SuccessDNA: The Key to a Successful Retirement Begins with You

The key to retiring successfully is having a deep understanding of who you are, what drives you, and what gives you a sense of purpose and fulfilment. Unfortunately, knowing ourselves fully is not always a priority in life. Life happens, so we seldom have the opportunity to really get to know ourselves. 

As we move into adulthood, often our choice of education and career is guided by what our parents did.  I’ve heard some say, “I went to that school because it’s my mom or dad’s alma mater” or “I went to law school because both my parents were lawyers”. Those who don’t follow in their parents’ footsteps may make decisions based on what felt right at the time, “I liked the food, so I became a chef.”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the reasoning behind these decisions, but later in life, when you’re looking for something more fulfilling, these choices may come into question. 

We ride along in life making progress, gaining experience and opportunity, but, as our life begins to unfold, deep down, we may have doubts about our chosen path. We may even envy friends who seem to be a perfect fit for what they are doing. Suddenly, we turn 60 and thoughts of retirement are upon us. What’s our next step? 

This is where SuccessDNA and the amazing SuccessFinder assessment tool come in. SuccessFinder was created by a Canadian chemist working in a lab who one day posed the question, “Why is it that when we combine two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, we always get water, but we don’t have this kind of formula for human behaviour?” 

So, he switched his research from chemistry to human behaviour and made it his mission to develop a periodic table of human behaviour. Just like the elements of the chemical periodic table, he identified and decoded human traits and distilled them into 85 different traits in eight different categories. 

Up until now, SuccessFinder has been primarily used in executive search to ensure that a company board is hiring the best C-suite executive for a particular role.  Coming out of the business world and seeing what this tool could do, I knew that this high-end assessment could potentially have extraordinary applications in the retirement field as well.  My idea was to repurpose this powerful tool and use it to help people at the planning stages of their retirement. By guiding them into a more introspective look at what drives them in several key areas of life, we have an opportunity to prepare them for a more fulfilling second act. 

The SuccessFinder tool identifies the categories of problem-solving styles, work habits, motivational factors, self-assessment, human relations, coping strategies, lifestyle priorities, and vocational incentives. While many of these areas are interesting to know about oneself, as a consultant and coach, I zero in on two main areas—lifestyle priorities and vocational incentives. That is where we find the real clue.

In my next post, we’ll take a closer look at each of these areas and why they are the key to retirement success. 

If you are curious to know more right now, send me an email at susan@successdna and I’ll share the answers.