Maybe you feel that once you’re 40 or 50 or 60, you’ve become a “subject expert” in so many things it would be hard to find, let alone select, any skills or topics you don’t know enough about from first-hand experience.

In fact, how you view and assimilate the experiences of your twenties and thirties in the second half of your life affects not only your continued personal development but your capacity to guide, coach, mentor, and teach others.

Before I decided to earn my MBA at New York University several years ago, I had worked in marketing services firms for twenty-five years, about half of that as a senior manager responsible for diverse teams of professionals.

There were fundamental lessons I couldn’t, didn’t, or wouldn’t absorb until I was in my forties, when I finally realized I still had a hell of a lot to learn, and it had little to do with becoming smarter about marketing or coming up with yet another so-called Big Idea.  I realized how much I could and needed to learn from the very people I was responsible for “managing “especially about how not to lead.

Guess which lessons were more rigorous? More humbling? More valuable?

Embracing the role of COACH, MENTOR, GUIDE, LEADER, TEACHER, or PATRON, formally or informally, so that others can learn from your experiences and develop their own Big Ideas, is a D A R E -ING move.

While it might seem that you’ve reached the pinnacle of your career because an org chart or your boss or your business card declares you the leader or chief something, not so fast (how about never?) do you become the Empress of Everyone.  The people above you, below you, around you, and in back of you (especially in back of you) will see to that.

They’ll DARE you to prove you’re worthy of their respect, admiration, and loyalty.

A couple of years ago, I entered a classroom at NYU once again, but at the front of the room as the instructor.  What I really want my students to learn about marketing is this:  The first brand they need to know how to market effectively is themselves, and that’s about more than just demonstrating their technical expertise or Big Ideas.

If they can’t with confidence and compassion convince a decision maker that they possess the personal empathy, experience, competence, and commitment to help him or her solve a problem that literally keeps him or her awake at night, they will never be able to interest the leader in their technical expertise or persuade the leader to buy into and champion their Big Ideas.

Almost anyone can get book-smart or tech-savvy or quant-driven.  It takes defeat plus determination, it takes humiliation as well as humility, it takes resolve and resilience, to deal with and DARE accept the fact that some of our worst experiences are also those that teach us so much we become experts.

And, who is more expert at that than women over 40?

DARE to figure out what you’re smarter at than anyone else. DARE to declare yourself an expert. DARE to guide others with what you’ve learned. And, DARE to admit what you don’t know but are willing to learn from the very people you DARE to LEAD or GUIDE or COUNSEL.

to figure out what you’re smarter at than anyone else. DARE to declare yourself an expert. DARE to guide others with what you’ve learned. And, DARE to admit what you don’t know but are willing to learn from the very people you DARE to LEAD or GUIDE or COUNSEL.

It’s really true that in order to be considered an expert in a subject, skill or topic, you have to have learned it so well that you could teach it.   I’m still learning, and I hope all of you are too.

In this blog-post, we are focusing on why it’s good for you and never too late to:

1) take up new physical activities,

2) engage in new social activities and

3) pursue new intellectual challenges that can make a positive difference in your well-being – for the short-run and in the years ahead.

If you happen to be job-hunting over the age of 40, after many years of being firmly entrenched in the same company, industry or location, you’re probably feeling that is a DARE-ing project in and of itself – which it is.  In that case, plant something new that takes care of your innermost self and boosts your confidence and sense of control while you’re grappling with change. Plant something that improves your physical health, ramps up your intellectual power and unleashes beneficial brain chemicals that contribute to your well-being. Here are just a few of the reasons experts advise you should plant new seeds now, especially if you’re dealing with added stress.

