Stop Shoulding All Over Yourself
We all deserve a life of joy and fulfillment, but for many of us that joy feels elusive. We've checked off all the boxes and done all the the things that the blueprint of life says should make us happy, and yet - no joy. Turns out, being happy isn't about following society's blueprint, but about creating our own blueprint for what we want out of our lives and taking action to make that happen. For us to embrace that opportunity, we first have to let go of other people prescriptions for our life choices, and build trust in our own inner compasses. That journey was hard and long for me, but it doesn't have to be. Join me as we explore and build an exciting future based on what YOU want, and how YOU feel inside, unlock a life of joy and fulfillment, and release yourself of the guilt of not enough.
Stop Shoulding All Over Yourself
Making Retirement the Best Years of Your Life with Lisa Stornaielo
Can retirement be the most exciting chapter in your life? Lisa, a business owner and retired Fidelity , thinks so and she's eager to tell you why. We kick off with a refreshing chat about retirement, shaking off the outdated notion that it signals the end of one's working or even living and experiential journey. Instead, Lisa provides valuable insights into how this phase can be a delightful transition, filled with opportunities to fulfil personal dreams and goals.
Ever wonder how to build a balanced 'life portfolio'? We join Lisa as she demystifies this concept and shares practical guidance on how to create one that suits your unique needs. We delve into the idea of using retirement as a stage for freedom and flexibility, encouraging you to dust off past dreams and utilize resources to build a vision for your future. This is a conversation that prompts you to look beyond the societal norms that place undue emphasis on productivity and to understand that rest and leisure hold their own value.
We wrap up with an enlightening discussion on retirement planning not just as a financial necessity but also as a route to finding and living with purpose. Lisa speaks to us about the power of retirement workshops as a safe space to explore, the importance of perpetual learning, and the sheer joy of a purpose-driven life. It's not often you encounter a conversation that could change your perspective on something as significant as retirement, but this episode promises to do just that. Join us, and let's redefine retirement together.
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🎵 Thank you to Karacter for allowing me to use Telepathy (2005) in my intro.
This is one of my favorite albums of all time.
👉 Check it out: https://karacter.bandcamp.com/album/karacter
This is my first time using this particular platform, so I'm actually very curious to see how it all plays out. So thank you for being my guinea pig today. Lisa, hello, it is so good to have you here on the Stop Shitting All Over Yourself podcast. Welcome, welcome.
Speaker 2:How are you today? Oh, I'm great. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank you for asking me.
Speaker 1:Oh, dude, after our conversation. So the reason why I asked Lisa on was because we were at an event where we were at the library, the elementary library. We're all sitting there talking and you said something about and I'm not going to do it justice, I'm sure it will come out today but you said something about how people think of retirement as the end of their lives and they sort of they struggle with what do I do after I retire and how there's such a more joyful way of thinking about retirement and I was like, oh my god, my wife talks about this kind of thing all the time. I was like I had that problem and I used to look at it in such a negative way. And Lisa has this perspective that is like your life kind of begins at retirement. Right, it's like, well, I don't even call it retirement, but we'll come to that later. So, lisa, I'd love to hear a little bit about what you do.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I have a huge background in leadership development and coaching and it was all around like career coaching and so. But what I do now is kind of an extension of that, and so a very good friend and colleague of mine we'd worked together for over 20 years we started this business about three years ago called the Future of you, and basically what the Future of you does is it provides a roadmap and resources to help people really think about this next chapter and to reinvent and create a personalized view of what retirement looks like for them. And we do it through a lot of things, but for the most part, we have either some online resources and a roadmap and a toolkit that folks can use, and then we also have employer sponsored programs where we do workshops for companies. Oh, vanessa, I can't hear you.
Speaker 1:Right, we have to unmute the mic when we start talking. So the question I have actually is what is like? Because we talk about retirement, so planning this out and so on, but what's kind of what is wrong with the current model of the way people think about retirement?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. So I remember looking up the definition of the word retirement when I started doing this and the thing that's really funny is it was all about like the end and death and kind of like. I'm not dead yet.
