Transcript:

Ben Smith:

Welcome, everybody, to the Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. My name is Ben Smith. Allow me to introduce my co-hosts, the Anna Kendrick and Sarah Paulson to my Robin Hurder, Curtis Worcester and  Austin Minor. How are you guys doing today?

Curtis Worcester:

Doing well.

Austin Minor:

Good. How are you?

Ben Smith:

Good. Good. I had to take the spirit of Maine-based actresses today. So we don't have a lot of them, but there's a few names that I think people might recognize there. Robin Hurder actually has a connection to our local area here in northern Maine, and she actually was a Broadway actress. She's been doing the Moulin Rouge, and then she went over to... did the new Neil Diamond play, so the Sweet Caroline one. So yeah, so we've been obviously doing this show. We're Episode 89. We're going to talk a few things, and I know, Austin, I want to turn it over to you because there's some things that we're talking about that might make sense for listeners to hear as we're talking about today's guests.

Austin Minor:

Sure. In our meetings with the retirees, they sometimes express to us that they sometimes feel lost and depressed. What previously gave them purpose in their career was no longer there, and they sometimes lack motivation to get up, get out of the house, and embrace life questions such as, "Who am I? What should I do with my time and what's next?" Sometimes occupy their thoughts. So how do we go about answering these questions and finding ourselves in this next chapter? How do we reinvent ourselves now that we have time to do so? This is exactly what this show is about, reinventing yourself in retirement.

Curtis Worcester:

That's right, Austin. I think as all our listeners probably know by now, we like to bring in guests who may be experts in different areas here on this show. So our next guest that we have today lives in the East San Francisco Bay Area. She actually grew up in Los Angeles, California, graduated college from UCLA and had a 37-year career as a probation officer. So since retiring, our guest has become an actress, author, public speaker, and blogger, so she's clearly staying busy. After her wonderful 37-year career, she has appeared in television, film, commercials, theater and print jobs. For over a decade, she performed regularly portraying patients at university medical schools as a part of student training.

Her transition to becoming an actress in her senior years has been written about in Time Magazine, The Los Angeles Times newspaper, AARP, and in Marlo Thomas's 2014 book, It Ain't Over...Till It's Over, which profiles different women who have reinvented themselves. So as I mentioned, today's guest is a public speaker speaking on the topic of senior reinvention. She has also been writing a free blog for years where she shares her thoughts, observations, and experiences, which she believes are universal to the retiree and senior demographic. Her public lecture, blog, and self-help book are all titled Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years: Find Joy, Excitement, and Purpose After You Retire. Her goal is to help retirees, those soon to retire, baby boomers and seniors reinvent themselves in this new stage of their lives called retirement.

Her published memoir about attending a senior acting class at age 60 with her 85-year-old father and going on to become a professional actress is Adventures with Dad: A Father & Daughter's Journey Through a Senior Acting Class, which I'm just going to throw out. Sounds incredibly fun. I picture my 85-year-old grandmother going to an acting class with me, and I think that would just be tremendous. So you can also find more about our guest at her websites, leegalegruen.com and leegalegruenactress.com, or you can check out her blog at leegalegruen.wordpress.com. So with that wonderful introduction, please join me in welcoming Lee Gale Gruen to the Retirement Success in Maine Podcast. Lee Gale, thank you so much for coming on our show today.

Lee Gale Gruen:

Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Ben Smith:

Well, Lee Gale, I just will say I know Curtis and Austin and I think just speaking to a conversation we had with a client last week had been retired for nine months and just everything we said in our introduction about feeling lost, "Don't know what to do with my time," "A lot of things I could be doing." I know we're going to get into reinvention and what all that looks like, but just I know this is resonating so much of a lot of your story and we want to get into it, but we always want to get to know you a little bit first, is get to a little bit know of your background. So I'd love to hear about your upbringing and how you were led to become a probation officer. What was that journey like?

