The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast Ep 037: Empowering Visibility in Women over 50

 

 

Transcript 

Ben Smith:

Welcome, everyone to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. My name is Ben Smith. I'm joined by my two colleagues, Curtis Worcester and Abby Doody. The Raye's Mustard and Holy Donut to my brother's lobster. How are you guys doing today?

Curtis Worcester:

Doing well.

Abby Doody:

Good. How are you?

Ben Smith:

Doing well. We keep rolling on these podcasts here have. I another really great show for you today. One of the things that we've been talking about more and kind of hearing a little bit more from our clients is that really as we change from one stage of our life to another, one thing we observe is really this resistance and struggle of losing our identity from a previous stage of life. Sometimes all of our clients, they might have been a captain of industry, maybe there are star athletes, but perhaps they're a parent to a child or children that are now independent. So there's lots of identity struggles that we've also heard from women over 50 and that's something that's made them feel like being a woman has been some of the hardest parts to feel like they've lost. That might be their beauty, it might be vocation, motherhood, being a spouse, lots of different things of our lives that we identify with and that changes in our life.

Ben Smith:

So really within the show, we want to have a guest on that has really tackled their own visibility, and done it really head on, and really reinvented themselves with a sense of optimism and hope in the face of this feeling. So our next guest, she has survived multiple crises in her life. And one notable, while living in Honolulu with her first husband and two biological daughters, she was suddenly widowed in her early 40s after her husband suffered a massive heart attack while traveling on business.

Ben Smith:

So in 1990, she married real estate auction pioneer, Sheldon F. Good, and together, they face the challenge of creating a large blended family. So she has also survived cancer and family suicide, but today she's the matriarch of a blended family. I like to describe her, and I know others do too, as a hip sophisticated grandmother to 25 grands and also redefining what it means to live life to the fullest as she's visited over 67 countries and regularly visits her children and grandchildren in seven different US cities. So I'd like to welcome at this time, to The Retirement Success in Maine Podcast, Susan Honey Good. Susan, thank you for being on the show. Welcome.

Susan Honey Good:

Well, I'm excited to be with you, especially since I had ... Several summers of my growing up I spent in Maine.

Ben Smith:

I love that.

Susan Honey Good:

We have camaraderie.

Ben Smith:

Well, tell us about that. Because I always like to dig in on any of our shows in terms of backgrounds and story, I'd love to hear a load of that connection to Maine about those summer experiences.

Susan Honey Good:

Well, my parents sent me away to camp in the summer. They decided that because I grew up in a very small little town that I nicknamed Kankakee by the Sea, but it really wasn't. It was in a big cornfield. They wanted to expose me to other facets of life. So they sent me to camp in Maine. It was in Freiburg, Maine, and it was a wonderful experience in my life because I met girls my age older and younger also, and experienced living with maybe 100 other girls for eight weeks, and actually I spent years going to this camp. I grew from my experience and I learned. Actually they had a 40th reunion and I took my husband who I call my ultimate concierge, Sheldon Good. He went back to Maine, and I saw my friends. So I love Maine. You live in a beautiful spot in the world.

Ben Smith:

I got to say, Susan, too is Freiburg ... You know when you get to Freiburg because you see the mountains there and it is so pretty. You really feel like it's just another ... It's a different corner of Maine. There's lots of different corners and that's just one that's very special. It really is breathtaking kind of being there. So I can imagine just being in that camp for eight weeks with friends experiencing outdoors, and friendship, and growth. It must have been a great experience.

Susan Honey Good:

And fried clams, and my first lobster, the Maine lobster in Portland.

Ben Smith:

Well, and you get pretty spoiled when you go to Maine and you have a Maine lobster because it's not like when you go other places and they give you Maine lobster because it's just as fresh as it could be.

Susan Honey Good:

I know.

Ben Smith:

I know I gave a little bit of lead in there in terms of her introduction. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and story in addition to the Maine camp piece, because I think with all this is why is Susan the guest today or why are we talking too? And I think that's one of the big things about your ark here, about your life, and really ultimately going towards the path of creating your community and your website on honeygood.com.

Susan Honey Good:

Well, I grew up in a small town that I told you I nicknamed Kankakee by the Sea, and actually, I was in a minority. It wasn't that easy because I came from one of the founding families of this town. So I was able financially to have things that most of my friends didn't have because it was blue collar town. But I was not a spoiled child. And also, the town was primarily Catholic and I was a little Jewish girl. So I had to survive.

