If you listen to the cries of Cassandra Economy and politics, demographic change is hanging over us like the sword of Damocles. Our Society is getting older - and there is a lack of youngsters. Or is the thing with that Age simply a matter of Perspektive?

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The young savages with 40 or 50

What is old, what is young? In our society there are different opinions and evaluations about what is old and what is young. And it shows how great the balancing act is - and how varied the range of possibilities.

In political careers, a mid-fortune is still a young poacher, a 30-year-old is considered a “greenhorn”. In the majority of the HR departments, on the other hand, dwindling performance and low flexibility are already attributed to employees or potential applicants in their mid-40s.

The special abilities of the silver ridges

Reason enough to look at the phenomenon of an aging society from exactly the opposite perspective. The following arise Ask:

Time of change

With increasing life expectancy, people always want more People also beyond the time of the so-called retirement from their professional activities meaning of life create.

"Time of upheaval and departure" called GEO Background in a theme magazine 2012 this phase in our lives. "The potential for change among older people is immense," says the New Yorker Professorin Ursula Staudinger im SPIEGEL Interview “Life is a construction site” from August 29.8.2013, XNUMX.

Change concrete

From the very beginning of our lives, we have the opportunity to discover completely new perspectives in many different ways, from dreams that we have perhaps not lived, from our memory-books - and with our experience to new, perhaps surprising ones Life plans.

But after we have answered the question of what opportunities are open to people in midlife, it now becomes specific: How can you use your potential? Because one thing is clear: Starting over is not a privilege of young people.

The older the better

It is our experiential knowledge that - cleverly used - empowers us in the middle of the world for the rapid classification of impressions and events - and gives us the power of precise judgment.

The renowned neuropsychologist Ernst Pöppel sums it up as “The older, the better”. It is true that the peaks of our attention, at which our Brain is ready to record something completely new, further apart than with the boys - Pöppel speaks of the slower metronome.

We combine differently in age

On the other hand, in the wave valleys between two so-called oscillation points, there are greater possibilities of combination for everything that bursts upon us. We process and combine different impressions more sustainably and draw from our experience.

An invaluable asset when it comes to the Reorientation goes. And thus about the decision-making process, from an initially timid blossoming Idea, which could still be possible, really for Implementation to get.

Volotion - with deliberation and intensity

In science, this process operates under the Term Volition and means to be the truly volitional person Objective pursued with deliberation and intensity at the same time: “An arrangement of self-regulatory Strategies, in which explicit action tendencies dominate over pure behavioral impulses” as formulated by a study by the Management Academy Review (Kehr, H. 2004, 29, 479-499).

In this will-forming process, the person willing to change reflects on their current situation, introspects the abilities, characteristics and motives that shape them and creates a landscape of ideas of what could be possible now - in order to now set themselves a goal decide.

From will to implementation

A very big, important step in this “career” of will. Now the step in the implementation is only a small one.

This process can be learned and especially people in the middle of life can draw from the fullness of their already lived life and their power of judgment in the so important deliberation processes. The decisive impetus for the implementation of the careful Planning may lie in a finding of the author Harald Martenstein: "What doesn't happen now will never happen again".