How to Live a Vibrant and Engaged Life From Age 50 Onward

[00:00:00] There is this potential to live a vibrant, engaged life from 50 onward, to have encore careers, to explore interests that you didn’t have time to explore when you were, um, married and dealing with a mortgage, and dealing with kids, and maybe dealing with a career. So a delightful little book on Aging is a, a little book that I hope women leave on their bedside table and read a piece or two at night.

Little bite size pieces about. This is a remarkable and noble passage. This is really a sacred passage, and you worked hard to get here. So embrace it.

Welcome to the Onward Podcast. This is your host, Emily Harmon, a retired naval officer and navy civil servant. I love providing a platform for people to share their stories in an effort to help us all realize how much we actually have in [00:01:00] common. My guest today is Stephanie Raach, and she’s the author of a delightful little book on aging and an advocate for positive aging.

She started a movement around encouraging older women to see themselves in a more positive light, an aging woman myself, I’m approaching 60. I enjoyed talking with Stephanie about the universal question. Who am I? This question comes up in our twenties and again in our fifties. Who am I? And what do I wanna do in the next phase of my life?

You’ve heard me talk about this in some past episodes, and you can expect more episodes like this in season three of the Onward Podcast, which starts in March of 2021. In this episode, we talk about how to not hold ourselves back, how to find our voice. We also talk about the importance of getting clear on what success is for us individually.

No matter what your age, I think you’ll find this episode enlightening. And if you’re a [00:02:00] man listening to this episode, it will help you better understand the females in your life. All right, Stephanie, welcome to the Onward Podcast. Thank you for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this interview because, uh, the topic appeals to me.

We’re talking about women and aging, right? Yeah. It kind of, we kind of grew into the topic. Yes, we did. How did you decide to delve more into this topic and to, at one point you started a podcast on it. You’ve written books about it. I wish that I could tell you that it was a very conscious effort on my part, but it was not.

I was writing for a little local newspaper in the Rogue Valley in Oregon, and I wanted to be published as many places as I could. I was trying to get my feet wet as a writer and. I came across a site called 60 and me.com and I began to write for them on a regular basis and I was amazed at the kind of feedback I got.

Blogging is [00:03:00] interesting cuz you get like almost instantaneous feedback. It’s like, you know who’s reading your stuff and you know what they think. And what I discovered was that there were a lot of women my age that just weren’t going gently into that good night. They were in their sixties and sometimes older and they didn’t wanna retire to embark a lounger or a golf course.

And there’s nothing wrong with either of those things, but what I was finding is that there was a kind of vibrancy that they weren’t really willing to give up. So the book that I wrote, the first book, a Delightful Little Book on Aging was a compilation of a lot of the posts that I did for 60 and me.com.

It just kind of explored a more positive way of looking at aging, something that wasn’t so stereotypical. Cuz if you look at television, you see that older women are portrayed as women who fall down and need a necklace to push a button. So somebody will come help us out. They’re portrayed as somebody that need all of the drugs and diapers and acute moms of old kind of infirmed.

[00:04:00] Age and age doesn’t necessarily mean infirmed, although age can be cruel. And as we get older, there is often a window of time when life recedes very quickly and the the systems begin to shut down. But that is towards the end of things. There is this potential to live a vibrant, engaged life. From 50 onward to have encore careers to explore interests that you didn’t have time to explore when you were, um, married and dealing with a mortgage and dealing with kids, and maybe dealing with a career.

So a delightful little book on Aging is a, a little book that I hope women leave on their bedside table and read a piece or two at night. Little bite size pieces about. This is a remarkable and noble passage. This is really a sacred passage, and you worked hard to get here. So embrace it. Not everybody makes it to this point.

That’s right. Not everybody makes it. I’m so glad we’re talking because this is exactly what I’ve kind of been through. I [00:05:00] retired in 2019 from working for the Department of the Navy for like 38 years, and it’s like, I was thinking, well, what do I wanna do next? And, and I was 56 at the time, and who am I?

And. I had been, felt like I’d been a wife, a single parent, a parent, a soccer mom, all the working mom, all those things of taking care of other people. And then it’s like, well, who am I? And what do I wanna do with this next phase of my life? And now I’m helping other people go through what I recently did to figure that out.

