When Freedom Feels Overwhelming
For people approaching retirement who wonder what they’ll actually do with all that time.
🟢 Retirement is supposed to be the reward. The wide open expanse of time you’ve been working toward for decades. You have a wide open calendar with no alarm clock telling you when you need to wake up. The stress is gone along with the deadlines.
And yet, one of the things I hear most often from people approaching retirement is that they’re worried about what they will do with all that time.
They aren’t worried about money, that was well planned for. However, they are worried about time and how to use it well.
🧭 This looming question and this uncertainty makes sense to me. Years ago, a pastor asked me a simple but powerful question about a decision I was wrestling with. I didn’t know what to do and he said, “What do you want?”
What I didn’t realize at the time was that I started telling him everything I could handle, everything that I was capable of doing and what I could accommodate. He stopped me and said, “Tammy, you can do a lot of things. I know that, but you haven’t answered my questions. What is it that you want?”
I was a bit stunned by the question. That should be an easy question to answer, but I honestly didn’t know, and I had to sit with it for a couple of weeks before I could answer it.
🌱 Here’s what I’ve noticed in my coaching practice, and while this applies to men, I have found it most consistently resonates with women. So many of the years of our lives are filled with obligation. Things we have to do, even if it’s loving obligation. We are raising kids, building a career, providing for our family and caring for aging parents. All of that seems to come first before we get a space of time that we can fill with what we want to do.
Whatever we personally like to do and want to do gets buried under other priorities. And if it stays buried long enough, we can genuinely lose track of who we are outside of our roles.
The freedom that retirement promises is real, but if you haven’t thought about who you are and what fills your cup, that wide-open space can feel a bit overwhelming. It’s a very human thing that happens when we spend decades putting others first.
💡 The only way through it, in my experience, is self-discovery. And the good news is that it doesn’t have to be complicated.
Two tools I use with my coaching clients are the Life Design Purpose Wheel and the Life Design Sweet Spot. Together they help people dig deep and remember what they actually enjoy, what brings them energy and what feels meaningful. Sometimes it surfaces things they used to love doing that got set aside, and other times it sparks curiosity about something they’ve never tried but would like to do.
From there, the IDEA Cycle encourages people to take action. This is so important because action creates clarity. You don’t have to have it all figured out before you begin…you just have to take one small step and pay attention to what you are learning about yourself.
✍️ If any of this resonates, I’d love to have you join me for a free webinar on October 18th at 2 PM Eastern.
It’s called 3 Keys to Retiring with Confidence and it’s designed for exactly this kind of conversation.
You can register here: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/3-keys-to-retiring-with-confidence-tickets-2001814128947?aff=oddtdtcreator
I look forward to having you there! 🌱
Designing Your Second Act publishes November 4, 2026, through Routledge Productivity Press. Pre-orders open October 14th, and I’ll be sharing a 20% discount code with newsletter subscribers. Stay tuned! 🌱 Tammy Martins is a retirement transition coach, speaker and author.
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