Breaking the Retirement Mold

This dynamic duo helps people create a new vision of life after “work” By Sonya Weir

As the baby-boomers move through their 50s and 60s, more North Americans than ever before are poised to make the transition to retirement.

And with more people retiring earlier —since the late 70s, the average age of retirement dropped from about 65 to 61 years of age —huge numbers of people are on the brink of making a significant life change.

Having successfully navigated this major life transition themselves, entrepreneurs Hugh and Joanne Wiley can provide invaluable guidance. After spending many rewarding years in their respective careers as psychologist and nurse, the couple found themselves facing the challenge of reinventing themselves— a challenge that ultimately led to an incredible, life-enhancing, growth opportunity.

They subsequently co-founded Full Life Seminars as a vehicle to empower others to discover new goals and dreams, and realize the opportunities inherent in change.

Through their wealth of blended skills, the couple focuses on helping people of all ages and stages reinvent their lives and careers, whether one has been retired from a job, been downsized, or is self-employed. And intention is a key component. At 66 and 54 respectively, Hugh and Joanne are no strangers to change, and it seems fitting that they met after independently participating in workshops that focussed on intention, a word that blinks like a beacon throughout our conversation.

While Hugh recounts many personal anecdotes about the power of intention, one in particular is especially fascinating.

When he was 18 years old, Hugh worked for Mobil Oil in central Alberta de-waxing oil wells, one of the corporation’s dirtiest jobs, one notch up from the lowest level. And as Hugh attests, Canadian winters can be bitterly cold.

Hugh clearly remembers the day his career path took an upward turn. On that particular day, just as he was thinking, “There’s got to be something more challenging than this,” he looked up to see a jet flying overhead. He was sure that a job was to be had at one of the airlines.

Within a week, he was in Calgary applying for a job at a commercial airline. Coming within a hair’s breadth of being hired—he got as far as receiving the employee’s policy manual —he was bumped out at the 11th hour by a unionized baggage department employee with seniority.

Although Hugh ended up selling real estate for the short term, albeit having had to lie about his age, he attributes his strong intention to change jobs as the catalyst for his career move and the inspiration to fulfill his real passion since leaving high school: resource conservation. And within only six weeks of leaving Mobil Oil, he had secured a position at the Oil and Gas Conservation Board, a job that he says was ideal for him.

“When I look back, I see it as a fairly straight pipeline with just a few bends, but at the time, I found it a meandering river and I wasn’t sure if I was going to get there,” Hugh recalls. “There’s a gap between where we leave and where we arrive, but trust that intention. It will work out.”

And it undeniably worked out for Hugh, who went on to become a practicing psychologist, successful entrepreneur, financial advisor, corporate trainer and planner, and most recently the author of Dancing with Change, a book that forms the basis for his and Joanne’s work with Full Life Seminars.

With a background as a nurse practitioner and educator, for Joanne, the idea of creating without intention is synonymous to creating by default, leaving us at the mercy of our ever-changing minds. “We’re always creating, but intention gives us a deliberate creation. Becoming a nurse was the first time I really felt like I had that intention of carrying something through to completion. Probably, the most dramatic example of intention was in manifesting the kind of relationship I wanted in meeting Hugh.”

In her 30s, after participating in a number of personal growth workshops, Joanne had made up her mind that she wanted to become a group leader herself later in her life. “I remember in my 40s thinking, at 50, I’ll do something different, and although it was hard to break from nursing —I’m still a nurse at heart—I’m truly passionate about my new career.”

For Hugh and Joanne, the concept of forced retirement is both counterproductive and limiting.

In his psychology practice, Hugh witnessed the effects firsthand, including marital problems, depression, and, tragically, for some men, premature death. “To me, it was the stress of feeling unfulfilled,” Hugh says. “With the baby-boomer bulge approaching, I felt it was critical that we get out and talk to these people so they can have a more meaningful life.”

Joanne echoes Hugh’s objective for Full Life Seminars. “One of the things we talk about in our seminars is that retirement is like a second career.”

After watching many retirees withdraw from life, it was clear to Joanne that if people could transform their approach to dealing with change, they could begin to recognize that retirement presented an opportunity to begin a brand new cycle of creativity and purposefulness.

