Episode #336 – Christine Sperber: Re-imagining Midlife with Modern Elder Academy

Cherylanne Skolnicki:

Today we’re talking about Reimagining midlife with Christine Sperber of the Modern Elder Academy. So I am so delighted to bring you today’s episode. I wanna tell you all about Christine Sperber, but before I do, I have to introduce you to Chip Conley. So I found my way to the Modern Elder Academy and the concept of being a modern elder via Chip Conley’s work, honestly, as a Cornell Hotel School graduate chip’s background in luxury hotels. Kind of had me at Hello, right. I just, he has such a cool background in luxury hotels, primarily on the West coast, and he was an early key advisor to Airbnb. Um, it was sort of an unexpected twist for him, right? Coming out of traditional hospitality and then really getting in on the ground floor of Airbnb. And, you know, in his words, like mentoring by day and interning by night, I think is how he thought about it, like being sort of in a reverse internship where even as the elder statesman of the industry, he really knew that he had so much to learn, and that led him to this concept of being a modern elder.

So he wrote a book back in 2018 called Wisdom at Work, the Making of a Modern Elder. I fell in love with this concept. He recently released a new book called Learning to Love Midlife. So that one hits home for me. And, you know, I think it’s important to note that while midlife technically spans the ages of probably 45 to 65, chip had this observation that many people have started to begin that phase really in their mid thirties. And that phase can extend much, much longer than someone’s sixties. I think I felt like I fully entered midlife by the time I turned 40. And I think that the ideas and the perspective that’s shared at MEA as they call it now, um, this incredible organization are just really spot on for the listeners of this show. So, one of the co-founders of this incredible organization is Christine Sperber.

And I had the opportunity to meet her and to have this conversation with her for the podcast. And she is just extraordinary. Christine is a seasoned entrepreneur. She is a powerful team builder, and she’s somebody that just exudes passion and authenticity and wisdom. Interestingly, it was finding and falling in love with snowboarding that really changed her life. Um, during the heyday of the early nineties snowboard culture explosion, she moved herself to Colorado and parked herself on a ski slope and describes herself as lucky enough to compete as a World Cup halfpipe competitor. I don’t know about being lucky enough, that to me sounds like skilled enough to compete by the age of 24. She was running a snowboard camp in Oregon as a general manager and really built a lot of her leadership skills and her team building skills there. And then while she was honing her leadership skills as both a coach and a trainer, she embraced yoga and has been practicing yoga for 30 years, which is amazing.

And then she pivoted and took some of that camp’s mojo to another mountain on Colorado Copper Mountain serving as its first get this title Minister of Culture because progressive resorts were really on the cusp of, um, embracing youth culture. And she had a lot of experience in that because of her snowboarding days. So she worked there for a number of years, branched out into some adjacent opportunities, sort of following her passion and her interest. And then as she says, Baja called, and she was invited to help found an award-winning hotel called Rancho Pescadero in Baja. And while she was in Baja, she crossed paths with Chip Conley and others, and their collaboration led to what is now MEA, the Modern Elder Academy, which is based in Baja and opening a second location in Santa Fe where Christine lives and works now. So if that’s not enticing enough, I mean, I am so intrigued by her whole backstory and life story, and some of the things that led her to the work that she does today.

But I have to tell you in this interview, Christine was so graceful, we had several technical issues, um, that kind of vexed us here. So right in the middle, you may hear a little bit of an abrupt transition. We had to stop the recording, or a call got dropped and we had to get back in. Um, so bear with me if there’s a little bit of a dicey transition in the middle. I promise you it doesn’t in any way undermine just the extraordinary wisdom that she was able to share in a relatively short time together. So I’m excited to share this interview with her and the concepts that she has become so versed in. Without further ado, please meet Christine Sperber. 

 

Cherylanne:

So Christine, welcome to the Brilliant Balance Show. I’m so happy you’re here.

