Balance sheets and retirement

Balance sheets belong to the world of finance and accounting. They have a column for assets and a column for liabilities. What has this got to do with retirement you are thinking.

There are many ways to construct a parallel:

The assets are your achievements you are most proud of and the liabilities are your greatest fears for the future.

OR

The assets are the things you want to keep treasuring and the liabilities are what you can safely let go of; the best example being attachment to your job pre-retirement.

I offer you the challenge to start to draw up your own personal balance sheet: think of what you want to hang on to and what you want to dispense with.

If you reflect on your own balance sheet for some time, I think the results that you obtain will be interesting.

Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.

Friends....again

Someone told me about five “features” that can characterise a friendship and they are 1) similarity 2) proximity 3) ability to communicate 4) expression of positive emotions about the other 5) frequency.

I agree with some and not others. More importantly, how can these features help us to understand our friendships: past, present and future.

In reverse order, I like frequency, and would argue that to see someone once a year would make it hard to develop a friendship. If being positive about each other is the opposite of shouting and screaming then I also agree with number four.

The third needs no discussion as long as we allow “to communicate” to have a very general sense that can go beyond talking and listening.

But I don’t much like proximity and similarity. The internet, through FaceTime and Skype, gives us the ability to talk to friends all over the world. So why would we not exploit it. The thornier one is similarity. I think it is natural to fall into friendships with like-minded people; but it might be worth the challenge of exploring a friendship with someone who is unlike you.

 Do you have friends who are quite different from you?

 If you don’t, what about the idea of finding some?

 Perhaps it could be a warm friendship, but with a hint of challenge.

 Retirement: You won’t know what it is like until you get there.

My first podcast....it's short!

A short description of the 64PLUS service.

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.