 and welcome to Think Tech Hawaii's program, Don't Just Age and Gage. I'm your host Larry Grimm. Thank you for joining me again. Every two weeks we have the same title program every Tuesday, second Tuesday, and explore the internal issues of aging. Many of our wonderful programs on Think Tech Hawaii are issue-oriented, socially-oriented, social concerns, and I'm so proud of them. Please take advantage of all those, and this one gets a little more focused on the internal dimensions of aging and what's involved and truly aging in such a way that you have an extraordinary elderhood. Will you age so that you are not a victim of your aging but are engaging in planning your life for an extraordinary elderhood? That's what I'm about. I am a pastor, I've been a Presbyterian minister, I've been involved in chaplaincy work with long-term care and hospice care. I've had a great exposure to people of all different stages and ages, and this stage of life has intrigued me for many, many years, and now that I'm part of that stage of life myself and also have come through wonderful learning experiences in caring for people. I can bring the resources of knowledge and expertise into a coaching relationship. My coaching relationship is entitled, So join a global community for your extraordinary elderhood. Would you bring that up, please, on the website? I would like to invite you to join a global community for your extraordinary elderhood at personalcoachingforlifeandfaith.com. Thank you. Well, the question that's kind of plaguing, interesting to me this morning is, why should I have a coach? Why, at this age and stage of life, could I think I would benefit? Do I think I could benefit from a life coach? And we're going to take on that question today. First of all, I could, of course, tell you that I'm the best that you could possibly find. And that's the reason that you should hire me, but that's not persuasive and certainly not convincing. I want to, first of all, make a distinction between coaching and counseling. People who engage in counseling, and I have done counseling, when I do a counseling program, I'm with my person, my client, to explore the past, their past and enable them to discover the dynamics of the past to find out what are the internal conflicts maybe that they carry in themselves that need to be resolved and how they can resolve those. And that's part of my counseling work. But coaching has to do with life goals, a vision of your life, and action plan to reach those. So that I help you identify goals for your life, figure out an action plan with resources. There's such an abundance of resources available. There certainly are on our island, our island here, but no matter where you're looking and watching from, there's an abundance of resources available for you in your aging stage of life. I call that the elderhood life. You had childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and now you have an elderhood. In that elderhood, there is a transition from adulthood to elderhood, and I teach five spiritual tasks that need to be paid attention in order for that shift in that movement and transition to be effective. We go through five stages, or excuse me, five spiritual tasks, grieving, sorting out stories, forgiving, preparing, and letting go. We do exercises around each of those five spiritual tasks that enable my client to feel freer and resolved on some things. Then the point comes of where we say, okay, what's your life going to look like? Here's this elderhood time, and it can be the most productive, it can be with the most exciting and satisfying time of your life in which you integrate all of that past into one seamless flow of your life story. So that's what coaching is about. And that specifically is what my coaching is about, so that you will have an extraordinary elderhood. The one thing that I don't want people to have feel is that they're elderly. I want them to feel as though they're, I don't want them to feel as though we're victims, they are a victim of aging. Rather empowered to make decisions, make choices about their future, and to work towards those. And that's what we'll look at more closely today. What are the dynamics of our life? I'd like to pull up a graphic that's called Four Key. In every human experience, there are four dimensions. There is a spiritual dimension, the blue, a physical dimension, the green, yellow dimension is relational, and the red is economical. And we'll look at all of those, each of those separately. But generally speaking, coaching, as I said, has to do with your vision and your life goals. What do you want in your elderhood? Who are you now as you enter your elderhood? I'm fond of speaking about my brother. My older brother, when he passed the age of 70, he says that he started thinking the first time he'd done it, started thinking to himself, how, when, and where? And of course, what he was talking about, how, when, and where will I die? These are things that he never thought of before. And the stage theorists, I'm a stage theorist, I like to frame my understanding of things in terms of stages. People as we go through stages have separate issues and separate tasks to fulfill, according to that stage of life. And I maintain that we do that as we enter the elderhood as well. It's a movement from productivity and adulthood, creativity and adulthood, external orientation to an inner orientation and adult and elderhood. We asked that question once and all about, what has it been about for me? What is it that I have enjoyed, achieved? How is it that I've made an impact on this world? What am I going to leave behind? And how is it going to benefit society and my family and everybody that I love? So that's, that's the change. That's the shift in a generalized terms, but becomes different specifically for each person and each client that I have. But I want to look at these four dimensions of the human experience with you and talk about elderhood in terms of these four dimensions of the human experience. Let's bring up that graphic now. The first dimension in the upper left hand quadrant is spiritual. And sometimes in our lives, we encounter our sense of weakness and ironically, or perhaps paradoxically, that weakness also becomes a strength or puts us in touch with our strengths. So the spiritual dimension, which is 25% of our lives, is a way of being internally oriented and conscious of what's going on in our interior life. Okay. The interior