Psychologists tell us that our formative years are roughly the first seven years of our lives. Those years are when we, as children, are sponges soaking up what we see and hear around us. So it was for Kathie Donovan. So it is for all of us. We accept what we hear from our parents and early teachers about ourselves without questioning its veracity. If we’re lucky, what we hear about ourselves is positive for the most part. But often that’s not the case and we grow up with beliefs that we are...

What’s your travel dream? Visit every county in Ireland, every state in the Union, every province in Canada? Why not think bigger? How about every country in the world? That’s the goal of our guest and his wife this week on The Art 2 Aging. Wayne and Sally Schmidt are in their 60s. They gave up their Groundhog Day life in Australia and embarked on a journey that, to date, has spanned 81 countries and taken seven years. Their story is one long travel adventure and Wayne lays it all out, along...

Wills and estates. Alongside life insurance, wills and estates are two things most people don’t want to think about, let alone do any planning around what happens to their assets when they die. This is why 68% of Americans and about 50% of Canadians will give their heirs lots of headaches at death. This week, The Art 2 Aging takes a very practical look at wills, estates, estate planning and death taxes. We have engaged the expertise of a top financial planner in Toronto, Canada to help...

How many of us are working in jobs or professions that no longer fulfill us? Plenty. But most of us don’t see a way out; we need to continue to work for the paycheck, to support our families, to pay our bills. What we yearn for, while heading off each morning to a job that leaves us feeling empty, is an inner sense of meaning. James Adams felt that way. He was a senior marketing executive with decades of experience, an entrepreneur in the food industry, and he was fed up. So in his 60s, he...

The NBA kicked off its 79th season this past Tuesday, for those of you who are into basketball. In 79 years, the game has come a long, long way. It’s a truly international sport, the seventh most popular game in the world, according to World Atlas. The NBA itself is international in terms of team rosters with 125 players from 40 different countries outside the United States donning team jerseys this season. But we’ll bet that the league has only seen one foreign player who is related to the...

Did you know that 50% of American men between 65 and 74 take statins?  How about women? Try 39% of women 75 and older. There are a further 8 million people in the UK who take statins at a cost of 100 million pounds a year to the National Health Service. What is going on? Do statins even work? Or are they just another drug to make Big Pharma even wealthier? Well, this week, we’re going to deep dive into statins to see if they in fact work. To do that, we have brought back a former guest,...

What does retirement look like for you? Have you thought about what you’ll do with all that time on your hands? All too often, we are told what a ‘retirement age’ should be and then we are shown images of retired people enjoying long walks along beaches or lounging poolside on a cruise ship – in other words, we are almost spoon-fed stereotypes by marketing and advertising agencies. Our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging begs to differ and she has the research to back up her contrarian views...

So, you’re 53 years old and you get fired without warning. What do you do? Well, if you’re Gail Mercer-Mackay, you don’t panic. You go to Arizona to play golf for two weeks and do some serious journaling as well. What Gail discovered (besides still having a slice) was that she wanted to be a writer. Long story short, she did become a writer and founded a content creation company in the process. Today, the company routinely earns revenue in the millions and at the age of 69, Gail is still...

How should we be looking at aging in the 21st century? There are a lot of ways we could tackle that question. We could come at it from the point of view of health and medical breakthroughs occurring continually around longevity. We could examine the question by considering whether or not we shift our thinking around retirement. Or, like our guest this week, we take on all of the challenges and throw in the elephant in the room – ageism – at the same time. Helen Hirsh Spence is a retired...

Nearly 30 years ago, a University of Toronto professor named David Foot wrote a book called Boom, Bust and Echo. The book dealt with how the global population was aging and how savvy investors could profit from the graying trend that would become a tidal wave. In fact, Foot referred to it in terms akin to those of a tidal wave. The book was a best seller. 30 years ago. Foot wasn’t blowing smoke; everything that he said would come to pass, did. So, if he knew this and wrote a book about it,...

Janice Walton and her husband, Dan, were married for more than 60 years. They made every decision, planned every holiday together. For six decades. They raised their two kids together, providing them with a safe and secure home environment. Dan was the love of Janice’s life when, overnight, their world went pear-shaped. He began to experience signs of dementia. Janice found herself thrust into a role she was ill prepared for – that of a fulltime caregiver. Then, Dan needed surgery. And after...

Baby boomers have grown up with technology. We’ve seen enormous change over the past seven decades. It’s staggering what has transpired since the days of telephone “party” lines in homes, rotary dial phones,  two or three TV channels via an outside antenna – the list goes on. So, it’s always odd to hear someone who is NOT a baby boomer make the assumption that older people are clueless about technology. We’re not. But what can baffle us is the complexity of technology today. Which baffles...

