Don’t Be Afraid of Preparing for Retirement

Wharton’s Stephanie Creary talks with experts from Harvard and Boston University about how to retire successfully and create a life that works for you.

Retirement doesn’t have to be scary.

After investing years of mental, physical, and emotional energy into their work, many employees fear the prospect of retirement. They worry about isolation, a lack of structure, a lack of purpose, even a loss of identity.

“People use metaphors like ‘leaping off a cliff’ or ‘jumping into the void’ to describe their sense of what it might be like to end their careers,” said Teresa Amabile, emerita professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

“Scary” was a word spoken often by the 120 people that Amabile and her co-authors interviewed for their new book, Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You. It’s a practical guide to navigating one of life’s biggest transitions. It also shatters some long-held stereotypes about aging and retirement.

“We busted the myth that this is a time of decline and distancing from life,” Amabile said. “This is a time of vital engagement in life for almost everyone that we interviewed.”

She and co-author Kathy Kram, emerita professor of management and organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, shared details about the book during an episode of Leading Diversity at Work, a podcast series hosted by Wharton management professor Stephanie Creary

Preparing for a Successful Retirement

In the book, interviewees told vastly different stories about their retirement experiences. The authors used those stories, along with decades of research insights, to identify the “work” that must be done — the four tasks needed to create a satisfying retirement life. They noted that the tasks don’t always appear in this order:

Decide how and when to retire.

Detach from work. Finish projects, hand off assignments, and emotionally detach. For many, effectively navigating feelings of excitement, loss, fear, and a strong desire to settle into a new life is the most difficult task.

Explore and experiment. Try new activities, build new relationships, explore new places, and do other things that help build a provisional retirement life.

Take the best elements from step 3 to settle into a stable retirement, one filled with people, places, and activities that suit you well.

Kram said that, as academics, the authors thought their careful study would funnel them to the “the right way” to retire. Instead, they found there is no right way. Some people continue working part time, some start second careers or volunteer, others spend time with family or simply doing whatever they want.

“There’s no prescription,” she said. “A person needs to examine his or her own values, priorities, and needs, which tend to shift over the life course.”

One of the key lessons from the research is “identity bridging,” which Kram describes as the process of carrying pieces of pre-retirement identity into post-retirement life in some way. It’s important for people to reflect on who they want to be once they are no longer an employee. Kram shared the stories of “Simon,” a professional with a supportive wife and good work-life balance, and “Margaret,” an introvert with a chronic illness and no partner or children.

Simon slowly eased into a successful retirement, enjoying leisurely mornings with his wife and applying his career skills toward volunteering with an organization that helps underserved people acquire necessary furniture. Meanwhile, Margaret realized she was headed for the lonely life of a “couch potato,” so she started going to the gym, volunteering at a hospice, making new friends, and trying other activities to create new routines in her days. The authors said Simon and Margaret serve as different examples of successful transition.

“Our goal was to get at the psychological work underneath the transition journey, and I think we achieved that goal,” Kram said.

‘Retiring’: A Personal Journey

Kram and Amabile spent 10 years on the book from inception to publication. During that time, they were both making their own transitions to retirement. Worried that their own biases or perceptions would color their research, they relentlessly checked their work with each other and with their other co-authors, Lotte Bailyn, Marcy Crary, and Douglas T. Hall. But the older ages of all five co-authors were also a benefit, giving them greater insight into the topic and prompting some self-examination as they went along.

“I think that’s one of the gems of this research,” Kram said. “We were each going through our own unique transitions while doing this project.”

Amabile said the story of one participant in the book changed the way she planned her own retirement. “Lawrence” and his wife moved 1,000 miles away after his retirement to be closer to one of their children. Upheaval in that child’s family, coupled with a lack of community, was harder than the couple expected. His story made Amabile and her husband, Steve, carefully evaluate their plans to move 100 miles away to be closer to their only child.

“I took that as a cautionary tale, and it really informed what Steve and I did as we were considering making the move, which we did make six years ago. It worked out extremely well for us,” she said.

The Four ‘As’ of Retirement

Amabile and Kram closed out the podcast with more sage advice that they called the “four As” of retirement: Align, Agency, Awareness, and Adaptability.

First, align the vision of your life after retirement with your current preferences, needs, and aspirations in order to create a satisfactory life when work no longer dominates your time. Second, exercise agency to make the changes needed to achieve that alignment. Third, develop better awareness to understand what affects you both positively and negatively. And fourth, develop adaptability because life is unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable.

“The process of retiring is not just a decision to retire, but it’s a journey that takes time. So, being patient with oneself is very important,” Kram said.