Midlife Mixtape

“Shouldn’t take a miracle”: Tracey Milligan, whose foundation provides services for victims of domestic violence, on hard work, serendipity, and “angels” along the way, plus her recent pivot as groundbreaking founder in the financial tech field.

Find Tracey’s work online:

Website: TheMilliganFoundation.org

Twitter:  @milliganfound1

Company: Term Payments

Leave your response for our Listener Question in the comments, or press HERE to record…What’s an album you bought a long time ago and still listen to all the time now – and why?

Here’s Carlos Santana playing in a slightly larger park…

Tracey Milligan 00:00

So I decided, you know what? I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to create an organization specifically to help victims of violence get to safe places, get to where they could be safe.

Nancy Davis Kho 00:14

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:38

Happy April and happy book birthday to TWO new books from the Midlife Mixtape Inner Circle. First up is The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, by Jess Lahey. Jess was on the show in Episode 74 talking about her NYT bestselling parenting book “The Gift of Failure”. In her new book, Jess shares her own experience of addiction and long-term recovery, seamlessly weaving together rich storytelling with compassionate, evidence-based analysis. The result is a supportive, life-saving resource for parents and educators to understand the roots of substance abuse, identify who is most at risk, and employ the most effective prevention measures.

Born into a family of alcoholics and drug abusers, Jessica Lahey spent her early adulthood trying frantically to thwart that multi-generational genetic legacy. She ultimately failed; descending into alcoholism in her thirties, she didn’t find her way out until her early forties. After years in recovery, Lahey was determined to protect her two adolescent sons from their most dangerous inheritance.

Written from a place of compassion rather than shame or judgment, The Addiction Inoculation is a thoughtful and indispensable guide to understanding the roots of substance abuse. It helps identify who is most at risk for addiction and offers parents, educators, and other caregivers practical steps for prevention.

And another book birthday shout-out to Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, aka one of the most generous writers out there, for HER new book “Broken (In the Best Possible Way)”. Jenny is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Furiously Happy and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and her new book is deeply relatable book filled with humor and honesty about depression and anxiety.

As Jenny’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, Jenny brings readers along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way.

With people experiencing anxiety and depression now more than ever, Jenny humanizes what we all face in an all-too-real way, reassuring us that we’re not alone and making us laugh while doing it. From the business ideas that she wants to pitch to Shark Tank to the reason why Jenny can never go back to the post office, Broken leaves nothing to the imagination in the most satisfying way. And of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor―the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball―is present throughout.

Find The Addiction Inoculation and Broken at bookstores, online, and in audio format!

[MUSIC]

Hi Midlife Mixtapers! I’m Nancy Davis Kho, creator and host of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. If you had a preferred brand of audio cassette tape that you shopped for at the mall before swinging by The Limited for some more baggies, I think you’re gonna fit in here just fine.

Before we get to today’s interview, I want to invite you listen ALL the way to the end, because we’re gearing up for another episode where YOU do the talking. I’ve got a question for you to answer – via voicemail, email, or comments in social media – and I’ll compile all of those into our April 27th episode so stick around to hear the question!

I get guest ideas in lots of ways – sometimes I’m pitched by a PR rep, sometimes a listener suggests a person who they’d like to hear from; sometimes I’m the one inviting someone I don’t know onto the show. And every once in a while I think of someone I have known personally for a long time and say, “How has this person not been a guest yet? How have I not invited them on?!” And that’s the case with today’s guest, Tracey Milligan.

Tracey is the founder and Executive Director of The Milligan Foundation, an internationally recognized relocation resource for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking. Having helped over 800 people to free themselves from violence, she has proven herself to be a champion for people in need. Passionate about instilling social change and morality. She is a prolific non-profit representative.

She’s created a payment solution called Term that’s set to change the payment landscape and revolutionize the lives of those who aspire to have more.

[MUSIC]

Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Tracey Milligan, I’m so glad you’re here with me today!

Tracey 04:45

I am glad to be having this conversation with you today.

Nancy 04:49

We have a lot of ground to cover because YOU cover so much ground! So we’re gonna have to move fast, but we always start the podcast with a critical question. What was your first concert, Tracey, and what were the circumstances?

Tracey 05:03

My first concert…I don’t know if this counts as a concert. I want to say I think it does. I am a true Bay Area native, grew up in San Francisco, right off the Castro/Mission/Dolores Park area and it just so happened to be the same neighborhood that Carlos Santana lived in.

Nancy 05:25

Oh, wow.

Tracey 05:26

So when I was a kid, Carlos would just play in the park sometimes. If he had a new song, he’d just be like, “Who in the neighborhood wants to hear? What do you guys think?” I remember summer days, “Carlos is in the park playing!” and you’d run out of the house and just go park on the grass and listen to Carlo’s hits.

Nancy 05:48

That is amazing. You should definitely count that as your first concert because it’s so unique.

Tracey 05:55

Well, I want to say that was probably my very first music experience. But my first real concert in stadium seats was a rap concert. My first concert, I actually got to see Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Whodini. That was my first real REAL concert.

Nancy 06:22

How cool is that?

You and I first met through your work with The Milligan Foundation. I don’t know if you remember this. You and I were at a get together for volunteers for a different fundraiser in Oakland.

Tracey 06:38

Yes, for Children’s Hospital.

Nancy 06:40

Yeah, that’s right. And I didn’t know a soul. We were at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland and I looked around the lobby and knew not a single person and I screwed up my courage and took my Dear Abby advice, like, “Find somebody else who looks like maybe they don’t know everybody, too!” And I’m like, “Look at that lady. She looks nice. I’m going to glom on to her!” And unfortunately for you, it was you.

You told me that night about your work with The Milligan Foundation and I was so impressed and I have followed your work ever since. I wanted to start this conversation by having you talk about this foundation that you started in 2011. Explain what it does and how The Milligan Foundation works?

Tracey 07:21

Sure. Well, The Milligan Foundation is a relocation service for victims of domestic violence and human trafficking and actually, April 6th, will be my 10 year anniversary for starting The Milligan Foundation . So it’s been 10 years…

Nancy 07:41

Congratulations!

Tracey 07:42

… of just so much. What The Milligan Foundation does is – basically, I jokingly say that we are the Secret Service to domestic violence. We move people quite literally anywhere in the world in order to be safe. We support any organization that even touches on domestic violence or person who may be facing life threatening harm from domestic violence. Any organization can reach out to us on behalf of a client that they have who’s facing danger and needs to move out of the area in order to be safe.

The core of what the foundation does is purchase airplane, bus, train tickets, gas, pay for motel rooms, hotel rooms, basically, anything that it takes for our person to be safe, to get from point A to point B. The last time we saw each other a few years ago, the organization had just started working internationally as well. In the 10 years’ time, I’ve helped people in Canada, in England, in Ireland, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Kenya, in Nigeria. Look, I got to keep thinking. In Zimbabwe….

Nancy 09:00

Just get a world map.

Tracey 09:01

…in Mexico, Yeah, it’s been all over. It’s been very rewarding and at times, heartbreaking, because people are coming to me when they’re in the most scared, the most dangerous time of their lives and they’re coming to me for help. So I’m just thankful that I can provide the service that I can do this.

I started doing this because I myself am a domestic violence survivor and I’m dealing with the issues that I ran into. When I left my violent relationship, I very naively thought that a woman escaping family violence would just automatically go into a shelter and start her life over again and that be that. But what I learned is that if you have somebody who’s dangerous in your life, shelters don’t always take you, especially if the shelter is in the area of your abuser. They won’t let you come there because you now become a risk or potential threat to that shelter if you have someone looking for you.

When I walked away from my violent relationship, my abuser was actively looking for me to cause me harm. So the shelters in my area wouldn’t take me in. That made me homeless on the street with a seven-year-old and a two month old baby, and I had nowhere to go, and no shelter would take me.

When I did finally end up at a shelter, when I finally did get to a shelter that was underground, specifically for high threat people like myself, listening to the other residents of the shelter at the stories of what it took for them to get to the shelter, I thought, “This is a ridiculous problem. It shouldn’t exist, it shouldn’t take a miracle or a set of random circumstances that would lead someone to be in a place of safety.” And so I decided, “You know what? I’m going to solve this problem, I’m going to create an organization specifically to help victims of violence get to safe places, get to where they could be safe.” Because oftentimes, when you are a person who is in family violence, you don’t have resources, you don’t have a car, you don’t have money, you don’t have a lot of things. But you’re forced to go if not across state, sometimes cross country and even out of the country.

So I’m just glad to be able to provide that service and I’ve done it for so long.

Nancy 11:35

Congratulations on the way that you are changing people’s lives.

Tracey 11:39

When I first started… my background is not nonprofit work. It’s not social work. This is purely passion for me. So I’ve had a pretty big learning curve to overcome.

A lot of it was just being naive and thinking, okay, well, I’m going to provide this service, and people are going to want it and that’s that. That’s what I thought when I first started and to go back to me sending out cold emails to organizations thinking, “Hey, I’m gonna help you with your clients and get people out of town if they need help,” and I sent out this email. I actually contacted the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and I asked them for a list of organizations and I sent out cold emails announcing The Milligan Foundation to about 500 organizations, and no one responded.

And I was like, “Why isn’t anyone responding?”

Nancy 12:41

“I want to help!”

Tracey 12:42

Yeah, exactly. I was like, “Why isn’t anyone responding?” That left me so dejected. I was like, “Does anybody even want this? Will anybody even use me? Will anybody even take my service seriously?”

But what ended up happening – because whenever I get interested in something, I want to learn as much as possible and that goes without saying with starting my organization. I had signed up for an event called the World Conference of Shelters and it literally happened two months after I decided to start this organization.

So I signed up to attend this conference. It was happening in Washington, DC, but I had second thoughts of going because nobody responded to my emails. Nobody would call me back, NOTHING. I booked my flight and I had a layover in Denver – a major hub. I had the layover in Denver and so I’m sitting there in Denver waiting for my connecting flight to go into DC and I’m sitting next to a nun.

And she asked me what time it is and I tell her. I’m sitting there and I said, “Yes. But I’m thinking about going home.” She said, “Well, why are you thinking about going home?” I said, “Well, I don’t know if where I’m going, I’m going to this conference of shelters in DC and I sent these people a bunch of emails, and no one responded.” She looked at me and said, “I’m going to that conference too.” I was like, “Really?” She said, “Yes, I started this conference” and I was like, “Really?” She was like, “Why are you second guessing yourself?”

So I told her what my organization does or what I was planning to do. Like I said, I was only two months into even implementing the idea. I was still learning.

Nancy 14:30

Right.

Tracey 14:31

I told her what I wanted to do, and I told her I was feeling that nobody wanted me because no one responded to my email. And she said, “If I had received your email, I wouldn’t have responded either.” She said, “We have so many abusers fishing, looking for who just left them and the service that you’re offering is so needed that it sounds like it’s too good to be true. What you’re offering is so good, it sounds unbelievable.”

She said, “But you sitting here talking to me now and I see that you’re a real person offering this very real service, of course, I want to use it. So no, you should absolutely be at this conference!”And I was like, “Okay!”

Nancy 15:16

I believe we filed that under the term Kismet. You were meant to be sitting next to her.

Tracey 15:23

Exactly.

Nancy 15:22

That’s amazing.

Tracey 15:24

So I get to the conference and within the first hour – I had spent some money putting together nice little presentation folders of my program of what I wanted to do – and within the first hour, I had given away all of my materials.And I was supposed to be there for a week.

Nancy 15:42

Oh, my gosh.

Tracey 15:43

But that was really the kickoff of yes, this is needed. Yes, I was actually going to be supported by other organizations and from that was where I really laid the foundation for my network.

Even though I didn’t start out of the gate working internationally, it was the relationships that I built from that conference, from the people that I met at that conference and then attending subsequent years with people following up saying, “No, when you’re ready to scale this outside of the United States, we want to be part of the network.”

Right off the bat, I want to say my first international case was in Ireland. When China established their first domestic violence shelter because they didn’t have it there, was no such thing there for a while, I consulted on that. When New Zealand implemented their violence against women policy mimicking that of the United States, I consulted on that. Just some really, really great relationships came from that and it’s just expanded over the years and I feel blessed to do this work.

Nancy 16:50

I know that during the pandemic, domestic violence rates have risen, because there’s no place for people to go – I’ve seen it referred to as “the pandemic inside the pandemic.” In one study I looked at the rates in 2020 had increased 18% in San Antonio 22%, in Portland, 10% in New York City and I’m sure this is true internationally as well.

Something that I hadn’t thought about is that it can be as bad or worse with same sex couples because the pandemic has hit same sex couples especially hard, with members of the LGBTQ community likelier to be employed in highly affected industries like education, restaurants, hospitals, and retail. So how has that impacted the work of The Milligan Foundation over the past 13 months?

Tracey 17:36

First, we had an influx of cases four years ago, because with all of the toxic masculinity that was put on a pedestal in the political climate, we saw hate crimes literally go up 1,000% in certain demographics.

