715: How Your Strengths Build Career Alignment, Fulfillment, and Meaningful Work You’ll Never Want to Retire From

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: What if you never wanted to retire from work? I know it sounds crazy, but go with me on this for just a second here. Think about it. Why is it that we plan on retiring from work in the first place? Where does it come from? And just 'cause everyone is doing it, how do you know that retiring is the right thing for you?

[00:00:16] For most people, it's just been what you're supposed to do. But really, most people can only imagine working in the way that they have done in the past, and a lot of times that involves lots of hours, less freedom and flexibility, or maybe something that if you weren't being paid to do it, you probably wouldn't choose it.

[00:00:32] But what if you were getting to spend your time in all the ways that you wanted to, and you just happened to also be getting paid for it? Would you then want to retire? No matter what your answer, I want you to begin questioning everything that you think you know about work and retirement.

[00:00:47] This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build.

[00:01:07] Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and I mentioned earlier that for many, retirement has just always been the plan. Everybody does it, so of course I'm going to also. But why? Where does this concept of retirement even come from?

[00:01:25] Well, it turns out that it's relatively new for humanity. In the pre-industrial era, many people worked until they physically no longer could do so. But then, you know, later on, military pensions were introduced in the 17 and 1800s. And then in 1889, Otto Von Bismarck, who was Germany's chancellor at the time, he created the first old-age pension system, and later FDR signed Social Security into law in the United States, and then corporations started following suit in the '50s and '60s when they jumped on the bandwagon offering pensions.

[00:01:57] Now, we're not gonna discuss here how the pension system started to collapse in the 1980s, but let's instead discuss the real question, the most important one. In the modern concept of retirement, what are we stopping work to do? Play golf, hang out with the family, volunteer? All those things are, you know, good, but to really answer this question well, I suggest a slightly different question first.

[00:02:21] This episode is about disconnecting the concept of retirement from fulfillment and shifting the focus to something much more useful. How do you actually want to spend your time? Now, we've talked about this idea of how you want to spend your time on many episodes of the Happen To Your Career podcast, but here's one thing that we've found to be true.

[00:02:38] Let's just dig into this in one particular area. When you spend more of your time aligned with your strengths, life feels better, not just at work, but everywhere. And the reverse is equally true. When you're disconnected from your strengths, life feels depleting, regardless of whether you're, you know, at work, you're clocking in, or you're sitting on a beach in retirement.

[00:02:58] That's why the goal has to shift here. Instead of asking, "What's going to get me to retirement?" Like, "What's going to allow me to tolerate this better?" Start asking, "How do I build a life where I get to spend more time doing what energizes me?" Because the most energizing version of your life will always be the one that's truest to who you are.

[00:03:16] But let's say for a minute that you're not interested in retiring in the traditional sense, and you're open to the idea that if you enjoyed your work immensely and it was incredibly fulfilling, then maybe you don't wanna give it up to go play golf. If that's the case, here's a few things that you need to know.

[00:03:32] Gallup, who I love some of the work and research that they've done, particularly around strengths, how people spend their time, what creates more levels of fulfillment. Anyhow, Gallup has spent decades studying what actually creates engagement at work, but also outside of work too. And Jim Harter, their chief scientist for workplace management, he and I got to sit down for a little bit in a past episode, and we'll link up that past episode on strengths in particular.

[00:03:59] But he's also led more than 1,000 studies on this type of work and this idea of fulfillment and engagement. The finding that keeps showing up across all of those studies is that people who spend the majority of their day using their strengths are six times more likely to be engaged in their work. Six times.

[00:04:16] And that number holds across industries, income levels, and job types. Now, I recognize that we're talking about at work, however, the finding in many of the studies also carry over to when we're using our strengths either inside work, outside of work, all of it has the same result. Now, this raises a couple of questions.

[00:04:36] First of all, if you find that work is draining you, the first question that's worth asking is not, "Hey, how do I get to a better job?" or, you know, "How do I tolerate this until I retire?" Or even, "Should I retire?" It's, "How much of what I do every day is actually drawing on my strengths, and how much of it does not?"

[00:04:54] And I think that this question needs to be continued to ask regardless of whether we're applying it to work or outside of work. For most of us, though, the answers to these questions are more complicated than they look. For example, your career might have grown in ways that have pulled you further from work that actually energizes you and deeper into work that just requires competence and skill development.

[00:05:16] Now, Marcus Buckingham, who's written a few different books, draws a useful distinction here. "A skill is something that you have learned to do well. A strength is the activity that energizes you when you use it." You can be exceptionally skilled at something and have it deplete you entirely. In a moment, you're gonna meet Dan.

