If you’re nearing retirement—or have recently retired—you may have noticed something surprising. For years, maybe decades, retirement was something to look forward to. But as it gets closer, or once it arrives, the feeling can become more complicated. You might find yourself thinking, I’m looking forward to this… so why am I also uneasy? What begins to surface isn’t really about how you’ll fill your days. It’s something deeper:Who will I be when I’m no longer working? That question can overshadow everything else. Concerns about staying busy or productive fade into the background, replaced by a more fundamental uncertainty about identity and purpose. This is a kind of existential uncertainty—and

There’s a pattern I see repeatedly in people who have just retired. Eager to fill up the time they used to spend earning a living, they fill their days with activities. The activities may be largely recreational or social in nature, or they may include serving on boards, volunteering at food banks, working on political campaigns, or any number of other rewarding, fulfilling tasks. For people who have been running at top speed all their professional lives, this seems like a smart thing to do. The idea of limitless, unstructured time can leave people accustomed to packed schedules and productive activity feeling strangely unmoored. But many people whose working lives

Speaking with a friend who’s nearing retirement, I asked how he was feeling about it. He said he’d looked forward to retirement for most of his working life—but now that it was close, his feelings had become more complicated. “At the same time I’m looking forward to it, I’m dreading it.” Why Retirement Feels So Different Than Expected The closer retirement gets, the less it’s about how you’ll fill your days and the more it becomes a deeper question: Who will I be when I stop working? That uncertainty dulls the excitement. Concerns about how to occupy your time take a back seat to something more fundamental—your sense of identity.

Most of us don’t realize the moment when life isn’t enough—it just begins as a quiet feeling something is missing. What happens when the life you built isn’t enough? For many people—especially later in life—that question doesn’t arrive gently. It shows up as a persistent dissatisfaction, or a deeper, harder-to-name unhappiness. What I’ve come to see is that this feeling often comes from a single, invisible source: living on the surface of our own lives, without even realizing it. It’s not that they’ve decided to live on the surface, or even know that’s where they’re living, they just aren’t familiar with the different purposes of the early part of life,

Over the years, I’ve coached a number of clients as they approached retirement. In almost every case there’s a period when the person about to retire freaks out a bit. Isn’t it ironic that there’s so much anxiety around retirement, a time of life we’ve been taught to look forward to? I’ve become convinced the primary reason for this freak-out has to do with just how much our identities (who we believe we are, and who we’d like others to believe we are) are shaped by what we do. For a majority of us, our sense of worthiness is inextricably tied to our profession. This sense of identity is essentially

In a conversation with a client about resistance the other day, it became clear to me that they had some confusion about the difference between acceptance and surrender. Though it’s common to confuse one with the other, they’re not really the same.

A week ago, a childhood dream was fulfilled when I was wrapped in the immersive experience of a total eclipse. I read about eclipses when I was about seven, so that means I waited sixty-five years to see it. It was everything it possibly could have been, but the real gift of the day turned out to have nothing to do with the eclipse itself.

How often do you find yourself staring into space? An untrue and unhelpful piece of received wisdom suggests that staring is a sign of slacking off, lack of focus, or being lost in a waking dream. What if it were something else entirely? I found myself in the middle of a good stare recently. I’d been writing all morning, was in a lovely mood, and was happy with what presented itself to be written. And then, there I was, in the middle of a good stare. I must have been in a curious mood (always a good sign) because rather than telling myself, “Snap out of it,” I let myself

It can seem strange to remember that a diamond and a lump of coal share the same essential chemical composition. They’re both pure carbon. A diamond is simply a lump of coal, plus time and force. Once time and force have been applied, no one would be likely to mistake a diamond for a lump of coal, even though the chemical composition hasn’t changed. You have the choice to regard yourself as either one or the other, a diamond, or a lump of coal. The shame of it is, that most of us, in complete innocence, see ourselves as the lump of coal. We may believe we have the raw