But the other hate crimes that started was in the home. So domestic violence went up in the country. To give a specific number, actually it went up 36%, almost 37% nationally. Calls to my organization for help went up 200% and when the pandemic happened, it cranked it up even more. It’s been excruciatingly hard because I haven’t been able to serve people. The financial climate of this country has also changed. People’s giving habits have changed. My organization doesn’t receive cash grants because of the work that we do, so it’s heavily dependent on independent or individual donors.

Nancy 18:50

Why would you not be able to get cash grants?

Tracey 18:53

I don’t get cash grants because we help people at their most vulnerable times, because we also provide security services for really, really high threat clients = we will actually provide basically bodyguard services and because we’re getting someone and actually moving them. We do help anyone. It doesn’t matter how you identify: male, female, or whatever. But if someone has children and they haven’t gone to court yet, then somebody who’s well-resourced can say, “Oh, well, my children were kidnapped and this organization is party to kidnapping and you’ve given them funding. So I’m going to come after you too.”

So a lot of the big grant giving organizations or big corporate giving organizations would not touch The Milligan Foundation with a 20 foot pole to help us with the actual services. Now, we are very fortunate and blessed in technology, because I am here in the Bay Area. So I’m very, very well supported technology wise with tech companies. The Milligan Foundation currently runs six figures worth of technology which is really wonderful. Salesforce is our biggest supporter since day one; Twilio for our emergency numbers, and a few other services, our content, our platform that our website is managed on – all of that is donated, and I’m very thankful for that. But for as far as actual cash, no, we don’t.

Nancy 20:28

So how could listeners of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast get involved in helping The Milligan Foundation? Where should they go if they are moved by your story and want to donate in some way?

Tracey 20:40

They can actually donate on the website, of course, there’s a donation button on the website.

Nancy 20:46

Let’s give them the URL for that so anybody listening has it.

Tracey 20:49

It’s real simple. It’s just themilliganfoundation.org.

But another thing that I’m doing just because we’ve had such a major, major influx, and like you said yourself, that there’s so much need across the country now for people who are trying to get safe. I’m actually coming out with a new initiative, a micro grant program, where I’m providing $100 in emergency funds for someone to pay for transportation costs or if they’re on the street, to get them off the street, to get them like a bus, to get a train ticket, whatever, to get out of town.

I’m doing that using a virtual ATM network that is built on the Clover and Green Dot and basically the debit card system that makes it so that they can pick up this $100 emergency grant at a 7-11, a Walgreens, a Walmart, anything like that. They don’t actually have to go to a bank or wait for a check or anything. It’s literally an SMS text message that is confirmed in a cash register a POS system at a 711 and they’ll have funds dispersed to them that way.

Nancy 22:03

We’re going to talk about why you are so well versed in the world of FinTech in a second because that is the second part of this interview.

But I just want to make a really quick point here. If you guys look at themilliganfoundation.org and are feeling moved to donate, I want to make a point, which is that after I met Tracey… I should have looked it up. We’ve probably met 6, 7, 8, 43 years ago, I don’t know, and I invited her to come to my Giving Circle, which if you’ve listened to this podcast before, you may know that I’m part of a group of women here in Oakland who have met now, I think we’re on 15 years, we’ve kind of lost track.

But we met when we were moms of young elementary school students and over the years, we’ve met four times a year to pool our resources and donate it to a nonprofit that one of the members has presented. So Tracey was my guest when it was my meeting to present and of course, my group was really moved by this and made a donation. And I’m going to tell you guys right now, it was not a huge donation. I don’t know what the dollar amount was, but we don’t roll. We’re not millionaires. We’re just donating. We’ve always said it’s what you would have spent on a night out with your girlfriends getting drinks and dinner. So the average donation is probably $50, $30, I don’t know.

We made this donation to The Milligan Foundation, and you were able to leverage that into getting Salesforce’s attention for a donation that really made a difference, right? You’ve explained to me that that just enabled you to take that next step that you really needed to take.

Tracey 23:36

Yeah, you haven’t even heard that story and I love, love, love telling that story. I have to say that I can actually now tell that story because contractually, I couldn’t say anything for a few years about that donation, about that support that I got.

So what happened? I attended your Giving Circle, and you guys asked me what I wanted to use the donation for.

I told you that the donation that your Giving Circle was giving me wasn’t to provide services directly, but to establish the IDVC, which was the International Domestic Violence Community, which was an initiative that I was putting into place that created a network of all the shelters and other organizations and connections that I’ve made over the years, and turning it into a private community. So basically, the Underground Railroad for domestic violence, digitally done in the cloud. And even though I was a Salesforce grantee, one of their one-to-one grantees, just to have access for their platform and to build out this community, I would need my own cloud servers. That went beyond the scope of what Salesforce typically gives a nonprofit. To do that, I needed to pay for that private server space. So to go outside, once again, what they usually give to nonprofits.

So I said that I was going to use the money that you ladies gave me that evening to start that service, to have that architecture, so that I could create this private Underground Railroad network of domestic violence providers, to create this global safety net so that we can all collaborate under one place securely.

I took that donation and that did provide the framework for the IDVC to be made, and it was going great. The following year I built it up to a point and was ready to launch again at the international domestic violence shelter conference. But I needed to pay for the licensing again and I had started fundraising to pay for that licensing. Now that licensing was $5,000 and long story short, I could not raise the $5,000. I couldn’t get it and I called my account rep at Salesforce, Ben – his name is Benjamin, but I call him Ben for short.  I called him and I said, “The unthinkable has happened. I have not been able to raise this money to cover my licensing. What is the plan B, C, D, E, F?” Because me switching over to my own private servers or my own private cloud for this meant that I would have lost at that point, what would have been six years’ worth of work.

I was like, “What can we do? I can’t lose everything that I just spent all these years creating.”

I will never forget: his exact words to me were, “Tracey, the work that you were doing is too important and I cannot let this die.” And I said, “Okay.” He said, “Give me two weeks, and I will let you know what happens,” and I said, “Okay” and I’m on pins and needles, because I’m like, “Oh my God, am I going to lose my servers?”

The time goes by, and he calls me and he says, “I’ve got good news for you.” What he did was, he took information from my website, he took information from a company overview that I had sent him and he had made a presentation on my behalf of The Milligan Foundation to the Salesforce Foundation asking them to either give me a grant to cover that years’ licensing for my private network, or to grant me additional time, like an additional 90 days or something to give me more time to fundraise.

From that presentation, they said, “The work that she’s doing is incredible. We’re going to cover her licensing indefinitely… in perpetuity, for as long as her organization exists.”

Nancy 28:05

Alright. I just got goose bumps.

Tracey 28:06

There’s more. It actually keeps going.

Because I’m a huge believer in paying it forward and Ben doing that and telling me that I mean, it took me to my knees, right?

Nancy 28:19

Of course, I mean, how could it not?

Tracey 28:20

Like you said, you got goose bumps.? It took me to my knees. And I just kept thinking, “He is my angel. He is my angel.”

Now, every boss wants to know when they have a great employee. No matter how big your company is, you want to hear when you have an exceptional employee and that is being way above and beyond any account rep. It just so happened I had Marc Benioff’s personal email address because I knew one of his senior VPs. We used to go and hang out in bars in San Francisco.. and he was like, “Marc would love what you’re doing, email him. He needs to know what you’re doing. Just email him!”

But Imposter Syndrome kicked in. I’m like, “Well, what the heck am I gonna do emailing Marc? What the hell am I gonna say?” But when Ben did this, I was like, “I’ve got to tell Marc, I’ve got to let Marc know that he has an angel working for him,” and that’s what I did. I sent that email and that was the very first sentence in that email: “You have an angel working for you and I need you to know this.”

I proceeded to tell the story of what Ben did, and the fact that it would have –  because my network spans 36 different countries and some of those shelters that are represented in my network don’t exist anywhere else on the internet, because they’re so small, they can’t afford it. I said the IDVC can literally touch hundreds of thousands of lives and your employee just saved that resource.

Nancy 30:00

Wow.

Tracey 30:01

I sent that email off and a couple days later, Marc writes me back and he said, “I’ve looked into your organization and what you’re doing. Everything Salesforce has is now at your disposal.”

Nancy 30:15

Oh my God.

Tracey 30:16

“Build what you need free of charge, for ever.”

Nancy 30:20

Wow, that’s amazing.

Tracey 30:23

I could not breathe. I could not breathe.

Nancy 30:28

But I also give you credit for making that contact too, because Imposter Syndrome is real. A lot of people would have just said, “I would never reach out to him!” So good for you for recognizing that it was something worth his while. I think too often we are very quick to say, “Oh, I don’t want to bother that person,” and a lot of the time, it’s not a bother. It’s something they want to know.

Tracey 30:50

Yeah, that technology donation that Marc personally said to give me was the largest donation that he had ever done to Salesforce, to the point where they actually had to open up a new department just to manage what I had. Because I pulled out all the stops and bells and whistles to create that channel resource.

Nancy 31:16

Somebody makes an offer to you like that, you have to act on it right quick.

Tracey 31:20

You know – I’m a car woman and I love to use car analogies…

Nancy 31:23

You’re about to lose me, Tracey. I don’t even remember what car I’m driving while I’m driving it. But you go on, somebody in the audience will know.

Tracey 31:30

Somebody in the audience will know. You’ll know this much. It would be like from driving a VW Bug to being handed the keys of a Ferrari.

Nancy 31:38

Okay, even I got that!

It’s awesome. I had some sense of what went down but I didn’t realize that’s how it went. Guess what you guys – this is my point, you can make a big difference when you just get involved, see what you can do. I’m going to refer you back to Episode 54 of this show when I talked about exactly how to set up a Giving Circle. I interviewed somebody who had one who has a much bigger deal than our little homegrown Oakland, janky – we love it, but it is pretty home grown. But man, you can make a difference. It’s worth doing.

Tracey 32:12

Yes.

Nancy 32:12

Oh my gosh, we’re going to run out of time. But I’m not going to let us do that before we talk about your newest resume entry, which is that you are now a founder of a FinTech company called Term Payments, which is an online store where you can put items that you purchase on layaway. So when did you start this? I really want to talk about what it’s like to be a female, black, over-50 founder in an industry that is like, Fully Chad. It’s a ton of young white guys, right? What is that like?

Tracey 32:47

Just like you said, Fully Chad. That is hilarious. Yeah, it is.

Nancy 32:53

Tell everybody what Term Payments is first, and then I have a serious question. I do have serious questions, Tracey, I have a couple. But tell everybody what it does and then I’m gonna ask my question.

Tracey 33:02

So Term Payments actually started off as me wanting to bring good old fashioned layaway as a selectable option when making a purchase online.

Because there’s companies you know, like Affirm and Klarna and Afterpay. They’re the point-of-sale finance where you see make four payments interest free and you can have your item now as long as you make these four payments or six payments or what have you. But those companies are still micro credit, micro loan, you still have to have a credit card, you still have to have a bank account, and it’s still leaving people unable to shop. There’s still a certain section that people who are unable to use that service.

So I thought wouldn’t it be great to bring good old fashioned layaway online, where you just make a deposit, agree to make X amount of payments for X amount of months and receive your item and not have it be credit-based, because the store or the seller holds on to the item until you’re finished paying for it.

That was what Term was originally going to be and that is still part of what Term is going to offer. But in my desire to serve who the layaway customer, is which is a cash customer who is typically walking into a brick and mortar and paying cash and not using a card, I actually came up with a solution that allows people to shop online with cash. So in pitching to venture capitalists, trying to get them to invest in me to bring this idea to market, they would look at me and hear my story, hear my solution and say, “|Okay, we understand layaway. We understand this a huge market there because we all know that Klarna and the rest of them. They’ve all raised like over a billion dollars each just about.” They understand that market. But they said, “Wait a minute, slow your roll, Tracey.”

Nancy 34:54

“I don’t like doing that, fellas. Have you met me before? I’m Tracey Milligan.”

Tracey 34:59

Right. “You just said that you’re allowing people to shop online with cash?” Because the nut that people have been trying to break in the FinTech space is, how do you get people who are unbanked or under banked to participate in the online economy?

Nancy 35:15

Let’s just pause really quickly, I want to give a couple of definitions. FinTech is just basically new technology that is an alternative to traditional banking services and it is really helpful for what you’re calling under banked customers, folks who don’t necessarily have access.

I want to make this point very clear that that has to do with redlining. We have talked about this in past episodes. But that practice of banks closing off access to financial services in certain neighborhoods because of the racial makeup has perpetuated a situation where there are a lot of people in this world who can’t open a bank account, who are distrustful of bank accounts, who can’t access all the kinds of ways that some of us are lucky enough to have access to.

So FinTech is an effort to reach people who are either unbanked or under banked and by the way, a lot of those services are very expensive, like short term payday loans is a typical example.

Tracey 36:14

Huge. 300% interest on that.

Nancy 36:15

I just want to make sure everybody understands those terms FinTech unbanked, underbanked. But also, make sure you see the connection to redlining and systemic racism when you’re thinking about these things.

Tracey 36:26

Yes, absolutely.

So Term Payments actually solves that. Investors caught on to that. They were like, “Wait a minute, you’re solving this problem, you are giving these people this consumer base a way to participate in the online economy without having a bank account, without having a credit card. Without even having credit, you’re allowing them to make purchases where they are. You’re serving them where they are.”