And I have noticed that a lot of women. My age, your age are like, I don’t know what I want. I haven’t dreamed, I haven’t taken the time to dream. And my husband said he wants to do this, this, this, and this, when he retires. And I’m thinking to myself, well that’s good, but what do I wanna do? And it’s an exciting time.

If you look at it as a, depends on your attitude, but you can look at it as, this is an exciting time. I can create myself [00:06:00] again. Right. And you know that question of who am I is such a universal question. And of course I think at, in our twenties, we explore that question as we break away from family and we individuate, who do I wanna be?

Who am I without, you know, my family of origin right there? What do I wanna do in the world? The thing is, is that there’s this kind of stereotype of we get to a certain age and it’s like, you know, don’t bother with that question. Or maybe you’re too old to dream. And of course, I, I don’t believe either of those things, but I think that it’s up to us as women to encourage young women, certainly to find their voice, to stand in their life of the truth and speak it.

But it’s also something that we are learning as we approach 60, 70, 80 years old. How do I now stand in the light of my truth and speak it? At this age, who am I now? What do I want? And you know, you’re asking all the right questions and, and the dreaming point I think is so interesting because are you really ever too old to dream?

I don’t think you are. [00:07:00] And part of what holds people back is fear. Fear of judgment. Fear that they’re not good enough. Fear that, well, what hap, I’ve heard a lot of people say, well, what happens if I don’t accomplish my dream? And my question is, well, what happens if you do? And we’re the ones holding ourselves back.

What kind of tips do you have for women that are in this stage that haven’t dreamed before or haven’t thought about this before? What are some of the things that you recommend that they do? That we, I don’t know that I have answers to that, but I did write an article a few years ago that that is in the book about failure after 50 uhhuh and while fail failure after 50 is so different.

Then failure at 20 or 30 or 40 because it’s, you know, kind of like your mortality and your dreams collide, and now what? And so I think you have to get clear on what success is. What does it mean to succeed as a writer? I looked for little places to publish. I found a great deal of satisfaction working for a little [00:08:00] local newspaper, for writing for some blogs and stuff, and I didn’t know that I was ever going to publish.

Was it going to be enough? And it’s, it’s the same question that we ask about money. You know, it’s like, what is enough? And I think we have to ask that same thing about success. Sometimes success is great and big and grandiose, and some of us are so vance. I’m not one of them, but I kind of plot along and still I do what I enjoy, which is writing.

And will that put me on the New York Times bestseller list? Who knows? But if it doesn’t, I think I would feel worse for not trying. Yeah. I would feel worse for not living out the dream of, yeah. I get up every morning, I go to my office and I write stuff. It helps me make sense of the world. It’s more than just the success piece.

I mean, people pick up things for more than just the success piece. For me, writing is a, a doorway into what Play-Doh called the Examined life. It does help me make sense of the world so that sits in on its own [00:09:00] whether there is ever any commercial success that goes with that or not. And I think the same is true of any art or gardening or cooking or, you know, not everyone is gonna be Julia Childs, but you may get a great deal of satisfaction playing around in the kitchen and dazzling your friends.

Well, what is success for you is a question that everybody has to figure that out, and I think that might change at different stages of your life and figuring out what it is for you and not what other people think it should be. For example, when I retired, people are like, you’re retiring at 56. You’re too young to retire.

You’re just, your brain’s gonna go to mush. You should go work for this big company. You should go be a consultant. You should, should, should. And for the first time in my life, cuz I had just been following this career path with the working for the military, I thought, well that’s what other people think I should do, but what do I want to do?

And it takes time to sit back and, and figure that out. And I talked to a lot of people in the military. I’d say one other thing, I mentor military people. [00:10:00] And so some of ’em were like, they get out, they transition and they just. Go right to work for like a big company and then they’re trying to move up and they’re asking me questions about that and I ask why?

Why do you want to do that? And sometimes they can’t answer it. They don’t know their why, and that’s really important to know too. I think there’s a different kind of calling too, as we get older, a different kind of purposefulness. I mean, when you’re, when you’re called to something in your twenties or thirties, the whole purpose is different.

