Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You – Teresa Amabile

A lot changes when you retire. That can be daunting, but it also presents valuable opportunities. It gives you a window to recreate a new approach to life now that you’ll have the time and freedom to pursue what you’d like to do. Teresa Amabile, co-author of the new book Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You, joins us to discuss the key lessons from over 200 interviews with 120 people and their experiences in retiring.

Teresa Amabile joins us from Massachusetts.

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Bio

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Teresa’s research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work.

Teresa’s work has earned several awards: the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s OB Division (2018); the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2017); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference (2018); the Center for Creative Leadership Best Paper Award (in Leadership Quarterly) (2005); and the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children (1998). In 2020, she was named one of the top 50 scholars, by citation count, in business/management (PLOS Biology). She has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including Apple, IDEO, Procter & Gamble, Roche Pharma, Genentech, TEDx Atlanta, the Society for Human Resource Management, Pfizer, and the World Economic Forum. In addition to participating in various executive programs at Harvard Business School, she created the MBA course Managing for Creativity, and has taught several courses to first-year MBA students. Teresa was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She was a director of Seaman Corporation for 25 years, and has served on the boards of other organizations.

Teresa’s discoveries appear in her book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations, illuminates how everyday events at work can impact employee engagement and creative productivity. Published in August 2011 by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is co-authored with Teresa’s husband and collaborator, Steven Kramer, Ph.D. Her other books include Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative. Teresa has published over 100 scholarly articles and chapters, in outlets including top journals in psychology (such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychologist) and in management (Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal). She is also the author of The Work Preference Inventory and KEYS to Creativity and Innovation. Teresa has used insights from her research in working with various groups in business, government, and education, including Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, Motorola, IDEO, and the Creative Education Foundation.

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For More on Teresa Amabile

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

The Balancing Act in Retirement – Stew Friedman

Retirement Rookies – Stephen & Karen Kreider Yoder

Independence Day – Steve Lopez

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Wise Quotes

On the Developmental Tasks in Retirement

“We found four jobs, essentially, four tasks that people have to do when they retire. Now, this work can be fun and exciting, at least parts of it, but it does take time and effort. The first task is deciding when and how to retire. This is a big deal for most jobs and most professions in the U.S. because we do not have a mandatory retirement age, as many industrialized countries do. So the decision is a thing that we have to deal with. The second task is detaching from work, tangibly ending, finishing up your work, doing the HR paperwork, but psychologically as well. And that part is a lot more difficult for many people, because they have to deal with a trio of losses, or at least big changes. One is identity. Another one is relationships that you’ve had for maybe decades at work. And the third is life structure loss. So your life has been really structured by that thing that’s occupied 40 or maybe 50 or more waking hours of your life for decades. So there’s that life structure loss. And that can all make detaching from work that second task kind of challenging. We saw many ways that people could deal with that successfully, but it is work. And the third task is exploring and experimenting to build a provisional retirement life, once you are in retirement. This can involve exploring and experimenting with new activities, relationships, groups, new organizations to join, places to be. That exploration actually can start before you retire. Some people  started dipping their toe into some things.But it usually happens in a big way after people retire in those first months and and really first year sometimes. And the fourth task is consolidating a quasi-stable retirement life. So figuring out from that provisional retirement life what seemed to be working well for you and and keeping those elements in your life, investing in them more if you feel like it and settling into something that feels more or less like a settled rhythm and routine for your life.”

On Life Structure

“Let me just explain this concept of life structure. Your life structure basically just includes everything in your life at a given point in time. Activities and relationships, groups and organizations you belong to, places where you spend your time. In our data, we saw a constant interplay, a kind of dance throughout the retirement transition between people’s life structure and what we psychologists call their self. The self includes everything central about a person. There are multiple identities. A person can be an engineer and a leader and a grandparent. So multiple identities, their values and priorities, their needs, their personalities, even their health.”

On The 4 As

“The four A’s…are alignment, awareness. agency and adaptability. So alignment is developing the realization that you should try to work toward good alignment between yourself and your life structure. And that just means looking at your life structure realistically and honestly and looking at yourself as you are now and seeing Does that life structure align well with who I am? And for that you need the second A, which is awareness. So you need to develop a good awareness of what the dynamics in your life structure really are and how they’re affecting you. You also need to develop good self -awareness. That’s often tougher for many of us. And it sometimes takes talking with a trusted other person, a mentor, a therapist or a counselor, sometimes a coach. I know you coach people, a trusted friend or a family member to help you reflect on who you are now. What’s really important to you? What are your needs? What are your most important values? So that A of awareness is absolutely necessary for you to develop that alignment that you need. And also to develop alignment, you need to exercise agency and that is to have the courage to proactively make changes in your life structure if you see that there are elements that aren’t working so well for you or maybe the agency to try to make some changes in yourself. And finally, because, as you said, life happens. We can’t exercise agency over everything in our lives. In fact, the truth is we can exercise agency over very few things in our lives. So we need to develop adaptability when things happen that we cannot control, we can’t change, this is our life and we need to figure out how to adapt, how to adjust.”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident. Schedule a call to discuss how The Designing Your Life process created by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans can help you make your life in retirement a great one – on your own terms.

About Your Podcast Host 

Joe Casey is the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy. He’s an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.4 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference.