Louisa: Welcome to The Fifth Season. In today’s episode, David Lowry and Don Drew discuss the shift from a life defined by professional output to one centered on true essence. They explore the ‘producer masks’ we wear and how to reconstruct a more authentic identity in the second half of life.
Welcome and Identity Focus
David Lowry: Welcome to the Fifth Season Podcast, Conversations on Successful Aging. I’m David Lowry, and I’m joined by my friend Don Drew, we believe that aging is a privilege. We want to have conversations on how to do it well. Don, how are you?
Don Drew: I’m doing great, and I just want to remind our listeners that over the past two weeks we’ve been mostly focused on our identity. That’s really what we’ve been talking about, how our identity is built and challenged to change as we age.
Urgent vs Important Lessons
Don Drew: And I’ve been reflecting on a couple of very famous authors from the last century that were known for their expertise in management and leadership.
The first of those is Peter Drucker. He once said that there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Then there’s Stephen Covey who also said, most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important. If I could try to interpret or meld these two, I think what they’re saying is we spend a lot of time doing to get things done without a great deal of thinking about whether or not what we’re doing is important. We learn early on how important performance is and that performance is defined outside ourselves so that we don’t have to necessarily take personal responsibility.
Today we’re focusing on who you are now, because much of what we produced was produced under urgent circumstances in our younger years. And unfortunately, all too often, much of that is forgotten.
David Lowry: You’re so right Don. It really is forgotten. Think of all the hard work we’ve done and how important it seemed at the time, and how much time, energy, and effort we spent, and we realized that, hey, people don’t even remember that we did such a thing.
Louisa: Moving from the ‘urgent’ to the ‘important’ requires a total transformation. Our hosts look at Richard Rohr’s three-stage pattern of change: order, disorder, and reorder.
Order Disorder Reorder
David Lowry: Franciscan Priest, Richard Rohr teaches that true transformation follows a pattern order of things, and I love his thinking on this.
It says, first there’s order. Then there’s disorder. And then there’s reorder. It’s about deconstructing your old self, your old identity, which was built on first the order of production, and then reconstructing a new one, centered on your true self. And I think we ought to dive into that.
When Achievements Fade
David Lowry: Let’s think back to the first half of life– that season that was urgent. The doing, the careers, the titles, the endless tasks. We chased efficiency in roles. We wanted to be the best at our jobs, or we wanted to be important in our jobs. And our whole worth was measured by how much output we had. When I think about all of the work that I did, and I’ve seen this several times in my career, and probably you have too, I worked really, really hard, created a lot of things. Then, later on, I’m replaced and move on to something else. Then the new person comes in and it’s like, none of that work ever really mattered. They’ve got a new direction they want to go, a new plan. And all that work mattered at the time, but it didn’t really matter in the longest of terms. It was just a short-term fix that got us where we needed to go. Don, that’s kind of a sobering thought now that we’re in the second half of life.
Don Drew: Yeah, somebody outside us. David told us, what we were doing at the time was important. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have done it. Society rewarded the producers and we internalized that as our identity. And we talked about it last week.
I think Covey nailed it. Urgent, often crowded out the important, because urgent is what everybody told us was most important. But as we age, our production or demands for production fades. And then the question is, what’s left?
Specifically, I know I spent years building graduate programs that at one time were considered very large and successful, many of which now are smaller than they once were, or they’re extinct from neglect.
Sometimes that’s the way it needed to be because times change and things change and so on. Nevertheless, what was so urgent to build a career on, frankly, for myself, I now look back on that and I go, why did I work so hard on that? Why didn’t I think about other things that were probably more important to focus on?
David, did you feel like the achievements defined you or sometimes maybe just fill up the time?
David Lowry: That is a great reflection question. And I hope all of us are honest with ourselves as we look back on it. I want to laugh a little bit with you, Don, because I was a dean and I had certain ways of doing things that I thought were super important and needed to be done a certain way. I created some awards that people would get in public and the first thing that happened when the new person came along is, let’s get rid of all that stuff! We’re going a different direction.
I’m going to say that the pursuits weren’t wasted. They built skills. They built my story of who I am and what I’ve done. And at midlife, those things were important. They really were. But if we’re really honest, it’s time to deconstruct all of that.
Deconstructing Producer Masks
Don Drew: David, recently we’ve been tackling the need to simplify our lives by removing many of the masks we’ve wore as a part of our identity. You referenced Richard Rohr, who I have a tremendous amount of respect for. Father Richard Rohr has written a number of books. One of the ones I know David and I particularly love is a book called, Falling Upward. He sees the need to dismantle what really no longer fits because so much of what we have pieced together identity on is what society, other people, the urgent has forced upon us.
