March 21, 2024 • 51 mins
This week Scott is joined Modern Elder Academy Founder and best selling author, Chip Conley. Scott and Chip discuss the joys of living in midlife, the importance of being a part of something bigger than yourself, and why life gets better with age.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm going to live as many adult years ahead of
me at fifty four as I have behind me, and
I remembered what it was like to be eighteen, and
that was a long time ago. So I better start
to be more conscious and intentional about how I want
to live today.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
I chat with Modern Elder, Academy founder and New York
Times bestselling author Chip Conley on the podcast. Chip is
on a mission to help you live the best decades
of your life, midlife and beyond.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Chip is one of the world's leading experts at.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
The intersection of business, innovation, psychology, and spirituality. As one
of the creators of the boutique hotel movement and the
modern Elder to the young Airbnb founders, Chip's been a
disruptor and expert on entrepreneurship and business leadership. In this discussion,
we chat about Chip's new book, Learning to Love Midlife
(00:52):
Twelve Reasons why life gets better with age. There's a
great relief in chatting with Chip, you know, I mean,
it was person meaningful to me considering I'm in mid life,
and what he teaches us is that in midlife we
can take great relief that our buy doesn't define us anymore.
That we can redefine what success looks like. He talks
(01:14):
about the great midlife edit, where we can let all
of our emotional baggage, mindsets and obligations.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
That no longer serve us out the door. Just see
it out the door, Bye bye bye.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
And he also talks about, of course something I love,
growing whole, where we can finally begin to feel part
of something bigger than ourselves. If you haven't felt these
things yet and you're approaching midlife, where you're well into midlife,
this episode just might inspire you to get going and transform.
If you're going through it already and you're transforming, and
(01:49):
you're growing whole, and you're letting go of all the
crap from your past you want to let go. Good
for you, this episode should encourage you to keep going. So,
without further ado, let's get into it already. I bring
you my friend, Chip Conley, Chip, welcome back to the
Psychology Podcast SPK.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I'm here with you. Yeah. Last time we did this
squared Yes, he squared he squared SBK. Yes. Last time
we talked a lot about Maslow and we both have
a love and fascination with Maslow, and I have written
books about him. But this time we're going to talk
about maybe other things.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, where we are, we're gonna have done about the
tom your book, of your new book. I love to
see the publicity. It's getting the press, the rave reviews. Man,
out of all your books, it's uh, well, actually I
don't know about that.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
All your books are personal with me. I was gonna say,
out of all your books, this one's the most personal.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I was like, wait, that's I feel like a lot
of books are I resonate with uh equally, but thank
you one man.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
I'm like, I'm forty four years old. It was written
for you.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
It was written for you. Well, let's so. The book
is called Learning to Love Midlife and Twelve Reasons Why
Life gets Better with Age.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
So it was written for you, well, and it was
before me.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
But I I gotta say I really resonated with it.
And I loved this quote. Midlife is the Rodney danger
Field of life stages.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
It doesn't get no respect.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Now, don't get no respect. Yeah that's how.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Don't Yeah not no double negative, it don't get well,
it still doesn't. But anyway, it don't get no respect.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I actually, in my my my students are so young.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
They don't. They don't know that reference.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
But I fly in class, you know, because I'm like
jokes in class and it's silence and I'm like and
I go, oh, I get no respect, you know, And
I was like, oh, even that one, no one gets Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Well, but isn't this true, though, Scott? I mean, midlife
as a life stage has a terrible brand. The number
one word attached to a just crisis, and it's for
some people it's the doorway to death. I mean it's like, oh,
on the other side of midlife, I have these disease, decrepetude,
and death. And so it's like this life stage that
(04:09):
people disavow.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Yeah, yeah, they do.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And as you note in your book, there's all sorts
of negative connotations where usually the word the term middle
life is followed by crisis. Right, So now are you
trying to reframe it in this book from crisis to
what to chrysalis?
Speaker 1 (04:27):
I do love the language if you think about first
of all, when it comes to social science research with
m geek just like you other I don't have a
PhD at touched me, although I don't have an honorary
PhD from Saybrook, But that's like you know in psychology.
But I only took one psychology class in college, and
that was with Phil Lombardo, who is the classic weirdo
(04:47):
professor I loved. So long story short is I am
fascinated by the fact that there's not a ton of
evidence that people have a crisis in midlife. There is
some evidence that I think is pretty pretty strong, although
some people don't like it, about the U Curve of happiness,
which shows that our life satisfaction declines on a low, long,
(05:10):
slow decline from our early twenties to the bottoming out
around forty five to fifty. I hate to tell you
that at age forty four your mileage may vary. And
there's a lot of reasons why there is this slow
decline and there's a low point of life satisfaction. Is
the crisis? No, I wouldn't say that. Is it a chrysalis?
(05:32):
So maybe it is and chrystal. Let's look with the
word crysalis, So a chrysalis, The word is a We
got familiar with it as a kid when we studied
the butterfly, because midlife for the butterfly was the chrysalis.
So a caterpillary plumps up and consumes and produces and
eats a lot until it actually spins its chrysalis, and
then it goes into this crystalis and it's dark and
(05:54):
solitary and guy, but it's where the transformation happens and
they come out on the other side about it. Now,
it had the butterfly had this the same DNA. The
catapultar had the DNA of the butterfly in it. They're
called imaginal discs. And long story short is. As I
started to think about this, I started thinking, well, the
U curve happiness shows that actually people get happier in
(06:15):
their fifties and their sixties and their seventies, and women
in their eighties even, And so what if, in fact,
midlife is a life stage where you're going through a lot.
You're supposed to shed a lot. Yes, it's it's a
transformative period and some of it's going to be scary,
but on the other side of it, you have the
(06:36):
best years of your life. Maybe life begins at fifty
and so that's that's a little bit of my perspective.
And based upon you know, we've had over four thousand
people come to our NEA or Modern Aldy Academy campus
in Baja average age fifty four. And we sort of
have seen, you know, like what it means for people
(06:58):
to be going through a crystalis as opposed to a crisis.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, and you use all sorts of terms to describe
this period. You're also talking about as an unraveling, but
you've refer to that as a good thing.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Can you explain a little bit how in the raveling
can be a good thing. Well, let's let's give credit
where it's due. Brennane Brown said this to me a
few years ago. She said, Chip, you know, I like
what you're doing. She would give me, give me a
cover quote from my book Wisdom at Work, The Making
of a Modern Elder. And I told her I was
creating this modern elder academy thingma And she said, well,
(07:32):
you're going to find a lot of people having a
midlife unraveling.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
And I said, oh, that sounds terrible. It's like unraveling
says like someone losing their mind. And she said, have
you ever looked at the dictionary at the word ravel?
To ravel means something so tightly wound you can't get
it undone. And for a lot of people in midlife,
they're so tightly wound in their expectations of themselves, in
how many obligations they have said yes to, and just
(07:59):
how they have cured their life that it feels like
a mess. And so to the midlife unraveling is learning
how to disconnect from many of the obligations and mindsets
and identities that we've inhabited so that we can do
what I like to call the great midlife edit, because
the first half of our life is about accumulating, and
(08:20):
the second half of our life, if we're getting it right,
is about editing. And so the unravel is the thing
that happens before you actually have the chance to edit
your life. Then we do a whole ritual around that,
at mea to help people throw into the fire what
they're letting go of, partly because we don't have rights
(08:41):
of passenger rituals or schools or tools for people in
midlife also known as mid lessens. In adolescence, we have it,
You have all this adolescent support and love and care
to help you through the emotional, physical, hormonal, and identity
transitions of adolescence. But what about the hormonal, emotional, physical,
(09:03):
and identity transitions of middle essence? Who is providing that support,
and who's your peer group and your cohort that you're
going through this with. For men, they don't even talk
about this stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Such a good point, such a good point. Wow, wow
wow wow. Chip Conleys, PK, you're right, yeah, you're.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
What What is the midlife atrium that you can create
for yourself?
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Yeah, A term from Mary Katherine bateson so.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I love you. How you give credit to people?
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I do? Yeah, because they deserve it. And so what
she said was this the following she said that we
have a tendency to think that with additional longevity compared
to fifty years ago, then it just means we're old longer.
And she said, that's not true. You're in mid life longer.
(09:56):
So you know, you're get to be old for the
last part of your life, but you're going to be
in life longer. And what you really need in midlife
is an atrium, a place to reflect upon how you
want to consciously curate the second half of your life. So,
if the average age of the person who comes to
MAA is fifty four and their average age they think
you're going to live till is ninety, you have thirty
(10:17):
six years ahead of you. And if you think about
fifty four is thirty six years into your adulthood, because
fifty four minus eighteen when you turned it an adult,
it was thirty six. So fifty four is halfway through
eighteen to ninety. And most of us at fifty four
don't say like, oh wow, how do I want to
consciously curate the rest of our life? No, we don't
give ourselves the space the midlife atrium to sort of
ask that we don't ask. We don't have someone curating
(10:40):
our life for us, asking questions like you know, ten years,
you know what we regret if you don't learn it
or do it now. What we need in midlife is
a midwife, someone who can midwife us through this road
map of midlife so that we can look at our
life and say, wow, I have longevity literacy. Now I'm
(11:03):
going to live as many adult years ahead of me
at fifty four as I have behind me, and I
remember what it was like to be eighteen, and that
was a long time ago. So I better start to
be more conscious and intentional about how I want to
live my next few decades. And that's I think part
of what the book tries to do. Learning to Love
(11:23):
Midlife It also tries to help people to see, like, man,
have we swallowed the anti aging message out there, the
message that the anti aging industrial complex wants us to swallow,
which is, you don't look young anymore. You got to
do things to make yourself be and look young. And
what I wanted to do with the book was to
help people see that there's a pro aging message out
(11:44):
there too. There's a lot of things that get better
with age, and so I tried to actually point out
twelve of that.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, okay, so let's get into some of those things.
Oh boy, which one should we start with first, don't?
