Redefining Retirement: How to Navigate Life, Purpose, and Identity Beyond Money
Transitioning from retirement is about far more than finances—it’s a profound shift in identity, purpose, and emotional grounding. Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons, J.D., a former attorney turned retirement transition expert, helps high achievers navigate this rebirth with clarity and optimism. Drawing from her own journey of leaving a high-powered legal career, Elizabeth shares how to find meaning beyond titles and redefine success through purpose, healing, and self-discovery. With practical tools from her Encore program and heartfelt wisdom, she guides listeners to see retirement not as an ending, but as a graduation into a more intentional, fulfilling life.
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL HEAR ABOUT THINGS LIKE:
- Why retirement is both an emotional and identity shift, not just a financial milestone
- The hidden grief and loss many high achievers experience when leaving their careers
- How to navigate retirement anxiety and recognize its early signs
- The importance of redefining identity and rebuilding daily structure after work ends
- How to move from being a “reactor” to a “creator” in shaping your next chapter
- Practical strategies for designing your first year after retirement as a sabbatical
- How to rediscover agency, community, and cohesion for a fulfilling post-career life
- The role of healing, reflection, and purpose in crafting a joyful new beginning
- Inspiring real-life reinventions, including a lawyer who became a Broadway producer
SOME QUESTIONS IRENE ASKS ELIZABETH:
- Could you describe your high-powered, intense personality and career, and why you chose to leave it?
- What was the path to learning to be a human being instead of a human doing?
- How did this lead you from Big Law lawyer to a high-demand retirement transition expert?
- You have a phrase now that you use—retirement anxiety.
- What is retirement anxiety and what are the kinds of symptoms connected to retirement anxiety?
- Why does retirement often include an element of grieving and even anger?
- Can you share some actionable strategies that help clients turn retirement into excitement?
- Tell us about your Encore program and how it supports people in designing their next chapter.
- What is a comfort zone, and what is the difference between leaving a comfort zone suddenly or gradually?
- What is the importance of healing when people attempt to navigate the end of their meaningful careers?
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GRIEF AND REBIRTH LINKS
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Redefining Retirement: How to Navigate Life, Purpose, and Identity Beyond Money
The Unexpected Grief of Retirement: Beyond Financial Milestones
I hope this message finds each of you very well. I’m speaking to you from my studio in West Orange, New Jersey. I could not be more delighted to have the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons, JD, who understands that rebirth doesn’t always follow loss. It can also follow the closing of a life chapter, such as retirement.
Elizabeth graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University Law Center and Suma Cum Laude from James Madison University, laying the foundation for a distinguished career in law and professional development. For more than twenty years, she has guided legal professionals through pivotal career transitions, helping them craft meaningful, purpose-driven lives beyond the practice of law.
As a retiree transition expert, attorney, and co-founder of two consulting firms, Elizabeth combines her sharp analytical acumen with deep emotional intelligence. Her work illuminates the often neglected psychological dimensions of retirement, empowering clients to embrace this life chapter with clarity, confidence, and renewed purpose.
Before founding her national consulting firm, Elizabeth practiced law at the premier international law firm, Milbank, but it was her own pivot from law to a new professional calling that revealed a deeper truth. Retirement isn’t just a financial milestone. It’s a profound emotional and identity shift. Her book, Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement, is a compassionate guide for those facing this inflection point with uncertainty, grief, or even fear. Elizabeth’s mission to help high achievers approach their retirement with intention, optimism, and purpose offers actionable strategies for planning beyond the numbers and exploring what it means to truly thrive in that next chapter of life.
I’m looking forward to an inspiring and powerful conversation with Elizabeth, who will be speaking to us from Tucson, Arizona, about the difficulty and blind spot she encountered exiting her intense career, why retirement often includes an element of grieving, her transition to a retirement transition expert, her actionable strategies for approaching retirement with a sense of intention and optimism, her book titled Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement, and so much more. If you’re contemplating retirement, supporting someone who is or simply curious about how we evolve through change, this conversation will surely open your heart and expand your perspective.
Elizabeth, a warm, heartfelt welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. It is such a pleasure to be here.
Thank you. I know we’re going to have a great conversation because a lot of people think about grief with the loss of a person, but grief also involves a loss in a marriage, a loss in a career, and all of that. I know a lot of very high-powered people who give everything they’ve got to their career, and then what?
It is one of the most sweeping changes that most adults will ever live through if they’ve been intense career professionals. As we will certainly get into later, we are all told to focus on nothing but making sure we’ve got financial security as we think about this. While I don’t diminish the importance of that, there is so much more one has to grapple with when they reach this moment. As we’ll talk about, I myself had to embrace change earlier than most people do with retirement. I was shocked at what that ended up meaning for me.
I’ll bet. What I love about your expertise is that you have a huge emotional IQ. My personal opinion is that many people who are in these high-powered jobs are not allowed to have feelings. They have to be on autopilot all the time. There are a lot of hurtful things that get said and done. There are betrayals and all kinds of things that go on in everyday life, let alone a high-powered profession. They’re probably at the end of their career, saddled with all these feelings that they’ve never dealt with, right? I would imagine.
Absolutely. I could not agree more. Intense business context, certainly, law firms can be this way. You’ve got to have your armor on all the time. You are there at the service of others. No one cares how you feel. No one wants to hear about it. One of your actual skills is to completely subordinate all of that to what either the firm, your clients, or your colleagues need from you. That’s what ultimately you are admired for. When it comes time to put all that down, for many other reasons as well, you haven’t been flexing the muscles of, “What do I want? How do I feel? What are my feelings telling me?” Those are tools and abilities that we all have as humans, but they get quite out of use for most people.
Redefining Identity: Who Am I Without My Career?
I agree. Not only that, but they probably come to you and say, “I don’t even know who I am without this job.”
That’s right.
Let’s begin so people can understand what happened to you. Could you describe your high-powered, intense personality, which used to be, but not as much now, and career? Could you also describe why you chose to leave your career, what you went through, and the difficult blind spots you encountered exiting it, which laid the groundwork for what you’re doing?
I do think there is some hard wiring here. I was always this little high-achiever type, so much so that I remember being a kid in grade school, insisting that I was going to be the one with top marks. I held myself to that standard mainly because it struck me, at least at that time, that that’s what the world appreciated about you. It is the ability to please them.
I was groomed into a consummate people-pleaser and was lauded over and over for the ability to do those things that third parties would applaud. That blindly carried me up a number of ladders, including working full-time while I went to law school at Georgetown at night. I had very high honors there, but an immense amount of work.
I honed this ability to shut out anything about what I wanted from a heart place, and it was all about what I thought the world wanted of me. Law was the perfect career to land in. I felt very lucky to be embraced by one of the world’s best international law firms. I hit the ground running and did that for ten years. In the midst of all of it, I started a family.
It’s because you had nothing else to do.
My joke used to be, “I’m not doing anything between the hours of 2:00 AM and 6:00 AM. What do you need?” One day, I proverbially woke up and realized I had an 18-month-old, a 3-year-old, and an 80-hour-a-week job. I was going to work to earn money so I could pay all these other people to live my life for me, so I could go to work and earn money. I won’t get into my very difficult marriage, but that was also not helping things. I woke up one day all out of answers. The only viable option appeared to be to let the career go because I could not be that A-plus person as a mother and as the lawyer I wanted to be. My marriage was in shambles, and the whole thing wasn’t working.
I said to myself at the time and to everyone else who thought I’d lost my mind, “Don’t worry. I’ve got this figured out. I’m front-ending my retirement. I’m going to borrow some time now when I need it, help get my kids raised a little bit, be more present in that part of my life, and then whatever. I can earn money later. That’s not going to be a problem.” I used this retirement construct as a way to make sense of what I was doing, which was pitching about fifteen years of incredibly hard work right out the window, and starting over.
