the heartbeat is going a mile a minute. And they’re like oh my gosh, I’m overwhelmed with anxiety now. What is in my future?” Because we have a structure every day with work. We know what we’re expecting, even if we don’t like it, we know what we’re doing. That goes away with retirement. And if somebody has their identity and their power feeling like it was taken from them, that can be a temporary setback for them that they can just get back on with a-

Deborah Heiser (32:15):

And that can happen with somebody engaging in the community that is somebody who’s engaging with people that they say, “This is something I’d like to do.” And I’ll give you an example of this, it’s like in an opposite direction. A teacher said, “I’m overwhelmed with both downsizing and retiring.” I went to her house,

she said, “I’m a teacher; now, I’m not. I’m nothing.”

Deborah Heiser (32:39):

And I looked around the room and because she was talking about downsizing and in the process of this, I said, “My goodness, what are you doing with all those beautiful paintings?” And she said, “Oh, I did all of those.” And I was like, “What? They’re amazing.” I really was like, “These are gorgeous.”

Deborah Heiser (32:57):

So, I said, “You never mentioned that you’re a painter.” And she said, “Oh, I’m not. I’m not a painter, I’m a teacher.” And I said, “Oh, okay, well, let’s talk about that.” So, we reframed that, when she moved, she opened up a gallery, and she was a painter now. Like that’s how it turned.

Deborah Heiser (33:11):

Now, another one was an artist who was like, “I want to.. There are other aspects of myself that I’d like to do. I like to go to sports games.” Okay, well, what do you do about that? Get cheap ticket? No, he decided to be the bus driver for the college teams because then he got to go down on the field and be right there. Now, that’s a creative way of having a pivot and a reframe. He never then said, “I’m not an artist,” but he got to say, “I’m following a passion of mine that I couldn’t have afforded otherwise.”

Deborah Heiser (33:48):

So, when we look at these things in our lives, I talk about this in the book also. This is something that we really have an opportunity to live the life we want to. But I’m the same way, we all get stuck in our own way sometimes, and podcasts like this that can open your eyes to something new, engaging outside yourself in some way.

Deborah Heiser (34:14):

Getting new fresh knowledge, it might be through a blog or a community, organization, or faith-based organization. These are the places that you can go to get a little reframe if you’re just stuck, not like if it’s been a pattern of decades of feeling negative.

Kevin Gaines (34:33):

You’re talking like just like a little kickstart or just refresh.

Deborah Heiser (34:37):

A refresh is super powerful. We all need a refresh from time to time. It’s not like just some people need it, we all do and it’s super powerful.

Stephanie McCullough (34:46):

I have one friend, we used to have what we would call ladder building sessions. Because if one of us was stuck in a rut, then we would get together and have coffee or lunch or something, and we could build a ladder to get ourselves out. And it was kind of like getting out of your own head, having a different perspective and a reframe for each other. It was a nice thing.

Deborah Heiser (35:05):

I just went to a what was called a clarity weekend. So, a friend of mine, her name is Sam Horn, she is somebody who has this real knack for getting people together and doing things. So, we had an all-women clarity weekend and everybody came with their whole thing. We all just went in, and I was like, “I don’t even know what I need clarity on, but hey, let’s see.”

Deborah Heiser (35:27):

This was just a gathering of women to get together for this. And now, we’re meeting afterwards all the time because we’re finding that we’re able to jumpstart each other because when somebody else sees us and what we do, they’re able to allow us to see ourselves through different lenses. And so, people can do that in their own communities as well. There’s a real power in that.

Stephanie McCullough (35:52):

I love that. Debbie, thank you so much for being with us. How can people follow you? Learn more, find the book?

Deborah Heiser (35:57):

You can follow me on … I write for Psychology Today, so just look me up there. You can find me on LinkedIn, you can find me at debraheiser.com. And you can find the book anywhere you buy books. And if you are a person who likes to listen and not read, it is available in audiobook.

[Music Playing]

Stephanie McCullough (36:17):

Excellent. I love an audiobook.

Deborah Heiser (36:18):

Me too.

Stephanie McCullough (36:20):

Fabulous. Thank you so much for your time.

Deborah Heiser (36:22):

Thanks for having me. I love your show. Thanks for putting this out into the world.

Stephanie McCullough (36:26):

Absolutely.

