Announcer: 0:05

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host, psychotherapist, coach, and empowerment expert, Beverley Glazer.

Beverley Glazer: 0:23

What happens when your career ends, but your drive to keep on working keeps going. Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer, a reinvention strategist and empowerment coach for visionary women over 50 who turn a lifetime of wisdom into their most impactful chapter yet. And you can find me on reInventimpossible.com. Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver is a professor of gerontology at the University of Toronto, where she spent 20 years studying why high achievers like CEOs and Olympic athletes hit the wall when they stop working. Her work has been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Forbes, Humor, and the Globe and Mail, and that's just to name a few. And she's a keynote speaker at the American Medical Association and alumni associations around the world. So let's dive right into why boredom is the most dangerous thing that you could do for your health. And how you can stay in the game on your own terms. Just keep listening. Welcome, Michelle.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 1:40

Thank you so much, Beverly, for having me. It's an honor to be with you.

Beverley Glazer: 1:44

Michelle, you were the youngest of four children growing up, and your father was 20 years older than mom. So did that happen to affect you at all? Because here you were quite little with an much older dad.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 2:00

True. I um, yeah, so so I my mom was my father's subsequent wife. So he had three children and I came later, and it definitely had an impact. Um, you know, I always my dad was always mistaken for being my grandfather. Um he did at a very um early point, you know, go through some really natural age-related changes and also developed dementia, which doesn't happen to everyone, but um, but given um his life experiences, he, you know, it was a big deal when he when that happened. And I was young and formative uh when those uh changes happened. And um I definitely felt that it really influenced my work and my life, and in many ways, really favorably. Um, and in other ways, just really helped me to think about what does it mean uh to age and what can we do? And how can individuals in society think about these changes that inevitably happen to some and unfortunately happen to some?

Beverley Glazer: 3:16

Sure, but if there's a decline in all of us, no matter what. And you were witness to uh to that in a big way when you were very, very young. Your dad served in World War II. Yeah, and he also lived a busy life, an active life. He was a physician, was he not? He was a therapist, a therapist. Yeah, yes. Okay, and yeah, so he's always listening to stories. I know what therapists do, I'm very much that. Yeah, you're always hearing people, you're always helping people. He wasn't forced to retire, or was that his force?

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 4:00

So he so, you know, at a at a certain point, my dad's dementia became really clear um to my siblings and I, and he he wasn't um really able to keep going. He was a very dedicated worker. Um, he was a very early licensed clinical social worker in the state of California. His license was number 11. Now it's got to be in the, you know, many, many, many, much higher digits than that. And um, and I think he had a profound impact on the you know clients and patients he worked with. And I think they also had a profound influence on him. His worth ec was really strong. And his personal life was a bit complicated given all the different marriages and children and and his life experience um in the war was significant. Like he he had nightmares um, you know, every, every pretty much every night of his life, which, you know, I I think is something that a lot of um war vets live with. And um and his work was impactful and also impactful on him. And when it came time to address the dementia, I I want to say my siblings really did a ton of the work in terms of like, you know, negotiating caregivers and a lot of logistics that were essential. And the and one small piece that I did was to close down his practice. And I did it at a at a young age, and you can imagine it was a bit involved, right? With like shredding documents and whatnot, um, and and locking up uh what was a space that um, you know, wasn't in his home, it was in an office, and it was to me a familiar space because I, you know, just as a kid, I'd spent time like waiting, waiting in his waiting room, you know, hanging out. But it was also um it felt really momentous. And um, and in a way, I guess it was something that I did, you know, I essentially retired him. Um, and it, you know, not in not in a um not with any malicious intention, you know, but but I really felt it and I really recognized, yes, he's not, you know, dementia is, you know, is a loss, right? But I sort of internalized this loss that he, you know, it's a dementia is a loss for us as family members, right? But closing down his practice was a loss for him. It was something he had been so used to and had gotten a lot of fulfillment from. And I um and it really made me think about like, what does this mean to close a chapter like that of someone's life? You know, because you have to.

Beverley Glazer: 7:01

Yeah. It's huge. It's huge. Yeah. And where was mom in this picture? She's 20 years younger.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 7:09

Yeah, so my parents divorced when um when I was nine. So they they she was not in the picture um for this sort of experience. Yeah.

Beverley Glazer: 7:19

And he didn't remarry. So that gave you even more responsibility.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 7:25

Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When there's a spouse involved, I think that there's often like, or when there's not a spouse involved, I think there's more that often does go to the children. That's fair, yeah.

