In August, I joined fourteen fabulous women from around the United States and Europe alongside expert facilitators, Susan Burnett, Joan Cheverie, and Catherine Dalipe with the goal of Reframing Retirement.
As a certified life coach for almost 15 years and a Designing Your Life Coach for five, I was eager to immerse myself in four in-depth sessions. I looked forward to participating in honest conversations, insightful breakout sessions and idea generation within a community of likeminded women.
Not only am I considering next steps for myself, (the third act!) but also have a few clients interested in coaching on the topic.
From Retirement Planning to Life Design
The Designing Your Life framework served as the roadmap for our approach and ways of thinking. Some participants were already familiar with life design and others were learning it for the first time, but everyone was able to apply the fundamental tools and concepts. As a coach I rarely turn these kinds of important tools on myself. I found it an amazing opportunity to look inside and get a sense of what I needed to think about to move forward on my path. It’s not often we make time to “assess our flourishing” at critical junctures in our lives. I found this exercise to be particularly transformative for the retirement stage of life.
We leveraged the PERMA Model to gauge our satisfaction in well-being domains of…
Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning and purpose
Accomplishment and achievement plus mental and physical health.
These foundational insights served as a compass throughout our workshop journey. The key questions of “What brings me energy in these areas and what diminishes it?” would serve as valuable guideposts for myself as well as my clients.
Inspired by Community
The best part of the workshops – hands down – were the breakout sessions. I was grouped with fellow participants – who were all in a similar “age and stage” of busy lives. We were able to go deep fast and support each other with ideas and challenges that solidified our Odyssey journeys. (In life design, you don’t create life plans, you design multiple Odysseys. These Odysseys encourage more, exciting future possibilities.) The facilitators created a safe space for curiosity, welcoming our feedback as they iterated the next session to make it even more valuable.
I strongly recommend taking this workshop! We all walked away with action items and more clarity. It was fun, useful, and 100% worthwhile!
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Winn Ellis
Certified Life Coach and Certified DYL Coach
winnellis.com