Lifes Best Steps

Suzanne Armstrong, B.A., M. Ed.President, Life’s Next Stepssuzarmstrong@lifesnextsteps.com

Suzanne Armstrong is an organizational consultant with over 30 years experience working with corporations to enhance their productivity and effectiveness. Her keen understanding of corporate life and how to manage change successfully is the foundation of Life’s Next Steps.

Suzanne created Life’s Next Steps in response to the scarcity of information and programs dealing with the life changes that 80 million members of the baby boom generation in North America are just beginning to face. While many people have planned their financial future, few have received help in determining how to live a happy, meaningful and engaged life in retirement.

“You would not start a business without a business plan — why should something as huge as retirement be any different?” says Suzanne. “We are here to help retiring boomers develop a clear road map that answers the big question of ‘What’s next?’ Having a life plan will help people make the best and most meaningful use of the time and resources at their disposal at retirement. Boomers will be this generation to redefine what ‘retirement’ means.”

Suzanne — herself born in the first year of the boomer generation — underwent this process of redefinition as she developed the workshop and used her own strengths, interests and passions as a focus.

Suzanne began her consulting career as a trainer, instructional designer and program developer. She honed these skills as a worldwide director of training and development for American Express based out of New York. Over time, the focus of her work turned to helping organizations such as J.P. Morgan/Chase, Citibank, AT&T and Blue Cross Blue Shield prepare for and sustain major strategic change. Recent clients include AGF Management (mutual funds), Moody’s Investor Services, Deloitte and Grey Global.

Lifes Best Steps

“There are no second acts in (North) American lives.”F. Scott Fitzgerald

“That’s what you think.” S. Margaret Armstrong

Life’s Best Steps So you’re about to retire. Now what?

If you’re a Baby Boomer, like I am, you probably remember what happened when your parents’ generation retired. They’d won WWII and then worked so hard the rest of their lives that most of them thought they just wanted to kick back and do nothing.

It didn’t work out all that well, and for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it was usually only Dad who “retired” and Mom, who still had the house to look after, didn’t like having Dad underfoot all day.

A friend told me that her folks retired years ago to Miami Beach where they spent their time eating, sleeping, shopping (using newspaper coupons), buying things for their grand-children, sitting in front of the television set watching the news and getting in each other’s way.

But we’re Boomers! That’s not going to happen to us, right?

Right!

We’re expected to do things differently, always have been, and we’re high achievers, those of us who survived the sixties, anyway. Now we have time to do what we’ve always dreamed of doing, whatever that may be. Our retirement will be meaningful, involving, perhaps even revolutionary, just like we were when we were kids. Now is our time. Right?

Lifes Best Steps

That’s more or less what I thought just a few years ago. And I should have known better. I’d spent my career, practically my whole adult life, working in cities big and small all around the world to help companies and their employees anticipate and manage change.

Well, I ask you, what’s a bigger life change than moving from a stellar career to, a…what?

I was going through just that problem and I was stuck. I asked friends who were getting ready to leap off the treadmill to talk about what they were going to do and they all said the same two things.

First, every one of them thought I was talking about their finances and they all said they were fine. That’s wasn’t what I meant, so I pushed on: “What are you going to actually do?” I asked.

Beyond the glaringly obvious – relax, take a trip, visit the kids, read more - not one of my friends, all smart people, had the foggiest (realistic) idea what to do with all that free time looming on the horizon.

And that’s when I made up my mind to link my passion, dreams, skills and knowledge to create a plan for my own retirement, my own next steps.

I wrote everything down – everything – and we’ll get into what I wrote down in a moment. As I wrote about what I wanted to do, my future emerged, a little vague at first. I was going to help people plan their retirements. How?

That’s when my experience kicked in. I’d been doing exactly this for years and years: managing change! I knew how the process worked: gather facts, analyze, link, question, discuss in workshops and come up with a Plan, the Plan!

It was an Aha! moment of genuine revelation when everything came together. I was going to develop a Life’s Next Steps retirement workshop, based on everything I’d learned over the years, all the research I’d done, and the process I’d developed and refined to figure out my own Life’s Next Steps, my own next best steps.

The process is fun and interesting.

It helps you look inside yourself to learn where you really stand and who you really are. You dredge up dreams and passions you’d set aside years ago. You determine who and what are important to you and you prioritize them. And you make sense of it all so you can figure out what you want to do, the perfect way for you to handle your life’s second act.