life involves emotions. It involves belief systems. It involves a consciousness of the divine, a consciousness of spirit. It involves a relationship with something greater than ourselves and the ways in which we think about and phrase our experience, our reflections, our reflections on those experiences. It's a whole internal perspective. And so what are some of the possible goals that you might choose in elderhood that have to do with the spiritual quadrant? For one, you may decide that you would like help in. One of your goals is to minimize the level of anxiety that you're having. I've been, as I said, a Presbyterian minister in my career. And one of the phrases that I'd love to preach about was Jesus words, don't be anxious about tomorrow. Your father in heaven knows what you need. Anxiety is always so strong for us, especially when we're imagining what's going to happen in the future. And again, when we talk about it that way, we're putting ourselves as a victim in the future that we're going to be subjected somehow to the to the horrors of future that we cannot even imagine at this point. And of course, that shoots our anxiety level up. And the higher our anxiety, perhaps you know this already, but the higher our level of our anxiety, the more cortisol we have, and the more the less we have access to our upper brain to our our neocortex. Now the neocortex is involved in analyzing, evaluating, planning, creative thinking, process problem solving. And the more we have anxiety in our future or anxiety about the past, even or something that we've brought forward into our lives, the less we're able to access that problem solving tool in our minds. So lowering anxiety has a tremendous impact on enabling us to envision the future and to look plan a future and to respond to the events that come before us and the choices that we have to make in the immediacy of our everyday lives. So up in the spiritual upper left quadrant, we may want very much to have that anxiety level reduced. There are other feelings that come along with that. We may find that we have a great deal of grief, so much loss in life, and that the grief is overwhelming also our ability to make decisions. And so you may wish to minimize and lower the dimensions of grief that you feel in your everyday life even. We can work for that. Maybe that some of the anxiety or some of your feelings and emotions are about guilt from the past. So often if we have guilt and regret, we're living in the past, we have anxiety, we're living in the future, it makes it difficult to live, both of those make it difficult to live in the immediacy of the everyday life with all the confidence and the good skills that you have. So those are some of the issues that come up and some of the possible goals, reduce anxiety, manage grief, reduce guilt, manage guilt and feel free to feel excited about the future of our lives. To be a child again, come as a little child and join in the planning of the future for an exciting and really wonderful elderhood. Now the upper right hand corner is what we usually think of aging, it's the physicality. So many of us feel as though we're dragged kicking and screaming into this stage of life by the diminishment of our physical ability. And it may happen that there are our physicality changes for sure. It does not necessarily mean that it's going to be a downhill slide into decrepitude. Although I think our society and our culture believes that and really wants us to think that that is so. I once was looking at a magazine, a yoga book that I had picked up, slipped through the pages and I found a woman who was bent in half in a position that I could hardly imagine even even moving towards myself. This was when I was much younger. And I read and she was actually 97 years old and was bent in half in this position of yoga. She had begun her yoga practice at the age of 70 and she was able to really to rise up in capabilities that she would never have imagined herself capable of doing earlier. So there are things that can be done in this elder stage of life physically that you can plan on and pursue when you have established goals like that. So physicality has to do with everything that we can measure. What do you need to decide about your health? What do you need to know? My coaching is both emotional and that upper left hand quadrant and informational in the upper right hand quadrant. What are some of the things that you need to take care of physically that is a goal for you. You want to reduce weight. You want to strengthen your body. You want to expand your capacity to degree. You want to sleep better. Sleep is so important for the processes of aging. What are the goals that you want to establish with regard to your physicality? Want to do more hiking? Do you want to go out on the surf board and learn to surf? Why not? But it takes some steps and some stages of planning. So when we are working with a live coach we are first identifying what we want. A lot of people don't know and are afraid to ask for what they really want in their lives. Second, making an action plan on how to reach those. When you have a plan you can change course if you need to. You can modify the plan so that it is most helpful and effective. As someone said, if you don't know where you are going you are certainly not going to get there. We have yearnings and longings for our hearts and bodies. We really can have those clearly identified so that we are moving towards those. And as we establish those we feel freer throughout our lives. Throughout from day to day it gives us an opportunity to take advantage of what is in the immediacy and the right now, the here and now. So upper left hand quadrant, facing me, upper left hand quadrant, spirituality in your inner life, upper right hand quadrant, physicality. And as we get closer to our dying physically the more excited and fulfilling life can be. More exciting and fulfilling our lives can be. The bottom right hand corner deals with our cultural norms. I'm sorry, the bottom left hand corner, the yellow, deals with our cultural norms and ourselves. What are the societies that you have been a part of? Where did you get the values that you hold dear? All of us inherit different values. We inherit a belief system from a church, from a religious body, from our cultural setting. From our schools we are taught certain values that we are expected to uphold. In our family life we have certain values that are transmitted