About this episode

Dr. Denise Taylor discusses the importance of recalibrating life after retirement rather than reinventing it.

A lot of the conversation on retirement runs one way: stay busy, stay productive. Dr. Denise Taylor thinks that could quietly cost some people their best years. Denise is a Chartered Psychologist and later-life researcher in the UK. She spent 25 years coaching people through career transitions, then, at 61, went back to school herself, completing a professional doctorate on how people reconstruct meaning after full-time work. Her research subjects were all at least two years past retirement, deliberately, because the first two years tell you very little. What she found in them became the backbone of her new book, ThriveSpan: Walking Gently Into What Matters Now . The extra years we have gained, she argues, arrive roughly between 60 and 80, while health usually still holds. Spending them duplicating the shape of your working life is a decision, and it’s not right for everyone. Her alternative is not reinvention, which she calls exhausting, but recalibration: a reset in which you subtract before you add. She is also candid about her own path. Leaving a twenty-year marriage. Four days and four nights alone in nature with no food and no tent. A doctorate that started the…

People in this episode

Host: Retirement Wisdom

Guest: Dr. Denise Taylor

Topics covered

• retirement
• career transitions
• meaning reconstruction
• personal growth
• purpose
• recalibration

Keywords

• retirement
• recalibration
• career transitions
• purpose
• ThriveSpan
• later-life research
• personal growth

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: ThriveSpan: Walking Gently Into What Matters Now

Places: UK

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