Our guest, Cindy Cox-Roman, a market researcher and gerontologist, joins our retirement podcast to share her perspective on the vital role of Personal Agency.

Psychologist Albert Bandura defines personal agency as "the human capability to influence one's functioning and the course of events by one's actions." As you plan for your life in retirement, it's wise to include personal agency so you can be in the driver's seat of your retirement.

I discuss with Cindy:

How she became interested in Gerontology

What themes are emerging in her research on people 50+

What personal agency is - and why it's important

How personal agency can change over the life course - and any gender differences she sees

What influences agency

How agency can be strengthened

What she's learned about mindful aging - and her advice on aging mindfully

Her new additional role with HelpAge USA

Cindy joins us from Washington, DC.

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Bio

Cindy Cox-Roman is a market researcher, gerontologist, and founder of WIT Consulting LLC, a strategic research firm based in Washington, DC. She works with clients to bring the voice of older people to the design of products, services, and systems. As of October 1, Cindy became the Interim CEO of HelpAge USA, the only US nonprofit that is exclusively focused on the wellbeing and inclusion of older people in low- and middle-income countries.

​Earlier in her career, Cindy headed up the New York Custom Research practice of Yankelovich Partners, a social trend research firm studying the attitudes and opinions of the American public and business leaders. Before that, as a Vice-President at Y&R, she led the development of consumer insights and strategy for global advertising campaigns. She also helped establish the company’s first office in Budapest, Hungary, soon after the Berlin Wall came down in the early 1990s.

Cindy holds a Bachelor’s degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a Master’s degree in Gerontology from the University of Southern California. Recently she has been conducting independent research on older people and personal agency, or the idea of being in the driver’s seat of your life. She’s passionate about this topic and is here to talk more about it today.

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Wise Quotes

On Uncertainty

"And [the research] is a work in progress, but I'll share some themes that have come out, which are also supported by other academic research. And they're very clear and they're very compelling. A major theme is a disconnect between what we often hear about people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, et cetera - that this is the time when you really know yourself. You have life figured out. You have a lot of self-confidence. You see these quotes all the time in interviews with celebrities and things like that. And certainly, there can be a lot of that, but there is a disconnect between that and the reality that for a lot of people, this can be a time of great uncertainty and that's not talked about as much. So in the first research study that I did, I talked qualitatively to primarily women, but also some men about this time in their life.  And one thing I asked a typical research question: If there were three words to describe this time in your life, what would they be? And there was a wide variety of things, but one consistent theme made it clear that this is what I'd call an 'UN' time - because the words that people tended to consistently use to describe this time of the life were words like unpredictable, unsure, and unsettling. Part of it can be the political environment and the economic environment, et cetera. Those are all [key] things, but this was more about internal uncertainty and being unsettled.