Christine Sperber:

I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Cherylanne:

So I’ve shared a little bit, uh, in terms of your bio and background in the introduction, but what I would love for you to share is maybe a story a little bit more about your personal journey before you got to where you are today, kind of what led to here

Christine:

<laugh>, her paddock, I believe is the right word, if I’m, if I’m saying it correctly. So I moved to Colorado in 1989 with dreams of being a snowboarder and being a ski bum. Like I really had such ski bum aspirations that just seemed like an amazing use of my young life, <laugh>. And, um, to be fair, I was not wrong. It is an amazing use of <laugh> a young life. Um, and then through, you know, extended playtime on the mountain, I ended up having a really beautiful opportunity to get paid to ride my snowboard for some time. And I did all the jobs in between that you do in a ski town to make it happen. You know, it’s like the pinnacle of being a ski bum is being a bartender. And I actually was never a bartender. I wasn’t, I wasn’t good enough to be a bartender, but I did all the other restaurant jobs, um, and I got to be an athlete.

And that kind of thing really broadened my world. I got to travel quite a bit, and I had the good fortune of doing that before social media, the good and bad, right? I mean, I think about some of the questionable choices that were made. And, um, I’m grateful that they are not recording <laugh>. Yeah. Anywhere. My youngest sister’s side note, my youngest sister made it through like rounds and rounds and rounds of interviews for the very first real world and got cut right at the end. Wow. And at the moment, she was kind of devastated that she didn’t make it. And now in retrospect, we’re all like, oh God, thank goodness, what good fortune. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Cherylanne:

Who could have possibly predicted. Right? Right.

Christine:

Wow. Can you imagine? No, your twenties forever? No, no. Mm-Hmm mm. So snowboarding then took me into hospitality by way of running snowboard camps, which really is a form of iterative hospitality on the fly. True, true. And then into, uh, so into this hospitality play, which happened when I took myself on sabbatical for five months to Baja and met some people who were building hotels and resorts and really just fell into it. Like there I, I try to create space for serendipity. And that was a perfect example of creating space for serendipity. And someone said, why don’t you move here and help me do this? And having that moment of seeing this movie, I know I’m supposed to say yes, I better say yes <laugh>. And so I did.

Cherylanne:

And when was that? When did you move to Baja?

Christine:

2008. Okay. Was the first, first time that I spent time in Baja. That was my five month Seba sabbatical. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, and then moved back in 2009 and really have kept a foot in Baja ever since. I’m currently living in Santa Fe based here, but traveling back and forth to Baja. My heart is still, of course, very much in Baja with our staff and campus there. I’m here in Santa Fe getting ready to open our newest and first US location.

Cherylanne:

So Cool. So cool. So that really leads us all the way up to the founding story of Modern Elder Academy. And you know, I’ve given them kind of the sanitized version of what it is, just what’s published on the internet, but I’d love to hear it in your words, like how do you describe this entity?

Christine:

Uh, okay. You know how it’s like one of the very first projects that you do when you’re working through a business plan or marketing, like what’s your elevator pitch? Yes. We’re six years in and still like, you know, we’ve got our boilerplate, but the fact is that, all right, so we’re a midlife wisdom school and we are dedicated to midlife transitions and helping people develop transitional intelligence and work through these transitions better to really embrace this midlife and beyond in a thriving way with new tools and new community. All that said, there’s still some elemental

Cherylanne:

Magic magic mm-Hmm.

Christine:

<affirmative> magic that we just can never quite get about what happens in the workshops and in our alumni community. And maybe there’s some beauty in that that we can’t quite nail it, but it is a beautiful thing. We’ve spent a lot of time, you know, writing white papers and diving into social science and really into, you know, credible thinkers and, um, evidence-based curriculum. And at the same time there’s still this kind of sprinkling of, of special

Cherylanne:

Magic. Yeah. Same. Yeah. We say that a lot here that, you know, the podcast and the things that reach kind of the broad public, it’s so hard to translate into words what happens behind the scenes once you’re a part of a two-way experience. And I think it’s because it’s experiential, you know, that to translate that into some kind of marketable language is difficult. And it’s very relatable as you’re describing that someone who has a marketing degree and spent her first 15 years in marketing, you know, it’s hard to do <laugh>. It’s hard work.

Christine:

Thank you. I’ll take it <laugh>. Yeah.

Cherylanne:

Take the permission slip. The concept of the modern elder. This notion of a midlife wisdom school. It is a blend right. Of wisdom and curiosity and something that just jumps off of the, the website experience at least. And the book itself is like that both are necessary, that there’s hard earned wisdom and also this kind of boundless curiosity. How do you get people to cultivate those?

