How reframing aging can help you become a wise elder
Someone emailed me this week and signed off, "From one reframer to another." I liked it. When I first started the Reframe Your Life podcast (in 2016!), my co-host Jo-Anne and I used life reframers to refer to our listeners. I'm bringing it back!
More than ever, it fits with my work. Whether it is aging, people-pleasing, or another area of your life that you are exploring, approaching it through the lens of reframing is helpful.
Reframing is looking at an experience from a different, often broader, perspective so that you can heal, grow or expand. An example is looking at a conflict through the eyes of the other person. You are looking through a different lens and reframing what you see.
People-pleasing involves reframing your need to be liked vs your need to be yourself. My friend Robie sent me this quote the other day, "You can not be a people pleaser and be in your authenticity at the same time. Your authentic self will disappoint most people, but that's why you're here." Reframing includes realizing that disappointing people help you align with what is most important to you. It also helps the other person to come to terms with why they are disappointed. People pleasing is often rooted in living up to the expectations that other people have for you. It doesn't matter what stage of life you are at - someone will always think they know who you should be and what you should be doing.
Reframing aging involves exploring your own unconscious bias regarding getting older. We receive many messages about what it means to be an older person, and many of us find ourselves in our late fifties or sixties, considering what we want in this next chapter of life. We deal with issues around our physical body changing just at the time when we feel like we finally know who we are and what we want. We live in a world that offers us anti-aging advice. We become invisible in public unless we fall into that particular category of 'silver fox.' Enter Sage-ing as a way to reframe those messages and become the wise elder your community needs.
One way you can reframe your life is to think about your legacy. I'm offering a workshop on Ethical Wills on March 18th. It will be a rich time of exploring how you want to be remembered, among other things. When you consider the values and beliefs that have shaped you and start to write them down, things shift. You can't help but see where you want to focus in the near future. All the things that aren't that vital drop away.