00:00:02
Speaker 1: Welcome to get connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on one oh six point seven Light FM.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Good morning, and thanks for listening to get connected. All around the world, there is a huge age shift going on. As a species, humans are living longer. We're all fortunate to live at a time when science has made it possible to stretch out our lives. So maybe, unlike your grandparents, you have time for a second career, to travel after retirement, to volunteer, to spend time with family, to live wherever you want. But what is the plan to make those things happen when we're living longer? What is your playbook to live better as long as possible. My guest is health and aging expert Stuart Kaplan, CEO of Self Help Community Services in New York and with Marcus Riley, co author of the new book Your Aging Advantage, The Seven New Stages of Aging. Stuart Kaplin, thank you for being on the show.
00:00:59
Speaker 3: Good to be here with you. Thank you.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: We've discussed several times on this show. Recently stewed how the elderly population in New York is growing faster than any other age group beyond the numbers, why is that significant? How does having more people over sixty five than any other age group impact everyone?
00:01:20
Speaker 3: Certainly, the growing aging population is one that everybody talks about. The question is how are we viewing that population. We need to rethink what aging means. Longevity has added many years to our lives. For the phrase its people commonly uses, does it add life to our years? The way we view the aging population from a resource standpoint, from a policy standpoint, all need to be rethought. When we used to have longevity to age sixty five or seventy, we are now seeing longevity a decade more, at least into early eighties. So we need to rethink the way we see the aging population.
00:02:09
Speaker 2: It's very interesting. When I was growing up thirty forty years ago, at a fiftieth birthday party, I'm sure you remember, people had black balloons and they had the grim Reaper. You know, it's very different now you work with the elderly population. What is unique to people in old age? What is it about those years that we don't understand till we get there.
00:02:33
Speaker 3: So, first of all, that fifty year old mark that you refer to with black balloons, it sort of suggests that we're going up a hill and when you hit fifty there's a declination, an inevitable declination. That is not the case, and that is the philosophy of our book. But in fact it's the way we live life. People no longer to think about fifty as the time where all things change. In fact, as you said in the opening, it's a time for rethinking new stages of life. And that's why we have created the book that talks about stages of living as compared to thinking about aging as a linear progression that has to be followed year after year after year. In fact, we live life moving back and forth.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: You have those stages in the book, seven new stages, with that model that goes from twenty five to one hundred plus. It used to be there was an off ramp sort of at sixty five plus, the off ramp to the end of the road. Your stages, I wonder if you could talk about them. Notable to me was that they were filled with opportunities.
00:03:48
Speaker 3: So our stages begin at young adult and move forward through six other stages, which conclude with something called larth stage, which is a stage of wisdom and settlement and fulfillment in life. And so the stages number one take you through life's journey, but recognize that you can move back and forth within the stages based on your passions, your interests, and your potential. So those stages are one that talk to people in terms of what are the activities that you are going through in life? Be they family, be they economics, be they work, be they location, where you want to live, how you want to live, And that's what the stages provide for. And indeed in the book we detail criteria for each of the stages, and notably, stages can overlap. So again going back to the concept that aging is not necesscessarily linear, a stage might run from age twenty five to forty, but the next stage might go from age thirty five to age fifty. So there's overlap because it is not tied to the day you were born or the date that is on your birth certificate.
00:05:20
Speaker 2: Can you give us an example of what you mean to go back and forth between stages.
00:05:25
Speaker 3: So we have a concept called flicker, and the flicker phase means that there may be a life event that propels you forward in stages. For example, she moves you into a more advanced state if you are very active in sports and terrific. When you are twenty five years old, you may all of a sudden find yourself in a stage that isn't just typically young adult, which is what the chronology would place you in, but would put you into something that as mid adult, because there's a place where you are settled more in terms of your life experiences, people you're associating with, places you may go, and so that would move you forward. On the other side of that, you may have a health setback when you are fifty or sixty years old that all of a sudden lands you in a condition that makes you feel like you're in a supported living stage, which might be in the sixty five or seventy year range, But after a period of rehabilitation, you can move back into your earliest stage. Similarly, a mental health the children moving out of the house, a divorce, a loss of a loved one again may move you forward because all of a sudden, you sit back, you begin to reflect, but there's no need for us to be settled in that stage. It's based on your purpose, it's based on your expectations, it's based on your activities. It is very much about your mindset that moves you back and forth between stages.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: My guest is Stuart Kaplan. He is CEO of Self Help Community Services in New York and co author of Your Aging Advantage, The Seven New Stages of Aging, a practical, step by step roadmap to take charge of your future, design a life of passion and purpose and thrive in every decade. You're listening to get connected on one oh six point seven light FM. I'mina del Rio. When we get to a certain point in our lives, people can feel as if they're wandering. You did your things you plan to do. You got married, you had kids, you built a career, you put your kids through college. This book is centered around goals. What is the importance of setting new goals?
