Aging is a natural part of life. As we get older, our physical body changes, our health, and our mind. But what actually happens to us as we age? What does it mean for us and for those we love? And how can we approach aging in a new way?
In this episode, I have Dr. Corinne Auman, CEO and Founder of Choice Care Navigators. We discuss the negative views of aging and how we can refrain from it as a natural part of life. Dr. Corinne shares the challenges of retirement, particularly for the baby boomer generation. Tune in to learn more!
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Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that I have yet to really truly bring up or focus an episode around, which is aging. Now, we all know that aging is happening. Some people approach it quite differently than others. You’ve heard me talk a bit about the generations and the different generational experiences, but what happens to us as we get older? What does that mean? And what does it mean for the people that we love and care about as we get older? And also, how can we approach it a little bit differently? You probably know that I am a little bit skeptical or let’s say not fully on board with the traditional ways that we have viewed aging in the past and even treat it mostly today. To talk about this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest for today, Corinne Auman, and she is the founder of Choice Care Navigators as well as the author of a book called Keenagers, which gives us a different new approach to aging.
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Corrine, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.
Oh, yeah, thank you for hopping on and talking about this important topic because, as we know, everyone out there is getting older, we all have ideas around aging, and we have a lot of different ideas. What are the ideas that you usually encounter, say, in today’s society about what it means to get older and what it means to have your loved ones get older?
So I think we are in a pretty ageist society, in the sense that the messaging you typically get around getting older is don’t do it, which, of course, we can’t avoid, so we’ve got this thing that is happening to all of us all the time, we’re going to be older at the end of this podcast than we were at the beginning, and yet we get this messaging from our culture around us that is constantly anti-aging, negative viewpoints on it, prevent it, if at all possible, look as young as you possibly can, which, I mean, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. People are making a lot of money off of your fear of growing older. So, I think that is the predominant view. When you get to actual like retirement years, people typically view those years in one of two ways. They either view it as kind of a time of earned relaxation where you do a lot of vacationing and you spend time with the grandkids, or they view it as a time of just inevitable decline, the end is nigh and there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s just all downhill from here. So, those are the typical kind of viewpoints you see about growing older.
And I have to admit that I’ve kind of succumb to it a little bit. Mostly, it’s because I think that that’s what’s pushed by our society. I think about what happens when people grow from their 20s into the 30s and 40s and stuff like that and it’s pretty emphasized to me this loss, this loss of the adventure, this loss of the independence, whereas I’ve actually experienced a little bit of the things that you actually do gain, like I think people sometimes start to become more self-confident, they start to reduce their give-a-fucks, to be able to just like not freak out over small little things anymore. Is that messaging, is someone turning 30 today hearing just overwhelming negative commentary about where their life is going to go in the next 10 years?
I think that cultural messaging is overall negative but when you talk to individuals like yourself or the people that I interviewed in the book, this is one of the big things, the reasons why I got into writing the book was because you have this kind of really negative story that we’ve been told.
And that they’re surprised by because nobody talks about them, right? The culture doesn’t tell you that story. And all the things that they are enjoying and doing and experiencing that isn’t part of that negative cultural story because they’re really positive in so many ways and that’s the piece that I think is missing from the story we’re telling about aging.
And what brought this passion about in you? What inspired you to want to dedicate your effort, your energy into the topic of aging and ageism?
So, I run a care management business and that’s basically a business where you are helping families navigate the healthcare field for their aging loved ones and when I first started that business back in 2012, I thought I was going to be working with 40-year-olds who were caring for 75-year-old parents. And what I have learned over this last decade is I am typically working with 65- or 75-year-olds who are caring for 95- or 105-year-old parents and that has really surprised me over the years. And I realize that my view, the story I had been told, the story I believed about who I was going to be helping and what a 75-year-old is like, it’s all wrong. It’s so different than what I believed it was going to be. And I think so many of us don’t think about it that way, don’t realize it, and I wouldn’t have realized it either except that I’m experiencing it day in and day out in my work. And I think it’s a really important message to try to get to people because you don’t want to plan your future, based on the wrong notions of aging. I think so many people are planning their future thinking, “Oh, at 75, I’m not gonna be in good health, not gonna be able to do things or gonna be retired and sitting around doing nothing,” and, instead, the actual story should be, “At 75, I may have retired from my first job but maybe I’ve started a new job or maybe I’m volunteering,” or, “I am spending a lot of time with the grandkids but I’m gonna be doing a lot of stuff, not just sitting around in poor health and miserable,” which is kind of what the culture tells us 75 is going to be like.
