When I listed all of my accomplishments, I realized I still wanted more of them! | ||
| --Bill, 69, retired retailer | ||
In this chapter, the findings from your inner and outer explorations come together. As we’ve said, the premise of rewiring is to know what you’ll be leaving behind and to know how you’ll replace it in the future. In this chapter, you begin to identify the replacements, which we call possibilities.
Up to now, you’ve completed a series of exercises that have forced you to answer some tough, personal questions. You’ve delved into yourself, created your personal discovery inventory, and seen the expanded world of work. You’re armed with a lot of self-knowledge, and to quote one of the pre-retirees we interviewed, you’re “ready to take the act on the road.” The question is, which road offers the greatest fulfillment?
This chapter completes step four of the rewire process. In this chapter, you create your rewirement possibilities menu, a list of work possibilities you might pursue. Three steps are involved:
Brainstorming to create your list of possibilities.
Evaluating to screen your possibilities against your drivers, the rest of your personal discovery inventory, your calendar analyses, audience, other considerations, and your own intuition.
Prioritizing to rank your rewirement possibilities menu according to how well each of the possibilities matches your drivers, the rest of your personal discovery inventory, and other considerations. After you’ve ranked the whole list, you will focus on your top five. You will use your top five possibilities in Chapter 11.
The ideal way for us to help you come up with work possibilities would be for us to sit down and brainstorm with you. That’s obviously impossible, so we’ve decided to do the next best thing: illustrate the process using our sessions with the four pre-retirees. We believe that sharing their interviews will help you see how you can come up with possibilities when you brainstorm on your own (the evaluating and prioritizing steps of the four pre-retirees are not shown).
First, however, here are a few general pointers that came out of our personal brainstorming sessions with the pre-retirees:
Start with the obvious. The first things to brainstorm about are the area or areas in your life that you feel strongest about, even if it’s something about which you have little knowledge. We started our brainstorming sessions with the pre-retirees’ strongest interests in their professional and personal lives. You should do the same.
Generate lots of possibilities, and don’t worry whether they’re practical. Your goal in brainstorming possibilities is to let out the kite. Imagine every possible idea, no matter how crazy. Try to come up with as many possibilities as you can, and don’t worry about whether they are too far out. You can always pull the kite back in when you evaluate the possibilities in step 2. You want the richest ideas possible.
Imagine using your skills in a different context. One technique that’s useful is to select a skill you already have and imagine how it can be applied in a completely different context—for example, a different field or type of organization. Your skills are transferable; where else could you take them?
Use brainstorming to generate more questions. When we met with the four pre-retirees, they were each in very different stages of their rewired thinking. The clearer an idea you have about what you want to do, the easier it is to come up with possibilities. When you don’t have a clear idea, you need to ask yourself lots of questions to clarify your thinking. You may need to do more thinking and possibly more research.
Take your time. You’ll probably need to sit down and brainstorm more than once. You might want to leave a few days between sessions. Write down everything. We advocate a healthy, open mind-set as you come up with possibilities. Check your cynicism at the door.
When you see the pre-retirees’ lists of possibilities, you’ll notice that one of the four work categories described in Chapter 9 has been listed next to each. Work categories can be used for brainstorming. Let’s say you’re an art director. You could come up with possibilities in each category, as in the following table.
Tip
Don’t penalize yourself by maintaining too rigid a definition of success, or you might deny yourself some terrific possibilities.
We now present the brainstorming of our four pre-retirees—Tom, Paula, Bob, and Carol—allowing you to see their outcomes before you do it yourself. Due to space constraints, we had to trim their lists, so don’t use these shorter lists as a model. Think of as many possibilities as you can.
Tom surprised us by saying that he had changed his mind and didn’t want to retire in six months after all, although he will leave his company. Although he was excited about rewiring, he now realized that his original dream of golf, golf, and more golf wouldn’t be challenging enough for him. He also had taken a lesson from the volatility of the stock market and knew he didn’t want to have to worry about not having an income.
Sales positions. As Tom worked through the exercises, he realized sales was his life, but he needed to rethink how he could be involved in sales in a less pressurized way. He brainstormed these ideas:
Promote a regional sales manager to his job and take his place with less management pressure.
Do sales training and development for his current company.
Sell for a competitor if he dared or wanted to, and if it didn’t conflict with his noncompete clause.
Sell a totally unrelated product.