00:07:56
Speaker 3: So understanding your purpose and where you would like to go is very much about your mindset as well as setting out specific, smaller objectives that get you to your goals. So sometimes somebody says, oh, I would love to live on the West Coast, I would love to jump out of an airplane. I would love to get remarried. That doesn't happen on the next day. So we can break those goals into small steps that get us there. Too often we are overwhelmed by the thought of a goal without thinking about the process for getting there. But if we go through a process and we include others in that process, it doesn't have to be only us. We sometimes think that it's my goal and therefore I'm totally responsible for it. Well, you are the person who is the center of that. But there are lots of resources. Family, there are friends, there are the Internet. There's lots of ways that we can work toward achieving the goal, and so if you do a step by step process, it's you are much more likely to get the same as in work. This is not just about life. This is as in life. Achieving goals should be a step by step process in that direction, and if there's a setback, take the setback, embrace it, and then move forward together.
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Let's talk about setbacks for a moment, though, because it seems like the older you get, the more things you have in your way, sometimes practical barriers. We can all move to Florida, we can't all afford it. We might have family nearby. When the outcome from a distance is not what you want, a how do we deal with it and be what's the importance of the mindset in the way we deal with it.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: Mindset is primary. We'll use that throughout the book because is the way we approach setbacks as well as the way we approach achievements. So if there is a setback, take it as exactly that there are bumps along the road in life. They will always be there. If you see them as major hurdles, they are going to be major hurdles. If you see them as just a bump, a speed bump, and think about it in the context of speed bump. Speed bump comes, you slow down, and if you're a driver, you want to stand what I'm talking about. You slow down, you go over the bump, and then you proceed again. You pick up speed after the speed bump. The same could be true with bumps in the road in life. As you're trying to attain a goal, we should not see them as obstacles that stop us or make us turn around or make us go someplace else. If you hit those, then you rethink, you reset and move forward again. There are people who see life as a glass half full. There are people who see there's a glass half empty. Both are correct, but how you think about it helps you to move forward toward your goals.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: How impactful is purpose? You've mentioned it, especially in older age. And if you don't know what your purpose is, you don't know what you should do next. How do you find it?
00:11:24
Speaker 3: So there are a portion in the book where we actually talk about how do you identify what your goals are? And there's a decision making process that goes on as well. But just start to jot down some of the things that you believe your goals are. Now they may not all be. And so after you put down a list of three or four or ten, look back over the list once it's there in front of you and say, oh, how realistic is this? Which one do I really want to Which you prioritize? And in the book we talk about how to prioritize. You prioritize your goals. And if you had ten at the beginning, if you're prolific and you've made a big list, Okay, we can't accomplish everything. Go back to say which are the priorities, or which are the ones that are most important to me, or which are the ones that are more achievable in your own mind? You think about what purpose you have toward those goals, how do they serve you best? Why did you put them down in the first place, and then just reprioritize them. And then there's a decision making process, and we talk about how to make decisions as well, because people sometimes get caught up in I'm not sure what to do, I'm wavering which way should I go? We talk about it in the book How to Do That. But priorities may often be driven by finances, by family, and by potential. Do you have the ability to do something?
00:13:00
Speaker 2: You do? Talk about how to deal with indecision, which I think is very important. That can be very taxing. But finances, finances are always going to impact how we live. Again, since you work with an elderly population, what would you say about how well people plan and what they wish they had done differently?
