I still have no clue how I became just about the oldest person in our office. Somehow, I must have missed the memo that was supposed to give me the heads-up. Today got here faster than I ever might have expected, and the time warp has given me whiplash. My term for this rite of passage, this occupational hazard? “The Flip Side.”

Of course, at 55, I’m hardly “old.” But I’m older than all but maybe six of our 120 employees in the New York branch of our public-relations firm — slightly older than the few Forty-Somethings, somewhat older than the many Thirty-Somethings, and much older than our ubiquitous Twenty-Somethings. Much, much older.

It seems only yesterday I was still the new kid on the job, with no idea what I was doing and no one expecting me to know much of anything. When my colleagues gave instructions, I took plenty of notes, and nobody ever mistook me for anyone important. I worried about everything — performing up to snuff, getting chewed out by the boss, being fired — and as a result I lived in a state of low-grade paranoia.

Now, suddenly, I belong to that vaunted club known as senior management. I operate from the opposite end of the spectrum, a baby boomer plying my trade shoulder to shoulder with Generations X and Y. Now, when I share an observation, colleagues might take notes, and clients usually assume I know something. People at work are more inclined to listen to me, smile at me and laugh at my jokes; somewhere along the road I apparently became fascinating, charming, and funny. I’ve graduated to the stature of tribal elder. It’s practically an out-of-body experience.

Even so, being older than almost everyone on the premises has certain … um … imperfections. Some of my younger colleagues have higher salaries, fancier titles, and larger offices (luckily, I’m a stranger to envy), and I often report to those very folks. My age does create certain differences with my juniors, too, differences in priorities and points of reference.

For example, I now go to the dentist more frequently than I do to parties. Most of my colleagues are getting married and having babies while I’ve just had my first colonoscopy. I also find myself wondering how anyone could possibly care about Jessica Simpson when I still have a crush on Sophia Loren.

It’s also strange occasionally being called “dude.”

I perceive time differently, too. My younger colleagues typically talk much faster than I can listen and, for that matter, they often listen much faster than I can talk. Some co-workers will e-mail me a note, only to leave me a voice mail repeating the message five minutes later, and then, still suffering from the lack of a response, pop into my office moments afterward regarding the same thing. Like network television, I now evidently operate on some sort of a seven-second delay. It reminds me of the George Carlin joke about how the shortest interval of time in the known universe is that fraction of a second between a traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn.

The flip side definitely takes some getting used to. But get used to it I must, and for the most part have. I’ve realized that being an older employee has a larger meaning, an underlying purpose, and special responsibilities: to pass along lessons learned, to influence, and to inspire. And, to set an example as a case study in how to emerge from layoffs, recessions and other adversities all the stronger. Since I’ve already gone where my colleagues are still going, they can look at me and better see themselves tomorrow.

I’m also trying to “work young” — talking a little faster and listening faster too. My comfort zone, previously only four square inches, has expanded to more like six. But above all, I’ve learned to respect my juniors. Only a few years ago, I never much cottoned to getting suggestions from anyone 10 or 20 years younger, and following any orders? Forgetaboutit!

Now I recognize that my juniors here often know better than I do, and keep me on my toes. And thanks to these “kids” teaching me how, I’ve finally emerged as a real team player. I also realize that after any serious discussion, the single most empowering question you can ever ask a younger staffer is “So, what do you think?” After all, even gurus can occasionally stand some advice.

The Flip Side has turned out to be both heartening and humbling. Little did I ever suspect that being older than almost everyone else at my job would give me a second chance to accomplish something long overdue. Namely, grow up.

ShareThis

Actor Ruth Gordon said, “To be somebody, you must last.” Since many of us expect to have twenty or thirty or more good years ahead, why do we have anticipation angst about retiring from our primary careers and moving on to something else?

When Christine Millen, at fifty-seven, was planning early retirement from her career as a business consultant to global corporations, she remembers asking everyone she knew how they spent their days as retirees. She wanted detailed explanations: “So after you wake up and shower, you begin reading the newspaper. Okay, how long does that take? And then what do you do? And after you’ve been to the gym for your workout, what do you do next?” No amount of explicit information about how others spent their time assuaged her concern over whether she could replace the dynamic, high-energy, intellectually challenging career she loved.

