Retirement As You Want It

Making Flow Happen

Have you found yourself being completely absorbed in what you're doing, so much so that time passes effortlessly? When you are focused on what you're doing so much that you are not in the least self-conscious? You have a sense of control and know what your goal is ... but you're totally involved in the moment?

This describes a "flow" state, one that athletes and performers experience when they're in their best state. It's one that you and I can get into via many different kinds of activities. And, it exponentially increases our enjoyment of life, the more we can create those flow times. 

I'm reading a book called Flow in Sports: The Keys to Optimal Experiences and Performances,  by Susan A. Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who created the idea of "Flow."   I decided to read this because I have a book coming out in a few weeks about high level equestriennes, called Women Riders Who Could... and Did - and their life stories portray this flow state.

I, in my lowly state as an intermediate rider who started riding at age 50, get to experience the wonderful state of Flow almost every time I ride my horse, whether I'm taking a lesson, riding on country trails of our New England town, or practicing in the ring.

What do you do to experience Flow? Are you in that state of concentrated focus when you're playing with your grandchildren, when you're cooking a gourmet meal for friends, when you're doing some aspect of your work? If you're interested in finding out more about the Flow research, there's plenty of opportunity - much has been written about it.

How's Your Pillow Talk About the Next Stage of Life?

Do you and your spouse yearn for different things for the next phase of your life? In About.com: Senior Living, Sharon O'Brien wrote about how Boomers are re-fashioning retirement, based on a Merrill Lynch survey.

Men, the survey found, crave relaxation and spending more time with their spouse. Women, on the other hand, see this next stage as freeing them to pursue new careers, personal growth experiences, and to contribute to their communities.

What prompts such differences in outlook? If the man has spent 30-40 years intensely immersed in earning a living, he's ready to kick back and refresh himself, slow down, and enjoy activites with his spouse. He wants out of the public sphere and into the private.

Many women, however, because of having taken years off to take care of their family, might see this time as freeing them to use their talents in the public sphere, either in community service, in employment or in starting a business.

Since the woman is often younger, she views her empty nest as an opportunity to try new things. Today's boomers-turning-60 view themselves as much younger than what we used to call "60," and are often fit and vibrant; staying home with a newly retiring hubby isn't as exciting as the idea of making a mark on the world, using their energy and skills to start something new.

 If you are in a couple that has different frames of mind about what's next, how have you communicated about it? How have you and your spouse negotiated ways to each get some of what you need in this critical period?

Click on the comment link below to contribute to the conversation.

Artists are Role Models for Aging Well

Recently I interviewed Riva Berkovitz for my TV show, called Alivelihood: New Careers As We Age. Riva started a new "career" as a photographer 3 years ago at age 77. She discovered her love for taking pictures with a "macro" lens after gazing at a beautiful park near her house. Knowing that she couldn't draw it and do justice to the look of the early spring leaves of weeping willows, she decided to try photographing it with her digital camera. This led to her examination of minute sections of plants and flowers she bought from her florist and her experimentation with different lenses and with cropping the photos using an online program. Cropping captured her attention and she's never stopped shooting and cropping flowers, trees, and plants. She's having the time of her life.

The magazine Aging Well published an article called: "Retirement Redefined: Lessons From Aging Artists" based on a survey undertaken by Joan Jeffri, Director of the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The author, Juliann Schaeffer, sees retirement as being a fluid process. She describes Jeffri's study of aging artists to see what accounts for their immense life satisfaction. "Artists don't retire... They see life full of possibility vs. seeing life coming to a close... They are often called 'see-ers' - people that see beyond what's there," said Gay Hanna, executive director of the National Center for Creative Aging.

Jeffri studies 146 educated professional artists and found that there was no disconnect with older age. They stay connected with their artistic community, they have a firm sense of self, the majority stated that their self esteem is good to excellent. They've adapted their life to fit their art; for example, when one woman could no longer manage working with safety pins because of her arthritis, she shifted her medium.

Hanna said, "Life's real happiness lies in finding some area of work that you can feel passionate about and then using it to stay connected with others and continue lifelong learning."

According to the researcher Jeffri, "The life of the aging artist is a microcosm of resilience and the artist's response to materials ... provides an extraordinarily special place..." See full article.