Speaker 2:Right, right, and we always say it's the 3G's gardening grandparents and golf, right. There's like this set view of what retirement is and the more people that I talk to about it, the more I realize that, just like we all are very individual, we really all have a different like vantage point of it. And so what ended up happening it was really interesting is a bunch of my friends started. We had worked for years at Fidelity Investments and they offered an early retirement package and a bunch of my friends started taking it. They were a little bit ahead of the game of me and they were having a blast. Like the money part of retirement because we worked at Fidelity all those years was all taking. At least the planning part of it was all taken care of and people felt somewhat secured in that.
Speaker 2:But what am I going to do with my time and who am I going to be? The identity part of it was daunting and so and I'm talking about super successful people who really managed their whole life right, they managed their careers brilliantly. You know our definition of retirement is you go from 60 miles an hour, an overflowing calendar, to nothing, to this big open space like right, and it was so overwhelming for some people. And my business partner at the time was my first client. I didn't even realize it. She called me up and she's like I've never been. She's scratch golf or never golf. Never travel so much. Everything's great and I'm miserable. I've got a lot more gas in the tank and I don't know what I'm going to do. And it's because that view of retirement that we're spoon fed from day one is the same view for all and it's very conforming and it doesn't really fit. And so we said you know what retirement needs a reboot.
Speaker 2:And I read this cool article called Designing a Retirement that Excites you and it really kind of sparked my interest. I heard this. It was kind of like all these things came together right. So I read that article. I saw this Forbes magazine piece that said by 2030, all baby boomers are going to hit 65. And we're the second that's not far away. No, we're the second largest population out there. Oh, geez Of a generation, right.
Speaker 2:But the other thing that's fascinating that means 10,000 people a day hit retirement age. Wow, no. And some of them do it with grace and others of them do it with what the heck? They're frightened and they're anxious because of the uncertainty and that kind of definition and view that we've kind of been socialized around all these years, that you know we should be really excited to do this. We should stop working at 65. We should, we should, we should right. What I've learned is you've got to just know what's right for you and with a little bit of tools and learning from others who've gone before you, you can design a retirement that excites you, but you can make this some of the most fulfilling part of your life. It's just fascinating the stories we've collected.
Speaker 1:You know it's so interesting you said earlier on and I, you know, even when we talked before this didn't actually resonate exactly the same way, but this time you said it and I was like, oh yeah, because it resonated. Now, this time I remembered something. So, you know, a while back, my wife and I, like she had said to me that you know, I was always working and I really was workaholic and it was a problem. I ended up going, you know, burning out, going to the hospital, blah, blah. But that's not the important part of the story, because obviously that's not an issue anymore.
Speaker 1:The important part is after the hospital and I come back home and I'm like, okay, I need to now work less and like be more mindful, so that I'm, you know, and so she and she is very good with boundaries so I'm like, okay, I'm going to clock out at five. So I start clocking out at five and I swear to God, I'm walking around in, like, house slippers and pajama pants, being, like, you know, shuffling things from one room to another, being like I literally don't know what to do with myself when I am not working, and like because I knew I had to, you know, I started to think about it, right, because and I'm like, oh my God, like what? Because I understood what that meant. What that meant was is that I had constructed an entire identity, life goals, schedule plans, like literally my entire life is built around this.
Speaker 1:And I'm still in it and I'm taking this time off and I'm thinking things like I'm worthless, I'm useless, I why are they? Even you know like those stories start to come because I'm not producing. So how am I even a valid member of society, right? So now I'm thinking to myself well, fuck, now I'm 65 and retiring. What kind of message have we been sending the people in our lives, people that we love sending people that we love ourselves? Right? That, basically, you need to do all of this is the cap. I'm like, I feel like I'm going through like this the capitalist machine at work right now, right, where we spend all of our time working and then it ends and then it's just like can I ask you something? Does that in your work? Have you found that that leads to a lot of depression?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have. There's a lot of statistics on that and also the other thing that I think leads to the depression is the loss of identity, the loss of purpose, contribution, but also community, and that's one of the big things that we find in our workshop piece especially is that they're not in this alone, but also there's tons of research out there, robert Waldringer in particular, who's on how, being in community, people live longer, healthier, there's less percentage of dementia. So it's that identity and community pieces that lead to depression in some people.
