We, however, tend to do things differently. After years of nurturing and giving to others, midlife is a time when we chose to focus on our own goals and dreams and begin to express ourselves in new and creative ways. At long last, we’re choosing to “do unto ourselves as we’ve been doing unto others.” The author of this quote is Gloria Steinem and her good friend and longtime editor at MS. magazine, Suzanne Braun Levine, and I discussed this very idea in the first installment of our ongoing monthly radio series.

So much has been said about happiness recently. Yet Suzanne believes this particular word does not cover the depth and complexity of the transformation we experience at midlife. Perhaps a more all-encompassing term would be “fulfillment.” And a large part of feeling fulfilled for women is sharing our lives with our female friends. In truth, as we’re doing unto ourselves, we’re hardwired to want to share our journey with those closest to us. As Suzanne puts it: “A circle of trust is a must.”

I invite you to take a brief 15 minutes from your day to listen to this enlightening conversation. You’ll come away feeling both informed and inspired. As always, Suzanne shares her special insight into the changes and challenges today’s women face as we continue to revolutionize the spirit and style of aging.

Yet, now that we’re past fifty, friendship and a sense of community with likeminded women holds even greater meaning. Aging can bring with it a shrinking world: we may no longer be working and feel the loss of day-to-day communication; we might live on the opposite side of the country from our dearest family members and mourn the physical closeness we yearn for; and we may lack the social resources that once gave our lives richness and depth.

Viola! Enter The Transition Network. This nationwide organization was founded to fill the void that many of us feel as we move beyond our initial careers and seek to find fulfillment elsewhere. Their Mission is to provide “a community for women over 50, who join forces as they navigate the transition from one career to another—or whatever is next.”

And, true to the boomer trailblazing spirit, The Transition Network defines itself as a “movement”—a national movement of engaged and energetic women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who together will:

• DISCOVER new perspectives and opportunities
• IMPACT their lives and their communities
• ADVOCATE with a collective and powerful voice

Talk about a feisty spirit! I’ve recently become a member of TTN and look forward to interacting with women my own age who understand the issues and concerns I’m facing at this time in my life. And, making things even more exciting, I just had the pleasure of interviewing the inspiring speaker and “encore career role model,” Betsy Werley, who also happens to be the Executive Director of The Transition Network.

I invite you to spend the brief fifteen minutes to listen to what Betsy has to say. You’ll come away from the experience with a renewed sense of purpose and confidence in all you can accomplish during this rich and fertile time in your life.

Also, be certain to check out the website for The Transition Network. With a few new friends on your side, a bit of information and support, and the inherent power found within a group of menopausal women on a mission, you’ll be feeling feisty for sure!

Special Event: I’m joining forces with the National Association of Baby Boomer Women to present a special Teleseminar, How to Land the Job You Love on Thursday, Aug. 12th at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. If you or a boomer friend are looking for work, please sign up and attend. There is absolutely no charge and we’ll be covering the critical tools and techniques that will jumpstart your search and help you maximize your opportunities in today’s competitive market. The last 10 minutes will be open for Q & A–so think of the special answers you need to know and plan on attending. Sign up here!

But there’s a fresh (um, actually mature) role model on the scene and she’s showing us an even greater lesson: 80 is now the new eighty. Maybe it’s her dimples or perhaps it’s the ever-present twinkle in her eye, but Betty White has become the pin-up girl for the Wrinkled Revolution. And, speaking of fresh, this gal has got some mouth on her! Did you catch her Saturday Night Live appearance?

Although her life has not always been easy (she lost her beloved husband, Alan Ludden, back in 1981 and never remarried), Betty White is showing us the art of aging without losing the spark and sparkle of youth. Her mind remains cuttingly clever and she’s not afraid of delivering a bawdy retort when interviewers give her any opening to inject that famous sense of humor. This lady is still taking risks, still making waves, and still enjoying life to the fullest. In fact, in just a couple of years, Betty will be showing us how to be a cheeky old broad at ninety!

So here’s to the woman who’s provided us countless laughs and many great moments for more than half a century: may her star continue to shine as she shows us the way to the Feisty Side of 100. If anyone can make her centenarian years sexy and fun, it’s gotta be Betty!

I had the great pleasure of connecting with just such women earlier this week: Tomatoes in the Trenches. They’re a bicoastal group who’ve joined forces to present a “lively gabfest for smart women over 40” on Blog Talk Radio. Each Wednesday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern and 10:00 a.m. Pacific, they interview fascinating women—from celebrities like Shelly Fabares to experts on film, food, design, and more.

The East Coast contingent is composed of three lively ladies from New York who grew weary of being overlooked by marketers choosing to lavish their attention on the size zero, barely post-pubescent set. Being trailblazing baby boomers and unwilling to be sidelined, they’d had enough of the invisibility factor. So these midlife tomatoes decided to create their own newsletter where they provide the real skinny on the best of everything in NYC. And they have standards! Whatever they promote has to pass muster at the “Three Tomato” review panel.