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When you get all your ducks in a row and begin combining facts, insight and thinking into a Plan, you have a roadmap for you, a roadmap that accommodates your dreams and passions and all the people and personal assets in your life. And when it’s right, you know it. You feel it.

My own Plan resulted in a company called Life’s Next Steps, which now offers thorough, ongoing and effective programs that my husband, Chris, and I - and our growing staff of experts - began offering in Canada. (I was brought up in Montreal; Chris is from Virginia.)

The participants in the Canadian groups spoke glowingly about Life’s Next Steps to their friends and families, a lot of whom lived in the US. One thing led to another and here we are in Florida offering the American version of Life’s Next Steps in interactive workshops for small groups with two different formats: a relaxed two-day version and a new, accelerated and very intense half-day version.

We’ve learned that smaller groups yield optimal results for our participants. No more than twenty; sixteen is ideal.

The main reason small groups work best is that a Life’s Next Steps workshop is not a series of non-stop lectures with you just sitting there like a literate turnip taking notes. It’s truly a workshop - a hands-on, personal guided tour through your life, your wants and needs, interests and passions. It’s about bringing your dreams and reality together into a coherent retirement life Plan for you.

Most of us aren’t going to keep doing what we do now.

A lot of us don’t even know why we started down our particular career paths. Did you pick you career or was it the other way around?

Remember Hollywood’s most famous career counseling session in the 1967 movie, The Graduate? It was a quick scene. Benjamin Braddock’s proud Mom and Dad host a house party for the recently graduated Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman). A family friend, Mr. McQuire, takes Benjamin out by the family pool for a confidential chat that went like this:

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MR. MCQUIRE Ben - I just want to say one word to you - just one word -

BEN Yes, sir.

MR. MCQUIRE Are you listening?

BEN Yes I am.

MR. MCQUIRE (gravely) Plastics.

They look at each other for a moment.

BEN Exactly how do you mean?

MR. MCQUIRE There is a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

BEN Yes, I will.

MR. MCQUIRE Okay. Enough said. That’s a deal.

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Lifes Best Steps

That was often how a career path started 40+ years ago and, who knows, maybe Benjamin did go into the plastics industry. (Mr. McQuire was right, by the way.) The same kind of thing happened in real life.

When my friend, Lois, had just graduated from high school and was heading to Boston University, she hadn’t picked a major. Her Dad settled it for her. He insisted on Education. He said teaching was a safe and secure career for a woman and that she’d always have something to fall back on.

A lot of us wound up doing one kind of job very well and we’re not even sure why we picked that job. But we did it most of our working lives and in some ways our careers now define us. The question for most of us is what should we have been doing?

Have you ever watched America’s Got Talent on NBC? It is fascinating to hear contestants’ stories. Many of them hold down menial jobs while they’re bursting with a talent for singing or piano playing or blowing things up.

In the show’s 2010 season, we met a 58-year-old woman named Alice Tan Ridley. Her daughter, Gabby Sidibe, had already become a movie star, nominated for best actress as Claireece “Precious” Jones in Precious. But Alice was still singing in New York subway stations where she’d been for twenty years, living off the small change passersby dropped into her basket.

Her passion is singing and she’s terrific. She stuck to it and now, as I write this, Alice has made it to the semi-finals and, judging by audience reactions so far, she’s got a very good chance of winning a million dollars along with her own show on the strip in Las Vegas.

Regardless of which career path you followed, the odds are that you soon won’t be following it anymore. It’s time for your life’s second act. In the first act, from childhood to retirement, you’ve been following a path chosen partly by you, partly by other people and mostly by circumstance.

Now it’s time to find out what you really want to do. Let’s start with your talents and passions. Please write some of them in the space below.________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Lifes Best Steps

If you completed the on-line aptitude test at: http://www.lifesnextsteps.com you know that you’re probably good in several areas at once: Information, People, Ideas and “Things”, for instance.

When participants at a Life’s Next Steps workshop work in groups (and we hope you’ll join us in one), everybody has a different set of aptitudes. That means that the other people in the group can help you fine tune your dreams and goals almost as outside consultants who really understand your challenges, providing ideas and support in several different ways.