So that is what Term Payments is actually bringing to market and so I’ve made that slight shift. Yes, I am still going to provide that service of enabling people to buy what they want, to look “on their terms.” But the big part of Term Payments now is actually the solution that that’s going to allow people to shop online with cash. I’m keeping my fingers crossed here – launch in approximately 90 days, maybe four months, where people can select Term Payments on quite literally any website where a payment needs to be collected, and can then walk into a physical location to finish that transaction with cash.

Nancy 37:41

I realized that my question isn’t so much a question, it’s a comment. So I am every presenter’s worst nightmare. “Hi, it’s not so much a question, it’s a comment and it’s a two-part comment.”

I just want to point out –  I hit the research hard today. Only 17% of FinTech companies have female founders, and women account for less than 30% of the sector’s overall workforce. That’s according to FinTech Magazine. My observation is that if you get a more diverse workforce, if you get more diverse group of founders, you’re going to have solutions that nobody’s thought of before because they’re coming from a different life experience, from a different place, from a different perspective and it’s also the good.

So I just think it’s fabulous that you are shaking things up. I hope you are scaring all the Chads. And I have a friend named Chad, so I hope he’s not listening. Not you, Chad.

Tracey 38:36

Chads don’t get it.

Nancy 38:38

Because they’ve never experienced it.

Tracey 38:40

Most of my time when I pitch certain VCs, I actually spend the majority of the conversation explaining how poor people think and what poor people want, because they don’t get it. I actually had one VC tell me,  “Why would someone want to shop someplace other than Walmart?”

Nancy 39:01

How hard did you grind your teeth in that moment? Did you crack a molar? Was it a molar cracker?

Tracey 39:08

Nancy, you know I can be blunt. And my response to him was if someone told me that the only place that I could shop for the rest of my life was Walmart, I’d want to shoot myself. I had another VC that I pitched to ask me, “Why would someone who doesn’t have a credit card want to shop?”

Nancy 39:32

Well, credit to you for not having a homicide record at this point. Thanks for coming on the show with your hands clean!

Before I let you go, we always close with this question. What one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Tracey 39:48

Follow your heart.

Nancy 39:49

What’s that mean to you?

Tracey 39:50

It sounds so cliché, but I knew exactly who I was when I was 16 years old and the only reason I deviated from the path that I was on was because I listened to other people, and I thought that other people knew better than what I knew. But now that I look back at that, it’s like, “No, I’m still that same person. I should have stayed on that path and I probably would not have made some of those mistakes that I made if I hadn’t thought that someone else knew better than me what I wanted.”

Nancy 40:21

Follow your heart is great advice. Tracey, I’m so thrilled we got a chance to catch up again, I feel lucky. Check out what Tracey is doing. I’m so glad you’re on the show today. Take care. Stay well, and I hope to see you in person soon.

Tracey 40:36

Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much, Nancy, I appreciate it.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 40:42

I want to just mention a phone number here in case anyone listening needs it – 800.799.SAFE is the National Domestic Violence Hotline, that’s 800 799 7233. And please head over to the show notes to check out links to Term Payments and to The Milligan Foundation to learn more about Tracey’s work!

Our next episode is all about you! Here’s the question I’m asking:

What’s an album you bought a long time ago and still listen to now – and why did it stick with you?

Maybe it reminds you of a certain place, or time, or person. Maybe it’s comforting like a big schlubby sweater, or invigorates you back to energy levels you had before the gray hair and your kids’ tuition payments. Whatever the reason that particular album (vinyl, CD, 8-track tape) still takes us space in your soul, let us know what the album is, and why. I’ll collect up your stories and share this in a Listeners’ Still in Rotation podcast episode at the end of the month.

As usual for our listener-contributed episodes, there are lots of ways to share your thoughts:

Please send in your favorite albums and we’ll all take a nice musical walk down memory lane in Episode 96!

Thanks so much to all of you for listening and I’ll catch you and your favorite old albums next time!

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

The post Ep 95 Nonprofit/FinTech Founder Tracey Milligan appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .

“Practice a certain acceptance”: Dr. Leslie Kernisan, MD, MPH and founder of the Better Health While Aging website and podcast, on how adult children can ask better questions and accept suboptimal choices with grace when caring for aging relatives.

Find Dr. Leslie online:

Website: BetterHealthWhileAging.net

Podcast: Better Health While Aging

Book: When Your Aging Parent Needs Help

Recommended reads and other resources:

A-b-b-bye bye, b-b-b-b-bye

Dr. Leslie Kernisan 00:00

There’s really this whole other aspect which is how are you going to transition into this change in your relationship?

Nancy Davis Kho 00:09

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy Davis Kho 00:34

Hey, listeners. Before we get into today’s episode, I want to acknowledge that the past few weeks have been particularly hard on people in the Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. I know from hosting this show how critical it is to listen to diverse stories and voices as a means of building empathy, connection, and understanding. If you follow @midlifemixtape on Instagram, you know that last week I participated in boosting the signal for AAPI writers and musicians in my posts. So just to balance out the three-legged stool, I wanted to take a moment to shout out a few AAPI-hosted podcasts you might also want to check out.

I love “By the Book.” It’s half reality show, half self-help podcast, and one wild social experiment hosted by comedian Jolenta Greenberg and culture critic Kristen Meinzer as they live by the rules of a different self-help book each episode to figure out which ones might actually be life changing. Another one to check out is “Self Evident,” a podcast hosted by Cathy Erway that tells Asian America’s stories across generation, across cultures, and across class, to explore what it really means to claim America today. And finally – a brand new one to check out called “Anywhere is Home”, hosted by Julia Relova, that explores the complexities of home through interviews on the who, what, where and when of home. She’s a newbie podcaster. Let’s help her find her groove!

#DiversifyYourPodcasts and Stand Up Against AAPI Hate!

[MUSIC]

Hi Midlife Mixtapers, it’s me, Nancy Davis Kho, creator and host of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. Did you ever own a comb that you bought at the mall because it had a really rad saying on it that you could display on your backside when you walked down the hall at school? Mine said DyNoMite. And did you use it to feather your hair? You are very welcome here.

This is one of those episodes that I call Hack Your Midlife – guests who can help us navigate the harder aspects of what we around here refer to as years between being hip and breaking one.

One of the hardest things many of us grapple with at midlife is the switch to being in a caregiver role for our parents, and that’s why I invited today’s guest on the show.

Dr. Leslie Kernisan, MD, MPH, is a practicing geriatrician and the founder of the popular aging health website and podcast Better Health While Aging, created to help families and older adults learn better ways to manage aging health challenges. Now a Clinical Instructor at the University of California, San Francisco, Division of Geriatrics, she was previously the site medical director of the Over 60 Health Clinic in Berkeley and founder of the GeriTech blog.

Together with award-winning writer health and aging Paula Spencer Scott, Dr. Leslie is the author of When Your Aging Parent Needs Help: A Geriatrician’s Step-by-Step Guide to Memory Loss, Resistance, Safety Worries, & More.

I asked listeners to send in questions and I had a bunch of my own. During the episode, you’ll hear a lot of book recommendations as follow up – no worries, I have included links to each of those in the show notes. If for some reasons the show notes for episode 94, don’t show up where you’re listening or they are not easy to read there, remember you can always go to midlifemixtape.com to see them in all their glory.

Ok, put in your ear horn. We’re gonna talk aging with Dr. Leslie.

[MUSIC]

I’m joined today by Dr. Leslie Kernisan. Dr. Leslie, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Leslie 04:06

Thank you so much, Nancy for inviting me.

Nancy 04:08

We have a lot to get into. You’re a geriatrician, and I have an audience that is full of questions for a geriatrician! Their first question that they’re going to want to know from you is: what was your first concert and what were the circumstances?

Dr. Leslie 04:20

I think my first concert was when I was 16 or 17 and it was Paula Abdul in Phoenix. I grew up in Tucson, but all the concerts were in Phoenix and I went with a friend.

Nancy 04:32

Was it one of those drive up and back same day kind of odysseys that teenage girls used to be able to go on without fear?

Dr. Leslie 04:40

Yes, something like that. And especially in Arizona, where everybody was driving by age 16! It was fun.

Nancy 04:45

Isn’t that ironic, because that actually ties into the story today. Because I saw an ad yesterday – it’s an old, old Paula Abdul video, and then it’s current Paula Abdul dancing with her old self, looking fantastic but talking about how now, she’s dancing with arthritis. We of Gen X used to watch videos on MTV, and now we’re worried about calcium supplements.

So thank you so much for joining me on the show today. This is one of those topics that I think those of us “in the years between being hip and breaking one” are grappling with. We want to know that we’re doing the right things and I think maybe there are no right answers, but there are better answers. So I really appreciate you coming on the show and bringing your expertise.

I mean, it is really shocking, that moment when you realize that your parent is the one who needs caregiving now. I think we all have had that moment, everybody can probably point to a conversation or an incident or, I hope not a fall, where you suddenly think, “Oh, my God, I’m in charge.” It can be really terrifying. But together with your co-author, Paula Spencer Scott, you’ve written this really practical, helpful guide for helping people assist their aging parents and other relatives. Because oftentimes, it’s not just the parents we’re caring for, I’m really looking out for an aunt of mine, personally. And the book is called When Your Aging Parent Needs Help: A Geriatrician’s Step-by-Step Guide to Memory Loss, Resistance, Safety Worries, & More.

I’m going to call you Dr. Leslie, if that’s okay.

Dr. Leslie 06:19

Yeah.

Nancy 06:20

I want to start by asking you why you wrote this book. What were the gaps that you were trying to fill?

Dr. Leslie 06:24

First of all, I started Better Health While Aging many years ago, because I got really interested in the fact that people had questions for all these common age-related challenges. They were looking online or googling, and often were finding information that was not written by us as geriatricians and that was not what we would tell people. I felt like well, here’s really an opportunity to support people.

Nancy 06:44

This is betterhealthwhileaging.net.

Dr. Leslie 06:48

Betterhealthwhileaging.net. Actually, initially, it was called Geriatrics for Caregivers, because I was really trying to help those people who were worried about an older parent or older relative, but we had a lot of older adults arrive interested in their own aging health challenges as well.

In running the site, I have always written articles specifically for people worried about aging parents, or an older relative. But we do get a certain type of question over and over again, which is: “I’ve noticed these declines in my parents,” – often they sound memory related, but sometimes they’re not. Sometimes it’s recurrent falls, or sometimes it’s just, “I just don’t feel like it’s safe for her to be living at home. But I’ve brought it up, and she’s ignoring me or she gets mad, or he gets mad” (there are like older fathers or male relatives, of course, too) “and won’t do anything and what do I do? Help!”

We’ve gotten a variation of that question over and over and over again and although we do have articles that address some angle of it, I felt like there was a need to sort of put it all together into something that would be kind of step by step and helpful to people.

We’ve actually had on the site, for many years, this free download The Quick Start Guide to Checking your Aging Parents, which started with that question. “My mom is getting old and still lives in this big house, should I worry or can she live at home?” That used to be the question and the answer is “Well, it depends.” And I thought, “Well, I have this whole process of what I look at and think about when I’m considering what’s happening with an older person who might be declining and lives at home, let me kind of lay it out.” Not that I can make people geriatricians, but here are the specific things that you would look for, and that you could ask a doctor about or a social worker about. So that was the first one.

This book was kind of the follow up to that, a little bit more about how to step in, especially if you’ve noticed memory problems.

But the other thing I really have noticed over the past few years is that people want to know, it’s not only like, what’s a sign they need help or what would be the intervention? But there was also this whole aspect of how to step in, how to talk to your parents, how to sort of think about your role. Initially on Better Health While Aging, I just gave a lot of the geriatric medical information like, “These are the important things to consider if somebody has been falling.” Then I would have people write and say, “But how do I get my mom to do this?”

I thought, “Oh, there’s really this whole other aspect, which is how are you going to transition into this change in your relationship?” Because most of us, if we’re lucky enough to grow old, will eventually experience some declines. And if we are lucky enough, we will have family members and people who care about us who will want to help. I feel like a lot of people, older adults, are going to go through this stage in life where their family is first concerned, and then often providing some assistance and even though this is really common, we don’t provide anybody with a roadmap of how to get started on that.

The book was meant to fill that gap. It does presume that – because there are so many variants on how people can get started on this journey with their parent –  it was written with the idea in mind that you have a parent who has been living independently and maybe they’ve had some health problems, maybe you’ve been involved a little bit but they’ve mostly been okay and now you’re noticing things. How do you figure out whether there’s really something to worry about? How do you approach your parent about it? If there are really worrisome signs, what could you do next, should you do next, and then some strategies on how to actually step forward in a way that is empathetic and compassionate and respects your parents’ dignity and autonomy as much as possible? So that was the genesis of the book.

Nancy 10:26

All in one small book, to get ALL your answers.

Dr. Leslie 10:31

Well, it is actually pretty short. And the reason is because we didn’t write the comprehensive encyclopedia guide of “here’s what to know about every single thing that might come up when you help your parent.” There are some books out there. There’s one I really like called How to Care for Aging Parents by Virginia Morris. This was more meant to address a few specific things like what people worry about early on. I even thought about calling it When Your Parent First Starts to Need Help. It’s really a bigger focus on communication, and how to navigate the role change and then really outlining a process that you could use.

