Hi, I'm Jeanette
Retired Education Leader. Second Act Guide. Writer. Teaching you to design a retirement you actually recognise as your own.
I’m a writer, course creator, and Second Act Guide based in Australia. After a long career in education leadership, I now spend my days helping people reinvent their lives through major transitions — especially retirement. I teach people how to coach themselves, drawing on neuroscience, mindfulness, and the small daily rituals that quietly reshape who we become.
Everything I create — the articles you’re reading now, my YouTube videos, my newsletter, and my online course Your Retirement, Your Way: Thriving, Dreaming and Reinventing Life in Your 60s and Beyond — is built around one idea. Retirement isn’t the end of anything important. It’s the beginning of the chapter where you finally get to live like yourself.
For decades, I climbed. Education leadership, long hours, the kind of career you build carefully over years. I loved it, mostly. It gave me purpose, structure, and a ready-made answer whenever anyone asked what I did. But somewhere along the way, I started living on autopilot. Burnout crept in. So did anxiety.
Then I retired.
I thought I’d prepared well. The financial plan was sorted. The bucket list was drafted. What I hadn’t prepared for was the strange, hollow feeling that arrived about three weeks in — the one that whispered who am I now? when the routine stopped, the phone stopped buzzing, and the title stopped doing the talking for me.
My healing came from small daily rituals — journaling by hand each morning, stepping into the sunlight before reaching for my phone, walking without a destination. Slowly, a new kind of life began to take shape. Calmer. Clearer. More mine.
It turns out I wasn’t alone. Most people I spoke to were quietly navigating some version of the same thing. So I started writing about it. And then I started teaching about it.
What I teach
A meaningful retirement isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you design. And the design starts with two questions most of us stopped asking somewhere along the way: what gives my life purpose, and what’s the vision I’m actually living toward?
That’s the heart of everything I teach.
My work is not about telling you how to retire. It’s about giving you the tools, frameworks, and prompts to coach yourself through this chapter. I’m not a coach — I’m a teacher, an educator. You know your life better than anyone else could. My job is to help you ask better questions of it.
The framework: EPARR
My course, Your Retirement, Your Way, is built around a five-part framework I call EPARR — a method for turning a vague sense of “what now?” into a retirement you actually recognise as yours.
- Envision — craft a clear and inspiring vision for this chapter of life.
- Plan — develop your personalised Retirement Thrive Plan (RTP) to turn that vision into reality.
- Act — take small but consistent steps that build momentum toward your goals.
- Reflect — use journaling and self-coaching to stay on track, celebrate wins, and adjust as needed.
- Renew — revisit these steps regularly to embrace growth, adapt to change, and stay aligned with what brings you joy.
The four key ingredients of a fulfilling retirement
Inside the EPARR framework, we work through the four ingredients I believe every fulfilling retirement needs:
- Health and vitality — prioritising your physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.
- Meaningful connections and growth — nurturing relationships and staying curious.
- Living with purpose — finding the activities and contributions that give your days meaning.
- Dreaming big — embracing adventure and the life you haven’t given yourself permission to live yet.
The outcome: your Retirement Thrive Plan
The EPARR framework and the four ingredients come together in what I call your Retirement Thrive Plan — a living document that maps out who you want to be in this next chapter and how you’ll get there. It’s practical, personal, and designed to grow and change with you.
The practice: journaling, reflection, and self-coaching
I’m a passionate journaler, and I believe some of the deepest clarity we can find comes from simply writing — by hand, in the morning, without judgment. That’s why journaling sits at the core of everything I teach. My course includes a full Retirement Thrive Journal to walk students through the reflection and help them build their own practice.
I also teach a Six-Month Cycle — Reflect, Recalibrate, Renew — because retirement isn’t a problem you solve once. It’s a chapter that keeps changing, and the practice is what keeps you aligned with it.
A modern companion: ChatGPT as your journaling buddy
One of the more unexpected things I teach is how to use ChatGPT as a digital mentor and journaling companion. Used well, it becomes a thinking partner that can help you surface patterns, ask better questions, and hold a longer reflection than a single page allows. It’s one of the most surprising and rewarding tools my students add to their practice.
What I believe
Retirement isn’t an ending. It’s a transition — and like all transitions, it asks more of us than we expect.
I believe what we consume, how we reflect, and how we move don’t just shape how we feel. They shape who we become.
I believe we have far more potential than we realise, and that the second half of life is often where we finally get to use it.
I believe the best part of this chapter isn’t the freedom from work. It’s the freedom to become someone new. Someone less performative. Someone more yourself.
You are not your job title. You never were. This season is about finding the person underneath — the one who was always there.
Why I do this
I do this work because I believe too many people step into retirement feeling lost, invisible, and quietly grieving a version of themselves they’re still trying to name. I did. And once I found my way through, I couldn’t look away from how many others are still in it.
My mission is simple: to make the thinking, practices, and frameworks I share as accessible as possible. That’s why I write free articles. It’s why I make videos on YouTube. It’s why my newsletter costs nothing to join. The course is there for people who want to go deeper, but the heart of the work is the free writing and the videos — and the hope that they reach the person who needs them most, on the morning they need to read them.
A little more about me
Before all this, I spent a long career as an educator, career coach, and in education leadership — leading teams, navigating the politics of institutions, and learning the hard way that the things that make a career successful aren’t always the things that make a life feel full.
I loved my career. I got so much out of it. The work connected me with extraordinary people, including refugees I coached — people who had navigated challenges most of us will never know, and who taught me more about resilience and possibility than I could have learned any other way. They reminded me, over and over, that we have far more potential than we realise.
I also learned — sometimes the hard way — that the best teams are built on mutual trust and respect. That lesson has stayed with me, and it quietly shapes how I teach today.
I’m a passionate journaler. I find clarity through movement and connection to nature. I walk daily, ride my bike often, and believe the best thinking happens under an open sky.
Design a retirement you actually recognise as your own
A letter now and then
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