Susan Honey Good:

I really didn't love growing up there. I always felt a little set apart, and that's why I love going to camp in Maine so much. But getting back to it, it really wasn't until maybe 20 some years later after I left at 18 to go to college that one day it dawned on me that I loved Kankakee by the Sea so much because I learned what it felt like to have empathy for others and compassion for others. I also acquired a great deal of resilience. And all three of these things have voted me well as a mom, a friend, a wife, owning my own company. So I owe a lot Kankakee by the Sea. And now actually, I go back every summer one time and I meet friends for lunch. I take my husband with me.

Ben Smith:

Again, the concierge.

Susan Honey Good:

Yeah. My concierge. Yeah.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. I want to hear a little bit about honeygood.com. In terms of you and kind of what you've been doing here with this website, there's a lot of ... Why I kind of gravitated to you, why our team did was you've really done this. You've really I think identified a need of women about finding identity and really establishing who you are, and it's okay to evolve, and it's okay to change. It's okay to be more of yourself, which is I think what really our show and our podcast is about. So I know with your community, honeygood.com, you've really been doing that. Can you talk a little bit about that Genesis or eureka moment of really helping women navigating aging and how that's evolved over time for you?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, let me start out by telling you how it happened.

Ben Smith:

Please. Yeah.

Susan Honey Good:

I won't take that long. I was bored. I met a woman and I started talking to her. It was at a tee. We had never seen each other before. And she said, "Well, what do you do?" And I said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I'm really bored and I'm really looking for something to do. I'm always doing something, but I'm bored." And she said, "Well, I can tell you what to do." And I said, "You can tell me what to do?" And she said, "I can." She said, "If you keep a journal for three months and you never miss a day writing, you will find your voice." And I said, "But I've never written anything in my life except in a blue book in college. I'm not a writer." She said, "It doesn't matter. I'm telling you, you'll find your voice." And I said, "Well, how do you know?" She said, "Because I'm a writer."

Susan Honey Good:

I believe in serendipity, I believe in fairies. So as I drove home, I turned on my French music at my car that my daughter gave me and kind of whistled the happy tune. I got home and I said to my husband, I told him the story. And I said, "Now I know how to type. I have my apple laptop. I want to try keeping a journal." So I did. And during this time we traveled a lot, but I took my journal ... my laptop with me. And for three months, I never missed a day writing. I just would get up in the morning and just write something. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have a plan for Honey Good either.

Susan Honey Good:

At the end of the three months, a friend said to me, "Well, now that you've sent me your nine million words, I think you should have a website." And I said, "I don't know anything about the internet." Now, I didn't know anything about writing either. I want women to listen to me because of this. You cannot let fear ever stand in your way because if you let fear stand in your way, you'll never start even when you invest money with people. You do your work, you do your homework, your research, you talk to people, then you take a leap. You don't ever let fear stand in your way. So I said, "I don't know one thing about a website." She says, "Well, I'm going to a networking meeting, and I am going to see if there's someone there that can put you on the internet." And I met this guy, Matt, he came over to our house. Before you know it, I was on the internet. I didn't have a following, I just ... I had nothing. I just started writing my stories. And little by little because I was authentic, I think. And I was very aspirational because I am aspirational, not inspirational, but I always aspire. That's how I wrote, in an aspirational way. Before you knew it, before I knew it, I started gathering women around me.

Susan Honey Good:

It was a hobby. It was not a business. It turned into a business. And now seven years later, I look back and I say, "I want to do a business I didn't know one thing about it, I would not advise it." It's been really hard technically. It's not like you own a little shop on a street and you know how to talk to people, et cetera. Everything's behind this computer. So it was very hard for me tech wise. But over the years, I think I have ... as a woman, I have flourished because of it. I really have. And so that's how it all started. It was a hobby.

Ben Smith:

And Susan, I love it. You just said about being aspirational, is that ... but it's aspiration tied with weakness, it's tied with a feeling of doubt, it's tied with a feeling of anxiety. There's something I said, I have struggled with this in the past. This is something that I've gone through, but here's how it got to the other side of it. And I think the vulnerabilities that we all have in our own lives, but you're even saying, "Hey, me in terms of my identity, and who I am, and what I've gone through is something that ..." But here's the aspirational component which I think we all need to hear.