Beverley Glazer: 7:37

Sure, and you were the youngest. So correct. Yeah. Yeah. So you felt it most. They all had their lives, you know, this is what happens. And so you spent two decades teaching gerontology. And I'm sure dad impacted you a lot to go into that field. What's the biggest myth that you came from all of this with retirement? The biggest myth.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 8:08

Well, I mean, I think the biggest myth starts with the idea that like retirement is this time to like luxuriate on the beach and um and just, you know, like relax and travel the world and is all like happiness, happiness, sunsets, and cruises. And, you know, so so my father really influenced my interest in studying retirement. Um, I went on and I did a graduate program that was um, you know, focused on econometrics, but I was looking at a data set that focused in on retirement data points. And um, and that was largely because of his influence. And the more I studied it, you know, I realized like, no, retirement doesn't just equal one kind of lifestyle, one kind of like experience.

Beverley Glazer: 9:02

Exactly. Yes, Freedom 55. That's a joke. Right. And uh I think with all of us aging longer and longer, we're starting to see what a joke that is. Because 55 can just be the beginning of so much more than just sitting on a beach. Not that it matters if that's what you want to do, however, not everybody wants to do it, and we shouldn't all be put in a box. And so, yes. I couldn't agree more.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 9:37

I I couldn't agree more, and and the way I look at it is that you know, there's there's you know a continuum, right? And on one end, there's people who can't wait to retire and who've planned for it, who are lucky enough to be in good health to enjoy it and have the financial resources and the partner or the interest in, you know, just experiencing life, and and they do. And you know, there's nothing to say that it's like has to be a bad experience, but there's another really important end of the continuum that is dreading retirement, is does not want to be forced into it, and has been largely ignored. And a lot of my work has explored that as I made the shift from strictly quantitative analysis into more qualitative research. I learned that there are many people who their retirement parties ended up feeling like funerals and more than celebrations, and that they really felt cut out, cut off, um, disregarded because of a arbitrary chronological age that they hit, and that there are huge losses to society because they can't contribute in the ways that they know they're capable of or that they desire. And um, you know, never mind the personal, right? Like personally, it's devastating. And we all understand that at early stages in life when we don't get the job or we're, you know, trying to get our foot in the door and we can't. But to be cut out after like decades of experience is another kind of devastation that I really think is important we address societally. And there's lots of ways to do that.

Beverley Glazer: 11:26

Yes. Tell us about your book, Retirement and its discontents.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 11:32

Yeah, so so um, yeah, so I I had done a whole bunch of different studies. Um, and the book is kind of like an amalgamation of those different studies. So um I've done quite a bit of work studying physicians and their experiences with retirement um surveys, interviewing them, listening to the greedy institution of medicine and how that acculturates people into medicine. If they can, you know, make it through all those stages. They're eventually, you know, in these roles where they're making life or death decisions, they're working on call, and that means they need to be awake and potentially awake, like, you know, at any time and waking up in the middle of the night and told life, okay, now you know, you're on shift, you're on duty. And those kinds of work that physicians do, um, they really are life and death decisions um for the most part. Uh, and to go from that to suddenly, you know, being at like you don't have the title of uh physician of doctor so-and-so anymore, you're not being consulted for what your lifelong experience has told you, and um, it can be really devastating. So, so one subset of my work um really focuses in on uh experiences of um people in medicine. And um from there, I I gave a talk and kind of connected with some other types of subgroups. Um, one was CEOs. So someone I was giving a talk, and uh someone came up to me afterwards and they said, you know, a lot of what you're saying about this like strong connection with work identity that relates to CEOs too. And I was like, Yeah, that sounds great, but like, how am I ever gonna get CEOs to talk to me? And of course it turned out that, well, I'm a CEO. And anyway, it was a fantastic experience. Um, and was able to connect with people who had a really different relationship to their work in the sense that they weren't, you know, they weren't performing operations, they weren't consulting with people about their health issues, but the buck stopped with them. And the support stuff that they had was also different, like really different than in a medical setting. But, you know, some of the people I spoke with had gone from having like two administrative assistants, two secretaries to like manage their schedules, and they were just so used to like 5 a.m. and then you know, every hour is blocked. If not, it was half-hour increments of time. And they never had to think about it. They just knew that it was going to be planned for them. And um, going from that sort of curated schedule to just, you know, okay, uh like maybe I'll have coffee with the guys, or uh, you know, or maybe I gotta figure out how to do that coordinating was really, really tricky. Never mind that, like once those sort of transitions in power happen, there isn't often a lot of consulting that happens between a current CEO with his predecessor with her predecessor, right? So there's a lot of that kind of just being cut out, usually prematurely. And then um, and then from there, I was working on a campus where um we hosted the PNAM games, and there were these amazing athletes and coaches. And long story short, I connected there with some very high profile, high um performance athletes. Anyway, so long story short, age, you know, um retirement and discontents is an amalgamation of the stories of people who identify really strongly with their work and whose work experiences were very intertwined with their personal identities. And therefore, retirement was uh a lot about coping with discontent. And it sort of shares strategies, but also missteps and some, you know, things to avoid and things to consider.

