George Jerjian shares his personal journey from a terminal medical diagnosis to building a life centered on purpose. He introduces the Identity Renaissance, a concept he developed after surveying thousands of retirees to understand their biggest obstacles. He discusses how to avoid drifting into oblivion by shifting from a fixed to a growth mindset. George explains why your identity is often the first casualty in retirement and how to reclaim it. This episode offers a practical look at making the most of your time while you still have it.

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Redefining Retirement: Finding Purpose After Your Career with George Jerjian

Introduction

Welcome to the show. It’s a show dedicated to showcasing people who are growing older in a positive and productive way or helping people grow older in a positive and productive way. Our guest is George Jerjian, coming to us from the UK, and George calls himself a retirement mindset mentor who helps people rebuild meaning and direction after their full-time jobs come to an end.

He’s an Emmy recipient, the creator of what is called The Dare Method, which we’ll get into later, an author, and a speaker. He has a really compelling story to tell us about how he became involved, actually, in helping people navigate what he calls the identity Renaissance. Great term. I want to hear about that. Welcome to the show, George.

Delighted to be on it. Thanks, Gail.

Tell us where exactly you are from in the UK?

I’ve lived in London most of my life, but I also lived in the United States for eight years.

Which part?

New York, New Jersey area, New York Metro.

Two big cities. Tell our audience your story that kind of led up to you doing what you’re doing, because I know it’s a great story.

Thank you. I had my life before and after this specific event that happened to me in 2007. I was 52, and I went in for a colonoscopy and came out with a death sentence, really. They found a huge lump the size of a large aubergine sitting on my pelvis. The oncologist said to me that in 98% of cases, bone tumors are secondary cancer, which means it’s spread through your body and there’s not a lot we can do about it. You’re looking at six months of life. My immediate reaction, a totally automatic reflex, was that I went straight into denial immediately.

The Pivot Point

That’s a safe place to be, right?

It is. I come out of my place to be right. It is absolutely out of my body. I pointed to myself from outside, saying, “That’s you, mate, not me.” We split the situation so you can control it. The bizarre thing is that for three weeks, I went through various tests and everything else. Three weeks later, I go see the oncologist, and he tells me, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you belong to the two percent club.”

What is that?

He said to me in 98% of cases, secondary cancer is a death sentence. It’s over. I belong to the two percent club where this tumor is not malignant. It’s benign, but it’s aggressive. He said to me, obviously, death sentence commuted, but you’re looking at six months of operation recuperation, learning to walk again. When your death sentence is commuted, that’s a pretty good outcome. I punched the air. I was like, I was happy. The three weeks that I was in that state of not knowing were pivotal in changing how I see life.

Those three weeks that I was in, in that space of not knowing what’s happening to my life, were a time that really pivoted my mindset because I realized that one of the most important things in life is time, and we squander it. We’re so much more careful about money. Careful about money, which is replaceable, perhaps with difficulty, but it’s replaceable. Time, once it’s gone, it’s gone. We can’t capture it back. That’s a notion that I hadn’t really contemplated.

Time is the one resource that’s non-renewable. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Don’t squander it.

That opened my eyes to the fact that perhaps I’ve not been living the life I was meant to live. I was on autopilot. We think we’re thinking, but we’re not. Once I knew that everything was going to be fine, but I just had to go through this operation, etc., I learned how to walk again. I spent my time recuperating and learning how to walk again.

Breaking the Semi-Retirement Myth

How long did that take, by the way?

Maximum six months. I was up and running again. I cannot play tennis or ski anymore in that sense, but I can walk, I can go to places, I can do things. It made me stop in my tracks and eliminate any businesses and work that are a complete waste of time and focus on what it is I wanted to do. Part of me was so focused on preserving as much time to do what I wanted to do and who I wanted to spend my time with that I semi-retired because I thought that was the way to go. I did not know any better.

That’s totally understandable.

I thought semi-retirement was going to be perfect for me. I’m a slow learner. It took nine years. Mind you, I had retired, semi-retired at 52. I had a long runway. If I’d retired at 65 and you had nine years, it’s very difficult to come back. Because I’d retired reasonably young at 52, add another nine years, and I was 61 when I realized that this whole retirement malarkey was, excuse my French, a crock of s***. I decided to do something radical to change my life. I went on a 30-day silent retreat.

Thirty days and where did you go to do this?

I went to a Jesuit Ignatian retreat in North Wales.

