How Retirement Changes Your Identity

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard Business School, is approaching her own retirement by researching how ending your work career affects your sense of self. She says important psychological shifts take place leading up to, and during, retirement. That holds especially true for workers who identify strongly with their job and organization. Amabile and her fellow researchers have identified two main processes that retirees go through: life restructuring and identity bridging.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone it's Kurt we need your help with our annual survey this is your last chance to help us get to know you so we can make idea cast even better for you
0:09.8	it's easy just go to HBR.org
0:13.0	podcast survey.
0:15.0	Again, that's HBR.org.
0:17.0	And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR IDEA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. Health and wealth, those two things are foremost in people's minds as they near the end of their working careers.
0:56.0	Can I afford to retire? Will I be healthy enough to enjoy it?
1:00.0	Research shows that when people are able to answer those two questions favorably, they're much happier in retirement.
1:07.0	No surprise there.
1:08.0	But there's another question that people find themselves asking, often only after they've left the workplace for good and that's who am I now
1:17.0	When people ask me what I do what do I even tell them
1:20.8	Work is such a huge part of our identity.
1:24.0	Retirement untetethers us from how we think of ourselves in a fundamental way.
1:29.0	And a new study offers insights into how to handle this transition more effectively.
1:34.0	Researchers at Harvard Business School,
1:36.0	Questram School of Business, Bentley University,
1:39.0	and MIT Sloan School of Management
1:41.0	interviewed 120 professionals at three different companies
1:45.1	across the United States.
1:47.0	In the study, they focused on the mental and emotional toll that retirement brings, and
1:51.8	they found that retirees go through two main processes, life restructuring
1:56.4	and identity bridging. Here to talk about the study's findings is Teresa Amabale,
2:01.7	she's a semi-retired professor at Harvard Business School
	...

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