A Guide to Navigating Honeymoon Highs, Loss Lows, and Finding Your New Purpose.
You naturally make a financial plan when preparing to step away from the phase of your life that brought you financial freedom. But you might not be prepared psychologically and emotionally for a very different existence.
While many assume it's all rainbows and butterflies, it's a significant change that can cause distress and confusion.
According to Dr. Riley Moynes, you'll go through four stages after exiting a career. Understanding these four phases can help you navigate the transition and ultimately end up happy on the other side, ready to focus your factory on a new output.
Stage 1: Honeymoon
When you first enter the uncharted territory of a transition, it should feel like a honeymoon!
You wake up when you want, you do what you want, and it's pure bliss. Suddenly, there are fewer obstacles to relaxing and pursuing your dreams.
Enjoy this phase as long as you can. Have fun! Spend time with your family, go on trips, and have adventures. This is a time for you to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Initially, you will love it, and you may not feel a care in the world. But eventually, you start to feel rudderless. You will likely will experience extreme boredom, a lack of purpose, or even loss. When these feelings begin, you've entered the next stage.
Stage 2: Loss
John, a business founder who retired at 40, said,
"Having retired this summer and having enjoyed an extended vacation boating and relaxing with friends and family this fall, I was hit with depression about the loss of routine and purpose. I thought I was losing my mind as every one of my still-working friends kept saying how much they envied me. So my sadness compounded."
Ironically, he envied his friends because they still had a clear purpose in their lives. This left him with a sense of emptiness, or extreme loss.
This phase is paradoxical. You have achieved what so many dream about—the ability to do nothing. But you feel adrift, disoriented, and purposeless. You might even feel guilty that you have negative feelings toward what many people perceive as great. But negativity is typical. Your entire life, you've been outputting money in your factory. Now that that phase has come to a close, you need a new clear output.
During this stage, you might experience five different senses of loss:
- Structure – You've had to wake up, work, and get a job done. Now, you don't, and losing that structure can be a big shock.
- Identity – President Ulysses S. Grant described when he left the White House, writing, "I am now simply Ulysses S. Grant, and I am trying to get used to it." Few of us will face that big a change, but in a society where we identify by our work, losing that identity hurts and can leave us feeling unrooted and untethered.
- Purpose – It's natural to consider your purpose once you've reached financial security. You may wonder, what mountain should I climb next? A sense of purpose is crucial to finding lasting happiness. Without it, one's feelings of extreme loss only compound.
- Relationships – Despite your best intentions, you may find that your business partners, employees, clients, and friends start to fade out of your life. Many of these are treasured relationships, but with the everyday connection gone, it's hard to stay in touch. Additionally, it can be hard to relate to others outside of your workgroup if you're not in the daily grind. Even finding people who are willing to listen can be challenging.
- Impact – Being a wealth creator naturally comes with responsibility and leadership. You've probably had people reporting to you, or you’ve had a high degree of responsibility for a long time. Becoming less important to everyone around you can make you feel like you've lost your impact.
The loss stage is the most challenging phase and can be incredibly lonely. The good news is that, in time, you'll move to the next phase. It will just take some trial and error.
Stage 3: Experimentation
Just as you had to experiment as you started your career to find where you best fit and what brought you the most purpose, now is the time to experiment and "write your second act."
Experiment with where you want to spend your time and money in the long term.
Jeff explains,
"When I first exited my company, I started interviewing people who sold their companies 10–20 years ago. One of them advised me to leave the house every day and be gone for a full workday. Whether you have something to do or not, find an office space and leave. You and your family need to see you leaving the house, and it will push you to try new things."
Jeff added that his kids needed to know what Dad did all day. If his answer were "nothing," it would set a terrible precedent for what he wanted his kids to do in the future. A person who does nothing stands for nothing, and he didn't want his children to think that was acceptable.
It's time for trial and error, and you might make many errors.
Thomas Edison conducted hundreds of failed experiments, but he said,
"Negative results are just what I want. They're just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don't."
It won't be easy to experiment with your life, and it can sound daunting, but you need to keep trying different things until you discover what makes it so you want to get up in the morning and hit the ground running. If you don't, you could easily fall back into stage two, loss, where no one wants to be.
Stage 4: Reinvention
"Not everyone breaks through to stage 4," says Dr. Moynes, "but those who do are some of the happiest people I have ever met."
Reinventing yourself can be the most satisfying part of becoming financially independent. But it can also be the most scary. Though you may be afraid, this is not a good reason to stay where you are. While success at this stage looks different for everyone, it almost always comes from serving others. In this stage, you are going to recover the five losses of phase two:
- Structure: A reinvented life means a restructured life. With a compelling new mission, you will naturally develop new routines and establishments.
- Identity: You may have become what you always wanted to be—an author, painter, philanthropist, craftsman, teacher, local politician, etc. You've cemented yourself in a new identity of what you attack each day.
- Purpose: Climbing your second mountain becomes just as important, or even more important, to you than climbing the first one.
- Relationships: Though old partnerships may fade, you connect more deeply and meaningfully with family and new friends.
- Impact:You can still be an influencer in your circle, and with the energy of your new mission, that circle of influence can grow beyond your imagination.
Knowing this fourfold cycle of emotions will help you navigate and eventually reach a good place. You can anticipate a more fulfilling future on the other side of this cycle. Wherever you are on this journey, genuinely enjoy the honeymoon of phase one, prepare for the feelings of loss you will experience in phase two, experiment and try as many different things as you can in phase three, and find real fulfillment in phase four.
