Navigating Retirement: Busting the Five Myths – Part 2

Last time we looked at the myth that retirement is easy. We found out that it is unfortunately not the  ultimate vacation for many people even though going on an extended travelling vacation or two may well be on one’s bucket list. The reality is that retirement is not as easy as people think. 9 out of 10 people actually fear ageing.

In their book “Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes,” authors William and Susan Bridges identify five main types of changes one goes through in life. They include loss of relationships, changes in home life, personal changes, work and financial changes and inner changes. One of the reasons why retirement is not an easy change is that it includes all five of the changes that the Bridges identified.

Myth #2: Retirement is about stopping work. This is actually quite a problematic view. Sadly many people do think that they can simply stop working after retirement. The reality is that we have been created to work. We are not meant to stop working. If you don’t keep working with your intrinsic skills then your life expectancy will dramatically decrease. Daimler Benz discovered this the hard way. A study was done showing that many of their top engineers had a life expectancy of only 3 years after retirement. They realized they had not prepared their most skilled people to find ways to either keep working with their skills or discover under-used skills in the new season that retirement brings.

Therefore retirement should actually be viewed as an opportunity to use your skills in different ways. If you can use your skills in meaningful ways, whether it is for remuneration or not, you will keep yourself motivated, energized and find a place of significance in this world.

To navigate this well, you will need to know what your top skills are – the things you love to do and are good at doing. These are the things that you seldom get tired of doing. And you will need to find new or existing creative outlets for as many of these skills as possible. Outlets where you can continue to use them and grow in your mastery in them. This will keep you mentally sharp too and combat many challenges that can come with the older years.

HR practitioners and organizational leaders should bear this in mind not just in preparing people for the retirement transition but also for all stages of their people’s careers. If you help people to maximise using their intrinsic skills, you will have an energized and motivated workforce where creativity, mastery and customer service excellence are natural outcomes.

Myth #3: Retirement planning is mostly about financial planning. Understandably a lot of emphasis is placed on financial planning for retirement. Unfortunately, a minority of people plan well financially for retirement. They start saving for retirement far too late or tap into long-term funding too quickly and too soon. They underestimate the power of disciplined saving and wise investing to harness the momentum of compound interest. However, retirement is not only about financial planning. Both financial and non-financial planning are equally important. And even more people fail to think through and plan out the non-financial aspects of retirement well.

William and Susan Bridges write:

“Considering that we have to deal with endings all our lives, most of us handle them poorly… Either we take them too seriously by confusing them with finality rather than as the first phase of the transition process and a precondition of self-renewal. Or we fail to take them seriously enough and because they scare us, we try to avoid them.”

The Bridges go on to explain the difference between “changes” and “transitions.” They say that “changes” are the external and physical things that change in our lives, while “transitions” are the internal and psychological changes that we go through as a result of the external and physical changes that take place. We often focus too much on the “change” and too little on the “transition.” Planning and processing the non-financial aspects of the big retirement transition will go a long way to setting you up for success during retirement. If HR practitioners and organizational leaders paid more attention to navigating the transitions that organizational changes bring, then we would see higher success rates and lower fallouts. This is just as true with the big retirement transition.

At Xpand we have the experience and expertise to assist and support HR Practitioners and their staff prepare well for the big retirement transition. We have designed a Navigating Retirement Scan that enables people to identify how ready they are and where they need to prepare more for this transition. We also have designed a simple process that helps people walk through a systematic approach to Navigating Retirement well. If we can assist you or your organization with these helpful tools please be sure to reach out to one of our consultants today.

This blog series is written by Gareth Stead.