If Frances Can Do It

I can do it too.

I can live to be 107.

Frances Hesselbein recently passed away at 107. Who does that?

Not only did Frances live to be this age, but she rocked it. She was ranked by Fortune as one of the greatest leaders in the world. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. She led both the Girl Scouts of the USA and helped found the Peter Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management.

To follow in her footsteps, I might need to work on my health—maybe give up a few things. Diet Coke. Chocolate peanut butter whoopie pies. New England IPAs. Too many days in a row of not working out. But I am a life-long Girl Scout!

My mother met Frances and admired her a lot. Mom was a president of Swift Water Girl Scout Council during Frances’s tenure as CEO of GSUSA. I remember my mother saying how impressed she was with her strong, graceful presence. A wise and visionary female leader—in a time when there weren’t many women in those kinds of positions.

I laughed when I saw that Frances lived to be 107 because I have always wanted to do that—to live to be 107. When I was in my early 20s and first heard the idea that you can create what you want, I thought, “Okay, then. How long do I want to live?” 

I figured 107 worked. That would bring me to 2076—the 300th anniversary of the United States. 

My family has had its roots in California since the early 1800s.  But a great aunt and uncle crossed the country by wagon to get to Philadelphia in 1876—they thought it would be a neat place to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the United States.

And in 1975, my family moved from California to Vermont for a year. My parents wanted us to experience the four seasons, but also thought it would be fun to be in the northeast for the bicentennial in ’76.

Since then, I kind of forgot about my goal to live to 107. The only people that I hear live that long are in the Guinness Book of World Records. Or I see them in National Geographic, and they live in Sardinia or Okinawa. So, I gave it up. 

But what IF I let myself have that as a goal? 

That is one big hairy audacious goal. 

What goal like that do you wish you could let yourself have?

They say we create what we think about. I figure, why not have a plan rather than just some loosey-goosey sense that I’m going to live to vaguely in my 70s or 80s? 

 I can hear people now, “Yeah, but what about your health? You don’t want to live that long if you are not healthy, or not with it.” But both of my grandmothers lived to be 93, and they were pretty sharp even at the end.   

 Recently, I met a coach who has a PhD in chemistry. After 20 years working in big pharma, she  found she wasn't having any fun. So, she decided to become a coach. She got a masters in positive psychology from Penn. 

I asked her, “What was your biggest takeaway from your program?”

“It’s all about choices,” she said. “You can choose how you see the world. You can go to a dinner party and think, ‘the potatoes were cold,’ or you can think ‘it was so great to be with people that I love.’”

So, why not think I’m going to live to be 107 years old…and I’m going to be healthy, sharp, and ready to go when my time is done.

 In other words, choose what you want and then align your life with it.

 I want to say thank you to Frances. It’s as if that door I had propped open for a long time somehow closed on me. But now, thanks to her, it is open again. If you can do it, Frances, so can I. 

 What is it that you want—that may even seem a tad ridiculous? What big hairy audacious goal do you want to let yourself have?

 I’m going to research Frances’s life a bit more. I want to know her secrets. I want to know how someone can never finish college and yet end up with over 20 honorary doctoral degrees. Remember that forum she founded with Peter Drucker? It now is called the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute.

 I want to know how she took the Girl Scouts out of the Betty Crocker era, inspiring and impacting generations of young girls—including me.

 And perhaps I will check out ancestry.com. Maybe I’ll find a DNA match to her and I’ll learn I have a tiny handful of her good genes.