Episode 257 BONUS Avivah Wittenberg-Cox Higher for Longer is not just for markets - Preparing ...

And I think the message is, listen, you don't have to do it all by age 35 or 40.

The way many of them are thinking, there's a huge amount of pressure in Q2 to accomplish

and achieve multiple things almost all of them in your 30s or early 40s, which is why that

happiness curve of life that people talk about dips in the 30s and 40s, because there's too much

pressure. And then we now see it in the burnout rates and the mental health issues of youngsters.

So I hope one of the big messages is, pace yourself in Q2 with the knowledge that really

Q2 are the building blocks and foundation of what might be your most impactful years and decades,

which can happen now in Q3.

I'm Ethan Devitt and welcome to the 50 Faces podcast. A podcast committed to revealing the

richness and diversity of the professional world by focusing on as people and their stories.

I'm joined by Eviva Wittenberg Cox, who advocates for new thinking and generational and gender balance.

She's a consultant, coach and speaker, who advises on the rising impact of longevity on people

and on the workplace and provides advice to help businesses thrive. She's the author of seven books

on gender, leadership and longevity and the host of the podcast for quarter lives, where she

applaud podcasts as a way to create real conversations in a very noisy world. I'm looking forward to this

real conversation here. Welcome Eviva. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks so much for having

lovely little bit here. Well, let's talk with your background in career journey. Where did you grow up?

What have you studied? I want to brought you to this multi-faceted career as a speaker, coaching consultant.

Well, at our advanced ages, we now have so many careers in our lifespan that it's kind of hard to

give a quick summary, but I started out in Canada. Of a French mother and a Swiss father, so

over a European background and I actually my mother tongue is French although it doesn't sound like that now.

And I studied in university, computer science and comparative literature which is a pretty good

indication of my either totally disjointed personality or interest in building bridges across areas

that don't usually talk to each other. So I'm always quite interested in what I usually summarize it

as as words, numbers and people. I like a lot of data. I like a lot of proof. I like writing and I

like working with a lot of people that I've been a coach for about 20 years. And so all the careers

I've kind of played with have revolved around these three interests and skills. I've also done an MBA,

instead way back in the early days after I went for as a way of pivoting from technology into

more management consulting kind of roles. An early company I had worked for a decade on corporate

communications of all kinds, which was a lot of writing and speaking and helping other people write

and speak. I was based in Paris for a long time, so I spent a lot of time working with companies who are

either going internationally out from France or American companies, North American companies,

moving into Europe. So kind of biling you will stance there. And then I got into sort of my main

first half career, which was working to gender balance, the business world for the last 20 years,

which I got into through a non-profit. I mean, I started a volunteer network when I became a mother

for the second time and I wanted to figure out how to balance work and personal life and family.

And this grew into one of Europe's biggest professional women's network that still exists today as global

PWN. And from there I really learned a lot about this whole gender issue, what women needed,

how the work world was designed, and that led me to create my current company in 2005 called 21st,

which has worked really on three issues, nationality balance, gender balance, and increasingly in the

last few years, generational balance. And these were kind of a big demographic and market issues of our

time, globalization, the rise of women, and increasingly the rise and strength of the old.

Well, we're going to dig into each of those and fascinating background there. The first question I'd

love to ask is around studying comparative literature. Because I love to go back into people's original

focuses, because I do think that you learn, I'm sure, a great deal from a degree like that,

particularly one that also has a language component of computers, computer science and computer

did you find you took away any skills or insights from a comparative literature degree into, say,

the universality of some of these problems that we're facing and trying to tackle?

Well, I learned many, many things from that early degree. I think one that I was taking two degrees

kind of computer science on the one hand, which sure of how didn't talk to the comparative literature

people on the other and that there was a really big separation between people interested in literature

and people interested in the sciences, which I thought was an initial shape. I'm very influenced

of course by the fact that my father was a mathematician and my mother was a literary professor. So I really

fused the interest of the two and what you learn from comparative literature and from this issue with

computer sciences, people are really different. And when you read literature from around the world

and from different cultures, you get a really early and deeper understanding that different

cultures have very, very different ways of seeing the world and that truth is very relative.

