Creating a Fulfilling Life Beyond Your Career

Aspen Splendor – 2013

Colorado

Create a Lifestyle That Serves Your Purpose and Allows Your Desires to Flourish

Throughout life, important responsibilities sometimes require us to postpone something we would like to do. A desire gives way to a necessity because our time, attention or financial resources must be directed elsewhere.

During the years of building a career and caring for others, such choices may occur repeatedly. Interests that are enjoyable but not essential wait while more pressing obligations receive attention. Some are eventually fulfilled. Others remain quietly stored in memory, awaiting a more suitable time.

The willingness to meet those obligations reflects the person you are. Whether your responsibilities concern family, profession or community, attending to them with goodwill expresses your character. The satisfaction that follows also helps develop it.

Over time, purposeful effort becomes familiar. You become accustomed to applying your abilities, meeting commitments and accomplishing something that matters. Even when hobbies and recreation must wait, the satisfaction of fulfilling your responsibilities can outweigh regret about what you have deferred.

Giving Deferred Interests Their Proper Place

When the conclusion of your career comes into view, the possibilities for personal enjoyment become more immediate. You may begin reconsidering the pursuits that previously received only occasional attention.

This shift can feel surprisingly unfamiliar. For many years, you have organized your life around what others needed from you. Now you are considering what you would like to choose for yourself. Learning to make those choices in a balanced way is part of preparing for the next phase.

After a career ends, the demands others place on you usually decrease significantly. You have greater discretion over your time and energy. Decisions about what to do, where to go and when to act can become more personal.

That freedom is worth enjoying. Long anticipated interests and hobbies can bring pleasure and a welcome sense of reward. You have good reason to appreciate opportunities that were once difficult to accommodate.

Nevertheless, the satisfaction of fulfilling a desire is not necessarily the same as the fulfillment you experienced through your work. Your occupation allowed you to apply capabilities you had developed over many years. It offered one important way to realize your potential.

Enjoyable pursuits can enrich your life, while the need to use your knowledge, skills and wisdom continues. Ending professional obligations does not necessarily remove that need. You may still require opportunities to express abilities that have become integral to your life.

The balance between necessity and desire therefore remains important, although the circumstances have changed. Your experience can help you adjust that balance. You are preparing to continue developing your potential in a phase with different demands and greater freedom.

A Season of Rest and Renewal

I especially enjoy autumn. Its name seems well suited to a season of such elegance. Trees display leaves of yellow, orange and red before their branches become bare.

The change invites reflection. Nature enters a period of rest, followed by winter and the familiar wish for warmth and comfort. Later, new leaves restore the trees’ green splendor. Their capacity for renewal was present throughout the quieter season.

Our lives also move through phases whose outward appearance can obscure what continues within. In our later years, a reduction in familiar activity does not mean that the character and wisdom developed through experience have lost their place.

Your lifetime has included unexpected difficulty and gratifying success. Trials helped form your character. Triumphs provided reasons for proper pride, accompanied by the humility and grace that experience can teach.

Along the way, others offered encouragement and assistance. Your gratitude honored their generosity. Sharing the joy of what had been achieved strengthened the goodwill between you.

Those years prepared you for the opportunity to balance what you need with what you would now like to enjoy. Giving more attention to desires is appropriate. It should occur with an awareness that some necessities continue.

The fulfillment of your potential is one of them. After striving for so long, you may be inclined to regard that work as complete. Yet the need to express your capabilities can persist even when your career no longer supplies the setting.

People sometimes discover this after making plans centered on recreation or relocation. A favorite sport can remain enjoyable while no longer seeming sufficient. A move can offer pleasant surroundings without providing the fulfillment that was expected.

When someone says, “I thought this would keep me busy,” the question deserves more attention. What was that person hoping activity alone would provide?

An Enduring Identity Seeks New Expression

Your profession provided opportunities to exercise your skills and experience the satisfaction of useful effort. When you pursued your work with purpose, it served as a means of realizing your potential.

The conclusion of that work changes an important part of your life. It does not ordinarily erase your internal identity. Who you are and Why you act can endure even as What you do takes a different form.

Purposeful accomplishment helped nourish you during demanding professional years. Its satisfaction made challenges more bearable and effort more meaningful. You may naturally continue to need that experience afterward.

The difficulty is that this necessity is often less obvious than the desires you have postponed. Plans may emphasize enjoyable activities and ways to remain occupied, with insufficient attention to the source of deeper fulfillment.

Both deserve a place. The task is to recognize the healthy need for purposeful expression and provide for it alongside the pleasure of pursuing personal interests.

You understand your own experience better than anyone else. Thoughtful reflection can help you discern the difference between what you enjoy and what you need for a fulfilling life. With that clarity, you can choose more confidently and appreciate the balance you create.

What you want to enjoy cannot be assumed to fulfill everything you need.

Let Your Lifestyle Give Direction to Your Plans

Understanding that distinction helps clarify what the transition from your career is intended to accomplish. Its purpose is to prepare a phase of renewal in which enjoyment and fulfillment can coexist.

A suitable lifestyle gives you opportunities to experience the satisfaction of purposeful expression while also allowing the pleasures you have earned. It addresses the individual who continues beyond the professional role.

Develop your Post Career Lifestyle Plan before your Post Career Financial Plan. Begin by clarifying how you want to live and what that life must provide. Then examine the resources available to support it.

As you do so, you may need to adjust your lifestyle expectations, your financial arrangements or both. The plans should inform each other while remaining attentive to genuine necessities and deserved desires.

The aim is a life in which freedom is accompanied by fulfillment, and enjoyment has room to flourish beside the continuing expression of your potential.

PS: Would you like to learn more about how to transition successfully from your career? I provide services to physicians, non-medical credentialed professionals, corporate executives, businessmen and entrepreneurs that are tailored to their specific needs. Click here to request an introductory conversation.

If you would like to learn about another way that I can guide you, check out this brief video that describes my unique online course: 

 The Practice Transition Course for Physicians. _TM 

Exuberance – 2017

Nevada