Creating Your Future Life After Running Your Own Business or a CXO Position

I’ve been working with a client who was the chairman of a financial planning business and he’s no longer, and he’s having to grapple with what the next phase of his life looks like.

The same time I was working with the career transition of a guy who was a CFO of a business and he’s sort of wanting to create a bit of a portfolio career.

Two people at the same time that were going through the phase of having to let go of what things were and embrace a new phase of life. What I want to share with you is what they learned and what I’ve learned from when you have been in a high level role for a company or running your own business and how you can recreate the next phase of your life. To have it as good as the previous phase.

The Challenge

When you go from a role where you’ve had a lot of status and seniority and you’ve been really busy, and you’re wanting to create a new phase of your life, it can be really difficult.

So the analogy is, think of all the sports people, Tiger Woods, a lot of the basketballers who have been really successful in one thing, but then that ends, and they can fall into a bit of a hole that’s hard to get out of.

The challenge of that is because sometimes what can happen is the identity that someone had over here, they’re unable to create a new sense of self over here that makes them feel good about themselves and builds their confidence and sustains them and does all that stuff in that new phase of their life. So that’s the big picture around what the problem is.

The Next Phase

If you do this well, the next phase of your life can be better, more fantastic than the previous phase, but if you get it wrong, you’re kind of going through this muddling time where you feel down on yourself and you are missing the old days.

Here’s three ideas.

1.The first one is people have this really weird view of retirement or winding down, and they think that it has to be like the movies almost.

Where kind of one day you go from everything and the next day you go to nothing. Or one day you go from this and one day you go from that, and the first idea is actually give yourself permission to take the things that you’ve learned in this role and apply them into the next phase of your life.

Now let me give you an example of that. One of the guys I’m working with has built a series of categories – Sport, community, business, consulting, one other that escapes me, but you get the idea right? And what he’s done is he’s applying the same level of rigour and planning and execution that he did in this role to those new phases of his life, and when I met with him, he basically said, “I can’t do that, that sounds like that’s my old phase of my life.”

And I’m like, “Dude, that’s who you are.” So carry on, give yourself permission to carry on some of those aspects of your identity from this role into that role, so that’s it’s not too big of a jump. All right? So that you can feel a sense of confidence in this new role.

2. Create future plan.

It’s just that thing I just talked about around this … ideally we want this phase of our life to be bigger than our past. If you’ve got a big gap, or that’s fuzzy, it’s really hard for you to have something to look forward to.

So what I would do with both of these guys was to say, you know, in 12 months time, we’re gonna run into each other in the street and you’re gonna go, this is great, this is fantastic, life is good. What’s happening if life is good? And from there, we develop those categories that I talked about before of what is aiming for.

3. Turn those categories then into a rhythm of life in terms of weeks and months

So for people are used to be busy, the biggest problem that can occur is there are these acres of space where they don’t have anything to do, and that’ll get them thinking, not in a good way.

So what we’re able to do is then turn the things that they want in this new phase into a weekly task, a monthly rhythm or a six monthly rhythm.

Summary

Now to give you an example, one of the things I do was visiting my brother, going riding every six months. One of the guys was into community visitation, so we wanted to visit older people. We’re gonna do that every two weeks, and building those rhythms into that new phase of life means that you can give yourself permission to take the skills that you’ve learned.

Build the future goals, and then set up a rhythm so that rather than this goes down, you can actually build a new identity in that new phase of your life.

Leave me a Comment or Get in Touch

So if you’re thinking about, you’re probably only watching this if you’re considering it, and if you are considering it, think about these three ideas so that you can shift from one phase of your life into another successfully. Leave me a comment down below. Send me a note.

Talk to you soon on the Reason and the Road.