Your Autobiography Gives Clues About How to Design Your Retirement

Psychologist Dorothy Cantor, in What Do You Want To Do When You Grow Up: Starting the Next Chapter of Your Life, gives us a template for accessing our past challenges and joys so that we may be better planners for our future. She assists us in making sense of what we've been through, the highlights and the disappointments.

Although Cantor's questions target the retiree and almost-retiree audience, they are useful for anyone contemplating a change. Rather than planning things to do and places to go to keep busy, she urges the reader to "develop a genuine occupation, which is the pursuit of activity because of an inherent personal meaning, need, or calling."

Here's some of the questions that Cantor asks us to consider:

• What will I do when I no longer spend most of my time at work?
• What good things do I get from my job, other than a paycheck?
• What dreams did I have as a child about what I'd be when I grew up?
• What was I passionate about as a child?
• What did I learn from my family about what the good life is about?
• Who were my heroes, my role models, my mentors?
• How did I make the decision about college, 1st job, career? Relationships? Family-making? Where those choices good ones or disappointing ones?
• What was I good at? what did I love? What did I hate about my choices?

Cantor takes us through each of the major decisions and encourages us to write down how we arrived there, what worked and what did not.  Looking back, what themes stand out? What messages do we take forward about how we can fulfill ourselves now?

We have the opportunity to experiment, to learn, to be like a child with eyes wide open, to let ourselves be in awe of the new, to take chances and risks. To build new skills and relationships. In an upcoming post, I shall reflect on these questions for myself. I hope you too will do so...and share them here.