deliver of a workshop called dynamic retirement so we're going to get right into it i'm so anxious to hear about this the concept i should say that you both were on a prior show talking about your own transition to retirement bonnie you had a family illness that really led you to make that decision right and then michelle being the planner that you are you with keeps urging your husband made the switch to retire correct so how did you come up with the concept now right to you know really develop a workshop for other women i based on i guess is it your o turned into a binder and everest every time i saw something that interested me was an interest to me of being a docent possibly teaching a course at a college going to travel to a certain place i made different sections of the binder and one of the things that i kept a section on is kind of things related to women and advice women may need experiences on coaching and what happened was as time went on i created a list and i for the first year of retirement my husband had and i had agreed that i wouldn't jump into anything kind of just be comfortable with the fact that you're making no decisions you're just not trying to fill up your time what you can do but verses a verse is what you want to do so on this list was a little note that said do women's workshop with bonnie and it was august and i had my i couldn't do anything till october officially i would wait my whole year or so and sitting down and i was going through the list again and my husband said workshops for women is that during our time at prevention bonnie and i were in a senior women's group and each senior woman on the team was asked to go back to their department and kind of create a grassroots approach or a forum for women to get together and learn from each others experiences we happen to call ours women life women's life experiences and i thought always put her put others first enter self second she was authentic i knew that i missed having that feeling of being with a colleague and creating something and i thought well she's the perfect person so i called her up if she didn't know what i was asking i did it under the guise of let me have it alone i'll leave it all fairytale she can take it you know michelle reached out and we had had not direct working relationships for many years but we had been colleagues for many years and our experience of working on that women's program was extremely gratifying from the perspective of how valuable the women who participated found it how comfortable they were in the settings that we would create and how great it was to be able to share with them not the textbook stuff but the real life and let everybody know we're all in this together if you think you had a blunder you hear about the blunders i so when michelle reached out to me i really wasn't looking for anything else to do i was enjoying the things that had made up my retirement life up to that point a lot of family things a lot of travel some writing some taking of classes and learning new things and i wasn't feeling that there was any kind of a need that i was trying to fulfill michelle is an extremely enthusiastic person and she had a lot of energy and excitement about don't you think we could do something valuable together and so i went away and fought about it and i think the driving thing beyond  the enjoyable experience of working with somebody who does have so much enthusiasm for everything is so interested in things and dynamic hence the name was that we both had experiences with other women that we knew who we knew to be competent talented accomplished and who every time we saw them would say how's that working out would you do what do you do with your day all day i'm afraid to even think about retiring am i going to be cooking all the meals and i don't even know why to do that i think you would find these otherwise really strong women and i understand that they didn't feel they had an avenue of certainly within their companies to discuss the issues we had learned from our experience with women's life experiences how much women in general learn from one another and creating an environment where that can happen in a sort of structure but very fun way where something we both got very enthusiastic of about and set to work doing a tremendous amount of research and outreach and putting together our program because people often complain about having to get up go to work and make the commute make the journey and when faced with the rest of their life on the other side it is actually scary right people don't necessarily run to it sometimes they just say i want to work longer i don't like you said i don't know what i'm going to do and for women it may actually be and you have research and i'd love to hear this research you talk about have am i going to have to cook all the meals but i'm going to have to take care of all these people when you know there are people who need care and if i work i can drop in i can make a meal if i'm not working then that becomes an expectation correct so for women i think it's actually even scarier but let's let's talk about the end two things i want to hit on one is about being scared and too is expectations of women and really statistics related to women and being caregivers so let's start with the scary when i shared with my team and others that i was retiring it had been clearly planned with my boss for a long period of time prior but as it became public i found out something very interesting i found out that when people approached me in the form of a question their fear came out really having nothing to do with me i had comments such as is keith sick are you sick what are you going to do with  yourself you know you might be with him thirty more years what are you going to talk about how are you going to travel are you sure you can do this financially so it was really interesting so i became an observer and i watched what people said to me because it really gave me clues into what people are scared about and that some of the things we put into our workshop the second point you hit on was women and expectations about women if you look at caregiving in the united states very high percentage of women that go into that role just because it's expected that there's aging parents there's also children who are working may not be able to afford childcare so then the retired person becomes the person providing that care  are ill and think or other family members well you're free now therefore you know i get i get some of that time so we felt strongly about doing the research as of women as caregivers about what things are frightening to people and out of building the workshop around all components of people's personalities and i think we also wanted to make sure that we we gave sort of a structured way of thinking about a variety of topics that we are things we think are important but not giving answers because there's no white right path for everyone for some people as in my case having the opportunity to care for an aging parent was one of the most important things i could do in other cases people have creative pursuits they'd like  to get into they have things dreams lifelong dreams that have been deferred that they'd like to get into there is no one right path but it is worth spending enough time thinking about it and thinking about yourself the same amount of time you might think about putting i nto something for another family member or for your work put that time