Just for this exercise, write down what you think are your major aptitudes:___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What have you dreamed of doing, but never got around to? Does your subconscious have a sort of bucket list, like the one the characters played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman had in the Bucket List movie a few years back?

What do you dream of doing? ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

All the research into happy retirements demonstrates over and over that the number one requirement is health. That means a great diet, good genes and regular physical activity. People who exercise have better cognitive function (they’re smarter). Taking care of our bodies also makes us more positive so we’ll live longer.

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What’s the state of your health now and what steps are you taking to be healthier in the future?___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You also need a healthy (exercised) mind. It helps if you are enthusiastic about what you’re doing and live in a positive environment.

To keep mentally active, you might want to learn something new, like how to play a musical instrument. A keyboard, for example. Or how to speak a new language (followed by a trip to a country where it’s commonly spoken). Actually anything will do – cooking, pho-tography, computer programming - as long as it involves learning, practicing and exercising your brain. Write down a few things you might be interested in trying your hand at: ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

During the Life’s Next Steps workshops, we help you uncover your strengths, your values, your passions. Your fellow group members (including people who will eventually become buddies and/or coaches) will help you gather and analyze what you’ve learned about yourself and then there are exercises, including learning how to identify and overcome potential barriers.

Then you create an Action Plan for various aspects of your life. You can reach out to your own connections to set your Plan in motion. Building, developing and leveraging your connections will help make your dream happen.

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So write down the names of some of the people you’re going to want to stay in touch with once you retire (family goes without saying):

Friends and acquaintances:_______________________________________________________________________

Social and Business contacts: _______________________________________________________________________

Colleagues:_______________________________________________________________________

People who already do what you want to do: _______________________________________________________________________

How will you set up the Connecting Meeting so it is a win-win for both you and your contact?

How can you find a peer coach to help with your Plan?

How will you set aside worry and get on with what you want to accomplish?____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The points in this mini-Guide are for you to work on by yourself. The process is so much more involving and deeper (easier, too) when you’re in a room with other people on exactly the same quest, and experts on hand providing you with the tools and information you need to perfect your Plan.

You can join us at an intense half-day workshop this winter in Miami (when it’s warm down here and c-c-cold up north) or at a more relaxed and more detailed traditional two-day workshop.

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I’ve been a Change Guru, a “hired gun” for dozens of corporations in so many countries I’ve lost count. I wasn’t just teaching. I learned a lot over the years and when I applied that learning to my own Plan, my future became clear, as clear as it was to Ulysses in Tennyson’s wonderful poem:

I am a part of all that I have met;Yet all experience is an arch wherethroughGleams that untravelled world, whose margin fadesFor ever and for ever when I move.How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

I hope we can help you create your own brilliant Plan. Now is the time for you! Let’s make it great.

Our upcoming workshops are in January, February and March 2011in Miami, Florida.

You can stay there, if you like, and join an intense half-day Life’s Next Steps session, the first step on a whole new and exciting path in your life. Or you can choose the more relaxed, more interactive 2-day workshop.

Either way, I hope to meet you soon, and shake your hand. It will be a pleasure.

Suzanne ArmstrongPresidentLife’s Next Steps

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Life’s Next Steps: Success Stories If you’ve spent any time on the Life’s Next Step web site, you know that I’m happy to blog about some of the people who’ve been through our 2-day workshops. Here are five of the stories I wrote about recently.

He just wanted to be a grandpa.

Chuck came to Life’s Next Steps to support Clara?, his wife. He didn’t need the workshop but Clara? did because she was about to retire.

When the workshop group began sharing dreams and aspirations, Chuck, who’s a sweetheart, joined in. He told us that he’d been retired for five years and already had his dream job - daycare provider for his three grandchildren.

Everyone in the group smiled and one man wondered “What happens in two or three years when the kids go to school and suddenly you’re no longer a key part of their day care?” Chuck hadn’t thought of that but let the topic die. For now.

Later, Chuck told his debrief partner in a dreams and aspirations exercise that he had always wanted to write but had never had time. By chance, his partner was a well-known cookbook author and she offered to spearhead a plan for Chuck.

What if he positioned himself as the “grandparenting expert” who’d keep other grand-parents up to date via Twitter and Facebook? He wouldn’t need to invest a lot of time or money but he could start writing right away.

Three workshop participants, grandparents all, said they’d read his tweets instantly – it was a huge need for new grandparents! The author gave Chuck her card and offered to help him get started.

