Transcript

Ben:                 Hi, my name is Ben Smith. I'm joined by the Han Solo to my Chewbacca, Curtis Worcester.

Curtis:              All right.

Ben:                 How are you doing today, Curtis?

Curtis:              I'm good, Ben. How are you?

Ben:                 I'm well. I'm well. We're really excited about our podcast today. In our conversations with our clients, we're inevitably sitting down with them, and we talk about purpose in retirement.

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 We talk about purpose in general, and one of the things that we hear, the majority of people we talk to, is, "I'm not going to retire."

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 "I'm not going to retire. I love what I do. I really enjoy the work. I really enjoy who I'm with. It keeps me active. It keeps me at the top of my game."

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 "I'm a better person, I'm a happier person because I am doing a profession, and that's what I like." You kind of go, "There's nothing wrong with that," but it seems like there's a natural push that we're all trying to push people to just get done and to kind of watch daytime soaps.

Ben:                 So that's something where, when we were designing the podcast series, was because we've been hearing that ... I don't want to even use the word objection to retirement, is this whole idea of, "I'm not going to retire." That's a fulfillment of retirement as well, in terms of purposes, is, "Hey, this is who I am. This is what brings me into the most joy. This is what I like to do."

Ben:                 So, at a summer party this year, I was talking to a family relative, and her name is Bonnie-Jean Brooks. Bonnie is the President and CEO of OHI. we talked about retirement, and she goes, "I'm not going to retire." It's like, "Well, that's the perfect person to bring onto this podcast today."

Curtis:              There you go.

Ben:                 So with that intro, I want to introduce Bonnie. So Bonnie, thank you for coming on the podcast today.

Bonnie:            You're welcome.

Ben:                 So with that kind of intro and that objection, one of the things we always want to dig into is, obviously, that we're going to talk a little bit about purpose and your purpose in your life, but to get to that purpose in life, we always want to hear stories. I think stories are the best kind of relator, in terms of we all relate to analogies. We can see ourselves in different situations, and we're not just 2D. We're very 3D.

Ben:                 So hearing you and hearing your story is that. So what I'd love to hear is just kind of your upbringing. Where are you from, and kind of what was your progression all the way to the academic world?

Bonnie:            Well, I was born in Portland, and shortly after I was born, 1941, World War II broke out. Before I was a year old, my father had gone into the Army Air Corps, and my mother and I moved from Portland back to live with my grandparents in Stockton Springs. Mama subsequently signed up to be a Rosie Riveter in the South Portland shipyard.

Bonnie:            So during World War II, my grandparents really raised me, and I often talk about the fact that one of my mentors in my life has been my grandfather. So this wasn't that long after the Depression, and it was during a time when all kinds of things were scarce. So I grew up with a scarcity mentality and felt like I could make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Ben:                 Your grandparents raising you in that time period, how old were they?

Bonnie:            Well, let me see. Grammy and Grampy were probably in their forties, I would say.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            I have never stopped to really think about that. But I lived with them for the first four years of my life.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            Then Daddy came back from the service, and we moved into another house in Stockton Springs. When I was five years old, we had my brother Terry, and then, subsequently, I would think it might've been around when I was nine years old, my parents were having marital challenges. My father drank a lot, and we thought that it would be better if we could just kind of get out of the area and Daddy could get a job in the area he was skilled in, which was, really, machining, a machine shop.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            So we moved to Wells, Maine, and Daddy worked at the Portsmouth shipyard. Mama took on odd jobs here and there. But then a time came when Daddy started working further away in Bridgeport and Hartford for Pratt and Whitney, in places in Connecticut.

Bonnie:            So when I was 11 and Daddy was gone a lot of the time, my sister Kathy was born. By then, Daddy was gone most of the time, and Mama was working full-time. So I really became a caregiver when I was 11 years old and was taking care of my infant sister.

Bonnie:            Then, two years later, my brother Bobby was born. Just trying to make sure that this is right, but I'm pretty sure.

Ben:                 Sure.

Bonnie:            Anyway, Bobby was born, and I ended up being a caregiver. Finally, it became apparent that my parents were not going to make it as a couple, and we were very poor. So my mother talked with my grandfather, and he went up and got Dick Fairbrother's truck from his pig farm. Then he drove down to Wells and picked up us four kids and Mama, and we came home to Waldo County.

Bonnie:            We came home to live in Searsport in a four generation household. My great-grandfather had died, and my great grandmother was living there. She had a memory loss of some kind, probably Alzheimer's. So Grammy and Grampy were living with her at that point, and that's where my mother and her four children moved. So we had the four generations living there. That happened in June of 1959, and then I started Searsport High School in August of '59 and graduated from Searsport High School.

Bonnie:            A big influence in my life in those years and from the time I was four years old was a family in Stockton Springs, Colonel Eugene Johnson, a [inaudible 00:06:53] boy ...

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            ... and his wife and their two daughters, one of whom became my best friend. She was three and I was four when we met. So I spent a lot of my growing up years living at Tallyho Riding Stable and shoveling horse manure and riding horses and became a riding instructor and all of that. Colonel Johnson was a real influence in my life. He was a leader. He was a military person and very well-organized. I believe I got a lot of my leadership skills from Colonel Johnson.

Ben:                 I always like to understand ages of where are people when they're making ... So here you have your grandparents taking you and your siblings in, back to Stockton Springs. For those that don't know where Stockton Springs is, so it's Searsport and Belfast, right? So right on the coast there.

Bonnie:            Yeah.