Lee Gale Gruen:

I had a middle class upbringing in Los Angeles, California. I lived with my father, my mother, and a sister, nothing very out of the ordinary. I went through high school, graduated, and it was finally time to go to college. So I attended locally UCLA. When I was about ready to graduate, they had tables set up along one of the walkways where employers would come and you could go up to the tables and sign your name, and they'd tell you a little bit about it. I was a sociology major, and I find that fascinating observing people and how they interact in society. So I was signing up for all kinds of things. When I got called by the probation department, I honestly didn't know what that was. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what you were supposed to do. But very frankly, they were the first ones who offered me a job. So I became a probation officer and I spent 37 years there. I found it fascinating dealing with my probation clients. I learned a lot there, so that was my journey.

Ben Smith:

So Lee Gale, I just want to just paint the picture. Hey, you're graduating college and you sign up to be a probation officer in your early 20s. How tough you have to be in terms of sticking with that career for 37 years and all the situations and all the things that you're dealing with over your career, just how thick-skinned and just mentally and emotionally strong you have to be for all the things. So just touch on that for a quick moment.

Lee Gale Gruen:

Rather than use the word tough, I'd prefer to use the word firm. I learned that my probation clients, probationers we called them, were human beings just like I am. They were frail. They had vulnerabilities, they were scared just like me and every other human being. They simply had, for whatever reason, chosen a path that our society calls criminal. Perhaps they didn't have the advantages that I had. Perhaps they were desperate, fallen on hard times, whatever. So they taught me a lot about myself, about life, and very frankly, it was a natural jumping off point to become an actress because they are the ones I learned from on what human nature is like, and I used it in my acting.

Austin Minor:

That's cool. Switching gears a little bit, we had mentioned this in the intro briefly, but tell us a little bit about your dad through helping him in his journey as he aged. What did you learn about yourself?

Lee Gale Gruen:

My relationship with my father when I was younger, it was a stereotypical family. My mother was a stay-at-home mother, stereotypical family for that time. There were three women in the house, my mother, myself and my sister, and then my father was the only breadwinner, so he ran the family. His word was the final word. I found him, as a young person, rather intimidating. As I grew older, I began to stand up to him and oppose him as all teenagers do. Of course, he wanted to maintain his position, and so we had a lot of arguments. I never really had a close personal time with him. The time that he was at the house, I shared him with my mother and sister, and then the rest of the time he was at work. So that was pretty much my relationship with my father. Then I eventually married and had my own household and had children. Yes, of course, I saw him, but again, usually with my mother.

Then the kids were there and everybody, I didn't have personal time. As we both aged, he mellowed quite a bit and I matured, so we came together more. But again, my mother was there, she became sickly. He became her caretaker. Two weeks after she died, I had started the acting class, and I invited him to come with me just on a lark. I don't even know why I said it. He was so depressed, so morose. I just thought it might be something given his outgoing personality, he was a charismatic man, and I just thought that it would be a fun thing for him. I had to talk him into it. He didn't want to go and blah, blah, blah. So he finally agreed, I think more to shut me up than anything else. We walked into the class that first day and the teacher called on him to come up and participate in improv. He was really getting into it and just loving it. On our way home, he said to me, "So what time are you picking me up next week for our class?"

Curtis Worcester:

I love that.

Ben Smith:

That's great.

Lee Gale Gruen:

And that started this journey, this amazing journey of attending that class with him for three years.

Ben Smith:

Wow.

Curtis Worcester:

Oh, my goodness. I love that. I almost don't even want to ask my next question 'cause it's going to go away from that journey for just a second, but I have to ask it. So the three of us are located pretty close to the geographical opposite of you and the country. We're here in Maine. Our show obviously has the state of Maine in our title. We like to ask all of our guests, do you have any connection to the state of Maine, whether it's a one-time visit or family or anything there?

Lee Gale Gruen:

I've eaten lobster from Maine.

Curtis Worcester:

All right.

Ben Smith:

There you go.

Lee Gale Gruen:

[inaudible]

Curtis Worcester:

Check it off the list. I love it. I love it.

Lee Gale Gruen:

I actually have visited Maine once many years ago. The thing that stands out in my mind, other than your absolutely magnificent coastline, you have something there and perhaps you still have them, I hope so, called lobster pounds.