[00:05:34] He had an executive title, a strong salary, and a clear upward path. Promotion by promotion, he drifted from his strengths into his skills, and his career kept growing. But then his company made the decision to remove his role entirely, and what he discovered was that success that he'd been chasing for 15 years was actually a step backward.

[00:05:51] Dan: I realized that the only times that I was truly happy in what I was doing was when I was teaching. And I realized that, you know, I had a career in sales training before, and I was happy. I didn't make very much money, and that's ultimately the reason why I pivoted to, you know, a higher paying director type role.

[00:06:10] Scott Anthony Barlow: The retirement fantasy is almost always a version of that, wanting to stop doing work that ignores who you actually are. So the normal thought process is, "wouldn't retirement fix this prob...?" The short answer is yes and no. For example, did you know that a significant portion of retirees actually return to work within two years?

[00:06:28] And when researchers look at what those people do when they go back, it's rarely a continuation of the career that they retired from. It's something different. It's typically something that's more aligned with what they actually want to be spending their time on. By now, you're probably not surprised, and of course, this means that retirement was not necessarily a solution here.

[00:06:47] What it did in many of these people's case was create the space to finally confront the question that the job had been drowning out for years, "What do I actually want to be doing?" If we go back to Jim Harter from Gallup, he makes this point plainly. The need to use your strengths does not retire. The drive to contribute in ways that feel meaningful does not switch off at 65.

[00:07:10] What changes in retirement is only the external structure. The internal needs these pieces. This is why people who retire without addressing the strengths gap often describe a specific kind of restlessness in the first year. The job is gone, but the friction is not, and the people who feel it most acutely are high performers.

[00:07:30] They're the people who are responsible for much of the organization, and it's because the same drive that built the career in the first place doesn't disappear when the career ends. It just goes looking for somewhere else to land. So back to our original questions. The most productive questions are not, "How do I get to retirement faster?"

[00:07:47] It's, "How do I identify the life that I want to be living and then find the most expedient route to that?" Which most of the time doesn't have to wait till retirement, especially if the work that you get to do is designed around your strengths. Because if it isn't, then of course, this problem that we mentioned earlier travels with you.

[00:08:05] I want to give you three questions. Questions that when we get to work with clients and help them really pinpoint their strengths and the unique combinations of strengths that they bring to the table that nobody else does, then very often we're doing a lot of work with them, and we're asking a lot of questions. I want to give you three of those questions in particular that can help you begin thinking along these lines.

[00:08:26] Number one, when in your career has time disappeared? What were you actually doing in those moments? The answers might be really telling. At the very least, it'll give you a clue or some clues as to where you can dig further.

[00:08:39] Question two, what work do people consistently come to you for? And also, what energizes you when you do it? I know that's a two-parter, right?

[00:08:48] Here's the third question. If you had to remove 20% of what you do every day, what would you cut, and what does that reveal about where your energy actually goes?

[00:08:56] What we're looking to find here is the set of conditions under which you do your best work and feel most like yourself doing it. Edna spent 19 years at one company. She built a very strong career in consumer packaged goods, and then she made a move to a new organization expecting it to be better. Turns out it wasn't. Within a year she was gone.

[00:09:14] Edna: I just didn't have the autonomy that I know I needed in retrospect to thrive. So after a year in, I said, "That's it." They were shocked, but I was not. I was busy. But for me, the work wasn't meaningful.

[00:09:27] Scott Anthony Barlow: The reason Edna needed autonomy so much is because her strengths very much are self-assurance and thinking futuristically, strategically making decisions on her own.

[00:09:39] So not having that autonomy restricted her being more of who she was. The people she was working with and the expectations in that particular environment, well, it just couldn't offer that, and no amount of competence or effort was going to change what she actually needed.

[00:09:55] In this case, that meant Edna didn't need a new job. She needed to understand what conditions made work feel more meaningful for her specifically, so that the next role could be built around these conditions. The clues to this were in her strengths.

[00:10:08] I wouldn't be surprised if Edna doesn't retire in the traditional sense because she has such a good idea of how she wants to spend her time and who she wants to spend it with.

[00:10:17] By the way, if you wanna figure out more of how you want to spend your time, regardless of whether it has to do with retirement or work right now, send me an email directly, Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and then we'll connect you with a member of our team who will help you figure out your specific goals and work to put a plan together to help you get where you want to go.

[00:10:39] No pressure, just a real conversation about where you are and where you're trying to get to and how you wanna spend your time. Again, just put 'Conversation' in the subject line because having a career that you don't wanna retire from is not a fantasy, or at least it doesn't have to be. It's a career with your strengths and who you are at the center of it, and that, as it turns out, is buildable at any point, wherever you're starting from right now. Until next time, I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.