Chuck’s a regular on Twitter now; his tweets are full of tips and suggestions based on his experiences looking after his grandchildren. He has a large and growing following. Next Step? He’s looking forward to writing a book.

When a Life’s Next Steps workshop helps to bring everything into focus, the stars align and you step onto the perfect path. Just ask Grandpa Chuck.

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Lifes Best Steps

I don’t want to do anything when I retire.

A man kept saying “I’m not sure I should be here; I don’t really want to do anything when I retire.”

We hear that every now and then but people usually change their minds once the group’s enthusiasm takes over. But this fellow kept beating the same drum. “I don’t want to do anything. Why do people even want to travel?”, he asked.

He travelled a lot in his job and didn’t understand that a lot of people looked forward to spending more traveling … big time!

At the end of the workshop he took me aside to ask one last question: “If I want to keep working, how would I go about it?” It occurred to me to kid him a bit and maybe ask “You mean when you retire you want to keep working at the same job?” But I didn’t. Instead, I suggested that he talk it over with his law firm partners.

I heard a few weeks ago that the firm is working out an arrangement. He won’t work in the same job but will continue to add value in key areas.

A happy ending, but the beginning was rough!

Getting outside your comfort zone

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard “I want to work till I drop”, my husband, Chris, and I could take a nice cruise.

People who say they want to work till they drop are invariably talented at what they do. They’re typical boomers in that every success has come to them.

But the notion of work till you drop worries me at times. I recommend looking at life in total, not just the professional/work part, and examining how it could proceed going forward. It’s easy to say “I’ll just keep doing this” but it’s also easy to spend a little time reflecting on missed or put-aside opportunities that would enhance an already successful life.

What’s not easy is actually taking steps toward one of those opportunities. Work till you drop people are so deep inside their comfort zones, so successful, so well known, that life

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seems to have a built in safety net. Working without a net can be downright scary but it can be exhilarating, challenging and uplifting.

Personally, I like to keep one foot in my comfort zone and one foot in something new, always ADDING to my life. That means doing new and different things along with familiar and safe things.

All the additional things I now savor are new (and, usually, wonderful) to me!

Dragged along in your husband’s wake

Sheila worried me. Her opening line at a workshop was, “I’m afraid I’ll be dragged along in my husband’s wake and I don’t have a clue what I want to do myself!”

Oddly, this came from a woman blessed with so many skills! She’s a well-known speech-writer, a gourmet and she loved to work out.

During the assessment debriefs Sheila received lots of feedback about how competent she was but she remained anxious and worried all through day one.

But on the morning of day two, we saw a woman transformed. Sheila was fresh, happy, almost beatific. What had happened?

Well, we ask Life’s Next Steps participants to review each day’s session at home to glean “Learnings Realized Overnight” and Sheila had done just that. It awakened something in her subconscious. She told us that things were still a bit fuzzy, but her path was becoming much clearer.

During the final exercise, Sheila shared her vision. She had always known that she still needed to earn money, so that had to be factored in. Armed with her love of food and her writing skills, she would travel to slo-food movement regions. She would write about her ex-perience and sell her articles one by one to magazines and newspapers before compiling them into a book. She knew many publishers and knew who to approach.

Sheila later told me that the day one encouragement of the group had been essential to guiding her to the right path for her future.

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The Lone Ranger finds his Tonto

Arthur, a lawyer, kept insisting that he wanted and needed to work alone. In fact, he preferred to be alone in most parts of his life. Needless to say, his family found this to be a difficult trait to live with.

Somehow, Arthur, who claimed to be a tough sell, managed to share his dreams, aspirations, and strengths during the workshop, but I could tell it was difficult for him.

What wasn’t difficult was his pleasure at finding an old friend, Daniel, a fraternity buddy, participating in the workshop. They hadn’t seen each in 30 years, even though they lived in the same town. They spent one of their debrief sessions discussing a favorite professor.

When it came time to choose “buddy coaches” Mr. Tough Sell, declared that he had been won over and in fact, was asking Daniel to be his buddy. Their mutual task, along with implementing their Life’s Next Steps action plans, was going to be a trip back to their university to look up that professor.

Arthur is now convinced that he wants to be more engaged with others as he faces a new phase of his life. And what a wonderful way to do it - with an old friend as buddy and coach.

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