July/August 2009

Planning in Turbulent Times
By Meg Newhouse, PhD, CPCC
Aging Well
Vol. 2 No. 3 P. 6

“Go to a life planner in these times? That’s a luxury I can’t afford!”

“Fulfilling work? I’ll be lucky if I can keep/get any job!”

“A financial planner, maybe—if he or she can work miracles and restore my savings.”

Have you heard anything like this lately? I have, so I’ve turned the focus of this column to life planning in turbulent times. How do we, as life planners for the third age, adjust our perspectives and practices to accommodate the uncertainty, anxiety, and fear accompanying the slide into a recession?

Before we can be fully attentive to and creative with our clients, we need to attend to our own perspective and needs.

Choosing a Perspective
Our job is to identify the opportunities in the crisis (recalling that the Chinese character for crisis is danger + opportunity). We need to acknowledge the anxiety—our clients’ and our own—but not dwell on it or resort to bag lady-type scenarios. Rather, consider an alternative scenario: We are experiencing a global shake-up, potentially a transition to a new paradigm, but at the very least, a shock to our existing verities and modus operandi—one that invites creative, out-of-the-box thinking about our values, our goals, and our world. This is what life planners do. They challenge their clients to clarify their values and goals and take steps to implement them. We do this more effectively if we have done it for ourselves.

We are being challenged at a fundamental level. Do we choose a perspective of fear or trust, competition or collaboration, scarcity or abundance? Difficult economic times tempt us to choose the former “me-first” responses, but note that disasters such as the Great Depression, September 11, and Hurricane Katrina brought forth outpourings of generosity, community, and service.

More Important Than Ever
I am convinced that times of upheaval call for a rediscovery and affirmation of our central values, as well as the passions and gifts that create our unique, irreplaceable offerings to the world. It may be more challenging because, as Abraham Maslow pointed out in his hierarchy of needs model, people struggling to meet basic survival and security needs are less able to focus on the higher level social and, especially, self-actualization needs so central to our work.

So we are presented with an opportunity to help clients look at their most basic values and how they want to address the concrete, daily challenges of living in turbulent and economically distressed times that are likely to endure for some time. At the same time, we can help them develop fresh ways of thinking—a new self-paradigm—allowing them to take advantage of hidden opportunities emerging from this current transition turbulence.

Helping Clients Concretely
Despite the importance of deep reflection, I doubt that it will attract clients to life planning in these times. More practically, the various life planning disciplines will need to work together to help clients find or create paid work that provides some fulfillment and meaning.

We should not give up on this goal because in the third age, these are especially compelling values, as substantiated by the success of the encore careers movement.

Career counselors or coaches can be particularly helpful in guiding third agers to understand the market challenges and exploit the opportunities in growth fields such as the green economy, health, education, and other infrastructure, all in accordance with their strengths and values. Clients may well need to retrain or upgrade their skills to compete effectively. Fortunately, many community colleges now provide such training.

Clients also need to know how best to present themselves  to emphasize their age advantage and overcome lingering age bias. We all need to inform ourselves on these workplace issues and resources. If clients need unfulfilling bridge jobs or temporary work to support themselves, we can help them discover unpaid work or activities that provide fulfillment and may lead to paid work down the line.

There will be plenty of opportunities for meaningful service, and there is good evidence that both service and vocation are antidotes to fear and depression. Moreover, many of these service opportunities, such as Experience Corps and the Peace Corps, yield modest incomes or stipends.

Social entrepreneurship, effectively championed by Civic Ventures, as well as some business schools, is a compelling path for the entrepreneurially inclined. Other opportunities can be found on Web sites such as www.encore.org, www.idealist.org, www.workforce50.com, and www.agelessinamerica.com.

Critical Considerations
Creatively reducing expenditures and increasing income runs the gamut from wise, informed professional advice from financial planners on strategies to preserve or grow diminished investments to commonsense advice on creating a budget, bartering, sharing, downsizing, cohousing, providing some of your own essentials, and entertaining cheaply at home with friends.

Keep self-care, fitness, and life balance as priorities. It’s more important than ever to counter stress. Ask your clients this question: What are the activities you love to do that cost little or nothing?

Seek out or foster supportive relationships, both personal and networking groups, including some specifically for third agers. Social science, as well as anecdotal and literary accounts, documents the importance of intimate social networks for health and well-being. We can help our clients seek out affinity groups, as well as networking or support groups, that address the issues with which they’re grappling, either virtual or in person (my preference).

Self-Help
When considering our own business needs in a depressed market, we may offer more group sessions and classes that are more affordable. Or it may make sense to collaborate with other life-planning professionals—for example, a career coach and a financial planner or a life coach with an estate lawyer or a geriatrician. The Life Planning Network seeks to facilitate collaboration among diverse professionals serving post-midlife clients.

Increasing our pro-bono offerings presents another option. Mino Sullivan, a career coach in Boston and a Life Planning Network member, got an overwhelming response from New England coaches to a call for pro-bono coaching service for the poor and unemployed. Such ventures provide life planning for people who need them most, model our values of service, and may lay the groundwork for future demand for life-planning services.

It’s particularly important to educate ourselves on economic and job trends, available resources, and the current employment issues, including intergenerational tensions and increased value vs. the added cost of older workers. Likewise, it’s essential to engage in policy issues and process to make it easier for elders to remain employed or be rehired and to combat ageism wherever we find it.

To fully serve our clients, we need to be grounded and present. What centering practices do we need to maintain? How do we connect with and reaffirm our deepest values and purpose, including service? How do we bring the focus to the people and activities that give us vitality and fulfillment? We tend to underestimate the power of example—our own example of living creatively with purpose and grace in turbulent times.

— Meg Newhouse, PhD, CPCC, is founder and past president of the Life Planning Network, a New England-based community of professionals from diverse fields committed to providing a broad spectrum of planning services and resources for the third age.