The Power of Mentorship & Aging with Deborah Heiser
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Cathy:Welcome to Late Boomers, our podcast guide to creating your third act with style, power, and impact. Hi. I'm Cathy Worthington.
Merry:And I'm Merry Elkins. Join us as we bring you conversations with successful entrepreneurs, entertainers, and people with vision who are making a difference in the world.
Cathy:Everyone has a story, and we'll take you along for the ride on each interview, recounting the journey our guests have taken to get where they are, inspiring you to create your own path to success. Let's get started.
Cathy:Hello. Welcome to late boomers. I'm Cathy Worthington. We're thrilled to introduce you to Deborah Heiser who specializes in midlife and aging, and she's gonna talk about what we boomers have to look forward to as we age.
Merry:And I'm Merry Elkins. Deborah is an applied developmental psychologist and author of The Mentorship Edge. She's the founder and CEO of The Mentor Project and believes older people are precious natural resources, and we're built to be mentors and pass our skills and knowledge on to the next generation. Welcome, Deborah.
Deborah Heiser:Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here.
Merry:We're excited to have you.
Cathy:Yeah. You're perfect for our message. So please tell us about how your own life experiences led you to the path you're on today.
Deborah Heiser:So I really never expected to grow up and become a psychologist. I didn't even know what that was. I'm a first gen college goer, and I used to go down to visit my grandmother in Florida. I lived in New York. And one time I went down and my grandmother was the coolest person on the planet.
Deborah Heiser:I never had to pack clothes. I would just pack shoes and go down and stay with her and wear her clothes. One year I got down and she was grouchy, unkempt, unhappy, and Mhmm. She just wasn't herself. And so I talked to somebody down there and said, there's something wrong with grandma.
Deborah Heiser:And they said, don't worry. We're gonna fix her. She's taking a medication. It's making her depressed. And by the time you come back in a couple of months to visit her, she's gonna be okay.
Deborah Heiser:And I didn't believe her. I didn't even know what depression was. Because it you know, I was, like, 20, maybe 19. And,
Merry:so
Deborah Heiser:I went home and I came back, and grandma was back to herself so much so that she had a boyfriend named Wilbur. So she was all better. And I said, that's it. I'm gonna be a grandma fixer. And I went back and a degree in psychology and decided to switch from working with, you know, children to work with adults and then embarked on a career in research, looking at everything no one ever wants to have or get.
Deborah Heiser:And that includes depression, frailty, Alzheimer's, all sorts of things. My first book was on, you know, palliative care. So, really, I was a conversation killer at any cocktail party. Lots of good chat with me.
Cathy:So Yeah. I get that.
Deborah Heiser:So what what happened was I wasn't really doing well with that, enjoying it. Somebody said to me at a party, dinner party, what do we have to look forward to as we age? And I was stumped. I was like, what are you talking about? I had been looking at everything that was negative, but that's an Yeah.
Merry:You know, that's I I was very curious. What do we have to look forward to as we age? Because the youngest boomers are now 60. And yeah. And so tell us.
Merry:What what do we have to look forward to?
Deborah Heiser:No one had looked at that, and so I hadn't either. I just kept thinking we'll we'll put a Band Aid on all these terrible things. But I learned that those are all outliers. You know? Depression, we shouldn't expect to be depressed.
Deborah Heiser:We shouldn't expect to be frail. We shouldn't expect to get Alzheimer's disease. These are things we shouldn't expect to have or get. So Mhmm. What I did was I went back to the research and I said, you know what?
Deborah Heiser:We've all been looking at aging from a physical trajectory that looks like an inverted big v, like this, like an upside down triangle. And so we have a steep, incline with our physical abilities, learn to walk and talk. And then, you know, by your twenties, we're really at our peak, and then there's a slow steady decline. And that's what everybody is scared of. You know, they get scared of the reading glasses.
Deborah Heiser:I'm wearing them. I don't even care. You know, like, these are the kinds of things that they say, oh my gosh. We're gonna everything we have, we're gonna lose. And what they don't realize is that, and I didn't either, is that there's an emotional trajectory that starts at the same time, and it goes up and it never goes down.
Deborah Heiser:So you should expect to be happier as you get older. Just like I'm in my mid fifties, and I told all my students who were in their twenties, you can outrun me, but I'm happier than you. And that's really what we can expect. You know, I'm not trying
Cathy:Isn't that interesting? I love that point of view.
Merry:Yeah. I do too. And and and, you know, part of it's what we're fed as we grow older and grow up.
Deborah Heiser:Up. Yeah. It's it's all media and it's other things that are out there that we're that we're really having in our background in what we're watching and what we're seeing in film. And I remember in the going to an Atlantic roundtable meeting, and Ellen Burstyn was sitting next to me, and she said, we need to see more older women in film. You know, there are plenty of older men, but the the people who are in the film are frail or they're the grandmothers or they're in a rocking chair.
