709: Why You Don’t Actually Want Early Retirement: How to Make a Career Change at 40, 50, or 60 That Brings Real Career Alignment

[00:00:00] Susan: I didn't actually want to stop working. I just couldn't imagine work being any different than it had always been.

[00:00:05] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's Susan, and about a year ago, she came to us with one goal- not to find her dream job, but to find something she could tolerate for the next seven years leading up to retirement. Seven years, that was her plan, and she thought that if she could just get through them, then she could finally start living.

[00:00:20] But get this, a year later, she told me she's not retiring anymore. Not because she can't, she's in a great financial situation, but instead, because she finally found work that fits how she wants to spend her time. Think about that for just a moment. That seems pretty crazy to the average person.

[00:00:36] Continuing to work for basically as long as you're living. Why would you want to do that? And once you see how retirement could look very differently, you might decide you just never want to stop working.

[00:00:47] I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and wanted to share what we see with clients over and over. So many people say things like, "Hey, I've got 20 years left," or, "I've got eight years left," and in many ways, they're counting down to retirement.

[00:01:01] Reason for that is, one, it's what you're supposed to do. It's like what you hear about since you're a small child, especially if you, you know, live in the United States or Western Hemisphere. It's definitely a thing that is prevalent. It's what almost everybody does. You chase your tail at work until some age where you magically stop working, and then finally start living.

[00:01:20] And then of course, you can take up golf or, you know, whatever it is that you want to do with your time. But what if work was the way that you wanted to spend your time because you enjoyed it? Because it aligned with who you are, and you felt like you were getting to contribute at a very high level. If work could feel very differently, would you still be counting down?

[00:01:39] There's actually a well-documented quirk of human psychology. It's called the availability heuristic. Our brains default to what's most familiar when imagining what's possible. In other words, if the only version of work you've ever known is the one that you've been living, it's the only version your brain can easily picture.

[00:01:56] Even though we can wrap our heads around the fact that there's probably something out there that we'd really enjoy, and if we can't see it yet, it doesn't actually feel real or feel possible for you. By the way, this is actually one of the reasons we've chosen to share many hundreds of client stories on this podcast, is because when we choose the professionals and leaders over the famous authors and really well-known speakers, it allows us to envision more of what could be possible if we can see other people like us that are actively doing this, doing what we think we might want to.

[00:02:28] This is an example of what I call systematic exposure, where you get to hear new situations. But it's couched in familiarity with, in this case, like real people who have similarities to you, but who made different choices.

[00:02:42] This is actually a really valuable tool for understanding what could be possible for you beyond your, you know, current imagination and current limitations. Because systematic exposure is so powerful in helping you to change your beliefs about what's possible for you, I wanna give you a few different ways that you can do this for yourself. Each of these ways are things that we do with clients pretty consistently.

[00:03:05] This first one is what we call a test drive conversation. Find one person doing work that sounds even remotely interesting to you, a consultant, a fractional executive, someone running a portfolio career, and have a 15 or 20-minute conversation with.

[00:03:20] I'm not talking about a networking call, I'm just talking about a genuine, "Tell me what your actual Tuesday looks like because I'm truly interested" conversation. Write down a few questions that you actually want to know the answers to, and then go and have just a few of those conversations. You don't have to have very many of those to expand what feels possible for yourself.

[00:03:40] Just a few conversations like this can do so much more to expand what feels possible for you, so much more than thinking alone.

[00:03:48] The second is a small side experiment. Take on one small project, even just a few hours, that lets you do the work rather than just imagine what it's like. You know, this might be advising a friend's company or consulting on a short-term problem, writing about something that you know a lot about. The goal here is not to develop this massive side hustle or build a business or really anything other than simply to gather real evidence about what energizes you versus what drains you.

[00:04:15] The third is taking a targeted course or even a workshop, immersing yourself in some measure of learning. You can go deep on something for a few weeks with that focused course, the workshop, certification in an area that you've always been curious about, and it doesn't have to be massive. We just wanna put you in a room, virtual or otherwise, with some other people that are already doing the work, and some way to expose yourself to what that's actually like.

[00:04:42] What is the terminology used? Go deeper in the topic area. See if that exposure alone shifts what you feel is attainable. Here's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to get you in front of what creates compelling, useful ways to spend your time, ways that you enjoy, ways that give you more energy versus simply deplete it.

[00:05:03] Ways that it helps expose you to different ways for you to contribute. Now, as you start to find some of these different clues and expose yourself to different clues, they can start to stack up. When they start to stack up, then it creates a very different set of feelings in terms of how you are doing work and what work can be like.

[00:05:23] The other interesting thing, too, along the way, is you're probably gonna get to meet some other people that legitimately enjoy their work, and that's how they want to spend their time. Yes, it's a tiny portion of the population, and also, yes, that's part of the reason we have our company around, to be able to help impact and grow that percentage.

[00:05:40] As you continue down this road, you'll start to discover that work can look radically different than what you might have ever imagined. You can work in very different ways. For example, 25 hours a week instead of 50 hours a week. Most people don't ever even think about the possibility of doing something other than full-time work in the way that they've known it in the past, and yet we still have helped many people make that type of transition into something far more part-time.

[00:06:04] Or, for example, a portfolio of consulting relationships instead of one full-time role. Now, that could be very different, too. Whether this is a fractional leadership position or an advisor relationship with companies that you've spent 20 years learning how to build, what's important here is the version of work that you've been living isn't the only version that exists. Most people just haven't experienced other ways of doing it.

[00:06:27] I think the other thing that makes this especially challenging to think about is when people are in their, you know, 20s or 30s, and that's the... And they've been working a certain particular way, then they imagine, you know, that's what needs to happen into their 40s or 50s or 60s or beyond. And when you're over 40, you know, or you're even older than that, typically this is the best time of your life to make a change because it's when you have the most experience, or when you have the best ability to contribute, which means that you can command a very different type of relationship in terms of what you're contributing versus what you're getting back.

[00:07:01] A lot of people feel like when they're going to do something different compared to how they've experienced it, that they're starting over. Not the case here. You're now finally in a position to do something differently, but much more on your own terms, because the value relationship, the contribution relationship, has changed vastly with those additional years of experience.

[00:07:21] My suggestion to you is that if you showed up to this podcast thinking something along the lines of, "I've got 15 years left. I wanna make the most of it before I retire," instead, I would start to ask a different question, that question of, "How do I want to spend my time? What could I be investing my time into that feels so good I actually don't wanna stop doing it?"

[00:07:39] Where that value relationship feels disproportionately different than what it might right now, where you're getting just as much out of it as what you are contributing. You might just end up wondering why you were ever counting down.

[00:07:50] If you know something needs to change, though, and you're not entirely sure how to make the move without throwing away everything that you've built, then I would suggest our career change guide.

[00:07:58] We made it specifically for people like you. It walks you through specific examples of how people in a similar situation to you discover their ideal career and make the move into work that's actually meaningful and well-paid, and that you wanna spend your time doing. You can click on the link below in the description, show notes, and read the guide.

[00:08:16] I also just wanna point out that the same thing that happened to Susan can happen to you. The moment you decide to stop waiting for retirement and start happening to your career is the moment that you get to move forward in a very different reality. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.