In this episode, Rachael Van Pelt walks you through a framework called the Purpose Pivot—how to move from a retirement that’s only about recovery (from career, caregiving, or the grind) into a Next Act with impact, without turning your life into a second job. Learn why “purpose” as something you create, not something you “find,” then build a practical Purpose Portfolio so your meaning is diversified and resilient across seasons of life.
If you’ve ever thought, “How do I find purpose in retirement?”—you’re not behind. You’re waking up. Because the problem usually isn’t retirement… it’s that a lot of people accidentally retire from meaning. And your nervous system doesn’t love that.
In this episode, Rachael Van Pelt walks you through a framework called the Purpose Pivot—how to move from a retirement that’s only about recovery (from career, caregiving, or the grind) into a Next Act with impact, without turning your life into a second job. Learn why “purpose” as something you create, not something you “find,” then build a practical Purpose Portfolio so your meaning is diversified and resilient across seasons of life.
If your home is consuming your energy—physically, financially, or emotionally—that’s not a character flaw. It’s a design problem. Take my Rightsizing Readiness Quiz to see whether your home is supporting your Next Act… or anchoring it. 👉https://bit.ly/4aiIBxx
Chapters
00:00 Googling “purpose in retirement” is a good sign
01:31 The Purpose Pivot: stop “finding,” start creating
02:50 The cultural script that fails: leisure as the reward
03:47 Identity whiplash: my pivot out of academia
04:32 Wealthspan reframed: asset-rich, impact-poor
06:17 Build Your Legacy blueprint: The 3 Circles Exercise
10:07 Your environment: oxygen or energy drain
12:07 Purpose Portfolio + the 4 Cs: Contribution, Connection, Craft, Care
14:34 The 30-day experiment (low-stakes, high-information)
17:03 Traps: going big, overcommitting, serving as avoidance, status quo
18:58 Take Action to Rightsize Retirement Purpose
If you've ever Googled something like, "How do I find purpose in retirement?" I want you to know that you're not alone and that it's great news. It's a sign that something is working in you. It means you're not willing to sleepwalk through the most powerful decade of your life.
The problem isn't retirement. The problem is that when people retire from their job, many accidentally retire from meaning. And the human nervous system does not love that. Your brain is smart. It wants a reason to get up in the morning. It wants a mission. It wants to know why it should mobilize energy and attention and effort today. So if you're sitting there thinking, "I have time, I have options, I'm not in crisis, and yet I feel kind of flat", That is valuable information.
Imagine for a moment your typical Tuesday. You wake up and there's no alarm, no urgent email, no meeting you have to prepare for. No one is depending on you in a clearly defined way. And for a while that feels amazing. You think, "finally I earned this." And of course you did, but then this weird thing starts happening. The days are pleasant, but they start to blur together. The calendar is empty, but your mind doesn't feel free. You have more time, but you lose momentum. And then you start wondering, "Is this it? Is this all there is?"
So today, I want to give you a framework for what I call the Purpose Pivot. We're going to talk about how to move from a retirement that is only about recovering from your career or parenthood to a Next Act that continues to have impact, without feeling like you stepped into a second job. And along the way, I'm going to challenge a couple of myths that we inherited about what these years are supposed to look like.
Before I go any further though, I want to be clear that I don't think there's anything wrong with rest and recovery. Leisure is nothing to feel guilty about. If you spent decades grinding, caregiving, surviving, raising kids, managing life, you just may need a season of decompression. I'm not here to shame anyone for that. But research shows that long-term fulfillment usually requires more than comfort. Comfort can be a trap. It's a blessing, of course, but it's not purpose.
And if you're thinking, "okay, but how do I find purpose?" I'm going to ask you to tweak that question a little. Ask instead, "how do I create purpose?" Because purpose isn't something you find like a lost set of keys. Purpose is something you build. You design it. You prototype it. You experiment your way into it.
