Matt Feret (02:28)
Hey everybody, it's Matt. Maybe you've done this, because I sure have. Let's say you're doom scrolling on Instagram and you see these posts or these reels: sold everything and moved to Portugal, retired at 58 and traveled the world, or left corporate and found my purpose. And for a second you think, geez, why can't that be me? And then reality kicks in. What about aging parents who need me? What about adult kids who...

still lean on me? What about the mortgage? What about this identity, even if you don't call it that, this identity I've built over 30, 40 years? All these transitions and pictures look glamorous online, but in real life, they're messy. Maybe you were laid off at 57 unexpectedly. Maybe you're laid off at 47. Maybe you stepped away voluntarily. Maybe you retired and instead of relief, you felt restless. Maybe you're still working but quietly wondering if this is all there is. For high achievers especially, identity gets really tightly wired to performance, metrics, relevance at work, and being needed. So when that structure shifts, and even if your finances work, something deeper still feels unsettled. Today's conversation isn't about selling everything and moving to...

It's about what happens when the old definition of success no longer fits and how to design what comes next in the real world with real responsibilities. My esteemed guest today is Johanna Danaher, founder and chief energy officer, which is an awesome title, of Anchor to Aspire, which is a coaching practice focused on helping high achieving professionals navigate major life and career transitions.

After more than 25 years leading global talent, culture, and leadership strategy at Pfizer, Johanna understands firsthand how deeply identity can become intertwined in a career, a title, and a W-2, and how destabilizing it can feel when that chapter shifts or ends. Today, she works with executives, pre-retirees, midlife professionals, and just plain old high performers who are navigating reinvention, whether they call it that. Whether that's a retirement, a layoff, just plain old burnout, empty nest, or simply the realization that the old playbook no longer fits. Johanna, welcome to the Matt Feret Show.

Johanna Danaher (05:06)
Wonderful, and thank you so much for having me here. I'm really excited to dive into this conversation about reinvention.

Matt Feret (05:14)
I am as well. Like I said, that's an awesome title you gave yourself. I have to come up with something cool like that someday. I love it. So tell us, I obviously gave an intro, but in your words, what do you do now, and how long have you been doing this? And what led you from a 25-year corporate career in leadership into coaching people through these life transitions?

Johanna Danaher (05:36)
Such a great question, right? So I had a major life transition myself. My role was eliminated after 25 years. So I was kind of pushed out of the nest, so to speak, and had an opportunity to really ask myself that question that I think many of us are asking is, well, what next? And I had spent a lot of time at Pfizer leading some of the efforts around corporate coaching, career coaching, leadership coaching, and I knew that that was something that was aligned to my passion. But I didn't know if it would be something I would want to do for myself. And this idea of becoming an entrepreneur and opening my own business and starting this on my own was really exciting, but terrifying at the same time. It was my daughter who actually kind of encouraged me to really take the step, because she is in college and she was a freshman in her first semester of university when I was laid off, and she was starting her entrepreneurial experiences there. She's like, “mom, there's so many people who are starting off in college, starting their own business. You have 25 years of experience in a pharmaceutical company. You've led a strategy. You could do this. You absolutely can do this.”

It was her belief that allowed me and gave me permission to give myself permission to try something completely different. So that's what I do now. I work with people who, like me, are going through a big life shift where they're not sure what next is gonna look like. They don't know what the next chapter is going to be.

The perfect plan we had laid out that we were following for our career trajectory no longer exists, and we have to reinvent what that career map looks like for ourselves.

Matt Feret (07:33)
When you've worked not only at Pfizer, but now this work that you're doing, what did you start noticing about specifically high performers when they hit these major life inflection points? Because I can imagine, look, I'll just say this in maybe a not so nice way. You were in corporate for a long time, so was I, in leadership positions. I don't think it's any secret. You can identify the people who are coasting.

You can identify the people who are like, I'll stay right here because it's low. I'm not going to get clipped. I'm not going to get downsized, laid off, position eliminated, whatever nice verbiage you use to eliminate. You're gone, basically. Fired, off, all these lovely names we use. But they're not necessarily high performers. They're just under the radar and hanging out. And you know that's what they're doing. They have no desire to do more, because they don't want to get in that position where they're a target for one of these layoffs. But then you've got high performers who are climbing that corporate ladder or who are entrepreneurs that have started their own companies and they just got to go, go, go, go, go. Maybe they've sold their company and now they went, I just did this for 30, 40 years and now I've got nothing. What do you notice specifically about high performers when they hit these major lifestyle or life inflection points compared to the, let's just say, non-high performers?

Johanna Danaher (08:58)
I think there's three things that really stand out. The first is that high performers are used to being very busy, right? We have a lot on our plates. We can juggle multiple different priorities. We can really see systems thinking, right? All of a sudden that's gone, right? So there's this whole idea of we're trying to fill the space that used to be really, really busy where we have the structure, have the calendar, we have the meetings, we have the expectations, we have the outcomes. We try to fill that. We don't pause to take a moment to say, well, what do I want to fill that with? So this busyness becomes glorified in a lot of ways. We continuously say yes to things that may not actually align with what we want to truly do. I always say that every yes that is really a

Matt Feret (09:35)
Mm.

Johanna Danaher (09:51)
concealed no is something that is going to really drain us over the long term. So this idea that busyness becomes glorified, productivity actually becomes over-functioning, right? You're continuously delivering for everyone else but yourself. The other thing is that I see high standards. High performers have high standards. They have high standards for themselves. They have high standards for others around them. That can very quickly become self-criticism.

Matt Feret (10:13)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Johanna Danaher (10:21)
Right? Our inner critic starts talking really, really loud. We start questioning whether or not we're capable because we're not necessarily seeing the same types of results. This idea that we had responsibility when we were in a corporate environment, right? A responsibility of a team that reported to us or products that we were delivering or customers that we were serving.

