Nov. 26, 2024

Unlocking the Secrets of Aging Gracefully with Deborah Heiser

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Join us on the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball, where we explore the fascinating world of aging with psychologist, author, and professor Deborah Heiser. Discover the profound connection between mentoring and aging, and how it can transform lives. Deborah shares insights from her research and her work with the Mentor Project, which has provided millions in mentorship hours worldwide. Learn about the essence of mentorship, preparing for retirement, bridging generational gaps, and the importance of traditions. Don't miss this enlightening conversation!
www.deborahheiser.com
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600

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00:00:00.719 --> 00:00:09.205
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, um, to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve, cheat.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate, and inspire. Today, we're going to be talking about aging, as I am joined by psychologist, speaker, author, professor, and consultant Deborah Heiser. Deborah has been quoted in places like the New York Times.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>She's been on several podcasts and local radio. She's been all over the place with her research, and her research focuses on aging, various topics related to aging. So we're going to be talking to her about everything that she's up to, her, uh, work and what drives her to do what she does. Uh, so, Deborah, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Speaker B>Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Speaker B>Sure. Um, I'm an applied developmental psychologist, and I am the CEO of the Mentor Project. I just wrote a book about mentoring called the Mentor Project. And most people wonder how somebody who talks about aging and has been researching it for as many years as I have been got into mentoring. But most people don't realize that mentoring is very connected to aging. So I'm very excited to be working in both fields at the same time.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So tell us what an applied developmental psychologist is.

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> Speaker B>So most people think of a psychologist as a clinical psychologist who works with pathology, things that have gone wrong or need to be fixed. An applied developmental psychologist is looking at everything that we should expect should happen. So, like walking and talking when you're little and as you get older, in midlife and beyond, all of the emotional and physical and other changes that we go through, what we should expect.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, so you're the founder of the Mentor, the Mentor Project.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So tell us about that and why you decide to found it and what it's all about.

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> Speaker B>Sure. So I was researching everything no one ever wants to get or have, you know, like dementia, depression, end of life, all of those. The sorts of things that make people scared of growing older. And I went to a party or a big dinner. It was at a conference. And someone asked me what we have to look forward to as we get older.

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> Speaker B>And I didn't have an answer for him.

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> Speaker B>So I decided to take a look at the research and what theorists were saying about growing older. And there was a lot out there. It just wasn't being talked about.

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> Speaker B>Most of everything. At the time, in the 90s and early 2000s, we were talking about everything that was negative about growing older. So I decided to really start to look at what happens in midlife. And at midlife we hit a stage. It's a developmental stage, that's an emotional stage called generativity. And that's where we care for others without expecting anything in return. We want to give back something to others and we do that in three ways, through mentoring, volunteering, and philanthropy.

00:04:06.824 --> 00:04:15.456
> Speaker B>And I thought, well, a lot of people can't donate the way that they'd like to in philanthropy or have a building named after themselves.

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> Speaker B>And although a lot of people and most people end up volunteering, mentoring is the only one where you're giving back a piece of yourself, your expertise or your values. So I decided to take a look at that. And when I was doing that, I interviewed about 45 people from, you know, a four star general to grandma. And everybody had the same thing to say. They all got so much out of mentoring. They felt so relevant and valued and like they made an impact on a person or changed even more than one person. And it made them feel so good, like they were, they had purpose in the world.

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> Speaker B>And so when I was talking to, uh, to these people, I ended up talking with a person name is Jim Moriarty.

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> Speaker B>And he said, you've got to meet some of my friends, some of the people I know. And so he started introducing me to some of the people he knew. And one of the person, a person I met through one of his connections is, um, Bill Cheswick. And he's one of the fathers of the firewall.

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> Speaker B>And he said, wow, I don't have access to kids, I'm getting ready to retire and I would love to be able to mentor, but I don't have any way to get in front of kids. And it's inappropriate to go to the park and say, hey kid, do you want to learn quantum mechanics?

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> Speaker B>So I decided, hey, how is it that people who've done world changing things can't find a mentee? Like, how weird is that? And I thought, well, maybe it's just him. And then I asked another person who also did some world changing things and he also didn't have mentees. And I thought, this is so strange. We have these people that anyone would want to pick their brain for a few minutes and would probably even pay them to pick their brain. And they can't find students or kids to mentor.