Christine:

Uh, such a good question. I mean, I think we’ve all spent time with that kind of elder know it all, and while tapping into and leaning into elder wisdom is wonderful, right? When we find it, I, there’s, I I feel like there’s such a societal hunger for that because it’s, it’s not as present, at least in my, in my experience, but the idea of someone who has that lifetime of experience who can remain curious and remain engaged, it’s so much more fulfilling to spend time with that person. And so we have the opportunity to be that person, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I think some of our very best tools around curiosity have to do with a growth mindset. We are huge fans of Carol Dweck and her work around growth mindset and the idea, the kind of the power of yet, you know. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I do find through our work with this, and I’m curious about your experience, but I find that, you know, as you move through your adult life you become rewarded for being prepared and rewarded for knowing Mm-Hmm.

<affirmative>. And I do find that this is quite gendered. I think that we as women have less freedom to show up as curious in the workplace, right? Because there’s kind of that always, we’re always proving, but when we can embrace that curiosity, when we can show up as a lifelong engaged learner. Yeah. It’s wonderful. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it’s wonderful and it’s engaging and invites other people into our circles in, in bigger ways. What we have talked about a lot at MEA is the flow channel, right? Miha cheek sent me high work around flow and where skill meets challenge. Right. And you’re just at the edge. Yes. Right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And when you can stay in that channel where there’s not too much challenge, so you’re in panic, right? But there’s not too much skill so that you’re bored. But right in that middle channel and that step function of I add to the skills and then I kind of n nudge towards boredom and then I can kind of add up skills and you know, it can be scary to be adding those skills and then you come across and nudge towards boredom again, in that step function, we believe that if you can add a growth mindset to that flow channel and approach it with more cur, more curiosity, we have the opportunity to actually widen that channel.

Cherylanne:

Interesting. Right. Yeah. That’s interesting. And so adding a growth mindset to curiosity is sort of like that, that’s the sort of alchemy that’s happening is that having a wider range that can keep you in a flow state is what I’m hearing you describing. Like it, its curiosity is the force multiplier.

Christine:

Agreed. And I think it also gives you that grace that many of us need, right? Because learning, especially after a lifetime of being rewarded, of knowing, can nudge towards like, am I coming outside of my dignity? Right? Am I in a scarier place? And when you can use curiosity, when you can be an explorer instead of an imposter, then suddenly we can widen that space for ourselves.

Cherylanne

That’s amazing. Because the amount of times that we all hear people now adopting the imposter syndrome phrase, right? And almost using it as a bit of a hi, like a, it’s a permissible hiding place. Like I’m feeling like an imposter has become very permissible to say. And I like that this is a potential way to circumvent it, like a different identity to sit in, in the same space, just a different narrative around what it means to explore great language in that same space. I’m curious, when you think about the challenges that people are facing, like situationally or environmentally, what are some of the things that are happening? You see a lot in this transition from kind of mid-career to the later stages in life. Like what’s the common thread?

Christine:

Oof. I would say that we’ve kind of identified three real common threads. And this is after six years of workshops and seeing people come through over and over again. It’s such a privilege. Number one is transition, right? And there’s all kinds of transitions. There’s the hormonal, there’s the familial, there’s the job transition. And we actually wrote a white paper about the anatomy of a transition, right? Because we all know about the power of naming at this point. You can pinpoint where you are in a transition, give it a name, look at the tools that you can apply to that point in the transition to keep you moving forward. We can actually develop a transitional intelligence that makes us better at moving through these. And midlife is rife with transition. I mean just tons, empty nests. It just goes on and on. Health changes, marital changes.

