Seven Strategies for Positive Aging

A practical companion to Robert Hill’s Positive Aging: A Guide for Mental Health Professionals and Consumers, Seven Strategies for Positive Aging presents essential tactics that encourage the development of positive aging skills. In Positive Aging, Dr. Hill challenged traditional conceptions about aging and offered a new theoretical framework for understanding the nature of aging. He argued that “Positive Agers” can be found everywhere, and come from all walks of life. They find satisfaction in life regardless of their personal circumstances. By adopting affirmative lifestyle choices and positive spirituality, they are able to age well. In his new book, Robert Hill explains how anyone can adopt and develop positive aging skills. Dr. Hill has drawn upon the theoretical perspective first presented in Positive Aging to develop practical exercises and techniques that are easily accessible to the reader interested in discovering how best to adapt to the aging process. The reader will discover meaning through lifespan learning, learn how to transform age-related decline, and find out how to employ the principles of continuity in order to feel good about oneself, even during challenging times. The reader will also learn how to apply “meaning-centered” techniques of belonging, altruism, gratitude, and forgiveness in his or her own life, in order to enhance emotional health. These techniques are organized into seven distinct chapters: Learning, Meaning, Wisdom, Belonging, Helping, Gratitude, and Forgiveness.

Dr. Robert D. Hill has studied issues of normal and pathological aging internationally at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden and in the Netherlands through a Fulbright Fellowship at Maastricht University where he developed and wrote Positive Aging. A licensed psychologist in the State of Utah and the Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah, he holds a diplomate in Counseling Psychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology.