Jane Moffett - Women Wrote the Map First: Navigating longer lives

In this week’s 4-Quarter Lives Podcast, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is joined by Jane Moffett, author of What Next? and the Founder of KANGAROO Coaching, for a conversation about the life stage still awkwardly labelled retirement. Moffett argues the adjustment after leaving work can take up to seven years, because stopping work is a major psychological transition involving shifts in identity, values and meaning — none of which can be hurried. She maps six recurring challenges, from the manner of leaving to the reshaping of time, structure and relationships, and pushes back on the pressure to name a purpose, offering meaning as the more useful word. The conversation turns to gendered career shapes — the male mountain versus women’s rolling landscape — the layer of Q3 women hitting their strongest decades, and why so few couples do this thinking together. Both agree: start early, and don’t go it alone.Jane Moffett has spent thirty years supporting women through major life transitions, particularly the points where the professional and the personal intersect — becoming a mother, leaving the workplace, returning after a career break. Her interest in the transition out of work grew from conversations with friends of her own generation: the first large cohort of professional women to have built full careers, and to face stopping work with no blueprint to follow. Finding nothing written for women in the UK on the subject, she researched and wrote What Next?, a six-part map of the challenges of redefining retirement.Useful Links:Book - From Retired to Defined Get full access to 4-Quarter Lives | Elderberries at elderberries.substack.com/subscribe