Like if we can get good at transitions, that’s putting something in our toolbox that will carry us right through midlife. Yes. So transition and mastering transition is number one. Number two is we have people seeking purpose all the time. If I had to distill the one question that people come and show up at a workshop and say, what is my purpose? What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? How do I serve? Who am I? What, what is it all about? So we hear a lot about purpose. And then the third is wisdom. Mm-Hmm. People are curious about how to own their own wisdom. A lifetime of wisdom, right? We’ve got this raw material of experience, but without taking the time to metabolize it, it doesn’t turn into wisdom. We’re not guaranteed to be old and wise. Mm-Hmm. We’re not guaranteed to be old <laugh>. Right, right. That’s a privilege. Yes. As well. But to really take the space, to take that raw material, to metabolize it, to turn it into wisdom that we can then, you know, help maybe feed back into the world and show up as that elder who’s still curious. Yes. A lot of power in that. So I would say those are our three real themes over and over again. Navigating transitions, purpose and wisdom. And

It’s so cohesive because I remember the thing that led me to this work in the first place to the book and then to finding out about the academy was the, I kept saying I feel like I’m entering the wisdom chapter and I was watching people, but I was really honed in on that single word. And I think this addition of transitions and purpose does feel more cohesive. Like it’s complete in that phrase of what’s happening. So it’s, it’s a not done yet kind of era and yet maybe done with this part. Like there’s the there that, which it really just invokes the word transition. 

Cherylanne:

There’s something happening here at this fulcrum point that I think a lot of us can feel. Is there a range of ages? Are there kinds of early adopters and late adopters in this range? What do people think of as midlife?

Christine:

Absolutely. And social science has actually just widened the window. So when we launched we thought it would be 45 to 65. What we found in real life is 27 I think has been our youngest. Late nineties we had a 92-year-old Linda with us, a 92-year-old

Cherylanne:

And midlife. I love it. I love it. <laugh>

Christine:

So great. He’s amazing. Absolutely amazing. Social science is now saying that midlife is a marathon, essentially starting at 35.

Cherylanne:

Alright. So I wonder if you could talk about the stages of that transition. Like it’s not just one and done unilaterally. We move on the fulcrum, there’s some kind of evolution we move through. What does that look like?

Christine:

Absolutely. And I do have to give credit where it is due on this. Uh, we have a white paper that was written by my brilliant business partner, Jeff Hamley and our SVP of Digital Carrie, who’s just gotten married. Carrie Cardinal. She’s wonderful. And she met her husband at MEA, her now husband at MEA. All right. So ready for this? Yeah. Transition begins with an ending. All transitions begin with an ending and we don’t often recognize that something is ended, which starts the next, right. So the beginning of a transition is an ending. We move into a messy middle and then we can find threads in order to work our way out of those transitions. And what happens to so many of us is that we revert to what we know. It is so easy to get in that cycle, stuck in that cycle of transition, going back to what we know and not exploring the threads that will lead us out. So here’s another place where curiosity really serves us. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is in transition. The best way to dive in on this is really to go download that paper from our website because they just did such a gorgeous job on naming all the parts and all of the tools. And I would be doing a disservice here, but paying attention to where things end. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, even sometimes its embracing ritual is very powerful to say this, this is an ending and here’s something new.

Cherylanne:

So in the white paper’s called the Anatomy of a Transition, we will link it in the show notes so people can get it directly from there. But it feels like that’s a really important kind of phase that can be helped by an experience at the Modern Elder Academy. I’m curious about what some of the specific experiences are. Like people can go to the website, they’ll read about them. But could you just tell us maybe one or two of your favorite experiences that people get taken through in this kind of residential experience there?

Christine:

Absolutely. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the educational and emotional arc of this week. Right. We are in it together. We create a cohort. Another thing that we’ve learned from social science is that the importance of depth and strength of our connections in our fifties has an impact on our health and longevity into our eighties. Wow. And so many of us come through midlife and kind of pick our heads up and go like, wow, I’ve been head down raising children or creating a career or, you know, we’ve all kind of gotten into our silos and those reconnections are so incredibly important. ’cause we’re all kind of floppy about a little bit, a little bit lonely. Right? A little bit like, wow, where did those 20 years ago? Yeah. Where were those 25 years ago? So it really surprised me at the beginning of the academy, the strength of these connections that are created during the week and having a cohort of people to talk through these things with.