Nancy 11:04

It’s written and organized so practically because it’s full of cheat sheets and checklists, and real life examples. You could never write the comprehensive book because everybody goes through this so individually, but you have it organized into Taking Stock, Taking Aim, Taking Action and Taking the Long View.

I mentioned this to you, when we were talking about setting up this interview: I lost my dad in 2016 very suddenly. We only had six weeks from diagnosis to funeral. I lost my mom to dementia in December over years. So I felt like, as I was flipping through the book, “Oh, yeah, we went through that. Oh, yeah, I should have asked that question. Oh, I did ask that question.” Some of the questions I’m asking today are because there were times I felt my siblings and I handled it ourselves GREAT, we were really on top of it. And then there was some stuff we NEVER figured out how to do right. When I saw the questions coming in from listeners, I was like, “Oh, yeah, I had that question, too.”

I think one of the challenges is even figuring out who should be on your team. I have to be honest, we could not find a geriatrician in my mom’s situation, there was so much demand. So good for you on picking a field where you will have the Full Employment Act your whole life, because we need really good geriatricians. Part of the challenge is even finding one who can do a consult with you and so I think Dr. Leslie’s book, while you’re waiting for that medical professional to be on your team, is a really good way to kind of position yourself and get prepared for what may be ahead.

Dr. Leslie 12:39

Yeah, we do try to give people a sense of not just what would happen ideally, but what to expect and what often happens. Because often, this unrolls kind of un-ideally, and that was actually part of the genesis for Better Health While Aging. Also I have a background in quality improvement and the quality of health care is often in general not as good as we wish it were, especially so for older adults who come in with more vulnerabilities. We do have this field of geriatrics, the art and science of modifying healthcare for older people, but there are not a lot of geriatricians there.

So I have an interest in, how do you leverage geriatrics? It can’t be that every older person frail or vulnerable or in need older person who needs us is going to be able to see us personally. Also, one of my goals has been to provide people with the information so that they can ask better questions of their usual providers and maybe elicit more of that geriatric approach, or at least have more of a sense of like, “Wow, I think my mom is really not getting what is recommended, so I need to either ask more or look for another provider.” The terrible thing is that people already have so much to do and the fact that they have to learn to be proactive and advocate is unfair and it makes me sad. But that is the reality right now. If you want better care and better health from the healthcare system, the more you know about it and go in prepared to ask for more productive things, the better off you are.

Nancy 14:06

I feel like this is one of those areas where we as Americans want everything to be perfect. You want there to be a right answer. I think it’s kind of a cultural thing that you can take a pill and everything’s gonna be fine or you can follow a stretching regimen or whatever it is, and things will be fine. I think it is one of the great life lessons that we have to learn that things may be suboptimal. They need to be good enough, but they may never be perfect. You mentioned another book that was helpful, but I wondered if you had ever read Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. I’m sure you’ve read that.

Dr. Leslie 14:41

Yes, I did. You know that was part of the impetus for this book too, because I mean, that’s a beautifully written book. He’s an amazing writer, a very knowledgeable clinician, and he is not particularly knowledgeable about geriatrics. He’s actually more knowledgeable about end of life and palliative care.

I was really struck reading his book how at one point, he tells the story of how, I think it was his mother in law, started having some memory and thinking problems and how she parked the car in the wrong driveway.  He sort of says how this was like “a moment” for them, but then he doesn’t tell people what to do about it.

I was like, “You didn’t give the information about what people could and should do!” He gave more specific information on how to address end of life situations but less on that situation that does come up for people all the time, which is, “My parents seems to be having difficulties, how do I get help for them and really, crucially, what do I do if they’re resisting and not accepting the help?”

Nancy 15:43

We needed you to write this book to put in concert with his. Bcause where his was helpful to me, and I’ll include links of course, to Dr. Leslie’s book, but I’ll put a link into this one, too…

Dr. Leslie 15:52

It is a great book. I want to say I think it is a great book!

Nancy 15:56

No, it was just helpful to me because he talks so much about thinking in terms of how each individual person defines quality of life. So you make your choices through the lens of, “Does that improve my parents, my older relatives quality of life as they define it?” Somebody recommended Being Mortal to me right when my dad got diagnosed, and I was like, “Are you kidding me now? I’m not going to read a book called Being Mortal when my dad’s about to die,” She said, “No, you really should read it. This is the time to read it.”

I was really grateful that she encouraged me because with that book under my belt, I was able to say to my siblings, “We need to figure out what are the things Dad wants to be able to continue to do,” and we came up with driving, and golf. Those were two things that animated my father. Every time there was a treatment decision, we would say to the doctors, “Will this prevent him from driving? Yes?” We’re like, “Not going to work for us.” I just wanted to mention that book. It’s kind of about the philosophy of end of life, whereas yours is about making everything as good as possible until you get to that point, in a really practical way.

Dr. Leslie 17:02

Yes, that idea of like what matters to someone is foundational to geriatrics. We share a…there’s a lot of overlap at times between geriatrics and palliative care and it’s really crucial in having these conversations and negotiations with an aging parent about how you can support them.

Nancy 17:20

Right.

Dr. Leslie 17:21

That’s part of why in the first section, Taking Stock, the first part of it is like, “Here are some specific cheat sheets and things you can look for, signs that yes, you should really be worried or maybe not so much.”

But the second part is getting your parents’ take. Because I have seen over the years that people so badly want to jump in and help their parents. But it’s really important to step back and be curious and better understand, how are they seeing the situation? What are they most concerned about when it comes to this situation? What do they really want? What are they afraid of?

Then also, at a larger level for their life, what are their most important priorities? Because later we can use that as a compass, as you and your siblings we’re doing. When we face specific decisions, we can think of it in terms of like, how does it fit in with what my parent has said is most important to them? Or what we’re aiming for? So yes, I mean, the more people can hear this message in various books and sites, the better.

Nancy 18:15

We got a ton of listener questions and there’s no way I’m going to get to all of them, but I’m going to get to as many as I can. If I don’t get to yours, make sure you check out Dr. Leslie’s book, When Your Aging Parent Needs Help and the website which is…

Dr. Leslie 18:31

betterhealthwhileaging.net. We have lots of articles and you can post a comment on most of our articles, and either me, or I have a geriatrician colleague in Canada, who helps me answer them.

Nancy 18:42

Right. Okay.

The first question I’m picking came from Esther, and it is a three-part question, but I’m gonna let Esther have three questions because a lot of what she was asking encompassed what other people were asking. So the first one was, “What tips do you have for starting challenging conversations about the individual’s desires for the future, whether it’s healthcare, long term care, etc and making a plan before your options are limited?”

Dr. Leslie 19:08

Okay. Should I start with that one or do you want to tell the other ones?

Nancy 19:10

Yeah, let’s start with that. Oh, God, I’m not going to hit you with all three. We’ll never remember them.

Dr. Leslie 19:13

We do have like a communication cheat sheet that is part of the book where we just list lots of good opening phrases or if it hasn’t gone well.

My general tips for challenging questions is first of all, stepping back, like, how have the conversations gone in the past, one? Two, have you had any concerns about memory or thinking? I bring that up just because if you have, I recommend approaching the conversation sort of slightly differently.

I mean, in particular, it’s harder for older adults to kind of make decisions or clarify what they want sometimes if they are having memory or thinking problems. It kind of depends on questioning yourself, like, what is it that you’re worried about, and that you’re hoping to know? Without knowing more specifics about the situation… if it’s how do I get them started generally on advanced planning, one of my geriatrician colleagues, Rebecca Sudori, has a really great website called prepareforyourcare.org that addresses conversations to prepare for the healthcare side of planning.

In healthcare, we’ve actually emphasized a lot the advanced planning for health care decisions, and not the other part, which is really relevant for every older adult, which is, “What would you like your life to be like later on? If you weren’t able to do everything you can do now, what would be most important? How could we support you? What were you thinking that might look like? If you had to make tradeoffs between some safety and autonomy or independence, what would you be willing to trade off?” Because, as you were saying, as Americans, we want everything to be perfect, and for there to always be solutions.

And aging often gets a little messier and involves adapting to changes. We often don’t give older adults enough credit for how much they do in getting through these adaptations. But then also, often it involves some tradeoffs, right? You can stay in the place where you’ve lived your whole life with three stories and lots of stairs and all the rest and there are some safety risks there. If it’s on the suburbs, you might end up further away from things, which can create some issues. Or you can make a change. But helping people think through their tradeoffs or understanding what goes into them, those are some of the things that I think about.

Nancy 21:30

I think it’s comforting to know that there are going to be tradeoffs. It’s not you, you’re not a bad kid, I think it’s really important to recognize that there are suboptimal choices, and you do the best you can. You try to keep the relationship cordial and not be the kid who’s yelling at your parent and not be the parent who’s yelling at your kid. Honestly, it reminds me of the toddler years. You have to be the bad guy sometimes but it’s okay to let them lead the way a little bit. Or a lot.

Dr. Leslie 22:05

Well, initially, you want to be letting them lead a lot, unless you’ve had reason to believe that they really are losing their mental faculties, in which case you might have to step in.

But you know another thing we address in the book is, again, framing people’s roles. Because initially, people really want their parent to be safe and healthy and they’re quite frustrated if they feel like their parent isn’t doing these things. They see it as their role to help them be safe and healthy. We saw this a lot, actually, when COVID hit, as people were very upset about their parents not following enough safety precautions.

One of the things that we try to do in the book is reframe as you’re not going to be able to control everything that happens to your parent. Yes, you can help them by bringing up things that might help them be safer or healthier, or things that fit in with their goals because if you ask them, most people would like to be safe and healthy enough to continue to live independently, and have all these things that matter to them.

But your goal is really to show up and accompany them on this journey and be there for them. That does start by being attentive and listening to them and learning more about what matters. And then I think there is a really important role for family to play in one, researching what could and should be done. And then trying to find respectful ways to bring it up and encourage or facilitate that for their parent, recognizing that it’s often not going to be up to you whether your parent does it or whether it works out.

Now, if it is looking like your parent really is losing their mental capabilities…and we do cover that in the book too actually, the question of capacity. Not that I think I can write a book and people can now determine their mental capacity, but it is important to start thinking about that a little bit that if it looks like they really can’t understand the implications of this choice that they’re making, then it becomes ethically and sometimes legally more permissible to intervene a little bit and do things that maybe you wouldn’t do otherwise. Say, “Well, should I maybe still let their doctor know even though they’re telling me no.” How much insight they seem to have into what’s going on is really relevant.

Nancy 24:17

Oh my God, Dr. Leslie, get out of my head.

That was, I think, maybe the hardest thing with my mom, is we did not feel her physician was taking it seriously that she was clearly slipping. So we tried every ruse, oh my goodness. I would call ahead and say, “I’m bringing my mom in for an appointment. Can I please come in with her because we think she’s slipping” and he’d say, “No, no, HIPAA can’t bring you in.” I would write notes… I mean, we tried everything and we didn’t feel like he really even clocked the loss of mental acuity until she’d had dementia at that point for maybe seven years. It’s super frustrating.

Dr. Leslie 24:59

It’s definitely been shown in a lot of research that normally trained primary providers are often very slow to notice. And then yeah, in terms of trying things – part of what the book does is layout, “Here are lots of things that you can try, here’s how we recommend trying them.” Sometimes people try these things, and they make headway. Other times they try all the things we suggest and give it a few tries and bring their best communication skills, and it still doesn’t work out. That was another message for the book is that if you feel like this is hard? It’s not you. It’s not your parents.

Nancy 25:33

It’s because it is hard.

Dr. Leslie 25:35

They are difficult situations. We have not set up our healthcare system and social service system right now to optimally step in and provide assistance. It often does take multiple tries: multiple tries talking to your parent, multiple tries talking to the doctor. We wanted not to discourage people by saying, “Listen, this is often going to be very hard,” but to reassure them that it doesn’t mean that you failed, or that you’re doing it wrong. It’s just the nature of this, and we wanted to especially try to help people give themselves some grace. Because I think, as you probably know, people often take on a lot of guilt, and put a lot of pressure on themselves.

Nancy 26:15

Guilt, and frustration too. Because you just think, “Oh, if they could only just do what I’m telling them to do, go to the memory care clinic or do this thing that is so obvious to me, but if they’re perceiving it as a loss of control,” and it can be really hurtful. We talk on the show a lot about normalizing things, sharing your story so you can normalize it for other people. That’s part of my goal for this episode today is just to recognize anybody who’s listening who feels like you screwed up, or your parents are mad at you, or you don’t know what to do. Same. I mean, SO same.

Dr. Leslie 26:54

Nobody has the skills to do this. I felt a little bit that way when I became a parent too, but I think we generally have more support for helping parents step into that role. It partly helps that it’s more predictable, the way people step into the parenting: the woman is pregnant, you have a due date, and all the babies start off usually mostly the same.

Whereas it’s exponentially harder to manage this transition where you start noticing things about your older parents, and you start trying to figure out how to step in because if your parent hasn’t been used to you being involved, and you haven’t been used to it, there’s a huge learning curve.

