 elevator up the 29th floor and I heard him talk to his friend about how he had just turned 55 and everything in his life was falling apart. I said you know I think you could use my coaching into elderhood and he and he said coaching for aging so I need I need to be coached on how to stay young again how to stay youthful and sexy and rich and keep doing the things that I love to do. I'm Larry Graham and my program is elderhood aging gracefully and today I would like to first of all give my deepest thanks to Think Tech Hawaii for the opportunity that they have afforded me to come to you and share these concepts these spiritual tasks that I think are essential to making your elderhood a real and wonderful experience of life. I have very much appreciated their partnership their collaboration in doing this and right now this will be a hiatus for my program for a while until the next year as they move into Think Tech Hawaii 3.0 a new program format and a new a new office space so I'm looking forward to their new studio as well however during this time today I wanted to tell you first of all that guy was right he doesn't need my coaching age you don't need my coaching age you're going to age you're going to age and the difference is do you want to age with a sense of joy and a sense of confidence and a sense of power that you can have by addressing and by enabling with with my partnership enabling you to involve process the inner dynamics of this aging process there are all kinds of resources externally that we offer people on the island can access and they are beautiful and wonderful resources and certainly some of them will be important and I wouldn't by any means I wouldn't short shrift any of those or discount any the importance of any of those external programs things that are offered but I think one of the things that I will offer that I think is more of a niche for me is I can relate to the inner process and that's what I'm focused on in these five spiritual tasks I have been a chaplain with Bristol hospice I'm entering into my third year now with Bristol hospice as a chaplain providing spiritual care for that community and I have loved every every year of it every every hour of it it's been challenging for me but it has also been so very rewarding and I want to encourage any of you who might be at a point of wondering about hospice care either for yourself or for a loved one to go to the website Bristol hospice dash Hawaii calm and check out our hospice offering I'm very proud of that of that corporation and I'm very proud to be a part of that that work which is significant work of caring for the dying and their families so check that out but I'm also here because I am as I am a coach a live coach I have been captured by this idea of aging and not just aging but the idea of the elderhood I mentioned in other parts of my my program presentations that we have a childhood we have adolescence we have adulthood and we have elderhood we approach elderhood as a stage and when we do that we can see that there's some tasks or some focuses that we foci that we can pay attention to and when we do pay attention to those and I think it helps to have somebody to work with you work with me on paying attention to them and then it opens up that stage of life to be so full and so rich and so wonderful really but today I'd like to open up to you the benefits open your mind to the benefits of coaching I have some qualifications I have been I have been a minister in the Presbyterian Church for more than 40 years and all the churches that I have served have had a major population of gray-haired people all through my 40-some years so I've worked with very closely with with elders and elderhood people in elderhood all through my career and I've long appreciated the the wisdom and the experience of those folks and how their contribution to this world and certainly in terms of my life as well and my work with them so I do know that there is a richness from just knowing those folks knowing folks who are in elderhood I also have qualification of of listening knowing how to listen and to listen to with empathy to identify where you are at I've served as a professional chaplain in long-term care and now in hospice care have done hospice care before and in Denver Colorado and then hospice care here for three years and the training in hospice professional hospice training chaplaincy training is to meet the person where they're at to accept them and to see where they are and to and to be a offer partnership offer accompaniment through the journey that that person is going through and that's what I do in my coaching as well I bring all those skills of active listening of caregiving of knowledge of human development and personal development into the relationship with my coach coaching clients the third thing is that I have had some specific training in life coaching when wherever you go with a life coach you'll have basically the same program and benefits there's some standard approaches that you would find familiar in coaching with me that as you would with other kinds of coaching and so the format is dependable and I have had some professional training and how to approach that as well then the final qualification I think for my coaching is that I'm well into my own elderhood I'm there I'm living it and looking to others for coaching me in that process of elderhood so that I go through it with all the richness and wonder that I can possibly have to what are the benefits of coaching using me for coaching well there are lots of benefits and I will turn my attention to those later in our program as I also will enable you to be able to know what the program expectations you could have of my coaching program first what we what is the problem we face well we face a problem as human beings in some ways it's social but in some ways it's just basically human what is the first game what is the first game we learn to play as human being peekaboo it's peekaboo we want to hide and be found we want to play hide-and-go-seek we play hide-and-go-seek in my backyard as I was growing up hours and hours in the evenings up until the time it grew dark hide-and-go-seek and that's how we play that's one of the most universal games of our human experience because as we age we actually get more sophisticated at playing hide-and-go-seek or hide-and-seek we as adolescents what do we do as adolescents we push the limits we push the boundaries of sometimes of law sometimes of rules or corporate school or institutional rules we push the boundaries and and we kind of with the hopes that we are covering our tracks well that nobody's gonna find out nobody will find out when I cover my track nobody will know that I've I've been caught nobody will catch me worst thing to be an adolescent is to be caught then they go on it