Have you put any more thought into your retirement as a result of the last few blogs? Hopefully you have, and hopefully your thoughts are positive ones. At least thinking about it is a step in the right direction. Nowadays, people are living on average, another 30 years after they retire. What a long time to create another phase of your life, or on the other hand an awful long time to just sit and waste, and what a waste that would be!
The ‘Old’ model of retirement, was where you finished your working life and that was it! You had lived your life and now you just kept the engine ticking over as long as you could. No more testing the engine to see how fast it could go, or how efficient it could be, or what its’ limits were or new found strengths. You just settled into a different kind of routine. Thankfully, “The ‘new retirement’ is not an ending, it’s a new beginning, the start of a life journey of vastly expanded proportion” (Richard P. Johnson, PhD).
A retirement research programme was carried out in Australia, the Retire 200 (100 men and 100 women) programme, to identify what it was that caused some retirees to be happy and others less so. Eight areas were found to be extremely significant, and one of them was receiving pre-retirement advice or education. This enabled people to be better prepared for the change, they showed lower levels of depression and a much more positive attitude to their life. The transition from a full-time working life was less stressful as there was a certain security in knowing that a lot of forward thinking had gone into the change. There was less apprehension around losing the familiar, and although change is not always easy, the pre-retirement planning smoothed the way.
Coaching for retirement, enables you to be pro-active and more involved in the whole process of retirement. It gives you the ability to look ahead and consider retirement as just another phase in your life. You are better able to determine what it is you want from life once you retire, and what you definitely don’t want to take forward with you! It enables you to critically look at your life to date, to evaluate the different parts and to decide what is truly important to you. By doing this, you may also come across old goals and dreams that never came to be due to life commitments, and now as retirement is approaching could become a major part of life ahead.
To be continued...............
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