So when the culture tells us 75 is going to be like, and I’m not denying it, what does that change for that 40-year-old that you were first expecting to work with? Do you feel like that 40-year-old’s life is being upended by this idea that “I’m running out of time”?
So this is a really interesting question. I’ve been doing some workshops based around the book and I’m working on some online workshops for the future and I’ve had a lot of 40, 50-year-olds in these workshops. I had a couple in one of the workshops and the wife after the workshop sent me a picture of a guitar and she said, “This is all your fault,” and I’m like, “What are you talking about?” and her husband who had been in the workshop, who’s in his 40s, had gone out after the workshop and had said, “I have always wanted to learn guitar, I’m gonna go get a guitar, do it because I’m not done yet,” and he had been thinking prior to the workshop, “I’m too old to learn guitar, I’m running out of time,” and he’s in his 40s but he was just kind of like – he had kind of resigned himself to this idea that it was over or that it was too late to learn something new, something like that. And after the workshop, he had gone out and bought this guitar and was taking guitar lessons and doing this thing. And I was really surprised. I mean, I was really pleased that someone in their 40s was already in that mindset of, “It’s too late, I’m out of time,” and going through the workshop with me really helped him go, “No, wait, I’m wrong. I’ve got a long runway ahead of me still. What do I want to do with it?”
Interesting. And so she said, “This is all your fault.” Was this from a joking standpoint or was there more she’s upset that all of a sudden there’s guitar noise in the house and everything?
Well, I think it was joking. I might have to go back and double check, but I think it was joking, and this is secondhand but she said that he told her that doing the workshop rewired his brain in a good way. It rewired his thinking about what his future looked like. And that’s, boy, if I could do that for every 40-year-old out there who was thinking the way he was thinking, that would be amazing.
I mean, it will be game changing, because there’ll be so many people doing a lot of the things and even a lot of the things that we talked about on this podcast about following your passions, which takes a certain amount of energy. And one of the questions someone, maybe someone reaching 50, 55, 60 might be thinking is, “Okay, I have this long career behind me and something and I’m kind of feeling meh about it now, maybe I loved it before, but I wanna start this business. Is it too late? Is there not gonna be too much reward?” and that’s a question I think going through someone’s head that point in time.
Yeah. And I think that’s legitimate in the sense that the culture has kind of told us the story of you work one career and then you retire from that and then you’re kind of done.
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs are people in their 50s and 60s where it’s a second career, a second – something they wanted to do and now they’ve got the time to do it. People get a little lost after they retire because the story that they’ve been told by the culture about what retirement should be or is going to be isn’t what they want when they get there. Because unending leisure time gets boring after a while and so you need something that’s going to give you some purpose on a day-to-day basis. And it can be lots of different things. It’s just a matter of what path do you want to go down. And, no, it’s not too late. Yes, you can still do stuff.
This reminds me of a question I asked a lot of people in just general conversations when people, especially around are talking about, say, frustration with jobs, frustration with work, and there are so many people that are overworked out there. I’ll often ask people, “How long do you think you can get without a job with no work of any kind before you get bored?” and I’ll get answers anywhere from a week to maybe a year, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten more than like a year of people who really have these ambitious ideas to travel the world and stuff.
There’s actually some good research showing that most people have kind of a honeymoon phase after they retire, 18 months or so where they go and they travel and they have a lot of leisure time and then after that, they’re looking for something to do because they need purpose. Everybody needs purpose. It doesn’t necessarily have to be work, per se, but they need purpose, something that makes them say, “I’m needed, other people need me around, I’m giving back, I’m helping other people in some way.” It’s not always about money, it’s just purpose.
