A retirement lifestyle strategies coach writes and speaks on concepts related to retirement lifestyle planning and encourages everyone to begin planning for retirement 3 to 5 years before it actually happens. Topics a coach might cover include disengaging from work, attitudes towards retirement, how this transition affects your relationship with your family and friends, finding purpose in retirement, and leaving a proud legacy.
Individuals, couples, and groups can all benefit from retirement lifestyle coaching and a thoughtful, focused, conscious process for planning for their retirement years. A good coach will also provide tools and resources that will enable clients to make the best of their lives for the rest of their lives.
Why do clients come to a coach?
Clients usually come to coaching because there is a gap between where they are in their current lives and where they would like to be. Coach and client work together to identify goals to help bridge that gap. In the coaching process, the coach helps clients expand their thinking, clarify goals, and hold their vision to achieve their goals. Progress is a function of partnership and collaboration between a client and coach as they create the client’s personal vision for the future. A good coach expects and requires behavior changes and will ask clients to be responsible and accountable in following through.
Coaching is a process that helps people who are motivated and goal oriented move to the next phase in creating the life they want. Retirement coaching is not outsourcing retirement preparation to a retirement lifestyle coach and sitting back, expecting results.
The retirement coaching process
Coaching can be done in person or by phone, whichever is most convenient for the client. It is present-oriented, forward-moving, challenging yet fun because the client is encouraged and held accountable for taking the necessary steps toward change.
A Certified Retirement Options Coach uses a number of assessments and tools to help pre-retirees assess their readiness for retirement and recareering. Depending on the circumstances and the individual needs of the client, assessment tools may include:
• The Retirement Success Profile for One-On-One Coaching
• The Life Options Profile for Group Coaching
• The Re-Career Success Inventory for Exploring a Post-Retirement Career
Each of these assessments is taken online, over the Internet. Results are available immediately and are personally interpreted by a certified coach. Each assessment has a companion book. In addition, these assessment tools are used in conjunction with resources that are provided to the client by the coach including:
• Life Transition Insight and Involvement Exercises to be used by the client
• Powerful Questions to be answered to deepen learning and facilitate “next steps” and goal setting
• Ongoing one-on-one and group coaching to provide personal support in areas where the client needs it
A retirement lifestyle coach helps a client prepare for the future. Together they create a lifestyle vision customized for the individual client and/or for the client and partner as a couple. Retirement Lifestyle Strategies help “make the best of your life for the rest of your life.”
Are you ready to begin the coaching process? Take the coachability quiz at http://www.retirementlifestylestrategies.com/quiz.html to find out if you are ready to work with a coach.