Changing The Way You Feel About This Next Phase Of Life – Retirement
One of my goals is to consider retirement from the standpoint of how people feel about their lives.
As such, I take advantage of the tremendous body of research that exists around the world and consider the psychology of retirement.
What makes this approach different? It doesn’t start with financial or workplace issues but from an emotional perspective.
I make no assumptions about your marital status, age, financial situation and desire to retire.
And also understand that not everyone sees a glass half- full or is a self-starter just looking for a blueprint for the perfect retirement. Your retirement is just that—your retirement.
However, we can provide you with some things to think about that you may not have known or understood that will help you get even more out of this next journey.
Our research suggests that:
i. Self-starters tend to do better than “other-directed” people and that most of us have the ability to become more self-directed.
ii. Optimists tend to do better than pessimists, but then optimists expect to do better than pessimists! We are all different and yet sometimes a new way of looking at something like retirement can change our level of optimism.
iii. We tend to do better in our lives (and certainly in retirement) if we have nurturing and supporting relationships. However, there are many who don’t like to spend time with other people and prefer their own company to friends and family.
iv. We gain more life enjoyment when we look after both our mental and physical health. We all know this, but perhaps we haven’t understood the power of healthy ageing on everything from our personal happiness to our longevity.
v. We need some of the things in retirement that work once provided us. It is far better to take some of the positives from work and bring them into retirement, but there will always be people who think that everything about work was evil and that prolonged leisure is the main benefit of a retired life.
Whether you want to incorporate them into your life will depend on your own personality and your willingness to change.
The self-starters and optimists will not have major problems making adjustments to their outlook—after all, they have been doing that all their lives and that is likely what has made them who they are.
Others are not used to making changes in their lives and are entrenched in their thinking. We are not telling you to be anyone other than who you are.
All we can do is give you some things to think about.