Society’s general mindset, however, can exacerbate the problem. “We have programmed people towards infirmity,” Hugh says. “For instance at some eating establishments, there is a special table reserved for seniors.”

Joanne is also concerned about the messages seniors receive. “There is an implication that if you are a senior, you can’t carry your groceries as well, and there is simply no evidence to corroborate that assumption.”

Having studied gerentological nursing for two years, Joanne abides by the “use it or lose it” maxim. She asserts that as long as people are actively engaging all of their faculties — mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual — there is no basis for the claim that one’s skill capacity is necessarily any less than it was when they were younger.

More and more, people who attend the couple’s workshops Reinvent Your Life and Re-imagine Your Business are in the process of dealing with changes related to their work. Some participants are facing early retirement; others have already retired from their jobs.

“We’re living so much longer,” Hugh says, “that we need something to do.” And because that “something to do” has a direct effect on our wellbeing, Joanne encourages participants to engage their hearts in their work and connect to their passion, “to something so satisfying that it keeps the energy moving. ”

Hugh recommends volunteering as one way to achieve that sense of purpose. It fosters a strong connection with one’s community, provides the individual with a way to give something back, and allows for an exploration into areas of interest that a full-time job may have previously precluded.

It is also a viable way to test the market and could lead to a possible job down the road.

Hugh and Joanne perceive their role as one of helping people to explore the many facets of change, while acknowledging that the impetus to change must originate from within. “It’s pretty hard to convince someone that they need to change,” Joanne says. “It’s the old light bulb and psychologist thing…the light bulb has to want to change.”

Hugh agrees: “I see us helping people develop game plans, which energize them to action.” In addition to facilitating their workshops, both Hugh and Joanne offer personal phone-coaching sessions, which enable them to reach a broad audience. For individuals who have lost a job or voluntarily struck out on their own, the couple provides a wonderful example of what reinventing one’s career can look like. Getting over the fear is tantamount to success.

“Fear blocks abundance on all levels,” Hugh explains. “It’s what blocks us from performing at our peak capacity.”

Having faced and overcome their own challenges lends a powerful authenticity to Hugh and Joanne’s work, and through re-inventing themselves and their own careers, they have found that inspiration is a much more effective motivator than sympathy.

After counseling many individuals who had either lost or changed jobs, Hugh states that regardless of the nature of the change, there is a common process. “Change is normal,” he reminds us, “and we’re so afraid of it.”

He also assists people to realize that on some level they had actually wanted to make a change, but were apprehensive about the risk. “Very few of us heard from our parents, ‘Go take lots of risks today’” Joanne affirms. But it would appear that whatever stage we are at, we must keep risking in order to grow.

Hugh, himself, risked jumping out of the box in 1980, the last year that he worked as a straight wage earner.

Having been raised in an environment of economic hardship, he was schooled in the idea of finding and keeping a good job that promised security. Nonetheless, approaching his 40s, when he had achieved tenure at a college where he was teaching, he realized that although in many people’s eyes, he “had it made,” he didn’t feel that way at all.

“With the exception of annual service increments, I was at my maximum salary, so I could project where my life was going until retirement. I felt that I had to step out, and when I stepped out, I found myself in a situation where I was more or less self-employed.”

He has since gleaned that no matter what kind of work we do, we are essentially always operating our own businesses.

Whether we are civil servants or self-employed, we service a clientele. And when we approach it from that perspective, we gain a greater sense of mobility and inner security and satisfaction. Joanne has this to add: “If we always thought of ourselves as a business unto ourselves, we would nurture ourselves better and make healthier choices.”

With an uncle in his 80s who still enjoys his job as a parking lot attendant for a role model, it seems unlikely that Joanne will be slowing down anytime soon.

And as for Hugh…“People used to ask me when I planned to retire, and I would answer, in my 70s,” Hugh laughs. “At my present age, I plan to retire when I’m 90. When I reach 90, I’ll want to put it off again. There is so much I still want to do and so many challenges and adventures to look forward to."

Sonya Weir is a freelance writer living in BC. She has a keen interest in people who make the world a better place

Email her at sonyaweir@uniserve.com