What Are You Planning?
As I plan for my retirement, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what it looks like day to day. I’ve had the honor of coaching a few people who are retired aimed toward focus and clarity. It has got me thinking about what my day-to-day might look like then and what I can do to bring that dream closer to reality. It starts with joy.
Watching a certain TV show which will remain nameless, I found myself smiling to the point where I noticed what was happening to my face, and I liked it. That got me thinking, about what type of activities, daily, weekly, and monthly bring me spontaneous joy. I want experiences that make me smile, shout “Hell Yes!”, and even those that make me sigh the good kind of sigh. Using my coaching methods on myself, I started to list them, all of them, large, small, and those in-between. Some of them are as small as tasty treats I like. Some of them are much larger such as projects that can take a year or more to complete.
It’s not just those experiences either. There are a lot of seemingly mundane acts that one must do to survive. How can I change those experiences to make them bring me more joy? The answer is, of course, mindset. I can change what they mean to me. I can gamify some of them. I can use the work to make myself earn rewards for items and experiences that bring more joy. I’m probably never going to like cleaning those icky parts of the bathroom but if I was cleaning it for someone I care about, it might not be so icky.
Imagine if every task you performed was part of a larger plan to bring you joy. What if you wrote out such a plan and implemented it? Can you plan that well, that detailed? Would it be worth it to do so? Be sure to leave some room for spontaneity. There can be quite a bit of joy in that as well.