Beverley Glazer: 15:40

Yeah, for sure. And they don't think of retirement, you just think of keeping on going, and that would be for athletes also, or for any high-performing people, you do not want to stop, you love what you do, you thrive on what you do, and it's taken away. Aging and agility, that was another book that you wrote, and that had to do with Olympians. Compare Olympians to the average person.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 16:09

Well, so uh an elite athlete who makes it to the Olympics is someone who uh by definition is demonstrating the limits of human potential. And to get to that kind of stage of physical performance requires incredible mental, physical dedication, focus, stamina, motivation, um, optimism, commitment. And they there there is there's some some things that everybody I think can relate to. Um, but to be able to make it at that sort of level also requires, I think, a level of a degree of sacrifice that most people are not asked to make. And so it comes with some consequences. It it often means focusing on a very singular goal to the detriment of developing other types of aspects of oneself. So I, you know, so I interviewed and listened to people who I thought for the purposes of aging with agility, I thought, oh, here I'm gonna get the you know, tips and tricks uh about how we can all um be more physically fit later in life. Like that was sort of my like hope out of the project. And it as it turned out, um the the stories that are shared there are really um a subset of people who some some that was true. Some there's some amazing tips and tricks, and and uh, and these are people who were reflecting on their experiences as athletes. So they're coming from a stance of being, you know, in mature years of life, but you know, had in earlier stages been Olympic athletes. And some of them like really faced very devastating um experiences that were related to having been athletes.

Beverley Glazer: 18:21

Yeah, and their careers are cut short very quickly. Did you ever find out what happened to them as they had to retire?

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 18:32

Yes. So there is um, for example, one um individual whose story is is is quite um elaborated on who had been a um high performance hockey player, and he um he, you know, uh early on faced um pretty serious injury, and then that led into um pretty serious drug addiction, and that led into um some really big challenges with work and living arrangements and navigating life and the things that, you know, for for many of us are sort of like natural next steps. Um, but for him, he had been so singularly focused on his athletic career at such an early age and had been so high performing. Um, but you know, the consequences of injury and addiction and not ever having a plan B really um were quite devastating in a lot of ways. And um, and and so I did learn, yeah, that those are some of the issues is the injury, and not everyone I interviewed ended up um having addiction. I will say that it's it it seems to be less unique in um high performance athletes than than we might expect, given that we sort of tend to have this assumption like these are perfect bodies, and so they're gonna always perform perfectly. Um, but almost all of them had some kind of injury. So the injury didn't always translate into an addiction, but the injuries were with them and meant dealing with some physical changes earlier in life than um, you know, some people make it all the way through and don't have any significant injury for many of us. Eventually, there's some kind of injury. Um, but for high performance athletes, it's very common to have a pretty serious injury injury uh pretty early. So there's all sorts of things that they're thinking about, including retirement, really early, right? At at very, very young stages when we're not quite, you know, developed to be or or you know, socialized to be thinking about that.

Beverley Glazer: 21:00

Sure, the presses are huge in so many different ways, but there must be a common thread among the hundreds of stories that you heard about people who thrive after 65. What is that common thread?