And I think that's only anchored by working across the sciences and literature. You also see that

people have very different perspectives of what the rules are, what value is, what morality is, depending

what side of those divides you're on. So it was something I'm still learning is just how rich the

differences are and how do we build bridges across them? And then before we launch into how you went

about tackling this problem, you said your objective was to balance the gender in imbalance in the

business world, not exactly a small undertaking. How do you approach something that could be seen as

enormous and tractable, unfixable? How did you go about tackling that? With humility. I think the

issue in tackling these huge issues is you're not going to solve the balloon. You're going to bring

your particular background knowledge and network to the shift that you want to do since I had

kind of by circumstance done in MBA and gotten started in the business world, which certainly

wasn't my family background or my educational background. Really, I thought okay, I have this business

platform. Gender is an issue in all strains of life. In my lifetime, we are kind of the tipping point

generation where women became the majority of the educated talent and most of the management coming

into a lot of organizations. So I thought I'm used that base. I also thought that business

would be faster changing than many other places. So it became for me a bit of a laboratory if I could work

with and I did some of the most progressive companies in the world who are really early adopters of

yes, let's leverage the skills of women and gender balance our organizations. That would create

role modeling for other companies and for other organizations and even countries to do the same. And since

I've never been of a particular country, like I don't really belong anywhere, I didn't feel very relevant

to any particular cultural frame. Well, I'm also an NCI graduate, so great to have another one here

and I will say that that was another huge eye-opening moment for me was the relevance of the

organizational behavior piece. Coming in with the hard skills is one thing, but just that bail being lifted

on the importance of the other side. I won't even say the word softer skills because that probably

minimizes them, but it was a real revelation. So I'd love to move now to talk about your work and

some of the concepts that you've real life into through the work. And the first is the four quarters

in life, this rubric. Tell us about that and this is applied to everyone.

Think it was really very obvious to me. It reminded me a lot of the whole gender issue, the rise of

women, how that was often misfrained and underestimated. And here was this massive increase in the

demographic shapes of countries. Basically, we're moving a world that was used to pyramids,

demographic pyramids with a few old people. A lot of young people to these much more generationally

mound squares with about the same number of older and younger for the first time in human history.

I mean, this is like so big and like gender, it's like so mind-blowingly large, global and hits every

country and every company and every couple. And I found just like I did with the gender issue. It's just

not being talked about that way or even framed that way. So I picked up my goal is not really to do

deep science or research in the Academy. It's much more to use the kind of insights that these people

bring like this hundred-year life book and translate a bridge build to a much more mass audience.

And so that's where the four-quarter life came is so how do you digest the idea of a hundred-year life?

My goal was to turn it into kind of business language, the business world is very familiar with quarters.

We spend our lives talking about Q1 and Q2. Have you achieved your goals? Did you spend your

budget? Are you ready for Q3? Has the end of the year Q4 looking? I thought it was a great metaphor

for life, right? How are we doing a hundred-year life so it's split into neat 25-year quarters?

And the more I thought about it, the more I thought a big part of the message I was trying to communicate

since I work in the business world was essentially that the really new thing in our longer lives

is actually this quarter that I call Q3, the third quarter, these 25 years after 50,

that used to be a time of slowing down in retirement. And now with this generation that you and I are

obviously a part of, it's very different from the way our parents live this phase, which is blossoming,

a time-affluence time, a time of greater health, activity, and interest and engagement in the

world. And so there was this massive opportunity to get people to realize they're going to live and work

longer than generations that died earlier. And what would we like to do with this Q3? We're often in

a stronger, slightly more secure position, both internally in our brains and externally in the world.

What do we want to do with that time? How can we use it? And how can we give forward some of the knowledge

and experience that we've used? And the other big piece of my four-quarter model is the work world,

as it stands today, is designed for cuters. It's designed for short-sprints careers that start at 25

and pretty much end at 50, unless you're of the very few that kind of make it to the top and stay on

for a bit longer. The corporate world's pretty good at nudging out the 50 plus or has been. And that's

just doesn't work anymore in a world where our demographics are reshaping. There won't be enough

young people for our economies. And so getting the work world to extend from Q2 out through Q3,

which is the same size, right? We're doubling the scope of people's working lives into these long 50 or

60 or Marathons. It's going to take quite a lot of adjustment of mindsets, management competencies,

and corporate systems generally. Just as I keep saying just as it required shifting from a very

male-focused male-dominated design to a much more gender-balanced one. So we've gone from gender-balanced

to generational balance. And it'll take a bit of time to get those four-quarters embedded.