Speaker 1:That makes a lot of sense. Like you know, you're seeing some of that like even with the COVID environment where a lot of people working from home you know you have a subset of people like me who are thriving in the home environment, but there are people who really need these. But I still have a community online and relationships and that kind of thing. If you don't know how to build a community online or you don't feel like you have that community and now you've lost the community you had at work, you know there's where a lot of that depression stuff comes from. That makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. So when I think about that like so when you work with your clients, I'm curious do you ever work with clients who are like young, like they're like? You know they're like and when I say young I mean younger than what you would somebody who's not retiring in the next five years, like someone because that seems smart to me like a 35 year old who's like help me plan for my retirement.
Speaker 2:So it's so fun. You should say that when we first started doing this, it was very organic, right. So we threw this my friend, who you know, the scratch golfer, my co-co-partner here in crime, she and she is very schooled in a methodology that we used a lot at Fidelity and I also was trained in it. It's called design thinking and it's basically an innovation methodology and framework that's from the Stanford Business School, and the first step is falling in love with the problem. So we started falling in love with this problem and we threw out on LinkedIn hey, does anybody want to? You know, here's what we're thinking. We want to learn more about it. And so we had a very wide swath of people that we started talking to, and it was people at various ages and stages. And what was fascinating is we first started looking at people you know five years out, right. And then we kind of broadened it to well, what about those adjacencies, like people who always just had their own business, right and of course, I'm never going to retire because I just, you know, they have their own gig going on, right and so we ended up talking to over 50 people. So we ended up doing this big kind of, and then we combed through like pages and pages and analyzed our feedback and we came up with, you know, interesting data.
Speaker 2:And so the first thing we came up with is people fell into three categories. Right, there were the people that were overwhelmed and really like just unsettled, right, and they were either in retirement or they were starting to think about retirement, but they just felt like hopeless, quite frankly. And those we had some people that really we did interview, people who were really depressed I would say would are depressed even though I'm not a clinician, can't type that right. Then we had these people in the middle that were cautiously optimistic is how we would talk about them. And they were the people, like my brother, who the current view and the current script on retirement doesn't fit them, but they know they've got the money and they know they should retire and they probably kind of want to scale back, but they don't know how. And so they're aiming, aiming, aiming, but they're kicking the can down and they're not like firing right they're not, they're like they're putting it off.
Speaker 2:And then we had these people that we call excited and engaged, and they were the ones that were, oh my goodness, manessa, kicking it out of the ballpark, right. We then formed a roadmap and we came up, we looked at those guys and we said what is it that they do differently? And we came up with five things that they did differently. And then we built a workshop around it and a whole toolkit around it and a roadmap around it and we tested it. And as we tested it, we iterated with real people, and the reason why I bring that up is you said what ages?
Speaker 2:Everyone always asks me what's the sweet spot, right? So, yeah, you could say one to three years or three, you know, one to five years, but we had people who were 10 years out and they were planners and I always you know, if it's somebody, if it's in their consciousness, like someone says who's, who's the best person for this, I'm like, well, if someone's thinking about it and trying to design it, that's the right person. So we've had people, as you know, in their late 40s, early 50s, all the way, you know, in their 70s, quite frankly, who are still hanging on in one of our corporate classes. They worked at a company for over 40 years and they were just, you know, kind of stuck in their minds about what's next, because this whole fear of, you know, losing your identity and just the anxiety of the uncertainty.
Speaker 1:Yes, the uncertainty is like you know. I think ultimately, you know, it really does come down to the uncertainty, but how much do you think? Because we don't know what's going to happen. But I think there's also an element of like you know, our society values productivity, right, and like that's like the pinnacle of all. And so if you're not producing, like what's your pointless, useless, worthless right? And that's not true. But society we internal, like, and I think about this, you know, when I think about why I wouldn't take rest before right, because, like I wouldn't rest, because if I'm not doing work, how am I providing value? And so I feel, like you know, there's an element of education that needs to happen, because I didn't want to retire for many years.
Speaker 1:So here's what happened with my life right, I was like I'm not retired, fuck retirement. Who needs to do that? I don't know. And I'm always going to work. I love working, I love my job, that's what I'm going to do. Right, and my wife was like you know, she just kept saying retirement and she's just like she's been saving and doing all of the. You and my wife, you're just going to meet at the conference, you're going to love each other, and. But she, you know, and finally, we actually had a conversation one day where we realized that the problem was that we were defining retirement differently and so in her mind, retirement meant well, let me tell you what my mind was.