A company called Rest Less has released the results of a survey it did on self employed individuals in the U.K. Rest Less has a simple mission: help those in their 50s and older to find jobs. What their survey discovered is that a record number of individuals over 60 have become self-employed. This represents nearly a quarter of all of those in the U.K. who work for themselves. It would be a real stretch to say that all those self-employed over 60 are dying to work for themselves. More...

Most of us blunder into retirement without any realization about how much our lives are going to change. We’re entering unchartered waters. Or, as our guest this week on The Art 2 Aging, Wayne Lehrer, would say, we are entering our third act without the knowledge of how to make it extraordinary. That’s why Wayne looks at life as a play in three acts. Act 1 is our personal development up to age 20. Act 2 is when we begin striving for success, accumulation, wealth building and family. Act 3...

This week on The Art 2 Aging, we resume our conversation with Jim White. If you’re Canadian, then you will know what President’s Choice is. As well as PC. Well, that’s Jim White.  And if you’ve ever eaten a muffin from Starbuck’s, then you have consumed a Jim White recipe. You have probably enjoyed food and beverage products from Costco, Walmart, Wegman’s, Safeway and many other food retailers throughout the U.S. that have Jim’s moniker all over them. Jim has enjoyed enormous success in the...

There aren’t many entrepreneurs who can boast that they are responsible for not one but two case studies at the prestigious Harvard School of Business. Or that they created the best selling cookie in Canada. But Jim White can. Jim is a 78 year old guy who lives with his wife in Napa Valley. He was born in the U.S. but became a Canadian citizen and lived in Canada for many years. During his time north of the border, Jim had careers as a journalist, photographer and food critic, all of which...

Cell senescence. Oxidation. Inflammation. These three terms represent what often happens to our cells as we grow older. Cell senescence refers to cells that lose their fuel and slip back into idle. They aren’t dead cells but they’re basically useless cells that can become cancerous. Oxidation is a process in the cells that impacts the cell’s electrical charge in a detrimental  way and inflammation in healthy cells can lead to chronic diseases and ailments if left untreated. The effect on our...

There is so much happening at the forefront of health and wellness right now that it’s difficult to know where to begin. What science has discovered about the human body is that it is not chemically based but electrically based. This means your body is electrical and responds to electrical energy. In fact, the body can be healed electrically. So, this week on The Art 2 Aging, we’re going to do just that: start to uncover a few universal secrets within the human body. Our guest is Dr. Steve...

How do we measure victory? Armed forces do it by defeating the enemy on the battlefield and in the air. Sports teams do it by outscoring their opponents. Athletes do it by setting world record times. Politicians do it by winning elections. You get the picture. But what about personal victories? Okay, so what do we mean by personal victories? Well, why not ask Gary Buzzard? For years, Gary wanted one thing more than any other: to call himself a writer. Unfortunately, Gary listened to his ego...

There may be one question that all of us, old and young, grapple with. We may not articulate it clearly but it goes something like this: does Life have a meaning? The inherent folly in that question is based on an assumption that Life has the same meaning for all of us. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. How could your life mean the same to you as my life means to me? Now here’s another question: what holds us back from finding meaning in our lives? This week on The Art 2...

Everyone talks about the “stages of life”: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and then, the Big One – old age. The problem with thinking in stages is that it has the effect of segregating life into different compartments. That’s exactly how marketers and advertisers think. They segregate the population into market segments. Makes sense for them but here’s the problem: when marketers who are in their own stage of life as adults think about those who are in that stage called “old age”, they...

Tiny electrical currents, known as microcurrents, which can generate rapid healing within the body, allowed an NFL Hall of Famer to play in the Super Bowl only six weeks after breaking his leg and tearing his Achilles tendon. Terrell Owens was that player. Microcurrent healing was in wide use in the late 19th century. And while it worked,  it was never carefully studied or documented. With the birth of the pharmaceutical age in the 1920s, what we now call frequency medicine faded from...

Here’s a shocking fact: 98% of  dementia sufferers are being cared for at home. That’s shocking because it means that the caregiver is likely a family member, often a spouse or adult child. Dementia victims suffer greatly and so do their caregivers, especially family members. That’s why what Allyson Schrier is doing is so amazing. Allyson’s husband was diagnosed with a form of dementia when he was only 47. He never worked after that and Allyson became his caregiver. She knew nothing about...

This week features a captivating story of a man named Tom Meschery. If you’re a fan of the NBA, then you’ll likely remember Tom. The Mad Russian. Number 14 for the Philadelphia and Golden State Warriors and the Seattle Supersonics. Teammate of Wilt Chamberlain. When it comes to life stories, Tom has an amazing one. It starts with overcoming adversity as a child, rising to become a star in the NBA, staggering under the weight of a terminal illness at 65, finally meeting the love of his life...