BlogPositive

My pressure cooker

If there was one item of kitchen equipment that I would save from a flood it would be my pressure cooker. I love it. Its so versatile and a great energy saving tool. I can make almost anything that has to be heated on the hob in half the time - nutritious stews in half and hour, warming soups in ten minutes or so.  And when I'm not using it as a pressure cooker, its the biggest pan that I own!

Tonight I've been cooking up two batches of soup for the freezer. Red soup and orange soup.  One based on tomatoes, mixed beans and pesto and the second carrot, sweet potato and butter beans.  Unfortunately as I was making the second lot I noticed that the valve is no longer sealing properly. This meant that it didn't get up to pressure and therefore I had to cook it for longer.  I think that I have a spare valve in the kitchen drawer so I'll easily replace it.

One of the great things about growing older is bringing along all our old ways with us, like my pressure cooker. I don't have many friends under 30 who have one.  However there is always the danger of getting trapped in those old ways and not being willing to move on. I love my pressure cooker but I also love my microwave.  Sometimes in life we need to take a hard look at the way we do things and ask ourselves if it isn't time for a change. Being older we are no strangers to change. We've already seen a lot of it and know how to deal with it. Also we know that we don't need to make radical change to see a result. Just tweaking things can give the desired outcome. I just need a new valve not a whole new pressure cooker.

What old habits and ways to you need to tweak?  What small changes can you make tomorrow?

Change Experts

I've been running some facilitated sessions this week for a Cumbria wide group who have undergone a merger recently. We have been reviewing the changes and talking through their feelings and any issues that they have.  Its just served to remind me that the older we get the more change we experience. And the surprising thing is that however terrible the change feels at the time - however scarey or hard or just plain stupid or daft, we survive and live to fight another day.

That means that once you get past 40 you must be a change expert.  You cannot get to that age without having experienced some major changes both in your working and home lives.  However most of us conveniently forget this. The next change comes along and we start to learn to cope all over again, forgetting that we probably have some great coping techniques that we know already tucked away in that big wardrobe where we save all of our life experiences.

So next time change hits you in the face, just remember that you are already a change expert and you already have a whole array of techniques that you have used to cope with change in the past. So get them out and dust them off - no need to search around for new ones when these have worked before.

Alzheimer's Disease

Today I am adding a link on my website to Helena Segets work.  Helena is a former Springboard participant from Newcastle who now has a studio at 36 Lime St.  Helena's recent work has taken the destructive trauma of mental decline in Alzheimer's disease and turned it into a positive experience for her and her customers.  You can see examples of her work on her website.

It is very sad that her mother was so ill and I really applaud the way that she has transformed this episode into a creative stimulus for her work.  We all encounter difficult periods through our lives, whether they are relationship breakups, physical trauma, death or injury of loved ones or any other of the many assaults that can overtake us.  As we get older the sum total of these things will increase and we can become overwhelmed.  However we can all choose how we react to and perceive these things.

We know that when we were younger and our pet dog or cat died, it was extremely difficult for a while but we survived. Life went on and we were better able to cope with the next bad thing that happened.  So instead of wallowing in the bad feelings that these events precipitate choose to use them as a positive influence.  It must have been traumatic for Helena when her mother was ill and she has now used that as a positive influence.  I went through a bad relationship breakup and produced some great poetry as a result.  I had my leg in plaster for 8 weeks and it enabled me to travel first class when I threw myself on the mercy of the railways.  My bags were lost by BA this week but it meant that there was no washing to do when I get home.

As we get older we have a great store of experiences that help us to see things in a positive light.  What are you hung up on at the moment?  How can you perceive it as a positive influence in your life?

