Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman

Aging is a natural part of life. As we get older, our physical body changes, our health, and our mind. But what actually happens to us as we age? What does it mean for us and for those we love? And how can we approach aging in a new way? In this episode, I have Dr. Corinne Auman, CEO and Founder of Choice Care Navigators. We discuss the negative views of aging and how we can refrain from it as a natural part of life. Dr. Corinne shares the challenges of retirement, particularly for the baby boomer generation. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that I have yet to really truly bring up or focus an episode around, which is aging. Now, we all know that aging is happening. Some people approach it quite differently than others. You’ve heard me talk a bit about the generations and the different generational experiences, but what happens to us as we get older? What does that mean? And what does it mean for the people that we love and care about as we get older? And also, how can we approach it a little bit differently? You probably know that I am a little bit skeptical or let’s say not fully on board with the traditional ways that we have viewed aging in the past and even treat it mostly today. To talk about this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest for today, Corinne Auman, and she is the founder of Choice Care Navigators as well as the author of a book called Keenagers, which gives us a different new approach to aging. --- Corrine, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Oh, yeah, thank you for hopping on and talking about this important topic because, as we know, everyone out there is getting older, we all have ideas around aging, and we have a lot of different ideas. What are the ideas that you usually encounter, say, in today’s society about what it means to get older and what it means to have your loved ones get older? So I think we are in a pretty ageist society, in the sense that the messaging you typically get around getting older is don’t do it, which, of course, we can’t avoid, so we’ve got this thing that is happening to all of us all the time, we’re going to be older at the end of this podcast than we were at the beginning, and yet we get this messaging from our culture around us that is constantly anti-aging, negative viewpoints on it, prevent it, if at all possible, look as young as you possibly can, which, I mean, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. People are making a lot of money off of your fear of growing older. So, I think that is the predominant view. When you get to actual like retirement years, people typically view those years in one of two ways. They either view it as kind of a time of earned relaxation where you do a lot of vacationing and you spend time with the grandkids, or they view it as a time of just inevitable decline, the end is nigh and there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s just all downhill from here. So, those are the typical kind of viewpoints you see about growing older. And I have to admit that I’ve kind of succumb to it a little bit. Mostly, it’s because I think that that’s what’s pushed by our society. I think about what happens when people grow from their 20s into the 30s and 40s and stuff like that and it’s pretty emphasized to me this loss, this loss of the adventure, this loss of the independence, whereas I’ve actually experienced a little bit of the things that you actually do gain, like I think people sometimes start to become more self-confident, they start to reduce their give-a-fucks, to be able to just like not freak out over small little things anymore. Is that messaging, is someone turning 30 today hearing just overwhelming negative commentary about where their life is going to go in the next 10 years? I think that cultural messaging is overall negative but when you talk to individuals like yourself or the people that I interviewed in the book, this is one of the big things, the reasons why I got into writing the book was because you have this kind of really negative story that we’ve been told. Aging has really been made a villain in our society but when you actually talk to individuals, as they get older, they say things like what you just said, in that there are all these advantages that they’re enjoying as they get older. And that they’re surprised by because nobody talks about them, right? The culture doesn’t tell you that story. And all the things that they are enjoying and doing and experiencing that isn’t part of that negative cultural story because they’re really positive in so many ways and that’s the piece that I think is missing from the story we’re telling about aging. And what brought this passion about in you? What inspired you to want to dedicate your effort, your energy into the topic of aging and ageism? So, I run a care management business and that’s basically a business where you are helping families navigate the healthcare field for their aging loved ones and when I first started that business back in 2012, I thought I was going to be working with 40-year-olds who were caring for 75-year-old parents. And what I have learned over this last decade is I am typically working with 65- or 75-year-olds who are caring for 95- or 105-year-old parents and that has really surprised me over the years. And I realize that my view, the story I had been told, the story I believed about who I was going to be helping and what a 75-year-old is like, it’s all wrong. It’s so different than what I believed it was going to be. And I think so many of us don’t think about it that way, don’t realize it, and I wouldn’t have realized it either except that I’m experiencing it day in and day out in my work. And I think it’s a really important message to try to get to people because you don’t want to plan your future, based on the wrong notions of aging. I think so many people are planning their future thinking, “Oh, at 75, I’m not gonna be in good health, not gonna be able to do things or gonna be retired and sitting around doing nothing,” and, instead, the actual story should be, “At 75, I may have retired from my first job but maybe I’ve started a new job or maybe I’m volunteering,” or, “I am spending a lot of time with the grandkids but I’m gonna be doing a lot of stuff, not just sitting around in poor health and miserable,” which is kind of what the culture tells us 75 is going to be like. So when the culture tells us 75 is going to be like, and I’m not denying it, what does that change for that 40-year-old that you were first expecting to work with? Do you feel like that 40-year-old’s life is being upended by this idea that “I’m running out of time”? So this is a really interesting question. I’ve been doing some workshops based around the book and I’m working on some online workshops for the future and I’ve had a lot of 40, 50-year-olds in these workshops. I had a couple in one of the workshops and the wife after the workshop sent me a picture of a guitar and she said, “This is all your fault,” and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” and her husband who had been in the workshop, who’s in his 40s, had gone out after the workshop and had said, “I have always wanted to learn guitar, I’m gonna go get a guitar, do it because I’m not done yet,” and he had been thinking prior to the workshop, “I’m too old to learn guitar, I’m running out of time,” and he’s in his 40s but he was just kind of like – he had kind of resigned himself to this idea that it was over or that it was too late to learn something new, something like that. And after the workshop, he had gone out and bought this guitar and was taking guitar lessons and doing this thing. And I was really surprised. I mean, I was really pleased that someone in their 40s was already in that mindset of, “It’s too late, I’m out of time,” and going through the workshop with me really helped him go, “No, wait, I’m wrong. I’ve got a long runway ahead of me still. What do I want to do with it?” Interesting. And so she said, “This is all your fault.” Was this from a joking standpoint or was there more she’s upset that all of a sudden there’s guitar noise in the house and everything? Well, I think it was joking. I might have to go back and double check, but I think it was joking, and this is secondhand but she said that he told her that doing the workshop rewired his brain in a good way. It rewired his thinking about what his future looked like. And that’s, boy, if I could do that for every 40-year-old out there who was thinking the way he was thinking, that would be amazing. I mean, it will be game changing, because there’ll be so many people doing a lot of the things and even a lot of the things that we talked about on this podcast about following your passions, which takes a certain amount of energy. And one of the questions someone, maybe someone reaching 50, 55, 60 might be thinking is, “Okay, I have this long career behind me and something and I’m kind of feeling meh about it now, maybe I loved it before, but I wanna start this business. Is it too late? Is there not gonna be too much reward?” and that’s a question I think going through someone’s head that point in time. Yeah. And I think that’s legitimate in the sense that the culture has kind of told us the story of you work one career and then you retire from that and then you’re kind of done. Even the word “retirement” means ceasing to work and that’s really not what retirement is for most people anymore. They retire and maybe they go back to work part time or they start a new business. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs are people in their 50s and 60s