Is Reinvention Possible for Older Folks?

Magnolia and Forsythia in Bloom

Face it, when you are a bit dissatisfied with your life, and decide to dig into the self-help literature, you almost never read success stories about people our age, do you? Reinvention seems to be limited to people in their 30's, 40's, even 50's. Anyway, old people are too set in their ways to create effective change in their own lives, right?

These popular stereotypes absolutely pervade the media. We older folks don't see many examples of people our own age who have successfully made over their lives, who have made extraordinary changes. And yet these kinds of things can and do happen.

Let's take a closer look

In some ways, older individuals have some real advantages when it comes to self-improvement.

• We've lived long enough to sort out what's important and what isn't.
• We've learned a lot more about a lot of things, including human nature, what we do and don't do well, and how the world works.
• We have more time to spend on learning and making changes. Most younger people's time is consumed by work, child care, getting ahead in general.
• We don't need as much sleep, giving us even more time.
• But we realize we DON'T have all the time in the world and so may be less apt to put off starting.

On the down side (AKA, excuses for sitting on our hands): 

• We may not have the available financial resources we had when we were younger.
• We may have become more risk-averse, and may hesitate about investing money and effort on projects that could fail.
• We may have become discouraged through the inevitable failures, large or small, that everybody experiences over the years. 
• We may have lost our confidence in our ability to learn new things, such as keeping up with all the new technology out there.
• We may not have the physical strength and energy we had when we were younger.
• We may have lost some of our emotional resiliency, and may find change more daunting than we used to.
• We may just have gotten a little lazy, and have come to like the relaxed, low-pressure lifestyle of retirement. 

This second list  may explain why so few older people make major positive changes in their lives. And why so few even try to do so.

What the second list comprises, though, as noted, is a series of excuses. For example, you certainly might become discouraged by stuff that happens to you. The disrespect shown in the workplace to many aging workers could easily make you start to feel you're not as able as the younger folks... if you let it. Fact is, research has shown that older workers are frequently the most valuable workers. They tend to have a better work ethic, get along better with other workers, are better at handling customers in an appropriate manner, and have a much better attendance record. So this, like everything else on the list, is just an excuse.

Those of us who are dissatisfied by where we are at this point in our lives, who want to make some serious changes, need to give up the excuses in the second list. We need to learn that these things, even where true, are not significant. They will only hold us back if we let them.

[Note on the photo: I took this earlier in the week, as I walked to the library. The day was gray and cloudy, threatening rain, but the roadways were lined with trees and shrubs in full bloom. Beautiful pink cherry trees and magnolias, and others covered in small white flowers. And of course, the bright, sunny yellow of forsythia. This beautiful magnolia fronts my library. I often sit in its shade, on the bench beneath. You can also see a row of cheerful yellow forsythia in the right background.]