Dr. Joyce: Almost a Million Twitter Followers and 71 Years Young

Winnie Sun

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

An interview with

Dr. Joyce Knudsen

Dr. Joyce Knudsen, PhD, is an internationally published author of ten books, a successful entrepreneur, the CEO of The ImageMaker, Inc. Communications Group, and a a social media maven with a massive social network that is closing in on one million people.

She is also the youngest 71-year old I know.

Afflicted in childhood with a vision impediment that prohibits her from driving, Knudsen overcame the limitations put upon her and launched a company that helps others overcome theirs. She helps clients understand and improve the image they project through their appearance, communication style, and behavior. On a deeper level, she helps clients address the self-esteem issues that hold them back: “I think of failure, according to other people’s standards, as a starting point for my path toward even bigger success,” she said, and she coaches her clients to do the same.

Knudsen launched her home-based image consulting business in 1985. She obtained her doctorate at age 54 and started building her social media empire in 2009. These days, she works around-the-clock to keep up with her international clientele and substantial social network. Between Skype calls and social engagements, Knudsen squeezes in time to work on her eleventh book, entitled “Refusing to Quit: True Stories of Women Over 60.” She seems perfectly suited as one of its subjects.

Knudsen strives to make a difference in at least one person’s life every day. She once helped a six-month coma survivor regain her confidence after a traumatic accident, and that client now owns her own business. She also helped another client achieve her goal of becoming the President of the American Veterinarian Association. “If I don’t [help someone] by the time I’m falling asleep…I reach out on social media. I love the interaction,” she said.

The positivity Knudsen espouses is an inspiration to older women who are fast approaching traditional retirement age and will continue to work, either by necessity or by choice. According to a 2014 Transamerica Retirement Survey, more than half (52%) of working women plan to continue working after they retire. Three out of five women over the age of 65 cannot afford to cover their basic needs, which forces them to stay in or return to the workforce indefinitely.

Why are older women so strapped for cash? It seems to come down to one simple fact: women live longer but earn just 78% of what men earn, according to a 2014 report from the White House Council on Economic Advisors .The lingering effects of a recession combined with threats of Social Security benefits cuts make retirement planning difficult, but the truth is, the advantages of working past 60 may exceed the supposed downsides.

Financially, working past the traditional retirement age makes sense. The longer you can hold on to your employer-paid contributions to your 401(k), the better. Continuing to work past 60 means you’re living off a paycheck instead of drawing from your savings, allowing you to continue feeding your retirement funds. Health insurance provided through work can be cheaper than Medicare and provide you with more comprehensive coverage.

But even more than that, science shows that working longer keeps you younger. Ceasing work can be detrimental to your health. Retirement often means participating less in both mental and physical activities, which means both the mind and body begin to deteriorate.

Retirement can also lead to a drop in self-esteem since so many people tie self-worth to their jobs. Combine that with fewer personal interactions with other people on a day-to-day basis, and you have a recipe for loneliness and depression.

Dr. Joyce certainly is not the type of person who lets age limit her goals or allows modern culture to dictate what older generations are capable of doing. She firmly believes that age does not determine a person’s worth in the job market, and workforce studies back her conviction. According to CareerBuilder.com, 54 percent of employers hired workers ages 60+ in 2014, up from 48 percent in 2013. A 2015 AARP Study makes the case that mature workers ages 50+ are highly valuable within many organizations — particularly in industries such as healthcare or energy that require highly skilled workers or those with unique skill sets. These older workers scored high marks for listening, writing and communication skills, leadership qualities, and a high level of employee engagement.

To women who may feel inferior because they must work well into their 60s and 70s out of financial necessity, Knudsen would encourage them to look at what might appear to be failure as an opportunity instead. “You can’t think [working past traditional retirement age] is a bad thing, but a step towards success,” she said. “You have to push yourself to keep going, be persistent, and believe in yourself.”

It should come as no surprise that Knudsen doesn’t ever want to stop working. She dismisses the idea of retirement completely. “No, it’s a silly question,” she says. “I have so much fun, and I hope I live long enough to do it all. I’m going to be 100. I want to be one of those centenarians.”

Winnie Sun is the Managing Director and Founding Partner of Sun Group Wealth Partners, a trusted financial consulting firm providing financial planning services to small business owners, senior executives, celebrities, tech elite, and established families throughout the West Coast. She has appeared on CNBC Closing Bell, Fox Business News, Huff Post LIVE, and is host of the The Renegade Millionaire show, and founder of the TheMillennialStudy.com. 

Winnie Sun is a registered representative with, and securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Investment advice offered through Sun Group Wealth Partners, a registered investment advisor and a separate entity from LPL Financial.

Aging and Spirituality

AGING AND SPIRITUALITY: After four years of research, these 12 keys were identified as the foundational principles of aging and spirituality letting us open-up to the special grace of our mature years, and taste life in abundance.
Transform your attitudes about aging,
Seek love everywhere,
Delight in connectedness,
Live in the “Now”
Accept your true self,
Forgive others and self,
Let go of anger and inner turmoil,
Give yourself to others,
Celebrate your faith,
Discover personal meaning in life,
Make your feelings work for you, and
Achieve balance in your life

quotes on getting older

Growing older is one of the most pervasive preoccupations of humankind. The passing of time is, after all, an inescapable part of the human condition. And aging, like love, is one of the most common themes in literature, be it the calm of poet Robert Brownings’ “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,” or poet Dylan Thomas’ raging against the dying of the light.

Being the paradoxical creatures we are, people generally want to live a long life, but at the same time, we lament getting older. We long for our days of youth and say “Youth is wasted on the young,” as the old adage goes. But while we can’t fight the inevitable aging of our bodies, we can shift our perspectives on what it means to grow older.

To some extent, aging is a state of mind. Instead of mourning the loss of youth, we can celebrate every extra year and be grateful for getting older. Many great minds and famous figures have said as much, and the following quotes might just change the way you think about getting older.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Philosopher and writer George Santayana

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The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain.–

Susan B. Anthony

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A human being would certainly not grow to be 70 or 80 years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.–

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung

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Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.–

Henry Ford

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Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.–

Minister and columnist Frank Crane

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I believe the second half of one’s life is meant to be better than the first half. The first half is finding out how you do it. And the second half is enjoying it.–

Activist and writer Frances Lear

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Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.– Eleanor Roosevelt

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The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.–

English writer W. Somerset Maugham

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Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are… These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.–

Virginia Woolf

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The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.–

Author Madeleine L’Engle

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There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.–

Sophia Loren

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If you are pining for youth I think it produces a stereotypical old man because you only live in memory, you live in a place that doesn’t exist. I think aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.–

David Bowie

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Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don’t. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.–

Author and speaker Martha Beck

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When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.–

Warren Buffett

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Today, I am 64 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age… A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you’re in and take advantage of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience, but you’re riding on another level. It’s completely liberating.–

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni

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Photo credit: v2osk/ Unsplash

About the Author
Tony Dunnell
Tony is an English writer of non-fiction and fiction living on the edge of the Amazon jungle.

Ripening with Age- Richard Rohr

September 18–September 23, 2022

Sunday
Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives, and does not happen without many slow realizations, inner calmings, lots of inner resistance and denials, and eventual surrenders. All of them by God’s grace work with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are. —Richard Rohr
Monday
What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul finds its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture. —Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Now, this period, this aging process, is the last time we’re given to be more than all the small things we have allowed ourselves to be over the years. But first, we must face what the smallness is, and rejoice in the time we have left to turn sweet instead of more sour than ever. —Joan Chittister
Wednesday
There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness. —Kathleen Dowling Singh
Thursday
As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful.
—James Finley
Friday
The soul of the “grand” parent is large enough to embrace the death of the ego and to affirm the life of God in itself and others, despite all imperfections. Its spaciousness accepts all the opposites in life. —Richard Rohr

Week Thirty-Eight Practice
I Will Sing a New Song

We invite readers to join theologian and mystic Howard Thurman (1900–1981) as he prays for the courage and ability to stay renewed over the course of his life:
The old song of my spirit has wearied itself out. It has long ago been learned by heart so that now it repeats itself over and over, bringing no added joy to my days or lift to my spirit. It is a good song, measured to a rhythm to which I am bound by ties of habit and timidity of mind. The words belong to old experiences which once sprang fresh as water from a mountain crevice fed by melting snows. But my life has passed beyond to other levels where the old song is meaningless. I demand of the old song that it meet the need of present urgencies. Also, I know that the work of the old song, perfect in its place, is not for the new demand!
I will sing a new song. As difficult as it is, I must learn the new song that is capable of meeting the new need. I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life, my mind and my spirit. I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before, that all that is within me may lift my voice unto God. How I love the old familiarity of the wearied melody—how I shrink from the harsh discords of the new untried harmonies.
Teach me, my Father, that I might learn with the abandonment and enthusiasm of Jesus, the fresh new accent, the untried melody, to meet the need of the untried morrow. Thus, I may rejoice with each new day and delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding.
I will sing, this day, a new song unto Thee, O God.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1953, 1994), 206–207.
Image credit: Katrina Lillian Sorrentino, Entelechy 12, (detail), 2022, photograph, Spain, used with permission. Jenna Keiper, Trinity Tree (detail), 2022, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Katrina Lillian Sorrentino, Entelechy 7, (detail), 2022, photograph, Spain, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.
This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.
Image inspiration: Aging and transformation: the natural cycle of life, learning, growing, sharing. We flower, we leaf, we shed, we become.

Pro-Age Advertising

Selling the Idea of Pro-Aging Advertisements
We should convince marketers to create ads that accurately reflect the character and value of older adults

By Jeanette Leardi
July 15, 2022

By now most of us are familiar with such classic advertisements as Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” or Life Alert’s “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!”, which depict older adults like me in stereotypically defective ways. It should go without saying that consumers age 50-plus don’t appreciate being characterized as comical, incompetent, stubborn, tech-averse people.