Provide sales consulting on technology needs to small and midsize businesses.
Sales and golf. We wondered if there was a way Tom could combine two of his strongest interests, golf and selling. Tom came up with these ideas:
Sell a line of golf clubs or related products or apparel.
Sell a line of any type of sporting goods.
Buy a logo machine and sell monogrammed golf shirts, towels, and so on, to golf clubs direct.
Get involved with investors/realtors in the sale of golf properties.
Join a sports marketing organization.
Entrepreneurial. Tom has always had entrepreneurial ideas in the back of his mind, but he’s never pursued them. In our brainstorming, Tom was on a roll and decided that he might ...
Start his own sales training/customer service firm.
Create a consortium of trainers.
Create a coaching and sales effectiveness company that specializes in salespeople.
Write a book on sales success and schedule speaking events.
Create a sales course for lawyers and accountants.
Acting. Tom says with a smile that one of the reasons he’s a good salesperson is that he’s a good actor. He was proud of his prior acting accomplishments. People have always told him he has a great voice, and he wondered what he could do with it. He brainstormed these possibilities relating to acting:
Get a voice coach.
Take acting lessons.
Go on a nonequity audition.
Develop a stand-up sales training comedy routine.
Model himself after John Cleese and create sales training videos.
Do voice-overs for products that need a strong sales pitch.
Tom ended his brainstorming session with a few ideas that were solely joy-of-golf related, including playing golf on America’s top 100 courses, going to the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, and teaching golf at the local high school. He noted that these could lead to business or new possibilities. Tom presents his top five in Chapter 11.
Paula wants to pull back but not retire completely. She told us she knew she needed visibility and thought her lack of it in her prior two retirements was one reason why they hadn’t worked out. With Paula, we started with her most immediate need—her business. Until she could determine how and what to do with it, she couldn’t figure out what to do with the rest of her life.
Identifying business possibilities. Paula was interested first and foremost in unloading some of the responsibilities in her human resources business. Here’s the list of possibilities:
Sell her business to one of her associates and stay on part-time.
Sell her business to a competitor and secure a three-year contract.
Sell the business to one of her associates and take on a rainmaker role only.
Keep the company but either promote someone from within or bring in someone from outside to handle the day-to-day management.
Take a partner who will buy the company in the near future.
Create a strategic alliance with a competitive firm and take a turnover fee.
Do a roll-up of her firm with other firms and have one of their presidents take over.
Take only a few select clients and work from home.
Work with venture capital groups whose companies need HR consulting.
Delete big consulting initiatives from the company offering.
Close the business and go to work for a competitor.
HR-related ideas that also emerged include these:
Do freelance writing for HR newsletters and publications.
Write a book on HR issues or on family businesses.
Give paid global HR seminars.
Create paid keynote address speeches on HR topics and get on a speaker’s bureau.
Become an adjunct professor.
Sailing and HR. We then looked at Paula’s passion, sailing, and wondered if there were ways to combine sailing and HR. Here’s the list:
Investigate whether any manufacturers of sailing equipment or related paraphernalia need HR consulting work.
Get a client to sponsor a sailing trip for its clients for promotional or marketing purposes.
Check out which CEOs/presidents are sailors and might be potential clients.
Offer HR consulting services to sailing-related nonprofits.
Write an article in Sailing magazine about how passions can lead to business; hope to get some business from it.
Write a book that combines HR tools and sailing.
Develop a paid HR team-building course for corporations, “Sail Your Way to Successful Staffing.”
Real Quotes
Coming up with possibilities is like twisting a towel. To get the most ideas, you have to keep wringing the towel tighter and tighter.
—Marc Myers, author of How to Make Luck Happen
Sailing and young girls. Next, we looked at whether we could tie sailing to her interest in developing young girls’ self-esteem:
Charter a boat and test-market a skills-building, confidence-increasing class for foster children or inner-city kids.
Charter or buy a boat and give free sailing lessons to needy girls.
Get a national or local company that sells to girls to sponsor a self-esteem sailing course.
Teach a sailing class through the local YWCA, Girl Scouts, or Girls, Inc.
Work with the city’s foster children department on a sailing trip.
Have the national HR association create a mentoring program for foster kids or inner-city kids.
Create a client-driven, cause-related corporate marketing initiative around kids and sailing.
Mentor one child herself.
Foster care. Because Paula grew up in foster care, this was a subject dear to her, too:
Contribute to the next mayoral race and begin to build relationships with city hall to help foster children by advocating for foster children.