 

Giving Back to Remain Engaged, Use Your Skills, or Prepare to Re-Enter Job Market

Are you a boomer who is downsizing from your mid-years' career and wants to use your exemplary skill set while providing service to a non-profit agency? Are you thinking that you need/ want to get back to being employed, but need up-to-date experience and references?

SOAR55 (Service Opportunities after Reaching 55), part of a nationwide network of 750 such organizations, serves volunteers who want to engage in purposeful work, not the old style volunteer who wants to serve cookies or stuff envelopes.

Boomers have a reputation for "wanting it all" and in their post-career years, that doesn't change. They want challenge, meaning, purpose, as well as the teamwork they've been accustomed to in their employed years. And they come with the energy, vitality, contacts, and expertise that many non-profits are going begging for in this strained economy.

Enter SOAR55, which happens to serve people and organizations west of Boston, but they exist in many parts of the US. What do SOAR participants do? Many perform direct service functions.

At a meeting I attended, volunteer Susan Ruder poignantly described her journey from educator to retiree to finding her niche at SOAR. After extensive training, she works joyfully with a team that goes into a women's prison and tutors inmates who want to get their college degree. After a few years on this assignment, she's ready for the next one and SOAR is equipped to match her with her next dream job.

See Nancy Bloom, another enthusiastic volunteer in the photo above (in peach) with Carol Fischman, another management consultant volunteer. Nancy is a social worker, former Director of Volunteer Management at a local human services agency and was on the faculty of the Hornstein Program at Brandeis University. She was trained as a SOAR 55 Management Consultant (the very first group) and has been part of several teams that have provided pro bono operational and management expertise to area nonprofits.

David Chosiad, another volunteer at SOAR55, comes from a business background and is an adjunct consultant who loves to go into a "messy startup" and clean it up, then start work with another. He worked with an aging in place organization, playing both strategic and practical roles and loves the daily variety of his tasks and personal associations.

SOAR55 also has a grant to reach out to unemployed and underployed over-55s.They provide workshops and volunteer experiences that are destined to give them experience in a (possibly) new field, upgrade their skills, and get current references to get back into employment.

Do you see the benefits of these service opportunites for you? Let me know how you want to become involved in your community to reap some of these goodies. Click the "comment" button below this post or contact me privately at Karma@LifeSpringCoaching.com

Nourish Your Neotenous Traits for a LifeLong Youthful Spirit

I never knew the word "neoteny" until last year when I reviewed Ronda Beaman's book, You're Only Young Twice for this blog. Beaman took many of her ideas from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu's work, chronicled in Growing Young published in 1989. Neoteny refers to the continuation of youthful qualities all through the lifespan. Contrary to popular myths about aging, we are capable of "growing young" until the day we die.

Montagu provides a hopeful picture of growing older. He describes how our culture has conspired to make us believe that we need to "grow up" or grow out of our childlike wonder in order to be mature adults. He challenges that view and urges us to develop our youthful traits.

Here is a list of qualities that Montagu discusses. When you nurture and nourish them, he believed, you will stay youthful forever:

 

• Need for love and friendship
• Sensitivity to others
• Thinking soundly without stereotypes, using observation, analyses, and experimentation which babies do from Day 1

·         The need to know and learn, to become aware

·         The need to work with pleasure and freedom

·         Exercise your curiosity, your "inquisitive insatiability"

·         Express your sense of wonder and awe

·         Play at activities just for the fun of it, not restricted to a goal

·         Express your imagination through the power ofmental images of what is not present

·         Express your creativity

·         Open-mindedness

·         Flexibility

·         Explorativeness

·         Resiliency

·         Enthusiasm

·         Sense of humor

·         Joyfulness, laughter, and tears

·         Optimism

·         Honesty and trust

·         Compassion

·         Sing and dance!

Which of these traits describe you? Which do you wish to work on so that you can feel more comfortable building them into your life? Do you know people over age 50 who exemplify this picture of neoteny? Comment here and if you give me permission, I’ll interview about your neoteny.

Volunteer All Over the World... Right From Home

Do you want to feel connected to the world but prefer to work from home? Volunteering from your living room presents all kinds of possibililties you might never have considered. See "How to Make a World of Difference -- Without Leaving Home."

Whether you're still employed, working part-time, or retired, you might want to enrich your life by being a virtual volunteer. With Internet access, you can join any number of organizations to express yourself in a different way from what you did when you were employed.