So that responsibility starts to blend and bleed into, well, I can't disappoint anyone. So I don't have boundaries. So that is because of the fact that we're still identifying ourselves by our achievements. So if I'm not producing an outcome or something, then I'm not valuable. So retirement or this whole idea of your next chapter

Matt Feret (10:54)

Johanna Danaher (11:14)
requires very different skills, right? We need to be curious, we need to be flexible, we need to accept support, and we need to be willing to say, I need help.

Matt Feret (11:26)
Yeah.

Johanna Danaher (11:27)
We are always the ones who gave help, who solved the problems, who figured out the solutions, and now we don't know what we're doing. So we have to be willing to ask for help and be vulnerable as well. And we have to also experiment without a performance metric.

Matt Feret (11:46)
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, you could probably, if you're watching, you could probably see my eyes going, hmm, yes, I might be able to relate to some of that personally in there. Yeah, if you're not producing, you're always producing outcomes, you're always executing, right? All these management modicums, and then all of a sudden you're like, yeah, not anymore. Now you have to think a little differently. So this is hard for everybody, but I'm going to ask it to you, because you've seen way more examples of this than probably anybody listening or watching. Let's go straight to the question. People don't say out loud and for a couple of reasons they don't think it's them, they don't like to think of themselves as this way, or they quietly know it but just don't want to say that out loud. Who am I without my job?

Johanna Danaher (12:31)
That's a great question. And I'm laughing because I'm still trying to answer that question myself. And it's been 18 months since my role was eliminated. So who am I? I'm Johanna. Simply, I'm Johanna. I'm a person who is inspired by nature. I'm a person who loves to be in a collaborative space with others. I'm a person who loves music but has zero capability of making music, but I love listening to it. So all of those are parts of who I am. I'm also a leader in my community, in my family, with my network. All of the things that made me good at the job that I did are still part of who I am. I'm just not the senior director of the talent pipeline anymore. I'm a leader. I'm a visionary. I'm a creator. I'm someone who can see disparate ideas and bring them together into a concrete whole, right? I can see the forest through the trees in a lot of different ways. So all of those things are very true, but we still have a hard time answering the question. Oftentimes, and I have a poll out on LinkedIn related to this, are you stumbling through it? Are you giving a list of activities? Are you saying who you are now? Or are you just saying, I'm still becoming because I don't really know?

Matt Feret (14:11)
Do you run into people that feel that kind of vulnerability is a weakness?

Johanna Danaher (14:17)
Absolutely, absolutely. I would say I've run into that individual who feels vulnerability is a weakness in any stage of life, right? Whether I was in the corporate environment, whether I'm out of the corporate environment, whether it was early talent back in academia, vulnerability does have this perception of being weak.In some cases, I would say it's actually probably our single most coveted strength, right? Is when we can be vulnerable, when we can be honest, when we can be truly the person that we are, that's where trust is formed, right? That's where we create psychological safety for those that are around us, whether they are direct reports, whether they're people we're working with, whether they're members of our book club. Being ourselves fully and wholly is really the only thing that matters.

Matt Feret (15:11)
You know, in some of your work, and I said this on the onset too, you do make a distinction between being emotionally unprepared or emotionally prepared, and then also financially unprepared or prepared. I think for people who haven't gone through this or haven't reached this stage yet might think, well, if your 401k balance is X, if you get laid off, whoop-de-doo, right? Or if you exit yourself.

That's on, that's, you've planned your finances. You've planned, you did this, you quit, right? You resigned, you retired. But why do financially prepared people still run into this not being prepared emotionally?

Johanna Danaher (15:56)
I think there's a couple of things, right? Because we're taught that the structure that we have in place is all we need, right? And we've also been taught, and at least this is an adage I have heard in my career and growing up, is that you leave your emotions at the door. There's no room for emotions in the workplace, right? So we've operated in this way so that we don't necessarily talk about how we're truly feeling. Feeling is something that often is

The word “fine” comes up when you actually ask somebody, how are you feeling? They say, I'm fine. No feelings in corporate. “Fine” stands for feelings inside not expressed. So those are the things that are actually there that are controlling us. That without acknowledging our feelings, our emotions can then tend to hijack us. All of a sudden we're operating from a default pattern versus conscious choice.

Matt Feret (16:27)
There are no feelings in the corporate world.

Johanna Danaher (16:53)
Right, so the whole idea is that the more that we understand how we're feeling in this moment, embracing those emotions and really giving ourselves the permission to feel things, then we're able to really operate from a different space. Otherwise it's feeling like this is happening to me versus this is actually from choice, right? That happens to us in just about any environment and we're human, right? It's supposed to happen. There's something that triggers us. We automatically fall into a protection cycle, right? That leads to certain emotions and certain thoughts and certain behaviors and it reinforces itself. But what we have to do when we're approaching retirement is actually give ourselves the space to really emotionally connect with what I am leaving. Whether it was I'm losing this because my role was eliminated, or whether it is I'm losing something and I'm leaving something and putting it behind me because I'm choosing to retire. So what am I leaving? And grieve that because there is a loss there. It's not going to be the same on the Monday morning the first day after your last day of work. You're not gonna have the calendar, you're not gonna have the hundred Teams pings or the Slack channel to connect with. So there is going to be loss. So you have to give yourself the space to recognize that, to grieve it. Then you also have to ask yourself, what emotions do I want to carry forward into this next chapter? What do I want to create more space for? Sometimes that can come with fear, right? But sometimes that can also come with excitement.

Matt Feret (18:35)
I mean, I think it's very...