The West Coast is represented by an amazing group of women I’ve written about several times on Feisty Side of Fifty. In the Trenches Productions was launched by four actresses who’d had enough of the ageist, sexist attitude of Hollywood. So, like their East Coast counterparts, they decided to take the bull by the horns and do something about the “ignored audience” on their own. Using the hormonal chutzpah menopause gifts us, they went about creating the first entertainment network for women over 40 on the web. Their productions are geared right at our interests, our issues, and us, and you’ll find humor and insight in each and every one of their fabulous films.

I was both fortunate and honored to be interviewed by Tomatoes in the Trenches about the best methods for landing a job when you’re fifty and over. It’s tough out there these days, but if you know the latest and most effective techniques to successfully compete in today’s job market, you’re halfway there. And there are huge benefits to being an older applicant—you just need to learn the tips and tools for turning your age into an advantage. So please give their show a listen and check out what you can do to distinguish yourself from the crowd of jobseekers and move your search forward quickly and on target.

And most especially, as baby boomer women who are all tomatoes in the trenches, let’s look out for one another and call a halt to the invisibility factor once and for all!

We boomers are indeed fortunate because, as Suzanne writes, for our mothers and grandmothers, the “change of life” meant their lives stopped changing. As their nests emptied so did much of their focus and purpose. Without careers and with limited options and outlets, many of them became ladies who lunch, played tennis or bridge, or waited anxiously to become grandmothers. Maintaining home and hearth remained their primary responsibility and, with fewer mouths to feed, their job description became marginalized.

Ours, however, is a different generation. The women’s movement, the trailblazing spirit of the baby boomers, and the current economic realities have combined to keep us actively engaged in life way past our half-century birthdays. Traditional retirement is a thing of the past as the “forever-young” mindset of the boomers drives us to continue to contribute, interact, and break social barriers.

With our passion and energy still intact, the popular phrase for women our age has become “fifty is the new thirty.” But Suzanne buckles at that one! As she wrote: “That is not it at all. I have discovered that most women in Second Adulthood are very happy being where they are—they don’t want to go back to any of their earlier stages or decades… The assumption is that youth—or at least younger—is the ideal state and that given a choice, no woman in her right mind would relinquish it. I have found the opposite to be true.”

I, too, have found the opposite to be true and I bet you have as well. The years of fifty and beyond present us with many gifts: a newly found freedom to speak our minds and renounce much of our reflexive need to please; a greater sense of strength, mastery, and the ability to roll with the punches; and the drive towards authenticity and becoming the magnificently ripe and wise women we know ourselves to be.

Fifty also brings with it life lessons. Suzanne has highlighted ten of them in her book Fifty is the New Fifty and I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing her about all ten. Please take the brief fifteen minutes to listen to the final broadcast in our series and then check back to listen to each and every one. The lessons are powerful and profound and will guide you well through this amazing time in your life. In fact, you too, will likely start taking umbrage when someone smugly states, “fifty is the new thirty.”

No—it’s not! It’s far from that. Fifty is the brand new, remarkably fertile, ripe, robust, and exceedingly feisty FIFTY!

One of my personal role models in the Internet department is Anne Holmes. Along with her husband, Steve, she’s founded and built several sites with boomers’ interests and needs in mind. These include:

• www.BoomerLifestyle.com – a blog dedicated to the Boomer lifestyle
• www.Boomerpreneur.com – a website that offers coaching designed to help Boomers learn to start their own businesses
• www.BoomerCo.com – a  blog site dedicated to showcasing publishing solutions and the tools Anne and Steve developed to help their fellow Baby Boomers create better blogs

And these are just for starters! The couple recently purchased two leading websites for baby boomer women:

• The National Association for Baby Boomer Women www.NABBW.com
• Boomer Women Speak www.BoomerWomenSpeak.com

The pair has big plans for these sites  and will be adding new resources, a new look, and even more benefits for members.

As Anne likes to say: “Perhaps one of my best credentials in taking over as ‘boomer in chief” at NABBW and Boomer Women Speak, is that I am a fairly typical Baby Boomer Woman, and thus know a lot about what we are all encountering these days. I have true empathy for what all of us are experiencing.

In other words, I know what makes us Boomers. And I not only champion us, I take offense at those who would call us ‘unrealized,’ or infer that we Baby Boomers have not lived up to our country’s expectations. After all, we Boomers have always been about blazing new trails, and we’re not done yet!!  Having tackled civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, then reinvented what makes up a family, and what the work environment looks like, our current task, in my opinion, is to restructure retirement.”

To those ends, Anne and Steve are busily adding to their collection of websites and are focusing on Boomer travel and an online magazine featuring articles written by their fellow Boomer bloggers. So take a few minutes and listen to my interview with THE Boomer in Chief, Anne Holmes. She’s a high energy, fascinating woman who’s a baby boomer to the core—and downright feisty to boot!