Speaker 1:In my mind, retirement is everything that we just talked about. So basically I die, I'm just not actually dead yet, so you haven't really put me in the coffin, but I'm already dead. And then I mean, and that sucks, it's a horrible, horrible philosophy, it's a horrible story. The other one, which I really like this way better, is when you have enough money that is paying for you to live, so that you can do whatever hell you want. And at that point you want to keep doing your job at Fidelity. Keep doing your job at Fidelity. You want to go and become an underwater basket-weaver? Go, do that. You can do literally whatever you want. And I said I subscribe to this philosophy. And once we got on the same page in our definitions, it moved us in that direction. I'm wondering how much of your work do you do? That is about moving people like me from one space to the other.
Speaker 2:Huge. That's the whole thing. Quite frankly, one of the things that we always hear from people and the way I sum it up and you'll get this because you've worked with a lot of coaches is we give people choice and agency. The current definition of retirement doesn't. It's right, and so what we say is create your own definition based on your own personal view of that We've been dreaming out of ourselves all these years. Right, we're on this career path. We're going that way. What we do is we help people envision and dream. So we have a very interactive journal that we bring people through and a series of modules that people go through that really help them revisit past things that they wanted to do or really start to dream about. What could this next chapter look like? It's so funny.
Speaker 2:When you were talking, it reminded me of when I first started this personally. My daughter was getting ready to go to college, and so I'm a career coach. I work with people as they transition to vice presidents and executives, and so I was like, oh, let me. So we were talking and I was so blown away by all the cool resources that were out there to help her envision her life, and I started to think, you know, in the next year. So I'm going to get the package. This is cool, I bet there's tons of stuff out there, right? So that was the tail end of the baby boomers. So I'm like I bet there's tons of stuff out there for people like me.
Speaker 2:And what I found which was so really disheartening was it was all about the finances, all about the finances, nothing about how I wanted to spend my time. And for me that felt backwards, that even though, yes, I had, you know, I had that kind of like I had enough support for my financial planning because of what I did for a living, where I, where I worked all these years, but it just felt backwards. In my financial planner I never forget was like OK, give me the date, when do you want to retire, where do you want to live, and I'll give you the money. And I'm like the number for the money and I'm like what do you mean about retirement? It's exactly like what your wife said to you. For me it just meant I'm not going to work as many hours it didn't, and for her it meant you're not earning any income. Yeah, and that's not what it meant for me. And until I got that straight with her and started thinking about it.
Speaker 2:You know, I love the fact I have the freedom and flexibility to be an entrepreneur at 61 and try this thing out and take all of who I've been my whole life and put it in a different context. I, you know, I saw this great quote. It's I'm not starting from scratch, I'm starting from experience. So I'm not abandoning my identity, right, it's just the next, you know, 2.0 of it and a different context, right?
Speaker 2:One of the cool things we do is we created a tool called the life portfolio and just like you have a portfolio of assets for your finances and you shift up the asset allocation at different stages of your life when my kids go to college, when my right, whatever you have a life portfolio and the assets are your time and how you're going to spend it.
Speaker 2:And so we divide it up into five sectors and we have you do a current state analysis and ask yourself, is it just right, too much or not enough? And then we say, all right, now let's dream, let's start to think about what do you want it to be next? And so then we that's where we begin our work together, and then we help people start to think about well, what are those little experiments and things I can do to start to today, no matter where I am, if it's someone to start to do it someone 10 years out, two years out, three years out, already retired, wherever you can start doing that. So we kind of teach people how to fish instead of giving them a fish. It's not one and done right.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it is a practice because, like my wife and I have been having. So it's funny. You should say that some of the you know where you talk about. You know your life portfolio and sort of like the things that you want to do and dream and so on. And what happened out of the conversation that she and I had about probably 20, like it was not very long ago, so it wasn't last year, it was the year before last, so 2021. And we went on vacation to Anna Maria, which was where we got married and had our honeymoon. We go every. Have you ever been?
Speaker 2:No, no, it's in.
