Welcome to Bertie le Roux’s podcast, episode 16. In this episode we’re going to talk about unfulfilled dreams, about situations when people retire, and they feel they don’t have a purpose anymore. There’s nothing happening, they basically stay at home, nothing to do anymore.
Advice for People in Retirement.
A lot of times people get to the end of their life and they have conversations with their families, pastors etc. A lot of times it’s around so many things they still wanted to do, I wanted to do this, and that. And there’s a lot of regret that gets in what advice do you have for people in that situation? I often speak to the elderly people who have come to the age of retirement and forced through their company or by choice hopefully not through bad health to retire.
I speak to people that are in retirement and yes if we talk about dreams, we have to talk about unfulfilled dreams as well, but then we cannot allow ourselves to dwell in that too much because the question is, what can I do about it? Often you’ve set yourself dreams and you’ve defined your dreams, you’ve done that reality check and said it’s achievable, but situations change and you simply can’t do it so you end up at the end of your working career and you find yourself with unachieved dreams.
That can cause a lot of negativity in a person because the question then comes at why were they here on earth? Why was I placed here? What was my purpose? Did I really live my purpose? Did I just go through life and are now facing death, which is inevitable. That should not be the question.
Retirement as a Fulfilled Life.
I will challenge you and tell you that you have achieved a lot of your dreams. If you just sit and be honest with yourself and review your past, your life with your spouse if you had one, your life with your children, your grandchildren, and the work environment, I can promise you, you can write a book on all of your achievements, which in itself, every single one of them was a dream.
There’s no one that can say to me that they’ve never achieved their goals and their dreams, it could have been short term goals that you had, medium term or long term it doesn’t matter, but you’ve had dreams. Yes, we’ve missed some, things go wrong, life sometimes throws a curveball at you, you simply can’t play it, but you should not dwell in that and say, listen I’ve had an unfulfilled life.
I challenge these people when are in retirement, “You should not retire, you should just rewire your expectations of life because there’s much time left.” Nowadays we just live longer and longer, so we might find out that we are going to be in retirement for that matter for longer than we have spent in our working career.
What are we going to do in that time? You have all the health that you deserve, live it, enjoy it and you don’t even need money to enjoy life. Retirement shouldn’t be that position where you put yourself in or others put you in, where you sit back and say “unfulfilled life, I haven’t achieved my dreams, what’s left”, you have no motivation and no reason to get up in the morning. You’re wrong, you have it, you deserve it, you’ve earned it.