Deborah Heiser:And then, fortunately, there did start to we started to see some changes like Gracie and Frankie and Grace, I think it's called.
Cathy:Uh-huh. Grace and Frankie.
Deborah Heiser:Grace and Frankie. And I loved that show, but we started to see a shift in women that started to come into film. And so we're starting just starting to see a lot of change that's positive where women are independent, having fun, they're sexy. And that's really what we should be expecting is to
Merry:Sexy grandma.
Deborah Heiser:Why not? Why shouldn't that be the way it is? It should be.
Cathy:Well, tell us what is generativity.
Deborah Heiser:So generativity is right in the middle. If you look at our emotional development, our emotional development starts with, you know, where we have to trust our caregivers. You know, we wanna make sure that we can trust whoever's holding us when we're babies, that they don't drop us, that they feed us, that they give us everything that we need. And then from there, we we embark out into more independence, and then we wanna start to figure out who we are. And then we wanna make close intimate relationships.
Deborah Heiser:By the time we hit midlife, we know who we are. We've gathered the friends who we feel like, it it's more quality than quantity. You know, we have a close knit group of meaningful connections around us. And that's when we start to look around and say, okay. I've checked a lot of boxes.
Deborah Heiser:I've done all the things I'm supposed to do. I had a job. I, you know, did all the things I said I would set out to do. Now what? And that's when people will often say, uh-oh.
Deborah Heiser:What's next? I've done it all. And that scares people. What people don't realize is that generativity kicks in at this very moment. And this is where we wanna say, I have a footprint, and mine matters.
Deborah Heiser:It's like that George Bailey from it's a wonderful life. You know, he doesn't think how much he mattered until he finds out. Well, we don't need to go through that in order to find out that we matter. Generativity is a time that if we can say, you know what? I care for others without expecting anything in return, which is the definition of generativity.
Deborah Heiser:I'm caring for others without expecting anything in return. I'm giving to people my expertise, my values, my, my culture, whatever it is, to someone else, they're gonna carry it, and that's gonna keep me relevant. It's gonna make it so that I am purpose and meaning, and we get to see those footprints. So generativity is really volunteering, mentoring, and philanthropy. And we naturally do that stuff, but we very rarely give ourselves credit for doing that.
Deborah Heiser:And it's really true. Creativity is something that we can say, hey. I just I just did this. It can be a grandma saying, hey. I passed down the family traditions.
Deborah Heiser:That's why we have our family traditions every year. It could be somebody passing down some work culture value. It could be some it the most the biggest ones, though, are the traditions and the values and the culture. Most people don't value those very much. You know, they think I'm not a professional.
Deborah Heiser:I can't be a mentor, but they couldn't be farther from the truth. If you do any holiday or any tradition or you look at religion, that has been passed down for centuries. No one has been, like, the great accountant who lived. You know? Like, this is something that, you know, everyone has the ability to mentor and to give back the legal legacy that is what they're choosing.
Merry:Yeah. That that that makes so much sense. It does. Tell us a little bit about how people can prepare for retirement and how they can adjust to not going to the office every day or have not having that paycheck come in or having to deal with the illness.
Deborah Heiser:So, really, if you're getting ready to retire, I like to tell people to prepare in advance. Now most people don't. But if you can't, to prepare in advance. And that is to say, look at yourself not as your identity card, which is what I've always called those business cards. You know, people will say, I am a, and it's their job title.
Deborah Heiser:Well, you wanna be more than your job title, and we all are. The things that people remember about us are not our job title. It's how we made people feel. It's how we pass on our values and our culture. Right?
Deborah Heiser:The meaningful things in our lives. So get in touch with what those are. Those are really our superpowers. Are you somebody that hosts the holidays? Or are you somebody that everybody, when they come, they expect a certain feel?
Deborah Heiser:Are you somebody that makes sure that everybody is following a culture, you know, with whether that's a religion or that's something in your family? Are you somebody who's putting out into the, community some way that you think that it should be operating? Maybe you're joining the rotary. Maybe you're getting involved in some meaningful way in your community that is going to shape that community or keep the culture of the community going the way that you like it. It's involving yourself outside of your job.
Deborah Heiser:And that is if you haven't done that before, and you retire and you say, uh-oh, which is what most people do, it's not too late. You just go do that. It's it's easy enough to find where you find joy.
Cathy:Oh, so all of that is the prep for the retirement
Deborah Heiser:Yeah. Yes. Of all
Cathy:of what you're expressing. And it's Yes. A lot of things that we may have completely overlooked in our lives. We we might be doing it, but in some cases, we aren't even doing it yet. Yeah.
