In this episode, Pilar talks to Jacquie Doucette, host of the Beyond Retirement podcast.
There is a whole new world past your retirement and through Beyond Retirement, Jacquie talks to people who have “retired to something rather than from something”.
182 episodes have been published, and about 215 are on the go. Jacquie records the interviews as soon as she confirms a guest and she slots them into the schedule so she is ahead of schedule by a few weeks. She’s got interviews scheduled into 2023.
The episodes are grouped into themes, each season lasting about one year. The themes in the current season (4) are freedom, generosity, confidence and planning.
Jacquie looks for guests who can share their own experience in retirement, or something that can be of use to people about to retire, or new to retirement. Her ideal listener is someone who is about to retire and know what there is out there and how to get it. In fact, she was one of her listeners when she started the show.
Jacquie started podcasting “by accident”, when she took a course on content creation and planned a whole year worth of episodes as an exercise. Thinking that she’d be able to talk for a little bit on each topic, she started the show. When she came across topics she had little knowledge of, she looked for guests to interview.
It’s only been a month since Jacquie retired. The show has made her think of elements of her journey towards retirement she hadn’t considered. She’s heard from successful entrepreneurs, but also those who’ve struggled, and those who continue to grow in different ways. A common thread amongst her guests has been their optimism, which fits well with Jacquie’s goal which is to help people be optimistic about their retirement.
By the end of the first season, Jacquie was running out of ideas to talk about, so she went on a course to learn how to find and recruit guests. The show changed completely – in good and bad ways. It spinned a bit out of control… Jacquie’s journey and the theme of retirement were getting lost, so for Season 3, she changed the format and cadence of the episodes. This resonates with Pilar, who misses talking directly with her guests when she goes through periods when she produces lots of interviews.
For season 3, Jacquie was producing two shows a week, and she was producing it on her own. She’s now gone back to weekly episodes, alternating between guest interviews, and solo episodes where she reflects on what she took from the previous conversation.
Right now, Jacquie has fully moved on to the next stage of her life and is looking at all the things that are possible and her next job is thinking about how to make her ideas happen. Her retirement gig is house sitting, looking after people’s pets. She’s also branding herself as a lifestyle specialist, building her brand through Beyond Retirement. (And check out her swag here!) Maybe at some point she will get to interview people in the locations she visits who have already retired, so that they can share their stories with her audience.
Jacquie’s advice for podcasters thinking of starting a show about their own transitions is to lay down on paper the transition, to see what it looks like. And for those looking to start podcasting, she’s got a course, Podcasting for Newbies!
29.30mins
Pilar shares her own reflections about the topic of “retirement” and why podcasting is a great way of expanding your thinking.
Pilar has started reading :The 100 Year Life, living and working in an age of longevity” by Linda Gratton and Andrew J Scott. She’s only 7% into it, but the premise is, we live a lot longer now than we did some time ago, so we need to change how we view the different stages of life.
Traditionally we’ve thought of Education, Work, Retirement but this might not serve us. Like Jacquie’s tag line suggests, it makes more sense to think about retiring towards something, and even if that thing looks nothing like traditional work, could be having coffee and going to Pilates classes all day, it’s still a new active stage. We haven’t retired from life.
Do we need another name in the English language for this stage of life? We retire a product from the shelves when the company making it closes down, for example. The concept comes also from the days when we started a job early in life and continued there until retirement. But even that is now rarely the case. (Of course retirement is not just about leaving a job but about drawing a pension, so there is that to consider.)
As an anecdote, in Spain you use ‘jubilación’ for retirement. And that word comes from jubilation. That’s because leaving work has often been associated with happiness and a fun milestone. But if you look at the world now, some people choose to continue doing some sort of work, but rely on their pensions as a source of regular income, and those lucky enough to be in a job they enjoy, might not want to retire!
Maybe we should approach education differently, specially change our view of when in life we should go through formal education.
This section has moved away from the topic of podcasting itself, but this is the joy of podcasting. It’s not about making podcasts. It’s about broadening your thinking, with your guests or your listeners, it’s about unashamedly pursuing your interests, asking questions (to yourself, your guests, your listeners), it’s about making connections that open up thinking for others. So, thank you Jacquie for guesting on the show and prompting these reflections. And thank you listeners for being here, creating the space for Pilar to think.
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