Boomers - Your Second Act Matters

As a Boomer an encore career can lead you in putting personal meaning and a positive social impact front and center of your second half of life. Right away by doing this you have aligned yourself with Millennials, many Xers and certainly Zs in making social impact a centerpiece of your next life. This concept now may create new and exciting opportunities for income, personally more meaningful impacts and wide social impacts. Those impacts can be purely cause related, through association and volunteer groups, or paid assignments within non-profits or public interest areas like education, health, the environment, government, or social services.

It may be too easy to generalize generations as we often do but let me lean into this specific for boomers or not. Your encore career or second act matters and you should make it matter. Those old enough or in a financial situation to choose how to live the rest of their career life post 40 have a choice. They can retire or they can continue to work and if they do work is it worth doing someting to really cement or leave a legacy. I had one person say to me this past week, a boomer: The legacy I might leave? I hope it is scratch golf. My hope for those considering an encore and second act. Why not make a bigger difference in this world and create a stronger legacy then your possibly well deserved rest and entertainment. 

A couple of questions: 

What will you do to be ready for the opportunities and challenges that your age and generation may have in store? 

Are you ready to tap your incredible potential and are you prepared for it all?

Let’s look directly at sobering news. As experience seems to be less important than technical know-how boomers must face facts - your age works against you in many endeavors and often by the perception those younger. What is your value at 55+, as a boomer and as a potential asset? I believe your encore career marketing can present you as a value add to anyone or any project. 

For boomers, this time to give back is now. How might you do it effectively and take the right steps before your good intentions, energy, money and desire starts to wane? Here are some practical ideas:

Motivate Yourself With Power 

For many of my boomer clients considering career change and encore careers they might follow someone’s advice, kind of feel like they know what they want to do but there is now powerful motivation pointing them in the right direction. This can be determined through interest surveys, assessments and finding out what will help you create the passion you need to commit to your new boomer career. Let’s to the real world I deal with every day in coaching. Jane wanted to become more engaged after watching her grandson, then 15, decline into muscular dystrophy. She lost him at 16 and just could not bear the pain it caused their family. She participated in walks, telethons and brought her beautiful son with her everywhere she could. When he passed, she found ways to work with MDA and become knitted to the organization. She did not stop there. She created a consultancy devoted to kids with his condition and worked with many other organizations devoted to muscular and other neurological degenerative disease cases. She built a B Corp and now gives back to schools and works even on environmental campaigns, combining many causes. It all started with her grandson. You cannot take her away from this passion now because it was built on something very personal, very painful and, with that, very powerfully motivating. Find the passions that stir you and take your pain into your cause. 

 Create New Networks With An Entrepreneurial Mindset

If you can secure contracts, grants or gain corporate sponsors to your consultancy, your nonprofit or your cause focused consultancy that’s a great thing to do but do not forget that people are the center of this not the money available. Align likeminded people to your cause and find those who would support you. Use creative means to stretch yourself into this focus and campaign powerfully using social media to write, publish, co-author books and do webinars or seminars that matter to people. Use business tools and tactics to align your network and create content that will move people emotionally to your cause. If you are not the creator of your encore career and you are closely aligned with an organization become a part of the marketing team dynamics to share stories, talk, and implore people of influence to support your cause. A client of ours recently took her boomer career to a whole new level to start an organization, creating college coursework, then taking this training to association groups and companies nationally. Another former Fortune 50 vice president has helped a university start up community create dozens of new busiensses. Anything is possible. 

Do It Like Your Life Depends On It

Boomers know how valuable time is and that consciousness and conscientiousness plays into your encore. Recognize that every life matters and time matters most when impacting the next generation is at stake. None of us know how much time we have left, but we do know the kind of impact we need to make. I believe boomers know that more than anyone right now how important it is not to just retire into rest even though we probably feel we deserve it but to move on to a new chapter, a bigger cause and a more profound impact. What kind of legacy will you leave when you can show the next generations that your life matters now more than ever and that you are not done making a positive, profound impact on the world. Bring on experts, rally people to your cause and bring in other generations to support and work with you on this worthy next act, this new mission. 

A version of this article appeared in 2020's Boomernomics by Dana Gower.