Your retirement is going to be better than your parents!

Lord, I’m sure hoping this isn’t a myth but will really be true in my case!  Because my parent’s retirement was certainly nothing I’d aspire to.

My dad lost his job when he was in his early 60’s and tried to get a couple of businesses off the ground without much success.  Mind you, by that time of his life his drinking was  pretty well ruling his life so who knows what really went on there.  Finally when he turned 65 he became a Commissionaire …you know, one of those fat old guys who hang around the front desk of federal government buildings signing people in and out, receiving packages and generally making like they are keepinge everything ship-shape.  Well, he had that job only a matter of months before he had a serious stroke that left him paralyzed on one side and without speech.

My mother’s health was already pretty precarious and despite the fact that the two of them had fought visciously with one another every day of their lives since I was able to remember, she insisted that he be brought home for her to look after.  And they proceeded to fight and argue their way into their respective graves!

So I don’t have to set my benchmark very high to have a better retirement than they had.  And I’m very clear  that the way in which my life is going to be very different is that traditional “retirement” isn’t going to be part of my future for a very, very, very long time.

What about you when you consider this final great myth of “retirement” …do you automatically assume that yours will be better than your parents?  In what way?  How will you measure “better” …you’ll live longer?  you’ll have more money?  a better quality of life?  more friends?  fewer friends?  more activities?  fewer activities?  more meaning?  a better marital relationship?  spend more time with your kids?  stay out of your kids hair more?

Have you ever even given any thought to how your parents engaged retirement and what that might mean for you?  Remember that the patterns of our lives are often learned from the previous generation and then repeated very much out of awareness.  What about how they lived would you like to actively take on and what do you need to do to make that happen?  What about how they lived are you committed to having be different …and what do you need to do to make your life be different than theirs?

Most of us have already surpassed our parents in terms of the quality of our material lives.  We live in bigger homes, have more and flashier cars, more responsible jobs with much larger incomes.  We also typically have fewer children than they did, more ex spouses and piles more debt than they would ever have been comfortable with.  And I think that is a really big conversation to pay attention to as you compare your dreams and desires about retirement to the reality of your parents.  While they may not have had as much as you do, they also likely weren’t hauling into their golden years a huge debt load.  And since they carried the experiences of living through the lean years of the Depression and the Second World War, they were much better at buckling down and living a fiscal reality than most of us boomers are.

I sure don’t have any answers on this one.  And I’m not even saying that our greater debt load is bad, but I am saying that it is a huge factor that each of us needs to consider as we prepare ourselves for the future.  I can certainly only speak for myself and I often find myself wondering …if and when the day arrives that I have to live on a fixed income, how will I manage given that I’ve spent a life accustomed to pretty much buying anything and everything that my heart desires when I desire it.  Do I have the fibre to live for extended periods of time without shopping and travel being the distractions that soothe my soul?  What about you?

I think that, for me, that may be one of the big unanswerable questions I’ll be taking into my future.  One of those questions that I’ll simply have to live through in order to have any idea as to what the answer will be.  And as I’m writing this, I’m realizing that when the time comes, I know I’m anticipating the challenge!

Once you retire you’ll make those friends and develop that hobby!

Ya right! The fact is that knowing how to enjoy yourself and other people where work or position isn’t core to the conversation takes skill. Not that we can’t all develop that skill, but it is one that requires an investment of time and energy to discover and then to develop.

The sad fact is that the later you leave it to develop the skill of building frienships or learning to relax into something that has absolutely nothing to do with making money, the harder it is likely to become to develop it. Developing friends and hobbies aren’t things that happen overnight to people who have no history with them.

And if you are relying on those workplace ‘friendships’ to sustain you, think again.  Ernie Zelinski in his book “Real Success without a Real Job” notes “Fact is, friendship at work is fleeting.  When transfers and layofffss aapn, ssuch superficial friendship proves to be transient at best.  Most people are surprised to find that when they retire their former work colleagues don’t want anything to do with them, whether the former colleagues are still working or also retired.”  

Now here’s a scary thought, Zelinski also points out that “Friends developed through marriage can be just aasleeting as friends developed in the workplace.  If you are married, regardless of how intimate you are with your partner, you still require clost friends — not your spouse’s friends, but your own.  Clearly, they aren’t real friends if your spouse has chosen them.” 

