When considering a particular area of retirement life, be it career, family, relationships, health, and so on, individuals fall into one of five camps:
1. I don’t know what I want;
2. I know what I want, but don’t know how to get it;
3. I know what I want and how to get it, but something keeps holding me back;
4. I know what I want, how to get it and I’m motivated and on track; and
5. I know what I want and I’ve already got it!
The retirement coaching process is most relevant and beneficial for those people falling into the first three camps above. A fundamental principle behind coaching is that each person knows best what they want. Friends, regardless of how well they may know you or whether they have your best interests at heart, still see your retirement from their perspective. Parents, mentors, counsellors and the like bring to the table their experiences and advise you on what you should do based on that. However, what may be relevant and important to them, may not always be equally so for you.
Call it gut-feel, intuition, or a hunch you generally do know what you want or don’t want at some level. It may not be at a conscious level, or worse yet it may be well hidden but at your very core you do know. An effective retirement coach is one who is able to help you access your own inner knowledge. In doing so, you establish what you really want in a particular scenario. The retirement coaching techniques employed to do this vary from person to person and range from asking powerful open-ended questions and creative visualisation to considering the same subject from a variety of different perspectives.
