I’m Retiring at 50 and Keeping My Business (Here’s What’s Changing)

The Fantasy of Retirement

Today’s episode is for all the ladies who dream about retirement. Those of us who catch ourselves thinking, “I wish a rich man would come along and save me from all this.” Or, “Why can’t my husband just make more money and take the pressure off?” Or maybe it’s just, “Can I just run away? Just to disappear and start over somewhere new.”

Those of us who are counting down the days, maybe it’s 5 more years, 10 more years until we don’t have to do this anymore. You know the fantasy, right? The one where you finally retire, sell everything, move to a beach somewhere and just stop. Stop being responsible, stop performing, stop carrying the weight of it all. Maybe your version is in the mountains or a small apartment in Paris, or just anywhere that isn’t here doing this, being this version of yourself. You tell yourself, “Just five more years, just until I hit this number, just until the kids are grown, just until I can retire. Then I’ll finally get to relax. Then I’ll finally enjoy my life.”

The Problem With “Over There” Thinking

But can I ask you something? What about your life right now? How do you want to live it? Not someday, not when you retire, not when circumstances change. Right now, today, this week, this year. Because here’s what I’ve noticed. We have this tendency to always think over there is better. Over there when I retire, that’s when life gets good. Over there when I’ve lost the weight, that’s when I’ll be happy. Over there when I make more money, that’s when I’ll feel secure. Over there when the kids are grown, that’s when I’ll finally have time for myself.

We’re always looking over there at some future version of our life, some future circumstance, some future finish line. And meanwhile, guess what? We’re missing right here. Here where your actual life is happening. Here where you have agency and choice, here where you could be making this moment, this day, this year absolutely amazing.

So what if instead of waiting to retire, we made here as good as we’re imagining there to be? What if that’s actually possible? That’s what we’re talking about today because I’m retiring at 50. But here’s the twist, I’m keeping my business, I’m not selling, I’m not stepping down, I’m not moving to a beach. So what am I actually retiring from? And what does retirement even mean if you’re still working? Well, let’s dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where our motto is simple: elevate your self-image, elevate your life. I’m Tonya Leigh, your hostess, and I’ll guide you to become the woman who doesn’t just dream bigger. She lives bigger. Let’s dive in.

What Retirement Really Means (And Why We’ve Misunderstood It)

Before I tell you my story, I want to talk about what the word retire actually means. Because I think when we understand the word itself, well we’ll start to see that we’ve been approaching this thing all wrong. So the word retire comes from a French word, which means to withdraw, to pull back, to retreat. In its original use, it was a military term actually. When an army retired, they were retreating, they were pulling back from battle. They were withdrawing to a safer position. And then the word evolved. And we started to use it, meaning withdrawing from public life, from active duty, from the world of work.

So retire meant to retreat from engagement. And that’s how we still think about it, isn’t it? Retirement is when you stop. It’s when you pull back, when you withdraw from the world of work and productivity and contribution. But here’s what’s interesting, is that what we really want? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself, do we want to withdraw from life? Do we want to retreat from maybe meaning and contribution? Do we want to pull back from engagement of certain things that maybe matter, but the way we’ve been going about them makes us think that we do. Or maybe we want something entirely different.

So let me share some stats with you that might surprise you. Studies show that within the first year of retirement, rates of depression increased by 40%. And it’s not just depression. Rates of physical illness increase as well. There’s actually something researchers call Retirement Syndrome. Why? Because for many people, retirement isn’t the relief that they thought it would be. They thought they wanted to stop, to withdraw, to have nothing to do. But what they actually discover is that they’re bored, they’re restless, they feel purposeless, they sometimes miss the structure, they miss the meaning, they miss the mattering.

So some of them try to fill the void with business. They start joining committees, projects, social obligations, different activities, but the same exhaustion. And for others, they often struggle with their identity. They think, if I’m not my job, then who am I? And many of them realize the problem was never the work. The problem was how they were working. The mental baggage that they were carrying around, the beliefs that they had about rest and productivity and worth, and all of that, they realize I’m just bringing that same energy into retirement.