Nancy 27:34

Right. We’ve covered Esther’s second question. I’m not even gonna get through Esther’s questions before its time but we did cover the second one. Here’s another one. She wondered what was the best way to get all parties, meaning siblings, on board with your plan.

Dr. Leslie 27:50

We do mention this in the book that early on, in the Taking Stock part, it’s getting your parents take, but also getting the take of other people who are closely involved. Could be your other parent if you have two parents living together and you’re more worried about one than the other, could be the other siblings, other people who are close.

Another book that I really like – I don’t think it’s great as a guide for talking to your aging parent, but it’s great for talking to other people – is called Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by the team from the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Nancy 28:22

Okay.

Dr. Leslie 28:23

It’s a book, I think, from the late 90s. It’s really good.

Nancy 28:26

Are you saying that caring for our aging parents is similar to negotiating a hostage crisis? Because it sure feels that way sometimes.

Dr. Leslie 28:32

Well, you are going to negotiate with your parents. However, what’s in that book, I don’t think is great [for that].

But it is great for negotiating with siblings, and others who are involved. In a way, they’re kind of relationship communication basics, which is that our tendency is to start off by trying to convince somebody else of something and to make our point.  We want to feel heard. But what is often more effective is for us to start with what they call in Difficult Conversations a “learning stance,” where we start off by being curious and saying to ourselves, “Let me first better understand how this person sees the situation and how they feel about it. Can we articulate a shared goal and then can we work together to figure out how to work towards that?”

That’s a really useful framework, I think, for addressing a lot of the things that come up with siblings. Sometimes one sibling will have – and it might be the sibling who’s closest who has seen lots of things – who is like, “Well, I think we should do this and when older parents start needing help.” All the existing sibling tensions and dysfunctions…

Nancy 29:37

Bubble right back up to the surface. Oh, yeah.

Dr. Leslie 29:39

…get to be more. They’re starting off with checking in with your sibling on like,”Have you noticed anything? How do you think things have been going? What were you thinking?” might be some next steps. Often when people feel like their input has been solicited and they’ve had a chance to be heard, they’re more receptive than to a proposal of, “I was thinking we should try this next.”

Nancy 30:03

By the way, if you are the sibling who does not live close, because that’s me… I think there is a really important role that those siblings can play. I was pretty good at charting the progression of my mom’s disease over time, because I wasn’t seeing her as much as they were.

One of the ways that it’s helpful to think about this is that everybody can play a role. What are your strengths? My brother was always super close to my dad in a way that my sister and I weren’t, just because they were both guys. So there were certain things, with my dad, that my brother was the better messenger for. It can be fraught, obviously. But also, if you think about it as, “What do we each bring to it?” maybe that’s a way to approach it from a more positive framework as you’re trying to get everybody working in the same direction, But stuff always bubbles to the surface. I think having that shared goal is really important.

I wanted to definitely ask this one. Matthew asked, “What is the time and how to broach the subject of taking the car keys?”

Before I let you respond, I want to tell you the terrible, terrible plan that I executed that didn’t work because you guys will know you have to get creative.

My mom was an excellent driver. Even when we had got her to stop driving, she still directed us wherever we went in Rochester because she’d lived there her whole life – Rochester, New York, where I grew up. She could barely talk. But she could point to the right and point to the left, and you’d be like, “Why are you directing me through the Burger King parking lot?” You’d pop out, you’d be like, “Oh my God, we’re at Betty’s house. How did you know that was the shortcut to Betty’s?” My mom was just a very good driver so for her, it was excruciating to try to get the car keys away.

So I came up with this plan. I’m like, “I’m going to issue a fake recall notice on her car, and then she won’t be able to drive anymore because she won’t know that it’s not a real recall notice, because she doesn’t have the ability to figure that out.” I went to the trouble of finding the dealer’s logo online. I made up this fancy letterhead paper, I wrote this letter.

If my mother got that letter, she round binned it IMMEDIATELY because we never heard. So my brother and sister were like, “Oh, yeah, the recall? Yeah, that worked really well, Nancy. Nice plan.” It did not work. So what should I have done?

Dr. Leslie 32:23

This is in the context of dementia of an older parent?

Nancy 32:29

Or maybe even if not. I mean, part of the thing with older drivers that I worry about is reflexes, even if they don’t have dementia.

Dr. Leslie 32:38

That’s true. Well, it’s definitely not your job as the adult child to intervene if their reflexes are getting slow.

I would say it’s really only your job to think about taking the keys away if you think your parent has a diagnosis – but sometimes it’s hard to get a diagnosis – of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s. By dementia, we mean a decline in their memory and thinking functions that seems to be permanent, that’s slowly getting worse and that’s affecting their ability to do daily life tasks, like drive reasonably well. If that’s the case, I’m actually working on a course that’s a bit of a follow up to the book right now. It’s going to be for people who are helping an aging parent with early memory loss or who’s early in the dementia journey.

Nancy 33:20

Oh, wow. Great.

Dr. Leslie 33:21

We have a whole lesson in there about dementia and driving so I was reviewing this. But there is a great resource online, it’s from the Hartford Center. They’re run by gerontologists. They create resources and they partnered with the MIT AgeLab to create a really good PDF resource on being at the crossroads for driving in dementia that has a worksheet of what to look for, ideas on how to bring it up. I mean, it’s great. So I highly recommend that resource.

Nancy 33:50

Where will people go to take the class that you’re talking about, because I’m sure people are gonna be interested in that?

Dr. Leslie 33:55

We’re gonna be starting the first version of it later this spring. But if they come to Better Health While Aging and just sign up for our email list, in general, we will definitely send out a notice.

Nancy 34:05

I want to take that class. Here’s what not to do: don’t do a fake recall notice. That’s not going to get you anywhere.

Dr. Leslie 34:10

Actually, what I was gonna say is a fake recall notice is not necessarily a bad idea.

One of the things we teach in the book is a process. For this problem, if you are worried about the driving of your parent with memory and thinking problems, we would recommend that first you  research what’s considered the expert recommended approach to doing this. The book doesn’t cover that in depth, although we have links to a few resources that cover it.

Generally, if you were to research, what people would say is, “Well, you should first see how your parent perceives it.” That’s what I would tell you, but you should make sure their doctor is aware of it. See if the doctor is wanting to make a recommendation that they stop driving; depending on the state, the doctor may in some states – I think where I am in California, you’re actually required to report dementia, although it’s not enforced at all.

But as a family, you could ask the doctor to report them to the DMV. In many states, you’re allowed to report an unsafe driver to the DMV, so the DMV calls them in. You’re supposed to take these various steps to see if you can get them to give it up and if those things aren’t working and they are impaired, then you start potentially coming up with “fiblets” or approaches like hiding the keys, disabling the car, telling a story about the car. In part of the book, we have a worksheet for coming up with a plan, and one of them is to like brainstorm things you could try. So I think what you did is fine: you brainstormed an idea that you could try. Not every idea is going to work.

Nancy 35:35

Yeah, if anybody needs letterhead from Dorschel Toyota in Rochester, New York, I’ve got it on my computer. Hit me up.

Dr. Leslie 35:42

It could have worked. I mean, in the end, the nitty gritty does involve brainstorming something that you think might work for your particular situation.

We want those for people to do that from an informed place, where they’ve already learned about the various approaches. The Alzheimer’s Association has covered it that ideally, we work with people with dementia so that they willingly give up driving, but in reality, a lot of them don’t and so sometimes family members do have to do something. I think what you did is fine.

We say at one point that no plan survives contact with reality. You’re gonna make a plan to try something with your parents, and you should be prepared for it to not work the way you expected the first time around. Then either you have to try a few times, because that’s really common. You just bring it up a few times in slightly different ways. You ask yourself, “Did I bring my best communication skills to it? Was that the best person to bring it up?” You also look, and sometimes you’re like, “Well, I think we could try that, again, just a slightly different way.”

Other times, you’re like, “Oh, nope, that didn’t work at all.” That’s part of the process, going back and being like, “Well, what’s a different little ‘fiblet’?” It is, unfortunately, sometimes necessary to kind of stretch the truth to get a person with dementia to stop driving, if they don’t willingly do it. Sometimes people take the car, it’s under repair, they just keep repeating the same story for a year. There are lots of different.

Nancy 37:05

That was exactly what happened. It went into “the shop”. “The shop” was my sister’s driveway and if somebody was driving her to my sister’s, we would move the car, so she didn’t get the visual cue. Eventually, she stopped asking about it.

Dr. Leslie 37:18

Exactly. You always want to sort of see if there’s a way to engage them and get them to agree. You also sometimes have to just nudge them and accept that they might not be entirely happy with it and then you’re kind of working your way to more sort of things that work around them after you’ve tried other things.

That process of trying other things is, I think, an important part of the process. It’s how we clarify to ourselves why we’re doing this: “Because I tried the alternatives. I gave it a good try. It didn’t work and now I’m moving on to this.”

Nancy 37:50

So I can’t even get to half the questions that I was going to, which was already a pared down list. I’m gonna read you one. You don’t have to answer because I think we already have, but it just made me laugh so hard.

Baruch Hernandez, who is a writer and stand-up comedian in San Francisco, sent this one in, “Do I have to tie up my dad to a chair to keep him from working? At this point, I feel like he’s a teenager, and I’m some old bag going, ‘You’re 70 with a ton of health problems, stop doing yard work!’ and he’s like, ‘Of course, you’re right! I’m just gonna chill, son. Don’t worry!’ A week later: ‘Hi, Dad. You what? You broke everything because you were trying to build a fence tried to lift some shit? No more pot gummies for you!’” I don’t think you have to answer that one, but I just love that question.

Dr. Leslie 38:26

My usual thing is “Well, do you think his memory and thinking is okay?” because we do address this in the book. If it is, then some of your role as a concerned adult child is to check yourself a little bit and be like, “Somebody I love is going to have different priorities when it comes to safety versus doing stuff.” And as a concerned family member, we totally got to try to influence each other. That’s what families do.

You want to be thoughtful about how far you’re going to take it. Sometimes a way to really show love is to tolerate our parents making us uncomfortable and accept that they’re going to make some choices that aren’t what we wish they would have chosen for themselves. I want to remind everybody listening that you’re quite likely to be making a similar choice when you’re the one who’s older and changing. We’ll see.

But that’s what tends to play out, is that we prioritize safety a lot when it’s for somebody else and when it’s us, we really want to live our lives and do things that bring us satisfaction, even if it puts us at some risk.

Nancy 39:28

The last question I’ll ask that a reader sent in, I thought was really important. Kristen asks, “How do we mentally let go and enjoy who our aging parents are becoming?”

I really love that because I think again, this goes to this quality-of-life question not just for them, but for you. It’s important – as your parent diminishes, they’re still something there. For me, it was so meaningful to just remind myself that my mom had a great sense of humor all the way to the end. She could barely talk, But her slapstick went up three notches because she couldn’t talk anymore. And I was so grateful for that.

So this idea of reminding yourself, there’s still a person that you love inside whatever is happening to your parent. The love can still be there – even with who they are now, you can find things to appreciate.

Dr. Leslie 40:21

Again, it’s going to be different if we’re talking about dementia than other forms of age-related decline. But yes, dementia in particular tends to really change a person in a way that’s really hard for family members.

I think a huge part of this journey, whether or not there’s dementia is, you’re learning to practice a certain acceptance and giving space to along with learning to focus on what they still can do, what they still have. They’re always lots of positive things that we can turn our attention to, and that are often going to help us and them.

I think it’s also really important to acknowledge and give space to the grief, the sadness, also often frustration, resentment. I mean, this journey brings up lots and lots of feelings and I think sometimes people can have trouble finding the balance between both seeing the positives, and also allowing space for the negatives. But they need an outlet, because otherwise, they really kind of poison you.

So it’s really important to find support groups, and forms of support, where you can connect with other people who know what you’re going through and can be a space to let you let that out and share it with you. Because that’s part of what’s gonna enable you to release it a bit and then turn back towards the many beautiful things that are often still there. I mean, this can be a time of incredible richness and growth for families, but also we shouldn’t sugarcoat it. I mean, often, it’s hard because people often have it happening at a time when they already have lots of other things going on in their lives.

Nancy 41:55

Absolutely. Their midlife mixtape is stacked.

Dr. Lesley 42:01

Yeah, exactly.

Nancy 42:03

I’m gonna link everybody to the Mazi Robinson interview that I did last year where she talked about, in the pandemic, feel all the feelings. Feel all the feelings. It’s okay, you need to do that.

Dr. Leslie 16:54

Yeah, you do.

Nancy 16:55

We have not just run out of time, but run way over. There’s so much to talk about, but I do want to ask you this: what one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Dr. Leslie 42:27

I do find that in doing this, people then start thinking a lot about their own aging.

So maybe if I can speak to that for a bit, I would say that this time in midlife is first of all, a great time to think about practicing those relationship and communication skills with anyone, practicing that art of – especially if someone’s not doing something you think they should do – let me like think more about how they see it, and what matters to them. Practicing those skills now is great. Anything to address long running conflicts with your parents or your siblings, anything you do towards that now is going to pay off.

Nancy 43:09

Get them handled now.

Dr. Leslie 43:11

Then I think learning better ways to manage one’s anxiety and stress and worry.

