Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter

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WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife

Episode: Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter 

For the past few weeks, I've been building a publishing practice.

I've been writing and publishing on my own website for a long time. In January, I began sharing my writing more consistently on LinkedIn. In March, I started the WorkLife Stories podcast. More recently, I began bringing the week's published pieces together in my weekly WorkLife Stories publication.

Now, nine months from official retirement age in Ireland, I'm beginning to think about another kind of chapter.

I'm not planning to retire. I want to continue writing, creating, learning and working — but I also want more room for life.

This episode is the prologue to a nine-month experiment exploring one question:

How do I design my next WorkLife chapter around how I want to live?

Once a month, I'll return to the story — the things I try, the rooms I walk into, the people I meet, the opportunities that emerge, the things that don't work, the things that surprise me and the questions that change along the way.

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Transcript

Speaker 0:08

For the past few weeks, I've been building a publishing practice — something I now realise is already part of Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter. I didn't set out thinking of it quite like that. I've been writing and publishing on my own website for a long time. In January, I began sharing my writing more consistently on LinkedIn. In March, I started the WorkLife Stories podcast, taking stories I'd written and giving them another form, another voice and another way of finding their way into the world. Then, more recently, something shifted. I stopped thinking only about individual pieces and began thinking about a publication. Every Sunday, WorkLife Stories brings together the pieces I've published and shared during the week. On my website, I think of it as my weekly publication. On LinkedIn, where the format is called a newsletter, that's how readers receive it. As of today, I've published four editions. It's still very new. But I've realised that what I've been doing isn't simply writing more or finding more places to share my work. I've been building a publishing practice. Welcome to WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife. I'm Carmel O' Reilly. And today's episode is Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter — Prologue: I've Been Building a Publishing Practice. For the next nine months, I'll be writing my way through a question I'm setting out to explore and discover: How do I design my next WorkLife chapter around how I want to live? This is where the story begins. Why build my own publication? Part of the answer began somewhere else. I'd started approaching publications about writing for them. I still want to do that. I want to contribute to other publications, encounter different readers and take my thinking into conversations happening beyond my own world. But approaching other publications made me think differently about my own work too. I have spent years writing. I have an extensive body of stories and ideas. I have my own website. Why not build a publication of my own alongside writing for other people? A place where I decide what gets explored. Where I can follow an idea because I'm curious about it. Where stories can unfold over time. Where the work remains mine. And perhaps, eventually, a place where somebody might encounter my writing and think: I'd like her to write something for us. I don't know whether that will happen. But I like creating the possibility. Learning by doing — and writing This is how I've learnt most things in my working life. By doing them. I'm a self-taught writer and self-publisher. When I wanted to take my stories into podcasting, I learnt by making a podcast. There are imperfections. There have been mistakes. There are things I know now that I didn't know when I began. That's part of it. I learn by doing. And I also learn through writing. I write about what I know and I also write about what I'm curious about. Writing makes me stay with a thought for longer. It makes me question what I think I know. Sometimes I begin a piece believing I'm writing about one thing and discover halfway through that I'm actually trying to understand something else. What I discover along the way often leads me towards the next story. I follow the story. There's an idea from MIT professor Patrick Winston that has stayed with me. He spoke about three things that matter enormously to our success in life: our ability to speak, our ability to write and the quality of our ideas. I've come to think about those three things in a slightly different order for myself. Writing comes first. Writing helps me develop the quality of my ideas. And now I'm beginning to wonder what happens when I take those ideas from the page and speak them aloud. Winston was also an influential advocate for the power of storytelling in communicating ideas. That's another reason his thinking has stayed with me. I’m a great admirer of his work. Nine months There's another reason I've been thinking about all of this. Nine months from today, I'll reach official retirement age in Ireland. Even writing that sentence feels slightly strange. I don't usually write about my age. I don't particularly think about people through the lens of age and I'm naturally quite private about my personal life. But this feels worth writing about. Because I'm not planning to retire. I want to continue working. I want to continue writing, creating and learning. I want School of WorkLife and WorkLife Stories to continue developing. I want to explore writing for other publications. I'd like to speak about my work. Guest teaching appeals to me. So does the possibility of working with students and educational institutions — particularly because learning by doing sits at the heart of my own approach to learning. And I'd like to spend more time in the world of books and literature. Literary festivals, book events and conversations with people who love stories appeal to me. Learning through literature — fiction and non-fiction — has long been part of how I explore working life, character and the choices we make. There are also things I haven't thought of yet. What I do know is that I don't want the next chapter of my working life to look exactly like this one. I want more room for life. What do I want that life to contain? Travel. Walking. Writing. Learning. Interesting conversations. People. Places. Experiences. Work that matters to me. And importantly, paid work that makes that life possible. Earlier this year, I went to Portugal for what was going to be my first exploration of combining working and travelling. It was brief. I discovered I wasn't quite ready for it yet. But I was there long enough to experience an evening in Porto that has stayed with me. I walked up to one of the high points overlooking the Douro and discovered hundreds of people gathering as the sun went down. People brought food and drinks. Live music was playing. People sat together and watched the changing light over the river and the city. The photograph accompanying this episode is from that evening in Porto, watching the sun set over the Douro. It was such a simple thing. And such a lovely way to spend an evening. I want more experiences like that in the years ahead. When I return, I want to walk from Porto towards Santiago de Compostela. Walking has always helped me think and process things. I suspect I'll write along the way too. I want work to remain part of that life. I just don't want work to take up quite so much of it. A different question Perhaps that's why I've started asking myself a different question. Not: When am I going to retire? But: How do I design my next WorkLife chapter around how I want to live? And inside that question are many others. How do I build a portfolio of paid work that allows me to earn enough while working less? How do  I take my writing into more places? How do I become better connected after spending so much of my working life working independently? How do I learn to enjoy networking — or at least discover a way of doing it that feels like me? How do I create opportunities to speak my ideas as well as write them? How do I work with other people without giving up the independence I value? How do  I ask for help with the things I can't do alone? And what else might become possible that I can't see yet? I don't have the answers. That's rather the point. The next nine months So I'm going to treat the next nine months as an experiment. Once a month, I'll come back here and write about what is happening. The things I try. The rooms I walk into. The people I meet. The opportunities that emerge. The things that don't work. The things that surprise me. And the questions that change along the way. I'm not setting myself a grand target for what my life must look like nine months from now. I want to discover it by living it. Because I've realised something about the work I've been writing for other people for all these years. I don't write about self-coaching because I have all the answers. I write about it because these are questions I have had to work through too. The characters in my WorkLife Stories are always navigating something. A decision. A change. An uncertainty. A possibility. Perhaps, for the next nine months, I'll occasionally be one of those characters. There will be nine chapters. Then an epilogue. And after that? I don't know. That's what I'm setting out to explore and discover. CLOSING That's today's WorkLife Story — Nine Months to My Next WorkLife Chapter  — a School of WorkLife Story. This is the beginning of a nine-month experiment in exploring a question: How do I design my next WorkLife chapter around how I want to live? Once a month, I'll return to the story and share what I'm discovering along the way. All the details and links are in the show notes, or you can find everything at www.schoolofworklife.com. Subscribe to the podcast for weekly audio stories, or visit The Storytelling Newsletter for the written versions. Or both. Remember: You don't have to know what your next chapter will look like. You can discover it by living it.