Cathy:So a lot of sounds like a lot of people have to discover this after they retire. What's happening? Better yeah. Better to think about it ahead of time. Right?
Deborah Heiser:Yeah. Because, you know, we don't give power to those things. It and I'm I'm looking right this. What's the power? The power is what has lasted for centuries?
Merry:Yeah. I
Deborah Heiser:wanna do that. That's where the power is. The power is never in. Here's I'm gonna continue with my job title. That gets lost in translation a hundred years from now.
Deborah Heiser:What do you want that was your legacy to go on a hundred years from now? Now say you if you prep for that, you can be out in your community. You can be engaged in your, you know, religious affiliations. If you're not religious, you can get engaged in your family culture. You can be saying, what do I want my future generations to look like?
Deborah Heiser:And if it's not your family, it's your nieces and nephews or whoever, who do I want to empower in and take on what I have? People get involved in organizations like foster care or other places where they are shaping the next generation. They mentor. They do other things, and those that that mentoring does not have to be in their career. It can be in other things that matter to a person.
Deborah Heiser:But we give the power oftentimes to what brought us the the cash or the money. And really the power that is everlasting for us is, sharing our most precious natural resource with everyone, which is, you know, our own personal gifts. We're not sharing that. We're burning down a library is my personal opinion in terms of the loss of every
Merry:Yeah. And and and like you said, we don't give ourselves enough credit for the the person that we are outside of our jobs or even outside of our families. And I think that's something I don't know how that can be achieved. Perhaps you have some idea as to how to achieve that.
Deborah Heiser:Yeah. So, you know, I'm gonna give you an example of some people who I, and I'm gonna give you two different forms of, say, mentorship that a person could get involved in. But I remember meeting with someone, and she said, I was just a teacher. Now I'm I'm I'm retired, and, you know, what else is there for me? And I I meet with my clients in their homes when I'm coaching them, and transition is the thing that I usually work with.
Deborah Heiser:And this person said, I don't I don't have anything to give. And I entered her home and there were paintings everywhere. I was, what beautiful art you have here. And she said, oh, well, I, you know, I do that in my spare time. I said, why don't you open a gallery?
Deborah Heiser:And she did. And our whole trajectory changed. It was something she did in her spare time that no one saw but her and, you know, maybe her family, but it was it was overlooked. And she never got an artist. She never identified as an artist.
Deborah Heiser:She identified as a teacher. But then in her
Cathy:Isn't that odd?
Deborah Heiser:Isn't it? But that's very common.
Cathy:It's so obvious, but it's it it was so great that you could be there on-site in order to point it out because she wouldn't have told you about it
Deborah Heiser:Yeah.
Cathy:If you were just talking on Zoom or something. Tell us about how older people get depressed, and what how would you address that, and how can we combat it?
Deborah Heiser:So, people can become depressed, and it it can be pretty common for certain illnesses, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, certain things, especially if you're taking a medication. So first to be on the lookout. If you see start to see signs and symptoms like we saw with my grandmother, we were just like, there's something wrong with grandma. You know? And my grandma was young.
Deborah Heiser:She was a young grandma. She was very vibrant. If you see see in someone else, it's very hard for us to see in ourselves. But if you see in someone you know, they're not coming around as often. They're not, engaged as often.
Deborah Heiser:Maybe they're grouchy. Maybe they are it could it's subtle things. You know? Oh, someone says just being grouchy, and she usually isn't. It to talk to them and say, have you had any changes lately?
Deborah Heiser:Maybe you need to see the doctor to get a medication change. That's the first thing where I would go if you're seeing a change in some. A lot of times, it's medication related or it's that they've maybe a person suffered from a stroke or had a heart condition and they're recovering. You need to be able to give it time, see if there are symptoms there, get that treated Mhmm. Then it get better.
Deborah Heiser:I always also say engage in talk therapy because, it can be jarring for someone, and they they may be interacting with their family and friends differently, and the talk therapy can help them through that. It's not long term for that. It's just, you know, it's it's a reset, really. So I hope depression is something that, yeah, we could face it. But if we catch it, we can treat it.
Deborah Heiser:It's it's something that is very treatable.
Cathy:Oh, good to know.
Deborah Heiser:Friends and your family first, see what they are.
Merry:Yeah. A lot of older people, though, have been uprooted and put into homes or retirement, areas, and that's pretty depressing for them to look at what they had and then look at this one room that they're in and and people that they don't know yet. I mean, how do you deal with that?
Deborah Heiser:So I worked in a nursing home in Manhattan for six years, and there's something called an adjustment disorder. And kids get this when they go to college. They get it when they go to sleepaway camp. They can you can get an adjustment just have an adjustment disorder anytime you have an adjustment. So people think it's only nursing homes.
