Getting and Staying Healthy as a Success Factor of Redirection

Lexy Martin

7 days ago

7 min read

When I began my Redirecting research, I identified Getting and Staying Healthy as one of the success factors that supported career and life redirection.

After 92 published Pivot Stories, health shows up in many different ways. Sometimes it's a driver of the redirection. Sometimes it gives people the energy and resilience to make one. Sometimes better health is one of the benefits people reclaim after leaving an unsustainable situation. And sometimes people must adapt their redirection around health limitations that aren’t going away.

For me, it appears often as something people attend to at the pivot inflection point and during their transition to their next stage.

The larger lesson I'm seeing now is: Getting and staying healthy helps preserve our capacity to choose, change, contribute, and participate fully in our lives. That makes it a foundation for redirecting.

For me, staying healthy is part of staying able to choose, contribute, and participate fully in life.

What I Thought Earlier

When I first wrote about Health as a success factor, I saw several recurring patterns.

Burnout, chronic stress, illness, and health scares sometimes prompted people to rethink career and life direction - thus a driver. Exercise, sleep, nutrition, therapy, mindfulness, and time outdoors helped others navigate uncertainty - helpful in transition. Caregiving also affected career choices.

I saw differences by age and gender. Women often talked more about holistic well-being, burnout, and caregiving. Men more often described fitness, stamina, and stress management. And health seemed increasingly important with age.

Those observations still hold value. But with 92 stories, I now think the more important learnings lie deeper.

Health Has More Than One Role in a Redirection

The stories show Health operating in at least five ways.

It can be a driver. Mercedes Sullivan took leave specifically to prioritize her mental health after realizing, “I was losing myself.” Joe Sprangel described years of relentless work and unpredictable crises that “took a toll on his health.” Liz Jurcik heard from her medical team and people close to her that she would drive herself into the ground if something didn’t change.

Health can also be a constraint. Jacqueline Kuhn’s ability to leave full-time work was affected by access to health insurance until Medicare became available. 65 is definitely a magic age. Naomi Bloom has continued to build a remarkably engaged life while living with fibromyalgia, spinal stenosis, pain, and mobility limitations.

It can be an enabler. David Fineman, contemplating another significant career move later in life, identified “energy, health, and desire” as part of being ready to take on something new.

It can become an outcome of redirection. Randy Saari redesigned retirement around being “fit, adventurous, healthy,” hiking regularly and losing substantial weight. Christy Marble made health and fitness a priority during her pause from executive work as did Gretchen Alarcon.

And perhaps most important, Health becomes an ongoing practice. It becomes something that must continue if the new career or life pivot is going to remain sustainable. But I question if people do keep up health commitments made at their pivot.

From Health to Capacity

One of the strongest new themes is capacity.

Heidi Spirgi, in her story, asked a deceptively simple question: “What is your energy capacity, and what does it take to refuel?” That may get closer to the heart of Health as a Redirecting Foundation than simply asking whether someone exercises.

Redirecting requires capacity. It takes energy to explore, learn, build relationships, tolerate uncertainty, try something new, fail at something, and try again. And our capacity isn’t infinite.

Meg Bear deliberately took a sabbatical before her next executive role, not because she was burned out, she emphasized, but because she wanted to enter the next chapter with full energy and drive. Suzie Genevieve went even further. Before making major decisions about what came next, she devoted an entire month to health and reset, including exercise, acupuncture, and medical check-ins.

These aren’t stories about fixing a crisis. They’re stories about protecting capacity.

Health and Wholeness

Individual health behaviors: exercise, nutrition, sleep, therapy, mindfulness matter. But several stories suggest that healthy living may be more of an optimized whole-life pattern.

Katherine Jones combines Pilates with piano, puzzles, courses, cooking, play, and intellectual stimulation. Steve Blechman’s retirement includes the gym, long walks, music, reading, crosswords, learning, relationships, and travel. Serena Huang combines exercise, therapy, scheduling, reflection, and attention to her own well-being. Scott Burton deliberately rebuilt his life around nature, meditation, fitness, relationships, and meaningful contribution.

None of these people is relying on one magic health practice. They’re constructing lives in which physical activity, mental stimulation, relationships, reflection, enjoyment, and control of time reinforce one another.

I recognize this in my own life. Exercise is essential to me, but it doesn’t stand alone.

Research and writing exercise my mind. Gardening, golf, Pilates, walking, relationships, travel, meditation, and continuing to learn all contribute to my ability to remain engaged.

Health is partly about the wholeness of the life we construct. That also helps explain why Health so often intersects with the other Redirecting Foundations rather than operating by itself.

Healthy Doesn’t Mean Free of Health Problems

“Get healthy” might inadvertently imply that successful redirection requires good health or that illness represents failure. The stories tell us something different.