I don't think we need to go in order here.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Let's just going to one of the ones that I
found most interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yes, and that's the fact that that a person's hero's
journey can really shadow side.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Now that really resonated with me.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Well, and tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, yeah, that that that. So the book is organized
with an introduction and afterward, and then there's twelve chapters
of the twelve reasons why life gets better with agent.
That chapter speaks to the idea of I understand my
story in essence, my narrative better because I had the
pattern recognition of more life. You know, when you're a
(12:38):
quarter of the way through a novel, you don't know
where it's going or who the characters are. But halfway
through you understand everything prepare you think you do. And
that's sort of like life. You know, by the time
you get the middle life, you can see your patterns
and some of your shadow side. You can see what's
consistent and thematic in the through line of your life.
And once you know that you can, you know you
(13:00):
will make Carl Young happy because you'll take the unconscious
and make it conscious, and then your life becomes better, hopefully.
So that chapter really speaks to the idea that you know,
you could look at your life as a hero's journey.
You could design even that chapter helps people design a
hero's journey or heroines journey for themselves to understand what
(13:22):
are the patterns that are typical and why is that important? Man,
It's so important because wisdom is about actually learning how
to learn from your mistakes. Your past life lessons are
the raw material for your future wisdom. And if you
haven't haven't learned something from the patterns that you've lived
(13:43):
out in your life, then you haven't actually built some wisdom.
And as Adam Grant said to me when I was
writing one of my past books, he said, like, Chip,
there's not a lot of evidence that that wisdom is
correlated with age. And I was like, really, that sounds crazy,
and he said, well, you know, there's a lot of
seventy year olds who have not metabolized their experiences. They
(14:03):
don't have made sense, and there's a lot of thirty
year olds who have. And it's like, okay, So what
I really wanted to help with people with the book
was to help people it's like, how do you make
sense of your life lessons in a way that makes
you wiser?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Relating to that, you know, what can be learned from
The Velveteen Rabbit.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
So the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit speaks to this
idea that your favorite toy, your favorite little doll, maybe
something that actually has been loved to death. It only
has one eye and all of the fur it used
to have has been rubbed off. And what the author
(14:46):
of the book says is, you know, as we get older,
we get more real, and to be real as a
doll is something means that you don't necessarily look good
on the exterior. But you have this, this love love
affair with this doll, this velveteen rabbit, in such a
(15:07):
way that it has a lot of sentimental value to you.
And I think there's truth to that for us in
our lives, is that, yes, as we get older, we
don't look as good as we did twenty years ago,
thirty years ago. Yes, if you want to put the
time and energy into having the body you had thirty
years ago, I love that you're doing that. But just
know that a six pack becomes more expensive as you
(15:28):
get older. And what I mean by that, I'm not
talking about Budweiser or Heineken. I'm talking about the fact
that a six pack apps take more time and more
energy to actually maintain at sixty than at thirty. So
there's an opportunity cost of trying to do that. So
let's get comfortable that we were issued a rental vehicle
(15:51):
at birth and it's called our body, and over time
it gets dings and the paint job isn't quite as good.
But what's more important than the outside and what it
looks like is what it feels like on the inside.
And that's when it gets real. That leather, you know,
the leather, you know, bank at seat that just smells
(16:12):
right because you sort of lived in it for a
long time, so you know, it's comfortable. Learning how to
get real issues. That's like of what it means to
get to birth.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
And it's well, your book was real. I mean you
said a lot of shit in there that I was like, oh.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
He went there. My mom, Yeah, my mom. My mom's
not a fan of that. I mean, you know, I
have eighty six year old parents. I'm sixty three and
eighty six year old parents and they think, t M,
I chip too much information. But you know what, as
you know, Scott, I mean, I grew up in a family.
I love my parents, love my sisters, and I grew
(16:50):
up in a family where I could not talk about
what was real. So I now in you know, in
my role as an author and a speaker and then
as the founder and CEO of the Modern Elder Academy MAA,
leading workshops all year round, I get real and I
can't not.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Do it because who you are. Yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And I'm not saying someone else has to be like that. Well,
I know, it's my charm, it's just my it's my realness.
It's like who I am and I don't have you know,
I have prostate cancer. I had radiation, I had like
testosterone suppression therapy, and I basically lost my libido the
last few years. Not fun to talk about. That, not
fun to talk about, you know what it's like going
(17:36):
through radiation. But I wanted to be real about it.
And that's why I have a daily blog called Wisdom
whilet You know, that helps people to understand like a
little microdos or wisdom and realness every day.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Well, I mean, the upside of everything has an upside.
The upside of not having such a libido as you
don't worry about your abs as much.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
That is true.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That is true. How are your abs? Dude?
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Well, look at these guns show.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
For those of you're just listening to it, you've got
he's showing his biceps, which Scott, you know, you know,
let's talk about that. Let's tell you, you know what, how's
your dating life? Are we going there? No, we're not
going to go there.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
We're going.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Well, you know it's you know, it is in our
mid forties often that we thirst for connection and a
depth of relationship if we don't have it in our
life at that particular time. In fact, if we do
have it and it's not going so well, that's one
(18:49):
of the disappointment. E goes expectations of minus reality. That's
sort of my my equation, my emotional equation for midlife.
Sometimes you feel like, oh my god, I'm in a marriage,
there's nothing or something in a marriage, and feeling lonely.
But you know you're gonna I'm excited for You're You're You're.
(19:10):
The reason that at forty four that you are going
to sail through midlife is because quite frankly, you're precocious
and you've already had some of the experiences that a
lot of people sort of like all of a sudden
get hit with at forty five. You've already had them.
Being tough on yourself in terms of success. Yeah, have
(19:34):
they're done that? Yeah No. Sometimes so a lot of
people sometimes like it hits them on the head at
forty five or forty six. But you you know, you've
beaten yourself up on that. You have high expectations of yourself.
You've hopefully gotten to a place where you are getting
clear about your own definition of success and more comfortable
with it. Unless worried about measuring it up to somebody
(19:58):
else's definition. That's that's a process. That's a process. I
think the fact that you have a level of introspection
and depth to you is good because it's not it's
not scary territory because that actually is often what starts
(20:20):
happening for people in their forties and fifties is that
they get introduced to a neighborhood they're not used to,
and that is the neighborhood of the interiority of their life.
And then and then they like use alcohol or drugs
or you know, sex or whatever, you know overworking as
their way to not use one of those three multiple
(20:43):
choice questions. We're not going to go there. Yeah. So
so I think that millennials and gen z are going
to help to flatten the the U cur of happiness
little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
It's no speak to my Twitter followers that I like edibles.
By the way, Chip, I love I love what you're saying,
and I love you know. There's this is the experience
I had reading the book. I would I would read, uh,
I just keep reading about what is common among people
(21:17):
at this age, and I'd be.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Like, wait, that's me that's going through.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
And so then there was this profound realization after finishing
your book that like I'm really not that special.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, well no, no, that's a good thing. That's a
good thing.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Another way of framing that in a in sort of
a more self compassion Chris, and that sort of way
is that there's a yeah, there's a great common humanity
here and and there is a there is like a
there there really are like there is a rhythm to life,
and well there's a normality.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, and there's a normality to many of the things
we go through. You know, I lost five male friends
to suicide during the Great Recession ages forty two to
fifty two. I had some suicide ideation myself during that time.
And what I think is true for so many people
in midlife, especially men, is they don't realize that some
(22:08):
of what they're going through is normal. And because we
don't talk about it, and because we want to be
the rugged individualist, we feel like we're suffering alone. And
that sort of let the life of quiet desperation that
I think it was thorough might have said. And so
I think, you know, gosh, the more we can help
(22:30):
people to see that we're not the only one going
through what we're going through and that there may be
some tools, like, you know, we have something called the
anatomy the transition that help people to understand, like what
you're going through a transition, here's these three stages of
a transition, and to help yourself, like I understand what
are the coping mechanisms and tools for each of the stages.
And I, you know, I just wish we had more
(22:53):
resources available to people in midlife so that they understood that, yeah,
you're an adult and you may feel like an idiot
because you're you're having emotions and feeling like you're really
bad at this thing or that thing. But if you
have a growth mindset on it, you're not going to
focus on trying to prove yourself and win. You're going
to focus on trying to improve yourself and word and
(23:15):
if you like, if you see life at that learning journey,
and you can laugh at yourself a little bit more
easily as well.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Definitely, And and part of that journey is letting go
of identities that maybe you've you've held onto your whole
life and even create a new one. You say, quote
the trip becomes the journey once you've left your baggage.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Or you've lost your baggage. Yeah, that just left it
even lost.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Its Yeah, we all have baggage, I mean, and yeah,
trying to sort through our baggage and understand what's there
and then maybe, you know, go ahead and put the
valise that the suitcase up on the shelf and say like.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Okay, I know it's up there. Now I'm not carrying
it with me. Part of the challenge of midlife is
it's a marathon. And if you're carrying a lot of
emotional baggage through a marathon, man, are you going to
be tired? Are you going to be very worn out?
So being able to open up the suitcase and see
what's in there, what kind of baggage is in there,
and then maybe repack it and then store it is
(24:22):
part of, you know, metaphorically, what we're trying to help
people do in midlife. But for a lot of people
who have baggage, they don't even realize that they're they're
they're carrying all this along with them. You just see
it in their eyes, and you see them worn out
and burned out all chip.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
I mean, you see a lot of people, You see
a lot of people you know, come and go in baha.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yes, we have a campus opening here in Santa Fe
where I am right now.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
What are some of the most profound things for you
personally that you get a chance to do with people
who come and take your courses.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, I think you know, people show up often feeling stuck.
I'll just tell you a quick story. There's a female,
a woman who came. She was sixty years old. She'd
been a litigator for thirty five years. She was a
damn good litigator and she's made a good amount of
money doing it. But she was wearing armor, and that
(25:28):
first twenty four hours of a week long program she
was you could feel the armor around her, not just
in how she wasn't opening up, but also in just
how it was weighing her down. And so we went
through an exercise maybe on the second day, which was
trying to understand your purpose and like, you know what,
(25:48):
you know, what are the breadcrumbs that take you to purpose?