Ben Smith:

Oh, yeah.

Curtis Worcester:

Yep.

Lee Gale Gruen:

Do you still have lobster pounds?

Curtis Worcester:

[inaudible] Absolutely, yes.

Ben Smith:

Yep.

Lee Gale Gruen:

That just blew me away. They're like hot dog stands. You're driving down the road and you get your lobster out of a window and you sit on these picnic type tables and any eat your lobster. I have never forgotten that.

Austin Minor:

I love that. I love that.

Ben Smith:

You cannot get any fresher than that lobster pound either. They're just literally pulling that right out of the ocean and then they can cook them up and ready to go. So it is one of the magical treats I think we have in the state of Maine that I think we just also take for granted a lot. But Lee Gale, I know we want to talk about the topic of the day, reinvention, and obviously you going from your career and having to reinvent yourself and figure out, "Well, what am I without a career here?"

So I want to go zoom right in, 'cause I just mentioned to you about that client that we just met with last week, and he's six months out from that first day of retirement. But I want to start with day one of retirement for you. Talk to us about how you felt that day that you were now forever done with your job. If I had asked you what you're going to do for the rest of your life, how would you have responded and how did that feeling change over the coming weeks and months?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Oh, my, that's a million-dollar question. I had not made any plans for my retirement. I just thought, "Oh, great. I won't have the pressure from work on me. I can rest. I can sleep late. I can read the newspaper from one end to the other," things like that. That first day was horrible. I woke up, I had nowhere to go. I had no reports I had to crank out. I had no one to interview, nothing, and I was lost. I remember standing in the den, I was in my den and I wanted to go into the kitchen to get something to eat, and I was just so out of it. I literally had to say to myself out loud, "Okay, Lee Gale, put one foot in front of the other." I was lost. That was a real mistake that I made, not finding out what one does in retirement, not checking out what is available in the community, not even making any decisions or even thinking about what I might like to do. So it was devastating.

I began to ask friends, people I knew, family members, if they had any thoughts or ideas. People would give me input on thoughts of things to do. I got some suggestions. I tried to do some research back then. This is 21 years ago, and back then, there was no internet to find all this stuff out. Perhaps I went to the library or just, it was basically asking people and checking things out. Here's something I want to really emphasize and what I'm going to talk about more later. I didn't just check these things out so easily. It's very frightening to do that, to find out about things and then get yourself there by yourself, be totally self-motivating. It's scary to walk into new situations where you don't know anybody and maybe you'll walk in, everybody knows each other and nobody knows you and nobody's talking to you and you're all alone.

This is very frightening to do, and you're wondering how you're coming across and are you looking stupid and things like that. So I finally started trying some things that people told me about, and I did several different things. I did a few volunteer things. One thing I did, I volunteered at a hospital and took my dog there for patient visits with my dog, and I enjoyed that. Some of the other things I did, I enjoyed, but there was not one thing that would just grab at me, just that passion. So that was my beginning journey. I was very tentative, fraught with all kinds of self-doubt, and it was not easy.

Austin Minor:

Wow. Yeah, that sounds like definitely a tough thing to get through, especially after a long 37-year career. You think, "Now I'm in the clear, I can just relax," and then certainly isn't what you think. Right?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Exactly, not at all. That got pulled real fast. Let me tell you.

Austin Minor:

So in your book, Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement Years: Find Joy, Excitement, and Purpose After You Retire, you go through some of the reasons why we all have a fear of retiring. As you've talked about your book and personal journey with others, what have others shared as the most prevalent fears they have of retirement?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Oh, my. I think people are again frightened. They have no idea what they're going to do with their lives. They are afraid that they will become irrelevant, that no one will find them interesting. No one will value their opinion anymore. They're just some old person to be put out to pasture. They're afraid of becoming a burden on their children or other people, they don't want to be. That is a big fear. People do not want to be a burden. They want to be self-sufficient. They're very frightened of being ignored, of just not being meaningful to anyone anymore.

