My grandson Lachlan is visiting. He lives in Minneapolis with his mom, my daughter Lindsay, and his dad, my son-in-law Kelly. Lachlan comes to California every summer and stays in our guest bedroom with his legos, his Star Wars books from the library, and his clothes. His mom packs for some tropical climate. I go to Target every year to buy more socks, sweaters, and long pants. Northern California is especially cold this summer.

I adore my grandson. So does my daughter Blake who lives nearby. There is a bit of a tug of war over this six year old. Blake has step-children who are Lachlan’s age. I don’t. I have grandchildren whose parents are my husband’s grown children, and some of them are Lach’s age. But Lach doesn’t know them as well as he knows Blake’s kids. I have DVDs and videos and trips to the library. Blake has a Star Wars Wii. I love to have him every minute, and I get tired. Blake has him somewhat less and gets less tired. I feel sad and a bit relieved when he’s not with me. I’m glad to have him back after an overnight.

My husband is often gruff with children (his own and his grandchildren who all live nearby) and I try never to be gruff with Lachlan. My husband feels justified in demanding that Lachlan behave when he’s being a little silly or resistant. My preference is to ignore the behavior til it goes away.

All of this collides when I get especially tired. Lach has been here for 9 days and grandma is pretty bushed. Grandpa looses his patience and yells at Lach. I want to punch grandpa when I see the fear in Lach’s eyes. Blake whisks Lach away and I feel terrible.

About two weeks ago I found a shadow in my right eye. I had had problems with this eye about five years ago, but since the lens had been replaced I couldn’t imagine that this shadow was serious. Now two weeks and two surgeries to repair multiple tears in my retina in that eye later, I am one eyed as the right one is swollen shut for the second time in two weeks.

I’ve been utterly dependent on the kindness of friends and family during this time. For the first week I had to lie on my left side and not get up for more than an hour a day. Now I have to keep my head down to let the gas bubble that completely takes up the volume in my eye reabsorb and keep the healing retinal tears from coming unstuck. My husband, whom I’ve misjudged in the past as not being able to tolerate any infirmity, has read to me, put eye drops in my eyes, driven me to doctors and hospitals, and generally been a good humored nurse. My daughter Blake is made for this kind of emergency. She marshals community resources and has, with Murray’s children and Second Wind (my spiritual community), organized every evening meal for two weeks.

I think of myself as not very gracious when needing help. I’ve found I needed a lot of it. For all of you who have helped with phone calls, meals and visits, I am so moved by the humor, generosity, and love that has been given to me. If you are reading this as a regular or occasional visitor and not as a personal friend, know this. Karen Armstrong says that religion was meant to be about action, not belief. We act like generous and loving people and by these actions we are known as “religious.” I can tell you that this definition and demonstration make perfect sense to me. Thanks to all who have acted in behalf of the one eyed monster!

There was a time when my job demanded air travel on Sunday and Friday every week. I would travel to the client’s site on Sunday, drive up to an hour further upon arrival at the airport, and reverse the process on Friday. My social life came to a screeching halt. I barely got groceries purchased, drycleaning exchanged, and hair cutting accomplished over the weekends at home.

Since November my husband and I, or just I, have been traveling at least twice a month. It is April. I’ve just returned from my second cross country trip since the beginning of March, and I’ll travel half-way across the country from the west coast to Chicago in 10 days. I’m tired and my husband has gotten a wicked cold.

Some of this travel has been for pleasure–family weddings and birthdays, a wonderful trip to Egypt in January–and some for work, my work as adjunct faculty at an online university. All of it is stressful, particularly since the advent of long security lines, the necessity to disrobe and rerobe at the beginning and end of these lines, planes with less and less leg room (I’m 5′9″ and my husband is 6′), connections that are scheduled too close for us over 60s to run from one gate or one terminal to another in 20 minutes, and other hassles related to air travel. We put on our virtual patience helmets when we leave the house and try to leave them on throughout our trips.

Last weekend, on our trip to the Washington DC area, I could feel my patience unraveling as we sat in freeway traffic at the end of a very long day. I could also feel my body rebel against the stress of the kind of life we’ve been leading over the last 5 months. My neck is seriously stiff. My shoulders are hunched close to my ears. My wrist is screaming due to both lugging bags too far and already suffering from carpel tunnel. My good eating habits go all to hell when I’m tired. And exercise? Other than walking along endless gateways and getting in and out of cars, forget it. When I get where I’m going, I just want to go to sleep.

I don’t imagine this is any easier for 30-somethings. I do imagine that the diminished physical capability of us over 60s makes this kind of activity even more stressful than for younger people. It is my choice to do what I am doing and I look forward to NOT doing it as of the end of this month.

I’ve been scanning the internet for a store that sells unusual, stylish clothes for older women. I want professional clothes as well as casual clothes. I don’t want arty bag dresses with five layers or sequined jackets from Chico’s. I want real chic. I found just what I was looking for thanks to Sunday’s New York Times Style section (my first go-to section when I wake up Sunday morning). The store is a website and it isn’t selling anything, just telling about chic older mostly New Yorkers who are interviewed and photographed by Ari Seth Cohen. Go there and see handsome men in orange jackets, gorgeous gray-haired women in greige fitted jackets, and just fabulous looking over 60s. The site http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ is worth a daily visit.