And often it's the things that excite you or agitate you,
or the things you're curious about, or maybe something from
childhood that actually feels fresh and new again that you
want to actually re explore. And she man she started
crying because she had these memories of being in about
(26:09):
a fourteen year old twelve year old at her grandmother's
home in Kansas, cooking pies. And she said, ever since then,
I mean, she never you know, she never focused on
cooking a whole lot, but whenever she loves having friends over.
Even though she's a litigator and she sort of likes
to argue a lot, that's sort of what she's become.
She hates that her profession has made her the end
(26:30):
to that, but she loves having people over because she
loves cooking dessert. And so by the end of the week,
she realized, I don't have to be a litigation attorney anymore.
She knew that she didn't want to do it, but
she had no idea what was next, and she was
looking for something adjacent, like I'll be a consultant to
litigators or something like that. And she realized that the
thing she really wanted to do was to go become
a pastry chef and then if she liked it, and
(26:53):
she would take a small step by going to a
pastry chef school, and if she liked it, she would
create a bakery in her neighborhood because the bakery that
used to be in her neighborhood closed down during COVID,
and that's what she's doing now. So what I love,
whether it's someone who's coming, you know, limping in based
(27:13):
upon a divorce that happened that came as a surprise,
or it's someone who has just sold their company and
feels lost. There another story I'll tell There was a
forty five year old investment banker who has retired, six
foot four, white from New York and he had a
lot of money and not a lot of purpose. And
then there was this four foot eleven African American, joyous
(27:36):
woman from Atlanta, Africa who was a social worker, and
she had a lot of purpose but not a lot
of money. And over the course of the week, the
two of them became close, even though they're from completely
different worlds, and they'd go for a walk in the
beach because they were in Baja as opposed to Santa Fe.
And by the end of the week they had become
(27:58):
quite close, and she taught him about purpose and he
taught her about money, and they're still close a few
years later, So that that's beautiful. You know. Dak Or Keltner,
who is at UC Berkeley, professor started the Greater Good
Science Center. He's on our faculty at MAA. Teaches every year.
Actually now he's teaching twice a year, once a year
(28:20):
in Santa Fe, once a year in Baja. In his
book Awe, which came out last year, which is a
great book, he focused on the eight common pathways to
awe globally and the number three on the list was nature.
And I would you would have thought, like, okay, nature
is the number one way to awe. That feels the
sort of like normal thinking, right, But it was not
(28:42):
number one on the list. It was actually number three,
and number one and number two on the list were
pro social things he would witness or experience. Number two
on the list was the list was collective effervescence that
Emil Durkheim term studied, the French sociologist who studied religious
(29:03):
pokrimages one hundred and fifteen years ago, and he said,
when people actually are in certain environments, their sense of
ego separation dissolves and their sense of communal joy emerges.
And so Daker said to me when the book, his
book came out, and I had talked with him a
lot about collective effervescements. I've always I am a founding
(29:25):
board member of the Burning Man nonprofit, and you know,
I'm very close with the founders, and so I have
I like collective effervescence. It gives it brings me a
lot of joy. So he said, you know what mea
when someone goes through a week long workshop, they feel
collective effervescence. That's part of what you're creating awe. You're
creating awe in with other humans in a cohort where
(29:49):
they actually feel a sense of that communal joy. But
number one on those lists is something came out of
left field, and it's called moral beauty. And he says,
he said that moral beauty is the number one pathway
for people to feel awe in the world, and at
a time like we are right right now where it's
so partisan and so difficult, and it's like, really that's common.
(30:12):
I mean, like, tell me more about it. And he said,
it's when in a workshop chip where you see people
and you may have been judgmental about them in the
first I don't know, first day, but then you see
their courage or their resilience, or their compassion, or their
equanimity or their kindness and you witness your the enlightened
(30:32):
witness for the best humanity has to offer. That is
the number one halfway to awe. So I bring all
of this up in the context of saying, what I
have been lucky enough to do for you know, six
years now with over four thousand people, is to experience
moral beauty and collective effervescence and awe and to feel
(30:57):
that with you know, twenty four people in the workshop
at the second, you know, for a whole week. Is
I feel so lucky. I'm not a livigator, so a
lit gator you know, gets the armor on. I'm quite
the opposite that. It's like it's opened me up in
ways that are just making me a better person. So
I feel very lucky.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Yeah, you are.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
There's a great integration here between your all of your work,
you know, integrating the work you've done with peak, right,
Like I mean, when you're talking about peak experiences, that is.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
True with middle.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Age, and you know, how can we basically ask you know,
you're asking the question, now, can we cultivate more peak
experiences in middle age? And what a what a what
a profound question? And but I think that we go
going even further. Your book suggests there's even greater potential
in Middle Ages than maybe we've ever had before or
that we'll have after.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
This might be the time.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Well, yeah, it depends. And you know, Arthur Brooks wrote
quite you know, eloquently in his books From Strength to Strength.
You know about fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence, and flood
intelligence is when we're fast and focused and we're good
at solving problems quickly. And when I worked at Airbnb,
I was surrounded by people with fluid intelligence and they
were as smart as can be, didn't have a lot
(32:23):
of peripheral vision, very focused on what was right in
front of them, and brilliant in many ways. But as
we get older, our food intelligence declines, but our crystallized
intelligence grows. And what is crystallized intelligence. It's our ability
to think holistically and systemically. It's what I what doctor
Gene Cohen in his book The Aging Brain called four
(32:46):
wheel drive of the brain being able to go from
logical to lyrical because actually the brain shrinks a little
bit as we age, and crystallized intelligence allows us to
sort of be adept atchoing from the you know, from
one side of the brain to the other and long
straight short is, as we go into midlife and beyond,
(33:06):
trying to find professions that allow us to tap into
our crystallized intelligence. Are connecting of the dots is really valuable.
I don't want a coach or a therapist who's twenty
five years old. I want to coach or a therapist
who's fifty five or sixty years old, because they have
the life experience. And I'm not saying I wouldn't see
a coach. This is let's be really clear, these are generalizations.
(33:29):
I want to be Not all fifty five year old
coaches are good coaches. But if wisdom is the metabolized
experience that leads to a distilled compassion, that's really what
wisdom is. Wisdom is a social good. Being savvy or
smart is not a social good, But being wise is.
(33:50):
It means you've metabolized something, You've had your life lessons,
and you're offering them to someone else. I love this
quote from David Viscott, which is the meaning of the
purpose of life is to find your gift. The work
of life is to develop it, and the meaning of
life is to give it away. That's really what we
help people with is to help people to understand their gift,
(34:12):
their mastery, the wisdom. How do you continue to develop
that and then how do you, as a social good
give that away to people? And I think that that's
part of our role, you know, Eric Erikson, I am
what survives me. You know, this is the era of
our life where we're supposed to be giving it away.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Is this what you meant by life as a horizontal
journey then a vertical one?
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
What I mean by that is that was later in
the book. So the book is organized with twelve different chapters,
and there's five different sections. There's a section on the
physical life up around Yeah, that's fine, and then the
emotional life, and then the mental life and the vocational
life and spiritual life and the spiritual life. You know,
we are we walk the planet, we through our career.
(35:03):
We're on a treadmill and we learn all these things.
And so life is a horizontal journey as we are
on that treadmill of life with everybody else. But there's
a point in life where we start to actually look
at our connection with something deeper and bigger than ourselves,
(35:25):
and that's when it starts to go vertical. And when
I say and I'm not saying I'm not speaking about
a particular religious tradition here. I'm speaking about the idea
that we feel connected with something bigger than ourselves, and
that maybe through a religious tradition or a spiritual practice,
and so that's when we move beyond, you know, the
(35:47):
sort of horizontal plane of life. And I do, I
do believe that is something that you know, there's a
lot of social science research that shows that we get
more spiritually curious in midlife and beyond. And there's you know,
and Richard Wore and charl Young both said, you know,
the primary operating system for the first half of our
life is our ego, and for the second half of
(36:08):
our life, it's our soul. But nobody gave us operating instructions.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Oh yeah, well, that's probably my favorite part of your book,
is all to talk about the discovering your soul.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
You know, well you say, reallying to what you just said,
I'm going to quote you. All of this can be disorienting,
but don't feat a new primary operating system is being
installed in your life, upgrading you from the era of
the ego to the stage of the soul. I mean,
it's basically what you just said, but I thought it
was worded better when you said it this other way.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
It's still you though, it is it is.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, but yeah, you know, I I know lots of
people who in their fifties, I justn' getting fill Pizzo.
Let me just use him as an example. He's a doctor.
He's from Italian American family, Catholic, you know, first first
generation to go to college, and his family ultimately became
a doctor, became the dean of the Stanford Medical School,
(37:09):
started the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. This man, in his
later life was trying to integrate all of the different
parts of himself and as a doctor and as a
professor at Stanford, he felt like the spiritual part of
his life was he was having a hard time. He
(37:29):
was trying to show up every day as a spiritually
minded person, but he couldn't. He couldn't figure it out.
And at seventy seven, a good Catholic boy, he surprised
all of his colleagues when he said, I'm going to
rabbinical school. I want to become a rabbi. And so
not only was he seventy seven. He's Catholic and he's
(37:51):
an academic, and this is like not at all what
he was studying. He realized that there was a spiritual
curiosity that had been there for the last twenty years
and he needed to scratch that itch and to and
to dive headlong into the deep end of the core
and he did.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
I love that. I love that story. When you're diving
deep end into the pool, though, it's just really helpful
to have a support system around you. And I really
like when you talk about who is there for you
as you shift your operating system from your ego to
your soul. How might you be a midwife for midlife
for someone else? And I think that that does cause
(38:28):
that that that's a moment of reflection, a reflection point
where you think, you know, the people that I'm surrounding
myself with the best midwives or mid what's the male
version of that?
