Shortly after Enise Olding was downsized into retirement, she found herself on a “non-optional journey” – a complex, enlightening, unsettling and turbulent time in her life.

It’s an experience we can all expect when we retire, she says, a time of reckoning when we ask ourselves some difficult questions.

What had our work careers really been about? Did we compromise our values too much? And what will we do now?

“It’s a period that most people go through,” says Olding, who, along with Carol Baird-Krul, teaches workshops in British Columbia for retirees and pre-retirees.

Photo courtesy of John van den Hengel
Carol Baird-Krul, left, and Enise Olding say the journey to retirement isn’t always smooth sailing.

Unlike most retirement seminars, they don’t focus on finances. Instead, they create awareness about the emotional challenges retirees will meet.

“Finances are obviously important,” says Baird-Krul. “But people have to realize that life expectancy is up, and the median retirement age is dropping.

“Our second career (retirement), in actual fact, can be almost as long as our primary career.”

And whether we start new full-time jobs, create part-time work, travel, golf or spend most of our time enjoying grandchildren, there’s an important transition in our lives that needs to take place before we move forward, she says.

Normally that transition takes 12 to 18 months. In that interval, people tend to travel through four phases that Baird-Krul likes to identify in nautical terms. The phases are:

* Fair winds and clear skies: It’s the time immediately after a person leaves the job for good, has had the retirement party and feels euphoric. People don’t have to get up at 6 a.m. on a Monday for work. They take long-awaited journeys, or move to a new community.

* Stormy weather: A few months into retirement, the questions seep in. People start to discover the unexpected, and there are questions. Where are you going and what will you do? Are you happy? What did you like and what didn’t you like about your job?

* Safe harbour: It’s soul-searching time, putting life into perspective. It’s also when people are especially encouraged to think about relationships, spouses, partners and friends. Who are those lifelong friends? Who are your friends from work and what place will they take in your life?

* Charting your own course: Once we come to terms with our lives, people can start making concrete choices about their future.

Baird-Krul and Olding base their workshops on current research and their own journeys, and supplement it with a survey they circulated among friends worldwide.

“Everyone in our survey said they were happy, but after a few months found themselves somewhat lost and directionless,” says Baird-Krul. “This is not a one size fits all. Even the people who are well prepared going into retirement get stuck.”

Most retirees sail through the initial phase. (Who wouldn’t like sailing on calm water, enjoying fair winds and freedom?)

But at some point, in varying degrees, people begin examining their lives.

When Olding was downsized at age 56, she had the financial wherewithal to choose what to do with her life.

The mortgage and the kids’ education weren’t factors forcing her to keep her nose to the grindstone.

“My concept of work changed,” says Olding, who enjoyed a career that included journalism, marketing and post-secondary administration.

She asked herself what she liked to do, what she was good at, and what she was good at but didn’t necessarily like to do.

Delving deeper, she wondered why it was so important in her past career that she had to live up to other people’s expectations.

“Now, when I look at them and from the point of view that they don’t mean anything in my life, I ask, ‘Why did I put such a value on what other people thought of me at work?’

“I found that turbulent,” she recalls. “It was unsettling . . . because I had worked many years trying to meet other people’s expectations.”

Olding says people can question what they did in their work life and recognize the disappointments. But retirees also have to honour what they did and the circumstances under which they occurred, she says.

When Olding came to terms with her life’s path, she joined Baird-Krul, a former teacher, who had been asked to conduct retirement workshops in a local school district.

Working part-time, they are nevertheless expanding their business, always focusing on showing people what lies ahead.

“Once I understood that it was normal to go through stormy weather, that was really great,” Olding says. “I was examining my life. I was energized, I was feeling productive that I was getting somewhere in my evaluation of life.”

In addition to creating awareness, the pair talks about readying for retirement. Again, it’s important to make a critical examination.

Consider golf, Olding says. What is it about golf that the person likes? Is it the outdoors, socialization, the skill? What is it that really appeals?

If it’s gardening, is it the satisfaction of growing something, of being with nature, or the exercise?

“If you’ve always had an office job, but you do everything else (recreationally) outdoors, when you consider your future you should think about activities outside, rather than an indoor setting,” Olding explains.

Pre-retirees are also told to consider how other people in will view their retirement. Will your kids expect you to babysit more? Or does your spouse have a secret desire to travel?

“A lot of people don’t know what their spouse wants,” she says. “These are things to figure out.”

A final challenge, an important caveat, is to visualize what retirement will be like when the demands of work, the structure, and the timetables that existed are removed.

For many, it’s difficult to imagine themselves without the work structure, Olding says. We simply don’t understand the emotional impact that a job has in shaping our purpose and direction.

“You can see yourself sleeping in and going for walks,” Olding says. “But until you are in a place where none of that structure exists, you cannot truly feel it and experience it.

“And you can’t consider who you are until that structure is gone.”