In this second installment of our four-part retirement series, Karen Kindred, a retired private practitioner with over forty years of experience in individual and couples therapy, explores how personality shapes the transition into retirement. We chat about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), walking through the four preference pairs—extroversion/introversion, sensing/intuition, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving—and why self-knowledge matters so much at this stage of life.
We spend some time on the judging/perceiving preference, since it has the biggest impact on how someone adapts to the loss of a structured work routine: those who lean judging need to build in schedules and plans to replace the ones retirement takes away, while those who lean perceiving must guard against drifting into an unstructured vacuum.
No personality type is right or wrong, and the healthiest, happiest retirement comes from learning to flex between preferences rather than being locked into just one.