Navigating life after work requires more than financial planning when your sense of self vanishes overnight. Retirement mindset mentor George Jerjian joins host Gail Zugerman to explain how individuals can successfully transition into their next stage of life using DARE Method Retirement strategies. By focusing on four key phases—discover, assimilate, rewire, and expand—you can shed your old professional identity and reconnect with your authentic self. George shares practical insights on taking a purposeful gap year and reprogramming your mindset for active growth. You’ll learn why traditional retirement is an artificial concept and how staying engaged protects your long-term vitality. Discover how to create a meaningful second act and avoid falling into post-career stagnation.
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How To Unretire And Build A Fulfilling Second Act With George Jerjian
Welcome to the show. We have a return guest who is George Jerjian from London. He’s going to be talking about how he came to his chapter of life to become a retirement mindset mentor. He talked a lot last episode about something he calls the identity renaissance. He’s going to summarize that for us and then we’re going to move on. Welcome back to the show, George.
Thanks Gail. Great to be back.
Thank you. Tell us a little bit maybe in a few sentences so that other people might not have been fortunate enough to read the last episode and should know a little bit about what you’re referring to when you call the identity renaissance.
Let me just kick off with identity. For a lot of us, we think our identity’s ironclad. We think who we think we are. It sounds weird but identity is malleable. Psychologists will tell you that we have 30 personalities. It would be one for each parent when we start off as babies and then for teachers, relatives, and friends. We develop these personalities, these personas. Persona is another word for masks. We never show our true selves.
Reclaiming Your Identity After Career Transition
There’s this mask that we present to the person that makes us and that takes us into pleasing people and so on, because we’re trying to adapt and survive in life. Identity is something that I touched on, because it’s the first casualty in retirement. People don’t recognize that. They think it’s health or money. It’s whatever, but the first casualties are identity. That’s because of the work that we did. It was an integral part of our identity. When the work disappears, we try to scramble back to work part-time or anyway because our ego wants to survive.
Life is goading us, pushing us to go in a different direction. We are petrified of facing that new journey. It’s a journey of the unknown. It’s fear. How do you change your identity? It doesn’t take a great deal to understand that. There are parts of us that have not been explored. There are parts of us that we suppress growing up. This is an opportunity for us to now resurrect certain parts of ourselves in order to embark on this next journey. My thing is that you want to try and get to your authentic self. The self that you would have denied to anybody else. The self that you’re not comfortable to admit.
Let me ask you this. Is this where we get to what you call the DARE method. Are we leading up to this?
Yes, but I didn’t know this. It’s the process that led me to this point. Everybody thinks moving into retirement is just a walk in the park. You just move from one place to the other. We don’t realize that we’re shedding our skins and our identity. To give you this analogy about shedding skin. If a snake does not shed its skin, it’s suffocated itself. In a sense, that’s what we do in retirement when we don’t shed our old identity, that is no longer fit for purpose in this next stage of life. This is probably a good point to start.
You develop through your own circumstances as I understand it, a method to help people through this process.
Correct. I developed a process because I went step back to where I was to find how I came to where I came to. Also, I surveyed 21,000 people. I’d studied a great deal about retirement, even back to its original point in history. Why was it introduced? How was it introduced? I put all of this together and created the DARE method. The first thing you want your audience to want to know is, what does DARE even mean?
Using Heart-Based Courage To Drive Personal Growth
DARE is another word for courage. Now, courage is not an intellectual faculty. It’s a heart-based faculty coming from the Latin core, meaning heart. It’s an emotion. It’s a feeling. The rational mind supports it. I have to bring a quote from Einstein who said that, “The intuitive mind is the master. The emotional mind is the master.”
It’s like saying use your gut.
In a sense, yes, because the heart has its own brain, so to speak, as does the gut. It’s about trusting our inner being. The heart holds the feelings. The feeling is where the power is. That’s the engine. The rational mind is what Einstein called, its servant. We live in a society that worships the rational mind and completely ignores the intuitive. In a sense, it’s bringing the thing back to its proper place, which is that you have to make a decision from the heart.
Who is it you want to be in terms of existing on this planet? You’ve served everybody. You’ve done everything else. Now, it’s your final chance before you get to your deathbed. It’s too late to change at that point. It’s life knocking on your door saying, “Who do you want to be?” For many people, it’s their higher self. Their gentle self and better angels. They want to do something that helps other people and gives them a sense of fulfillment and significance.