Speaker 1 (38:42):
You can be you can be a male goodwives yeah,
mid husband.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Okay, okay, good point.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Good point.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
In my attempt to be be PC, I was not.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
PC anyway, but yeah, how how you know it is
a good moment of reflection to think about who you know,
who do you really want to be the midwives? And
who do you want to midway four? I mean there
might be that that reflection might cause you to change
some things in your life, right, some drastic changes.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Well you know this, Get this opens the door to
a phrase that I really love, which is social wellness.
When we think of wellness, we tend to think of
the personal side, like your sleep, your you know, nutrition,
your exercise. But as Bob Waldingger at Harvard is shown
with the eighty five year old eighty five year long
longitudent Study of Adult adult Development, you know, the number
(39:33):
one variable for people who are happy, healthy and living
into their eighties and nineties is how invested were they
in their social wellness in midlife and beyond. And so, yes,
to answer your question, having a social safety net, having
you know the people in your life that are there
(39:54):
for you on a rainy day, that's really important. But
we also need to think of friendship as a practice.
You know, if you don't if you don't if you
don't exercise, you know, you you atrophy. And so if
you don't practice friendship, it'll atrophy. And for a lot
of men in particular women too. But because we have
the spinning plates of our twenties, thirties and forties. Everybody's
(40:15):
really busy. It's really easy to lose track of friends
and to lose track of what it means to be
a friend and how to be become a great friend.
And there's been a lot written about that in the
last year, pertly because we have a loneliness epidemic. But
I really like using the term social wellness because I
think that's really what we need to do to solve loneliness.
(40:39):
We need to help people to realize that there's a
huge value in having people in your life and and
have them across energy generationally as well. You know, most
of the people who are our peers and the people
who know us intimately are around our same age. But
my gosh, is it beautiful when you've got somebody who's
(41:01):
become a bit of a mentor to you and they're
twenty years younger and you're learning from them. Yes, I mean,
I love that that might My experience at Airbnb is
I was twice the age of the average employee there,
but and I was mentoring all kinds of people, but
I was learning as much from them as they were
from me.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
My personal trainer right now, she's half my age. Now
I realize that, Yeah, really helping them get into good cheap.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Good for you.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Shout out to my personal trainer.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Okay, yeah, I also really loved the part on growing hole.
It's a it's a phrase that combines two of my
favorite words, so of course I'm going to like it
or love it.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Talk a little bit about what it means to grow whole.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
You know. We know society has a you know, a
narrative about growing old. But I wanted to do is
you know, I love language. Midlife Crystal is my left
crystals crisis. Krystal is pro aging and to aging, and
I wanted to say, like, Okay, growing old doesn't mean
it I'll have to be a bad thing because you
could be growing whole. And when you're growing whole, you
(42:09):
are integrating all of who you've ever been into who
you are now as well as who you are who
you will be in the future. Eric Erickson, you know,
as the eighth of the you know eight different Stages
of adult development, talked about integrity versus despair as the
eighth you know question that was going on in one's
(42:31):
life late late in life, and so the word integrity
is interesting because to be integrity he didn't necessarily mean
a person who doesn't lie. He meant more that you've
integrated all of the polarities of yourself to introvert and
the extrovert, the wise and the curious, the gravitas and
(42:53):
the levity, the yin the yang, the masculine, the feminine,
and what you show up with is the alchemy of
all of that. Whereas when we're young, we're compartmentalized and
for a lot of reasons, and we don't necessarily feel integrated.
So one of the processes of growing old is to
grow whole in a way that people see you in
(43:17):
your presence as being complete and that and you know,
you know, the best thing you could ever do is
complete your life before your life ends. And so helping
people to learn how to integrate and alchemize these various
polarities of themselves is very valuable. Frankly, we need it
(43:40):
in society right now. But if you can actually do
it as a human and show up with that, you
know you're you're doing one thing to help have a
less polarized world.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah as well, you just the phrase dichotomy transcendence is
a big part of that sort of transcendent. Yeah, those
who become trends senders. Yes, in a lot of ways,
you are pointing people in the direction of becoming a transcender.
What I love peak experience. He's a transcenders have a
lot of peak experiences. They resolve these conflicts, you know, they.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Have psycho hygiene. And he's one of my favorite. One
of his hyphenated words.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
I loved that's clever. That's clever. Actually I heard that one,
that's clever.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Oh yeah, psycho hygiene. So let's talk about that for
a second. Because as a CEO of Boutigo to company
called viv and then helping to run Airbnb and then
at MA, this was one of the things I thought
of as my job as a leader. My job was
to create healthy psycho hygiene such that, you know what,
(44:44):
a lot of companies are set up there, like you
end up feeling like I have to take a shower
when you go home because it's been like a sweat box,
or you just feel dirty. And so to actually create
a psycho hygiene in an organization such that people feel
like a cleansed by coming to work and I feel
psychologically lighter as a result of it is really raret
(45:07):
by saying not easy to do and a great aspiration
for a leader. And so I write about that a
little bit in my book Peek How great Companies get
their mojo from Maslow love that.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Thank you for a double clicking on that idea. Let's
maybe end this on the topic of play. Actually, no, no, no, no, no,
what a really before we talk about play?
Speaker 3 (45:34):
You know, I'm upset.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
I'm really really interested in the idea of late bloomers.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
This is a topic that has been.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Will Key obsessed with since my first up article is
about late boomers for the popular audience and psycholo to
today when I was like twenty eight years old. And
I'm really interested in the extent to which we don't
have to give up on our dreams. Yeah, maybe we
had like dreams in childhood. That can we revisit some
of our dreams in childhood that we gave up on
(46:02):
in middle in midlife.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Of course, I mean, I told you the story about
the litigation attorney who went back to saying I want
to be a pastry chef. That happens a lot. You
can find love. I mean, the number of people I've
met who actually after getting divorced, ended up connecting with
and becoming getting married to a high school or college sweetheart.
Is it's staggering, I can talk. I can tell you
(46:25):
it's dozens of people at this point. So, yes, helping
people to see that just because you hit forty or
fifty or sixty doesn't mean you don't have the opportunity
to experience being what it means to become a beginner again,
or what it means to have a dream fall into
(46:48):
your lap as a surprise. So, you know, I think
one of the things that we do get better at
as we get older is we are we have less
expectation and entitlement on that. So, you know, when we're younger,
we have an expectation, and that expectation leads to entitlement,
and it leads to disappointment, And you know, there's a
(47:09):
ratcheting of psychology that happens around that midlife unraveling when
we actually lower our expectations a little bit and we
maybe make them into hopes as opposed to expectations, and
as in so doing, we have less less entitlement about
how the world's supposed to work for us in the
(47:30):
next ten years and more of a sense of maybe
discovery and gifts that actually arrive for us out of
left field. And I know, you know, to be able
to be in that kind of childlike wonder to say, like,
I don't know what the next ten years is going
(47:51):
to be like, and I'm going to be really bad
at predicting it. I just know that if I show
up with a passionate engagement and a curiosity, people won't
notice my wrinkles. They'll known as my energy and and
I probably will show up in a way where things
are gonna happen, and I'm gonna, you know, I'll be
the beneficiary of them, even if some of them are hard,
(48:14):
because even the thing that's a hard, painful lesson is
that raw material for wisdom.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, ain't that the truth? Everything can be fodder for
wisdom if you're wise.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
On everything.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
That sounds like a tetology, But okay, let's end just
talking about this idea of pressing play on your life again,
because it does segue what we just talked to segu
Is Nice into that pressing play on your life again.
You know, how to incorporate more play into our lives
and and and have this fresh new you know, childlike
(48:50):
wonder that.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
This Sometimes people like in the Korean and Japanese and
Chinese cultures, they say, when you turn sixty, you have
a second second adulthood or sec actually second childhood actually,
and for some people they look at it, you know,
fifty as your second adulthood, the idea that you are
in your fifties and beyond maybe starting to create some time, affluence,
(49:17):
some space in your life to try things. I mean,
let's face it that when you're you know, you've got
the spinning plates of a career and a family and
kids and taking care of parents and sandwich generation and
all of these obligations that you have, you know, taken
on in your twenties, thirties and forties, there is not
a lot of room for curiosity or for play. So
(49:39):
the only way this works is if you actually start
to look at doing that great midlife edit that I
mentioned earlier, and you start to let go of the
mindsets and obligations and you know, archetypes that have been
defining you so that you can have some new space
come in. When that new space comes in, it's really
helpful to ask yourself, what would give me some joy?
(50:02):
You know, my first but talk is called, you know,
to have life, and it's not something we ask ourselves
when you're younger, because we sort of are on a
path to like try to live up to someone else's
expectation of success. But pressing play on our life gives
us the opportunity to get curious and to try some
(50:23):
things that maybe we should tried twenty five years ago.
But you know, now's a no bet. There's no better
time than now. And Plato said long ago. Yeah, Plato said, like,
you know, you can learn more about a person in
an hour of play than a year of conversation. And
that is not meant to mean like there shouldn't be therapists,
(50:44):
because you're gonna have a the year of conversation with
a therapist. But the truth is that play allows so
many different qualities of a human to come to come
to the surface. And so that's it's a very important
part of our MEA program. We're not just in the
classroom all the time. We're doing play, and we're doing
(51:05):
play that is experiential as a way of us learning
something along the way.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
I'm gonna end today's interview with another quote I loved,
but I want so many quotes from your book. I
was just pulling things out of Oh my god, you say, yes,
we are aging and growing at the same time, and
ironically it's our growing that helps us with our aging.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
Yeah, very clever, very clever tip.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
It was a real honor and privilege to have you
back on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
I wish you all the best with this book.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Thank you, Sbka. You know it's just an honor to
be here with you. I love I love the podcast,
I love what you're doing, and I appreciate being a friend.
