What 45 Years in Healthcare Taught Me About Change. And Why None of It Prepared Me for This.

I led organizations through mergers. Restructurings. System overhauls. Culture change. I knew how to manage all of it. I had the frameworks, the communication plans, the stakeholder maps.

Then I retired. And none of those tools worked.

Here is what I learned the hard way. Retirement is not an organizational change. It is a personal transition. And that is an entirely different thing.

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What 45 Years in Healthcare Taught Me

I spent 45 years in healthcare leadership. I guided major EMR implementations. Financial system overhauls. Restructurings that touched hundreds of people. I stood at the front of the room and said, "I know this is hard. Here is how we get through it."

I believed it. I still do. Change management, when done well, is one of the most valuable skills a leader can develop. You learn to communicate a clear vision. You spot resistance early. You build the plan and track the milestones. You keep your eye on the destination while you carry people toward it.

For 45 years, that worked. I was good at it. So when I retired, I assumed those same skills would carry me through.

They did not.

The Difference Between Change and Transition

Here is what the research says. And what I eventually understood from the inside.

William Bridges spent decades studying why change efforts fail. His core insight sounds simple. It cuts deep. Change and transition are not the same thing.

Change is the external event. A new system. A restructuring. A retirement date on the calendar. Change is situational. It can be planned and announced. It can happen fast.

Transition is the internal process you go through as you come to terms with the change. Transition is slow. No project plan can manage it. It does not start with a new beginning. It starts with an ending. The letting go of what was. Then it moves through what Bridges called the neutral zone. That uncomfortable in-between before anything new takes shape.

The change-management world says the same thing in its own language. Prosci, which has studied this for 30 years, defines change management as the work of supporting people through the personal transitions that change creates. The plan is not the point. The people moving through it are.

Change is situational. Transition is psychological. And for the first time in 45 years, I was the one who had to do the inner work.

Why Change Leaders Get Tripped Up in Their Own Transitions

Here is the irony I did not see coming.

The skills that made me good at leading change worked against me in my own transition.

A change leader is trained to focus on the destination. Keep your eye on the future state. Build momentum. Shorten the time people sit in uncertainty. Good instincts for a system rollout. Bad instincts for the neutral zone of your own retirement.

The Center for Creative Leadership makes this point plainly. Leaders who have mastered the structural side of change, the vision, and the reorganizing and the restructuring, often struggle most with the human side. They are so practiced at moving past it. CCL cites a striking figure. Seventy-five percent of change initiatives fail. Not because the plan was wrong. Because the human side of the change went unsupported.

In my own retirement, I kept trying to manage my way through. I made lists. I set goals. I went looking for the project plan to rebuild my life.

There was no project plan.

That was the hardest lesson I have ever had to learn.

The Three Stages of Transition, From the Inside

Bridges describes three stages. Every real transition moves through them. It does not matter whether you are a front-line employee in a restructuring or a retired executive sitting in your kitchen, wondering what to do on a Tuesday.

The first stage is the ending. Before you begin anything new, you let go of what was. For me, that meant grieving my career. My title. My daily structure. The version of myself built from 45 years of purposeful work. I did not expect to grieve those things. I thought I was ready to leave them. I was not as ready as I thought.

The second stage is the neutral zone. Bridges called this the hardest and most important phase. The old life is gone. The new one has not formed. From the outside, it looks like nothing is happening. Inside, it is where the real work happens. The identity rebuilding. The sorting of what actually matters when no one is measuring you.

The third stage is the new beginning. Not a restart of what was. Something new. It cannot be rushed. It cannot be engineered. It grows out of the work you did in the stages before it.

What the Retirement Research Confirms

I am not the only one who learned this. The research on retirement points the same direction.

A 2025 study in the Journal of Prevention and Health Promotion examined the lived experiences of retired adults and developed what the authors call the Retirement Adjustment Framework. They found three core components of a good retirement. Identity rebuilding. Social connection. Independence. None of those are tasks you check off a list. They are internal. And the authors note that the retirement transition itself may be the best moment to do that work. It is when the biggest shifts in identity, relationships, and daily life all happen at once.

Another qualitative study, published in 2023, asked what actually helps and what gets in the way of a good retirement. Money mattered. But it was one barrier among several, not the whole story. The things that helped people most were social support, personal character, and staying socially engaged. The things that hurt were poor health, weak support, and the one I recognized in myself. No plan. A retirement crisis.

Financial security is necessary. It is not sufficient. The inner work is the part no advisor can do for you.

What Transfers, and What You Let Go Of

I do not want to leave you thinking 45 years of change leadership taught me nothing useful for my own retirement. Some of it carried over.

Knowing that transitions have stages has steadied me. When I understood I was in the neutral zone, I knew I was not stuck. Not failing. In process.

Knowing the messy middle is temporary helped too. Every change effort has a stretch where things look worse before they look better. I had seen enough of those to trust it.

And naming what is ending mattered. In organizational change, helping people honor what they are losing is one of the most important things a leader does. I had to do that for myself. Name what I was leaving. Sit with it. Then let it go.

What I had to let go of was the belief that I could manage my way through this the way I managed everything else.

Retirement is not a project. There is no stakeholder map. The only person who can do the inner work is you.

The Most Important Change You Will Ever Lead Is Your Own

Everything I learned in 45 years about how people move through change is true. And none of it fully prepared me to be the one going through it. No role to play. No plan to follow.

If you have spent your career leading others through difficult change, hear this. What you are about to navigate is different. Maybe not harder. Different. Understanding change at a professional level will not spare you the inner work. It just gives you a vocabulary for what you are feeling.

Use it. Then be willing to go further than the vocabulary takes you.

The frameworks that worked at work won’t carry you through retirement. But the right guide will.

My book, The Hidden Side of Retirement, is written specifically for people who knew how to lead others through change — and discovered that leading themselves through retirement was something different entirely.

Available now on Amazon. → here

Resources

The research and sources behind this post:

1. Bridges, W. The Bridges Transition Model. William Bridges Associates. The model distinguishes change (the external event) from transition (the internal psychological process), and describes its three stages: endings, the neutral zone, and new beginnings. In use by leaders and consultants for more than 30 years. https://wmbridges.com/about/what-is-transition/

2. Center for Creative Leadership. How to Transition Through Change. Notes that many leaders master the structural side of change while underestimating the human side, and cites the figure that 75% of change initiatives fail when the human dynamic of transition is not addressed. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/adapting-to-change-its-about-the-transition/

3. Creasey, T. Change vs. Change Management. Prosci. Defines change management as the structured approach to supporting individuals through the personal transitions that organizational change creates. https://www.prosci.com/blog/change-vs-change-management

4. Fadeeva, A., Simmons, J., Thomas, L. B., Baker, K., & Ling, F. C. M. (2025). Retirement Adjustment (R-Adj) Framework: Understanding the Interplay Between Individual and Contextual Factors. Journal of Prevention and Health Promotion, 6(2), 335–361. Identifies identity rebuilding, social interaction, and independence as the core components of retirement adjustment, and the retirement transition as the optimal window for that work. https://doi.org/10.1177/26320770241279737

5. Alavi, Z., Abolfathi Momtaz, Y., & Alipour, F. (2023). Facilitators and barriers for successful retirement: a qualitative study. Pan African Medical Journal, 44(111). Found facilitators of successful retirement to include social support systems, personal characteristics, and social participation; barriers included worsened health, lack of a plan and retirement crisis, socioeconomic problems, and inadequate support. https://doi.org/10.11604/pamj.2023.44.111.35608