Even if people say, I mean, again, thinking about high achievers, and that's not always the same, but like, I'm gonna sit on my front porch on the rocker and go fishing. Some people can be very happy doing that. Not a lot of the people in my network either, probably not yours. But you hear these things like, get out there and volunteer and go sit on a board at the Humane Society, and now you're gonna join the women's club at church, which you've wanted to do for 30 years, but they meet on Wednesdays at 10 and you can't do that. All these little things keep busy, and I hear, maybe I'm not the only one that hears, like a lot of people respond to this transition by filling their calendar immediately, endless activity. Like, I get to do all the crap I wanted to do and never did. I've heard, I've had other guests on before say the whole travel thing is part of that because they're like,

OK, well, if you have a bucket list and then you travel for two years and then your bucket's done, now what? I've never really heard that piece that you just talked about was like, grieve it, mourn it, which sounds sad. To me, retirement doesn't sound super sad. But anyway, the point is to have a space where you have time to define and measure and figure out what you're dragging forward and what you're not. Why do so many high achievers rush to stay busy?

Johanna Danaher (19:57)
I think it's because of the discomfort with that emotion that we talked about before, and it's also because we've, we measure ourselves back to how the job, right, we were doing a job. Most of us, anyone, whether you're a high achiever or not, are doing a job because we feel motivated and that it's meaningful, right? So we're in a space, we're delivering something because it speaks to our sort of energy of purpose, right? We're connected to that purpose. That's gone. So we try to figure out what we want to anchor on again, right? So what gives our life meaning at this point in time? If we haven't stepped back and asked ourselves that question, we start filling the calendar with things that have this maybe superficial meaning or they're supposed to do this perception, right?

Instead, the most important thing that I've done is actually redoing a values assessment. So sometimes many of us may have done a values assessment earlier in our career to understand the values that guide us. Some of us may never have done that. It is one of the most insightful things to be able to do. What value do I want to carry forward, right? For me, you probably have two or three core guiding values. Some people may have up to five. I wouldn't say more than that because that's realistic, right? So really relooking at your values and understanding how everything that comes on your calendar aligns to that value. Because if it doesn't, that means you're leaking your energy out, doing something, giving energy to something that's just not fully aligned with your sense of personal purpose and sense of meaning. So figure out what your values are and then use those values as the first line to assess anything that you're saying yes to.

Matt Feret (22:01)
That's really hard though, because especially if you're a high achiever and you're like, well, now I'm going to go sit on boards and do consulting work. You may be right back on a Team call. And you may hate Teams calls because you sat on them for 20 years, whatever version of Teams you want over the last 20 years, and get 15 minutes into your first hour long and go, this sucks.

I don't want to sit here anymore, but that's what you have to do to quote unquote stay busy. How do you handle those types of realities versus just look, I love what you're saying, pick three and first one's family and the second one is stewardship and the third one, anyway, none of the three have anything to do with sitting on a Teams call. I mean, do you just stick to your guns? I would imagine it's easy for people to slip right back into old habits even though their values are defined at this point. How do you handle that?

Johanna Danaher (22:53)
Yeah, it's very easy. So a lot of it is really looking at boundaries. So once I talk with someone around these are the values, then let's look at what are the boundaries that we need to put into play. Because oftentimes, and I'll ask the question just like you did, right? Well, how did you feel at the end of that? Were you energized or were you drained? If you were drained, then that's a signal that this is probably not aligned with your values or there is something that is a boundary that is not being honored. So let's take a look at that, right? So if you really want to be invested and involved in this organization sitting on the board, but being on the Teams meetings and involved in the administrative aspect of it is draining you, figure out a different way to be involved, right? Maybe you're actually going to be the one who's going to be out front and engaging with the customers.

For me, I volunteer on a board here in my town and it's for a chorus. And part of what I was very excited about was the fact that I would have more capacity to be there and to be a part of it. But I am so like, well, I'm all in. I'm like, I'm going to cook the orchestra dinner, I'm going to be back in the kitchen, I'm going to be ushering, I'm going to be on the board. But I'm like, yeah, OK, I got to really focus. What do I want that board involvement to look like? Where would my natural talents be best leveraged by them and what is energizing to me? And the thing that I volunteered for as part of that board is very different from what I've done in the past. I'm volunteering for an actual in-the-park concert for Summer Pops, and I've never done that with this group before. I never had the capacity to do it before. So I would do communication stuff, I would do front-of-house stuff. Now I'm sitting here saying actually I really want to be involved in this because it's larger scale, it's outdoors, which is really important to me, and it's in the community. So I've chosen the way in which I'm engaging very differently now because it's more important for me to be outside.

Matt Feret (25:06)
You're saying no more, right? You're going, no, this is what I'm going to do and I'm not going to deviate because what you're saying is you've got to go right back to those values that you probably likely should have written down someplace or stuck on your mirror, first thing you do when you're brushing teeth when you wake up. Because I hear what you're saying. Getting off those, you can get dragged just like in corporate, you can get dragged. Hey, can you sponsor this project? Sure. Next thing you know you're checking somebody's PowerPoint going to the board.

You're like, wait a minute, how did I get into PowerPoint checker mode before this thing goes out? It just spirals. So it's really okay to be very, very pointed. No, I'm not going to cook supper, I'm not going to clean the dishes, but I will help out with the Summer Pop series and be very deliberate. Is that right?

Johanna Danaher (25:51)
Yeah, being very deliberate, knowing when to say no, because every yes you say is a no to something else, right? So always remember that. So every single time you say yes, you're saying no to something else. Whether that is being able to be at home, whether that's prioritizing going to the gym, whether that's sitting on your front porch, whether it's going fishing, whatever it is, in order to say “yes” to one thing, you have to say “no” to something else.That “no” is usually subconscious and it's usually our own individual well-being because we tend to prioritize ourselves last.

Matt Feret (26:29)
In corporate, you're probably used to not really thinking you could say no.

Johanna Danaher (26:35)
Correct.

Matt Feret (26:37)
Yeah, that's gonna, you got to be really attuned to that. I would imagine people have a hard time with that. I would for sure. So let's talk about the stages of transition. So there has to be a stimulus, sounds like the stages of grief. I don't mean to sound like that. But let's start like maybe the first one. So when someone leaves or loses a long-held role, is there a predictable emotional arc that you've seen?

