Author Archives: Amy Gage

Unknown's avatar

About Amy Gage

A community relations director in higher education and mother of two adult sons, Amy Gage spent the first 20 years of her career as a journalist and public speaker in St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The issues addressed in her award-winning newspaper column, "On Balance: Issues That Affect Work and Home," remain relevant today. In "The Middle Stages," she continues the vital conversation about women's work and lives, with a focus on the challenges and contradictions of aging, the mixed blessings of forsaking family time for the more immediate rewards of a career, and how middle-aged women can continue to forge full lives even as their priorities and sensibilities change.

Flexibility, Focus Ease Strain of Midlife Career Shifts

1 Reply

Sarah Berger, 47, insists she wasn’t afraid when she got downsized from her director-level job in early September — even though she is single and solely responsible for her mortgage and other household expenses. Even though it’s her second career transition in four years.

Even though — as is often said of women on the other side of 40 — she isn’t getting any younger.

“It doesn’t pay to panic,” Berger explains. And here’s where age and experience served her: “I was feeling confident about what I’d achieved. I felt I had something to offer.

“As soon as I got laid off, literally driving home, I already was putting together my list of people to call,” she says.

Berger began with the women in her book club. “These are professional, well-connected women who believe in lifting up others. So I knew that if I called on them, they would use their network to help me.”

A fund-raising professional, she landed an even better position in mid-October — six weeks to the day after her layoff.

“The networking for me was key,” says Berger, the new director of resource development and communications at Neighborhood House, a nonprofit with a 117-year tradition of serving immigrants, refugees and low-income populations in the Twin Cities.

LinkedIn cartoon

Purposeful connections

This so-called “hidden job market” — in which a matrix of personal and professional connections opens doors — accounts for up to 80 percent of new hires, according to Forbes magazine.

That’s why Cathy McLane, 52, began rebuilding her network a year ago when she decided to ease herself out of a role as marketing and communications director at a prestigious private school in suburban Minneapolis. McLane had been there 14 years and recognizes now that she “had clearly stayed too long.”

She was out of practice in the discipline of connecting with professional peers — and out of step with the digital ways networking is now conducted. “I didn’t realize how deep I’d gotten in my little rut, my happy rut,” she says.

McLane activated her social media presence, which now includes 379 connections on LinkedIn and 578 followers on Twitter, with a handle — @CathyConnects — that describes where she wants her career to grow.

And, because no Tweet beats a face-to-face meeting, she started calling on people in similar roles at health care organizations and in higher education (including me, during my years at St. Catherine University). “People warned me that the level of job I want will come through knowing someone who knows the hiring manager,” McLane explains.

She was businesslike, professional and prepared in her informational interviews. And, without fail, she observed three practices:

  • Ask your business contact who else you should meet.
  • Write a timely and specific “thank you” note.
  • Purposefully stay in touch. “Part of networking should be giving back,” McLane says. “You want to add value. So if I find a good article or blog or website, I send that out.”

‘The age thing’

Six months after leaving her job, McLane has yet to land an equivalent career position. She’s got a long-term contract doing project management and internal communications for Cargill, which she hopes will become the “seed client” of the business she is launching: Cathy Connects LLC.

The glass ceiling she hit during her job search is less about gender than age. “People don’t always want 20 years of experience,” McLane says, because it calls up all sorts of speculations and suspicions:

  • Will you demand a higher salary?
  • Will you be digitally savvy?
  • Can you keep pace with the speed of change in today’s workforce?
  • Will you stay in a position for which you’re clearly “over-qualified”?

Consultant Sue Plaster, a former communications and HR executive who herself was laid off at age 50, says the economy and “the age thing” hit middle-aged men and women equally hard, though women likely pay a higher price for looking older. “The self-confidence aspects of the job search are really challenging,” she says.

And so, three pieces of advice for people in a midlife career transition — from three women who have been there:

  • Plaster: “Invest in a professional headshot for LinkedIn that portrays you in a favorable way — not a glamour shot but no selfies either.”
  • McLane: “Take space, not time,” she says, quoting Karen Himle, the recently named vice president of corporate communications at Thrivent Financial. Rather than mindlessly filling up your calendar, “slow down and take space to reorient: What’s important? What makes you happy?”
  • Berger: “I did not say no to a coffee date, ever. My goal was to make one contact a day. Those professional networks are really important.”