Speaker 1:Florida. It's loved. I mean, it was lovely. Now it's you know, now whatever, because it's covered in seaweed. But I love, love, Anna Maria, when it's not covered in seaweed it's still going to be gorgeous. I love you, Anna Maria.
Speaker 1:But we were there and we've always wanted to live on the island and or live there. And then, you know, we were having a conversation about build the life you want to live and then pay for it. That's sort of like how she said build the life you want to live and then we save the money to pay for it when we retire. And so I've always wanted to live by the water. And we had this great house in Franklin that you know, great investment, great location. When the time came for us to retire, we'd be able to sell it, make a ton of money, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:And I said I don't want to wait until we retire to live by the ocean, Like I want to live by the ocean right now. And so and I finally, I've been timing this conversation for a while and in this particular day I had the language I needed. I said you keep saying to build the life I want to live and then save for it, the life I want to live has a house on the ocean. So all I'm saying is, can we get that house now, Right? And she was like, why don't we look and see? And that happened to be Right when the rates went down to almost nothing two years ago and the house price so like we got the house on the ocean Specifically because we went during that time.
Speaker 1:So I think this exercise that you're talking about I'm curious to know when you're, when your students go through it. Do you often find that they don't just end up figuring out things are gonna do in retirement, but they probably end up with a list of things. They're like I'm gonna start doing this now. Like I'm gonna start pottery classes now.
Speaker 2:Because that's one of the key things that we noticed and the people that were excited and engaged. So so we ended up creating a four-step Proprietary process that we bring people through, and one was rebalance your life portfolio, which is what I just spoke up. Another one that is huge is connecting to your purpose, and we all have a purpose, and I used to believe me. I got paid a lot of money to go out and look for purpose workshops and I'll never forget. I went to one and it was three days of navel gazing and I left it with a purpose Statement that was perfectly crafted. I was yeast in the bread of life, but I was very proud of it.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna say that you, every time I see you enough. And you're like you know, lisa, today you look like the yeast in the bread of life.
Speaker 2:You know. And then I come home it was like really crazy. And then, as I was doing research for this and heard how important it was I about purpose, I found this guy's name is Richard Lider leidee are. He's fabulous, all kinds of Ted talks and things Very easy to look up, and we not only leverage our own research, we also go with adjacencies. Like I talked about Waldringer, I'm talking about Lider and what he says is you, we all have a purpose. It's a part of our DNA. It's about discovering it and igniting it. And he said you can find name your purpose in five minutes on the back of a napkin, and he has this napkin test. So we do that. And then once you've got like, hmm, here are the different sectors and what I want more and less of in my life, and you start to think about your purpose. We talk about what you are saying, which is we coined a new phrase, we call it activating. Retry meant.
Speaker 2:I meant I love it. It's all about, like, those people that were excited and engaged. They did the little experiments and many of them did it on the side of their desk while they were still working. They were curious and they just and I did this research that we started. I was still working full-time when I started doing it, because I got so many calls from so many people in my life that were struggling with this and this is supposed to be the happiest time of your life, right here, our everything we've worked for and it's such a like.
Speaker 1:Let down. This is the greatest day of my life.
Speaker 2:Right, and if not, then you, you can. You can hear it like you hear people who are new to it and they're talking themselves into it, right, but no one talks about like this, like it's the shooting, right, no one talks about. This can be time of Anxiety and it can be a time that you're it's a roller coaster, but. But so we say, start these little experiments before and, if nothing else, you learn what you don't want to do, right and so. So that's, we do have people and and what is so Fulfilling for me is this silly little life portfolio tool that I was doing on myself and trying to figure out. It like Ignites people, it motivates them and engages them, so it doesn't feel like, oh, I've got to do all this work, I've got it right. It's not like a big journal, it's just this little kind of thing, and what I find is how much it it ignites people's Planning and they're they're again sense of adventure, they're like their imagination in the lots of ways.
Speaker 1:You know what's interesting? I you kind of just gave me a vision right now, right, and it's cuz, the vision you gave me was this, right. So you talked about trying, right, like trying the little experiments, and I think you have people who are prone to they're like I will try things, I will try anything, I'm not afraid of what's gonna happen. And then you have people who are like I'm afraid of everything, I'm not trying anything, because God knows what can happen. Now I used to be that second person right where I've gotten so afraid I wouldn't even leave the house. I got just completely just housebound. I was like I was afraid what would happen if I walked out the door and forget dyeing my hair blue. Oh my God, that would be insane.