00:06:18.365 --> 00:07:26.134
> Speaker B>So we decided to work to get Bill into schools and we ended up founding the mentor project because Bill wanted to get into schools. We thought it would just be 10 people. You know, sort of having fun, not doing anything other than just having a good time. And it turned out that after just six months, we moved to 60 people, then to 80, and then to 100. It just grew like crazy because there were so many people who wanted to give back as they got older and didn't have an outlet for it. So it was some founding the mentor project with a group of other people. I wasn't the sole founder, um, was not something I set out to do. It just organically happened. And since the time that we founded it, it's only grown. And this year alone, we've given out more than $2.7 million worth of mentorship hours from the top 1% of people in their field to students around the world and five countries outside of the U.S.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, you're also a professor at Adjunct professor. So tell us what you teach.

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> Speaker B>Sure. This semester I'm teaching, um, gender and, um, prejudice. And I have taught introduce introduction and child development as well.

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> Speaker B>So. But for the past seven years, I've mostly been teaching gender and prejudice.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, what do you feel, in your opinion or your mind, makes a good mentor?

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> Speaker B>There are five things that actually make a good mentor and a mentee. When we think of a mentor, it's really a relationship. And so both, uh, when I, I say what would make a good mentor, it's exactly the same things that make a good mentee. So a person needs to want to be able to give something back to people. So when I say this, the mentor project is focused on the mentor. We want to find out what people want to give back. So a mentor has to want to be able to give something back to others. And the mentee's job is to want to accept that. And that sounds easy, but that isn't always easy. We often meet people who want to give something back. But maybe the person, like if somebody said, hey, I want to give, I want to tell you my expertise in, uh, maybe car mechanics, I might not be that interested in it, but somebody else might be really interested in it.

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> Speaker B>But if I try to match up with that person, I'm not going to be a good mentee, because I'm not going to be as accepting or receptive of their expertise.

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> Speaker B>So part of it is a matching and being able to say, hey, um, this isn't the greatest match. And moving on. A lot of people think that if you're paired up with somebody, you've got to make it work or it's a failure. So that's the first thing, is that somebody has to be generative and want to give something back, and, and the mentee has to want to take it. The next thing is that it has to be intrinsically motivated. And so what I mean by that is that a person has to want to mentor without being given any reward or award or compensation of any kind. And most people, um, you know, if you are getting paid to mentor, you're not a mentor. So most people can really relate to intrinsic motivation. That's something like if you, if I were to ask you, hey, would you like to volunteer at a soup kitchen, giving out food and beverages to hungry, thirsty people, almost everybody says, yes, I would like to do that. And then if I say, okay, now I'd like you to volunteer your time that you've already said you'd like to do at Starbucks, and, uh, everyone says, no, I don't want to do that. So volunteering for the pure love and joy of it is intrinsic motivation. If you are doing something for paying, like going to work at Starbucks, that is maybe the same activity, but you're expecting something from it. And, uh, that is usually an award or a reward or a certificate or pay, something like that. So when we're mentoring, both the mentor and the mentee have to want to do it without getting anything other than the knowledge transfer or the skill transfer or the value transfer of what it is. Um, so a person shouldn't be thinking that their mentorship is also an internship or something like that.

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> Speaker B>And the next thing is, it has to be a meaningful connection. You cannot really mentor somebody if you don't like them and if you don't feel connected to them. And the same goes for a mentee. If you really don't like your mentor and you're just putting in time, hoping to get out information, you're not being a good mentee. In fact, you're not a mentee. You're somebody who's just putting in time with someone. The next thing is that you have to trust the person. And this. If you're in business and you're in a company and you are looking to get mentorship from a boss above you at whatever one level or two level levels above you, and you're worried that if you tell them you don't know how to do something, that they will not promote you or that they will give you a bad performance evaluation, that's not going to be good mentoring, you know, situation.

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> Speaker B>Likewise, if you're a mentor and you feel like the mentee is going to steal your ideas or that they will, you know, not use them properly, then that also isn't going to work. So we have to trust each other.

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> Speaker B>And finally there has to be a goal.

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> Speaker B>And that goal can shift and change with time. But we really need to have one that's set up so that we're not just chit chatting, that we're doing something with a purpose. So in that case, uh, a mentor. The way that you can be a good mentor is that you are all those things that I just mentioned. And if you want to be a good mentee, you are doing all of those things that I just mentioned.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All, uh, right. Well, for those of us who are close to retirement age or trying to prepare for that part of our lives, give us, uh, some things that you feel like we can do to get ready for retirement.