I'm going to live as many adult years ahead of
me at fifty four as I have behind me, and
I remembered what it was like to be eighteen, and
that was a long time ago. So I better start
to be more conscious and intentional about how I want
to live today.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
I chat with Modern Elder, Academy founder and New York
Times bestselling author Chip Conley on the podcast. Chip is
on a mission to help you live the best decades
of your life, midlife and beyond.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
Chip is one of the world's leading experts at.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
The intersection of business, innovation, psychology, and spirituality. As one
of the creators of the boutique hotel movement and the
modern Elder to the young Airbnb founders, Chip's been a
disruptor and expert on entrepreneurship and business leadership. In this discussion,
we chat about Chip's new book, Learning to Love Midlife
(00:52):
Twelve Reasons why life gets better with age. There's a
great relief in chatting with Chip, you know, I mean,
it was person meaningful to me considering I'm in mid life,
and what he teaches us is that in midlife we
can take great relief that our buy doesn't define us anymore.
That we can redefine what success looks like. He talks
(01:14):
about the great midlife edit, where we can let all
of our emotional baggage, mindsets and obligations.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
That no longer serve us out the door. Just see
it out the door, Bye bye bye.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
And he also talks about, of course something I love,
growing whole, where we can finally begin to feel part
of something bigger than ourselves. If you haven't felt these
things yet and you're approaching midlife, where you're well into midlife,
this episode just might inspire you to get going and transform.
If you're going through it already and you're transforming, and
(01:49):
you're growing whole, and you're letting go of all the
crap from your past you want to let go. Good
for you, this episode should encourage you to keep going. So,
without further ado, let's get into it already. I bring
you my friend, Chip Conley, Chip, welcome back to the
Psychology Podcast SPK.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I'm here with you. Yeah. Last time we did this
squared Yes, he squared he squared SBK. Yes. Last time
we talked a lot about Maslow and we both have
a love and fascination with Maslow, and I have written
books about him. But this time we're going to talk
about maybe other things.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:26):
Yeah, where we are, we're gonna have done about the
tom your book, of your new book. I love to
see the publicity. It's getting the press, the rave reviews. Man,
out of all your books, it's uh, well, actually I
don't know about that.
Speaker 3 (02:41):
All your books are personal with me. I was gonna say,
out of all your books, this one's the most personal.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I was like, wait, that's I feel like a lot
of books are I resonate with uh equally, but thank
you one man.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
I'm like, I'm forty four years old. It was written
for you.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
It was written for you. Well, let's so. The book
is called Learning to Love Midlife and Twelve Reasons Why
Life gets Better with Age.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
So it was written for you, well, and it was
before me.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
But I I gotta say I really resonated with it.
And I loved this quote. Midlife is the Rodney danger
Field of life stages.
Speaker 3 (03:16):
It doesn't get no respect.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Now, don't get no respect. Yeah that's how.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Don't Yeah not no double negative, it don't get well,
it still doesn't. But anyway, it don't get no respect.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I actually, in my my my students are so young.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
They don't. They don't know that reference.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
But I fly in class, you know, because I'm like
jokes in class and it's silence and I'm like and
I go, oh, I get no respect, you know, And
I was like, oh, even that one, no one gets Okay.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Well, but isn't this true, though, Scott? I mean, midlife
as a life stage has a terrible brand. The number
one word attached to a just crisis, and it's for
some people it's the doorway to death. I mean it's like, oh,
on the other side of midlife, I have these disease, decrepetude,
and death. And so it's like this life stage that
(04:09):
people disavow.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Yeah, yeah, they do.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And as you note in your book, there's all sorts
of negative connotations where usually the word the term middle
life is followed by crisis. Right, So now are you
trying to reframe it in this book from crisis to
what to chrysalis?
Speaker 1 (04:27):
I do love the language if you think about first
of all, when it comes to social science research with
m geek just like you other I don't have a
PhD at touched me, although I don't have an honorary
PhD from Saybrook, But that's like you know in psychology.
But I only took one psychology class in college, and
that was with Phil Lombardo, who is the classic weirdo
(04:47):
professor I loved. So long story short is I am
fascinated by the fact that there's not a ton of
evidence that people have a crisis in midlife. There is
some evidence that I think is pretty pretty strong, although
some people don't like it, about the U Curve of happiness,
which shows that our life satisfaction declines on a low, long,
(05:10):
slow decline from our early twenties to the bottoming out
around forty five to fifty. I hate to tell you
that at age forty four your mileage may vary. And
there's a lot of reasons why there is this slow
decline and there's a low point of life satisfaction. Is
the crisis? No, I wouldn't say that. Is it a chrysalis?
(05:32):
So maybe it is and chrystal. Let's look with the
word crysalis, So a chrysalis, The word is a We
got familiar with it as a kid when we studied
the butterfly, because midlife for the butterfly was the chrysalis.
So a caterpillary plumps up and consumes and produces and
eats a lot until it actually spins its chrysalis, and
then it goes into this crystalis and it's dark and
(05:54):
solitary and guy, but it's where the transformation happens and
they come out on the other side about it. Now,
it had the butterfly had this the same DNA. The
catapultar had the DNA of the butterfly in it. They're
called imaginal discs. And long story short is. As I
started to think about this, I started thinking, well, the
U curve happiness shows that actually people get happier in
(06:15):
their fifties and their sixties and their seventies, and women
in their eighties even, And so what if, in fact,
midlife is a life stage where you're going through a lot.
You're supposed to shed a lot. Yes, it's it's a
transformative period and some of it's going to be scary,
but on the other side of it, you have the
(06:36):
best years of your life. Maybe life begins at fifty
and so that's that's a little bit of my perspective.
And based upon you know, we've had over four thousand
people come to our NEA or Modern Aldy Academy campus
in Baja average age fifty four. And we sort of
have seen, you know, like what it means for people
(06:58):
to be going through a crystalis as opposed to a crisis.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Yeah, and you use all sorts of terms to describe
this period. You're also talking about as an unraveling, but
you've refer to that as a good thing.
Speaker 4 (07:11):
Can you explain a little bit how in the raveling
can be a good thing. Well, let's let's give credit
where it's due. Brennane Brown said this to me a
few years ago. She said, Chip, you know, I like
what you're doing. She would give me, give me a
cover quote from my book Wisdom at Work, The Making
of a Modern Elder. And I told her I was
creating this modern elder academy thingma And she said, well,
(07:32):
you're going to find a lot of people having a
midlife unraveling.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
And I said, oh, that sounds terrible. It's like unraveling
says like someone losing their mind. And she said, have
you ever looked at the dictionary at the word ravel?
To ravel means something so tightly wound you can't get
it undone. And for a lot of people in midlife,
they're so tightly wound in their expectations of themselves, in
how many obligations they have said yes to, and just
(07:59):
how they have cured their life that it feels like
a mess. And so to the midlife unraveling is learning
how to disconnect from many of the obligations and mindsets
and identities that we've inhabited so that we can do
what I like to call the great midlife edit, because
the first half of our life is about accumulating, and
(08:20):
the second half of our life, if we're getting it right,
is about editing. And so the unravel is the thing
that happens before you actually have the chance to edit
your life. Then we do a whole ritual around that,
at mea to help people throw into the fire what
they're letting go of, partly because we don't have rights
(08:41):
of passenger rituals or schools or tools for people in
midlife also known as mid lessens. In adolescence, we have it,
You have all this adolescent support and love and care
to help you through the emotional, physical, hormonal, and identity
transitions of adolescence. But what about the hormonal, emotional, physical,
(09:03):
and identity transitions of middle essence? Who is providing that support,
and who's your peer group and your cohort that you're
going through this with. For men, they don't even talk
about this stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
Such a good point, such a good point. Wow, wow
wow wow. Chip Conleys, PK, you're right, yeah, you're.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
What What is the midlife atrium that you can create
for yourself?
Speaker 1 (09:30):
Yeah, A term from Mary Katherine bateson so.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I love you. How you give credit to people?
Speaker 1 (09:36):
I do? Yeah, because they deserve it. And so what
she said was this the following she said that we
have a tendency to think that with additional longevity compared
to fifty years ago, then it just means we're old longer.
And she said, that's not true. You're in mid life longer.
(09:56):
So you know, you're get to be old for the
last part of your life, but you're going to be
in life longer. And what you really need in midlife
is an atrium, a place to reflect upon how you
want to consciously curate the second half of your life. So,
if the average age of the person who comes to
MAA is fifty four and their average age they think
you're going to live till is ninety, you have thirty
(10:17):
six years ahead of you. And if you think about
fifty four is thirty six years into your adulthood, because
fifty four minus eighteen when you turned it an adult,
it was thirty six. So fifty four is halfway through
eighteen to ninety. And most of us at fifty four
don't say like, oh wow, how do I want to
consciously curate the rest of our life? No, we don't
give ourselves the space the midlife atrium to sort of
ask that we don't ask. We don't have someone curating
(10:40):
our life for us, asking questions like you know, ten years,
you know what we regret if you don't learn it
or do it now. What we need in midlife is
a midwife, someone who can midwife us through this road
map of midlife so that we can look at our
life and say, wow, I have longevity literacy. Now I'm
(11:03):
going to live as many adult years ahead of me
at fifty four as I have behind me, and I
remember what it was like to be eighteen, and that
was a long time ago. So I better start to
be more conscious and intentional about how I want to
live my next few decades. And that's I think part
of what the book tries to do. Learning to Love
(11:23):
Midlife It also tries to help people to see, like, man,
have we swallowed the anti aging message out there, the
message that the anti aging industrial complex wants us to swallow,
which is, you don't look young anymore. You got to
do things to make yourself be and look young. And
what I wanted to do with the book was to
help people see that there's a pro aging message out
(11:44):
there too. There's a lot of things that get better
with age, and so I tried to actually point out
twelve of that.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Yeah, okay, so let's get into some of those things.
Oh boy, which one should we start with first, don't?
I don't think we need to go in order here.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Let's just going to one of the ones that I
found most interesting.
Speaker 2 (12:03):
Yes, and that's the fact that that a person's hero's
journey can really shadow side.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Now that really resonated with me.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Well, and tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
Yeah, yeah, that that that. So the book is organized
with an introduction and afterward, and then there's twelve chapters
of the twelve reasons why life gets better with agent.