I think midlife is a great time to do that. I mean, the pandemic has given us all reason to practice, but I think first of all, it’s gonna be really helpful for when problems with an aging someone or anybody come up, but also with our own aging, right? Many of us right now have an achy joint here or there that doesn’t heal as quickly as we wanted to. Learning to balance that, “Well, I’m going to try to make it better and I’m also learning to not be so intensely frustrated when it doesn’t get better as quickly as we wish.”

But also, those skills also matter because one of the things that comes up for people when they’re in the 60s is vulnerability to medications that affect memory and thinking. A lot of times in my work when we see people in their late 80s who are developing memory and thinking problems, we’d like to get them off these medications so that their brains can function at their best level. It’s really hard to do it at that stage if somebody is already declining. So I would say midlife is a great time to do the work, because often it takes work to learn to manage things without medications. Things like anxiety, sleep problems, the rest, because those skills that you learn in terms of managing stress, anxiety are going to pay off later.

Nancy 44:26

We Gen Xers hate to know it, but we are going to be those aging parents someday. So anything we can do to take steps now to make it easier for our kids and yet still, like you said, maintain the independence that we are all going to want to cling to the very last minute. Maybe that’s a good way to think about it. You’re gonna be the same way. Try to have a little grace for your parents who for whatever reason also want to be independent.

Dr. Leslie 44:55

The independence front is interesting.

I would say generally, you want to be preventing bad stuff now, building skills now that are going to serve you later or help maintain your health later. But there is also a very real need, which most people do very little on, to plan for unpleasant possibilities. Because if you’re lucky enough to get old, a lucky minority of those people are totally functional until they die relatively suddenly, or quite suddenly due to an accent or some illness.

But what most of us are going to experience is some health declines, some health crises, and needing assistance from other people and a significant number of people are going to need that assistance for even a few years if not longer. In a way, it’s sort of like succession planning, right? “Who could I start grooming to get to know a little bit my health, my finances, so that first, if there were a crisis, if I suddenly got sick, or was in a car accident, who could oversee this for me, short term?” Then later, it’s “Who could actually like be a collaborator with me?”

Then we’re going to keep our fingers crossed. I always tell people to hope for the best but plan for the possible. I am the type of person who feels like, “Well, I’m gonna take an umbrella and plan for the rain on a cloudy day, because every time I take it and never rains.” That’s my approach, right? So if you do all this planning, probably you’ll find it was never necessary. But that’s better than the opposite, which is finding that it was necessary. If I were to start becoming forgetful, what would I want my family to do? Who could start helping me out? What would that look like? The ideal is to start doing that, but it’s hard. It’s hard to get started and most people tend to just put it off until it’s kind of too late.

Nancy 46:36

Well, maybe after you’ve gone through it with your parents, you’ll understand why it’s so important.

Dr. Leslie 46:40

We’ve had so many people ask us about it that if I get around to it, in another year or two, we’ll do the follow up, “In Case I Need Help.” That’s for all the people who come to our site and first help an aging parent and then are like, “How do I prepare so this doesn’t happen to my children?”

Nancy 46:56

Title it: “Don’t Let It Happen to Me.”

Dr. Leslie 46:57

Exactly.

Nancy 46:58

Alright, Dr. Leslie Kernisan, thank you so much for being on the show. The book is called When Your Aging Parent Needs Help: A Geriatrician’s Step-by-Step Guide to Memory Loss, Resistance, Safety Worries, & More. You can find it at betterhealthwhileaging.net. I’ll include links. You’ll find it there. But thank you so much, Dr. Leslie, I really enjoyed talking with you.

Dr. Leslie 47:18

Thank you so much, Nancy.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 47:23

Throughout that interview, I had one critical question that kept bugging me: what IS the Paula Abdul video that got made into an ad where she’s dancing with herself?! It’s “Straight Up”, duh, and I put it into the show notes. Crisis averted.

I hope you found Dr. Leslie’s insights helpful – it’s a big topic but luckily, between her book and the others we mentioned in the episode, there are a lot of resources available to you, including me, who has a template for a fake car recall if you need it.

My takeaway is that I’m going to document all of our banking/insurance/household stuff for our kids this weekend. My dad used to send his three kids an updated list like that every January, showing where their accounts were held, what bills were paid automatically, all that, and my siblings and I used to roll our eyes. What do you think was the BIBLE after Dad died and we had to take over household management for my mom? That instruction manual saved our bacon. I figure I owe at least that much prep work to my kids.

We’re gearing up for another listener-contributed episode at the end of April and I want to know from you what YOU’D like to talk about – we’ve done first concerts, we’ve done GenX summer memories, we’ve done advice to our younger selves…what do you want to talk about – and hear about from other Midlife Mixtape listeners – next? Drop me a line at [email protected], or send me a message via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @midlifemixtape.

I also wanted to let you know that I’ve been doing a TON of virtual events around the topic of gratitude letters in my book, The Thank-You Project – for school groups, community organizations, libraries, and workplaces. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in learning more about, or if you know of a conference or organization that might be interested in learning more, please let me know at [email protected]! If I book an event thanks to you, I’ll send you a signed copy of The Thank-You Project! I really appreciate the support.

Take care, all of you, and get those vaccines as soon as you’re eligible, so we can all get together and hang out soon! Straight up!

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

The post Ep 94 Geriatrician Dr. Leslie Kernisan appeared first on Midlife Mixtape .

“The opposite of play is perfection”: Jeff Harry, positive play coach, on using play to navigate hard conversations and relationships, the inspirational power of boredom, and why the pandemic is the perfect time to connect with your inner goofball.

You betta kill it. YOU BETTA KILL IT

Jeff Harry 00:00

This is not about you. This is about you doing it to give permission for other people to start to show up.

Nancy Davis Kho 00:08

Welcome to Midlife Mixtape, The Podcast. I’m Nancy Davis Kho and we’re here to talk about the years between being hip and breaking one.

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

Nancy 00:33

Hi, listeners. In today’s episode, you’ll hear a LOT of talk about dancing and dance floors and just tearing it up to great music. If that makes you wish you could hit the club, there’s good news! It’s time for another Alternative ‘80s virtual dance party with Midlife Mixtape and San Francisco’s iconic Cat Club! This Thursday night, March 4th, DJ Damon will be playing your favorite Alt-80s dance hits on his Twitch channel for two hours, starting at 5 pm Pacific, 6 Mountain, 7 Central, and 8 pm Eastern. All you have to do at the appointed time is go to twitch.tv/dj_damon. That’s twitch.tv/dj_damon – don’t worry, I’ll leave a link in the show notes – and you’ll be at the party along with Bowie, Violent Femmes, the Clash, and more.

Turn your speakers ALL the way up and dance wherever you’re listening! There’s a chat function on Twitch and I’ll be hanging out there starting at 5 o’clock so I hope you’ll drop in and say hello. Lesson learned from when we did this back in December – if you’re going to use an alias in Twitch, at least give me a clue so I know who I’m chatting back to!

Damon and I have also decided that as long as we have some cool people like you together for a little dance party on Thursday night, we’ll try to do some good – we’re hoping you’ll make donations to Bay Area food banks, or food banks where you live, if you hear a song you love! During the dance party, I’ll drop links into the Twitch chat to make the donations to Bay Area organizations easy. So bring your song requests on Thursday – I hope you’ll join in for a single song or for a couple of hours. That’s Thursday, March 4th at 5 pm Pacific, 8 pm Pacific at twitch.tv/dj_damon. I will see you there!

[MUSIC]

Hey Slackers, it’s me, Nancy Davis Kho, creator and host of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast and author of The Thank-You Project: Cultivating Happiness One Letter of Gratitude at a Time. My book got a little shout out in the New York Times over the weekend, what a thrill! Thanks to everyone who’s still spreading the word about the book, which helps readers understand how gratitude letters can change the way you view the world for the better, and it gives you tools to get started on thanking the people who have helped, shaped, and inspired you.

I hope you are all hanging in there and that at least some of you have gotten your vaccines – just think, with every episode, that many more listeners will be protected and we’re that much closer to getting back to seeing the people we love and not to mention hanging out at restaurants, concerts, and bars with a shit-ton of strangers. I can’t wait!

Today we’re going to talk about play, which may seem entirely counterintuitive during a pandemic. It did to me and that is actually the exact reason why I invited today’s guest on the show. I figured if we walked away from this episode knowing how to incorporate more play in our lives during a pandemic, think of how much easier that will be AFTER herd immunity.

I’m talking today with positive play coach Jeff Harry. Jeff shows individuals and companies how to tap into their true selves, to feel their happiest and most fulfilled — all by playing. Jeff has worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day.

Jeff is an international speaker who has presented at conferences such as INBOUND and SXSW, showing audiences how major issues in the workplace can be solved using play. Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers of 2020 for his organizational development work around dealing with toxic people in the workplace. Jeff has also been featured on AJ+, the San Francisco Chronicle, and CNN. His play work has most recently been featured in the NY Times article: How Do We Add More Play To Our Grown-Up Life – Even Now.

Jeff believes that by simply unleashing our inner child, we can find our purpose and, in turn, help to create a better world. So let’s jump into the midlife sandbox with Jeff Harry.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 04:10

Welcome to the Midlife Mixtape Podcast, Mr. Jeff Harry, how are you?

Jeff 04:14

I’m so excited for this.

Nancy 04:16

I’m so excited about this too. We’ve got to lay a little groundwork here for a level-set for our listeners. The first question we always ask on this show: what was your first concert and what were the circumstances?

Jeff 04:28

It was Smokin’ Grooves concert in Chicago.

Nancy 04:33

What the heck is that, Smokin’ Grooves?

Harry 04:35

Yeah, it was all these hip-hop artists back in the 90s like Gang Starr and Busta Rhymes and it was just all dudes on stage, all dudes off stage. It was very testosterone centric, and a lot of swaying back and forth, but not in that happy way, but in more of an angry way, like, what am I doing here?

Nancy 05:06

How old were you?

Jeff 05:08

I was like 16, 17 years old. I thought I was so cool to go and then when I was there, I was like, I don’t like this at all.

Nancy 05:17

“There’s a lot of testosterone floating around in this room.”

Jeff 05:19

Exactly. I was like, “Where are…I’m not attracted to any of you, I’m sorry.”

Nancy 05:24

Well, it’s funny because Jeff, you and I have seen each other many times over the years at this Mom 2.0 conference, almost always on the dance floor. Almost always, we are spastically dancing past each other going “Woooo, Warriors! Oakland!” Because we both share our love of the Warriors and our Oakland roots.

Jeff 05:45

BAY AREA!

Nancy 05:46

So I can’t imagine you being grim at a concert. Or really in any setting.

Jeff 05:51

I know.

Nancy 05:52

As I was thinking about having you on the show today, I wondered, we’re going to talk a lot about play and unlocking people’s silliness and letting people relax. What part does music and dance play in that? Do you use that as one of your tools for helping people loosen up?

Jeff 06:10

Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, you and I are the people that start the dance floor, right? Like, at weddings.

Nancy 06:13

Always.

Jeff 06:14

We don’t care. I’ve been thinking about this, that I now believe the opposite of play is perfection. And perfection is rooted in shame, and you really can’t play when you feel shame. So the people that I love dancing with the most are the shameless, are the people that don’t really care. I’m out here for me. I don’t care if you want to dance or not. We usually are the first ones on the dance floor and then as soon as the dance floor actually gets packed, then we’re like, Our job is done. It’s not fun anymore. Because we are all about the start of it, and the exploration of it and being like, wait, what type of energy can we create in the room?

Nancy 07:01

Do you know… I was at my 30th College reunion, so, Ivy League, East Coast, pretty buttoned up. And they had a great DJ and was anybody dancing? No! Finally, the president of the class, who is a Wall Street mover and shaker – very nice woman, but I think we probably exchanged four words, all of our time in college… she walked straight over to me and said, “Could you please get this started?” I said, “I have been waiting for that request. Yes.” I went to the DJ and said, “Play this, play this, play this” and yeah, BAM! Everybody was out dancing. We know how to do it.

Jeff 07:36

You may need that person.

Nancy 07:39

Yeah, you do.

Jeff 07:40

There is even a video of this guy at this festival randomly in Portland dancing and making a fool out of themselves for 10 minutes and people are laughing. They’re mocking him. They’re filming him. But then all of a sudden, two people join. And they start dancing, and they were mocking him. But he didn’t care. He was just fully in it and then more people joined and more people joined and then now it’s this viral video where he’s surrounded by 200 people and they were like, this is an example of how you can create a movement. It’s in that same way of the first person that is willing to be out there, scorned, ridiculed, and is still doing it.

I even remember when… I haven’t shared this that much. When I used to go to this New Year’s Eve party at the Four Seasons in Chicago with my parents. I don’t know why we went to this foofoo party. But each year it was my sisters and me that started the dancing. And they started asking for us! It was like, I should get paid to do this!

Nancy 08:46

Have you seen this TikTok? It’s an older black guy sitting in an office and he’s just in the corner cubicle doing his work. And somebody comes in and starts playing Everybody Dance Now and the guy is just like, this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for. If I can figure out how to put that with the show notes, I will, because that to me is the heart of what you do. This guy is sitting there, he’s working and then suddenly, there is so much joy that he cannot sit in his desk, and he’s doing the Everybody Dance Now. And he’s good too, by the way, he is a really good dancer. I must have watched it 90 times in a row because it was just delightful.