From Lost to Liberated: Navigating the Emotional Landscape of Early Retirement
That’s a very big comment about the strength of who you are to be able to know your truth and face down all the outside opinions and influences. That’s usually pretty hard for most of us to do. That points to your emotional IQ because you were in touch with who you are. It seems to me, though, that you had merged the proof of your success with your sense of self-worth. You’re no longer a human doing. What was the path to learning to be a human being? How did this lead you to this surprising new path?
It was interesting. When I took this big leap, I decided to leave the hustle and bustle of DC and move out to Tucson, where it was less expensive. I thought, “I need to quiet my life down, figure out who I am, and dig into this motherhood thing.” After the euphoria and the first three months wore off, I was utterly lost. I adored my children. I adored being with them in this role, but it was using a sliver of who I understood myself to be. I had lost all of that stimulating work and all the intellectual challenge. I’d left all the people behind. I did not know how to function in a world where time scarcity was not my primary companion.
For me, pressure had always been the water I swam in. Since the time I was tiny, I would create pressure so that I could see if I could do it. Suddenly, I was all out of the pressure. I was all out of time scarcity. It was just me, and it left me feeling utterly aimless. I did not know who I was, I did not know how to function, and I did not know how my life was supposed to work.
For the first time in my life, I was terrified that I didn’t have an answer. It wasn’t about doing. There was nothing to do about it. I was going to have to get inside of myself, look for answers there, and live my way to a new Elizabeth. That was so terrifying and lonely. I didn’t want to admit to anybody that I was this lost, especially the people who had looked at me quizzically when I told them I was throwing my whole life out the window and moving. It was a pretty demoralizing time, to be honest.
I know you have a phrase that you use, retirement anxiety. It sounds like you were completely living that. How did the dots connect to getting you to where you are?
There was a lot of personal learning and studying that I did. I embarked on all sorts of that stuff in the background.
You started reading and looking into things?
Yes, about psychology, spirituality, what makes a meaningful life, and what is the self. I had been so focused on things outside of myself that I hadn’t gotten curious about myself at all. There was that going on. Eventually, I needed to make my way to some professional engagement. I began working in the talent space as a recruiter. I was working with lawyers who wanted to change their positions in law firms, and then the collapse of 2008 happened, which destroyed my business overnight when Lehman Brothers collapsed. That was another giant blow.
It's not about your ability or skill. It's just a marketplace that's changed. Share on X
In the wreckage of that, what I realized was, “All of these other people are going to be foisted out of their law firms and laid off with no pathway. They’re going to have to reinvent themselves the way I did. I know I can help them. I did this. I know what this feels like. I have a series of ways to look at oneself and one’s life that could be helpful.”
I began putting a program together and working with people in 2009 who had lost their jobs. They’d gone from the heights of success to joblessness, prospectless, and didn’t know where to turn or what to do. That’s how this all began. Later, I began working with people facing retirement because that particular crisis had passed. It was interesting that the collapse of my first business, which I didn’t enjoy that much, is what led me to delve into the self-healing I’ve done and discover a complete format for helping other people do the same thing.
Beyond Anger and Grief: Embracing Retirement as a New Beginning
If you hadn’t done the work on yourself, you would never have been able to help other people. I know that retirement often includes grieving, which you were doing. Did you also feel anger? I know some people who come to you feel anger, also, right?
Yes. I was more grieving than angry. I was angry that there was no way to be a successful lawyer and mother at the same time. I didn’t find it anyway. There are those who do figure it out. I didn’t figure it out, and I was possibly mad about that. The other reality is that I was more grieving because I loved what I did, I loved the people, and I loved the challenge, but I also loved my kids. I loved what that held for me. I will never regret that decision, but it doesn’t mean that letting go of something meaningful isn’t still difficult.
When we’re working with people who have been doing this job for 3 or 4 decades, increasingly, law firms are asking their partners to leave at 55, 58, or 60 to make room for the younger generation. It’s a trend that’s taken off in the last couple of years. There are plenty of people who are angry about that. They’re like, “I’m 60. I’m at the height of my powers. I’m fantastic at what I do. Why am I being asked to move on?” It’s not about your ability or your skill. It’s the marketplace that has changed.