That chapter speaks to the idea of I understand my
story in essence, my narrative better because I had the
pattern recognition of more life. You know, when you're a
(12:38):
quarter of the way through a novel, you don't know
where it's going or who the characters are. But halfway
through you understand everything prepare you think you do. And
that's sort of like life. You know, by the time
you get the middle life, you can see your patterns
and some of your shadow side. You can see what's
consistent and thematic in the through line of your life.
And once you know that you can, you know you
(13:00):
will make Carl Young happy because you'll take the unconscious
and make it conscious, and then your life becomes better, hopefully.
So that chapter really speaks to the idea that you know,
you could look at your life as a hero's journey.
You could design even that chapter helps people design a
hero's journey or heroines journey for themselves to understand what
(13:22):
are the patterns that are typical and why is that important? Man,
It's so important because wisdom is about actually learning how
to learn from your mistakes. Your past life lessons are
the raw material for your future wisdom. And if you
haven't haven't learned something from the patterns that you've lived
(13:43):
out in your life, then you haven't actually built some wisdom.
And as Adam Grant said to me when I was
writing one of my past books, he said, like, Chip,
there's not a lot of evidence that that wisdom is
correlated with age. And I was like, really, that sounds crazy,
and he said, well, you know, there's a lot of
seventy year olds who have not metabolized their experiences. They
(14:03):
don't have made sense, and there's a lot of thirty
year olds who have. And it's like, okay, So what
I really wanted to help with people with the book
was to help people it's like, how do you make
sense of your life lessons in a way that makes
you wiser?
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Relating to that, you know, what can be learned from
The Velveteen Rabbit.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
So the children's book The Velveteen Rabbit speaks to this
idea that your favorite toy, your favorite little doll, maybe
something that actually has been loved to death. It only
has one eye and all of the fur it used
to have has been rubbed off. And what the author
(14:46):
of the book says is, you know, as we get older,
we get more real, and to be real as a
doll is something means that you don't necessarily look good
on the exterior. But you have this, this love love
affair with this doll, this velveteen rabbit, in such a
(15:07):
way that it has a lot of sentimental value to you.
And I think there's truth to that for us in
our lives, is that, yes, as we get older, we
don't look as good as we did twenty years ago,
thirty years ago. Yes, if you want to put the
time and energy into having the body you had thirty
years ago, I love that you're doing that. But just
know that a six pack becomes more expensive as you
(15:28):
get older. And what I mean by that, I'm not
talking about Budweiser or Heineken. I'm talking about the fact
that a six pack apps take more time and more
energy to actually maintain at sixty than at thirty. So
there's an opportunity cost of trying to do that. So
let's get comfortable that we were issued a rental vehicle
(15:51):
at birth and it's called our body, and over time
it gets dings and the paint job isn't quite as good.
But what's more important than the outside and what it
looks like is what it feels like on the inside.
And that's when it gets real. That leather, you know,
the leather, you know, bank at seat that just smells
(16:12):
right because you sort of lived in it for a
long time, so you know, it's comfortable. Learning how to
get real issues. That's like of what it means to
get to birth.
Speaker 3 (16:23):
And it's well, your book was real. I mean you
said a lot of shit in there that I was like, oh.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
He went there. My mom, Yeah, my mom. My mom's
not a fan of that. I mean, you know, I
have eighty six year old parents. I'm sixty three and
eighty six year old parents and they think, t M,
I chip too much information. But you know what, as
you know, Scott, I mean, I grew up in a family.
I love my parents, love my sisters, and I grew
(16:50):
up in a family where I could not talk about
what was real. So I now in you know, in
my role as an author and a speaker and then
as the founder and CEO of the Modern Elder Academy MAA,
leading workshops all year round, I get real and I
can't not.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Do it because who you are. Yeah, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And I'm not saying someone else has to be like that. Well,
I know, it's my charm, it's just my it's my realness.
It's like who I am and I don't have you know,
I have prostate cancer. I had radiation, I had like
testosterone suppression therapy, and I basically lost my libido the
last few years. Not fun to talk about. That, not
fun to talk about, you know what it's like going
(17:36):
through radiation. But I wanted to be real about it.
And that's why I have a daily blog called Wisdom
whilet You know, that helps people to understand like a
little microdos or wisdom and realness every day.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Well, I mean, the upside of everything has an upside.
The upside of not having such a libido as you
don't worry about your abs as much.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
That is true.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
That is true. How are your abs? Dude?
Speaker 3 (18:01):
Well, look at these guns show.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
For those of you're just listening to it, you've got
he's showing his biceps, which Scott, you know, you know,
let's talk about that. Let's tell you, you know what, how's
your dating life? Are we going there? No, we're not
going to go there.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
We're going.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Well, you know it's you know, it is in our
mid forties often that we thirst for connection and a
depth of relationship if we don't have it in our
life at that particular time. In fact, if we do
have it and it's not going so well, that's one
(18:49):
of the disappointment. E goes expectations of minus reality. That's
sort of my my equation, my emotional equation for midlife.
Sometimes you feel like, oh my god, I'm in a marriage,
there's nothing or something in a marriage, and feeling lonely.
But you know you're gonna I'm excited for You're You're You're.
(19:10):
The reason that at forty four that you are going
to sail through midlife is because quite frankly, you're precocious
and you've already had some of the experiences that a
lot of people sort of like all of a sudden
get hit with at forty five. You've already had them.
Being tough on yourself in terms of success. Yeah, have
(19:34):
they're done that? Yeah No. Sometimes so a lot of
people sometimes like it hits them on the head at
forty five or forty six. But you you know, you've
beaten yourself up on that. You have high expectations of yourself.
You've hopefully gotten to a place where you are getting
clear about your own definition of success and more comfortable
with it. Unless worried about measuring it up to somebody
(19:58):
else's definition. That's that's a process. That's a process. I
think the fact that you have a level of introspection
and depth to you is good because it's not it's
not scary territory because that actually is often what starts
(20:20):
happening for people in their forties and fifties is that
they get introduced to a neighborhood they're not used to,
and that is the neighborhood of the interiority of their life.
And then and then they like use alcohol or drugs
or you know, sex or whatever, you know overworking as
their way to not use one of those three multiple
(20:43):
choice questions. We're not going to go there. Yeah. So
so I think that millennials and gen z are going
to help to flatten the the U cur of happiness
little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
It's no speak to my Twitter followers that I like edibles.
By the way, Chip, I love I love what you're saying,
and I love you know. There's this is the experience
I had reading the book. I would I would read, uh,
I just keep reading about what is common among people
(21:17):
at this age, and I'd be.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
Like, wait, that's me that's going through.
Speaker 2 (21:21):
And so then there was this profound realization after finishing
your book that like I'm really not that special.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Yeah, well no, no, that's a good thing. That's a
good thing.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Another way of framing that in a in sort of
a more self compassion Chris, and that sort of way
is that there's a yeah, there's a great common humanity
here and and there is a there is like a
there there really are like there is a rhythm to life,
and well there's a normality.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
Yeah, and there's a normality to many of the things
we go through. You know, I lost five male friends
to suicide during the Great Recession ages forty two to
fifty two. I had some suicide ideation myself during that time.
And what I think is true for so many people
in midlife, especially men, is they don't realize that some
(22:08):
of what they're going through is normal. And because we
don't talk about it, and because we want to be
the rugged individualist, we feel like we're suffering alone. And
that sort of let the life of quiet desperation that
I think it was thorough might have said. And so
I think, you know, gosh, the more we can help
(22:30):
people to see that we're not the only one going
through what we're going through and that there may be
some tools, like, you know, we have something called the
anatomy the transition that help people to understand, like what
you're going through a transition, here's these three stages of
a transition, and to help yourself, like I understand what
are the coping mechanisms and tools for each of the stages.
And I, you know, I just wish we had more
(22:53):
resources available to people in midlife so that they understood that, yeah,
you're an adult and you may feel like an idiot
because you're you're having emotions and feeling like you're really
bad at this thing or that thing. But if you
have a growth mindset on it, you're not going to
focus on trying to prove yourself and win. You're going
to focus on trying to improve yourself and word and
(23:15):
if you like, if you see life at that learning journey,
and you can laugh at yourself a little bit more
easily as well.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Definitely, And and part of that journey is letting go
of identities that maybe you've you've held onto your whole
life and even create a new one. You say, quote
the trip becomes the journey once you've left your baggage.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Or you've lost your baggage. Yeah, that just left it
even lost.
Speaker 5 (23:41):
Its Yeah, we all have baggage, I mean, and yeah,
trying to sort through our baggage and understand what's there
and then maybe, you know, go ahead and put the
valise that the suitcase up on the shelf and say like.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
Okay, I know it's up there. Now I'm not carrying
it with me. Part of the challenge of midlife is
it's a marathon. And if you're carrying a lot of
emotional baggage through a marathon, man, are you going to
be tired? Are you going to be very worn out?
So being able to open up the suitcase and see
what's in there, what kind of baggage is in there,
and then maybe repack it and then store it is
(24:22):
part of, you know, metaphorically, what we're trying to help
people do in midlife. But for a lot of people
who have baggage, they don't even realize that they're they're
they're carrying all this along with them. You just see
it in their eyes, and you see them worn out
and burned out all chip.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
I mean, you see a lot of people, You see
a lot of people you know, come and go in baha.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Yes, we have a campus opening here in Santa Fe
where I am right now.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
What are some of the most profound things for you
personally that you get a chance to do with people
who come and take your courses.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Yeah, I think you know, people show up often feeling stuck.
I'll just tell you a quick story. There's a female,
a woman who came. She was sixty years old. She'd
been a litigator for thirty five years. She was a
damn good litigator and she's made a good amount of
money doing it. But she was wearing armor, and that
(25:28):
first twenty four hours of a week long program she
was you could feel the armor around her, not just
in how she wasn't opening up, but also in just
how it was weighing her down. And so we went
through an exercise maybe on the second day, which was
trying to understand your purpose and like, you know what,
(25:48):
you know, what are the breadcrumbs that take you to purpose?