I love that concept, and I know we both know Catherine Foot, and she actually has a lovely anecdote

in her podcast, but she did last year around the idea of thinking like you've just been written a play,

and even told you need to add an extra 20 minutes or half an hour to the length of the play.

What would you do then to play? Would you just repeat the same story that you've been doing?

Oh, would you think about maybe staging a differently staggering differently? And when you start thinking

about a life, not only is 100 years, but as having these four-quarters,

how do you think about maybe thinking about your early Q3 and how to plan that?

Any sort of tangible differences in mindset? Yeah, I think it's huge. So you and I are both of the

generation, particularly of women, who were stuck in the old mindset at these kind of three phase life.

You study, you work, and then you retire. And so our idea of life and the way we tried to balance

out work and family, and all the other things we were trying to do was to delay some of the

adulting, as the young folk call it these days, of Q2, as late as possible. So we got married later,

and later, and later that trend is still going on. We had children later, and later, and later, well into

our 30s, and then we tried to balance the whole layout at a slightly later age, which was not always

very obvious or easy. And sometimes we got hooked in the corporate systems that weren't adjusted to that.

So I think the opportunity of this longer four-quarter life and the existence of Q3 is for Q2s,

to take a bit more time to do some of the things that we didn't take much time to do, have kids when you

want them, cause maybe a little bit more or plateau. I'm not suggesting you drop out, but that

parents can take a little bit more breathing space right now. They think that, and there's so much

media around having a kid costs you a million dollars in career, net present value, and people aren't

having kids anymore, despite wanting them. And I think the message is, listen, you don't have to do it all

by age 35 or 40, the way many of them are thinking. There's a huge amount of pressure in Q2 to

accomplish an achieve multiple things, almost all of them in your 30s or early 40s, which is why that

happiness curve of life that people talk about dips in the 30s and 40s, because there's too much pressure,

and then we now see it and them burn out rates and the mental health issues of youngsters. So I hope

one of the big messages is pace yourself in Q2 with the knowledge that really Q2 are the building

blocks and foundation of what might be your most impactful years and decades, which can happen now in Q3.

That's Berlin. So now we see the link between women's careers, perhaps on the 100 year

light, but thinking about that. So thinking about Q3, so by your estimate of 25 years per quarter,

that's between the ages of 15 and 75, how well a Q3 thing workplaces are today to cater for that

segment, that demographic to fully, truly include them. And I think we are spoken a lot on previous

series about some of the unhelpful biases in place and the fact of ageism, the fact that it's almost

tolerated in plain sight, although never explicitly so. How do you think businesses need to adapt?

Profoundly, like they had to adapt to women, right? It's a whole other thing. Again, it's not just

ages, I mean, that's not the most constructive frame with which to walk into organizations and say

it's time to change, just like it wasn't very helpful to yell about sexism and try and change companies,

right? It's like this is huge, but this is a massive business opportunity if you wake up to the

demographic realities of 21st century talent and markets and consumers. There will be new needs,

new services, new opportunities, and new ways of managing careers over much longer timeframes,

which means they shouldn't be quite so vertical and linear and unbroken the way they were for the

sprints when they were left in Q2. Now we can have more time for lateral moves for going in and out,

for taking sabbaticals, for life long learning, all these things we've been talking about for quite

well, but now in an age of increasingly fast-changing technology and AI, we're going to have to spend

much more time. I think the things humans will now have to spend more time on right from the beginning

is health, we're going to have to invest in living longer and more healthfully and learn how to eat

and exercise and sleep right from early on, not later, and we're going to have to learn how to learn,

all the time, all the time, not once in a blue moon if we go back for an exact end program,

but how are we going to embed learning into everything we do at every age without stopping until we die?