Most of us were handed a cultural script that goes something like this. You work hard for 40 years, you sacrifice, you're responsible, you save your money, and then you retire when you reach some arbitrary finish line. Retirement is the reward. It's a life of pure leisure where you finally get to focus on yourself. You get to enjoy freedom forever. And while that sounds wonderful, it's great until you're in it. That's when you realize that all the things that made you successful in midlife weren't really burdens, were they? They gave your life meaning. Things like structure and responsibility and contribution, feeling needed. They gave you identity, social connectivity, a sense of usefulness. And it all disappears at once, doesn't it? It creates a void. It's why some people retire and feel untethered. Their days used to produce purpose for them automatically, but now they have to create it intentionally.
I learned this the hard way when I did my own pivot from academia. I spent more than two decades doing clinical science, medical research, and I loved the rigor. I loved the questions. I loved feeling that the work mattered. But there came a point when I felt trapped in those ivory walls. I felt called to more freedom, freedom of entrepreneurship. And that was confusing because I actually had a lot of freedom as a tenure-track professor of medicine. When I finally stepped away, I expected relief. And while I did feel some of that, I also felt untethered. It's not because I didn't have enough to do, but because I had lost my built-in mission and identity. I didn't need more freedom. I needed to create a new identity.
Mission also ties to wealthspan. When people hear wealth, I think they just think money. How long will my money last? Did I save enough? Can I afford healthcare? Can I afford the next 20 to 30 years? And they're all important questions, but I think we need to expand our definition of wealthspan beyond "how long will my money last?" We have to expand the definition into something more meaningful, like "how much impact can I have?" I'm not suggesting that you have to leave some grand, dramatic, lasting legacy. I mean, how will you impact your community, your family, you're inner circle?
Why? because you can be financially secure and still feel emotionally undernourished. You can be asset-rich and impact-poor. And it's confusing when that happens because we're told once you achieve financial independence, you've made it, you're free. But freedom without meaning can quickly turn into drift.
Or if it isn't drift, it's the psychological trap of "more". For many of us who were achievers, we got used to the "next-rung-on-the-ladder" mentality. Another promotion, another goal, another project, another milestone. It's not all that unusual in our society today, but the problem with that "more" is always going to be a moving target. At some point, "more" stops working as our compass, which is why we need a pivot. Rather than thinking of retirement as the finish line, we shift to thinking of it as our launch pad. Rather than thinking of wealthspan in terms of retirement savings, we shift to thinking about our impact. or purpose by intentional design, not by default.
How do we do that? How do we build that mission without turning retirement into just another treadmill? We do it by creating a legacy blueprint. Many of us tend to treat legacy like something that happens after we die, like it's what people talk about at our funeral or write in our obituary. But legacy is actually built in the ordinary choices that you make while you're alive. It's how you use your time today. It's how you show up. It's what you protect, who you invest in.
So here's a simple exercise I want you to do today. Imagine you're not trying to find your passion. Instead, you're trying to identify your natural contribution. That's the thing that you naturally gravitate toward that feels both meaningful to you and valuable to others. And that thing typically sits at the intersection of three questions.
The first question is, "what do people often come to me for?" Not what do they flatter me about? What do they actually seek me out for? Is it your balanced perspective? Is it your calm, your strategy, your compassion? Maybe it's problem solving or your humor or reliability. The second question is what problem makes me lose track of time? Is there something that you can think about for hours without forcing yourself? Third question is what do I care about enough that I'm willing to be slightly inconvenienced by it? I think that's a big one. Purpose usually comes with a bit of friction. It asks something of you. Could be your energy or your attention, a bit of effort, courage, not every day, but in a real way.
To make this even more concrete, I want you to draw three circles that overlap on a piece of paper. In the first circle, write down the skills you have, not just your job skills, your life skills. In the second circle, write out the resources you control. Could be time, money, space in your home, flexibility, a network, life experience, wisdom. The third circle, write what you care about. That could be the problems that tug on you, the people you feel drawn to help, the systems that frustrate you, the communities you want to strengthen. And then I want you to look at those three circles and how they overlap. That's going to give you the first draft of your purpose. And I say first draft because this will not likely be a one and done revelation to you. This is a design process. The way those circles intersect give you insight.