Suzanne Braun Levine coined the term in her book, Inventing the Rest of Our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood and refers to it again in her next book, 50 is the New Fifty: 10 Life Lessons for Women in Second Adulthood. The Fertile Void refers to the period most every woman experiences when her first adulthood gives way to her second. Changing hormones combined with major shifts in life circumstances (empty nests, plateauing careers, relationships grown all-too-familiar, and so forth) produce a period of such significant re-evaluation, that it can shake us to our very core.

The good news, however, is what follows on the other side of the Fertile Void. As we rebuild our lives, Suzanne tells us we stop asking, “What do we want to do?” and start asking, “How do we want to live?” For women, second adulthood becomes a quest for authenticity. We pay less attention to our personality (how we interact socially) and more attention to our character (the way we act when we’re alone) as we move towards a more authentic way of being.

As we become more comfortable and confident in our own skin, any perceived slights and wounding by others carry far less weight—we literally lighten our load. Ideally, we can let much of the baggage we’ve borne for years slip away. And this includes the baggage we’ve piled upon ourselves. It’s a time of forgiving and forgetting as we forge forward toward a new wholeness and self-actualization.

I invite you to take a listen to this latest, and very important, lesson in our 10-part series on embracing our age and making the most of this special time in our lives. Once you pass through the Fertile Void, most women report that the feisty side of fifty is truly a remarkable, deeply rewarding, and enlightening place to be!

In Part One of “Your New Normal,” I told the story of Sally Franz who was hit with Transverse Myelitis and went from being a perfectly healthy Alpha Female to becoming paralyzed—uprooting her reality in a swift and devastating 20 minutes. Although Sally’s experience was extreme, many of us have dealt with difficult and challenging situations of our own: the loss of one or both parents, divorce and the dissolution of relationships, major disappointments and hurts, the loss of a job, and a myriad other major events that sent us into a temporary tailspin.

It seems that, just when we’re coming into our own as fully formed powerful women, life conspires to knock us down. But maybe not. My latest interview with Suzanne Braun Levine, founding editor of Ms. Magazine and author of several books on women and aging, was all about finding the strength to create our new normal after we’ve been hit by major adversity. One of the women she interviewed used the term “forging forward.” Rather than merely “moving forward” or “coping,” this term has energy and determination behind it.

As Suzanne reminds us, the very defiance and strength that wells up within us during the powerful midlife transition we experience as women serves us well. No longer robotically focusing our attention outwards to please others, we’re more equipped to tap into our inner resources and stand up to these types of challenging circumstances. Ironically, Suzanne says, one of the major lessons to be learned at such times, is to reach out to others for aid and assistance. So, while our inner reservoir of strength is increased, so is our ability to ask for help.

It’s one more fascinating lesson from Suzanne’s latest book, “50 is the New Fifty.” I invite you to check out her site and take the brief 15 minutes to listen to our interview. You’ll come away inspired and empowered.

It is true that significant life events may force us to create a new normal, but as women in our fifties and beyond, we can handle it. In fact, when hit by these major events, we boomers can and will forge forward in a very feisty way—flower power all grown up is a thing to behold!

Sally Franz, a well-known purveyor of “boomer humor” found herself in just this situation. Always in the peak of good health, Sally was an avid skier, rock-climber, and all around active kinda gal. Then one day on a ski trip, as she was traversing the double black diamond slope, she felt a tingling in her left toes. She tried to ignore it but the tingling traveled up her left leg and then started in her other foot. So Sally decided to return to the lodge.

By the time she made it down the hill (a mere 20 minutes or so), Sally was paralyzed. As a victim of the strange and immediately debilitating disease, Transverse Myelitis, Sally’s life changed in untold ways. She went from being a self-ascribed “Alpha Female” to becoming a paraplegic who needed bedpans and help washing herself. This unfortunate experience became her “new normal.”

In truth, Sally became an unwilling victim of the healthcare system, as it exists today. But victim is a role our friend, Sally, does not wear well. So she got to writing. The result is a fabulous read all about the good, the bad, the ugly, and the funny of what she experienced. I invite you to check out Sally’s site, listen to our interview, and take a look at her book.

Scrambled Leggs: A Snarky Tale of Hospital Hooey is a work you won’t soon forget. Sally dispenses hope and humor and she also provides valuable advice for patients, caregivers, family, and friends. I wish I’d had this book years ago. I would have done many things differently when my mother was ill and bedridden for years.

Don’t miss “Your New Normal—Part II” when I continue my 10-part series with Suzanne Braun Levine on Feisty Side of Fifty Radio and she shares her thoughts on dealing with the more difficult aspects of aging.

Yes, we do grow feistier with age but sometimes life throws us a big curve and we need to stop and reevaluate. And we do have a choice. As we face our own new normal, it’s helpful to remember Sally’s words: “Given what I have left, now what can I do?”