Now, when you talk about the need for purpose and a little bit about it doesn’t have to be about money, do you think it applies to, say, our general attitudes about work? Because I think that there’s also a societal story around work that says like, “Okay, you pick,” growing up as a millennial, I think I got the brunt of this, like, “Oh, you’ll pick something that you really love and it’s gonna fulfill you when you –”
You’ll never work a day in your life.
Yeah, exactly. Only to get into the working world and find out that it was completely different. That was not really what anyone really had experienced, and I think, you know, I’m part of a whole generation of people that had like this gigantic, I think, collective disappointment in what we experienced in the world based on what we were told as a kid, like, “What do you want to be when you grow up? It’s gonna be great. I’m gonna pick this thing and it’s gonna be wonderful,” and then when people don’t find their passion, their purpose in the thing that they have to do to make money, it can often be very unsettling.
I’m a Gen X and I think we were kind of told that same sort of stuff, like find what you love to do and you’ll never work a day in your life. And I think some people find that and that’s wonderful but not everybody does. And the thing that I have found in talking about retirement is sometimes people will accuse me of saying you just want everybody to work until they die and that is not my point at all. I mean, some people do still need money as they get older because they didn’t save enough or because the cost of everything keeps going up and so whatever they have saved doesn’t meet their needs. But for a lot of people, it’s not necessarily about an income, it’s about having something to do and this actually becomes a big issue for older adults as they try to go out, maybe find a part-time job, sometimes employers won’t look at them because they think, “Oh, well, they’re gonna want the same salary they made when they were working full time,” and a lot of older adults, they don’t want that at all. I mean, the money’s nice but what they want is the reason to get out of bed, the people that you interact with at work, the socialization, the feeling like their knowledge is useful and they can help other people. And I think that’s ultimately what we all want out of work or volunteering or whatever it is that we’re doing, we want to feel like we’re giving back, our knowledge is useful, and that people want to have us around.
Yeah, because I think the lack of those things is what’s causing a lot of, I would say, lack of engagement. Many jobs, when your job, you’re getting paid –
Discontent.
Yeah, the discontent, like, oh, you’re doing this job but they don’t want your knowledge, they don’t want your experience, they just want to have you, put it bluntly, shut up and do what you’re told.
Be a cog in the wheel.
Yeah, be a cog in the wheel, and I’ve had jobs in my past where I was specifically told I was a cog in a wheel. So what are your thoughts on the opposite end of the spectrum, the FIRE movement? I’m sure you’re familiar with that one.
I don’t think I am. Tell me.
All right. So, FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early, and essentially what the movement is people who live way, way below their means for seven, eight, ten years in order to save up enough money so that they can kind of live off of dividends for the rest of their lives and sometimes retire as early as their late 30s but usually kind of into their 40s and 50s.
I think that’s an amazing idea. I mean, my only caveat to that would be make sure when you retire early and you are living off those dividends that you still have something that you’re doing that makes you want to get out of bed on a Tuesday morning, having some sort of purpose, but the really great thing about that idea would be I’ve got enough money coming in that I can go spend my time doing the things I really want to do, be that start another business or volunteer or maybe somebody in my family really needs caregiving or travel, whatever those things are, now you’ve got the freedom to go do that. But what are those things going to be? Because, again, I don’t think those people are retiring early because they want to sit on a couch all day and watch The Price Is Right.
Yeah.
They’re retiring early because they want the freedom to go do the things that give their life meaning. And, see, that story is different than a retirement story which is you retire and then you just don’t go do anything, you don’t work and you just only do leisure stuff, there’s no purpose message in retirement. I think with the retiring early, I’m going to retire early and then I’m going to get to go do all the things that give my life purpose and meaning and not have to go to some job where I’m just a minion.
Yeah. So you talk about the narrative around retirement. Where did that narrative originate? At what point in our history from when we first started farming and leaving hunting gathering and I know it probably operated very, very differently then because farms were family farms and you would have like the grandparents and they would probably be more of an advisory role while the younger people are actually doing the physical labor on the farm. When did the idea of retirement the way we’ve understood it, and what I oftentimes refer to as the 20th century work culture, when and how did that originate as a concept?