Just to give you an idea how this looked for me when I did the exercise. In the skill circle, I of course had my degrees and certifications like my PhD in physiology, health coaching, licensed realtor, accredited investor. I also have a lot of hard skills that come along with those like, expertise in statistics and scientific method, managing rental properties, coaching, exercise training, menopausal health, that's just to name a few. I also have soft skills like writing and speaking and leading and negotiating contracts and crunching numbers and speed reading. Those are just work-related skills. I have a variety of life skills that round me out like being good at organization and time management, attention to detail and so forth.
In the resources circle, there's a lot too. I have an abundance of love for others, a supportive husband, multiple investment properties, broad social network. When it comes to what I care about, the things I could think about and talk about for hours, the things that people come to me for advice on, that's going to be obvious to you. It's all about long-term health and home fit. I absolutely love helping people create their best Next Act. When you see how my three circles intersected, this podcast was an obvious outcome of that. It's my passion project.
But I want to add something that I think often gets lost in the conversation about meaning, your environment. It's going to either support you, it's going to support your purpose, or it's going to quietly drain it. If your home is high maintenance, it's isolating, expensive to run, or physically mismatched to your body, it will tax your energy. And purpose requires energy. The wrong environment will choke off your purpose before it even starts. It's the reason I talk so much about rightsizing. Because for many people, the issue isn't motivation, it's bandwidth. It's mental load. It's the daily friction of managing a life that no longer fits.
When I left academia, I left behind an environment that no longer fit me. I left behind a long two-hour commute that no longer fit. And let me tell you, it breathed life into my lungs. Purpose needs oxygen. Your environment is either giving you oxygen or stealing it. The places you frequent, the people you interact with, they either fit who you're becoming or they are a relic of your past. That's not to say that a pivot will be instantaneous. Sometimes it is incremental.
In fact, when I pivoted into coaching and real estate, it wasn't a neat, confident leap. It was more like a series of iterations. I kept experimenting and then noticing patterns. People weren't just asking me about health or money or housing. They were asking, "How do I design my next chapter so it actually fits me?" Once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it. Coaching and real estate became less about negotiations and transactions and more about helping people create their ideal environment and lifestyle to support long-term independence and energy and freedom. That was a big shift for me, realizing that my work wasn't my job title. It was the impact I was having, no matter how small.
That's why I want to give you some strategies to create impact using what I call a Purpose Portfolio. I think most people treat retirement like a single asset strategy. They'll say, "I'm going to relax", or "I'll travel", or "I'll help with the grandkids." And don't get me wrong, any of those activities are wonderful, but they're fragile if they're your only purpose. Once travel becomes difficult or your health changes, maybe a spouse gets sick or finances tighten, then that single asset strategy collapses. But if you create a portfolio, that's different. It's diversified. You're spreading meaning across multiple categories, so your life stays resilient.
In my view, most fulfilling retirements contain four key ingredients, the four Cs. Contribution, connection, craft, and care. Contribution is where you give. Connection is where you belong. Craft is where you grow and build mastery. Care is where you protect your energy and health so that you can actually do the other three. But you have to allocate your portfolio like an investor, not a martyr, which means you don't have to go "all in" on one cause or one role. You don't need to become a full-time volunteer or start a nonprofit to have purpose. Think small. Smaller time investment, but diversified.
Sometimes purpose looks like mentoring. Sometimes it looks like serving on a board or leading a Bible study. Sometimes it looks like becoming the family historian or building a small community. Maybe you host a monthly dinner party where people feel safe and really talk. In other words, purpose doesn't need to be grandiose. In fact, if your idea of purpose is something big and impressive, you just might be chasing ego dressed up as meaning. Real purpose is often quieter. It's repetitive. It involves showing up for a long time in a small way, day after day, with nobody even noticing. And that's why it works.