But in these later years, there is a calling that I believe is more contemplative. It asks us to be still, it asks us to be grateful. It implores us to be an elder. And being an elder doesn’t mean that, you know, you get to go read some kids’ beads for ’em. Doesn’t mean that you’re gonna go tell ’em, let me tell you how to do life.

You know? Yeah. That’s just annoying. But it does mean that the way in which you live your life, the way in which you model life for those younger people. [00:11:00] Is what makes you an elder. So I think that in my life now at I’ll be 69 in a few months, there is this calling to become still at certain parts of the day.

In the morning alone with my tea, to just have the experience of being alive and getting quiet in that there’s a kind of spirituality to it, regardless of religion, but something that, God, I’ve lived this long, and life is sacred and it’s been this amazing trip, and those are things that, you know, it’s not really appropriate to think about when you’re 30.

You’ve got other stuff to worry about, right? Kids paying the mortgage, all that stuff. So I think there’s a different calling now too. And uh, you can fill up all the time. Yeah, go get another job with a big corporation. Right? Or you can find a balance of what you love doing, what you will invest yourself in.

And also this calling too be still. And no, and that is something that I thought when I retired that being still would just happen because I’ll have all [00:12:00] this time. And I’ll be able to slow down and be still. But for me, being busy and do, do doing is like my way of just maybe not dealing with the stuff that comes up when I’m still.

And so I’ve worked, been working on that and I’ve learned to be more still and I’ve learned to deal with some feelings and things that maybe I. Had not taken time to deal with when I, you know, like divorces and just, you know, things that happened in my life that I was just too busy. I just kept going. So for people who are listening, if you think that the stillness is just going to come easily when you retire it, you may find yourself like me, where you sometimes have to create it, and then once you create it and figure it out, you want more of it.

Right. It’s the work of the authentic heart. Yeah. Authenticity doesn’t just descend upon us. No. We get up and work it. I listened to a podcast of yours and you were talking about closing the house for [00:13:00] your, your former husband, and I was very moved by it, and I, I have long thought that grief is one of the great transformative forces in life because you don’t really inter grief without there being a love component to it.

Love informs us how much. We grieve, and I think grief then in turn informs love. But I was so moved by that because sometimes when I do shows, you know, I look at the title and I think, boy, I, I hope this isn’t one of those false positive things where we, it’s all rainbows and unicorns that, that they’re, but when I listen to this podcast of yours, I thought, oh, this woman understands.

What textures the heart is not just our polite, joyful moments. What textures? The heart is the grief that we walk through and it makes us more compassionate beings. And as we get older, we lose more people. Siblings die. Parents die. Wow. Um, friends. Yeah, and it’s not meant to be a place that we get stuck, although that can happen too, but I [00:14:00] think it’s meant to be a bridge that helps us get into the rapture of the experience even more.

As Joseph Campbell put it, he said, you know, life is about the rapture of the experience and grief does. Provide that doorway. Yeah. Oh, definitely. And, um, that’s what happens when I get quiet, is I start to grieve him and what we could have had, or, you know, whatever. I talk about that in that episode. Yeah.

Um, and every day I feel better and better. And I think that being more authentic, being reflective, taking time, investing in ourselves. Investing time in ourselves. Investing time to figure ourselves out is setting a good example for our children if we have children or for just other people around us too.

And as women, as aging women, I discover that we hold the tears. Yeah. We don’t have really a ceremony to weep in this culture. There is a lot in our world right now that needs tears [00:15:00] because tears are cleansing. Yeah. And it’s just a point to put out to your listeners that, you know, it’s like if you start feeling weepy in older age, because I think some people do.

I think a lot of people do. Yeah. It’s like, go for it. Yeah. Allow yourself to weep. We carry the tears of the world. That’s part of our role as, as wise women, as wise elders is to, to model that. Why do you think people fear getting old? I think there’s lots of reasons. The commercial, most commercial reason is, is that we stop being represented.

So we stop seeing images of ourself in the news or in advertising that show who we are as vital, vibrant women. And so we start to think, I’m invisible, I’m insignificant, I’m no longer relevant, and we buy into that story. I must need a drug right to cure this. That’s part of it. Part of it is that the family has broken apart.

