Retiring soon?
How will you make sure that you get the retirement you deserve?
What an excellent book and what an appropriate title - my thoughts have never been so provoked! My retirement thoughts had previously consisted of whether I would have enough money (although I had not defined 'enough', of course) - accompanied by vague images of living by water, having a dog and doing lots of walking. Oh boy, do I need to do some more thinking!
Thank you, Ann for such a brilliant guide to all the things I really need to consider. Reading it has opened up all sorts of possibilities. It will take me a while to answer all the questions, but once I do, I know I will have a much happier and fulfilled retirement than I had thought possible. I am making a long 'bucket' list ....
Liz Miller, www.blitzyourenergybills.co.uk
How much time have you spent thinking about and planning the non-financial side of your retirement?
There's a saying in retirement coaching that 'most people spend longer planning their annual holiday or vacation than they spend planning the non-financial side of their retirement'. Now I have no way of knowing how true that is, but one thing that I have observed as a retirement coach and trainer is that, generally speaking, the majority of people who are about to retire seem to get very little support with planning for their retirement.
In fact, the more pre-retirement seminars and courses I taught, the more I realized that only the very enlightened HR departments were sending along delegates who were below middle-management level. My constant thought was: 'What happens to the rest of the retirees? The ones who don't work in management? The ones who work on the shop floor, the factory floor, in the admin office? After all, they deserve to get the best retirement they could possibly have too! They need to plan their retirement just as much as those at managerial level!'
Let's face it - this is important stuff! You could spend up to 30 years in this next phase of your life and, without a doubt, it'll be like no other period that you've experienced before...
For example, for the first time in your life:
• You'll have all that extra time on your hands (an average 2,000 to 3,000 hours per year)
• You'll, potentially, be living on a fixed income (and don’t even get me started on what's happened to the interest rates on savings over the last few years!)
• If you have a partner, you'll be learning how to be around each other on a full-time basis for, probably, the first time in your life
• If you're single, you'll need to make sure that you maintain existing social connections, forge new ones and put the systems in place that will support you as you get older
• You’ll have to get serious about your ‘bucket list’ of things that you still want to be, do and have
• You’ll have sole responsibility for providing yourself with a reason to get up in the morning and discovering a way to add structure and a sense of purpose to your days
• You may have to manage other people’s expectations about how you will use your new-found time. (For example, someone may have their eye on you as their new babysitter, caregiver or dog-walker.)
• You’ll have the opportunity to examine some (or all) of the activities you engage in and decide whether they add to or detract from your enjoyment of life
• You’ll have the time to really begin to take care of yourself and address any niggling (or not so niggling) health issues
And, although you'll be retiring, you have some of the most important work of your life still to do...
MAKING SURE THAT YOU GET THE RETIREMENT YOU DESERVE!
You see, I’m acutely aware of the fact that retirement will probably be your last chance to get the life that you’ve always wanted – a life that you really, truly love! I have no wish to be rude, but none of us are getting any younger and we have no idea what lies in our future. You’ve spent the biggest part of your life either at work, or travelling to and from work, or engaged in activities in preparation for the next day’s work! And you didn’t have an awful lot of choice in the matter – you got up every morning and did what you had to do to keep body, soul and family together.
But now, for the first time, it’s different… Now you have a choice. Now it’s up to you!
So, this was my dilemma - as a retirement coach, I knew I wanted to do something for all the people who don't receive any support with their retirement planning… but what should that be? After all, there are plenty of perfectly good 'how-to-do-retirement' books out there already and I didn't want to spend my time reinventing the wheel.
I wanted to give those people something that they could work through at home, in their own time, at their own pace. Something that would really get them thinking about their retirement and how they wanted it to look and feel. Something that partners could work through together. Something that they could dip in and out of whenever they needed to. Something that would stop them from being in the 20% of people who are so disillusioned with retirement that they wish that they’d stayed at work.
So, here’s what I came up with - my solution:
Thought Provokers: Questions You Need to Ask Yourself BEFORE You Retire
(and it’s definitely NOT your average 'how-to-do-retirement' book)
I have just read Ann Harrison's excellent book, "Thought Provokers", and would highly recommend it to anyone contemplating retirement. As the title suggests, it certainly makes you think about the years ahead.
As someone who is now working part-time I wish it had been around when I was making the many important decisions necessary for a successful retirement.