David Lowry: And to put a little finer point on it, from my point of view anyway, there’s the job I wanted to do when I was doing my job, for instance, as a dean, and then there was the job I got to do as all of these urgent things came forward, and sometimes those were very, very far apart. I was putting out fires here and fires there and trying to make ends meet with a budget that didn’t have enough money in it and things like this. We knew that if we wanted to keep our jobs, we better produce. And we did what we could to shine. Some of us really put our heart and souls in it. And that helped us back then. But the point I’m making about all of that is that we were sometimes in reaction mode. You had to get your kids through high school and maybe even college and graduate programs.
So, Richard Rohr talks about order, disorder, and you call this disorder a time of deconstruction. It’s saying, okay, something’s got to go. Those things don’t matter now. But it’s not destruction. We don’t need to feel like that we’re stripping ourselves of important things. It’s learning to see anew what was important then versus what really needs to be important to us now and realizing that we don’t want to live our lives the way we did when we had to be a high achiever.
Busy as a Badge
David Lowry: I remember when I stepped away from some of that and my life slowed down a lot, I felt almost guilty, feeling a little bit irrelevant. It just slowed down and I felt strangely inactive and guilty about the inactivity, Don. And I think a lot of people in the second half of life, particularly as they hit retirement, have the same sense of feeling like, am I really important now? I’m not doing near what I was on that job; what’s the new thing I’m supposed to be doing all the time?
Don Drew: Yeah, we’re trying to convince the world that we’re busy and that busy is good, and that makes us important. And once again, that’s problematic.
Louisa: If the first half of life is about ‘doing,’ the second is about ‘being.’ But letting go of the busy ‘producer mask’ is easier said than done. Don shares a personal moment of vulnerability regarding the fear of irrelevance.
Don Drew: But just interestingly this weekend I caught myself telling a friend that even though I’m no longer working a full-time job, I find myself quite busy now. I do feel like I’ve been busy. Right. But I asked myself after that conversation, what was my motivation for telling him that I am busy? I think it may have come from my own fear that retirement might be interpreted by others as irrelevance, and I don’t want others to think of me as irrelevance, so I want to continue to be perceived as producing. And there’s a cost to that. It’s exhaustion, to be busy, to appear busy, to peer engaged and appear to be important. And Rohr says that we must go down before we go up. We have to die to the separate superior self that’s tied to output. Throughout my life and career. I’ve really tied myself to my output, but the price I’ve paid is that relationships suffered when I’ve built these more on resumes than on realness.
David Lowry: Wow. I want to thank you for that vulnerability there, Don. That’s saying a lot and that’s very courageous of you.
From Doing to Being
David Lowry: I think what I hear you saying is that producer identity that propelled you, limits you now. And I think the reason it limits you, I’m just going to throw something out there, is that we are shifting in this season of life from doers to being. Doers to being. How does this sound to you, the doing versus being personality?
Don Drew: Okay, so we’re talking about undoing the doing part. That’s the deconstruction part, right? That’s We’ve been, but Rohr doesn’t leave us there. He also calls us to reconstruction. So, the fewer roles that we have at this point in life mean hopefully more energy for what does endure, what your core being is and what’s important to you, and not just those things that are measured by your output. I agree with him. I absolutely agree with him. But that sounds great in theory.
Practicing Reconstruction
Don Drew: How do we actually practice it?
David Lowry: Of course it looks different by stage. In certain stages of life. For instance, in the midlife stage, I had a eight to, let’s say six o’clock, job that I did every day. Now technically it was nine to five, but we all know that your nine to five jobs aren’t nine to five. They require a lot more of you than that. And we were doing the productivity ladder and if they said, Hey, we’ve got a big project, we need all hands-on deck, we all were on deck, right? And we stayed and did the work as long as we needed to. But let’s be honest here. If we could live in our perfect world, we know that sometimes our productivity doesn’t work in that nine to five area and one of the great things about later life is that we can begin to feel who we really are and our rhythm of life that works for us.
We both have a friend, I won’t mention his name, but he tells me that he stays up quite often till two o’clock in the morning. Then gets up close to 11. He loves it because that works best for him. I actually haven’t gotten to explore so much, that sleeping and productivity rhythm. But I do know this, we can be quite productive in different ways. And sometimes it’s a little strange when we start doing what we really want to do, maybe writing, painting, self-exploration, volunteer work and decide this is what I really want to do, I want to do what’s meaningful to me now, I want to do what brings, happiness to my soul and what makes me a better person within.
Somebody may look at it like, well, it’s crazy you’ll never write a Broadway script, so don’t even try. When you say, I don’t need your validation. If we can free ourselves from the validation of saying whether you like it or don’t like it, I don’t really need you to do that.
