《The Joy of Retirement》: Finding Happiness, Freedom, and the Life You've Always Wanted

THE JOY OF RETIREMENT 

FINDING HAPPINESS, FREEDOM, AND THE LIFE YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED

David C. Borchard

with Patricia A. Donohoe

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Borchard, David C.

The joy of retirement: finding happiness, freedom, and the life you’ve always wanted / David C. Borchard with Patricia A. Donohoe. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8144-8056-4 (pbk.)

1. Retirement—United States. 2. Retirement—United States—Planning. 3. Retirees—United States—Life skills guides. I. Donohoe, Patricia A. II. Title.

HQ1063.2.U6B67 2008

646.7’90973—dc22

2007052951

© 2008 David C. Borchard

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1: Reinventing Your Life at Fifty-Plus

CHAPTER 2: Life Transitions: Endings and Beginnings

CHAPTER 3: Imagination and the Next Season of Your Life

CHAPTER 4: The Life Themes Profiler: Developing Themes for a New Life

CHAPTER 5: Self-Liberation: Transcending Old Roles

CHAPTER 6: Establishing Your Criteria for Fulfillment

CHAPTER 7: Connecting Your Talents to Interests

CHAPTER 8: Relating and Behaving Differently as a Senior

CHAPTER 9: Coming Home: Relocating to the Good Life

CHAPTER 10: Sustaining Vitality: Managing Your Changing Self in a Changing World

CONCLUSION: Authoring Your Life

References

Index

About the Authors

PREFACE 

IF YOU’RE IN THE FIFTY-PLUS STAGE OF LIFE, what’s your reaction to being referred to as a “senior”? Some of my clients shudder at the word and severely object to such a label. Personally, I like the idea of being a senior. Do you remember your high school and college days when you couldn’t wait to achieve the lofty status of senior? When you became a senior, then you probably thought you’d arrived and that you were now mature, experienced, and wise. You might have even looked down on the underclassmen.

In corporate life, folks work hard to become a senior partner, senior advisor, or senior executive. In ministry, pastors differentiate their status as senior from those who are associates or assistants. Why is it that when we reach a senior status in life, say about fifty-five or so, that we then are reluctant to acknowledge our graduation into this new status, which once was so desirable? Could it be that at fifty-plus we associate the word senior with the pejorative label of being “old”?

Old, however, is an old concept when it comes to the new human lifespan. Age is not so much a matter of chronology as it is of health and mindset. Satchel Paige, a colorful character from the sports world and possibly the greatest baseball pitcher of all times, once said, “Aging is a matter of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”

Today seniors are generally healthier, longer-lived, and more active than ever before. In this new world, I suggest we consider achieving fifty-plus status as enviable. In Asia, you’d be revered. So why not enjoy all the hard-won freedom and wisdom that comes with this time in our lives?

image What We Want in Senior Life 

As a career management coach and counselor, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of clients over the past 30 years, mostly ranging in age from 20 to 50. In recent years, however, I’ve been seeing growing numbers of individuals in the fifty-plus stage of life. They want help with reinventing their lives. Some of these individuals want to continue working, but in some new capacity or another; some want to engage in full-time hobbies; some want to volunteer; and many just say they don’t know what they want.

Yet I’ve found that there are two things almost all of them are seeking. First, they clearly want more freedom to manage their lives and to be more autonomous. More or less, many of them say, “I’ve spent my time in the trenches. Now I’m looking forward to doing what I want rather than what is wanted of me.” One of my clients in the process of planning his retirement said, “I feel like an adolescent again—free and ready for new things.”

A second, and not quite so obvious, aspiration my clients have is to become more fully who they are. It seems that so many of us in the first half of life have focused on being what others wanted of us, what our professions required, what our corporate identity demanded, what made our parents happy, or what we thought we needed to be in order to fit in and to make it in life and work.

