Everyone says you have to get ready to retire financially and of course, you do. But what they don’t tell you is that you also have to get ready psychologically. Who knew? But it’s important for a couple of reasons.
First: 10,000 North Americans will retire today and every day for the next 10 to 15 years. This is a retirement tsunami and when these folks come crashing onto the beach a lot of them are going to feel like fish out of water without a clue as to what to expect.
Secondly: it’s important because there is a very good chance that you will live 1/3 of your life in retirement. So it’s important that you have a heads up to the fact that there will be significant psychological changes and challenges that come with it.
I belong to a walking group that meets early in the mornings a week. Our primary goal is to put 10,000 steps on our Fitbits and then we go for coffee and cinnamon buns, more importantly. So we have gotten the habit of choosing the topic for discussion. And one day the topic was how can you squeeze all the juice out of retirement. How was that for 7:00 in the morning?
So we walk and we talk on the next day we go on to the next topic. But the question stayed with me because I was really having some challenges with retirement.
I was busy enough but I really didn’t feel that I was doing very much that was significant or important I was really struggling. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what success looks like in a working career but when it came to retirement it was fuzzier for me. So I decided to dig deeper.
And what I discovered was that much of the material on retirement focuses on the financial and or the estate side of things. And of course, they are both important but just know what I was looking for. So I interviewed dozens and dozens of retirees and ask them the question how do you squeeze all the juice out of retirement?
What I discovered was that there is a framework that can help make sense of it all and that’s what I want to share with you today.
You see there are four distinct phases that most of us move through in retirement. And as you’ll see it’s not always a smooth ride. In the next few minutes, you’ll recognize which face you are in if you are retired. And if you are not you will have a better idea of what to expect when that time comes. And best of all you will know that there is a face for the most gratifying and satisfying of the four phases and that’s where you can squeeze all the juice out of retirement.
Phase 1: it is the vacation pace and that’s just what it’s like you wake up when you want, you do what you want all day and the best part is that there’s no set routine. For most people phase one represents their view of an ideal retirement relaxation, farming, the sun, and freedom. For most folks phase one last for about a year or so. And then it begins to lose its luster. We begin to feel a bit bored we actually miss our routine something in us seems to need one and we ask ourselves if that is all there is to retirement.
Now when these thoughts and feelings start to Bubble Up you have already moved into phase 2.
Phase 2 is when we lose the big five significant losses all associated with retirement. We lose that routine, we lose a sense of identity, we lose many of the relationships that we had established at work, will lose the sense of purpose and for some people, there’s a loss of power. Now, we don’t see these things coming we didn’t see these losses coming and because they happen all at once it’s like, poof, gone. It’s traumatic. Phase 2 is also when we come face to face with the 3 Ds. Divorce, depression, and decline both physical and mental. The result of all of this is that we can feel like we have been hit by a bus. You see before we can appreciate and enjoy some of the positive aspects associated with phases 3 and 4 you are going to in Phase 2 feel fear anxiety and quite even depression. That’s just the way it is, so buckle up and get ready.
Fortunate need some point most of us say to ourselves hey I can’t go like this. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life perhaps 30 years feeling like this. And when we do that we have turned the corner to phase 3.
Phase 3 is a time of trial and error. In Phase 3 we ask ourselves “how can I make my life meaningful again, how can I contribute?” the answer is to do things that you love to do and do really well. But phase 3 can also deliver some disappointment and failure. For example, I spent a couple of years serving on a condo board until I finally got tired of being yelled at. You see, one year the board decided that we were going to plant daffodils rather than the traditional daisies and we got yelled at. I thought about law school thinking perhaps of becoming a paralegal. And then I completed a program of dispute resolution, but it all went nowhere. I love to write, so I created the program called Getting started on your Memoirs, that program has met with limited success. It’s been a rocky road for me too. And I told you to buckle up.
Now I know all these can sound bad but it’s really important to keep trying and experimenting with different activities that will make you want to get up in the morning again because if you don’t there’s a real good chance of sleeping back into phase 2, feeling like you have been hit by a bus and that’s not a happy prospect.
Not everyone breaks through phase 4 but those who do are some of the happiest people I have ever met.
Phase 4 is a time to reinvent and rewire. But the face of new wolves answers some tough questions too. Like, “what’s the purpose here?” “what’s my mission?” “how can I squeeze all the juice out of retirement?”, You see it’s important that we find activities that are meaningful to us and that give us a sense of accomplishment. And my experience is that it almost always involves service to others. Maybe it’s helping a charity that you care about, maybe you will be like the old Coots. Yeah, these faults took poof in the local farmers market, and were prepared to give advice based on their vast years of experience to anyone who came by.
Or maybe you’ll be like my friend Bill. I met Bill a few years ago in a 55-plus activity group. In the summer we go together and walk together and bicycle together and in the winter we curl. But Bill had this idea that we should exercise our brains as well. He believed that there was a tremendous pool of expertise and experience in our group and so he approached a number of folks and that’s if they would volunteer to teach some of the things that they love to do to others. And almost invariably they agreed.
Bill himself taught two sessions one on iPads and one on iPhones because we were smart enough to know that a number of our members had been given these things as gifts at Christmas by their children and that they barely knew how to turn them on. The first year we offered nine programs and there were 200 folks signed up. The next year that number expanded to 45 programs with over 700 folks participating. And the following year we offered over 19 programs and handed 2,100 registrations.
That was Bill. Our members taught us to play Bridge and Mahjong, they taught us to paint, they taught us to repair our bicycles, we tutored and mentored local school kids we set up an English as a second language program for newcomers, we had book clubs, we had film clubs, we even had a few golf clubs. Exhausting, but exhilarating. That’s what’s possible in Phase 4 and you remember the five losses that we talked about in phase two loss of routine and identity and relationships and propose and power. In Phase 4 these are all recovered. It’s Magic to see.
So I urge you to enjoy your vacation in phase one be prepared for the losses in the Phase 2 experiment and try as many different things as you can in Phase 3 and squeeze all the juice out of retirement in Phase 4.