Reflection
A few months ago, I was a bit on edge. I knew that I was mentally done with my career and my husband and I talked a lot and dreamed together about “what’s next?” Yet I found myself feeling frustrated, like I was frozen with the pause button on, unable to move forward but not happy with my current state. My life had become a workout on an indoor treadmill; I was doing everything I had to do to get by, but I wasn’t going anywhere. This situation caused me more than a little anxiety. It was clear that being on auto-pilot, shuffling through my daily routine, was no longer working for me. However, I knew pragmatically that my husband and I weren’t quite ready to move into our next phase. This sensation of being stuck was killing me.
My Solution
I think of myself as more self-reliant than average. Still, it was clear to me that I could use a helping hand getting un-stuck and moving on with things. So I reached out to a career coach in my network. As outlined in my “Time to Hire a Corporate Jailbreaker?” post, this turned out to be a very smart move.
By building a detailed plan for the future state of our career, our household and our lives, I’ve been able to stop worrying, start focusing on our future and emotionally extracting myself from my current state. Here are some key steps we took to find peace.
Trello Dream Board
Making our future dream more realistic meant documenting the details, from pragmatic to fanciful. This board gave us the chance to bring life to “what” our future will include. My husband and I initially scheduled time together to add to the board. Now, we mostly tuck in photos, links and ideas as they pop up. It’s become our place to store all of the neat lightbulb moments for our future so that we can build these things into reality later.
Using the Trello dream board, we’ve established what types of critters we’ll have on our next homestead and how many, which fruit trees and vines we’ll add to the permaculture and the types of hospitality infrastructure we’ll put in place. The images make the shared dream so vibrant, the ideas and links are stored safely so that we don’t forget anything, and the dream has become so much closer and so much more real that we can’t dare to back away from it.
Financial Business Model
I confess to being a bit of a spreadsheet nerd. I love to build models and play around with data scenarios. So it came naturally to me to build out our financial business model in Excel. This model helped to clarify where the money will come from as we step away from our full-time careers. We’ve worked so hard to get where we are today from a financial standpoint, and a big shared fear was “screwing the pooch” by giving up our corporate paycheck too early. The outputs of our financial scenarios provided the mental and emotional security to see that, except under a few worst-case scenarios, we are going to be just fine. We may even thrive in our next phase. But we won’t be deprived.
Timeline
Ah, yes, that important element of every major undertaking: the timeline. I built out a detailed timeline which I reviewed with my husband to ensure his buy-in. The timeline is focused on events that need to transpire up to the transition to our next phase. So many important things need to happen: Pre-sale fixes and repairs to our current home and property, getting rid of 20 years of accumulated “stuff”, narrowing down the location of our next property.
Honestly, I didn’t build the post-transition timeline out in too great of detail because there is so much variability depending on the property we buy next. And it turns out that, as important as the detailed timeline is to bring us to our transition is, it was very liberating to just admit that we can’t control every aspect of our future state and need to relax a bit and let the topography, climate and layout of our next homestead dictate some fine print for us.
Key Takeaways
I’ve got two key takeaways for my readers.
First, if you are over 50 and feeling stuck, you’ve got to make a plan to escape your current state. The issue isn’t going to magically self-resolve. Get out of your rut and reject the status quo. No, this doesn’t mean you need to make some wild midlife crisis switch that shocks your family and friends, although it may feel like that’s necessary. We found that by simply having a plan for our “what’s next”, we are calmer and more comfortable in our current state of “today”. We made the future escape plan real by putting pictures, words and even chicken coop and garden plans together in one place. Combined with the pragmatic support of a financial business plan and a timeline to which we can commit, there’s much less worry, much more excitement about our future together and a higher level of contentment as we continue working our day-to-day heading toward our bold escape.
Next, I want to encourage you to resist trying to plan every minute detail of your future state. Haven’t you done enough of that? From carrying a heavy academic load at college, mapping your career, taking care of family and planning for retirement you’ve already sweated the details. Try to let go just a little and let the flow of your escape plan carry you through. It’s exciting and liberating to do so. Yes, there are a lot of details that need to be mapped out and tasks that need to be executed leading up to your transition. But I encourage you to stop trying to control every single little detail of your future “what’s next”, and to relax a bit and let the current take you to this destination. Trying to apply the same maniacal rigor to your escape from corporate life may just land you out of the frying pan and into the fire. Let your semi-retirement or full retirement be a place where you can escape the stress and heat. Start building this muscle memory now.