Ben Smith:

When I've gone through your website and really read a lot of your work over the last few months, that's what I've taken out of it. Is it's just a really great kind of combination back and forth because I think when you go either one way or the other, it's all my flaws, and well, it was me, and I'm this, and this is bad. Or just everything's hunky-dory which is kind of the social media stuff at times. Is everything's perfect, everything's always great, nothing's ever wrong. Having those two things together, I think was ... with my eyes, what I'm seeing is your magic combination there. Would you agree?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, I happen to be a very fortunate person to have a positive attitude. I do think a little bit it's in your genes, your makeup. I just always see my glass half full even when it's empty. It's been empty, but for some reason, we have ... everybody has the power within them to conquer whatever they have to conquer. And I don't say it lightly because it's scary at times. If you get really sick, or you lose your job, or you become widowed, or divorced, it's really scary, but at that point, you have to make a choice. I try and not teach women, but I just tell them my stories. How I'm really scared, but I've got that positive attitude going. I then say to myself, "Okay. I've got choices." And now I'm going to start doing some inquiries and I'm going to try and figure out what to do with the goal of landing on my feet.

Ben Smith:

And I like what you said there [inaudible 00:14:22] about a couple things. One is, from a life perspective, it is having that mindset of trying to get to the other side, and also from a business perspective, when you say, "Hey, I'm running my website, honeygood.com." I don't know anything about the website, I don't know anything about tech this, I don't know anything about HTML code or any of that, but what you do know about is what the message you're trying to convey and that you can solve the rest of it.

Susan Honey Good:

And so can everyone.

Ben Smith:

That's what I want to make as the point.

Susan Honey Good:

It's not me, it's everyone can.

Ben Smith:

That we can all look to the things in our life and the reason why we should not do things. And there's always a reason you can do that, but there's also the reason the other side, right?

Susan Honey Good:

Yes.

Ben Smith:

So that's what I wanted to get to you today, Susan. It's really around this line of talking about empowering visibility in women over 50. Again, we sometimes may look at ourselves or we may see ourselves change over time. We may look at our own visibility and say, "Well, I'm not what I'm used to. And because of reasons A, B, and C, that maybe I'm not worthy of love, or maybe I'm not worthy of attention." Something along those lines. So that's why we wanted to get you in today's show. So really, what we're tackling is the idea of a concept of identity loss. Obviously the biography we read, it's tough to see that in terms of all the stuff you've done in your life, you really had any trouble coming to grips with who are women at any age. And I know what you just said was a little kind of that too, but can you talk about how you've struggled with your own identity over time, and how often do you see this with other women?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, I was very fortunate that my mother, who's still loving, she did everything. She tried, and so she was a great role model for me. She didn't own a company, that's about the only thing, but she tried and did everything. And my dad always took the high road. That's really hard to do especially for women, but it works. So this is how I feel, I think after you are 50 years old, you can be a shy woman and very introspective, or you can be a woman that's just out there, but one thing I think every woman should realize after she is 50, 60, whatever, over her lifetime, she has, whether she realized it or not, she's earned her PhD in life. So somewhere in here, she's really interesting. Especially if you are interesting, you are interested. We talked about this a little bit. If you take a woman, she now has gray hair, she's not as attractive as she was in her 40s, 30s, 20s, but if she's interesting and curious and she realizes she is, even if she's a quiet soul, when she walks into a room, she has power, she has mental power. She's going to walk taller, and she's going to smile broader, and her eyes are going to twinkle. There can be a woman that is far more beautiful than she is and she's going to attract people to her.

Susan Honey Good:

So I believe that 80% of every woman's beauty, even young women, is inside. It's your inner beauty. And 20% is your outer beauty. And because the magazines, and the newspapers, and everything, it's always young, young, young, young, no wonder women feel this way, because they forget to mention what's really up here. That's real beauty because you become interesting. You see? I think of women would just think about this a little bit, and yes, keep themselves up and take care of themselves, but realize they have far more up here than the 20-year-old, or the 30-year-old, or the 40-year-old, right?