Ben:                 But talk about the sandwich generation, right, is you have your great-grandmother there and your grandparents caregiving to her as they're caregiving to four kids at that point.

Bonnie:            That's right.

Ben:                 So wow. What you hear that term today of sandwich generation, but not to that extent. Right? You don't have that level of generational differences. But I guess my question really being, is Colonel Johnson, in terms of his relationship ... Obviously, was he a colonel at that point? What was his age, and where was he in the military?

Bonnie:            Yes. He was retired. I think that he was in his early thirties when I first met him ...

Ben:                 Oh, okay. Wow.

Bonnie:            ... and he had just mustered out of the Army. He had been in the US Cavalry, and he had mustered out. He had purchased two homes in Stockton Springs. One was what we call Tallyho, and the other one next to it was Shadow Lane. They would live in Shadow Lane in the winter and Tallyho, which was not winterized, in the summer.

Bonnie:            Also, one of the that I didn't mention is that when I was in my sophomore year of high school, my mother remarried to a man that she had met in Wells. It's probably true that my younger brother Bobby is his son, and my sister Kathy was only three, I think it was, or four when Mama remarried. So Bob, my stepfather, really took in Kathy and Bobby under his wing, but did not take in my brother Terry and I.

Bonnie:            I was able to escape some of the negativity that came from him because I had only two years, and I left for college. I applied to Boston University and was accepted. I actually applied to two schools, Springfield ... Well, actually, I applied to three, now that I think of.

Bonnie:            I knew when I was a freshman in high school that I wanted to go to college, and there wasn't anyone from the previous graduating class that had gone to college. When my mother went in a to parent teacher weekend in October of my sophomore year, I guess it was, the high school principals discouraged her from letting me think that I might go to college.

Bonnie:            Of course, this is a podcast, so it'll probably be heard by a lot of people, but I don't care.

Ben:                 No, just our friends.

Bonnie:            The principal said to my mother, "Oh, Ruth, discourage her from going to college. She will be knocked up before she even gets out of high school."

Ben:                 Yeah, yeah.

Bonnie:            So of course that, immediately when Mama came back and told me that, that meant I was going to college ...

Ben:                 Yes.

Bonnie:            ... come hell or high water.

Ben:                 First-generation, at that point, right? So had anybody else in your family gone to college before?

Bonnie:            No, no. Daddy had gone to some sort of a trade school in Dexter.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            But that was it. Mama started nursing school in Portland and dropped out to get married shortly thereafter.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            So no, no one. Actually, the stories go that Grampy went to something called Shaw Business School, which I think might have turned into Husson, but I'm not sure ...

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            ... because he was the paymaster over at the Searsport docks during what we called ammunition through World War. So he was great with math.

Ben:                 So you chose BU.

Bonnie:            I choose BU.

Ben:                 You said, "All right. I'm going to be a phys ed teacher." So you got into being kind of an education, academic side of this. So now you've accomplished your bachelor's degree, which is a great accomplishment, especially with a family dynamic that is ... You're, "Hey, I've accomplished something that nobody in my family has ever accomplished." Then what? Right? What's next for you after that? I mean, if you're in Boston and to come back home with your family, but the world's your oyster at that point. Right? What do you do?

Bonnie:            Well, I worked hard to get through college. I didn't have financial support from home. My grandfather had saved $500, and that sent me off to college, that first year. I got student loans and work study. Did a lot of work study.

Bonnie:            When I was 12 years old, I was asked ... actually, 13. It was my freshman year, and we were asked to write a philosophy of our life. I uncovered that essay that my mother had saved after she died, and my philosophy at that time was the same thing that it is now. I intended to go to college, and I would come back home to Maine and help people less fortunate than me.

Bonnie:            So I graduated. By then I was dating Jim Brooks from Maine, and I signed a contract to teach at the end of my sophomore year in college. They were desperate for qualified physical education teachers. So by the end of my sophomore year, I signed a contract to teach at Winslow High School.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            So I taught physical education, a couple of biology classes, and was the coach of every sport you can think of, JV and varsity, swimming, basketball, field hockey, soccer, lacrosse, cheerleading, you name it. Anyway, the buses were meeting each other, so I could get off one and get onto the other one.

Bonnie:            Jim Brooks and I got engaged my first year of teaching, and he wanted to continue his education. He hadn't graduated from Wentworth Institute. He had missed a calculus class. So we decided he'd go out to Northrop Institute of Technology in California. Halfway through my sophomore year, we got married, actually November of my ... When I say sophomore, I mean my second year of teaching at Winslow.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            I moved to California. I got on a Greyhound bus and stopped in Springs, Maine with my grandmother and my grandfather, and we went from Stockton out to Los Angeles on the bus.

Ben:                 Wow. Oh my goodness.

Bonnie:            Yep. So I had my daughter Holly while I was out there.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            Within weeks of the time that I had her, I was bored, and I needed to find something useful to do other than just stay home and think about soap operas. I wouldn't know the name of one. So my husband was in favor of that. He was also working full-time for Western Airlines, as well as going to Northrup.

Bonnie:            So I applied to the Los Angeles School Department, met with the director of physical education. Frances Chapman was her name, and I interviewed in August of 1965, which happened to be the month that Watts burned and that people were killed and injured. She asked me if I would like a challenge, and I said, "Well, absolutely."

Bonnie:            "Well," she said, "we have two physical education jobs open in junior high schools, both in Watts." I had two or three classes of adaptive physical education, where I was teaching kids with intellectual disabilities and physical disabilities.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            So that's where I really got the inspiration of what it means to be able to make a difference in the life of someone with limited intellectual disability. I kind of followed that path after that.