It’s Not the Work –  It’s the Mindset

So here’s what I realized for myself. Maybe retirement isn’t what I’m actually seeking. So at this point, I feel like I need to share some really raw truths with you. And I don’t think we talk about this enough. I’ve been in this industry for a long time, longer than most, almost 20 years. And I’ve seen behind the curtain my friend, I’ve talked to the people you follow, the ones who businesses you admire, the ones who lives look so perfect on Instagram, the ones who broadcast how much money they make and how much money they have. And guess what? A lot of them, and I mean a lot of them are burnt out.

They’re carrying around the weight of their careers and their businesses like a backpack full of rocks. They’re successful. Yeah, they’re accomplished and they’re exhausted. And they’re fantasizing about retirement too. So you’re not alone. I’ve had those moments myself. In fact, just last year was one of them for me. I remembered the exact moment I was sitting with Fonz and I just looked at him and I said, “Can we just sell everything and run away?” And I meant it in that moment. I genuinely wanted to sell everything, the business, my house, just get rid of everything and just disappear and go live on a beach somewhere. Stop being responsible for anything.

And you know what? This is normal. If you’ve ever had that thought, “I just want to run away from it all.” Or, “I can’t wait to retire.” You’re not alone, you’re human. But here’s what I had to sit with. Do I actually hate what I do? Is the work itself the problem? Is retirement really the solution that I’m seeking? And when I really sat with those questions, the answer was so obvious. No. The truth is I love the work I do. I truly love it. I love the women that I work with, I love creating, I love teaching. I love building something that feels meaningful. I love creating community.

So if I love the work, why do I sometimes want to burn it all down? Why am I fantasizing about retirement? And that’s the question that changed everything for me because here’s what I realized. It wasn’t the work that was crushing me, it was everything else. And I need to be specific here because I feel like there’s this assumption that when successful people are burnt out, it’s because they don’t know how to rest or they feel guilty about not being productive. Well, that’s not my story. I’m actually the queen of leisurely hustling. I don’t struggle with giving myself permission to rest. I don’t feel guilty about taking time off. I love to play.

But last year when I was sitting with Fonz fantasizing about selling everything and running away, I felt so much pressure. I was dealing with the frustration of people not doing their jobs. I had to fire eight team members. Eight. We were dealing with tech issue after tech issue. And the worst part, all of this was impacting my client’s experience, which is my worst nightmare. These are the women I care about, the ones who have invested in my programs. And their experience was being compromised because of all of these operational issues. And then there was the amount of work that needed to be done to get everything cleaned up and working the way I wanted it to work. So that pressure, it felt immense, it was real to me. And it made me want to run.

But here’s the thing, and this is what I want you to really hear. Whether it’s work or something else, life is always going to have its challenges. As they say, life is going to life. I think about one of my members who finally after years of dreaming about it, retired and she told herself, “I can finally relax now. I can finally enjoy life, there’s going to be no more stress, no more pressure.” And then soon after her retirement, her husband was diagnosed with cancer. A different circumstance, but even bigger weight, more stress, more overwhelmed. Life didn’t get easier just because she retired. Life just gave her different challenges.

And that’s when I realized we often think that running away from one circumstance is the answer. But what if it’s not? What if the real answer isn’t changing the circumstances? Now, sometimes you need to, sometimes that’s warranted. But oftentimes it’s us changing how we relate to the circumstances. What if it’s not about retiring from work but retiring from a certain mindset? Because here’s what I want you to understand, and this is so important. What we’re always after is a feeling. When you fantasize about retirement, you’re not actually fantasizing about not working. You’re fantasizing about how you think you’ll feel when you don’t have to work.

So let me ask you, what do you think you’ll be feeling on that magical day when you retire? When you don’t have to work anymore. Is it relief? Is it peace? Is it freedom? Is it ease? Joy? What is it? And for me, when I asked that question, the answer was clear in that moment, it was a relief I was after. And I was telling myself, retirement would give me that relief. But I know that’s not true. I’ve changed circumstances enough to know that you just take one mindset into the next one and recreate the same feeling unless you work on what’s going on up here.

But for me, I thought it was going to bring me relief from the pressure, relief from the responsibility, relief from the weight of it all. But here’s the thing, and this is where everything changes, and I want you to really hear me. Circumstances don’t create feelings. Our thoughts do. Retirement is just a circumstance. It’s an external condition. And external conditions don’t create our feelings, our thoughts about those conditions create our feelings. Which means I was waiting for retirement, a circumstance, to give me relief, a feeling. But relief isn’t created by not working. Relief is created by how I think about my work. How I think about my life, my responsibilities, my challenges.

