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Meet the NineWomen
What do successful women do with their lives after they retire? Today, they do not simply retire to a rocking chair. Since 60 is the new 40 for this generation, they are ready for new challenges and adventures and are looking for help making sense of their lives. Some of these women are motivated to be an influential force in the lives of their counterparts. Such is the case with a group of New Jersey women, who came together to form the NineWomen.
In early 2002 Yvonne Shepard, a recently retired AT&T executive, called nine like-minded and also recently retired women together for a first meeting. She asked the group to join together to have fun, make money, and give something back to a society that had done so well by them. Averaging fifty-four years old, active and energetic, the women were too young to really be retired.
For the most part the women did not know each other, so they started by developing a set of questions about their pasts and going around the room answering the questions one at a time at the beginning of each twice-monthly meeting. Sometimes they just had fun, hiking on barrier islands, taking a class in drawing together, visiting gardens and art museums. They also encouraged each other in their personal endeavors. When six months had passed and they had finished the questionnaire, they realized they had done more than bonded - they had let go of their pasts, enabling them to move on and take some real steps toward defining new lives. Their youngest member went back to a full-time job, but stayed with the group, saying she was following Milton Berle's advice: "If you want to keep looking young, hang out with older people." One woman published essays in local newspapers; another sold her botanical artwork. Others took classes in art, photography, and journalism.
Excited at what they had achieved, the group decided to write a pamphlet to encourage other women to form similar groups. When each of them had written an essay about how the group had impacted their lives, they discovered they had more than a pamphlet, they had a book. They self-published in early 2004 using their own artwork, photography and design. In addition, they included a Part II which provided their questionnaire and told about the lessons they had learned and the group processes they had developed. The day that Beyond the Corner Office - Essays by NineWomen reached an Amazon rating of just over 6000, surprisingly good for a self-published book, they were ecstatic. The women learned from their readers that the book described feelings similar to ones they had, and that they were really talking about how to get through a major transition in life. Surprisingly, they even heard from men who felt they were helped by the book.
This amazing group of women did not stop once their book was published. They now give talks about the book, and offer seminars for women in transition. They have also designed a game, called Possibilities©, that helps players explore possibilities in their lives.See the Events page of this publication. All of the NineWomen's activities have been trialed with several groups of women. Of course, their own lives continue, and they have done their best to support each other through transitions like the death of a parent, moving to a new house, helping seriously ill relations, having a first grandchild.
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