VolunteerMatch.com offers a database of 50,000 remote jobs all over the world. If you speak a foreign language and would like to hone your communications skills, you can find a job that you can do without the hassles and expense of traveling to a foreign country. If you have a skill you'd like to share, there is a volunteer opportunity for you. You can establish your own hours when editing or translating documents, designing graphics, or doing research nearer home or abroad, never leaving your house.

For those less computer inclined, how about beintg a foster caretaker for ailing pets or vacationing pet owners? Or make daily phone calls to elderly who live alone anywhere in the country or world? Or knit blankets for homeless shelters?

Needing or wanting to stay close to home no longer need be a deterrant to volunteering and staying active in the global community.

Do You Know Where Your Spouse is (Going to Be When You Retire)?

"Can We Talk?" a Wall Street Journal article, published in September of 2007, asks if couples are talking with each other about their retirement plans. The author mentions a Fidelity Investments survey of 502 couples who were interviewed separately and discovered that couples don't talk to one another about the crucial decisions of when they would each retire, whether one would continue to work after "retirement," whether they want to stay put or move, and what their preferences are about how they'd spend their time after they leave their full-time mid-years' life. Even fewer couples talk about how they'll fund their long futures...assuming, as most experts predict, that we have 3 or 4 decades to live after "retirement."

Jan Fulwiler and Karen Ostrov, retirement life experts, have developed a program in collaboration with Howard and Marika Stone of 2Young2Retire to help couples begin the process of planning, visioning, and decisioning about this next exciting phase of life.

They suggest that with 2-3,000 extra hours to spend together, couples are putting themselves at risk by keeping mum about this. It must be a sensitive topic. Why is that? I can only speculate.

As much as my husband and I talk about everything, and considering that I am a retirement coach, it's surprising, no, shocking! that we have not talked in detail about what we envision for our lives after we leave our full time jobs. We both love our work...most of the time...do we imagine we'll be working this much, or this intensively into our 70's, 80s, and beyond? Are we in denial about aging and believe we'll have the energy and motivation to do this until we die? Are we afraid to face the possibility that we have different agendas or timeframes, as many couples discover once they do retire?

It's a popular belief that most people spend more time planning their next 2-week vacation together than they do their decades-long retirement. If you are one of those couples who has neglected this important topic, here's some thoughts that Fulwiler and Ostrov offer (with my embellishments) to help you start thinking together about how you want these bonus years to be for you:

• Review what you enjoy, as opposed to what gives you transitory pleasure. Enjoyment is more long-term, challenges your mind and body, and has the possibility of putting you in flow, that wonderfully alert, conscious state where time passes effortlessly.
• Create a vision calendar of how you'd each like your life to look when you don't have to report for a job 50-60 hours a week. Fill in each time slot separately for an optimal kind of week or month and then share those calendars over a nice dinner in a quiet restaurant.
• Consider to what extent either or both of you want to give back or leave a legacy of writing, products, experience, or money to the world. How would you do that?
• Set aside time to try out fantasies that you each have, whether it be living in a different place, working in a different field, volunteering, starting a business together, learning a new activity that you want to deepen your involvement in. Don't assume it'll be as wonderful as you think without trying it first.
• Give yourselves permission to do things, such as traveling or learning a new sport... separately, alone, with friends, or with a group.
• Develop Plans B and C, should your plans fall through, because of illness, disability, or psychological need in either of you or your family or because of other conditions, such as not being able to sell your house or not having as much money as you expected to have.
• Most important of all...Talk about it and Plan. Don't go into this potentially fruitful period with blinders on. I'm going to do it TODAY. 

Write to me at Karma@LifeSpringCoaching.com or click the "comment" button below this post.

 

Blogging Your Heart Away for Mind Fitness and Making New Friends

Have you always thought you had a lot to say? Do you have a book lurking within you? Do you want to leave a legacy to your grandchildren of the memories, ideas, and inspirational messages you think about? Do you want to communicate with people you've met around the world, but don't want to call or write to each one separately?

My mother, Jeanne Brooks Kitaj, was an inveterate writer. She kept in touch with people she had known back when she was 12 years old by typing single-spaced letters until the last few months of her life at 85. If she were living now, she might be tempted to blog.