If you don’t have a history of creating and sustaining deep friendships do you have any idea of how to start?  That’s a question you might want to consider:  if I want some friends in my life, do I even know how to go about creating them?  Where would I learn such a skill?  Other friendship oriented questions you might want to consider are:  Who could I become if I had some close friends in my life anyhow? In what way would my marriage be improved if I had a few friends of my own?

If you’re a woman considering the friendship question you might want to add to your list:  if my husband were to die or get seriously ill tomorrow, where would the support and intimacy I get from my spouse come from?  I emphasize this question for women, in particular, because we are much more likely to lose a spouse to death or disease.

So what about the hobby question.  I think it’s very similar to the friendship question.  And the two are surprisingly intertwined.  Because often our friends are the people we share interests with.  But don’t mistake golfing buddies or shopping buddies with true friends.  While our friends often share similar interests, the friendship typically is larger and more encompassing than simply engaging the same hobby.  That being said, most of the same questions could apply to developing a hobby as do to creating and sustaining a friendship.

Interestingly, think the source of successfully developing resides in the same impulse:  you have to WANT to create and grow either one.  If you are developing friendships or hobbies only because I say so or you’ve read a book that says you must, it’s unlikely that anything meaningful will ever develop.  But if you examine your life and notice that there is  this little corner (or maybe a big corner!) where you will admit to feeling lonely or unfulfilled or bored and you focus on friendship or hobbies as ways to deal with it, you may surprise yourself with what develops.

I think what’s most important is that you start engaging this big retirement myth now simply because it gives you a longer runway for creating some alternative to work for yourself!  Even if you are like me and don’t plan a ‘traditional’ retirement.  Especially if you plan to ‘non-retire’, i.e. start a business or find another type of work, the second half of life holds so many opportunities to give ourselves permission to explore aspects of our human potential that may have remained dormant for decades.  I work almost as many hours today as I did a decade ago when I was a corporate executive type.  The difference is that today my work is:  stuff I love, at a pace that I set, includes friends and hobbies in the mix, is more about enjoyment and play as it is about accomplishment and duty, and presumes that I am always growing and becoming a more creative human being!!

Once you retire you’ll get the life you’ve always wanted to live

Nice fantasy for sure …just put in enough years doing what everyone else thinks is important and then your reward will be that you can get to live the life you’ve always wanted!  If only it were so for most people.

Because here’s what most of us don’t notice.  Living life a certain way requires not only a set of beliefs about what’s possible for us, what’s right for us and what we deserve, but it also demands that we settle into habits so that life becomes so routine that we really aren’t living at all; we’re simply putting one foot in front of the other and repeating yesterday’s pattern.  We keep thinking that tomorrow will be different and we lose sight of the fact that until and unless we make ourselves different, tomorrow can be nothing but a repeat of yesterday’s pattern.

So what are the patterns of your life that you’ve long since forgotten to notice?  Do you operate out of a perspective that everyone is out to screw you and you’d better be on your toes if you don’t want to get screwed over …and then you wonder why the world if filled with suspicious people?  Do you operate out of a perspective that you’d better save as many nickles as you can ’cause you never know what disaster life is going to throw at you …only to discover that your life is one long string of disasters?  Do you operate out of a belief that all good things come to those who are patient …only to notice that you’ve become awfully good at waiting for things to happen to you when everyone else seems to have stuff happening all the time?

These are the kinds of habits of living that we can so easily fall into that are awfully hard to break when our life changes.  I was talking to a woman this morning who is at an age and stage in life where she is financially pretty comfortable.  She’s in a line of work where her entire income is commission based and because of her financial diligence over the past few decades she has amassed enough of a cushion that when things are slow for a few months there is nothing to panic about.  But panic she does on a regular basis.  What she’s beginning to notice is that her body can no longer stand the strain of these regular bouts of anxiety and panic she creates and her health is becoming compromised.  She thought for years that if she could just create this financial cushion she’d be fine.  She’s now discovering that it isn’t about the financial cushion.  It is about a much deeper set of beliefs she has about how the world operates and her capacity to deal with the vagaries of life.

