Category: Uncategorized

Entering retirement offers the opportunity to set new, meaningful goals.

It doesn’t matter whether you already have concrete ideas of your retirement life in mind or not. Sitting down and intentionally setting goals will not only help you give your daily life structure and direction. It will also allow you to move forward with a fresh sense of purpose.

Here are six practical tips to help you create new goals that align with what you truly want in this next stage of life.

#1 – Choose a goal – even if you don’t have one.

Even if you don’t have a specific goal at the moment, the act of setting a goal can be a really powerful and useful exercise.

It gives your mind and life focus and direction; it strengthens your motivation to realise your personal potential; it helps you get what you want. So, think about the different areas in your life and pick one you don’t feel happy about.

Now, choose a goal to help you make positive changes in the chosen area.

#2 – Get specific, but don’t think about the how yet.

Be very specific about your goal.

Talk about your goal in the first person and the present tense. Decide on time-frames, deadlines, and other details. However, don’t think about how you will achieve the goal yet.

For now, you focus on the what and when.

#3 – Write the goal down.

Take your goal out of your imagination and make it real and tangible.

The best way to do this is to write it down. Writing down your goal on a piece of paper gets it out of your brain. You now can look at it, you can adjust it, you can carry it around, and you can (and should) read it again and again.

Your goal now acts like a GPS destination, indicating where you want to go.

#4 – Stretch yourself with the goal, and ‘welcome’ any negative feelings.

Offer yourself a real self-development opportunity – make sure that you push yourself beyond your current comfort zone with your goal.

If it seems easy to achieve, it’s not a real goal! You will know you have stretched yourself sufficiently if negative emotions such as fear, doubt, or shame arise. Don’t push these feelings away; accept them as normal parts of the process.

Honouring and managing these feelings will not only ensure that you achieve your goal but also allow you to become a more robust and better version of yourself.

#5 – Uncover any negative thoughts and question/replace them.

Search for the negative thoughts that cause uncomfortable feelings.

It might be something like ‘This is too hard to do’, or ‘I don’t know how to do this’, or ‘I don’t know if this is what I want’. Uncover all the thoughts behind your feelings of disbelief or doubtfulness or fear – and write them down.

Then, remind yourself that these thoughts are just choices. Your human brain is bringing them up to protect you – it wants you to avoid any risks by keeping everything as it is – but that doesn’t mean you have to believe these limiting thoughts. 

Tell your mind, ‘No worries – I’ll figure this out.’

#6 – Have a brainstorming session with your future self to design an action plan.

When you are ready to start working on your action plan, you can ask your future self for help.

Imagine yourself at the place in the future when your goal has been completed. From that place, look back to where you are now, and you tell your present self the how – all the steps you took to accomplish the goal and what you did to overcome the obstacles on your way. Write these steps down; they build your action plan.

Now, you are ready to take the first action and work on achieving your goal!

With these tips, you can set new goals for your retirement life that will help you start moving and creating the life you want to live in retirement.

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If you have any questions or want to talk about the planning, organisation, or management of your retirement life –

LET’S TALK.

You can easily book a free Zoom Meeting with me HERE.

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The VIP Directory – The Heart of the Optimised Paperwork Systems

Today, I want to discuss how you can structure your VIP Directory and compile its contents, as well as the additional resources (collections of physical/digital paperwork) that will complement the directory.

The VIP Directory (Very Important Paperwork Directory) is the heart of the Optimised Paperwork System. It’s the central information collection point and contains all the information and data essential to your life’s paperwork/information requirements.

In addition to your directory, you must compile and maintain a set of physical and/or digital folders that contain the very important documents you want/need to keep for various purposes.

The difference between the VIP Directory and its additional resources

There is pure data and information important to you, like your date of birth, and then there are important documents in physical or digital form (= paperwork), that contain specific data and information, like your birth certificate.

The VIP Directory collects the pure data of your life and also the information where the related, more comprehensive documentation is kept.

So, your date of birth will be included in an overview of important personal data in your directory, and the directory will also contain the information where the related document, in this case, the original or copy of your birth certificate, can be found, e.g. in a designated folder called ‘Personal Documents’.

The directory is structured along the various areas or topics that play a role in your life

The structure of our VIP Directories is always 100% unique because we, the creators of our directories, are all unique and arrange our lives around unique sets of areas/topics.