So, originally, the idea of retirement actually comes from Germany. They were the first country to implement a retirement age and a pension system to support someone after they retired. And then, in the United States, that really comes about in the 1930s with the setup of Social Security. And so if you think about human history, you worked until you died because you had to work to survive. You had to do farm labor, you had to find food, you had to – somebody had to be doing the cooking, and the cleaning and all those things and when you had intergenerational living, you had multiple generations on the farm or wherever we were, then the older adults were part of that. Older adults were also the keepers of the knowledge. When we didn’t have the internet, what we had was older adults who knew stuff and then would teach it to the younger generations. But once we started to get into industrialization, we get to social security, now we have this idea that you work until a certain age and then you get to retire. Now, when social security was first implemented, the average American lifespan was 67 years old. So you retired at 65, that’s our retirement age, you retired at 65, you get social security and you get it for a couple of years until you pass away. What has changed radically now is if somebody dies at 67 now, we go, “Oh, my gosh, they were so young.” The longevity of the American population has increased to the point that our average lifespan now is like 74 for men and 76 for women, but that’s the average. That means we got a lot of people who are living to 80, 90. We’ve got more centenarians, people over 100, and what we call super centenarians, people over 110, than we’ve ever had before in recorded history. So, this idea of retirement age at 65 had not changed. If you ask people what’s the retirement age or what’s your goal for when you’re going to retire, most people will say something around 65. If you retire at 65, you’re probably looking at a decade or two or three after that, and that was not the intent in the beginning. And, again, it’s not that I’m saying people need to work until they die but you do need to think about if I retire at 65 and I live for 20 years after that, what am I going to do for 20 years? Because The Price Is Right is going to get boring. And it’s also a very quick way, lack of purpose leads to depression, leads to people start to withdraw socially, their health starts to decline, like they need to figure out what they’re going to do next, especially if they had a job that was really like who they were. So if they were a doctor and they were working 60- or 80-hour weeks, then, all of a sudden, they retire and they’re not working like that anymore but they also don’t have any hobbies that they did because all they did was work previously, people can really have a crisis of, “Who am I now and what am I supposed to be doing because all I’ve ever done is this job that was really critical to my identity?” And so you really have to figure that out again once you retire.
And is this like, sudden peeling off the Band-Aid, for lack of a better way to put it, part of the issue because one thing that I observe about my parents’ generations, not to stereotype anyone, was that there was a lot a lot more pride in working those 60- to 80-hour weeks, and that’s also the generation that’s currently retiring so I think we’re seeing a lot of people, as you’re probably observing in your workshops and everything, a lot of people who suddenly have this Band-Aid pulled off, you suddenly go from a, “I’m a high-powered executive, potentially, I’ve moved up the ladder working 70-, 80-hour weeks for decades of my life, this is my identity,” to suddenly done. Is there another way to do that?
I’ll give you an example of a gentleman I interviewed in the book. He had been a doctor and had been an oncologist and had worked all these years doing that and he talked about in my interview with him how hard it had been to walk away from that because he didn’t know who he was anymore, didn’t have time to have hobbies prior to retiring, and so now suddenly he went from this real position of power and authority, he’s the doctor, he’s telling you how we’re going to treat your cancer, and he’s this really important person, to suddenly, “I’ve retired and I’m not doing any of that anymore and I don’t know what to do with my time and I’m getting on my wife’s nerves because now I’m at home all the time,” and he was really struggling with, “What am I gonna do now to figure this out?” Now, this is not in the book but I know this gentleman and he’s in a rotary club and one of the things he’s done is really devote himself to a bunch of volunteer work within the rotary club and so he’s kind of restructuring his life and finding purpose that way. And he plays the banjo, he picked up the banjo again and has joined a band. It took some time to figure that out. I mean, I think he would tell you it took a year or two to get his feet underneath him again and figure that out. And I think for younger generations, we may not have quite that same Band-Aid pulled off, like you said, of we had this high-powered career and where we’ve been at a company for 30 years and that kind of thing, but I do think we have to think about our longevity and what are we going to do with that time. I think it may be even more important for us to think about those extra decades that we have now because we don’t have the financial security of pensions that previous generations had. We don’t know what’s going to happen with social security and so it may be even more important for us to be thinking about what do I want to do, how do I structure my life, and not thinking, “Oh, I’m gonna get to 65 and retire and head on off into the sunset on an unlimited cruise.”