Johanna Danaher (27:01)
I'd say it's like any change curve, right? You think about the change curve, you sort of have shock, and then there's anger, and then there's resentment and fear, then there's opportunity, then you kind of cycle sometimes back to sorrow, to grief, then excitement. So yes, there is sort of the change curve, but you're going to hit all of these different emotions, and it's so unique to each individual too, right? So while you might be like, shouldn't I be at the stage of happiness now? Well, no, right? No, you're going to be at whatever stage is right for you. And sometimes you're going to be able to hold what appears to be very paradoxical emotions to be completely true at the same time. You can be excited and still sad, right? And those two things can happen simultaneously. You can be sad for losing the network that is at your fingertips, but excited for the next opportunity to do something different. You could be fearful of stepping into something entirely outside of your comfort zone, yet really energized by that idea. And those two emotions can coexist at the exact same time.

So I would say don't rush anything. The stages are going to be the stages, and they're going to be unique to you.

Matt Feret (28:27)
Hmm. How? I mean, everybody's gone through change stages in their life, right? I personally, and I don't mean this to make this about me, but maybe I'm like a lot of other people. I feel like I get stuck on a stage and I don't want to be in there anymore. You know, if I get stuck on a resentment stage, you know, if somebody at work, you know, I don't know, tried to attack my position or career or something, whatever happened, right? I'm in this resentment phase, and then like a couple of months later I come back to it or like, you know, I'll wake up first thing in the morning and be like, why is that person popping into my head? How would you coach someone, and I'm not saying I'm resentful, I'm just saying, but like if you get stuck on something, you get stuck on shock, let's pick that one. Like, God, that's never happened to me before, I've never been laid off. How do you get off of being stuck in shock or any of those types of emotions that are invasive, not necessarily something that you can just go, I recognize I'm in a change stage and this will play itself out. It keeps coming back to this messy middle. How do you coach people to get through that?

Johanna Danaher (29:31)
Yeah, so there's a couple of things. I'm an energy leadership coach, and there's an energy leadership index assessment that actually tells us what energy level we are operating from on a good day and what happens under stress.So you start to see numerically where you are and what are the things that are driving you? So truly getting understanding as to what the trigger is that is actually pushing you into that space, right? That's a more catabolic response of either victimhood or anger or even rationalization or toleration.Then looking at how you leverage other areas of strength that are in your profile to pull you out, right? So recognizing when you're there is the first thing that we talk about. Because oftentimes it can also be subconscious, right? We don't recognize that we're actually in that space and we're in that cycle, right? We're in the cycle of it's somebody else's fault. I'm putting blame elsewhere, it's not my fault, it's external to me, when it really is internal.

So the first thing is acknowledge, validate, and accept where we are, right? The acceptance process is one that's hard, but it is one that we have to talk through. This is my reality. If this is my reality, how do I want to shape that reality? Then we talk a little bit about how we can move through that. But the most powerful thing, no matter what stage of a change curve that you're on, understanding the emotions is the first. The second is the power of taking a pause. Just pause. That pause could be a few weeks or it could be microseconds, right? It's that what is something that's triggering this emotional response? I'm going to pause, I'm going to calm my nervous system, and I'm going to breathe. It sounds silly, right? It sounds like, huh, this doesn't seem so complex, but it is the most powerful thing that we can do at any moment is pause, because it interrupts the cycle that we're in.

Matt Feret (31:40)
Do people replace that pause with busyness and never get to the actual pause and reflection and calm?

Johanna Danaher (31:45)
All the time.

Yeah, all the time. I say that there's three types of pauses, right? There's the micro pause that you're building in your day-to-day. This is an intentional pause that you're taking before you're going into a meeting, before you're shifting from work to home, before you're going out on a date, whatever. You're going to take that micro pause. Or you have an entirely busy schedule that you've filled with all sorts of things between one thing and the next. Pause.

Like when I was at work in the corporate environment, I actually had two meetings on my calendar every single day and they were color coded. One was 15 minutes in the morning and it was red and it stopped. That was my pause moment. I'm like, I've already been in five meetings, I've already answered 150 emails, I need to take a break. And I'm literally going to give myself this 15 minutes to stand, to maybe eat lunch that I didn't eat, or breakfast. I'm going to give this gift to myself.

Then I gave myself 90 minutes, and that was green, and that was for deep focus work. So I always had those two on my schedule. Now I could move them around, but I also had them color coded so anybody who would see them when they were proposing meetings to me knew that the red, I'm not going to accept the meeting. And that was my boundary. I'm not accepting a meeting that's going to overlap this. Or if I have to, because it was critical, I'll move that 15 minutes somewhere else. But I never let that go. And I still practice that today. So I still make sure on my calendar I always have at least 15 minutes in the morning and 90 minutes in the afternoon for me to have flow and for me to have a pause.

Matt Feret (33:35)
That's probably unique to everybody. Well, the pause practice shouldn't be unique, but the amount of time and when and how it's done is probably unique to everybody.

Johanna Danaher (33:45)
Absolutely. Some of us are morning people. Some of us get into flow later in the day. So knowing yourself, being able to create that. Some people might need two 15-minute pauses versus a longer set of pause. But I think that's really important. Then the other thing that we don't do when we are at work, and even when we're not necessarily full time working, we don't take our vacations. That's a problem.

We need to actually have that seasonal pause.

Matt Feret (34:17)
Do you mean take vacations as in take vacations, but bring your cell phone with you and work can get you if it's an emergency? Or does that mean to do it like the Europeans and take three weeks?

Johanna Danaher (34:30)
Do it like the Europeans. Now whether it's three weeks or a week or just a weekend, give yourself that space because you need it. Physically we need that space to step away. We need to be able to give our mind and our neurons the opportunity to really reflect. We can't reflect when we're constantly on. So taking that seasonal pause is really critically important.