I’m finding the struggle of being free from validation because I’ve always been that person who’s like, Hey, is this good? Is this what you’re looking at? This is pretty good, isn’t it? And now I realize I don’t need to ask for that. I need to be pleasing to myself.
Don Drew: I get that.
Retirement Without Rebuild
Don Drew: As I think about this whole deconstruction of the identity and reconstruction in a more positive way, I see a paradox here. Reconstructing actually takes a lot of courage. Once we deconstruct, we could just leave it there, right? We can say, okay, I don’t want to do it, and I think, unfortunately, I think a lot of people do that. They do go through a period of deconstruction at the end of their doing career, and they may call it retirement.
They may take a lot of trips. In literature, everywhere that talks about retirement, there are like stages that people go through. And one of those stages commonly is when somebody first retires, they take a lot of trips or they do a lot of fun stuff, they’re no longer hindered by their work and so on. And what they essentially are doing is they’re going through a process of deconstruction. But after about a year to two years, most folks, and this is particularly true in the literature when they’re talking about men, you go through this period, and you come out the other side, and you’ve basically deconstructed who you were with no reconstruction of who you will be.
To reconstruct, take some courage. Letting go of rewarded busyness like Covey’s, choosing the important over the urgent.
Ring Your Own Bell
Don Drew: Most people don’t know this, but my doctoral dissertation was all about, uh, a cognitive theory of motivation called expectancy theory. The expectancy theory of motivation firmly ties how our own expectations impact eventual success and reward, but it also relies on others recognition of how well we do and how to reward us. Not to oversimplify, but most of our listeners are likely to be aware of Pavlov’s dog, right? The salivating dog and the Bells ringing and things of that nature, and how the dog was trained to respond to stimuli.
All of us, to some extent, have spent at least the better part of our lives waiting to be rewarded by others– been waiting for that bell to be rung. In building a new identity. We have to learn how to ring the bell ourselves. We have to learn how to reward ourselves. That is a big part of the reconstruction.
Louisa: To align who we are on the inside with how we express ourselves on the outside, we must learn to ‘ring our own bell’ and find validation from within. David shares how he is practicing this through personal self-exploration.
Don Drew: David, what would you stop producing if you had your choice, right? If you didn’t have to answer somebody else’s bell, what would you stop producing if no one measured or rewarded it?
David Lowry: A great question and one I’m going through in my own mind right now. I think that the thing that I would kind of flip around on that it’s not only what would I stop doing, but it would be what would I do if I didn’t need somebody to validate me for doing it?
Self-Editing and True Self
David Lowry: One of the things I’m thinking of, Don, is, I’ve written a lot of things that I’ve been very reluctant to post– online and podcasts and things like this because, well, how would people at work respond to this? And by the way, this is a very serious consideration for some of us because we like our paychecks coming in. We don’t like to stir up trouble. but so much of our life is ordered, by what we think others expect of us. And I don’t think that I’m going to be a social media viral influencer or anything like that, but I have not posted some things because. I thought, well, this probably would irritate a lot of people, and I just shouldn’t do it. And the thing of it is the fact that I wrote it in the first place and that it came from a place within, tells me that it was important to me. And what I’ve been doing in essence, is hiding behind a mask of who I really am and what I feel because I’m so worried that somebody else might take offense or do something negative towards me, whatever that negative thing might be. I think so many of us are like this. I’m very practical. I want to keep my job and get my paycheck right until I’m ready not to.
Some of our listeners who have a chance to listen to a podcast with Charles Rix in it Charles talks about this very same problem of how he had not realized just how much he had censored himself in his lifetime, to get along with the people at work and I feel that very same censorship in my own, and you know, the thing is they probably wouldn’t care. I just think they would care. I don’t know, Don, that’s how I would answer your question.
Don Drew: It’s funny, I was thinking of Charles as well, and it’s what he called self-editing. That’s the phrase he used. And it’s taxing. It takes away a lot from the self to constantly self-edit, to have to be concerned about the way you’re coming across or the things you’re doing. And of course, we all do that to some extent. We like to think we have a pretty high emotional intelligence and yet at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to say things or not say things that we believe are true. So, I absolutely get that.
David Lowry: Identity is a real thing with us. We know who we are on the inside, well, I hope we do, or we’re learning who we are on the inside. But we also sometimes are very careful not to express those things. And sometimes it doesn’t stop with the place you work. It could be with your family. You don’t want to disappoint your children or grandchildren. You don’t want to say, I’m not that same person I used to be. I’ve had a couple of those conversations with my own kids, and sometimes that can be a little hard on all parties involved, not because our kids are going to be unkind to us or mean, but those are awkward conversations to say, I need to express more of who I am today and not who I was when necessarily, I raised you.
