So Baby Boomer: Life Tips

Where were you in 1969?

In many ways, the "culture wars" of the twenty-first century began in the sixties.  Those 1960s were symbolic of change, creativity, experimentation and the perseverance of human spirit.  The final year of the sixties decade was a vastly influential year covering politics, sports, civil rights, music, technology and much more.

Personally, while living in the Metro Seattle Area in 1969, I looked up into the sky and thought I saw a Boeing 707 plane flying very low.  After awhile, I realized what I saw was the maiden flight of the Boeing 747 high in the sky.  In January 1969, my wife and I had purchased our first house overlooking Lake Sammamish and the Cascade Mountains and on August 18th, 1969 our son John Robert Agno was born in a small hospital in Bellevue, WA.

Here are some of the events that happened in 1969 that you may remember:

Jan 12 - Joe Namath and the New York Jets won Super Bowl III

Jan 20 - Richard Nixon is inaugurated president of the United States

Jan 30 - The Beatles give their final live performance in London

Feb 9 - The Boeing 747 takes its maiden flight

Mar 1 - Mickey Mantle retires from baseball

Mar 3 - The launch of Apollo 9

Mar 30 - Detroit police engage in a gun battle with members of the group New Republic of Africa

Apr 9 - Harvard Student Strike

May 18 - Apollo 10 launches

May 25 - Midnight Cowboy premieres in New York City

June 22 - Cuyahoga River catches on fire

June 11 - True Grit with John Wayne premieres

July 18 - Mary Jo Kopechne perishes in Chappaquiddick incident

July 20 - Man walks on the moon

August 8 - "Helter Skelter": Manson Family murders at the home of Sharon Tate & Roman Polanski

August 15 - Woodstock Music and Art Fair in White Lake, NY

August 20 - Arlo Guthrie Alice's Restaurant premieres

Sept 6 - Lieutenant William Calley formally charged for his role in the My Lai massacre

Sept 8 - Police raid the Black Panther breakfast in Watts, CA

Sept 23 - Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid hits screens in limited release

Sept 26 - The Brady Bunch debuts on ABC

Oct 11 - The Zodiac Killer murders San Francisco taxi driver Paul Stine

Oct 16 - Mets defeat the Orioles to win the World Series

Oct 29 -Computer networks, in any real sense, didn't exist until the ARPANET was built starting in 1969.  However, the first email message via the ARPANET network (the forerunner of the Internet) was sent by Ray Tomlinson, an old high school friend of mine, in late 1971.

Nov 10 - Sesame Street debuts on National Educational Television Network

Nov 19 - Apollo 12 lands on the moon's Ocean of Storms

Dec 4 - Black Panther Party leaders Fred Hampton & Mark Clark are killed during raid by Chicago Police

Dec 24 - Curt Flood declares his intentions to challenge baseball's reserve clause and file as a free agent---(that free agent act kicked off the move toward high salaries for talented professional sports players and corporate executives that we recognize today)

Source:  Rob Kirkpatrick: 1969: The Year Everything Changed

Boomers at the University of Michigan

Country Clubs in Crisis

The economic downturn has suddenly made a golf club membership seem more extravagance than necessity.

For generations of golfing executives, joining a private club not only provided a venue to entertain clients but also served as a validation of their success.  Now the economic downturn has created an existential crisis for many of the nation's 4,400 country clubs.

Hammered hardest are the thousands of middle and lower tier courses.  Already, dozens are in foreclosure.  And, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF), as many as 15% of the rest say they're suffering serious financial problems.  Among the troubled are such venerable clubs as the Country Club of Lansing, MI that is in foreclosure.

The pain isn't over, either.  The number of golfers belonging to clubs now is down to 2.1 million--900,000 below the peak in the early 1990s.  Experts such as consultant Jim Koppenhaver, whose Buffalo Grove, IL firm, Pellucid, monitors the industry, believes at least 400--and worst case, 1,000--private clubs will have to close, convert to public play, or be absorbed into healthier clubs before the carnage is over.  "The whole country club model is at risk," says Koppenhaver.  But "for a lot of golfers, the value proposition of belonging to a club is hard to pencil out."