Curtis Worcester:

I can't even imagine some of the conversations you have around that. I want to keep going and keep picking your brain here, Lee Gale. So again, the title of our show, we have the words retirement success, but I think the three of us talk and we think sometimes we might as well call it retirement happiness as well, it's achieving that. So as you're discovering your own answer to what makes you happy in life, what did you find out about happiness and what retirees struggle with around their own personal happiness?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Many of us don't even know what will make us happy.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure.

Lee Gale Gruen:

We've maybe been at a job for years. You have to get a job. You have to support yourself, your family. So we work our job, it becomes commonplace. We do it almost by rote automatically. We get better and better at it. We never stop and think, "Am I happy?"

Curtis Worcester:

Right.

Lee Gale Gruen:

"Is it giving me satisfaction?" Maybe it gives some satisfaction, but we never stop and think, "What do I really want to do? What will make me happy?" When you are confronted with that, I didn't know what would make me happy. I had no idea. There were no people talking about it, that's why I wrote the book. Nobody was talking about that.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure.

Lee Gale Gruen:

Nobody was telling retirees what to do for finding happiness. There were lots of books on financial planning and health matters, but nothing about what do I do to satisfy myself, to fulfill myself? Now, I've got years left here. So I have various sections in the book that talk about how to identify what will make you happy and how to go about finding it. That is the chapter that I call The Secret.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. I think we're going to talk about that in a few questions, but it did stick out to us as well.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, Lee Gale, I know when we read that, that's why we wanted to get into that 'cause again, that is... again, to that client that's in my mind right now, I know that that's the thing that they're searching for is, "What is my secret here, and what's going to be that recipe for success?" I know obviously after working for 37 years as a probation officer, you get introduced to acting classes in retirement. You had a nice buildup of asking your dad as the throwaway there like, "Well, maybe we go together," and getting him to attend. That one class really got him hooked. But I want to hear a little bit about that development of three years here about, "Hey, he gets hooked." I'm sure not every class was the best ever. I'm not sure, but I want to hear about how that led to that magical connection with your father, as you said of you had matured, he had mellowed, finding that together and exploring a passion together that obviously is well out of both of your comfort zones. Can you just tell us a little bit more about that journey with your dad?

Lee Gale Gruen:

I was not looking to enroll in an acting class. As a matter of fact, that would've been the farthest thing from my mind. I was never comfortable speaking in front of people. I always had that nervous, that heart pounding, that not being able to sleep the night before, so I never would have sought something like that out. I literally fell into that acting class. A friend told me about this school that offered classes for seniors, and I went to check it out. I was looking at their schedule of classes, and I saw something called scene study. I thought that meant that you read plays and maybe analyze and discuss the scenes. That's what I thought it was, so I decided to try it out. I liked plays, what the heck? I walked in that first day, and a man approached me and handed me some papers and said, "Here, you want to read this with me?" I said, "Sure." He walks up to the head of the class, and I'm standing there. I didn't know what he meant, and he says, "Come on." I go, "Where?" "Read this." Well, my heart started absolutely pounding.

That was my worst nightmare, and I seriously considered walking out of the class. I seriously considered it. The only reason I didn't was because I'd already said yes, and I was a mature senior. How could I just slink out of the class? So I walked up slowly, grabbed a look at what was in my hand. It was the first scene from Death of a Salesman, very, very complex play. That made it even worse. I seriously didn't think any words were going to come out of my mouth. My heart was just pounding. So we started reading, and my first words were little tiny words, a little squeak kind of. But as we continued reading, I became lost in the material. I forgot about the room full of people staring at me and judging me. My voice got stronger and I became the character. I didn't know that was going to happen to me. I became the character. At the end, we read for about 10 minutes and everyone clapped. I went, "Oh, my God. I just read for 10 minutes," and I was absolutely hooked.