I say to them, “The good news is you are going to have to do that final lap. You want to do it with your hands in the air, high-fiving everyone on the way out, because you have got the opportunity of a lifetime ahead of you. You’ve got to be intentional about crafting it. If you default into all the habits that guided you into a successful legal career, you are going to probably find that you are rather lost in this new chapter because you are not going to be reacting to everybody else’s needs anymore. You’ve got to author your life, and here it is.”
Spotting the Signs: Understanding Retirement Anxiety in Loved Ones
I love how you’re introducing them to change because so many people are afraid of change and transition. That’s wonderful. For the people who are tuning in, if they have relatives, loved ones, or anyone who’s nearing retirement, so that they can identify, what are the kinds of symptoms that are connected to retirement anxiety? What are the symptoms that the audience can hear so they will understand that their loved one may be going through something like this?
If we’re talking about folks ahead of retirement, but who are having to confront it in the relatively near term, that indicates maybe somebody is very unsettled about this and doesn’t feel like they have a confident, intentional plan. First of all, they may repeatedly push their date. They find excuses to push the date out. They resist active succession planning. They resist talking about what they are going to be doing in the future.
The topic is something that almost brings up a sense of shame, so resistance is what you will see, whatever shape that takes. People get lethargic. They can get resentful and negative about what they’re being asked to do to help pave the way for a smooth transition. They may be frustrated. There is a lot of negative emotion because it is resistance. There is no embracing of this as a change filled with opportunity. It’s more like, “This is the beginning of the end.”
There’s a lot of negative emotion around retirement because it comes from resistance — instead of embracing it as a change full of opportunity, people see it as the beginning of the end. Share on X
They’re like, “My life is over.” A bunch of them get depressed. It probably affects personal relationships. To everyone out there, if you’ve got someone approaching retirement and you’re all of a sudden finding him or her getting very testy or difficult, I would imagine that may be something they’re not even in touch with, but that’s at the base of that. Maybe they start to rely on substances or worry about their morbidity.
Let’s go to what you do to help these people. Someone is getting ready to retire. They’re lost. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re not feeling so wonderful, but then someone says, “Maybe you ought to talk to Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons. She can help you make advanced planning for this retirement thing that’ll even provide you with financial security.” How do you go about that? What is that all about? Why do they come to see you? How does that prepare them?
I always tell people that there are at least two meta projects that any human being’s got to embrace if they’re going to move through this change with confidence, excitement, and energy, and feel that sense of optimistic future. One is, there’s a project around identity bridging that I’ll talk about in a second. The other is life restructuring.
When you think about it, your professional life has almost certainly been the primary scaffolding of the way your life works. It’s this very strong central part of your structure, your schedule, and your routine. All the rest of life tucks in around the edges. If you pull it right out of the center with no thought about how to restructure your days, your weeks, or even your whole year, it is so disorienting.
People will often feel like they’re wandering around, trying to kill time. They’re like, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t have anything coming at me anymore. I don’t have anything to respond to or react to. No one needs me. No one wants me. What’s the point?” They drift over to the sofa and start watching TV all day. It’s tough if you don’t have a proactive way to redesign your days.
For the identity piece as well, there’s a very interesting bit of psychology around the fact that part of what shapes our identity is a sense of agency, community, and cohesion. Agency being we know how to make stuff happen, communion being we know where we belong, and cohesion being we know what the patterns of our lives are.
When you think about it, retirement disrupts all three of those things. It disrupts every single one of those. If you want to be intentional about reshaping your identity and bridging, you’ve got to think, “How am I going to redeploy my talents and skills?” That’s new agency. You’ve got to think, “Where am I going to find my new communities? How am I going to reshape my routines and my habits so I have a newfound sense of cohesion?” If you rebuild those things with intention, first of all, it’s fun. Second of all, you are shaping your identity. You are rebuilding yourself and putting yourself in the path of a new opportunity. That gets fun and juicy. It’s like graduating from college again.
