Questions For Your Retirement: How Coaching Can Help You Discover Answers

Retirement Coaching supports individuals to attain the greatest fulfilment and find meaning in one’s later years. We work one-on-one with clients delivering, a highly personal and customized planning for retirement plan to make the most of life in retirement. We do this with personal care and optimism.

Retirement coaching considers pertinent questions such as:

• What are your retirement goals? What are your responsibilities?
• What does your retirement look like?
• How are you going to spend your time? What are your hobbies and interests? What is your life balance?
• Are you retiring or downshifting your career? What type of work commitment suits you, your family and meets your physical health? Is a career shift an option?
• What are your relationships like?
• How do you manage your health?

Let’s consider ways of incorporating the benefits of work into the retirement period.

Work can be undertaken in a new capacity with reduced hours and commitment, such as voluntary work, mentoring younger people entering the industry, part-time or casual work, consultancy or a new work role.

This brings:

• some income with perhaps additional superannuation
• sense of purpose and status

As one contributes, they are building a new identity and increased self-esteem.

Individuals can explore their interests and renew old passions that were un- or under used, as they worked and built careers.

As a teenager/young adult, music may have been a passion that was dropped as one built their career and was raising a family. The new retirement would rekindle the enjoyment that music brought.

Involvement of activities at work, leisure and hobbies means that individuals

• manage their time
• and socialise with others

To plan a meaningful retirement takes time, and honesty. But there’s also fear attached. You wonder, how can such a well-deserved period in our lives, one where we have saved for such a long time, be clouded with fear? Let’s look at some of these fears.

Fears

• Letting go – you have worked for many years, have a routine, are ‘busy’ and now we are faced with the opposite – no work, and largely unstructured time.
  The individual has moved from one extreme of fulltime work – to the other, no work.
• Facing yourself – can’t hide behind one’s work role, busyness, meetings or emails. This is about your identity and self-image.
• Perhaps it is recognising that you need to spend more time than previously with your partner. You’re wondering, how do I do this? What can we do, talk about?
• You may have recognised that through full time work, you’ve neglected your personal relationships, or your hobbies. Yet, you know that it is probably good for you to catch up with your friends and spend time on your hobbies. How do you reconcile this situation?
• You may feel guilty about spending time and money on yourself and having fun. You may ask yourself: ‘am I worthy of this?’
• Or, your vision may be of yourself only working hard without fun! How do you change the vision? It’s now you are feeling the privilege and enjoying your retirement.
• Or, you are fearful that during your retirement you will become the available ‘full time’ babysitter for your family.

Retirement is a stage of your life that is a gift. Rather than assuming your retirement will fall into place, it deserves a holistic plan to create a meaningful retirement.

I’d like to leave you with the final question:

‘How do you want to spend your time during retirement?