And if that’s true and it is, that my relief comes from my thoughts, not my circumstances, then I don’t have to wait for retirement to feel it. I can give myself relief right now by changing how I think about what I’m experiencing. That’s what I mean by retiring from a mindset. I am retiring from the thought that I have to wait for some circumstance to change before I can feel how I want to feel. I’m retiring from the belief that relief lives over there in some future version of my life. I’m retiring from the idea that I’m trapped by my circumstances and have to escape them to feel better. And I’m retiring to the understanding that I can feel relief right now, right here in the middle of challenges while still running my business, while still having responsibilities. Not by changing my circumstance, but by changing my relationship to those circumstances.

How to Change Your Relationship to Circumstances: Question One

So let me give you two questions that will help you start doing this. Question number one is, if I had this week off from my work, what would I be doing? I want you to get super specific. If you’ve been dreaming about retirement, I want you to really think about what would you be doing? You had a whole week off. How would you be spending your time? Where would you be going? Who would you be doing it with? What exactly would you be doing?

I know when I asked myself this, what came up for me is, oh my gosh, I’ll have such slow mornings. I’ll really savor my coffee. I might read in the middle of the day. I’ll have beautiful lunches with Fonz. I’ll work on creative products just for the pleasure of them. I’ll spend time with the people I love without rushing. I’ll go to bed early without guilt.

Question Two

And then I ask myself the follow-up question, why can’t I do those things right now? What is actually stopping me? And I realized nothing. Nothing is actually stopping me except the thoughts that I have about what I should be doing about what’s productive, about what’s allowed. And then the second question is, if I had a whole year off from work, what would I be doing? And this causes you to think about maybe the bigger experiences that you want. Maybe it’s the travel, the adventures, the new hobbies, the things that you’re saving for someday. What would you do? Where would you go? What experiences would you have? And then ask yourself, why can’t I do those things now? Or at least start doing some of them or planning them or putting them on the calendar or making them real instead of just some fantasy that lives over there.

Because here’s what I found. Most of the things that we are waiting for retirement to give us, we could actually start experiencing them now. Maybe not in the exact same way, but in some way. Maybe you can’t take a month off to travel, but you probably can take a long weekend. Maybe you can plan one big trip this year instead of waiting until retirement. Maybe you can’t have every morning free, but maybe you can protect one or two mornings just for you a week. Maybe you can’t eliminate all the challenges, no one can. But you can stop waiting for the challenges to be over before you allow yourself to enjoy your life.

Retiring From the Wrong Way of Thinking

So when I say I’m retiring at 50, here’s what I actually mean. I’m not retiring from my business, I’m not retiring from work that I love. I’m not retiring from contribution or purpose or meaning. I’m retiring from this mindset, from this way of thinking that makes me feel trapped. That makes me think that I have to wait to some future date to feel the way I want to feel and do some of the things that I want to do. I’m not waiting for the tech issues to be resolved or the team to be perfect or the challenges to disappear. I’m going to give myself relief right now by changing how I think about what I’m experiencing.

I’m retiring from the idea that challenges mean that something’s wrong. Life is always going to give us challenges. My client’s husband getting cancer after she retired taught me that challenges aren’t a sign that you need to quit or run away, they’re just a part of life. I’m also retiring from looking over there and missing here. I’m done fantasizing about retirement. I’m done fantasizing about some future version of my life and missing the life I have right now. Now, I love to think about my future self. I do it all the time. But I do it because I want to see how she’s thinking, how she’s feeling, and then bringing it back to here. Because here is where life is happening.

I’m also retiring from the need to have everything figured out. I don’t know what’s going to happen next year, next quarter, next month. And I’m done exhausting myself, trying to control everything. I’m also retiring from performance. I’m done showing up as the version of myself that I think people expect. And I’ve been working on this for years, but I feel like I’m finally at that place of like, I’m just done. You know what? Some days I’m brilliant. Some days I’m a mess. And that’s okay. It’s called being a human being.

