I have been listening to women lately.
Not just any women. These are talented, accomplished women who spent decades building successful corporate careers. They led teams, managed clients, solved problems, traveled, met targets, survived mergers and reorganizations, and became very good at what they did.
And then they left.
I began interviewing them because I wanted to understand what happens next.
I already knew from the research behind Rethink Retirement: It’s not the end but the beginning of what’s next that retirement is rarely the simple transition we have been taught to expect. But I realized that I hadn’t listened closely enough to women who had spent much of their adult lives inside corporations.
So I went looking for them.
I have more interviews ahead of me, and I am not ready to call what I am hearing “findings.” I am an anthropologist. I know better than to decide what a culture means before I’ve spent enough time listening to the people living in it.
But something interesting is beginning to emerge.
They didn’t necessarily want to stop working
One woman loved her work as an IT project manager. In her early 60s, her company wanted her to relocate to its corporate headquarters. She declined and ultimately left in what she described as a forced retirement.
Within a month, she opened a garden center.
She ran it for nine years.
Think about that.
She didn’t retire from being productive. She didn’t lose her curiosity or her desire to build something. She left one kind of work and created another around something she loved.
Another woman had spent years in HR consulting, working with major companies and building business. She enjoyed the work, earned a good living and valued her colleagues. But a merger changed the organization. Expectations shifted. Travel was becoming part of the conversation.
At 69 she began thinking: Do I really want to keep doing this?
She negotiated her departure.
And then came something she hadn’t anticipated.
Her calendar was empty.
The phone stopped ringing.
Nobody was coming to her asking for advice.
For someone accustomed to being needed, busy and engaged, that first experience of retirement was startling. She cleaned closets. She cleaned drawers. She cleaned the garage.
Eventually, there was nothing left to clean.
That story stayed with me.
What exactly are we retiring from?
Another woman recently left a career in social impact that included roles at Citigroup, MetLife and a corporate nonprofit.
She described what she wanted to leave behind very clearly: the 9-to-5, constantly being on email, answering to someone else.
She considered taking time off. She considered volunteering. She went on a six-day silent meditation retreat to quiet her mind and become more open to whatever might come next.
And then an opportunity appeared.
Today she is becoming a co-founder of a social enterprise.
She is learning how to build a business. She is thinking about revenues and expenses. She is taking what she has learned over decades and applying it in an entirely new way.
That doesn’t sound much like retirement to me.
It sounds like redesign.
Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question
For years, the question has been:
When are you going to retire?
I’m beginning to wonder whether that question makes sense anymore, particularly for women who have invested decades developing knowledge, judgment, relationships and expertise.
Perhaps the better question is:
What part of the way you work are you ready to leave behind—and what parts of yourself do you want to take with you?
That’s a very different conversation.
Because these women don’t seem to be saying, I never want to work again.
What I hear instead is:
I don’t want to work that way anymore.
They want more control over their time.
They want to decide what deserves their energy.
They want to use what they know without necessarily returning to the corporate structures in which they learned it.
They want meaningful engagement without endless meetings.
They want flexibility without becoming irrelevant.
And perhaps most importantly, they want the freedom to discover what else they might become.
The part we don’t prepare women for
Corporations spend enormous amounts of time preparing talented women to succeed.
There are leadership development programs, executive coaching, succession planning, mentoring and professional development.
But how much time do we spend helping accomplished women prepare to leave?
Financial planning is important, of course. But having enough money to retire doesn’t answer some of the hardest questions:
Who am I when my title disappears?
What will structure my days?
Where will I find the intellectual stimulation I took for granted?
Who will need me?
Where will my community come from?
What do I still want to learn?
And perhaps the biggest question of all:
Now that nobody else is designing my life for me, how do I want to design it?
That question fascinates me.
I am still listening
I have another couple of dozen corporate women scheduled to interview, and I don’t know yet what they will tell me.
That’s the fun of doing research this way.
I don’t begin with the answers. I listen for the stories. I pay attention to the words people use, the moments they remember, the things that surprised them and sometimes the struggles they didn’t anticipate.
Then I look for patterns.
Already I am hearing themes around identity, daily structure, purpose, community and something I hadn’t originally named strongly enough: agency.
For decades, the organization helped determine the rhythm of these women’s lives.
Then one day, it didn’t.
Freedom sounds wonderful.
But freedom also requires us to decide what to do with it.
Over the next several weeks, I’m going to share more of what these women are teaching me as the research continues—not as a prescription for how women should retire, but as a window into how accomplished women are actually navigating this remarkable transition.
If you are approaching this stage yourself, here’s the question I would leave you with:
If you weren’t retiring from work, but instead retiring from the way you have been working, what might you want to carry forward—and what would you gladly leave behind?
I’d love to hear your answer.
The essence of growing older is living each day and caring about tomorrow.
If you like the conversation, share it and share your own thoughts. Miles to go before I rest, to paraphrase Robert Frost.
Leave behind the parts that exhaust you; the proving, the politics, the feeling that busy means important. Take what you’ve learned, what you’re good at, the people you care about, and the parts of yourself that still light you up.
Definitely a worthwhile endeavor!