And we really work with, we don’t send out resumes or cvs ahead of time. We really have the chance to meet each other almost from the outside in. Right. In a real authentic way. People take time to listen to each other. We’re not worried about taking up too much space. There’s a real give and take. One of the things that we built, one of the foundations of the academy, is this idea that wisdom is not taught. You can’t teach someone wisdom. It is shared. So when we can create a container for people to show up and share and listen and be curious and communicate, it’s, that’s really, as you were saying before, that that interplay is, there’s so much magic in that. So, you know, we’ve crafted this curriculum, we’ve written a 160 page workbook that we’ve evolved over and over as we continue to learn.

So there’s, you know, classroom work that’s, you know, deeply tied to thought leaders in all of this transition and midlife field. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then we have experiential education that’s designed to support what we’re learning in the classroom, both from place of creating the condition to keep the work going, but also, you know, the invitation to be a beginner is something that we do quite gently throughout the week. And then amplifies <laugh> a little bit as you know, and can end up with a 92-year-old on a surfboard. That is an invitation to be a beginner. And for many people, if you ask them at the beginning of the week, um, when we go take a surfing lesson at the end of the week, are you coming? People are like, hell no. No, I am not going to surf. And by the end of the week it’s like every hand is in the air. Yes. Let’s go try this. What do I have to lose? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You know, so I would say that we have crafted a week that has kind of this evidence-based classroom curriculum that is supported by both the physical place that we have built and then this experiential education that invites you to be in community, to be a beginner, to try on new ideas. And

Cherylanne:

It almost has to have that experiential component because we talk a lot about being a beginner with our coaching clients. And I think there’s such reticence to go back to being a beginner when again, you’ve hit a phase in life where you feel like you’re expected to be an expert in something, you know, or all the things. So I even watch it with my kids. I mean, they’re far from midlife, but I think when we’ve kind of drilled into kids that if you don’t start really early, it’s too late. You know, I like the club sport culture for example, that just tells kids that if you haven’t mastered this sport and you haven’t played it at an elite level by the time you’re 13 or 14, you’re too late for you. Which is so sad. I mean, it’s just gutting to think about that. And then yeah, that same kind of thing as you age up, we’re the same people who are saying at 30 or 40 or 50, like, it’s just too late for me. But it’s not, and that’s such an important part of this experience is to anchor them into like, let’s just try it and remember what it feels like, the exhilaration of trying something new that we may have forgotten.

Christine:

Absolutely. We do an exercise, uh, in the classroom where we talk about, you know, can you tap back into a time in your youth really like the sub twenties where you learned something new? And what were the things that served you in that time? Did you go to a new school? Did you learn a new language? Did a new sport? Like what were the traits that you embodied at that point that made that learning different from the way you might approach learning something now? And how can you carry that into the present day and really can be such a gentle unlock. It’s almost like a

Cherylanne:

Second childhood. Yeah. It’s lovely. Like you get another shot at all of that good stuff.

Christine:

Yeah. Yeah. Again, talking about Jeff Ley, my, my business partner, he calls this the second adulthood where we really get the chance to decide who we want to be. We get to parent ourselves into who we want to be, you know? I love that. It’s a great concept.

Cherylanne:

It’s so, you know, you’re a great storyteller and I wonder if you have any stories of individuals that just stand out. You don’t have to name their names, but like where you really watched that arc of transformation unfold and maybe lead somewhere pretty exceptional afterward. Is there anybody who comes to mind for you?

Christine:

Gosh, there’s so many. The most gratifying part of the job is like, I do the thing that we’re not supposed to do with the phone and the bed at night, you know, <laugh>. So I’m getting like, we have about 4,500 people closer to 5,000 now who are alumni who’ve passed through different programs. And I, you know, I get the late night like, Hey, I’m doing relief work in Ukraine now because I left the corporate world, or I’m now a baker. I like it, it is really gratifying to see some of those transitions that have happened. I love that. Um, <laugh> a lot. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun. Like,

Cherylanne:

I mean those examples, I hear some like third act like the what’s the career after the career? Um, and or the vocation. Like what’s really the calling that I’m following that maybe I was ignoring and now I have the opportunity to dance and explore, really see what it might be like. Some of those things you described, I think are the things we tell ourselves we’re not allowed to do or can’t do. And again, I think it’s so important why the life stage that you’re serving is the life stage you’re serving. There are new freedoms that open up as some of those chapters of responsibility come to a close. So the fact that every transition begins with an ending, it’s like, yeah, that makes perfect sense that some space may come back to be able to pursue things that maybe wouldn’t have been possible 10 years earlier.