Deborah Heiser:But it's good things too. It's things we like and get excited for. Mhmm. And so you have to really give yourself a few months to be able to say, okay. The person needs to adjust.
Deborah Heiser:But most people do. You know, a lot of times people think of a nursing home as something really terrible, like a jail, and it's not. It really isn't. I've said to my kids, I don't wanna live with you. I wanna go somewhere and live.
Deborah Heiser:And it's because they have a lot more people around. There's a lot more to do. You know, my mother-in-law lived in my house for ten years, and she's 98 now, and she lives in assisted living facility. And she loves it there because we all worked and went to school. What a boring in our house.
Deborah Heiser:It was not a fun house. So the idea that you're surrounded by people and excitement in the home, it's really a fallacy in many cases. A lot of people live in their home, and it's hard to take care of it. It's hard to keep it clean. It's hard to cook for yourself.
Deborah Heiser:When you have people doing that, they love and care for you, and they really do in nursing homes. I mean, you wanna check out your nursing home like you would anywhere that
Cathy:you go. Right. But But the people that work there are just angels on Earth. Right?
Deborah Heiser:Yeah. And assisted living is is nice. So I would say that there's a real, stigma about about living in in institutions, and there should there need not be. My father-in-law, an example is that he had a surgery and he came to the rehab unit. And my mother-in-law kept coming in and saying he wants to go home, and he didn't.
Deborah Heiser:I worked there. And so I would go visit him. And he'd say, no. No. I'm good.
Deborah Heiser:He's like, it's the first place that everybody's waiting on me, hand and foot. And, you know, he got to eat all the foods he wasn't allowed to eat at home. And he kinda had a sense of freedom. And
Merry:Uh-huh. He was like, no. No. I'll stay the amount
Deborah Heiser:of time, whatever the doctor says. And so a lot of people think that someone is unhappy or that they're, you know, not having a good time, but he felt like he was in a spa because everyone was taking care of him. And he left and he went back home and, you know, after a a short stay. But I think that most of us hear from media or other places that that institutions are really the last place that we wanna go, but it's really not as cut dry as
Cathy:that. Well, let's
Merry:let's talk a little bit about, you know, parents and and and older their parents and also their children and how we can bring generations together to solve all these challenges that face them.
Deborah Heiser:You know, I always advocate that people try if they can for intergenerational. Not everybody lives near each other, but if, you know, I lived with my mother-in-law for ten ten years, and a lot of people said, oh my gosh. How could you do that? That it's not hard. It you that's one thing that people can do.
Deborah Heiser:They're also you know, if you can live near your children, that's another thing. But the other thing that you can do is if you live far apart, you can do regular get togethers on Zoom. Mhmm. Things like that. It's not always feasible for people to take group vacations.
Deborah Heiser:That can be very expensive. But regular Zoom is good. You know, we have relatives in Australia and other places, and we do as much communication as we can even with big events, on Zoom. So what has been seen by many, which is, you know, the full texting thing as negative, it's really been one of the best connectors of people long distance since COVID that we've found. And
Merry:Absolutely. Jump
Deborah Heiser:on that bandwagon. It's really big fun.
Cathy:Yeah. And can you tell us a little bit about your book, The Mentorship Edge, and tell us about the mentor project? And also start by defining mentorship.
Deborah Heiser:Okay. Sure. So mentorship is part of generativity. It's where someone is giving their skill, their value, their expertise to someone else without expecting anything in return. And I'll just give you a full definition of it.
Deborah Heiser:So the first thing that is required for the mentor and the mentee both is that there's someone who wants to give something away. Right? So if I said, hey, Kathy. I would love for you to share your expertise in something, and you're like, I don't want to. Then you're not mentoring.
Deborah Heiser:Right? And I'm
Merry:so that if somebody wants to
Deborah Heiser:give something away and you need somebody who wanna touch it, because if you said, hey, if Cathy, you said, hey, Mary, I wanna give this to you, and Mary was like, I don't want it, then that's not mentoring either. You need a giver and a receiver. We also intrinsically motivated, and that means that you are not getting paid for it. If you're at work and you're getting paid to mentor, you are not a mentor. You're probably an adviser, you're a coach, or you're something else, but you're not a mentor.
Deborah Heiser:And that's because if we feel like we are, in need of an extrinsic motivation, like money or, any kind of an award or reward something, then we aren't really doing it without expecting anything in return. And here's the example. I always tell students in my in my class, how many I ask them how many of you would like to volunteer at a soup kitchen? And they all raise their hand. They say I would.
Deborah Heiser:And I say, okay. Great. You'd feel really good about that, or are you doing it because, you know, there's some other reason? I say, no. It would feel great.
Deborah Heiser:I I've even done it. I loved it. And I say, okay. Instead of doing that, go volunteer at Starbucks. And they all say, I would never do that.