My point in all of this is to invite you to begin to notice the beliefs you have that underlie the way you’ve chosen to live your life and to begin to notice that there is a link between those beliefs and the strategies you engage to get through your days.  And the day-to-day habits of living are unlikely to change unless you address the beliefs that underly them.  Think about obvious ‘bad’ habits like over eating, smoking, shopping, etc.  We can all curb our ‘bad’ habits for relatively short periods of time.  But unless we deal with the beliefs that underlie them, we’ll either develop a new ‘bad’ habit or we’ll go back to the old one.

What many don’t notice about beliefs is that they are not immutable.  In fact, they are not designed to be static for life.  And yet, a huge part of my coaching practice is helping people begin to let go of the death grip certain beliefs have on them and to create new beliefs that support the life and sense of identity that better reflects who they are today.  Think about it, many of our beliefs were installed or put in place when we were children and we haven’t checked in since then to notice that our worlds are different.  I have many clients who grew up in homes which were either physically or emotionally unsafe places.  Homes where physical and sexual violence were commonplace.  Homes where shame and humiliation were a daily way to keep everyone in line and the household shipshape.  It is not uncommon for children growing up in these types of environments to believe from an early age that the world is an unsafe place and to act accordingly.  It is often amazing for them at the age of 40, 50 or 60 to realize that they have been totally safe for decades but some inner eye is always on the alert, always scanning for danger.  And that they are exhausted from the effort!  When they begin to remind themsleves that there isn’t danger in every human encounter, they suddenly find themselves willing to go places, try activities, have conversations they never would have thought about before. …but until they found the place inside where they noticed that they carried a belief that the world was unsafe, nothing could fundamentally change for them.

So my question to you is:  what beliefs are you lugging around that exist for you as a “truth” about how the world is that no longer serve you?  Especially as you move towards retirement, if you want to experience life differently than you’ve experienced work, it would be worthwhile investing some time, energy and possibly money in exploring those dimensions.  Otherwise you may find like a lot of folks that come retirement your life will feel remarkeably like the one you have today!

Aaaah, an endless weekend called retirement …

…forget it! One of the reasons that weekends and vacations are so sweet is because they are sandwiched between the experience we call work! Without work, the endless weekend can quickly become a vast wasteland of time spent in front of the TV.

Now, I must say that I make a distinction between being gainfully engaged in an activity that provides some structure and gratification in my life and holding down a meaningless ‘job’. In fact, now that I’ve been self-employed at something I love to do for over a decade, the distinctions between weekend and work week have faded to a remarkable extent. I’ve been noticing in the past week or so that while I like to believe that this wonderful life of mine has little structure to it, that is not really the case. It’s just that the structure of my life is much more free-form than it was for the 30+ years I spent in corporate environments.

The structure I live with these days goes something like this: get up somewhere between 6 & 8 a.m. (or later on the few occasions I change my mind), turn on the computer, check e-mail and then settle into my day. That is, except for Thursdays when I have my business networking meeting, and the last Tuesday of each month when I have another networking meeting and the occasional time when a coaching client needs an early morning coaching session. Frequently on Mondays and Fridays I don’t get dressed until well into the day because I get busy on the computer up-dating my website, chatting with friends via e-mail, up-dating my blog and doing assorted admin stuff for the business. Tuesday through Thursday I may have coffee with existing clients, new people I’ve met or with my buddies, interspersed with coaching sessions. Depending on my mood, I’ll read for either business or pleasure, journal and do marketing stuff. Two or three times each week I try to schedule some exercise, but I must admit I’m very happy to have something else interrupt that! I’m usually back home before 5 at which time I’ll make dinner and then my husband and I will relax for a few hours, watching TV, reading, playing board games, doing crossword puzzles. Then I’ll usually do a couple of hours of work before packing it in for the evening. Oh yes, some weekends are filled with shopping, hiking, taking photographs and generally knocking around. But a couple of weekends a month I usually have a workshop scheduled.

So while there is a sort-of structure to my life, it is one that has an ebb and flow to it and is always open to a welcome diversion from the typical. I probably work as many hours a month as I did when I was a corporate executive (sometimes even more if a fit of writing overtakes me) but because almost all of it is highly enjoyable, it no longer feels effortful.

