For Women on the Journey of Their Lives: Background and Book
My journey toward the publication of my #1 Amazon Best-Selling book A Call to Further Becoming: The New Declaration from Women Over 50 began several years ago. It speaks to the unmistakable impulse women like me are feeling. What I learned changed my life, and from what readers are saying it’s changing theirs too.
I became aware of an extraordinary shift several years before the pandemic.
Women over age 50 — clients, friends, leaders in corporate workshops, and me, seemed to be questioning traditional post-career models of life. For many, the well-worn picture of traditional retirement felt foreign and unattractive.
I kept hearing women’s voices speaking the same themes:
* A strong desire to continue making a difference in the world though not in the same way.
* A deeper and less achievement-oriented feeling about purpose.
* Healthy resistance to assumptions about age and relevance.
* Restlessness! No desire to “wind down.”
* An attraction to experiment.
* Love of learning without emphasis on producing.
* And in many cases, a deep desire for spiritual development.
This impulse to embrace a new way of being that breaks from old stereotypes and breaks through to a newly emerging pattern is happening at precisely the same time humanity needs the leadership of wise women.
That’s how evolution works. Individual + collective urging = an evolutionary upshift that keeps life progressing.
Sensing my own satisfied closure on 28 years in the corporate world, I wondered if the personal shake-up I was feeling was a norm for women like me.
That’s when I stumbled on the work of social anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson. Bateson announced in Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom that for the first time in human history, there’s a whole new phase of life between ages 50-70+. Those of us living it are literally pioneering a new way of being. She calls it “adulthood II” – the stage after adulthood I before entering elderhood.
Whether we know it or not, we are laying down new tracks for what this stage is.
In 2016/17, I interviewed 100 women ages 50-70+ across a mix of racial, socioeconomic, professional, geographic and religious backgrounds. The purpose was to find the answers to these questions:
* What’s happening in the lives of women age 50+, especially those who have had strongly-defined careers and are approaching what used to be called retirement years?
* Are there new markers for this new stage of life? If so, what are they?
* How are we navigating the big “what now” question?
* Is traditional retirement (ease, travel, volunteering, relaxation) a thing of the past?
* What’s most important to women at this stage of life?
* And … what are we learning as we pioneer this new territory that other women can learn from?
Ten themes emerged. I call them Declarations.
They all lead to one affirmation: the impulse for us over age 50 is not about disengagement but a call to further becoming.
A Call to Further Becoming: The New Declaration from Women Over 50 reveals details of the ten themes ~ the call for us to continue self-actualizing, expressing our creativity, and honoring the feminine wisdom we possess that is so needed in the world.
May whatever impulse led you to find this page and explore my resources support your calling.