George, I had heard about a walk people do. Is it in Spain or something? That’s similar.

It’s similar. It’s a different thing, but it’s very similar because the whole concept of silence and going on a 30-day walk in what’s it called?

Special trail.

Yes, it is. I’m trying to remember. It’s called the road to Santiago.

That’s it.

It’s a 30-day affair. Start at the base of the Pyrenees and the south of France. People used to do this in medieval days, and they still do it today. The concept is that when you are walking on your own, walking is a great way to get in touch with who you are. You’re walking on your own, but you meet different people on the way, which, because you do not know them and they do not know you, puts you in a place of vulnerability. It puts you in a place of being kind. It opens you up.

The Power of Silence

I say this in jest, but you meet people along the way, considering you can’t talk.

Retirement isn’t an end. It’s a chance to do what you love with people who matter.

Not in the silent retreat you cannot right, when you’re doing The Camino, thank you came finally came to me the Camino, which is the way, and there was a film with Martin Sheen about that which was fascinating about a guy who’d lost his son. He went on this trip, and it was a very fascinating story, but my 30-day silent retreat was in silence. I get all the white noise, all the distractions in life, out of my head so I can go inwards to find what it is in my deepest self.

After the 30 days, what were your big takeaways? How did you change, and when did you recognize the change within yourself, and how did that lead to your next step in life?

I discovered it while I was on that retreat, because by the third week in silence, and by the way, somebody like me doesn’t go silent very easily.

I can tell.

I do not go silent. I hate silence. I don’t like silence. The reason is, and I think this is in a lot of people, there’s a part of us that we suppress because we consider it weak. We consider it, it’s not helpful to our progress in life.

Also, I think people feel like they get rewarded if they’re good speakers. Is that true in the UK too, do you think?

Of course, I think that’s true everywhere because it’s not even about speakers. It’s if you have that super confidence, people like to be close to you because they think they can actually, by osmosis, get some of your confidence. The reality is our inner selves are not necessarily that super confident person, but it’s the authentic you which you hide, not just from other people, but I think as we grow up, we tend to put that part of our personality in the dungeons and double lock it, make sure it doesn’t come out.

While all these are the best attributes of ourselves, they’re forefront when we’re talking about. Anyway, the silent retreat made me go through an audit of my life. Homes I’d lived in, what were the good things that happened to me there? What were the challenges? That built something very interesting, because I’m a writer and then I had lots of time to read it again to see if there were any connections. I discovered what may be obvious to people today, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time, was that every crisis I’ve had in my life was a platform to step up to something new.

Defining Growth Mindset

As a stepping stone, right?

It is exactly. It is exactly. When we’re in that, we’re not happy bunnies when we’re in crises. None of us are. I ended up writing a book called Spirits of Gratitude: Crises are Opportunities, which has twelve stories that I’ve elicited from that silence about my life. I harnessed it to a lesson learned from each one. I have one more little story to tell you before I move to the next stage.

What I learned from this is that in the third week of that silence, I broke down. I felt like I was at the bottom of a swimming pool, sitting there and ostensibly breathing in the pool. Just in the imaginary world. I saw all the things I’ve done to hurt other people in the course of my life, which I used to defend vociferously and justifiably. I was really good at that. Literally go up in bubbles. I didn’t even try to hold them back.

It was being released. All the negativity was being released.

All this stuff was being released. I walked two and a half hours a day in that beautiful Welsh countryside where you had more sheep than people. Occasionally I did speak to the sheep, believe me. If you’re a talker, you will speak to anyone or anything. I was just literally crying. Tears were flowing down my face, and it wasn’t forced or anything. It was just gushing out. There were tears of sadness.

By the fourth week, I was still weeping, but in those walks when I was on my own, there were tears of joy and lightness and gratefulness that all this stuff has come out and I’m now free. One of the things I did want to study after this was mindset. I wanted to learn about mindset. How do you change the way you see life, the way you see people? That took me on a new journey.

Your identity doesn’t retire when your job does. Find your new purpose.

You’re describing mindset as being somebody in the current time and place, how they’re proceeding with their life. Am I correct in that definition or not?

No, I would take a step back. What do I mean by mindset? A mindset isn’t just necessarily our intellectual minds. It’s also our emotional mind. It’s a combination, but it’s also trying to think of the author of the book, Carol Dweck, who wrote a book called Mindset, where she talked about growth mindset and fixed mindset. Most of us have fixed mindsets, because that’s the way the educational system has brought us. It’s trained us into having fixed mindsets. If you’re not very good at maths in the early days of your student life, when you’re a student, that becomes a stigma, and you believe that, and therefore you never become good at maths.

