It’s a fact of life. We are all getting older – every minute, hour, day, and month that goes by means that we are incrementally a little older than we were. Coincidentally, everything around us also is that much older just with the passage of time. This includes our cars, clothing, office equipment, furniture, and especially our homes.
Since everyone is getting older – us, our families, and everyone else we see or come in contact with – we can use this to our advantage. In fact, no one alive is immune from aging. It goes along with living.
That said and understood, people need help to adjust to how aging affects us. We all adapt to aging differently, and each of approaches each day with a different set of circumstances that help set the tone for how we get through that day.
As Certified Aging In Place Specialists (“CAPS”), we have the additional training, insights, and solutions ready to use for people in their current settings as well as to help them remain in their current homes long-term. For anyone reading this article who is unfamiliar with the CAPS program, who wants more information, or would like to find a CAPS professional to contact and work with them, visit stevehoffacker.com.
Throughout the year, we have the opportunity to work with people in their home setting. They don’t have to come to us – we go to them. We make it very comfortable for them to discuss their needs, illustrate or actually show us what is and is not working for them, describe what they think they might need to improve their home, and allow us to get a first-hand look for ourselves as to what we think is going on in their living space.
This makes it a very easy sale, but more than a sale, we are helping people improve their lives and their current living situation. In fact, when we approach it from strictly and aid situation rather than a sales posture, we are going to be more effective. Rather than looking at how much money we can make through a sale, we should be more concerned with how we can help someone have a more safe, comfortable, convenient, accessible, and enjoyable experience while continuing to live in their home long-term.
Even better for us, since we are experiencing the aging process as well – no one is exempt from it – we can call upon our personal experiences in working with our clients. Depending on our age and the level of our physical abilities and any vision or hearing limitations we may have, and the people in our lives from immediate family to close friends, we likely have some experience is seeing people deal with many of life’s curves and setbacks as it relates to temporary disabilities to more long-term impacts on ability and function. We can use this knowledge to provide empathy for those we are about to serve and to give us insight into how to approach their needs and create solutions for them.
Learning, like aging, is a life-long process. As we experience more of what life has to offer – the highs as well as the lows, the happiness and the sadness – and adjust to it, we are that much more equipped to offer valuable insights and services to our clients. We are able to call upon the collective experiences of ourselves, our colleagues, and our professional and strategic connections when we show up at our client’s home with a treasure of helpful information that we can incorporate to any solution we create for them.
Unlike many other professions, and perhaps rather unique to our as aging in place specialists, there is not a specific skill set to learn or a textbook to master before beginning to help our clients. Of course, we have different abilities that we bring to the client – construction, building materials, kitchen and bath renovations, occupational or physical therapy, interior design, floor plan layouts, assistive technology and equipment, and more – that we have learned and mastered before entering this field, but the aging in place arena allows ys to us what we already have and build upon that as we add to our collective experience with each day and project that is completed.
For those of us already in this challenging and rewarding field, there is more work to do that we could possibly undertake so we are able to serve those who require our services the most, those whose needs most closely align with our business model, and others where we think we can make a difference. Each provider is going to choose whom to work with a little bit differently so that is good also.
Not in the field yet? Think about what you might be able to contribute and check us out.