It was like a drug. "I want more of this. I want more of this." So when my mom died a few weeks later and I invited my father, I guessed that he would be a natural because he was very outgoing, as I mentioned earlier, very charismatic, and he absolutely loved it. In no time at all, as I told you, he told me going home, "When are you picking me up next week for our class?" We began to attend. The protocol of the class was that you find scenes from plays already published plays to do with a partner in the class and perform in an acting class showcase. Well, there was no material for an 85-year-old man. The Sunshine Boys had already been done last semester, so there was nothing. I started having an idea of writing my own scenes for us to perform, so I was desperate. I had written in my career as a probation officer, I wrote sentencing reports for judges to help sentence criminal defendants. So I started writing scenes based on my father and myself, dad and daughter scenes.

Dad was always doing these outrageous things, and daughter was always pulling her hair out with his antics. Well, the class absolutely loved it, and my father was the hit of the show. I wrote them to showcase him. I was the straight man. He absolutely loved it. When we performed in front of an audience at the acting class showcases, the audience adored the whole thing of this senior father-daughter team. They were asking, they'd come to a new showcase and they'd say, "Is that little old man going to be in it again?" Of course, my father loved all the attention, so it was an amazing bonding experience between us. We were together all the time. I would call him when I was driving home from somewhere and we'd run our lines on the phone. I'd go over to his apartment, and we'd rearrange all the furniture and make it like our set and we'd rehearse. We were always rehearsing and running our lines.

Austin Minor:

That is so great. I love how unexpected it was too, like you were saying that this wasn't something you and your dad had planned on doing, it just fell into your lap, and it sounds like it created some amazing memories. This was all eventually becoming the basis for your memoir Adventures with Dad: A Father & Daughter's Journey Through a Senior Acting Class. So do you have a moment in mind that it inspired you to write a book? You mentioned you wrote for your job a little bit, but as far as creative writing, had you ever really written previously in your life before this?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Never. I had never done creative writing in my life, never aspired toward it, never thought about it. My father and I were sitting in class one time and somebody else was up doing their thing. I started to think, just sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with him, "What a cute story this would make." Everybody was just enchanted with this scene. Everyone in the class loved this senior father and daughter team, and the audiences loved the whole idea. So I thought to myself, "Gee, maybe I could write a book maybe for my kids, my grandkids, something like that. I really ought to write this down. It really is awfully cute." Then I thought some more about it over the coming days and weeks.

Then that other horrible side of all of us, that negative side that tells you you're no good and you can't do that, would rise up and say, "Are you crazy? You're not a writer. You don't know how to write a book. That's ridiculous. Forget it." So, of course, I'd get discouraged and I'd put the thought away and a few months later, I'd think about it again. Sometimes it was many months later, sometimes it was even a year or two later, or a year-and-a-half later. One day, I hadn't thought about the book in months, I don't know how long, and I woke up at 3:00 in the morning with half the book written in my head. It was amazing.

I had chapter titles, I had full paragraphs. I had dialogue, I had everything, and yeah, I was exhausted. I was tired, and I wanted to go back to sleep. I, again, split it into that double personality, and I was saying, "Okay, I'll do it in the morning. I'll just go back to sleep now." The other part of me said, "Get out of the bed, write this down. You know you won't remember it in the morning." So I finally, 'cause I couldn't fall asleep, I got out of bed, and I was not about to walk down the hall and get paper out of my office to write this down. So I looked around my room to see what I had, and the only thing I could find to write on was a pack of Post-its. So my book started on Post-its.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that.

Lee Gale Gruen:

I woke up the next morning, they were all over the floor.

Austin Minor:

That's awesome. So what was scarier starting out? Was it acting classes initially or starting to write the book?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Oh, that's a no-brainer. It was the acting. It was, again, I had not planned to go to an acting class, and I suffered from horrible stage fright. I minimized it earlier when I was speaking, saying, "Well, it was hard to speak in front of people," or, "I had the jitters," but it was crippling stage fright is what it was. I think that is a problem for so many people. I've heard that that is worse than thinking about death. Stage fright is far scarier. So the acting was that first day I just wanted to dig a hole and crawl in as they say.