And often it's the things that excite you or agitate you,
or the things you're curious about, or maybe something from
childhood that actually feels fresh and new again that you
want to actually re explore. And she man she started
crying because she had these memories of being in about
(26:09):
a fourteen year old twelve year old at her grandmother's
home in Kansas, cooking pies. And she said, ever since then,
I mean, she never you know, she never focused on
cooking a whole lot, but whenever she loves having friends over.
Even though she's a litigator and she sort of likes
to argue a lot, that's sort of what she's become.
She hates that her profession has made her the end
(26:30):
to that, but she loves having people over because she
loves cooking dessert. And so by the end of the week,
she realized, I don't have to be a litigation attorney anymore.
She knew that she didn't want to do it, but
she had no idea what was next, and she was
looking for something adjacent, like I'll be a consultant to
litigators or something like that. And she realized that the
thing she really wanted to do was to go become
a pastry chef and then if she liked it, and
(26:53):
she would take a small step by going to a
pastry chef school, and if she liked it, she would
create a bakery in her neighborhood because the bakery that
used to be in her neighborhood closed down during COVID,
and that's what she's doing now. So what I love,
whether it's someone who's coming, you know, limping in based
(27:13):
upon a divorce that happened that came as a surprise,
or it's someone who has just sold their company and
feels lost. There another story I'll tell There was a
forty five year old investment banker who has retired, six
foot four, white from New York and he had a
lot of money and not a lot of purpose. And
then there was this four foot eleven African American, joyous
(27:36):
woman from Atlanta, Africa who was a social worker, and
she had a lot of purpose but not a lot
of money. And over the course of the week, the
two of them became close, even though they're from completely
different worlds, and they'd go for a walk in the
beach because they were in Baja as opposed to Santa Fe.
And by the end of the week they had become
(27:58):
quite close, and she taught him about purpose and he
taught her about money, and they're still close a few
years later, So that that's beautiful. You know. Dak Or Keltner,
who is at UC Berkeley, professor started the Greater Good
Science Center. He's on our faculty at MAA. Teaches every year.
Actually now he's teaching twice a year, once a year
(28:20):
in Santa Fe, once a year in Baja. In his
book Awe, which came out last year, which is a
great book, he focused on the eight common pathways to
awe globally and the number three on the list was nature.
And I would you would have thought, like, okay, nature
is the number one way to awe. That feels the
sort of like normal thinking, right, But it was not
(28:42):
number one on the list. It was actually number three,
and number one and number two on the list were
pro social things he would witness or experience. Number two
on the list was the list was collective effervescence that
Emil Durkheim term studied, the French sociologist who studied religious
(29:03):
pokrimages one hundred and fifteen years ago, and he said,
when people actually are in certain environments, their sense of
ego separation dissolves and their sense of communal joy emerges.
And so Daker said to me when the book, his
book came out, and I had talked with him a
lot about collective effervescements. I've always I am a founding
(29:25):
board member of the Burning Man nonprofit, and you know,
I'm very close with the founders, and so I have
I like collective effervescence. It gives it brings me a
lot of joy. So he said, you know what mea
when someone goes through a week long workshop, they feel
collective effervescence. That's part of what you're creating awe. You're
creating awe in with other humans in a cohort where
(29:49):
they actually feel a sense of that communal joy. But
number one on those lists is something came out of
left field, and it's called moral beauty. And he says,
he said that moral beauty is the number one pathway
for people to feel awe in the world, and at
a time like we are right right now where it's
so partisan and so difficult, and it's like, really that's common.
(30:12):
I mean, like, tell me more about it. And he said,
it's when in a workshop chip where you see people
and you may have been judgmental about them in the
first I don't know, first day, but then you see
their courage or their resilience, or their compassion, or their
equanimity or their kindness and you witness your the enlightened
(30:32):
witness for the best humanity has to offer. That is
the number one halfway to awe. So I bring all
of this up in the context of saying, what I
have been lucky enough to do for you know, six
years now with over four thousand people, is to experience
moral beauty and collective effervescence and awe and to feel
(30:57):
that with you know, twenty four people in the workshop
at the second, you know, for a whole week. Is
I feel so lucky. I'm not a livigator, so a
lit gator you know, gets the armor on. I'm quite
the opposite that. It's like it's opened me up in
ways that are just making me a better person. So
I feel very lucky.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Yeah, you are.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
There's a great integration here between your all of your work,
you know, integrating the work you've done with peak, right,
Like I mean, when you're talking about peak experiences, that is.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
True with middle.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
Age, and you know, how can we basically ask you know,
you're asking the question, now, can we cultivate more peak
experiences in middle age? And what a what a what
a profound question? And but I think that we go
going even further. Your book suggests there's even greater potential
in Middle Ages than maybe we've ever had before or
that we'll have after.
Speaker 3 (32:00):
This might be the time.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Well, yeah, it depends. And you know, Arthur Brooks wrote
quite you know, eloquently in his books From Strength to Strength.
You know about fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence, and flood
intelligence is when we're fast and focused and we're good
at solving problems quickly. And when I worked at Airbnb,
I was surrounded by people with fluid intelligence and they
were as smart as can be, didn't have a lot
(32:23):
of peripheral vision, very focused on what was right in
front of them, and brilliant in many ways. But as
we get older, our food intelligence declines, but our crystallized
intelligence grows. And what is crystallized intelligence. It's our ability
to think holistically and systemically. It's what I what doctor
Gene Cohen in his book The Aging Brain called four
(32:46):
wheel drive of the brain being able to go from
logical to lyrical because actually the brain shrinks a little
bit as we age, and crystallized intelligence allows us to
sort of be adept atchoing from the you know, from
one side of the brain to the other and long
straight short is, as we go into midlife and beyond,
(33:06):
trying to find professions that allow us to tap into
our crystallized intelligence. Are connecting of the dots is really valuable.
I don't want a coach or a therapist who's twenty
five years old. I want to coach or a therapist
who's fifty five or sixty years old, because they have
the life experience. And I'm not saying I wouldn't see
a coach. This is let's be really clear, these are generalizations.
(33:29):
I want to be Not all fifty five year old
coaches are good coaches. But if wisdom is the metabolized
experience that leads to a distilled compassion, that's really what
wisdom is. Wisdom is a social good. Being savvy or
smart is not a social good, But being wise is.
(33:50):
It means you've metabolized something, You've had your life lessons,
and you're offering them to someone else. I love this
quote from David Viscott, which is the meaning of the
purpose of life is to find your gift. The work
of life is to develop it, and the meaning of
life is to give it away. That's really what we
help people with is to help people to understand their gift,
(34:12):
their mastery, the wisdom. How do you continue to develop
that and then how do you, as a social good
give that away to people? And I think that that's
part of our role, you know, Eric Erikson, I am
what survives me. You know, this is the era of
our life where we're supposed to be giving it away.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Is this what you meant by life as a horizontal
journey then a vertical one?
Speaker 3 (34:39):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (34:39):
What I mean by that is that was later in
the book. So the book is organized with twelve different chapters,
and there's five different sections. There's a section on the
physical life up around Yeah, that's fine, and then the
emotional life, and then the mental life and the vocational
life and spiritual life and the spiritual life. You know,
we are we walk the planet, we through our career.
(35:03):
We're on a treadmill and we learn all these things.
And so life is a horizontal journey as we are
on that treadmill of life with everybody else. But there's
a point in life where we start to actually look
at our connection with something deeper and bigger than ourselves,
(35:25):
and that's when it starts to go vertical. And when
I say and I'm not saying I'm not speaking about
a particular religious tradition here. I'm speaking about the idea
that we feel connected with something bigger than ourselves, and
that maybe through a religious tradition or a spiritual practice,
and so that's when we move beyond, you know, the
(35:47):
sort of horizontal plane of life. And I do, I
do believe that is something that you know, there's a
lot of social science research that shows that we get
more spiritually curious in midlife and beyond. And there's you know,
and Richard Wore and charl Young both said, you know,
the primary operating system for the first half of our
life is our ego, and for the second half of
(36:08):
our life, it's our soul. But nobody gave us operating instructions.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Oh yeah, well, that's probably my favorite part of your book,
is all to talk about the discovering your soul.
Speaker 3 (36:19):
Yeah, it's wonderful.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
You know, well you say, reallying to what you just said,
I'm going to quote you. All of this can be disorienting,
but don't feat a new primary operating system is being
installed in your life, upgrading you from the era of
the ego to the stage of the soul. I mean,
it's basically what you just said, but I thought it
was worded better when you said it this other way.
Speaker 1 (36:40):
Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
It's still you though, it is it is.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
Yeah, but yeah, you know, I I know lots of
people who in their fifties, I justn' getting fill Pizzo.
Let me just use him as an example. He's a doctor.
He's from Italian American family, Catholic, you know, first first
generation to go to college, and his family ultimately became
a doctor, became the dean of the Stanford Medical School,
(37:09):
started the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute. This man, in his
later life was trying to integrate all of the different
parts of himself and as a doctor and as a
professor at Stanford, he felt like the spiritual part of
his life was he was having a hard time. He
(37:29):
was trying to show up every day as a spiritually
minded person, but he couldn't. He couldn't figure it out.
And at seventy seven, a good Catholic boy, he surprised
all of his colleagues when he said, I'm going to
rabbinical school. I want to become a rabbi. And so
not only was he seventy seven. He's Catholic and he's
(37:51):
an academic, and this is like not at all what
he was studying. He realized that there was a spiritual
curiosity that had been there for the last twenty years
and he needed to scratch that itch and to and
to dive headlong into the deep end of the core
and he did.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
I love that. I love that story. When you're diving
deep end into the pool, though, it's just really helpful
to have a support system around you. And I really
like when you talk about who is there for you
as you shift your operating system from your ego to
your soul. How might you be a midwife for midlife
for someone else? And I think that that does cause
(38:28):
that that that's a moment of reflection, a reflection point
where you think, you know, the people that I'm surrounding
myself with the best midwives or mid what's the male
version of that?
Speaker 1 (38:42):
You can be you can be a male goodwives yeah,
mid husband.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Okay, okay, good point.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Good point.