Not only will it prepare you for publishing your book, but blogging provides much more than that. "Put It In Writing," (by Ronni Bennett) an article in WSJ's recent Encore section states that "blogging is one of the best ways to stir up your blood, brain and beliefs in later life."

By stirring up your blood, brains, and beliefs, it increases that dendrite formation that I've talked about here before. That means it leads to more brain fitness. As we research, sort through, and compose posts for our blogs, we are continually exercising our brains, much as we do for our bodies when we power walk with weights in our hands or ride the elliptical machine.

In addition, an invaluable benefit of blogging is the social interaction you engender by asking for and receiving comments on your blog and by adding comments to other like-minded people's blogs. In "Put It In Writing" Bennett mentions friends she's made all over the world in her years of blogging. She even has met some of these people in person as she or they have traveled. A bonus especially for people who were accustomed to socializing with their co-workers, but no longer have so many built-in associates as they did when they went to the office every day.

Some of the blogs Bennett mentions are worth knowing about: My Moms Blog by 82 year old Millie Garfield; All About Olive by 108 year old Australian Olive Riley; and Kalilily Time by Elaine Frankonis.

Do you want to know how to get started blogging? Visit my mentors' site and get some easy training with The Blog Squad. And comment here if you have had experience with blogging you'd like to share.

For Women Only: Who Wants Commitment?

The Wall Street Journal's special section: a Guide to Retirement Planning & Living, includes a humorous essay for women who'd like to date men, but don't necessarily want to share their lives 100% with yet another husband.

Andree Aelion Brooks tells her readers about how surprised she is, as a 60-something single woman, not one who thought about herself as so desirable even as a young person, to find that men are pursuing her. Maybe, she muses, compared to her agemates, she's now attractive, fit, independent, and, most importantly...not looking to hitch up again.

What better social life to have, she writes, but to date Harry for the opera, Jack for skiing, Sam for intellectual conversations over a delectable dinner? Brooks is now keen on "playing the field with abandon" as long as she's not hurting anyone's feelings.

Many women who find themselves single after a long time are desperately seeking a mate, but notice that all the available men are looking for much younger women or they are drowning in invitations from all their women acquaintances.

But, Brooks has found a magic formula. Maybe it'll work for you. She is computer-savvy, and thinks that often when one of her male suitors invites her back to his house, it's to pick her brain about how to use a flash-drive, his in-dash navigation system, or download photos from his digital camera. And, she's not at all ready to commit her time to taking care of a man who (statistically speaking) might get ill, frail, and need her help for years to come.

How about you? What's your idea of the ideal relationship in your bonus years?

Getting Out of Your Retirement Rut With Coaching

Have you recently retired and find yourself at loose ends or too tightly scheduled but not doing things that you find meaningful? Or, perhaps you've encountered a setback you didn't anticipate...You moved to a new area, hoping to enjoy the warm weather, but miss your family and friends back home. Or your adult child was laid off and became increasingly depressed. Or your frail elderly parent, whom you moved to be near you, is taking up all of your time.

Many early retireds meet circumstances that were not part of their dream. WSJ's "Getting Out of the Retirement Rut" by journalist Kelly Greene suggests a "retirement makeover." There's so much interest in this age group of the eldest Baby boomers who are retiring, that there is a new show, called "What's Next" on Retirement TV that focuses on helping this group remake their lives. Individuals can volunteer to be on the show and get contacts and assistance to make their lives more of what they want.

How can people determine what kind of lifestyle would suit them after retirement? Greene documents that many people are employing life coaches these days, an increasingly popular vehicle for creating your next step.

As a life and retirement coach, I was pleased to see this article. One of the niches I enjoy working with (perhaps because I'm in the same demographic) is retireds or almost-retireds who want to meet these bonus years with a plan. Not a rigid plan, but rather one that allows for serendipity. But, surely, a plan that includes the possibility of continued employment in the same field or an entirely different one, part-time or part-year, or special projects; or civic engagement; or travel while volunteering, or taking your grandchildren to exotic destinations, or caregiving. All of these ...and more are now open to the new generation of healthy, active, engaged retireds. Which constellation of activities best suits your interests, talents, values, and passions?

If you haven't thought about this yet and would like to experience a complimentary session with a seasoned professional retirement coach, email me at karma@LifeSpringCoaching.com and check out my website.