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.
A new podcast episode of About You
LISTEN: In this podcast Michael talks about learning, over time, how to structure and balance working from home with working out of home. He also discusses looking after ageing parents, gratitude and managing stress.
Ambition and retirement
Three simple questions about retirement:
I pose these three questions, in order to answer them.
1. Is there a formula for a happy retirement? I don’t think there is.
2. Is there a science behind retirement? Yes, to some extent.
3. Is there an art to retiring well? Yes there is.
Retirement coaches are there to help clients figure out the art and science of retirement.
Then the obvious question to ask is: who might benefit from being coached into retirement? To answer this I will divide retired humanity into three very broad groups:
1. Those happy people who, in their working lives, favoured balance over ambition. They will probably coast into retirement without the help of a coach.
2. People who were ambitious at work but view retirement as the ultimate period of de-stressing. They will probably work out their own way to de-stress.
3. This third group consists of people who were not only ambitious in their working lives, but now want to find outlets for their ambition in retired life.
I believe that it’s the third group who can benefit most from the art and science of retirement coaching.
Why is it so? It’s for the reason that typically they will fear that in retirement they will no longer be useful and productive. Moreover they fear that a long period of life without clear goals could lead to profound unhappiness.
If you are in this third group, the good news is this. In retirement you won’t need to target job promotion or increased pay as a goal for your ambition.
Instead you can work with your retirement coach to construct highly personal goals and activities for your retired life.
Please contact me if you wish to discuss this further.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
After the honeymoon....
The honeymoon of retirement
Suppose you have already retired. Let’s say you are between 65 and 70 in age, and that your first 1-2 years of retirement have been a dream. You have de-stressed, travelled and even watched daytime TV.
But now the honeymoon is over and you have decided it’s time to get on with a seriously active retired life; in the remaining years of good health allotted to you. Maybe you want to learn a language or help in some charitable endeavour.
There is a missing ingredient for YOU:
How to start?
First thing, it’s time to recharge those batteries. Whoops, what if you discover that your batteries have gone flat. Roadside assistance can’t help. Maybe you should have thought about that earlier.
Why? It’s because to activate a process requires energy. Activation energy is even needed when you get up in the morning. It’s the ingredient that starts a reaction, breaking apart the current state of affairs and transforming it into something new. This happens in a chemical reaction or the lighting of a fire.
In other words, to move into your new phase of life will demand energy. To move from a relaxed, de-stressed life to something pacier and more intense will not happen by will-power alone.
Where will you get that energy? It’s there, but to activate it will require effort and endurance. From YOU.
That is the answer to how to start.
If you want to discuss this further, details are on the website 64plus.com.au
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
About You...a new episode
In this podcast we discuss
why retirement is a transition that benefits from planning
where retirement coaching fits in
taking retirement seriously
Multiple retirements
There is more than one way to retire. You can choose it, it can be forced upon you by illness or redundancy, or you can play with it. It’s the playing with retirement that I want to analyse in this article.
I hear talk, amongst my clients and more generally, about the idea of a trial retirement. People ask me if I think it is a good idea. The answer is yes and no; it depends. First let me try a definition. I think a trial retirement can happen to you for a number of reasons:
-Putting your toe in the water to test whether retirement “feels” good for you;
-Heeding the siren call of the employer who still needs you;
-Retiring more than once in order to rehearse it and get it “just right”;
Leaving aside financial considerations, there are many ways in which the three multiple retirements could be good or bad for YOU. Let’s unpack them in order to understand some of the emotions and feelings at play.
1) Toe in the water
So you think that the water of retirement may be too cold. You say to yourself: “I will stop working for now, but we will see….” This is the retirement that isn’t really a retirement. What about thinking of retirement as something permanent, as follows?
Isn’t it a good idea to think of retirement as a way to “turn Monday into Sunday”? In other words, retirement gives you the chance, at last, to wake up on Monday and do nothing, because of the absence of the gravitational attraction of work.
Some people feel guilty doing nothing on a Monday. That is an emotion you could try to dispel. Or maybe that is one reason for the toe in the water: you don’t feel that you merit so much freedom. That is something to think deeply about.
2) The siren call
This is the case where you really want to quit work forever but someone else has a different opinion. Your boss flatters you by telling you that you can’t be replaced.
Of course you were brilliant at your job, but are you irreplaceable? Apparently Charles de Gaulle said that cemeteries are full of indispensable people. Mmmmm. This is a component of the first “M” of 64PLUS’ 4M process: Missing (what do you miss from work). Is it possible that you are simply missing being at work and that you are masking this with feelings of irreplaceability? Part of the process of retirement is to stop that missing feeling.