Ben Smith:

Absolutely. Susan, what I'll add to that too is in terms of ... Obviously, we all go through training in our lives and lots of different things, and seminars, and such, but one thing I always learned was this idea of when we walk into any room, there's really two types of people. There's energy givers and energy takers. We know those people when they walk in, because those energy takers are the ones that, well, it was me, and the mood of the room just goes way down. Because they take the energy from others and take them to themselves, those people are hard to be around as they don't give anything back to us. So the energy givers are the ones that walk into that room and all of a sudden they want ... people want to be around them because people feel better when they're around them. They feel like they want to be associated with that person because that energy in the room just got better.

Ben Smith:

What you're describing is something very similar. Obviously from a women perspective, it's a little different, but I kind of follow that too. You can notice people when they walk in and all sudden that ... especially if they know them, that mood of the room will change one way or the other, and that says a lot.

Susan Honey Good:

I agree. I have an interesting story because after the children leave the home and people retire, a lot of people they move because they're empty nesters, whatever, and they have to make a choice of where to go if they're going to move away. Not just downsize, but say move to warm weather. So I had a friend about ... Well, she was at least 15 years older than I am, and she lived in Manhattan, and she had piercing blue eyes, white hair. Even as a young girl, she owned a small newspaper. She wasn't a model, but you would notice her. She went home and she said to her husband, "Jerry, you know what? I've been walking down Madison Avenue lately and no one's noticing me. I'm getting really down, and I'm not happy about it, and I know it's that I'm invisible. I'm no longer young." So she said, "So I really been thinking about this. I think we should move to Palm Springs, California." And he said, "What?" She said, "Yes, because everyone's older, and I can make my mark. I can feel within myself visible again. Manhattan is not for me anymore." That's when I met her. She totally reinvented herself. And she believed that every 10 years a woman should reinvent themselves in some way.

Susan Honey Good:

So what did she do? She started collecting beautiful beads and she started designing jewelry, and it was beautiful. She sold jewelry, and she learned to play bridge, she learned to play mahjong, she would play canasta, and she became the most visible woman in a room. It's a wonderful story because she knew herself, and she knew it was time in her life to make a choice, and she figured out what was good for her. So to all the women out there, if you're sitting wondering what to do, you don't have to move to a new town. Maybe you join a new group, maybe you go back to college and take a course, whatever makes you happy. Do a shift. You know who you are, you just have to make that shift.

Susan Honey Good:

So I like to kind of tell a story because you usually remember something instead of just writing I think this, or I think that, or I did this. When you relate it to something that actually happened and it was so successful than ... it makes you think. So make a list. I always say take a sheet of paper, make a list. Pros, cons, what you like, what you wouldn't like and do some real soul searching. And then don't let fear stop you and go for it.

Abby Doody:

That's great. Because I think a lot of women who get older, that sense of beauty that other people perceive about us kind of goes away. And so trying to find ways to kind of reinvent yourself or become visible again becomes really important. So you kind of touched on it a little bit, but I think digging into it a little more would be helpful. So your advice to women who kind of are feeling this way, what do you tell them? How do they become visible again even if it's just from their own self-confidence perspective?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, first of all, what Joyce did she put herself in a community where she was on equal footing with all the other women and that right away was very helpful. It goes back to going inside your head and realizing that you have your own Moxie. You have it. By joining a group, I think that's very beneficial. Now, we're all in a flux with our lifestyle. It's very difficult. I call the place we live now, elsewhere, because the whole world is elsewhere. None of us have ever been exposed to this type of situation. So you can spend time with your family, take up a new career, meet new people by joining a new group. You have to do it yourself. No one can do it for you. And ultimately, the fact is that every woman is going ... is not going to be as beautiful as she was when she was younger, right?

Curtis Worcester:

That's right. Yeah.

Abby Doody:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.

Susan Honey Good:

And positive, think positive. There's positive psychology. It's a whole new field today. So instead of dwelling on what you don't have, dwell on what you do have.

Curtis Worcester:

Susan, I want to rotate a little bit here and I actually want to give you a little plug. So on your blog at honeygood.com, Susan, you had a guest contributor and you discussed the concept of your enchanted self and the importance of your value moments in life. Can you just take a minute and talk about that concept of your enchanted self and how does it help women build their identity?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, actually, what that was is I did a podcast with a positive psychologist. Her name is Barbara. And she opened up a whole new world to me. I was fascinated. I had just mentioned positive psychology, I had never heard of it before. So what she does with young women ... women or women, no matter what our age, is that when she talks to them, she doesn't talk to them about what was bad in their life, she talks to them about what was good in their life. Like I explained to you, my enchanted self was realizing that growing up in Kankakee by the Sea really taught me things. It's wonderful to have empathy for others and compassion for others. And it's wonderful to have a tenacity and true grit. I lived in a negative surrounding, but out of it came positive results. And that's how you learned to welcome in your enchanted self.

