Shifting Gears to Your Life and Work After Retirement

by Carolee Duckworth, Marie Langworthy

Whether you are about to retire, already retired, urged to retire or involuntarily downsized, the retirement experience is a seismic shift from known to unknown. Shifting Gears to Your Life & Work After Retirement will clarify and demystify the confusion, even the panic, surrounding this crucial transition, and help you design your ideal retired life path.

Income may not be first on your list for what you will miss most about working. Even more critical, how will you replace your sense of social connection, purpose, mental stimulation, relevance? And how will this sea-change effect your essential relationships?

While there are many books to help you with your retirement finances, what about your retirement life? What will engage you and make this final third of your life meaningful and right for you?

Shifting Gears will be your guide through the possibly shattering, but ultimately exhilarating, process of defining and pursuing the path best suited to who you have become, and who you want to be when you "grow up" again, this time.

WHAT'S INSIDE?
10-Point Retirement Countdown to let go of the old. Proven 5-Step Process to create your own exciting new retirement. 7 engaging pathways to pursue or combine. 5 categories of work, including pursuits you may not have thought of. Sample matches of your uniqueness with absorbing options of pursuit. Specific resources to optimize your passage. Snapshots of retirees who invented their own compelling retirements. Current and emerging technologies & their significance for your future. Issues & needs that arise when retiring jointly with your partner. A goldmine of updated websites to supercharge your journey of discovery.

Genres: Self Help

340 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 2013

Reviews

[Elizabeth (Stuffed Shelves) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe this book is meant for the generation of the baby boomers. The book is dedicated to them, and it is this generation that is retiring in today's time. This is a very practical book to help those of retirement age, figure out what direction to take when it comes time to retire. There are thousands upon thousands of books out there that aid you into retirement. Most books give you the where, when, and why retire. This book is mainly helpful in getting yourself emotionally ready for retirement.

There is even a Rediscover Your Work, Self Statement for you to fill out in chapter seven which looks like an educational mad lib to getting yourself prepared for retirement.

This book would not be suitable for those who are preparing themselves financially, to retire in the next ten years. If your looking for information on where and how to invest and where to put your money, this is not the book for you.

I found the grammar and spelling errors to be distracting, along with the badly formatted book that broke up the sentences and ruined the flow of the book. I did think it was a great idea for the authors to put space for notes after each chapter, this comes in handy for those who don't have a digital copy, and need to keep notes.

[Denise DeSio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shifting Gears to Your Life & Work after Retirement by Carolee Duckworth & Marie Langworthy contains a surfeit of facts, from telling us that there are 77 million Boomers and that 50% of US discretionary spending is generated by this group, plus a plethora of website references, from 50+ job sites to 20 url’s offering opportunities to volunteer. It is packed full of great information for anyone contemplating retirement and or late stage life in general.

In real estate appraisers are trained to evaluate properties based upon a foundational concept known in the industry as HABU—Highest And Best Use. For example, if a home is located in a commercially zoned area, it might appraise higher if it were converted to a business. I have a very strong opinion that Shifting Gears’ highest and best use is as a process guide, along the lines of The Artists Way. But the way Shifting Gears can be of the highest and best use is if the reader uses it as a workbook, spending many wide awake hours deploying all of the tools and processes it contains, to perform a thorough re-imagining of what the final active chapter of our life could and should be. Many texts exist to tell you what options are available when transitioning to retirement. Shifting Gears shows you how to define and implement a most satisfactory pathway to a lifestyle that best suits who we have become, who we are now, and who we want to be when we grow up.

The authors point readers to many outside sources to augment the journey of discovery. They assign meaty exercises from taking the Myers-Briggs test to the free “Assess Your Values Online” test available at http://people.usd.edu/~bwjames/tut/ti.... But they also draw readily from their own education, employment and life experience to increase the relatability of the critical points in the book. Drs. Duckworth and Langworthy demonstrate their genuine interest in giving their readers the most complete roadmap to chart the What, Where, When, How of retirement, but unlike most entries in this genre, they provide methods to pour deeply into the Why.

I urge anyone who is embarking on this phase of life to put Shifting Gears to its highest and best use. Roll up your sleeves and delve into a process that may have a profound impact on the rest of your life.

[Karen R. Deslandes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good Read

This book was very helpful. I especially liked the part about having multiple paths in retirement and not being tied down to just one.

[Trully Sunee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ever think of retirement? Have goals or plans for it? Looking at retiring from one position and starting a new career life? Seeing where you are currently and being honest about whether you are closer or further away from it is a major step in transitioning/shifting to a way of life that is still comfortable is what this book addresses. A way of life that works for you and your family is what this book assists one in finding.

Also, the authors, Carolee Duckworth and Marie Langworthy, remind us sometimes we don't assess our personality, abilities, motivations, or our thinking in comparison with the line of work we are looking to transition into next. What do we better match up with in terms of time, money, career, family life, and what retirement period to look forward to are major themes written about.

The lines of business may change time and time again in our life. Different factors outside of business/career also need to be considered for work and retirement to be maintainable and enjoyable. The later years are to be more productive and enjoyable as we get older and wiser. This book is great insight how to do so!

The steps to assess where we are and where we want to go are easy to understand. The stories were given by those who wrote the book and have decades of experience working hands out with rebuilding work forces from children to adulthood. Reading how the authors worked in the school systems, from the administrative, business-public and private areas of education to the workforce side of preparing and assisting people to find work was quite refreshing. This assists with getting a well-rounded view of what we have to look forward to and pitfalls to watch out for in our own futures.

There were many concepts and processes that we are given as references to assess what, when, how, where, and if it is logical to retire. Lots of dedicated research speeds up the process of transitioning into retirement for Early and Late Baby Boomers. Life is full of inspiration when able to take this informative book and apply it and SHIFT GEARS.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good reference text especially for volunteer links in the appendix. Less preachy than some texts in the genre, but a bit wordy as well. What is needed is a *succinct* outline of these successive steps of self-examination.