Bonnie:            I became the department head. There were eight cause ed teachers. I became the department head. I was also taking classes. I went to Cal State Long Beach, Pepperdine College, and UCLA, taking courses, and got 80 some master's credits, but never got a master's degree. I only was taking courses that I felt could help me be a better teacher.

Ben:                 Sure.

Bonnie:            So I got transferred. I became the department head. The other phys ed teachers wanted me to be the department head because the department head left to go to the high school to be a teacher there. So I was there, and then the third year, I was asked to transfer to the elementary school and take over supervision of a pilot program of elementary physical education teachers. I had to travel around to different schools. Plus, I had my own classes.

Ben:                 What drove you back to Maine? What was the gravity back to you of ... because going from California to New Jersey, New Jersey to going, "Hey, I'm, I'm learning things," whether it be phys ed teaching and then getting into intellectual disabilities and helping and getting more ability and skill and aptitudes there, to go ... Why come back to Maine? What was drawing you there?

Bonnie:            Well, unfortunately, I didn't have much of a choice, unless I wanted to be divorced.

Ben:                 Okay, gotcha.

Bonnie:            Jim, when he was in Morristown, got a promotion to move to Wichita, and people warned him not to go, that his boss was a guy who had gone through three different people in that position in a six-month period of time. Jim insisted we were going to go to Wichita, Kansas.

Bonnie:            So he went out. He started the process of buying a house. Soon as we could sell the house in New Jersey, the girls ... By then, I'd had Misty.

Ben:                 Your second daughter. Yep.

Bonnie:            Second daughter. So we headed to Wichita, and we were there. I was very, very upset about it, very upset, because he took a $1,200 increase in pay, and I lost a $12,000 job. So we couldn't find a job. I couldn't find a job in Kansas within driving distance. There was a downfall in the aviation industry, and the aviators that were being laid off were going into the schools, public schools, and teaching.

Bonnie:            So two months to the day for the day we closed on our house in Kansas, we closed on it again and sold it, because he found out what people had been talking about. I mean, he couldn't take it. So we went back to New Jersey again and moved in with our close friends, Ray and Dolores Zukowski.

Bonnie:            There's a lot to this story, but we ended up wanting to buy a piece of land in Beddington Township that had a riding arena, which was very attractive to me. Yes, it had a little apartment attached to it, and it had an occupancy permit. But what we didn't understand after we all moved in and the horses were kicking on the side of the bedroom was that it was an occupancy permit for horses.

Ben:                 Oh. Oh, wow.

Bonnie:            The code enforcement officer came and said, "You've got to get out." So Jim went to Eastern Pennsylvania, bought a tent, and we lived in the tent ...

Ben:                 Oh, wow. Okay.

Bonnie:            ... while he was trying to design plans to build a house, and as it was, the codes was so strict there, you had to have architects and engineers and so forth.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            Meanwhile, he was traveling to Morristown, just whizzing around, and they hired him back. Well, we had to move out of the tent, because the code enforcement officer came again and said, "You can only have a tent pitched for 30 days in this township."

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            So by then, Jim said, "Well" ... I wasn't out of the tent yet, quite, and Jim said, "I've been offered a job, and I can live anywhere in the East Coast that I want to live, including Maine." I had moved so many times in such a short period of time and handled selling houses, buying houses and all that ...

Ben:                 While you have your two children.

Bonnie:            ... while I had the two kids. Oh, and the dog, and the cat, which ate the goldfish on the way across the country. So he said, "I'll give you 24 hours to decide where you'd want to live."

Bonnie:            By then, I was just plain exhausted. So, finally, I got a job in 1974 at a private school in Camden. It was a residential treatment center for kids with emotional challenges and intellectual disabilities, and I was the phys ed teacher there.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            Drove back and forth and forth, back and forth. Jim was flying more and more and more, and it finally came to a point where his and my marriage dissolved. He left in 1977, the same year as the private school closed ...

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            ... because the owner sold it, and I immediately got a job as the executive director of the Belfast Area Children's Center in Waldo and worked there for two years. All the time, I was raising the girls, because Jim had gone in '77. We didn't actually get divorced until '80, but in 1979, I got a call from a physical education friend of mine named Bonnie Bean, who had been a phys ed teacher at Pineland, the one state institution for people intellectual disabilities. She has subsequently gone to work for the state and was a case manager in Bangor.

Bonnie:            She called me. We were in the middle. State was the defendant in a federal class action suit, consent decree, and there was a demand for improvement of conditions at Pineland, as well as building up of community services. There were literally no community services for people, no group homes and things like that.

Bonnie:            So Bonnie called me one day in 1979, in May of '79, and she said, "Bonnie, I need a favor, and you owe me a favor."

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            "I'm on the interview team. We are trying. We've got a new nonprofit that we've started." Severed state employees and one community member started a nonprofit because of the federal court action.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            She said, "We can't find the right person we think could pull off this job of becoming the executive director," because this agency was supposed to support people who had never been deinstitutionalized since they had entered the institution at age five or six. They all had the dual diagnoses of intellectual disability and mental illness, were violent, self-injurious, and all of that.

Bonnie:            She said, "We've come down to the point where all the people in the interview team have been asked if they could think of one person who could do this job, then to ask them to come in for an interview." So she asked me to come in. I said, "I can't. I like my job." She said, "You owe me a favor." So I drove in for the interview. Before I got back to the daycare center, they called.

