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Retirement Renewal

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

Your Retirement Your Way book coverMany of us look to our retirement as a possible renewal; however we may falter in our attempts to decide what our most significant aims are — our interests, our motivations, what results will satisfy us and our loved ones. We know that we would like to focus our legacy, our own understanding of what is valuable to us — our life, our contribution — but we are not sure how to create out of that a plan for our future. This blog is dedicated to creating a community of people who can be resources in analyzing each others’ gifts and clarifying steps to enhance their future.

We begin by exploring times in our lives when we have operated at our peak. Time flew by — we were so engaged with what we were doing that we lost all track of time. We call that experience “flow” and the concept is based on the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who first described it in a way that was useful for Western readers. I have found over many years of helping people access their most creative selves that by analyzing memories when we have been in a state of flow, we can establish rich sources of information about our most creative states. What were we doing; how were we doing it; what, in retrospect did it mean to us and what made it so special?

By analyzing these memories, or stories, we approach the bedrock of our personalities: what allows us to operate at our best? And how can we use this information to plan for a great future — one that has us eager to start a new day? Having collected these stories over many years I have found that the more interpretations of the memories we gather the more likely we will be able to find ways to apply our memories as guides to the future
I would like to dedicate this blog space as a community bulletin board where people can send in their “memories” (I will present guidelines similar to the ones in our book “Your Retirement, Your Way” for instructions about how to write them) and then open this forum to peoples’ contributions. Following that we can present interpretive suggestions about those experiences — what interested the writer, how they went about it, what parts of their personality seemed to be excited in the memory — and then suggest ways for the writer to plan based on this information. A close analysis of this kind approximates the state of introspection which allows us access to our preconscious thoughts. We can work as a community to the very essence, the core of our selves!
Copyright © 2006-2008 Your Retirement Your Way
Alan Bernstein, L.C.S.W. & John Trauth, M.B.A
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