Life Mapping: A Vision of Success
Success is much more than economic gains, titles, and degrees. Planning for a successful retirement is about identifying all the aspects of your life. 
Similar to preparing for a trip, you need to define the following details: Who are you (origin), where your going (destination), how your going to get there (vehicle), your knowledge and experience (backpack), your objectives, goals (landmarks, and route).
Origin: Who you are
Like a map has a starting point. Your origin is who you are at this moment. Most people when asked to introduce themselves would say, “Hi,my name is Chris and I am a 55-year old, retired manager.” It doesn’t tell you who Chris is; it only tells you about her present situation. To gain insights about yourself, you must look closely at you believe in, your values, and principles as well as your economical, professional, cultural, and civil position. Furthermore, you can also meditate on your experiences to give you discernment on your good and bad traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses. Upon self-examination, Chris realized that he was extremely motivated, unselfish, service-oriented, but he was also impatient. His disposition was in educational activity. Furthermore, he thought that life must serve a purpose, and that wars were harmful to human dignity.
Destination: Where are you going, your vision of who you want to be
“Who do want to be?” That’s your vision. Now it’s crucial that you know yourself to have a clear idea of who you want to be; and the things you want to modify whether they be attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you barely know yourself, then your vision and objectives for the future would also be blurred. Your goal should embrace all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Pursuing Chris’s story, after he defined his beliefs, values, and principles in life, he found that he needed to have a life dedicated in helping his fellow men.
Vehicle: How will you get there, Your Mission
A vehicle is the means by which you will reach your destination. It’s similar to your mission or calling in life. To a large extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself. Based on Chris’s self appraisal, he decided that he was suited to become a teacher and that he wanted to become one. His chosen career in retirement was to teach. Describing his new ambition fully: it was to live his new life dedicated to helping people in his same situation (retired) as a teacher.
Travel Bag: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude
Clothing, drinks, medicines, and other travelling essentials are contained in a bag. Applying this concept to your life map, you also bring with you indisputable knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These influence your competence and assist you in achieving your vision. Granted, there is a motive for you to measure what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to take in along the way. This double appraisal will give you ideas on your landmarks or measures of success. Chris recognized that he needed to add professional knowledge and skills in teaching so that he could become a teacher. He knew that he was a bit quick-tempered, impatient with people so he realized that this was something he needed to change.
Landmarks and Route: Objectives
Landmarks confirm if you’re on the right course while the route sets the travel time. So, in projecting your life, you also need to have landmarks and a itinerary. These landmarks qualify your success. These measures need to be specific, measurable, possible, realistic, and have an end so you can’t set two major objectives such as earning a master’s degree and a doctorate degree within a period of three years, since the least number of years to complete a master’s degree is two years. Going back to Chris for instance, he discovered the following landmarks in his life map: collecting the elements that will be part of the program he would teach in his private course by the the age of 56; completing the preparation of his course by the age of 57; his marketing program by the age of 58 ; Retiring at the age of 59; and teaching his course “how to start a business online”.
Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes
The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. But frequently our plans are changed along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control. Like in any path, there are turns, detours, and potholes thus; we must expect them and adjust accordingly.
Associated Press said “home equity” may be baby boomers’ salvation; while comments in other media’s say proceeds from selling their house is what millions of baby boomers are counting on for their retirement.
Retirement…A New Life – A New Career
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For many the idea of retirement comes with the automatic translation that it means that you will stop working is just not acceptable. For many,
retirement from work is equivalent with no longer living. If you have been a productive worker all of your life and someone asked you what your dream retirement might look like, you might respond “to work” because you may be one of those people for whom work is what gives meaning and purpose to life.
It isn’t fair for us to impose the same standards of retirement on everyone. To say that to enjoy your golden years, you must take up fishing, start sleeping until noon, sit in a rocker and watch the day go by and gradually turn into a senior citizen would to many be the same as sentencing them to life in prison without parole. So for many it’s very possible that working would be the thing that would make your retirement meaningful.
Still others must continue to work into their retirement years because they did not or could not prepare for retirement. Whatever the situation, there are some adjustments that should be made to shift to a retirement career that you can continue to do well into your senior years.
You can get a running start on your retirement planning if you find that a career change is appropriate later in life. Many times we do find that the career we are in may either be changing so fast that it’s hard to keep up, it’s too physically demanding when you are older or in some other way that job has become a “young man’s game”. If that has happened to you, you can get a jump start on finding a career that you can stick with well into your retirement years, that career can be an income generator that might never go away.
It is not at all uncommon for men in their later years to start a new career. Perhaps you just want a career where you can use the creative side of you and one that can be a natural transition into retirement. Perhaps you reached the maximum vesting of your retirement account with a job you held for decades so you can “retire” from that job with full benefits and funding and still start another career that you can take on into retirement and keep doing as you enjoy the fruits of retirement as well.
Many times the skills and knowledge you learned in the business world during your first career can transition you into a lucrative consulting career late in life. One way to explore this option is to think of the venders who sold goods and services to you when you were in your previous career and contact them to see if you might now represent their services as a former satisfied customer. If you had specialized knowledge and training in how to use their software or a technical product, that training which your former employer paid for can now transition into an exciting career as a sales representative or sale support for the very companies who once had you as a customer.
The internet can also open up worlds of money making opportunities that you can use to land work or sell something you may have made by setting up your own web site and learning how to promote yourself online. Many cottage industries have taken off and been hugely successful just getting what you do out into cyberspace. For example, if you are talented at making beautiful artistic pottery, you can create a line of pots that is perfect for sale over the internet. You can work with a skilled internet web developer and marketer to get your product out on the internet and before long, you might have more orders
than you know what to do with all flying out through your web site which is collecting the money and filling your back account up with all the profits.
The ways you can create a new business in your retirement years are only limited by your imagination. And once you have a good new career going that you can continue well into your retirement years, you won’t have many of the worries other retired people have. You can enjoy the freedoms of a retirement lifestyle and made plenty of money at the same time. And that’s a great combination.