I definitely know that the concept of an endless weekend holds little appeal to me or to most of the folks I know who have stepped off the organizational treadmill. Most of the people I ever encounter these days who hold delusions that that is a great way to spend a life are those who trudge into the office (or some other place they don’t really want to be) and endure whatever needs to be endured until Friday night comes and they can really ‘live life’. What they seldom notice is that the things that seem so fulfilling when they only get to do them for a few short hours might not be quite so fulfilling when they are accessible 24/7. Getting up when you want, going to bed when you want, watching as much TV as you want, golfing all day if you feel like it are all wonderful fantasies when you are feeling harried and overburdened. But study after study has shown that they quickly pale once they become the dominant focus of our lives.

I feel like I keep harping on this conversation about ‘meaning” in life …and I know I’ll keep at it because it is so spectacularly important to a long, healthy and vibrant future. When was the last time you really thought about what provided meaning in your life? How would you complete this statement: “The most important thing to me about being alive is ….”, where what you insert into the statement can’t be about any “thing” or “activity” but must be a state of being. If you were to do a gap analysis on the top 10 things that are most important to you about being alive and where they place in how you’re currently living your life, what do you think it says about how rewarding your future is likely to be? I can’t tell you how many clients I have who say that “family” is the most important thing to them about being alive, and yet their family life feels like pure hell to them. They fight, argue, judge and demean those closest to them, all the while claiming that they are more important than anything else. “Self respect” is another item that frequently comes at the top of the list, yet when clients start to think about it, they notice that they regularly sell their souls to the highest bidder (you want me to miss my child’s birthday because this trip is important to the company, yes sir! you want me to be the one to tell these people I’ve worked with for 25 years that they have no job as of Monday, yes sir! You want me to stop seeing my friends because you don’t approve of them, yes dear …you get the drift). “Connection” is another one that comes up frequently only to have people discover that they are totally disconnected from any sense of themself, let being able to connect with another person. I could go on and on.

It is being willing to explore those big, unwieldy, few clear-cut answers types of questions where you’ll discover what’s meaningful to you about life and living. Not likely you’ll find it in creating a short-list of your top 10 hobbies and learning how to do them better.

So next time you think about that endless weekend you’re looking forward to, ask yourself how meaningful it’s going to be for you to just float along?

Imagine …never having to work again!

Yuuck is the conclusion that many people are coming to when they actually begin to live the reality of never working again. And there are many more who are realizing as they move into their late 50’s and early 60’s that a life without the presence of work isn’t something that they aspire to.

A good portion of those folks who don’t foresee an imminent future without work make a distinction between paid and unpaid work. These are the folks who plan to include volunteer work as part of their future. And a goodly number of them are about to be severely disappointed. They may have experiences like one of my coaching clients who has a strong interest in fashion and lots of experience living as a fashionable woman who wears a wig due to a medical condition. She decided to volunteer her services to a local cancer organization which supports woman undergoing radiation and chemo and who experience great self-esteem challenges when they lose their hair in the process. Despite being a person with a strong background of success in an organizational environment, good communication skills in 2 languages, a personal history of knowing what it’s like to live with this kind of challenge and a strong willingness to be of service she hasn’t even had her application acknowledged by this organization, let alone seriously considered.

And she is not alone. There are many stories of people who have sought to volunteer only to discover that they are shunted into opportunities that don’t reflect their interests or that can leverage their expertise. I personally have sought to volunteer several times only to have my interests in ‘getting my hands dirty’ at the working level diverted to a possible board position when people discover my corporate background and my expertise in strategic planning and organizational change. Like many of us who have spent years sitting in planning and politicking meetings, we are looking for something else, something much more meaningful than directing the efforts of the staff of not-for-profit agencies.

I’ve just finished reading Lee Eisenburg’s great book “The Number” and he talks about many retirees living similar scenarios which have shattered their dream of engaging unpaid work in retirement, so I believe that being disappointed with the volunteer sector it is a fairly widespread experience amongst aging baby boomers.

All that to say, for many of approaching traditional retirement age are discovering that the thought of having a life that does not contain work isn’t something we aspire to. We may need to work and get paid for it because we are carrying a debt load that our pension or savings can’t support; we may want to work because we can’t imagine our life without it; we may choose to work because it is a process that provides structure and accomplishment in our life. Even if we don’t need the money, I think there is a growing number of older folks who will end up creating their own not-for-profit agencies in order to ensure that their needs get met as well as making the contribution to society that they are committed to.