About coaching, what role does coaching plan this? Because I think this third quarter,

for women to take care also coincides with metaphors, so there could be some hormonal changes perhaps,

or just general changes that affect one's confidence levels, or otherwise, and regardless of that,

I think coaching should actually play a role much earlier in Q2. In order to think about this

awesome, tell me about coaching and how maybe that can be integrated into any career.

I think actually, I would rather see rather than thinking of coaching as something we layer on,

I think increasingly what we have seen is the evolution of management itself, integrate coaching

as a style of management and leadership that generalizes it so that your people managers will always

be a little bit also your coach and they will be skilled, I'm being a little idealistic here,

they will be skilled in some of these issues and I have been spending. Most of my career,

creating what I call gender-biling dual managers, right? Managers are able to understand gender differences

enough to accompany them, support their teams, and their careers, and their consumers,

by knowing what they need different life stages and ages, if they're men, if they're women,

if they're parents, if they're not, if they've got aging, parents are not, there's so many

issues that have to be integrated that I think throwing a coach as a layering on top is nice,

but far more useful is if managers and the systems in organizations that they rely to manage people

have adjusted to this new reality and I just add that yes, of course Q3 has not only physical changes

and it has not only physical changes for women, then change too, we spend so much time talking about

menopause, much less about endropause, guys, age two, a lot of them have prostate issues, we never talk

about that. So there are other tab brews, I think it's time to make, I don't think we should just focus

this as women have all these issues and men have none, I don't think that's a great service to women

by the way. And I think the workplace will need to be skilled in keeping everybody healthy, active,

and engaged, or accompany them if they need a little bit of time to flex a blast through some of the

shifts of which the physical one is only one, right? There's motivational changes, emotional changes,

and of course the life course, right? You have children leaving, you have parents getting old and aging,

and we know that whoever you are, you're usually often caring for somebody in crisis moments at

different points in life and employers who don't factor that in, and managers who don't know how to

manage those moments are going to lose a lot of people. Excellent points about the University of

Change in Q3, and in fact, it's throughout one's life, but particularly maybe it's a notable MP3.

And I suppose the flip side of not layering in coaching, if it is integrated and if managers can

can include that in their style, is I think also an advocacy for self that is needed, you're not expecting

a coach to fix it all, you have to in a sense take control a little bit of that journey. How would you

recommend that people think about that? I do a lot of work with individuals on these ideas of four quarters,

and I think one of the skills we need to build is awareness of the hundred year life, awareness of

these longer lives and careers, and then some ability to navigate transitions a little bit more

calmly and resourcefully right now. This move from Q2 to Q3 is very under institutionalized. There's no

degree that you can go and do. Very few schools offer programs for people to stay engaged and gear

up and accelerate into their 50s and 60s, right? You can take a few classes on how to develop a hobby,

but what we really need is upskilling in order to stay employed, which is what a lot of people are going

to need to do. So preparing individuals for that is part of the work that more and more coaches are

moving into. So I think they're more and more midlife transition coaches. There's the emergence of

midlife transition programs and a number of companies and universities have started. I did a year

at Harvard that was called the Advanced Leadership Initiative, which is very much this transition year.

Others have started Stanford Oxford is adding in programs. So I think we're going to see this come into

play more and more to accompany people through natural life transitions, but also much more frequent

professional transitions. We will change careers more often in the future than we have in the past

and knowing how to do that and I have a whole course on what are the skills you need in order to transition.

How do you prepare? How do you muscle up for this marathon of these new career shapes? Yeah, we all have

to get skilled at being really good transitions. That's going to be the 21st century management skill.

That's fascinating, concept. And I think also, it's funny how we started this discussion reflecting

on COVID and maybe it changed that for a student to make. I do think COVID and it's the uncertainty

of plunge just all into forced as well as the stress and the health concerns and anxiety, et cetera.

All of these kind of came to the forward once. But I think learning how to manage anxiety is a key

part of managing transitions. Learning how to get comfortable with uncertainty too is a key part of

managing transitions because it is all around us. A lot of people are not comfortable with it.

