Beyond Retirement

John is a career-transition coach who focuses on helping professionals in the middle and later stages of their career in defining, planning, and achieving more meaningful and sustainable careers.

He is the author of the best-selling book, Boomer Reinvention: How to Create your Dream Career Over 50 and has been named a Top Influencer in Aging by PBS/NextAvenue.

John's main focus is the idea that you don't have to retire if you don't want to. There are many different avenues that you can transfer into to bring you closer - or right TO - your dream career. There is another spot for you if you want it.

You always want to think about yourself as a consultant, even if you’re not an entrepreneur or freelancer: Consultant providing value to a client, unlike an employee taking direction from a supervisor. It’s a mindset: "what is a problem that I can find and then solve." Don’t just show up and do the work. Take responsibility for your work.

John is offering a free ebook to help you begin the process to start your next career move. You can get the book at:

go.johntarnoff.com/3steps

You can connect with John at:

https://johntarnoff.com

https://linkedin.com/in/johntarnoff

Go to www.retirenowquiz.com to see if you're on track for retirement.

Mark is the president of Safe Harbor Retirement Planning, where he has served as a relentless retirement guide to thousands of individuals since 1986. The secret to his longevity has been asking the questions other advisors simply don’t ask; it allows him to make the best decisions for each client’s unique situation and ensure retirement success.

Mark is a former radio talk show host, an author, and the go-to financial educator in the media. His most recent book, Don’t Outlive Your Money in Retirement! 7 Key Steps, unveils the step-by-step process used to help maximize the retirement journey.

Among other topics in the interview, he talks about the retirement "red zone" - the period from 4-5 years before retirement to 4-5 years after retirement - when there are some serious conversations that have to take place in preparation for retirement. A good retirement plan takes good planning.

You can reach out to Mark on any social media platform:

Website: http://www.55retire.com

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/55Retire

Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/55retire/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksingercfp/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/55retire

Patrick O’Malley is helping to keep people happy and he talked about how we can stimulate our brains through learning. He spoke specifically about his work teaching people how to play the guitar, but he did say that the same process works with any instrument, so if you’ve always wanted to play an instrument, maybe now’s the time to pick it up and get started! We’re not getting any younger, are we!?

        I guess the first big take-away from my interview with Patrick has to be that it’s important to keep learning – and be passionate about it as you go through life – because it leads not only to improved brain health but also increased physical health. Patrick pointed out a few research studies that show how studying music decreases rates of depression and increases both cognitive and verbal skills.

        Of course, not everyone wants to learn an instrument; I get that. But there are many other things to learn. Try a new language, or maybe pick a time period from history and start learning what you can about that period. I’d be willing to bet that ANY period in history had something interesting going on that you don’t currently know about.

        The second thing that Patrick talked about that I’m really interested in is the idea of how to create habits. He talked about “Flossing 1 Tooth”, the idea being that if you don’t generally floss your teeth, but you want to start, one way to do it is to decide that you’re going to floss 1 tooth today. And then tomorrow, you floss that one tooth again, and 1 more. Chances are good that if you take the time to floss that first tooth, you’ll keep on and do the rest anyway. It works the same way with just about anything that you want to create a habit of doing.

I wrote a blog post about this topic a while ago – actually, the post was about 3 different books I read on the idea of habits and small changes. The books are The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, and Atomic Habits by James Clear. The basic premise of each of them is that by making small, seemingly insignificant changes each day, you can have a profound overall effect on your life. Those small changes can be positive or negative, meaning that if you keep making small negative choices – such as watching another hour of tv at night instead of going for a walk – over time, the resulting impact will be much larger and still negative, while each day, the impact doesn’t seem to be much at all. An extra hour of tv isn’t really going to change your day too much...you might even feel perversely BETTER, if you’re a bit tired from your day, to just relax for the evening. And one day is nothing, you tell yourself. But tomorrow night, because today’s activity (or lack of it) didn’t really affect you badly, you might choose to do nothing again. Do you see how it compounds? After a few days, it’s much easier to forego the exercise in favour of the relaxation. The guilty voice in your head has been pushed aside by the little demon guy who’s saying “See? No problem! You can relax!”

By the same token, it’s pretty easy to make small positive changes without really changing your life drastically. Maybe you’ve decided to take up that instrument we spoke of earlier. So today, you play for just 5 minutes, learning how to make some sound come out of whatever instrument it is. No big deal, right? 5 min is nothing. Then tomorrow, you do the same thing again, but because you already did 5 min today, you get a bit further because you already know how to make the sound. And the next day, you’ve actually played a couple of notes, or a chord, or whatever. Now you can start to see the change happening and it gets easier to take that 5 min. It might even turn into 10 or 15 min after a couple of days, when you start to see the compounding effects of the small changes. I know you

Patrick O'Malley is a guitar teacher who teaches people of all ages to play guitar. We had a great discussion about the health benefits of playing a musical instrument. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve ever played anything before or whether you’ve got an innate talent for it, simply DOING it can help you reap these amazing benefits:

• Improved mood & reduced levels of anxiety and depression
• Maintenance of language & speech skills
• Improved multi-tasking ability
• Increased ability for Injury recovery and brain rewiring

That last point - brain rewiring - is fascinating! Neuroplasticity is something that I’ve been interested in for a long time, and Patrick spoke about the fact that musicians have more grey matter than non-musicians. The ability of the brain to form new connections (rewire itself) is a key factor in the brain’s ability to recover from trauma or injury. He wasn’t making this up - he shared the scientific studies that prove all of these benefits and triggered his own curiosity to discover them for himself. 

Patrick has been teaching guitar for years (20k students have enrolled in his online guitar courses). He told me that during the pandemic, around a third of the emails he gets from students are people who have retired and started to play guitar for the first time after years of wanting to do so. 

“People often believe their hands or too big or small or that they are just not musical enough,” Patrick says “but really the key factor is that nobody wants to spend days sounding terrible at an instrument to finally become good in the end. So I have created a course that’s fun and rewarding - YOU CAN SOUND GOOD WITHIN YOUR FIRST HOUR OF PLAYING. That’s the big secret right there.”

For a limited time, you can get his beginner's program for 50% off: http://bit.ly/guitar-retireabc