So my question to those of you who are still committed to the myth that you’ll get to a point where you never have to work again, what will enter your life that will offer you the sense of achievement, purpose, structure and companionship that working does? Keep in mind that each week has 168 hours, of which only 70 or so hours can be attributed to sleeping, grooming, eating etc. For most of us work has been keeping us busy for about 40 of the remaining 100 hours each week, leaving about 50 hours available for hobbies, cleaning, running errands, socializing, commuting, watching TV, etc. etc. If you plan to not work at all in retirement you will have almost twice the leisure time that you currently have (and if you live in a large centre where commuting takes hours each day it’ll be even larger) …how will you use those endless hours in a way that will provide both meaning and structure to your life?

I encourage you to get specific in your answers. A broad brush “Oh, I’ll travel” “I’ll golf” “I’ll hang out with my buddies” isn’t sufficient. Get out a calendar and begin to block out activities that will engage you each day. What time will you rise? What time will you go to bed? What activities will you do regularly (daily/several times each week/weekly/monthly) and at what time of the day? How will your weekdays and weekends be the same or different? Are you really diligent enough to get yourself exercising every day? If your good buddy with whom you plan to do so much gets sick or has a change of heart/plans what will be the implication on your plan? If travel is how you expect to fill your future, what will you do during those periods when you aren’t on the road? If you have a seasonal hobby such as golf, fishing, camping, gardening (remember I write from the great white north where many activities are highly seasonal!) what will fill your time in the off season?

One woman I talked to recently has already begun to engage her husband in conversations about how their life will change as their children leave home. She has decided that even though she has taken on accountability for most grocery shopping and meal preparation while they’ve had kids in the house, she has absolutely no intention of continuing that habit once she and her husband become empty nesters (let alone as they move into retirement). He has already begun to join her in shopping excersions and weekend meal preparations to rebuild his skills in that area. She has begun to take golf lessons so that she can socialize with her hubbie differently when they have more time together.

The point isn’t really the specifics of how they are re-jigging their lives. The point is that they are re-jigging their lives in anticipation of a major lifestyle change that they know is only about 3 years away. And I think it illustrates the kinds of conversations, negotiations and willingness to prepare in advance that most of us would be well advised to undertake if we want to have the lives we want, rather than living the ones we get by living at default. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again just as a way of reminding myself what’s important to me …I know that whatever the future holds for my husband and me it doesn’t include me being responsible for preparing lunch for the two of us!!!

What do you want in your future and what do you absolutely not want? One thing I can pretty much guarantee is that if you don’t actively create something new you’ll find yourself pretty much living today’s life well into old age.

You’ll have retirement aced when you’ve saved enough money

There’s this guy I know who has recently come into a lot of money and is planning to leave the workforce soon with great hopes that his life will become much more interesting and fulfilling once the pressures of work are no longer there. Not like he hates his job. Up until recently he’s found it pretty interesting, but he’s begun to recognize that he has mastered it and the work itself no longer holds the same challenge that it did a few years ago. What he really dislikes about work is the bureacracy that seems to have enslaved his organization, coupled with the management double talk that seems to be the order of the day.

Then there is another guy I know who’s been retired for a couple of years now. He loved his work but was very content to know that he’d put in his 35 years and could comfortably pension out to a life that probably involved starting a small business, travel, and living well off his generous pension. And he’s finding that the reality of retirement is quite different than he’d anticipated. First of all, even though he’s extremely fit and goes to the gym almost daily, he’s starting to have health issues that he hadn’t anticipated this early on. His buddies with whom he’d planned to start a business have changed their minds and plans about their priorities so he’s having to try to create other options for himself. And while he and his wife still travel a bit, they’re finding that the new world order makes air travel much less enjoyable than it was a decade ago.

A third has been retired less than a year with a pension that allows him to live very comfortably. He is driving his wife and extended family nuts with his constant complaining about what’s wrong with the world and every special interest group and minority in it. And he is about to take on the burden of a new, much larger home as a way of giving himself projects to do to while away the long hours.

Each of these people thought they had their retirement aced because they’d taken care of the financial side of things. But none had invested much time or effort in developing ideas, plans and alternatives for what would bring meaning to their lives when work was no longer there to sustain them. And the one who has been retired the longest is already beginning to experience a phenomena that isn’t widely talked about: health concerns developing soon after retirement occurs.

