Ellen Hooper: Retirement doesn’t have to spell the end of purposeful living

I’ve been thinking a lot about retirement lately. Perhaps not what you would think would occupy the mind of a 35-year-old mother of two. I haven’t actually been thinking about my own retirement. Instead, I’ve been thinking about how the questions people have about their life post-retirement are really similar to the questions that people have about their career after they’ve had a baby. I’m a career coach and I work with a lot of people on turning their career aspirations into reality. Unwittingly, I’ve developed a bit of a specialty in parents of young children. It seems that there’s nothing like having a baby to get you reflecting on what work means to you and gearing up to throw all the cards up in the air and see where they land. As my parents have happily moved into retirement, I’ve had the privilege of speaking to them and a lot of their friends about the transition. There’s a lot that’s the same about these two phases of life. Both require you to drastically change your day-to-day routine, whether you like it or not. Both phases offer up periods of reflection which inevitably get you questioning who you are and what you like to do. When I work with new parents on making career changes the thing that consistently holds them back from following their wildest dreams is time and money. There’s something that could be so freeing about designing your post-retirement life when time is an expanded resource and you’ve already decided not to focus on a regular income. It’s ironic that we often see retirement framed in such a negative light — a senior citizens card and you’ve been put out to pasture. If decisions about work were about deciding how we make our money, what if decisions about retirement were about how we get to spend our time? Lots of the frameworks we use in career coaching can be easily applied to retirement. What are your strengths? What brings you joy? Where do you get your energy from? What do you like to do? There’s also a growing trend for workplaces to engage with “retirees” in new and different ways. As the world of work has changed, so have the models of how we use “talent” (a wanky word that HR people use to mean people and their skills). Your knowledge, expertise and experience doesn’t fall out of your head on the day of your retirement. More and more businesses are engaging people who have retired as consultants, freelancers, casual workers, short-term contractors and interim executives to manage the peaks and troughs of work. In his book about finding your perfect career, What Colour is Your Parachute, Richard Bolles says there are seven areas that define your work. They include; What you know about and are interested in, who you work with, what skills you use, your geography, your purpose, your working conditions, and your pay and responsibilities. With (perhaps) the exception of pay and working conditions, all those things are still relevant factors in deciding how to spend your time in your ‘post-work’ life. But now, the options are endless. Do you like to swim? To golf? Do you want to volunteer? Sing karaoke? Make cushions out of vintage clothes? I’ve heard that youth is wasted on the young, so why would we let our retirement pass us by? You don’t have to be young to have a life that’s filled with fun on purpose. Ellen Hooper is a career and retirement coach and people and culture expert.