00:13:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, planning is a big, big issue for in the aging process as well as once you are older, you know, have you done the proper planning. So people often plan for their finances. They give thought to it in advance. They often think about some of the advanced directives that we now use as sort of common nomenclature about you know, living wills and you know how you want to be cared for if you reach a stage which requires care. But we don't plan for life's course necessarily. We let that happen, and it's often driven by our work, environment and family. And so if we go beyond, there is more to life. We spend forty hours a week at work, some people spend one hundred hours a week at work. But if we think about the other aspects and begin to plan fully work through the process of what else is important to me again back to purpose, that that will help you to walk through a path that you think about in advance. We don't plan. We do too little planning. If you ask me, what's the thing that we don't do enough of? As we're going through an aging process. We don't plan for aging. We allow it to happen because each day, yes, we grow a day older. But again, if you think of it in state, in stages of aging, you're not growing older every day. When you were nine before that birthday party with the black balloons, when you were forty nine the day before, and then you have the party the day fifty. Oftentimes people are so do you feel different, And the answer very often is no, I feel the same as I felt yesterday. So the chronology that we have in our mind that society has taught us because we put candles on the cake is not the way we actually live life anymore. Give in longevity given the word retirement and no longer carries the connotations that carried decades ago. People are not retiring at the age of sixty well, sixty five is still used as a as a magic number. People all too often are just blowing right through that or retiring early again, going to stages say you know, I'm ready, I've done what I want to do with life. I want to do something different. Retiring from this work, from this job, from this segment. We are not retiring from life. We are retiring from himent pertains to work. That's the way it was set up, based on our social security system, going back again back to the nineteen thirties. But we use retirement as something as okay, retirement over life is done. I'm going to sit back and let's see how long I could just sit on the couch. That is not the way we truly live life anymore.
00:16:32
Speaker 2: It just occurred to me while you were saying this. You know, so many people get joy in planning vacations, which is a week at a time. Imagine this satisfaction of planning out your years and thinking about those as they come up and being ready when they arrive.
00:16:47
Speaker 3: Part of the planning totally correct. But we do not think like that. So we need to rethink aging. We need to rethink life stages and where we would like to be. And if you can envision yourselves, where would I like to be five years from now? Where would I like to be ten years or fifteen years from now? And we realize that things change along the way, so again we make adjustments as activities and events in our lives come about. But it helps us to see beyond that tipping point we put before at the hill of fifty, but we could put it at sixty five. We set it wherever you want, but that tipping point is what upsets our healthy and beneficial and future view of life. Beyond wherever you set that tipping point for yourself.
00:17:44
Speaker 2: There's a great opportunity to start planning with the new book Your Aging Advantage, The Seven New Stages of Aging, co written by Stuart Kaplan, who is also CEO of Self Help Community Services in New York. Thank you for being on to get connected.
00:17:58
Speaker 3: It has been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: This has been get connected with Nina del Rio on one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the station. If you missed any part of our show or want to share it, visit our website for downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm dot com. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Welcome to get connected with Nina del Rio, a weekly conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on one oh six point seven Light FM.
00:00:13
Speaker 2: Good morning, and thanks for listening to get connected. All around the world, there is a huge age shift going on. As a species, humans are living longer. We're all fortunate to live at a time when science has made it possible to stretch out our lives. So maybe, unlike your grandparents, you have time for a second career, to travel after retirement, to volunteer, to spend time with family, to live wherever you want. But what is the plan to make those things happen when we're living longer? What is your playbook to live better as long as possible. My guest is health and aging expert Stuart Kaplan, CEO of Self Help Community Services in New York and with Marcus Riley, co author of the new book Your Aging Advantage, The Seven New Stages of Aging. Stuart Kaplin, thank you for being on the show.
00:00:59
Speaker 3: Good to be here with you. Thank you.
00:01:02
Speaker 2: We've discussed several times on this show. Recently stewed how the elderly population in New York is growing faster than any other age group beyond the numbers, why is that significant? How does having more people over sixty five than any other age group impact everyone?
00:01:20
Speaker 3: Certainly, the growing aging population is one that everybody talks about. The question is how are we viewing that population. We need to rethink what aging means. Longevity has added many years to our lives. For the phrase its people commonly uses, does it add life to our years? The way we view the aging population from a resource standpoint, from a policy standpoint, all need to be rethought. When we used to have longevity to age sixty five or seventy, we are now seeing longevity a decade more, at least into early eighties. So we need to rethink the way we see the aging population.
00:02:09
Speaker 2: It's very interesting. When I was growing up thirty forty years ago, at a fiftieth birthday party, I'm sure you remember, people had black balloons and they had the grim Reaper. You know, it's very different now you work with the elderly population. What is unique to people in old age? What is it about those years that we don't understand till we get there.
00:02:33
Speaker 3: So, first of all, that fifty year old mark that you refer to with black balloons, it sort of suggests that we're going up a hill and when you hit fifty there's a declination, an inevitable declination. That is not the case, and that is the philosophy of our book. But in fact it's the way we live life. People no longer to think about fifty as the time where all things change. In fact, as you said in the opening, it's a time for rethinking new stages of life. And that's why we have created the book that talks about stages of living as compared to thinking about aging as a linear progression that has to be followed year after year after year. In fact, we live life moving back and forth.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: You have those stages in the book, seven new stages, with that model that goes from twenty five to one hundred plus. It used to be there was an off ramp sort of at sixty five plus, the off ramp to the end of the road. Your stages, I wonder if you could talk about them. Notable to me was that they were filled with opportunities.