Well, the other interesting thing that I always talk about is that, right now, the average job tenure in this country is 4.1 years. Obviously, we’re not better equipped financially because social security pensions are all going to be gone and we have to figure stuff out and work on our investment portfolios, but are we better equipped mentally a little bit, a lot of us who have had to, say you’re 35 and you’ve already switched jobs five times?
I think we could be absolutely in a sense that we’re more flexible and more open minded about, “Hey, well, maybe I’ll try to do this,” or, “Hey, maybe I’ll try to do that,” but I do think we’re still in that culture of ageism that makes us go, “Well, am I too old to start that new business? Is it too late for me to do that?” And the culture keeps telling us that all the time. I have a friend who just turned 40 and she was feeling fine about it but she said what made her feel weird was everybody around her and what they said, because she had a birthday and they were like, “Oh, well, you know, you’re doing great for 40,” or, “You’re looking great for 40,” and all these comments that other people kept saying to her, and she said, “I did think I looked great and I did think I was doing great, but the way people kept saying it to me, I was like am I not doing great?” Because it’s the messaging, it’s the things we hear people say or people say to us. We kind of idolize youth. When people have great achievements by the time they’re – it’s the 30 under 30, I don’t want to see the 30 under 30, I want to see the 30 over 55 who have done something new and still striving and achieving things that they didn’t necessarily expect to be doing.
And given that our culture has gotten older, demographically, we have, a lower birth rate and we have people living longer and longer, how is it that a population that’s gotten older on average has become more ageist than it was before? How did that even happen?
I don’t know if we’re more ageist than we were before. I mean, I think that’s been around for quite some time.
The shift from valuing older people to valuing younger people really happened with the boomers. Share on XWhen they were young, there started to be the shift from valuing the older people to a really big focus on that 18 to 25, 18 to 40, whatever that marketing was younger –
Yeah, you’ll take a level every time they say it but, yeah.
Right. That’s when we really started to see a shift because you had this huge generation of young people and this all the shift to focusing on them and everything they valued and wanted and we could market to them, that kind of thing. And it hasn’t really changed since then. So now they’ve gotten older but we still really value young people. In our world right now, you get a lot of the silver tsunami and we’ve got too many older people and it’s all going to just kill us all and the antidote to that in my mind is, again, not that we have too many older adults, how can we harness the free time, the knowledge, the energy that these more so than ever before healthy, active, older adults have, how can we harness that to the betterment of society? Is our health going to decline as we get older? Absolutely. But most people, even if they have a health problem, still have something that they contribute back to other people around them and that can be all kinds of different stuff. It’s not like you suddenly get older and you have a health problem and then you just can’t do anything and you go home and that’s the end of the story. Right now, we’re getting ready for a presidential election and we’ve all seen the recent debate and I get a lot of people who are like should we have age limit, should we this, I am all for growing older, obviously, and my point is not – I have nothing to say about either of them but we should be looking at each older adult based on their abilities and what they can offer society and their community and the people around them. We should not be making blanket statements about anyone based on age, because if you’ve met one 75-year-old, you’ve met one 75-year-old. You cannot make a blanket statement about all 75-year-olds, just like you couldn’t make a blanket statement about a 45-year-old. I mean, you have to look at each individual and their abilities.
Yeah, and there are going to be big differences in just how well people took care of themselves over the years, I read a book called Bike for Life: How to Ride Until You’re 100, and this book actually talks about some of the things you can do even from a younger age to take care of yourself for longer. And I had seen people like that in my life too, people who are regular cyclists, I like to ride my bike, who are in their 80s and still can bike really, really well because they never let themselves go. They were constantly keeping themselves active and there VO2 maximum, your capacity in your lungs, a very active person, their VO2 maximum declines in order of magnitude slower than a very sedentary person. So you’re going to see a lot of that variance. And so you’re talking a bit about just changing the way we look at aging, changing the way we look at retirement, and even in these collective economic arguments, as I’ll say, changing the way we view the narrative that we tell people, “Okay, this is what you can do when you’re older.” What do you think is the most important thing we can do to shift that narrative to make a better economic future for an aging population?
