I joined Danny van Leeuwen on the Health Hats podcast to talk about what retirement really looks like in real life, and how to keep growing without burning out. We talked about purpose, identity, energy management, caregiving, and how to build a meaningful chapter using something I call micro-stepping with mini goals. We also talked about the Five Rings of Retirement and why “retired” does not have to mean still or done.
Listen to the conversation: Retirement – Micro-stepping with Mini-goals
Show: Health Hats
Host: Danny van Leeuwen
Guest: Cyn Meyer, Founder of Second Wind Movement and creator of the Rewire My Retirement method
Published: December 29, 2019
Length: 27 minutes
Click to listen or read:
Retirement is not off. It is different
A big theme we explored is that “retired” is not always the right word anymore.
Danny describes his current life: consulting, advising, mentoring, podcasting, playing music in two different bands, staying active with MS, being a grandparent, managing his own health, and choosing projects on his own terms. He is not a boss. He is not an employee. He is busy and fulfilled. And yet people ask him Are you retired.
That word does not always match this stage of life. The traditional definition of retirement equates to all leisure, full stop. The lived experience for a lot of people looks more like selective engagement. You choose where your time goes. You protect your health. You say yes to what matters and try to say no to what drains you.
The conversation is not about stopping. It is about owning your time.
What we covered
1.) The Five Rings of Retirement
I walked through the core framework I use, which is the Five Rings of Retirement. It is a way to design a full, energizing later chapter instead of just drifting into a passive one.
- Growth
Your stimulation and challenge. Staying mentally active, learning, doing things that keep your brain working and your curiosity alive. This matters for fulfillment and for brain health. - Health
Not just physical health, but also mental and emotional health. Strength, mobility, mood, resilience, stress, capacity. For many people, protecting their health is a job in itself. - Finance
Money still exists in the picture, but its role is specific. Finance is there to fuel your life in the other rings. It is a support system, not the center of identity. - Community
Your relationships, connection, belonging. Partners, friends, collaborators, bandmates, neighbors, people you build with. Without community, isolation creeps in fast. - Giving Back
Your sense of contribution. How you share your gifts, experiences, and perspective with other people. This might look like mentoring, advocacy, creating tools and resources, storytelling, caregiving, teaching, or building something for others.
This is the part I emphasize over and over: retirement is not only finance. Most of society and most of the retirement industry talk almost entirely about the money ring. Meanwhile, the other four rings are where your identity, meaning, and daily joy actually live.
When people ignore those four, they fall into stagnation, isolation, depression, over consumption of TV, and a slow slide toward feeling invisible.
When people strengthen those four, they tend to stay sharper, more mobile, more connected, and more emotionally alive over time.
2.) The old model of retirement is outdated
We talked about how most of us were conditioned to see life as a straight line in three chunks:
- Learn when you are young
- Work and raise a family for decades
- Retire into leisure
That model is not just outdated. It is harmful.
Leisure only, with no growth, no challenge, no contribution, and no evolving identity, often leads to stagnation. You see more loneliness, higher depression, worse engagement with the world, and even cognitive decline. You also see a huge amount of time lost to passive consumption. Danny points out that older adults are averaging more than 40 hours a week of TV. That is a full time job of watching, not living.
What is showing up instead is a cyclical model.
Learning, working, rest, contribution, creativity, caregiving, health management, passion projects, income projects, community work, art, all woven throughout life in different proportions at different times. Not just front loaded or back loaded.
This newer pattern is much healthier. It keeps people mentally and socially engaged rather than collapsing into “now I sit.”
3.) Purpose is not generic. It is personal
One thing that keeps coming up inside Second Wind Movement is the word purpose. People want to know what theirs is. They also quietly fear that they do not have one.
We talked about why that happens.
Most people spend decades being driven by roles that are assigned to them. Parent. Professional. Partner. Caregiver. Provider. Leader. Fixer. Support system. There is not a lot of space in those years to ask What do I actually want.
For some people, they literally have not asked themselves that question since they were eight years old.
So when they finally enter this later stage and the external roles loosen, there is often a scary pause. They do not quite know who they are without those roles. They do not yet feel clear on what they want to build next. They are not lazy. They are unpracticed at looking inward.
That is where the work begins.
4.) Micro-stepping with mini goals
We went deep into the tactic that Danny calls out by name: micro-stepping with mini goals.
Here is how it works:
- First, you pick one of the rings that feels low energy right now.
For example, maybe your body needs attention (Health), or maybe you feel isolated and miss real connection (Community), or maybe you feel like you are just consuming and not creating (Giving Back). - Second, you define a mini goal in that ring.
A mini goal is meaningful but contained. Something like I want to get back to playing music with other people or I want to rebuild strength and balance or I want to start contributing my story so it actually helps someone. - Third, you break that mini goal into micro steps.
Micro steps are so small they are almost impossible to avoid doing. Five minutes of practice. Two push ups. One outreach message. Sixty seconds of audio recorded and posted. One short paragraph in a journal. - Fourth, you do one micro step a day. Every day.
The rule: if it is too big to finish in that day, it is not a micro step yet. Break it down again.
This is not about heroic grind. It is about consistency that gently rewires behavior.
Danny gave a few concrete examples:
- Posting just 60 seconds of audio or video a day in a podcaster community. Not a whole production. Just one minute. That kept him creative and connected. It let him keep learning in tiny, sustainable bursts.
- Building strength with MS starting at two push ups and, over time, getting to 17 push ups every other day. Not by forcing huge workouts, but by sticking to regular, repeatable movement and letting the baseline slowly climb.
- Saying yes to music in a way that was realistic. Joining bands, working on sax, showing up for horn section work, and putting in about an hour a day of practice. Not by “overhauling his life,” but by layering music in through daily repetition.
This is what I teach inside my Rewire My Retirement program. You do not wait for motivation to show up. You build momentum through tiny, repeatable proof.
Your brain’s default setting is to conserve energy and stay in the familiar. Micro stepping makes action small enough that your nervous system does not revolt. Over time, those reps create habit. Habit creates identity. Identity creates movement.
5.) Caregivers and identity loss
We also talked about a group that often gets ignored in retirement conversations: caregivers.
A lot of people in their so called retirement years are still in full time service mode. Caring for a spouse. Caring for an aging parent. Caring for an adult child with complex needs. Caring for grandchildren.
Sometimes that caregiving is so intense and so constant that the caregiver forgets there even is a self outside of that role.
I shared the story of a woman who spent more than 20 years caring for her son after he became paraplegic in college. Her entire identity became caregiver. Then her son died unexpectedly. She had no idea who she was without that role. She had planned to care for him for the rest of her life. Suddenly there was a painful vacuum.
We used the same process with her: Five Rings, mini goals, micro steps, daily action. In her case the work led to major life shifts, including selling her home and relocating to rebuild a new version of her own life.
Not everyone is in a place to make that kind of change. Caregivers are often overextended, exhausted, and out of balance. For caregivers, the question becomes: which ring is at zero right now. Which part of me is starving. Then we begin with one micro step in that ring, even if it is five minutes.
And we name something important: sometimes “Giving Back” is already at a five because you are giving everything you have. The work for caregivers is often to raise the other rings without guilt.
