Let’s Help Prepare you for YOUR Retirement:
No two retirements look the same - yours won't either. Below, you'll find a selection of articles written to help you put words to something you might not have realised needed articulating. Sometimes the hardest part isn't finding the answer; it's not knowing there was a question worth asking in the first place.
If you'd like a feel for how I think about retirement - or a sense of what working together might actually be like before you commit to a call - start with the blog. It's the closest thing to sitting in on a conversation with me.
Who am I part 2
The first version of this article “Who am I?” posed the question:
“This is one of the interesting challenges of retirement: how to define your role in the world: what exactly do you do? Who are you now?
Before you retired perhaps you had a business card with your name, details; and underneath were written some key words that described your role in the workforce. In retirement would you want to have a card that designated you as “retired”?
If that is your answer then read no further.
On the other hand, you could ponder three questions in retirement:
1. What is your potential: what are you good at, passionate about?
2. What is your goal: what are the desired outcomes to match this potential?
3. Implementation: how will you reach your stated goal?
It gets better. Do all this once, then repeat, experiment, have fun.
Retirement: you won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Choice
So what do you want to do when you retire? What activities, projects, inactivities, work, passions will you throw yourself into? The choice is yours; but your list may be long, which could be a problem.
Psychologists have generated a vast literature on choice. A surprising piece of that work is the concept of “choice overload”. I hear you say what can that be; surely having more options to choose from is better than fewer, after all aren’t we good at deliberating and choosing?
Well, I have read about an experiment in which shoppers in a shop are offered 6 jams to choose from. Then at a later date, they get offered 24 jams. 24 is bigger than 6, that is good for choice right? However whereas shoppers readily purchased when 6 jams were on offer, hardly anyone purchased with 24 on offer. Choice overload.
In other words, excessive choice, whilst initially appealing, may end up demotivating the purchaser.
What is the answer to this dilemma when applied to those choices in retirement mentioned in the first paragraph? Limit the number of your choices. Experiment with your choices; and if you fail with one then try another.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Weekends and stress
Weekends are easy to define: they come at the end of the week. However, there is a big difference between the end of a working week and the end of a week in retirement.
As a worker, the weekend was your lifeboat to sanity, a chance to do whatever it was that you wanted to do, or had to do - but had no time for during the week - as well as a chance to de-stress. As a retired person the weekend is just another two consecutive days.
Then again it isn’t. As a retired person, the weekend is what you used to celebrate in the past and that workers celebrate in the present. Those workers will be all around you and you will be aware of this.
Perhaps that is all that a weekend needs to mean to a retired person. It is what others celebrate around you. Meantime, you can set your own routine: one that doesn’t need to consider that any day of the week is special.
I have seen a church in Italy that has a painting of a skeleton above which is written. “I once was what you are and what I am you also will be”. Sounds like a description of a weekend in retirement.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
The shame of loneliness
If you feel lonely, and I mean chronically lonely, you probably want to reach out and connect to more people, and yet the quality and quantity of those connections will be a highly personal consideration. For example, how many people would you feel comfortable sharing your deepest feelings with is a question only you can answer.
Many adjectives pair with their opposite: good and bad, beautiful and ugly. But I can’t think of a natural opposite to “lonely”. That said, companionship and sociability may be useful cures for loneliness. Companionship could mean anything from a life partner to a friend to talk with at a café.
So let’s develop the idea of a cure for loneliness. I am not aware of any pill you can take. Moreover, the simple prescription to get out of the house and find friends, companions, activities may work for some, but not for others.
But in some cases there may be something deeper going on; and it’s called shame. Think of the child who enthusiastically wants to share an experience with a parent but, for whatever reason, the parent rejects the request saying “I am busy, go away”. This experience may cause shame with thoughts of the kind: I am not worthy of my parent’s attention.
By extension it may be that loneliness – in some cases – is based in negative feelings of not being good enough for other people and hence fear that they will reject you.
These are feelings that are worthy of further reflection and consideration; in order to generate a cure for a particular and personal case of loneliness.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Boredom
When children get bored it often causes them to ask their parents to solve their little problem, which in turn makes parents impatient. “Find something to do!”, may be the cry of the exasperated parent. This raises two questions: 1) what is boredom and 2) what is to be done about it?
To begin, I have yet to find a good definition of boredom. But it does seem to possess two dimensions 1) the environment 2) personal motivation. Here are examples:
1) A bored schoolchild in a classroom where an uninteresting subject is being taught on a hot day.
2) An adult who can’t get motivated to start certain attractive activities.
There must be a complicated link at play between the environment and the desires of the individual. Either you are trapped in the eggshell of boredom or you crack through it and escape.
In retirement the issue of boredom can arise; and in small doses it should not create problems. In case it persists longer-term, you may want to consider your environment and your motivation, that is to say your meaning or purpose now that you have stopped working.