That being said, it helps if you have a network. You don't have to fly solo. A lot of retirees become isolated without realizing it. And that's because work used to provide casual contact, social texture. And retirement removes that structure. So you don't just need a purpose, you need a container where purpose can live, which is why I encourage people to think about building three anchors. First, a purpose partner, a friend who's also designing their Next Act right alongside you, not someone who just wants to complain about the world, someone who still believes they can shape it. Second, an organizational touchpoint. A place that you can show up regularly enough that people recognize you and rely on you in a healthy way. Third, a reoccurring container. Maybe it's a class, a board, a volunteer shift, a faith community, a mastermind, a walking group, something that makes your contribution predictable.
And here's the part that's going to relieve some pressure if you're thinking, "but I still don't know what my purpose is". It's totally fine. It's normal. It's not failure. It's a starting point. And instead of waiting and hoping for certainty, I encourage you just to do a simple 30-day experiment. It'll be low stakes, but it'll give you lots of information. Just choose one small commitment that you can test-drive this month.
For example, go mentor one person who needs it. Keep it simple. Just take them to coffee. Ask how things are going. And then really listen. Or go volunteer at a place that you care about. You don't have to make a long-term commitment. Just see if you can help out once or twice. If there's a group you've been considering, attend a couple of meetings. Get a feel for it. If you have a small project that's been tugging on you, just go through some initial planning steps.
If you do nothing else this month, at least do a bit of scouting. Research three organizations in your community and reach out to one of them. Nothing heroic, just an experiment. And at the end of that 30-day experiment, don't ask, was it "perfect"? Ask, did it energize me? Did it connect me? Did I feel more like myself?
When I launched this podcast two years ago, I didn't do it because I thought, "Oh good, I need something else on my plate". I did it because I kept having the same conversations with people. The podcast just became my way of answering that question broadly to more people and providing an actionable framework. Honestly, it reminded me that purpose rarely arrives as a lightning bolt. More often, it shows up as a repeated nudge, one that you finally stop ignoring.
Which leads me to a few other misconceptions about purpose that I think tangle us up. One is the pressure to go big. The belief that your purpose has to be some grand public or monetized thing. No. Purpose can be deeply meaningful and completely invisible to most people. I'll admit I succumbed to this pressure a little bit when I started the podcast, but I quickly realized that I'd do it whether I reached many people or just a few. I didn't do it to go viral, I did it as a calling.
Another trap is over commitment. Some people go from empty calendar to packed calendar overnight because they're anxious about creating meaning. They say yes to everything. And then the new purpose becomes just another form of energy depletion. I've been guilty of this one as well. I think it's too easy to say yes to just one more thing. But purpose does not need to be all consuming.
Another trap is using helping others as a way to avoid our own situation, our own transition. This is subtle. Sometimes we serve because we love to serve, but sometimes we serve because we know if we slow down, we're going to have to feel grief or uncertainty or whatever the emotion is. If that's you, I'm not judging. I've been there too. I'm just inviting you to be honest because purpose that is built on avoidance will eventually collapse.
And finally, there's the status quo trap. because change feels scary. This is huge, especially when it comes to changing our environment. People will often stay put not because staying is best, but because deciding what's next can feel overwhelming or exhausting. And let's be clear, postponing your life is a decision. It's just a decision made by accident, not with intention.
So I challenge you to treat the next decade as a grand beginning, not a slow fade-out. Take immediate action, not someday, this week. Start by texting just one person and asking them to do that 30-day purpose experiment with you. You don't need a crowd, you just need one ally. Share this podcast with them, get going.
And if you find that a part of what's blocking your purpose is that your home is consuming your energy, whether it's physical or financial or emotional, that's not a character flaw. That's a design problem, but it's solvable. And it's exactly why I created my Rightsizing Readiness Quiz. You'll find a link in the show notes. Take that quiz to get clear on whether your home is a support system for your Next Act, or it's an anchor.
And listen, if you've been feeling that untethered feeling, that drift, that quiet question of "what now?", I want you to hear this. It's a good sign. It tells me you're not done. You're at the doorway of a new life design. And better yet, you're in good company here at Next Act Ninjas. So keep coming back.
Until next time, my friends, live well, love more, age less.