Sherry Lansing: Envisioning late-life careers [jewishjournal.com]

Posted by Danielle Berrin

In the summer of 2008, at a national gathering of Hadassah in downtown Los Angeles, nearly 2,000 women shrieked with delight as Sherry Lansing, the pioneering first female to run a movie studio, coolly extolled the upside of aging.

“I used to think 60 is the new 40,” Lansing said brazenly, dismissing the pithy phrase as platitude. “Now I say 60 is the new 60!”

Lansing was the keynote speaker that morning, there to discuss her transition from workforce leader — specifically, her 14-year tenure as chairwoman of Paramount Pictures — to philanthropist. Although some say she was poised to become the first bona fide female mogul, Lansing turned 60 and decided instead to pull the curtain on her Hollywood ambitions. “In my late 50s, I started to get bored,” she confessed during a recent interview. “I’d had a wonderful career, I loved movies, I loved my time in the film business — but I felt as if I was repeating myself. The highs weren’t as high; the lows weren’t as low. I had this pull to have a different kind of life.”

Widely regarded by her industry colleagues as both kind and intellectually curious, she sought to develop a more expansive legacy, one that could parlay her career into a late-middle-life calling. By no means did she plan to retire — that would not be her nature — but she sought an encore, a “third act,” as she put it, that would give her life purpose and meaning and enable her to share some of her very considerable fortune with others.

“She was incredibly measured and clear-headed about leaving,” producer and former Disney executive Donald De Line said about her exit. “But I thought, ‘It’s too seductive, the power, the job itself is so thrilling.’ I think everybody kind of thought, ‘OK, that’s what she’s saying — she’s not really gonna go. People can’t give up those jobs. Usually, they go kicking and screaming and have to be pushed out the door. That was not the case with Sherry. She turned 60, and she was gone. And she never looked back.”

But privately, Lansing feared the unscripted day. A notorious workaholic, she agonized over the potential emptiness. “She was concerned that after being so immersed in the world of entertainment that she would maybe feel she didn’t have enough to do,” her friend, the author and philanthropist Cheryl Saban recalled. “She reached out to everybody and asked, ‘What am I gonna do with myself when I retire?’ ”

Click to read the rest of the article at Jewish Journal…

Quote of the Day: Endurance

“Anything that lives were it would seem that nothing could live, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rocks and shifting sands, any such creature, beast, bird, or flower, testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent in all forms of life. Including the human. Even in us.”–Edward Abbey

Thursday Lite: Discover Helen’s Blog

How to Stop Working and Go Home at Night [lifehacker.com]

By Alan Henry

Many of us can’t wait to pack up and head home at the end of a long workday: we count down the hours and as soon as our shift is up, we’re out the door. For others, there’s a stigma to leaving on time, or worse, we have a difficult time forcing ourselves to leave the office, whether or or not we love our work. Here are some ways to break the cycle of working late and get your evenings, and sanity, back.

You might not have the willpower to just leave on time at the end of every day, you may feel like you have to stay late, or maybe you’re on a roll or your coworkers are still there. Still, there are ways to coax yourself to leave.

Make Leaving Worth Your While

If you provide yourself an incentive (or by contrast, a punishment) to get out of the office on time, you can trick yourself into wrapping up your work every day at the same time. It may not cut to the core of why you get lost in your work, or feel like you have to work late, but it does provide you a reason to get out of the office on time. Here are a few suggestions:

Have a family member call you each day. If one of your primary concerns about working late so frequently is that you’re missing out on time with your spouse, partner, friends, or children, one great way to get that jolt back to reality is to have one of them call you when it’s time for you to head home. You’ll need to sit down and talk this over with your family, and you’re explicitly telling your family to force you into coming home every night, but those are good things if they achieve the desired goal. Talk it over with them and ask for their help.

One of my colleagues at former job used to get a call from his wife or daughter when they knew he should be packing up to head home. It wasn’t enough to have dinner ready when he got home, he needed a bit more motivation to actually stop working and leave the office. Hearing his daughter’s voice at the end of the day was just enough motivation to make him want to go home and see her. Alternatively, enlist some friends to call or SMS you to remind you that it’s time to leave the office-or to meet you after work.