Designing Your Encore: Finding New Purpose and Joy in Retirement
They’re getting a new purpose in their lives. In some ways, it could be very liberating.
That’s what I tell everybody, I tell them, “Think of this as another graduation. Do not think of it as the end of something. It’s the beginning of something.
Is this what you do as part of your encore program?
Absolutely. We facilitate people through a series of exercises and stories that help to build definitions for these things. We work on brainstorming the ideas that excite them, and then we build pathways of action toward those things. When people can get into action toward exciting, new, inspiring ideas, that’s when all the magic happens. That’s when the people show up. That’s when the universe shows up to help you. That’s when the most surprising opportunities appear, but they must be energized by you. Nobody is going to come knocking on your door and hand you that. It takes planning and work, but it’s so worth it.
When people take action toward exciting, inspiring new ideas, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when the right people show up, when the universe steps in, and when the most surprising opportunities appear. Share on X
Actionable Strategies for a Thriving Retirement: Becoming the Creator
Do you want to give us some of the actionable strategies that you use to help a client who’s turning this retirement into excitement?
Yeah.
They no longer have to wake up at 5:00 in the morning. Maybe they can sleep a little later.
There are many pieces, but I’ll share some of the most actionable ideas that we get repeated feedback about. One thing we talk about a lot is becoming the creator instead of the reactor. Those words have the same letters in them, but they mean very different things. What we say to people is, “Think about your first year out of this career, and almost think of it as a sabbatical.
Take a sabbatical year and say to yourself, ‘I’m going to reflect on who I am and what I want to be. I don’t have to have an answer right away.’ When people ask you what you’re going to do, and everyone will, tell them you’re taking a sabbatical,” which sends back the message, ‘I’m going to take a thoughtful year for myself, but I’m not gone. I’ll be back. I’m going to be doing things.’
Buy yourself an annual planning calendar, so you can see the entire year with your eyeballs instead of one week on your phone. Put yourself at the end of this coming year and say, ‘If it’s a spectacular year, what would I have done? Who would I have seen? What great adventures would I have shared with the people I love?’
Begin to build this year. Build it in advance. Plan it for yourself. You must author it.” We also say to people, “Once you’ve started to identify some of those exciting, big dreams that you still have that you still haven’t done, when you notice saying to yourself, ‘I don’t have the skill to do it. I don’t know how to do it. I don’t have any way to think I could do it,’ don’t let that stop you. Start making plans.”
There are two questions we tell everyone to answer for themselves. 1) “What else do I need to know?” 2) “Who can help?” Those 2 questions are the beginning of everything because 1 of them tells you what to research, and 1 of them tells you who to go meet with to get advice and get more introductions. When people follow that pathway in the direction of the ideas they’re excited about, that’s when we see the most outstanding developments. It’s getting that action moving.
Do you help people online through Zoom, or do they meet you in person? How does that work?
They typically meet us in person. With Encore, which is our premier program, they will work with us individually over two days. It’s a very intensive, high-touch program. We also have group programs that people can attend in a group over two days. We also have a one-day Zoom-based program that has most of these elements as well. We’ve tried over the years to create different price points and experiences that work for people, no matter their circumstances. I did write the book with the idea that I could share as much of this as possible in a 10 format that anyone can get.
Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement
The first actionable strategy, for someone tuning in, is to buy Elizabeth’s book. Read the book and then give her a call, so you can strategize more. Do you help them make connections also? You do that, which is wonderful. If a person’s a little stuck, you’ll have places they can go, people they can talk to, and all that.
After fifteen years of working with people in this role, we have an unbelievable set of relationships and resources in every direction you can dream of.
That’s fantastic. It doesn’t matter what career they’re retiring from. You can help them.
That’s right.
They could be in philanthropy or something.
We’ve worked with people in all different career paths and people who’ve sold businesses. Any major inflection point where you are leaving a big commitment like this behind.
