Jane Moffett Of KANGAROO Coaching: 5 Things Retirees Say They Wish They Were Told Before They Began Retirement
To experiment with trying new things, but not to rush into doing too many things and just ‘filling’ your time.
As a part of my series about the “5 Things Retirees Say They Wish They Were Told Before They Began Retirement” I had the pleasure of interviewing Jane Moffett Of KANGAROO Coaching.
As an executive coach and trainer, Jane Moffett has thirty years of working with women at key points of change in their lives when the personal and professional intersect. She writes and publishes regularly in this area and provides services to Henley Business School, leading the assessing team for all the coaching programmes. Jane runs group coaching courses for women who are at the life-stage of stopping work, and her recent book What Next? The savvy woman’s guide to redefining retirement is published in September 2025
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
As a trained musician, I explored a couple of different career paths including teaching and working for a music agency, but it wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I found the right fit for me when I started working for a large UK charity supporting new mothers with their transition to motherhood. At the age of 50, wanting to increase my skillset and work in a different environment, I studied for an MSc in Coaching and Behaviour Change at Henley Business School, which was closely followed by founding KANGAROO Coaching a couple of years later. My love of research was ignited during the MSc, and I now write a series for ‘BACP Workplace’ where I focus on issues or challenges that employees might experience out of work, how these may affect them in work, and what managers and colleagues can do to better support them.
About 3 years ago I was celebrating my birthday with 2 of my closest girlfriends, and our conversation turned to discussing our futures — in particular, our futures without work. One of them expressed her concern about what she would do and how she would spend her time when she was no longer working; so much of her identity, sense of purpose and of value was tied up in her work, that she couldn’t imagine her future without it. This idea of standing on the edge of an abyss with no clear view of the way ahead stayed with me, and I wanted to find out more, and talk to more women. Realising that the first big cohort of professional women in the UK are at the life-stage of retiring, it dawned on me that we have no blueprint for our future — things are different for us from the way they were for previous generations of women. In my book What Next? The savvy woman’s guide to redefining retirement I have combined my love of research with my conviction that having a better understanding of yourself opens up more choices. My aim is that by the end of the book, the reader will have designed their own unique map of their future.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
There’s no one story that stands out, but there are a few that come to mind, and the thing that links them all is being open to having conversations — wherever you are. In this way, I have struck up conversations with people on trains, at big events, at concerts, etc. who have become influential in my life, and who I have gone on to work with, and to become friends with.
Can you share a story with us about the most humorous mistake you made when you were first starting? What lesson or take-away did you learn from that?
It all stemmed from being too honest (and not politically savvy enough). I was working for a very small company in a job that I didn’t enjoy, when my boss took me out for lunch and asked how I was enjoying the job. Instead of spinning a story about how much I was getting from my work, how I wanted to develop, etc. I said that the job was fine, but I didn’t want to do it long-term. When, a couple of months later, I made an administrative error that impacted one of our clients, he reminded me of our conversation — particularly of the fact that I had indicated that I wanted to move on at some point. Although implicit, his meaning was clear!
What I learnt from this is that it can pay to think of ways of answering questions that are your truth, but that also don’t damage your career prospects.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There’s not one particular person — but a whole host. What links them all, though, is that they have seen something in me that I might have not seen myself, and have offered me opportunities — which I have always taken.
What advice would you suggest to your colleagues in your industry to thrive and avoid burnout?
As a coach you are always partnering with your client to work on whatever it is that they bring to coaching, so taking time to focus on yourself by having supervision and by having coaching yourself, can help bring perspective and greater personal realisations. It’s also important to work out what your own personal balance is in terms of time spent working and time spent on leisure, and to make sure that enough of your working time is filled with work that you enjoy.
What advice would you give to other leaders about how to create a fantastic work culture?
To have a clear sense of who you are and what you stand for, and to communicate this well. To create trust with those that you work with, to be supportive and flexible, to respect the different strengths that people have, and to show people that they are valued.
Retirement is a dramatic ‘life course transition’ that can impact nearly every aspect of one’s life. Obviously everyone’s experience is different. But In your experience, what are the 5 most common things that people wish someone told them before they retired?