Not only does Ann ask the right questions - which is the main focus of the book - but she gives the reader some of her own thoughts to enable you to begin the thinking process and come up with your own particular solutions.
Ann does not tell you what to do because the main role of a coach is to ask questions; and as coaching assumes that each person is an individual then by asking the correct questions you will engage the reader in a voyage of self discovery and allow that person to work out what is best for them.
This little book covers all aspects of one's life - personal, family, health and work - and I urge you to ask yourselves these questions as they certainly made me think of what lies ahead in my retirement.
Mel Rosenthal, Dental Surgeon
'Thought Provokers' contains over 500 questions which are designed to help you get the happiest, healthiest, most vital, productive, energetic, prosperous and fulfilling retirement you could possibly have.
Thought Provokers is filled with questions that will help you to:
• Envisage, design and plan how you want your ideal retirement to look and feel
• Balance having the kind of retirement that you want and need to have with planning to meet your future needs
• Think about the logistics of how you will live your life in this next phase
• Challenge some of the assumptions you may have already made about your retirement
• Discover what you still want to be, do and have in life
• Think about the choices you make – both now and in the future
• Reach a better understanding of yourself and how you want your life to be in retirement
• Get more of what you want in life and less of what you don't want
• Determine the steps you need to take NOW to make your life (and the aging process) smoother and easier in the future
• Sidestep the potential challenges and pitfalls that retirement can bring
• Determine what your definition of happiness is at this stage of your life and show you how to build more opportunities for happiness into your everyday life
• Ascertain whether your vision of your ideal retirement and your definition of happiness at this stage of your life match those of your partner
• Develop a shared vision of retirement with your spouse or partner (or, if you don’t have a spouse or partner, take the steps that will alleviate your worries about feeling lonely and isolated in retirement)
• Explore how you feel about your other relationships (for example, those with your friends, children, grandchildren and elderly parents) and the expectations those people hold about your retirement
and, most importantly, help you to:
Get the retirement you deserve!
An unusual approach. Very readable and understandable. Very thought provoking.
John McDonald Writer, entrepreneur, NLP Master-Practitioner http://www.johnmc.co.uk/
So, who is Ann Harrison?
I'm the owner of the Contemporary Retirement Company, a Retirement Options coach, a pre-retirement trainer and (as far as I'm aware) the UK’s first 2young2retire certified facilitator. I'm also a Barbara Sher Success Teams Leader and a certified confidence coach. I originally trained as a life coach with CoachU and the Graduate School of Coaching and before that, I spent many years in further education as a lecturer and manager.
I'm also the author of The Retirement Detox Programme: 40 days to get your retirement back on track which I wrote after growing concerned about the number of people for whom retirement was just one big disappointment.
I’m passionate about helping people like you to get the happiest, healthiest, most vital, productive, energetic, prosperous and fulfilling retirement you could possibly have, whilst, at the same time, helping you to balance having the kind of retirement you want and deserve to have, with planning to meet your future needs.
I found your book very thought provoking. It asks questions you may have previously found too uncomfortable to ask but, thankfully, suggests answers you may not have thought of. I anticipate dipping into it on a regular basis.
Maria Jenkins Director, Free Stay UK www.freestayuk.com
Now, I don't know about you, but I hate sales letters... the ones that go on for miles whilst l’m losing the will to live and thinking, 'Just get to the point and tell me how much it costs!' So here you go:
You can get an immediate download of the Thought Provokers ebook for just £19.97.
That’s it – no hard sell. I’ve either convinced you to make sure you get your copy of the Thought Provokers ebook or I haven’t. If I haven’t managed to convince you, many thanks for staying with me this far and I sincerely wish you a very, very happy retirement.
However, if ‘Thought Provokers’ sounds like just what you need – you’ll want to know how to get your copy! So here you go:
Just click on the 'Buy Now' button below and you will be taken to my 'Ann Harrison Life Coaching' shopping cart where you can, safely and securely, purchase the Thought Provokers ebook via Paypal for just £19.97.
You will then receive a thank you email containing details of how to download your ebook which will be delivered in PDF format. To read it, you will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer. If you don't already have Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer, you can download it here and install it on your computer, free of charge.
This is a risk-free purchase. If, by the end of Thought Provokers, you have worked through all the questions and don’t feel that you have benefitted from them, you may contact me for a full refund.