It has been a couple of months since we last talked, and I wanted to share an update on what’s been going on with me. I’m coming to you from New York City, and the city has been electric.

I had the great fortune to experience the Knicks winning the NBA, and the city was so vibrant. This idea of collective effervescence is real. Everybody was so excited, and on top of it the World Cup is going on here too. I’m grateful I’ve had the chance to be here in this moment.

Thanks to my friend John, who works at WABC-TV, I got to attend The View on Monday morning. I’m a huge fan of the show, so that was a thrill, and it happened to be the episode when Jalen Brunson was the guest.

Afterward I went to a mixer that some local and national media people were attending. It was a lot of fun connecting with folks and meeting new friends, and I got to have a conversation with Bill Ritter, a longtime anchor at WABC who has been on the air for 25 years, maybe longer. He was recently diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s, and his last day as an anchor was Friday, June 12th. He’s still doing some reporting, including a series of stories about living with Alzheimer’s. He came to the mixer along with his former co-anchor Liz Cho, and he was such a lovely guy to talk with.

One of the things we talked about is exactly what this issue is about: shifting perspective. More on that in a minute…

April 30th was surgery day. I was so nervous and anxious about it, but I got through it, and it went really well. Thank you to everyone who offered support in the weeks leading up to and the time after. The surgeon and team got everything but one pin out (it’s now clipped so it shouldn’t bother me in the future). I’ve been recovering, and I can feel the difference in not having that hardware in there. I had lost appreciation for how much discomfort and pain I was actually in. And what it was like to move through the airport security without the extra screenings.

For the last two weeks or so, I’ve been walking without a cane in most places. There are still some spots, like airports, where I just need it. It’s too chaotic. The next step in this journey is finishing up PT, strengthening everything, and getting my step back. Lots more to come on that.

A couple of things came up this past week that made me decide this is what I wanted to write about for this issue. I pay attention to what’s going on in the world and what people around me are talking about, and I get inspired by that.

First, in that conversation with Bill Ritter, I was telling him who I am and what I do, and he said it’s so needed right now to have empathy and to see other people’s points of view, because we’re living in a divided world that can’t go on. We can’t stay this divided without finding ways to come together, support each other, and connect.

Then I heard Joy Behar on The View’s Behind the Table podcast where she mentioned being tired of all the animosity going on. She was sick and tired of it, and I agree. I think a lot of us are tired of hating people on the other side, distrusting them, or dismissing them. It takes a lot of energy. Energy that could be better spent building a better world together.

But the thing that really cemented it was a talk I gave this week up in Greenwich, Connecticut, with the Retired Men’s Association of Greenwich, an organization about 70 years old.

The group has regular meetings with coffee, pastries, and a speaker, and this week I was the speaker. I walked in just as their general meeting was wrapping up, right before the social break, and I was standing next to a gentleman, older than me, like the rest of the group, since they’re all retired.

He said, “I’m looking forward to hearing from you because I’m trying to figure out how to communicate with somebody in my life who has TDS.” I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, and then he confirmed: Trump Derangement Syndrome. He talked about how every time he talks to this family member, possibly his adult son in his 40s or 50s, the son gets very outraged and emotional, and it’s difficult to talk to him about what’s going on in the world. This man clearly wants to preserve the relationship and wasn’t sure what to do.

Right after he mentioned TDS, he asked me, “Don’t you think it’s a good idea that Iran isn’t able to threaten us anymore?” That was the moment I realized I had not yet had any coffee. I got a cup and came back, and we kept talking.

It’s not about the viewpoint itself, that’s for him and his son to work out between themselves. What I shared with him, and then with the whole group, is the idea of shifting your perspective and turning things around to see things differently. As I told him: if you keep trying and you’re not getting a result, you could walk away from it, but it didn’t sound like that’s what he wanted. Or you could turn it around. Try a different approach. Try to see things from his side. Try to understand where he’s coming from.

My eyes were first opened to this idea back in 2008. I was doing a project with General Mills, trying to understand what aging boomers, people in their 50s and 60s who were starting to retire, were going through. We were doing lengthy in-home interviews, and one of the people I talked to was a woman named Emelia in Philadelphia. She was 57 at the time, my age, and she appears in the book, in the Turning It Around chapter and again in Mirror Mirror.

Emelia was a corporate executive who traveled a lot for work and developed carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists from typing on her laptop. She needed surgery for it and wasn’t able to go back to work for quite a while.

As she talked, I noticed she kept making a gesture with her hands, like she was holding an invisible ball and turning it over, as she said, “You’ve got to turn things around. You’ve got to look at things from a different perspective.”

That year, her adult son was being deployed to Iraq. We talked about her concern for him being over there, and she said, “You’ve gotta turn it around. You’ve gotta look at it that he’s with a unit of trained soldiers, and they do what they can to keep people safe.” She said you have to look at it from that perspective, and then he’ll come home. It had become a clear way of being for her and how she moved through the world.

When I first heard that from her, it opened my eyes. It’s the foundation of what empathy is about: shifting your perspective so you can hear, be open, and imagine what it might be like to be somebody else.