Christine:

Absolutely. And then the Communo community acts as an amplifier, right? So I see cohorts that, you know, have been meeting weekly or monthly for four or five years, and one person will embrace a transition and everyone kind of rises up to say like, that’s a great idea for you. And then that’s so inspiring to someone else in the group. It kind of pops them in a different direction and it becomes this bubble of support and potential and possibility. Right. So we can kind of drag each other along. Yes.

Cherylanne:

What does it payback for you as somebody who gets to be steeped in this regularly? What is something that you have discovered or an insight you’ve unpacked or something you’ve tried lately?

Christine:

Oh, that’s a great question. Okay. So two, I guess it was about two years ago, maybe a year ago, I finally learned how to use my splitboard. So the snowboard that comes apart, you put skins on the bottom so you can climb uphill. Like this is something I was supposed to know for the last 30 years, right? At one point I was the hard good rep for the largest snowboard manufacturer in the world. I sold these things. The assumption is I know how to do this. And I really was kind of, I didn’t realize it, but like a bit humiliated. I didn’t know what mm-hmm was like. <affirmative>, where am I gonna start? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And then realized, this is the perfect example of me kind of eating my own lunch. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or like taking our own medicine. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I went out and learned to Flipboard. It is so much fun. I can’t believe that I let a fear of looking foolish or not knowing, you know, even if it was a bit subconscious, hold me back from doing it. So, you know, now I am loving splitboarding. It’s a great exercise. It’s so meditative and uh, just a fun way to spend time in the mountains. Yeah. So that’s just one example.

Cherylanne:

And I, you know, as you said that, my first thought was, oh gosh, I don’t even know what that is. So thank you for explaining it. And, and I think, but it’s evidence of like, it’s rooted in your passion. It’s rooted in something you were doing as a, your entire life in an earlier stage of your life. And I wonder if that’s sometimes a clue is like a connection from the familiar to the unfamiliar, like a chance to go back and go deeper. I always say one of my regrets is not having studied cooking abroad, like the, you know, people who listen to the show may have heard me say that before. I had an opportunity to do it right after college and I didn’t. And that’s the kind of thing I could imagine getting really excited about in that chapter is like, yeah, this is your chance to go play deeper, explore more deeply in something that maybe, you know, something about, doesn’t have to be radically different from a massive departure from your hobbies and interests.

So fun. Absolutely. When we talk about the, you know, one of the most powerful tools of moving out of that messy middle of transition is what are the things that interest you? Like, follow these breadcrumbs, follow the threads, see where it leads you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And again, like, you know, curiosity is leading us in new directions. We just have to be really careful not to come back to like what we know is safe. I see. It’s so easy. Well,

And that’s fair because you could make a more radical departure, right. And follow an entirely new thread that you haven’t done before at all. That’s a good push. ’cause I, my inclination you can tell, would be like, it’s gotta be grounded in something. I know something about <laugh>.

Christine:

I don’t think that’s a bad idea. Especially like, I think you can get better at embracing change, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you become bolder as you have success and then Yes. Try to bite off a little bit more, right? Sure. Oh, I, I surf for a day, <laugh>, maybe I’ll go on a surf trip. You know, maybe I’ll just buy it, I think, I think it can grow out, our bravery can grow over time.

Cherylanne:

Yes. And I have no doubt that some listeners will want to pursue an experience at the academy and we’re gonna make sure they know how to do that. But for the people who aren’t ready to do that, it’s not time. They can’t, for whatever reason, what is something that they can do to embrace the ethos of the academy in their daily life? Like what is, I, I’m, I’m betting you’re gonna talk about curiosity here, <laugh>, but maybe something that’s real specific that they could do to just get the ball rolling in this direction.

Christine:

Okay, here’s one of my favorite, favorite hacks. So we have a, um, we’re quite fortunate to work with Dacker Kelner, who’s the founder of the Greater Good Science Center. And he’s the world’s foremost scholar in the human experience of awe. Right? I love it. That makes me feel like I just didn’t dream big enough with my life when I realized that you could become the world’s foremost scholar in the human experience of awe, but we can put ourselves in an awe state, right? And he has written a book called Awe, and there’s eight different pathways that we can use to get to awe. And the power of exposing ourselves to awe, being in awe is that it diminishes that sensation of being alone. It opens us up to possibility. It makes us realize our connectedness, which I think puts us in a braver place, right?