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> Speaker B>So if you're getting ready for retirement, start thinking about who you are outside of your job.

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> Speaker B>Because most people, when they have a job, they use that as their, I call it their identity card. They identify themselves with their job and then when they leave their job, it's fun for a couple of weeks and then they start to feel like, oh, who am I? I'm not Joe the teacher, or I'm not Sally the painter.

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> Speaker B>It's your identity shifts when you leave your job. And most people need to realize what their identity is that is not job related. You know, it can be anything.

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> Speaker B>It can be, I'm someone who, pat. I'm someone who's family oriented. I'm the one who passes down the values and, um, traditions of our family. I have an identity that this is what means something to me in the world. And it can be anything.

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> Speaker B>So it's as long as, uh, if you're preparing for that before you retire, you're going to be just fine and you're going to be able to transition to retirement, find things that make you productive, make you feel useful and relevant, and make you feel like you're still adding meaning to the world, which retirees do feel that way. They feel happy and fulfilled unless they're having trouble with their identity and where they stand in that way.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, you know, these days in some instances we have a generational gap.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>But in your opinion, what can we do to bring generations together to be able to solve different problems or different challenges?

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> Speaker B>One of them is mentorship. I mean, that's just an, that's the easiest thing.

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> Speaker B>And if we start, you know the one. This is my personal opinion. I think that we should be starting kids young. I'm of the age, in my mid-50s, that when I was young, we used to have to do community service and get engaged in our communities outside of ourselves. And then that shifted to being more focused on make your own personal brand, get yourself, you know, so that you're working towards your own personal goals. And when we don't see the world outside of ourselves in a bigger way that, you know, so that we see that we are a part of the whole world, it. It makes it harder for us to connect later. So what I think the biggest thing for getting intergenerational communication going is for people to connect outside of, you know, their own personal silos. And that is through things like, you know, civic engagement can be through, you know, we just had an election. Getting people involved in, in that it doesn't matter who you're excited for, but getting involved in that, it makes you feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself. And another intergenerational thing is the passing of traditions and values. And most people do not think of the incredible importance this holds and how important intergenerational communication is. And this is in our homes. So religion is passed down, um, century after century from, you know, one generation to the next. If you get ready for a holiday, which we are in the United States right now, we're getting ready for Thanksgiving. People have traditions around that holiday and other religious holidays that people celebrate as well throughout the year. And they have certain foods, certain ways that you walk in the door and you know what you're going to expect. Those traditions are incredibly important to us.

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> Speaker B>They make us feel safe, they make us feel comfortable. We pass them down to our children. This year I will be, as I do every year, making our Thanksgiving dinner from the handwritten cards that were from my grandmother in her handwriting. I'll be passing that down to my children. But every year we have the same thing. And, uh, it's the same taste, it's the same smell, it's everything. And if we leave something out, it doesn't feel right. So just getting people together intergenerationally around things that we feel comfortable with, that are value oriented are so incredibly important.

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> Speaker B>It doesn't have to be that somebody is saying, oh, I have an expertise, I have a professional background, or something like that. The most powerful, long lasting, um, intergenerational passings of knowledge are our traditions, our values, our religion, our culture. Those things that really holds longer than any small invention or thing like that that we might think at the moment is very much more valuable.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, I know reading your bio, I see that you have a special power to have lots of top experts to mentor for free. How were you able to do that?

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> Speaker B>Well, I was told when we had Bill and a couple of other mentors that no one would ever want to join us in our. You know, we were just having fun giving back to kids in schools, um, volunteering our time. You know, no one was getting paid. We were just doing this for fun.

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> Speaker B>Um, and then it. It organically happened. You know, people contact me all the time and ask if they can mentor and give back, and it's something that I didn't have to work hard at. There's nothing that, you know, that part wasn't hard. Getting the top experts to come and mentor for free is not hard.

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> Speaker B>People like to do that. There's nothing better than a person feels than when you see that someone takes your information and knowledge and expertise and they're using. It's like the feeling that you get when you give somebody a gift and they open it up and they realize this was something they'd wanted for so long, and they get that expression of joy on their face.

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> Speaker B>And you, as the gift giver, feels so amazing. So that's how all the mentors feel. They love it. And so when they do it, then their friends say, oh, I'd like to do that. And then other people see that they've been doing, and they say, I'd like to do that. And so that was not a hard problem at all. Uh, it really was something that in the first few years, we operated on$547 because everyone volunteered their time. Even the administrative work has been volunteered. So, you know, in the beginning, we started with really nothing.