When you reach a certain age, as Carl Jung said, “What was true in the morning of life becomes a lie in the evening.” Everything we chase in the morning of life, achievements, accolades, and ambition becomes too much hard work with two little returns after a certain age. This is where you can’t just continue doing what you did.
Thriving post-retirement isn’t about sitting back. It’s about finding meaningful ways to serve others.
What’s the first step?
Before I get that, I want to say that this is not me coming up with this. I’m bringing in together, even in literature, the odyssey. The odyssey’s the second part of the book. The first book is The Iliad, which is about the battle of Troy. It’s that whole battle of Troys. The younger parts of life. The odyssey is the second part. Which is returning home to yourself, and I’ll end it there. What is DARE? DARE is courage to take this hugely necessary and essential step to moving into the second half of life with a different mindset, a different heart, and a different purpose.
Decoding The Four Pillars Of Post-Career Expansion
The other thing is, DARE is also an acronym for discover, assimilate, rewire, and expand. I did that because you can see this atom flight and you will lose people. They will go astray. When you have a box, a Lego and you show them how to put it together. You create a word they remember. Everything else comes back to this point. You can drill down and that’s why I try to make it easy in how I share information. Discover is about discovering what retirement is and what it is not. There are eight billion people on this planet and each one has a different definition of retirement.
How do you do that? How do you tell somebody who is at the gateway to another chapter of their life? What do you say to them? How do they start the discovery process?
I say to them, “I don’t have the answers for you, but I can help you elicit the answers from within you.” Another revelation to people is that the answer does not lie out of us. People are looking for the next thing outside. Somebody is going to show me the way and somebody’s going to tell me what to do. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I have no right to tell you what to do. Each one of us knows what we want, but we’ve lied for so long we’ve forgotten.
It’s about drilling down within. It’s about an inner journey. It’s an odyssey. An indenture as opposed to adventure. It’s about exploring and facing up to the things that we are fearful about. Facing up to grieving who we were. That’s a process, too. Who we were is gone and people get stuck where they are because they can’t move on. They don’t know how to move on. I helped them to take that leap of faith to explore.
How do we move from new ending to new beginnings or endings to new beginnings?
It’s the process. If you move to the second letter A of DARE, which is assimilate. Assimilate new information about how our mind works. I’m not talking about the conscious mind or thinking mind. I’m talking about the intuitive, the emotional mind, the subconscious, and the unconscious. Again, as Jung said, we have to shed light on our own darkness. Also, Joseph Campbell, the mythologist talked about going on the heroes’ journey.
Shifting From Fixed Thinking To Endless Possibility
We do that at the beginning of life. We need to do that as we come towards the end. The same but a different journey. Assimilates about understanding how our mind works. It’s the opposite of how the intellectual mind works, logically, step by step. The next letter is R. It’s about rewiring our thinking. Moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. Carol Dweck talks about this in her book, Mindset. A synopsis of it capturing a sense or two.
A fixed mindset is, “I can’t do this.” A growth mindset is, “I can’t do this yet.” One word pivots you. It opens up to new possibilities. It’s about changing and rewiring that inner dialogue. E is for expansion, to expand. Why do I say expand? If you retire at 65, you will likely live another 25-30 years. The Paradox is some of us will not make it now.
Generally, and statistically, most of us are going to make it by a nuclear Holocaust or whatever. Most of us are going to make it to a very ripe old age. Some to even to 100 quite easily. From 65 to 100, is 35 years. Say 25 years. The way we think is not going to help us get through that time. We’re not going to be able to traverse the terrain with the old map and an old mindset. Everything has a software update and we need that, too. It’s about changing how we think, how we perceive and how we feel.
It’s very interesting. The DARE method, how long does it take? What is it involved, so our readers get more of a handle on it?
The DARE method is an eight-week module. It’s a pre-recorded digital eight week one and then there’s a live one where I’m on their 90 minutes each week for eight weeks with a group of people. I do a presentation for 30 minutes and then we spend 60 minutes working on exercises, which I’ve prepared for each module.
How do you individualize it for each specific person that’s working with you?
It’s a process and everybody’s going to come to it from a different angle but the essence is the same. The facts, the stories, the approaches, and the direction, all will be different for everybody but the process remains the same because they are all about questions and quests.
Stop saying you can’t do something. Add the word ‘yet’ to unlock new potential at any age.
What’s the age range that you think would get the most out of your program? Is it more suited for somebody just entering retirement or somebody who’s been stymied for five years?