Work gets us out of the house at a certain hour each weekday. Work also dictates how we structure our time, how we manage personal and household chores, what we do with family and friends and when, and why we decide to do certain things and put off others. Work is our identity, our label. It is how we reveal ourselves when we meet others for the first time; it is our defining elevator speech. Telling someone that we teach college math, or direct a project for the government, is shorthand for what we can do, who we know, and how we fit into the general scheme of adulthood. What will we do when we no longer have such a label to fall back upon? And, how will we think about ourselves?

Catherine plans to retire from teaching when she is sixty, and she admits to feeling a “little nervous” about the idea. Self described as “not an artsy-craftsy person,” she is worried about what she will do. During the previous summer she took an education course, but that still left her with too much free time. “I don’t know what will turn me on besides my regular job. I’m having trouble finding a passion.”

On top of feeling pressure to find our passion, we believe that everybody else who retires is going on to bigger, better, more inspirational things than we are, like being on the board of a foundation to create world peace. That’s one pretty tough standard to aspire to as we try to identify a postretirement life, and too easily sets us up for failure if our goals are anything less than saving the world.

And as we contemplate our transition-to-retirement navel, we also fear becoming isolated. Work means other people—a community where we share small talk and find companionship. Even if our coworkers, patients, clients, or customers are not close friends, they engage and stimulate us, and we reciprocate. Complicated or easy, these relationships are a key part of what we think about and participate in at work. Mostly it’s banter and gossip. But that is the very stuff that lets us know we have others’ support, can count on their feedback, and have the emotional IQ to survive. If we retire from this work community, we worry about losing these connections. That’s because we know they will not be easy to replace.

Most of us hate the word “retirement.” Any dictionary definition implies that retirement is a time for us to find a spot in which to curl up and die. Without consciously thinking about it, we hear and see “tired” in the word. Absolutely nothing about the word instills optimism or enthusiasm.

Retirement 2.0 is as flexible and creative as our imaginations can make it. It may be all things at the same time or something we do in successive chunks. As retirees we may have an encore job or career, and go back to school, and contribute time and skills to a nonprofit or governmental organization, and go to art exhibits, and lunch with friends, and care for a frail parent. It is a shifting state through which we may pass in and out. It can be a period when we actively pursue a singular passion or combine a variety of interests and commitments. As retirees we can take a break from work and then become a returning retiree. We may donate our services as a volunteer and possibly receive a small stipend for our time and skills. Or we can take a seasonal job and retire again as the weather turns beautiful. Retirement is a changeable state that integrates education, work, and leisure, defined in terms that suit us. Let’s just get past our aversion to the word and use it to mean what we want it to mean.

This kind of transition is new to us as well as to the experts. Since we are without guidelines or role models to conjure up from the past, it can leave us feeling isolated and adrift. The process of tackling this distinct transitional stage puts us in new territory. We know we need to prepare but are uncertain about how to do it or whether it is even possible. As we examine others going through transitions, we see that a variety of role models are out there just doing it. Sure, we can seek practical advice from emerging experts, but the truth is that we must give equal weight to our own thoughtful insights that emerge as we talk to other women and as we observe women who are a few steps ahead of us in the transition process.

Copyright © 2008 by The Transition Network, Inc. Excerpted with permission from the book, “Smart Women Don’t Retire – They Break Free,” by The Transition Network and Gail Rentsch, published by Springboard Press.

ShareThis

[Listen to the interview with Juliet Stevenson online - click here]

David: Juliet, how are you handling middle-age? You are phenomenally talented. I’ve noticed that you are very busy and have done something like 20 films in the last eight years. How do you do it?

Juliet: Have I? I haven’t counted. Yes, I have worked a lot. I spend my whole life juggling … my children and my work and my partner, Hugh (Brody), and other things besides. I just consider myself like anybody else who is doing that … and most women I know are doing that. I think it is kind of crazy and there are times when I think that I’ve bitten off a little more than I can chew.

