We will be the first...

Transitioning to work-optional life (formerly known as retirement) in 2026 and beyond is uncharted territory. No previous generation has had this much health span, wealth and mobility.

In this episode, we lay out the six foundations or controls you get to work with to create a fulfilling next phase of your life, a phase that can easily last 30 years or more.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome to each and every one of you to the inaugural episode of Retire and Aspire. You're just getting started. Got to ask you a question. Where are you in your journey? Where are you in your journey in retirement? Have you taken both feet out of the career world and planted them firmly in retirement? And how is that going? Or are you somebody who's half in, half out, working on a contract basis? Or maybe you're one of those folks who are future planning to see what retirement can be. Regardless of where you are in your journey, I think over the upcoming weeks we've got some great guests coming on. We're going to be able to provide some value and insight into how you view your retirement and maybe some new ideas. Maybe some new ideas of what is possible. Raise those expectations a little bit. Because in terms of what retirement is, here we are in 2026, I'm not sure how you feel, but I really don't think society's caught up to figure out what to do with us. I mean, what do you do with these people who are in their 50s and 60s and 70s, who have all this vibrancy, all this knowledge? I gotta tell you, sitting on the porch, watching the world go by, uh, visiting and shopping, casinos, all I'm giving you all the uh the tripe activities that are stereotypical for retirees, that just ain't enough. At this stage in 2026, retirees are capable of so much more, and I, by the way, call it work optional living. Retirement in 2026, this is not your parents' retirement. It's certainly not your grandparents' retirement. A hundred years ago, the average age was around 58. Today it's 85 and it's climbing higher. So a lot of us can expect two, three, or four decades of full-on vibrant living, and we're still figuring out how to do it. And that's what this podcast is about. If you think of it like technology, you know, if you grew up in the 80s or 90s, you'll remember the terms like VHS and DVD and Blu-ray, and they kept on evolving, you know, to streaming services like Netflix, and now you've got 4K resolution and 8K resolution. Well, if you run parallel into what retirement says we should be doing, we're still at the VHS and DVD stage. Your financial advisors, the media, uh uh in terms of movies and commercials, um, just doesn't show up. I remember watching uh recently a hockey game, and uh there was an old guy knocking on a cantaloupe when uh his granddaughter was going to go order the cantaloupe from an online delivery service. The guy looked like he was in his 70s in a wheelchair. You know, there's people in their 85 year age, 75 years of age who are doing triathlons. Those are the images we have to get the world to to see us through because we are capable of that. And and even more importantly, of the world believing it, you've got to believe it. You've got to believe that your retirement, your transition time is not the finish line. You've got to believe that at least some of the best days of your life are in front of you. I mean, in the whole period of time, there's been no generation that has had this much wealth, health span, or mobility. Through all the millennia, we have this winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately, we haven't really figured out how to cash it in yet and how to use it. And again, that's what with the guests coming on, we're going to give you some ideas. And and the really cool thing about this is there is no one way. This has to be your way. What mind switch and retire and aspire is really getting you to do is to think for yourself. To think for yourself and to get in touch with an inner voice that we all have, that a lot of us, myself included, bury as we go through life with careers and family. Coming out of university, I started in commercial banking, and I really loved how people started their own businesses, and I soon realized I was on the wrong side of the table. I should be the small business owner. So much to my parents' chagrin, I quit uh the bank uh when Prime, I think, was two and three-quarters, um, which was which was really good because I had a 3% mortgage back in 1985. That'll give you an idea how old I am. And I went out to Whistler and I bartended for a season and I saved enough money at that point then to move on to Hawaii for a few weeks. And if you've ever been to Hawaii in the Diamond Head Mountain at the south end, I believe, of Waikiki Beach. And I climbed up there and I asked myself this question as a 20-something who's got stars in his eyes and think everything is possible, what would I want to do? And I came up with the idea that I wanted to work with wildlife. Great. Five years in university getting degrees, and what do I want to do? Work with wildlife. Yeah, not too many people were impressed. But that experience taught me a lot because I came back. There were no jobs working with wildlife, so I created one. And I went on to create Canada's largest endangered animal sanctuary and education center. Based out of Toronto, taking in and like abandoned zoo animals, abandoned exotic pets, that kind of thing. And that was me listening to my inner voice. I was given a gift that early on in life, I listened to it, I acted on it, and with a lot of luck and a lot of support from a lot of people, I knew that things could come true. So here we are, three, four decades later, and a lot of us have forgotten to listen to that inner voice, or we dismiss it as childlike fantasy. I often get on panels where people go, well, you know, I'm not 20-something, I'm not going to be starry-eyed. Why not? Why not be starry-eyed when you're in 50s and 60s? You've got more money, generally, you've got more wisdom, we hope, and we've got more time. The problem is we've been so busy paying and feeding and taking care of that we haven't listened to that inner voice. So in the mind switch world, we've got six foundations that we take a look at for a great work optional life. And uh top of the list for most people generally is purpose and identity. And we will cover these in future episodes. But if you're just listening and hearing about us for the first time, purpose and identity, takeaway messages from today is it isn't one