2024 Senior Australian of the Year recipients – Positive ageing (3 minute video)

The 2024 State and Territory Senior Australian of the Year recipients share their favourite things about ageing and what advice they would give to their younger selves.

3:26

No matter how old you get, just keep on learning something every day. 

The advice I'd give myself when I was younger is not to believe what other people say about you when they're always putting you down. 

The advice I'd give to my younger self is never to give up on believing that you can make a difference to the lives of other people, no matter what age you are. 

Try and enjoy good health and work your way through every situation you're confronted with.

What we mainly need is someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to.

My younger self will be told to exercise, eat healthy and take life easy and enjoy life.

The advice I give my younger self about ageing well is to be patient. Change takes a while and you need to bring people along with you and inspire them to change.

The favourite part is that you just get more knowledge, hopefully more wisdom that you can pass on to others. 

To me, it's waking up in the morning and still being here. I've got another day to experience life and to enjoy it and to achieve what can be achieved.

I think the favourite part about ageing is that you can make mistakes and you can learn from them – always got the capacity to learn. 

Ageing is really good for experience. And you get it (over) time as you get older, but you use every bit of experience you've got to help somebody else. 

It's a time when you know what you like and what things give you pleasure and you tend to be less distracted by things that you know are not going to give you long standing pleasure. So, you know, what sort of activities are enjoyable and beneficial, you've established habits that are productive and healthy and hopefully relationships that are enduring. 

My favourite part of ageing is to be yourself, take out stress, eat healthy and maintain a good lifestyle. 

My favourite part about ageing is that I feel that I've gained wisdom through doing things and I can pass that to others, I can mentor others, and I love to be able to give people sound advice and see that that helps them along.

I want to use my expertise with other people and try and make them who they want to be in the future.

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