Ben:                 Yeah.

Bonnie:            Well, I got back there late, because I got stopped for speeding on the way in Monroe. But so that began my career, the one that I've had now for 40 years.

Ben:                 The name of the organization ...

Bonnie:            Was Opportunity Housing Incorporated.

Ben:                 Okay.

Bonnie:            We were to have had two six-person group homes, but they weren't six-person group homes for very long. Right there in '79, we opened up two group homes, one in Orrington, one in Bangor. On December 21st of 1979, I was asked to get a violent kid out of the Elizabeth Levinson center, which was a state-run pediatric facility, because this boy was pulling out the tubes and tipping over the wheelchairs of the other children.

Bonnie:            So we started children's services in '79, and here we are, 40 years later, and we're serving over 600 people a year in a whole array of services. We have the intellectual disability side of the family, and we have the mental health side of the family. Then we have three apartment buildings for people who have serious and persistent mental illness and were homeless. We got them off of the streets and into those apartment buildings. We have a food pantry in Brewer, and we have a mental health clubhouse in Ellsworth and case management in six counties.

Ben:                 So I think there kind of needs a little bit more explanation, 40 years of really great career success. Right? Here's where you start with day one, with a six-person group home facility, and how many staff members did you have at that point?

Bonnie:            Well, our first office was at what we then called BMHI or Dorothea Dix ...

Ben:                 Yes.

Bonnie:            ... because these people were so difficult that they'd been transferred from Pineland to Dorothea Dix. So my first office was up there, and I hired six staff members. When we moved out of there, we got to know the people. That was my idea. We don't want to get a group home and move six people into a group home who have never been out of an institution ...

Ben:                 Sure.

Bonnie:            ... and have all these significant reputations. We get to know them on their grounds. They get to trust us. Trust is a big part of the issue. They've been traumatized and beaten and sexually abused and everything else in the institutions.

Bonnie:            So on October 17th, we opened up the first group home, and then we hired a lot more staff. I mean, you had a lot of one-to-one support needs. Then we opened up the second home on December 21st. No, no, no, December, 11, 1979, and that that was ... Those people all had autism, intellectual disability, self-injurious behaviors. Three of them, we would taking lead tests every week, because they were life-threatened with lead in their system from picking the walls at BMHI and eating the cinder blocks.

Ben:                 But at that point, too, right, these medical diagnoses weren't what they are today, right? Autism was kind of very little known about autism at that point.

Bonnie:            That's right.

Ben:                 So very broad-based, in terms of these diagnoses, correct?

Bonnie:            Right.

Ben:                 In terms of the treatment and how people were treated individually, and so you've had an organization that's been almost the forefront of a lot of these medical diagnoses and how to help, right? How to assist them, how to maybe, in some cases, if they're able to, reintegrate them into the community and have them participate in lots of different levels.

Ben:                 So can you talk a little bit about this organization? Obviously, you saw a need right from Pineland, immediately, but how has that need changed? Right? So over 40 years, where I think you ... Was it a reaction, maybe immediately, to that class action suit, right? You said, "Well, here's an agency, and I'm heading up this agency," but it became something bigger. Can you talk about just that evolution over 40 years?

Bonnie:            Well, I think one of the things that I missed saying is that, in my interview, a picture was painted of this ... They're taking bets that the people who are taken out of the institutions are going to return. The state employees are taking bets. The advocates are taking bets. Definitely the defendants were taking bets. "How do you think you could pull this off?"

Bonnie:            And I described, "Meet them on their grounds," and I said, "Everything is possible." I knew when I was interviewing for this job that I treated everybody as an individual. I did not know one damn thing. I'm not a clinician. I never wanted to be one. I think you get into trouble if you try to be a clinician. I think that if you accept people for who they are and develop trust with them ... and there was nothing like this going on anywhere in the country. I could not turn to any community provider in the United States and find anybody who, outside of an institution, was providing supports for people with dual diagnoses.

Bonnie:            So yes, the times have changed. The big success at that point was just helping people to get out of these horrifying situations they were in in the institution. But right from the beginning, we were always helping people to identify what their dreams and their aspirations were and always believed that the human potential is limitless and that there's so much within all of us that we just have to have people to help pull it out of us.

Ben:                 That's right.

Bonnie:            So treating people as individuals helped the people we supported at that time and today to go further. Of course, the times have changed. Pineland closed in 1996. There is no more Pineland, and Dorothea Dix has downsized. I think it might have between 50 and 60 licensed so-called beds up there at this time.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            So you do not have people coming to you out of institutions now. You have kids coming to you or adults coming to you from living at home and from having a much more progressive education in the public schools than they had at that time. So the expectations of parents have changed over these 40 years.

Bonnie:            Unfortunately, we had one class action suit follow the Pineland class action suit, and those consent decrees helped to bring resources into the lives of these people so that we could give them the types of resources they needed to become more independent, more self-determined.

Bonnie:            But now we have a whole new generation of parents who want something different for their kids. They don't want their kids in group homes anymore. They want their kids in independent living. They want them to maximize the use of technology to assist them with their intellectual and behavioral needs. The conundrum here is that the smaller the environment, the more expensive it is.

Ben:                 Sure. Yeah. fixed cost, right?

