You struggle with that at all when the last position was eliminated.

I know you're still working.

You still have a position.

But was there any struggle with feeling like you lost a piece of your identity?

Absolutely.

And it's absolutely natural to go through.

And even though I knew it was going to happen, when it does happen and you no longer get those calls or those invitations, all of that goes away.

If that was your sole identity and you had no other inputs and way to feel good about yourself,

I can imagine that somebody like that would struggle.

When Donovan came back from vacation and realized that his role was eliminated, he was financially

ready, but the real work was psychological. Identity, purpose, and learning how to spend after a lifetime of saving were the real challenges that Donovan faced. In today's episode, we break down the four core buckets of retirement, and we learn how to test retirement before you dive right in. If you're on the edge of retiring about fear what's next, stay tuned. This episode is for you. Hi, Donovan. Thank you for joining me on

this episode of retirement reality. I'm curious, if you could choose one word to describe your

retirement so far, what would that word be? Choice. Choice would be the defining element for

my retirement journey. It was the ability to make the choice

at the time and the choices that I made earlier on in my career and in my life plan, my

financial plan helped me be able to make that choice when the time came. I love that.

I'm going to come right back to that. Before I do, how long have you been

retired at this point? I guess technically it would just be a little bit over a year.

And I kind of call it semi-retired because I'm not fully removed from the professional life

that I used to have. I still do a little bit of consulting,

both individual private coaching and then business consulting and some instructional work

through one of our post-secondary institutions on management and leadership and business.

...