Career Change to Coaching: How Lori Candela Found Her Niche by Getting Closer to What Mattered

Most people plan the financial side of retirement. Very few plan the rest.

That gap is exactly where Lori Candela does her best work. In this episode of She Coaches Coaches, Candy sits down with Lori Candela, certified professional retirement coach and founder of Retiring on Purpose. 

Lori brings more than 30 years of experience in coaching, leadership development, and career transition. Her own path to retirement coaching - a career change to coaching that took 15 years of intentional planning - is a model for any professional thinking about what's next.

How Lori Made Her Career Change to Coaching

Lori spent years as an instructional designer, helping corporations design learning strategies to guide teams through organizational change. She was good at it. And eventually she started asking herself the question that changes everything: which parts of this work do I actually love?

The answer was coaching and facilitation. Not the design work itself - what she loved was the human part. The transition. The moment when someone found their footing in a new way of being.

She started planning. She worked with a career counselor. She enrolled in coach training. She got certified as a professional coach and then - after someone in a workshop asked if she'd considered retirement coaching - she found her real home.

That pivot is worth sitting with for any coach still finding their niche. Lori didn't coach anyone on anything. She got one degree closer to the thing she cared about most. From helping leaders help their teams through transition, she cut out the middle step and just helped people through transition directly.

That's what build a coaching business your way actually looks like. You follow what you love until you find the thing only you can do.

If you're still searching for that, start with the free course: https://candymotzek.lpages.co/vfo/

The Non-Financial Side of Retirement Nobody Plans For

When most people think about retirement planning, they think about money. The savings rate. The pension. The portfolio.

Lori works on everything else.

She calls it the messy middle. When someone retires, they lose more than a paycheck. They lose their title, their structure, their daily peer group, and in many cases their identity. Everything they've used to answer "who are you?" for decades suddenly changes.

And that catches people off guard. Even people who planned carefully and looked forward to retiring.

Why do I feel sad? Why am I angry? Why don't I want to get out from under the covers to figure this out?

Lori says those feelings are normal - and expected - in any major life transition. What helps is knowing they're coming. The recognition that this is what transition feels like, not something going wrong, is often enough to help people move through it with more grace.

This is the coaching business mindset work that applies far beyond retirement. Any time we end something significant, there's grief in the ending. The beginning doesn't arrive the moment we close the door.

Values Work - Why High Achievers Are Often Doing It for the First Time

One thing that comes up in almost every retirement coaching conversation is values.

Lori finds that surprising. She's so used to values work that she forgets most people haven't done it. And for high-achieving professionals who have spent decades driven by achievement, status, and income, the values that drove them up the ladder are often not the values that will sustain them in what comes next.

Lori's approach is three-part. First: what are your values? Second: how will you live aligned with them? Third: how will you know that you're doing it?

That third question is where most values conversations stop short. Lori doesn't stop there.

For coaches, this framework is directly transferable to client work. It's not enough to identify values. You need the evidence that tells you you're living them.

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The Burnout Connection - Why Starting Early Changes Everything

Candy raises a question in this conversation that Lori hadn't framed quite this way before: what if retirement coaching could prevent burnout entirely?

Lori's answer is yes - in many cases, it could.

Burnout in high-achieving careers often comes from two places. The first is dissatisfaction - you're good at the work but you stopped loving it. The second is the golden handcuffs problem. You're well-compensated, you feel stuck, and you have no picture of what you're working toward.

When you have a vision for the next chapter - even a rough one - the hard days in the current one feel different. You're not just enduring. You're building toward something.

Lori started building toward her own next chapter 15 years before she made the transition. She knew what she wanted. She knew what she needed to get there. And she got there - without burning out along the way.

Her advice to anyone still in a career they're ready to leave: begin now. Start asking what you want the next chapter to look like. You get to write this one.

Ready to build a coaching practice that feels like yours? Book a free 30-minute call with Candy: https://stepintosuccessnow.com/

The Retirement Journey Roadmap - What the Process Looks Like

Lori's signature coaching tool is the Retirement Journey Roadmap. It takes clients through an exploratory phase - new identity, new purpose, new meaning - and consolidates all of that self-reflection into one place with concrete goals and small actionable next steps attached.

Lori's free Retirement Clarity Assessment is the starting point. It gives personalized feedback and is available at retiringonpurpose.com. She also offers a free 30-minute clarity call for anyone who wants to talk through their own journey.

Key Takeaways

• Retirement is a major life transition - not just a finish line. The non-financial side is where most people get caught off guard.
• The messy middle is real. Grief, confusion, and loss of identity are normal parts of any significant ending - and knowing they're coming helps.
• Values shift over a career. Most high achievers haven't reviewed theirs since they were climbing the ladder. Start there.
• The best time to plan your next chapter is 10 to 15 years before the transition - not after.
• A career change to coaching, like Lori's, often starts with one question: which parts of my current work do I actually love?

Conclusion

Lori Candela spent 15 years working toward her next chapter before she actually stepped into it. She knew what she wanted, built the skills to get there, and made the transition with clarity and intention.

That's not luck. That's planning.

About Lori Candela:

Lori Candela is a certified professional retirement coach and founder of Retiring on Purpose. With more than 30 years of experience in coaching, leadership development, and career transition, she helps successful professionals prepare for the non-financial side of retirement and create a meaningful, fulfilling next chapter with greater clarity, purpose, and intention.

Web: https://www.retiringonpurpose.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lori-candela/

Free Gift: https://www.retiringonpurpose.com/ (Retirement Clarity Assessment - personalized feedback to help you understand where you are in your retirement journey)