Bonnie:            Right now, we've got 2,000 people on the waiting list for services just in intellectual disabilities, to say nothing about people with mental illness. I have to say that when the community consent decree came to an end in 2010 and I was chair of what was called the Consumer Advisory Board, which was the oversight body for the state, there was not one person on a waiting list in 2010. Now there are, in nine years ... Is that nine? 2010 ... Nine years. There are 2,000 people.

Ben:                 Wow.

Bonnie:            A part of that has to do with the administration that we've just finished with.

Ben:                 Sure. Yeah. Because do more with less, right, has continued to cut funding?

Bonnie:            Yes. Yep.

Ben:                 Yep. So in regards to the organization today, right, so do you have a kind of back of your head ... Obviously, if you're helping people, 600 people is what you're saying today, individuals that are receiving assistance through OHI?

Bonnie:            Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ben:                 What do you think the cumulative number would be over 40 years for OHI?

Bonnie:            Non-duplicative count, different human beings?

Ben:                 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bonnie:            I'd say between 3,000 and 4,000.

Ben:                 Yeah. So just think about ... Especially Maine's a small place anyway, right? There's 3,000 and 4,000 people receiving help to live independently and, again, reacclimate in lots of different ways. Why I'm bring that up as a number is you start thinking about purpose, and we talk about they're their own purpose, right, is that, "Hey, they're achieving." I love what you said and what you see at OHI is that statement, "Everything is possible."

Ben:                 I worked at OHI in college as well, in the training department. So I saw that every day, right, reporting to work and kind of seeing that and everybody living that. It always impressed on me that, look, it doesn't matter what maybe from the outside you see, but it's helping people realize their fullest potential. That's really ... What a kind of blessed mission to have, right, is to say, "Hey, I'm looking at every individual person and trying to help them achieve their possible best."

Ben:                 To parallel it to our podcast here, our little project, which is I think we all kind of get to a point in our life, and it could be we start out in that point or we could be in that point in retirement. We all kind of start losing our way a little bit of who are we and what are we about and what is our purpose and all that, which is why I wanted to kind of go to this point, right, to start talking about this.

Ben:                 In terms of your career at OHI, it's been 40 years, right? You've had a wealth of experiences that you just described before that, and people, in their life, they start kind of getting this gravity of, "Well, hey, at 55, you start thinking about retirement, right?" Isn't that what everybody starts saying, is at 55, you've got to start thinking about it, at 60? You've just got to get done, right? You've just got to get done your professional career, and that's something that we all just do, which is, by the way, as you've seen a lot of generations with kind of your great-grandparents all the way through, of going ...

Ben:                 Well, retirement's very new by the way. Right? This is not a ... This concept of 30 years of living after you get done with your professional career is very new, but when people are saying that to you in your role today, where you have this wealth of experience, you've helped grow an organization for 40 years ... and I'm sure people maybe directly say it or indirectly say it to you, of, "Well, when do you think about getting done?" How do you react to that? Because I know we what we started with is," I'm not going to retire," because of, again, what you described, of you get a lot of self-worth out of this.

Bonnie:            I was thinking about this question. Interestingly, I have surrounded myself. I think that this is part of the key to life, the key to the aging process. There are different types of aging. There's the aging of the body. There's an aging of the mind. There's the aging of the spirit, and I have surrounded myself with young people.

Bonnie:            So I'm a relationship builder. So I don't know that there's ever been a time when someone has said to me, "When are you going to retire?" when there isn't someone present at that moment who says, "She's not retiring. We need her. She's not retiring."

Ben:                 Right, right.

Bonnie:            I've been very, very involved in my national association. I've been the president of our national board twice. I had a 21-year stretch on the board of directors of our national association, everything from the director of policy, vice president of policy, to the president to everything else. I am surrounded now, at the national association and out-of-state association and right at OHI, with these young people at who ... They don't ask me if I'm going to retire. It's people my age who are tired ...

Ben:                 Yeah, yeah.

Bonnie:            ... and who don't have as exciting a job as I have.

Ben:                 You see it, don't you? You can see it in their eyes.

Bonnie:            Yes.

Ben:                 You can see it in their energy levels.

Bonnie:            I have seen it in my sister's eyes.

Ben:                 Yeah, and you can kind of get this feeling of, "Yeah, I'm spent." Right? "I've given all I can give, and am I moving to the next thing?" I see it with when you have ... I want to be careful in how I say this, but there's people that do a job for their career, right? They do it for lots of reasons, whether they're providing for their family or it's an exchange of their time for money, right? They're receiving money to then do things that they like to do, right? They're kind of using that as a way to find and explore other passions, because that's the best thing they can find that can compensate them the best for their time.

Ben:                 But the other part of ... which I think we all hope we all get into is this idea of, "This career is my passion," right? "This is what I'm placed on this earth to be. If it's unpaid, $1, or $1 million, or negative $10,000, I would probably pay this to be this." Right? "This defines who I am, and this is what gives me the most purpose."

Bonnie:            Yes.

Ben:                 Of course, we're dealing with the retiree population a lot, right?

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 It's easy to look at this, especially seeing it in that pre-retirement, and we're having so many people right now that are 58 years old and 60, and they're just done.

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 Right? You can see it. They're done. They're just, "I'm holding on for a reason of ... to 65. I'm holding on until 62, because I'm concerned about Medicare. I'm concerned about social security."

Ben:                 I'll tell a quick little story, trying to keep it as kind of confidential as possible here. But one lady that came in and we talked to, she was telling the story about ... I asked her a question. "Well, how much of your work do you like right now?" She answered with 0%.

Bonnie:            Oh, dear.