That’s great. Let’s talk about this wonderful book of yours. It’s called Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement. I know that it redefines retirement as a gateway to do opportunities, meaning an accomplishment. You also explain comfort zones. Please tell us what a comfort zone is. What you’re talking about is that year in between. You talk about, suddenly or gradually, the difference. Also, anything else you’d like to tell our audience about your book?
The comfort zone is such a helpful model to understand. When I meet a client who is a year away from retiring, they are squarely in their comfort zone. They know who they are, what they’re doing, and how to do their thing. They’re probably at the very top of their skillset in their industry. Talk about comfort zone. They got it.
Everything they still want is outside their comfort zone. If they’ve got a deferred life they never lived or they’ve got a big goal they still haven’t achieved, it’s something that’s outside their comfort zone, or else they’d already have it. What I say to them is, “It’s always uncomfortable leaving your comfort zone. It’s okay. You are going to be uncomfortable. Don’t worry about that part. You need to do it gradually. If you fling yourself out of your comfort zone the way I did, you are very likely to activate the panic button in your brain, which is going to cause you to freeze, flee, or faint. Your poor brain gets overwhelmed.”
It’s always uncomfortable to leave your comfort zone, and that’s okay. You’re going to feel uneasy, but don’t worry about that part. Just take it gradually. Share on X
It could be all three at the same time.
It’s a, “Too much, too soon. The circuit is overloaded. I’m paralyzed.” When people say, “I’m rushing 60 miles an hour towards the edge of a cliff, but I’ll figure it out,” you might, but you also might end up in that panic zone. What I say is, “Let’s get a plan so you have some sense of control and direction. You’re going to gradually move out of your comfort zone and embrace this discomfort bit by bit.
Before you know it, you’re in a whole new comfort zone. You’ve been learning along the way. You’ve done this in a way that your psychological self can take it on board and use it for growth instead of paralysis.” That’s a much more empowered way to make this change. I fear for people who do it so suddenly, only because I lived what that felt like. You can get lost and lose your confidence.
You become paralyzed, not even thinking.
You don’t recognize yourself because you’re normally the one who can get it done. Suddenly, you can’t, and it’s even scarier.
David Shapiro’s Journey: From Real Estate Law to Broadway Producer
I know that you have a client named David Shapiro. He’s a tremendous role model for what you do. He reinvented himself at age 55 from a real estate lawyer to a successful Broadway producer. That’s a real shift. Tell us David’s story and how you helped him.
It is such a fabulous story. He was a real estate lawyer, 55, at 1 of the world’s premier law firms, and in Chicago. He was very pleased with the career he’d had, but he was only 55, so he was saying, “I can’t be done.”
Was he reaching that threshold where you get to a certain age and is like, “Bye.”
Yeah. He had made more money than he needed. He felt that he had come and done what he’d come to do, and it was time. He didn’t have the same passion that he had once had, and yet he still didn’t quite know what he wanted to do going forward. I asked him, “If you could do anything, and I guaranteed you total success, whatever that means to you, what would you do?” He said, “I’m going to say this out loud, but I don’t want you to write it down because it’s so preposterous. I would’ve been a Broadway producer. The cherry on top would’ve been that I’d have won a Tony Award.”
I said, “I hear you. You don’t want to tell me you’re going to go try to do this, but let’s break it down. If you did, what would you do? What do you need to know? Who could help?” We made a little action plan, and I said, “What do you have to lose doing the research and meeting with some of these people that you know in the industry to get their advice?” He’s like, “I have nothing to lose. You’re right. I’ll humor you.” He goes down the road of this work. I know we’re short on time, but I will fast-forward to this.
Please, go ahead.
He met with people. He researched. He started to realize, “I see what’s involved in this role.” He was putting the feelers out there. Lo and behold, he gets a phone call from one of the people he had met with, who said, “David, I know you know you’re interested in this area. I’ve got a show I’m trying to raise money for. I’m not able to get it over the finish line. Would you be willing to help me?”
It was a small show. David said, “Why not? I’ll give it a shot. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ll try.” This small show did get funded, and it got David a seat at the table. When the next phone call came, it was for the Broadway show Hadestown, which he produced and received a Tony Award for. That was three days after he met with me.
