Design Your Retirement Before It Designs You
I have lived in 5 countries on three continents. I have packed up homes, started over in cities where I knew no one, built friendships across time zones, and learned that belonging is something you construct rather than something you find. I would not trade any of it. But I will tell you something nobody warned me about: when you...
We have been thinking about retirement wrong. For most of our working lives, retirement has existed in our minds as an endpoint. The finish line. The thing you get to after decades of commuting, meetings, deliverables, and performance reviews. You cross it, you stop, and then – the assumption goes – life gets good. Except the research does not support...
I have been sitting with this one for a while, because it annoyed me before it clarified itself. A while back, I started noticing something in the conversations I was having with people in their late 40s and 50s. Smart people. Experienced people. People who had given decades to their careers and were starting to think – quietly, carefully, sometimes...
I was walking through London a while back when I came across a sign that stopped me in my tracks. Its message was simple: “Don’t slow down for the wrong reasons.” I stood there longer than was probably acceptable for someone standing on the pavement staring at a sign. But it landed. Because it said in a few words what...
I want to tell you about a conversation I had with a woman I’ll call Claire. Claire was 54 and had been thinking about making changes to her life for a few years. She knew what she wanted – more space, more purpose, a health routine that didn’t rely entirely on good intentions and optimism, a clearer sense of what...
Picture this. It’s a Sunday afternoon sometime in the 1990s. Your dad is in his armchair – newspaper, cup of tea, television on in the background. He’s worked the same job for 30 years. He has a pension. He knows exactly what retirement looks like because everyone around him retired the same way. He’ll be fine. Now, picture yourself. You’re...
Let me ask you something, and I ask you to sit with it for a second. Is there something you’ve been meaning to start – really start – for months? Maybe longer? Something that matters to you, that you know MATTERS to you, and yet somehow keeps getting pushed to the next week, the next season, the next version of...
Let me be clear: I’m not here to shame you. I’m here to wake you up. ๐ Because here’s the truth about Gen X and retirement readiness: most of us are sleepwalking into the next 20-30 years of our lives. We’re on autopilot, doing the same things we’ve always done, vaguely aware that retirement is approaching but not really dealing...
Click here to download your copy of the accompanying workbook! In Part 1, we explored what happens to men and women during midlife – how she becomes more assertive and adventurous while he becomes more emotionally available and connection-focused. It’s fascinating research, but it leaves one big question hanging: what do you actually do about it? Because understanding that you’re...
I was having coffee with a friend last month when she said something that made me laugh: “I spent 30 years being the nice girl who never rocked the boat. Now I can’t seem to stop capsizing it.” Her husband, meanwhile, had recently started asking her how she was feeling about things. Actual feelings. After 25 years of marriage. She...
Last Tuesday morning, I was out walking my dog when I spotted Margaret coming the other direction with Charlie, her scruffy terrier mix. Same time as always – 6 AM sharp. Charlie and my dog did their usual sniff-and-circle routine while Margaret and I chatted. “You’re consistent,” I said. “Same time every day.” “Oh, Charlie doesn’t give me a choice,”...