I wouldn’t have it otherwise, and I haven’t noticed any drop-off of stamina much. I haven’t yet experienced a lot of energy loss. People say it happens to you in your 40s but I don’t really feel that … yet. I guess it’s easy if you have natural stamina. I think it’s genetic … my Mum is 83, and she’s still tearing around. I don’t tire that easily.

I have had my kids late, and that does make for some degree of exhaustion. My littlest is only seven, and he needs a lot of running around … football in the park, up early and bed late … but I asked for this. These are all choices I made, and I wouldn’t have asked for them if I didn’t think I could somehow manage them. It’s like anything – you derive energy from what you like to do and I love my kids to pieces and I would never have managed sustaining a career without children like this. They just keep me sane.

I think that as you get to middle-age I think that one of the great problems is that you start to see the work you do and the industry you are in with a much more saturnine eye … I’m not in love with the (motion picture) industry or the business anymore, and that’s for certain. When the work is good, it’s still thrilling. When the script arrives that’s truthful and exciting and original, I love it as much as I ever did but there’s a lot about the profession that I dislike, and I think I would have found it very hard to go on in it if I hadn’t had kids to enable me just to step right out of it and get a perspective on it. So the two different aspects of your life complement each other in a way.

David: Wasn’t it last year … you were cast as Colin Firth’s mother in the film, “And, When Did You Last See Your Father.”  How did that feel?

Juliet:  I know … outrageous wasn’t it?!

David: And, you are about the same age!

Juliet:  I think I’m about three years older than Colin … I know (laughter).  The character … I had to go between mid-30s through late 60 … 70.  I thought, how am I ever going to play 70!  That’s crazy! Well, I had a lot of latex (makeup) … let’s just get that out there …

[Listen to the interview with Juliet Stevenson online - click here]

David: I saw similarities between the character Nina that you played in “Truly, Madly, Deeply” and the character of Julia in your new film, “A Previous Engagement.” Both seem like intense yet vulnerable women.

Juliet: I thought that, too, but I really hadn’t thought about it. When I watched “A Previous Engagement,” I thought, gosh she’s like a … she is an older Nina. I completely agree, and I think that has to do with the writing.

Joan (Carr-Wiggin, who wrote “A Previous Engagement”) writes fantastic dialogue. I thought the dialogue was the best dialogue I’d had in a movie since “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” She just understands the rhythms of speech and how the heart and the head are just furiously fighting for attention when you speak. You delude yourself with language and then you backtrack … sentences are broken up … nobody speaks in perfect sentences and most writers don’t recognize that. But Joan really does understand about the way people think, the fragmentation of thought and the infusion of thought with passion. She just understands the rhythms that connect you up.

And, I think there is something similar in the character Joan had written … very similar to Nina. Both characters are quirky, full of contradictions. Both are very intelligent but also capable of making really daft decisions and not always knowing herself well enough to make a wise decision and yet impulsive on the one hand and cautious on the other … wanting adventure, terrified of adventure. That comes from the writers. It’s amazing how few writers are really able to write dialogue that reflects the complexity of who we really are. As an actor, you get that dialogue in your mouth, it releases you, it gives you scope and you really play it.

David: Tell me about your interest in human rights … to help asylum seekers in England.

Juliet: I recently mounted an event in London … it is to give voice to people seeking asylum in England, mothers and children shut up in detention centers without lawyers or protection. I am very ashamed with what this country has become in the way it deals about the asylum process. It’s cruel, it’s humiliating, it’s degrading and for those who have to experience it and for those whose country it is, at best it’s an embarrassment and at worst an outrage. It’s having a terrible impact on a large number of people. I just can’t stand it that England is like that. It shouldn’t be like that. We have such wealth, so many resources. People are just asking for a fair hearing. We should be a country proud of offering refuge to people in need of it, and I can’t stand it that it is not that anymore, and the government has fallen prey to the tabloid press who are always priding themselves on tough immigration control.

David: Do you have any advice to share with women in their 40s and 50s about relationships, career and the challenges they face at this point in their lives?