A braver and happier place. When I ask rooms full of people what they think the number one pathway to a is, it’s always nature, number one. The number one guest is always nature and its powerful guests and it’s easy to put yourself outside and to really just take in where we are. Presence is such a yes, uh, bleeding thing in our society, right? It’s so, it’s so easy and so hard all at the same time. So nature is available to most of us, most of the time just get outside and notice. But my very favorite, and the number one pathway, and this was an absolutely massive global study that he did, is moral beauty. When we expose ourselves to examples of bravery or generosity, it can put us right into an estate also moving together, right? So taking a dance class or a yoga class can help move us into a state. But it is such a simple way, especially if we’re in transition and we’re stuck in transition to harness the power of awe that is available to all of us all the time, as simply as going outside and contemplating a plant, perhaps. Really just, it’s an amazing hack

That is a fantastic push. So finding a way to connect with awe and the fact that there are in fact eight pathways to do so is so, it’s, it’s like right in front of our faces. That is, that is fantastic. I love it all the time. Music is a pathway to awe. Yes. Design. It’s incredible. I recommend his book. I recommend the book. Awe. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> entirely. I think it serves us in midlife in a gigantic way.

Cherylanne:

Amazing. Amazing. And the right place to send people is MEA wisdom.com, correct?

Christine:

Absolutely. Great. And if you’re not ready to travel to, you know, in person, we also do online courses for those of you who like to learn in your pajamas, <laugh>, I salute, salute that as well. <laugh>. Beautiful. Lots of, lots of free resources on our website as well. We wanna, Yes. Well we’re certainly gonna Do this, as many as we can. Ebook

Cherylanne:

The Anatomy of a Transition. There are other free resources on the site. The site is a treasure trove y’all. So when you get there and have a chance to poke around and explore, you’re gonna see this exceptional experience that’s been built in Baja. If you choose to go in person. I think it’s an, it’s something I hope to do one day, it’s an extra, it looks like an extraordinary experience. And we’ll also link up a couple of the books that were referenced. The Making of a Modern Elder I think is a great book as well. Chip’s book and then ah, link to as well. And thank you so much. Oh, learning to Love Midlife is the next 

Christine:

That’s the newest. His newest, yes, That is the newest one. And really it comes out of these six years of work that we’ve been doing together and this idea that there is so much more ahead of us and this idea of the U curve of happiness, which also comes out of a massive global study that we just never hear cited in the media. I just can’t think of a single study or story where I’ve been overtly told that, you know, mostly we’re happier as a species in our fifties than we are in our forties and happier in our sixties than we are in our fifties, happier in our seventies and even into our eighties as a species. We get happier. That is a tale worth telling.

Cherylanne:

What a perfect place to land it. Christine, thank you for being with us today so much. You are extraordinary and this was really inspiring. Thank you.

Christine:

Thank you so much for having me. Wonderful.

Cherylanne:

Okay. Thank you so much for tuning in today for this particular episode. I am confident that you are walking away inspired, uplifted, and with a new spring in your step after listening to Christine. I don’t know how you couldn’t write to her. Her boundless curiosity is so evident in this interview and I found it to be really energizing. I kind of bounded around after the interview for a while, just pinging with new ideas and possibilities and that to me is one of my favorite states to be in. So I’m grateful to her for helping put me back in that place. I’ve linked all the things that we talked about for you in the show notes, so make sure you go there to check out the books that she referenced as well as their website. Christine is just an exceptional human and I think that she’s in a community of exceptional humans in terms of the work that they are doing. So I’m glad to have had the chance to introduce you to her. If you are new to the Brilliant Balance podcast, welcome, please take a second to follow the show wherever you listen to podcasts so that you can get all of the future episodes delivered straight to your feed. The biggest gift you can give me is to take care of doing that and follow the show anywhere that you listen to podcasts. That is all for today, my friends. Till next time, let’s be brilliant.