00:03:48
Speaker 3: So our stages begin at young adult and move forward through six other stages, which conclude with something called larth stage, which is a stage of wisdom and settlement and fulfillment in life. And so the stages number one take you through life's journey, but recognize that you can move back and forth within the stages based on your passions, your interests, and your potential. So those stages are one that talk to people in terms of what are the activities that you are going through in life? Be they family, be they economics, be they work, be they location, where you want to live, how you want to live, And that's what the stages provide for. And indeed in the book we detail criteria for each of the stages, and notably, stages can overlap. So again going back to the concept that aging is not necesscessarily linear, a stage might run from age twenty five to forty, but the next stage might go from age thirty five to age fifty. So there's overlap because it is not tied to the day you were born or the date that is on your birth certificate.
00:05:20
Speaker 2: Can you give us an example of what you mean to go back and forth between stages.
00:05:25
Speaker 3: So we have a concept called flicker, and the flicker phase means that there may be a life event that propels you forward in stages. For example, she moves you into a more advanced state if you are very active in sports and terrific. When you are twenty five years old, you may all of a sudden find yourself in a stage that isn't just typically young adult, which is what the chronology would place you in, but would put you into something that as mid adult, because there's a place where you are settled more in terms of your life experiences, people you're associating with, places you may go, and so that would move you forward. On the other side of that, you may have a health setback when you are fifty or sixty years old that all of a sudden lands you in a condition that makes you feel like you're in a supported living stage, which might be in the sixty five or seventy year range, But after a period of rehabilitation, you can move back into your earliest stage. Similarly, a mental health the children moving out of the house, a divorce, a loss of a loved one again may move you forward because all of a sudden, you sit back, you begin to reflect, but there's no need for us to be settled in that stage. It's based on your purpose, it's based on your expectations, it's based on your activities. It is very much about your mindset that moves you back and forth between stages.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: My guest is Stuart Kaplan. He is CEO of Self Help Community Services in New York and co author of Your Aging Advantage, The Seven New Stages of Aging, a practical, step by step roadmap to take charge of your future, design a life of passion and purpose and thrive in every decade. You're listening to get connected on one oh six point seven light FM. I'mina del Rio. When we get to a certain point in our lives, people can feel as if they're wandering. You did your things you plan to do. You got married, you had kids, you built a career, you put your kids through college. This book is centered around goals. What is the importance of setting new goals?
00:07:56
Speaker 3: So understanding your purpose and where you would like to go is very much about your mindset as well as setting out specific, smaller objectives that get you to your goals. So sometimes somebody says, oh, I would love to live on the West Coast, I would love to jump out of an airplane. I would love to get remarried. That doesn't happen on the next day. So we can break those goals into small steps that get us there. Too often we are overwhelmed by the thought of a goal without thinking about the process for getting there. But if we go through a process and we include others in that process, it doesn't have to be only us. We sometimes think that it's my goal and therefore I'm totally responsible for it. Well, you are the person who is the center of that. But there are lots of resources. Family, there are friends, there are the Internet. There's lots of ways that we can work toward achieving the goal, and so if you do a step by step process, it's you are much more likely to get the same as in work. This is not just about life. This is as in life. Achieving goals should be a step by step process in that direction, and if there's a setback, take the setback, embrace it, and then move forward together.
00:09:30
Speaker 2: Let's talk about setbacks for a moment, though, because it seems like the older you get, the more things you have in your way, sometimes practical barriers. We can all move to Florida, we can't all afford it. We might have family nearby. When the outcome from a distance is not what you want, a how do we deal with it and be what's the importance of the mindset in the way we deal with it.
00:09:55
Speaker 3: Mindset is primary. We'll use that throughout the book because is the way we approach setbacks as well as the way we approach achievements. So if there is a setback, take it as exactly that there are bumps along the road in life. They will always be there. If you see them as major hurdles, they are going to be major hurdles. If you see them as just a bump, a speed bump, and think about it in the context of speed bump. Speed bump comes, you slow down, and if you're a driver, you want to stand what I'm talking about. You slow down, you go over the bump, and then you proceed again. You pick up speed after the speed bump. The same could be true with bumps in the road in life. As you're trying to attain a goal, we should not see them as obstacles that stop us or make us turn around or make us go someplace else. If you hit those, then you rethink, you reset and move forward again. There are people who see life as a glass half full. There are people who see there's a glass half empty. Both are correct, but how you think about it helps you to move forward toward your goals.
