MEET COACH GARY GROTH

Gary Groth, MS, PCC, CPCC
Professional Coach, Gerontologist, Entrepreneur

Gary Groth is a certified professional coach, a gerontologist, and the founder of Genarian. He spent thirty-five years working in non-profit fundraising as a Director of Development. Following institutional philanthropy work, he launched Gro(w)th Coaches LLC, a private practice coaching firm, where he was a coach and consultant to founders, executives, boards of directors, funders, staff, and volunteers of non-profit organizations.

Great coaching for people who change the world!

In a fit of mid-life excitement and change, Gary earned his Master of Science in Applied Gerontology from U Mass Boston in 2015, the year Genarian was created.

Gary is an entrepreneur, solution finder, and impact creator. He responds to the myriad of requests, observations, and complaints about aging made by genarians in his life by getting curious about the topics, the barriers that exist to addressing them, and exploring the solutions that are available. The work of Genarian is personal, real, and quite universal.

Genarian is a testament to life reinventions occurring at any stage in life. Gary hopes to model for other mid-life genarians how it is possible to attend graduate school while running a company, raising a child, maintaining a happy marriage and home, and engaging in the community.

Gary is a native of California who found his way to Philadelphia urban living via the suburbs of Boston and Minneapolis. He and his husband, Michael, are empty nesters now that son Benjamin has launched!

The empty nest includes a lot of camping, a snowboard, extensive genealogy research and archives, a “Bubbe” cart for walking to local grocery stores, an extensive record album collection, and a rapidly growing “bucket list.”

Life is good!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

I chose to use photographs from my family archives to convey to you what Genarian means to me. It’s personal. And I know issues of aging are personal to you too.

I might have purchased stock photos online but something about those staged representations of aging, and care, and gray hair, and mobility equipment felt inconsistent with my own vision for Genarian and my personal experience. An acquaintance labeled online stock photos as “unrealistically staged happy and optimistic old people, better suited for a health product than a coaching website.” True!

Genarian is about family–mine and yours. Genarian is about sharing our intergenerational conversations, dreams, and ideas. Genarian is about the intertwined stories and people and histories we carry our entire lives. Genarian is about serving the genarians we love when they need us to.

Summer picnics, birthday cakes, new babies, travel memories, graduations, grandchildren, laughter and tears, weddings, baseball games, and once-in-a-lifetime moments, captured in sepia tones or digitally enhanced, are familiar to us all. I hope you see yourself and your loved ones and your stories in these photos.

The coaching work of Genarian is personal.

HELLO FROM GARY GROTH

Hi, I’m Gary Groth.

Thanks for stopping by genarian.com to learn more about me as a professional coach and gerontologist. All the information is here, and you can contact me personally to learn more about me and my coaching services if that’s helpful to you.

And when you hire a coach, you hire a whole person, not just a person with a specific professional skillset. So, I want to share a bit about myself to give you an idea of who I am in addition to being a coach and gerontologist.

I’m a husband, dad, son and son in-law, brother and brother-in-law, uncle and great uncle, neighbor, voter, Jew, gay man, alumnus, donor, member, runner, snowboarder, record album collector, genealogy enthusiast, dog lover, and an avid tent camper now disguised as an RVer. I have been a Cub Scout and Boy Scout, Student Body President, Red Cross youth volunteer, newspaper carrier, school board member, grocery store clerk, deli worker, and college debater. Fun fact: I have visited every state in the US and have lived in California, Georgia, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.

I delight in friendships that are new and several that are older than 45 years. Many of my dearest friends are much older than I am (101, 88, 84!) and each enriches my life immeasurably. I lived abroad in India as an undergraduate and have traveled the world quite extensively since. I love mid-century modern furniture and displaying beautiful art produced by family and friends who are artists.

Midlife has been a great adventure! Once my son completed graduate school and fully launched, we downsized completely! We sold our suburban Boston home and moved to a loft apartment in Center City Philadelphia, donated over half of our personal effects, sold the cars, sent our boat to our nephew, and totally simplified. Urban living has been an exciting challenge, not only because the city is new, but because the lifestyle and culture is so new and unfamiliar. I am out every day, carry cloth tote bags for grabbing a last-minute item at a store, relish the energy of the street scene, enjoy the amenities of the city (the subway, buses, libraries, public art, historic neighborhoods), and especially enjoy that nothing is more than a 20-minute walk away. Cities can be good places for aging well.

Like many of you, my life has been challenging as well. In the recent years, I have experienced a lot of loss—the deaths of my beloved father and mother in-law, several dear friends, two uncles, our precious cat sisters, and our family dog. I grieve the changes in relationships once essential in my life; life is funny that way! My husband retired after a wonderful career in professional fundraising, leaving behind a primary identity for a reinvention of a new one. Retirement of one partner certainly changes the dynamics of a long marriage and conscious reinvention—of self and couple—is necessary. COVID has been a real mixed bag, to be sure. Beyond feeling very afraid early on, and getting sick with COVID myself, I am grateful for the vaccines and the sense of direction they offer. I also viewed this time of disruption as one to refocus so I began running and getting fit (and learned to bake bread, complete a daily crossword puzzle, and launch a new business). Consequently, I lost 30 pounds, reinvented my diet, and have run in several local 5 and 10K races (and performed really well too!).

My clients get all of Gary Groth when they engage me. I don’t cleverly separate my professional life from my personal life. I am fully me and my life experience frames who I am as a person and a coach. So, yes, when we talk about risk taking you’ll hear about when I have taken risks whether it was moving to a new city or learning to snowboard in my 40’s or going to grad school in my 50’s; when we talk about working with siblings to address your family challenges I can share about my personal experience in this effort; when we talk about being stuck in unhealthy patterns of living I can share about creating a workable awareness and practice of daily wellness; I can talk about what it means to start, to stop, to change, to let go, to accept, to dig in, to fall apart and to hold it all together.

Please, give a call if Genarian can be of support to you.

Gary

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