As we age, however, a shift tends to occur. We stop being so concerned about how others see us and become much more interested in being and becoming our “natural selves.” I call this the self-realization inclination, and it’s pretty much a bug that most of us get in the fifty-plus years. I hear clients refer to this aspiration in a number of different ways. Some talk of their desire to “be and do what I want,” some talk of the “freedom to be me,” and some say things like, “I’m looking forward to switching from being Mr. Corporate Guy or Ms. Career Professional to figuring out and being who I really am.” The process of letting go and rediscovering or uncovering who you are is one of the wonderful benefits of graduating to the status of full-fledged senior.

image How This Book Can Help 

It’s one thing to harbor the aspirations of self and life reinvention, but how do you actually achieve them? That’s a question I hear often from my fifty-plus clients. For many years I was working with one adult at a time in this process, but as the demand grew I realized the need to serve a bigger audience. For that reason, I developed a course that I’ve been conducting at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., over the past several years. The course has become quite popular, and individuals outside of the organization often ask me if they can attend.

Unfortunately, it’s a service available only for employees. Additionally, a number of executives would like the service but are unwilling to take the course out of concern that others would see them there and get a wrong impression. Senior executives don’t want others to think they are jumping ship, but they do want and need to plan for a different kind of future—one minus an executive title. While I occasionally deliver the course in other settings, those settings also are geared to a limited audience. Not everyone who might like access to a course of this nature or to individual coaching can afford it. Others shy away from what they might consider as “needing help with their life.”

It’s for these reasons that I have developed this book. My hope is that it will serve as a self-guided process for individuals looking to find new meaning and purpose in their lives as seniors. I have spent years—decades, really—developing a process to help those who want to get a bigger bang out of their senior years in terms of personal freedom and self-realization. If you are thinking of senior life as retirement and a time just for hanging out, this book may not be for you. But, if you are one of the many who see the fifty-plus years as the “Gateway to Freedom” and are excited about making the second half of life the best yet, read on. This book was developed for you.

The Joy of Retirement presents mind- and vision-expanding perspectives for creating a lifestyle for your senior years that is meaningful, enjoyable, and rejuvenating. The book features process, content, and assessment tools that have helped hundreds of fifty-plussers reinvent themselves and create fulfilling retirement lifestyles. The book evolved from my 30 years of career coaching and counseling experiences with adults, and, I hope, contains a large measure of the expertise and wisdom I’ve gained from working with so many individuals from so many different backgrounds.

I’ve designed a structured approach for authoring a new chapter of your life because I’ve found that people who are in transition and in a quandary about their future appreciate having a step-by-step approach. They want to see a path through the woods. I therefore designed the book as an orderly process for helping you resolve six of the major life issues that confront most in our fifty-plus years:

1. What do I really want (vision)?

2. Who am I, and who am I becoming (identity)?

3. What is truly important to me (values)?

4. What might I want to do more of and less of (talent application)?

5. Who will be the key players in my future (relationship)?

6. What kind of environment is best suited to my/our unique needs and aspirations (location)?

image Opportunities vs. Barriers in Senior Life Redesign 

The good news for fifty-plussers is that the potential for self-realization is greater in your senior years than at any other stage of life. By then, you have the three core ingredients essential for autonomy and self-realization: freedom, life perspective, and a fully evolved personality. Throughout our early and middle adult years, most of us are too preoccupied with managing the serious business of our careers, raising families, tending to chores, and paying the bills to be all that concerned about something as abstract as autonomy and self-realization. Consequently, the urge to self-realize doesn’t fully impact most of us as a developmental priority until later in life.

There is one rather large barrier that stands in the way of resolving the “so, now what?” question and achieving self-realization, which is that this task can be exceedingly complex. That’s because, by nature, it requires clarifying your deepest aspirations, your strongest interests, and your most energizing talents. That’s a task involving a process of objectifying a subjective domain, which is difficult work for most of us. Furthermore, even with your attributes and aspirations clarified, identifying the best way of expressing them in a world of unknown possibilities can be perplexing. Because the task can seem so daunting, all too many of us avoid the self-introspection and exploration required. Or, even more likely, we narrow the issue to something overly simple, such as where to live. Although a new home in a new environment can be engaging, at least temporarily, taking on a too narrow a perspective in life restricts your potential for discovering and becoming the incredibly unique creation you really are meant to be.

