- Notes from the Road
- Posts
- Problem Solving at 50+
Problem Solving at 50+
Plus: Retirement Coaching, Our New Look, Weights vs. Cardio
Hello friends! Welcome to Notes from the Road, where we crack the code on your 50s and beyond. In this issue:
We’ve got a new look!
I’m now a certified Retirement Coach.
How to solve problems without problem-solving.
Getting your financial house in order.
Escaping fight or flight.
Weight training vs. cardio: which one?
First time reading? Sign up here.
Our New Look
If you’re a long time reader of this newsletter, you may notice that things look a bit different today. That’s because we’re taking a fresh look at our format, and making it crisper, cleaner, and easier to read. You can expect to see a few changes like this in coming weeks. Hope you like it! Let me know what you think.
More News
I’m happy to share that I’m now a Certified Professional Retirement Coach! That means I've developed skills that help people work through the non-financial elements of retirement. (You’ll need to get your financial advice from someone else 😉). You’ll see more information and resources on this in future newsletters. Stay tuned! | ![]() |
The Third Way
Must it all be either less or more, either plain or grand? Is it always “or?” Is it never “and?”
Have you ever had one of those days where you’d be happy to leave the office and never go back?
I had one of those days last week.
Dragging myself home that evening, I thought about those “retire early” people. What if I could be one of them? The idea captured my imagination. But my imagination couldn’t conjure a way to do it and still make the numbers work.
In my mind, I had a choice to make: happiness versus financial security. Happy, unhappy. Secure, insecure. Those were the thorny problems to be solved.
But what I had, my friends, were not problems to solve. They were polarities to manage.
We talk about polarities a lot in leadership and executive coaching. That’s because leaders are often called to manage situations that involve opposing, interconnected elements, like centralization and decentralization, or short-term goals and long-term goals.
To balance and manage elements like these, leaders must consider a range of possible answers in-between the extremes of do it or don’t do it. There’s no “solving” these tensions. The key to success is to find a sweet spot: a point of equilibrium between the two.
Despite all of my highfalutin professional coaching knowledge, none of this was on my mind when I scurried off to our financial planner. When,” I implored breathlessly, “when can we make this happen?” We ran through the numbers. Nothing really worked. There was an age when I could stop working. That was the age. Period.
In that moment, in a creative (desperate?) burst, I wondered out loud: “How can I get both happiness and financial security here?” And it all came back to me. It doesn’t have to be a choice. There’s a vast area of “in-betweenness” to explore. All kinds of “What If” questions tumbled out: What if I worked just a few days a week but for a few years longer? What if we boost our savings for a couple of years?What if I just took a one-year sabbatical and then jumped back in, if I could make that work?
Our financial planner was perfectly happy to analyze each of the ideas I threw out. The good news is that a few of them are viable. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to stop working tomorrow, but I’ve got a glide path that starts sooner than before. And that made this exercise very worthwhile, indeed.
So remember: whether you’re navigating retirement or any of the other many complicated decisions that arrive at 50+, you may not need to make a hard choice between only two options. There’s always a third way. You just need to stretch your thinking to find it.
![](https://media.beehiiv.com/cdn-cgi/image/fit=scale-down,format=auto,onerror=redirect,quality=80/uploads/asset/file/0962d458-47ec-424e-89a1-1a1e45e7b4be/Equilibrium_1200_x_630_px.jpg?t=1721335503)
Dreamstime Photo 310954586 | Andrei Dzemidzenka
What about you? Have you used a creative approach like this in thinking about your retirement options? |
The Weekly Roundup
Worth your time to watch, read, and listen.
#Dopamine
Remember the Summer of 1978? The wonderful Donna Summer brings us right back there.
How was today's newsletter? |
Reply