You know, I mean, we talk about it with our kids. We make sure that they have their spring breaks. We get really angry when they take spring break away, right? Because our kids can't be in school for more than 10 weeks at a time without having some sort of moment for a pause. But we don't give ourselves the same grace.

Matt Feret (34:59)
Yeah.

Yeah, I can remember getting my first full-time job after college and it was like, this is a weird feeling. Life is now divided into two-week paychecks with two weeks of vacation. Your first job, a lot of jobs, even not just your first job, but it was a weird thing because you could go do things in the summer in school or spring break or have an internship on the week, whatever it was. And all of a sudden then life turns into just every two weeks you get a paycheck.

It's a time to, it's a good thing to remember. It wasn't always like this. It was just for the last X number of years. But let me go back into the traits that drive success, things like ambition and discipline and intensity. Those are really powerful things that people bring to the table. And when they're rewarded for it in work life over time, usually these highly successful people will continue. You don't just turn that off or slow that down. So how do those very same qualities that got people to where they got now all of a sudden, I think you're inferring, can become roadblocks in this midlife transition?

Johanna Danaher (36:31)
Yeah, absolutely. They can become roadblocks. I would say anything that is a superpower of ours has the potential to be a saboteur and to really self-sabotage us. For me, one of my primary areas is being a helper. So I'm very focused on the work that I do being about how I ensure that I'm delivering value to others. What ends up happening is that I over-deliver on value to others that I actually don't prioritize myself at all. Right? So I've had the same goal for a year and a half, which is to get into the gym and go to the gym on a regular basis. I have failed on that goal three times in the last nine months. So I've gone and I've gotten back in and I'm paying for this gym membership and I'm not going.

Matt Feret (37:21)
They love you, by the way. The gym loves you. Thank you. Keep doing it.

Johanna Danaher (37:28)
Keep going, keep on. But that's, you know, so I'm so focused on what am I doing for everyone else that I'm not actually focusing on what I need to do for myself. So I have to think differently about how I get movement into my life, right? If it's not going to be going to the gym, then I have to lean on the thing that I love that's going to actually get me to bring movement in. What I love is being in nature.

I love going out for walks and for hikes and walking along the coastline. So I'm structuring my days to ensure that I get that. So while I might not get to the gym, I'm actually getting the movement in. So I think that's one area that for me is an example of how my superpower of being a people person has actually tended to lean into being a people pleaser, which then has this sort of self-harm component to it.

Others are those of us who were very skilled at project management. We had execution timelines and timetables and we were able to really put together agile teams or however we were executing on this work. Sometimes that can actually get us into a space where we're now a stickler for rules and regulations and we make dinner at five o'clock every day or 10 o'clock every day or whatever it may be. All of a sudden these things that were enabling us to do our work are actually getting in our way in our home life or in our business life.

Matt Feret (39:03)
Yeah, how about some more examples for people to think about this in that way, which is when you're a high achiever, you're rewarded for a really long time for doing things a certain way. Again, going back to what you talked about earlier is that you have to be values aligned, which sounds easier than it is because you have to first define your values. When was the last time anybody really sat down and thought of you know, maybe during an HR exercise once a year at a retreat, sure. But I mean like that also has a tinge of HR-ness to it. You're a corporation, so you can't really do it like that. But if you move into that kind of values into purpose, and not to sound again too much like an Instagram doom scrolling session, but values, purpose. But that can, I would imagine, really easily turn into pressure.

What does that look like when you've got those values, you've got your purpose mapped out, but then all of a sudden now you've got this pressure? That doesn't feel good. How am I supposed to think about that?

Johanna Danaher (40:10)
Yeah, and it's a great point, right? Because high achievers will also put that pressure on ourselves, right? So we're the ones who are creating that particular cycle. This is where that boundary setting comes in. So what I do is I work with my clients to say, okay, so what does it look like when this value is being honored? What does it look like when this value is not being honored? So we have to understand that, right? So what does that feel like for you? What is an example of how that comes to life?

Then we have to sit down and say, okay, let's put some boundaries in place, right? Whether that's time, whether that's commitments, whether that's expectations with your loved ones, whether that is whatever, there's like eight or nine different types of boundaries that we would actually spend time on. They're relevant to that particular type of value. But boundary setting is really hard, especially for high achievers, right? We've always been rewarded for output.

Then to set a boundary that says I'm not going to do that or I'm going to say no, that feels like we're actually punishing ourselves. But we're actually rewarding ourselves because we're giving ourselves the time and the capacity to be able to do the things that matter most. Time is finite. Energy and the energy that we bring is something that's renewable. Energy is the capacity to do work.

Matt Feret (41:20)
Yeah.

So how can people then keep their drive? I mean, which is really what we're talking about here, right? Go, go, go, achieve, achieve, execute, execute. How can someone keep their drive yet without letting it define them in these stages?

Johanna Danaher (41:46)
If I had the answer to that...

I think I'm still figuring that one out myself, to be honest.

Matt Feret (41:51)
Because I think it's really, I mean, I would imagine it's very difficult to make that kind of transition where you're just going and it's like, no, you don't necessarily have to, you get to pick and choose a little more. You don't necessarily have to do all that.Then you might feel lazy, right? Which gets back to the busyness. Where am I going to be busy? Oh, I got to get something done. What am I doing? I got to move my, well, if I got to move the lawn, it's going to be freaking perfect. It's going to be the best lawn on the... Maybe you just never get over that.

But either way, there's that drive piece that I think is a component here that high achievers are driven people and they just feel like they have to put their energy towards someplace. You said earlier, no, you should pause during these transitions and stop. Like don't do what you were doing. Take a beat, take a moment and think about what's next because it will be different. You may be that driven, but you may not be able to apply that drive in the way that you did.