Speaker 1:But I think that what's really great about what you're talking about is almost like, in order for someone to know that it is safe to do those things right, because somebody they have to feel safe for it this workshop almost gives you like a here's a safe environment, there's a fence, nothing bad's gonna happen. Now let's start doing this right. And I think that what happens is is you teach them this one thing and they practice it, and then they're like, oh my God, right. So they get that dopamine hit and then they realize they're not gonna die and it is okay, right. And so like it almost greases the wheel now so it primes the pump so that when you do retire you're not trying new things, like it's almost like you know, it's like you're lock off your head, you know it's like here you go, you thud and then now start everything new.
Speaker 1:And now I go back to what you said earlier, where you said I'm not coming in the blank slate Like I brought. I have a rich history. There's a whole person here, right. And then we start to see ourselves instead of somebody who is just closing the lid on life and say, okay, now what it's, oh my God, I created all of these things. What am I gonna do with these things now? Like, how am I gonna use these things now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love what you just said, because, for me, one of the things I love about being in my 60s I have to be really honest with you and I don't often think of the number, but what I love about where I am in my life maybe I should say right now is I always went through life with FOMO, right, fear of missing out. So I jam-packed, I fit, you know, and I still sometimes to this day, because I've got such, you know, a freedom of schedule, but I and I like having a certain level of activity. Like you know, I'm at pickleball three times a week, I'm playing golf a couple of times a week, I'm on my spin bike. You know that's me, though.
Speaker 2:But what I love is it gives me at this point, to say, meh, I don't wanna do that, yeah, or yes, I do and I'll make time for it. And I feel like, instead of letting that opportunity or that ask drive me, I put that ask through my filter and I'm able to say is this gonna? You know, even like I still have folks reaching out to me and I do some work on the side my coaching practice for executives or, you know, as they transition a career coaching practice, and I'm affiliated with a company that does that, and but there are times when people will reach out to me and they'll be like, oh, can you do this for me? Like I'd love it because I've done contract work for them, and I'm like, yeah, no, never.
Speaker 1:Ever wanna be like I don't wanna do that anymore.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, I'm not doing performance management ever again. Sorry, I know, I used to love it, no. And so there's something about getting so solid on like my life portfolio and my purpose and it's like is that gonna cause that's gonna fulfill me? Yeah, that's gonna. You know it's not a job, then, manessa.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. It's so. It's a passion, it's a purpose, it's motivating, right. It's different. I'm fortunate my career did a lot of that for me. It sounds like yours did too. I was well fitted for what I do for a living, but I did too much of it, or I started to. You know you're in a big company and there's. You know I play well with others, so I know the whole political landscaping can do it, but that's a lot of energy. Who wants to? You know I'm like, yeah, I never wanna do that anymore. I don't wanna do that anymore.
Speaker 1:I'll help you-.
Speaker 2:This is why I love you.
Speaker 1:This is absolutely why I wanna join the podcast, cause, like I feel you so hard. I love that you can like cause, like really that's the freedom, right. And when you talk about retirement like this, I'm like, dude, I can't wait to retire. So now my wife and I are always like. I'm like the other day she said we reached, so we hit like a number in our retirement assets. And she's like, right now, if we retired today, we get $1,000 every month for the rest of our lives. And I'm like woo-hoo. I was like, can we retire? No, I'm not yet, but like, but still, we made a huge milestone, so okay.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious, you know, as we start to sort of wind down, I'm actually curious to know a little bit more about. So you mentioned earlier that you work with people one-on-one, you have workshops, you have things like that. So I sort of like, what are the modalities in which you work with people? And like, how does that work? You know, cause, like there's so many different ways. It seems like you're gonna apply this. I'd be curious to know what the different ones are and how that goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, before I jump in there, this is a little backdrop and it's so funny something you just said that got me to think about this. It's the financial piece, right, and it's like which comes first. It feels very chicken egg, right. So recently we've been approached by a couple of financial services planning firms because they're even noticing that there are people in their population of clients that have the money but are reluctant to retire. And they're saying, if we're really they're very caring and holistic financial planning organizations and they're saying, if we really are doing our job, we wanna help people more holistically. And there's a whole holistic retirement planning movement that's coming out of that financial services industry and not a lot of them are there, but you see that. So we've got two things it's starting, it's delicious Starting and what's neat about it is they're loving our stuff and they're saying, hey, there are ways we can partner together, which is really kind of cool, right. So we offer, I'd say, two avenues to get our stuff. One is for individuals.