00:11:13
Speaker 2: How impactful is purpose? You've mentioned it, especially in older age. And if you don't know what your purpose is, you don't know what you should do next. How do you find it?
00:11:24
Speaker 3: So there are a portion in the book where we actually talk about how do you identify what your goals are? And there's a decision making process that goes on as well. But just start to jot down some of the things that you believe your goals are. Now they may not all be. And so after you put down a list of three or four or ten, look back over the list once it's there in front of you and say, oh, how realistic is this? Which one do I really want to Which you prioritize? And in the book we talk about how to prioritize. You prioritize your goals. And if you had ten at the beginning, if you're prolific and you've made a big list, Okay, we can't accomplish everything. Go back to say which are the priorities, or which are the ones that are most important to me, or which are the ones that are more achievable in your own mind? You think about what purpose you have toward those goals, how do they serve you best? Why did you put them down in the first place, and then just reprioritize them. And then there's a decision making process, and we talk about how to make decisions as well, because people sometimes get caught up in I'm not sure what to do, I'm wavering which way should I go? We talk about it in the book How to Do That. But priorities may often be driven by finances, by family, and by potential. Do you have the ability to do something?
00:13:00
Speaker 2: You do? Talk about how to deal with indecision, which I think is very important. That can be very taxing. But finances, finances are always going to impact how we live. Again, since you work with an elderly population, what would you say about how well people plan and what they wish they had done differently?
00:13:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, planning is a big, big issue for in the aging process as well as once you are older, you know, have you done the proper planning. So people often plan for their finances. They give thought to it in advance. They often think about some of the advanced directives that we now use as sort of common nomenclature about you know, living wills and you know how you want to be cared for if you reach a stage which requires care. But we don't plan for life's course necessarily. We let that happen, and it's often driven by our work, environment and family. And so if we go beyond, there is more to life. We spend forty hours a week at work, some people spend one hundred hours a week at work. But if we think about the other aspects and begin to plan fully work through the process of what else is important to me again back to purpose, that that will help you to walk through a path that you think about in advance. We don't plan. We do too little planning. If you ask me, what's the thing that we don't do enough of? As we're going through an aging process. We don't plan for aging. We allow it to happen because each day, yes, we grow a day older. But again, if you think of it in state, in stages of aging, you're not growing older every day. When you were nine before that birthday party with the black balloons, when you were forty nine the day before, and then you have the party the day fifty. Oftentimes people are so do you feel different, And the answer very often is no, I feel the same as I felt yesterday. So the chronology that we have in our mind that society has taught us because we put candles on the cake is not the way we actually live life anymore. Give in longevity given the word retirement and no longer carries the connotations that carried decades ago. People are not retiring at the age of sixty well, sixty five is still used as a as a magic number. People all too often are just blowing right through that or retiring early again, going to stages say you know, I'm ready, I've done what I want to do with life. I want to do something different. Retiring from this work, from this job, from this segment. We are not retiring from life. We are retiring from himent pertains to work. That's the way it was set up, based on our social security system, going back again back to the nineteen thirties. But we use retirement as something as okay, retirement over life is done. I'm going to sit back and let's see how long I could just sit on the couch. That is not the way we truly live life anymore.
00:16:32
Speaker 2: It just occurred to me while you were saying this. You know, so many people get joy in planning vacations, which is a week at a time. Imagine this satisfaction of planning out your years and thinking about those as they come up and being ready when they arrive.
00:16:47
Speaker 3: Part of the planning totally correct. But we do not think like that. So we need to rethink aging. We need to rethink life stages and where we would like to be. And if you can envision yourselves, where would I like to be five years from now? Where would I like to be ten years or fifteen years from now? And we realize that things change along the way, so again we make adjustments as activities and events in our lives come about. But it helps us to see beyond that tipping point we put before at the hill of fifty, but we could put it at sixty five. We set it wherever you want, but that tipping point is what upsets our healthy and beneficial and future view of life. Beyond wherever you set that tipping point for yourself.
00:17:44
Speaker 2: There's a great opportunity to start planning with the new book Your Aging Advantage, The Seven New Stages of Aging, co written by Stuart Kaplan, who is also CEO of Self Help Community Services in New York. Thank you for being on to get connected.
00:17:58
Speaker 3: It has been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
00:18:02
Speaker 1: This has been get connected with Nina del Rio on one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views of the station. If you missed any part of our show or want to share it, visit our website for downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm dot com. Thanks for listening.