Deborah Heiser:I feel totally taken advantage of. It would be terrible. And so it's that same situation, volunteering in two different situations. But if there's usually an expectation of pay in one, then that's where you get the sort of icky feeling. And so most people in the workplace are not really mentoring because they're expected to mentor for pay.
Deborah Heiser:So the third thing is it has to be meaningful connection. I have to like the person I'm mentoring. And if I'm the mentee, I have to actually like the person who's mentoring me. So if it's not
Cathy:because there there has to be mutual respect. Exactly. Especially because you're gonna have to respect the advice they're gonna give you.
Deborah Heiser:Exactly. So somebody has to wanna catch it and do something that so if I'm gonna mentor somebody and the person's like, oh, too good, I'm not actually getting anything out of that. The person that's being mentored has to say, I value that information so much, and I wanna take it on. That's how I then get to say, I matter. You know, my footprint is being made right now.
Deborah Heiser:So both need it. So the next thing is trust. If I'm a mentor and I think that my mentee is gonna steal my information and go somewhere with it, that could happen. I'm in the workplace. That's not good.
Deborah Heiser:And if the mentee feels like they can't share that they don't know something, be vulnerable in front of somebody, that maybe they'll fire them or they won't give them a promotion, they need that trust in both directions. And finally, they need to, whenever we have anybody out here doing this, after the trust, we really need to be able to, have the whole thing come together sort of like a recipe where everybody is, all of this is happening together.
Merry:Is that what you outline in your book?
Deborah Heiser:I do. I outline all of these in the book. Oh, the the last thing is a goal. When you put all these things together, that usually has a goal. And that is outlined in the book.
Deborah Heiser:And, I talk about all the different ways in which a person can mentor from grandmas to astronauts. It's not always hierarchical. It can be what's called lateral, and this is where everyone is doing this all the time. I saw YouTube engaged in it, talking and trying to help each other out with sound. So what happens is when a person, we is next to somebody, you look to your left or you look to your right, you're usually gonna find somebody who knows something you don't, and they're able to help and, likewise, use them.
Deborah Heiser:So how often have you been somewhere and somebody knew something that you didn't and they helped you and then now you know it? Now you're carrying that information. Happens every single day. Like, I'm positive. Today, you have done this or anyone who is listening or you will do this.
Deborah Heiser:You will help someone or someone will help you, and they're not your boss. Mhmm. And they're not someone above you. And in in the in in the so Charlie Camarda who was in space, he's an astronaut. He, was on the STS one fourteen that followed the, Columbia disaster.
Deborah Heiser:And when he was up in his face, they he was looking around. He was like, this is great. It's everything I ever thought it would be. And then he got a call from mission control, and I said, you might have the same problem with the previous mission had. And what can you you can't, like, jump out and say I'm done.
Deborah Heiser:You know? I'm gonna open the door and leave. So he called he didn't call mission control and say try to help me with this because he felt like he didn't trust them at that moment. Like, hey. You sent us up here, and we have this potential problem.
Deborah Heiser:And that would have been a hierarchical thing. Right? So he called somebody that he knew really well was a really close friend from space and said, hey. I know that you're an engineer and you will understand this. Do I need to call my family and say I'm not coming back, or is there something we can do to fix this?
Deborah Heiser:And the guy said, I think I'm gonna take a look at it. I'll talk it over with you. He and he told Charlie everything he thought would be the case. And then he said, I think you need to do a space walk and fix the tile that was the demise of the previous mission. I think you have a loose tile too.
Deborah Heiser:So they did a space walk, and they arrived home safely. Had they not had he not had that advice from that lateral mentor, they would have died. So that's how powerful. Powerful it is. It's not just swapping recipes.
Deborah Heiser:It's not just, you know
Cathy:You know, it's interesting because because just this morning, I had to do, an emergency visit to my dentist. Right? And I had broken a tooth, but I saved the tooth thinking. And somebody said to me, why would you save the tooth? Like, what good is that?
Cathy:But it turned out that was a crown that I didn't even know it was a crown. And the fact that I brought it back, she was able to cement it back in, my dentist. So I called a couple of people, and one of them was Mary. And I said, you know, be sure when you're, getting something repaired in your mouth or anything, bring it with you, the the piece that fell out. So I was, like, actually mentoring someone this morning saying, be sure you save whatever fell out of your mouth.
Cathy:And it was just funny to that you brought that up because it would it just strikes me as kind of interesting that I was just doing that without thinking of course, you're not thinking about mentoring. Exactly.
Deborah Heiser:But there you are making a difference in somebody's life. They now know that may hold it. They don't they don't lose that information. That doesn't go away. That gets incorporated into them.
