Which Mindset Will Make A The Difference in Retirement

Every experienced gardener you meet will tell you how important it is to fertilize the right plants at the right time if you want your garden to look beautiful. Pride in your work means delighting when people recognise your efforts, taking pleasure in creating a wonderful showpiece for all to admire.  A good gardener won’t regret the effort put in to yank out all those horrible weeds to make it perfect. Imagine the insanity of someone going around fertilising all the weeds and then not understanding why no one ever stops to look at their garden. Some people just never get it right !

I presume that if you’re reading this post you have been lucky enough to have had the personal abilities, skill and the good graces to have achieved something resembling the kind of life you’d always wanted. Perhaps now that you have a bit more time on your hands there’s an opportunity to begin exploring what your new garden could look like. What kind of feelings and thoughts have you been out there watering, cultivating and fertilizing for such a long time. Perhaps some maintenance is needed.

Did you always go the extra mile? If you were successful in your working life then your achievements were probably due to you thinking deeply about things, did you often prioritize certain choices above all else just to make things happen, sometimes missing out on stuff to ensure your dreams came true, you were focused. You knew exactly where you were going and what effort was needed to get there. You were honest about what was important to you and what stood in the way.

Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose .Lyndon B. Johnson

But where to now? Everything you’ve developed and understood, all the life skills and training, your professionalism, your gratifying communication skills, the leadership qualities and teamwork initiatives that have set you apart, your ability to problem-solve and create analytical forward thinking and your incredible musical genius or fixing peoples plumbing….amazing stuff, all of it. You’ve achieved so much. Let’s now come back down to earth for just a moment and look at what kind of plants you may wish to grow in your new garden. Do they need shade or full sun, loamy or clay soil, how much water is required etc…. So, all that’s been achieved in the past may slowly be fading, moving into our memories, being filed away. We get only vague glimpses of our cherished past selves when we catch up with old friends who knew us so well, back then.

This is not your old life anymore. This is really something new, but be aware, frustration can ruin the best-made plans. The difference between what we expect and the way we handle what actually happens is the true definition of who we are. So what will your new garden look like? Which emotions will continue to work best, which ones need to be dug out and thrown away into the compost. The past contains many old habits, the world of cut-throat business, climbing over friends to get to the top of your chosen profession, years of dedication with no one ever noticing but ultimately, it’s all part of the game that has been played for so very long. These are skills that belong to your old life, skills that divide and conquer, the idea that we must win at any cost, the normal old competitive nature of our economy and your role in it. It’s this very mindset however, that may become counterproductive to a successful retirement career, you have to know where to look and then to use those well-honed skills to refocus, to find what’s actually growing in your garden, to understand what doesn’t belong there anymore. More often than not our past success, our skillset has relied on us not seeing the weeds at all. 

What we Feed Grows

So what are the essential skills you’ll need to bring along if you want success in this new venture of yours? Retirement is about inviting lots of new ideas to your life by nurturing an open mind, that’s how you invite them in. Just as you’ve worked so hard to get where you are now, your new project will also take some time to produce results. Changing your outlook will help tremendously in establishing the best design layout possible for your future garden, but don’t be surprised if the results don’t show up for weeks, months or even some years ahead. Feed the right thoughts and a beautiful new garden will emerge.