Episode #13 This is Verla Fortier of Your Outside Mindset Show where I shine a light on aging adults who may have a chronic illness and who are taking back their outside mindsets by looking or going outside to spend time close to trees, shrubs, and plants. I started this podcast for two reasons. I want to help people to recognize that going outside is not just a nice thing to do, but it can save your life. And I want to give you practical tips to live longer, prevent dementia, and control your chronic illness, if you have one. If this sounds good to you welcome home.
Today it is my pleasure to introduce to you Joe Casey and Denis Wuestman of The Retirement Wisdom Podcast.
Joe, Denis, and their guests focus on the “changing nature of retirement today and the non-financial aspects of a successful retirement transition.”
On their Retirement Wisdom podcast they talk to leading experts in the field, and the stories of people who have created interesting second acts as they share practical tips and ideas to create your own. Before I started this podcast I was a guest on their show, and here is the link for you to listen to.
Today Joe will share his coaching process and ways of creating Outside Mindset Habits. Denis Wuestman will tell us about his Retirement Transition Design Workbook and give you examples of how to use an Outside Mindset for your retirement plan.
Let’s start with you Joe.
Please tell us why and when you decided to become a coach. How does this fit with your podcast?
I had been working in HR for about 15 years and I had the opportunity to have an executive coach. It made such an impression on me, my leadership skills, and those who worked around me in my organization. And I became very curious about how that happened. Especially since I didn’t think my coach did that much – and that I was doing all the work. Now I see why. She was an excellent coach. After that I began to be interested in what made a good coach. And I decided that after I left HR I would go into coaching. And I wanted to get a good education in the coaching process. So when the company I was working for was acquired, I went back to school. I took the coaching certification program at Columbia University and began an executive coaching practice – which I still have today.
When I was doing that clients started to ask me, can you help me to figure out what to do next – because I don’t want to be doing this in my 50s or 60s. The first time this happened, I was coaching a very talented professional to become the CEO of the company. He was 52 at the time. The CEO was in his 70s. And about half way into the process, my client confided in me. He said ‘this process has been great, and has been the best professional development I have ever had. But it has taught me one thing: I don’t want to be the CEO. I want to go off and do something totally different. I want to make a difference in the world. And I have some big ideas, but no really sure how to get there. Can you help me with that?”
I said well I can’t help you while I am doing this, but we can talk outside of this. So I started to look at what tools were out there. So I found some and then more and more people started asking me for example how, after retirement, do I get on to non-profit boards. People came to me who wanted to work for a non-profit or be on the board of a non-profit that they were really interested in.
So I created the podcast Retirement Wisdom with Denis who is also on the call. Our podcast really tries to do a few things. I had gone back to school for a Master’s in Gerontology at the University of Southern California and I was really impressed with the research being done by faculty there. So we have researchers on the podcast, academics, and authors, and to help people make a successful transition to retirement.
What is your perspective on coaching? What message you are trying to get across?
Growing up I was very involved in athletics. I had a coach then who made a huge difference in my life. In fact I still give to a high scholarship in his name because he made such an impact on my life.
I was a basketball player, and then became a runner. I set a goal to run the Boston marathon. I spent a few years at it and took the time down. But realized that “I don’t think I can do this by myself.” And then I decided to follow my own medicine and hired a running coach. That running coach really did not overhaul my training. I had done my research on building my training program. But he made one really important change and I was able to cut my time by 8 minutes. He changed my long run approach.
The message I am trying to get across in coaching is that we can be better and learning does not stop as we age. And the retirement phase of life is a good to do this. The second message is like my marathon experience, you can only go so far on your own. So that is what we do on the retirement side. We help people to figure out what it is they really want to do and we help them to develop an action plan on how to make that happen.
As a coach how you would help our audience to incorporate an use an Outside Mindset into their lives?