Jeff 09:22

He does it in every place. He does it in grocery stores. He does it in hotels and it’s the same audio. It’s just, “Don’t you do it! Don’t you do it!” He’s like, “Oh yeah. I gotta do it!”

Nancy 09:36

Let’s talk about the work that you do. We’re going to start at the very beginning. What is it that you as a play specialist do and through your work with Rediscover Your Play, how do you get us to connect with our inner silliness, our inner sense of joy?

Jeff 09:51

Maybe it’s better if I start with my Batman origin story as the way to get there. Do you remember the movie Big, with Tom Hanks?

Nancy 10:00

Yes, of course.

Jeff 10:01

I saw that and he danced on that piano and got offered a job to work for a toy company and as soon as I saw that, I was like, you can do that as a job? I was in third grade so I started writing toy companies that day on my word processor. That dates me, right? I kept writing toy companies. I would get a lot of rejection letters back. Then finally a toy company software told me to go into mechanical engineering. They went out of business later. Maybe I shouldn’t have listened to them…but I did and I went to Tufts, got into mechanical engineering, and then graduated and got in the toy industry.

I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten exactly what you’ve wanted, and then been so disappointed when you get there? But there were no toys, no fun, no high fives, I was in a cubicle. Why do they pad the walls? I don’t understand!  It was not fun at all and I’m at a toy company.

So I left, had my quarter life crisis, left New York, came to the Bay Area, bumped into an organization that I found on Craigslist and there were only seven people at the time teaching kids engineering with Lego, and they were just playing for a living and there were seven of them. They were paying $150 a week. But I was like, oh, they get to play. I can make this work. I’ll figure it out, right? I was able to grow it into one of the largest Lego-inspired STEM organizations in the US, if not the largest, where we were teaching 100,000 kids a year.

And the whole time we did this, we had no idea what we were doing. We were playing. We picked cities we thought were fun. We picked people we thought were fun. We had no business plan. We experimented all the time. We’re like, Oh, that doesn’t work. Well, let’s try that! and then we eventually got the attention of Silicon Valley, Facebook, Google, Adobe. They asked, “Do you do team building events?” We’re like, “Of COURSE we do!” NO WE DIDN’T. We had never done that in our lives. We were like, “Yes, we do it all!”

Nancy 12:03

“We do now!”

Jeff 12:04

I ended up running team building events for the top tech companies in the world for the next decade and what I noticed while I was doing all this is they would speak about disruption, collaboration, communication, pushing the envelope, all these buzzwords. But they weren’t doing any of it. Even as the best organizations, they have not created psychologically safe spaces for people to actually take risks and play. So I created Rediscover Your Play to combine positive psychology and play to help them navigate hard conversations through play, to talk about toxicity at work, to talk about how do you deal with your inner critic and imposter syndrome, to talk about how to get your staff in flow all using a play-oriented mindset.

Nancy 12:52

What do the workshops look like? Do you come in on site for a day? Now especially during the pandemic, how are you delivering all that programming?

Jeff 13:01

Yeah, a lot of this stuff, we’ve now been able to move online. I ran a workshop called… I don’t know if I can swear on this podcast?

Nancy 13:09

Of course, I took the E [for explicit] early on in my podcast life.

Jeff 13:15

Excellent. So I run a workshop for the Department of Homeland Security called Dealing with A-Holes at Work Through Play. That was one of the workshops.

Nancy 13:24

Which one of those words were you worried I was going to bleep out? A-hole? It’s not even the whole word.

Jeff 13:30

Ok, dealing with assholes. But that is literally the title of one of our workshops, because we realized that the eradication of a-holes is necessary. I think SHRM did a study and found that $223 billion was lost in the last five years due to toxic people. So that’s one of the workshops we do where we actually have people role play and practice, how do you confront that a-hole? How do you have that hard conversation?

Because if you think about work, we never get to practice at work. You think of a football game, they practice all week for three hours. But when we’re at work, we’re just expected to work and produce all the time and we never get to practice navigating a hard conversation, addressing how to be a leader, figuring out how to deal with my inner critic like all these things. So I set up these workshops to actually put people in situations where they feel what they’re actually going to feel when they leave this and it gives them the bravery to take bigger steps.

Nancy 14:30

Are there people in your workshops who are super skeptics? Because work is not generally a place where we think we are going to be rewarded for being silly.  I think a lot of us tend to be a little protective of ourselves. We don’t want to make fools of ourselves in front of the people who have the power to promote and demote and pay us.

Jeff 14:49

Yeah, absolutely. There are definitely skeptics and the thing is, I hate forced fun. I HATE it. I run team building events. I’m not trying to force anyone to play when they’re not there. I actually treat it more like a playground where I’m like, “Hey, this is the project or the thing that we’re doing right now, if you want to participate, great. If you don’t, you can just hang out on the sidelines, like we’re in a playground and if you want to join in later, then feel free to.”

The reason why partly why I say that is because the people are like, “Well, why is play necessary at work? It’s not necessary right now.” I always reference Steven Johnson, who said, “You’ll find the future where people are having the most fun.”

If you look at the organizations that are thriving right now, the TikTok, Clubhouse, Disney+, Netflix, all these organizations, the ones that are willing to take risks, those are the ones that are thriving, those are the ones that did well in 2020, that were adaptable, that were resilient. That’s all using a play-oriented mindset. But if you choose not to play, if you choose to be like, “Well, I just want to get back to normal and we’re going to do things the way we’ve always done it,” you’re going to become the next Blockbuster.

If you need more examples of why play is so important, look at Google with their 20% program.

They give their staff a fifth of their time to pursue whatever suits their curiosity, as long as it helps out Google. In that process, what has come from the Google 20% program? AdSense, which pays the bills, Google Meet. And Gmail. Those are all curious play projects people had on the side.

For businesses, they may not be able to give a fifth of their time, but they can help their staff figure out like, what is your flow work? What is your red thread work? What’s the work where you forget about time? What’s the work that even if you weren’t getting paid you would do this type of work? What percentage of time are you currently spending on that type of work? 10%? You’re only doing it 10% of the time? How can we increase it to 15 or 20%, which is really only a couple more hours a week. Because studies have shown when you do your flow work, it has a ripple effect on all the other work that you do and your productivity levels go up, your morale goes up, and you’re less likely to leave the organization.

Nancy 17:07

What about beyond an organizational setting? How do we at midlife try to embrace that creativity and that fun? Because generally speaking, midlife isn’t exactly famous for flights of fancy. I mean, we’re balancing our kids, we’re balancing our aging relatives. You mentioned forced fun. Sometimes when I hear about programs like this, my sense is, oh my God! That’s something else I have to do! Another thing on my to-do list, I know I have to have more fun than I’ve been having. So how would you address that concern?

Jeff 17:38

I would first address it by first having compassion for ourselves.

By the time you turn the age of 18, you have heard the word “no” 148,000 times. That’s what one study found. On top of that, you were “should” on by your parents all the time, by your parents, by your school teachers, everyone is shoulding on you. “You should do this! You should do that! You should do that! You should major in this!” And you’re like, “I’m six. Why are you telling me what I should be majoring in right now?”

So everyone’s pushing their anxieties on you. Then you get to your teenage years, especially now with social media, and all this social media and media is telling you you’re not enough, you shouldn’t be yourself and frankly, you actually should be spending more money trying to become somebody else.

So you’re fighting all of that. Then when you try to be your playful self, when you try to be a little bit more mischievous, people say you’re doing too much. “Why are you acting that way? Why would you want to start a podcast? That makes no sense.” People are always questioning you. You have to battle all that just to be able to play and be yourself.

The suggestion I would give people- two suggestions. One is – my play mentor Glen Gordon would always say, “You can’t play until you soothe yourself.” If you’re feeling a lot of anxiety, a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, that’s not the time to play. You actually have to allow yourself to feel those feelings, feel them fully as they talk about in positive psychology, before you let them go. You can’t try to numb them. But actually allow yourself to feel it fully, and once you feel that, then figure out what soothes you. When I take showers, that’s when I have a huge amount of ideas. When I go out on walks, when I’m dancing in my house, sometimes with a costume on. What is the thing that actually calms you down? Is it meditation? Whatever it is that actually calms you to a place where you can actually then receive.

And then I challenge people to do something that most people have not done in a really long time and that is: get bored.

What I mean by that is stop binge-watching Netflix, stop looking at social media –  and I’m not talking about forever. I’m talking about one hour, 30 minutes where you just are not looking at it. If you think, “Well, I don’t have time.” Look at your phone. Your phone counts how long you’ve been on your phone. The average is four hours a day. You can find 30 minutes to an hour to get really bored.

The reason why I say get bored is because think about when you were a kid, when you were bored, that’s when you came up with your best ideas and your most mischievous ideas. And then you’re like, Oh, man, maybe I should start a podcast, maybe I will make this ridiculous video, maybe I will email this person I’ve always wanted to email like, maybe I’ll do the thing that I’ve always been scared to do, but also kind of excited and see where that curiosity takes you. That is your way in which you could actually play again.

Nancy 20:41

That’s something everybody listening to this show could do. I mean, especially now during the pandemic, if you can’t find 30 minutes to stare into space, when are you going to find it?

Jeff 20:53

Here’s another way in which they can do it.

If you want to employ your friends to help you out, reach out to three to five of your closest friends, get on the phone with them –  I know, it’s kind of foreign –  but get on the phone with them or see them face to face via Zoom, and ask them two questions:

“What value do I bring to your life?” Because I think a lot of times we forget, or maybe we’ve never known ,what value we bring to our friend’s life. What do I do for you? Why are we friends? Why do you keep hanging out with me? What value do I bring to your life?

Then the second question is, “When have you seen me most alive?” Another way of asking this is, “When have you seen me most playful, most creative, most myself?”  This question comes from the Howard Thurman quote, “Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs is for more people to come alive.” Again, what value do I bring to your life and whenever you see me come most alive? When you get those answers back and you start writing it down and look at all the patterns, there’s so many ways in which you either are already playing or ways in which you can play again and then you could reach back out to those friends and be like, “Can you help me to play more in this way?”

Nancy 22:02

Right. The last episode of the show was with Laura Tremaine who wrote a book called Share Your Stuff. I’ll Go First and it’s all about sort of deep questions you can ask your friends, but you can also reflect on yourself. One of them is, “What were your magical moments?” She encourages us to just think about times in our life that really stand out as those memories you want to carry with you and I realized in prepping for this episode, well, one of my magical places is this family camp that I’ve gone to since I was two up in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.

I still travel back from California to go to that and my siblings, and I, and now our spouses and our kids all stay in the same cabin. We go there with people who we met when we were two, three, and they’re all parents and even grandparents at this point and I think one of the reasons it is so magical to me, is because we all play there.

Jeff 22:58

Yeah.

Nancy 22:59

One of the days that I’ll never forget, this is a couple years ago…there’s a thing out in the middle of the lake, a floating spinner. It’s a big floating donut, basically, with a trampoline in the middle. The lifeguard stands on the trampoline, and you go out with your life jacket on so you’ll be safe. But you get up and stand on this outer rim of the spinner and you try to run around while the lifeguard is going up and down on the trampoline.

Of course, it’s designed for the summer campers. It’s all supposed to be kids, but there was a day –  it was a beautiful sunny day- and I was out there and it was with a bunch of 40, 50, 60 years old people who had grown up at this camp together. We were in hysterics running around this thing, trying to bounce each other off. It was just this pure joy and I could remember what it felt like to be eight years old and having fun, just fun for its own sake.  I realized there’s a reason that stands out to me so much: because it’s isolated. I don’t always have fun. Maybe at midlife, these moments of just fun for its own sake become that much more valuable.

Jeff 24:05

I love that you said that, because the way in which I define plays is very broad. It’s any joyful moment where you are fully present. Where there is no purpose, there is no result. You don’t have anxiety about the future. You don’t have regrets about the past, you are just fully engaged in that present time. One thing I wrote  abut was the Fun Joy Play Index. I replaced resolutions because I don’t believe in resolutions and I was like let’s do a Fun Joy Play Index every year.

At the beginning of every year, look back, and you can do this for 2020, think about what were your most fun, joyful play moments. I asked many questions like, “What was your most awe-inspiring moment? When did you laugh the most? What was just like a moment where you just couldn’t stop smiling?” You just start to reflect and savor those moments again and that’s also a way in which you can not only relive those moments, but actually boost your immune system now, by simply going back and savoring those moments. And then after you’ve recognized all of them be like, What fun joy play moments do I want in 2021? Even if the pandemic is still going on, even if I’m in quarantine, who are the people that I want to be spending more time with and connecting with?

One of my great friends and colleague, Lauren, we were like, “Oh, we need to do more tipsy brainstorms where we have a few mimosas while we brainstorm!” and we scheduled those. There’s something else about anticipation and looking forward to having real, amazing connections. We have to think – at the end of your life, we have to learn from the dying. One of the biggest regrets of the dying is, “I wish I had the courage to live the life that I want to live and not the life that others expected of me.” I think our whole life, we’re trying to think of what is the right way of doing things so that I can collect as many possessions or, whatever, accolades. But no one thinks about that at the end of your life. You think about the Fun Joy Play moments. So why wouldn’t we be spending more time focusing on that?

