Transitions are important to understand when it comes to retirement planning…
…because retirement isn’t just a single point in time. Understanding the stages of transitions will help you as you being your retirement planning process.
So even though retirement isn’t just one single point in time, we tend to treat it that way. We throw the person retiring a party and send them on their way to make their own way in the world at the end of their career. But for that person retiring, that moment isn’t just the end of their career… it is potentially the end of many other things.
This could be an ending of the structure that their career provides, an ending of some of the relationships that they may have developed in their career, or an ending of a certain identity.
This is what makes transitions such an important piece of retirement planning. When I refer to ‘Transitions’, I’m borrowing from the work of William Bridges, the author of Transitions – Making Sense of Life’s Changes. This book can get you through any time of big change in your life and I encourage you to pick it up.
In the context of retirement planning, transitions are really about understanding who you are and what’s important to you, and then bringing that into the next phase of your life.
According to Bridge’s philosophy, a transition follows three stages. It begins with an ending, it goes into a neutral period, and then the last stage of the transition is the new beginning.
What happens for most people in retirement is they go from an ending to a new beginning, skipping over that neutral period. If you spend some time understanding how transitions flow, so those three steps – the ending, the neutral and the beginning, and spend some time processing endings and working on yourself for this neutral period, then the new beginning is authentic to you and it is fulfilling.
This is what I share with you in this video today. You might want to pick up the book, William Bridges – Transitions. Take some time to acknowledge transitions and do some work on yourself to understand what’s important to you and how you will bring that forward with you into your retirement.
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How you will be designing your life in your retirement? Leave a comment below and let me know. Share this post with others who are at any stage in their retirement planning process and will benefit from understanding the transitions they will face.