So I mentioned that I noticed which coaches were good in our company and ones that were not so good. I discovered that the ones that were the best had a variety of tools and approaches because people they coached were coming from different backgrounds, points of view, different goals, and objectives. So I set out to make sure I had as many tools in my toolkit as possible. One of them I found in 2014 is something you have also used and that is Tiny Habits by a PhD at Stanford, BJ Fogg who runs the Behavior Design Lab there. I saw his method when I was on a business trip to Seattle. I used design to do something physical. I realized I had not done sit ups in a while. I started with one and built up to 200 a day without thinking about it. He came out with his book “Tiny Habits: Small Changes That Change Everything.”
There is a lot of research behind it but he breaks it into 3 simple fun steps. The first step is to figure out what you want to do and do the smallest version of it. You then anchor it to something that you do already and finally, you celebrate. And that is one of the big breakthroughs that he came up with is that “emotions create habits.” And it really does help to rewire our brain and tells it we want to do more of this.
So I started this in 2014, and when he started to train coaches, I thought I would like to have that in my coaching toolbox. So it is something that I use. He has a free 5 day Tiny Habits course where you can take 3 things that you want to do and learn his process on a small scale. And then what I do is take people on a deeper 4 week program after that and work in some of the broader tools. But I highly recommend the process because he has figured out how to take something very difficult (habits) and make them easy simple and fun. There is that famous quote: “we are what we repeatedly do.” Forty percent of what we do is based on habits, so we want to get out in front of our habits and design them in our own way.
Me: Yes, and I love the way he says pick something you like to do or want to do.
Top easy universal coaching tips for this podcast audience.
A couple of things, to your point, think about what it is you really want to do or move toward. The second thing is get a good coach who is qualified for what it is you want to do. I give this advice. Most people hire a coach that they have good chemistry with or get along with. We don’t tend to do this in other areas of our life. For example if you are trying to find an auto mechanic, I don’t want the one I like, I want the one who knows my particular make and model of my car and with the best skills for the work. So I think it is good to interview 2 or 3 coaches to really understand what their process is about and what their experience has been. So I think chemistry is important but sometimes over rated. I think we have all had the experience where we bought something because of the person. So I think the advice I can give is pick the coach with the best training and experience to get you where you want to go.
Over to you Denis Wuestman
Please tell us a little about your background and why you created The Vision Workbook for Retirement Transition.
I had a 35 year career in corporate financial services. Here my interest in process improvement and helping others that led to coaching after my corporate career.
Joe was the person who introduced me to coaching in 2015. After my retirement I was doing consulting and coaching around the LEAN management systems. There is a core component of LEAN that gets managers and teams to work together in a collaborative way. Coaching was a large part of that process. Joe introduced me certification in coaching called Brain Based Coaching. This was a fascinating process and I enjoyed it. So taking those two together, I was able to see that my interest in process and in helping others through coaching relate to each other.
And then Transitions. We focused on transitions in the Retirement Wisdom podcast. I had gone through the same transitions as everybody else. I had my own plans. And I think we all plan very well on the financial side, but not on the non-financial aspect of retirement. We are all going through the same thing, and how do you plan for what is next? That is when the usefulness of coaching through these transitions became obvious to me. Joe has already talked about the benefits of coaching. Coaching can help people to struggle less and get there a little quicker. Getting a thinking partner, I used in process improvement all the time. So this can help you in your personal life, especially in transition.
How would an outside mindset be a part of the transitions in retirement life?
To step back a bit, there are two questions that people face when transitioning into retirement. First, “am I ready?” financially and non-financially. The emotional side, your identity, attitude, and purpose in life all lead into how do I invest my time? How you will invest your time is so important and a core aspect of creating a vision.
I believe in planning, researching, writing things down, experimenting, and creating actions. I think visioning gives people a way to get started while building so clarity and focus on what is next. It helps people to use skills and build new ones. We want to keep moving forward when it comes to this next part.
Visioning is a great way to get started when you are unclear where to invest your time. The workbook itself –well the word work is important – -because it is work. It is meaningful work because it takes you through this journey of meaning and reflection. If you can mentally connect with a vision, you can reduce or eliminate the amount of struggling that you do.
When you talk about visioning in an Outside Mindset I will touch on the different components. One of the components is care of self. Here we are talking about physical, mental, and spiritually wellness. And thinking about the Outside Mindset, reading your Outside Mindset Workbook was great. Listening to Your Outside Mindset podcast combined with my own work, the physical aspects of being outside were obvious, but not so much the mental benefits until now. Our memory, energy, focus, health, happiness… all these things became really important in caring for one’s self.