Ben Smith:

I like that. I want to say too, Susan, we actually had a guest on a few episodes ago, her name was Elisa Spain. She does life coaching, but career coaching as well. She's actually based in Chicago. So one of the things we really learned from her, similar to your the positive psychology piece, was this concept of unreliable narrator. So the context here is when we say things about ourselves, flat things that we say about ourselves are sometimes things that counteract or don't tell the real story. So for example that maybe we're talking about our financial advisory practice. It's been doing great, we've been building it, we're at $300 million in assets, but you know what? It's really a small practice.

Ben Smith:

A lot of other firms have been growing way more than we have. We got a good team, but it's not that big of a team. So we start saying things that might be positive, and then we immediately counteract with something that is negative because we don't want to maybe seem too conceited or overconfident. So kind of what we say to others about our stories immediately kind of counteract the positive things that we're doing. And that was a really kind of valuable thing that we're saying, "Hey, we all do that too." This is something where we say our life story, or I'm really proud of this person, or my wife, or my husband, or my son or my daughter. We're proud of these things happening, but, "Oh, well, they're salutatory and have their high school, but they only have 80 kids in their class." Well, why'd we have to do that? Why would we have to go and immediately kind of knocked that accomplishment?

Susan Honey Good:

Absolutely.

Ben Smith:

I think we were kind of looking at that as something we're like, "Wow, we do that all the time too." Maybe it's just the Maine thing or maybe there's just a lot of us who kind of do that. But what I hear you going from the positive psychology angle is very similar of, we need to look at the positive things in our life and look at all the things that we're doing and not kind of bring in all the negativity.

Susan Honey Good:

I think that's very important. And I think it's not bad to like yourself. Actually, it's very healthy to like yourself and be good to yourself. So many people, I don't know, especially women, they feel guilty if they're good to themselves, and nurture themselves, and take time for themselves. And really, in a way, what you're saying is it's really important to be authentic. People look up to you when you're authentic and when you're vulnerable because everybody is vulnerable sometime. But when you can write and say, "I felt really scared." Or, "I felt vulnerable." That's really being strong because you can say it. But quite honestly what you said about your company, and I'm not giving you a plug, I'm just saying, I would rather go to a small company because that's what you said your [inaudible 00:29:05]. I would rather because I would feel that I was really important, and that I wasn't a number.

Ben Smith:

And I think that's where we go as, hey, we're proud of what we've built, but also we're proud of the size we are. There's a mouse for every house. In some cases, somebody wants to be with the gigantic institution, and for whatever reason that's something that they want to be. Maybe there's more strength there, or whatever, a deeper depth, or whatever the thing might be, but we have built this and this is how we work with our clients and we want clients to be as passionate about us as we are about them. That's I think the marriage. When people are [inaudible 00:29:47], we're saying, "Hey, we're attracting clients that we want to work with every day, not clients who we go, "Well." Hopefully anybody chooses me because hopefully we can get any business in the door. And that's not what we're putting out. Even with the shows here that we're doing, it's all about, well, what is it like to work with Ben, and Abby, and Curtis, and the guidance point team here? And again, well, here's our interactions and we care so much about you as our clients.

Ben Smith:

We want to have these conversations because these are the problems that we all deal with. And having experts like yourself on, Susan, is one way that we can express that to people. So I think this is a really great segue into another great question here. Is you have really developed something in terms of community, is that you have a Facebook group, it's called Grand Women with Moxie where loneliness disappears. We love Moxie because of the Maine kind of connection to Moxie. But you have over 1,200 members and that is growing every day, which by the way to get 1,200 people to agree on anything in this day And age is amazing. So can you talk a little bit about why these sorts of groups are so important for women especially?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, what I enjoy so much on Honey Good is when people comment to me, I love to reply. And I don't reply like this, I really reply, and I like that interaction, and so I was thinking about this and my groups. I was written up in the New York Times, it's probably three years ago now, and it's because I had a multi generational group. The women were between the ages of 22 and 95, and no one knew anyone except me. The New York Times wanted me to do this because they knew I loved groups. To start back a minute, I believe women need women, very much so.