It’s 55 to 75 is what I normally say. You can go a little further out and further in. It all depends. What I teach conceptually is applicable to a 30-year-old because it’s mindset changing. A younger person who is embarking on life in the traditional path of getting married, getting a mortgage or house. Although that’s not the way it goes these days, they’re on a different trajectory. I don’t serve that group of people, but the mindset change can apply to everybody. My process is targeted to people aged 55 to 75. There is no ideal situation, whether it’s pre-retirement, in retirement or long in retirement. If you’re ready for a change, this is going to help you.
How did you develop these exercises?
That’s such a good question. Coaching has a lot of exercises. I’m not a coach but I approached the coaching association and got them material that they use for different specific changes that I wanted. I knew what changes were required. I just didn’t know how to help people process it. I then took that information and reformatted it to people aged 55 to 75 with the concept of transitioning through retirement to unretire and have a new beginning.
The objective is, at the end of the eight weeks, you end up with one sheet of paper where you’ve got your life plan a work in progress. It’s not written in stone, which helps you to now explore what you need to do. For many people, it will be, for example, I’m done with my business. I didn’t know what to do, but now because I thought about it, I sat down and worked on this for myself. I’ve decided that within the next two or three years, I want to sell this business.
Navigating The Sabbatical Phase With Purpose
In the meantime, I’m going to work on what I’m going to be, who I’m going to be and who I’m going to serve in the next chapter of my life. Again, I also recommend to them that you want to take a gap year like a sabbatical. Not immediately. Sell your business first and then don’t jump into something immediately. You need time to decompress. Travel to a place you love.
I went around the world in 80 days because that was my epic journey I wanted to do. That was my dream. That was my unfinished dream of a youngster who wanted to do this years ago and life got in the way. Everybody’s got their own, “Do not mimic or copy me.” You have your own agenda. You have your own and you should keep that sacred because everybody’s journey is sacred and unique. It’s how you step into who you are.
Getting back to your example, which I love, of the man with the business. He’s going to sell the business and you’re telling him to take a gap year, and then what?
When you go on your gap year, the process is you’re now in a completely different environment. It’s amazing that when you go into a new environment how humble we become. We don’t know and we need people’s help. Arrogance gets parked. We all are human. We get to a certain place and we think, “I deserve this or I deserve that.” It’s nonsense. It’s all Imagination. Going to a foreign country, you’re forced to see things from a different perspective. If you’re humble, it’s much easier to navigate.
You’re on this journey not for a vacation. You’re on this journey to observe with curiosity how other people live. Would you like to live that way? What aspects of life there can you see yourself flowing with? You are going into this project or this gap year with intention and you come back enriched. I’m thinking of the book The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
The guy leaves his town in Spain. He goes all the way through North Africa. He falls in love. His money is stolen from him. All sorts of things happened to him and good things happened to him. Finally, he comes back home to the same town. He’s a changed person and the town he lives in, he sees in a different way. That’s what I would encourage you to be thinking about, because this is the real deal. This is real life. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. We’re not performing for anyone.
Your client comes back. They travel and they observe. They take things in like a sponge, so to speak. They come back, then what?
I’ll give you an example with one of my clients, Jenny from Yorkshire. She was a nurse originally and then she went into the caring business where a lot of NHS nurses needed extra work. They would come to her and she would place them in different places. She created the business with a partner and it grew and it grew. She reached a point where she was tired, exhausted and she had dreams that she wasn’t sure what it was exactly.
Doing my course, she was able to visualize what she wanted to do. One of the things that she did in the whole process of getting to what she wanted to do was to create this health spa thing near the sea in the Northeast of England. She also wanted to do a bit of traveling. She managed to sell her business. It took her two years to sell her business. In the meantime, she travelled across Europe in a camper van. When she came back, she literally started on this project that she visualized a few years ago.
It’s not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s a process. Is it difficult? Yes. Is it challenging? Yes. Is it fulfilling? Absolutely. Is it better than being stuck? No. What I’m saying is that being stuck is a horrible place to be. Being stuck and just being comfortable and unchallenged is not the way to live life. We have one life and we got to do something magnificent with it. I would use the beautiful sentence of Mary Oliver the American poet. She says, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life? What will you do with it?”
Discover, assimilate, rewire, expand. The four steps to thriving after traditional retirement.
What is it about the environment, your family and your friends that best supports a person?
I’m not sure I understand the question.
We talked about environmental factors that factor into our lives and that compasses family and friends. How did they best support us in our goals or in our lives, in your estimation?
