The One Question to Ask When Considering Post-Corporate Life

Do you ever catch yourself daydreaming about what it will be like when your corporate career ends?  Do you have a clear vision or is it a blank slate?  Perhaps you’re stuck because you think you need to have a clearly defined plan before you embark on a new adventure.

While pursuing a solo passion is the path for some, most people, myself included, don’t have a singular focus.  In fact, when I left my long-time career to become an entrepreneur, I decided on the general direction of wellness and was in the process of writing a book, but I wasn’t certain where the business would lead.

Turns out, a passion of mine is podcasting, which I didn’t know in 2019 when I left my job.  Another passion has become online education, creating courses to help midlife professionals as they transition out of their corporate careers.  I found my way to these new activities through experimentation.

You can, too.  And there’s a really simple way to get started – with one question.  It was the question I asked myself five years before I left my corporate gig.  And that question is:  How do I want to spend my time?

How do I want to spend my time?  I never asked myself that question before.  My life was too structured to have that kind of time luxury.  But it became a crucial question as I began to think about the second act of my career.

Asking how I would I like to spend my time allowed me to explore what I found interesting without trying to figure out how it would support me one day.  It helped me cast a wide net and cultivate the things that intrigued me.  I love learning new things and found that one thing led to another in a cool zig-zaggy kinda way.

Do you know where I found my answer to how I wanted to spend my time?  On my bookshelves.  All the books, ebooks, audiobooks, magazines and podcasts that I was consuming were all about things like healthy eating, endurance sports, weight training, writing, creativity, spirituality, simplicity, meditation, nature, to name a few.  And all of those topics, for me, fell under the umbrella of wellness, of living a good life.

So I followed that trail.  While I was still working at my corporate job, I studied to become a certified wellness coach and created Athena Wellness Enterprises.  In my last year of corporate, I started blogging and writing my book, The Athena Principles, Simple Wellness Practices for Overworked Professionals.

In a few short years, my business portfolio has expanded and now includes the blog, book, podcast, coaching, speaking, affiliate marketing and online classes – revenue stream expansion beyond what I could have imagined before I left my corporate career.

So I invite you to ask yourself the same question:  How do you want to spend your time? 

Here are a few ways to begin to experiment:

• Explore the times in your career when you felt in flow.  What about those activities made you lose track of time?

• Identify your key turning points (professional and personal).  Can you leverage those experiences in such a way that they become useful to others?

• Engage with your heart by doing things you enjoy and see where it leads.  Are there activities you always wanted to try?

• Create a place to dream and dream big.  Can you dedicate a journal for these creative business ideas, notes and questions?  I use a bullet journal just for this purpose.

• Think strategically as you create your own portfolio of multiple income streams. Do they have the ability to scale and develop into passive, recurring revenue?

Here’s how I worked through those steps.  In my spare time before I even started my business, I explored fitness bootcamp, which led to trail running, which led to endurance sports of cycling and ultra-marathoning, which led me to taking culinary courses in plant-based sports nutrition. I did an analytical inventory of my bookshelves to identify what I loved learning about and that led to a Google search on wellness coaching.

Throughout that whole journey, I kept checking in with myself and gauging how each activity made me feel.  I knew I wanted my business to be creative, lucrative and portable so I could work anywhere.  That made it easy to sort through a number of professions I considered.

As much as I love fitness, I didn’t want to be a personal trainer because I would have to report to work at a specific place and time.  As much as I love to prepare plant-based food, I didn’t want to be a chef for the same reasons.  So it was this process of elimination that allowed me to dream and try on different hats.  And it was an invaluable experience.

Where all of this did lead was creating a business where I can bridge the corporate and wellness worlds.  I love taking a holistic approach to wellness – mind, body and spirit – and making those more esoteric topics relatable for Type-A, success-driven executives and entrepreneurs, especially those who have maxed out or become burnt out and disconnected from themselves.  It’s an honor to hold the kind of space they need to drop the professional façade to do the deep work.

So, how do you want to spend your time? As you work with this experimentation process, remember to be kind to yourself.  This inner works takes time and reflection.  Giving yourself this time is a gift and one that your deserve.

Additional questions to hold:  When am I learning and growing?  What do I value? What matters most?  How does this activity make me feel?  Where am I currently spending my time and how does that need to change?