I can attest to that.

Her thesis is that if you say to the person, “Look, it’s okay to fail once or twice, but you’re failing forwards.” Instead of saying, “I cannot do maths,” you would say, “I cannot do maths yet.” That allows your mind to pivot and be open to being changed.

Interesting.

On the back of that, I went, I thought to myself, where do I go and learn about this? I found a man who passed away a few years ago, Bob Proctor, the Canadian mindset coach. I studied and worked with him for eighteen months. After which I decided the people I want to be targeting in terms of who I serve are retirees, to help them find a new mindset so they can have a new beginning.

The Identity Renaissance

That’s true. Often when people retire, that’s their whole sense of identity, and they’re often at a loss. Where do I go from here? Who am I now? How come nobody knows me anymore? All those kinds of questions enter their mind. That can be somewhat of a roadblock in terms of moving forward.

This is what I myself discovered in my own journey of learning about retirement and what happens to people after retirement. I surveyed over 21,000 people in the English-speaking world, aged between 55 and 75. I asked them what their biggest challenge was. I had nine questions, but essentially, what is your biggest challenge? Fifty percent said health issues. Thirty-five percent said outliving their savings. Fifteen percent said having no purpose and aimlessness.

Which is the most important thing?

Wait for this. When I gave them agency, I tweaked the two questions later. I said, “If you had a magic wand, which one would you address?” Fifty percent said health again, but this time 36% said finding a new purpose.

That’s important for your health. That’s what we’ve learned.

Without purpose, you literally are tiptoeing into oblivion because you might think that you can retire from life, but our mind is working 24/7. If our mind is not given something constructive to go towards, it will create destructive ideas, meaning worries. That’s what you have all the time in the world to worry about now because you’re retired. If you don’t find something to occupy you that’s constructive, your mind will turn to the negative.

That’s true. Let’s talk a little bit about what you call the identity renaissance. I’m really intrigued by that term. Could you talk a little bit about that? What does that mean?

The identity renaissance, first of all, I love that word because again, it’s like a rebirth, but with a more magical twist to it. Why identity? Just step back a little bit to put it into context. After I’d done my twelve-month survey of these 21,000 people who answered nine questions and they told me the results, I felt something was missing. I really did. I thought I’d done the right thing. I’ve done the marketing, the surveying. I’ve got the results I was seeking, but I just felt there was something wrong. Something was missing. When I came across a quote by Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, who said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That’s when I had my a-ha moments. People do not know what they do not know.

Most people have a fixed mindset because of our school system. Choose to fail forward instead.

They do not know what they want. Who else said that? Steve Jobs.

What did he say?

He said, “People do not know what they want.”

That’s for sure.

He would create things that people would never think of, or if they went into market research, they may not say, “That’s great.”

To come back to the identity issue, I went back to the drawing board, and I discovered that we all know the first casualty in war is the truth. The first casualty in retirement that no one speaks about is identity. Who am I now without my work? There are people who retire and who continue to evolve and adapt, and they’re fine. They almost do not know why or how.

Maybe they fall into a certain trap, or they are lucky.

The fact is, when you come to the end of your working life, I am convinced beyond a doubt now that our identity is compromised. It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re a CEO, a leader, a president, or even a janitor. Your identity is compromised. When your identity is compromised, you are drifting into oblivion. One of the antidotes to Alzheimer’s and dementia has got to be having a purpose and a new identity going forward in this last chapter of our lives. With a massive difference, you need to love what you do this time.

Creating Your Own Map

People were probably tuning in and saying, “George, how do you get to that point where you are lucky enough to either fall into something or somebody sees something in you that could be really productive and positive. How does that happen?”

Another excellent question, Gail. There is no easy answer. The answer I will give, and this is my own personal experience, is that you have to make the effort to discover it. You are the only one who has the answer within you. Do not go out looking for answers outside. Nobody out there is the guru that’s going to tell you what you should be doing with your precious life. Why is it we do not do what we do? It’s because we’re scared. We’re scared to find out what we love to do because there is a danger that it may take us away from the people we love.

Is that a fear of meeting new people, or is it a fear of failing at something new? What is that?

It could be any combination. I suspect the first one would be that we’re afraid it’s going to disrupt our immediate arrangements or whatever living arrangement that we have.

