Tom Pollack
COACHING
What comes next?
THERE ARE TIMES IN LIFE WHEN WHAT HAS WORKED FOR US NO LONGER FEELS QUITE RIGHT
Sometimes the change is obvious. We leave a career, retire, end a relationship, move to a new place, or find ourselves facing circumstances we didn't choose.
At other times the change happens more quietly. A life that has been successful and rewarding begins to feel less engaging. The things that once motivated us don't have quite the same pull.
My work is about those moments.
I coach people navigating significant transitions and people who want to become more intentional about how they live the next part of their lives.
For many, the question is especially compelling as they begin to step away from a long and absorbing career: What do I want the next part of my life to be?
WHEN A CAREER ENDS, SOMETHING LARGER IS OFTEN CHANGING
For decades, work may have provided much more than income. It may have given us structure, challenge, community, recognition, purpose and a large part of our identity.
Even when we are ready to leave, we can underestimate what it means to have all of that change at once.
The question is rarely just: What am I going to do with my time?
It is more often: What will make this next stage of my life feel engaged, meaningful and alive?
For one person, the answer may include another form of work. For another it may involve family, friendship, travel, learning, creativity, contribution, community or spiritual life.
Usually the answer isn't something we simply figure out in our heads. We discover it by paying attention to what matters now, becoming curious about possibilities, and trying things.
I think of this less as retirement than as creating a bridge from one significant part of life to another.
THIS HAS BEEN A CENTRAL PART OF MY WORK FOR MANY YEARS
Much of my work over the past two decades has involved people navigating the transition from one important stage of life to another.
Today, I am one of the facilitators of The Bonus Round, a program offered at Modern Elder Academy's campuses in Santa Fe and Baja for people moving away from significant careers and exploring what they want to come next.
For several years, I facilitated a program for retiring partners at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), helping people who had spent decades in demanding professional careers begin building a bridge to the next stage of their lives.
And for 19 years, I facilitated the Hudson Institute of Coaching's LifeForward program, working with people who wanted to step outside the momentum of everyday life, consider what mattered most, and make thoughtful choices about what came next.
My interest in this transition work is also personal. After a long career as a lawyer, I left the practice of law and created a very different second professional life for myself.
Those experiences have left me with a deep interest in a deceptively simple question:
How do we make the years ahead not merely full, but genuinely meaningful?
TRANSITION CAN BE AN INVITATION
Most of us spend years building a life around responsibilities, relationships, ambitions and expectations. Some of those choices continue to serve us. Others may not.
A transition gives us an unusual opportunity to stop and ask:
What matters to me now?
What do I want more of?
What am I ready to leave behind?
What continues to give me energy and curiosity?
Who am I when some of the roles that have defined me begin to change?
And what would it mean to create the next part of my life deliberately rather than simply allowing it to happen?
These are not questions that necessarily have quick answers.
My role as a coach is not to provide those answers. It is to help create the space, structure and conversation in which you can discover your own.
Tell me,
What is it that you want to do with your one wild and precious life?
~Mary Oliver
ABOUT TOM
I came to coaching after a long first career as a lawyer and a partner in a Los Angeles law firm.
In 2001, I completed the Hudson Institute of Coaching's certification program and began a second professional life centered on something that had interested me for many years: how people grow, change, and make choices about the lives they want to lead.
Hudson has been an important part of my professional life for approximately 25 years. I facilitated its LifeForward program for 19 years and have taught and facilitated in Hudson's coaching program for the past 15 years.
I have also supervised professional coaches for approximately 12 years.
My own experience of leaving one substantial career and creating another has shaped my understanding of transition. Moving away from a familiar identity can contain both freedom and uncertainty. It can also create the opportunity to ask questions we may not have had time—or reason—to ask before.
