When Susan retired from her role as a hospital administrator at 63, she did what most newly retired people do — she said yes to everything. Book club. Grandkids two days a week. Church committee. Three separate standing coffees. The garden she’d always wanted to start. A watercolour class on Wednesday afternoons.
Within four months she was exhausted. And worse, she felt hollow. She’d swapped one busy life for another, and she wasn’t sure the new one was hers.
It took a conversation with her daughter — who asked her what she was actually excited about — for Susan to stop and look honestly at her week…
She sat down on a Sunday afternoon with a cup of tea and her diary open in front of her. She read through the week ahead, slowly, and asked herself a question she’d never quite let herself ask: which of these am I actually looking forward to?
The answer, when she let it come, surprised her.
Out of everything she was doing, only two things consistently made her feel like herself: the watercolour class, and the slow hours she spent in the garden. The rest were obligations she’d dressed up as retirement. The book club was a friend’s project she’d politely backed. The church committee was guilt left over from her mother. Two of the three coffees were with people she didn’t really enjoy spending time with — she’d just felt unable to say no when they’d asked.
She put the cup down, picked up a pencil, and started crossing things out.
The committee went first. Then one of the coffees, with a kind note. Then the book club, after one last meeting where she said her thanks. She kept the watercolour class. She kept the garden. She kept the grandkids — non-negotiable. She kept the one coffee with her oldest friend, the one who actually saw her.
Then, in the middle of her redesigned week, she did something that surprised her. She blocked out a morning. Tuesday morning. From 9 until noon. No plans. No shoulds. She wrote one word in the diary square: nothing.
The first Tuesday she did it, she felt anxious. The empty diary square seemed almost rude. She went for a walk. She came back. She made a second coffee. She sat in the sunroom and watched the light move across the floor. Nothing happened. Nothing was supposed to.
By the third Tuesday, the morning had become her favourite part of the week.
By the sixth, she told me it was the first time in forty years that she’d given herself permission to just be.
The garden flourished. The watercolour class led to a small show at her local library that ran for three weeks. Her relationship with her oldest friend deepened in a way she said she hadn’t known was possible at her age. And the strange thing, Susan said, was that her week didn’t feel emptier — it felt fuller. Just a different kind of full. The kind she’d actually chosen.
“I thought retirement meant filling the gaps,” she said. “It turns out it meant being brave enough to leave a few of them open.”
When I think about Susan, I think about how the busiest people in retirement aren’t always the most alive. I think about how the simplest, bravest thing you can do — when your week is bursting at the seams with things that don’t quite fit — is to take a pencil and start crossing them out.
And I think about her blank Tuesday morning, and how much it ended up holding.
You don’t have to fill an empty Tuesday. You just have to let it be empty long enough to find out what it might want to become.
If Susan’s week sounds familiar you might enjoy finding out more about my course Your Retirement Your Way.
Your Retirement Your Way is a science-informed, self-coaching course designed to help people intentionally design their next chapter of life—rather than drift into it.
At its core, the course reframes retirement as a personal reinvention project, shifting the mindset from “retiring from work” to “retiring into a meaningful, fulfilling life.”
It guides you through a structured but flexible process that includes:
- Clarifying what retirement means to you – moving beyond outdated ideas and creating your own vision
- Understanding the emotional transition – including identity shifts, loss of structure, and the “in-between” phase
- Designing a personal blueprint – setting goals across key areas like purpose, connection, health, and daily life
- Building supportive habits and routines – using neuroscience-backed strategies to create sustainable change
A key feature of the course is its guided journaling and reflection exercises, which help you coach yourself through decisions, build self-awareness, and stay aligned with what truly matters.
Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all plan, Your Retirement, Your Way empowers you to create a life that feels purposeful, structured, and deeply your own—with the tools to keep evolving as your needs change.
Please note Susan’s story is a composite drawn from women I’ve worked with. Names and details have been changed.
