290. Quick Thinks: How to Have Better Conversations About Aging

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Be direct, clear, and empathetic. Don't bubble wrap your communication. My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In my recent conversation with gerontologist Kerry Burnight, she discussed so many useful approaches and skills that we could not capture them all in one episode. So here, we provide more of Kerry's insights into effective communication we can all benefit from, especially when we communicate with older people. 

[00:00:37] In your book, you have a quiz about your mindset towards aging, and I, I feel many people have a declining mindset, as you define it. Can you describe techniques and ways that, that we can flip that switch? Because I would much rather have a positive outlook and reap the benefits from perhaps doing so. 

[00:00:54] Kerry Burnight: Yes. Your listeners can think of it, there are two options. One is the decline aging mindset, which is aptly DAM. The DAM mindset.

[00:01:03] Matt Abrahams: You're dammed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:01:04] Kerry Burnight: Yes. And that's the prevalent, that is the cultural norm, that's what, that's our default setting. Then there's the growth aging mindset, and if you put an E on, it could be GAME. But the growth aging mindset, in fact, is backed by science, and I think that's what helps. This is not a put your head in the sand thing. This is, in fact, knowing that I am going to be able to, for example, solve problems. And I want to give you an example of it, because if people know this, it's going to change the way that they think about their own problem solving. And problem solving is something that we need all lifelong. So I have a colleague who has passed, but he was at Harvard, and his name is Gene Cohen. He had a PhD, MD.

[00:01:50] And he, every week on Wednesdays, he would pick up his parents, who were in their 90s, from the train station. He would pick them up there, help them with their walkers into his car, drive them to his house, where they would eat dinner, and then he would drive them home afterwards. One day, this brilliant son was late. His parents come up to the platform, dumping snow. They're looking around, didn't have a cell phone with them. They look over, they see a pizza place. They carefully walk to the pizza place and they say, "You know, we'd like to order a pizza, and we'd like to have it delivered to our son's house. And when you do, we'd like to ride along with that pizza in the car."

[00:02:34] Matt Abrahams: Oh my goodness. What a great solution. 

[00:02:37] Kerry Burnight: He gets home, his parents are there with a hot dinner ready to go. But if we didn't understand that we can come up with solutions that are not necessarily tech, and we need to listen long enough, so people who are ahead of us, our job is to close our mouth for a minute and listen to the solutions that older people come up with. And so often they have great solutions that we wouldn't even come up with because we're not there yet. 

[00:03:05] Matt Abrahams: So look forward to and embrace the benefits that come with age. And I love that example. I, I think person and food delivery simultaneously, what a great idea. Thank you for that. You, in your book, provide several examples of how we can cultivate joy in our life. The one that stood out the most to me, and that I've enjoyed doing the most, is Give of the Day. Can you explain this activity and share how it works? 

[00:03:30] Kerry Burnight: Yes. So because we know that giving really impacts the quality of our long lives, not to mention benefits others, we need to put it into practice in the same way that we do the physical strength kinds of things. So when people say, like, "At what age should I start working on my joyspan?" I say, "Well, at what age do you think you should start on your cardiovascular health?" As early as possible. And what makes your life better between the ages of 23 and 24, also are the same as 93 and 94. So it's never too early, and it's never too late. You can think of it almost like the way that you lift a weight, and you're just doing a few every day, having that ability to look at your day and look for opportunities to give of yourself, and that they're small.

[00:04:22] And so in the purpose literature, Steven Cole at UCLA did a study, and he looked at the epigenetics of purpose or giving or contribution. And what he found is, all variables held constant, those who felt that they had a purpose had different gene expression in inflammation and antiviral load. And it was so robust that they did a piece in The New York Times about it. And you're like, wow, so giving makes a difference. So Give of the Day is proactively take a moment, maybe when you're having coffee, maybe when you have a little bit of downtime to think, "What is something I can find today?" And I'm gonna give you some examples. You might look in your backyard and you see that there are lemons back there.

