The Woodard's Journey to Becoming Delighted Expats in Mexico #305

Description: In this episode, I am speaking with Emily Bron from International Lifestyle Consulting. Emily helps people relocate for retirement or for remote workers to find their ideal destinations. Emily has relocated to a foreign country multiple times in her life. You will probably pick that up by her accent. She is relocating again and helping others do the same. Read the Emily’s bio: After living and working in 4 countries (3 continents), experiencing several immigrations, changing professional fields (engineering, research, banking, IT, and travel consulting), and being an avid traveler with a cultural discovery mindset, she created International Lifestyle Consulting to advise how to find the best matching place for you to relocate abroad for a better quality of life, work, or retirement. As a professional Baby Boomer and remote worker, she is relocating again! Her guidance and advice are based on the following: Her multi-immigration and life experience of relocating alone and with family Daily follow-up on the selected destination news and immigration updates Firsthand travel experience at each location Thorough destination inspection with relocation in mind Real-time updates for each recommended area Knowledge of immigration options and the relocation process Information from local contacts and resources She is fully proficient in English and Russian and can speak other languages. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode I am speaking Steph Silver who is the author of the book Anywhere, USA: A Memoir. This will be a bit of a different kind of episode. I have known Steph for many years and I had no idea that she had an upbringing with an incredible amount of upheaval. I want you to hear a bit of the story from the book, the process of writing her memoir, and what she got out of the book from a personal growth perspective. Read Steph’s bio: Steph savors the little things wherever she goes—like flowers in a field, sunlight through the trees, or sounds of laughter. Moving over thirty times before she was seventeen, traversing between campgrounds, fully furnished homes, and homeless shelters, Steph used her optimism and grit to rise to a place of comfort, peace, and personal success. She is now on a mission to enhance as many lives as possible and to help humans thrive. Her first book, Anywhere, USA is a memoir that reveals some dark sides of a turbulent childhood while shining light and optimism at every turn. Despite close calls with disasters, both natural and man-made, Steph believes that if she is good enough, strong enough, or works hard enough, one day she’ll become worthy of the love and security she seeks. Who she ultimately chooses to become and if she’ll transcend her circumstances are questions Steph must answer for herself more than once in this gripping coming-of-age story. Steph founded VINE Collective in 2018 after parting from a branding agency she helped grow over 12 years. Through individual and team coaching, retreats, public speaking, and brand work, VINE cultivates meaningful and memorable experiences that bring forth the most exceptional versions of each person and/or brand. Steph also uses her desire for human connection, authentic experiences, and profound growth to train, educate, and amplify leaders and businesses who live through their mission, vision, and passion as host of MVP Business Podcast. She’s deeply driven to build relationships and help people authentically grow, succeed, and connect. When she’s not managing her team, visiting with clients, or connecting with friends, Steph can usually be found cooking, gardening, dancing, or mountain biking with her two sons. After listening to this episode, I want you to think about friends and colleagues. How well do you really know them? I have known Steph for over 10 years and she is a really together person but after I read her book, I wondered how did she survive her childhood to become the person she is today. Many of us had very difficult childhoods and not everyone is here today but people like Steph can be an inspiration for all of us. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode I am speaking with Wendy Mayhew who is the author of WISER: The Definitive Guide to Starting a Business after the Age of 50. This is a rebroadcast of episode 180 I recorded with Wendy in early 2020. I think it is as relevant today as it was 3 years ago. This is a guide to entrepreneurship for those over 50. Before we get to the episode this episode will publish the Monday before the US Labor Day weekend. I will not be publishing a podcast episode the week of September 3rd nor will there be a Career Pivot Insights newsletter on Sunday, September 3rd. Here is Wendy’s bio: Author Wendy Mayhew has been an entrepreneur for 40 years. Her most recent businesses are WISE - Seniors in Business and WISE 50 over 50 Awards. WISE - Seniors in Business, was formed to change how older entrepreneurs are perceived and to guide wannabe older entrepreneurs on deciding if entrepreneurship is for them. Wendy has quickly become Canada's leading expert on older entrepreneurship. She has done extensive research and understands the challenges facing this newest and fastest-growing group of entrepreneurs. Wendy is a sought-after speaker and workshop facilitator by business organizations now starting to realize the importance of serving this newest group of entrepreneurs. Seeing the gap in information available to older entrepreneurs, Wendy authored WISER: The Definitive Guide to Starting a Business After the Age of 50 to assist this group of new entrepreneurs in starting their businesses. Wendy also offers assistance and guidance to help business organizations set up programs specific to new entrepreneurs starting a business later in life. The WISE 50 over 50 Awards recognize and celebrate Canadian entrepreneurs over the age of 50. With the support of well over 100 Canadian organizations sharing information on the awards through their networks, the 50 over 50 Awards have generated awareness of the most under-supported and underserved group of new entrepreneurs in Canada. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode I am speaking with Mauro Guillén who is the author of the book THE PERENNIALS: The Megatrends Creating a Postgenerational Society. This is a topic that you need to be paying attention to as we are in the later stages of our careers. There are some big megatrends that many companies, governments, and people are not paying attention to but many of us will still have to deal with. This will affect our work life, family life, and retirement. Read the author’s bios: Mauro F. Guillén is one of the most original thinkers at the Wharton School, where he is Professor of Management and Vice Dean for the MBA for Executives Program. An expert on global market trends, he is a sought-after speaker and consultant. He combines his training as a sociologist at Yale and as a business economist in his native Spain to methodically identify and quantify the most promising opportunities at the intersection of demographic, economic, and technological developments. His online classes on Coursera and other platforms have attracted over 100,000 participants from around the world. He has won multiple teaching awards at Wharton, where his presentation on global market trends has become a permanent feature of over fifty executive education programs annually. He is the WSJ bestselling author of 2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything.  I have been interested in generational change for many years. We have a lot of generational change in our society that I think Mauro discusses in his book. He does not say how to solve it but spells out the megatrends in an easily digestible way. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode, I want to discuss with you what I am seeing in the 50+ job market. I was on an Encore Network call the other day and two of us were asked for our views of the 50+ job market. I want to discuss how I view the world in August of 2023 and take you through 4 examples of very recent success from members of the Career Pivot Membership community. I am part of the Encore Network https://encorenetwork.org/ and I was asked to speak to what I was seeing. Another gentleman was asked to speak about broader economic data. I know a lot of listeners of this podcast are career coaches, resume writers or provide other services in helping people with their careers. I want you to check out the Encore Network. The Encore Network is a coalition of leaders who champion the civic, social, and economic contributions of people 50+ by creating community, stimulating learning, and inspiring action to transform the encore stage of life. Believe it or not, the economic numbers are pretty good. Yes, inflation has stretched a lot of you financially, but it is coming down. The big companies of the tech sector have been laying off but the tech sector is really a pretty small part of the overall economy. I will tell you that the green energy sector is hiring. A lot of money has been flowing into that sector after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. The official unemployment for those 50-54 and 55+ is below 2.5 percent. I will link in the show notes the latest press release from Nifty50s.com with the data. Nifty50s is another member of the Encore Network. I run the Career Pivot Community which has about 40 people currently participating with an average age of 60 and over the last six months I have seen a lot of success. I discussed some of the success these folks are having getting hired during the Encore Network discussion. I want to highlight some of what I talked about. These are folks who are mostly in their mid to late 50s. They are getting hired I want to take you briefly through their stories. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode I am speaking with Mitchell Clionsky who is the co-author with his wife of the book Dementia Prevention: Using Your Head to Save Your Brain. This is a topic that many of us will have to deal with. It may be an aging parent, a spouse, or yourself. It is a fascinating topic on what you can be doing now to prevent getting dementia. Let me read the author’s bios: MITCHELL CLIONSKY, Ph.D., is a board-certified neuropsychologist who specializes in evaluating and treating patients with cognitive impairment, dementia, ADHD, and traumatic brain injury. EMILY CLIONSKY, MD, completed residencies in internal medicine and in psychiatry and is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. She specializes in the care of patients with cognitive impairments. They have a combined 70 years of professional and clinical experience in medicine and neuropsychology and have treated 20,000 patients. They partner at a private practice, Clionsky Neuro Systems, Inc., based in Springfield, Massachusetts. They are experienced public speakers, podcast guests, and workshop presenters for general and professional audiences. This is a topic that has touched my life. My mother died in her mid-80s with dementia and her last few years were not pleasant due to the dementia. My son’s mother-in-law started showing signs of dementia about a dozen years ago when she was in her late 50s. She is now in her late 60s and requires full nursing home care. This a debilitating condition and for some this is preventable. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and be sure to pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this week’s episode, I want to discuss Navigating the Emotional Roller Coaster of My Wife's Heart Surgery. I will keep this short but I want you to understand the strategies I am using to reduce risk and more importantly keep my sanity. For new listeners, my wife and I have lived in Ajijic Mexico which is in the State of Jalisco only a short distance south of Guadalajara, the 2nd largest city in Mexico and the home of a number of the country’s best medical schools. Health care here on the private side is mostly frictionless. Access to the private healthcare system is easy and affordable. The same cannot be said about the public healthcare system and I will put a link in the show notes when I discussed the public healthcare system in a previous episode. To see a specialist, you usually can schedule an appointment in less than 2 weeks and often much faster than that. Recently, I went to schedule my annual skin check with my dermatologist, and I was able to secure an appointment for the next day. My doctor was not rushed and spent well over 30 minutes with me. Past appointments have lasted up to an hour. The cost was about $60 US. That was not a copay but the total cost. I am far more likely to see my doctors and in between appointments I can call or text them via WhatsApp. If I have a question I will text them and usually I will get a response in a few hours directly from the doctor. My wife has real relationships with all of her doctors, which includes a hematologist, endocrinologist, dermatologist, gastroenterologist, and now a cardiologist. My wife being a retired RN is a total pain in the butt patient and she loves her doctors here. That sets the stage for this story. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and be sure to pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode, I speak with Mike McNatt, a test and compliance engineer who continues to work contract jobs well into his 70s. He was introduced to me as the guy who has got this gig work down and that is not working for Uber. This is a rebroadcast of one of the best episodes of 2022. You may be asking why I am doing a rebroadcast at this time. As my long-time listeners know I live in Ajijic Mexico just south of Guadalajara. My wife and I have some major decisions to make in the coming weeks. My wife needs to have what I hope will be non-invasive heart surgery. I will be putting my focus on whether my wife has the surgery performed in Mexico where we have no insurance but dealing with healthcare is much easier or do we return to the US where we are covered by Medicare but we will have to deal with the US healthcare system. Just to be clear, my wife feels fine and has not been told to reduce her level of activity. This came as a complete surprise, and we feel blessed to be dealing with healthcare here in Mexico. Making the appropriate appointments with world-class medical specialists can be done in days and not weeks or months. That is where my focus will be in the coming weeks and not producing content for this podcast. Back to the introduction of the episode. My good friend, Marti Konstant, who is a workplace futurist and career coach, said I needed to have Mike on this podcast. Mike has worked contract engineering jobs and has developed a strategy to stay fully employed. Mike is an engineer who was interviewed for Forbes called, Working In Tech At Any Age–This Engineer Tells You How. He also produced multiple LinkedIn posts on his strategies which I will include in the show notes. Back in the 1980s, when I worked for IBM, I helped lead a mechanical design support group. Our internal customers hired a lot of contract engineers for 12-to-24-month contracts. What I learned was they would work a contract, then take a few months off and then find the next. They were completely comfortable with this lifestyle. Here we are 30-40 years later, and this is a new way of working. Mike has become comfortable with this, and I want you to listen to his story. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and be sure to pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode, I am speaking with my buddy Thom Singer. I have known Thom for 15 or more years. I met with Thom when I was in Austin in May 2023, and he told me that he had recorded a TEDx talk called I Did That. One of the key points in his TEDx talk is it is alright to ask for help especially as it relates to mental health issues. This discussion about mental health is one of the most consequential discussions I have had on this podcast. Please listen to all of it. When I was in Austin in May of 2023, I had a coffee or beer with 10 individuals and 6 of them discussed some form of mental health issues that they were having or someone close to them was having. One of those was Thom. Thom’s speaking business completely collapsed during the pandemic. I had Thom on the podcast during that time to track what he was doing to recover. The last time I had Thom on the podcast was in episode #255 in January of 2022 called Learning How to Adapt and Get Scrappy with Your Career with Thom Singer. Thom did a lot of different stuff to keep his career going. It took its toll on him in so many ways. What I want you to get from this episode is there are a lot of people out there suffering from various forms of mental health issues. It might be someone you care about or it might be you. It is okay to ask for help. I have sought out help at various times in my life with my own mental health issues and Thom did the same. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.

Description: In this episode I am speaking with Kevin Kelly who is the author of Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. On his 68th birthday, Kevin Kelly began to write down for his young adult children some things he had learned about life that he wished he had known earlier. To his surprise, Kelly had more to say than he thought and kept adding to the advice over the years, compiling a life’s wisdom into these pages. When I read this book, I was smiling the entire time. Here is the short version of Kevin’s incredible biography: Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acts as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is the founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia. He is best known for his radical optimism about the future. This episode is sponsored by Career Pivot. Check out the Career Pivot Community, and pick up my latest book, Repurpose Your Career: A Practical Guide for the 2nd Half of Life Third Edition. For the full show notes and resources mentioned in the episode click here.