That gets me into the whole subject of change. People resist change. Fear of the unknown, right?

Yes. Change also. Relationships are very volatile. Even the best relationships are very volatile. The minute you introduce an extraordinary change, and retirement is a change, whether we decide to do anything about it or not, it’s going to impact all relationships. Spousal, children, and whatever. The change will impact. If there is a risk, why not hedge for a risk that’s going to give you a reward and an uplift? Life is a risk. There is no zero risk in life. Any decision you make, good or bad or indecision, is a decision. There’s no escape. The point is that our fears are not logical. Here’s the thing, though.

We have two choices at retirement. We have a choice to stay stuck where we are and just tiptoe to a quiet death whenever it comes, or however it comes. We can take retirement as life knocking on our door and saying “This is your last chance saloon to do something worthwhile with your life, to do something you love to do, hopefully with the people who love you still around or nearby.” If you do not do what you must do and you do not do what you love to do, how can you love the people around you is my question.

If you don’t find a constructive purpose, your mind will turn to worry and destruction.

Again, it’s logical, and people do not act on logic. They act on emotion, and they will justify it with all kinds of reasons. “My grandson or my grandchildren need me. I need to be around.” Maybe yes, but you can still have a life doing what you love to do. It’s not one or the other. It’s this and this. How do you go about finding your identity and your purpose in this next chapter of your life? My argument would be that our identities are not written in stone.

There are parts of us which have been perhaps suppressed or perhaps not explored. Here’s an opportunity for us to do some work to discover what it is that I love to do. If you ask people, most people, as I was in the same boat, so I’m no different. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I went through the process of trying to find what I love to do.

I’m trying to understand. You went from your silent retreat to sort of expunging negativity from your life and deciding to move forward in a positive way. My understanding is you came across probably a method that worked for you that you wanted to share with other people. Is that correct?

I learned for myself, not for other people first. I learned for myself. I thought, I’d love to be doing something of service. Now, I’ve never been in the service business per se. It’s something that, at this stage of life, I studied a great deal of the ancients. I studied Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, all the way down to Carl Jung. I read an incredible amount of books. I didn’t just read. I studied them. To see how what they discovered applied to retirement and reinventing yourself. Carl Jung said something which you don’t hear about very much. He said something fascinating that stopped me in my tracks, and I drilled down more. It was, this is the quote, “What is true in the morning of life becomes a lie in the evening.”

Tell us what that means. That’s a great statement.

My interpretation of it is that in the morning of life. It’s all about achievement, accumulation, ambition. It’s all the A’s. It’s all the accolades. You name it. It’s all there. In the second part of life, all that looks like a lot of hard work for so little reward. The curve goes like this. The bell curve. It just goes south, and you’re thinking, this is too much effort for too little satisfaction. What used to make me feel really satisfied achieving or doing something doesn’t quite do it for me now. What does? There are lots of people who’ve studied this. There’s an amazing book by another psychologist whose name escapes me now. The surname is Zweig. She wrote a book called The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul.

Interesting title.

Coming out of this identity thing of being specific to something that’s more flowing instead of taking it’s a giving. In a sense, our accumulated experience can be distilled into wisdom. Are all old people wise? Probably not. They all have a scintilla of wisdom from life experiences, which AI can’t give you. My point is that we have a handbook for every step of life as well. We do not have a handbook when we come to retirement. We’re just left on our own. Do what you need to do. Do what you will. There’s no map. We have to create that map.

George, I have to say this is a good note for us to take a pause because I’m running out of time, but we have so much more to talk about. I really want to get to the dare method you created and endings and beginnings. We have so much more to chat about. I’d love to have you come back and do another episode if you’re willing to do that.

We can get further into probing down, perhaps into your method that will keep people in suspense about the dare method and learn about that and whatever else that we can talk about. We’ve had an interesting trip or time travel so far, and you’ve looked at life in a wonderful way that I know is very helpful to so many people. If you agree to that, that would be wonderful. We can continue this wonderful conversation. How does that sound?

I’d be delighted. Sounds like a great idea.

Thank you so much for coming on, and we will look forward to hearing more about the DARE method in the next segment of the show. Thank you, George Jerjian.

Thank you, Gail. Much appreciated. Take care.

Bye.

  

Important Links

• George Jerjian
• George Jerjian on LinkedIn
• George Jerjian on YouTube
• The Dare Method
• Spirits of Gratitude: Crises are Opportunities
• Mindset
• The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul