How Retirement Changes Your Identity
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.
Health and wealth. Those two things are foremost in people’s minds as they near the end of their working careers. Can I afford to retire? Will I be healthy enough to enjoy it?
Research shows that when people are able to answer those two questions favorably, they’re much happier in retirement. No surprise there.
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? When people ask me what I do, what do I even tell them?
Work is such a huge part of our identity. Retirement untethers us from how we think of ourselves in a fundamental way. And a new study offers insights into how to handle this transition more effectively.
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