The Pause That Refreshes

Thinking About Tomorrow: Reinventing Yourself at Midlife
by Susan Crandell

(Page 7 of 11)

At forty-five, Kirk Kvetko jumped ship from a twenty-three-year career at FedEx to climb South America's highest peak. Four years later, he's back at work, and his wife, Colleen, has called her own time-out from a high-flying banking career.

Kirk and Colleen's Lesson: Saying sayonara to an excellent job can be the smartest career move of all. A sabbatical is a nourishing recess period when you take time to develop a clear picture of what kind of work you want to do.

AT FIFTY, COLLEEN Kvetko turned her back on a supersuccessful thirty-four-year career (yes, she'd been working in banking since she was sixteen), quit her job, and accepted a retirement package without the slightest intention of retiring. "I'm taking some time to reinvent myself, asking myself these questions: What skills do I have? Do I want to go back into banking or do I want to put my energy somewhere else?" she says, clearly enjoying the fact that no holds are barred, the sky's the limit.

Her husband, Kirk, wasn't a bit surprised when Colleen announced her decision one evening when they were taking a walk near their Naples, Florida, home. Five years earlier, he had retired from a two-decade career at FedEx.

So are they spending golden afternoons together, sipping iced tea on their lanai? Not a chance. Kirk is back at work, running operations for a company that sells financial services to seniors. And he says of Colleen, "She's got more hustle. She won't last as long as I did. I give her six months." But neither of them would trade their sabbaticals for anything.

"I have to have passion for what I do," Colleen says. "I hit fifty, and I said to myself, Let's step back and rethink it. I'm in that muddy water right now."

Listening to the calm and humor in her voice, it's hard to imagine the tortured six months that preceded her decision. Hers was not an easy job to leave. President of the Fifth Third Bank for thirteen years, she'd been named the fifth most powerful woman in banking by US Banker magazine. "My bank agreed to buy another bank last summer, and I knew my role would change," Colleen says. "I promised myself if I didn't love coming to work every day, I was out of there." But following through on that promise was tough. "I'd wake up in the middle of the night. I did more crying in that six months than in our entire twenty-seven years of marriage." She was haunted by the thought of abandoning the two hundred people who worked for her. "I was on the fence: Give up that big salary, that title, that position, the career I had since I was sixteen? Was I letting down all the women in the bank world to whom I was a role model?"

Sign up for a fund-raiser walk. Name a cause, and there's a walk to raise money. The distances are doable even for the workout-challenged. Just Google the cause of your choice.

Those considerations were all too familiar to Kirk. "The day it hit me, I was at a national sales event in Nashville, where I was to give a presentation to thousands of FedEx employees." He had been passed over for a promotion, but, more than that, he was weary from twenty-three years of being on call day and night. "I went up to my room, had a cigar on the balcony, and thought, I'm not enjoying this. It's time to check out." He delegated his presentation to a colleague and caught a flight home. That night he wrote his letter of resignation.

"FedEx is a fabulous company, but twenty-three years there is like forty years somewhere else. I did everything - ran call centers, business service centers, the drop box network. It's a 24/7 business. Many nights I slept in the office," he says. "I wanted to enter triathlons, bike across America, climb a mountain."

During their early years together, Kirk and Colleen had a single financial goal: to get to the point where either one of them could say, "I quit." "When Kirk and I got married," Colleen recalls, "we decided that no matter what, we would live on one paycheck and bank the other." Through those lean years, Colleen moonlighted at a card store at night, and Kirk mowed lawns. Month after month, paycheck by paycheck, their savings mounted. "I drove a Corvair with a rotten floorboard," Kirk recalls. "We bought handyman-special houses and fixed them up. We sold the first one for a sixty-thousand-dollar profit, I'll never forget that."

