An Olympic athlete commits years and years in the pursuit of success.
Dedication, discipline, commitment, sacrifice, making decisions that optimise the realisation of their dreams. It’s what it takes to be successful – it’s hard-earned, no one is ‘lucky’ to be at the very pinnacle of their career, to be truly world class.
Yet success in sport doesn’t always lead to happiness and fulfilment away from the stadium and the applause of the crowd.
That hard work doesn’t necessarily prepare the athlete for life after sport. In fact, the very things that have made them successful in their competitive careers might make it difficult to find fulfilment once their sporting ambitions have been achieved.
All that training doesn’t make it easy to know what to do six months later when they find themselves on a Tuesday afternoon sat all alone on the sofa with a cup of tea wondering what’s going to come next.
The stats don’t make for pleasant reading. Too often we see the stories of what happens when it goes wrong – a profound sense of identity shift, depression, substance misuse, broken relationships and a significant loss in purpose and direction.
These are not weak people – they have been fearless warriors fighting for success. But that strength doesn’t necessarily make it easy to answer the question – who am I when I’m not competing?
Our work at Human First helps address this – we run programmes to support athletes with the emotional journey associated with that transition.
But if you are reading this as a business leader, a successful CEO, an equity partner then the transition into retirement may come with the same fears and challenges.
You might not have been chasing medals but the drive to win and succeed is likely to be very much alive in you. The client win, closing the deal, the promotion, the bonus, the recognition of your peers, being selected for work that only you can do – these are your podium moments. And you’ve spent a career organising yourself in pursuit of them.
Your journey probably started early: top of your class, prefect, head boy or girl, honour student, first class degree at the best university, chosen for the best graduate programmes, the first / youngest / fastest to be promoted. Repeatedly chosen and selected for roles that only the best could do. You have been used to being a winner – at some level, anything else has felt like losing.
This is the water you swim in. You have been immersed in this world – surrounded by people who operate in the same way you do. Choosing environments specifically designed to reward the hardest working, most dedicated and most successful. It is such a feature of your world that you may have become invisible to it. It’s not an accident, it’s a pattern baked into your personality and identity, it’s the way you see the world.
The challenge of retirement is the thought of walking away from what you know.
The fear is not about giving up the job. It’s about no longer being relevant.
It’s not about an empty diary or not having someone manage your schedule, it’s the fear of losing who you are.
So much of our identity is tied to what we achieve, and the rewards we receive for doing something well. The challenge is walking away from an arena that provides the external recognition and validation that we have become so used to.
High achievers in sport or business are often tied into some Sisyphus style struggle – working so hard to push the rock up the hill, only to find we need to do it again and again. Each achievement only pushing the horizon further away, each success fading into the rear-view mirror as we focus on the next one ahead of us.
It is so pervasive we often fail to see it. We have many names for it – the treadmill, the hamster wheel – but still we think it applies to someone else.
Many of us are trapped in a narrative that the happiness or fulfilment we seek will be found in the next success, the one just beyond our reach. The tragedy is that the drive that made us successful may be the very thing that makes retirement seem impossible.
The fear is often found in the thought of losing your edge, the thing that has fuelled your success, kept you ahead in the race. The work we do at Human First is not about losing that edge it’s about gaining a choice. The drive itself is not the problem, it’s the compulsion, the reactive habits that mean the drive is engaged before you’ve had time to realise it. The chase, the need to win, the hunger for the next success – the search for the next hit of dopamine from an extrinsic reward.
This is more common than you think. Whether it’s athletes or business leaders, one of the challenges is that very few people are talking about it. It is another fear or vulnerability that we feel we need to hide.
This is why traditional coaching alone doesn’t address the real challenges found in retirement. Setting new goals only feeds the same old habits. The way we work at Human First is through a deeper exploration of the identity and mindset – this includes therapeutic and philosophical approaches to look under the surface and ask some of the bigger questions.
This demands a different type of courage, leaders can be reluctant to do some of that deeper work for fear of losing the very things that made them who they are. The beauty of this work is it doesn’t mean giving up or losing our strengths, it’s about discovering something more powerful – a greater sense of who we are, without the compulsion to prove our worth.
Those who face into the fear, who can open up and explore what is going on, are those who are best equipped to manage the challenges of this transition. It may go against the habits of a lifetime but it’s an opportunity for a much wider celebration of what it means to be human.
There is a huge amount of freedom to be found when we shift from a mindset of ‘what can I get?’ to ‘what can I give?’. Shifting from scarcity to abundance, from fear to generosity.
This is not giving up those hard-earned skills and strengths but about putting them to a different use. This is about letting go of the fear within the question – who am I when I’m no longer defined by my work? And discovering the potential within the question – who could I be if I was no longer defined by my work?
That becomes a genuinely liberating question to explore. And in my experience, it’s one of the richest and most rewarding journeys to go on. Not to chase some new target but to embrace a much wider definition of who we are when we are not limited by our roles, our titles or our past successes.
Clear view 