Contemporary Retirement Coaching Blog

Great Quotes - On using your talents

Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

Henry Van Dyke

Quick Links

From The Telegraph: Proof man flu exists - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7505207/Man-flu-is-no-myth-as-scientists-prove-men-suffer-more-from-disease.html

Blogging Boomers Carnival #155

Janet at GenPlus is hosting what she describes as our 'motley crew of blogging boomers' this week.  According to Wikipedia, a motley crew is 'a roughly-organized assembly of characters' and I suppose that's a good description for us, really - a roughly-organized assembly of characters with plenty to say for themselves...  Click here to find out what we're saying this week.

New study shows US and UK exercise guidelines won't stop weight gain for women

A new study which appears in today's Journal of the American Medical Association indicates that older women who want to avoid gaining weight need to take at least an hour of moderate exercise every day.  (Examples of moderate exercise include brisk walking, leisurely cycling and golfing.) 

The findings are based on a study of 34,079 non-dieting, middle-aged women who were followed for about 13 years.  The women who gained little or no weight during the study started out at a healthy weight and consistently got the equivalent of an hour a day of moderate exercise.  Only 13% of the women fell into this category - the rest gained an average of almost 6 pounds during the course of the study.

The government-recommended guidelines for exercise in both the US and here in the UK are just 30 minutes, 5 days a week. 

These findings come as no surprise to me - it's pretty much what I've experienced in my own life.  When I took my first 'retirement' from my job as a curriculum manager at a further education college and started to work from home, I gained two dress sizes within the space of about 18 months, despite the fact that I continued to exercise every day.  I've lost that weight again now, but it took a while for the penny to drop and for me to realise that the level of exercise I had been used to taking was no longer enough now that I was home-based. 

With hindsight, when I went out to work, I used to be on my feet all day.  Dashing off to meetings, running around managing my teams, walking between the various teaching sites which were scattered throughout the town - I even chose a house which meant that I could walk to and from work each day, which added 25 minutes walking time to my day, and I would often walk to the shopping centre during my lunch hour or take a stroll around the nearby park with a colleague. 

When I retired from college life and started to work from my home office, much of this activity disappeared from my life and the extra weight started to pile on.  

Nowadays, I work out for an hour, at least 6 mornings a week and I know that I will always need to keep a close eye on what I eat. I also know that I could just resign myself to it and accept that, as we get older, we do get thicker around the middle (apparently, during our 40s and 50s, we start to lose 2 to 3% of our muscle mass per year), but, somehow, I just don't feel like me when I'm bigger.  It feels unnatural and I could never get used to what I see when I look in the mirror, so, for as long as is humanly possible, I will continue to get up at 6 am and work out.

You can read more about the new study here.

Are you paying attention?

Don't go through your retirement unconsciously... pay attention to what's going on in your life.

Some of the things I suggest you pay attention to include:

How you feel - What makes you feel good?  What doesn't feel so good? Are you regularly doing more of the things that feel good than the things that don't?

What energizes you and what zaps your energy

How you're spending your days - What activities do you engage in during the course of the day?  Which of those activities bring you joy and fulfilment and which just fill your time?

Who you're spending your time with and how they make you feel

How you feel about your obligations - committees, voluntary activities, etc.  Is this really how you want to be spending your time?

Your health - Are you getting all your regular check-ups/self-checks? Do you exercise daily?

Your mental health - Do you feel stressed on a regular basis?  Do you feel 'down' on a regular basis?  Is feeling down turning into full-blown depression?

Your weight - Is your weight gradually increasing?  Are you happy for that situation to continue?  If not, what are you going to do about it?

Your nutrition - Are you regularly eating a healthy and varied diet?  Do you regularly eat at least 5 portions of fruit and vegetables every day?  Do you eat regular portion sizes?  Does your diet provide you with the energy you want and need?

Your level of boredom - Do you find yourself feeling bored on a regular basis?  Do you experience boredom too often for your liking?  What could you do to alleviate your boredom?  Get a part-time job?  Start a business?  Do voluntary work?  Take a course?

How much TV you're watching - Is this how you planned on spending your retirement?  If it's not, what are you going to do about it?