Juliet: I suppose I would say of my own experience … I think I function best when I ignore. When I function from a sense of who I am, based on a sense of who I feel myself to be inside, and not try to conform to what the world expects me to be from the outside because of my age. When I am just functioning from instinct and from those internal drives that shape your day, I don’t take much notice of age. Age kind of runs alongside, like a reality that’s jogging beside you.

If you look at yourself in the mirror and see what the world sees, and you say, “God, I’m this age and I’d better behave like this and this and this because that’s what people expect from a middle-aged woman,” I think that’s going to doom me to a pretty depressing existence. Whereas, if you just be who you are, be who you feel yourself to be – if you feel yourself to be 80 one day, okay then be 80, but if you feel yourself to be 22 the next day, be 22.

But, especially to women, do not buy in to what the world tells you to be … don’t give up on your expectations of sensuality or don’t take the world’s value of you. Develop a sense of your own value and worth and try to defend it from what the world will tell you your value is. Because, for women, the world will value you very much for your external appearances and age is going to impact on that very, very significantly but that’s not having anything to do with the experience of being alive.

[Listen to the interview with Juliet Stevenson online - click here]

ShareThis

If you are fortunate enough to work for a forward-thinking company, you may have the option of a corporate sponsored sabbatical. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the percentage of companies offering some type of sabbatical is growing, both for paid and unpaid leave.

Begin with the End in Mind
Before you even set foot out the door, you need to have a re-entry strategy. The most difficult thing about going on a corporate sabbatical is the shock of coming back. That said, if you are allowed eight weeks, be sure you return home no later than day one of week seven. You will need some adjustment time to catch up on bills and correspondence and confront personal landmines before you will able to handle professional challenges.

Build Your Case
Corporations generally do not reward poor performers. Here’s how to build your case and increase your chances of being selected.

It’s never too early to start planning to apply. Ideally, you should allow at least three months of personal and professional preparation before you even approach your boss.

• Keep it professional. Are you currently besieged with personal calls and email while at work? Do you come in looking tired due to lack of sleep? Has your personal appearance/grooming suffered? Are you tardy? For the next three months, make a conscious and concerted effort to address these types of issues.
• Improve your product. This is the time for some critical self-evaluation: Is your performance truly up to par? Make a list of things you feel need improvement, then start improving them!
• Become a true team member. This is perhaps the most critical piece of advice for this preparatory period. You could be the most efficient, professional, and productive employee in the company, but if you are not visible, none of that may matter.
• Know that you will likely only have one shot. Don’t try to take any shortcuts. If you apply for a sabbatical and fail, this could end up causing feelings of resentment and negativity, which will be very difficult to mask.

Apply with Grace
If you’ve followed the above suggestions and are at the end of your three month preparation period, you are now ready to apply.

• Avoid drama. It may be tempting to stagger into your boss’s office looking distraught and pleading for the time off. Don’t! The main message you need to communicate is that this is a reasonable request that has been well thought out and considered.
• Have your paperwork accessible. Your boss may wish to look it over, so it would be a good idea to have relevant sections highlighted or tabbed.
• Show consideration for how your plan will affect your boss and coworkers. Prepare a written outline of your existing duties, and who in your opinion could help with your tasks. Make it clear these are only suggestions: You do not want to be perceived of as arrogant.
• Be flexible with your timing. Let your boss know that you understand that your decision will impact him as well as the company.
• Craft an inspiring mission statement. When it comes to filling out the paperwork, be prepared to name at least one personal goal you hope to attain during your sabbatical. Make sure this goal, although personal in nature, will also provide an obvious benefit to the company.
• Set expectations regarding communication while you are gone. While a true sabbatical should involve no communication between employer and employee, this can vary within each firm. Allow some “panic time” after your last day in the office for your boss and coworkers to contact you with unforeseen questions. In other words, don’t depart for Timbuktu the next day.
• Expect the unexpected. Be prepared to come back to a work environment that has also evolved. You may find yourself facing a new boss, new responsibilities, and a new routine.

ShareThis