Susan Honey Good:

So at the end of two hours, they didn't want to stop talking. I felt so wonderful when everyone laughed because of the interaction. And I said to myself, "I've always been a gatherer. I've always collected." I collect seashells, I collect turtles because I learned when I was in China that turtles, it's a folklore as long life. I just love collecting. So my group is like they're in my parlor. I've collected them and they just mean a lot to me, and I want to hear their stories.

Susan Honey Good:

It's not about me, it's about them, it's about the group. So I realized ... I didn't realize, just sensed that women are really lonely. Not all women, but after ... when their children leave home, or they retire, and they don't see their friends that they worked with for years, or they lose their spouse. So I thought I wanted to give back and I want to have this group so we can just share joys, and share stories, and just have a good time together, and it's working. We have 1,400. I know if I opened it up and made it public, it will really grow, but I want to keep it private, and I will keep it private. Like your business, you have your niche. I want to keep my niche, but I may more or less change things on Honey Good. Not my writing, but maybe have a multi-generational group in my parlor, and you, young people teach me about the internet and I'll teach you about life.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. It's a good trade off. Great. And Susan, I want to make a point here too. One thing that I think as you're assembling these people in your parlor is ... We've kind of said this a little bit, but by kind of saying here's my vulnerabilities and here's the optimism to that. But you're also saying, "Hey, I want to tell you that I'm worthy, that I have a worthy voice." But you're also saying, "But you do too." I love that because when you say, "Hey, I got 1,400 people in a Facebook group." And you want to keep it private because you want to say, "Hey, this is a safe place, and that we are all are believing in this concept together that we're all worthy and that we can all share."

Ben Smith:

So you, and by proxy, have been a really great leader here to all these people to say, "I'm putting myself out there to start." Maybe I started this a little bit here, but giving them that confidence, giving them that feeling of self-worth, what a great gift that you've given there? So I want to just kind of put that plug in because I don't think probably everybody maybe thinks of it that way. From seeing it from the outside and for people that maybe don't have that self vote of confidence, it's a huge gift.

Susan Honey Good:

Thank you.

Abby Doody:

So just kind of shifting back to something that we touched on a little bit earlier. So beauty isn't really something that we've chatted much about on the show before. So can you help talk about the importance of women feeling beautiful and kind of redefining their style over the age of 50? 50 is now the new 40 and we keep saying that. Style keeps evolving and people are acting and staying younger much later in life. So how have you seen that? How have you seen women's style change into their 50s?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, all of my friends or most of my friends they're like 40. They work out, they take care of themselves, they wear the latest trends. I don't believe in fashion, I believe in style. I don't buy real trendy things unless I think it's going to stick. They are very concerned about the latest hairstyles, latest makeup. They're very hip and they are very involved in everything. This sounds trite, but this is what I believe. I believe age is just a number. You can be old at 30 and young at 80. It's all up here, right?

Abby Doody:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Honey Good:

In your head. So women are very hip today. Very hip. And age really is just a number. They put extensions in their hair, they do the nail bit, they travel solo, they live with men unmarried, they do their own thing. I'm not going to say every woman, but I'm saying every woman can and should. They feel their own power.

Abby Doody:

That's great.

Ben Smith:

In our experience, there's some times where maybe there's somebody that's looking to evolve or adapt over time. Friends and family members are more up to maybe not react well to change. They're not reacting well to change and they're saying, "Susan, your clothes are just a little too much." They're going to comment negatively on somebody trying to find their voice, trying to find their worth, trying to find more of themselves. What we're trying to say is for people that are around somebody that's going through their own change, or their more identity, is what can we say to them that helps them be constructive and positive with the women in their lives?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, I think they should really respect them. If the woman maybe is more ... wants to try new things and the spouse or partner doesn't, women are very willful, women are very smart. A smart woman will know how to lead her significant other to at least try something or to expect, accept and live with what she wants to do for a while. Give her a chance.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. Because I think that's part of it. I think there's a fear as we all try to go through our own change or we all try to evolve a little bit here of, hey, if I've done my makeup the same way for 30 years, and all of sudden I try my makeups something maybe a little bit differently, then that might be something that I get criticism for, or I get, "Well, what are you trying to do? Be 22 years old again?" So that's I think what we're trying to go. There's fears of I think any of us, but we're trying to say I'm trying to make sure I continue to feel beautiful, I continue to feel this way, and I want to make sure that the people around me are supportive in that realm as well.