Lesson learned: “I have yet to meet one person who’s transitioned who hasn’t landed in a good place. It’s how you approach life, your attitude,” concludes Cathy McLane.

Become a Midlife Revolutionary: Walk to Work

3 Replies

Minneapolis is among the 10 safest cities for pedestrians in the country, the local newspaper announced this week. Seattle was the most safe, Detroit the least among the 25 large urban areas studied.

That’s comforting news, given that I do a lot of walking in Minneapolis and its twin city, St. Paul, where I live and work. But the data ignore the more interesting sociology.

Buried in a recent U.S. Census Bureau analysis of the percentages and characteristics of people who walk or bike to work is an age-related statistic that speaks to the subtle mind shifts that start to happen in middle age.

Although walking to work is most common — no surprise — among young adults with relatively low incomes, it creeps up again among people 55 and older. People like the violin maker who lives across the street from my house and walks more than a mile to work in all weather, or like his wife, a college bookstore manager who commutes a similar distance by foot or bicycle.

People like You Are Hereme, who a year ago traded a 40-mile commute for a walkable distance to work of 1.2 miles. Now, instead of nonstop meetings by iPhone in unpredictable weather and crawling traffic, my commute entails reading sidewalk poetry, admiring the art of urban landscaping and simply getting lost in my own thoughts.

Why walk? Why bother?

A higher percentage of people walk to work in Minneapolis (and, by extension, St. Paul) than in other cold Midwestern cities like Chicago and Milwaukee, according to the Census data. Across all 50 metro areas studied, an eco-friendly commuting method — walk, bike, bus, train — is most prevalent among people who live and work in the same city.

But the uptick in “older worker” walking interests me most — because my experience correlates exactly with the statistics. Walking has become, for me, a social statement, a political action. I walk to work because our neighborhood streets are choked with cars. I walk because I polluted the planet for years so I could enjoy both the city career and the small-town family.

I walk because the United States has become a fat and lazy nation, with obesity rates more than double what they were in 1970 and an average of 2.28 vehicles per household. “We don’t have a parking problem” in St. Paul, a City Council legislative aide told me recently. “We have a walking problem.”

And so, while it would be easy for me to talk about the more balanced perspective that middle age brings — along with the resulting confidence to slow life’s pace, to find my path — in truth I’m not sure that’s why I’m walking more. I walk because “excess” has become the U.S. brand, a hedonism we export to further justify our self-centered shopping and consumption.

I walk because I’m a child of Depression-era parents who raised my siblings and me without air-conditioning, with one TV and with the discipline to turn off lights even back when electricity was “penny cheap.”

I walk because I’m a sucker for the starfish story, and walking to work is one thing I can do, one small difference I can make, in a planet that grows more damaged by the day.

It’s not easy being green

Living an eco-life is more palatable and possible in a granola-eating, rainbow-flag–waving neighborhood with bus lines close by and a grocery store, Thai restaurant and charming retro movie theater within easy walking distance.

Still, walking to work has its challenges, especially for middle-aged women. Discomfort and inconvenience top the list:

  • Walking takes longer than driving, and that’s a pain on Monday morning when I have to be at the weekly staff meeting by 8:30 a.m.
  • It rains in Minnesota, and, of course, it snows.
  • My building has a Wudu station in the second-floor bathroom where Muslim women can wash their feet before prayer, but the closest showers for commuters who walk or cycle are at the athletics facility across campus.
  • My lunch gets squished in my backpack, which also gets heavy with a laptop and a pair of work-suitable shoes inside.
  • It’s harder to walk and wear a skirt or suit — the expected attire for a woman my age. I dress more casually than I’d like because it’s easier to stuff jeans or cotton pants in my backpack than to carry dry-clean-only clothes.
  • You have to plan. I need my car for work — at least that’s what I tell myself when I have an appointment more than a mile away. Instead, I have learned to plan outside meetings at the top of the workday, so I can drive there and back, park my car at home and then walk in. I also meet with people more often by phone.

Most important: I have a tolerant employer who has no problem with me working from home sometimes or varying my schedule. And that’s what a walk-to-work movement will require — flexibility from employers who recognize that a healthy, calm person is a more balanced, productive employee.

