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  More Advance Praise for

  The Joy of Retirement

  “Once the mindless myths associated with aging are dispelled, people of traditional retirement age must learn to identify the purpose they can pursue with a passion. With the help of books like The Joy of Retirement, our rapidly aging population can renew their motivation to systematically envision where meaning lies in a capstone calling.”

  —Helen L. Harkness, author, Best Jobs for the Future, The Career Chase, Don’t Stop the Career Clock, and Capitalizing on Career Chaos

  “Borchard and Donohoe have put together a comprehensive yet readable and truly helpful planning guide for anyone considering retirement.”

  —John P. Springett, retired Department of Defense senior executive

  “I’ve just retired after 45 years, so The Joy of Retirement could not be more perfectly timed. David Borchard and Patricia Donohoe offer expert counseling and spiritual advice (combined with a dose of common sense) to those of us finding our way in the sometimes frightening world of life after paid employment.”

  —Mike Bowler, retired education editor, The Baltimore Sun

  “With a rare combination of scholarship, wit, and common sense, David Borchard has pierced through the misconceptions about this phase of life and reminded us that retirement is not an end, but rather a new beginning—an opportunity for growth, creativity, and the discovery of one’s authentic self.”

  —George McHenry, ex-lawyer turned artist

  “I have retired after a long career in international health consulting, and I am now both a faculty choral director and a student going for my bachelor’s degree in music. The Joy of Retirement effectively leads prospective retirees through the process I went through myself. Borchard’s tools present the kind of challenges one needs to face at this transition point and provide readers with actual data so they don’t have to rely on unreliable hunches and intuition. His hundreds of personal stories provide wonderful role models for going in whatever direction a person wishes to go.”

  —Robert S. Northrup, M.D.

  THE JOY OF RETIREMENT

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

  David C. Borchard

  with Patricia A. Donohoe

  Special discounts on bulk quantities of AMACOM books are available to corporations, professional associations, and other organizations. For details, contact Special Sales Department, AMACOM, a division of American Management Association, 1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  Tel.: 212-903-8316. Fax: 212-903-8083.

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Website: www.amacombooks.org

  To view all AMACOM titles go to: www.amacombooks.org

  This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

  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.

  Printing number

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  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?

  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 foc
used 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.

  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)?

  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-o
riented 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.

  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.