Deborah Heiser:How often do you do that? And you just Yeah. Give that Right.
Merry:Little free Daily, actually. But you don't know that you're doing it.
Deborah Heiser:Right. Yeah. So when you do, you get the same benefit as Ebenezer Scrooge, who when he, the self made guy who was a millionaire, lived in a a mansion and had servants taking care of his every need, was miserable until he started becoming generative. Every time you're generative, it makes you the new Ebenezer Scrooge, the guy who's so happy with tiny tid and everybody else. It really does have that effect.
Deborah Heiser:Then you get to say, I made a difference. And you did it.
Merry:What what else makes a good mentor, and why do you think we're built to mentor others of any age?
Deborah Heiser:So we're built to mentor because we all need to feel like we are valuable and needed. We all have that feeling. And we're too busy when we're younger developmentally to even take that in. If I say to a 30 year old, you will have someday feel like giving back to others without expecting in anything in return, they're gonna be like, you're crazy because they're not developmentally there. But and they're not ready to say I have value in the world.
Deborah Heiser:They're still busy pulling in all the information that they need for themselves. That's their job. They're trying to figure out who they are and what they're doing in the world and what their purpose is. By the time you're in midlife and we have that breathing room, our kids are old enough, We've we are good enough in our jobs. They are in our roles in our homes, wherever we are.
Deborah Heiser:That's where we have the space. We say, you know what? I like these things about myself, or these are the things that I feel powerful about. That's what I wanna pass on to others. We don't really think about it that way.
Deborah Heiser:We just start doing it. So it's something that we're built to do, but we just don't think about it. You didn't even think, Kathy, about, oh, I'm gonna tell this person this important information that she would need to know about anything that might break in your body. But now that person knows it, and that what a good thing to have, that information. So you're doing it all the time.
Deborah Heiser:Yeah. Don't take credit for it. Yeah. Well, it's That's interesting.
Merry:I do you think that younger people can mentor older people? Because I've seen a lot of older people go to ashrams or places where they feel that they can get more spiritually tuned to the universe and the environment and themselves. I mean, is that do you have you seen that?
Deborah Heiser:I see, mentoring as not having an age associated with it. And here's why. If I'm working to understand culture, I need, if I wanna work with millennials, to get a millennial perspective. That's not gonna be a gen x or a boomer perspective or the the greatest generation perspective. I have to go to that generation.
Deborah Heiser:And likewise, the younger generations need to plug into other generations. We all have to do that to get a perspective of whoever it is that we wanna target. If we want to target everyone, we need to get everyone's perspective. So, yes, spiritual or whatever, it doesn't really have an age. It's really what do you want to learn?
Deborah Heiser:Do you if you're going into advertising and you wanna sell things, you better not just rely on your own perspective. You better be looking at the whole age trajectory. And I know that they always say, oh, yeah. Just go to the younger generation if you want tech support. I don't look at it like that.
Deborah Heiser:I look at it like every generation has a perspective because they were born in and raised a certain way and have schooling done a certain way. Because there's a certain perspective that is really relevant to every, say, decade and maybe even a little broader than that. So I yes. Reverse mentoring is strong everywhere. Just as strong, but that's part of hierarchical.
Deborah Heiser:I don't really differentiate it.
Cathy:That's great. And, also, we know that you lead a nonprofit organization in three countries. So can you tell us about that?
Deborah Heiser:Yeah. It's actually more than that. It's, like, five. So
Cathy:Oh, five countries.
Deborah Heiser:Oh. Yes. The mentor project came about really, it's a it's an act of generativity. So what happened was I was starting to talk to people when I was first saying, hey. I wanna learn about what we have to look forward to, and I was talking to people who mentor.
Deborah Heiser:I wanted to look at generativity, and I looked at philanthropy. And I thought, well, not everybody can put their name on a building. And even though you could engage in philanthropy, which is rounding up at the grocery store and what you buy, I I just didn't res that didn't resonate as much with me. Volunteering, we all do it. Everyone does it.
Deborah Heiser:But mentoring is the only thing that comes from us. Right? A little piece of us goes into somebody else. So I started to talk to all sorts of mentors and people who really got really enjoyed mentoring. And when I got to one person named Bill Cheswick, he's one of the fathers of the the network firewall, which is how we're all safely talking with each other.
Deborah Heiser:He said, I'm getting ready to retire from the, from Bell Labs, and I'm gonna live on a farm. I have no access to kids. It's not like I can go to a park and say, hey, kid. You wanna learn quantum mechanics? It's not gonna be it's not gonna work out well.
Deborah Heiser:So we were like, okay. Let's try to get you
Cathy:into I'm kidding.
Deborah Heiser:I know. Right? So let's try to get you into some schools. And so we did. And so it was just a couple of us that were getting Bill into some schools, and we were also going into schools and girl scouts and, like, really doing a stem stuff with kids.