Isn’t the question, no one is an island? We’re all connected to other people such as family, parents and children. We have to do the best we can without losing ourselves in it. That’s part of the danger, always giving and not realizing that we’re not giving anything to ourselves. That’s not being selfish. There’s a lot of conversations you need to have with your family, like difficult conversations. Some of us will be drawn to going one way and our partner will want to go the other way. Your kids will be militating in another direction. We have to be honest with ourselves.
In the conversation, without being rude or offensive, we have to put a foot down about what it is that we want to do with our lives and take into account what your partner and kids want to do. It’s very difficult to hold people down. It’s about a dance. You have to be prepared to dance, to have a family, an engagement that is a floating one. Somebody has to go elsewhere because they need to learn or study something or their work will take them somewhere else. It’s about flexibility and honoring that everyone has a particular journey.
Rejecting The Myth Of Passive Retirement
People don’t like change particularly when it comes to retirement. They think, “I’ve worked all my life. Now I’m going to sit back and enjoy it.” It’s not the way it works. That is an illusion. To that point, I would say, I’ve researched this thing so deeply that, again I use Einstein because he’s come up with some fantastic stuff on this. He said, “If you want answers to problems, look at nature.” I looked at nature. Nothing retires in nature.
It’s either growing or dying. This retirement malarkey is a human concept. It was initiated by Caesar Augustus, because he didn’t want to be assassinated like his Uncle Julius. He introduced retirement funds for his military, including down to the soldiers, Centurions because he wanted them to be comfortable, so they wouldn’t rock the boat. They wouldn’t try to take his place. Later on in life, going forward to Bismarck and Roosevelt. They all introduced it because they needed to. The industry wanted to get rid of the older people so the younger people could come in.
That continues now also.
Correct. Exactly.
George, what is the one thing you tell people not to feel fearful of in terms of growing older?
We’re all growing older and ultimately going to die. What we don’t want to do is drift into oblivion into dementia and Alzheimer’s. When you retire, you can retire from your work but you can’t retire from life. Our unconscious mind cannot be controlled. It works 24/7 from our date of birth to our date of death. When we stop being creative and we stop being of service, and we’re disconnected from society and from people, and we disengage from mental work. We’re doing ourselves a huge disservice because our mind, being 24/7, will create problems so that it can solve it.
It will create worries. To give you an example. The two things people worry about in retirement, health and money. Now, you’re at home 24/7. You have all the time in the world to create problems. I don’t have enough money. We got a cut back. It’s all about making the sound box smaller and smaller, but we should be expanding and not reducing. If you want to stop worrying and you want to stop being fearful, engage with life. Do something that provides service to people.
That’s a good point. I was just going to say somebody I don’t know who quoted but they said, “The first third of your life, you’re learning. The second part, your earnings and the third party, you’re returning. You’re giving back.” How many people that you interact with your DARE method, would you say end up feeling more fulfilled by giving back?
Everybody gives back in their own different way. It’s difficult to put everybody in one bucket. Post-retirement, you’re not working to make money. Not even make money. You want to be earning something. It’s not about, “I want to earn $5 million in the next three years.” That boat has sailed. It’s over, but it’s about making a fulfilling living. It may take you a few years to get to the point where you are earning because you’re going to invest for the thing to grow.
Creating Impact Through Service And Purposeful Work
You provide a service that you enjoy giving. It makes you feel fulfilled. You are earning your crust of bread and less likely to be depleting your pension because for 98% of the population, we will outlive our savings. It’s not about preserving your pension but it’s about not depleting it entirely. You don’t want to reach the age of 85 and think, “I should be looking for a job now.” You’ll be Gaga and gone by then.
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You want to be creating this new work, which provides a service to people. It gives you joy doing that work. The question to ask yourself is, “Would I do this work for nothing?” If you love what you do so much, you would be prepared to do nothing and the paradox is that one person is going to pay you money.
What’s next for you, George?
I don’t know. That’s the mystery and the beauty of it. I’m doing what I do. I enjoy what I do. I get paid for what I do. Am I making millions? No. Do I want to make millions? If it happens, it happens but I’m not seeking it. What I am seeking is to change as many lives as possible. The joy for me is seeing people transform to something that they might never have achieved if I hadn’t intervened.
How can my readers contact you if they would like to learn more about what you’re doing to help people enter this new chapter, which sounds fascinating?
Thank you. I would say go to my website, GeorgeJerjian.com. I have social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. George Jerjian is the handle and you’ll have everything there.
It’s been wonderful talking with you again. I know you’re doing some important things, and I’m so glad that you could share everything with us and our readers. Once again, thanks for coming back. It was quite a treat.
Thanks. It’s been fun talking to you.
Thank you.
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