Jennifer McGaha

When Jennifer McGaha’s grandmother was in her late eighties, Jennifer asked her what her favorite age so far had been. “Fifty-five,” her grandmother answered, as though there were something magical about this stage of life, some deeper way of knowing from this vantage point. So, in her own fifty-fifth year, Jennifer began to take note. She jotted down her impressions of simple, everyday things that struck her as beautiful or humorous or intriguing and kept a list of all the accomplishments, large and small, that actually mattered to her. What she found was that during midlife, joy can be both harder to come by and easier to find, but once you begin looking for it, you might just find it everywhere. In this presentation, Jennifer will discuss her joy journey, which she documents in her book "The Joy Document," and offer suggestions for participants to bring more joy into their work and personal relationships through midlife and beyond.