The Golden Window — Issue #11
Your financial plan tracks your money to the dollar. It says nothing about the resource that's actually running out.
ONE STORY, ONE SIGNAL, ONE TOOL, ONE QUESTION - EVERY WEEK
Issue 11 - The Golden Window
For most of your career, money was the constraint. You made decisions around it. You measured yourself by it. But at the senior stage, something shifts, and almost no one tells you when it happens.
The scarce resource stops being money. It becomes time. Not time in the abstract, the someday-I’ll-retire kind. Healthy time. The specific, finite span of years where you still have the energy, mobility, and clarity to embrace a next chapter, instead of just paying for one.
I call that span the Golden Window. It is open right now. It will not stay open forever. And “one more year” spends it down, regardless of whether you realize it.
This is the last of five articles in this series. We started with what people regret when they wait too long, then the costs that never show up on a balance sheet. We looked at why the people most able to leave are the ones who don’t, and at what one more year actually costs when you stack the years. This issue is where those add up to a number. Not money. Time.
A Coaching Story
💬 A de-identified composite scenario based on my coaching experiences. This story does not reflect the experience of any particular individual or organization in any way.
She was a chief medical officer in her early 60s, with eight years at the top of an organization she was proud of. The compensation was extraordinary. Her financial planner had told her, in plain language, that she could retire any time she wanted.
She did not come to coaching to talk about money. She came because she felt stuck and could not explain why, given that by every measure on paper, she had won.
I asked her to rate her experience in the role from one to 10. She said it was a 10, easily.
Then I asked her to rate her enthusiasm for it. She sat with that one. “A three,” she said. “Maybe.”
High experience, low enthusiasm. People call that burnout, but it isn’t. It is a chapter that has reached its logical conclusion, yet it continues. On and on and on.
So, I asked my client the question her financial planner never had. Not “what would leaving cost you?” Instead, I asked: “What is this role costing you, in the years you can still do something with?”
She told me about volunteer health care work she had wanted to pursue for a decade. Hands-on, demanding work — the kind that needs working knees and real stamina. Every year, she had filed it under “later.”
Yet, “later” kept moving further out on the calendar. And the version of her that could actually embrace that dream had a shelf life — one she had never once put on a spreadsheet.
She was not being reckless by wanting this dream. She had been reckless by assuming the window to embrace it would stay open for her.
The Changing World of Work
📊 A key data point and my insights about what it means to the changing world of work around us.
Americans now live an average of 12.4 years in poor health at the end of life, the largest gap between lifespan and healthspan of any of 183 countries studied. That figure has grown from 10.9 years since 2000. (JAMA Network Open, Global Healthspan-Lifespan Gaps Among 183 WHO Member States, 2024)
Read that as a planning fact, not a health scare. Your lifespan and your healthspan are two different numbers, and they are drifting further apart. The years at the very end are increasingly years that people can fund but not fully use.
That means the window for doing — not just affording — a next chapter is narrower than your retirement projections assume. Your financial plan draws on your projected lifespan. Your real choices are influenced by your healthspan. The gap between those two lines is exactly the cost no one is modeling.
The executive with the extraordinary package had planned beautifully — but for the wrong number.
This Week’s Resource
⚙️ A framework, tool, tip, AI prompt or skill that you can save and put to use immediately.
The Meaning Plan
You have a financial plan. Most senior professionals have had one for years. Almost no one has its companion.
I call it a Meaning Plan. A financial plan answers, “can I afford the next chapter?”
A Meaning Plan answers “what is the next chapter for?” It governs the financial plan, not the other way around. The money is the fuel. This is the destination.
Three questions to start one this week:
1. What would I do with the window if money were already handled? My client’s planner had given her permission to leave. She still needed permission to want something different. What would you do in her circumstances?
2. Who carries this work forward after me? At the senior stage, your value shifts from being the person who does the work to being the person who develops the people who will do the work. My client named two potential successors before she changed anything else. That single move turned “leaving” from a loss into a handoff.
3. What is one small prototype I could run in the next month? Not a leap. A test. My client ran one conversation with someone already doing the work she was drawn to. One conversation told her more than a year of deliberating had.
Your very next action: pick one of the three questions. Answer it on paper this week.
The Meaning Plan is where you start. The Golden Window course is where you finish the thought: a five-day walk-through that puts a real number on what staying is actually costing you in healthy years, not only dollars, then hands you the step-by-step for what comes next.
A Powerful Coaching Question
🤔 This week’s high-value coaching question for you to consider in whatever way you like to reflect.
Here is the question I would put to you if you were sitting across from me:
You know almost exactly what one more year in your role will pay you. Do you know how much it will spend, in the years you can still use fully?
Inspiration for the Week
“The soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else’s.”
— David Whyte, The Heart Aroused (1994)
The window does not close all at once. It narrows quietly, a year at a time, while you are busy being responsible. The good news is that the window responds to attention. See it, and you can start spending it on purpose.
You are no longer drifting. You are designing.
Before You Go
If the Golden Window named something you have been putting off, hit reply and tell me what it is. I read every response, and they shape what I write next.
The Golden Window course is open.
If this issue named something real, the course is the full version of it: the diagnostic that scores where you stand, and the plan for the chapter ahead. It’s open now at the founding price of $197. It goes to $297 after July 23.
Until next week,
So helpful, so necessary!