1.)  If Your Sneakers Are Moldy, Your Brain Will Get Oldie. A few years ago, the only weight I ever pushed around came from the sound of my own loud mouth. A year later, and dozens of pounds lost, I can attest that exercise saved my life, improved my well-being and enhanced my intellectual focus. Here’s why it would work for you:

• Dr. John Medina, a developmental molecular biologist, says in his book,  “Brain Rules,” that a lifetime of exercise can result in a sometimes astonishing elevation in cognitive performance, compared with those who are sedentary. Medina asserts that exercisers outperform couch potatoes in all sorts of brain metrics tests, such as those that measure long-term memory, reasoning, attention, problem-solving, even so-called fluid-intelligence tasks – which refers to how you put to use the information that you learn. One of the biggest surprises is that you don’t even have to exercise that long or hard to reap these benefits! Did you know that even walking several times a week will benefit your brain? The ideal is doing two to three bouts of aerobic exercise for at least 30 minutes – which can reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s by 60%!
• Exercise improves your mood because it stimulates the release of three feel good chemicals in your brain. Called neurotransmitters, their medical names are serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. By stimulating the release of these hormones, exercise has been proven to help lower depression and anxiety.  So, get out there and walk off the stress, or go for a bike ride, or – if you’re not the outdoorsy type – put on some music and dance like a fool in your own home.

2.)  If the only laugh lines you have are from watching late-night Seinfeld reruns on TBS, you need to get some real friends. When was the last time you had a conversation with a friend who made you laugh? More importantly, when was the last time you actually felt you could cry with a good friend who wouldn’t judge you?  If you don’t have friends like that, maybe now’s the time to consider going beyond your current circle of friends (or all those online LinkedIn connections.  Would you ever want any of them to see you with streaked mascara?  I didn’t think so.)

Additional tips:

• Be proactive about cultivating, engaging and caring about people you really want as friends, and weed out the ones who don’t feel that way about you. In this day and age it’s too easy to rationalize that there are many other things we need to be doing work- and family- wise rather than spending time with friends. Yet, connections with true friends and family members are what matters to our well-being.
• According to psychoanalyst, educator and author, Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., positive social interactions are a powerful mechanism for controlling stress. As women talk with other women about worrisome occurrences in their lives, their stress levels fall because oxytocin (the maternal friendship and bonding hormone) levels rise. Even during non-stressful times, having solid friendships has been proven to improve health and extend one’s lifespan.
• If you’ve been a mom for most of your adult life and your circle of friends is tied to your children, now might be the perfect time to expand your circle of friends. Getting involved in organizations other than your children’s school or church expands your perspectives.

 3.)  Unchain Your Brain, Train Against the Drain. Learning a new language, researching the competition before starting a company or learning to play a musical instrument are all exercises to unchain your brain. To plant or seed something new, challenging and fulfilling while waiting for the next big thing to take seed, it’s a good idea to engage in an activity that is not related to a work situation or family demand.

The following are a few reasons why:

• Taking up new intellectual activities stimulates different neural regions and develops new pathways within the brain.  This helps to re-energize the brain against the dreaded “brain-drain” many women complain about in middle age, and helps you see problems in a different light.  As Dr. John Medina writes in Brain Rules, “What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like – it literally rewires it.”
• The more you stimulate the neural regions and pathways, the more adept you become at the new skill or activity you’re learning. It’s that fluid intelligence thing again. One of the other major benefits of taking up new intellectual activities is that it increases your self-confidence that you can, indeed, learn new things.
• There are nine different kinds of intelligence, but most people neglect to explore, let alone develop, those outside their comfort zone. Conversely, we all know of artists, musicians, business-owners and scientists who did their best work after the age of 40, 50 or even 60.  By developing different facets of their intellectual capacity, they surpassed the creativity and productivity of their youth in ways they never would have DARED or imagined earlier in their lives.
• Those are just a few of the reasons why planting something new – physically, socially or intellectually – can be beneficial both in the short run and over the long haul, even in times of stress.  Next week, in Go DARE, we’ll provide a list of ideas for what to plant or seed. There’s no limit to why, what, where and how you can grow by DARE-ing yourself!