you know on yourself and really think about it and i think part of the important elements that came out from from our research and from a lot of reading is the importance of communication and the importan particularly with those that are most in your life of making sure that you're on the same page the spouse is the most obvious one but there are plenty of others you know what is our life going to be like what do we want it to be like are we together are we apart are we pursuing different interests are we spending you know all of our time on the same kinds of things have those conversations early and be thinking about it the other piece that that sort of dawned on me and i'm old enough to not have lived this the women's liberation in being a letdown being less than fulfilling and the last thing we want is to have a feeling of wow i work so hard in my life now is this all there is how do we fill our life with those things that we enjoy meaningful that give us a feeling of relevance and significance and those are all good issues to talk through while you're thinking of things so you don't have the fear of you know and stopping you from doing something that might be important to you and also i think about safety and time sobhani talked about the workshops that we have done in the past one of the things it provided was a safe haven where you can come and kind of ask a question or let your hair down a little one of the things that women  may find it difficult to do is go talk to their boss about them i think about retirement you don't want to be irrelevant you don't want to be not getting an interesting project or assignment say if you say i'm going to be retiring in three years or so and they not may not have put enough time into thinking about what that is so the workshop provides a safe environment and also as busy women whether it's caretaking for elderly parents or young children or others in your family you don't even carve out the time to do it so this is a structure in which you can at least get to know yourself a little better and that's part of the answer to people who have sent to us in the past for why women what's different about women and honestly what we think there are a lot of things different about women when it comes to retirement but chief among those driving this this project for us is that this really is the first generation of career women  who are not just working at a job but they've had a role that gave them a lot of satisfaction came influence it gave them rights michelle said sometimes you have power sometimes you've had very meaningful contributions you could make and so there is a bit of a fear of well now that i've worked really hard in a career and you're our age and i just stepping back into what am i housewife now what am i now right and helping women sort of think through you don't lose any of your identity it's a different identity and you get to create that identify things that the things we like that is so powerful that it's different to did it right and you just take what you were and build on that right because i could see i'm not at that stage i mean in some respects maybe i am but i have three kids and college is ahead of me but i think of myself as in retirement eligible at the moment maybe i am but the thought that you can create it for yourself that you can empower yourself to do it and you're not left to others expectations i think is super super power rankings so how do you target i want to talk about the women that you're targeting how they actually get to your workshops are these workshops aimed at whom right ok when you talk about kind of being empowered enough to and i had to face the fact that i really want to do those or did i think that's what i should say and do in order to achieve kind of the result i wanted and i think it's kind of a combination of both that you kind of trained to do that you need to do it in order to get ahead in this environment we're looking at women anyone's welcome where that wherever they are in their career point to to join us we were looking in the anywhere from zero to five years out for you to really try what they perceive their retirement so they're in they're actually working they're working but they're looking anywhere from zero to five you're ready to retire now one of the things that bonnie and i were just talking about last week was she met someone that had retired and hadn't had the time or opportunity to think about what she wanted and said ok i'm sitting home and you know i'm not watching t v and i haven't thought about it so it doesn't mean you could be three years post retirement still come you could be someone who is thinking about a future that you do know you have and you're ten years out you're welcome to come but the main gist of what we're trying to do is those people that are in the zero to five years out to really come join us and think about it in changes in how people might find us so we're doing a joint program with one of the new your jersey universities this fall with a combination of women from corporate america and women from academia  we've really toyed with a lot of different approaches as to how does this fit and how do we reach the women who are interested i think that to the extent that we find that there's individual interest we'll be putting seminars on in groups and perhaps several times a year  develop a mailing list with folks and we'll keep them apprised but we also think that there is a great opportunity for women's organizations to sponsor a program like this for professional associations for financial planners and they want to to help  round out the aspects of retirement that are not necessarily financial and leave driven more than a hoax and also for heads of human resources and corporations even though it's typically the financial it issues that a company helps advise their employees something like this we think is a value added investment in lawyers that helps employees crystallize their thinking which can honestly help companies plan better when they're when they're valued employees sort of have a plan and are comfortable talking about it companies are more able to deal with situations like maybe phased in retirement so that we can keep the expertise or planning for it so we think there is a lot of opportunity there to tailor it to the needs of specific groups the great great one thing that we haven't touched on is the unpleasant but you know we talked a little bit about the sandwich generation right you left because you really need only about that last time you know what i'm not even talking about that i'm talking about in a situation where there's a downsizing restructuring and i really thought that i was going to be working right and now i'm not ready so are those women are they also part of your target or are you looking for people who are really more planned full as as one can be in this economy so there's sort of a different dynamic there so if it is unplanned in out of your control  be honest and say that the majority of what we focused on are people who have control of their ok lives ok i can see a benefit from someone where it's unplanned and yet they're not financially desperate and they just need to explore those other issues because when pride a lot of resources and here's all the different kinds of things you can look into here's organizations here's here's all the books we've read as part of our research that we find valuable and if you're interested in this topic we're