I mean, I think the biggest shift is our mindset, having a positive view about aging itself and about your own aging process. Share on X
There’s a researcher up at the Yale School of Public Health, her name’s is Becca Levy, and she has some really interesting studies that she’s done looking at people’s views on aging. Do you have a positive outlook on aging? Do you have a negative outlook on aging? And then she follows people over time. And what she has found is that people who have positive views live, on average, seven and a half years longer than people who have negative views. And you can imagine that that’s in part because if you have a positive view, you’re doing things, just like you said, you’re reading books about how do I cycle to 100 and you’re thinking about and looking forward to those years, whereas if you have a very negative outlook, “It’s all downhill and it’s gonna be miserable and things are gonna be terrible and it’s inevitable that it’s all gonna be a decline,” then you aren’t doing those things because of that outlook. So I really do think changing the story that we are telling ourselves individually can then help change the story that we are telling as a culture about growing older and what it means to grow older and what do we do with all these older adults that we have because if I’m thinking in a positive way, then I can think, “Well, how do I set up volunteer programs?” or, “How do I get older adults who can mentor younger employees?” or I’m thinking of how to utilize them rather than just going, “Oh, no, there’s nothing we can do and it’s all terrible and I don’t want any part of that.”
I read about four years ago a book called Remix by Lindsey Pollak and this book is all about how to incorporate all five generations into a workforce and the silent generation, the older than boomers ones, and then, of course, the boomers, the Xers, the millennials, and the Gen Zs, which, currently in the workforce, we still have all five of them and if people continue to, by your advice and continue to find purpose later in life, we’ll continue to have little five generations there. And this book introduced a term for me that I later would see elsewhere, a term called “perennials,” basically the idea of someone that considers themselves an ageless generation. And one of the things that I say about it and my approach is that I continue to listen to hits one in the new music and continue to like keep track of what’s happening, I know what it means when someone says something slaps and someone says someone’s cappin’ and all that stuff, so my question is, is that approach of, and I would really summarize it in avoiding getting stuck in your ways, because there’s been another survey that said that people tend to think that the best art, music is whatever came out when they were teenagers and I don’t necessarily agree with that. Every single decade of music had some good stuff and some bad stuff. So people calling around saying the 90s or the 2000s were the best doesn’t necessarily resonate with me. Does that help on a spiritual cognitive level keep your mind sharp or am I just kind of missing the point completely about this approach to aging thing?
No, I think you’re right on course there in the sense that the idea is that you are always learning, you are always growing, you’re always changing, and that is good for you as an individual. It’s really good for your brain, learning something new, challenging your brain, not doing the same thing, not getting set in your ways and doing the same thing over and over again. Our brain is very plastic, it’s very moldable, it’s forming new connections all the time and the way you do that is by challenging it, by learning something new, learning that new guitar, listening to new stuff, reading new stuff, that’s what you want to keep doing. And it really is a use it or lose it sort of thing, both physically and mentally. I love the word perennial because perennial is a flower that blooms every year. It grows, it has new growth every year and that’s really who you do want to be in order to have the best possible elder adulthood that you could, and just life in general, like just to not stagnate and keep growing and learning all the time.
And now you talk a bit about purpose so before we wrap up, I want to make sure that we get a chance to talk a little bit about your purpose and the purpose of your business. So, you help people manage, either care for people as they age. What is the overall impact that your business has or that you hope your business to have?
