Let’s fast forward a few years. We’ll time travel to the year you stop working full time at your job. If you’ve already stopped working at it, you can stay where you are today – you’re good.
Leaving work is an exciting time! All of the sudden you can sleep in, you no longer have to worry about meetings and corporate bureaucracy is now a thing of the past.
Your newfound time will bring about new challenges. You’ll need to reframe how you spend time with your family, you’ll want to find time to stay healthy, you’ll want to set boundaries for activities that impact you negatively (anything from alcohol to too much TV).
Aside from that, you may want to find out what parts of your job you truly loved and want to keep. This was the focus of the previous lesson on creating an identity bridge. We’ll dig more into that here with the hope you can highlight at least one or two areas that might need some attention in your post-work life.
What Parts of Your Job Do You Need to Continue?
Your field of work. If you loved your field of work, you may want to find a way to continue working in that industry.
Many teachers volunteer as tutors. Programmers donate their time at Code For America. Experts use their years of experience as occasional consultants at companies, or through calls at companies like AlphaSights or GLG Research. Some others start up their own side project in the same field.
Working with a team. One part of a job that many people miss is the social interaction. Being around a group of likeminded people all working together. So many of my friends have come from work that it was difficult to leave!
Luckily, there are opportunities everywhere to work together with other people. You can join a Facebook group and become a member/moderator, go to a Meetup, join a local sports team (I favor Ultimate Frisbee myself), or team up with friends for something. That something could be anything from camping ro BBQing to building a business. Think about what you miss most – whether that’s the camaraderie, the teamwork or just the friends.
Look for successes. An area that resonates strongly with me from my former jobs is the sense of accomplishment when completing a project. I live for that feeling of a job well done right. For some it could be related to the accolades, for others it’s the intrinsic feeling of achievement.
Look for ways to get this same feeling in your own life. If you love being awarded gold stars by other people, look for ways of doing something more public. If you celebrate in a job well done, find something you enjoy to work on.
For me, I found that even just learning a bunch of new recipes helped give me that same sense of accomplishment as releasing a programming course to millions of people (something I used to do in my career). It helps that my wife enjoys my cooking.
Share your competence. One area that retirees often struggle is in their own self image. For years – or decades – they were considered experts in their field. They were looked up by coworkers and seen as a goto person for answers.
That’s a very different feeling than that of a spouse or parent. If you thrive as being seen as an authority in a topic, that’s OK! That means you have a lot of knowledge to share. The hard part is finding how to share it and who to share it with. That might mean a book or a blog, but it could also be as simple as answering questions on a public forum.
Find your own significance. In the United States it’s all too common to derive a lot of our self worth from our jobs. Do you think that in Italy if someone loses their job it’s as tightly connected with their identity? Absolutely not.
The closer you connect your job with your personal sense of significance, the more difficult it will be to be happy when you leave. Finding ways to feel significant when you’re no longer going to work is a deeply personal journey.
Part of it is rewiring our own brains to what’s most important. You don’t need to make major changes in the world to be significant. You can be significant by just being you. I love this quote by Fred Rogers that touches on this:
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has- or ever will have- something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression. – Mr. Rogers
You may not yet know how your specific form of expression will help the world, but the world is a richer place by having you express it. If that’s not significant, I don’t know what is.
How Do You Fill This Gap?
Try making a list of the areas of your job that you’ll miss the most. Significance, working together on teams, a sense of accomplishment – whatever yours might be.
Next, rank them from what you consider to be the most important to the least important.
Pick the very first one on the list and make a plan for that one! Your plan could involve a personal project, volunteering, going to counseling, working part-time, helping friends with projects or even something as small as reaching out and asking for help.
Rather than trying to fill 20 holes at once, just focus on this one for a bit. Develop a plan for how you might help fill that gap if/when you’re not working.
Now for the hard part: find a way to put that plan into action while you’re still working.
Just like in the previous lesson, we don’t want to wait until we’re not working anymore to try this out. Find a way to start now!
I’ll wrap this course up with more last quote by Mr. Rogers. It’s crazy to me that some of his lessons to kids about work-life balance and are just as important for retirees:
It’s really easy to fall into the trap of believing that what we do is more important than what we are. Of course, it’s the opposite that’s true: What we are ultimately determines what we do! – Mr. Rogers
It takes time to rewire your brain (I’m still working on myself for sure). Find ways to no longer be defined by what you do, but rather who you are. A spouse, parent, someone who follows through, who loves (your hobby), who inspires or helps others in some way, or who encourages those who need it.
If you can go into retirement with this as your self-image then the transition will be much more smooth.