Your workbook chapter “Your Brain on Stress” shows us how by spending time outside we can help the brain to function and avoid cognitive decline. So we can use this information to plan and create opportunities to incorporate what you like to do outside into your retirement vision.
My own personal story about being outside was like a lot of people. We had jobs. Reading your work and thinking back I realize that I used to do some of these things. If I had a stressful day, I would go outside and take deep breaths. I didn’t know why; it just made me feel better. I wasn’t making the connection or on the benefits of all of this. For five years, I would take my kids every Saturday morning to the park. We would just sit around the trees.
Now I am a huge cyclist. I bike outside all the time, and my favourite spot is these tree tunnels. When I bike in the tree tunnels versus no tree tunnels, I can’t wait to get back into the tree tunnels. I didn’t know why, but now I am learning exactly why. So that is how the Outside Mindset fits into my Visioning Workbook.
There are other aspects of my Visioning Workbook where an Outside Mindset fits too. These include work, maybe look into a work interest that is done outside. Maybe volunteering, if you want to volunteer, you could get involved in something that is outside. If you like teaching physical things, maybe consider teaching hiking, swimming, ice skating. You could become a nature mentor and help people to get outside.
Then you can add an Outside Mindset to the social and leisure aspects to your retirement visioning. So your book brought this in too, the importance of relationships and social networks. Schedule your outside time with a buddy. Join a club that is outdoors.
In your book there is a chapter saying that people are happy with other people, but happiest outside …so bingo. Combine the two. So you can combine an outside mindset into your relationships.
So in your leisure activities you are recharging yourself physically and mentally. So not just physical that you are recharging yourself. Recharge your intellect. Read more about nature. This is a great way to become more informed. Read your book Take Back Your Outside Mindset. Go to a nature museum. Go on line. And then ask yourself simple questions about nature. And look at the land and sea, and ask yourself, “what would I like to do?”
So those are some examples of what I believe that people can do to use an Outside Mindset in their retirement plans.
I was listening to your podcast episode with Mark Hume on fly fishing. So one of the areas I talk about in my Visioning Workbook is growing and learning. What are you curious about? How can you apply continuous learning to that area? This is the kind of thing that helps people to move forward. So when I was listening to Mark talk about fly fishing, his message was that it helped people to slow down. And I reflected on that and thought sure.. the slower the movement actually makes it more successful. Well when it comes to thinking about your retirement, take your time, slow down, and reflect. This way you have a better chance of being successful. And here is where coaches can really help you to take self reflection to the next level.
So in my coaching I help people to learn by doing and to create actions. In your book Take Back Your Outside Mindset , you have a good chapter on Doses of Tree Time. You have to plan and you have to take some time to do. So what I like to leave people with is, what are you doing, what are you learning, and ultimately how do you build this vision going forward. So I think strategies to actions are very important and they help people get results. And you can certainly apply an Outside Mindset to this process. Take Your Outside Mindset Workbook and do it outside, under a tree!
If your listeners are interested in getting Denis’s Vision Workbook for free, after October 1st, mention the Outside Mindset podcast and email me at: coachdenisw@gmail.com
Joe Casey who should listeners tap into your resources?
The Retirement Wisdom Podcast has free resources and all the podcast episodes for three and a half years. We have descriptions of the coacing that I do, including the Tiny Habits Coaching that I spoke about. We have other coaches on the website.
Thank you Joey Casey and Dennis Wasman this has been great.
So listeners check out The Retirement Wisdom Podcast and go to their website retirementwisdom.com. Use Joe Casey’s coaching ideas to work your outside mindset habits to into your heart and soul – and every day of your retirement. So that when times get tough you have the resilience to And apply Denis Wuestman workbook to integrate your outside mindset plan into your larger retirement transition big picture. Combine these two approaches for your retirement wisdom.
Thank you for listening to the end. Please check out my book Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Prevent Dementia, and Control Your Chronic Illness and go to my website Treesmendus.com for more free resources. To support this show please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast.