Yup, sad to say but it is widely known in medical circles that people who retire without a clear plan that engages them in meaningful activities begin to experience a deterioration in their health very quickly after they leave the workplace. Think about the injustice of it …you spend decades going to a place you may not like, doing work that you may not like and just when you think you can relax and enjoy the absence of all those pressures, you begin to actively wear down. It is similar to the illnesses that people experience when they’ve been under prolonged stress and then they relax. You know, students getting colds and flu when Christmas break happens after they’ve made it through weeks of long hours and the intense pressure of term papers and exams; people burning the midnight oil to get their desks cleaned up, only to go on vacation and develop a bug.

What seems to make the difference for those retiring is quickly moving into activities in your life that bring a sense of fulfillment, pleasure and measureable success. Another way of describing having a meaningful life.

We vastly underestimate the power that work has in our lives to define who we are, provide structure to our days, offer a sense of accomplishment, extend a challenge and create a supportive social network. Without the presence of those things in our lives, it doesn’t matter how much money we have, we begin to come apart somewhere inside …even if we are busy racing from one golf event to another!

So what’s it going to take for you to begin to think seriously about the non-monetary aspects of your future? What plans and alternatives are you investing in so that you don’t become one of those folks who starts to fade within a year or two of taking the golden handshake?

So you think you’ll be different in retirement?

During a recent coaching session with a client who anticipates retiring from her long-term career position within the next 5 years we got to talking about the mountain of bills she has created for herself.  She was busy doing what so many of us do …beating herself up for being so unable to manage her money better and for getting herself in a position where she ‘needed’ to work in retirement.

As we explored the conversation about her chronic indebtedness, my client began to begin to notice that she had a deeper conversation about herself going on, namely, she was pretty lazy and indulgent.  In holding that image of herself, she began to notice that indebtedness worked for her at some level because it helped ensure that she could never up and quit her job because she had to keep working in order to pay her bills.  She began to realize that until she dealt with the deeper image she had of herself as a lazy person it made sense that she’d need to keep herself in chronic debt.  Even in retirement if she didn’t have debts that meant she needed to continue to work there was an underlying anxiety present for her that she’d just end up wasting her life, frittering away her time and energy on non-important, non-relevant projects.

My client quickly began to notice that the strong desire to be different or, indeed, that willpower and determination to be different weren’t sufficient for her to change her life in a fundamentally different way.  As a coach and educator with years of experience dealing with people who want their lives to be different, I know that Jean’s situation isn’t unique.  Like many people heading towards retirement age, Jean wants her future to be different that the past.

What separates her from most is that she has learned that she must invest herself in discovering the intelligence that underlies her current behaviours in order for her to create a different future.  Simply wishing to be different, presuming that an event like retirement (or marriage, or the birth of a child, or the death of a parent, etc.), or willing ourselves to be different are insufficient.  We must invest time, energy and likely money in a process of Self discovery that clears a pathway for the change we desire to occur.

I love working with clients like Jean who are motivated to create the changes they seek in their lives.  I feel sad for the multitude of people I meet who just keep wishing and hoping that something will happen to magically change their lot in life.  And I despair for the many people I meet who have given up and have come to believe that the mediocre or awful life they are living is the best that they can hope for.  And I’m curious …which group do you fall into?

I am thrilled for myself that I fall into the first category, fully aware and fully committed to the fact that the life I lead is the one that I create for myself.  Beholden to no one yet connected to everyone; ready, willing and able to change anything in my life when it feels like it no longer serves me.  What a powerful and potential filled way to move through life.  Want to join me??

Retirement is an ‘event’ launching the rest of your life – not!!

Perhaps because I’ve been involved in career transition coaching for about a decade now I’ve come into conversation with a large number of people who thought they were cruising towards a pretty comfortable retirement …and then their world collapsed around them through downsizing or illness.

These are the people who’ve been caught in my #1 Retirement Myth: that retirement is an ‘event’ launching the rest of your life. As much as we may have our own mental countdown of the months, weeks, days and hours until we clean out our desk, hand in our key and parking pass, and have that final party with colleagues …for huge numbers of today’s work force, that ‘event’ never materializes.