Schedule an activity right after work, every day. If you’ve been meaning to get into shape, take a yoga class, or volunteer at a local charity, making sure you sign up for activities that will force you to leave the office at a regular time every day is a great way to stay active, do something with yourself outside of the office, and give yourself incentive to leave the office every day on time.

For some people, getting a gym membership is enough to encourage them to not waste the money they spend every month and get out of the office and to the gym every day. For others, it takes a little more: meeting a friend at the gym every day at the same time, for example, or signing up for a sports league or volunteer shift that begins at a time that requires you to pack up and leave the office at the end of your day if you want to make it to your next obligation on time.

Click to read the rest of the article

Tuesday Lite: A Day in the Life of California

This is an absolutely beautiful and short video of time-lapse photography about a day in California.  Enjoy!

How to Create an In-Case-of-Emergency Everything Document to Keep Your Loved Ones Informed if Worst Comes to Worst [lifehacker.com]

Melanie Pinola — If you were hit by a bus today or were otherwise incapacitated, would your loved ones be able to quickly locate your important information or know how to handle your affairs? Many of us have a great handle on our finances, but our record keeping systems might not be obvious to family members or friends who might need immediate access to them in times of emergency. Here’s a step-by-step guide to organizing your vital information so it can be conveniently and safely accessed when needed.

The Goal: A Master Document or Folder with All Your Important Information 

Full size

Perhaps the easiest method for creating a centralized document or set of files would be creating a Google Spreadsheet that you could share with your family and friends and keep updated regularly. We’ve created a basic Master Information Kit template just for this purpose. The spreadsheet includes prompts for the information below, but you can customize it for your particular needs. To use the template for yourself, in Google Docs go to File > Make a copy… to save it to your Google account (make sure your version of the document’s sharing settings go back to the default “Private”).

Update: Due to high traffic to the template, Google Docs is only showing it in list view, making it impossible to copy. This zipped file has downloadable versions in PDF, XLS, and ODS formats. You can still import these into your Google Docs account.

There are really only a few steps to setting this organizer up: gathering your records, securely sharing them, and keeping them updated. Follow along and you’ll have your kit set up in no time—and a little extra peace of mind.

Click to continue reading this important article: http://lifehacker.com/5817021/in-case-of-emergency-how-to-organize-your-important-records-in-a-master-information-kit

A Call for Written Stories from Transgendered Individuals

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E. L. Doctorow

from Helen Hill LMFT

One of the most powerful catalysts for change is telling your story.  It doesn’t need to be your entire life.  In fact, for the purposes of effectiveness, it should not be your entire life.  People often relate to events such as sudden change, loss, triumph, grief, acceptance, love, rejection, challenge, redemption and the like.

A story can humanize the experience of transgendered people to those who have never experienced a transgendered individual.  Let’s face it, there’s just not that many of us around!  (According to a UCLA study there’s only 700,000 of us in the USA out of 360 million people!)

If you have a short story you’d like to share that you feel taught an important lesson, I would be honored to place it on my blog.

There are a few caveats:

• Your story, you, and the people involved will remain anonymous.
• No references to outing identifiable others.
• No one should be personally endangered by the telling of your story.
• Your story needs to focus on one important event or life lesson to be shared.
• Please, nothing prurient, no fetishism or exhibitionism, no encouragement of self-harm/self-destruction.
• I will only EDIT your story for grammar, punctuation and anonymity.

For an example of what I mean about a short story, please see my example, “A Transition Story: The High School”  (Of course, since I’ve already “outed” myself years ago, anonymity does NOT apply to me!)

You can email me your stories at: helenhillmft@gmail.com

Thank you and let’s get writing!

Brain Food: Conan O’Brien’s 2011 Dartmouth Commencement Speech

Brain Food: Take a Nap, Change Your Life

Quote of the Day: Pain and Loss

“Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. …a world, or a relationship. Everything has its time. And everything ends.” -Sarah Jane Smith