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> Speaker B>Just people wanting to mentor and give back and volunteer. So, you know, we really got very lucky.

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> Speaker B>I actually have to rephrase that. That was not luck. That was really. It really is an example of humanity and how we're built to be really good people and we're built to want to do good things for others. So I didn't have to work at that. We're just built to do that. So people were just being themselves.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Sweet. Tell us about some of your writings. You know, your books, your articles. Tell listeners where they can check out your work and what we can expect when we read it.

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> Speaker B>Sure. I just wrote the book and it just came out. It's called the Mentorship Edge. And that book has stories from all sorts of mentors, from astronauts and how he was saved, and one of them was saved in space by a mentor and, um, you know, a grandma and a bunch of people from A whole different. Lots of different backgrounds, military examples. And I really do define mentorship, what it is and what it isn't, and how it differs from networking and coaching and advising and sponsoring and how you can use all those together. And I think the biggest takeaway from this book is that of course you can use it in the workplace. Of course, everything that we've learned from the mentor project and from that I've learned from all the research that I've done in writing can be done at work. But everyone can and should be doing this in their home life as well, because it makes you feel so good. So that book is available anywhere. Any person likes to buy books. It's called the Mentorship Edge. I also write for Psychology Today, and that is on, um, it's called the right side of 40. And it's all about midlife and older and what you can expect. I write about the good things that we can expect. Things like you can expect to be happier as you get older. I like to think of us as an apple tree. You know, when you are young, you're a seed. You become a tree. Um, then as you get older, it's not until you're really old that you're ripe and you start to bear the apples. And that's your wisdom that you're giving away. That doesn't happen when you're young. It doesn't happen, you know, earlier. It happens when you're older, when that tree is older. And so I write about that, um, about the positives of aging. And I also have, um, uh, linked a, uh, substack that I write. And everyone can access that as well. And I write about mentorship and aging. And I have someone who also helps by writing once a month about financial stuff. That is not my area of expertise and it is hers. And so she'll put something out once a month, month on that. So you can really find me and my writing in those places. And, you know, I, uh, really hope people will access it because we really do have a lot that we can look forward to every year we grow older.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, besides all of the stuff that you got going on right now, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to be aware of.

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> Speaker B>The. The next things that we're going to be doing are launching more, um, mentor project locations. We, um. I just got asked if we. We just launched the mentor project in Kenya. So we have a mentor project there. We have. We are going to be launching one likely in Vietnam, in Miami, and we have One in Tanzania. Um, so we're looking to expand. Um, this is my goal this year, is to expand, uh, the reach and to talk about mentorship in a broader way than just, you know, the mentorship that we're doing with the mentor Project. But how we can make this into a movement and shift the paradigm from thinking that mentorship and, uh, you know, is an activity that you do at work, but instead, uh, to think of it as a lifestyle and a life choice that by midlife we should be actively engaging in.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, so listeners can keep up with everything that you're up to. Throw out your contact info.

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> Speaker B>You can reach me, uh, through the Mentor project was, which is mentor project.org through my website, which is deborah heiser.com you can email me at deborah heiser gmail.com.

00:24:41.297 --> 00:25:02.404
> Speaker B>you can find me on LinkedIn. Deborah Heiser, Ph.D. i'm on Twitter or X, but I'm rarely there under Deborah Heiser and Facebook, um, under the Mentor Project. So if you're interested in anything about aging or mentorship, I hope you'll reach out to me because I do answer everyone who reaches out.

00:25:04.625 --> 00:25:12.244
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if there was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Speaker B>Sure. I hope that everyone listening will look to their left and they'll look to their right.

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> Speaker B>The person sitting next to you is probably a mentor and you didn't even know it. And the person on your right is probably your mentee and you didn't even know it. You're mentoring and receiving mentorship from others all the time and all you need to do is just become more aware of it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, anytime you have an opportunity to mentor, please do so. Deboraheizer.com Please be sure to check out Deborah's work. Follow Rate Review Share Reach out to her Jump on your favorite podcast app. Leave us a review. Check out the show. Share it. Follow us if you have any guests or suggestion topics. Curtis Jackson 1978@att.net is the place to send them. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Deborah, thank you for all that you do. And thank you for joining us.

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> Speaker B>Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. And you keep making the world a better place.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com until next time, stay focused on Living the Dream Dream.