I asked her about the hand gesture she kept using. She told me that as she was recovering from the carpal tunnel surgery, her surgeon had suggested she try Tai Chi. The gentle, steady movements calm the brain and help with healing while strengthening the muscles she needed. She started taking classes and it transformed her. She loved it so much that she went on to teach Tai Chi to inner-city school children, giving back through it.

During that interview, with myself, two clients, and a videographer there, I asked Emelia to give us a Tai Chi lesson. We moved the furniture out of the way, and she guided us through five or six minutes of it, right there in her living room: the breathing, the hand movements, the gentle calming. For me, that experience put me on the path toward studying yoga and understanding mindfulness and shifting perspective.

All of us can be sitting in the same room, looking at the same vista, and we’ll all see different things. That’s okay. That’s part of what makes us who we are. But then you have to try to turn things around and imagine what it might be like from the other person’s side.

As we work toward coming together with people who have different points of view, it’s about turning things around and imagining what it’s like from their perspective. That can be hard. Thinking about the gentleman I spoke with in Greenwich, I think the emotion built up in those conversations with his son is part of why he landed on a label like “TDS.”

When we have difficulty connecting, pause to think about who that person is and what might be motivating them. If there’s emotion in the conversation, take a curious breath: a big inhale, hold at the top and then exhale that calms your parasympathetic nervous system, turning off the fight-or-flight response, so you have time to respond thoughtfully. Then ask: “Tell me more, what’s going on?”

Strive to get to the base of what’s actually happening for the other person, what’s motivating that perspective. Instead of fighting over whether it should be this way or that way, get down to the fear or the passion point that’s driving the response.

Shift your perspective enough to be able to say, “now I get it, I understand where you’re coming from?” Then you can share your own perspective and why you feel differently, but from a new place of understanding. From there, seek out a way to compromise or collaborate. Or at least help each other feel safe, secure, and supported.

Each of you wants to feel like the other person will have your back (particularly in the case of the man from Greenwich and his son). We may disagree on one issue, or two, or five, or ten, but ultimately convey: I value you. I value our relationship. I’ve got your back. That’s what we need to remember so we can come back together, as a community, a society, a nation, a world. Understanding what we have in common and where our differences lie, and how we might work together. But to get there, we have to shift our perspective, not at the high emotional level, but at the deep underlying one. This is not easy work.

In fact, whether you are dealing with someone you perceive has TDS or is a MAGA faithful, the same approach applies. We’ve gotten so quick to shout and shut down that it hasn’t left room to shift perspective and try to come together.

The Curious Breath will be your guide. It makes space in your head so you can figure out the next question and how to actually respond. Don’t worry about getting it wrong. This takes practice, it takes effort, and it takes both people coming together to figure it out and preserve the relationship. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do: preserve the connections we have with each other.

An HR executive recently told me I’ve got this kind of portfolio career going, a bit of this, a bit of that. And it’s true. I’m still involved with Dig Insights, doing empathy workshops and consulting on insights programs, and I’m still giving talks about how to be more empathetic in the workplace and how that improves communication, collaboration, and persuasion. But I’ve also had time over the last few months to think about what’s next.

The passion area for me right now is a conversation I keep having with a lot of my friends, about the older generation, our aging parents, the older people in our lives. What is it that they want, not just at the end, but along the journey? You might be healthy and independent at 70, 75, 80, 85. But what’s your vision for yourself? How do you want to live? How can the people in your life help you get there?

I’ve had these conversations with my own parents about what they’re looking for and how things might play out. We’ve brought my sister into it too, and we’re mostly aligned. I’m sure we’ll find something we’re not quite aligned on down the road, but my sister and I can support our parents as they move further into their 80s.

I’m curious about other people’s experiences, both the adult children navigating this and the aging parents themselves as well as experts in all aspects of how we live and what we need as we age.

I’m in the research phase now, and I want to have conversations with people to hear their stories. My partners at Dig Insights and I are also developing a survey so we can understand at scale what’s actually happening in society, and not just in the United States. I’m interested in how this plays out around the world, since some cultures are more oriented toward age and elders, and others more youth-obsessed.

I’m also trying to understand how this differs within the United States. The Black friends I’ve talked with have had different experiences and are approaching this differently than my white friends, and similarly with my Hispanic friends. I want to gather all of these stories to find commonalities which will help with the survey to prove things out. And then, I’ll be coming up with helpful tools, tips and tricks based on everyone’s input.

I could really use your input. There’s a short sign-up here to let me know you’d be open to helping, whether that’s the survey only, a call with me, both, or something else. I’ll start reaching out after that.

Please share this with friends and family who are going through this, who’ve already gone through it, or who you know it’s coming for. I’m also interested in hearing from people who are childless by choice, and from people who’ve already lost their parents, to hear what that experience was like. This is a universal truth: we are all going to die. But it’s a choice in how we move through these last chapters, the 4th quarter, the Golden Years, however you like to call it, toward that final step. and I’d like to help people come together so they can have a more positive final stretch of life, whenever that end comes.

Thank you so much. I appreciate the time, and I appreciate you. 🙏🏽

Stay curious. Ask good questions. Let empathy follow.

Rob