Genny's story
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Genny Jones goes by many names – 'Confident Queen', the 'Happy Accountant' and 'Recycled Teenager'. All of them tell you a little bit about her personality and approach to life and ageing. At 62 she’s pushing back on ageism at work, teaching African dance to people with dementia and planning a new enterprise.
Genny can remember what she calls the “trigger moment.” The moment she realised she was getting older. “What made me start thinking of ageing is that one day a brown envelope from HMRC came through the door. I sat down and opened it and it said ‘now you are 55 you could withdraw some of your pension’. I was like ‘PENSION! I am only 55 and people are talking about pensions and retirement!’”
Seven years on, Genny is still working as an accountant, a career she trained for more than four decades ago, but references to her age have started to come into day-to-day office life. “When I did my CV I didn't put my date of birth on it. I went for a job and got it with no mention of my age, but when I went to set up my payroll the ladies laughed and said ‘How old are you Genny? How long have we got you for?’ I said ‘that's a bit rude, just because I'm in my 60s it doesn’t mean I'm going to die tomorrow’. I was so hurt.”
“Another time I heard a young girl talking to her friends and she said ‘I'm working with a lot of old people in this place, it’s so boring.’ I said ‘young lady, one day you're going to be our age so do not ever say that’. But then I thought to myself ‘Oh my God, when I was young I said things like that about old people.’”
"What I realise now is that what used to be old is not old anymore. People are dressing up and becoming more confident as they get older. The perception we had is that when you reach 60, that's it. But now, I go to the gym and I see old people. There’s an instructor who’s 73 years and I know a lady who is 87 and she has just started her own beauty business.”
Starting a business is something that’s in Genny’s plan too. “I've always used my accountancy to give me money to live and I do all the other stuff for fun. But this year I'm slowly trying to switch because I realised that accountancy at this time of my life is causing me a lot of stress.”
The ‘other stuff’ Genny refers to is a raft of activities she delivers under the banner of Confident Queen. Confidence workshops for children, wellbeing workshops and mindfulness advice for people of all ages, laughing yoga and African dancing, to name a few. For years Genny has been offering these activities as a volunteer or for a very small charge but now, as she looks to find a way to reduce work stress, she is hoping to make it an enterprise.
These support activities came about as a result of a personal crisis Genny had in her mid-forties. After the end of her marriage she describes falling into a “deep hole” for five years, struggling to bring up two toddlers and manage debt. A chance encounter set her on path towards a Gingerbread holiday for single parents where she met others in a similar position and onto a course in life coaching. From there she developed her Confident Queen persona, which started as a song and dance routine to support anxious children but later developed into the wider offering we see today. It also made a TV star of Genny for a moment back in Aril 2012 when she appeared on Britain’s Got Talent.
“I meet so many people who are going through stuff and I feel if I can do something, if I can give them a reason to smile and feel good, then I should. It makes me feel good as well. When I was going through my stuff I had so many random acts of kindness from strangers and I always believe in paying it forwards.”
On turning 60 Genny trained as an African dance instructor. Dance has been a way for Genny to forge friendships and seek happiness ever since she came to the UK from Sierra Leone at the age of 15. She decided to turn that passion into a professional skill after supporting her Mum to stay fit in her old age.
“Right up until Mum died, at 84, she was doing her daily shopping at Brixton market. I would be doing slow, slow dance with her and she said, ‘you should teach others to do this.’ Now I am running dance classes for all ages but especially for elderly African Caribbean people, using their music. Some of them have dementia but when you use the music that they can relate to they are up dancing. We have a lot of fun.”
Looking back to that letter from HMRC, what would Genny say now if she were to get another out of the blue letter about retirement? “I don't think people retire, they just do different things. I only have to look at my mum. She used to work for the Commonwealth Office as a private secretary, travelling and going to all these conferences. But when she retired she was even busier than when she worked, on this committee and that committee. I will never retire. I will always be working because I’ll always need to make people smile. I'll be working and empowering people even in my sick bed in the hospital!”
