Hello, It is 2:00 am in New York, 8:00 am in Johannesburg, and 1:00 pm in Bangkok. Welcome to IN TRANSIT with Sundae Bean. I am an intercultural strategist, transformation facilitator, and solution-oriented coach, and I am on a mission to help you adapt & succeed through ANY life transition.

What if I told you I have something that can help you live seven years longer. The best part is it’s free. According to the research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Becca R. Levy, PhD of Yale University and her colleagues found that adults who developed positive attitudes about aging, lived more than seven years longer than peers who had negative attitudes. My question is; Why are we not talking about this more? We’re talking about vitamins, we’re talking about exercise regime, but just our attitude about aging can impact the longevity of our life. And that is why I’m so excited to have Natasha Ginnivan here. She is a researcher of psychology and aging, a blog writer at Mobilising Wisdom. And thanks for her bicultural and third culture kid (TCK) upbringing, she’s interested in cultural attitudes to aging, exploring age stereotypes and self perceptions of aging. Natasha, welcome to IN TRANSIT today. 

Natasha: Thank you. Sundae, it’s is great to be here. 

Sundae: I’m going to say a little bit more about your background so people have some details about you. Your work is centered around the ways that we can disrupt age stereotypes through intergenerational learning, and that’s something that I love, what you are doing is an absolute passion of mine as well, through mutual mentoring, reframing, aging and wisdom sharing. She’s an advocate for the importance of inner work and self-reflection, and is interested in how we can take our life experiences, both good and bad and transform these into lessons worth sharing. These include activities of self-inquiry, mindfulness and meditation, art exploration and creative ways to realize our full potential as we age. 

So for people who know my work, they can completely understand why I’m excited to have you here today. 

So, you certainly mean business when it comes to understanding our attitudes to aging and how it impacts our lives. I am so curious, how did you even come into this area of study? 

Natasha: Yes. So interestingly, I went through transition in my 30s and felt like I needed something a little more. I used to be a designer in fashion and product development in my 20s. After I have my first child, I was interested in researching psychology. I’d always been quite interested in that field and I returned to studies at the University of New South Wales and took up psychology and my very first project was on implicit attitudes to aging. And we looked at the implicit association test as a class and we all sort of took it as an experiment and then we observed the score together as a class, and recognized that we all tend to have these implicit biases around aging. 

And I was curious to know whether a cultural background had a difference, and I come from two different cultures, my dad’s Australia, my mum grew up in the Philippines. S