“PLAY,” as defined by J Huizinga in Homo Ludens; A Study of the Play-Element in Culture :  “PLAY is often interpreted as frivolous; yet the player can be intently focused on his or her objective, particularly when play is structured and goal-oriented, as in a game. Accordingly, play can range from relaxed, free-spirited and spontaneous through frivolous to planned or even compulsive.”

As a nation, do we PLAY? A poll conducted two or three years ago by Opinion Research Corporation found that 29% of American workers took no paid vacation time in 2007, and another 24% took a week off or less. According to ORC, in 1980, people in only 10 other countries lived longer than we do.  Now, people in 41 other countries live longer. Give US a BREAK!

Whether a BREAK for you entails a favorite sport, taking a class, reading novels by favorite authors, skiing in frigid weather, or sitting on a beach meditating, you know what refreshes you to meet and conquer new challenges. OK, so none of us is free as a bluebird, but a little more DARE-Play, even in small doses – an hour, a day or a weekend – could help keep the crow’s feet at bay.  Here are some ideas:

1.  Break Free! Bored by your usual exercise routine? Check out www.workoutz.com a free site with clips of every exercise you can imagine – and some you probably wouldn’t believe – like Burpees: a full body combo of squats, jumps and leg lifts, no equipment needed.  Likewise, chair boxing, or chair aerobics, plus Wii fitness and Zumba, which is pumping aerobics set to Latin music. To really pump it up, try a hula-hoop, jump rope or trampoline.  Learning any new sport – whether you intend to master it or not – can wake up your muscles, strengthen your bones and boost your calorie burn.

2.  Laugh to keep from crying. Dr. Madan Kataria, an Indian medical doctor, has created “laughter yoga” – whole-body exercise of laughter with yoga breathing.  So respected, he was brought to Iraq to cheer up our soldiers.  Find laughter clubs in the U.S. at www.laughteryoga.us.

3.  You say Vacation, I say Stay-cation. Has really caught on this past year, because taking a break by exploring local landmarks, nature trails or ethnic enclaves means you can take a break without going broke doing it.

4.  Take this Job and Love It. Explore another job or career via a “vocation vacation” www.vocationvacations.com, where you’ll be paired up with a guide in your career of interest.Worth it, if you want to pursue your second act, but need direction.

5.  Get More Head Vroom. Get smart and have fun at the same time.  A few suggestions:

• Retorts and All. Come up with a better comeback to that twit in your office that thinks he has all the answers!  Formulate a pithy (and respectful) rejoinder to your boss’s demand that you work yet another weekend! How? Take an improvisation class, guaranteed to improve your response time, your sense of humor and your confidence.

• Speak Up, Speak Out.  Fear of public speaking in second only to fear of death as the most common phobia.  At some point you’ll have to deliver an articulate speech or make a sales presentation or introduce yourself at an important meeting.  And, if you’re thinking of going back to college, or starting a business where you’ll have to talk to bankers and investors, or you’re on the C-suite track, you absolutely need to know how to produce and deliver a compelling speech.  Toastmasters, www.toastmasters.org, specializes in helping almost anyone become a better speaker for almost any venue or occasion. 

• Say What? Learn a foreign language – one of the best ways to expand your brainpower. Berlitz, www.berlitz.com specializes in “total immersion” – you engulf yourself in the history, culture, people and other facets of the country whose language you want to master.  If you just want to make sure your stay-cation isn’t cut short by ordering curry that drives a nuclear fissure through your gut,  visit www.rosettastone.com and learn a language fast, even if you’re just venturing a little out of your comfort zone. 

• Tell me about it. If you’d rather keep your mouth shut, write a scathing tell-all memoir. You can let your fingers do the talking at www.writersonlineworkshops.com, which even offers trial runs of courses.  Feed your inner Emily Dickinson via a poetry class, or become a gossip girl via a blog-writing course. Too much work?  Get Your Life As Story, by Tristine Rainer, an easy guide filled with ideas for writing your memoirs. Chapters on:  “How to Write What You Dare Not Say,” and “Dealing with Your Dark Side“ are too fun to resist.