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 21:16

Yes, yes. I think I think the key is like, yes, people thrive. And, you know, a lot of people think it's all doom and gloom and dread and decline. But you're absolutely right, Beverly. Like there are there are several things. So, you know, the the top, like I would say the top takeaways from you know, from my work with aging utility were focused, focusing on what your goals are, um, being able to apply whatever you did earlier that was helpful, whether it was at work, whether it was, you know, in your social life or your family life, those kind of skills that you were good at. That worked for you, apply those to the goals that you want for your mature years. Another is confidence, having the confidence to say, yeah, I'm gonna focus, I'm gonna focus on what I want to do now. You know, maybe in the past it was focusing on the child rearing or the other people that, you know, are very, very important. Um, or the work goals or accommodating your boss, but having the confidence to say, actually, like I want to be strong so that I can navigate the winter so that I can walk to the grocery store and and feel like I'm okay to keep walking. That's a very basic example, but but for many of us, that's a that's something we put some time into. Having the confidence to say, I'm gonna, you know what, I'm gonna do an exercise class, whatever that means. I'm gonna do something that is intentional physical activity, even though it might feel vain or whatever. I'm doing it because like I have the confidence to take care of myself. And embedded in that is motivation, like finding whatever it is that motivates you, whether it's because you want to look good or because you want to be there for your grandchildren or be there for your neighbor or whatever or yourself, right? But there's gotta be some kind of like thing you tap into because it's your habit, because it, but whatever motivates you. I found that people who um really thrived, they found some source of motivation and there isn't a one-size-fits-all answer there. Um, and then there's a few more, like resilience is another one. People who tap into that. So I interviewed some people who who didn't move much. And um, and that's that's a that's a reality for some people uh for a range of different reasons. And and without you know, sounding too judgmental, well in a positive judgmental way, I would say that resilience is really remarkable because a lot of popular culture sort of writes us off if we're not physically able-bodied and agile and and whatnot. But having that emotional resilience to say, you know, and all of them are sort of very intertwined, right? Also having the confidence to say, no, I'm okay with this, is this is where I'm at, and I'm gonna keep going. Another's optimism, um, that you know, there's been a lot of research about that. And I would just, you know, add to it to say that um the doom and gloom mentality is just not helpful. There's not a ton of room for that. And if it happens, it happens, but there isn't a lot of uh benefit to you know focusing on that. And I when I heard what I learned was those who were optimistic, um it served them really well. That's a that's a short version. And the last is commitment, just sticking with it, just stick with it.

Beverley Glazer: 25:11

Yeah, that's horrific. So, what would you tell listeners who are listening to right now, and they say, I feel that my best life is really behind me, and I kind of lost myself worth it.

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 25:25

I would say I heard you saying your you had a best life, that there is a best life in there. And isn't that a wonderful legacy? You had uh a best life, and let's let's build on that. The a lot of folks sort of struggle, I've observed, with what will their legacy be? What will their impact be once they're gone? And that I think is the most challenging piece if there isn't any best life aspect. So I would say, good for you that you feel like you had a good best part, because we can focus on some other best aspects. I mean, you know, the simple answer would be like, no way, no way. And let me show you some examples that, you know, you're not, you're you that's not gonna happen. Um, there's many, many folks who have had, you know, their biggest contributions come in later stages of adulthood. And if that's helpful, we can expand on those examples. But for someone who is is is um concerned that they're not gonna reach those achievements yet, I would highlight that literature that suggests, you know, the the U-shaped curve of happiness, that there are these amazing uh built-in features that that uh you know that that should should um be exploited, which means that we can find ways to find happiness and those best lives at all stages, but we're especially likely later. And I would just suspect they they haven't ched into that yet, but it's gonna come.

Beverley Glazer: 27:15

Yeah, and so what I'm hearing throughout all this, Michelle, is there is potential, there is possibility. Don't give up, keep going. Thank you so much, Michelle. Dr. Michelle Panersilver is the professor of gerontology at the University of Toronto, where she has spent 20 years studying high achievers like CEOs and Olympic athletes when they hit the wall and retire. Her work has been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, Forbes, Zoomer, The Globe and Mail, just to name a few. And she's a keynote speaker at the American Medical Association and alumni associations throughout the world. Here are a few takeaways from this episode. Your success can make transition harder. So be patient with your change. Don't fall into the leisure trap. You need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, or your mental and physical health can decline. And you don't stumble into your purpose. If you've been relating to this conversation, trade one hour of screen time to learning something new that keeps your mind creative and agile. Ask yourself what you're interested in today and don't look back. And let go of one label that no longer serves you. This clears space you that you need to create what's next for you. For a similar episode on reinvention and retirement, check out episode 153 of Aging with Purpose and Passion. And if you love podcasts for older women, award-winning author Jane Leder and guests take a deep dive into the joys and challenges of being an older woman. That's janeleder.net. And so, Michelle, where can people find you? What are your links online?

Dr. Michelle Pannor Silver: 29:18

Uh you can find me on LinkedIn. I um I do have a website, Michelle Pannorsilver.com, and um I look forward to being in touch.

Beverley Glazer: 29:29

Awesome. Michelle's links and all other links are going to be in the show notes. They are on reinventimpossible.com. And so, my friends, what's next for you? Are you tired of spinning the wheels at three in the morning? Get the stuck to unstoppable roadmap and receive my free insights to your inbox every weekend. And that resource is in the show notes too. You can connect with me, Beverly Glazer, on all social media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook. That's Women Over50 Rock. And thank you for listening. Have you enjoyed this conversation? Please subscribe and help us spread the word by dropping a review and sending it off to a friend. And remember, you only have one life. So live it with purpose and passion.

Announcer: 30:21

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossible.com. And while you're there, join our newsletter. Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion. And celebrate life.