Naomi Bloom may be the clearest example. She's had to change expectations and adapt to significant physical limitations while continuing to travel, contribute, learn, maintain relationships, and live independently. Her experience suggests that the goal is not necessarily to eliminate health limitations. It’s to protect, improve, or adapt to our health in ways that preserve as much agency as possible.

Bob Johansen offers another version of that idea. He deliberately redesigned how he works so he could continue contributing as a futurist without the physical demands of constant travel. At the same time, he maintains cycling and weight training because he sees a direct relationship between physical health and mental agility.

Health supports agency. When health changes, successful redirection may mean adapting the way we contribute rather than stopping.

Getting Healthy Isn’t Enough. We Have to Stay Healthy.

This is where the next stage of my research needs to go.

Several people paid significant attention to health while resetting. Gretchen Alarcon, for example, maintained early-morning workouts during an involuntary career pause because they kept her grounded. She has since returned to a demanding leadership role. Did she maintain that routine? I don’t know, and that question matters.

A successful redirection can create the conditions that cause us to abandon the practices that helped us get there. The new job gets intense. The business grows. Travel returns. Calendars fill. Exercise goes first, sleep gets shortened, reflection disappears, and relationships get squeezed.

The same thing can happen to another Redirecting Foundation: Relationships. We know we need a strong network during a transition, but that network also needs to be maintained after we land somewhere new and actually, continuously.

I think Health works the same way. It isn’t transition scaffolding that we dismantle once the new structure is standing. It must remain part of the structure.

What the Stories Can and Can’t Tell Me

My research methodology was open-ended. I began with hypotheses about what I believed contributed to successful redirection, but I asked each person four broad questions rather than asking directly about each hypothesis. I was looking to see if the hypothesized factors emerged naturally from their stories.

That approach means the stories are better at showing how a success factor operates than at telling how prevalent it is. Absence from a story doesn't necessarily mean absence from a person’s life.

I know this firsthand. Al Adamsen is deeply committed to volleyball and other sports. Melissa Arronte is dedicated to strength, resiliency, and optimal health; she and I are participating in Project 50-to-80. Jess Von Bank is extremely dedicated to exercise and participates in demanding events such as Ragnar races. None of that surfaced in their Pivot Stories. Meg Bear and Amy Wilson have subsequently made significant commitments to their health while entering new professional chapters.

My coding therefore distinguishes “Not Evident in the Story” from “not important to the person.” That distinction will matter in the next phase of this research.

What the Stories Say So Far

In this first coding pass, 35 stories contained Strong Health evidence and another 21 contained Moderate evidence. Twenty-one had Health as a secondary element, merely mentioned. Health was not evident in only 15 of the published stories. Even that last group cannot be assumed not to value Health. Getting and Staying Healthy may have been an established part of their lives that never became part of the story.

More important than the counts is what the stories are teaching me. Health isn’t simply exercise. It’s physical, mental, and emotional. It includes sleep, stress, therapy, movement, medical care, mindfulness, rest, recovery, boundaries, energy, and sometimes simply creating a life that doesn’t deplete us.

It also intersects with the other Redirecting Foundations. Stewardship of Time gives us the time to exercise, sleep, recover, reflect, and care for ourselves. Financial Considerations matter because healthcare access, financial runway, and freedom from immediate income pressure can affect the choices available to us. Relationships provide support through illness, caregiving, transition, and recovery. Purpose and Continuous Learning can help keep us mentally and emotionally engaged.

The Foundations are beginning to look less like eight separate ingredients and more like an interacting system. I’ll come back to that.

For now, I’m comfortable putting a stake in the ground: Getting and Staying Healthy is a success factor for redirecting. Not because healthy people are guaranteed successful pivots, not because illness prevents one, and not because everyone needs to become an athlete. Health matters because it affects our capacity and our choices.

This Is a Point in Time

The 92 published stories at the time of writing this have taken me far enough to strengthen the hypothesis, but they’ve also given me a new question to investigate: What happens to our health practices after we redirect?

Did people who exercised, meditated, protected their sleep, went to therapy, spent time outdoors, or otherwise cared for their health continue those practices once the new job, business, or life became demanding? For people whose health practices never surfaced in their Pivot Story, were those practices quietly supporting their ability to redirect all along?

I’d like to go back to some of the people whose stories are part of this research with a short follow-up questionnaire. I want to understand what they were doing for their health before, during, and after their redirection; what changed once the next chapter became demanding; and what, looking back, they wish they'd protected more intentionally.

So this is not the last word on Health as a Redirecting Foundation. It’s where the research stands after 92 published stories.

If you’re one of the people I’ve interviewed and I reach out, I hope you’ll help me with the next round.