A lot changes when you retire. That can be daunting, but it also presents valuable opportunities. It gives you a window to recreate a new approach to life now that you’ll have the time and freedom to pursue what you’d like to do. Teresa Amabile, co-author of the new book Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You, joins us to discuss the key lessons from over 200 interviews with 120 people and their experiences in retiring.

Teresa Amabile joins us from Massachusetts.

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Bio

Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration, Emerita and a Director of Research at Harvard Business School. Originally educated as a chemist, Teresa received her doctorate in psychology from Stanford University. She studies how everyday life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. Teresa’s research encompasses creativity, productivity, innovation, and inner work life – the confluence of emotions, perceptions, and motivation that people experience as they react to events at work.

Teresa’s work has earned several awards: the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Management’s OB Division (2018); the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2017); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Israel Organizational Behavior Conference (2018); the Center for Creative Leadership Best Paper Award (in Leadership Quarterly) (2005); and the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children (1998). In 2020, she was named one of the top 50 scholars, by citation count, in business/management (PLOS Biology). She has presented her theories, research results, and practical implications to various groups in business, government, and education, including Apple, IDEO, Procter & Gamble, Roche Pharma, Genentech, TEDx Atlanta, the Society for Human Resource Management, Pfizer, and the World Economic Forum. In addition to participating in various executive programs at Harvard Business School, she created the MBA course Managing for Creativity, and has taught several courses to first-year MBA students. Teresa was the host/instructor of Against All Odds: Inside Statistics, a 26-part instructional series originally produced for broadcast on PBS. She was a director of Seaman Corporation for 25 years, and has served on the boards of other organizations.

Teresa’s discoveries appear in her book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. The book, based on research into nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations, illuminates how everyday events at work can impact employee engagement and creative productivity. Published in August 2011 by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is co-authored with Teresa’s husband and collaborator, Steven Kramer, Ph.D. Her other books include Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative. Teresa has published over 100 scholarly articles and chapters, in outlets including top journals in psychology (such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and American Psychologist) and in management (Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal). She is also the author of The Work Preference Inventory and KEYS to Creativity and Innovation. Teresa has used insights from her research in working with various groups in business, government, and education, including Procter & Gamble, Novartis International AG, Motorola, IDEO, and the Creative Education Foundation.

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For More on Teresa Amabile

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Edit Your Life – Elisabeth Sharp McKetta

The Balancing Act in Retirement – Stew Friedman

Retirement Rookies – Stephen & Karen Kreider Yoder

Independence Day – Steve Lopez

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Wise Quotes

On the Developmental Tasks in Retirement

“We found four jobs, essentially, four tasks that people have to do when they retire. Now, this work can be fun and exciting, at least parts of it, but it does take time and effort. The first task is deciding when and how to retire. This is a big deal for most jobs and most professions in the U.S. because we do not have a mandatory retirement age, as many industrialized countries do. So the decision is a thing that we have to deal with. The second task is detaching from work, tangibly ending, finishing up your work, doing the HR paperwork, but psychologically as well. And that part is a lot more difficult for many people, because they have to deal with a trio of losses, or at least big changes. One is identity. Another one is relationships that you’ve had for maybe decades at work. And the third is life structure loss. So your life has been really structured by that thing that’s occupied 40 or maybe 50 or more waking hours of your life for decades. So there’s that life structure loss. And that can all make detaching from work that second task kind of challenging. We saw many ways that people could deal with that successfully, but it is work. And the third task is exploring and experimenting to build a provisional retirement life, once you are in retirement. This can involve exploring and experimenting with new activities, relationships, groups, new organizations to join, places to be. That exploration actually can start before you retire. Some people  started dipping their toe into some things.But it usually happens in a big way after people retire in those first months and and really first year sometimes. And the fourth task is consolidating a quasi-stable retirement life. So figuring out from that provisional retirement life what seemed to be working well for you and and keeping those elements in your life, investing in them more if you feel like it and settling into something that feels more or less like a settled rhythm and routine for your life.”

On Life Structure

“Let me just explain this concept of life structure. Your life structure basically just includes everything in your life at a given point in time. Activities and relationships, groups and organizations you belong to, places where you spend your time. In our data, we saw a constant interplay, a kind of dance throughout the retirement transition between people’s life structure and what we psychologists call their self. The self includes everything central about a person. There are multiple identities. A person can be an engineer and a leader and a grandparent. So multiple identities, their values and priorities, their needs, their personalities, even their health.”

On The 4 As

“The four A’s…are alignment, awareness. agency and adaptability. So alignment is