You know, we don’t live in agrarian times [00:16:00] anymore when you’ve got like a couple generations, three generations living together. And so age becomes something to be feared because age is separate and apart. It’s over here and our lives are over here. So there’s that, that divide. And then I think that I’m of a generation that kind of came of age with feminism, the current modern feminist movement.

And I think that my generation and really women 50 on up, we’re learning how to find a voice in this older age. That’s relevant to us and speak our mind, and we’ve had some great models for that, certainly, certainly with Bader Ginsburg, who was an amazing model of that. But you, you’ve got a lot of people out there.

Iris Appel, if you don’t know who she is, or she’s a fashion designer in her nineties, that still. Teaches in New York and these young women flock to her every year and she’s, she’s absolutely bizarre. And I mean that in the most wonderful way in which she’ll wear a hundreds and bracelets at a time and she’s really something.

[00:17:00] I saw Carol King concert a recording of one in Hyde Park recently. And the thing about that I loved about that concert was there’s a moment in the concert when she’s singing, you Make me feel like a natural woman. And behind her is this jumbo screen and it’s the 28 year old Carol King. Now Carol King is 74.

It’s the 28 year old Carol King singing You Make me feel like a natural woman. And they are singing in harmony with each other. Oh my gosh. And it gave me goosebumps and I went, oh my God. That’s it. That’s the metaphor for becoming an older, wiser woman, is that you begin to harmonize with your younger self.

So there are great examples out there that are teaching us to find our voice and our strength and our confidence. As older women, I wanna be as confident as Warren Buffet. Screw it. Yeah. Yeah. Elon Musk’s mom is a model. Have you? I can’t remember her name, but she, she’s older, you know, gray hair. She’s a model.

I see her on [00:18:00] Instagram and stuff, and I think it’s so cool to see some of these older women. I think there’s a lot of ’em that have their own Instagram pages. Right, and they’re just being themselves, and I know some people think, oh, you can’t, at a certain age you have to cut your hair short. You have to do this, you have to do that.

You have to do that. You don’t have to do any of that. You have to be you. Once again, it’s the work of the authentic heart. Right? Right. So what, um, inner work have you done that helped you be comfortable with aging? Or did it come naturally? I think some of it came naturally because I’m fiercely in, I’ve always been fiercely independent and some of it was earned because I realized that the culture didn’t go along completely with the way I saw things.

So now it’s become kind of a quest for me to uplift other women. I want to uplift other women and inspire them to embrace these years. Embrace every last damn wrinkle. Yeah. Let your hair go gray if you want to. If you wanna cut it short, great. If you wanna grow it long, great, but [00:19:00] find your voice in this.

And that’s become my platform and my message is that uplifting of other women to find their strength at this time of life. So what gives you the confidence to do that? Some of it is just stubbornness, and I’m fortunate to be married to someone who has always encouraged my independence. Who didn’t expect me to always agree with him, and that’s certainly been helpful.

And some of, you know, you asked about inner work and I’ll tell you that I think the work of gratitude can’t be emphasized enough really at any age, but it, it’s become especially relevant in my life these last few years. And I have to work at it because I think that there are days when we all feel a little down or even despairing and that you can find so much to be grateful for if you slept in the house last night, if you had food on the dinner table, there’s a lot to be grateful for.

And you can get lost in the gratitude of things and it’ll definitely turn things around. And right now I feel a [00:20:00] little lost in the gratitude of older age. I’m digging it. And at a certain point, I do think there’s a tipping point where I think that as women collectively, not just me, but like you and me and any woman who is 50 years and beyond, I think we have reached a collective tipping point where women have said enough already.

Yeah, just enough. I wanna be the best me I can be, and I’m gonna do what I wanna do. And if you’ve got a problem with it, I don’t know. Get a life. Right. I love that attitude. So how do you help women do that besides, you wrote one book, a delightful little book on aging, and then you’re writing another book that’s coming out in August of 2021.