The complexity of this challenge, combined with the need to redirect our lives toward an uncharted future, means that many of us forgo the opportunity for self-realization and settle for a more mundane life style. Achieving the good life, from the self-realization perspective, isn’t likely to occur by accident. For most of us, this is a process that requires time, thoughtful introspection, and a willingness to make difficult choices. This book offers an affordable solution to this challenge in the form of a self-guided process—one that has been tried, tested, and proven through my work with hundreds of adults and professionals in the field. The book offers tools for assessment and self-understanding, resources, and a planning guide for achieving self-realization. The book presents numerous examples from the lives of real people as role models for inspiration, hope, and creative ideas.

It should be noted here that this is a book about recreating your life and your identity in the senior years, and not about the important business of financing a retirement. Bookstores are full of excellent resources for planning and managing that important aspect of your life. Do a Google search on “retirement planning” and you will get tens of thousands of hits on the subject, the great majority focusing on financial planning.

Much less has been written about re-inventing your “being.” That tends to be especially challenging for those whose work lives have kept them so busy they have had little opportunity for addressing the equally important issue of who I am becoming or who I will be when I leave behind my corporate identity, my professional persona, or my impressive job title, along with my youthful adulthood. By all means, one needs to address the financial aspects of senior life in order to enjoy the freedom of more autonomous living that life in the fifty-plus years offers. For sure you will want to address, if you haven’t already, your financial well being. That, however, is a matter outside the realm of this book, one for you and your financial advisor to give careful consideration.

Also, this is not a book about retiring to a life of leisure and self-indulging ways to pass the time away. Your time remaining is far too precious a commodity for trivial pursuits. In fact, nearly 60 percent of baby boomers, those of you born between 1946 and 1964, indicate an intention to work after retiring (according to a 2005 MetLife Foundation Survey). But a majority of the work-oriented folks want to do something that provides a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives rather than full-time income generating. Whether you are planning on continuing to work during your senior years or transition into a more traditional leisure-oriented lifestyle, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to achieve full-fledged self-realization. This is a book designed for those looking to take full advantage of the new freedoms, the self-liberation, and the joy of graduating into senior status that life in the fifty-plus years offers.

image Bringing Forth Your True Self 

Graduating into senior life provides the best opportunity most of us are ever going to have to achieve what the Gospel of Thomas attributes as a message from Jesus: “If you bring forth what is within you, that what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.” Regardless of your spiritual orientation, this quotation can be an inspiration to self-realize and enjoy the full promise of your human potential. I hope you find the pages that follow an inspiration as well.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

WHEN ONE HAS BEEN IN THE COUNSELING PROFESSION as long as I have, it becomes difficult to determine whom to acknowledge for the ideas, insights, and factual experiences that have combined to form the content of this book. In general terms, however, I would be remiss were I not to mention Dr. Daniel J. Levinson, author of The Seasons of a Man’s Life, and until his death in 1994, professor of psychology at Yale University. I had the good fortune many years ago to attend a workshop that he conducted while he was in the process of putting the results of his years of research into the final product of his ground-breaking book on the stages of adult development. I was able to correspond personally with Dr. Levinson for his input in a paper I was preparing for an individualized graduate school course on the subject of adult development. Dr. Levinson’s work was a key inspiration in my decision to concentrate on adult development as the focus for my work in counseling.

In that regard also, I want to acknowledge Dr. Nancy Schlossberg, Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, both for the many top-notch professional seminars she hosted with luminaries in the adult psychology field while she was at the University of Maryland and for her significant personal contributions in her many publications. I recall vividly a professional seminar when Dr. Schlossberg debated Dr. Levinson about his concepts of predictable stages in adult development. Like so many others in the counseling profession, I have benefited immensely from the vast contributions that Dr. Schlossberg has made and continues to make in the study of adult psychology and life transition management.