While it would be easy to ascribe the clubs' woes to the economic crisis, experts say the seeds were planted in the early 1990s, when Congress enacted tax reforms that eliminated or reduced the ability of club members--and, more practically, their corporate employers--to deduct club dues as a business expense.  That raised the effective cost of joining clubs and gave rise to a new breed of upscale public courses some executives view as suitable, and cheaper, places to entertain clients. 

Societal changes, had an effect as well.  While earlier generations of men viewed their clubs as weekend sanctuaries from work, if not from the wife and kids, many executives in their 40s and 50s are opting to spend their weekends not on the course but on sports fields coaching their kids' teams.

In the end, some industry insiders believe that the long-term solution is to reinvent the country club, moving beyond golf to a broader array of services that meet the changing needs of younger members.

Source: BUSINESSWEEK, November 9, 2009

Staying Healthy & Letting Go of the Need to Win

Amid ever-rising calls for more exercise in America, there isn't much guidance on cutting back.

As the Baby Boomers, who fueled marathon and triathlon crazes, enter their 50s and 60s, their unquenched competitiveness can become a threat to their stiffening joints, rigid muscles, hardening arteries and high-mileage hearts.  And it doesn't help that nearly every exercise message they hear emphasizes more. 

It's as if nobody wants to acknowledge that exercise isn't the fountain of youth.  The competitive flame is hard to extinguish, as the returns from retirement of cyclist Lance Armstrong and professional quarterback Brett Favre have shown.

As co-author of a new book called "Fit Soul, Fit Body," Mark Allen (a 51-year-old athletic coach once known as the world's fittest man) argues against fighting age with more hours on the treadmill.  "If you can't let up on the competitive part of it, if you have to go as fast at 50 as you did at 20, you will grind yourself into the ground and become stressed out, bitter and unhealthy," he says.

A study published last year in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine reinforced other recent research showing that intensity tends to diminish the view of physical activity as pleasant.  "Evidence shows that feeling worse during exercise translates to doing less exercise in the future," says Pateleimon Ekkekakis, an author of that study and a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University.

Taking on new sports or challenges can give long-used muscles a break while feeding the desire for new goals, says Marjorie Albohm, president of the National Athletic Trainers' Association, who at 58 has become a recent devotee of spinning.  "As you age, you have to be flexible about new activities.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, September 1, 2009

Why do boomers read blog postings?

Independent, publicly traded American newspapers have lost forty-two percent of their market value in the past three years, according to the media entrepreneur Alan Mutter.  Few corporations have been punished on Wall Street the way those who dare to invest in the newpaper business have. 

Public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line.  A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty percent of Americans said they could believe "all or most" media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven percent just five years ago.

"Less than one in five believe what they read in print," the 2007 "State of the News Media" report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded.  Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced mainstream news media.

Getting what you want to know from blogs

Thirty-nine percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs.

Most bloggers don't think of what they do as journalism.  37% of bloggers cite "my life and experiences" as the primary topic of their blog.  Politics and government runs a very distant second with 11% citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog.  7% are into entertainment-related topics, 6% sports, 5% general news and current events, 5% business, 4% technology, 2% religion, spirituality or faith and 1% each for a special hobby or a health problem/illness.

If you really want to know "what's happening now" searching blogs is the place to go.

Here are my blogs: www.CoachingTip.com  www.SoBabyBoomer.com  www.WhatCanItBe.com

Here are specialty blogs and social network sites that I regularly check out: www.WomanLeadership.com  www.BigHouseBlog.com  www.CareerTips.us.com

Boomer "OverThinks" Putt

Almost 60 years-old boomer Tom Watson just needed to make an eight foot putt to win the British Open golf tournament yesterday and become the oldest winner of one of golf's majors.

Watson had been in zone all four days during a difficult contest where the best golfer, Tiger Woods, had not make the cut to play in the final days.  When Watson walked down the fairway to receive the loud appreciation from the 20,000 plus gallery, the pressure peaked and Watson realized he was very close to accomplishing something that no professional golfer had done before him.

With the adrenalin rising, he over hit his approach shot---with the ball rolling over the green; requiring him to hole out in two strokes in order to walk away with the trophy.

His first putt, ran past the cup by 8 feet--more than he had hoped for.  Now eight feet away from victory, he knew he was out-of-the-zone and tried to make his brain relax by focusing only on the putt he had to make.  He made similar putts thousands of times in the past but his Gremlin kept whispering in his ear that those times were different from this spectacular moment-in-time.  

