Retiring? Ten Early Steps.

By Karen and Erica

Retirement happens overnight. Once you are retired, that’s it. You relax and have fun, or you don’t. But there’s not much more to it. Except that there is. A lot more. The state of retirement changes over time. If you loved your career, and you are uneasy about retirement, here’s how it plays out for many of us.

• Before. You knew it was coming. But you did not believe it really would ever come. Something else would happen to stop retirement. But no. It’s getting close. Some people look forward to it. You are uneasy. 
• Last Day. Time’s up. Maybe there’s a party where people tell you they are envious. (They don’t sound that sincere.) You look around your office, and walk away. There’s a big break in your well known routine. No more office. You have no idea what you will do tomorrow.
• Collapse. As it turns out, tomorrow is easy. You are exhausted after decades of work. The adrenaline has drained out of you. You sleep late, you go to movies, you read books, you become a lady who lunches. You never did that before! You like it!
• Mourning. After a while, a little sadness creeps in. You no longer have have your long time community, a familiar structure, a known status, a paycheck. Do you have any purpose, any more? Who are you, exactly, without your career? Can you really spend the next three decades at play? How did this happen?
• Fear. They were rare and valuable once, but now days with no obligations and no plans make you apprehensive. Who can you hang with if everyone is working? Will you be alone with nothing to do–forever? You talk to a few people, and you look at retirement books. Everyone advises you to look into hobbies, day classes, getting back into the gym, volunteer work. OK, you can try some of that. But you’re not sure that’s really the life you want.
• Social insecurity. When people ask what you do, you say you are retired—something you feel you should be proud of, given what it took to get to this point. But you feel weird. And people’s eyes glaze over when the “r” word is uttered. They don’t seem impressed. In fact, they seem uneasy. They walk away.
• Work. You don’t like where this is going. You realize you will not wake up one day to find a brilliant post-career identity, and there are decades of retirement ahead. You will need to do what you have always done–work at figuring out a plan. You need to identify, at least conceptually, what you might want to do next, and to start thinking about how you can make it happen.
• Talk. You talk to everyone who retired about what they did afterwards, how they decided what to do, and how they made it concrete. Once you get an idea about what you would like to do, you find that people are very willing to help you. They have ideas you would never have imagined. They introduce you to other people who have other great ideas.  Now that you are on the move, going forward, everyone is interested in talking to you. No-one walks away.
• Excitement. You start to see through the fog. Your picture of the future is getting clearer. There are plenty of obstacles, but you have faced obstacles throughout your life. Muscle memory kicks in and you figure out how to overcome those obstacles.
• Success. You begin doing something fulfilling. Purposeful. Something you discovered, or created. Something that is not like your old job, but has some of the good parts of your old job. Something new in some way you had not imagined while you were working in your first career.

Hooray! You’re through the hard part. You see that post-career life has endless possibilities. Congratulations! You’ve arrived.