Speaker 2:We offer what we call jump starter and jump starter plus. We have an online learning platform and it's built. There are six modules that bring you through our roadmap. You get a lifetime access to all our stuff because we're big on this should never be one and done. You should try things as you go so you get all our modules.
Speaker 2:There are articles from like Harvard Business Review, forbes, ted Talks, youtube videos from all types of people that are in this space that we've included in our roadmap. We have online learning videos that we've created. We have a very detailed but engaging learning journal that's a guide that takes you through those six modules if you will, and so you can do that all by yourself online on your own, and we call that jump starter. Now there are some people that really love to do this and be held accountable and they love the coaching element. So we built Jumpstarter Plus and we put in three coaching sessions so you meet and then there's like an introductory session at the beginning and then at strategic points along the way, there's three sessions where you meet with a coach, and that coach is an accountability coach, if you will, and oftentimes people will then say I want to keep this up and they'll buy another package that would add on that makes sense, it does, it really does.
Speaker 1:It's great, but I feel like if you really want to like turn it into a lifetime habit, you want to spend that time like just to make sure it's really there.
Speaker 2:Yes, and we want to make sure that we people access this in a way that they can consume it for themselves. And we know that it's very individual, so we didn't want to handcuff people to getting the coaching, and so we did it in two ways. One is no coaching, one is with coaching. I love that You're that first and then add on coaching, and all our coaches are people like that livid, they walk the talk. So you might be too young for this, but I always say so. I'm really dating myself. There was this guy and his name was Syce Burling and he did the Hair Club for Men.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, oh, the Hair Club for Men. I'm not as young as I look. That's hysterical.
Speaker 2:The headline was I'm not only the president, I am also one of our key clients. I remember that. Oh my God, I remember his voice.
Speaker 1:It's all coming back to me now. I love this and the link is going to be in the show notes. Everyone who wants to hear his delightful voice again? Oh my gosh, it's so funny.
Speaker 2:So my business partner Nanay and I I always say that to her I'm like we are the guinea pigs, right, we do this. So we've got all of that Plus we've run this through six times before we finalized it and we iterated it with real people. And going through all of this Then we've started to get some interest from employers Really interesting people who were like we want to help people from like a diversity and inclusion, like at all stages and ages along their career journey in our company. And so we know people are hanging in there because of this uncertainty, but we want them to be able to have the freedom and flexibility to move on. And so how do we do that?
Speaker 2:And so we have created this accelerator workshop, which is six weeks. We meet once a week and bring them through everything that's in Jumpstarter. Just we do it live. They have access to it all on the learning platform. Like Jumpstarter they also can. But the added bonus from that is they do it in a community and we've done it as an open enrollment. It's just hard to kind of get everybody on the same day. It's much easier to have someone buy a workshop and they, you know, have they fill it, but it is so powerful when you're with other people at the same right that are absolutely.
Speaker 1:Especially if they're all in the same area. You ask the. You learn so much just from the questions people ask, like it's 10 folds 12, I'd so much better Like. I would always recommend doing that.
Speaker 2:And if they're in the same company, it's even we've found even stronger. And man talk about the brand loyalty and ambassadorship. When these people leave, yeah, and they're even saying, oh my gosh, all my friends are saying I've never heard of a company that does this for their folks. And again, everyone gets total access, lifetime access to all our stuff, so that one is like our community and we call it accelerator.
