Category: Intentional Living

Intentional Living in Retirement: Choosing What Truly Matters

The transition into retirement offers a unique opportunity to redefine our values and priorities.

We can decide who we want to be in this new stage of our life, how we want to show up, and where to focus our care and attention.

There’s no shortage of things that might draw our concern. We notice countless areas in ourselves, our lives, and the world around us that we’d like to improve, change, or act on.

However, we must recognize our limits. Our time, energy, and resources are finite, and attempting to care about everything can lead to disappointment, exhaustion, and even burnout.

Instead, retirement offers a chance to thoughtfully limit what we care about, focusing on what aligns most with our values and goals.

Consider this question: What am I no longer willing to care about?

This simple exercise and a real-life example will guide you in redefining your priorities.

#1 – Make a list of all areas of your life.

Example:   Relationships, work, home, fitness and health, finances, personal interests and hobbies, etc.

#2 – Choose the area you want to focus on right now.

Example:   My relationships.

#3 – Pick the one segment of your focus area you care about most.

Example:   My relationship with my mother.

#4 – List all the things you care about regarding that thing.

Example:   What I care about regarding my relationship with my mother:

• • a) She says she is feeling lonely. Should I visit her more often?
  • b) I wish she had a closer relationship with Aunt Mary.
  • c) I am worried about her health. I think she should eat healthier and drink more water.
  • d) I wonder what she is thinking about our recently bought house.
  • e) She is always so impatient with the waiters when I take her out for lunch.
  • f) She wants me to call her daily, which stresses me out.

#5 – Go through your list again. Can you discover specific patterns? Categories of things you care about?

Example:   It seems I am thinking a lot about what she might think of me and what she expects of me. And I am worried about her well-being, and in some regards, I am quite judgmental of her.

#6 – Deliberately choose the things you no longer want to care about.

Example:   I am no longer willing to care about what she thinks of me (d, f). I am no longer willing to care about what (I thought) she should or shouldn’t do. (b, e)

#7 – Cross these things out on your list. Promise yourself to cross them out in your mind, too.

Example:

• • a) She says she is feeling lonely. Should I visit her more often?
  • b)  wish she had a closer relationship with Aunt Mary.
  • c) I am worried about her health. I think she should eat healthier and drink more water.
  • d) I wonder what she is thinking about our recently bought house.
  • e) She is always so impatient with the waiters when I take her out for dinner.
  • f) She wants me to call her daily, which stresses me out.

#8 – Now, look at what remains on your list. These are the things you want to care about. How do you want to do that?

Are you taking care of them in the best possible way already? Is there any room for improvement? Write down what you want to change.

Example:

• • a) I care about her well-being. And although I know that I’m not able to take away her feelings of loneliness, I decide now to visit her twice instead of once each week.
  • c) I accept that I can’t make her eat healthier or drink more. However, I’ll ensure she always has healthy snacks and enough water in her kitchen.

#9 – Finally, based on the decisions made in #8, plan the next action step. And take it.

Example:

• • I will visit my mother tomorrow, and I will bring her some healthy snacks.
  • Whenever I notice that I drift back to my old caring habits, I will remind myself of the only two things I want to care about in my relationship with my mother.

Living intentionally means that you deliberately decide how you want to live – and what you want to do to create the life you want.

It means that you don’t let life just happen to you and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, you actively define what’s important to you and how you want to experience and live your life.

You are well aware of your priorities and proactively make changes that move you toward the life you want to live.

Your priorities give your life direction and guidance.

Planning your life with intention doesn’t have to be an intimidating or overwhelming exercise.

If you regularly check and update your priorities, you are well prepared to act and react confidently when faced with bigger or smaller decisions in everyday life.

Your priorities also direct and guide you when you must manage a significant life challenge:

• • A planned transition like entering retirement, becoming an empty nester, downsizing,
  • or an unexpected event like divorce, the loss of a job, a critical illness, or the death of a loved one.

How do you choose your priorities – and direct your life in the way you want it to go?

Continue reading Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Our lives and our experience of life reflect where we spend most of our attention.

The thoughts that we paid the most attention to in the past, the ones we thought most frequently, are the thoughts that have created our current results.

The thoughts we pay most attention to today, those we are thinking most frequently right now, will create our future results.

Our attention is our most powerful resource. And we can intentionally make good use of this resource. We have the power to control where we place our attention.

However, the amount of attention available to us is limited.

At any given moment, we can pay attention to only one thing. Just one.

That’s why it is so important to intentionally decide where we want to put our attention.

In Part 1 of this short introduction series, we defined what living intentionally means, in a broader and in a more narrow way.

In Part 2, we listed some typical life situations to get a clearer idea of what intentional living might look like in real life.

Today, I want to briefly discuss a simple framework that helps us create a more intentional life.

Living intentionally – How do we get there?

No matter what the specific intention behind a client’s decluttering or organising project is, we always use my simple 3-step process – the ‘ADA Framework’ – to realise the desired outcomes successfully.

The ADA Framework

These are the steps that my clients practice and implement to actively take control and create the life they want to live: 

Now, that we have defined what intentional living means, it’s time to consider how the concept plays out in real life.

Living intentionally – What does that look like?

Living an intentional and organised life looks different for each of us, of course.

Each of my clients has very personal and unique goals and ideas about what they want to achieve and why they want that.

Decluttering and organising physical stuff and personal information.

For some of my clients, the focus of the work is creating more space and order in their personal environment. They want to clear their home and belongings or optimise their physical paperwork and digital information management. Their intention is to enjoy more spaciousness, clarity, and lightness.

Planning, organising, and successfully realising bigger changes in life.

Living intentionally – What does that mean?

Basically, living intentionally means that we deliberately decide how we want to live our life. And then we act on that.

We don’t let life just happen to us and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, we actively define what’s important to us and how we want to experience and live our life.

We proactively make any necessary changes, even if that doesn’t feel very comfortable.

And we get ourselves well prepared for the challenges and opportunities the future might bring along.

Specifically, living intentionally means that we get good at thinking and acting intentionally. 

It means that we actively