Retirement can mean a loss of identity — how to bring happiness to your next act

By Richard Eisenberg

Finding your identity after working full-time can be “a great challenge that’s really fun”

For many people entering retirement, the famous lines from the beginning of “A Chorus Line” resonate: “Who am I anyway? am i my resume That’s a picture of a person I don’t know!”

Building a new identity in retirement or massaging the identity you had when you were working full-time can be a serious challenge.

“This identity issue is so big because we spend our entire lives evolving into who we’re meant to be,” said Michael Kay, who recently retired from the Livingston, NJ, financial planning firm he founded in 2001 kicked.

He now leads the Chapter X community for “men transitioning into life after work” and found that identity is “a pretty common part of the conversation.”

Read: Once on the verge of retirement, these people are taking a gap year after a successful career.

‘Who the hell am I?’

Kay has parted ways with a career you’ve been building for over 40 years, noting, “You pull out the rug and it’s like, ‘OK, who the hell am I?

That’s the question Stuart Silverman wrestled with in 2016 at the age of 67 after retiring from the Mountain View, Calif., distribution and marketing company he founded some 15 years earlier.

Before retiring, Silverman said, “I had a really fabulous identity. I’ve done a good job. I was very respected.”

But he didn’t have much to do outside of his job.

“Work was my hobby,” he remarked. When Silverman retired, “I started to realize that’s a problem.”

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Finding your new identity in retirement

After doing some thinking with his wife Terry, Silverman decided he would find his new identity by offering presentations — and then a 12-week course — around transitioning into retirement. He loves and loves helping others who are struggling with challenges in retirement, including identity.

Joe Casey, a Princeton, NJ-based retirement coach, author of Win the Retirement Game, and host of The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, calls identity “one of the biggest issues I see working with clients transitioning into retirement. ”

The reason?

“We tend to confuse who we are with what we do,” Casey said.

Silverman said transitioning into retirement can be “a grieving process.” Part of this can be mourning the work identity you’re now behind.

“When you’ve had a very stressful career, there’s a decompression time,” noted Carl Landau, the Sacramento, California host of the ironically named “I Used to Be Somebody” podcast.

Read: The number of baby boomers and Generation Xers planning to work past 70 — or forever — is staggering

Who fights more than others

While it’s somewhat of a generalization, according to the four retirement experts I spoke to for this column, men tend to face identity issues at retirement than women do.

Casey said the female clients in his retirement planning practice tended to have an advantage over men “because they looked at themselves in a broader way than just their job.”

Identity can be particularly challenging for doctors and lawyers who are used to being perceived based on their titles and status.

“I had a client who was an oral surgeon, and six months after he had to go out of practice, he told me he had become a ‘fill-in surgeon’ for ‘this doctor, this doctor and this doctor.'” Kay remembered.

“‘He said, ‘Michael, I’ve been a doctor all my life. I don’t want to be a mister.’ And I turned to him and I said, ‘Listen, I’ve been a mister my whole life. But you know, he couldn’t cross that bridge.’

Landau is an entrepreneur who, like me, calls himself “tireless”. (“The idea of ​​being retired sounds awful. It says, ‘You’re done,'” he said.)

He said he hasn’t had any identity issues after selling his live events/conferences/exhibitions business from Niche Media in 2019. And Landau believes that retired entrepreneurs tend to have fewer identity issues than former employees and managers.

“I think entrepreneurs are pretty good [dealing with identity in retirement] because they’re so used to failure,” joked Landau. “You’re always trying new things and it’s not that big of a deal.”

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The fun of forging a new identity

Landau, who has interviewed more than 60 podcast guests “who used to be someone”, calls the search for identity after the full-time job “a great challenge that is really fun”. Part of his new identity is being a stand-up comic and, as a new pickleball fanatic, co-authoring a new book, Pickleball for Dummies.

For some people – and I would consider myself one of them – adopting an identity in retirement means holding on to a part of the identity you had when you were working full-time. That can mean doing the same kind of work, just less of it. Said Kay, “Replacing two days is a lot less scary than replacing five.”

In other words, your new identity doesn’t have to be 100% new. “Sometimes we just need to update our identity like we update our iPhones,” Casey said.

Or it may mean adapting your skills to something else in retirement, as Silverman did; It took him about three months to find his new identity.

“When I was working, I felt really good that I was helping sales reps find jobs, moving the world forward, and helping the economy,” he said. Nowadays, Silverman said, he gets that feeling from helping others retire.

“The most important thing in the transition to this next phase [of retirement] wrestles that concept of identity, purpose, and meaning to the ground,” Silverman noted. Finances are important. Health is important. Many other things are important. But if you don’t get that, it can lead to depression.”

assess yourself

In Silverman’s retirement transition course, he gives participants a score sheet to rate their happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 and a list of 50 values ​​and drivers that might be important to them in retirement. He also asks them to list the pros and cons of working full-time, as well as the pros and cons they have regarding retirement.

“By going through these, it helps them get a sense of what their identity and purpose was when they worked and what it should be now,” he said.

Kay said it’s about finding your “joy.” He advised, “Think about what turns you on, what gives you some level of satisfaction.”

However, as Casey wrote in “Win the Retirement Game,” some retired people answer the question, “So what do you do?” in the past.

“They describe who they used to be,” he remarked. “But people who are successful in this next chapter answer differently, in the present tense. They describe what they do, what drives them now. They talk about the new story they are living.”

Pursue a new or former passion

Sometimes finding a new identity in retirement can mean pursuing a new (or perhaps previous) passion, like art or performing.

Kay returned to the trumpet and now plays with the South Orange Symphony Orchestra and at a jazz club in Montclair, NJ. He and his wife are currently learning how to play bridge.

After Bob Vogel retired as a communications professor at Miami University in 2009 (one of Landau’s favorites while studying there), he began touring the country and playing the piano. These days, the 80-year-old “is the entertainment at Smokey’s, a high-end restaurant in Wisconsin. He’s having fun with it,” Landau said.

Welcome being a beginner

Don’t worry that if you learn something new in retirement to forge your new identity, you won’t be immediately successful. “Give yourself permission to be bad at something,” advised Casey.

Landau added: “It’s fun to be a beginner and just learn. Once you’ve done that, there’s a huge world in front of you.”

If you have a spouse or partner and are struggling with your identity in retirement, the experts I interviewed strongly recommend discussing it with them.

Kay said, “The first step is to have this big conversation about, ‘This is what I want to do. How does this affect you? How does this affect us?’ And also the idea that ‘I might struggle with that. I could get out of my game.’”

Silverman said this was a big help to him. “Terry has been very supportive. She said, ‘Whatever works for you, honey, and I’ll help you with that.’

How long it may take to find your identity

Don’t be alarmed if identity issues get you in trouble in the first few months of retirement, or even the first year. But if they’re still struggling after a year, “I think beyond a year, then you’re struggling and you might want to seek help,” Landau said.

This could mean talking to a therapist or a life coach, or to friends, family, or others who have been through a similar transition.

Remember, Casey said, you’re a lot more than you used to be.

“Seeing ourselves as committed to our job minimizes the fact that we are all multidimensional,” he noted. “Having the opportunity to step back and think about the other parts of us can be really helpful.”

If you’re struggling with identity issues in retirement, or have had this experience, I’d love to hear from you about it. write me an email Thanks very much!

-Richard Eisenberg

(ENDS) Dow Jones Newswires

10/19/22 1019ET

Copyright (c) 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.