[00:05:09] Pick them, put them in a bag, go next door to your next-door neighbor. That takes two seconds, whether they need lemons or not, and that helps with social connection. It's little, tiny things, mentoring, listening. Sometimes just taking the time to think, "I'm gonna be fully present in my listening," is the greatest give that we can give. But it doesn't just happen, and it's not just the big moments, it's the little moments, too. And when we think about giving, there is another part of the equation, because it does feel good to give, and we know about the giver's high. But If everybody is just giving, we don't have the other part, which is the receiving. And so something that we need to also learn is how to receive.

[00:05:55] And so when somebody offers, like, "Oh, your wife is sick. Could I bring over dinner?" We want to say, "Oh, no, I got it." But instead to go, "Thank you." To let... And people say, "I'll be happy in longevity as long as I'm independent." And that, for me, is disconcerting because I know what the path looks like. So I like to think the reality is that we are interdependent. We never really were entirely independent, and we certainly, if we're holding our independence out as the goal, that's a little bit rougher than saying, "I'm going to give and also receive."

[00:06:33] Matt Abrahams: I love the activity, and I really appreciate you calling it out. I know that in my father's life, my father has passed, but his ability to accept help, there was a fundamental transition when he began to accept it versus fighting it, and thank you for highlighting both sides of that equation. I want to turn our attention to communication, and part of it I want to look at your communication, but also communication that some of us struggle with.

[00:06:59] Let's start with not yours, but ours, and I'd love to get your advice. Many of us find ourselves needing to have very difficult conversations around aging, be it talking with people about stopping driving cars, moving into assisted living, other situations. What advice and guidance do you have to help those of us who need to initiate those conversations, or perhaps those who are receiving that conversation? What can we do to help make that better and less angst and conflict filled? 

[00:07:30] Kerry Burnight: I'm so glad you asked that because it is the question that comes up every day. And I will start with what not to do, because this is how it goes when you're a gerontologist. I now will pretend that you are the 90-year-old father and I am your adult daughter at age 60. I'm concerned about something, and so what I do is I go in hot, and I use the only model that I know, which is parenting. So this parenting the parent or role reversal, it's not a good model, because as adults, you as the father, you, you're not a child and you don't want to be parented. And the reality of aging is, on the one hand, there is safety.

[00:08:16] Younger people are all about, "This isn't safe. Safety, safety, safety." But it's not the whole picture. If you look on the other end, it's autonomy. And autonomy is one of the developmental drivers of growing older. And so by going in hot, that I, the adult daughter, am gonna fix your problem, I'm taking away your autonomy, and you, of course, your natural reaction is, "Back off. I got this. I don't need any help," because I've threatened you. So please, adult children, don't go in hot. And I can say this because I've done the same thing. My mom was in the hospital for months. I thought I was being so terrific. I got a hospital bed downstairs so she didn't have to go up the stairs, but I didn't ask her.

[00:09:04] So she got home, and she was sick to see this hospital bed set up without her permission in her nice house. So I do it wrong a lot, and so that's why I can say. So how do you do it right? Okay, let's say the conversation is around driving. Please throw out this thing is, when do I take away the keys? I mean, that right there is the biggest red flag. So everyone who's having that thought, please put it away. Step one, just like in all communication, as you well know, is to close your mouth and to listen. Because then the person is not going to feel like you're coming after their autonomy or their personhood or that you're thinking they're less than.

[00:09:47] So it would be a series, not just one, not this big sit-down, little conversations where you go, you know, you're just talking maybe about driving, right? So you're not going after them in any way. And then maybe in my case with my mom, she was having more nicks on her car. So I didn't go in and go, "Mom, oh my gosh, this isn't safe. You know, you could kill someone. Look at that." I learned to shut my mouth and say, "Tell me more about how driving is feeling." And then she's looking for you to see if you're coming after her, maybe that's enough for conversation one. Maybe the next conversation, "Are there parts to it that are getting hard, or are you doing fine?"