However, what I found, it was so addictive, so mesmerizing, it grabbed me so much that I couldn't let it go, and it overrode the stage fright. It was more powerful than the stage fright. Little by little, I overcame my stage fright. By becoming another character, I was able to do that. Then little by little, I was able to do it as my own self, not just as another character. That's why I'm able to be a public speaker now, and that's why I can give interviews and things like that because the stage Friday is gone.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that.

Lee Gale Gruen:

That is so exciting. It's like I took a pill.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that. I want to just step in and just say, I think that experience alone from the acting class, I think is an incredible story, so thank you for sharing it. Then obviously the memories and the wonderful experiences you shared with your father obviously are probably trump that. But so I want to go back to your book and something you teed up for me a little bit ago. Again, I believe it's the fifth chapter of your Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement years book, which by the way, we're going to again have links to in our show notes and stuff as well for everybody listening to go check that out. So Lee Gale, I guess my question for you, so that chapter again titled The Secret, my question for you, without giving away the entire chapter, because we do want people to go check out the book, the big question, what is the secret to retirement?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Well, the secret, of course, as we've discussed is find something that will grab you, that will become a passion, that will motivate you to the point where you wake up in the morning and you say, "Oh, today is the day I get to go to such-and-such." It will motivate you to want to get out of that bed, get dressed, get out of that house, and embrace life as I say. That has to be pretty compelling, not just some little fluff thing. It has to be pretty compelling. So how do you find something that compelling? Now you can do it like I did, just pure dumb luck and fall into it.

Curtis Worcester:

It happens, though. It happens.

Lee Gale Gruen:

But pure dumb luck is not necessarily that. One thing I tell people, "Try lots of different things, not just the same old things that you've always done all your life." There's nothing wrong with that. Some people retire and for example, if you were a teacher, you might find great joy or contentment tutoring students. So there's nothing wrong with doing what you've always done if that brings you pleasure, but try lots of different things, things totally out of your comfort zone, things you've never thought about before, experiences such as I did with acting. You might find something grabs you to the point where it just sweeps you off your feet. You can't even believe it. It's like, "Where has this been all my life?"

Another thing is how do we even identify what you might check out, what you might look into? There are several ways to do it. Again, one is something you've done all your life and maybe want to pursue that. Another thing that I advise people is to think about what kind of movies do you go see? What kind of books do you read? What kind of magazine or newspaper articles do you read? For example, I realized that I always read the science articles. I did not pursue that as a career, but it's fascinating to me. So one thing before I discovered acting, I was doing some volunteer work, and I don't know, I read something about the Natural History Museum was looking for volunteers. I called them, and it was far from my house.

She said, "Well, we also handled the La Brea Tar Pits and they have a docent program." Actually, I already had become involved in acting and got hooked on acting, but I had other free time. The La Brea Tars was right near my house. For those of you who don't know what the La Brea Tar Pits is, it's a very world-famous paleontological site, active site right in the middle of Los Angeles. So I contacted them. Sure enough, they had a docent training program, and I went and got involved. I began to lead tours, public tours of both the Tar Pits and inside their museum where they house all the ancient animal bones that they pull out of the Tar. I love that it played into my love of science and my love of acting. I was performing in front of a group.

Curtis Worcester:

Sure.

Lee Gale Gruen:

So that's fine. Think about what things that you always gravitate toward but maybe never had the chance to do much about. So those are a couple of secrets. I have a few other secrets, which maybe I'll withhold and let people buy the book-

Curtis Worcester:

That's right.

Lee Gale Gruen:

... if they are so inclined.

Ben Smith:

So Lee Gale, I want to ask a question 'cause I think what's really fascinating about your story is you had a blank slate and you were able to experiment and try and find things that you were passionate about and you continue to do, and you continue to do that. I think obviously where we help people when they retire, a lot of times they have this vision that they look at and they say, "Hey, I'm looking at this person and I see their retirement. That looks perfect. Oh, that looks just picture perfect," especially for being in the Northeast like we are, we don't have great weather at times. So there's a lot of escapism to, "I'm shoveling snow and things are terrible in the winter, and I want to go somewhere where the weather's nice."