I notice really stunning looking women with gray hair. I especially notice the ones with geometric cheek bones and salt and pepper short, sleek styles. I’m jealous. I’d like to wear my hair that way too. It says to me, “I love the way I look and to hell with all of the stereotypes that say I should look any different.”

I went gray about three years ago. I don’t have that wonderful strong wire-like hair it takes to pull off the red lipstick, sleek short hair look. Mine is baby fine and white in the front with a brown underlayer in the back. In order to keep peace at home, my hair is longer than I’d choose to wear it, but not long by any measurement. It covers my ears and mostly covers them in curls (completely chemically induced, as my hair is straight as a ruler). I get many compliments. A striking woman at one of my workshops said she only needed my example to have the courage to go from electric purple red to gray.

My best friend who is somewhat younger than I warned me that I would be perceived differently in professional environments and that I might not like how I was treated. Since I do at least a third of my professional work with her company, that hasn’t been a problem. The remaining 2/3 of my work is online so I can choose to be seen or not (by my computer camera).

I don’t want to be younger. I don’t even want to look younger. I do want to be considered beautiful until the day I die. For me, gray hair is part of my age-appropriate beauty, and part of the beauty I admire in others like Helen Mirren at right.

I have been meeting with a SCORE client of my husband’s. This unusually capable and handsome man (doesn’t hurt to look, right?) is building a database to track organizational change processes. Since I’ve spent most of my adulthood leading, participating in, and crafting solutions for organizational change, my husband thought I could be more helpful to Steve than he could be.

It turns out I can be helpful. I can tell Steve what hasn’t or doesn’t work when planning, introducing, implementing, and tracking organizational change. I can tell him because I’ve done all of these things–just not as well as I think they should be done. Making change is hard for any person. Multiply that by 10 to 10,000 and you have some idea how hard it is for organizations. But the more important challenge for both individuals and organizations is making sure change is happening and then making it stick. Virtually no corporation does this well. The military does it much better.

I can’t tell Steve how to build a database. God no. I can tell Steve what needs to be built into a database that purports to help organizational change agents build and track a change process. Years of experience and some wisdom about change, my own personal change and changes I’ve led in organizations, help me to be helpful to others with more enthusiasm than experience.

Yesterday I did my third in a series of five teleclasses about Appreciative Coaching. A friend and colleague put me onto vyew.com as a way to do webinars. Using this site with its free conference line has worked just fine until I had international participants. Static from the international connection in our second session made it impossible to hear each other. I went in search of a better option.

I assumed, as I have on each step of my learning journey about technology, that there was a neat solution–simple, elegant, obvious–but one I didn’t yet know about. I spent a week looking at free and fee-based conferencing sites on the internet. I talked to salespeople and customer service representatives. After a week of searching, a wonderful down-to-earth woman at the site I’m now using told me that there is no perfect solution to conferencing with international participants. Yesterday we used both the vyew.com site and a fee-based conferencing site (connection via internet and telephone conference line). The sound quality was much better and the connecting information was more complicated. In fact, I used the wrong number to connect initially!

Ultimately, the sound quality was much better. I suspect that some of this was true because my Peruvian colleagues were on mute for the entire hour. So, one more challenge of working into one’s older age. I assume that younger people know the solution to everything I have yet to discover. In a way it is a relief to know that that isn’t always true. In another way, I feel more mystified as to what I should know (about technology, mostly) and what isn’t yet known.

I sat listening to a creativity lecture yesterday and a light bulb lit up. I’ve been blogging–hesitantly, intermittently, kind of haphazardly–for a year or more. I grab a theme, then it kind of drifts off. I’m initially enthusiastic, and then not. As yesterday’s lecturer talked about finding what is real and true for each of us and then capitalizing on it, I knew almost immediately what is real and true for me now. But I have not wanted to write about it honestly.

I am 66. I work. I want to keep working until I either die or someone tells me it’s not a good idea for me to work any more. I still work mostly for pay and I might do more volunteer work someday, but not yet. Here’s what I do for work:
Teach in an online graduate program (both masters and doctoral level courses)
Coach managers, artists, and anyone in transition or transformation
Conduct webinars about my book Appreciative Coaching
Serve on the board of a religious community
Serve on the board of a local chapter of the International Coach Federation
Consult as part of a team to public agencies in San Francisco about leadership and conflict

I get paid to do all of these. Getting paid is part of what I want to write about, but not the deeply honest part. I want to write about my own challenges in continuing to work. Some of them are:
I get tired much more easily, and my brain is like glue when I’m tired.
My husband is 9 years older than I am. He has diabetes, a heart condition, and poor memory. Though this is mostly not a problem, sometimes it is.
I am taking medication for high blood pressure (hydochlorothyozide) and residual hot flashes (gabapentin/neurontin). Sometimes the medication makes me stupid (gabapentin).
I have arthritis in my feet which is mostly a nonstarter until I travel when my feet both look like basketballs and feel like I’m walking on nails inside my shoes.
I have carpal tunnel in my right hand, again mostly a nonstarter, except when I wake up in the morning and two fingers are numb, or I can’t hold a fountain pen because it is too heavy.