Speaker 1:I love it. Love it, and you know something you said earlier where you were talking about diversity and inclusion and like making sure that people at all ages are taken care of. You know, I 'm not on demand throughout the year, but as I was preparing for this podcast and I was really reflecting upon our previous conversation, I even wrote this down because I didn't want to say it wrong, because I thought I thought about something that I realized I've been talking, you know, I've been talking to so many people lately who are, um, you know, and we've been seeing so many people in the world right now, so many different backgrounds, that I think that they're all speaking about this story that we've told this way, that it's been, is not okay, right, and so I think what we're seeing happening in the world right now is like a collective rejection of the status quo that, like, is related to gender, race, sexuality, age, mental health, disability, like the people in those groups are saying you know what? We are absolutely done with the story that was written long before we were even born about who we are, what we can do, how we should retire. People are tired of living under the societal belief systems that are assigned to us by default, right, and so I feel like every person I talk to is someone who, like yourself, for a group of people, has said no more, like we're done. We are moving into a different space, which I feel like so much, like the millennials right now, or like the generations that are coming, that, like my generation, like so Gen X, like so, I'm like a few years, like 77. So I'm like right at the end of Gen X, a couple of years, and but, like my generation, is going to reap many of the rewards from what it is that you guys are doing at the end of the boomer generation for what you're creating right now, because by the time my group starts to retire, right, or you will have all these systems in place so you will be able to be like, listen, we put this in place that you didn't have to suffer like we did.
Speaker 2:We are like trailblazers, right. I love that so much. I did so I'll be like dude.
Speaker 1:I'm retired. I'm retired from retiring, I'm doing something else. Now, you know and that's actually the joy when I think about myself in terms of my life, right, and I don't know what your separations would be, but in my mind, about every seven to 10 years, I'm a different person and have a whole different set of things, right? So if you retire at 60, there's like three different people you can be right. So it's like you know, no, I mean like, and if you decide in the story in your mind you're like, hey, it's ended. Then there's three whole people that you're not going to be able to be because you already decided that.
Speaker 2:So that's what really. That's brilliant that you caught that, because that really jazzes me. So my purpose is I love and have always loved to. This is what it turned into from the yeast in the bread of life, bs, right, I just love to help people live to their potential. I love that. That's just. It hooks me right, and so I've done it throughout my whole career. Silly things like when I first had the first training job I ever had was helping people with a new customer service computer program and when they couldn't make sense of it, I make sense of it and help them with that. To my job as a corporate executive, helping people as they become executives. Right To my, the way I've parented my kids and launched them off to college, and my recent grad who just graduated college right In my marriage. Like, when I think about it and I look back the role I play with my siblings, I'm always the one who's that. You know the helping them discover their purpose and and do it in a way that's not traditional, like why can't you?
Speaker 2:You know, my brother is, is 67 and everyone. He's like the oldest person, he's number one sales guy, he's always winning awards, blah, blah, blah. And his boss is like please don't retire, please don't retire, please don't retire. And my brother's like I got the money I can retire, I should retire it. And I'm like stop, like stop. What do you love? And he goes this is what I go. What do you love about your job? Cut a deal with him. Tell him that's what you want to do. Work a couple of days less, don't he goes. I hate, I go. What do you hate? I hate all the new systems. I'm like I bet he'd hire someone because you bring in the box. He has to like, do their own system and turn up, hasn't he said that? He goes, tony, and so it's like that, right, it's just so cool to connect to your purpose, to see it out there.
Speaker 2:And for me, I don't know when I, when I'm going to stop this. I just like you, every couple of years I'll figure it out how much, how little, and it's still jazzing me. What's what's bringing me? You know like, and do I still have time for the things for? You know, if I just want to play, this time, you know? And giving back, like you and I serve on a board, that's big for me. I couldn't always do that when I worked full time. So it's one of those things in my life portfolio. When I look at those five sectors, there's like a spirituality section right, there's a physical kind of section. There's relationships, family and friends right, there's work. What I feel is, and why I call work, it's contribution. It might not be for money, but it's like how do I contribute to society?
Speaker 1:Oh, my God, love that, love that so much. It has been such a glorious time talking to you today. I wanted to ask really quick if people were willing to work with you. Where can they find you? Sure, our work.
Speaker 2:My website is thefutureofyoucom and if anyone wants to speak to me personally, it's lisa at thefutureofyoucom. That's my email.
Speaker 1:Fabulous, and we'll have all of those in the show notes. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today. This was absolutely fabulous. I cannot wait to get this up there. Thank you again.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you so much, Vanessa. Take care now.
