Mary Louise Floyd Celebrity Guru

Mary Louise Floyd writes from her own experience as a wife, mother, homemaker, educator, speaker, and civic activist. A retired boomer, Floyd has been married to her husband, Ed, for 28 years. Their son, Spencer, a recent college graduate, is what Floyd describes as an “archetypal Gen-Xer.” Since her retirement in 1999, Floyd has remained active by immersing herself in community service. She served as President of the Mount Paran Woods Garden Club, and she currently serves on the Board of Directors for Keep Atlanta Beautiful and on the Members Guild for the Atlanta Historical Society. Prior to her retirement, Floyd worked as a successful educator for more than 30 years, serving as a high school English teacher and a library media specialist. A member of the Smithsonian National Faculty and the Delta Kappa Gamma Society for Educators, she holds an M.A.T. in English and an Ed.S. in Library Media. She has published numerous articles on civic matters and education issues in the Citizen’s Review, Libra News of the Columbia Library System, Media Educator: Journal of the Georgia Library Media Department, and School Library Media Quarterly, among other publications. As Business and Professional Women’s Young Career Woman of Georgia in 1973, she lobbied for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and advocated empowerment for women through education and career opportunities. Now she envisions the power of women leading her generation into a new era. An empty-nested mother and incurable superwoman, Floyd lives and continues to grow with her retired, corporate-attorney husband in Atlanta, GA.

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Age Matters? Which Age?

The year 2006 marked the sixtieth birthday of the first 77 million baby boomers. This generation, born between 1946 and 1964 and representing 27% of the U.S. population, is turning 60 at the rate of one boomer every seven seconds. So, what’s age 60 to the forever-young boomer? It’s the new age 40. When someone asks you how old you are, answer with your feel, do, or look age, not the candles on your latest birthday cake. As the meat in the multi-generational “sandwich,” boomers have the responsibility of modeling for future generations how to live healthy, productive second adulthoods, heretofore unprecedented in history.

Retirement as Second Adulthood

At the turn of the twentieth century the average lifespan was 47 years. Now healthy sixty-five-year-olds can expect to live into their mid-eighties. Currently most Americans retire at age 61.7. Retirement, or its eligibility, now marks the transition from first adulthood to second adulthood, a marvelous new chapter to human history that is just beginning. It offers a second chance at life with all the accumulated wisdom of a first life, like reincarnation without the death part. Ask yourself, If I could live my life again, what would I do? Write these aspirations as goals for your second adulthood and then develop an action strategy to accomplish the goals. Look at seeming obstacles as challenges to be all that you can be—and haven’t been yet.

Golden Anniversaries Need Empathetic Communication

A century ago people married, raised their children, and died. Even in 1935 when the Social Security Administration institutionalized retirement, life expectancy was only 61.7 years. With the golden years we now enjoy comes the expectation of celebrating golden wedding anniversaries. The fifty-, sixty-, or seventy-year marriage is a phenomenon of longer life expectancies that needs to be addressed. Retirement offers the opportunity to reevaluate and enrich your relationship with your life’s partner. The key to relationship success is empathetic communication. Everyone can become an empathetic listener by learning to respond with one of the four A’s of communication: acknowledgement, affirmation, appreciation, or affection.

Making New Friends and Keeping the Old

Through friendship, we validate who we are. When we retire, we lose our daily collegial contact that validated what we did with our lives forty hours a week. Retirement affords us the time to cultivate new friends and improve our existing friendships. Aristotle’s three categories of friendship help us understand our relationships with others. A friendship of pleasure is based on the fun or entertainment a friend offers. A friendship of utility is based on what a friend can do for us. A friendship of virtue is achieved when two people hold the same ideals and wish good for one another. In retirement this highest form of friendship can be achieved through some form of community service in which you share with others a common commitment to do something good and meaningful.

Finding Your Giftedness

You’ve retired from your first adulthood’s job-defining identity. If you feel there’s something you want to be remembered for besides your net worth and your resume, you now have the time to pursue it. Examine what you always had on the back burner while you were putting bread and butter on the table, climbing the corporate ladder, attending PTA meetings, and carpooling to soccer matches. If you feel there’s some creative part of you that wants expression, then go for it! Find you giftedness. Unfortunately, the boom generation went through school when “gifted” was defined by the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test. In the early 1980s Howard Gardner redefined giftedness into eight dimensions, and he’s working on nine and ten. The idea is that every human being is endowed with some creative potential that is waiting to be tapped: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Your legacy awaits you.

Using Personal Intelligences to Help Others

Regardless of our innate endowment in the personal intelligences, sometimes called our social/emotional I.Q., these interpersonal and intrapersonal abilities grow with age. For this reason, retired people are well suited for care-giving, mentoring, and counseling. In this way, too, helping others through our social and emotional skills and talents is also a way of using our creativity. Retirees can greatly enrich their own lives by giving themselves to at least one volunteer activity.

Initiating a Retirement Wellness Program

We’ve all heard the alarming statistics. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. The majority of diseases in our country are termed lifestyle diseases because they are caused by choices we make. Retirement is the ideal time to change unhealthy lifestyle habits because retirement means a new lifestyle. If you smoke, quit. Initiate a retirement wellness program that prevents disease, reduces health insurance premiums, improves the quality of your life, and models personal accountability for one’s own body for future generations. In retirement, that workout no longer has to be squeezed into dawn or dusk. Study the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2005 available on the Internet by the Department of Health and Human Services and United States Department of Agriculture. Determine how much and what kind of physical activity you need from www.MyPyramid.gov. Morph that body into new form.