You wanna tell us about that book? That book is called CRX Rising, unlocking the Power of Midlife Women, and it’s my personal feminist history, but it’s also our collective feminist history of the last 50 years. Because you haven’t lived long enough now to see things like when I came of age, you couldn’t get [00:21:00] alone without a husband’s signature When I came of age, if you were a single mom with a couple kids, Nobody was gonna rent to you and there were no laws to protect you.

And certainly harassment laws have changed, financial laws, all of those things. So I talk about that history in the book and I talk about my personal history. And this is what I love about working with other women. Whether I’m writing to them as my audience or, or I’m speaking to them or I’m doing a radio show or a podcast or anything, is to, to lift them up with this idea that you, inside of you.

There is a story. There are many stories, and they’re unique and they’re wonderful, and they expand every emotion and every thought. And you have your own personal feminist history in addition to the feminist history that you’ve seen outside of yourself. When I think of my great-grandmother, Eva, coming over on the boat from Russia, I think of my grandmother, Julia, a [00:22:00] tiny little town in Albert, Colorado that pretty much still looks the same as it did a hundred years ago.

And my mom and these women paved away for me. And we all have those stories. We all know that our great-grandmother, our grandmother, our mom, paved away and paid a price. And now I’m at a PA n a age where I can pave away and pay a price before I check out and pass that torch to a younger generation.

That’s what’s exciting to me. We pass a light on to the younger generation, and you also host, well, you had a podcast, but then that turned into. Getting a, a radio show? Yeah, we have a, a radio show. I, I work with a partner and we talk about age and age issues and we kind of juxtapose like, you know, 1968 to our current year and what we’re going through now, and we talk a little bit about history and it’s called Yak about today.

And we have a website. So if you don’t live in Florida where the show airs, we o [00:23:00] air on, uh, Florida’s Space Coast from Melbourne, Florida, all the way down to West Palm Beach. And we’re on W C Z R 1 0 7 0.1. But yak about today.com is where we post all of our shows. Also as podcasts. So you can hear us either place.

Yeah, that’s great. And then you have an Instagram page. Well you have it, your Instagram got hacked, so you, you’re working on that. Yep. You have a, uh, Facebook page too. And that’s your personal page? Or is it one on? It’s my, it’s my author page. Your author page. Okay. All right. Wow. I’ve learned so much. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that you think that maybe I should have asked you or a point, you know, it’s sometimes people ask me that question, is there anything you want me to ask you?

And I always feel that kind of gear in the headlights. Yeah, look. Gosh, I don’t know. I just felt like, you know, I was having a conversation with an old friend. Yeah. It was awesome. So, I mean, I know it’s, it’s kind of an interview, but it’s like, this was so easy. It was like having a conversation with an [00:24:00] old friend and someone who shares your values and your vision and, and it’s, so I guess that’s the one thing that I would add is I think it’s so important for us to have a circle of women.

With whom we share our hearts with whom we share our aspirations and our dreams. And it also gives us an opportunity to support other women in their aspirations, in their dreams, and in their sharing. So I think that’s really important too. Yeah, women friends are just the best. Oh, I know. And, uh, like today, I’ve got, tomorrow I’m, I’m kind of co-writing a book with some people, and I have three chapters.

We’re all writing three chapters, and mine are due tomorrow. And then I’m starting this big. Like challenge in within my Facebook group, and a friend of mine said, we’re going away. And so one night in between we’re taking a break and going away. And I think that for me at least, and probably a lot of women are like this, you can just work, work, work, or go, go, go.

And taking those little breaks, especially like a girl’s getaway, is just so nice. You come back, feel, you feel like you don’t have time, [00:25:00] but you come back feeling so much more refreshed. Well, I have to ask, what are you writing a book about? Oh, this book is more on government contracting. It’s interesting.

Ok. That was my last job and it’s for veterans, however, so two of my chapters are on government contracting and one of ’em kind of takes some of my episodes from the podcast and relate them to government contracting, cuz that can be overcoming adversity too, doing government contracting. So kind of tells stories in it, but I also am writing a chapter about, It’s cuz it’s mainly for veterans who are transitioning and maybe wanna start their own business or whatever that one of my chapters is on authenticity.

