How coaching can support retirement planning

Retirement, like any other transition, can bring unexpected issues that coaching may help you work through. It can be a new experience for many career-focused people, including executives, business people, middle management and professionals in roles such as policing, fire services or healthcare, where work can be full-on, pressured and demanding of time, energy and focus.

How different will it be to have:

• Fewer pressures from outside yourself?
• Less demand and structure in your days and evenings?
• Changes to daily routines, including meals, rest and activity?
• Changes to your relationships, such as spending more time with family or those you live with?
• Time to consider what you will do all day, every day?
• New choices about what you can do instead of the daily routines you are used to?

Yes, there can be a lot to master, not only the financial balancing when you retire. There may also be people, places, options and new opportunities to prepare for as they arise. These opportunities might be more disguised in new situations than you have previously experienced.

Like other aspects of your career, coaching can help you consider how to manage this transition and explore the options and opportunities available to you. Retirement isn’t necessarily “the end” of your career; it may simply be a change of direction, with reduced hours or new choices that suit your needs.

For example, consultancy is a popular option for experts in their field. Coaching itself may appeal to former executives in specialised fields, or perhaps a local role could help fill the time, introduce you to new people and offer new challenges.

Retirement isn’t the end it used to be considered, but a new beginning and a chance to think about the life you want to live. A coaching programme could begin up to six months before you hand in your notice and continue for a couple of months afterwards to support the readjustment, though the timescale is up to you.

Clients have benefited from retirement coaching over longer periods too, finding that there is so much more they can do and that making choices and decisions is not always as easy as it was when there were outside parameters to meet.