For many they are unceremoniously downsized out of their jobs after investing 25, 30, or 35 years with a corporation. In most cases, not only do they lose out on their much awaited pension, but they don’t even live with any human dignity. They are escorted off the premises and told not to come back. They are given no time to say good-byes to colleagues and since they are usually disconnected from company e-mail systems it is difficult to close the loop on those valued relationships. Not only has their future crumbled in the space of a few short hours, but their sense of self worth and dignity is usually severely impacted by the way they are treated.

For many others, especially women, the demands of an ailing life partner or aging parents requires them to leave work long before they’d ever planned to. And like those who are downsized, they often leave the workplace suddenly with little time to wrap up the way they’d like to because they are often responding to a family medical crisis: someone has had a heart attack, stroke or surgery and needs their presence immediately.

And then there are the folks who have to leave work prematurely because their own failing health means that they can no longer keep up with the demands of the workplace.

In today’s workplace, any or all of these scenarios can be present for any of us. And certainly while I don’t advocate detailed planning for these eventualities, I think it is worthwhile to sit down and give yourself permission to consider some “what if” scenarios. What if you got downsized unexpectedly? What if you got so sick you couldn’t work any longer? What if a family member needed you to leave work to take care of their needs? How would you live? What would your priorities be? How would you ensure that your own needs continued to be met?

Surprisingly, it isn’t unusual that for those people who live through one of these life catastrophes to end up seeing them as a huge gift and blessing. Once they’ve made it through the rough periods of adjustment that typically accompany these situations, people frequently report that they were saved from themselves in many ways. I’ve had clients talk about how being ‘kicked out of work’ was the permission they could never quite give themsleves to leave a job they found meaningless and the beginning of finally creating a joyous new career for themselves. I’ve had clients talk about the joys and growth they experienced in taking care of an aging parent with the pressures of work completely removed from their lives. And I’ve had clients who finally learned through their illnesses to put themselves first and to take care of their own needs before everyone else’s!

To be sure, many were now living in much more modest financial circumstances than they were previously. And many of them discover that despite their straightened financial circumstances, they actually have a better quality of life than they did when they were working at their long-term jobs.

So if you are labouring under the myth that you’ll make it to the point that you’ll have that big retirement event in your life, you may want to think again!

Will you make it to retirement?

Okay, okay. I suppose it’s a sign of creeping old age but my husband and I have become regular readers of the obits. Yikes, when did that happen?

What’s sad about it is that we read it because with surprising regularity we read about former business colleagues who have died. And these aren’t former business colleagues who were well into their 60’s 15 years ago. These are our contemporaries; many of whom are dying in their 50’s & 60’s.

They comprise a growing group of boomers who won’t make it to any kind of retirement: traditional, non-retirement, unretirement. Perhaps I should re-phrase that a bit …who won’t make it to the age where they can potentially draw their first Old Age Pension cheque.

It is scary to think that the average age at which women in Canada become widows is 55. That means that there are a whole lot of men who die young and never make it to that magical age of 65. And in addition to those poor souls who leave us entirely, there are also lots of people who are forced into a form of early retirement because their health is so poor that they can no longer work. These folks may be ‘retired’ in that they can’t work, but it certainly isn’t the kind of ‘retirement’ most of us would wish for ourselves.

A daily round of medical appointments, feeling unwell, with limited mobility and not enough money or vitality to get out and do all the things that make life worthwhile. A kind of physical purgatory before the big bang ends it all.

This popular myth that we’ll all make it to that age where we get to choose whether we’ll ‘retire’ or what the form of our retirement will take is insidious in that it lulls us into a false belief that we can live the last decade or so of our worklives pretty much like we’ve lived the previous 3-4 decades. We continue along on the treadmill of our lives believing that once retirement comes we’ll change and create the kind of meaningful life we really want for ourselves.

If you are thinking like this, I urge you to wake up and begin to presume that you just might now make it to whatever retirement you’ve been envisioning for yourself. Ask yourself these questions:

-if I found out that I only had 6 months left to live, how would I choose to live my life?

-if I died suddenly what kind of mess would I be leaving behind for my spouse, business colleagues, friends and children?

-if I died suddenly is my spouse sufficiently aware of my financial situation (or indeed finances in general) that they could manage readily without me?