And you really have to know yourself when you’re starting a business. And you have to know your strengths, your weaknesses. You have to know why you wanna start the business. I mean, there’s so many things. You don’t just leave the military and go, oh, I’ll start a business, or, oh, I’m gonna go work for this company.

Because I think sometimes along the way, Especially women from what I’ve seen, lose themselves as they’re in the military because you kind of have to be conforming and you, you [00:26:00] lose part of that off your authentic self in some ways in the military. So there’s kinda gotta be a rediscovering when you’re in that transition.

I so agree with that. And I think that self-knowledge, which is a powerful thing, I really think it’s a, a lifelong. Work. It’s not like you get self-knowledge and it’s like, okay, I’m done. No, it’s, you know, there’s this constant turnover of self-knowledge. I, I was reading a psychologist named James Hillman, who’s a little off the beaten path, and he has this image of psychological growth being like a tree that grows upward.

But he says, then there’s also this tree that grows downward, that roots. Downward, and that’s part of the inner work that we do too for self-knowledge is this kind of growing down. We learn the shadow parts of ourself, we learn where we’re rooted in family, whether you like your family or not, right? It’s still, that’s where your roots are.

So that whole thing about like. Who am I now? It’s like that, that ongoing question of, I think it’s a just the human condition. It’s like, where do I [00:27:00] belong? Right? And when you’re in the mil. And so I think partly too, you have to, some of the things you have to know about yourself are what are your values?

And kind of when you’re in the military, you adapt to their values. You know, do the honor, honor country, things like that, which is all fine. But when you get out, You’re not gonna be necessarily always working for people that have those values duty outta country. And you ought to really think about, well, what are your values and what you’ve been serving others your whole life?

Is that what you wanna keep doing, serving others? Do you want to do? Go work for somebody else. Do you wanna be a, a sole entrepreneur? What is it that you want and not what is it that others think you should do? Yeah, I mean, those are such great questions for like anyone entering into a transitional phase of their life, which retirement is, it’s a transitional phase, right?

If you’re retiring from the military, even if you’re going to something else. Right. It’s retiring, but you’re leaving after six years or seven and going to do something else. Right. Those kinda cool. Am like questions that, it’s just good [00:28:00] stuff. It’s always good stuff. So that’s one of the things I’m writing my chapter on and I’ve developed a coaching program around it too.

So it’s just fun and uh, helping other people what I like to. And do you work with people other than military? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the people are, you know, a lot of the people that I work with are in the Onward movement. I saw you join that today. Yeah. So they’re in that onward movement and uh, that’s just a free Facebook group.

And then I’m starting a coaching program that I think some people are going to, are going to join, and I want to expand that. There’s a whole journey that I’ve been through that I feel like I can help others. To go through and learn more about themselves for people who want. I love that. It’s gotta kinda, um, got your back.

Yeah, it, it’s ok. I got your back. Yeah, I love that. And everyone else has each other’s back in there too. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So it’s a group and there’s probably. I haven’t looked at the metrics lately. There’s at least 1200 or maybe 1300 people in the group, and most are women. But I think it’s important for men to be in the group too.

Like I think there’s about [00:29:00] 20% men, maybe 25. But it’s good because men go through some of these same things. Maybe they don’t speak their feelings as much, and also I think it’s important to helps them understand maybe the woman in their life. That woman’s going through, or the people that work for them or with them and just get other perspectives on things.

So it’s men and women. Well, older men not sharing their feelings hasn’t worked out well for us. Yeah. So definitely. Well, it was so nice to meet you, Stephanie. Thank you so much. This was just, it was a delightful way to, um, spend my midday with you. So thank you very much for having me. You’re welcome. Let’s all live a vibrant and engaged life as we embark on our encore careers.

As we age, we discover the benefits of inner work as we get to know ourselves again after having put everyone else first for so long. I invite you to join the Onward Movement [00:30:00] Facebook group as we explore some of these topics collectively. There’s a link in the show notes, or you can simply search on Onward Movement in Facebook groups.

Also, the Onward Accelerator Group coaching program provides a safe place to delve further into your inner work journey. Thank you for listening today, and if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review wherever you listen to the Onward podcast. Have a great day, and I’ll be back with you next week, same time.

Same place.