to us and shape us as into the people that we are. Well what is, at some point we have to make those our own. We make those our own by, or don't make them our own, by critically analyzing what we want to believe and what works for us in terms of those values. I had one patient, one client whose mother was in the, she just moved her into a facility for her long-term care. And every time she went to visit her mother, her mother would just tell her, why did you do this to me? You're supposed to keep me at home. That's where I belong with you and your home. She was the oldest daughter in the family and she had a cultural background that taught this that the oldest daughter had to take care of them, of the mother aging parent in her home. And she had had her mother in her home and came home at one point the daughter did one day and found her mother on the kitchen floor. She had fallen and could not get up and did not have anybody to call, any way to get any help. She was on the floor for a good part of the day. Well the daughter said that was it. The daughter had to work, the daughter had a husband and children to take care of. So mom moved into a facility and their mom had safety, security. People who took care of her were conscious of her every day, all day long. And so I said, you know, you did, but the daughter felt so guilty, she said. And I said, but you did the thing that was the best for your mother. You gave her the best gift you could, which was a place of security, warmth and provision. But we worked with her guilt and she was able to decide not to feel guilty anymore. And so she took on a different set of values from what her culture had intended her to hold. There's a place where we have, we have to find ourselves within the system of values that we hold, either within it or opt for another one. And part of coaching is to be exposed to others, to have that looked at closely and to make some different choices. The reason that is, is because the lower right hand corner or the red cycle there, part of the cycle is economical, I call it. Now I like the word economical because it comes from the Greek word eikos, the Greek word eikos means household. And so when we talk about economical, we're talking about the whole household of life, how we structure our household, how we come and go, how things look, what, how does the environment reflect our values? How do the things that we engage in reflect our values? If I am value from, if I bought into a cultural value of love my neighbor as I love myself, am I opening myself up to my neighbor? Am I economically moving towards that and caring for one another in that way? And then what way did I join a church? Did I join a service organization? Do I want to be involved in international work, foreign affairs relations? How do we then take our energy and resources of time, energy and money and shape those into activity in the world in which we live? Yeah, so, so what could be more fulfilling than to have an opportunity in your elderhood stage of life to be a part of mentoring program or to read books to children at a local school? There are so many opportunities to then to do this kind of thing at this stage of life. And if you know what goals you're going to reach out for in that area, you know how to make an action plan. And that's what this whole thing is about the human experience and the four keys to unlock your extraordinary elderhood. You work in the four different areas. Now you can work with anybody in these four areas and I maintain that anytime you and I have made a change of our lives to take on something new, to engage in some kind of endeavor that we haven't been involved in already, we have found a coach, either maybe it was something that we read, but we've found some coaching that helps us model our lives and also to make plans in terms of the goals that we want to reach and to follow through with those. And that's the third important piece of of having a coach. And that's accountability. You have an opportunity to check in every week on a one on one online coaching with me and check into the to I check in with you to see how it's going. Have you kept to your goals this week? Did you did you do what you needed to do in order to lose weight in order to get stronger in order to change your physicality? Did you do some meditation to help strengthen your awareness of God? What have you done? Did you worship with the community so that you have a strong relationship and bond of love within a community that you know? So that's so one on one accountability is planning and accountability is the third piece on third piece in coaching. In addition to that, the second thing that we do be you may you may have been very much aware in your own life with the COVID of how isolated and lonely we can feel. So one of the worst things about aging is that we tend to get lonely, tend to get isolated, cut back. Even our children may not be available to us. They may not be visiting us. They may in fact think that we are not really wanting us to be around wanting them to be around. That's not hardly true, but they may find it difficult to visit while they see maybe we're struggling with some physical issues. We're going to work with that. We're going to find out ways that in fact we can get around that with them. But also we develop an online group of about nine elders who are also interested with you and making your adulthood extraordinary. And I call those elder guilds. So we have a weekly online meeting of your elder guild. And what we do is share the best practices for aging. We do that best practices for aging for those of us who are involved in adulthood, but also for those of us who have parents and other friends and family in adulthood. Best practices for caregiving also. And then finally, I have an Elderhood Academy of which you can be a part that has all kinds of opportunities for learning and growing and expanding your understanding of your own life in that Elderhood. So let me show you again my website, the homepage, landing page of my website. Become a part of a global community for your extraordinary Elderhood. Personal coaching for life and faith has all the contact information you need to get in touch with me. And to take on a free opportunity for a short coaching session with me, just so we can get to know each other, you can kind of test me out. And I wish you the very best in your life. I'll be back in two weeks and I wish you a lo-ha.