[00:10:32] And then sometimes we can say like I really like, Mom, how we can talk about these things, 'cause I know some other families it's such contention. But look at us, we're just talking. 'Cause I really value you and your decision-making and your problem-solving. How did you, for example, like with your mom, what was that like, right? So you're putting the person as they should be, as it's their life and they're ahead of you. And yes, you have concerns 'cause you love them, and you don't want rough things to happen. Another one is, this is a personal example, my mom's house has treacherous stairs. And then the most hard marble or something at the bottom.

[00:11:16] And so my older sister said, "Mom's gonna fall down the stairs and break her neck. You can't let her live here by herself. I can't believe you're a gerontologist and you let her do that." So I did hold that a bit, but then I did this advice of communication of, in a calm way, having conversations with my mom of saying, "How do you feel on the stairs?" Next time, "What would happen if you would fall? Do you ever think about that?" And my mom, because she doesn't have cognitive impairment, we can especially have, she said, "You know something, Carrie? It is critically important for me to live in my house. And I wanna tell you something. I probably ultimately will fall someday, and I know for sure I am gonna die someday.

[00:12:01] So I want you to know in advance, you didn't do anything wrong if you find me bloody on the floor. You know that you enabled me to do what I wanted." It's not the case of everybody, but in that conversation, and I said, "Oh gosh, Mom, you should talk to my sister too, and to my brother." So we had all these conversations because aging is a time of greater heterogeneity than any other time. Everybody's path is different. Everybody's family is different. But the one result that's the same is it all ends the same way, is that you pass away. And that's not defeat, and it doesn't mean that you did it wrong. And so some of these families that I work with, where they're just bubble wrapping the person into misery, I think maybe you didn't have the conversations 

[00:12:48] Matt Abrahams: What a powerful image there. So many things that you said there that I want to highlight, but first, these conversations aren't just with the person who might be older. It's also with the others who to help take care of them, and you have to coordinate that. And I think a lot of your advice that you gave also applies to those conversations as well. Start with inquiry. Understand that the conversation might be about a bigger issue than you think, so it's not about the car keys, it's about autonomy. And break the conversation down into pieces. It doesn't all have to happen at once. And engage the other person in the conversation. Wonderful advice. 

[00:13:26] Kerry Burnight: And you'll, you will disagree, and that's the part to it, too. Is that, and so then you're trying to really think through to what extent is it their life, and we let people do what they want to do even if we don't agree. Or then you put in the complicating, sometimes there's cognitive impairment. And that really complicates things because would they have chosen a different path if they didn't have some cognitive change? So I'm not saying it's easy, but I'm saying the more you dig in, the more transparent, the more multiple conversations with other family members, the better.

[00:14:00] Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. Absolutely. I want to talk very briefly about your approach to explaining these things. You have a wonderful way of helping people understand very complex and, in some cases, highly emotional issues. You use storytelling, you use exemplars, you use very vivid images. How do you think about making complex information more accessible to people? Because in a large part, that's what you do. How do you think through that process? Because all of us in our lives have complex things we have to explain. 

[00:14:30] Kerry Burnight: I had not a diagnosis of ADHD when I was younger and needed it. But I just fumbled through, thinking, "Why can I not pay so very close attention?" And so I have a shorter attention span, and I want to get to the point quickly. And so my hope was that I would write a book that, get to the point. Like, what do I need to do here to make my life okay? 'Cause I'm scared about growing older. So I just tried to write what I would want to read. So in that regards, I think maybe the ADHD helped me.

[00:15:08] Matt Abrahams: In some ways, you know, and I feel the same way in the books I write, is get to the point. And I like how you use examples, you reinforce, you have catchy phrases, you use quotes, you give activities. All of those are ways to revisit the same point to really help. And I think all of us, in the complexities that we have to describe and explain, can benefit.

[00:15:29] Well, there you have it. So many useful tools and tips from Kerry Burnight. Please be sure to check out our full episode with Kerry and give her book Joyspan a read. Thank you for tuning in to this Quick Thinks episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. And check out fastersmarter.io for deep-dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider joining our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community at fastersmarter.io/learning. You'll find video lessons, learning quests, discussion boards, an AI coach, and book club opportunities. Again, that's fastersmarter.io/learning to become part of our Think Fast Talk Smart Learning Community.