Deborah Heiser:And someone said no one will ever wanna do that. People who are really high, you know, level individuals, top 1% of their fields are never gonna do that. They're busy, and they're above that. Well, within six months, we went to 60, then to 80, then to a hundred, and we had to put a total wait list on it. We blew up, and everybody came to us.
Deborah Heiser:We were not out soliciting this. This was nothing I ever thought of your company. This was never anything I thought of as becoming as big as it was, but we were really able to prove the theory correct because every day we're getting new people saying I wanna I would like to be a mentor. We have astronauts. We have Nobel laureate nominees.
Deborah Heiser:We have astrophysicists. We have artists. We sent one artist to Tanzania, to a village that had never had western art, to learn cartooning. You know? Right now in Brooklyn, teaching kids in Brooklyn art.
Deborah Heiser:The goal is to get the two kids from the two areas together. So mentors, what we decided to do was made it make it a mentor focused organization so that if a mentor had something they wanted to give back, it wasn't somebody calling in and saying, can somebody mentor? Here's what I'd like. It's saying, here's who we have. Any mentee want what we're giving.
Deborah Heiser:Some mentees around the world contact us and say, hey. Yeah. I'd love what you're giving. Can I connect with this mentor? Can you have this mentor talk to us?
Cathy:And what's the contact info for that at this point? Mentor. I know we'll talk about that later.
Deborah Heiser:You can just click on 3.org.
Merry:Click a button
Deborah Heiser:that says become a mentee, or you can click the contact contact button and contact us. But, honestly, what we were able to show with the mentor project was that people want to give and that no one feels too important to give and that everyone out there, who gives ends up saying, I wanna give more than the allotted time that we ask of people. It becomes we also found that our mentors started mentoring each other that we didn't expect, doing lateral mentoring, starting their own companies, doing all kinds of things. You know? And so Yeah.
Deborah Heiser:That's the mentor project. We've impacted we've given away more than $3,000,000
Cathy:Wow.
Deborah Heiser:In 02/24, in free mentorship to students around the world.
Merry:Gee, that's wonderful. You're really making a difference in the world, and that that's accolades and kudos to you. It you know, in a way, while you've been talking, I've I've thought that the this Late Boomers podcast that Kathy and I do is a way of mentoring. Not only do do we get mentored by the people that we speak to, but we can pass on this to the people who are listening. And it it's so very rewarding.
Merry:So that's that's another story for you. And I was going to ask you if you have any more examples of how people have made a difference besides, well, even the astronaut story or the art the story of the artist. How wonderful to hear that. Do you have any more that you'd like to relay to our audience?
Deborah Heiser:Oh, sure. You know well, first of all, I wanna say, yes. You are doing modern mentoring. When mentoring was first defined, they did not have podcasts. And this is a, modern so you are both modern mentor modern mentors in doing this.
Deborah Heiser:And I do talk about that in the book, the different forms of modern mentoring. But, like, here's another example that we all know of. I'm gonna talk about a job example, and this is in the book. But there are a lot of examples, but I wanna give this because most people use all kinds of stuff, and we don't even know how it came about, but we think we might. So there was a guy, Steve, and he was at work.
Deborah Heiser:And he, was given a task by his boss, like many of us have had.
Merry:We've gone to the office. The boss comes in and says, I
Deborah Heiser:have an impossible task for you to do in an impossibly short amount of time. And so Steve is like, okay. I got it. Now he didn't, but he wasn't gonna tell his boss because he wanted to keep his job. So he's like, yeah.
Deborah Heiser:I've got it. Don't worry about it. So the boss said, okay. And he comes back a couple days later, and he's like, Steve, you haven't made much progress. And Steve's like, I got it.
Deborah Heiser:He didn't. So that night, Steve calls his friend Steve in a panic. And he says, Steve, I don't know how to do this. I've hit a wall. I need you to help me.
Deborah Heiser:And so Steve says, I gotcha, buddy. I'll come after work and help you. So he comes after work, everybody's gone. And the two of them start working together and they're working the night away, like Rucklstiltskin, weaving wheat into gold all night long. And the next day, Steve's boss comes in.
Deborah Heiser:He says, Steve, you made so much progress. And Steve said, I told you I had it. And this continues night after night, and the boss is so thrilled. And this job ends up getting finished earlier than the impossibly short deadline. So that Steve was Steve Jobs, and he was working at Atari.
Deborah Heiser:And his boss was Al Alcorn, who's known as the father grandfather of, of video games. The work that they were doing was the first video game breakout, and the person that was helping Steve was Steve Wozniak. And so that was an example of lateral mentoring that no one ever thought was lateral mentoring. But that's a pure example of that, that when you're in trouble, you call the person that you trust, and you say, help me. And as a friend who says, no.