Possible remedies are 1) make small variations in your daily routine to see what interesting and unexpected outcomes might emerge 2) reflect on your life, in order to recall aspirations from the past that you may want to revive.
Boredom is no enemy, it may be the spark of creativity that motivates you to find purpose and meaning.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
A conversation between two friends
Jim is about to retire, but Mike retired 3 years ago.
Mike: So what will you do with yourself when you retire Jim?
Jim: Relax, travel a bit, play golf and relax.
Mike: Interesting, but say a year on?
Jim: Let’s see. Now you have been retired for what around 3 years, don’t you miss work?
Mike: I did at first. Actually the transition from work to retirement was stressful and difficult, in a way that I didn’t expect. My job gave me a clear purpose. Also, I missed the friendships. But now I’ve made new friends and I see them all the time.
Jim: How did you do that?
Mike: I realised early on in retirement that I really wanted to do voluntary work, there’s plenty around, and you meet new people and test yourself in new situations. It’s not like work at all. And you make friends there.
Jim: Do you do that five days a week?
Mike: Oh no. I’m also studying Japanese. Seriously. It’s an open-ended commitment. I can do it at any time of the day for as long as I am motivated. Then when I go to Japan next month I will have a much better chance to understand their culture than when you and I went on that work trip ten years ago. Do you remember?
Jim: Yes I remember that, it all seemed pretty strange. But I think I will miss the pressure of work, it really motivates me.
Mike: I make my own pressure. No boss tells me what to do. Except for the voluntary work which I can turn off when I want to, I am my own boss.
Jim: How did you work through all these issues?
Mike: I got help. From a retirement coach. He is not a financial planner but he listens. He helped me to find my meaning and purpose since I stopped work. I can give you his details.
More on executive and retirement coaching
I wrote some time ago about executive and retirement coaching, making the point that while the first is commonplace within corporations, the second is still finding its way. In other words, companies have yet to see the value in providing retirement coaching to their soon-to-retire employees.
In making a case for retirement coaching I pointed out that, when implemented, it sends a signal to younger staff that the company values its employees at all phases and times. That is a key benefit as I see it. What obstacles stand in the way of its implementation?
It may come down to this: retirement coaching is still a cottage industry and therefore not at the same scale as a corporation of reasonable size. This is not the case with executive coaching which has developed over the years and is typically well-placed to meet the needs of its corporate customers.
But the important point to make is this: when you help someone in their 60s to search for their personal meaning, in my opinion, a certain congruence of coach and client is important. And it is from a cottage industry that you can hope to find that compatibility. That is a coach who is a good match in terms of experience and stage of life to the retiring client whom they help. Moreover, given that coaches often work in networks, that compatibility should not be difficult to locate.
Finally, just as the retired person’s search for meaning involves experimentation, so a corporation’s search for good retirement coaching outcomes will involve a degree of searching and experimenting. Let’s start.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Emotions
People ask the question: what is retirement coaching?
Let me begin by mentioning two things that retirement coaching is NOT: it does not cover issues of financial planning nor mental health. There are many specialist practitioners in these two areas.
However, between those two practices, there is the emotional makeup of a retired/soon-to-retire individual. Why is this important? To answer this, I like to think of how emotions (happy, sad, angry, bored, frustrated, restless etc.) connect to two other aspects of who we are.
The first aspect is behaviour. How often have you seen a person lash out and behave badly because they are expressing an emotion such as anger or frustration? So it is not hard to believe that a retired person who hasn’t settled into a contented emotional pattern may start to impact those around in a negative way. This can’t be good in the longer term.
The second aspect is understanding. A retirement coach tries to help the retired person come to understand the world of postwork and the client’s place in it. So, for example, what kind of balance should the client strike between activity and leisure. Yes, emotions enter into this equation. There is no universal answer to this; each person will find a balance, and in this it’s useful to get some help.
Yes a retirement coach will charge for the service but why not think of this as an investment (amortised over time) in your emotional future; no different from gym membership and probably a lot cheaper, as six sessions will suffice!
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Risk
Conventional wisdom has it that risk aversion rises with age. This statement seems both empirically and theoretically reasonable, but let’s investigate further.
First I think of financial risk. There in retirement, where there is no prospect to gain income and top up a retirement account balance, it may be quite reasonable to become intolerant to investment risk.
Second, wounds and scratches take longer to heal in older age. How sad. However, that may sensibly discourage older people from skateboarding and rollerblading. Not only that; but as reflexes slow, along with our reaction time to the unexpected, there is again more reason for caution. Besides falling on your backside becomes less elegant the older we get. It’s that status thing.
The moral of this piece is that as we move into retirement we need to be aware of, and I say avoid, what I call acronymically SAHS or Stay at Home Syndrome.
In other words, even though there are reasons to become risk averse as we age, this is a trap to avoid. I say that we need to keep experimenting in retirement in order to secure our personal meaning. To experiment requires that we take risks, measured perhaps, but still risks.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.