I’m also retiring for waiting for permission, permission to rest or to slow down. To enjoy life right now, I’m giving myself that permission. I’m not waiting for retirement to grant it. And here’s what I’m retiring to. I want to retire to presence. Actually being here, in this moment, in this day. Instead of always thinking about the next thing, the next problem, the next goal. I’m retiring to relief right now. Again, not someday when the circumstance has changed, but right now by changing my thoughts about my circumstances. I’m retiring to trust. Trust that I’m enough, trust that things will work out. Trust that I don’t have to control every circumstance. Trust that challenges don’t mean something’s gone wrong. It just means that I’m a human being, living a very human life.

I’m retiring to pleasure as a regular practice. I’m talking beautiful meals, long walks, time with the people that I love. These aren’t luxuries. They’re not something I’m going to save for retirement. They’re essentials that I want to build into my life right now because the reality is we’re not promised retirement. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here. I want to savor what life has to offer right now.

I’m also retiring to work that I genuinely love. Now, here’s the kicker. As a business owner, as an entrepreneur, there are going to be things that I’m required to do that I may not think I love now, and I have options here. In fact, I have three options. I can delete it, not do it at all. I can delegate it, meaning I can have someone on my team do it. Or I can delight in it. I can choose to love it. No longer do I want to do things and then be in agony over it as I’m doing it. That’s not doing work you love. I can choose to love what I choose to do. And if it’s something that’s not required and I don’t love it, then I’m just not going to do it. I only want to do work I genuinely love, and that’s something I get to choose to do. And this is the most important one. I’m retiring to the understanding that I can feel how I want to feel right now. Not over there, but here.

How to Start ‘Here’: Step One

So how do you actually do all of this? Let me give you some real practical steps. Step one, identify the feeling that you think retirement’s going to give you. Again, is it relief, peace, joy, ease? Name it, get specific. Because until you know what you’re actually seeking, you can’t create it. 

Step Two

And then step two is to recognize that circumstances don’t create your feelings, your thoughts do. Whatever that feeling is that you’re seeking, retirement won’t automatically give it to you. Your thoughts create your feelings. So ask yourself, what would I need to think to feel that way right now?

Step Three

And then step three is to ask yourself those two questions. If I had the week off, what would I be doing? And why can’t I do that now. If I had the year off, what would I be doing? And why can’t I do that now? Why can’t I start planning some of those experiences this year, not in some future date?

The question that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is, how can I make here amazing? What would make today feel like I’m truly living, I’m fully alive? You actually have more agency than you realize, more choice than you’re allowing yourself to have. And then finally, you have to give yourself permission. Don’t wait for retirement to grant it. Permission to rest, permission to enjoy your life right now. What are you waiting for permission to feel, to do, to have? Give it to yourself today.

Step Four

And then the last step is to change your relationship with your challenges. Again, challenges don’t mean something’s gone wrong, it just means that you’re a human being. And challenges are a part of life. They don’t mean you need to quit or to run away because guess what? They’re going to be a new set of challenges over there. Learn to embrace your challenges. Learn to use challenges to become stronger. How do you need to think about your challenges differently to give you a sense of empowerment, to help you navigate them with so much more ease?

I know we all have this tendency to think that over there is going to be better. To always fantasize about some future date, whether it’s when you’re married or when you’ve sold the house or you’ve built the house. And in this case, retirement. But I know from running from one circumstance to another, it never works because who you are here is going to be who you are there. So again, learning to make here as beautiful as you think there is, is the secret sauce. And that is what I’m retiring to, my friend.

And so I want you to share in the comments below, if you’ve been fantasizing about retirement. If you think, “Oh my God, that day when I no longer have to work, that day when the pressure is off.” And yet here you are working in your life, here you are. The circumstance is you are someone who is not retired. Ask yourself those questions. And I’d love for you to share your comments down below. If you had the day off, what would you be doing? If you had the year off, what would you be doing? And why can’t you do that now?

And if you’re wanting more support around this, if you’re thinking about, “Okay, Tonya, this sounds great. But I do need something, I need to know what I’m stepping into.” I encourage you to take the Next Era Quiz. It’s where you’re going to get specific results on the energy that you are ready to embrace, that you are ready to embody. You can go to schoolofselfimage.com/quiz and take it. And as always, thank you for listening to this episode. Have a beautiful week and I will see you in next week’s episode. Cheers.