MOT and Service

Here in the UK we have to have our cars tested for road-worthiness every year and because I do lots of miles I also get mine regularly serviced.  However we often fail to treat our bodies in the same way.  My body is the machine that is going to get me through life so I feel that I'd better look after it.  That means that it needs regular servicing and MOT and an occasional polish, just like my car.  And as my car is getting older I am finding that I am having to do more at each service.  More parts require attention. And my body is just the same. As I am getting older I am putting more effort into looking after it.  I was chatting with a friend the other day who observed that I needed to keep working as long as I could just to pay for all the specialists working on my body - the osteopath, chiropractor, physio etc etc

As we get older lots of things that we used to take for granted with our bodies do start to change, metabolism slows down, muscles start to decay, joints become stiffer and everything then becomes much more effort.  However it does not have to be that way.  You can make a decision today to look after your sole life machine even better than you do your car.  You can make a decision to service it every day with exercise, to keep it operating smoothly with regular stretching, to give it the best fuels to run with by eating and drinking well and to pep up that metabolic rate through regular aerobic workouts.  You sole life machine will reward you for this by giving you better performance every day and you can then give it a polish with a treat like a day out, new experience or just some relaxation time.

So when did you last go for your well woman or well man MOT?  Ring your GP today and get it booked then draw up your body servicing and maintenance plan to follow.  And if you need more motivation just keep reading this blog and of course BlogPositive.

Creativity

I've been on a creativity in business course this week.  It was a fabulously stimulating experience and I'd reccomend it to anyone.  I got to thinking about how our creativity is fueled and part of this is about connections.  A lot of these can be contributed to experience.

If you have a wide experience of food then you can probably think of lots of things to do with green beans. You'll have experienced soups and salads and a vareity of dishes which had other ingredients but where you could easily contruct them using green beans.  If you diet consisted solely of boiled green beans then you would probably find it difficult to think of many other ways to serve them.

One thing that is true as we get older is that we have a greater store of experiences and there are some experiences that we have repeated many times.  This gives us a great wealth of material within which we can make new connections.  After coming back from holiday in India you'll be making green bean curry, which you'd never thought of before. So as well as older and wiser we are also older and more creative.

Resisting progress

Resistance is futile, progress will overtake all of us eventually and we will be dragged kicking and screaming into the present.  As we get older though we frequently retreat under that warm comfort blanket of the things we know and trust.  This can be because in our great experience of the world we have found that embracing new stuff sometimes gets our fingers burnt.  You remember that you tried that new supermarket and they didn't have your favourite tea or any natural yoghurt.  You buy a new phone as I did, only to find it doesn't do half the stuff that my old one did and the software is painfully slow (Nokia 5500 versus 5140i).

However we tend to dwell on these bad experiences which then causes reluctance to try other new things.  And its only by dipping into that great cornucopia of new opportunites, new experiences, new relationships and new things out there that we continue to grow and enrich our lives.  The brain makes new connections when it encounters something new and an adapting brain is an active brain so by doing new things you will improve your mental fitness.

I have had new software on my desk for months and have been putting off loading it cos I knew I'd have to learn new ways to drive it and it might not work the same way as the old version.  I finally did it about two weeks ago and it has changed my life (sorry does that sounds really sad!).  Now working in Outlook 2003 it sweeps the 100 or so daily spam email messages away into a separate folder so I never even see them.  its saved me loads of time and effort.

So where are you resisting progress?  What are the areas in your life where you think you are too old to move on?  What new things are you going to do this coming week to change that?  Where in your life is it time to upgrade to a new version?

Welcome

Welcome to my new blog about being positive about getting older.  I have been helping older workers with their development and I think its useful to track our positive achievements, making the most of our many talents and building on our vast experience to have a fulfilled existence both at home and at work.

Older wokers are now a significant force in the workplace and getting the most out of us is going to make the difference between success and failure for some organisations.  I will share with you statistics, facts and resources to help you in your quest to grab more action as the shadows lengthen on your career.  We can think about what we can do to keep ourselves healthier for longer, keeping our brains and bodies active and functioning at their peak.  We can chat about what new avenues are open to you now that you have more time and energy due to your changing circumstances.  But we will also not overlook the troubles of caring for elderly relatives, children and grandchildren alongside juggling stressful careers and busy home lives and also that elephant in the living room of failing pensions that means that many of us will need to work longer than we had hoped.

We will also share experiences of those getting to grips with all these changes, setting new goals and strategies for the future through our new development programme for older workers, Fresh Steps.  It is my plan to expand this into a multi-user blog so that we can hear about their experiences as they take new steps into their futures.