Nancy 26:20

I wonder if your work has gotten particularly difficult since the pandemic started? Because the facts are that things are so hard for so many of us, we’ve lost people, we’ve lost jobs, we’re worried about our kids, we’re worried about our neighbors.  I wonder if there is a pervasive sense that this is not the time to have fun. This is not appropriate given the environment within which we find ourselves.

Jeff 26:46

In my opinion, I feel like this is the MOST important time to!

Here, I’ll give you this example. When my father passed away in 2015, I was at his funeral, and his brother showed up. His brothers had not seen each other in 20 years since their mom passed away. I’m surrounded by all of them and I’m feeling grief and sadness, but I’m also feeling joy and gratitude that they’re there, that all of my extended family are there. And at first, I was like, “Oh, cannot feel both feelings!” I remembered Inside Out, it was like, you feel all the feelings, you feel all of them at the same time, and you allow them to flow through you. That’s what living is.

I really felt joy and gratitude, not just for them but just for what my dad had done for me at the same time that I was like, I’m so sad that I’m never going to have another conversation with him again. But we should have to allow ourselves to feel all those feelings instead of trying to numb them. I get it if people want to binge watch Netflix to a certain point. But when that binge watching is like almost like eating Cheetos, where you’re starting to feel sick, and you’re like, this is not feeling good for me anymore, then stop doing that and start pursuing something that actually brings you joy.

There is a guy on Clubhouse right now – and for anyone that doesn’t know Clubhouse, it’s this new social media app that’s all audio. He was going into all these rooms and there are all these really popular people, there are all these celebrities. He was like, “This is not the right room for me. I don’t know why I’m on this app, but I’m a musician and I just want to bring happiness to people’s lives.” So he was just like, “I’m just going to create my own room and call it the Lullaby Room and I’m going to play lullaby music at 10,11pm at night for anyone that wants to join.”

Because of the pandemic, it became the most popular room on Clubhouse. It was so popular that they made him the icon on Clubhouse! If you download Clubhouse now, his face is the icon! When people ask why he did it, he was just like, “I was just pursuing the thing that brought me the most joy.” We’re only on this planet for a certain period of time, so why wouldn’t we be devoted to pursuing that and even in times of grief, still feeling joy and gratitude, I think, is essential for living.

Nancy 29:16

I’m glad you brought up that example of your dad’s funeral because, as you know… you were so kind to me when we had to reschedule this after my mom died in December. I had a very similar experience at my dad’s funeral, where the grief that was heavy and real was side by side with such joy at seeing people. My cousins came out of the woodwork, and you know, I have a funny family. I just do. It’s the man’s legacy. And so there were moments of utter hilarity during my dad’s funeral.

When mom died in December, and I couldn’t get back there – we’ve postponed her memorial, we’ll do that sometime this summer –  a big part of my feeling of loss was that I couldn’t get the fun part of it. I could see it –  I was watching [her burial] on Zoom as my cousins and my siblings and nieces and nephews were all there in New York and I was so sad because I thought, oh, I’m going to miss out on the camaraderie and the joy of being together that also is a part of this particular kind of grief. And then I remembered because of the pandemic, they all had to go to their separate houses.

So we’ll find that together next summer, but I absolutely relate to what you’re saying. It’s not disrespectful to feel moments of joy within loss and within difficult times. I do think it’s part of how you get through them.

Jeff 30:37

I think it’s also part of the celebration process of that person’s life.

Nancy 30:40

Right.

Jeff 30:41

I want my funeral to be a party, man! I mean, it should be a celebration. One of my favorite memories of last year was these conversations I had with my friend Lauren and my friend, Julie, where we would talk about death. We talked about death for hours and it was something fascinating about how most people avoid this, but we found by actually talking about it, by actually exploring it, we understood more of what we wanted to do in our lives and live right now. Because when you truly do understand death, then you truly do know how to live more.

Nancy 31:19

The stakes get a lot higher when you know that it’s coming to an end, when you admit to yourself that you don’t have infinite time.

Jeff, where’s the best place for people to go to find your work and tune in to more of what you’re doing with Rediscover Your Play?

Jeff 31:33

Simply go to rediscoveryourplay.com and click on the Let’s Play button where I have a bunch of play activities and you can then hop on a call with me and figure out how you can kick ass in this world through play.

Nancy 31:45

There are also photos of you…what grade were you in, fifth grade? It’s a thing of beauty. You had a lot of hair as a young child.

Jeff 31:54

Is that the one with the champagne bottles and the money?

Nancy 31:57

Yes, exactly. You look like you were living your best life. At that point, you’d already been sending letters out to the toy companies. Who wouldn’t want to hire that kid?

Jeff 32:04

That is very funny because that’s when I won bingo in Bermuda as a seven-year-old and let’s just say the other bingo players that had been playing there for quite some time were LIVID that this seven-year-old. had won two champagne bottles and $230. They were like, “What is he even going to do with it?”

Nancy 32:26

We’re going to take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, and then we’ll come back to hear more with Jeff Harry of Rediscover Your Play.

The presenting Sponsor of the Midlife Mixtape Podcast is the Amateur Music Network.

You know what’s a great way to bring more play into your life? Music. It’s not a coincidence that we talk about playing the piano or the guitar. It’s fun!

Our sponsor Amateur Music Network is all about that playful spirit. It’s a Bay Area nonprofit that connects amateur musicians with professional mentors, and with one another, through online workshops, conversations, and listings.

They’re serious—in a playful way, of course—about amateur in their name. “We do it because we love it!” is their motto. Isn’t that what play is all about?

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OK, it can’t replace an in-person choir, and on Zoom nobody can hear you singing. But Ragnar’s unique ability to connect through the screen will have you feeling like you’re getting personal coaching from one of the very best and with Amateur Music Network the focus is always on being together in a community of music-makers, even while we’re apart.

Sign up for Singing Saturdays by going to amateurmusic.org/workshops. That’s amateurmusic.org/workshops and if you don’t sing, but do play a musical instrument, check out Amateur Music Network’s other online workshops. There’s something there for everyone who loves making—and playing—music.

[MUSIC]

Nancy 34:23

Alright. We’re back with Jeff Harry and I wanted to ask you, Jeff… I’m kind of a leading edge Gen Xer and you are the last part of Gen X and I wanted to know, between the bookends, is there anything special about the way Generation X approaches fun and play? Is there kind of a special sensibility that we bring to it?

Jeff 34:43

Gen Xers were before social media. We know what it’s like to actually be told, “Go outside” and then, “Well, I don’t have anything to do.” “So what? Go and come back when it gets dark.”

Nancy 34:59

Boredom is not unfamiliar to our generation. We grew up with it.

Jeff 35:01

I remember my sisters and I would be fascinated looking at a dead fish and trying to squeeze its guts out of it for hours. FOR HOURS.

Nancy 35:13

Raise your hand if you ever sat around with a rock and a roll of caps.

Jeff 35:16

Not to mention we’ve gone through so many different ridiculous, not just presidencies, but so many different disasters. But yeah, so I think we have a really interesting perspective of what it’s like to actually be bored, while also being savvy enough to be part of a lot of the social media that’s happening now.

Nancy 35:38

You’ve mentioned a couple of people as mentors. It sounds like you’ve been really deliberate about that, about putting together a team of people to help keep you on track.

Jeff 35:46

Yeah, it wasn’t like, “I need to find a mentor!” It was just like people that I vibed with. I was like, Let me just spend more time hanging out with this person, because they’re fun! It’s just like being on the dance floor and you’re like, I want to hang out with you. You can feel when there’s not ego in the dance group. When people are dancing for dancing’s sake, and when people are dancing to get attention. I want to be with the people that are just there just because they just love wiggling their body.

Nancy 36:19

What’s next for you as a play expert at midlife? Are you still operating kind of without a plan? Because you sure have created a vision and a path for yourself. What you talked about with the early-stage company, where you guys were just throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks – it has worked for you! But are you still using that process, or do you have a plan now?

Jeff 36:41

I still am using it to a point. I follow my curiosity for the most part, but the overarching vision – I really got inspired by Brené Brown when she was just like, “I want to have a global conversation about vulnerability and shame.” I want to have a global conversation about the power of play to change things.

You could use play to address climate change. You could use play to navigate difficult conversations. I just had a conversation with a Trump supporter, someone that I completely disagree with and it was on her YouTube channel. She had thousands of people watching. And using play, we were able to have a conversation for three hours and find commonality, find a certain level of understanding. It wasn’t all happy at the end of it, but we figured it out. There’s so much healing that needs to happen, mental health, division politically, dealing with stuff like climate change, having more empathy, especially around the pandemic. All of this can be used if you use a play-oriented mindset to actually help people connect on a values level and connects through empathy, instead of through our rational mind which we’re always trying to do.

Nancy 37:54

I hope that all of you will go check out Jeff’s work at rediscoveryourplay.com and Jeff, I hope we’re going to see each other on the dance floor again, IRL, someday soon.

Jeff 38:04

Yes, can I good will hunt your people before we…

Nancy 38:08

I don’t even know what that means but sure, give it a go. They are game for anything.

Jeff 38:13

You remember Good Will Hunting?

Nancy 38:15

Yeah.

Jeff 38:16

So this moment of the movie resonates with me so much.

It’s at the end of the movie at the construction site where Matt Damon is sitting with Ben Affleck – and for anyone that has never seen Good Will Hunting:, Matt Damon’s a genius. He could have any job he wants and right now he’s hanging out at the construction site with Ben Affleck, they’re working construction.

Ben’s like, “What are you going to take one of these high paying jobs?” and Matt says, “I’m not. I’m going to work construction. We’re going to raise our kids together; we’re going to take them to the Foley Field and that’s just what I’m going to do.” Ben turns to him, and he’s like, “If I see you here in 20 years, I’m going to kill you. I’m literally going to kill you.” Matt goes, “What are you talking about? What, I owe it to myself?” Ben says, “No, you don’t owe it to yourself. You owe it to ME. Because I’m going to be here in 20 years and that’s fine. But you’re sitting on a winning lottery ticket and you’re too scared to cash that in.”

I truly believe for all the listeners out there, you ALL are sitting on winning lottery tickets and you’re not trying to cash it in for yourself. This is not about you. This is about you doing it to give permission for other people to start to show up. When you actually do something that’s scary, but exciting, it gives someone bravery to be like, whoa! Maybe I can do that. You starting this podcast is the only reason why I’m now here all these years later!

If there’s one message that I can communicate to your listeners, it is that you have this opportunity, you only have a short time to do it. What are you going to do with the time that you had? Are you going to show up? Because everyone else is waiting for you to show up so they can also be fully alive!

Nancy 40:01

It’s such great advice and I’m so happy to hear you encourage people because yeah, taking that risk is so scary, but the payoff is huge. It’s huge. I’m just seconding everything you said.

Before I let you go, though, we always close with this question: what one piece of advice do you have for people younger than you or do you wish you could go back and tell yourself?

Jeff 40:22

The advice I would tell myself is that nobody knows what they’re doing. If 2020 didn’t show you that… even Brené Brown, Simon Sinek, they didn’t have a clue of what they were doing, either! So nobody knows. That makes you an expert on yourself. Follow your intuition, follow your curiosity. Trust your instincts. Remember that your rational mind, your inner critic is designed to protect you and it’s designed to save you from all the scary things out there. But it’s your intuition, THAT’S where your creativity, that’s where the risk taking, that’s where all the impact is.

So listen to that intuition. Listen to that inner child. Listen to that inner curiosity, and it will take you on an adventure that you’ll never regret.

Nancy 41:16

Wise words. Jeff, thank you so much so much for coming on the show. This is really inspiring. Everybody, Jeff, Harry, rediscoveryourplay.com and Jeff – I’ll see you on a dance floor sometime soon.

Jeff 41:27

Yippy!

Nancy 41:28

Woo-hoo!

[MUSIC]

Ok, I hope it’s ok with you that I gave Jeff permission to “good will hunt” you without knowing what that was or asking if you were ok with it. Generally, I’m down with consent. I think it’s a good thing. But I felt like the worst he was going to do was use a Boston accent. I felt it was worth taking the risk.

I hope today’s show gave you some ideas to chew on. I’d love to hear what you thought – drop me a line at [email protected], or send me a message via Instagram, FB, and Twitter @midlifemixtape. Remember, every rating and review you leave makes it easier for other listeners to find me, so I’m grateful to you for adding your thoughts, wherever you listen!

Remember, in two nights we’re meeting again. Join me on Thursday night for our next virtual Midlife Mixtape Dance Party – go to twitch.tv/dj_damon at 5 pm Pacific!

Ok, here’s your homework before the next episode. Google “Har Mar Superstar videos.” That’s Har, H-A-R, Mar, M-A-R SUPERSTAR – and watch the Prisoner video, or Lady You Shot Me. Follow that rabbit hole ALL the way down. Keep watching those videos and then come back here in two weeks. That’s all I’m saying for now. I’ll catch you then!

[THEME MUSIC – “Be Free” by M. The Heir Apparent]

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