Rethinking Retirement: Two Reasons High Achievers Struggle With Life After Work

Intense professionals live lives of tremendous success and outstanding accomplishment. As they approach retirement, however, they may expect that they will “figure it out” — that their expertise will carry them through this next phase of their lives. Unfortunately, it doesn’t often work out that way. What are the two big reasons why people with high-paying, high-profile, high-intensity careers struggle after retirement?

Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons, Retirement Transition Expert and Author of “Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement,” shares two reasons why high achievers struggle with life after work (and how they can rethink retirement):

1) Loss of Identity & Purpose: Intense career professionals tend to conflate who they are with what they do and what they have achieved. Now in retirement, with their primary engine for productivity, accomplishment, and recognition gone, an existential anxiety begins to settle in: “Now that I’m no longer the ass-kicking lawyer at the prestigious law firm, who am I?”

Rethinking: We each have an enduring self —the part of us that has endured and grown before and during our professional lives, and will continue doing so after our professional lives. Understanding how our profession helped answer our core motivational desires is vital to designing new ways to meet those needs and reconstructing our purpose in retirement.

2) Newfound Freedom: For the high achiever, effective time management is a way of life, and living in a pressure cooker is familiar. Upon retirement, all of that ends. In its place? Vast, unending stretches of free time. When time stops making its demands — and they finally get bored of sleeping late —former high achievers may wonder, “What do I do now?”

Rethinking: With newfound control over our time and freedom from the demands of a high-intensity schedule, we can begin to engage our schedule proactively, giving our full attention to any activity we choose, structuring our days around what would be truly ideal, and using new tools and approaches — such as flextime and thinking with an artist’s attitude —to rebuild our life structures in retirement.