I thought I covered it so we do play hide-and-seek as adolescents but it gets even more sophisticated as as adults because as adults we are able to mmm we become kind of magicians you know what a magician does the way a magician works is is that he'll hold the coin here and disappears it's actually here's let's look here look here while I hold look here while I hold the coin here look over here be distracted with this while this hand is at work and that's that's just a just a metaphor for how we like to continue in a more sophisticated pattern of of hiding seek hide-and-seek we like to think that we are elusive that we won't be caught with aging and yet you stand in front of that mirror I stand in front of the mirror in my bathroom and I look at my mirror and I say who is that guy somebody come here got a stranger in my bathroom and he's old there's no no getting around it we're going to age and it's going to show up in our bodies and in our our functioning and I show up in our social relationships because there is such a thing as ageism which we experience in our societies and it's going to show up in our attitudes also and I say it especially becomes critical and difficult if we if we don't pay attention to what comes up in our lives and internally in particular you know when we were kids we believed in Santa Claus when we were children when we were teenagers we laughed about Santa Claus we became adults we became Santa Claus and now in elderhood we look like Santa Claus cannot get around the fact that we are change but that we are aging can't get around that but you can decide what your attitude will be about your aging and that's where my work comes in enable you to go through this process with a consciousness and a processing of some of the emotional spiritual dimensions that are inherent in this but I think are inherent in this aging process when it's a it's we enter into what's called the sage stage in Hindu thinking Hindus looked at life as four stages four stages that they had the first stage was we're a student we're learners we are spend our lives discovering and understanding the second stage is producing we produce something and it's kind of a householding stage we can develop a household we develop an economy kind of an interesting aside is that the Greek word for a house and household is Oikos and from that word we get economy Oikonia Oikonia so this householding is a inherent again in our human experience I mean from students we become householders or productive people we build businesses we build our wealth we build our purposefulness in life we are involved in contributing to the world in which we live third stage in the Hindu thought is we become wanderers we we get to the point where we say and I'm not sure what this is all for what's all this about back in the sixties we had that song from Bert backer act I think it was Bert backer act what's it all about Alfie Alfie is it just the moment we live what's it all about when it started out Alfie isn't there is something more to life than just making money and what is the purpose of this productivity and the Hindu thought the person went out into the wilderness they went out into the forest actually out in the forest began to ask the questions of what is this all about who am I what do I what how do I make sense of this life they may spend years doing that it's a solitary event which they go through and then after they had their time in the wilderness and know that they're ready to return they come back to the village for the fourth stage and the fourth stage is the stage of the sage of wisdom they bring their sagacious their sagacious understanding their their wonderful rich understanding of life back to the village they say to the villagers here's what I offer here's what I now have to offer and in exchange for their for their sage wisdom they receive sustenance they receive rice in their bowl they receive a place to sleep and that's the way in which Hindu thinking thinks about life and when we're in elderhood we're in that sagacious stage that sage stage I like to call it to a stage when we are have something unique to offer and that is that is our our our intelligence and well-being that we bring into that stage in other places I've seen that there are two ways of looking a lot that stage of life you can go be an airplane high above the clouds of a thunderstorm look for an opening and dive down to land and that's a terrifying experience or you can start out over the ocean coming into Honolulu and have a nice glide down to the landing pad that's the kind of thing I want to do with you in my coaching we're going to take a break for about a minute give a chance for people to see some more about think tech and don't forget to donate to think tech Hawaii thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tours the atherton family foundation carol mong Lee and the friends of think tech the center for microbial oceanography research and education collateral analytics the cook foundation Dwayne Carisu the Hawaii Community Foundation the Hawaii Council of Associations of apartment owners Hawaii energy the Hawaii energy Policy Forum Hawaiian Electric Company integrated security technologies Galen Ho of BAE Systems Kamehameha Schools MW Group the Shidler Family Foundation the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust Volo Foundation Yuriko J. Sugimura thanks so much to you all from Honolulu we're back with elderhood age and gracefully I'm Larry grim in the rest of this program the program that you have before you with my other other videos in which I interview most people people on most of them they're organized around what I call five spiritual tasks these are observations I've made that with people that I've worked with that there are five spiritual tasks that present themselves at this time of life you you'll get more of the exposure to those in the other videos and also as you do the coaching with me but let me just briefly review those first one that I've noticed is grieving we do more grieving that we think we're ever going to do and the grief experience is a grief experience that keeps coming back sometimes and revisiting us and we wonder why don't we get over some of this for one thing grief increases there's a number of reasons that we get are experiencing this grief maybe loss of a job maybe loss of an identity maybe loss of a relationship loss of children sometimes loss of friends and family members as we age into elderhood suddenly we find our life has more losses than we thought we'd ever experience that's supposed to be a time of loss and all my life gaining these things now they seem to be falling away but they're not well it's not huge I mean it is huge but what's even huge more difficult is the experience of the grief that goes along with that so part of coaching