And please remember that the next time you go outside, do something you like, and you will be designing and creating your own outside mindset routines. These consistent outside habits will give you calm, energy, and resilience for whatever life throws at you – because if you ask me – we all need a little more of Your Outside Mindset.
Bio Joe Casey
Joe Casey is a catalyst for positive change. Joe is an executive coach, who also helps people create the life in retirement they want. Joe has earned four coaching certifications that inform his work with his clients, including becoming a Certified Retirement Coach, a Designing Your Life Certified Coach and a Tiny Habits Certified Coach.
Prior to becoming an executive coach, Joe spent 26 years at Merrill Lynch, where he was most recently SVP, Head of HR for Global Markets and Investment Banking.
Joe earned an MA in Gerontology from the University of Southern California, an MS in OD from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Executive Coaching from Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his executive coaching certification from Columbia University.
Joe has been quoted in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, MarketWatch, US News & World Report, Kiplinger’s, The Atlantic, and CNBC.com on second careers and retirement.
Explore resources and coaching programs at retirementwisdom.com
As Joe mentioned, BJ Fogg, PhD, has a free 5 day program on his Tiny Habits Method at https://www.tinyhabits.com/join
Denis Wuestman Bio
Denis Wuestman is a Retirement and Business Coach/Consultant and holds two coaching certifications: Results Trained Coach (NeuroLeadership Group) and Certified Retirement Coach (Retirement Options). He helped co-found a Princeton NJ based coaching company (Retirement Wisdom) focusing on the non-financial aspects of key life transitions including retirement, career and life situations and is one of their retirement coaches. He is also a frequent co-host on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, featuring authors, researchers and journalists on the changing nature of retirement. Denis provides individual coaching and business consulting through his own company, CORE Coaching and Consulting LLC.
If your listeners are interested in getting Denis’s Vision Workbook for free, after October 1st, mention the Outside Mindset podcast and email me at: coachdenisw@gmail.com
Joe Casey who should listeners tap into your resources?
The Retirement Wisdom Podcast has free resources and all the podcast episodes for three and a half years. We have descriptions of the coaching that I do, including the Tiny Habits Coaching that I spoke about. We have other coaches on the website.
Explore Joe’s resources and coaching programs at retirementwisdom.com
Thank you Joey Casey and Dennis Wuestman this has been great.
Bio Joe Casey
Joe Casey is a catalyst for positive change. Joe is an executive coach, who also helps people create the life in retirement they want. Joe has earned four coaching certifications that inform his work with his clients, including becoming a Certified Retirement Coach, a Designing Your Life Certified Coach and a Tiny Habits Certified Coach.
Prior to becoming an executive coach, Joe spent 26 years at Merrill Lynch, where he was most recently SVP, Head of HR for Global Markets and Investment Banking.
Joe earned an MA in Gerontology from the University of Southern California, an MS in OD from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Executive Coaching from Middlesex University (UK), a BA in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and his executive coaching certification from Columbia University.
Joe has been quoted in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, MarketWatch, US News & World Report, Kiplinger’s, The Atlantic, and CNBC.com on second careers and retirement.
Explore resources and coaching programs at retirementwisdom.com
As Joe mentioned, BJ Fogg, PhD, has a free 5 day program on his Tiny Habits Method at https://www.tinyhabits.com/join
Denis Wuestman Bio
Denis Wuestman is a Retirement and Business Coach/Consultant and holds two coaching certifications: Results Trained Coach (NeuroLeadership Group) and Certified Retirement Coach (Retirement Options). He helped co-found a Princeton NJ based coaching company (Retirement Wisdom) focusing on the non-financial aspects of key life transitions including retirement, career and life situations and is one of their retirement coaches. He is also a frequent co-host on The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, featuring authors, researchers and journalists on the changing nature of retirement. Denis provides individual coaching and business consulting through his own company, CORE Coaching and Consulting LLC.
If your listeners are interested in getting Denis’s Vision Workbook for free, after October 1st, mention the Outside Mindset podcast and email me at: coachdenisw@gmail.com