-if I died suddenly what messages of love, caring, admiration, support or friendship would I take to my grave unspoken?

-if I died suddenly what would be on my list entitled “I wish I’d done more of/less of”.

I’m certainly not proposing that you begin to obsess about the fact that you won’t make it to retirement, but I am suggesting that you spend some time considering whether you are as prepared as you’d like your spouse or your parents to be. One of the reasons I have such fond memories of my mother-in-law is that she had prepared fully for her demise. She not only had pre-paid for her funeral, but she left very detailed instructions about what she wanted: the kind of food she wanted served at her reception; the kind of flowers she wanted at her service; who got which trinkets & possessions. She even left little envelopes of cash with money for the organist, gratuities for the caterer, etc. It made life so much easier than the mess both of my own parents left behind them.

Even more importantly than the ease of others at a stressful time of life, answering these questions might be just the wake up call you need to begin to shift your life so that you feel more alive and engaged …a process that might actually mean that you end up living longer and experiencing a much better quality of life for however much time you have left to you.

One of the main reasons I chose to leave the corporate world over a decade ago was that I couldn’t bear the thought of getting to be 70 yrs old and looking back at my life being disappointed in myself that I hadn’t taken the opportunity to explore my limits when the opportunity to downsize presented it. I recently had the opportunity to be a co-author a book (Sekhmet Rising: the restlessness of women’s genius) with 16 other women aged 26-81. That book closes with a short chapter where each author answers the question “if I’d known then what I know now” …virtually everyone speaks to the fact that they’d trust their instincts more, they’d be less fearful of what others think, and they’d live larger.

My invitation to each of you is that it is never too late for you too to create the life that you want for yourself rather than the one you think you’re stuck with!

The past doesn’t necessarily predict the future

A colleague was telling me about his parents the other day. This is a couple who have recently retired, have grown children and an aging parent with dementia. They are financially comfortable, have been blessed with a good marriage …and are beginning to grate on one another’s nerves, despite their best intentions.

They are a couple who have succumbed to Myth #8 on my list of Top Ten Retirement Myths: your close relationship with your spouse/partner will sustain you in retirement.

Who knows what they are going to choose to do about it. Hopefully they will begin to create meaningful activities away from one another so that they’ll “be” someone with something new and exciting to always be bringing into their relationship. Sadly, they may devolve into the parents another colleague has: cranky, resentful and obsessed with the lives of their children. A couple who has few interests beyond their own immediate household. And their quality of life and ability to sustain wider relationships is slowly but surely eroding as the years pass.

It certainly doesn’t have to be this way. I was talking to another person recently who was reflecting on just how much better his own long term marriage has become since he chose to invest in his own personal growth and evolution. One of those people who doesn’t plan to retire, he has become very aware that the person he has become is quite different than the person he was 5 years ago. And the state of his interactions with his wife is living proof for me of just how far he’s traveled. He was at the point where he was thinking of leaving his marriage because it felt flat and uninteresting. The conversations he had with his wife had slowly but surely wound down over the years so that they revolved around such invigorating and stimulating topics as what’s for dinner; what needs to be fixed around the house; when & where will we take vacation; which kid of having which problem.

One of the discoveries he has made in his journey of Self discover and Self growth is that if other people are going to find him interesting, he has to be interested in himself! He’s had to find some new hobbies, resurrect some from his childhood that he’d long neglected …and even more importantly, he had to be willing to search his soul for the places where he knew that he mattered (and always will!) and become willing to share these discoveries of Self with his wife.

Through that process of willingness to be vulnerable and to share with her stuff about himself that he had kept hidden or unspoken for decades he has breathed new life into his relationship.

I think it’s there’s an important life lesson in his experience for all of us who have been with a partner for a very long time. If we’re bored or irritated with that person, the place to look for resolution is not with them but within ourselves. If we aren’t interesting and companionable enough to make ourselves happy, how can we offer that to another human being.

So I hope for my colleagues’ parents that they go well beyond finding meaningful activities beyond their relationship …I hope that they discover that each of them is still more than capable of growing and developing as human beings and that they step into that process and thereby retain an ever evolving vitality and joie de vivre that makes them attractive to their spouse, children, friends and strangers for a long, long time into the future!