When Kirk walked away from his job, he didn't have to worry about making ends meet, even if he never worked again. "Money isn't everything," he says, "but it certainly dictates what you can do." Without his job, he wasn't bored for a minute. He threw himself into running the house. "I told Colleen, 'You just work, I'll take care of everything else.' My brother-in-law bought me a shirt that said CABANA BOY." He paid the bills, ironed Colleen's blouses, sent out birthday cards.

Kirk had a few other things on his to-do list, most notably climbing Aconcagua, the highest mountain in South America, with a reputation for brutally changeable weather. "We lost our cook, a very experienced climber in his early twenties, who got hypoxia and literally walked off the mountain," Kirk says. There were nineteen people in the party; only three made it to the 22,841-foot summit. Kirk turned back just twelve hundred feet below, amid seventy-mile-an-hour wind gusts and a snowstorm blowing in. "I could see the flag; that's how close I was. It's a lonely feeling, after all that training, but you have to do the smart thing." The real victory was the $330,000 the group raised for two charities.

Last year, when Kirk was offered the job he now holds, he approached the decision employing a new methodology born of lessons he'd learned on his sabbatical. "If I went back, I was going to do it on my terms." He asked to shadow the CEO who was courting him. For nine weeks he traveled with him, attending meetings and meeting the staff before accepting the job. "I bought all the air tickets, the hotel rooms; I didn't want any obligation." Then Kirk put off the start date for two months while he and Colleen took a Mediterranean cruise and he went fly fishing in Montana. Back in the office, he now works smart, not hard. "I have raised productivity way past the goals we set, but I check out every day by four."

The day Colleen retired, Kirk advised her to reclaim her life. In her banking days, Colleen was out at business dinners every night. "The new rule should be, if someone calls and you don't want to do it, you don't," he says.

"The next six months are going to be one part planning, one part serendipity," Colleen adds. "I'm very goal-oriented; I like to feel productive. But that might be adding value to my body, by working out with a trainer every day." She's also overseeing the design of a smaller house, so they can simply lock the door and head off on trips. Over the next few months, Colleen plans a visit to her family in Ohio and a niece in LA, girlfriend trips to Yosemite and a South Carolina spa, an Alaska cruise and an African safari with Kirk.

She hasn't lost any time getting a new career on track; even before she left the bank, she was studying for a real estate license. "That way, I'll have something to jump into right away if I start getting bored," she says. "I know the community, the mortgage market, the legal side." Her friends are horrified, seeing this as a road right back to fourteen-hour workdays. "They know how I am," she laughs. "But I'm going to try to avoid that this time." She may sell houses, or become a mortgage broker. Or then again, she may not. At this point, she's preparing for everything, committing to nothing. "When the time comes, I'll know what the right thing is.

"I'm a risk taker in pretty much everything I do," she says. "When I'm on the golf course, and I've got a 160-yard second shot over a big lagoon, I'm not going to lay up, I'm going to go for it." She's eager to see how the next chapter of her life turns out. However the plot line proceeds, it will include a very powerful marriage. "I'm so lucky," Colleen says. "We're best friends and we have so much fun together. Twenty-seven years later, I'm still as much in love with Kirk as the day I married him."

Colleen drives an aqua Thunderbird convertible, and she's just changed the license to GO plus her initials, slightly disappointed that her first choice, GO GIRL, was taken. When she was working at the bank, she couldn't put the top down. "I was always driving to an appointment so my hair couldn't be messed up." Now, she reports, the top has not been up since she called time out. At last, Colleen can feel the wind in her hair.

Copyright © 2007 by Susan Crandell

About the Author

I got my first job after college not because I was the smartest applicant - I wasn't - but because I was the only one with a pilot's license. I'll be grateful forever to Bob Parke for hiring me at Flying magazine because that's where I met the love of my life, Stephan Wilkinson (the author of two wonderful books, The Gold-Plated Porsche and Man and Machine). Thirty years later, Steve and I are still working together, both freelance writers with offices in our little Hudson Valley farmhouse. Our daughter Brook, who's an editor at Conde Nast Traveler, is the only one with a real job.