is to learn how to live with grief live with grief and to process through it and recover from that grief so that's part of the coaching first part second part has to do with our stories we have stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves who are you very likely that you have a story of where you start off and saying something like I always do I never if you look closely at that statement you'll find that always is not accurate and never is not accurate and that part of what we do is tell ourselves these stories as a way of understanding of shaping who we are in the everyday life that we live and it may be from an event in the past that we need to process and think about and get derive something of importance to it maybe something we need to reconcile some aspect that we need to revisit our lives what are the stories that help shape who you are and what are the new stories that you want to take on in this elderhood time we sort out our stuff when we get to elderhood you know you looked around the house and you think how did I get all this stuff but every piece of that stuff has a story attached to it and you'll you'll determine what to do with the stuff in accordance with the stories that you have a emotionally attached to those so you can always look at those stories figure out where you are and what you want to keep once you want to discard what you want to rewrite actually the third thing the third spiritual task I call them spiritual tasks but if that sounds like too much work let's call them spiritual discoveries because that's part of what happens in coaching is this discovery the third thing is forgiving I'm not talking about a religious mandate you've got to go out forgive if you don't feel like forgiving I'm talking about a kind of human impulse that arises that people have a need to forgive not to forget but to forgive not to reconcile but to forgive so that they themselves we ourselves are set free from the burden of revenge or anger or or accountability that we hold over someone else you can unilaterally forgive and we look at that in the coaching because it can be very binding not forgiving somebody you can bind yourself up not forgiving others not forgiving yourself the fourth thing is preparing and there are lots of ways that we look at preparing and in my programs I look at the externals preparing from a healthy program coaching in a health program to preparing for the help of a social worker hospice care for nursing for a place to live as we age thinking about these things in concrete terms so that we're not caught by surprise when we come down through those clouds suddenly hit the runway yeah so preparing there's lots of things to do in preparing externally but also there's an internal preparation and that internal preparation is how do you envision your life how do you envision your life in this life but also in the life to come how do you envision your adulthood in this life and also in the life to come many people will think about the things that they have learned as children and suddenly have a surge of oh wondering what heaven is about and hell is about or wondering if how it's going to how they're going to experience this life after life process we'll look at that too in our coaching and then the fifth thing is letting go I have wandered the halls of my hospice in Denver area and I had patient daughter come out in the hallway and say you know mom is just so strong she just will not let go and letting go is very very difficult for us in the in the elderhood process they have so much that we find ourselves having to let go it can be the things that we've lost things that have been taken from us or the things that we have put aside even even if it's the best thing for us we still have have a grief and a need to let go so those are the things that the five tasks and the five discoveries that you'll have as you do coaching with me and here's what the program consists of first of all contact me contact me with a telephone number or the email address you see below and I will respond I'll be in touch with you and I'll give you a one-hour conversation on the phone and we can get to know each other and begin building trust and then I'll invite you to a six-month-long online webinar in aging aging gracefully and it's the concepts that are in this program that I've been putting out in this program but we'll look at each one particularly and I hope that you'll have a webcam so that we can see each other in video conferencing that's when I have the best relationship then and or if even sooner than that we can contract for one-on-one coaching online and do that one-on-one coaching on an hourly basis and then finally there'll be a one-on monthly online sage meeting meeting of sage people meeting of the sages the elder hood and we'll have a chance to share with one another our journeys in elderhood so it begins with contacting me at that email or telephone number and I hope you will do that soon and we can start this process I'll talk about terms on the telephone and generally good a good framework is of six weeks is a good framework to think of so that at the end of six weeks we reevaluate what's been helpful for you what's been good what hasn't been helpful and and what to continue with her or or leave behind so the principal benefit of what you will experience is to undergo a transformation transformation is growth you've seen that bumper sticker perhaps aging is mandatory growth is optional I'm offering you this opportunity for growth in your elderhood I'm your you are the actor of course I'm just the director I come alongside you and listen to what you have to offer and what your best skills are what your orientation is and then we expand on it elaborate it and you'll come out of six weeks I believe feeling confident feeling rounded feeling stronger and more excited about this elderhood experience and making it what you want something that's so real and so wonderful you never thought it could happen years ago I landed in Hawaii then in Colorado 25 years I wanted my children to just set me on a mountaintop say I'll die there don't worry about me and then I ended up coming to Hawaii and unbeknownst to me I ended up applying for work with Bristol hospice was hired to be a chaplain something that I love doing and and it's in my elder I came out of retirement to engage again in something that's part of who I am as as a minister and as a pastoral care person I drive an electric vehicle which is consistent with my values with the environment I have an opportunity to care for people and to reach out anyways I've started singing again I had a I'm taking voice lessons from a local teacher and I'm singing in a choral group my life is so rich and wonderful I want yours to be that way as well Larry Grimm aging gracefully elderhood is for you