Johanna Danaher (42:53)
You may not want to. I think the other thing that comes to mind as you were talking is judgment. We judge ourselves and we put judgment on every situation that we're in. So if we could actually live a life of non-judgment, where we're not judging it as good or bad, then that actually gives us more freedom and capacity, right? So when we judge something, we're already putting criteria in place.

If we remove that and we sit back and we say I'm not going to judge whether or not I'm doing the right thing, well right by whose definition, right? So it doesn't matter whether it's the right way as long as it's your way, right? But that's hard. It's very hard. We've been taught to have judgment, we've been taught to have discernment, we've been taught to evaluate options and be incredibly decisive.

Then all of a sudden now we're in this new world, in this new chapter, and we're being encouraged to remove judgment. Because once we start judging it, we're going to put a qualifier on it. This was bad, this was good, and then that's going to lead into I'm failing or I'm succeeding. So removing judgment is also really important.

Matt Feret (43:51)
Mm-hmm.

Really tough work.

Johanna Danaher (44:19)
It is. But it's the most important work, getting to know ourselves.

Matt Feret (44:20)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's easy to be defined by careers and jobs and titles and work. Then when you don't necessarily have that voluntarily or involuntarily, that's a lot of work. It's under stress. A lot of your work has also centered around understanding kind of that energy under stress because what you're talking about is transitions through these types of changes. What happens neurologically or from a psychology standpoint when someone feels that identity threat?

Johanna Danaher (44:57)
Ooh, well, we automatically go into protection mode. So you think about any threat that comes at us from a physiological perspective, it's going to trigger our fight or flight sense and state. That's normal. It's completely natural. This threat is like the proverbial mountain lion that's going to eat us. So our bodies, our minds, our nervous system, is automatically going to go into how do I protect myself? And that protection cycle is one that runs on autopilot, right? I have to protect myself. There is a threat, something is going to harm me or I have felt pain. So then you're going to have an automatic thought which is usually a judgment, right? This is bad, I shouldn't do this. I need to do something else, I need to make sure I'm safe. So I'm going to get busy because I don't want to say no because that might make somebody angry and if somebody's angry then I've failed or I've angered them or I've disappointed them, right? Whatever the issue is, then that triggers an emotion and that emotion triggers a behavior. That behavior is then rewarded and it's like, well, see, that's happened. I did this and that, yep, that person got angry with me. I disappointed that person. I failed in this experiment.

Then it's all cycles again.

Matt Feret (46:29)
We get to these ages and stages, you know, some of us know ourselves better than others, right? Or they've spent time or they've talked to you or talked to folks like you and understanding their own stress responses and kind of look outside of them and see over their shoulder like, wait, how are you reacting to this? And some people can't. Some people are just getting, especially I think if you get laid off, you know, out of the blue, you get clipped because then it's not anticipated. You can kind of think, you know, like the Stoics, right? You can kind of pretend and go, well, what would happen if Monday morning I came in? But you really don't take it too far down the line because it's stressful to think about that. But as you're in these stages in midlife and beyond, how does understanding your own stress response sort of change how you navigate layoffs or retirement or that other R word, reinvention?

Johanna Danaher (47:22)
Yeah, yeah. Again, another great question, right? So, and I don't know if I have an easy answer for this one. It's very much about back to the emotions. It's recognizing your emotions because that's where everything stems from. It really does. And we don't necessarily always accept that or even have the word for the emotion. I actually have an emotions wheel on my laptop. It's a sticker.

So I look at that on occasion and it says, here's the, I was something I used with my daughter when she was much younger. So it's very simple, but I look, this is, I'm feeling hot, I'm sort of anxious. Well, why am I anxious? I'm anxious because there's something that I have to do and I have to do it well.

So how do I calm myself, right? Or I wake up at three o'clock in the morning and this happens all the time and I swirl like, I should have done it this way. I can't believe I said that in the meeting or man, I sent that email and it wasn't very well written and I was sort of whatever the story is.

Matt Feret (48:38)
You know how many people are nodding right now? I'm just doing it. I'm like rolling my eyes going, yep, yep, yep, we're all relating. Yeah.

Johanna Danaher (48:44)
Yeah, all of it. Yeah.

So it's like how do you interrupt that cycle, right? You have to. And that's where that inner critic comes in. And so what I say to myself, and it's something I have to practice on a regular basis, I say, would I have this conversation, and would I say what I'm saying to myself, to my daughter or to my friends, to my husband, if they brought the same challenge to me? Would I talk to myself when I talk to them like I'm talking to myself right now?

The answer is always no. I would never say what I say to myself at three o'clock in the morning to anyone I love.

That is the moment where you go, then why am I saying it to myself?Tthen you can start to rationalize about why you would say it to yourself, and then you have to catch it again. So it's this constant sort of, you know, catch that judge, catch that inner critic, and cultivate an inner coach instead.

Matt Feret (49:44)
I'll do something that I did and maybe you'll psychoanalyze this too. When I used to do that, and I don't do it anymore, thank God, but when I used to do that, I finally got to this place and I don't think I heard it anywhere, I made it up. I basically said, they're not paying you right now, stop thinking about it. And like you, I would have to repeat it, repeat it, because I'd put my head back down and it's just gone, well I'm talking about that work. No, they're not paying you right now, they pay you from eight to five. After five, that's on their dime. You're working for them for free, especially at 3 a.m. And I would just have to repeat it over and over. Now, again, psychoanalyze that and tell me that I'm deferring something else to not think about it. But that was what got me through a lot of those nights, which is they're not paying you right now, stop giving them free work.

Johanna Danaher (50:28)
Yeah, exactly.

It's exactly that. But then again, high performers will be like, well, of course they're not paying for me right now, but I could be better.

Matt Feret (50:37)
Right, that's, and that was it, right? How do I get an edge? Because I am thinking about this at 3 a.m., so 8 o'clock in the morning, my brain's already been working. Yeah, it's silly what we do sometimes on the high performance side. OK, let me...