Creating pro-aging ads takes a willingness to abandon the belief that fear-based messages presenting aging as a process to ridicule or dread are the best vehicles for generating sales | Credit: Allegro/Youtube
However, too many advertisers still don’t seem to get that message, despite the fact that the older-adult market is a huge and lucrative one, well worth engaging.

In our ageist society, older consumers need to become marketers of their own social value, and to enlist others in that cause.

Creating pro-aging ads isn’t rocket science; it just takes a willingness to abandon the belief that fear-based messages presenting aging as a process to ridicule or dread are the best vehicles for generating sales.

In our ageist society, older consumers need to become marketers of their own social value and enlist others in that cause. The targeted “customers” are the companies who continue to turn out shoddy products in the form of discriminatory ads.

In other words, marketers must be sold on the idea of creating pro-aging ads. Luckily, such models already exist.

Here are three examples of how older adults can be depicted realistically, without being mocked, debased, or pathologized:

Ad #1 — Allegro, a Polish E-Commerce Platform Trading Company
Like all compelling ads, this one tells an engaging story. A man living independently decides he wants to learn English. His reason, as yet unknown to the audience, inspires him to order a kit online (yes, he’s computer literate) and later a suitcase. He has a goal, which he knows will be a challenge, but because he has a positive sense of his own aging, he believes he can achieve it. What’s more, he finds a creative, low-tech way to assimilate new vocabulary and is diligent and persistent, even when he makes mistakes.

There are humorous moments that aren’t presented at his expense. And lest we think he’s lonely or isolated, we learn that he has a female friend and is quite capable of international travel on his own. We finally learn the motive behind our hero’s personal endeavor in the ad’s kicker, the last thing he says … in perfect colloquial English.

Ad #2 — Subaru
After her trip, a grateful grandmother gets a ride home, probably from the airport, in her granddaughter’s car. The conversation in the car is supportive and sharing; their little adventures show the grandmother to be fun-loving, proactive, and a really “cool” person to be around. The auto’s selling point is that the grandmother had inspired her granddaughter to get the same kind of reliable car that she owns. This ad is a paean both to legacy and to intergenerational appreciation.

Ad #3 — French Telecommunications Company Bouygues
This is my all-time favorite pro-aging ad. It begins with a quirky father with a good sense of humor who’s a kind of maverick, believing that Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” is an appropriate holiday tune for his Christmas compilation (“Compil’ Noël”) tape. Various Bouygues products are subtly presented throughout the lifespan of the father and his son, showing the evolution of those products (ATM to car stereo to flip phone to smartphone). This parallels the evolution of the father-son relationship, throughout which the father’s passion and lightheartedness never fades.

The commercial ends with an acknowledgment of the father’s legacy through the son’s relationship to his own child — yet another case of intergenerational sharing.

Don’t assume that all older adults are mindlessly brand loyal.

All of these commercials are elegant, imaginative, compassionate and effective. Producing others like them merely requires more proactive creativity and less lazy, stereotypical thinking. The effort can pay off handsomely, once companies and their ad agencies realize that they have been working against their own interests by promoting messages that marginalize current — and future — older adults.

Elders are primed to buy quality products. Let’s all convince marketers to create more effective ways to sell them.

My Advice for Advertisers
Tell us a story that makes us care and with which we can identify. The overwhelming majority of us are neither uber-elders who skydive nor cartoon characters who angrily chase kids off our lawns with brooms. In general, we don’t want to be seen as extraordinary; ordinary is fine. But we do want to be seen — and respected.

Depict us as the complex individuals that we are. We tend to defy the neat boxes into which marketers and advertisers seem to want to put us. Although this is obvious to most of us, we need you to be aware of it, too.

Address the reality of our challenges as well as our willingness and ability to overcome them. Don’t assume that all older adults are mindlessly brand loyal. Show us how your products can directly and practically affect our quality of life. We can be amazingly flexible, creative and resilient in finding ways to deal with limitations. And we are inspirational models for others when we do.

Use humor in ways that build us up, not tear us down. We appreciate jokes about the human condition that allow others to laugh with us rather than at us.

Show us having affirming, productive relationships with others, especially those of younger ages. Illustrating how all of us go through this lifelong process together can add value to your marketing and build your consumer base.

Include us older adults on your marketing teams. Even before you get to the focus group stage of an already prepared advertisement, front-load your effort by using older writers, designers and production people. Not only will the resulting ad be more appealing to 50-plus consumers, it will save you time and money in the process.

The bottom line is this: Know that the messages you use to sell to us may also be seen and unconsciously absorbed by younger people. In welcoming us, you also welcome their future consumer selves.

And after all, isn’t that your goal?

Social gerontologist and Ageful Living blogger Jeanette Leardi is a Portland, Oregon–based community educator and public speaker who gives popular presentations and workshops on ageism, brain fitness, creativity, health literacy, and caregiver support. Her essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared in The Charlotte Observer, The Oregonian, The Dallas Morning News, Stria, ChangingAging, and 3rd Act Magazine. Read More
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