Eight Steps We Took To Jump Start Post-Career Life.

By Karen and Erica

From the time we started working, as new lawyers, we began to identify ourselves strongly with our jobs. We loved our careers, we worked hard to get them, we worked harder to succeed in them, and we were sad to leave them.

Then we retired.

We knew we identified ourselves, at least in part, as lawyers. We were proud to have achieved that status, and we were fully engrossed by what we were doing. But until we had been away for a while from our careers, and the structures they created for us, we did not realize just how important that identification really was. Even the quotidian events of each day were inexplicably unnerving. We didn’t get up to go to the office. We didn’t put on our suits. We didn’t have clients. We didn’t have schedules. We didn’t have deadlines. We didn’t have our familiar communities. And ee didn’t have paychecks.

Was life terrible? Au contraire, at first life was grand. We went to matinees, enjoyed long lunches, got a little more fit, and lived the good life.

But over time, after we were rested and started to think again, we took stock of our new status. We had a thirty year runway. We couldn’t just play for decades. We didn’t like identifying ourselves as former lawyers, without any current portfolio. We wanted to get back into the swirl of life.

Luckily, we did have each other, so we spent a long time talking, trying to figure out what was going on and what we wanted to do, now that we were retired. We knew we could not commence new legal careers—we had already had the best—so we needed to figure out what else we might find gratifying. We needed to find something that was not 24/7, yet was purposeful and fun.

And we began to understand that our next phase would not come to us in a flash of brilliant light. We had to work at it.

• We decided we needed to have a place to go where we would be able to map out what we might do next. We rented a teensy weensy WeWork office, and we went several days a week to talk and do research.

• We made a list, on a yellow legal pad, of the things we liked from the working world, and the things we did not. In the first category, for example, were mental challenges. In the second, tedious and mindless chores.

• We got business cards with our names, phone numbers and email addresses.

• We got up (reasonably) early. We left our homes for at least a few hours a day. 24/7 was history, but if we wanted to stay connected we could not lie around watching the soaps either.

• We began to realize we were not alone in our hesitancy about accepting a life of leisure. We talked to everyone we could find about how they pictured retirement. There was a lot we could not identify with. The upshot—we realized we needed to create a new model for ourselves.

• We figured out we needed a livelier answer, more in the present, to the inevitable question: what do you do. We worked p something along the lines of: we are thinking about how to do retirement, considering a number of options, and trying to redefine retirement to play to our strengths. We usually stumbled over the phrase when we actually used it, but we got better with practice.

• When we were out and about, we dressed. When we met at the office we would dress in a more businesslike way—not like we used to dress, but we tried to communicate that we were engaged in meaningful activity.

• We realized that being in the mix was the only way to stay in the mix, so we said yes to everything and everyone. Almost

After a while, we began to regroup. We started to feel we still had value, and began to realize other people might perceive that value if we moved with confidence. We came to understand that our cohort of women retirees was new, and to a great extent unseen. We began to identify ourselves as retired lawyers working to transform retirement for this new set of retirees, including us. We were the same people we always had been, but we had pivoted to a new identity, based closely on the one we had before we retired.

Your journey may be faster. And it may not. But we know now that the transition can be done–and it is so worthwhile to take the journey. If you are at the beginning, and perhaps feeling a little dislocated, just wait. You will soon be using your successful career as the foundation to allow you to spring forward toward a different, and gratifying, phase.