Susan Honey Good:

Well, I think that that these women should ... they should hold firm. I'm thinking about myself. If I want to be happy, I have to be happy with myself, right?

Abby Doody:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Susan Honey Good:

So if it's a husband, you're not going to delete him out of your life. If it's other people, other women, I think I would look onward and maybe bring new women into my life, or a new set of friends into my life. Because here's where I am now. I'm not ready to just wilt, I want to bloom. So I think I would do that because I don't want somebody to bring me down.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Susan Honey Good:

And if I can't bring them up, then maybe I have to find new avenues of people that think the way I think to try something. It's not a death sentence, it's wonderful to try. If it's a spouse or a significant other, I would just say, "You may disagree with me, you may not like this, but I'm really happy right now the way I am, and just be supportive of me for a while." And then maybe I my lipstick won't be as red, or whatever it might be, or we won't travel as much, or whatever. I'm not stubborn at all. I was chosen one of Chicago's 50 fierce women. And I had to write why I'm fierce. So I was having lunch with friends that day, it was a summer day, and I said, "I have to write about why I'm fierce. I'm not fierce." I said, "I looked it up in the dictionary, it's not me at all. Or any of your fierce, there were three of them. Well, we're not fierce. That's an awful word. And everybody was in their 60s.

Susan Honey Good:

So I walked home, it was a Friday. I had to have this end by Monday. Saturday, and Sunday, my husband said, "What is wrong with you?" I said, "I can't write why I'm fierce. I have to turn this in. It's going to be in a magazine. I'm anything, but fierce." And then all of a sudden, it hit me. And in 10 minutes, I wrote a poem. It's one of the best things I ever wrote. You can find it on my website. And I went to myself, I am fierce. I'm fierce because I love deeply, I'm fierce because I have great values, I'm fierce because I put my family first.

Susan Honey Good:

So I think that any woman, every woman is fierce, every man is fierce. You're not like [inaudible 00:41:40], that kind of fierce, you're fierce. So I know we've been talking about this a long time, but I kind of get what you're meaning now. I would stay true to who I was trying ... who I felt happy within myself with, I would do that. And then if my husband really was unhappy, I try and find a happy medium, but I wouldn't give it all up.

Abby Doody:

So just a question about kind of your history and you as a person. So part of your story was getting remarried right after losing your husband tragically. So from your experience, what advice do you have for adult kids or grandkids who see their parent or grandparents starting to date again? It could be a rocky transition possibly. What have you seen? What advice would you give to people going through that?

Susan Honey Good:

Well, can I turn it around?

Abby Doody:

Of course. Yeah.

Ben Smith:

Sure.

Susan Honey Good:

I think because this is what I learned. Usually when parents are divorced or widowed, well, especially widowed, the children are probably in their late teens, or they're in their 20s, and parents think of their ... they no longer think of their children as little children. They look at their children and they think, and then they fall in love, and they see things from their side, why aren't my children happy? It's really the other way around, because I have learned that when a boy or a girl, a daughter or a son loses a parent, they are children. And they see their mom holding another man's hand, and they see their mom really happy, it's really ... it tugs at their heart. It is so hard. So it's like they're seven years old. You see?

Abby Doody:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Curtis Worcester:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Susan Honey Good:

So I don't think adults see that. Even though women are really loving creatures, very maternal, I don't think that a lot of them really see that, understand that. But once they do, I think the children will act better and the parents will understand better, and it'll be an easier ride.

Abby Doody:

Yeah. That's great.

Ben Smith:

I think that's a really important point, Susan, because again, our show is really around empowering visibility in women, but not doing it in a way that really is ignoring the environment. It's not ignoring the kids and not ignoring spouses, it's really about flourishing within it. I think that's a really important point you just made there because if we just kind of go, "Well, I fell in love and this is who I am, everyone should just accept me." That's not at all what you just said. This is something where looking from the kids' perspective, they're that young age again. They're looking at mom, and mom still has that young age in their eyes. How do we make that work together? And I think that was a really important point you made.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. Thank you. So Susan, we have reached the final question of this podcast episode. We always love to ask or to wrap up with a question about retirement success. Naturally, the name of the show is Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. So I want to ask you how you think retirement success for women is going to evolve sort of from this point? And then looking into your crystal ball into the future, how will that happen, and how do you define that?