Deborah Heiser:Give me money. Yep. You'll say, of course, I'll help you. So that's one example. Another similar example was I was in college.
Deborah Heiser:I was in graduate school, actually, and we were getting going out on our externship. And if you're a graduate student, you're on your externship and you need to get good you know, they need you need good feedback from them. It's part of what you're doing. You need to be able to show that you're good at what you do and that you're gonna be a good, psychologist when you leave. So I'm on my externship, and my my fellow student was on hers.
Deborah Heiser:And I get a call, and we're on cell phones. And this was when cell phones were giant, and it cost, like, a million dollars to talk on your phone. So she calls must be important because she's calling me on my cell phone. So I pick it up, and she's like, hey. My and she's whispering.
Deborah Heiser:She's like, hey. I have to do kappas. That's a statistic. I don't know. I know you know them because we were just in class, and you learned them, and you weren't using them.
Deborah Heiser:And I said, okay. I'll I'll walk you through it. She said, if I don't learn this, I have to do an entire project, and I'll be outed that I don't know it, and I don't wanna lose my externship or be seen negatively. So I said, okay. So we sat there, and I talked her through how to do kappas.
Deborah Heiser:She did her project in a worked out brief. Now that is something we all do. Was I unusual in doing that? No. She did that 17 other times for me in other situations.
Deborah Heiser:So that little tiny thing of a student calling a fellow student and saying, help me out. I'm in trouble or I think I am may not have been, if I don't get this. But the feeling of helping somebody else, we all get that feeling. Of course, I'll help you. Those examples are in the book.
Deborah Heiser:There's a bazillion others. Bill, how he you know, how the network firewall happened wasn't just Bill. It was a whole mentoring, example that goes with that. There are all sorts of examples of grandmothers who mentor their grandchildren and carry on the traditions. Thanksgiving, every year, I use my grandmother's handwritten recipe cards to make everything exactly the way that she made it, and it came from her mother most likely.
Deborah Heiser:Now if I leave anything out, everybody's, like, bummed, you know, if I leave one single item out. Now my kids will have that recipe, and I didn't know how powerful it was until my uncle came to our house one year, and he got to have it. And he had been eating his wife's, you know, family's recipe. So he came and he said, this is my childhood Thanksgiving from beginning to end. And so I shipped him out meal next time so he could have it.
Deborah Heiser:But do you like, everyone can imagine how it feels when you walk into a tradition that's been held for a long time for decades, how you just feel right at home. Your whole blood pressure goes down. All of that. And that's mentoring. So that card that I hold from my grandmother with the recipes is as strong a mentoring as Charlie's was making home from space safely.
Deborah Heiser:Oh. But that's all in the book.
Cathy:That's really, really great. And one more thing I wanna ask you, what would you like our audience to have as a takeaway today?
Deborah Heiser:Look to your left and look to your right, you're looking at a mentor.
Merry:That's powerful. Very true. I love it.
Deborah Heiser:Thank you.
Cathy:Love that. Yeah.
Merry:Thank you. I love that. Yeah. I have to really ponder that. Well, I'm looking to you, Kathy, right now and to you, Deborah.
Cathy:Okay.
Merry:Thank you. Our guest today on Late Boomers has been Deborah Heizer, psychologist of in aging, mentor, author of The Mentor Edge, and founder and CEO of The Mentor Project. If you would like to become a mentor, contact with Deborah at our website, deborahheiser.com. And, also, as you mentioned earlier, what is it? Mentoredge.org
Deborah Heiser:or mentorproject?.org.
Merry:Mentor project Org. I like to say that a lot so people can remember it. Mentorproject.org. Thank you.
Cathy:And tune in next week when we'll be meeting Autumn Karen, who's a filmmaker, ghostwriter, and educator. Please subscribe to our Late Boomers podcast on YouTube and take us along in the car and on walks on your favorite audio platform. Let us know what gets you inspired. We are on Instagram at I am Kathy Worthington and at I am Mary Elkins and at late boomers. Please share the late boomers podcast info with your friends who may not yet be listening to podcasts and might need a little mentoring.
Cathy:Right? Thanks again, Deborah.
Deborah Heiser:Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure to be with you both.
Merry:Thank you. Great to have you.
Cathy:Thanks so much.
Cathy:Thank you for joining us on Late Boomers, the podcast that is your guide to creating a third act with style, power, and impact. Please visit our website and get in touch with us at late boomers dot biz. If you would like to listen to or download other episodes of Late Boomers, go to ewnpodcastnetwork.com.
Merry:This podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, and most other major podcast sites. We hope you make use of the wisdom you've gained here and that you enjoy a successful third act with your own style, power, and impact.
