You are a healthy, wise, experienced person who has worked successfully as a professional, entrepreneur, volunteer, or homemaker. Now you are coming to your fifties or sixties. Perhaps your employer expects you to retire to accommodate the need for cutting costs in a business that’s suffering during the recession. Maybe you’re one of the fortunate ones who took their investments out of the stock market before the crash (I was not one of them, even though my husband pestered me about it for months ahead), leaving you a reasonable income to live on until you discover what you want to do next? Or you and your life partner have always dreamed of doing something different after you leave your mid-years’ hectic schedule.

Do you want flexibility, structure, travel? Do you want to give back to those less fortunate after a life of abundance? Do you worry that you will lose things you’ve depended upon for your sense of worth if you just retire to a life of leisure – such as your status, power, influence, opportunity to mentor, or the intellectual challenge and camaraderie of a work life?

Do you and your life partner have different ideas about when to retire or how your retirement should look?

Perhaps you’ve talked to friends and relatives who’ve retired and after the initial honeymoon, they’re beginning to get bored, lethargic…even depressed? Or you can’t listen to their stories about their golf game anymore and can’t imagine doing what they are doing.

Do you know that there are many resources available to jump-start you on a road to a fulfilling retirement? There are now many books, support groups, teleclasses, and life coaches who can work with you to create a meaningful, purposeful retirement based on your cherished values and goals for the next stage of life.

This is a sample of what a professional life coach will do in working with you. A coach is trained to listen to who you are now and to collaborate with you in designing just the kind of retirement life you want. A life coach might take you on a journey through your past to ask you about the experiences you had where you were in Flow, in the Zone, where time passed effortlessly because you were so engaged in what you were doing. These peak experiences can be gems that suggest what you want to build into your life now. Or you may have had periods where you pursued a dream, but changed course because of practicality or your family’s urging or what you thought an adult “should” do. Perhaps these dreams point to your next adventure.

A life coach might assist you to identify your life purpose, which when you get clear about that, will nourish your dreams and give you concrete goals to develop. A life coach will work with you to move you toward action steps so you see progress within weeks.

Don’t be caught facing retirement without a plan. Make certain that plan is not based on advertising or media hype, but rather on your individual and very personal needs, values, goals, and desires.