15 Feb Rewiring your future

Thinking about retiring? Have to retire soon? Thinking about making a change in your life? Consider rewiring your future instead!

As an integral/transitional Coach, my invitation to you is to consider The Golden Thread in order to find new purpose and meaning in life!

There are a number of reasons that gets us to the end of a particular phase in our lives.  This could be chronological age, a moment in time, boredom, frustration, a need for change or simply time to move on.  For those who are fortunate enough, we usually spend, what we consider to be our productive years saving up for what we know as ‘retirement’ with the hope that we will eventually have enough money to ‘retire’.  A part of this process is contributing to an employer pension fund or to a personal retirement fund.  When the time comes, we then draw down from these funds in order to have some financial stability and independence.

However, financial planning or drawing on our personal retirement funds is only a part of what we need to do when we stop working in the formal sense.  Neither you nor your financial planner have any way of calculating how long your ‘retirement’ will be.  While it is important to have some level of financial independence once you have stopped working, very little fore-thought or planning is made or calculated towards the quality of the years you have ahead of you.

Financial planners calculate longevity on estimations but as we know, more people are living longer than ever before.  People post-65 years of age today are healthier and more active than our parents ever were because of better nutrition, medial support services and lifestyle choices.  Another way of looking at this is to consider the various psycho-social development stages in our lives.  In broad terms let us consider that the stages of our lives are the years from birth – 18/22 where, through the journey of our formative years we transition into adulthood through experiences and learning. The 2^nd stage of our lives, around 22-65 years are the years where we evolve in areas of professional and personal growth and the years where we accumulate knowledge, wisdom and life-lessons as we progress. That makes the 3^rd stage – the years where we pull through the golden threads of our lives – the years ahead of us – the best years of your lives. How do we harness all the knowledge, wisdom and experience for ourselves as we live out our 3^rd stage of life? What adventures have we planned and what dreams are still to be met? What if we had an extended 3^rd stage of our lives – longer than anticipated? What would the quality of our lives look like?

So, what if our understanding of ‘retirement’ was less of an age or aging factor and more of an incentive to physically, emotionally and spiritually move to the next stage of our lives with new found inspiration, determination and enthusiasm?  Would we plan differently and live our lives less complicated?  Would we make different choices and what would inform those choices for the next phase of our lives?

Just when you think that you have amassed a wealth of wisdom, knowledge and experience, the world seems to be lurching and spinning off its axis.  Since the announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic in February, 2020, we have been caught up in a world that is completely without reference to anything that we have known before. In its place, we have become trapped in a two-world dichotomy; that which we have come to know and consider ‘normal’ and that which we now refer to as the ‘new normal’.  As we consider the future, it looks as though the ‘new normal’ is here to stay along with all its challenges and uncertainties.  And as we move through the ‘new normal’, we do so with trepidation as we are forced to make new or indeed different choices about our future.

But the ‘new normal’ also gives rise to new ways of learning, new way of doing things, new opportunities and new challenges to figure out.  So, how do we embrace the ‘new normal’ and incorporate it into our daily lives and build on these for our future?  Will the concept of ‘retirement’ or ‘early retirement’ still be an option?  Do we still get to transition from one job to another?  Is working from home a choice or part of the ‘new normal’?  How will we go about making choices and changes in our lives?

Instead of ‘retirement’, ‘early retirement’ or making a transition, I invite you to consider rewiring instead so that you create your own ‘new normal’ with choices and options that speaks to you directly.

I invite you to think differently about the future because the choices of the past are no longer the options for the future.  If we do not take a moment to reflect on this, we will be stuck in our two-world dichotomy – unable to act as we did in the past and too afraid to face the future.  Instead, the ‘new normal’ gives rise to explore new freedoms, new opportunities and the ability to create a new sense of purpose in our lives.

Coaching to what I call, The Golden Thread, is about exploring all these questions and options.  One of the most important lessons that I’ve learnt in life is that you always move from something – to something!!!!  Coaching The Golden Thread is about putting in place the stepping stones that get you from the ‘one side of the bridge to the other’. In short, it should have nothing to do with age.  It is about the choices we make along the way that helps us make the transition to where we would like to be in the future.  It is about continuous personal growth, development and wellbeing.  It is about rewiring in order to re-discover the best we have to offer ourselves, our family, our community and our society.

Coaching to The Golden Thread is about pulling through the golden threads of wisdom, experience, skill and knowledge in our lives to make our tapestry bolder, more colourful and most original. It is about exploring everything that has gone before that has brought us to this particular point in time – to look at the interconnectedness of our lives and to see the golden threads that have shaped us into a unique human being.  Coaching is about pulling through these threads from the 1^st stage through to the 2^nd stage and to the 3^rd stage of our lives.  It is about allowing our life’s experience to best be defined and enacted in our 3^rd stage!  What would the 3^rd stage or 3^rd Act of your life be like – what would it look like – have you taken a moment to consider this?

Coaching to The Golden Thread is about re-imaging our traditional understanding of ‘retirement’ – be that early retirement, thinking about retirement or planning retirement.  It is about supporting you to change your value proposition from retirement/retiring – to rewiring, re-discovering and empowering your future!

If you are close to ‘retirement’ or ‘thinking about retiring’, – if you have any thoughts along these lines and you think that you need to talk about it, I would invite you to reflect on the following questions as a means for engagement.  These are as follows:

If you’ve answered these questions, my invitation to you is “How can I help?”

If you have any comments or suggestions or if you would like to make contact, please contact me via:  plawrence@thegoldenthread.co.za. Or, go to my website at: CoachingandMentoringFutures.com