Peak Careers

Professional Development for Career Practitioners

purpose in life

Ahhhh…retirement. Hey WAIT A MINUTE!!!

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Image from Wikipedia

“The future ain’t what it used to be.”  Yogi Berra

“Retirement ain’t what it used to be.”  Jim Peacock

First off, ‘retirement’ is clearly not the correct word. I don’t think we have found the right word yet but they also didn’t know what to call young people in their teens in the early 1900’s until a psychologist studied them and came up with “teenager” sometime in the 1920’s.  *(Did you know that it was the automobile and the freedom it gave this age group that helped create “teenagers”? That and the fact that many people moved from rural farm life to a more urban manufacturing life).

What we are calling this retirement time period ranges from 3rd Age, The Third Quarter, Graduation, Commencement, Encore Career, The Bonus Years, and more. I prefer to call it “rebalancing” (Read my blog on rebalancing).  Why? Because I don’t see this as a time to end (retire), begin, or change –but more as a transition that requires rebalancing your values, interests, passions, time, and energy. But as the 76,000,000 Boomers wander into this new developmental stage, psychologists and sociologists will be studying the traits that make up this stage in our lives. We just need to wait until they figure us out 🙂  Listen to Jane Fonda talk about this new adult developmental stage. Yes, seriously, it’s Jane Fonda and it’s very good —TEDTalk.

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Technology free retreat – What a great day!

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On February 19 of this year, I turned off all my technology and took a “Rebalancing Retreat.”

Thanks to the inspiration from my brother Mark who has taken retreats annually for years and to Richard Leider, a ‘purpose’ expert who suggests in his book, Repacking Your Bags, taking a ‘technology-free’ day and to use that day to  j u s t   t h i n k…

My retreat was at a local liberal arts college in a remote room in the chapel tower. My view included the beautiful campus on top of Mayflower Hill in central Maine, to the east towards the coastal mountain range, and to the north up the Kennebec River Valley towards Quebec. Inspirational and fortuitous says my brother the priest. Below are some of my thoughts from that day.

I find myself reaching for my phone to check emails (I must have 20-30 by now from last night) or to send a text to someone… and I realize…the text can wait, it really is not that important they receive this text at 8:45 a.m.  

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Reading for your own professional development

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Each year I devote my December newsletter for career practitioners to my book reviews. While reading books I like to jot down notes and possible things to do generated from the reading and then I write short reviews on my Book Blog. I read a mix of professional books and fun books and you can see how eclectic I am by going to my book blog.

Reading The Demographic Cliff by Dent to my grand-daughter.
Reading The Demographic Cliff by Dent to my grand-daughter.

I encourage you to read professional books, magazines, journals, or blogs as a way of expanding your own professional development. Reading professional articles or books is just one way that you could learn something new or discover a different way of doing something you’ve been doing for long time. Ultimately I hope that I will learn something to help my clients or my students.

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No Regrets. Only Lessons to be Learned.

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Regrets are wasted energy.

I had a person in one of my online seminars post that she was an oncology nurse early on in her career and was often the last person people spoke to before dying. Many of them shared their regrets with her about:

  • Not taking risks in their lives
  • Not doing jobs they wanted to do
Mt. Whitney
Perspective often helps how you view things
  • Not doing the education they wanted
  • Long-held grudges

    • She had to leave nursing because this was such a depressing part of the job. But what she learned was to live a life of no regrets.

    Don’t look at your career development ever as a regret. You can’t change the past… only the future. And it’s how you deal and react to past events that are important. Most of us make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time. Remember that when you look back on your career development.  Don’t ponder or wonder “what if…” Let it go and move forward.

    The key to regretting something is to look at it and ask yourself, “What did I learn from it?”  I really have no regrets about past decisions and mistakes because I learned something from all of them. I learned that a bachelors degree in Forestry still helps me appreciate the outdoors and to understand ecology in a different way. It was not a waste of five years…and I love the outdoors…as a hobby. So there are no regrets. What I learned by being involved on campus during that time in a variety of student activities was that my true passion was working with people and creativity. That was a good lesson.

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    Less is Best

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    Less is best in most cases. We live with a tsunami of information and all we often need is a beach and an umbrella. Malcolm Gladwell in Blink says, “We live in a world saturated with information….The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.”20130704_112354

    So how do we take this enormous amount of information and turn this into understanding? One way to do this is to embrace the “less is best” motto and it will leave you with the clues to understanding. Malcolm Gladwell speaks to this in his book and I talk about “trusting your instincts”. (See 3rd bullet point in this blog).

    When working with college students on their resume, I say that every word on this needs to count. To have a purpose. You do not need to tell me that 207-555-5555 is a “cell phone” or JimPeacock @Peak-Careers.com is an “email”, I know what it is. Use bullet phrases, not sentences in your experience area because I am skimming this document, not reading it. Make this resume shorter, meaningful, and cleaner, so I can understand you.

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    Boomers to Save the Economy…again.

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    Why not? Boomers have driven the economy since we were born. Our love of toys in the 50’s & 60’s created many new companies. You are welcome Hasbro, Fisher-Price, Legos, and Mattel.

    With 10,000 Boomers nationwide turning 65 daily across the country, we are facing a labor shortage crisis everywhere. Here in Maine, nearly a third of the population is in the Boomer age range. Some states are worse than others, but nationally 47% of the labor force is 55+ during the decade 2006-2016. The growth in the labor force for ages 16-54 is less than 1%!  YIKES! Houston, we have a problem.

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    A career expert, David DeLong calls them “piling up at the door”.

    Here in Maine, the total labor force is 700,000 and with 411,000 people aged 45-64, they will be leaving the workforce in the next 2 decades. Match this with 302,000 residents under the age of 20 years old, this could be a gap of 109,000! And Maine is typical of states across the U.S.

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