Ben:                 0%. I said "Okay, when you come home at the end of the day, what are you like? Are you happy? Are you angry?" She goes, "Ben, honestly, I'm upset. I'm stressed right out. I don't like what I just did for the day." I asked her the question of ... I said, "Okay, what is your relationship with your granddaughter right now? When she sees you at 5:05 and you've come home, what is your relationship?"

Ben:                 She goes, "Well, she's of a certain age. Little girls can be annoying sometimes. They're asking lots of questions there." She goes, "And I probably snap at her." I said, "Okay, well, what type of relationship are you having with your family, your granddaughter?", because if she's ... "Say she's eight years old, and if you're trying to get to Medicare or Social Security, say it's a few years out, how many years are you going to be the worst possible version of yourself, right, in order to get to some arbitrary benchmark, because that's not providing you passion your life?"

Ben:                 So those sorts of moments are what really drive me to go ... Every second, we should always be asking ourselves the question, "Is this the best version of me, and what am I here to do?" That's where I like where we're going with this, is this conversation about my purpose, right? Sometimes it's, "My purpose has evolved from something to something else," and that's great, too, but when you start getting people that they're just done with work ... and they're just done. I'm talking about really human stuff, right? It's like they've tapped out.

Ben:                 So what I hear you say is, "Hey, everyday, I get up. I'm excited to be at work." Right? "I'm excited to be with the people I'm with. I love what I do. I love the impact I'm making. I love the difference. I love surrounding myself with this., and I'm powered by it and not spent by it." I think that's the time we've kind of seen from people that are retiring from something, is this idea of when they're seeing that that quotient reverse, they're seeing that they don't exit the day and go, "I'm really proud of myself. I'm really proud of all the energy I gave. I'm actually happier because of what I did today." if it's the opposite, I think that's when you know, is kind of what we've kind of seen in experience.

Ben:                 So I just wanted to ... whether it be flipping that back to you as a thought. But from our end, there's just so many people unhappy in their jobs, and it's so saddening to me. Well, life is so short that we've got to we got to maximize our time, and we've got to find that thing, because if it's just you're just trying to get money in order to do something else, well, I don't want that person to have a negative relationship with their granddaughter for $30,000. Right? What is that worth? Worth way more than that. Who would ever have that trade-off, if you actually put it in those terms?

Ben:                 So I wanted to just kind of flip ... It's not really a question. It's a statement, back to you, but I wanted to kind of have that conversation with you.

Bonnie:            Well, I really am blessed in the job I have, because the things that I love to do are part of my job. So, for example, my granddaughter, speaking about granddaughters, is in Washington. She works for Congress. Now, because of the travel that I do in my job, I see Elizabeth far more than I would if I wasn't traveling.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            I just spent a week in Moldova, studying, visiting with people with disabilities in little, tiny, poverty-stricken villages. But what did I do when I left Moldova? I flew into Washington, DC for a policy summit and had dinner two different nights and spend an afternoon with Elizabeth.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            So in the work that I do, relationships are very important to me. Family is very important to me, and I love travel.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            I get to do all of that. I think there's a difference when you're speaking to a retiree, whether that retiree is the boss or is not the boss. I've built a team at OHI, and so we have a great succession plan. If I were to drop off the face of the earth today, we know, with board approval, who is going to be the next CEO.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            We have a lineup of people who could be the CEO.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            No, they're not me. Nobody is anybody but themselves.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            So I go home happy every night. I go home exhausted because I'm working as many hours a day, on average, right now as I did when I started this job. I've always worked hard. I love to work hard, and I've got a good situation at home. Well, I've got my sister and brother-in-law right around the corner from me, down on Cape Jellison, and now I've got my daughter Misty, who is a harder worker than me, and her husband, Dan, around the other corner, and we talk every day. Then I've got Holly and Matt down in Rhode Island, the parents of Elizabeth. Holly and I talk every day on the way to work.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            So I've got family, I've got my brother Bobby in Prospect. I see him every Sunday, and my brother Terry at Litchfield, I don't see quite as often, but I've got my family all around. My grandson Noah is a junior at NYU.

Bonnie:            I don't care what kind of a job I would have. I could be retired right now, but he doesn't want me at NYU.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            He's got too many fishes frying there at NYU.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            So I love what I do, and if I ever have to fill out an application of any kind and ask for income, I don't know. I have to get on the Internet and Vanguard Savings and look up what I'm making, because I don't know.

Ben:                 Right, right.

Bonnie:            It's not important to me. I go home every night, and I go home to two very stable creatures. One is my partner, Damien, who doesn't make any demands on me. He's not the least bit threatened by a strong woman, and he is incredibly bright. He's a veteran, and my 185-pound St. Bernard. Yes, Bruno, my dog.

Ben:                 Well, I think what I want to just kind of commend you for, right, is being thoughtful to almost the audit of your time, right? It's easy to just kind of get in a habitual pattern, right, especially over 40 years of, hey, I kind of get into a pattern of what my role is, and it can feel not new. It can feel routine and boring after a while. Then you lose your passion for it, because maybe you're not reinventing yourself.

Ben:                 From years ago, and probably when I was in college, I had done an interview with you. I think it was an MBA program class that we had, and I had to talk to our class about it. But the idea of futurism is that you've always been looking ahead, and that's something where kind of looking ahead, that I know this is not something you've probably not thought about, is you've created all of this, because if something is off in my life, I have a system in place to help make all this work, right? Because you've worked too hard for 40 years of OHI to make that really work and to have all these people that are dependent on this organization, if something happened to you, for that just to go away, right?