Speaker 3 (38:49):
In my attempt to be be PC, I was not.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
PC anyway, but yeah, how how you know it is
a good moment of reflection to think about who you know,
who do you really want to be the midwives? And
who do you want to midway four? I mean there
might be that that reflection might cause you to change
some things in your life, right, some drastic changes.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Well you know this, Get this opens the door to
a phrase that I really love, which is social wellness.
When we think of wellness, we tend to think of
the personal side, like your sleep, your you know, nutrition,
your exercise. But as Bob Waldingger at Harvard is shown
with the eighty five year old eighty five year long
longitudent Study of Adult adult Development, you know, the number
(39:33):
one variable for people who are happy, healthy and living
into their eighties and nineties is how invested were they
in their social wellness in midlife and beyond. And so, yes,
to answer your question, having a social safety net, having
you know the people in your life that are there
(39:54):
for you on a rainy day, that's really important. But
we also need to think of friendship as a practice.
You know, if you don't if you don't if you
don't exercise, you know, you you atrophy. And so if
you don't practice friendship, it'll atrophy. And for a lot
of men in particular women too. But because we have
the spinning plates of our twenties, thirties and forties. Everybody's
(40:15):
really busy. It's really easy to lose track of friends
and to lose track of what it means to be
a friend and how to be become a great friend.
And there's been a lot written about that in the
last year, pertly because we have a loneliness epidemic. But
I really like using the term social wellness because I
think that's really what we need to do to solve loneliness.
(40:39):
We need to help people to realize that there's a
huge value in having people in your life and and
have them across energy generationally as well. You know, most
of the people who are our peers and the people
who know us intimately are around our same age. But
my gosh, is it beautiful when you've got somebody who's
(41:01):
become a bit of a mentor to you and they're
twenty years younger and you're learning from them. Yes, I mean,
I love that that might My experience at Airbnb is
I was twice the age of the average employee there,
but and I was mentoring all kinds of people, but
I was learning as much from them as they were
from me.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
My personal trainer right now, she's half my age. Now
I realize that, Yeah, really helping them get into good cheap.
Speaker 1 (41:26):
Good for you.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Shout out to my personal trainer.
Speaker 2 (41:31):
Okay, yeah, I also really loved the part on growing hole.
It's a it's a phrase that combines two of my
favorite words, so of course I'm going to like it
or love it.
Speaker 3 (41:43):
Talk a little bit about what it means to grow whole.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
You know. We know society has a you know, a
narrative about growing old. But I wanted to do is
you know, I love language. Midlife Crystal is my left
crystals crisis. Krystal is pro aging and to aging, and
I wanted to say, like, Okay, growing old doesn't mean
it I'll have to be a bad thing because you
could be growing whole. And when you're growing whole, you
(42:09):
are integrating all of who you've ever been into who
you are now as well as who you are who
you will be in the future. Eric Erickson, you know,
as the eighth of the you know eight different Stages
of adult development, talked about integrity versus despair as the
eighth you know question that was going on in one's
(42:31):
life late late in life, and so the word integrity
is interesting because to be integrity he didn't necessarily mean
a person who doesn't lie. He meant more that you've
integrated all of the polarities of yourself to introvert and
the extrovert, the wise and the curious, the gravitas and
(42:53):
the levity, the yin the yang, the masculine, the feminine,
and what you show up with is the alchemy of
all of that. Whereas when we're young, we're compartmentalized and
for a lot of reasons, and we don't necessarily feel integrated.
So one of the processes of growing old is to
grow whole in a way that people see you in
(43:17):
your presence as being complete and that and you know,
you know, the best thing you could ever do is
complete your life before your life ends. And so helping
people to learn how to integrate and alchemize these various
polarities of themselves is very valuable. Frankly, we need it
(43:40):
in society right now. But if you can actually do
it as a human and show up with that, you
know you're you're doing one thing to help have a
less polarized world.
Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah as well, you just the phrase dichotomy transcendence is
a big part of that sort of transcendent. Yeah, those
who become trends senders. Yes, in a lot of ways,
you are pointing people in the direction of becoming a transcender.
What I love peak experience. He's a transcenders have a
lot of peak experiences. They resolve these conflicts, you know, they.
Speaker 1 (44:14):
Have psycho hygiene. And he's one of my favorite. One
of his hyphenated words.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
I loved that's clever. That's clever. Actually I heard that one,
that's clever.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Oh yeah, psycho hygiene. So let's talk about that for
a second. Because as a CEO of Boutigo to company
called viv and then helping to run Airbnb and then
at MA, this was one of the things I thought
of as my job as a leader. My job was
to create healthy psycho hygiene such that, you know what,
(44:44):
a lot of companies are set up there, like you
end up feeling like I have to take a shower
when you go home because it's been like a sweat box,
or you just feel dirty. And so to actually create
a psycho hygiene in an organization such that people feel
like a cleansed by coming to work and I feel
psychologically lighter as a result of it is really raret
(45:07):
by saying not easy to do and a great aspiration
for a leader. And so I write about that a
little bit in my book Peek How great Companies get
their mojo from Maslow love that.
Speaker 2 (45:22):
Thank you for a double clicking on that idea. Let's
maybe end this on the topic of play. Actually, no, no, no, no, no,
what a really before we talk about play?
Speaker 3 (45:34):
You know, I'm upset.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
I'm really really interested in the idea of late bloomers.
Speaker 3 (45:39):
This is a topic that has been.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Will Key obsessed with since my first up article is
about late boomers for the popular audience and psycholo to
today when I was like twenty eight years old. And
I'm really interested in the extent to which we don't
have to give up on our dreams. Yeah, maybe we
had like dreams in childhood. That can we revisit some
of our dreams in childhood that we gave up on
(46:02):
in middle in midlife.
Speaker 1 (46:04):
Of course, I mean, I told you the story about
the litigation attorney who went back to saying I want
to be a pastry chef. That happens a lot. You
can find love. I mean, the number of people I've
met who actually after getting divorced, ended up connecting with
and becoming getting married to a high school or college sweetheart.
Is it's staggering, I can talk. I can tell you
(46:25):
it's dozens of people at this point. So, yes, helping
people to see that just because you hit forty or
fifty or sixty doesn't mean you don't have the opportunity
to experience being what it means to become a beginner again,
or what it means to have a dream fall into
(46:48):
your lap as a surprise. So, you know, I think
one of the things that we do get better at
as we get older is we are we have less
expectation and entitlement on that. So, you know, when we're younger,
we have an expectation, and that expectation leads to entitlement,
and it leads to disappointment, And you know, there's a
(47:09):
ratcheting of psychology that happens around that midlife unraveling when
we actually lower our expectations a little bit and we
maybe make them into hopes as opposed to expectations, and
as in so doing, we have less less entitlement about
how the world's supposed to work for us in the
(47:30):
next ten years and more of a sense of maybe
discovery and gifts that actually arrive for us out of
left field. And I know, you know, to be able
to be in that kind of childlike wonder to say, like,
I don't know what the next ten years is going
(47:51):
to be like, and I'm going to be really bad
at predicting it. I just know that if I show
up with a passionate engagement and a curiosity, people won't
notice my wrinkles. They'll known as my energy and and
I probably will show up in a way where things
are gonna happen, and I'm gonna, you know, I'll be
the beneficiary of them, even if some of them are hard,
(48:14):
because even the thing that's a hard, painful lesson is
that raw material for wisdom.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, ain't that the truth? Everything can be fodder for
wisdom if you're wise.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
On everything.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
That sounds like a tetology, But okay, let's end just
talking about this idea of pressing play on your life again,
because it does segue what we just talked to segu
Is Nice into that pressing play on your life again.
You know, how to incorporate more play into our lives
and and and have this fresh new you know, childlike
(48:50):
wonder that.
Speaker 1 (48:51):
This Sometimes people like in the Korean and Japanese and
Chinese cultures, they say, when you turn sixty, you have
a second second adulthood or sec actually second childhood actually,
and for some people they look at it, you know,
fifty as your second adulthood, the idea that you are
in your fifties and beyond maybe starting to create some time, affluence,
(49:17):
some space in your life to try things. I mean,
let's face it that when you're you know, you've got
the spinning plates of a career and a family and
kids and taking care of parents and sandwich generation and
all of these obligations that you have, you know, taken
on in your twenties, thirties and forties, there is not
a lot of room for curiosity or for play. So
(49:39):
the only way this works is if you actually start
to look at doing that great midlife edit that I
mentioned earlier, and you start to let go of the
mindsets and obligations and you know, archetypes that have been
defining you so that you can have some new space
come in. When that new space comes in, it's really
helpful to ask yourself, what would give me some joy?
(50:02):
You know, my first but talk is called, you know,
to have life, and it's not something we ask ourselves
when you're younger, because we sort of are on a
path to like try to live up to someone else's
expectation of success. But pressing play on our life gives
us the opportunity to get curious and to try some
(50:23):
things that maybe we should tried twenty five years ago.
But you know, now's a no bet. There's no better
time than now. And Plato said long ago. Yeah, Plato said, like,
you know, you can learn more about a person in
an hour of play than a year of conversation. And
that is not meant to mean like there shouldn't be therapists,
(50:44):
because you're gonna have a the year of conversation with
a therapist. But the truth is that play allows so
many different qualities of a human to come to come
to the surface. And so that's it's a very important
part of our MEA program. We're not just in the
classroom all the time. We're doing play, and we're doing
(51:05):
play that is experiential as a way of us learning
something along the way.
Speaker 3 (51:10):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (51:11):
I'm gonna end today's interview with another quote I loved,
but I want so many quotes from your book. I
was just pulling things out of Oh my god, you say, yes,
we are aging and growing at the same time, and
ironically it's our growing that helps us with our aging.
Speaker 3 (51:25):
Yeah, very clever, very clever tip.
Speaker 2 (51:28):
It was a real honor and privilege to have you
back on the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 3 (51:32):
I wish you all the best with this book.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
Thank you, Sbka. You know it's just an honor to
be here with you. I love I love the podcast,
I love what you're doing, and I appreciate being a friend.
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