thing, and it covers a lot of different aspects of your life. And guess what? You're gonna have three, four, five or more reinventions of purpose and identity once you hit work option life. Generally speaking, it ain't just one thing. We're also going to take a look at vitality, vitality mentally, physically, spiritually, how we have to, perhaps for the first time in our lives, really take a look at this machine that's been supporting us these first five, six, or seven decades of our lives, and to start taking care of it. Because somewhere in our 40s, uh, Mother Nature says, you know what, you've filled all the imperatives I had in mind for you. I'm going to begin to slow down. And if you've ever noticed a mirror as you pass by and you're in your 50s or 60s, you'll notice itself is the favorite direction of your body. Um, some people say that is also of the mind, but I'm here to tell you, I'll use this word once or twice a day. I don't mean to offend, but bullshit. There's a group of students in their 90s at Harvard taking master's programs. They're performing on par with the fellow students in the 30s. We have people who are finishing the Iron Man triathlon who are in their 70s and 80s, and they didn't start getting active until their 50s and 60s. What I want you to do through joining us in these very episodes is allow that inner child of yourself, without sounding trivial or dismissive, to come out and play again, to listen to that voice. Yes, I know the same things that got your attention when you were a teenager or twenties probably aren't the same thing, but I want you to bring the mindset of wonder of what could be. We've had people in mind switch who've been CFOs, CEOs. Uh one guy who was a CFO of a of a major uh uh company and um just was lost. The identity once he left the the institution was gone. We went back into his past. He was a manager of a bar back in his university days, loves music. Didn't want to manage a bar again, and that was a twenty year something, not a sixty or something. So we found him a music festival in his local area and he got involved with that. Started booking the acts, doing volunteer work. We want you to allow those feelings to come in. Do you remember Mr. C? Uh Mr. C from Happy Days. The show back in the 70s, Mr. Cunningham, I think his name was Tom Bosley. You had a visual image of Tom in your mind? A little paunchy gray hair. How old do you think he was when he filmed that? Forty-eight. Yeah, you might have guessed high 50s, early sixties. And we're not talking about how somebody just looks, but how people act. And with Retire and Aspire, what we're looking for for you to do is to not aim at the society benchmark of what somebody at your age should be doing, whether it be in your 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or beyond. We're going to show you that the capabilities, by and large, are there. We just sometimes have to work at them a little bit harder to make them happen. So we've got the foundations of purpose and vitality. We also want to put adventure back into our lives as well. Most people who are 50 have adventure already scrubbed from their lives. Or they say, Boy, we went on a great cruise or a great wine tour. We want real adventures. Real adventures do great things for us, and they do great things for us because when we leave our careers behind, sometimes not who we are but what we were gets left with it. And our egos and our self-confidence can take a big hit. Real adventures, well, they they have three things. You get excited about them, sure. You learn something new when you do a real adventure. But the other thing too is you don't know what the outcome is. It's not guaranteed. And if one thing that is present in your work optional life is that change will be continuous. Early on, my thought would be please do not crave stability in your work optional life. That is not something that leads to great outcomes. As a matter of fact, the people who have the most fulfilling work optional lives usually reinvent themselves every five to seven years and embrace themselves with new possibilities. The other three foundations of the retire and aspire model include one that perhaps is the most important but is not spoken about usually because of uh embarrassment is social connectivity. The challenge is that a lot of folks who retire who have robust social lives when their kids are at home and their work environment is going, things change when you leave your career behind. And over one-third of those 65 and older report loneliness to the level that it affects their mental well-being. We'll talk more about that in future episodes. The fifth foundation for the Mind Switch program is financial. Now it's not your investments, it's not that at all. It is on spending habits and the U curve that usually follows in retirement, where expenses generally tend to be higher once somebody initially retires because they want the RV, you want the vacation home, we'd want the travel, and they tend to level off, and then later on in life, due to healthcare expenses, they go up again. We'll have some experts on to talk about that. And the sixth and final foundation of the mind switch model is something we call living legacy. And living legacy is simply this it's a question for you. What five words would you want somebody who knows you to use when they watch you live your work optional life? Is it caring, contribution? What is it? Five words that you want your life to reflect. It's an interesting exercise to go through, and uh in one of the upcoming episodes we'll dive into that deeper. So that's what Mind Switch, Retire, and Aspire is. If at the end of our time together, you've got one, a dozen, or two dozen uh tips to live more vitally, uh more fully, more happily, the authentic you, or maybe even you came out and joined us for one of our virtual retreats or one of our in-person retreats, then our time together, from my perspective, has been worthwhile. Next episode we're going to be dropping, uh, we're going to be talking to an Olympian uh professor, actually. She's unlimited. She's a former Canadian Olympic rower, and she's got some great insights on personal leadership and how you can guide your mindset for that. So thank you for joining me for this inaugural, if not abbreviated version of the MindSwitch podcast Retire Inspire. You can always reach out with comments and feedback. I always appreciate that at Scott at MindSwitch.ca. That's Scott with two Ts at MindSwitch.ca. And until next time, just remember, we are just getting started.