Ben:                 There's this talk about ... Our word in the financial industry is this fiduciary, right, is this putting interests of someone else above your own, which is what you're doing in this organization, right? So you're putting all these systems in place, which is extremely important as an executive, but as a responsible person, is making sure that those things are there.

Ben:                 But from the happiness perspective, for retirement, again ... What I heard you say is that you've created systems in place and these relationships that are happening, that they happen every day, and you've maintained them, and you continue with all these family and friends you have to work at, right? They're two-way streets, but you always have to really work hard to maintain relationships over your life.

Bonnie:            Oh, I don't know about that. I don't know that you have to work hard. If you are a natural relationship builder, it's not work.

Ben:                 That's true.

Bonnie:            It's a part of who you are, and people know it.

Ben:                 Yeah.

Bonnie:            People know it. So I have friends all over the country. I like to say that if I got stranded, if an airplane had to stop someplace, I would know somebody I could call to come get me ...

Ben:                 That's beautiful.

Bonnie:            ... in almost every state, including Hawaii and Alaska, and in some foreign countries, too. Of course, I've planned my funeral.

Ben:                 Yep. Right.

Bonnie:            Well, I mean, not the details, except that it's going to be a huge party, and all these people I have wanted forever to get to meet one another, because there's Denise up in Alaska, and there's Joanie in Sedona and Amy in Ohio. They'll all come, and they'll get to meet one another.

Ben:                 I want to ask you just a future question. So, again, the systems and elements for you, are there things about ... In terms of the aging process, what are you scared of? This is something where we had Dr. Cliff Singer on a few episodes ago, and one of the things that we talked about was mortality isn't what people really are fearful of as they're aging, as you have a peak of awareness of your own mortality, that you kind of have this fear that really settles by the fifties and the sixties.

Ben:                 What he says is a lot of the issue is around dependency, is that people don't want to be a burden, right? They want to be independent. They want to do all the things they always wanted to do, and they want to continue to do that as long as possible. So a lot of the resistance over aging, what he was describing, was dependency. Would you share that? In terms of aging for you, what kind of is fearful for you?

Bonnie:            I think that having to have my two working daughters quit work. I have argued with them about this, and you will not need to support me. You will not need to take care of me. I would be just fine in a nursing home, and if I've got a tongue in my head and half of a brain, I, I'll run the nursing home. I won't let them treat me badly.

Ben:                 Sure, sure.

Bonnie:            But I would say that that is my major concern. But the girls, they both are in the healthcare field, so they are a bit more astute about what it means to take care of somebody ...

Ben:                 Sure.

Bonnie:            ... than another kid who says, "Oh, I'm going to take care of you," but then, when the time comes, they have no clue about it.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            So I am concerned about that, although they have a plan that, one of these trips, I'm going to crash and burn doing some exciting thing, and then they won't need to take care of me. My health is good.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            I don't want to brag about it, but I had a tick on my back last week, and my staff got all upset when I discovered the tick. "You've got to get over there to Penobscot Healthcare" and so forth and so on. When I went over there, this young guy who's taking and doing the intake, well he asked me what medications I was taking, and I said, "Well, I'm not" "Well, who is your doctor?" I said, "I don't have one," I mean, because the doctors turn over fast.

Ben:                 Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Bonnie:            So, I mean, over there at Husson Internal Medicine, I've had four doctors. So I haven't gone back after three years. I'm tired of them turning over.

Ben:                 Yep.

Bonnie:            But I do not take calcium or vitamin something or other, nothing. I don't take anything. This young guy asked me my birthdate again. So the same thing happened when the tick doctor came in.

Ben:                 Yeah.

Bonnie:            He said, "They haven't got any medications down for you."

Ben:                 "Surely, that must be wrong."

Bonnie:            Yeah. "Well, but your vital signs" ...

Ben:                 Too good?

Bonnie:            "Your pulse is 52. Why is that it?" My blood pressure was something like 112 over 63 or something. I don't know what it was, some low thing. Anyway, and so my health is good. That's a part of why I can be as positive and optimistic about my future, is this is not work for me. It is not work.

Ben:                 Yeah. I want to wrap up with one final question for you. So usually what we're asking as our last question on this podcast is asking people about their retirement success, which I think we've covered in spades and probably isn't the best question to ask. So I want to ask a different side of that question. What advice would you give somebody that is looking to work as long as possible in the career that they love? What do you think that they should be thinking about or doing to enable them to do that?

Bonnie:            They've got to be working in a job that they love and that they can't do without. They have got to have a work-home life balance. They have got to do the things that are going to keep them mentally and physically healthy. Those things are pieces of advice.

Bonnie:            I also would say you've got to do succession planning, whether it's leaving things in good shape at home so that if you drop today, your passwords are all lined up, even though you have to change them every five minutes.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            I mean, I leave on the refrigerator who to call for Damien and all of the oil, the gas, the this, the that, the paper people. So you've got to have things organized, because it weighs on you. There were a few ... Oh, I would say about eight years, seven years ago maybe, I felt there were things that needed tending to that I'd put off for too many years. So I took a ... I think it was a month or two sabbatical ...

Ben:                 Interesting.

Bonnie:            ... and put some things in order. So you have to have peace of mind to continue to work. If you don't have peace of mind ...

Ben:                 Which kind of goes to organization, right?

Bonnie:            Yes.

Ben:                 It's like, well, being organized leads to more confidence. More confidence allows you to then have that peace of mind to do what you want to do too, right ...