It's rare to be comfortable with it. But I think that may have to be a factor in how we approach

this next phase is not being able to predict we don't know which of us won't get maybe be lucky enough

to have that fourth quarter. Health is always a concern. Maybe a styles or a loved one will have

an uncertain event like that. So all these skills I think are important part of the toolkit as you look

at the time. Navigating what's being called the never normal phase is going to require new

skills. But I also think that's one of the opportunities of sort of intergenerationality.

For the moment we live life mostly siloed by age and I think the older who've been through a few

cycles and crises in their life are actually a little calmer and a little less anxious that some of

the youngsters who have these enormous things that they don't know how to navigate of course not.

And I think if we were better connected across generations we'd also be better equipped in companies

but also politically to invent and innovate our way through some of the massive challenges that are facing

us. Whether it's a green revolution, a digital revolution or this longevity revolution we've got

huge challenges and I don't think we're going to be able to solve them without better idea,

generation across different ages. I love that perfection on the benefit of intergenerational

groups really. They also think it's key for contributing resilience into younger generations to

hear from older generations as to how they will become. I think is an important piece. Speaking of

reflections and overcoming, whether in any eyes or lows of your career that you can reflect on

maybe learning lessons from. I've almost always worked for myself and I think I've worked for myself

and what might be called lifestyle entrepreneurship rather than growth entrepreneurship. And so I think

a lot of what entrepreneurs learn early off with their early experiences is there isn't really

they have a very different approach to failure or downs. I always just find you're constantly

working on ideas or interests, some of which pan out and some of which don't so you're almost naturally

in what now has become known as design thinking. You have ideas, you market test them, some of them

take off and generally by the time you do something for a little while you get a little bored and

you're thinking from a position of relative accomplishment. What would you do next? Like what's the

next thing that's happening in the world that might require your skills or your contribution? And I think

that's kind of the shape of my career. I've gone through a series of arcs working on a variety of topics.

And if I look back where their ups and downs, there was more natural, like a planter, a tree

goes towards sun, right? There were some things that just ended up not growing and they were shelved and put

on the back burner and others you navigate your way through towards what feels a little bit sunnier and

more welcoming. But I'd also say, listen, I've always a little bit ahead of curves, not too far ahead

but a little bit ahead. So the initial few years of most of what I do, nobody wants like I've always

spent my life, I wish I was of this ilk but I've always spent my life mostly selling things people don't

really want for quite some time. And so that hard part of this kind of slogging a little bit alone in

the wind until things catch up and then you're carried off on a current that you've partly created or

contributed to. And given your wealth of connections and the work you do that people you've coached,

the articles you've written, the feedback you've received, is there any word of wisdom,

no jam that you can leave us with in terms of something maybe that you wish to your younger self

had known or that you think we can take with us? Yeah, I mean, I think listen, I've always been surrounded

by people at least 10 years older than me, I find them incredibly useful. But then I think the biggest

piece of advice I give and I really don't give much advice because I don't think it's necessarily always

very useful is listen to as many people as you can experience as many things as you can take it all in.

But in the end, don't listen anybody except what you're on deep intuition because nobody else is in your

shoes with your motivations, your background, your personality, that whole snowflake thing it.

And so you have to take in lots and lots as much as you possibly can. There's always nuggets to be

gleaned but don't ever listen to what anybody tells you that's a real imposition and it's kind of the

opposite of coaching, right? Coaching is always much more about dragging out what's really needs coming out

from deep deep inside you. I love that. Well, as somebody with, I think, to the day five months left

and Q2, I am so excited to hear about the prospect of Q3 and Q4 and I thank you for the wisdom of

planting that out as to what it may look like and thinking ahead as to how we should think ahead

as to what our careers look like. The idea of having these long exciting varied careers is such an

empowering and exciting one. So thank you for coming here and sharing these insights with us.

My pleasure in the earlier you know about Q3, the better able you are to run at it properly.

Well, we look forward to doing that and watching you continue to do that. Thanks, Ethan.

I'm Ethan David. Thank you for listening to the 50 Faces podcast. If you liked what you've heard,

I would like to tune in to hear more inspiring professionals and their personal journeys.

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