Tammy Martins is a senior executive, strategist, and writer with more than two decades of experience helping individuals and organizations navigate meaningful transitions with clarity and purpose. Her career spans healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing, where she has led large-scale transformation, strategy execution, and leadership initiatives focused on human-centered change.
Tammy is a Certified Lean Leader through John Black & Associates, a Six Sigma Black Belt through Maple Leaf Foods, and a Six Sigma Green Belt through General Electric. She was also one of Saskatchewan´s first Kaizen Fellows, completing a two-year, learn-by-doing program that shaped her experiment-driven, systems-oriented approach to change. Across her career, she has applied Lean thinking, design principles, and strategic planning to help organizations move from current state to future state with intention and discipline.
Her professional work designing resilient systems eventually prompted a deeper personal question: if these tools help organizations navigate complexity, why are they so rarely applied to major life transitions? That question became the foundation for Designing Your Second Act. Through years of research, interviews, reflection, and storytelling, Tammy discovered that the same principles used to build resilient organizations can also be applied to build fulfilling lives beyond traditional definitions of success.
In addition to her executive leadership, Tammy is the founder of Next Chapter Life Design --
You've built a career you're proud of. But lately, a question keeps coming up: what comes next?
Maybe retirement is a few years away, and you're not sure how you'll spend your days. Maybe you're ready to step back but not stop. Or maybe you're wondering who you'll be without the title that has defined you for decades.
Most retirement books focus on the money. Designing Your Second Act looks at everything else too. It treats life beyond full-time work as a stage to design, shaped by purpose, well-being, identity, contribution, creativity, and freedom.
Tammy Martins spent more than two decades helping organizations through major change as a Certified Lean Leader, Six Sigma Black Belt, and Kaizen Fellow. In this book, she applies those same tools to one of life's biggest transitions. Drawing on research, design thinking, and real stories from people navigating their own second acts, she offers a clear way to move from uncertainty to a plan you can act on.
Inside, you'll find practical tools already tested in coaching and workshops:
- The Life Design Purpose Wheel, to see where you stand across six areas of life
- The Foundations Readiness Check, to assess your readiness across health, wealth and purpose
- The IDEA Cycle, to try out possible paths through small, low-risk experiments before you commit
- The Life Design Playbook, a one-page plan for your next chapter
Whether you want to fully retire, ease out gradually, or start something completely new, this book will help you design a second act that fits who you are, with confidence instead of guesswork.
Foreword
Author's Note
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Introduction
Chapter 1. Reimagining Retirement: A Second Act Mindset
Chapter 2. Designing Your Second Act: From Dreams to Possibilities
Chapter 3. Building Your Foundations and Introducing the IDEA Cycle
Chapter 4. The Ground You Stand On
Chapter 5. Designing Your Second Act
Chapter 6. Living Your Second Act
Chapter 7. Thriving in Your Second Act
Chapter 8. Legacy, Impact and the Ripple Effect
Chapter 9. The Organizational Challenge: Designing Better Endings at Work
Chapter 10. The Ripple Effect: When Design Becomes Visible
Chapter 11. The Power of Choosing What´s Next Conclusion
Conclusion
Epilogue: Beyond the Exit: Designing What Comes Next
Reader Reflection and Discussion Guide
Appendix A. Life Design Purpose Wheel™
Appendix B. The IDEA Cycle™ Worksheet
Appendix C. Foundations Readiness Check
Appendix D. The Life Design Playbook™
Appendix E. Finding Your Life Design Sweet Spot™
Appendix F. Resources for Further Reading
Through clear tools, reflective exercises, and real examples readers learn how to imagine, prototype, and implement a second act that fits their values, personality, strengths, and aspirations. At its core the book operationalizes life design using the same disciplined, iterative thinking that drives successful organizational transformation.
Learning and growth take place throughout our lives. That is the way to make sure that each of us fulfills our unique purpose! Retirement isn't the end; it's just another stage in which we can make the most of our talents in our precious time. Thanks, Tammy, for writing this fabulous guide to help people build a bridge to their best future!
— Karyn Ross, leadership coach and founder, Love and Kindness Project Foundation
