Map Your Days & Build Wellbeing – Matt Bloom

Catch up to your money. It’s often ready for retirement before you are.

_________________________

What helps wellbeing endure as our lives change?

Matt Bloom has spent much of his career studying human flourishing. In this conversation, he brings his insights into retirement and combines it with lessons from his own transition from professor to writer, volunteer and what he calls a “wise elder.”

We discuss why wellbeing is built through small daily practices, how adopting a new identity can change your behavior, why many need to become more intentional about friendship after leaving work, and how volunteering and shared-interest communities can create both connection and meaning.

Matt also explains how older adults can become “guardians and shepherds” of relationships and shares Map Your Days, a simple practice that takes five minutes a night and that, in 27 years of teaching MBAs and executives, he says has never failed to teach someone something they didn’t know about their own life.

Matt Bloom joins us from Colorado.

________________________

Bio

Matt Bloom is the author of Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy. He is a writer, speaker, entrepreneur, and emeritus professor of management at the University of Notre Dame. Bloom holds advanced degrees in psychology from Cornell University (PhD) and the University of Kansas (MA), and is an award-winning teacher who earned top honors for courses he taught to undergraduates, MBA students, and corporate executives. At Notre Dame, Matt taught classes on innovation and design thinking, organizational change and leadership.

As a professor in the Mendoza College of Business, Matt studied well-being for nearly three decades where he led the WorkWell research project. Initially, he and his team of ten researchers focused on the well-being of people in the helping and healing professions: international aid workers, global health professionals, educators, clergy and ministry workers, physicians, and other healthcare professionals, among others. He later broadened his focus to include both well-being at work and in life more generally. The team also launched a first-of-its-kind mobile application to capture daily experiences from several hundred research subjects.

Prior to becoming a professor, Matt was a financial advisor at Shearson Lehman Hutton, a consultant at Arthur Young, a psychiatric orderly at The Kansas Institute, and a paramedic for the Douglas County (KS) Emergency Medical Service.

Some of Matt’s favorite wise well-being practices:

Extended backcountry hiking (5+ days). And, yes, there are no showers or bathrooms

Baking hearth bread using natural leavens, mild sourdough starters

Scuba diving on coral reefs and wrecks in the Caribbean

Catch-and-release fly fishing on small mountain streams

Poetry reading using a process he adapted from lectio divina

Reading novels. Among his favorite authors are Marilynne Robinson, Richard Ford, Richard Rosso and Abraham Verghese

_________________________

For More on Matt Bloom

Lasting Wellbeing: Science-Based Practices for Tranquility, Authenticity, Meaning, and Joy

Website

Ritual app: Download for iOS or Android, or start at ritual.io.

_________________________

More Retirement Podcast Conversations You’ll Love

How to Flourish…in Retirement – Daniel Coyle

Retiring: Creating a Life That Works for You – Teresa Amabile

The Good Life – Marc Schulz, PhD

_________________________

Wise Quotes

On the Value of Small Steps

“Our wellbeing rises and falls mostly as a result of little things that we do day by day…We live our values mostly in the little things that we do.”

On Relationships

“Quality matters more than quantity.”

On Elderhood

“We can really be the guardians and shepherds of family relationships.”

_______________________

About The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

There are many podcasts on retirement, often hosted by financial advisors with their own financial mo