Bonnie:            Right.

Ben:                 ... whether that's working or whatever.

Bonnie:            Right. Also, you can't go to bed at night sorry that you didn't say something to somebody that you should have said.

Ben:                 Right.

Bonnie:            You have got to have those conversations. Sometimes they're courageous conversations, but don't let the sun set on a bad relationship.

Ben:                 Yep. I agree with that. That's a good thought to end on. So Bonnie, I want to thank you for being on our show today. I so appreciate you sharing your story. I think for this, for our show, we want to provide inspiration. So I know, in lots of different ways, you've inspired me personally. So I appreciate you coming on and doing this for us. So thank you for coming on today.

Bonnie:            Thank you for inviting me.

Ben:                 Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you. So I appreciate everybody tuning in today. So happy to have Bonnie coming in, and I've been referred to her as Aunt Bonnie, right?

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 So I have a family relationship with Bonnie there. Why was she the person? Again, we were at a birthday party together, and you ask the natural, "Hey, when are you going to retire?" She says, "I'm not going to retire."

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 Well, jeez, that would be a phenomenal podcast, because we hear that from clients all the time.

Curtis:              We do. Yep.

Ben:                 It's like, "Well, I love what I do, and I'm not going to retire." Well, jeez, there's got to be a retirement at some sort of time, right?

Curtis:              No. "But, really, when are you going to retire?"

Ben:                 Yeah. "Really," yeah, "when is that going to happen?" So there's this kind of natural gravity that pushes people to eventually get done their position or their job or their vocation or that sort of thing.

Ben:                 Again, the purpose of our podcast is about purpose. Well, we go through that entire conversation with Bonnie, and you go, "I completely 1000% understand her purpose" ...

Curtis:              Yeah, yeah.

Ben:                 ... "is being part of OHI and helping people with mental health and mental disabilities and growing that organization to help that population." You can just tell she bleeds it. She cares with all of her essence of her being, which is what I've really loved about her my entire life ...

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 ... is kind of seeing her having that purpose. There's no wavering. There's no other things she'd rather be doing in her life.

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 That's it.

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 So for me, that was kind of why I wanted her on the show today, and I really appreciated her telling that story like only she could. Hopefully, you all hearing that today got something from that, too.

Curtis:              Yeah, it was certainly interesting for me to sit here, because I've heard of Bonnie a lot from you.

Ben:                 Yeah.

Curtis:              But no, she did a great job. Just to stress on the statement "I'm not going to retire," we joke about it, but there really are a lot of people we hear that from. I think one reason that Bonnie is successful and can say that is there is a plan. Bonnie knows that, inevitably, someday she's not going to be working ...

Ben:                 That's right.

Curtis:              ... whether that's her choice or not. She's shared her thoughts on that. But it's so important to have that body at OHI she talks about, the governing body above her, that there is a plan in place for the day that she doesn't come to work.

Ben:                 Yep.

Curtis:              We talked about it a little bit with Susan Ware Page and more recently with David Jean, just about businesses having that succession plan. It differs a little bit, because some of the people we hear it from may be the only person at the top of the organization. But I guess I would say it's even more critical for them. It is more critical for them to kind of have that plan.

Ben:                 Yeah. With Bonnie, of course, what's interesting about ... She's a part of a nonprofit, right?

Curtis:              Right.

Ben:                 So they have a board of directors, and they have people that are independently thinking about the organization and these sorts of situations. So there's a natural forcing the leaders to think about that.

Curtis:              Yeah. Right.

Ben:                 It's like, "Hey, what are you going to do when you're not here anymore?"

Curtis:              Right.

Ben:                 "This is going to be a day, and we need to have a plan in place," which, in a way, makes her job so much easier. She's not looking over our shoulder, going, "Is this the day that they're going to kick me out today?"

Curtis:              Right.

Ben:                 There's an understanding what that looks like and when that's going to be and what sort of situation would have to arise for her to step down or step into a different capacity. So I like that that that was an outcome from this conversation of, "When I say I'm not going to retire, it means that I have something in place that allows me to stay in this job as long as possible" ...

Curtis:              Right.

Ben:                 ... and to hear this from the retiree perspective, which we've talked to Diane Walsh about is ...

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 ... "My purpose is I want to stay in my home as long as possible." Well, you have to do things in your home to allow you to stay there.

Curtis:              Right.

Ben:                 It's the same thing with the job, right?

Curtis:              Yep, yep.

Ben:                 Again, this isn't a job. This is her purpose and her passion and her career.

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 So yeah, so I think a good takeaway for those that are listening today is, "Hey, if I'm an owner, and I might be the only person that is ... I'm a one person owner in a company, and that's all we do. But having that so if something happens to me today, that there's kind of this living will," like what Rachel and Joy talked about from Rudman Winchell ...

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 ... this kind of," Things happen. Here's where the keys are. Here's how the payroll gets done. Here's all my responsibilities, and it'll be taken care of that way." So pretty cool.

Curtis:              Yeah.

Ben:                 For those listening, again, if you want more resources or to hear a little bit more about Bonnie's story and OHI, we will have links to OHI and Bonnie through our blog. So you can go to blog.guidancepointllc.com/11.

Curtis:              11. This is 11.

Ben:                 We've made it past the 10 mark.

Curtis:              That's right.

Ben:                 Wow.

Curtis:              We got to double digits and kept going.

Ben:                 Yeah. So you can go there and find more information. We appreciate you tuning in. Hopefully, you got something out of today, and looking forward to next time.