“Want to Know the Secret to a Great Life After Retirement?”
Introduction
We tend to want to socialize with people of like mind. Even though we have retired from a primary occupation, we want to enjoy the positive elements of our lives that were involved in the workplace, including the friends we made and the habits we formed. The post-retirement life should not require starting all over, unless the previous work life contained more negative elements than positive ones. The only way to know for sure is to take time to evaluate the last few years of your work life.
Plenty of websites, magazines and blogs will give you the financial and health advice you need to survive in the post-retirement years. For starters, here are a few that I’ve found useful – one day I may go into more detail about how to use these websites to your advantage:
But what do you do with a healthy body and balance sheet for the next 40+ years? If you’re like me, sometimes a helpful guide will give you the hints you need to encourage you to look at yourself honestly, to assess your life in ways that just idly thinking about it before you go to sleep at night won’t do.
For instance, most Americans eat meals that provide many more calories than the meals they ate 30 years ago. We don’t think about it very much even if we’re aware of the fact. However, as our waist sizes increase, we reach a point where we can’t ignore it anymore. Recognizing the weight gain doesn’t help us very much, however. Instead, we need a set of steps to get us past the recognition phase and assist us in our ability to see what we’re eating, reduce the size of the meals we eat and develop a healthy plan to lose the extra pound or two we gained. The plan takes us through the transition from a poor diet rich in calories to one that is rich in taste but lean in calories, increasing our energy and adding to a positive physical life.
The same thing applies to our post-retirement years. We’ve focused so much on increasing our financial assets to reach independence that we don’t see the positive or negative habits we’ve formed in our adult years. Why should we ignore our mental mindset as we prepare for retirement? We shouldn’t. Otherwise, we will hit a brick wall because we hadn’t built up the mental attitude needed to apply the brakes and successfully navigate the sharp turn off the fast-paced, corporate-driven career path and onto the more leisurely, personally-designed retirement path.
The next few chapters will provide the framework to help you build a life better than the one you dreamed you’d live after you retired.
CHAPTER 1 – DID I WORK TO RETIRE OR RETIRE TO WORK?
You’ve just come back from the luncheon where your boss and coworkers spent 30 minutes roasting you in a PowerPoint presentation using photos from old company parties. You’re packing up the last couple of items from your desk that you hadn’t already taken home with you the last week of work – the photo of your family, a pack of half-used Post-It® notes, the scratched-up nameplate, and a company-inscribed pen – when you suddenly realize you have no idea what you’re going to do the following week. Sure, you had joked with your coworkers that you were going to sleep late, work on the house and kick back a little but is that really what you want to do?
Like many of us, you’ll want to sleep late that first day off from work but you’ll probably wake up at the regular time even if you hadn’t set the alarm clock. You’ll toss and turn and tell yourself that you have all day so why not get a few more hours of sleep? Instead, in the back of your mind, last-minute details of your exit plan pop up in your head. You had forgotten to tell one of your coworkers about a spreadsheet that needs to be updated once a week, or you were supposed to fill out a logbook of the last time you used the company truck. You feel like getting up and calling in to check up on your new replacement. In other words, you still have the habit of working. You can’t help it.
Don’t worry. The habit can be broken.
But do you want to break the habit?
Studies show that a habit takes 28 days to form. How many days does it take to break a habit? You tell me. When was the last time you took a long holiday/vacation? Were you still thinking about work on the second or third day away from the office? Or were you still checking your email on your smartphone every day? Habits are as hard to break as you want them to be.
Do you like the habit of getting up in the morning with a general idea of how your day will go? Or do you like the idea that each new day will present you with an unexpected flow? Sometimes, it’s a little of both, isn’t it? We want to know that our house will still stand and that our cars will still run but we don’t necessarily want to sit in our house all day watching the clock tick from 7 to 8 to 9 a.m. or get in the car and have it take us from our house to the bank, to the post office and grocery store in the same route and at the same exact time every day, passing the same people while we pick up the same items. We like variety within the framework of regularity.
If you can use your work habits to your advantage in your retirement, why should you try to break them by changing your ways just because you’re not working a regular job anymore?
If you’ve just retired, don’t stop what you were doing!
CHAPTER 2 – WHAT IS WORK?
We all have a definition of work. Often we think of work as something we have to do or must do in order to get what we want. Sometimes work becomes an activity we enjoy because we get comfortable with the activity. When we think about it, we may even like what we’re doing. For those who love the work they perform on the job, I salute you. You may never retire. For the rest of us, the world is out there waiting.
Are you ready to find out how?
You can read about the secret in books like "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. You can also figure out the secret by determining your risk aversion/attraction on many free risk assessment websites. I cover some of these "secrets" for you on the blogs, http://treetrunkrick.blogspot.com, http://www.treetrunkrings.blogspot.com, http://www.treetrunkbrings.blogspot.com, and others while telling a few humourous tales.
Our lives are short - let's have fun in our personal lives, in our careers, and after that day we decide to leave the active worklife for something new and exciting. We're just as important to one another after we retire as when we gave our all in the workplace - retirement means you have control of your importance! Let's get out there and make a difference today!