Paula ended up with four lists of possibilities in areas she cares about—in business, sailing and HR, sailing and young girls, and foster care. We’ll see Paula’s top five in Chapter 11.
Bob wants a phased situation at his company, but he hasn’t spoken to his management yet. Because the phased situation had never been done in Bob’s department, we focused on that first when we sat down with him. We asked Bob the following questions about the phased situation.
Phased situation. The first area we focused on was his idea of a phased situation at work.
Community interests at the company. Bob wanted to investigate working in community initiatives and other nonprofit situations at the company (whether phased or not). For many years, Bob had spearheaded the community outreach activities at his company, and he had headed the United Way initiative. Here are the ideas Bob came up with:
Move to the company’s charitable giving department.
Move into the community affairs department.
Become a two-year, on-loan executive to a nonprofit with salary paid for by his corporation.
Set up scholarships/internships and co-op opportunities with engineering students and the company.
Work with marketing to create strategic alliances or promotional events with community organizations.
Set up website opportunities and contests for future engineering students.
Giving back. Bob could take his community mind-set directly outside and into the nonprofit arena. Here’s the list Bob came up with:
Run a nonprofit as an executive director.
Become a nonprofit executive recruiter.
Join or start a nonprofit strategic consulting or development firm.
Deliver paid speeches and seminars on nonprofit board governance.
Work for a charitable foundation.
Become a development officer.
Church. Bob is a lay leader in his local Episcopalian church, and for years he has wondered if he has a calling into the ministry. Bob brainstormed these possibilities:
Pursue the ministry.
Do paid fund-raising for the national church, in the States and globally.
Do missionary work, in the States or globally.
Write spiritual novels.
Get involved with the organizations building Episcopalian retirement communities.
Develop a course to show churches how to successfully use corporate tools in a church environment.
Personal interests. Bob’s World War I interest was a natural to brainstorm against:
We’ll see Bob’s top five possibilities in Chapter 11.
We discovered that Carol had a vision with no details. Her brainstorming consisted of creative questioning of possibilities.
What do you see yourself doing? We began by asking Carol what she actually saw herself doing for or with animals. When she couldn’t come up with any concrete ideas, we asked her general questions to try to flesh out her interests:
Combining care for animals with other interests. Next, we asked Carol to consider how she might combine other strong interests in her life—politics and art—with her love of animals. Here’s the list of questions she considered:
When Carol saw the abundance of possibilities, she knew that she would have to do some more focusing on her own. She realized that she needed to do more research. We return to Carol in Chapter 11.
Now that you’ve seen the pre-retirees go through the brainstorming process, it’s time for you to do the same. Hopefully, you’ve seen the power and importance of this step.
Think back over what you’ve learned about yourself. Through the rewire process so far, you have discovered your drivers, created your personal discovery inventory, and completed the analysis of your intellectual/physical side through the calendar analysis and strengths/skills review. Think also about any concerns or intentions you may have at this point that you may not have taken into account. Use everything you know about yourself and then proceed on gut-feeling or instinct.
Think about the topics you’d like to brainstorm. Have fun and be creative. This process works in both up and down job markets because it’s a tool to help you prioritize what’s important to you.
Possibilities take time to make happen, some longer than others, so it’s never too soon to start brainstorming. If even a kernel of an idea exists, jot it down. Don’t discard anything at this point—you’ll do that later. A possibility doesn’t have to gel or even make sense at this point. And remember to use your imagination.
If you’re really stumped, ask others for ideas. They may have ideas or possibilities you like. Write down any possibility you or they think of. Nothing is off-limits for the creation of your next act!
The next step is to screen your rewirement possibilities menu against your drivers and the rest of the items in your personal discovery inventory. How many of the possibilities match your drivers and your dreams, interests, accomplishments, strengths, and skills? On this second pass, take into account your intuition or gut instinct, as well as your calendar analyses and audience considerations, discarding those that don’t feel right and you wouldn’t consider pursuing. What possibilities screen well and feel right? Add a possibility you haven’t considered previously if it pops into your mind.
Next, go through your list and rank your possibilities. You can rank all of them or just cherry pick your top five possibilities. Write down your top five. For your own reference, jot down your rationale—why you are choosing one over another—for your ranking. Give yourself ample time to choose. In the next chapter, you start to act on your possibilities.