I must also acknowledge my friend and colleague Dr. Frederic Hudson, both for his publications that have made significant professional contributions to the field of adult development (see the reference section of the book) and for the contributions he provided to so many through his Life Launch course and coach training program at the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara, California. I have personally experienced Dr. Hudson’s courses, even going to one with my wife, Pat, some 18 years ago. In my mind, Dr. Hudson is a towering figure in the field of adult development and personal growth. I have learned much from him over the years of our professional friendship and consider him to be both a mentor and a role model for adult development.

Although I did not have the privilege of personally studying with Erik Erikson, his work in identity formation and the stages of psychosocial development are such a part of the knowledge base in adult development that it’s hard to know for what specific content of this book to acknowledge him. Instead, I feel it important to recognize his work in general terms for breakthrough insights in understanding the psychology of adult behavior and development through the ages and stages of the lifespan.

In more specific terms, for their contributions in the development of this book, I want to thank my colleagues at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. The assistance they provided enabled me to develop the course that has served as a primary conceptual and experiential basis for this book. I want also to thank my many colleagues in the counseling field for their interest and their input, suggestions, ideas, feedback, and the knowledge they have shared with me in the development of this project. In that regard, I especially want to acknowledge Dr. Arthur LaSalle, Dr. Elizabeth Lopez Murgatroyd, and Dr. Stephanie Kaye for their professional expertise and support over the years in helping to make this project a reality.

I must also acknowledge the hundreds of individuals in the fifty-plus stage of life who have participated in the workshops I’ve conducted and been my clients in individual counseling sessions over the past decades. Working with these individuals has been and is an ongoing learning experience. Their stories fill the pages of this book and bring life experience, reality, and the unique personal touch to its content. I have, or course, not used the real names of individuals, except where noted, and in some cases altered some details in order to protect the confidentiality of my clients.

I most especially want to acknowledge my wife, Pat Donohoe, for her direct support and assistance in ways too numerous to determine. She has been a constant source of ideas, reality testing, and intellectual input in this project from its inception some seven years ago to final manuscript. She has sat in on presentations and workshops I’ve delivered on the subject and provided encouragement and insightful feedback, both positive and negative. She has also been the book’s chief copy editor and my writing coach. In both of these capacities, her background and expertise as a former English teacher, magazine editor, and college public relations director, along with her own well-developed writing talents, have enriched and deepened the book, not to mention the process of writing it—a process, I might add, that also enriched and deepened our own relationship. As an ordained Presbyterian minister, Pat has also helped me to explore and emphasize the significance of the spiritual dimension to life in our senior years.

For all of these many gifts, I am truly thankful.

David C. Borchard

CHAPTER 1

image

REINVENTING YOUR LIFE AT FIFTY-PLUS 

“I knew who I was during my career in this organization, but I have no idea of who I’m going to be when I leave here.”

—A 55-YEAR-OLD MALE EXECUTIVE PREPARING FOR RETIREMENT

“I’ve worked hard for the past 27 years doing the company’s work, and now I am desperate to discover what I really want to do in the next chapter of my life.”

—A 53-YEAR-OLD FEMALE PROFESSIONAL PREPARING FOR RETIREMENT

“Retirement for me has been the gateway to freedom.”

—A 65-YEAR-OLD RECENTLY RETIRED EXECUTIVE

image Rejuvenation 

If you’re in the fifty-plus years, retirement no doubt has been on your mind, unless you’ve already made the transition to life beyond full-time employment. As I write this, I am 70 years old—chronologically, that is. I’d put my functional age at fifty-something, and I dislike the word retirement.

Have you ever checked out the definition of retirement? My dictionary defines it as “to withdraw oneself from business, active service or public life; to disappear, to take out of circulation; withdrawn or secluded; difficult to be seen, known, or discovered.” With that definition, why would anyone ever want to be retired?