going to give you as many web sites and there's a face  there is there's thousands of books on amazon we've tried to do some of the work to narrow down the focus so someone who finds themselves in that situation but is not financially desperate and needs to explore well now what am i going to do i think they could come away with some insi some ideas to get them started about how do i build the life that i want and i don't think that they would get the depth of financial you know expertise to help them out of a sort of desperate financial situation right that some of what we explore are what are your worries what are the things that you do or you used to do even as young as a child that excited you what are some of the things that you like about your current job what are some of the things you don't like and sometimes looking at some of the things that you don't like kind of leads you to the things that you do like absolutes so we create a environment where by doing it in segments and kind of putting it out there to say try to think about what's keeping you up at night and you know you could be a person who maybe has been downsized or you could be a person in a role that really you find it unfulfilling or you're unhappy going to every day at least in an environment where you can be going to think about those things and think about how you can navigate toward something that you know makes you happier on a day to day basis i think women who are feeling out of control in one aspect could certainly benefit from saying well look at all these other aspects of my life that i can get control of like i do have to deal with that part at some point in time love more now i can think about my interests i can think about what's important from a family person i can think about health and some of the issues we had and i can take control of the things i can control while i'm trying to deal with the rest of it and i think it's all it really is all about women sort of  another learning from everyone's experiences having an opportunity to see that we're all sort of in the same boat at some point is the let me issues and really getting that sort of shared experience and one of the things that i had done in prior to retiring was interview retirees that to me seemed that somehow they had an answer or they seemed to be doing things that they had thought about they put time into and that was really a great journey for me just reaching out to people and learning in advance what they experienced and what i could avoid or what i could supplement and it's amazing what those folks told me and it was you know people at a very high level of people who have done very different things in the corporate world because sometimes you know there's experiences you can get from going outside your normal route so that was a great way to find in that some of the things that we've put in kind of the how to how do you approach this right well that leads me to a question what are some of the common pitfalls or obstacles or challenges that you think people face you know particularly if they're planning because you may say well if you're planning you've thought of everything but that's not the case so what are some of the common things that your workshop addresses that you think either people it's just an awareness so i think i think we find that a lot of people do a better job on financial planning than anything else and they often don't put much thought at all into the rest of the issues the emotional adjustments your identity how do you find those things that are important to you to spend your time on how do you pursue interests how do you meet people if up to this point your only sort of friendships were corporate friendships or the parents of your grown children how you create a social network for yourself  often people are thinking i need to plan for right my retirement which means for when kate check health insurance check they don't think about all the other issues and so i think that's the biggest draw many for most people and when bonnie talked about you know kind where the relationship you have and what's going to happen to them one of the processes i went through is i said to myself who do i want in my life and that's that's an interesting and scary question so from a work perspective i said you know what will i miss because in building a new life you have you can't just say ok you know i've got a lot of great things from work what were those things but i also did i miss and why and i came up with a list of the people that i was going to make a personal commitment to myself not to them for me to stay in touch with them and then if someone else her that's fine too but i made a conscious decision and i even thought about my personal life that way and it sounds easy to do until you have to really think about kind of what  what do i want my life to look like oh yeah and i would think tied to what you're both saying about relationships so people who were in your life or in your life because of your authority and power correct once that goes away and you realize that and you thought maybe you had a personal connection all these years and if it really wasn't there well or it's diminished because they're now trying to form a relationship with the person who replaced you you know and that doesn't mean they didn't like you but hey you know me so much time so it's so much stuff that way and i think both of us still stay in touch with people we were close to and we get together periodic late but the truth of the matter is they're in a whole different orbit absolutely and you know film and meaning and gives you all those things to michelle's point that you miss about work without all the things that you don't salute so we talked about the target market the you're aiming towards and you mentioned that you're providing educators who are thinking about our key ally that are thinking about are closer to that retirement spectrum and you know as we've been building this we've talked to a number of colleagues and friends said wow i'd like to get out of that so we're kind of creating that joint approach and we're doing a couple of other things we feel we've developed a survey on women's attitudes and fears about retirement that we're going to be sending out to a lot of individuals to sort of gather more information that might help us target our workshops more closely and then we are having people reach out to us through our e mail which is dynamic retirement at g mail dot com go to should express if they have interest or the organizations have interest in putting something together for their group or for their for their company wonderful wonderful well i think this is tremendous i think it's a need as you've identified i think you have research on your side you have your own personal experience and i like the fact that you know that it's different and that's not to say that you know i'm pleased about what happened for you but that you bring those perspectives because they're very real you know being in the sandwich generation having to care for an ill parrot right so one who's ill so you both are going to bring a real dynamic to the workshop that i think i terrific i just thank you so much for being a guest on the show and sharing your expertise and of course it's great to see you both thank you for having oh i'd love to absolutely absolutely so thank you to bo absolutely thank you karen thank you thank you thank you for tuning in to new beginnings with care