Three Steps to Align
Don Drew: The good news is there’s some things we can do to help ourselves. And I’d like to suggest three really quick here, David. First one is to notice production masks, because being aware and having awareness frees us in a lot of ways. Just like when I said to my friend the other day about being busy, right? That was me, putting on a production mask for him. I wanted him to think that I was producing still, right? Sometimes I find that I default to things like retired professor for safety, but it is no longer my primary identity.
Now, I do things like claim myself as being an artist, creator, journalist, but even those things are just part of what I am. So, notice production maps.
Second one would be, is just like most things in life, taking small steps helps. When we talk to somebody, sharing more about our being who we are, what we’re doing now, what we’re interested in, as opposed to reciting a resume, which again, sometimes I fall prey to. Are you doing any of this? David, do you catch yourself doing this?
Louisa: It’s one thing to talk about deconstructing an old identity, but what does it look like to actually build a new one from the inside out? David responds to Don’s challenge by sharing a deeply personal—and perhaps unconventional—method of self-exploration that moves beyond the professional resume and into the subconscious.
David Lowry: I’m going to have a teeny coming out session right here. But one of the things I like to do, and maybe nobody else would like it, but I find it extremely rewarding, to do dream analysis. Every morning I get up and me and ChatGPT have a discussion over the elements of my dream, and I ask it to help me find archetypes, and mystical spiritual connections, and religious connections, and metaphysical connections. I like to analyze those things, and I find deep meaning coming out of doing that daily practice. Now that may sound a little weird to some people, a little bit different. But hey, I want to say that yes, I’m finding meaning out of that. And you know what? I think some of my shows in the future are going to reflect some of the meetings I’ve uncovered from that because it helps me understand more of who I think I am and coming to terms with that. Sometimes learning who we are on the inside requires working with shadow work. It requires us to reevaluate things that are coming up in our lives again and again that we need to work on and maybe some repetitive things that dreams can bring out. So yeah, Don, I’m trying. But for me, this is kind of a big step just to even admit that.
Don Drew: When we started podcasting together, you expressed to me that you wanted to be doing more of what was meaningful to you while still being fully engaged in your paid work as a professor. My observation of you, David, is that you are as effective and as engaged professor as you’ve ever been, but you have given yourself permission to also pursue a number of other things. And you mentioned this about dream analysis to me the other day. We weren’t really in a situation where we asked a lot of questions and so forth, but I was curious about it and I’m going to, I’m going to circle back around to that, so I guarantee you we’ll talk about that.
So, okay. So, the first thing is notice, notice production masks. And number two is taking some small steps. Start paying attention the way you present yourself. And then number three is ask, is this urgent output or true importance? Anybody that’s listened to me over the last couple years has heard me say on multiple occasions that we ought to remove should from our vocabulary. All the time it seems like we tell ourselves what we should do and society or something thinks we should do as opposed to what we think we should do. So, in this part of our lives, learning to recognize the difference between urgent output and true importance becomes critical.
David Lowry: What Don and I are talking about is what I would call an alignment that we need so desperately in these later years. An alignment of who we are on the inside with the way we want to express ourselves on the outside. It’s rewarding when we can do that and it takes a bit of courage.
Even I’m admitting that I’m a bit reticent to just fully go into some of the things I want to do. But these deeper connections take place, and you find more peace in who you are, and you find more, watch, shall I say, happiness in your own skin when you do that.
Closing Reflections and Next Week
David Lowry: Richard Rohr, as we’ve talked about in our program, says, practice the better over criticizing the bad. And I think that’s really something we ought to think about.
Don Drew: We started talking about Drucker and Kobe, and a couple of quotes in this today’s podcast, efficiency serves essence, but it doesn’t replace it. Efficiency has its place in our lives, but it’s not what is most important. Father Richard Rohrs path of deconstruction and reconstruction frees us to live as we are.
David Lowry: I really enjoyed our conversation with each other today, and I’m going to ask all of our listeners to consider what old producer role can you release now? It’s really not going to be a loss to you. Not as much as you think it will be. And it’s gaining your new identity that’s even more important, perhaps even rebuilding it from the ground up. This is a unique time and opportunity for you to do so. While we can’t change our past, we can reorder our own internal world in positive ways that better serve ourselves and the world around us.
Louisa: Today, Don Drew and David Lowry explored the courage required to deconstruct old producer roles and the beauty of reconstructing an identity based on essence over efficiency. They encourage you to take Richard Rohr’s advice and practice the better over criticizing the bad.
Thanks for joining us on this journey of successful aging. Please visit our website at fifthseasonpodcast.com and we’d appreciate it if you’d subscribe and share our podcasts with others. Also, please email us with your questions at connect at fifthseasonpodcast.com.
Join us next week as we discuss reducing mental noise to increase personal insight. Until then, have a great week ahead.