Giving Founders the Language of Spirituality

Baby Boomers are dying like they lived. Even late in life, everything is big. Full of promise. Unprecedented.

Now that the day is lengthening for them, there is no shortage of second-half-of-life self-help books, relationship advice, and promises of vibrancy to one hundred years and beyond. Even aspirations of crystallized intelligence as our brain atrophies. There is a kind of breathlessness about the final third of life. In the next three decades, the U.S. population of people over 100 is expected to quadruple.

I’m excited about that too, of course, given my age. But with a caveat.

My parents are still alive and mostly mobile at 90. My grandmother lived to 103. Her older sister lived to 105. If you’ve spent any time at all with someone over 100, you know that she is likely not anticipating the next season of the Golden Bachelorette. Life at those upper reaches is nothing if not hard.

Contrast today’s life expectancy with that at the turn of the 20th century: Men could expect to live 46 years while women lived to 48. Today, 125 years later, life expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years old while globally it is more than 70.

It was fortuitous, then, for Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, to help launch the 20^thcentury’s thrust into adult development theory with this quote:

The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.

Maybe Jung had a crystal ball and envisioned a time when Boomers would be living past 100.

Life in Late Afternoon

Even while the literature explodes for greying Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers, little seems to be applied specifically to aging founders and leaders of family-owned businesses.

Yes, there are boatloads of advice for establishing advisory boards, making succession happen sooner rather than later, giving up control, setting up a family office, and protecting one’s legacy (ergo, “protecting the money”). The advice seems to be primarily about goading founders to get off the dime and move with alacrity towards the sunset. Everyone wants the aging leader, the one in power, to listen up, give up control, and take a little advice.

But what if we began to view the aging leader’s world through their eyes. For starters we’d learn that life’s veil of permanence (“I’m going to live forever!”) is lifting, slowly for some and more quickly for others. This realization tends to be imperceptible to those around him or her, especially family members.

It’s a slow inward turning, at least for those who are on the path towards deeper meaning. “The afternoon of human life,” wrote Jung, “must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.”

Life in the late afternoon is simply different in kind from the morning.

The moment one uses the language of meaning and purpose, however, is when the language of psychology and management bow to the language of spirituality, which has largely been the purview of religion since the beginning of time. Psychological language tends to frame the human condition analytically (as a diagnosis) as well as negatively (as dysfunction). Management language tends to frame problems in terms of efficiency or innovation.

However, spirituality language, such as the phrases “letting go” or “relinquish,” is more descriptive of the interior journeys of aging leaders as they grapple with mortality, wrestle with what everyone wants them to do – give up power – and find meaning in the afternoon.

This is why so many founders feel drawn to telling their family business story. Capturing the narrative of their family business allows leaders to make sense of their journey, uncovering values forged through years of uncertainty, daily hard work, and perseverance. By looking back and giving voice to their life’s work, they not only define what has shaped their past but also identify values that can guide and inspire future generations.

For many founders, the family business story provides meaning and purpose different in kind, as Jung suggests, from the building of the business. Through storytelling, the founder’s descending sun casts a warm, guiding light on the afternoon of the next gen.

In this way, storytelling becomes invaluable to the continuity of the family enterprise, for it is values that have the potential to endure and affect change into the next generation. Perhaps we need to add another category to family consulting that uses the language of spirituality.

Call it spirituality. Call it adult human development theory. Perhaps it’s best to stick with “the interior journey.”