From what I have read, from the people that I have spoken to, and from the people who have done my online group coaching courses, these 5 important themes have emerged:
1. That retirement is a process and can take a long time.
2. That it’s different for everyone, and no one size fits all.
3. The importance of seeking out new friends and networks to add to your existing ones.
4. If you have a partner, the importance of having a frank conversation with them about what your hopes are for the future, and what their hopes are.
5. To experiment with trying new things, but not to rush into doing too many things and just ‘filling’ your time.
It has been really interesting for me to see how much people who have done my online group coaching courses have benefitted from being in a group of others going through the same experience at the same time. By sharing their stories and being honest about what they are finding difficult, they realise that they’re not alone in not enjoying every aspect about retirement.
Let’s zoom in on this a bit. If you had to advise your loved ones about the 3 most important financial issues to keep in mind before they retire, what would you say? Can you give an example or share a story?
My book focuses on the more holistic side to retiring, rather than the financial side, but I have recently read Andrew J Scott’s latest book The Longevity Imperative. Building a Better Society for Healthier, Longer Lives. This fascinating book discusses various aspects of creating an ‘evergreen’ society, and the three take-aways for me about finances are:
1.Work out what you want to do at different stages of your retirement and plan accordingly.
2.Consider continue working in some form for longer so that you carry on being productive, and so that you have fewer years in which you need to draw on your pension savings.
3.Invest in your health and fitness and in improving your skills and knowledge in order to increase your ‘human capital’.
If you had to advise your loved ones about the 3 most important health issues to keep in mind before they retire, what would you say? Can you give an example or share a story?
There is so much that you can read about what you should be doing to keep healthy as you grow older, but what I would advise is:
1.Find something you enjoy doing that helps your fitness, and build a routine that works for you and is achievable — you can always increase the amount you do once you have more time.
2.Put things in place so that you avoid being lonely, as research shows that loneliness is bad for both physical and mental health. In fact, loneliness can increase risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia, and is as influential in reducing life expectancy as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
3.It’s important to enjoy food, but make sure that you’re aware of what you’re eating, and the impact it could be having on your body and your health.
If you had to advise your loved ones about the 3 most important things to consider before choosing a place to live after they retire, what would you say? Can you give an example or share a story?
I hear from so many people about the importance of community — being part of one, contributing to one, supporting one. So, I would say that making sure you are living in a community that you feel you belong to, or moving to a place where you could be part of a new community is key.
Friendships matter, so think about whether or not you have friends where you live, as these will become even more important to you when you retire and are not seeing people at work. If you are considering moving to a new place, will it be somewhere where you can easily meet new people? Someone I spoke to decided to move when she and her husband retired, and everyone said that she would miss her friends. What actually happened is that she made a whole new cohort of friends, so now she has both her old ones and her new ones.
Research shows that it is important to be with people of different ages. This focus on the positives of intergenerational living can include seeing family, being part of community projects that include older and younger people, taking part in activities that all people of all ages take part in. I was talking to a friend recently who goes to language classes that are in the evening; one of the things he most enjoys about it is that the class is made of people of all different ages.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
It would be some kind of forum where everyone could share their experiences in a way that that was listened to and valued, so that we could come to a point of deeper understanding of and respect for others.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story?
At different times of my life there have been different books that have made a big impact on me. One of them is The Birth of a Mother. How Motherhood Changes You Forever by Daniel Stern and Nadia Bruschweiler Stern, which explains the different stages that women go through when they become a mother, and underlines how much of a significant psychological transition becoming a mother is. Another one is Dear Life which someone gave to me when one of my closest friends died. Beautifully written by Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor, it interweaves her own journey with grief with stories from her work, and was helpful when I was also grieving. More recently, The 100 Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Linda Gratton and Andrew Scott has had a big impact on me with its focus on investing throughout our lives in ‘intangible assets’ which will help us as we get older.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
My favourite life lesson quote is ‘carpe diem’ (seize the day). Never having had a clear career plan has meant that I have been open to opportunities, and believe in making the most of what is happening to me right now. This concept was reinforced just this summer when my husband and I were on holiday in Sweden and struck up a conversation with someone in a bar who told us of how some of his friends say ‘we’ll do this next year, or in 5 years…’. Having recently been bereaved, he believes you need to do things now; as he said “Don’t wait — the show is now!”. I love this new iteration of Carpe Diem.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
On LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jane-moffett-11295826
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Jane Moffett Of KANGAROO Coaching: 5 Things Retirees Say They Wish They Were Told Before They Began… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.