William Damon draws on encore.org research to help someone navigate major life transitions. He suggests reviewing your purposeful moments, learning from regrets, and reframing losses as part of your identity to find renewed purpose even with health constraints.
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What advice do you have when you are constantly, constantly needing to reinvent yourself, whether it's through death and one death, or multiple deaths or diagnoses of loved ones that have catastrophic impacts in your environment or just simply retiring? Because that's pretty significant.
Yeah, you bet. Well, yeah, I mean, you've really, you've really hit the nail on the head about what people our age go through for sure. And we actually just let me say, I do recommend encore.org the website and we did a research project with encore.org about this exact set of questions and that if you I did that with my wife, Ann Colby, and if you look on the website, it has the results. The good news is, the good news is that first of all, everybody confronts exactly what you are talking about, Kelly, including all the health issues and everything else. The good news is that even the most severe health issues do not interfere with people finding new purposes later in life. And by new purposes, I mean post job or post retirement. And also, as I said earlier, post the time when your kids are off living their own lives and even though there's still a type of purpose for you, it's much less day to day. So people do find all kinds of purposes and they can be, again, ordinary, they can be caring for animals or all kinds of things that people get involved in. But I would say in terms of advice, and this does get me back to the Life Review and what I write about in the book, what I would say, and it has to do with that issue of the past, is that if you examine the past, this is what Robert Butler, the great psychiatrist, pointed out when he developed the Life Review. He said, we always go back to our pasts, but there's a helpful way to go about it and a not helpful way to go about it. And he was working with patients that were depressed. I am not a clinician and I don't work on depression. But he wrote that with his patients that got depressed, it was that they were fixated on failures and regrets and the kind of negative experiences in their past that they had a hard time getting past, partly because they didn't think about them systematically. In the Life Review, number one, thinking about the purposeful experiences you've had in the past, what are you proud of? What did you do? Even if you're not working on that anymore, what did you do that actually you got satisfaction out of and getting lessons from that and bringing that forward and the things that you regret not making? The mistake that I made, which was, you know, I regretted never having followed up and being interested in who my father was, I regret that. But not getting hung up on that and saying, oh, you know, that has led me to a mistake I can never cure. But rather thinking about those regrets in a way, in two ways. One is, what can I learn about them? And if I can correct them now, here's how I can correct them. Some of the regrets you will not be able to correct. There are catastrophic things, people die and so on that are just lost forever. But then you can realize, and this is the kind of the wisdom of the life review, you can realize whatever's happened, even tragedies that have hurt me or impaired or lost people to me or have hurt my health in a permanent way, whatever they are, they have still led me to the person I am now. And I actually would not want to be anybody else. That's one thing about humans. You can envy somebody's situation, oh, this person has a billion dollars or this person, whatever, but you don't actually want to be them. You want to experience life as who you are. And so the wisdom of that, I think, is realizing that whatever it is that's happened in your past, even if it's been impairing and it can't be corrected and was a mistake, it's led you to who you are now. And you can experience and find a way to experience life through your own integrity, through who you are now. And you can find, whoever you are, you find joy in things and purposes moving forward. And maybe even the fact that you are somewhat handicapped at this point, it gives you even more of a mission of saying, you know what? That's what we found in our encore study. People with serious health problems often got enormous satisfaction about being able to do things, even though they couldn't do them in the full way they could when they were 20 years old. It got tremendous satisfaction. Even though I'm in a wheelchair, I can still do this, and so on. So that's the wisdom of the life review.
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