He’s on his fifteenth show. He’s got a very vibrant life as a Broadway producer between New York and Chicago. I had dinner with him a few years ago. He is like, “I am living the best life ever. This was what I was meant to do.” He is brimming with joy. He did the work, but he needed somebody to give him a little bit of a pathway. His comment to me later was, “I would’ve over-lawyered my idea to death. I would’ve come up with all the reasons it was going to fail and couldn’t work. Instead, what I needed to do was get busy trying.” I love his story, not just of the “accomplishment,” but he’s happy.
I’m sad that I don’t know him better because I’m in the New York City area, and he’s got Broadway shows.
Water for Elephants.
The Power of Healing: Inspiring Others and Finding Joy in the Moment
That is so wonderful. That’s a great inspiration for people who are reading about how you could turn your life around when you’re saying, “I can’t.” The other thing that you do is see things more from a higher view because they’re enmeshed in their confusion and their feelings. Speaking of the higher view and being enmeshed in your feelings, what is your message about the importance of healing, which is some of what you do that you’d like to share with our readers?
I have a couple of thoughts on that that I share with everybody. One is, you have worked so hard to get to this moment. The promised land was not just a bank account. The promised land was that you get to flourish, and you get to expand, grow, and take a bite out of life because you did it. Middle adulthood is hard. We have to raise families, create security, and work. You do all these things. Don’t short-sell what is possible when you get to this moment.
The other thing I tell people is, “People are watching you. Your kids are watching you. Young people are watching you. Don’t be that person who gives them another bad example of, ‘Retirement killed that guy.’ Be the person who flourishes and shows them what is still possible. That’s what we all need. We need inspiring people to lead the way.” I remind people, “Somebody’s watching you. You have the opportunity to give back in a way that is so beyond just earning a living and saving money. You’ve got time, energy, and wisdom, and that is available to the world. Find your way. You’re going to inspire others and build joy in yourself and other people.”
What great role-modeling for kids. It’s teaching them not to be victims, like, “Look at how my father or my mother reinvented themselves and what they did.” My last question is, what’s the Elizabeth tip on finding joy in life?
My big picture answer is the more you can be connected to the moment you’re in, the more joy you find. I will tell you what helps me do that more than anything else, and that is my little companion dog. It’s a dog for me. Animals have a way where they’re always in the now, and they always love you. They’re the best example of unconditional love I’ve ever found on this planet. For me, when I need to get myself back in the moment, I go snuggle my dog.
That brings you so much joy. In closing, I am reminded how tough it can be to walk away from a career that shaped a person’s identity for so long. There’s that quiet sadness in that transition. What you do so beautifully is to help people move through that and start seeing what’s possible. You show them that retirement isn’t the end. It’s more like a graduation. It’s a chance to write a new chapter, one that is full of purpose and joy. Thank you from my heart for this inspiring conversation and for the meaningful work that you do to help so many others. I wish you abundance. Blessings.
Thank you. It has been an absolute pleasure
To be continued.
Guest’s Links:
- Encoraco
- Zelinka Parsons
- Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement
- Connect with Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons on Facebook
- Check out Encoraco on Facebook
- Check out Encoraco on Instagram
- Reach out to Elizabeth to Claim Your Discount
About Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons
Elizabeth Zelinka Parsons, J.D., is a Retirement Transition Expert, lawyer, and co-founder of two consulting firms, Zelinka Parsons and Encoraco. A magna cum laude graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and summa cum laude graduate of James Madison University, Elizabeth has spent over two decades shaping professional development and transition strategies for legal professionals. A former attorney at Milbank, she built a national consulting firm assisting AmLaw 100 firms with talent solutions. Author of “Encore: A High Achiever’s Guide to Thriving in Retirement ” (Feb. 5, 2025), Elizabeth combines analytical rigor with creative vision to help professionals redefine retirement as a dynamic opportunity for growth and fulfillment. Learn more at encoraco.com.