I don’t want or intend to work full-time for any one organization ever again. But I do want more balance and diversity in my life than was possible when I was fully employed. That sentiment is one I often hear echoed from the hundreds of retirement-bound clients I have worked with over the years. How about you? Where do you stand on the question of how you want to be spending your time in the next chapter of your life?

As a freelance professional counselor and career management coach, I work with individuals transitioning to pension-supported lifestyles. The great majority of these folks are far more interested in life and work change than traditional retirement. My clients seldom mention the topic of retirement. Instead, they think about how to rejuvenate their lives by recreating, reinventing or redesigning the way they live. Retirement has a passive connotation. It sounds like something that happens to you because you have gotten old—through no particular fault of your own. Life recreation, by contrast, suggests a self-initiated action—one that originates from free will and intentionality rather than from an imposed condition. Maybe it’s time to retire the word retirement in favor of a more positive term. I invite you to coin a new term for your exciting new chapter in life!

Exciting? Yes! But not without some work. The big challenge facing most of us in our fifty-plus years is how to recreate a fulfilling and meaningful life appropriate to who we are now, taking advantage of the life, work, and learning possibilities now available. There are at least three compelling reasons to pay attention to your new challenge:

1. At this life juncture, you may now have the opportunity for greater freedom by way of a pension-supported lifestyle.

2. Never before have you been this old, which also means you have less time remaining in this earthbound experience. This sobering reality makes the time we do have a valuable commodity, a potentially rich but limited resource.

3. At this point in our lives, we have more life-enriched experience, along with deeper self-knowledge from which to make more fulfilling life choices than we did in our younger years. This hard-won wisdom provides a reference from which to discern what is going to make us richer or poorer in body, mind, and spirit.

The process of life reinventing often begins around fifty-plus, when we find ourselves mulling over questions about life meaning, personal identity, and our core values. Here are some of the kinds of questions that typically arise in this self-questioning process (check any of these that resonate with you):

image What will I do when I am no longer committed to the structure of full-time work?

image Who am I now, and who am I becoming?

image What is it time to leave behind?

image What do I call myself when I no longer have a job title or organizational affiliation?

image What do I care deeply about?

image Where would I/we want to live if I/we could live anywhere?

image How much time do I have remaining in this lifetime?

image Why am I here?

image Will I become an old couch potato when I don’t have to go to work?

image How will I know if I’m being successful when I am no longer being evaluated by my performance at work?

image Are my best days behind me?

image So, what’s next?

We shall address these issues in depth in later chapters. For now, let’s just acknowledge the reality of our aging selves. At fifty-plus, we have entered the ranks of what traditionally has been thought of as elderhood or seniordom. As we enter a new life era, it’s time to let go of that which no longer serves us well or that which we can no longer sustain for some reason. This includes youthful vigor, self-esteem based on career success, or beauty based on unlined faces. At fifty-plus, it’s time to fit into the skin of fully matured adulthood and create new reasons for being and thinking about ourselves. It also may be time to develop underutilized talents and interests, and possibly even engage in some new kinds of work, paid or unpaid.

image Change, Rejuvenate, or Hang On 

Are you in a quandary of whether the time has come for a change in life, a change in yourself, or an unchanging hold on what you have? You may not want to jump prematurely into an uncertain path, but you also may not want to stay stuck in a current rut simply because you fear change. If you have reached a plateau in your current situation and are running on the low side of motivation, you are probably facing the choice of whether to get rejuvenated through a big life-changing leap or to undertake a few small adjustments here and there. Big life leaps might include choices such as retiring from work, getting a divorce, taking on an entrepreneurial venture, moving to a totally new culture, or undertaking a major career shift. Smaller, life-rejuvenating adjustments might include engaging in some new interests like joining a meditation group, volunteering as a Big Brother or Sister, leading a Boy or Girl Scout troop, joining a church choir, initiating a new project at work, starting a new assignment within your organization, or enrolling in courses of personal interest at the local community college.