Susan Honey Good:

I think women handle aging far better than men because I'm in the scene and I see it. Men retire and they become loners. Women retire and even if they're alone, most women are never alone because they're gatherers. So they either gather their family around them, they gather other women around them, they gather clubs, they join clubs. They're movers and shakers because they're gatherers. Where the man, he now ... he doesn't have his career. He's lost even if he plays a little cards, or plays a little golf, or goes whatever. So I think as time goes on, women will even get better, and stronger, and much more independent, and really believe in themselves and go after what they want. And I think men, they really need a woman in their life because men that don't are really lonely. I see it. They don't know how to. You have to learn. So I think it's all positive.

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah. I like that.

Ben Smith:

And Susan, I will applaud you as well because I think it's so amazing to see you, and hear your voice, and see ... Again, your journey in your life is just so inspirational from a multi-generational perspective of what you've accomplished, what you continue to accomplish, and how you continue to look forward. You're always relevant because you're you. I think what's the best thing about it is just being authentic. It's something that is just kind of one of the best things coming out of this episode today. So we really can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing your wisdom, sharing advice. It really has been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Susan Honey Good:

Thank you so much. I enjoyed meeting all of you and talking to all of you.

Ben Smith:

Thanks, Susan. Take care.

Susan Honey Good:

You too.

Ben Smith:

So empowering visibility in women 50 plus. So good to have Susan Honey Good on the show today. One thing I know we didn't actually talk about was her maiden name was Honey and actually her remarriage was Good. So it was a kind of a natural name. It sounds like almost so good of a name, almost a stage name there. But yeah. So Susan Honey Good.

Ben Smith:

Again, we always like to end our episode with a little bit of highlights that we took away from the show. Well, this is a topic ... It's a newer topic here that we've kind of seen and the one that we wanted to make sure that we're kind of emphasizing for our podcast here. But let's start with Abby. Abby would maybe mind share some of your lessons that you learned from Susan today.

Abby Doody:

Yeah. So I really liked how Susan talked about how everyone has their own internal power and how people have more power than they realize. And oftentimes, we can be the last ones to see that and finding our voice is really important. So I really liked how she chatted about that.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. And I'll add to it because again, the lesson I was going to take away was that conversation about your enchanted self. So I know she kind of used the word fierce there and kind of figuring out kind of how we are all fierce, but that enchanted self part that she talked about to have your value and your worth. And I noticed that's a lot of the issue we have as we age, is going, "Am I worthy, am I worthy of love, am I worthy of being even taken care of at some point in my life?" And I think that's something we all struggle with especially during different times. Maybe it's in a pandemic, or economic crisis, or whatever area or age we live in. All those things are very natural feelings.

Ben Smith:

I wanted to bring up what Elisa Spain said about having an unreliable narrator. Sometimes we say things, and sometimes it's the percolation or thoughts of, "Hey, I am really good at this." But then I couple that with, "I'm really bad at that." I feel like I got to negate out the positive stuff with the negatives. And I think that really can kind of negate some of that worth discussion and your worth in other people's eyes. I'm kind of tandem those two lessons together, Abby, but [inaudible 00:49:35] there. So Curtis, what was something that you took away from the show today?

Curtis Worcester:

I think a big piece that we talked about was this concept of identity loss and whether a man or woman you go through these phases of your life. You retire as you age, your life changes and the life around you changes. I think people can struggle with that in finding their identity. Susan did a really good job kind of talking about that from a woman's perspective and gave a lot of good tips on how women can ... I don't know, fight, that's the right word, but do find their new identities or just ... It may not be a new identity, just find their identity that they may have lost. So I thought you did a really good job with that and I enjoyed hearing her tips.

Ben Smith:

Yeah. Again, with all of us that we've gone through it, but also from her end, she's had lots of change and lots of things in her life and had to continue to adapt and to evolve and re-emphasize her identity. So I thought it was a really good things to kind of take away today. Thank you guys for sharing your highlight lessons there. So of course with all of our shows, we have a website which you can kind of go to and find a little bit more information about Susan and her website, again, honeygood.com. So we'll put that link there and link to several articles that we were referencing here today. So you can find us there. Find the transcript and listen to it or the YouTube link to watch us if you want to actually see the video with Susan here. So I appreciate every tuning in. I always can't thank you enough for your listenership and looking forward to seeing you next time. Take care.