The Age of Fulfillment – The Next Phase of Your Life

Have you thought about your retirement and the role it plays in your life now and in shaping your future?

Retirement is merely another phase of our life. Even though you’re retired it doesn’t mean your life stops! Your life will continue to change. You will continue to grow! Consequently, your journey through retirement doesn’t really have an endpoint or a final destination.

Have you ever dealt with a management challenge? Life is some times this way. First, you need to figure out where you want to go. Second, you need to decide how you’re going to get there!

Retirement is deciding how you’re going to spend your time. You certainly will have the means to do as you want. The question is - have you set the goal? Without knowing where it is you want to be can spell boredom and unhappiness in a time of jubilation!

You need to look at where you are now and then where you want to be. This means asking yourself some tough questions. For example: what would you like to achieve in the years ahead of you? What is really important to you? Are you living the life you want to live or are you following someone else’s plan for you? Are you using your time wisely? What is missing from your life now?

These are not easy questions. If you whip out the answers in 5-10 minutes perhaps you aren’t serious about the quality of your retirement. Give these questions lots of thought. Make sure the answers are yours not your partner’s, significant other, your children or friends.

Remember, retirement is another phase of your life that can last 15-25 years or more! You have a long life ahead of you and this fact may be too big an idea to deal with. How will you organize your time to address such issues as household chores, interests, and new career? Perhaps working on smaller issues can help your chunk down the larger topic of retirement.

The road of retirement has many forks in it just as there were prior to retirement. There are new interests waiting for you to discover. To decide which fork to choose will require some vision. Having a vision of where you’d like to be can assist you in providing you direction.

Establish a list of things you want to do, give each item a priority rating and then decide when you want to do these items. What you are going to do next is similar to what a house designer does. A client describes to the designer what they envision their dream house would look like and have.

The designer thinks about what house style and layout would meet the goal. Then a rough draft is made and eventually the details are filled in as the planning continues. Back and forth the designer and client will go until the end result is as close to perfection as possible.

By planning our retirement choices you will map out a direction to take you down the road of fulfillment. How well you plan will determine how exciting a journey it is for you!

As with any journey there will be things, sites and side trips you hadn’t anticipated. Stay flexile- decide if going off the main road will add or subtract the quality of retirement. Be willing to explore because there is a whole world out there for you to discover!