Your finances - Are you spending too much?  Are you getting through your nest egg faster than you expected to?  Are you not spending enough?  Are you being too cautious with your money and depriving yourself unnecessarily?  Who could advise you about this?

And finally:

How much you feel you're achieving and how much satisfaction/fulfilment you get out of your days.  Pay attention to how satisfied you feel at the end of each day.  How did what you did today make you feel?  How much satisfaction do you feel on a scale of 0-10?  (0 = the worst day ever and 10 = I can't imagine being more satisfied.)  Then, ask yourself the following questions:

What did I particularly enjoy today?

What would I like to continue or do again tomorrow?

What could have been better about today?

What have I absolutely no wish to repeat?

What one thing would I particularly like to change tomorrow?

Tuning into the above on a regular basis - and taking appropriate action where necessary - can keep you on track for the happy, healthy, fulfilling retirement you deserve!

Blogging Boomers Carnival #154

It's Monday, so it's time for Blogging Boomers again - the blog carnival equivalent of the Energizer Bunny.  This week, our host is Rhea at The Boomer Chronicles.  Here's the link. 

Quick Links

From Beliefnet: 13 Ways to make new friends and

From PsychCentral: 10 More ways to make friends

I'm not going mad... I'm becoming enlightened

As you get older, do you feel the need to dispose of more and more of your possessions? 

I asked that question as my response to a conversation that's been running on a coaching discussion group that I belong to.  The originator of the conversation was wondering whether, as we get older, 'our systems have an inbuilt need for less rather than more' and I responded as follows:

'I've moved house 10 times in my adult life, and 5 of those moves were within the last 7 years.  Each time I've moved house, I've practically worn a groove between my house and the local charity shop in my attempts to get rid of the number of possessions that I've accumulated in my 51 years.
 
Following my last move, which was almost a year ago, I resisted getting the bulk of my possessions out of storage (in someone's garage) until a couple of weeks ago, when the garage owner said they wanted to rent the house out and asked me to collect them.  I duly hired a van, collected my stuff, took the things I felt I needed into the house and stored the rest (40-50 boxes full!) in my own garage.  I have absolutely no desire to unpack those boxes - many of which are still unopened from a house move 7 years ago.  These possessions are all things that I believed I 'needed' to have when I acquired them, but nowadays, I just want to feel free and unencumbered, and, apart from my beloved books, I want to have as little clutter around me as possible.'

One or two of the other group members responded, saying that they were experiencing much the same thing, and expressing relief that they weren't alone and going 'batty' in their advancing years.  One member, downshifting coach, Sally Lever, explained it:

"According to Eastern wisdom, this is the play of nature's wisdom and a natural progression as we age. "Growth" becomes less about "doing" and more about "being", less about expansion and consumption and more about re-integration and re-evaluation, exchange, evolution and renewal. According to this model, this is the beginning of the Third Stage of Life and, very broadly, these are the themes that I see emerging most often with myself and those of my clients who have entered this arena, whatever their age.

Quoting Lao Tzu: "To attain knowledge, add things everyday. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.""

So there you go - I'm not going mad... I'm just becoming enlightened.  I'll look forward to that!  Meanwhile, pass me that incense stick, will you?

The link between erectile dysfunction and cardiovascular disease

I don't often write about sex-related subjects on this blog (must be that typical English reserve!) but I read an article a few months ago about the connection between Erectile Dysfunction (ED) and cardiovascular disease that seemed so important that I wanted to tell you about it.  However, before I got chance to write anything, my browser closed unexpectedly and I couldn't find the article again (grrrr!).

From memory, the article said that there was a practically sure-fire way for doctors to diagnose cardiovascular disease in men without even laying a hand on them, and that was to ask them if they had ED.  (It's all down to blood circulation and, if blood's not circulating properly to one part of your anatomy, it's probably not circulating properly, full stop.) 

Anyhow, I found another article today from Science Daily that says practically the same thing in a more long-winded way, but the gist of it is: "If a man has erectile dysfunction, then he needs to ask his physician to check for other risk factors of cardiovascular disease."

Great Quotes: On Starting Again

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have happened to me.  The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure of everything.  It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple Inc.