I want to be clear that I don’t want to write about my aches and pains. BO-RING. I do want to write about the joys and challenges of wanting to and continuing to work into my old age. There I wrote it. I will continue to write about this for as long as it is interesting to any audience. What do you think, audience?

I was losing my job as a training manager.  The department for which I worked would be eliminated.  I had to find another job inside the company or leave to find a job elsewhere.  I found a job in another division that seemed to offer the opportunity to use my best talents.  I got an interview with the head of the division.  The first time I ever met Tim I knew that if I worked for him, my job and my relationship to a boss would be different.  At the end of the interview, Tim asked, “Who needs to know that we’re talking about this job for you?”

He knew that our division was disappearing. Yet, he wanted anyone who would be affected by my leaving that division, or anyone else within the company who had offered me a job, to know that Tim and I were talking about my joining his division. Tim modeled political openness in a way I’d never seen before.

I took the job. I shared responsibility for a national salesforce with a product expert. My responsibility was to hire, train, motivate, and develop each of these sales people to sell the product. As part of my job, Tim asked me to make presentations to annual meetings of all of the division executives. After the first one, Tim came to my office. He complimented me on my presentation. Then he asked, “Could you help me be a better speaker?”

No boss I’d ever worked for had suggested that I did something they needed to do better. No boss had ever asked me for help in his or her development. Tim had no ego when it came to learning. He was an equal opportunity learner. If he couldn’t do something–strategy was his gift, not management–he either learned to do it, or hired someone to do it. He had hired and honored a very good manager to manage the day to day business of our division. Adam and Tim were of one mind. Adam ran the division. Tim developed and promoted the division.

Finally, when I l accepted another offer outside the company, only 14 months later, for what I hoped would be my dream job, Tim came to me and asked about the particulars of the job. When I answered his questions, he said, “You have to take this job. It is the job you should have had when your division collapsed.” No hard feelings. In fact, Tim and Adam gave me a going away party and lovely gift.

Tim was and is an appreciative leader. He always looked for the very best in everyone, including his competitors. He consistently sought ways to be a better and better leader. It has been no surprise to me that Tim has thrived within the company I left. He is the leader against whom I measure every other leader I meet.

I believe that true leadership is first chosen and then developed.  Many people are chosen for and serve in leadership positions.  In some cases, leadership is thrust upon the leader.  Not all of these leaders have made their own thoughtful choice about whether and how they want to lead.  They may want the trappings of leadership, or the perks.  They may even want to lead, but have not considered what that means to them.

For those who have made a personal choice to lead, development opportunities such as courses, interactive experiential learning, coaching, and reading can be helpful and enhancing.  The prerequisite for development is choice.  This is probably true of all human change processes.  I believe it is critical to leading.  Do we ask whether a client or learner wants to lead?  I think we assume that a good performer does want to lead and I think this assumption can waste our time (scholars, consultants, and coaches) and theirs.  In order to be something we are not now, we need to want to journey to that place, to that way of being in the world.

If someone chooses to become a leader that decision should set off two paths of development.  One is internal and requires self-reflection, action, self-monitoring and evaluation, and the other is external—action in the world—that others assess.  These two directions are synergistic and require conversation.  If the budding leader only self-assesses, she gets no real world confirmation that her growth is positive and expansive.  If she only acts, she cannot build real self-reliance as all of her feedback comes from others (and can be affected by their own agendas).  A coach can often facilitate this conversation between internal and external development.

Personal development of leadership capability requires self-evaluation, purposeful action, and “other” evaluation—from the organizational culture within which a leader develops.  Coaching, because it can connect the internal and external development paths, is increasingly helpful to leaders who want to grow.  Current research in both neuroscience and positive psychology indicates that the optimistic would-be leader develops more creativity, more connections with others, and more resilience on her path to leadership when positivity (strengths, successful experiences, and challenges overcome) is a focus of development.

Finally, a developing leader needs to coordinate his growth and development with others.  Leadership is relational, not isolated.  A leader cannot, and should not operate unilaterally.  In my opinion, too much has been written about the leader, and not enough about leadership.  The one elevates the individual; the other elevates the whole (organizational system).  Although ego contributes significantly to a leader’s ability to learn, fail, try again, and ultimately succeed at various leadership strategies, it has no place in the actions of leadership.  Leadership coordinates and integrates the ideas, feelings, strategies and experience of many good brains within and outside of any organization.  Leadership requires individual leaders as facilitators, developers, and decision-makers, but is not limited to leaders.  Leadership is equally dependent on colleagues, peers, followers, consultants, and customers.  In the world in which we operate today, an increasingly borderless one, leadership requires the agreement and contributions of everyone, not just individual stars.