Sitting in a plane to Chicago squeezed in row 37 between two very large men, my fingers feel as constricted as my legs. The plane is totally packed as we leave a gloriously sunny fall Boston day behind. Am feeling slightly guilty playing hooky from class for a second week in a row. But like many in my cohort, our projects are starting to pull us into our futures.
For me, it’s an almost constant bevy of new people, ideas, writing, engaging and - my latest passion - podcasting. This week’s 4-Quarter Lives podcast guest, Kevin Robinson, is an inspiring and eloquent ALI Fellow ’22. The podcast alternates between experts on longevity, leadership and work, and role models of people fully embracing the joys of Q3. For Kevin, that lies in giving forward. Born black in Detroit, he rose to the heights of the legal profession at local, regional, then national levels as a public prosecutor. Now, he’s working on ensuring that other members of the community he came access more stability and opportunity through financial education. Listen here.
It’s exciting, energising … and a bit overwhelming. I figure I’ll digest it all … in 2023. For now, I’m basically saying ‘yes’ to most everything that twinkles in my inbox. There’s a lot! That’s how this particular weekend came about. Three conversations, three invitations, three playdates. The red thread that runs throughout: leadership, longevity, midlife, and some amazing women.
Kicking Ass In A Corset
Can anyone dream up a better title for a book? When author Andrea Kayne, a professor at DuPaul University and leadership expert, first reached out, I was hooked on the idea of her book. Leadership lessons from Jane Austen heroines. Husband Tim, a lifelong Austen aficionado (who accuses me regularly of having dangerous Emma-leaning tendencies towards match-making) lapped it up.
When Andrea and I met up over a (very) long lunch in Cambridge, we covered about 1% of what we wanted to – women and work, divorce and late love, Chicago and the fact that she lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house! An architect I have adored my entire life (have you read Loving Frank by Nancy Horan? Unmissable), in a neighbourhood of Chicago, Oak Park, with no less than 20 of his houses within a few blocks. When she invited us for a weekend… who’d resist the new ‘yes’ mantra? And a visit to his truly awe inspiring Unity Temple just around the corner?
Andrea Kayne’s book begins with this sentence:
“What can organisational leaders in business, education and government learn from an unemployed, unmarried woman who lived in patriarchal, mysoginistic rural England more than 200 years ago? A great deal.” Read the book, but here are her simply powerful propositions:
The 6 Ladies & Their Leadership Lessons
Elizabeth Bennet from Pride & Prejudice: Know your inherent value.
Elinor Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility: respond to difficulty with internal calm and resilience.
Anne Elliot From Persuasion: choose and claim your hard work and merit.
Fanny Price from Mansfield Park: faithfully follow your moral compass.
Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey: protect and retain your internal wonder, curiosity and hope.
Emma Woodhouse from Emma: learn from a place of openness and humility.
University of Chicago Launches New Midlife Program with a Splashy Symposium
With the usual delightful synchronicities that often bubble up when you are moving into new work avenues that align with your interests, values and skills, an invitation popped up on Linked In (what would one do without LI?) soon thereafter. Seth Green, Dean of the Graham School, busy launching the University of Chicago’s new Leadership & Society Initiative (LSI) midlife program, invited me to their all-star, bang-up, 3-day introductory Symposium.
And, of course, it landed the days just before my Chicago weekend. The universe winking, I always think (although don’t really believe). But I do get the sense (and have watched many coaching clients experience) that when energies start flowing in directions aligning your talents with the world’s calling, a flood of supposedly random opportunities come flooding in.
Chicago invited 100 or so potential programme participants to get a taste of what the programme would be all about. And really laid it on. A sold-out crowd jostled to this introduction-come-focus-group discussion around their program’s invitation to “make your next chapter matter.”
Presentations from alumni ranged from Anne Mulcahy (former CEO of Xerox) and David Axelrod to Valerie Jarrett (CEO, Obama Foundation) and David Brooks (NYT opinion writer) covering panels and conversations structured across three days into three chapters (Know Oneself, Understand the World, Envision the Future) with titles like:
Leadership in Your Third Act
How to Save a Constitutional Democracy
Using Science and Scaling to Revolutionise Early Childhood
Energy & the Economy
The Liberal Arts as a Premise for Understanding Societal Change
Finding Your Voice
Pivoting Towards Purpose
Seriously heady and inspiring stuff. They’ve been listening and learning a lot from alumni of both the Harvard ALI and Stanford DCI programmes, and have been integrating the feedback into the design of Chicago’s own version. The 3 days closed with the President of the University of Chicago, Paul Alivisatos, enthusiastically supporting the creation of a midlife transition movement as a huge opportunity for the school. “A calling to be more engaged,” he noted, “starts by asking the right questions. Having individuals on a life journey to explore with us the next stage of life, is the next level of an ‘examined life.’
The more of these programmes that launch (this one in September, 2023), the better they will become. They each are learning from the others, and then mixing it up and adapting it to their own cultures, communities and alumni. Besides, Chicago is a truly lovely city.
The Midlife ReThink in Chicago
Once you are in a city, you might as well test all your ideas on some willing victims. So when Jesse Jury and Kathy Bresler, who run ALTAR, a Chicago-based women’s community heard I was coming to town, they invited me to conclude their 3-part series on ALTARing Ageing. We agreed to run a Midlife Rethink session for a cross-generational group of women and learn together about life’s 4 quarters. More about that perhaps… next week.
Digesting Dying With Dignity
Writing is a wonderful form of therapy. So in the aftermath of my mother’s death, husband Tim and I have spent quite a bit of time talking, walking and writing about it all - and its impact. Including this week’s FORBES blog we co-authored titled A Designed Death: Where and When the World Allows It. Here’s an excerpt:
Medically assisted dying is hotly debated in an ever-expanding number of countries. Advocates and opponents proffer powerful and passionately held arguments for and against. From early-adopting Switzerland to latest-to-the-table Australia, more and more countries are legalising the practice. It is now available to over 280 million people in 11 countries around the world. It was on offer to my mother, who recently (and gratefully) used Canada’s legislation to orchestrate her own wise demise.
As a writer and researcher who studies the implications of longevity on life and careers, I have focused in these columns mostly on the 3rd Quarter, the years from 50 to 75. But because so many of us in this stage of life accompany our parents to their 4th Quarter ends, it is worth exploring how we can best support them. And learn from them how to (better) plan and prepare for our own ends. Having just gone through this personally, it seems an essential task of Q3. And a gift to our children in Q4. What have I learnt? If we don’t claim the design of our own deaths, it’s likely someone else will. Cede this space if you will, but read this first.
And that’s more than enough for this week. I’m off for a walk to explore more of Frank, and hope that your weekend has brought you a similar dose of colours of fall, feisty females and inspiration.