Well, we’re like adult children for hire in the sense that we come in and we help you figure out everything – a typical phone call for us is everything was fine with my parent or spouse, whoever it is, until…, and then there’s been some sort of major event and now everyone is very stressed out and everyone is very upset and they are trying to figure out the entire landscape of senior healthcare, Medicare, what does it pay for? What’s assisted living? What’s memory care? All these different kinds of care and how do we finance it? How do we pay for it? What are our options? And they’re trying to figure that out in a crisis situation, typically, and they’ve got a really big learning curve and they’re really upset and they’re very emotional. And, unfortunately, most of my families have done very little planning and they’ve had very few discussions with their loved ones about, “What do you want?” or, “How are we gonna pay for it?” or any of those things. So, our purpose is really to catch them in that moment. We kind of joke that they’re like cats on the ceiling with their claws stuck in the ceiling and our job is to be underneath them going, “It’s okay. We’re gonna catch you and we’re gonna give you some pets and we’re gonna tell you everything’s gonna be okay and we’re just going to help you figure everything out in that moment,” and that’s really our goal. We have a lot of long-term clients that we kind of manage, going to doctor’s visits and doing things on a long-term basis. But, I mean, I really think purpose is helping them figure out what to do and make sure everything’s okay in that crisis moment when they are so stressed and so vulnerable and they just need a trusted person to tell them the truth, even if the truth is not so great, because healthcare is very expensive, but to tell them the truth and give them their options and point them in the right direction in that moment of crisis.
And with that purpose in mind, if anyone out there listening just had that moment, just got that call, dad just got in a car accident, you talked of crisis moments, wants to get a hold of you, what will be the best way someone would contact you about your services?
So we are in North Carolina so we really only service North Carolina. If you’re in North Carolina, I am thrilled to have you come in. That website is navigateseniorcare.com. If you’re interested in just me personally or in the book or the kind of retirement coaching stuff that I’m starting to do now, that is corinneauman.com and that’s where you’d find all that information.
And just in case anyone’s not looking at the show notes, can you spell that out? I know sometimes you get some misspellings there.
Sure. So it’s C, O, R, I, N, N, E, A, U, M, A, N, dot com.
Excellent. So if you have just any questions about navigating retirement, you want to check out Keenagers, I’m sure there’s some links to where to purchase the book as well.
Absolutely. All on the website.
Excellent. Well, Corinne, thank you so much for coming on Action’s Antidotes today and telling us about a new way to think about both aging and retirement because they do go hand in hand and hopefully everyone listening out there, if you’re coming up on that age, you’ll have some time to think about. “What am I gonna do next beyond my identity around my job?” and if you’re a bit younger, you’re more thinking, “How do I stay sharp and how do I embrace this learning, this constant change?” so that when it does come time for you to continue taking care of yourself or continue to be a full human being beyond, theoretically, if it’s 65, I actually still personally think that retiring at 65 for me is going to be a pipe dream, I mean, whatever you think it is going to be, but if you think it would be 20, 30 years, there’s going to be stuff and there’s going to be more to do than watch The Price Is Right or whatever it’ll be by then.
Yeah, very good. Thank you so much.
And I would also like to thank everybody out there listening today for tuning in to Action’s Antidotes, getting inspired. Remember that there’s many different ways that we can look at both our jobs, our careers, and retirement, and the fact that we’re rethinking a lot of that means that no matter what age you are, you have time to go ahead and pursue that thing that you’re passionate about, whether it be just playing a guitar or starting that business about that issue that’s really what’s been on your mind.
Important Links:
Grab her book: Keenagers: Telling a New Story about Aging
About Dr. Corinne Auman
Corinne is the founder of Choice Care Navigators, a company dedicated to helping families navigate the aging process. Corinne is dedicated to fostering personal growth, resilience, and authentic living at every age. Corinne’s passion lies in reshaping how we perceive older adulthood, a vision she beautifully encapsulates in her groundbreaking book, “Keenagers.”
Corinne is on a mission to change the conversation around aging. In a culture where many avoid thinking about older adulthood until the last minute, she urges us to embrace aging in a positive light. Her story is not just about her successes; it’s a call for all of us to care about aging, dispelling myths and embracing the beauty and potential of every stage of life.
About the Book
- Learn how to embrace and make the most of your later years
- Get inspired to take on new challenges and break outdated stereotypes of aging
- Discover how to create a fulfilling life, even when faced with changing circumstances
- Explore the stories of keenagers and gain a deeper understanding of the aging process