Retirement, as a major life transition, can be both thrilling and challenging in unexpected ways. Written by acclaimed authors in the fields of business leadership, careers, and work, this book goes beyond the typical financial and health-related advice on retirement, providing insights to guide you in broader areas of your life – identity issues, relationship challenges, and questions about creating a new retirement life structure that works for you.

With lively, engaging writing, the book tells the detailed retirement transition stories of 14 people – and draws on over 200 interviews with 120 people – to explore how retiring involves a reconstruction of both the person and their life structure. You’ll gain wisdom on the common themes and the wildly different approaches people take to the four big tasks of retiring: making the retirement decision, detaching from work both tangibly and psychologically, building a new life structure for retirement, and settling into a relatively stable retirement life – but prepared to restructure again as life unfolds into the future. Throughout each chapter, you’ll see how the dynamic interplay of self, life structure, and external context affect a retiring person’s day-to-day experience in the final months of their career, as well as their early years of retirement – and how life satisfaction depends largely on alignment among the three. At the same time, you’ll learn how family, friends, and colleagues, as well as the organization the person is retiring from, can play a crucial role.

This book is for you if you are seeking deep, nuanced insight into – and practical advice on – the psychological, social, and life-restructuring aspects of retirement that can make all the difference for life satisfaction. It is also for you if you are a family member or friend of a retiring person, a helping professional, or an organizational leader who cares about your older workers and the value they bring to your organization even as they depart.