2025 September 9 Working together

You can listen to the original Facebook LIVE here.

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about some of our upcoming events and changes on the horizon. We started this conversation last week, and we're going to continue and go through some more things this week.

I hope you're excited about what's coming. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, or send me a message. Tonight we'll be talking about some specifics of things that are coming up, including webinars, challenges, and other initiatives we have planned.

Last week we talked about how our focus is to help provide you with tools and different perspectives on how you see your life. We want you to maintain self-respect and faith in yourself, and understand that you always have some degree of control over how you respond to a situation. You can learn to reframe situations to better align with your life vision, never give up, and appreciate the good things that happen in life around us.

Of course, most of us generally try to think and act these ways, but sometimes life situations become tedious or challenging in unexpected ways. Our goal is to provide you with more tools to help you rediscover the power and energy that you already have inside you to live your life from a perspective of energy and purpose.

One of the biggest subtle things that can affect our lives is our everyday thinking and attitude, especially our attitude towards ourselves. This can affect every aspect of our lives - how we view life, how we feel about our place in life, and especially how we view ourselves. There are a number of techniques that we discuss, and we'll be teaching those in greater depth to help you develop a life vision and become more focused on living a life consistent with that vision.

This isn't a magic instant fix, but rather long-term techniques and strategies that you can use every day to help motivate you and find joy in even the simple things that you do. What about the big things you've wanted to do, but now think it's too late to attain? We have interviews coming up with many people who've either started doing things much later than society generally says we should, or still do things long after society tells us that we're too old.

I mentioned last week one of the people that I hope to have on the show is a woman in her late sixties or early seventies who still does skateboarding. She won a competition and has no intent of slowing down. Activities like rock climbing, skateboarding, starting a company, or beginning a new career well after retirement, learning new technology skills such as using artificial intelligence - there are really no age-related limits on your skills and what you can accomplish if you're determined and willing to be a bit adventurous.

So you might be saying, "But what will people think?" We talk about ageism, what other people think, self-respect, self-confidence, and related topics too. Ageism, which is bias or discrimination based upon age, can have severe negative impacts upon our self-esteem and motivation to improve ourselves, but it doesn't have to. We talk about ways that both help insulate you from the effects as well as be an active part of fighting back against this casual discrimination.

There are money tips too, but different than most financial advice that you see targeting older adults. Many financial services that target older adults are really about the best way to spend your hopefully large retirement fortune. That's great if that's where you find yourself - congratulations! But statistics say that roughly 65% of Baby Boomers and 55% of Gen Xers do not feel financially prepared for retirement. A large percentage of both those groups have absolutely nothing saved.

While nothing can totally make up for years of not saving, there certainly are ways to maximize your joy in retirement years, both by developing sources of retirement income and by adjusting our attitudes and expectations. We've invited some financial advisors to be on the show, but we're being pretty picky about who we want to connect with you. However, there are a couple people who are presenting a different path where you are more mindful about what brings joy into your life and prioritizing those aspects of your spending.

We're also starting a community, initially free, in which we can share ideas and tips of how to find more satisfaction after a conventional career ends. The whole point of the community is to get like-minded people together in a friendly, safe environment where we can talk openly about things. Other people can chime in and say, "I had the same problem. This is how I addressed it." It's a nice way to connect with people who already understand because they're in the same situation.

Popular culture would make you believe that life is essentially over once you reach 60 or so. When I looked at my age cohort on social security, my expected lifetime was in the mid-eighties. Clearly, we're still capable of making significant contributions to the world in those 25 years between what pop culture thinks and what we know we're capable of achieving.

Personal interaction continues to be very important and may even grow in importance as we age. As we age, we tend to lose friends for a variety of reasons. Some friends may move away to be closer to family or to live in a different climate. Some may need care in an assisted living facility that makes it harder to visit in person. Some may pass away. But we've already spoken with potential guests who work in the areas of social interaction, grief management, and ways to discover others that you can connect with. Plus, in our community, there will be opportunities to meet people, and we may partner with some other larger existing communities to bring even more social options to you all.

Technology and safely using it, avoiding scams, living overseas and the joys and pitfalls of that experience - these are other areas of great importance. There are so many relevant topics, and we're talking to experts in many of them, plus providing a platform for all of us to share our wins and our challenges so we can all live a more fulfilling life.

As an example, I was waiting for a bus earlier today and I started speaking to the person next to me. It turns out that two years ago her husband passed away and she realized she had basically withdrawn from social activity. She came to realize that wasn't a healthy way of living, and now she's taking trips to the national parks with groups of other people. I asked her if she'd please come on the podcast and talk about her whole thought process in getting to that point, because I think it'll help all of us to hear her story. We got off at different places on the bus, but she said she'll try to get in contact with me. Hopefully, we'll have her and more people like her who can tell us how they realized what was happening and then how they were able to move beyond that.

Again, we often think our problems are unique, that no one else would understand. But in reality, a lot of us face similar challenges, and together we can change each other's lives for the better.

So that's it for the evening. Your homework tonight is to think about one or two challenges that you've been having as you get older and write down the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of the challenge. Extra points if you also write why you think those challenges are insurmountable in some way, and then send them to me as a comment. I think we have email addresses posted on the website. If not, we'll add a mailbox where you can send your thoughts, and we can use that as the basis for the community as a starting point.

As always, remember there are a lot of wars and things going on in the world. There's a lot of bad stuff. For places to support, UKR7.com has links to support the people in Ukraine, and World Central Kitchen works throughout the world in disaster areas, bringing food and services to people right after a disaster, usually before other agencies get their act together. They're at WCK.org. These are two great places to help, but there are many places, both large national and international organizations as well as community organizations, with people putting in a lot of effort to help those who are disadvantaged or have come across bad times.

Even if you're not in a time and place where you can donate either time or money to one of these groups, remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. It can be something as small as saying good morning to somebody or smiling at somebody when you pass them on the street.

Again, thank you for joining us. It's always fun to be here and see the feedback. As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and please subscribe and hit that like button. If you didn't see anything you liked or have something particular you want to hear about, please drop me a comment. Have a great week. Remember to live the life you imagine, because that's the path to contentment.

Thank you always for stopping by. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.