Johanna Danaher (50:52)
One thing that comes to mind, just real quick, it's sort of this foundational principle from my coach education; what if you can't make a mistake? What if you can't ever make a mistake?

Matt Feret (50:55)
Yeah, hit it.

Wait, you mean you're not allowed to or can't as in like you can never do anything that's a mistake?

Johanna Danaher (51:11)
We only label a mistake a mistake after the outcome, when we know what the outcome is. So when we're in the moment, we're making a choice. We're making a choice based on the data set that we have in front of us, right? We only label it, that was a big mistake after the outcome. So if we can't technically make a mistake, all we're doing is we're actually learning. We're building the muscle of a growth mindset, right?

We made a choice. The outcome was different than we anticipated or that we expected. We label it a mistake, but instead we could have labeled it as, it didn't work out. This is what I've learned and this is what I'm gonna do differently. So all of a sudden, it kind of was like, I wish I had heard that like 30 years ago, right? I really wish I had heard that then.

Matt Feret (52:07)
Yeah, yeah, that would have been nice. That's not on any onboarding document I think I've ever seen at a company. I'm going to shift. I mean, we're having a great conversation, but I want to shift just a second, just a little different lens. Then I want to go back to something I said in the very beginning, which is that these are not changes from age 24 to 26 or 18 to 22. These are changes in a time of life typically where you can't just blow up your life and move to Portugal. You have parents who need you or will or could. You've got adult kids, young adult kids, but adult kids, you have financial constraints. How do you, when you're in these phases and these ages and these phases, how do you design kind of this reinvention and values-focused reinvention with those realities and that real-life responsibility?

Johanna Danaher (53:14)
Yeah, and all of those things are very true for me and my own experience and for everyone listening. So I start with identifying not only the values that we talked about, but what are your non-negotiables? So what are those constraints that exist? Let's acknowledge them. And how do we then operate within them? So for me, I do have aging parents and she lives actually five hours away and I'm the closest.

So that is a challenge in and of itself to be a distance caregiver. And so I had to really sit down and make sure that what I'm doing in my space gives me the freedom, the capacity, the ability to be with her when I need to be with her. But I can't sell it all and move to Ireland or Portugal or Spain, even though I would love to. But I'm here, I'm in Connecticut, she's in Maine. So we have to figure out how to continue to operate?

So I did define these as non-negotiables. These are the things that I have to ensure continue, right? It's my mortgage, I have to be able to pay my mortgage. So the functional needs have to be satisfied and served. And then these other responsibilities are things that have to be addressed. Now I can then figure out how.

I'm not co-located with my aging parents, right? I'm not moving to that location. I'm still living where I'm living, but I'm figuring out how to have a network in that space so it doesn't have to fall on me, but it has to be something that I have visibility and control and insight into. So you have to design that intentionally, I think is really what I'm trying to say here. Sit down, look at your values, look at the non-negotiables, look at the things that are foundational, right? And then you build from that foundation.

Matt Feret (55:06)
That doesn't happen in those micro moments. That happens with intentional thought and planning. So just get tactical and practical for a second. So if someone's listening or watching, feels unsettled right now, or is sensing a layoff coming, which you know as well as I do, you can. Some of them come from out of the blue. Or again, they're thinking of selling their business, or they've sold their business, and they're hanging out for two years to make sure the new owner doesn't screw everything up. But it's winding down and the path is there. If someone feels unsettled right now, what would a 30-day, forget the number of days, but what would a reset look like?

Johanna Danaher (55:48)
So I can give my experience and I can also talk a little bit about how I coach people through this. So the first is, for me, very much making sure I had clear insight and understanding of where I was financially. I have a daughter in college and I have an aging parent. My husband also left his career and he's also retiring at the same time that my role was eliminated. So we really had to spend some time making sure that we understood and setting up a very specific budget for our family going forward, which was going to be very different from what it was before, because we're in a very different stage, right? And we were double income and now we are not double income. So it's making sure that you really have that clarity of what does this mean for me now? What is it that I can operate within from that perspective? So sit down, do your finances, talk to a financial advisor.

If you don't have one, just make sure that you really have clarity on where you stand from a financial perspective. If you're in the US, another consideration is medical care, right? So what is your medical coverage? So you have to make sure that you're understanding what are the options available to you, right? There's Medicare and Medicaid, depending upon your eligibility criteria. So really get to understand what that looks like. So those are the fundamentals, right? Make sure that you have those things and you have that understanding because that just takes away some of the angst and the worry, right, that may come with some of these changes. And I recognize that not everyone has the same financial capacity and capability as others, right? But understanding what your finances are and building a budget that is workable for you is really important. So looking at multiple options, and that's what my husband and I did, and we laid out. We have budget option one, budget option two, and that's sort of what we operate within and we look at it quarterly.

Secondly is actually having a conversation if you are a caregiver, have a conversation with your parents, right? Understand what are their needs, right? Making sure that you have visibility into who their doctors are, right? If you haven't done this before, make sure that you do have sort of those fundamental things covered. And then the next phase is to really then start to map out, well, what do I want this next chapter to really look like? Where do I want to spend my time?

Where do I want to spend my energy? Do an energy audit, right? The energy audit is so insightful because all of a sudden you realize I've been spending so much time on things that don't bring me joy. Then start to work on boundaries.

Matt Feret (58:30)
Boundaries. That's the first 30 days, or as fast as you can get them, or how long? I mean, again, it's a saying. That's a luxury, especially if you don't, you know, if you need the income and you don't have enough to take 30 days or 60 days. But you can do that all in 30 days? And is it right to do it? Here's a question I definitely wanted to ask you and I forgot until now. Let's say you get laid off.

Do you do it in the first 30 days or do you give yourself a little decompression time? When is the right time to do this? Is it right when the change happens? Is it before? Or do you give yourself a little breathing room knowing that... I was leading you into an answer because I hope your answer is to give yourself...