As a practical matter, I would also suggest that open-ended commitments where the boss has the power to call you back when he/she wants, while great for the boss, may not be ideal for you. That reminds me of a former phase of my life in the world of stock options: the buyer of the option typically has more control than the seller. Control can be a very good thing for YOU to have in your retired life.
3) Getting it “just right”
Finally, we come to the wish to control retirement, domesticate it, and make it the perfect summation of a life.
I am not sure there really is such a thing as “the perfect retirement”. If you like to have control in this way I also challenge you to think of the responsibility that goes with control. If you are already a grandparent, think of how parenting control and therefore responsibility have largely disappeared. That is probably a good thing for you.
More generally, is losing control such a bad thing? Think of the times you were dragged off to a family barbecue that you didn’t want to attend. Was that the end of the world for you? You may find that letting go of things in retirement has enormous benefits for you.
A final thought. Isn’t retirement, full and forever, a duty that we owe to the next generation so that they can “own” the workforce and get on with building the new world?
Please contact me if you want to discuss further…..see this website for contact details.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Retirement and society
We all like to think of ourselves as interesting and unique individuals. But as individuals we sometimes forget that we have been formed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the rules and norms of the society in which we grew up, and in which we now live. As a result, we often “follow the herd”. Doesn’t this help to explain our tastes in the movies we watch and the sports we play, to name two easy (and non-controversial, I hope) examples?
In this social sense many of us (not all of course, by any measure, but for the purpose of this short article I need to simplify) drink from the same fountain: marriage, family, work.
You may object to this when it comes to work. Isn’t it totally obvious, you are thinking, that work is what we do because we need to earn a living? Sure that is true, but there are also herd-following aspects of work to consider. Aren’t you surprised – at least this is true for me – when you hear of a worker who DOESN’T work Monday to Friday, 9-5? In other words, the norms and rules of society have conditioned me to believe in the normality of that Monday-to-Fridayness.
But of course there is much greater variety on display and, once I start to think harder, I can see that. That example is to do with peoples’ working lives. Now let’s talk about the norms and rules of society when it comes to retirement.
By the way, when I ponder the word retirement I can almost feel a string that pulls me towards a group called “Retired Men”. Can we coin the collective noun: a Roundup of Retired Men? Please let me know if you have a better alternative for that collective noun.
So in retirement there are social norms and rules that you are “expected” to fit; such as grandparent, charity worker, gardener, household cook. You might think that I am over-simplifying with these examples, but isn’t that often the case with societal norms? They typically have the simplicity of an advertising pitch, in order to make them easier to comprehend and adopt. There is nothing wrong with any of these examples, but I claim that there are other paths to walk.
That is my point. The norms of society are out there and easy to understand (by and large) when it comes to the choices you can make in retirement. That is both their strength and defect; clearly laid-out paths to follow as distinct from highly personal and individual choices.
My take on this is simple. If you have already guessed that I am about to introduce retirement coaching into the conversation, then you are correct. Please be patient, there is only one more paragraph to read.
By working with a retirement coach you may be able to discover your very own and personal mould-busting life of retirement. The one that, deep-down, YOU want to have. Then society will work with your choices, not dictate them.
Please contact me if you want to discuss these ideas further.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.
Retirement, sea change and regret
Imagine two neighbours Paul and Paula, both aged 60, and both on the point of retirement. Paul and his wife Dianne decide that it’s time to move out of the city. Paula and her husband Mike stay in the city. Paul and Paula meet for coffee one year later. Here is a part of their conversation.
Paul: Hey Paula, I am not enjoying life away from the buzz of the city and my network of friends and relatives. Truth is, I’m pretty bored.
Paula: Hey Paul, we feel the opposite. City life is strangling us. Maybe it’s too late to move.
Listening to these expressed regrets shows us different emotions at work. Paul is blaming himself for the choice he made, while Paula is envious of the choice that Paul has made i.e. the choice she didn’t make.
In addition, we don’t know to what extent these two friends feel that they had control over their decisions, or were hostage to Mike’s and Dianne’s wishes.
Of course regret affects everyone differently according to its:
1. Intensity
2. Frequency
3. Duration
However the regret in our example is not all bad:
1. Paul and Paula can reflect on their experiences and learn from them.
2. There will be silver linings to the choices they made/didn’t make.
Retirement is a time to make choices, because you can. Choices can bring regret. Fact. But experiencing and learning from regret can be beneficial.
Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.