The sidewalk art three blocks from my house says it best: I don’t know enough about balance to tell you how to do it. / I think, though, it’s in the trying and the letting go / that the scales measuring right and wrong — quiver and stand still.

Lesson learned: “Walking the talk” is a literal action. By living my values, I may inspire someone else to do the same.

The Oldest Woman in Yoga

6 Replies

Ask middle-aged women which physical changes have surprised them, and they’ll talk about joints: aching knees, fragile ankles, sore shoulders that restrict range of motion.

The less common complaints are about bathroom habits. “Jumping makes me pee!” says a 56-year-old yoga instructor and nutrition coach. Another woman, 62, says simply “constipation” when asked about the physical change she least expected.

Our skin starts to dry out as early as our late 20s. We begin to lose muscle mass in our 30s. By our 40s, we see parentheses flank our mouths and darker circles beneath our eyes. But for some of us who have been athletic all our lives, the hardest signs of aging are the physical limitations.

“The payback for pushing yourself too hard gets worse as you age,” says Web MD, a valuable online resource for both diagnosis and healing of athletic injuries.

Gayle Winegar, president and co-owner of the SweatShop in St. Paul, Minn. — a Pilates- and strength-based studio that attracts women of middle age and older — agrees that shoulders and knees become more vulnerable with age. And injuries take longer to heal. “You get one injury, and that has a downward spiral. It’s hard to get up to the frequency, intensity and duration you had before,” she explains.

Slow down, you move too fast

Ego invariably is at the core of my athletic injuries. Whether it was the right hamstring muscles I blew out by showing off during a step aerobics class I was teaching, or the advice I failed to heed in my late 40s that middle-aged runners are less prone to injury if they slow down and even take “walk breaks” on their runs, I have consistently yielded to that competitive drive to keep up, win, be the best or — most humbling, in hindsight — to appear younger than I am.

Now, at 57, I finally recognize that if I don’t act my age, I’ll be sidelined.

I practice yoga at Core Power, a high-octane urban chain that attracts primarily young professionals. I joined in February 2011, desperate for the 104-degree rooms and chance to sweat during a typically frigid Minnesota winter. I also wanted Western-style yoga classes that focused more on fitness and rigorous workouts than Eastern philosophy.

Proudly referring to myself as the Oldest Woman in Yoga, I jumped into the most demanding classes, determined to keep pace with the youthful peacocks whose “body art” danced as they flowed through the poses.

Months later, I sustained a shoulder injury from doing the difficult Chaturanga Dandasana (yoga push-up) pose too quickly and with insufficient back and abdominal strength. It cost me weeks in physical therapy and a three-month hiatus from Core Power.

Yoga push-up

Yoga push-up

Older and wiser

Ego is the antithesis of what a yoga practice is supposed to be about. But that pastoral ideal — to “stay on your mat,” to focus solely on your own breath, to resist comparing body types and flexibility — is difficult to practice at a Type A studio like Core Power. And for a Type A practitioner like me.

Then I figured out that injury could heal me, not only the other way around.

When I returned to Core Power, I went to slower-moving, balance-focused classes that don’t include multiple repetitions of Chaturanga. I learned the 26 poses of hot yoga and sought out teachers who are closer to my age. And, just as yoga calls us to take its spiritual tenets with us off the mat, out into the world, I began to look at myself and others differently.

The Oldest Woman in Yoga quit mentally competing and comparing. If the loose skin shows on my lower belly, stretched twice — mightily — by nearly 10-pound baby boys, so be it. To paraphrase Gloria Steinem: “This is what 57 looks like.”

I ask instructors how to modify for my tight hips and weak left shoulder. I warmly greet the young women who clean the studios and bathrooms, and strike up conversations with other middle-aged women.

And, in an effort to focus less on being thin than being strong, I tried a TRX class at the SweatShop.

“I would love to look good in an Academy Awards ball gown, but that no longer is the highest thing on my list,” says Winegar, who founded the SweatShop in 1981, at the cusp of what would become a booming fitness movement. “Now, I want to get up without an achy back or stiff hands or feet that don’t work or a shoulder that doesn’t move.

“Women need different things at all stages of life.”

Lesson learned: I am working to accept my age rather than denying it. If enough of us come to celebrate the inevitable, society may see the wisdom that comes with wrinkles.