DON'T RETIRE, REWIRE! 5 Steps to Fulfilling Work That Fuels Your Passion, Suits Your Personality, or Fills Your Pocket By Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners Publisher: Alpha Publication date: September 2002 Price: $18.95/trade paperback ISBN: 0-02-864228-7 "This book will become the classic guide for anyone who is ever planning on creating a new and fulfilling future for themselves!" -- Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D., author of Age Power and Age Wave "DON'T RETIRE, REWIRE! is sure to become the 'Retirement Bible' for the 76 million boomers out there." -- Ann Richards, former governor of Texas "DON'T RETIRE, REWIRE!" SAY TRANSITION EXPERTS New Book Reveals Proven Plan For Developing A Fulfilling Next Stage of Life The first baby boomers are now retiring, with many more on their heels. At the same time, people are living longer and are more active in their later years. According to transition coaches Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners, this means that traditional retirement - based solely on leisure and rest - is no longer viable for most people. "Instead," they say, "it's necessary to find ways to reroute the energy that was spent on full-time employment into deeply satisfying, personally customized work activities that can transform your next act into the most fulfilling time of your life." Sedlar and Miners call this strategy "rewiring," and in their new book, DON'T RETIRE, REWIRE! 5 Steps to Fulfilling Work That Fuels Your Passion, Suits Your Personality, or Fills Your Pocket (Alpha, September 2002) they explain how it can be done. The authors - who share twenty-five years of executive search and counseling experience - conducted focus groups, surveys, and personal interviews with several hundred pre-retirees and working and non-working retirees to discover how retirement can be more fulfilling. "We found that those who were satisfied with this period of life had created a new kind of retirement - what we call 'rewirement,'" they explain. "These happy people had either intuitively known what their deepest needs were - and had fulfilled them with new activities - or had discovered how to satisfy them through trial and error." To guide people through this process, DON'T RETIRE, REWIRE! outlines an easy-to-follow, five-step strategy - involving dozens of self-assessment exercises and quizzes, and illustrated with stories and lessons from many real-life people - for developing a successful "rewirement" plan. This includes: Seeing the opportunity - This involves realizing that the energy one used to spend in work has to go somewhere; it needs to be rewired. The authors offer a number of quizzes to help with this step, including one aimed at assessing psychological preparedness and another designed to reveal how family dynamics may change once traditional work-life has ended. Identifying your drivers - Rewirees must identify their personal motivators, or drivers. Recognizing what they need for personal satisfaction will make it possible to find new activities in rewirement that will be truly fulfilling. Again, the authors include useful quizzes, including one which lists thirty common drivers, accompanied by self-analysis questions to help readers recognize which ones are significant for them. Linking the drivers to your activities - This means examining one's life carefully to evaluate what work-related activities will go away at retirement time, and what will be left. This section guides readers through a "calendar analysis" which enables them to see clearly the mechanics of how their day-to-day life will change, and what this will mean psychologically and emotionally. Creating Your Rewired Vision - The authors offer practical exercises to help identify dreams and interests that can form the basis for new activities and new work - whether full- or part-time, for pay or volunteer - in rewirement. The authors include a variety of helpful tools, such as twenty questions to identify personal interests, and a series of exercises for recognizing skills and strengths. Putting Your Action Plan in Motion - The authors suggest brainstorming opportunities and possibilities, and explain, with step-by-step strategies, how to find a position with the hours, challenges, and rewards that fit one's drivers and dreams. "The key secret for success in this next stage of life is: 'know what you'll be leaving behind when you retire, then figure out how to replace that in the future,'" Sedlar and Miners contend. DON'T RETIRE, REWIRE! is the perfect handbook for the millions of people facing the end of their traditional working life - and who want the next level to be even better. # # # ABOUT THE AUTHORS JERI SEDLAR and RICK MINERS, husband and wife, established SEDLAR & MINERS, an executive search and transition coaching firm, in 1994 and co-authored their first book, On Target: Enhance Your Life and Ensure Your Success, the same year. Sedlar is the former editor-at-large of Working Woman magazine. Miners was previously president of Goodrich & Sherwood, a management consulting firm, and currently is president of FlexCorpSystems, a human resources outsourcing firm. Profiled in magazines, quoted in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and interviewed on numerous local and national TV and radio shows, they've motivated many.
close window