So there's a lot of escapism of, "Where can I get out of this state and can I go somewhere that's got to be nice?" So just thinking about a conversation we had with, this is pretty typical, but a newly retired client and describing themselves as being lost. They envision going to Florida and the Sunshine State, is there's so much to do and it's sunny every day and nice and warm. It doesn't get below a certain temperature. But then they didn't really tell them about the terrible weather that happened like tornadoes and lightning storms and rain, and then they rent down there to try like, "Well, we'll rent and see how it goes," but the person I'm thinking about is a tinkerer.

They wanted to tinker on things around the house and paint and fix things and do all the things that you do. So he goes down there and then he can't tinker on anything 'cause he is renting. He doesn't own anything down there. He just brought things in a truck, and that's what he owns. So he's now back in Maine after saying, "Geez, that wasn't the best experience ever in Florida." He's going, "What do I do next, but I'm overwhelmed by all the things that I can do?" So I just thinking about you as the expert here in retirement reinvention and that situation, that person comes up to you maybe after one of your talks and says, "Lee Gale, I'm lost. What do I do?" How would you counsel that person?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Well, the example you gave sounds like he's found some things, but he's overwhelmed because there's too much, and it sounds pretty much like what I just discussed. He has not identified which of all of these things that are in this big basket would make him happy, and that's what he needs to figure out. I'm guessing that he's looked at all these things and nothing is jumping out at him or he would know already, "Wow, that sounds really neat." So he needs to use some of the techniques, some of the tools that I mentioned in The Secret of how to identify what particular things make him happy. It's not necessarily what makes me happy. Acting may not do it for him. We're all different. We all need to find our own secret happiness.

I talk a lot in the book about how some people are extroverts and they love performing or being in front of people, opportunities where they can be in charge. I talk about various types of things that those people might seek out. I also talk about introverts, and they would be very unhappy doing those things. I had one friend who became a volunteer in what was called the Bone Room at the Natural History Museum. They had a bunch of drawers full of old animal bones that had never been cataloged, and he sat by himself all day long cataloging these bones and he loved it. It tapped into his type of personality. So you need to figure out what works for your particular personality, not the next guy's personality. So take a look at my chapter on The Secret.

Curtis Worcester:

Here we are again with The Secret. I love it. I love it.

Austin Minor:

I have a question for you, Lee Gale. Just switching gears a little bit. So I want to ask you about your care. You helped take care of your dad as he aged. How have you thought about who will take care of you?

Lee Gale Gruen:

I have thought about that and because of that, seven years ago, I totally uprooted myself. The person who will take care of me, who loves me dearly and I love him, is my son. My son lives in the Northern California, San Francisco Bay Area, and I lived in Los Angeles. Over the years, all family members moved away and my son relocated. So I had lots of friends in Los Angeles, but who was really the one who loved me enough to spend the time and energy really taking care of me? I realized it was my son. I also had a second reason for moving, and that's because I wanted to see him more often and his family, my daughter-in-law and my grandchildren. So I totally uprooted myself. I left my home.

I sold my home that I'd lived in for 45 years, and I found in Northern California an active retirement community. I tried it out for a few months, like the man you mentioned who went to Florida and checked out Florida, well, I checked it out. I rented for a few months and found just the opposite from him that I really loved it. They have all kinds of wonderful clubs and activities and that I could recreate the things that matter to me up in the Northern San Francisco Bay Area. They had a drama club so I could get involved in that. They had a writer's group, they had the things that mattered to me. So I moved seven years ago away from Los Angeles, which means that's where I had an agent. I went on auditions. I booked paid acting jobs. I've made lots of commercials.

I had to give that up. However, I made the decision that as much as I loved that it was time to move near my son. So I wanted to move when I was able to do so, not when I had to. So I was still vibrant, I was still in good health. I was able to make the move, and I wanted to structure my life in such a way to be as little of a burden on my son as possible. I wanted to get rid of all that stuff I'd accumulated over 45 years that was shoved in cabinets and closets in the garage, and so I did that. I think people really need to have those thoughts about what happens when you cannot care for yourself anymore. Who is it going to be and how can you set it up to make it as easy on that person as possible?

