Dealing with loss of authority in retirement

Transcript

Here are a couple of things that I went through when I was experiencing loss of authority due to retiring. I owned a business, I had employees, and I'd become accustomed to things like people listening to me, people asking me for advice, when I asked for things to get done, they were typically done. And when I retired, all of that authority went away. I could do a whole talk on how it's not really authority anyway, unless people buy into it. And most of the time our people were bought into what we were trying to do. But a lot of times what we're losing is compliance, not authority. But either way, it feels like the loss of authority. And what I caught myself doing was trying to reproduce it in my personal life. One of the things I caught myself doing, and I've talked about this in other posts, is what I call... the get off my lawn syndrome. Where I'd be like watching what the neighbors were doing, watching what other people were up to, getting kind of snoopy, kind of bossy, kind of grumpy. Basically just sort of thrashing about, looking for areas where I could sort of boss people around. I got that fixed pretty quickly. Another thing I found myself doing was sort of trying to become the CEO of my household. Amy had a lot of systems and processes set up that were working just fine. But once I was home, I started finding ways to improve them all the time. I started finding ways I could quote unquote improve them. And it's just disruptive because, you know, she's been doing some of these things for 30 years or more. She doesn't really need another set of eyes on them, making them better. And then the third thing I'd say that I was doing was when she would tell me like a work story, a lot of the time I would like jump right into management mode and start giving advice, sometimes like in rapid fire. She was always really nice about all these things. She never directly confronted me about any of it. Sometimes she would like not engage. And that's probably a good thing because I could pick up the clue that she wasn't really interested in a bunch of advice. She was just telling me something that was aggravating her. Those are three things to watch out for. Get off my lawn syndrome, becoming CEO of your household, and sort of getting too engaged in your spouse's work if they're still working. Enjoy your retirement.