Hosted by Sunrise of North Lynbrook, Rona Siaca, Director Of Community Relations

On Thursday, April 16, three worlds overlapped for an evening’s conversation: the marketing and service world of the audience, the emotional and phenomenal world of the elderly, and the psychological world of the speaker.  We sought to develop a common picture that would bring these three together.  Dr. Bouklas and Dorothy Gozdziak—a lawyer with a specialty in eldercare issues—had prepared a monograph for the meeting.  Here are some of the highlights of the discussion and with it the themes of their paper:

• Awareness and listening will reveal that chronological age has little to do with inner experience.  You’re sitting with a 70- or 80-year-old but quite often encountering the 26-year-old within, because there was a perfect mating of ability, power, opportunity and accomplishment at that time.  Much of what you see as the potential client’s resistance comes from the discrepancy between how you see him and how he sees himself.  For 40 or 50 years, he’s remained 26.

• Admiring and respecting are crucial to all business efforts.  At that moment the client is the sun and the moon.  The client is the universe.  That’s the proper business climate for connecting with any age.  And it doesn’t hurt for younger people to bring along a senior associate, to make the connecting easier.

• Dealing with objections is one way to handle resistance.  Another way is to side with them.  The primary school tale, “The Sun and the Wind” captured that attitude, and Rona Siaca was kind enough to share it with us in telling detail.  Objections themselves intimate that we’re “on the outside” and the client is not having a family feeling about us.  We discussed how to become part of the family, how to “function from the inside.”

A member of GPNY shared her work with us.  She was a powerful human being, humorous, attractive, and self-effacing in a pleasurable way that made people relate to her automatically.  Like many, she was a diamond waiting to be discovered, and we talked out additional ways to let people know that she was out there, practicing her craft, and ready to serve.  She was already doing everything right, and we encouraged deeper forays into the market, where she could showcase her brilliance.

We also addressed the matter of direct service to the elderly, the feelings aroused by needy, frustrated and sometimes regressed people, and I advised that “An m-m a day keeps the doctor away.”  This took us into the world of therapeutic interactions available for lay people.  And we weren’t talking about candy.  This is so transformational an idea that it’s best presented in a seminar format.  There, we can describe it, react to it, and talk it out.

It was a great group, and Dorothy Gozdziak and I got to share the thoughts we’ve been developing in our collaboration on behalf of the aging population.