Midlife School Week 1; A few shocks, and a good dose of hope

Was I eager – check.

Was I nervous – a little.

Did I have a preconceived idea about what to expect – yep… (why do I do this to myself?)

Was it what I expected – nope.

It’s been 30 years since I applied myself to any considered study. I’ve definitely got geeky tendencies so when the preparation material was released for my Modern Elder Academy retreat-at-home 8 week experience, I was eager to devour it. They were correct in their description of it - it does indeed have plenty of intellectual ballast, cemented in science and I loved that about it.

I wrote recently about why I signed up, but in brief, I’d been inspired by the community creation work I’d been doing at Telstra Purple, and by the increasingly human-centric focus of my profession – but something was still missing for me and I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

I was approaching 50 and read Chip Conley’s ‘Wisdom at Work’ book and got intrigued by the concept of how one’s vintage can grow in value as you age provided you can evolve, learn, collaborate and counsel well (instead of retreat and entrench!).

Here are my 5 takeaways from my first week back at school…

Takeaway 1: I realise my world has shrunk quite significantly during Covid

I was originally meant to go to the MEA campus in Baja on 15th March 2020 to do a similar course in small group but it was inevitably cancelled. I think I’d held on to that notion of the small group when I turned up to the first live online event.

The faculty had other ideas… they wanted to showcase the scale of the operation and so invited every registered delegate from all over the world – that’s 170 people from 11 different countries.

It’s fair to say that this was by far the most diverse audience I had been thrown together with for some months and my preconceived idea of what was about to happen was obliterated.

I fought the Covid WFH isolation hard at first. I made a point of making new connections and having calls with those people. I even attempted to set up a walking group with local colleagues.

But I realise now that after a while I gave up and settled into a pattern of working from my home office, talking to familiar colleagues. So joining MEA Online has definitely given me the jolt I needed back into a more diverse community - thank you.

Takeaway 2: I need to work on really suspending my judgement and be patient

They set out clear guidelines on suspending judgement. No advice was to be offered to any other delegate. We were to just listen to each other without offering opinions. How many of us genuinely do this for any considered period of time in our lives?

The positivity in the room was overwhelming for me. People seemed to be diving in to speak up, to comment in the chat, to share and express how amazing they were finding everything and how glad they were to be here. The audience was predominantly US based and I found myself looking for reasons as to why I found the big-group positivity hard to keep up with and wondering if it was a cultural thing. On reflection, I realise that this is all part of letting go of the judgement of myself. Not searching for reasons but just being aware of how I was feeling and being ok with that. Just leaving it at that, without trying to solve, change or fix anything.

And most definitely not trying to get all the answers to my questions in the first class (whoops).

[*I’m actually publishing this piece as we embark on week 4 of the programme and have learnt so much more about fixed v growth mindset, taking part in ‘Type II’ fun to make us more open to new experiences, and disrupting pattern behaviours. It’s all designed to help us avoid those triggers that may cause us to stand back from opportunity, or dig in and entrench without realising we're doing it.]

Takeaway 3: How to make quick and good connections

We were coached immediately in the way they wanted us to meet our fellow cohorts explaining that people are typically very good at talking about:

a) things they know (they call this vault one)

b) stories they can share (vault two)

They told us that the key to making good connections, is to talk from how you feel – they call this the third vault and the most powerful one for really making strong connections. This resonated with the discoveries I’d made on our most recent programme working at Telstra Purple looking at what people were sharing on LinkedIn. Whilst LinkedIn is typically considered a business platform, our study found that human stories about ourselves were magnitudes more popular than stories about our work. (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/linkedin-more-social-than-ever-heres-staggering-proof-catherine-coale/).

Takeaway 4: We know about IQ & EQ. Today’s world demands TQ.

This is a big part of our future curriculum. MEA is introducing us to their concept of TQ – Transitional Intelligence. And if there’s one thing we can rely on in our current world, it’s change.

To get us started, Jeff Hamaoui took us through a quick but impactful exercise that looked back on a change event that had challenged us historically. In just a few minutes, the exercise transformed the thought process from ‘wow that was an awful event’ to focus instead on the skills we’d wisely used to navigate it, and the growth that came from it over time. A great springboard for the deeper work to come

Takeaway 5: Most mid-lifers are saddled with an outdated, depressing narrative on ageing, but MEA wants to change that.

Thank god someone wants to break the cliché that is the midlife crisis!

MEA Online is a social enterprise designed to change people’s mindset on ageing and to show us how ageing can be aspirational again (phew). And they're not the only ones. This narrative seems to be gathering momentum as I notice that the brilliant Eleanor Mills has created Noon, an inspirational community designed to empower women in midlife that actually has a good dose of glamour and intellectual appeal combined.

I’m really interested in what MEA has to say on intergenerational collaboration and growth mindset and love the fact that they believe wisdom is not taught, it is shared through community.

More to come next week!

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Other musings in my Midlife Wisdom School chronicles and interesting sources to pass on:

I've gone back to school... the world's first midlife wisdom school https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/ive-gone-back-school-worlds-first-midlife-wisdom-catherine-coale/

The Making of a Modern Elder (17 Minute TEDx Talk)

Wisdom at Work https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wisdom-at-Work/dp/B07GY2Q6FM/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=wisdom+at+work&qid=1623251273&sr=8-1

Whitepaper: The Emergence of Long Life Learning. A conversation started for educators, policymakers, and entrepreneurs. https://longlifelearning.education/