His Gremlin talked him out of the zone that he had experienced for every other stroke he made during the last four days.  That concentration and confidence he had radiated left him when he needed it most.  He began to overthink this last putt and when he hit the ball it was too soft and came up short. 

The result was he had tied with one other golfer for the tournament and they proceeded to a four hole playoff...but for Watson the disappointment in his play on the 18th overtook him and there was no way he could play his best during the playoff. 

 Rick Carson: Taming Your Gremlin (Revised Edition): A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way

The Leadership Lesson

Experience has taught us that confidence precedes competence.  A person in the office or a player in a game must first believe he or she can succeed by developing a winning attitude reinforced by skill-building practice.  Tom Watson experienced this during the 2009 British Open right up to the last remaining hole to be played in regulation.

As each person's talents are built into strengths, a positive energy emerges. This energy force builds and reinforces the person's confidence to create a critical mass which is often referred to as "momentum" or "being in the zone."  It is their coach's job to keep the momentum going; so as not to lose the positive energy flow.

Visit this Week's Blogging Boomer Carnival #123

Blogging carnivals start out by the thousands, but those that can sustain themselves for as many as 50 episodes are much fewer.  And a carnival which has turned out its 100th edition is practically unheard of.

Today, be sure to visit Blogging Boomer Carnival #123 hosted by Barbara Ann Weibel at Hole in the Donut.com to find out what's happening in the world of Baby Boomers!

Baby Boomer Bikers

With kids in college and more free time, Baby Boomers have returned to motorcycling.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), motorcycle ownership among the over-40 crowd has been on the rise for years, jumping from 15.1 percent of total motorcycle ownership in 1980 to 43.7 percent by 1998.

Since 1995, U.S. motorcycle registrations have increased from 3.8 million to nearly 6 million at the end of 2004.  Baby Boomers are in the driver's seat of the current expansion.

Even a 2 percent increase in motorcycle sales to this generation would result in about 750,000 new riders, and that's probably a conservative number, according to David Anders, a Merrill Lynch analyst in New York.  Given that an average boomer is 49 years old, they will continue to ride another 10 or 15 years, Anders said in a research report released in March.

Despite their passion for riding, evidence suggests older bikers may pose more of a safety risk.  According to the NHTSA, motorcyclists 40 and older accounted for 47 percent of 3,900 fatalities in 2004 and 60 percent of the yearly increase in deadly crashes.

Physical Exercise Matters

The aging of the Baby Boomer Generation and the surging of obesity and diabetes to epidemic levels are focusing attention on the healing powers of physical fitness.

The Wall Street Journal reports that a 30-year study of five men shows that almost anyone can get a second chance at youthful fitness.  The study began in 1966 when five healthy 20-year-old college students loaned their bodies to science by staying in bed for 20 straight days followed by intense exercise.

Three decades later, the same five men, now in their early 50s and bigger around the waist, signed on for a follow-up to examine the effects of aging on the cardiovascular system.  Researchers were astonished by what they found: The three weeks of bedrest back at age 20 was more damaging to the men's aerobic capacity than 30 years of aging.

To assess cardiovascular fitness, researchers used a measure called VO2 max, an indicator of the body's ability to use oxygen at maximum exertion.  'Oxygen is the key molecule in life that allows us to make energy in our bodies to do physical work' says Benjamin Levine of Presbyterian Hospital and University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, and a researcher on the study.

When the men reunited for their 30-year follow-up, all five had gained at least 20 pounds each, and a couple much more.  Then the men began a carefully controlled, six-month aerobic exercise program.  They all reached their target performance: VO2 max readings equivalent to those when they first entered the study at age 20.  That doesn't mean the men can run a quarter mile as fast, as they could in their youth, but it does suggest their endurance is essentially as good as it was then.

The results of this study offer the prospect that starting a moderate but consistent exercise program later in life (even after years of falling out of shape) can restore aerobic capacity to levels one had as a young adult.  It's never too late to establish an exercising ritual within your daily activity.

Why not take a walk today, tomorrow and, maybe even, everyday this week?

John G. Agno, certified executive & businesscoach www.CoachedtoSuccess.com