Curtis Worcester:

Yeah, I think you're exactly right, Lee Gale. Honestly, I think the three of us can sit here and applaud that answer you just gave in sharing that story and really what you've lived through here. We have reached the end of our show, I do have one final question for you. Frankly, I typically ask how someone's going to find their retirement success, but I'm just going to tell everyone listening, you've already found that, okay. You're an actor, you're an author, you're a blogger, you've thought about your care. You're planning ahead. So I guess the question, I'm going to pivot a little bit here is, what do you want to accomplish next?

Lee Gale Gruen:

Well, I'm already in the process of accomplishing-

Curtis Worcester:

All right.

Lee Gale Gruen:

I discovered something else, and again, just pure dumb luck. It wasn't what I started out with. I wanted a little more exercise and I asked somebody, an acquaintance in one of my classes here, and she said, "Oh, I belong to the hula club." So I thought, "Well, I didn't even know if I could do it. I have some foot issues and they danced barefoot," but I thought, "All right, I'll try it out just to get some exercise." Well, guess what? I love it.

Ben Smith:

Nice.

Lee Gale Gruen:

Not only do they dance the beautiful dances, we have to learn the choreography and we perform in public.

Ben Smith:

Look at that.

Lee Gale Gruen:

What could be better?

Curtis Worcester:

That's cool.

Lee Gale Gruen:

We have our beautiful hula costumes and we perform throughout our community at events on stage with music. So that's my next path that I'm pursuing, hula dancing.

Curtis Worcester:

I love that.

Ben Smith:

Lee Gale, you are an inspiration. That's just amazing. We appreciate you coming on our show. Thank you so much for sharing the secret, sharing retirement success with us, retirement happiness. Being able to hear and pick your brain and really go through a lot of your experiences, and I can't urge people enough that are listening to data to check out your books there. We'll post some links in our show notes to them, but I know we all personally shared that one and got a lot out of it. So thank you for coming on our show. We really looking forward to maybe hearing what's next from you down the road, maybe past the hula up and going into the next thing. But thank you so much for coming. It was really a delight.

Lee Gale Gruen:

Well, you're very welcome, and it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Ben Smith:

Thank you, Lee Gale. I thought Lee Gale Gruen did a fantastic job today. That was a fun conversation, and especially for someone that's just so on topic to what we've been talking about, she just of embodies the whole themeing that we're doing with our entire show-

Curtis Worcester:

I think she hit five episodes of ours, at least in-

Ben Smith:

Yes.

Curtis Worcester:

... thematic answers there, so that was really well done.

Ben Smith:

Yeah, I'm reminded by our episode, I think it was 36 with Elise Spain about thinking of retirement as a life pivot that Elisa was talking about, that having this unreliable narrator as someone that in that back of your mind is calling you and telling you can't do something or you don't deserve to be happy. She fought through that, especially with that Lee Gale fought through that, especially with the book is, I think with the acting, she was thrust into it not even knowing she was going to be performing when writing is like, "Well, sitting on the idea, and is this going to be any good? I'm not a good writer," and all the things she told herself. But then she fought through that unreliable narrator and really pushed it through 'cause it was just too powerful. So really nice things there of things we've been talking about for a few years.

I just want to do another push on her website here, so make sure we'll have in our show notes, Lee Gale Gruen, Gruen is G-R-U-E-N, so L-E-E G-A-L-E, and then gruen.com. So leegalegruen.com and leegalegruenactress.com, and you can check out her blog at leegalegruen.wordpress.com as well. We'll have links there to those, in addition to links to Amazon. The two books that we're referencing is Reinventing Yourself In Your Retirement Years and Adventures With Dad & The Daughter's Journey Through a Senior Acting Class. So we'll have those links on Amazon if you go to blog.guidancepointllc.com/89 for Episode 89, and you can check it all out there. Thank you so much for tuning in to our show. We really appreciate you joining us and on this retirement success journey with us, and we will catch you next time.