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?

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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.

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The Third Way

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.

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.