Kevin Gaines (36:27):

Thank you.

Kevin Gaines (36:31):

I really found this one interesting, Stephanie, because I wasn’t getting confused, but I could hear myself feeding myself my own line of bullshit frankly, of, hey, I mentor in my job, because of what I’m really doing is helping people sort through their stuff and get to a better place and become happy and everything. And I get paid, but you know what? I really enjoy what I’m doing, and I get the value from doing all that, and I could just hear myself. It’s like my God, I’m not going to be able to walk out of my office door because my head’s going to be so inflated.

Kevin Gaines (37:11):

So, all that to be said, I’m glad we were able to clarify the difference between mentoring and just doing your job.

Stephanie McCullough (37:22):

If it’s paid, it’s not mentoring. That was a really interesting piece of it. It is the volunteer part of it, because it’s just not the same if it’s part of your actual work.

Kevin Gaines (37:36):

I mean, it’s not to say that you can’t derive some sort of happiness from it, but mentoring is something different.

Stephanie McCullough (37:45):

But I think Debbie brings, which is different, is her perspective as an applied developmental psychologist. We humans, we have an emotional developmental trajectory, and this phase of generativity is an actual thing that most of us are going to hit and go through, wanting to start to give back from that, which we have learned and experienced up to now. I’ve seen it as a pattern among people I know, but it’s an actual thing.

Kevin Gaines (38:18):

Yeah, I think the first thing she said was probably the most important thing, which is as you get older, you get happier. And she’s right, we only ever hear about the bad stuff, the downside. And let’s be honest, how many of us watch movies or TV shows or read books in which somebody has a good day? You don’t.

Stephanie McCullough (38:40):

That’s boring. Is that what you’re saying?

Kevin Gaines (38:42):

It just doesn’t draw the eyeballs. But I think we need to say that more, we need to hear it more that, you know what? There’s a decent chance you’re going to be happy. And don’t look for the bad stuff. Yes, bad stuff’s going to happen, it’s going to be what it’s going to be, but don’t be scared to embrace the upside of this stuff.

Stephanie McCullough (39:09):

And that kind of idea that you get more of what you’re looking for. So, if you’re focused on the positive parts of it that you’ll see more. And I think the corollary to that is, well, if you’re not feeling that positive part, maybe it deserves a little kind of looking at where you are and what you’re doing and how you’re spending your time, and what might be missing.

Stephanie McCullough (39:31):

Is this part of generativity, of giving back of yourself, is that maybe missing in your current structure? And as we talked about, you could maybe find that way to do that in your current situation, or maybe it’s time to make a change.

Kevin Gaines (39:45):

Yeah. I mean, I think Stephanie, you just nailed it. It’s changing your mindset of, oh, bad things are happening to me, but that’s because I’m getting older, bad things are supposed to happen to me. Bad things are happening to me, and yes, some of it is just life, but maybe I do need, as we were saying earlier, a refresh. Maybe I just need to look at this a little bit differently and maybe things are not what I think they are at the moment.

Stephanie McCullough (41:11):

A reframe. And I do appreciate her saying that sometimes, it’s time to talk to a mental health professional. If you kind of find yourself stuck in that negative patterns of thought, we have interviewed therapists and coaches and all kinds of people on this show.

Stephanie McCullough (40:26):

There are plenty of professionals out there focused on this phase of life who have some expertise, who can maybe bring you that perspective. And yeah, maybe you’ll get there on your own, but it could jumpstart you and get you there that much quicker.

[Music Playing]

Kevin Gaines (40:39):

Absolutely.

Stephanie McCullough (40:40):

Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation, we certainly did. We’ll talk to you next time. It’s goodbye from me.

Kevin Gaines (40:46):

And it’s goodbye from her.

Stephanie McCullough (40:50):

Be sure to subscribe to the show and please share it with your friends, show notes and more information available at takebackretirement.com. Huge thanks for the original music by the one and only Raymond Loewy through New Math in New York. See you next time.

Voiceover (41:04):

Investment advice offered through Private Advisor Group, LLC, a registered Investment Advisor. Private Advisor Group, American Financial Management Group, and Sofia Financial are separate entities. The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual security. To determine which investments may be appropriate for you, consult your financial advisor prior to investing. This information is not intended to be substitute for individualized tax advice. Please consult your tax advisor regarding your specific situation.