• Play it again, Sam.  As we get older, one of the best ways to feed the brain is to learn to play a musical instrument.  An ear, nose and throat specialist once told me that many people over 40 take up piano, and not just because they’re beautiful, they’re romantic, and they’re available – even for rent – in different sizes for every setting. The fact is that once we get to our 40s and 50s, our affinity for percussion (drums and other  instruments that are struck hard) lessens, and our preferences evolve to softer music.  Learning to play the piano requires practice that builds and expands brain cells.

• STOP, LOOK, LISTEN. This Is Your Brain On Music, by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, is an excellent book on how music changes your brain waves for the better, and how to choose music to help you solve problems, think up new ideas, and generally expand the energy of your brain cells.  Also, check out Fred Plotkin’s two excellent guides, Classical Music 101, and Opera 101, to learn the stories behind the music that has moved men and women for ages.

• Read All About It.  Those of us who are sorry we didn’t pay enough attention to Shakespeare or Faulkner and other great authors, can invest just $11.65 for The New Lifetime Reading Plan:  The Classic Guide to World Literature, Revised and Expanded, by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major, with short summaries of the greatest authors and their works.

• Get Into A Gap.  People over 40 who’ve been laid off and are lucky to have received compensation packages, might want to consider a “gap year” to reflect, refresh and reinvigorate their lives. An excellent guide is: The Gap Year for Grown Ups, 3rd Edition: The Most Comprehensive, Practical Guide from the Leading Gap Year Specialist, by Susan Griffith (2009).  Griffith covers it all, from the reasons for doing it, such as: “…burn-out, turning 50, sensory overload, bereavement and depression, shaking out the cobwebs…”, to how to manage career and financial implications, and even logistics of dealing with email and renting out your home if you go away.

So, whether you stay, pray, or get away, whether you want to take a nap or make a gap, just DARE yourself to PLAY. Live more than a little! Live longer! 

Before I decided to spend more than the GNP of a third-world nation to pursue an MBA in my 50s (and suffer the terror of sitting in finance classes feeling as if I’d crashed a secret coven where everyone was interrogating me in Satanic dialects), I too DARED to Start something else.

The sight of the World Trade Center falling in front of my eyes led me to conclude that 20 years spent promoting soap and cereal for global marketing services firms was enough, and that it was time to do Something Important!  Fast-forward three years and three not really important jobs: turns out, every one of those moves was a False Start.

But those experiences, though excruciating, were so beneficial. Here are just a few of the books that have helped me and other women over 40 Start something new. Not a definitive list, but it’s a Start.

• The Breaking Point: How Female Midlife Crisis is Transforming Today’s Women, by Sue Shellenbarger. The Wall Street Journal career columnist illuminates through anecdotes and excellent reporting, the many types of work, avocations and fun that women have Started after they hit 40.

• A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink.  Full of ideas to think differently, explore all types of intelligence (artistic, physical, etc.) to innovate, pursue meaningful work, and stay relevant.

• I Could Do Anything, If I Only Knew What It Was, by Barbara Sher.  One of the best, most honest books on helping you visualize your “perfect life” – delivered in an empathic, amusing style.

• Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. Exercises to plumb your deepest needs and how to tap into your unconscious for ideas your editing mind won’t allow.

• Jump Start Your Brain, by Doug Hall.  Promises to make you 500% more creative – from a marketing guru who creates products and campaigns that convince us to try, buy and stay loyal to stuff we never even knew we needed let alone wanted.

• AHA! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas, by Jordan Ayan.  Not just 10 ways, but thousands!  Has unstuck even the most tenacious, stubborn, blank, fearful minds.

• Write It Down, Make It Happen, by Henriette Ann Klauser.  A free-association guide, with prompts, questions and lists to encourage you to think differently, identify goals and aspirations, and, yes, make them happen.

• Second Acts, by Stephen M. Pollan and Mark Levine, attorney and author/collaborator.  Guides you through what they call “sources of dissatisfaction” so you arrive at your personal hopes and dreams.

