Maybe It's Time to Think Differently About Retirement

I am starting to read articles now about letting go of retirement as a viable option, especially the concept of Freedom 55 and early retirement.  They bring me back to a dialogue I had with a client (lets call him Joe).  We focused on his perception that he was running out of time and needed to work harder and how it was creating unnecessary pressure within him.  He turns fifty next year and only had 15 years to go until he “retires”.  He went on to say he wanted to have the capability to retire at 55 if he wants to.  The irony is that his father, 85, still shows up at the factory he founded 50 years ago.  Joe’s father clearly has no motivation to pack it in and retire. Of course Joe is his own man.

This conversation made me wonder where the whole retirement concept came from?  

Since then the idea has evolved somewhat but it doesn’t change the fact that retirement is a made up concept that we have completely bought into.

Take a “Thinking Differently” perspective and try this on for a minute…

See your life as a seamless expression of activities performed in a certain locations, with certain people over a period of time.

When Joe did this he began to see his entire life as one complete unit with no segmentation. This new concept was very freeing to Joe especially when he realized that there is no waiting there is just living right now. 

I am sure you have friends who have “retired” early to travel, play golf all day long, and will refute what I am saying.  Consider this your friends never did “retire”, instead in realty your friends merely changed what he/she did, who they did it with and where they did it. Making everyday an expression of who they are and what they want.

Mankind has been in some sort of civilized community form for about ten thousand years, struggling to make ends meet and slowly improving life longevity. For the first 9,900 years we shared space with our loved ones, passing on what little wealth accumulated, working till we dropped, and doing what we could to pass on knowledge.  Then approx 120 years ago, the German Chancellor Bismark had an idea.  He decides to pay any one who lives over the age of 70 an annual amount of money and the concept of retirement was born.

Procrastination Doesn’t Actually Exist!

A few weeks ago I was talking with my brother who said he was procrastinating on a project at work and his lack of action was beginning to affect his credibility with his team.  I heard him beat himself up over his lack of action and blamed it on procrastination. I suggested to him that procrastination was a made up word and that it doesn’t actually exist. He of course had a hard time with this and it took quite a long time to convince him otherwise, after all both of us had grown up believing in the concept as real.

Procrastination is a concept, a word that someone at sometime in the past made up to describe a human condition of action or non-action. We humans believe we need these labels to help us understand ourselves but believing in the concept is the problem not the inaction or time passing.

The label allows us to:

·         easily become distracted from the real issue,

·         feel guilty,

·         beat ourselves up and generally feel bad, thereby wasting more time and energy.

Just for a moment take the concept of procrastination out of your thinking and free yourself to explore what is really going on:

1. You may be going against your natural rhythm of how you accomplish tasks.
2. The creative process and ideas sometimes require space, stasis or "downtime" to fully form.
3. There is not enough information available to make a decision or take action.
4. You don't believe that what you want is what you want.
5. You don't really want to do what you think you “should” do.
6. It's not yet time.
7. You don't trust yourself.
8. The task is too overwhelming when envisioned in your mind.
9. Habit and conditioning.

When I had finally convinced my brother that his focus on the idea of procrastination was distracting him from actually discovering the issue of his inaction, I described it to him as a blanket over his thoughts, he was able to identify that, the real issue was his belief that he had to complete aspects he was not good at. Within 5 minutes of this discovery he had drawn out his strategy. The next day he made a phone call and the project was completed shortly thereafter. What was interesting for me was the sudden relief he felt and the corresponding release of energy and confidence the sudden insight created. This happens quite frequently.  Energy creates follow-through.

Many people feel this release, this freedom, when they realize they are not procrastinating at all. How could they be, it can’t exist. Like my brother they are merely missing a key piece of information that is outside of their discovery because of clouded thinking and blame.

Now I am not for a moment suggesting that there is not a feeling of time passing, or distracted action or a general shouting within your head that you “should be doing something dammit”. Rather release the idea of this being a problem from your thinking. This should let your natural insights and intelligence emerge to help you understand what is really going on for you.

Stop thinking so hard, stop trying so hard, let go and breathe. Feel confident in the discovery that procrastination does not exist.  By letting go of a fixation on language and a label and recognizing that what is going on is natural and fine we can give ourselves the freedom to act or not. This freedom after all is really what you want anyway.

How do you want freedom to show up today?

There Is No Box?

What is beyond those things we take as accepted solutions?

When you start asking a question like this the answer can be startling in its simplicity. All of a sudden freedom is possible, and meaning to life is clearer. There is an energy, a vitality you can tap into when you are free for instance, to end the need to, try and “think outside of the box.” It might in-fact be better to discover, that the box never existed in the first place.  

 Ask yourself, “What is beyond the advice I feel compelled to follow? "

A new perspective is available. Acceptance and freedom from internal suffering, doubt, and chatter is possible. For instance when we let go of our incessant need to question ourselves and simply love who we are all our internal judgments and manipulations drop away. All the energy and time we take in distracting self chatter can now be used for more enjoyable pursuits like deeply connecting to those we love.

I have spent over 20 years exploring and creating models of personal and organizational change. Some worked brilliantly, other dismal failures. Throughout it all though was the drive and feeling that we were missing the obvious, that we were focusing on the surface issues not getting to the root of it all which just may be thought itself.

My job as an advisor to CEO’s, business owners and executive teams is to help them answer, unanswerable questions by teaching them to think differently . But to do this requires them to explore the assumptions and language they hold on to as truth.

What truths are you holding on to?

Together we will look at what if there never was a “box”?

The Story Behind Thinking Differently®

I am someone who has, for as long as I can remember, been interested in how people think and operate in the world. Even as a teenager, while painting water pipes high up in factory rafters during the summer, I remember listening to people interact and wondering how they can work better together. It has been a lifetime pursuit that gets expressed through all I do both personally and professionally.

Though I do have a university degree, I was not a good student and it was not until my mid-thirties, early forties that my fascination for human development and the potential of the human spirit fully blossomed. I have created and refined over the years all the programs and the philosophy that I live and my clients use. It would have been no doubt easier to go out and buy into other people's training packages but I was driven to create, write and reflect on my own observations and conclusions.

The interesting challenge, of course, is to accept who you are and how you operate in the world and then to fully maximize this understanding. I would say that when this clarity hit me between the eyes my ability to help my clients increased significantly. I see my progress as the inverse to formal learning where you learn in order to apply knowledge and skills in the world.

For me, it can be described as "I am and now let's figure out what that really means to me and others." As you can no doubt conclude it is extremely important that I live what I teach. I believe to be truly effective in helping someone transform their life; I have to be prepared to go to the edges of myself. Life, after all is worth playing to the fullest.

I am happy to share this knowledge with Thinking Differently®, a philosophy based on how the root of thinking and perception influence actions and outcomes.

The Goal:To answer the unanswered questions you have within you that have probably been there for quite sometime, maybe even years; questions that have taken too much energy and time to answer. Questions about you, your life, your business, and what you really want.

Learn more at http://www.jonathancreaghan.com/

I encourage you to share this new way of thinking and look forward to hearing how you have found the answers.