Of course, no one ever knows for sure what outcome will result from a decision to go forward with a major life change, and only you can determine whether you are prepared to take that leap. The following Life Vitality Assessment can help you determine whether the time has come to undertake a major transition, to make some small alterations in your life, or to remain a while longer in your current situation.

Life Vitality Assessment 

Use the following rating scale to assess your current attitude in response to each of the 20 statements below. Record the number that best describes your response to each statement in the left-hand spaces. When you have recorded your response to all 20 items, tally the sum of all responses in the box provided.

image

______

1. I would be completely content if my life were to continue pretty much as is over the next 10 years or more.

______

2. I have a rewarding work life and enjoyable leisure activities.

______

3. I would continue with my work and life exactly as it is even if I suddenly came into great wealth.

______

4. I continue to have as much or more energy and enthusiasm for my work and/or life situation as I have always had.

______

5. I never experience boredom or self-doubts about what I’m doing in my daily activities.

______

6. I feel personally empowered and am a creative force in continuing to make my life and work rich and rewarding.

______

7. I seem to be running on a full tank of energy and vitality pretty much all the time.

______

8. I am definitely not ready for retirement because there is much I still want to do professionally.

______

9. My love life is at least as full, rich, and rewarding now and for the foreseeable future as it has ever been.

______

10. I have a clear sense of what my core values are and believe they are fully congruent with my current life situation.

______

11. If I lost my work situation tomorrow for any reason, I am confident I could move onto an excellent new situation in short order.

______

12. I feel great about who I am and am taking excellent care of myself physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.

______

13. I find my current life situation highly challenging and feel good about what I’m learning and how I’m growing.

______

14. Those individuals who know me beyond casual acquaintance hold me in high esteem.

______

15. I am optimistic that I can continue on pretty much as I am now and for the foreseeable future.

______

16. I have a great family life and enjoy rich relationships with good friends and associates.

______

17. I am happy where I/we live and have hobbies and interests outside of work that enrich my life.

______

18. I am clear about my criteria for personal success and am on the right track with my life and work.

______

19. I believe that my current life and/or work situation enables me to contribute and develop my full potential.

______

20. My current life and work situation fully uses my best talents and top interests.

Record your total score from all 20 responses: ______

Interpreting Your Assessment Results 

At the onset of the twentieth century, if you achieved the age of 50, you were old. A hundred years ago, the life expectancy was fifty-something. But that was then. Today, it’s a different story. In his book The Power Years, Ken Dychtwald reports, “If you’ve already made it to fifty, you can expect to live at least until your mid-eighties, and thanks to impending scientific breakthroughs, these numbers will keep increasing.”1 That means that, if you transition from full-time work in your fifties or sixties, you still have about a quarter of a century remaining to hang around. Not only that, but there is a strong statistical probability that your coming years are going to be lived in good health and financial well-being. What are you going to do with that much time, and with the options and resources available for enjoying these years?

How rich and fulfilling your remaining years are going to be has a lot to do with your mental outlook at this stage of life. In her book Don’t Stop the Career Clock, Helen Harkness, a psychologist in her seventy-plus years, illuminates the difference between chronological and functional age. Chronological age is what the calendar records, while functional age is a more accurate measure of how old you are based on your physical health, your emotional state of mind, and your creative spirit.2

We grow old, Dr. Harkness observes, by buying into the prevailing negative social and cultural expectations about chronological age. One can easily buy into these expectations with the result that we are programmed to begin declining in our fifties and then accelerate the downward trend in our sixties and seventies. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Who says that declining functionality is inevitable in the fifty-plus years? That may have been true for retirement in the Industrial Era. Back then, most people tended to be used-up physically when they retired at age 65, and they subsequently contributed to the stability of the Social Security system by dying soon after. But that is history. In the twenty-first century, we take better care of ourselves, have improved health care, are living longer, and think differently about the post-fifty years. We remain vibrant by being active in mind, body, and purpose.

Assessing Your True Age 

How old are you chronologically? ———

How old do you feel yourself to be functionally? ———