Baby Boomers and Resilience - A special case?

Over the past year or so, we’ve noticed an interesting, yet disturbing, trend in both our training and coaching practices. It seems that Baby Boomers – those of us born some time between 1946 and 1965 – are falling off the resilience wagon in record numbers. Here are just a few examples of the many cases we’ve been hearing about:

• A coaching client who had enjoyed 35+ years of business and personal successes suffered a major blow to his resilience when his second entrepreneurial venture imploded due to the current financial crisis. When we first met him in an Adaptiv Resilience Training Workshop in 2005, his Resilience Factor Inventory (RFI) scores were among the highest we’d ever seen. But he retook the RFI at the start of his coaching engagement, and 5 of his 7 resilience factor scores had dropped. And what he told his coach was consistent with these lowered scores: “In the past, I would have faced this situation down and figured out how to turn it around and succeed. But this time, I just haven’t been able to do it. For the first time in my life, I’m questioning my abilities. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined that I would be in such a tough spot at this point in my life. Instead of kicking back and giving back, it feels like I’m having to start all over again from scratch!”
• At a recent resilience training workshop, an executive of a pharmaceutical company spoke about her struggle with caring for her sick and aging parents – a mother with advanced Alzheimer’s, and a father recovering from cancer surgery. Unlike at most times in the past, her job was taking a back seat to her family crisis. A proven and resilient leader at work, she admitted that trying to balance the ongoing work demands against the seemingly endless parental caregiving was taking its toll – both physically and emotionally. She had come to our resilience training workshop to find some relief.
• After a speech I gave at a professional association meeting, an attendee approached me and told me his story. He was a senior sales manager in the medical device industry, where he had spent more than 30 years of his career. Although his team was consistently ranked in the top performance quartile, a rash of negative events – including a key product recall and a staff reduction that decimated his support organization – had resulted in the worst quarterly sales results he’d ever had. Now he was worried about his own future at the company, and wondering how marketable he’d be as a fifty-something year old sales manager. I’ll never forget his parting words: “There was a time in my life when I felt like I could handle anything that the world threw at me. I’ve always been a fighter, and most of the time I’ve been a winner. But now I feel like a toothless tiger!”

These stories are merely examples of the hundreds of cases we seen where traditionally highly performing professionals faced challenges they had never before experienced, and their resilience and performance were suffering. Regardless of the underlying reasons – whether physical, emotional, behavioral, financial, or some combination of these – Baby Boomers are struggling in unprecedented numbers.

We believe this population presents a truly unique set of resilience characteristics that requires a special set of resilience skills. That’s why we’re building a workshop especially for them, drawing on our own research and experience. But we can surely use your input as well. Let me know what you think. If you have a story about yourself, or about a baby boomer friend or associate that is struggling with their resilience, please share it here. We’ll hold everything in the strictest of confidence.

I’ll continue writing about this topic here and will freely share our findings with you.