That’s why you will not find a universal template for a VIP Directory that you can just fill out with your personal data and information.

Only you can decide which areas/topics are very important in your unique life and should be included in your directory.

A simple example:

If you own a dog or cat, you need to include the category ‘Pets’ in your directory, while for another person, someone who doesn’t have a pet, this category would be irrelevant. They, however, might need to add a topic like ‘Boat’ in the category ‘Possessions’, which wouldn’t make sense to include in your directory (unless you own a boat as well).

The following is an example of a VIP Directory structure

It is supposed to help you get some first ideas for potential topics of the table of contents of your own directory:

Again, the template above differs from the table of contents you will create for your directory because your directory and its contents will be unique. It might include some of the topics listed in the template above, but it will also contain other topics, topics that are relevant to you and your life.

Let’s say, for example, you are the caretaker of your ageing parents and responsible for organising their daily lives. In this case, you will have a category like ‘My parents’ included in your VIP Directory, in which you collect all essential data and information about the organisation of your parents’ lives/needs.

Another example of the table of contents of a VIP Directory

This example represents the structure of the VIP Directory that I compiled for myself and my husband:

As you can see, our VIP Directory contains a category called ‘Overview Business M – Let Go – Move On’ (at the bottom of the table).

This category is part of our directory because my business, Let Go – Move On, is part of my life. Therefore, the most relevant data and information related to my business belong in our directory.

Now it’s your turn!

Start to think about the structure of your VIP Directory.

And READ HERE how to compile the content of your directory.

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Do you feel inspired to create your own VIP Directory?

My article series, ‘Radical Paperwork Optimisation and the VIP Directory’, provides you with all the information and tools you need to start and complete the process successfully.

Continue reading HERE.

What’s your focus of interest – Home Decluttering or Mind Decluttering? 

Just ask me – I now can easily find the information you are interested in. 

All my blog articles are now nicely organised in two ‘containers’ with clear labels:

One ‘container’ contains all the blog posts that focus on Home Decluttering topics.

The other one stores the articles that focus on Mind Decluttering issues.

The reason why I decided to do the work and why my blog archive is now clutterfree and well sorted:

Recently, I felt a bit ashamed because I – the ‘clutterfree life’ coach – struggled to find one of my blog posts under the ‘clutter’ in the archive.

A client wanted to get her sentimental belongings – items inherited from her mother – sorted out. I thought that a blog post that I had written about this topic a while ago would be helpful to her. 

But then I had a typical clutter experience – I couldn’t find that post. I knew it was somewhere but not where exactly. So it took me a while to search around in my archive. Finally I found it.

But I knew that it was time to declutter and organise my blog archive. 

And I had a typical decluttering experience – I discovered articles that I had forgotten about and was happy to see again. And others that might have been useful at the time I created them but now no longer were up-to-date and needed to go.

I made some tough decisions. And then got everything that I wanted to keep nicely organised.

Now I know again what I have in my blog archive and where I can find it. 

I can’t say that I was happy about the time I had to invest in the decluttering and organising process but I totally like the result. It was worth the time and effort. 

That’s a typical clutterfree experience:

The process of letting go of what we have kept but don’t need (any longer) is not always fun and very often hard work – but the result is always positive:

More order, space and clarity. More reason to feel relaxed, content, and peaceful.

More …   Fill in the blank – What are the feelings that you experience at the end of a successful decluttering project? 

Taking action to create the life we want is not always easy.

When we decide to make changes in our life or set a goal, we usually feel excited and determined to do whatever we have to do to realise the change, to achieve the goal.

However, doing the work isn’t so much fun in many cases.

We have to be willing to invest time, effort and energy, we might feel uncomfortable and anxious about how to get the work done.

So how can we keep ourselves going if we get stuck, if we feel like giving up and quitting the work, even before it has started or as soon as tough challenges show up?

We can ask our most powerful friend for help and support – our future self.

Download the free guide to your future self now so that you can start working with her towards your goals.

You future self will help you do what you want and need to do.

Together you will develop an action plan that really works. It includes all the things you need to start, stop, or continue doing in order to create the results you want to have in your life.

Start to create the life you want – now.