We help Phoenix staff members at all stages of their career. Today we are going to talk about those who are going to be leaving Phoenix this year, to retire. We have been helping people with this transition for nearly 25 years and so have some experience at this (more than most people who do it just once in a lifetime).
There is so much to a sucessful retirement and much of it is not financial (we can fix the financial in most cases). We will look at several of these points in future blogs, initially let’s look at the concept of the Future You.
This is a really important concept to wrap your head around at any age and the earlier you can nail it the better.
Psychologist Hal Hershfield’s research in this area has shown that as human benefits we are bad at seeing our future selves as a separate person who needs looking after and providing for. In fact his research showed that people were better at picturing people that they don’t know such as future Matt Damon than they were at picturing themselves in the future. His excellent TED talk on the subject can be listened tohereand his research papers foundhere.
This is a problem because why would you you make decisions that hurt in the present to help out that person in the future. If you don’t feel a connection to the you at retirement age, then you are much less likely to help that person out now.
This might sound like a financial problem but actually it is much wider than this and we covered the financial aspects of Future You in thisblog post.
The human inability to emphathise with our future selves contributes to eating too much, drinking too much, weight gain, lack of exercise, too much time scrolling on our phones, gambling, over-spending and a multitude of other short-term actions that give us a dopamine hit. It can also lead to us making really bad decisions on behalf of our future selves. In this TED Radio Hourpodcastjournalist Shankar Vedantam talks movingly about Stephanie, a nurse, who always told her husband that she didn’t want to ever be resusitated. She based this on what she saw with her patients at age 35 and slightly flippantly told her husband to shoot her if she ever had a serious illness. Sadly she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig Disease (ALS) at 59 and her health rapidly deteriorated. Much to her husband’s surprise when she was rushed to hospital and offered life support, she took it. The Stephanie at 35, hadn’t understood what the Stephanie at 59 would want.
Picturing the future you can be so helpful with managing a wide range of our current behaviours. So, how can we help ourselves.
Pre-Covid when we ran face to face seminars for people going through life transitions; marriage, redundancy, starting a family, retirement, we used a phone app to age the attendees faces (it used to turn my current face into my dad’s face, which was disturbing). We would then get attendees to stand at one side of the room and think about the person in the picture, as if they were a separate person stood opposite facing them. We would then get the attendees to write down what they thought would be important to that future self and what they would say to their current self if they could speak.
We later stopped using that particular app as concerns emerged that the app developer was using the images captured, as part of the western election interference of aRussian bot farm. Whilst we were using it though, it had a huge effect on the attendees. They became more emotionally connected to the future self and more likely to think twice about short-term decisions and more committed to long-term thinking.
This is an exercise that any of us can do and it helps to plan our Lasting Power of Attorney and Will decisions, saving decisions, risk decisions, health choices, spending choices, environmental impact choices and many more. It is the first step of many towards a happy Future You.
