The Balancing Act in Retirement – Stew Friedman
The Retirement Wisdom Podcast
Evolving Four Circles in Professional Life
The speaker, an emeritus professor, continues to work with clients and grow their small company, the total leadership company, which focuses on bringing their model to individuals and organizations globally. They are expanding the reach of their book into different languages, recently publishing in Vietnamese and soon to be available in French. While still teaching in executive MBA programs and doing executive education work, the speaker is gradually reducing their workload, focusing on fewer engagements. They refer to the different circles of their professional life, inviting people to explore this concept further at myfourcircles.com.
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Today’s Building Block: Personal Growth
If you’re planning for retirement, you’re well-versed in figuring out how to balance work and life. You may be tempted to think you won’t need to worry about that once you retire. But not so fast. If you’re planning an active retirement, you’ll need to be thoughtful in balancing the different domains of life and creating harmony among them. Several practices from Stew Friedman’s Total Leadership model can help you be intentional about your next phase of life. Start with Stew Friedman’s free tool at Total Leadership.org:
Create Your Four Circles Picture
Stew Friedman joins us from suburban Philadelphia.
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Bio
Stew Friedman, founder and CEO of Total Leadership, is an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been on the faculty since 1984. He worked for five years in the mental health field before earning his PhD from the University of Michigan. As founding director of The Wharton Leadership Program, in 1991 he initiated the required MBA and Undergraduate leadership courses. He also founded Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project in 1991. Friedman has been recognized by the biennial Thinkers50 global ranking of management thinkers every cycle since 2011 and was honored with its 2015 Distinguished Achievement Award as the world’s foremost expert in the field of talent. He was listed among HR Magazine’s most influential thought leaders, chosen by Working Mother as one of America’s most influential men who have made life better for working parents, and presented with the Families and Work Institute’s Work Life Legacy Award.
While on leave from Wharton for two-and-a-half years, Friedman ran a 50-person department as the senior executive for leadership development at Ford Motor Company. In partnership with the CEO, he launched a corporate-wide portfolio of initiatives designed to transform Ford’s culture; 2500+ managers per year participated. Near the end of his tenure at Ford, an independent research group (ICEDR) said the LDC was a “global benchmark” for leadership development programs. At Ford, he created Total Leadership, which has been a popular Wharton course since 2001 and is used by individuals and companies worldwide, including as a primary intervention in a multi-year study funded by the National Institutes of Health on improving the careers and lives of women in medicine and by 135,000+ students in Friedman’s first MOOC on Coursera. Participants in this program complete an intensive series of challenging exercises that increase their leadership capacity, performance, and well-being in all parts of life, while working in high-involvement peer-to-peer coaching relationships.
His research is widely cited, including among Harvard Business Review‘s “Ideas that Shaped Management,” and he has written two bestselling books, Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life (2008) and Leading the Life You Want: Skills for Integrating Work and Life (2014), now being taught as a MOOC on Coursera. His third Harvard Business Press book was Parents Who Lead: The Leadership Approach You Need to Parent with Purpose, Fuel Your Career, and Create a Richer Life (2020). In 2024, The Wharton School Press published a new edition of his landmark study of two generations of Wharton students, Baby Bust, 10th Anniversary Edition: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family. Work and Family – Allies or Enemies? (2000) was recognized by the Wall Street Journal as one of the field’s best books. In Integrating Work and Life: The Wharton Resource Guide (1998) Stew edited the first collection of learning tools for building leadership skills for integrating work and life.
Winner of many teaching awards, he appears regularly in business media (The New York Times cited the “rock star adoration” he inspires in his students). Friedman serves on a number of boards and is an in-demand speaker, consultant, coach, workshop leader, public policy advisor (to the U.S. Departments of Labor and State, the United Nations, and two White House administrations), and advocate for family-supportive policies in the private sector. Follow on Twitter @StewFriedman and LinkedIn, read his 50+ digital articles HBR.org, and listen to his podcast Work and Life with Stew Friedman, which began in 2014 as a nationally broadcast show on SiriusXM Wharton Business Radio.
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For More on Stew Friedman
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Mentioned in this Podcast
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Retiring? Check out these Best Books on Retirement
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Wise Quotes
On Four Way Wins
“So people come up with ideas for real world experiments toward what I call four way wins. What can you do? What steps can you take within your scope? It doesn’t have to be huge. In fact, smaller is better because it’s more likely to be doable that you believe is going to have a positive impact on your work, your home, your community, and for you personally. And people worldwide have been doing this, hundreds of thousands of them coming up with ideas for innovation that they then try in the laboratory of their real lives. And there’s all kinds of experiments that people try…People come up with all kinds of wonderful creative ideas, but we identified nine different archetypes for the things that people do. And then they try them and they gather data on what works and what doesn’t after creating a simple action plan and a scorecard. And then they learn from these experiments what it takes to create change that’s really sustainable because it works not just for you, not just for your family, not just for your community, not just for your professional life, but for all of those different parts.”
On an Ideal Day in the Future
“The way we do that is real simple exercise that is really powerful. It is to simply imagine a day in the future, and usually we choose 15 years out, which for retirees is pretty scary or can be, but it’s a useful marker because it’s too far out to plan, but it’s far enough that you could sort of see it. So just imagine an ideal day, 15 years from now, what are you doing on that day, morning, afternoon, evening, with whom and why? With what impact do you expect to be having? And so when people do that, very often, even elderly people, they realize, wow, that is the day I want to be living. Maybe I should take some steps to make that the day I’m living right now. So part of the purpose of articulating your vision of an ideal future is to inspire you and then others to be making that more of your life presently. So the revealing and engaging kinds of experiments involve people taking that leadership vision and sharing it with other people and asking them to do the same, or I mentioned earlier about how people uncover their values powerfully by looking at their own life histories and identifying the episodes in their histories, even going back to childhood that have shaped their values to bring those stories and to practice doing so, but to bring them into the real world of real relationships and ask others to do the same.”
On Service
“Please do the model of Learn, Earn, Serve. In terms of life stages, I think it’s been true for many people, although I think it’s misguided and that we should be learning, earning, and serving in every phase of our lives, even if in different measure across the different phases. So certainly as you have, if you’re lucky, more opportunity to serve others who were in greater need than you, and that’s most of humanity, you’re going to feel better about yourself if you do that, people are going to want to be around you more if that’s something that you care about. There are people who reach old age and they just want to be alone. And certainly there are days when I would rather be on a mountaintop and not interacting with any other human being, and I try to create some space for activities of that sort. You need to just be with yourself sometimes. But in terms of service, I mean, that is a great and noble activity. And again, it keeps you vital and you’re going to feel better about leaving the earth, leaving the world of your real relationships. If you feel like you are using the resources that you’ve got, your skills, your attention, maybe some of your treasure to be helping others, that’s certainly what other people are looking for you to do.”
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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 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 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.
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