Leave your empathy behind part two creating a new sense of self

 According to the school of Mental Health in Ontario exploring self-awareness and a sense of identity is a chance for courageous and supportive conversations about strengths, difficulties, preferences, values, lived experiences, and ambitions.

To do this you need a safe environment where you can learn, affirm cultural heritages and practise advocating for yourself. Having a sense of who you are, in the context of culture and community, may help you see how you matter and can contribute to the world.

Retirement has been defined as "an event, a formal departure from paid work that occurs on a given day, a status with new rules to learn and a process that begins the day an employee acknowledges that the worker role will end". For example, there may be losses of social and recreational activities with co-workers, a shared history with other workers, pride in and respect expressed for a worker’s competence, the stimulation and challenge of the job, and perks that were part of the job.

For many of us, the job is the hub of our working years’ lifestyle because it occupies so much of our existence. Involvement with family, friends, recreations, hobbies, and so on was often fitted around employment. However, the social interaction of the workplace is also part of our social life. For many of us, such peripheral but important aspects of the workplace can be overlooked until they are missed following retirement.

Now that old roles and behaviour patterns must be abandoned or modified, retirees may face the difficult task of finding new sources of identity to replace those lost to retirement. Future retirees are often advised to develop a diversified portfolio of “selves” so that despite losing some selves to retirement, others will be available to fill the gap. Some of these alternate selves (e.g., family roles, club involvements) will continue into retirement and may grow to be as prominent as those aspects of identity that were job-related.

The fact is what people have done in the past indicates a high probability of what they will do in the future. This situation has its positive side in that many aspects of our personalities and behaviour will continue to function in retirement. The presence of identity assimilation (seeing one’s experience of the world as compatible with one’s identity) and accommodation (adjusting in order to achieve compatibility of identity and experience) can contribute to a balanced identity over time that does not swing between two extremes: either denial of the need for adjustment or excessive modification.

Therefore, retirement could be viewed as a process that has a great impact on life transition that will lead to a sense of emptiness, loneliness and a reduction in life satisfaction. Or retirement could be viewed as a process that has a great impact on life transition that will lead to a sense of discovery, exciting new relationships and an increase in life satisfaction. Both views are self-fulling prophecies. If you believe the former it will come true, if you believe the latter, it will come true. Your understanding of yourself and your self-awareness is important in which world view of retirement you take.

Retirement is associated with a person being longer needed in their job. Retirement can be seen as a beginning to the end of a human career where much focus is given to free time and rest after a long career phase of work. Therefore, to ensure that retirees maintain the quality of their life as before they plan for retirement but the first step in good retirement planning, is not financial planning but self-awareness.