Johanna Danaher (59:13)
I'm going to say yes to all of those, right? So because your brain is going to automatically go to protection mode. So in that 30 days, you're going to have to, you're automatically going to go, my gosh, I am in pain. There is something that is happening to me. I need to fix it, right? That is an automatic response and that is totally normal, totally okay.

Matt Feret (59:18)
Okay, okay.

Johanna Danaher (59:39)
We want to interrupt that by taking the pause, giving ourselves a little bit of breathing room. But we also want to keep coming back to this. This shouldn't be a once and done type of thing either. You should constantly be looking, are these new things that I'm doing still bringing me joy, still aligned with my purpose? So asking yourself this on a regular basis.

Matt Feret (59:48)
Hmm.

Johanna Danaher (1:00:01)
Not saying every Monday, but just continuously checking in with yourself. Is it bringing me joy or am I falling into a repeatable trap of overdoing?

Matt Feret (1:00:16)
Would you give the same advice to someone who is retired and had planned this and went, OK, on June 1st I'm not working anymore? Even though that's planned, it's still a change. Would you recommend someone do it still within that 30 days as well? Or would you give a different series of recommendations for the planned sort of change and transition?

Johanna Danaher (1:00:39)
I think for me it's all the same because you won't know until that Monday morning after your last day worked really how you're going to feel.

Matt Feret (1:00:54)
Mm. Fair.

Johanna Danaher (1:00:57)
You don't know. Even if it was the biggest plan and you had the party and it was planned for two years, you're still going to wake up on that Monday morning and you're going to have a series of feelings. So you're going to need to give yourself some space to process those feelings.

Matt Feret (1:01:15)
Fair enough, I understand that. Last, not the exact last question, but this has been really fun. This hour has flown. I can't believe it's been almost an hour since we've been talking. I could do this for a lot longer. You mentioned this a couple of minutes ago, but I want to ask you this one-hit question here, which is, because you said, I wish I'd heard about this 30 years ago. So you've got people in their midlife and beyond and they're high achievers and they put a lot of pressure on themselves and they've been rewarded for that over and over and over. And then they may see a layoff or a voluntary, like I'm going to quit, do something else, or I'm going to volunteer, I'm going to be on a board, or heck, I'm just going to retire. I'm going to retire better than everybody else. I'm going to scratch golf, whatever those things are. Travel the world, scratch golf. It's go, go, go, achieve, achieve, achieve, execute, execute, execute. I don't know that you're going to talk anybody out of this at age 60,  if that's the way they're going to be. But what do you wish high achievers understood earlier in their careers and even earlier in their lives from what you've seen? What do you wish they understood earlier about self-worth and success?

Johanna Danaher (1:02:33)
That's a great question. Yeah, no, it's a very hard one, right? Success has outward definitions of what success looks like. But the only one that matters is what does success look like for you? So what is successful for me and what I define as success is going to be very different from what you do, and what my daughter says, or my husband says, or my friends say.

So really getting to know your own success definition is probably really, really critical. And I wish I had done that much earlier in my life because I was always chasing what somebody else defined as success. Now, if I could go back and do it all over again, I probably wouldn't have stayed 25 years in my corporate career. I probably wouldn't even have gone into the corporate career. I would have stayed working in a bookstore on the coast of Maine.

But I didn't. I had an amazing career. I had a wonderful career. I had an incredible company that I worked for. I learned so much. I became the person I am today because of it. But if I was to be honest, it's not my definition of success. So really focus on what success means to you, not to anybody else, not anybody else's definition. That's what I wish.

Self-worth?

Well, self-worth is defined by you.

Matt Feret (1:04:06)
Yep. I'm right there with you. I'm right there with you. Maybe not a bookstore off the coast of Maine. I'm right there with you. Look, this has been awesome. Where can people learn more about what you do and about your work and how to engage with you?

Johanna Danaher (1:04:27)
The best place to find me is actually on LinkedIn. So I'm very active on LinkedIn under Johanna Danaher. I post there regularly. I engage in conversations. DM me if you want to connect. And my website, anchortoaspire.com. But definitely either one of those places is the best place to get to me.

Matt Feret (1:04:46)
Thank you, and I'll put those links on the episode page on the website as well, or come find Johanna on LinkedIn, or find me because I just sent her an invite like three hours ago and I haven't seen if you've accepted it, but I did. So anyway, we'll figure each other out and we'll find each other. Thank you for doing this. Johanna, what stands out to me is that what you're talking about isn't just kind of doing a light switch change from high achiever to you know, something else, be it retired or semi-retirement or just doing something different, nor is it about abandoning responsibility to others, your family, but also your own. You are the way you are, but there are things you can and should do during these really hard transitions and changes, during these stages.

It's also not about chasing Instagram versions of reinvention, although maybe, I don't know, whatever, go sell everything and buy a van and let us know, come on the show and let us know how it goes. But it's, I think your point is designing the next chapter or chapters intentionally with awareness of your energy and your values, and also not forgetting about your real life circumstances.

This isn't just three values and then go off to Tahiti. This is three values and yeah, mom and daughter and son. Let's make sure we're not abandoning some of those values by just doing what we want and how we need to or what we think we need to do. Transitions are inevitable, but drifting through them is optional. That's a choice. And to everybody listening or watching, thinking proactively about who you want to become is tough work and it can seem a little hokey. It's not, you've got to take the time because you've got to figure out not only what you want to achieve, but also what you don't want to put up with anymore and what you refuse to, because again, none of us are gaining time right now at that stage. It's all about what are we going to do with the time we've got left, with our health and our wealth and our wisdom, and hopefully use all those things to strengthen your wellness in every stage of life.

Johanna, thank you so much for being here. I had a great time.

Johanna Danaher (1:07:14)
Thank you so much, Matt, as well. It was wonderful to talk with you today.