• Six-Week Start Up, by Rhonda Abrams.  An easy-to-complete workbook for launching a new venture, whether a business, nonprofit or other creative endeavor, especially if you don’t have the time or inclination to pour thousands of dollars into B-school, psychotherapy, or other forms of long-term torture.

All the prattling hyperbole about suspected “wardrobe malfunctions” such as J-Lo’s left nipple about to flee its incarceration from badly affixed designer duct-tape (pun intended), and the utter vapidity of starlets prattling on about whose shoes they were wearing – because everyone knows they’re surely not wearing their own shoes but serving as mannequins (shoe-trees?) for some designer – bored me more than the interminable litany of Awards No One Cares About.

There was a great deal of comment on age in yesterday’s reviews – the age of the TV audience for these awards, as well as the ages of the winners and hosts. Linda Holmes at NPR.org wondered: “It was not a night where Hollywood attempted to reach a young audience, as it did last year when it paired James Franco and Anne Hathaway as hosts — and wound up with dire reviews for the telecast.”

And the CNN.com article yesterday by John Anderson concurred. “Was it really just a year and a day ago that the Academy Awards made its big play for youth, via the double-edged disaster of James Franco and Anne Hathaway? OK, that didn’t work. At all. But last night’s full-frontal embrace of the past — punctuated in no small way by the choice of a silent movie as Best Picture — was a back flip, a half-twist, and a landing in deep denial.”

Speaking of “full-frontal,” could I be the only one who wants to point out to Angelina Jolie that she is so gorgeous from the neck up, why indulge in a full-frontal leg-lift in every single close-up? Was it some sort of a signal to Brad, who looked more like a hound-dog last night than ever?

Maybe the Academy reads the same business analyses I do, which is that women over the age of 45 are the best target audience for serious adult movies and fiction as well as nonfiction books and, perhaps, the best target audience for the Oscar telecast.

And here’s a factoid that makes it ironic that there were few memorable commercials shown during the telecast: with the TV audience getting smaller, (or is it older?) who needs to spend a fortune on TV ads?

The most wry comment I read yesterday was that the reason The Artist won as Best Picture is the average demographic of Academy voters is a 62-year-old man, and The Artist focuses in no small part on the happiness that a “trophy wife” brings to the film’s main character – a gorgeous Frenchman who, in his eloquent silence, brings new meaning to the term “eye candy.”

The best news is that 2011 gave mature movie-lovers not one but at least a dozen substantive, intelligent characters played by women over 40. Compare this with other years; in the last thirty years or more, older women routinely bemoaned the fact that there were just no good roles for them anymore. They were invisible in Hollywood after reaching 40.

But Sunday night, Meryl Streep, brilliant beyond description, won Best Actress for The Iron Lady. Viola Davis in The Help and Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs were also nominated for the Best Actress category, and Octavia Spencer, who won Best Supporting Actress in The Help, will be 40 in May.

This year older women dominated the red carpet with their grace, beauty, and style. But more importantly, they delivered their talent, depth of character, and passionate artistry to film and to us. They were duly recognized and awarded by the Academy, and I am thrilled to see them acknowledged.

So whether it was a night for a young or old audience, more importantly, talent of all ages was considered and duly awarded – without prejudice to age. Maybe filmmakers are finally starting to realize that grownups go to movies too. Maybe they’re realizing that not all films can be about some transformer superhero or other for which its creators can automatically expect exponential gadget-driven revenue streams into perpetuity. Maybe they’re beginning to see that the movie industry’s best bet for a brighter future, whether the distribution is through theaters, mail-order DVD or streaming, is the population that draws a salary and has disposable income and time to enjoy movies.

Not only is it a population that makes purchase decisions about adult movies, but it is also the demographic that often funds the spending of transformer superhero fans.

As the noble and definitively adult wife of the most noble and defeated salesman of all time decreed: “Attention Must Be Paid.” Or, as I say:  “Piss us off at your own peril. Give us more like Meryl!”