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SETTING THE STAGE

Imagine you are attending a live theatre performance divided into three Acts. It is interval, following the conclusion of the second Act and you are reflecting on the show so far. You feel that Acts One and Two have been powerful and thought-provoking. You are wondering what surprises the rest of the show might bring.

But this show is unique. There is only one performance…it is a play written by you and you are writing the script as the performance happens in real time…the actors are on stage waiting for their lines. There is no rehearsal and there is only performance – this is opening night and closing night all in one. And no one yet knows – not even you, the playwright – what the ending will be. And the final twist? You are the lead actor, the star of the show.

The play is called “Your Life”.

Act One embraced the early years of your life – the years that prepared you for work. The content of Act Two has been your working life. Act Three is yet to come and you wonder what surprises it has in store for you. Act Three may well be a long one. It’s up to you to make it memorable for you and for those who love you. You will want to feel that, at the end of “Your Life”, the rest of the cast and the audience alike will give you a standing ovation, acknowledging that you have given a performance they will never forget.

You have of course written many sub-plots along the way – getting a job, getting married, having children, retiring from competitive sport, adjusting to the kids leaving home, to name but a few. So in one sense the prospect of giving up fulltime work is just another sub-plot that you will have managed to live and grow through, just as you did through all the previous life changes. This one might seem different because work has been the centre of your life for so many years. Your job has defined who you are – in your eyes and in the eyes of everybody else in your life – at work, home and even at play.

Many people can’t wait to retire. You may perhaps have seen work as of little more value than enabling you to pay the bills. A few good things have happened and there were times when you really enjoyed it, but by and large you find work to be a necessity rather than a joy. On the other hand you may have embraced work as a key part of your personal life evolution, to the point that you don’t want to quit. This is especially the case if you have built up your own business and see it as your primary driver for living. You can’t envisage a life that doesn’t involve a working career.

I have mentioned two scenarios. Your experience might be somewhere in between.

Whatever you feel about work you will have done some financial planning for your later years. We all spend considerable time and money to make sure we have financial security during our dessert years. It’s just as important to develop your own self-investment plan. A self-investment plan is exactly what it says – investing in your own interests, talents, abilities, passions and dreams – deciding what you actually want to do with your time in the next phase of your life. Statistically speaking, we can look forward to living a lot longer than people did in past generations. In the times of the 19^th century Industrial Revolution, management felt you had lived most of your life by the age of 65 and likely to die by age 70. There was little point to planning a full and meaningful life after your working years then. Now you might even live as long yet as your working life so far. That’s a long time if you are thinking of spending your dessert years basically sitting in your rocking chair watching the world go by.

Whatever your feelings are about this final stage of your life, fear can be a big factor in your thinking. Not just fear of not having enough money to enjoy your dessert years but also the fear of a life without work. Will you have interests that motivate you in the way your career work has done over the years? You will need to make some long-term lifestyle decisions in a fast-moving, rapidly-changing era where it is hard to predict what the world will be like next week or next year, let alone over the rest of your life. Will you just keep going the way you are for all those years? Probably not.

Your way of thinking about retirement is being influenced by many factors other than simply the role of work in your life and your identity as a person. Whether you are male or female, you will be experiencing a change-of-life. You might be starting to wonder if your life is like a glass that is half-full and still filling, or a glass that is half-empty and continuing to drain away. You are certainly starting to see almost everything differently – including your priorities, your physical and mental abilities, your financial needs and who is important in your life. To many of us these changes are scary because they are signs of getting old. Increasingly though, we are starting to see this changed outlook on life as something of a release from the expectations we felt were placed on us in the first half of our lives. Maturity is helping us to realize not only are we entitled to follow our passions but others actually want us to relax and be ourselves more.

Putting it simply, you are moving into a wonderful stage of life where you start the gradual process of changing the emphasis from:

 Making what you have to do the centre of your life (supported by what you love to do)….to

 Making what you love to do as the centre of your life (supported by what you have to do).

It doesn’t happen overnight but the very thought will drive you onwards over the coming years.

They say everything happens in three’s and that applies to life itself.

I have already described your life is like a traditional three-course meal. The other three-stage perspective relates to a statement I made very early in this book: “The whole of your life from birth to death – not just your working career life – is a continuum of progress, growth and self-actualisation.”

1 Where you are at right now in your life’s progress, growth and self-actualization

2 What interests/passions you would like still to pursue towards fulfilling your natural-born potential

3 What actions/changes/recalibrations you might make in your desire to fulfil that potential

Now, long before you make any decisions whether to cease fulltime work, is a great time to seriously think about those three statements and how this book can help you look ahead positively and with optimism to the promise of your life still to come.